Letting Go

by Philip Roth

  He had not for a moment expected that his son would live with him forever. A year, two, three, and Gabe would have found the right girl in New York—well-bred, intelligent, kind—whom Dr. Wallach would have accepted without question as a daughter, and subsequently loved like his own child. The young couple would have been married and would have settled down in the city, Gabe teaching at Columbia, or NYU, or Hunter, or any of a dozen places. Dr. Wallach could imagine his son and his son’s young wife—he could even see her, a slender girl with brown hair and a soft voice—living just across the way from him on the East Side. On Sunday afternoons he would bundle up and take an invigorating walk through the park to visit them, to stay for a light supper, and then take a taxi home. And in the summers there would have been morning swims just like this one—the son and the father (perhaps even a grandchild) coming down to the beach before breakfast and diving together into the cold blue sea, while back in the sunny white house they had all rented for the season, his daughter-in-law, a pink pegnoir over her nightgown, was pouring orange juice into sparkling cut-glass goblets.

  Of course at that very moment Fay was at her house preparing a nice breakfast for the three of them; and since one could by no means expect life to conform to one’s fantasies—even to one’s plans—he told himself that what had happened was not just to be endured, but to be accepted and valued. There was no reason for him not to consider himself a very lucky man for having met Fay Silberman. Without her, his last year would have been the most morbid of all. There had been Gruber in Europe with him, of course, and though the fellow was a satisfactory enough companion if one was oneself in a giddy mood, if one was not, then Gruber with his smiling and joking was worse than no one at all. In Europe Dr. Wallach had seen numerous widows and widowers traveling with friends they did not particularly care for, people to whom they had connected themselves only because they had lost those to whom they had always been connected before. He had seen them sitting opposite one another at the restaurant Tre Scalini in Rome, amidst all the old beauty of that piazza, picking at their food; he had seen them reading separate sections of the Herald Tribune in the lobbies of the Lotti in Paris and the Grand in Florence, waiting for the sightseeing buses to pick them up and take them away; and he did not really know who was more miserable, those who traveled with acquaintances they couldn’t stand, or those who traveled, literally, by themselves. On the Queen Mary, sailing home, there had been a bosomy, bejeweled woman from Virginia, a widow of fifty-five or so, who had told him that she had gone to bed at eight o’clock every night she had been in Paris. She had pretty blue eyes behind her glasses, and powder in the creases of her neck, and she brought tears to his eyes; under the table—they were all in the lounge waiting for the horse racing to begin—he had taken Fay’s hand.

  Oh yes it was luck, it was good fortune indeed that had thrown him together with Fay only two days out of New York. With Fay along, so many funny little things had happened; and one warm night in Venice he had taken her for a ride in a gondola and she had lifted his hands and held them against her breasts. Imagine if he had had to go out with Gruber in a gondola! Yes, Fay had given him pleasure, and that despite all the drinking she had done—all the champagne, all the red wines and white wines and rosé wines, all the Scotch and Irish whiskies, whose consumption had added to the festive spirit, but had also helped to blur for her the image of her husband being driven, dead, around his lawn on a power mower. It had helped to erase the memory of the eight-room house in New Jersey, and of that same husband whose heart had failed him, and who—said Fay to whomever she happened to be speaking—had been very very good to her.

  So Fay drank, and Dr. Wallach drank, and Gruber drank too, but then one morning they were back in America. They took a taxi from the pier to his apartment, and when he came out of the bedroom where he had changed his shoes, there she was standing in front of the fireplace with a glass in her hand. On native ground it apparently took even more alcohol than it had abroad to blur the past; at last it seemed he would have to say something before some accident, some tragedy, occurred. On Thanksgiving Day particularly he had been conscious of how much her drinking had prejudiced his son, whose approval he had been counting on (knowing all the while that he would not get it—that Fay in no way resembled the boy’s mother). Eventually he had cautioned Fay, had asked her to make him a promise, and the miracle that had happened was that she had stopped. At first cut down, then actually stopped.

