Letting Go

by Philip Roth

  Theresa carried a long plastic purse with her, about the size and shape of a loaf of bread; its insides were visible to the naked eye. Walking into the dining room, I felt it rhythmically whacking my side, and though I decided to show nothing, at one point the girl herself nearly looked up at me to apologize. But she wasn’t quite able to pull it off; she merely hugged the purse to her and sank back into her pool of shame. Finally—nothing in life being endless—our crossing was over and we sat at a small corner table.

  “Miss Haug …” I said. She was searching through her purse and, oblivious to the fact that my mouth was open, continued to search until she came up with an orange Lifesaver which she slipped secretively between her lips. I decided I had to allow her still more time to calm down, to look up. And I realized that Libby—for all I resented and suspected her manner (at the same time I responded to it), for all I had begun to hate both Herzes for the crazed and wild sparing of one another that they engaged in at the expense of others—had perhaps been prophetic in pleading that Paul be spared the job of interviewing the pregnant young woman. Not that I was myself in possession of a calm reasonableness, or even a plan of action; simply, my disappointment in seeing what Theresa was, was not the disappointment of a prospective father. Surely it is possible that Paul Herz might have wept or become angry or gotten up and walked out. I did not see any of these choices open to me. I would let her finish her Lifesaver, order a little dinner, and then begin to extract from her the information and promises necessary, and give her whatever advice she would be needing.

  In twenty-four hours I had become a kind of authority on adoption. Leaving the Herzes’ apartment I had not driven back to Martha’s directly, but to the campus, where I had made my way to the law library and settled down angrily with the appropriate texts. That morning I had learned more through a telephone call Martha had made to her lawyer friend, Sid Jaffe. Jaffe had been exceedingly thorough and informative, and after she hung up, Martha told me he had even said that he would try to help her two young friends with the papers and legal work when the time came. “Free,” she added. It had been generous of Jaffe, but facile I thought, and though I could not actually resent the offer, given what it would mean to Paul and Libby, I would have liked to make it clear to Martha what I believed to be her old boy friend’s motive. Instead I found myself displaying a sizable amount of approval (isn’t that wonderful, isn’t that swell) while Martha made several statements almost punishable in the grossness of their nostalgia—statements about Sid’s sweetness and reliability. Though the matter was shortly dropped, my conviction grew that I had been unfairly tested and unfairly judged. That Jaffe was sweet and reliable was perfectly all right with me, but after all, he had not been through with the Herzes what I had been. Anyway, if Jaffe was so sweet and reliable, why hadn’t she taken her two kids and married him?

  Of course I said nothing of the sort—though the night before, it happened that I had said something of the sort.

  It should be made clear that it had been Martha and not I who had suggested that the same Libby Herz who had given us all such a monstrous evening, should become the mother of Theresa Haug’s bastard child. Some time around four in the morning—this was in bed, after the Herzes’ departure—Martha had no scruple about awakening me to tell me her idea. I sat up a moment, and then in a groggy fury got out of bed and came down upon the floor. I stormed around that room, round and round it; with no consideration for anyone or anything, I raised my voice, feeling in me all the ferocity of someone in a dream getting his sweet revenge. The hell with them! Fuck them—the two of them! I’ve had enough! Too damn much! Let them take care of themselves! Then I got back into bed. Through it all Martha watched me in what must have seemed a moment of pure insanity. Or maybe not; maybe it looked very sane indeed, and practical. For it occurred to me—and why not to her?—that it was not only my involvement with the Herzes that had caused me to erupt as I had. Afterwards there was silence in the bedroom, darkness and winter, and the knowledge that beside me Martha was thinking her thoughts. And I was thinking mine: My life, what is it? My life, where has it gone? One moment I knew myself to be justified and the next vindictive; one moment sensible and the next ignorant and cruel. The battle raged all night, and through it my bruised sense of righteousness, flying a big red flag reading I AM, kept rushing forward—my patriot! my defender! my own self! It cried out that I had every right to be cruel, every right to be through with the Herzes. With everybody. It raised a question that is by no means new to the species: How much, from me?

  At long last morning came. Light. In the day the self does not dare fly the banners it gets away with at night. In the day there are Martha’s eyes; there is Mark, visible; there is Cynthia, a brown-haired child three feet nine inches tall. There was a glimpse of Paul Herz’s head as he closed the door to his Humanities class. When he has just had a haircut, the back of a man’s head is where he looks most vulnerable. I am. He is. We are. What will be?

  It was not willingly that I went sliding back into what I wanted to slide out of. But back I slid.

  Theresa Haug sat up, chancing a small glance—through her small eyes—over at me.

  “Miss Haug,” I said once again, and without even a fight she surrendered to her gracelessness and immediately twisted one of the buttons off her blouse. The next problem seemed so large as to be facing all the diners in the room: what to do with the button? I thought, She wants me to call her Mrs. Haug—is that it? and the girl sat there dangling the button by its broken thread, spellbound by the sheer, unrelenting sweep of her misfortune. Finally I found myself extending my hand. She dropped the button into my palm and I deposited it into my coat pocket.

