Letting Go

by Philip Roth

  Cynthia, after a quick look around the kitchen, said, “Well, it’s not exactly me. It’s really all of us in Mexico.”

  “Martha too, you mean?”

  “Everything. All of us.”

  “I certainly would like to see it,” Sid said

  “Would you?”

  “Sure, why not?”

  “Just a minute!” she dropped her dishtowel where she stood, and took off for the bedroom, which was beside her mother’s. “Hi, Mommy!” she said, and skipped into her own room. Instantly, all hell broke loose.

  “Christ, Markie,” roared Cynthia, “what’s the matter with you? Are you nuts?”

  “Whaaa? Whooo? Mommy!”

  “Markie,” Cynthia howled. She rushed back into the hall and began to stamp her feet. “That damn kid,” she told her mother, “was sleeping with my picture! He wrinkled my whole picture!”

  “It’s not just your picture, sweetheart,” Martha began.

  “If he wants a paper,” Cynthia shouted, “let him buy one!”

  At this point the childless couple who lived above them began to hammer on the floor.

  “Oh—” Martha cried, grabbing her hair. “What the fuck do they expect! It’s a holiday!”

  She screamed her words in Sid’s direction, as though she wanted to frighten him; he paled, and dove back into the dishes. While she calmed herself and calmed the children, he finished the silverware—and then, in plain sight of her, he reached up into a cabinet and took down the Bon Ami. Oh the Bon Ami—the Bon Ami was just too much. What right had he to twist her arm so? What right had he to be so perfect? She would have sold her soul to the devil, were he able to make her love the man who stood in an apron in her kitchen, shaking the beautiful white cleanser down into the dirty sink.

  It is difficult to be casual about the power of Thanksgiving; it produces expectations, and starts ordering around our emotions, and, above all, it takes unfair advantage of our memories. Though Martha Reganhart did not consider herself particularly reverent about celebrations, she nevertheless could not become accustomed to having to earn a living on Thanksgiving Day by waiting on tables. She could work without too much pain on Sundays, Labor Day, Memorial Day, and even the days of Christ’s birth, crucifixion, and ascension; but that she had to spend eight hours on the next-to-last Thursday in November taking orders for fried jumbo shrimp was proof that her life had not turned out as she had hoped. She attempted to pay no attention to the direction in which they were headed. Instead of proceeding directly to the Hawaiian House, she suggested they stop first at the playground and let the kids run around.

  Mark and Cynthia—and here was one of the mysteries that held their mother’s world together—were strolling twenty feet in front, holding hands. Mark was wearing long pants and his blue coat, and Cynthia her red jacket with the hood; above them the sun was a dull light behind the clouds. Cynthia was helping Markie across the street and seeing to it that he did not toss his cap up into the branches of the bare trees. For twenty minutes she had been as well-behaved a child as one could ask for; outside the apartment building she had taken her brother aside and silently buttoned his fly.

  “It comes over her,” Martha said, “every once in a while. I think she’s going to take flight and join God’s angels. Maybe it’s fresh air that does it.”

  “She’s going to be a knockout,” Sid said. “She has those blue eyes, and then she rolls them …”

  “She’s a sweet child,” Martha said. “She’s just a little frantic.”

  “She’ll be all right. They’re perfectly decent, lively, charming kids,” Sid told her. “Stop worrying.”

  They were inspiring words, upon which she was willing to lean. Sid himself was looking like something to lean upon—husky in his raglan coat, jaunty in his tweed hat with the green feather. She would have kissed him for his dependability, except that she was supposed to be deciding, even while they walked, whether to marry him for it; she had thought she had already made up her mind, but it appeared—to her own surprise—that she hadn’t.

  “It looks,” Sid said, “as though Dick is coming up in the world.” It looked, too, as though he were changing the subject, though he wasn’t.

  “Yes, doesn’t it?” She took his arm as they crossed the street. Memory carried her all the way back to Oregon. “It’s a lovely time of day,” she said.

  “What do you think he’s going to do? Will he start sending money?”

  She breathed in a good supply of the autumn air. “I don’t think he could have made an awful lot from four or five pictures.”