  It was at about this time too that they had begun to talk seriously of marriage. She had acceded to a wish of his, and apparently that had soldered them one to the other. The engagement that they had announced at Thanksgiving had not actually had a great deal to do with any impending marriage; it was mostly a convenience, a way they had come upon to deal with their revitalized passions. It had been one thing, they discovered, to lie together in strange hotels in foreign lands; it was another to be back home, with Millie in the kitchen clanging pots and pans, and the bedroom door double-locked. Slowly they had come to feel a little like a pair of teen-agers, and so he had made her his fiancée.

  But in only a little while, when the first excitement had faded—no one was whispering French in the hallway beyond the keyhole any more—the engagement itself seemed to matter less. There had even begun to grow in him a feeling, half sadness, half relief, that in a month or two he would be back to his single life, to the lonely meals and the smoky pinochle games with Strauss and Kirsch and Gruber.

  Then one evening around Christmas time, having gone out by himself for a Chinese dinner, he returned home to find Fay, in her silver fox, collapsed on the living-room rug. In her left hand she was holding onto a gold menorah, which—she later told him—she had brought in with her from New Jersey. She had come all the way from South Orange in a cab, the nine-branched candelabra in one hand, a bottle of Scotch in the other. The taxi driver had helped her along beneath the canopy, and the doorman had supported her up to the doctor’s apartment, and inside she had passed out. On the floor she hugged the candelabra to her and wept over her children in California who wrote only a post card once a month. He helped her up and brought a cold cloth for her sad eyes, and it was then that he had made her promise that she would not drink again. Later, though it was in conflict with his atheistic principles, he allowed her to light the Chanukah candles and set them up on the fireplace mantle. A few days later they went up to Grossinger’s and stayed through the New Year. And now they were to be married. When they went out to dine, Mrs. Silberman would not even have a cocktail before her meal.

  And the future? Well, why wouldn’t it be pleasant? There was a trip to the Bahamas planned for their honeymoon, and for the following spring they were talking about six weeks in South America; Fay had even called Cooks to inquire about arrangements. Nevertheless, there is no one who does not have the right to imagine what might have been—there are always the ifs. If, for instance, his son had come home to New York and given him a year or two—

  He looked out to where a wave was driving in toward the shore, and he hoped that Gabe would not see it—that it would wash over him, drown him. Filled with rage, he wished that Gabe were dead. He wished that the boy had never been born. He was just like his mother—cold. He hated them both for leaving him.

  But when the wave came rolling down and flowed up to the beach, he felt only remorse. His heart sank and did not rise again until he caught sight once more of his son’s head. How could he hate what had been everything to him? His wife, after all, had not willed leukemia upon herself. Yet in those black months after her death, with Gabe stationed halfway across the country in Oklahoma, Dr. Wallach would sometimes think that Anna had waited until he was all alone to die to see if he had learned anything from having lived a life with her. And had he? She had been a strong-willed, polished woman; for two generations in America, and in Hamburg for generations before that, the Seligs had been professional people, lawyers and physicians, and Anna Selig Wallach had been a true enough daughter of her
class. There had been a certain wisdom about her, a contemplativeness, and—for all the precious goods that had always been hers—an understanding on her part of what it was not-to-have; she knew how you were to act when everything was taken from you, without cause or warning.

  It had been an education for him, watching her die. It was as though her whole life had been a training for those last three months. Not once, from fear or pain, had she cried out; not once, for all the fatigue that weighed upon her, another pound a day, had she been mean or cross. She had not lost her temper—this impressed him greatly—and even her tears, which curiously were more frequent in the early weeks of the disease than in the last, had seemed more for him than for herself. And then one evening around dinnertime she left him, and it did not really seem that he had learned very much. He cried from fear and pain for a week. One night when Millie came in with his hot milk, which he hoped would be an aid to him in falling asleep, he had had to ask her, the maid, to sit down in the chair beside his bed for a few moments. It was several months before he could sleep with the light off; she died in the early fall and not until winter did there come a morning when he awoke to find the room lit by the gray sun and not by his bed lamp.

