Letting Go

by Philip Roth

  I came to respect Jaffe on those Sundays because he seemed to be a lonely man who had come to grips with his condition. Watching him, I wondered what my own particular style would be were I to wind up forty and single. There was something orderly and methodical about him that he managed to make attractive, though Martha had already indicated to me that it was that same orderliness that rendered him less than exciting, that finally—at least she had believed this in the past—made of Sid an uninspirited, unoriginal man.

  “It’s amazing,” Sid was saying, as the car was moving again, “how much she looks like Cynthia.”

  “Who?”

  “Martha. Or Cynthia like her, I suppose I should say. Now that she’s rested and suntanned …”

  I said, “They both have the same eyes.”

  Sid looked sternly ahead now. “That’s right.”

  After a long silence I asked, “You’ve seen Theresa?”

  “I stopped by the other day.”

  “Did you see the baby too?”

  “I did.”

  “And it’s all right …?” I asked.

  “Oh sure,” he said. “Has Libby been calling you too?”

  I shook my head.

  “I thought you meant she’d been calling. She’s called my office three times in the last day or two. Making sure the baby’s got the proper number of appendages. Actually, the thing turns out to look a little like her. As much as it can look like anything yet.”

  “Did you tell Libby? I’m sure it would excite her. At least I think it would,” I said.

  “It did. She’s a very charming girl, in her excited way.”

  “I’m sure this is going to make her very happy.”

  “It’s terrific,” Sid said.

  “I haven’t spoken to Paul, have you?”

  “I spoke to him once.”

  “I suppose he’s excited too.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Paul’s a much calmer person than Libby,” I said.

  “Of course, Libby tells me that his father just died. I guess that’s muted his pleasure some.”

  I nodded. “Though,” I said, a few moments later, “I don’t believe they were very attached, Paul and his father.”

  “Apparently Paul goes to synagogue for him every day.”

  “He does?”

  “Every morning, Libby told me. To say Kaddish.”

  “I didn’t know that … I never really thought of Paul as a religious person.”

  “However, a death—” he began.

  “Yes, I suppose you’re right.” There had been something in his voice that I did not like—the tone of a man who considers himself a little more upright than his neighbor.

  Heading up Maryland, his mood changed, and the tone, if it had ever been present, changed too. “Well,” he said, “I know someone who’s going to be glad to see you.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “I take it you’re Theresa’s Mr. Wallace.”

  “Oh. Yes. She never got it right and I gave up trying.”

  “Well, she asked for Mr. Wallace. I think it’ll help, your being there. I’m glad you could stay in town.”

  I did not quite understand—or rather, I thought I understood, but was a little blinded by surprise, and then by irritation. “I planned to be in town anyway,” I said.

  When we were within a block of the Herz apartment, he said. “So we’re all straight on procedure then.”

  “I think so. The Herzes will wait in your car, and you’ll get out with me and get a taxi.”

  “I’ll have a taxi right by the hospital entrance.”

  “And I’ll get Theresa, then I pay the bill—”

  “You’d better pay the bill first,” Sid suggested. “I think it’ll be less complicated. Paul will give you the check—I called up and got the total on the bill—”

  “Then I bring her downstairs,” I said, “and get into the cab with her.”

  “I’ll park the car around the corner. That way the Herzes won’t have to see her. And she won’t have to see them.”

  “That’s a good idea.”

  “Anything else?” he asked.

  “That seems about everything. I take it she hasn’t seen the baby.”

  “That’s all been taken care of.”

  He was not really officious, and not actually self-laudatory, and his managerial qualities were certainly to be valued, especially at this time, and yet I found myself feeling a tinge of resentment for all the little things he had thought to do. Even on the previous night, when I had told him on the phone that he could use my car, he had countered by suggesting that it might actually be better to use his—it had four doors and would make it easier getting in and out with the baby. Probably that was so, and I had acceded; but after hanging up, I had a picture of him in his bachelor apartment thinking about the number of doors my car had as compared to the number of doors his car had, and I appreciated how, after all, a certain kind of woman might find him a little dull. “I suppose that’s the most sensible way,” I agreed.

  “Otherwise they get attached, and it could cause trouble later. With the adoption. It’s better for everybody this way, the girl included.”

  “Absolutely.”

  He parked, and just as we were stepping out of the car, a window above us opened and Paul stuck his head out. “We’ll be right down,” he called.

  Sid and I sat down on the front steps of the brick building to wait. Across the street some kids were playing in a small weedy lot; next door to us several Negro women with shopping bags in their arms were chatting on the porch; a tall thin elderly man, apparently related to one of the women, was standing down below polishing his car and occasionally tossing a remark back up toward the porch conversation. It was a restful moment, a pleasant summer moment, and there was even the smell of honeysuckle from a bush in the little scrubby yard to our left. But most pleasant of all was a pleasure I began to take in my companion’s organizational abilities. As we sat there waiting for the Herzes, I looked out toward the street and counted one, two, three, four—all Sid’s doors—and I told myself that everything was going to come off smoothly and easily. Why shouldn’t it?