  “I don’t think that’s our business. How much is he behind?”

  She shrugged.

  “Martha, I’ve asked you to simply keep a record—”

  “He’s probably going back to Arizona. He’s probably as broke as ever.”

  “Then maybe he ought to stay in New York and get a job.”

  All she wanted to do now was to point out a house that reminded her of her family’s big frame house back in Oregon; she did not care to dilute the day’s pleasure any further with talk of her former husband. In 1953, when he had disappeared into the canyons of the Southwest, she had given up on chasing after him for the support payments. It was not only because she could not find him that she chose not to have any papers served. Dick’s running off had told her what she had always wanted to know: paying all the bills, every nickel, dime, and quarter, had permitted her to stop condemning herself. She was not mean, bitchy, immoral, selfish, stupid and dishonest—all the words he had hurled at her when she had fled finally from Mexico with the children; it could not be she who was the betrayer of their children—not so long as she was as harried and unhappy as she was.

  Martha said, “He has a job. He’s a painter.”

  “I meant a real job, to meet his obligations.”

  All she knew about painting was what Dick had taught her; still, it was no pleasure to see the Philistine in Sid oozing out. “It’s not important,” she said. “Please.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you, that painting looked like hell to me, I’ll tell you that.”

  “In black and white it’s hard to know.”

  “Oh yes? Did you like it? Would you like to tell me what it was supposed to be?”

  “… Cynthia had it—it’s all of us in Mexico, I suppose. Look, it’s a kind of painting I guess you’re not in sympathy with. You’ve got to see a lot of it”—and the voice she heard was not her own, but her ex-instructor’s—“before you start to get it.”

  “What am I supposed to get? That’s what I’d like to find out.”

  “Oh Sid, are you asking me to defend that whole God damn bunch of phonies? The guy doesn’t have any money—what am I supposed to do, bleed him? He’s a pathetic neurotic whom we should really all pity, except that he happens to be a son of a bitch. Sid, he couldn’t get a regular job. If he worked in a factory or had to pump gas, well, he just couldn’t. He’s a painter—that’s actually what he is, for some unfathomable reason, and there’s nothing we can do to make him not one. So let’s forget it for today, please.”

  “What are you so pigheaded for, Martha?”

  “I’m not pigheaded. I don’t need him.” Sharply she added, “They’re my children.”

  But Sid went right on, not figuring her anger to be directed in any way at him. “He’s having a success, right? He’s obviously made a little money, isn’t that so? Then now is the time to open up correspondence. Honestly, honey, now is the time to slap him in court—”

  “Why don’t we wait? Why don’t we just wait and see what he does, all right?” But when she squeezed his hand, it made it even more obvious that she had trampled once again on his concern for her. “Sid, I appreciate everything you’ve done—”

  He stopped her. “Do you?”

  There was no further conversation until they reached the playground, where Stephanie Parrino and her two little brothers were playing on the seesaw while their grandmother, Mrs. Baker, watched over t
hem.

  “My father sent me a picture,” Cynthia told Stephanie’s grandmother, and then went off with Mark to the swings.

  Stephanie’s grandmother had once been the mother-in-law of Billy Parrino, the man who had sat in this very playground and asked Martha to run off to Paris with five children and himself. Billy had finally divorced Bev, and Bev had tried to drown herself in the toilet. She was now on the ninth floor of Billings receiving shock treatment, though all discussion of her condition was carried on as though she were down with a bad cold.

  “How is she feeling?” Martha asked.

  “Oh not perfect yet, of course, but coming right along,” said Mrs. Baker.

  “That’s fine.”

  “She’s responding beautifully,” Mrs. Baker said, and they all looked off at the children, rising on swings into the gray rough sky, a sky aching to plunge them directly from November to January. On the apartment-house wall directly behind them, some waggish University student had scrawled:

  John Keats

  1/2 loves

  Easeful Death

  The words were enclosed in a heart. It did not strike her (as it might have on a day when there was a little sun in the sky) as witty at all. Keats had been dropped into his grave at the age of twenty-six. Thinking of the death of Keats, she thought of her own: for three years she had been meaning to scrape together enough to take out $10,000 worth of insurance on her life … She suddenly plunged headlong into gloom. Twenty-six.