  Then Gabe had been discharged, and when he had come home, what had his father done but driven him away? He had moaned and leaned, leaned and moaned, and there was Gabe flying off to Iowa, to Chicago! God in Heaven, why had he been so clutchy? If only he had learned a little from her, if only he had been able to remain calm … But that would have been unnatural! At his age he was entitled to his feelings—why should he act happy when he was sad? Why smile each time the boy went out the front door, when each time he wanted to cry? What kind of son was it, anyway, who left his aging father!

  All sons. All sons leave their fathers. Of course. He considered himself a student of psychology and he was not naïve about certain facts of life. Just the other day on the beach he had had an interesting discussion about paternal problems with Abe Cole, one of New York’s leading psychoanalysts, who happened to have the house next door to Fay’s. He had told Abe, and four or five others sitting and chatting under their umbrella, that unhappy as he had been when his son had gone off for good, he had known in his heart that a boy does not become a man living in his father’s house. In part it had been to impress Abe with his objectivity and intelligence that he had spoken so, and to impress the others too, Fay’s summer friends, whom he suspected of not thinking so highly of dentists as they did of psychoanalysts. Also he had been trying to impress Fay, which he found himself doing fairly regularly of late. His desire to impress, however, had not led him to be hypocritical; he believed what he said—children grow up and go away. That was one of life’s laws to which he and his son could not expect to be made exceptions. Nevertheless (and this he had not been able to say to Abe, though it was what he had hoped they might get to talk about), there are certain circumstances, are there not? Special predicaments people wind up in that are not of their own choosing and that both child and parent have to recognize and make accommodations for? If only his son, for instance, had had an ounce of patience with him; if only he himself had displayed an ounce of control …

  However, what was was. Be philosophic. He would have to work with what he had … Gabe had driven straight through from Chicago in one day and had arrived at eleven-thirty the night before. They had all sat down to have a cup of coffee and a sandwich together, and no real strains had been apparent. Gabe had even said good night to her as he went off to bed, and when they were alone again, Fay had commented on what nice posture the young man had. Well, there was a certain willingness in that remark, wasn’t there? And as for Gabe, he was an intelligent boy, a decent boy—so why then should there be strains? They were three grown people; if they all worked at it a little, they could have a week together that would be a foundation for their future happiness.

  He reasoned and he reasoned, and still, when Gabe swam to shore, and Dr. Wallach handed a towel up to him, he found himself unable to relax. He was stiff and ill at ease, fearful of saying the wrong thing, all this in front of his own flesh and blood.

  Gabe sat down beside him and they looked out at the sea. He asked if his father had gotten over his chill and Dr. Wallach assured him that he had. This enabled them to look out at the water again. The doctor checked his watch, but they were not due back for breakfast for another half hour. The beach was empty of people as far off as he could see.

  “So how’s teaching this year?” Dr. Wallach asked. “Still crazy about it?”

  “Oh, I like it all right.”

  “Still like the Windy City?”

  “As a matter of fact,” said Gabe, rubbing his towel across his shoulders, “I’m getting a little tired of it.”

  He could hardly believe his ears. His heart took a long stride forward and met, head-on, the wall of his chest. Through some miracle of the will, he managed not to cry out, “Then come, come, my darling son—come back with me!”

  He said instead, “Oh? No kidding.” He was so proud of his self-control that he could have shaken his own hand. He looked—casually—over at his son, and saw upon his face what seemed to be depression. “So,” he began again, “I suppose you won’t be hanging around Chicago very much from now on.”

  “I don’t know. I’ve even been thinking of leaving teaching.”