  Jaffe had said something to me that I did not hear.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “—says that you’re going East?”

  “Martha does?”

  “Yes.”

  It had only been at dinner the night before that I had definitely decided to go; it must have been after dinner then, between the time Martha had picked up the phone and handed it to me, that she had passed on the information to Jaffe. It was like having your decisions go out over the wire services.

  “My father,” I explained, “is getting married. That is, he’s just set the date, and he wants me to come spend some time with him and his fiancée. My mother died a few years back, you see.”

  “Well, that’s quite an interesting thing, for an older man like that to remarry.”

  “He’s sixty. I imagine it is.”

  “How does it feel for you?” he asked pleasantly.

  “Oh,” I said—and wondered, as I paused, how much he really did know about my private life beyond the fact that I owned a two-door automobile—“I’m very happy for him.”

  “It should be pleasant.”

  “Yes.”

  “I mean your trip.”

  “I don’t think I’ll be gone more than a week.”

  He took that fact in. “New York?”

  “They’re out on Long Island. East Hampton.”

  “Isn’t that where Dick Reganhart lives, Long Island?”

  “He’s in Springs.”

  “Oh,” said Sid, “is that far?”

  “As a matter of fact, it turns out to be about ten miles east.”

  Just then someone called down, “Hey, hi!” It was Libby. “You two—one more minute!” Her hair was hanging loose on either side of her face, and she was waving at us with her lipstick.

  “Hello,” I said
, looking up.

  “How are you?” Jaffe called.

  “Terrified,” she answered. “I can’t get my lipstick on anything but my nose. I’m shaking all over.” She ducked inside.

  Jaffe turned to me. “She’s really quite a spunky girl. They’ve had a lot of troubles apparently.”

  I wondered if he was trying to needle me. But his manner was agreeable, and I decided that all he had been trying to do, now as earlier, was to make conversation.

  Next he said: “I suppose you’ll get over to see Cynthia and Mark then.”

  “I’m sorry—”

  “I suppose in the East you’ll get over to see the kids.”

  “I don’t really know.”

  “If you should, send them my love.”

  “Certainly.”

  “If they even remember me.”

  “Oh,” I said, “I’m sure they will.”

  “I hope so,” he said. Maybe he didn’t recognize the irony; maybe he did. “I was very fond of them,” he added, as though they had not departed merely from the Midwest but from this life.

  A second later the door behind us opened and Libby and Paul appeared. We all greeted one another. Shaking Paul’s hand, I said, “Congratulations.”

  By contrast to the rest of us who were suntanned—Libby included—Paul looked more haggard then ever. Of course it was only two weeks since his return from Brooklyn and his father’s funeral; looking at his hair that needed cutting, and his eyes that needed sleep, I was struck again by the news of his going each day to synagogue to say the mourner’s prayer. “The best of luck,” I said to him.

  “Thank you,” he answered.

  We continued to grip each other’s hand. It was warming for me to believe that despite the confusions between us—even the coldness, the hostility—we could confront each other on this special day with a decent amount of respect. Suddenly I sensed Paul’s helplessness in a way I never had before—that is, without even the thinnest overlay of suspicion or doubt. I thought I understood what he had felt and been made to feel toward the woman he had chosen, and by choosing, altered. I have been searching for a Libby, and I have found myself one. I have made myself one—Martha. A lacerating idea, but it hung on, and however it worked against me, it led me to my fullest understanding of what had happened between Paul and myself, of what his feelings had been for me. I now had an experience to go by; where Paul Herz had once had Gabriel Wallach, Gabriel Wallach now had Sid Jaffe.

  “What are you going to call her?” I asked him.

  “Rachel,” he said.

  “Because we had to wait so long.” The explanation came from Libby.

  “Congratulations, Lib,” I said, dropping her husband’s hand.

  She gave me a smile, but neither extended her hand nor took a step toward me. And that was all right too, so long as everything was under control and we all coasted through the morning under the guidance of Jaffe. Sid was standing now with his hands on his hips, a soldierly posture; whenever she looked his way, Libby grinned. She held a hand out straight before her and showed him how it was shaking.

  Sid said to Paul, “Well, how does it feel being a father? Have you got the shakes too?”

  He had spoken just as I was about to turn back to Paul to say I was sorry to have heard of his father’s death; consequently, I said nothing, for it would have been a most inappropriate comment at that moment. The best thing for me was silence. Not leading, but following. In an hour or two (I told myself this at the very same time that I simply could not believe it) the Herzes would have their baby. Getting into the front seat alongside Jaffe, I found myself remembering a day back in Iowa, the day I had driven Libby out to pick up Paul, whose old Dodge had blown a piston. I remembered having asked Libby if she had any children, and her reply, her Oh goodness, thank God, no. It was our first exchange face to face.