  Mrs. Baker, meanwhile, was saying that every day another kind mother invited Bev’s children for lunch. A friend of Mrs. Baker’s had sent a basket of fruit from Florida directly to the hospital, and though Bev wasn’t quite up to peeling things yet, her mother had brought the oranges home and marked them with nail polish and put them in the refrigerator so Bev could have them when she got out. Tomorrow, Mrs. Baker said, she was taking all the youngsters bright and early down to see Don McNeill’s “Breakfast Club.”

  Martha reached out for Sid’s hand. She sat stone still, wondering how much worse off Bev Parrino would be if some doctor up in Billings shot too much juice through her one day and sent her from this impossible life. As they left the little park, silent but for the creaking of the swings, she managed to put down a strange noise that wanted to make itself heard in her throat. Then Markie began to cry that all he had done was push.

  Her watch showed twenty-five minutes of holiday remaining; she tried to think of what they could do until five. The kids were moving—had moved—into their late-afternoon crabbiness, and Sid, she knew, was still waiting for her reply to his proposal. Patient, ever-ready, faithful, waiting. Only ten minutes had elapsed since he had thrown his most solid punch of the day. Do you? Do you appreciate me, Martha, your situation—do you see what I can do for you …? And yes, she saw—she had reached out for his hand, and he had been there to give it to her, even if he did not understand for a moment the panic she had found herself enclosed in.

  “I didn’t swing! I always push!” Mark was crying. “I want something!”

  “You’ll swing next time, Markie—”

  “I want a Coca-Cola! I want to go to Hildreth’s! I want—”

  For reasons of her own Martha did not want to go to Hildreth’s; but she could not go back to the playground either, to confront Mrs. Baker’s stiff inhuman smile and consider further Beverly Parrino’s condition. So she stood in the middle of Fifty-seventh Street, while Markie screamed and Cynthia joined in with him, and she might have stood there for the full twenty-five minutes she had coming to her had not Sid taken her hand once again and led the three of them to Hildreth’s for a Coke. And fortunately the place was empty; all the students had gone home for the holiday, and the hangers-on—the strays, the outcasts, all the purposeless people she had come to know during the last few years, who could only have put the final depressing touch to her afternoon—were either sleeping or hiding, or, in private and questionable ways, paying homage somewhere to the day.

  The four of them sat at one of the booths along the window, Martha and Sid drinking coffee, and the children over their Cokes, stifling and giving in to gaseous burpings. Behind the lunch counter the Negro girl who ladled out the food was preparing an elaborate turkey sandwich for herself; inside the store dreamy dance music came from a radio, and outside a pleasant, gray, Sunday deadness hung over the street. Everything combined to lull Martha backwards—the music, the coffee, the plasticized smell of the booth itself, and of course the street. Aside from Pacific Avenue in Salem, where she had been born and raised, Chicago’s Fifty-seventh Street, was the thoroughfare of her life. Looking at it, blowy and deserted, touched now by dusk, was like seeing the set of a familiar play without seeing the performers or hearing the lines. But in the dark theater of memory all the old scenes could easily be recollected, all the old heroes and heroines. She could remember this one long store-lined, tree-lined, University-lined street, and so very many Marthas. There, plain as day, was Martha Lee Kraft, buying her Modern Library books in Woodworth’s. And there was Martha Kraft taking the I.C. train to the Loop, and having absolutely the most perfect and adult day in Carson’s—a solid hour trying on dark cloche hats, and narrowing her eyes at herself in the mirror when the saleslady wasn’t around. And there was Martha Kraft, saying to herself Why can’t I do anything? and taking her first lover. And Martha Kraft carrying a placard: VOTE FOR HENRY WALLACE. It weaved above her head as she marched clear from Cottage to the Lake, and beside her, carrying his own sign—who was that anyway? Who was that sweet boy with the social consciousness and practically no hips at all? What was his name, the one into whose basement room she moved her guitar and her Greek sandals and her brilliant full skirts and her uncombed extravagant hair? And there was Martha being wooed and won, right in Hildreth’s. Richard M. Reganhart of Cleveland, blue-eyed, dark-haired, fierce, wild, a painter, an ex-G.I.—he had not even to cajole her … And there was one morning when Martha was sitting in a booth opposite him, the two of them eating that skimpy, sufficient lover’s breakfast of juice and coffee and jelly doughnuts, one morning when at the tip of Martha’s uterus, Cynthia Reganhart was the size of a pinhead, when Cynthia (who is presently dredging at the bottom of her glass through a straw) was hardly bigger than nothing at all.