  “Something happen?”

  “It’s just not quite as satisfying as it was. Maybe I’ll try something else for a while.”

  “I see.” He attempted to let more than a second elapse, but couldn’t. “For instance, what? Just speaking off the cuff, you know.”

  “Traveling. Maybe living in Europe for a while.”

  “Oh. Uh-huh. Interesting …”

  They had been speaking with their eyes toward the horizon, but now Gabe turned to the doctor and smiled. The boy had the height and carriage of his mother, but he had the doctor’s long head and stern good looks. There was no doubt that he was the doctor’s son. “But I’m not sure, you see, about anything,” he said.

  Dr. Wallach wondered if his own stern eyes looked stern enough; they were not teary, and he most assuredly did not want them to look as though they were. “When would this be?” he asked. “You know, a year, two years—”

  “I don’t know … I’m even thinking of resigning. Of not going back, except to get my belongings.”

  “Well, this is a surprise.”

  “For me too. It only occurred to me about halfway through Pennsylvania yesterday. As I said, I’m not even sure.”

  “Well,” the doctor said—casual still—letting some sand drift slowly off his hands, “it just shows—your heart is in the East after all.”

  “I didn’t mean to indicate that I’d decided anything—”

  “Who said you decided anything? I was just making an observation.” They were silent. Until Dr. Wallach said, “I mean your business is certainly your business. Europe is a beautiful and educational place, there’s no doubt about that. It’s too bad you didn’t feel this way last year”—he was desperate with the desire to sound simply chatty—“when I was going.”

  “Yes—well—I thought I’d stay a little longer. I’m not so much thinking of touring as settling down there awhile.”

  “Well, sure, you’re single. Live it up. You still like the bachelor life, huh?”

  Gabe shrugged. “I’m not planning to marry anybody just yet.”

  “Certainly, take your time, look around. Take a walk down Fifth Avenue for yourself. The most beautiful women in the world. Let me put it this way: the Italian girl is a beautiful girl, I’ll grant that, and the French girl is certainly a girl of fine qualities too. And even the English girl has got something about her, very soft skin and so forth, but for nice wholesome all-around good looks, give me an American girl, any day. If I were a young man looking for a wife, I’d look right around here. You don’t even have to go very far from Central Park to find the kind of girl I’m talking about.”

&nb
sp; Gabe only nodded his head. The doctor felt his face go incandescent—how obvious he was! His son said, “Shall we go back for breakfast? I’m getting hungry.”

  They both got up. “No,” the doctor said, “I didn’t think Chicago was going to be your city forever. New York gets in a man’s blood—speaking for myself, I mean. You know that song, “Autumn in New York”—well, popular as it is, there’s some truth in it.”

  “Of course my plans aren’t definite …” They started off.

  “Look,” said Dr. Wallach, a finger on his son’s arm, “nobody’s plans are definite.”

  “I suppose that’s so.”

  He was afraid to say more. How could he tell him he was uncertain about Mrs. Silberman when he was actually uncertain whether or not he was uncertain? Suppose he confessed to doubt and married her later anyway? Could he possibly allow himself to appear even more weak, more needy, than he had already? To his own son?

  Why not! Damn it, what was a family for, if not to be weak in front of?

  “Would that be a breach of contract?” he heard himself asking. “Suddenly resigning like that?”

  “No, no—I don’t even imagine I’ll do it. It was just something impractical, really, that I thought of in a groggy state.”

  “After all, though, if you’re not happy out there, there’s no reason you should stay. You have a right to make your own decisions.”

  “Dad, look …”

  “What? What’s the matter now?”

  “Nothing. You know, though, that when you and Mrs. Silberman marry—is this what you’re getting at?”

  “What?”

  “Well … let’s do get things out in the open. You know I couldn’t move in with you two. I mean if I were to leave Chicago. That would be very unrealistic for you to bank on. Surely you know that as well as I do.”