  Her hands dove out of sight, and a strange rattling arose. I realized after a moment that its source was her skirt, a gold, luminous, bespangled garment that apparently dispatched noises upon making contact with a foreign object. Under the skirt a half-dozen crinolines were supposed to add joie de vivre, but the buoyant air imparted only heightened her unromantic proportions. I began feeling less and less hopeful about the chance of our exchanging two complete sentences; then my mind took a giddy turn and I could hear someone disrobing Theresa Haug: freeing her from her orchestral skirt, flicking open her remaining buttons, unsnapping all that seemed to hold in a piece her upper half. There was some chilling fragility about her which suggested that the elaborate network of straps and frills beneath her sheer blouse was there for unfortunate orthopedic reasons. I looked at her only with sympathy and noticed the silver cross that met the rise of her slip; the metal touching flesh made me conscious of the actuality under the clothes. It was incredible; under those layers of shiny cloth lived a woman with sexual parts. It was only a short step to wondering about the man who had seduced her. Seduction? What could the fellow have wanted? Found?

  The waitress was now beside us. “How about something to eat?” I asked.

  She barely opened her mouth, but nevertheless managed to say no.

  I tried to slide a menu under her eyes. “Not even a sandwich? I wouldn’t be hurt if you settled for a sandwich.”

  I smiled. She didn’t. The waitress, a wall-eyed blonde in no great rapport with the world’s sorrows, coughed.

  “Coffee?” I asked.

  “Uh-uh.”

  “I’m going to have coffee and a piece of apple pie. How does that sound to you?” I waited only a second more, then spoke directly into the waitress’s boredom. “Would you bring us coffee and pie?”

  “Two or one?”

  “Two.”

  Theresa signaled neither pleasure nor its opposite; if you ordered her pie, she’d eat pie.

  And so it turned out. When the waitress lowered our dishes onto the tablecloth, whose soft white glow we had both been wordlessly facing for three minutes, Theresa picked up her fork, dislodged a tiny square of crust, halved it, halved the half, then pressed the back of the fork into the crumbs, a few of which attached themselves to the prongs. She carried them to her li
ps and finally ate in a little birdy way that I gradually realized was her conception of manners. Who had seduced her, I wondered, catching sight of her tongue? Who had wanted to?

  It was an endless time before she had swallowed the few flakes of crust. “Would you like a glass of water?” I asked. “She’s forgotten our water … Excuse me, but would you like an Alka-Seltzer?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “You’re all right?”

  She closed her eyes, then batted the lashes. “They … have … nice … pie,” she finally articulated. “Home baked.”

  “Yes, it’s awfully good, isn’t it? Do they have home-baked pie in the Hawaiian House?”

  She proceeded to deliver a series of shrugs and head-bobs to indicate yes, no, and finally that she wasn’t sure. She returned to her plate, separating into pieces a crumb of pie that in itself was almost invisible.

  “You don’t have to eat it if you don’t want to,” I said.

  “… It’s nice and tasty.”

  “But don’t force yourself,” I said, unnerved. “If you’ve already had dinner …”

  “Is there a powder room for ladies?”

  “I think so. Don’t you feel well? Would you like some help?”

  “I want to comb my hair.” She was standing, and I wondered if she were going to pass out. In a rush, my napkin sliding to the floor, I rose and took a step toward her; the girl’s face registered its first emotion: panic.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  Her pale face had, incredibly, paled. “Where you goin’?” she demanded.

  “Nowhere.”

  “I thought you were goin’.”

  The people at the table beside ours looked up over their spare ribs like harmonica players. “You were going,” I said softly.

  “Uh-huh. I was goin’ to wash up.”

  “I was just standing,” I said, feeling my own color change.

  “Yes?”

  “Why don’t you just go ahead?”

  She walked off, holding her purse in one hand and her table napkin in the other.

  I sat down—sank down in my chair. Muzak swathed me in cotton batting and the gentle flickerings of the candles erased the flaws in the faces of the other diners. Everyone looked younger than he was, and my memory went reeling back to those first few evenings (or were they Saturday afternoons?) I had ever taken out a girl, back to all those Chinese restaurants on the upper West Side, where with a squared-off handkerchief in my breast pocket and a scented lacquer of my mother’s holding fast my recalcitrant hair, I waited for my sixteen-year-old companions to return from the powder room so that we could get on with the egg roll. Later I came to interpret all those toilet trips of my first dinner partners as a sort of coquetry on a very primal level—the mysteries of the body’s lower half for the anxious, throbbing adolescent boy to ponder—and it occurred to me it might be something like that for Theresa Haug as well. So far our evening had certainly been like some wearisome blind date: the boy trying bravely to live up to parental expectations of gallantry; the girl staking her all on an imbecilic shyness, which was at bottom only a misguided and sullen sort of flirtation. All that abysmal helplessness … all the fastening of my mind upon the word seduction. I reached into my pocket for a handkerchief and came up instead with the button off Theresa’s blouse.