  “I’m sorry we kept you waiting,” Libby said, as we started off.

  “That’s okay,” Sid said.

  “We were just putting up the crib,” she explained. I turned around to look at her while she spoke. “We didn’t want to put it up until today,” she said to me, “not until everything was sure as sure could be. It would have been awful to come home to that crib …”

  “Well,” I said, “it’s only a matter now of going down and picking up the baby.”

  Libby became quite excited when I said that. She turned to her husband. “Isn’t that something?” He took her hand in his. “Is your heart thumping?” she asked him.

  He smiled. “Oh no.”

  “Oh I’ll bet,” she said.

  Every time we had to stop at a traffic light, Sid turned around in his seat and teased Libby. “Well, are you still with us, Lib?”

  “Still here,” she sang.

  “Just wanted to check. You look like you’re really ready to take flight.”

  “Run away? Oh no—”

  “I meant fly. Sprout wings.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Yes, I am.”

  The hospital had not yet been landscaped. It was a huge new concrete building, one wing of which was still unfinished. The grassless, treeless ground that sloped down to the street revealed the gutted markings of trucks and tractors; the light, reflecting off the packed-in earth and the flush cement walls of the hospital, had a powdery quality, as though it were not substanceless but a film of particles that upon contact would settle over one’s clothing and leave a coating on the teeth. At the sight of the hospital, the little jokes and pleasantries we had all of us been making—even Paul at the last—stopped abruptly.

  The only ornament the gaunt hospital showed was a narrow-armed gold cross that hung over the central glass doorway and rose three stories high. Four nuns in flowing black habits happened to be standing under the cross as we drove by, and the cross, the flat, gray, sunlit walls and the four sisters all came together to make time seem at a standstill, nonexistent even, the illusion one is troubled by in certain anxious dreams. The surrealistic arrangement of the objects appeared to be the outward sign of a world static and impersonal, a world into which one moved with an overpowering consciousness of the sound of one’s shoes, and of the slight tremulous noise of the breath, the life, in one’s nostrils; where every human gesture, once made, seemed either an exaggeration or a diminution of the gesture intended; where words spoken into the boundless landscape were either inaudible or too loud—a place where one found oneself with little control over the image one wished to convey, or the effects one hoped to produce.

  If no one in the car shared my several chilling illusions, they all seemed to share the solemnity that those illusions produced in me. None of us spoke as Sid continued right on past the crescent-shaped drive that led up to the hospital entrance; no one asked any questions when he turned left at the corner. Passing the unfinished wing of the hospital, on whose gently swaying scaffolds overalled workmen appeared carrying buckets and leaning into wheelbarrows, Sid proceeded halfway down the block before he pulled over to the curb and parked. We were in the shade now, and though neither nuns, nor cross, nor hard glary walls were before our eyes, my sense of imminence did not diminish. I had never been in this section of Chicago before and I had never been in a situation quite like this one either, and yet I had a very deep sense of repeating an old event. I had been through all this, precisely this, in another life.

  But of course that is a feeling we all experience on occasion, and it too is illusion. If and when we allow ourselves to be convinced of other lives and other incarnations, it is to be spared the necessity of facing up to futility, of confronting the boredom and the limitation of our own predicament; for no one is particularly happy about those endless repetitions that make us predictable and contained and therefore sane—and therefore fallible, the subjects and objects of pain. Thus this event for me, this adoption we were about to set in motion, this rearrangement of people, was really not the repetition of an act in any other life; it was only a crystallization of several acts in this one. I felt the impact
then of all the shufflings of parents and offspring that I had witnessed and been a part of in the last few years—the rearranging and the rearranging, as though we could administrate anguish out of our lives. I leave my father; the Brooklyn Herzes throw out their son; Martha cuts loose from her children; now Libby opens her arms to Theresa Haug’s bastard child …

  After Sid Jaffe pulled up the hand brake, no one in the car moved, no one said a word. It lasted but a second, our collective inaction, but the uncertainty, the fear, the humility—whatever had caused us all to take in our breath and delay for a moment more that which we were about to do—seemed to me a recognition by the four of us of the powers outside ourselves, a tribute to a presence, or a lack of presence, so solid, so monumental, so stark and immeasurable, that it rendered quite inconsequential the blankness of those hospital walls we were about to enter. But then Sid turned a little in his seat and said, “Well …” and I felt a flow of energy in me, and for all that had failed to come out of the shufflings and separations we had each of us been party to in the past, for all the confusion that had grown out of the rejections and the yearnings, the demands and the hesitations and the betrayals, I put my hand to the door and half opened it.

  In the back seat Paul was leaning forward.

  “I think it’ll be best,” Sid was saying, “if you two wait here. It shouldn’t take us too long—okay?”

  “We just wait here?” Paul asked.

  “That’s right. And we’ll bring the baby to the car, and”—he smiled—“that’ll be that.”

  “And the girl?” Paul asked; it seemed suddenly very important to him to hear all the details.