  But—all those prayers and tears to the contrary—she was not nothing at all, and everything that had then to begin, began, and everything that had to end, ended. For five months Fifty-seventh Street was hardly seen, it was only walked upon, blindly; and then there was sunny Mexico, and Dick Reganhart was ripping the shirt off his own back—his fried eggs, lately heaved against the white stucco wall, sliding relentlessly toward the floor.

  “I didn’t marry you, you gutless bitch—you married me!”

  “I thought you loved me—”

  “You thought! You were hot, baby, and you itched for it and you got it! And you made me marry you, don’t you forget that, ever! Four years in the Army, four years—and now this! I’m in prison! I can’t paint! I have nightmares—”

  “Then why can’t you just love me—”

  “You are a sly bitch, Martha Lee. You don’t love me—you know you don’t! Oh someday I’ll find your ass down in Our Holy Mother of Guadalupe and you’ll be crying out to Jesus for help—why did you get such a sonofabitching husband, why-yyy are you afflicted with such a sinful man! Well, you tell Our Holy Mother, the only sin, you conniving bitch, is this fucking prison of a marriage! Why don’t you listen to me! Leave that God damn egg alone!”

  “You miserable coward—don’t tell me what to do! Everybody in the world loves each other! Every rotten secretary loves her boss! Guys fell off our front porch just from loving me, you bastard—what’s the matter with you!”

  “Let’s keep it straight, America’s Sweetheart—you used my cock! That’s the why and wherefore, Martha—”

  “Shut up! We have a baby, you filthy beast!”

  “I told you, didn’t I? I said get a God damn abortion—”

&n
bsp; “I’d like to cut your tongue out, you mean pricky bastard! I’ll ruin your life like you’ve ruined—”

  “You hooked me is what happened, Martha—you hooked me and now you ought to be happy, you selfish, stupid—”

  The train moved north, taking almost two whole days to get through Texas, five impossible meals in the State of Texas and innumerable voyages down the car to the toilet; tiny Mark cried and little Cynthia gloomed out at the never-ending brush, and then there was Oklahoma City, there was St. Louis and then Peoria, and now we are back in Chicago, we are back on Fifty-seventh Street, we are in Hildreth’s once again, perhaps in that same historic booth. Dick Reganhart is destined to make a fortune painting rectangles, for he is a child of our times, but for Martha Reganhart life is a circle. And if it ends where it begins, where is that? What’s next? Where was she going? This was not what she had envisioned for herself while she tweeked her brand new little nipples and stared up at the ceiling on those rainy, windy, winter nights in Salem, Oregon.

  “Blair!” Cynthia screamed. “Hi!”

  “My ofay baby! Honey chile! Cynthiapia!”

  Cynthia dissolved, not entirely spontaneously, into laughter, and Mark, always a willing victim, doubled up in ecstasy, and hit his head on the table top.

  Blair reached into the booth and plucked Markie out of his seat. “Hey, Daddy,” he said, jiggling Markie in the air, “you will have dehydration of the ductual glands which corroborate the factation of the tears. Is this the reactionary reaction cogetary to the stimuli, or is you pulling our leg?”

  Mark squelched his tears instantly and stared into the mysterious continent of Blair’s skin; the man was brown and rangy and undernourished, with Caucasian lips and nose, dark glasses, and a manic potential that could turn Martha’s mouth dry. Cynthia went flying out of her seat toward the visitor, and her Coke wobbled across the table; her mother, years of practice behind her, caught it just before it tipped over into Sid’s lap. She looked at her companion and found him trying to throw a smile into this big pot of merriment. But then she heard him groan when Blair slid into the seat opposite them, a child in each of his arms.