  When she returned to the table I did not stand and so we managed to get by without incident. I noticed reddish blotches directly beneath her eyes, and then on her arms too.

  “Are you sure you’re all right?” I asked.

  “Better,” she said.

  “You’re not”—I went ahead, feeling guilty now for having shoved the pie upon her—“you don’t happen to be allergic to apple?”

  Of all things, she became coy; her hands began to flutter all over. I realized now that Theresa Haug had an age. She was no more than nineteen.

  “What is it, Theresa?”

  Her mouth flickered at either end; I was present at the birth of a smile. “Yes?” I said.

  “Oh—I just try to bring up some color—in my face?” She ended on a high, questioning note. “In the winter I go so white …”

  “Are you from the South?”

  “Uh-huh.” The emphasis I took for regional pride. “You ain’t,” she said.

  “I’m from New York.”

  “Mister?”

  “Yes—”

  “Are you the doctor? Aren’t you goin’ to examine me—where?”

  “Well, look … I’m not the doctor. I should have made it clear.”

  “I thought you was the doctor.”

  “Well, no. I’m a friend of the people—”

  “I’m supposed to see the doctor,” she moaned.

  “You will,” I said. “Please don’t worry. That’s all going to be taken care of. I’m a friend of the people who are interested in adopting your baby. The baby. Martha said you were interested in giving up the child for adoption.”

  “Martha Lee said you was the doctor—”

  “No, I don’t think she did. There must have been a little confusion. She must have said that I’d tell you about a doctor.”

  Her mouth became so thin a line that I could hardly see it. “Who are you?”

  “I’m a friend,” I repeated, “of the people who are interested in the adoption. Look, you don’t have to worry about a thing. I’m just an intermediary, a go-between, you see. I’ll answer any questions you have, and so forth. Is that okay? Really now, you don’t have to worry about a thing.”

  “I’m not worried,” she said, pathetically.

  “That’s fine.”

  “I thought you was the doctor. See, I just have to get to a doctor.”

  “Of course …”

  “ ’Cause I’m from Shelby County—Kentucky?” she said. “And I know, you see, all this snowin’ and the bad weather and all—?”

  “Yes?”

  “I know it’s just”—she flushed—“affected my monthlies. A few warm days and I’ll be myself again.”

  “Miss Haug, haven’t you been to a doctor yet? Didn’t a doctor tell you you were pregnant?”

  “He weren’t no specialist. Just a plain old doctor.”

  “Well, these people,” I said, “are quite willing for you to see an obstetrician as soon as you like.”

  She seemed angry. “What people?”

  “The people who want to adopt your baby.”

  “What am I supposed to do about that?”

  I made believe I hadn’t heard. “They’re very decent people, I assure you. They’re very anxious to give this baby a home. I’m sure they’ll give it a good home, and all that it needs.”

  I could see that everything I had been saying was entirely beside the point as far as she was concerned. Nevertheless I went on. “The father—”

  Here she came alive. “Oh he don’t care!”

  “He does,” I said.

  “Look, he ain’t got nothin’ to do with it!” It was her first display of passion and I realized that we were talking about two different people.

  “Is this person in Chicago?” I asked.

  “If you don’t mind?” she said. “I’m not interested in talking about this person.”

  “You don’t think he’s interested in the child then?”

  “I don’t know—” she said, “I hardly know him.”

  I tried to accept that, blank-faced.

  “You see,” she said, leaning forward so as to whisper, “I keep, well, throwin’ up—and well, now I’m really wonderin’ if it couldn’t be some kind of appendix condition. In the stomach?”

  “I don’t think so. I don’t think it would be appendix.”

  “You’re no doctor,” she said.

  “That’s right. But neither are you.”

  “That don’t mean nothin’. I had an aunt—my aunt? and she lived in our house, and she had an appendix, real bad? And all she was doin’ was throwin’ up left and right.”

  “That may be. How old was she?”<
br />
  “She’s my aunt—” Aunt had two syllables. “Seventy.”

  “And how old are you?”

  “Twenty, next month.”

  “Well,” I said, “there are a lot of physical conditions that can make a person nausequs. Appendicitis is certainly one, so is food poisoning—”

  “I don’t think I got that,” she said, shaking her head.

  “Pregnant women often become nauseous too, you know.”

  After a moment, in a small voice, she asked, “You think I’m goin’ to have a baby?”

  “I’m no doctor, Theresa, but I think so.”

  “Oh boy …” She rested her forehead in her hands.

  “But you knew that, didn’t you?”

  She blurted out, “Well, what about me? What about when I quit work? What happens to me?”

  “What do you mean, what happens?”

  “I have to live, I have to rest. Gee whiz, mister—money.”

  “Theresa, calm down. You have to understand that I’m only an acquaintance of the family. So I can’t tell you much about money. They’ll … look, I’m going to give you the name of a lawyer, Mr. Jaffe—”