by Philip Roth
2
Theresa had been told to stay in the bedroom. Harry had said it was none of her business.
And that was true. She had just forgotten everything that had happened. She was too busy to think about anything. All she ever did was iron clothes, and wash dishes, and sew on patches, and darn socks, and change diapers, and listen to what Harry told her to do—like to keep her ass out of Fluke’s place. But he needn’t have—when did she ever have a minute for herself?
Everything was for them. What about me? she thought, and tears came to her eyes. She was only twenty. She’d never had any fun. Only with Dewey, and then right off she’d gotten caught. And Dewey hadn’t even cared about her. Did Harry? He said he loved her. That was why he had married her. That was why he had asked her to come back to him. Oh yeah?
She wondered if it was too late for her to become a nun. Would they allow you to be a sister if first you’d been a Baptist? At least if you were a sister you weren’t the slave of any damn man! Or any kids! What that little Walter deserved was a good crack. Otherwise he’d never learn to do it in the bowl. She’d told Harry that, but he just told her to go to the bedroom. He and Vic were going to go into the trucking business. Oh yeah. On what? He couldn’t even afford a Christmas tree. Some Christmas Eve! Locked in a room. She was not to leave her room if Wallace came.
She thought about Mr. Wallace. She hated his guts. Talking to him on the phone, she had been unable to stop her heart from pounding away. She tried to remember what he looked like. Every time she heard “Earth Angel” she thought of him. It was almost like their song. In the past when she heard it, she had thought of Dewey.
She went to the closet and looked at her clothes. When was she ever going to get to wear anything but an apron? She never had a chance to dress up. Harry never took her any place; all she’d done since Thanksgiving was change diapers. That Wanda was smart to get out when the getting was good. But she had gotten out too. The trouble was she should have stayed out. She tried to remember why she had come back. Because she missed a nice family Thanksgiving! Everybody in America had been eating candied sweets and turkey and dressing and cranberries—except her. She loved candied sweets more than anything, and when she had called Harry, he had said that that was just what he was having. So she’d come back, and there hadn’t even been any damn candied sweets at all! Just the same, she thought then that he really loved her. He said he loved her when she asked him. Then why did he make her stay in her room? She had a right to see Mr. Wallace if he came. Gabe.
She thought about sex all the time.
Harry didn’t. At least not with her, she thought, moving from the closet and flopping down across the bed. She had heard people say that men only want women for one thing. Well, the only thing Harry wanted her for was to be a maid to him and those kids. And they weren’t even her kids! She began to whimper. She had only become twenty on November nineteenth!
It was just too bad Dewey had been married—otherwise he would have had to marry her. But of course she was already married. The only one who wasn’t married was Mr. Wallace. Boy, she had really told him off on the phone. Harry had been good and mad when she had finally repeated to him what he had said to her. Who the hell did he think he was! Who was he, breaking up families! He was nothing but a goddam Jew, making a dollar on somebody else’s troubles! Vic said he wouldn’t be surprised if the Jews had made the recession.
She wondered what it was like to do it with a Jew. She remembered the story of the little nigger boy they had taken to the hospital back home. She began to giggle and then she was crying, really crying this time. Harry just got on top, most times when she wasn’t even ready. The only warning she had was that he would get up and pull down the shades all the way, then draw the curtains across and close the door tight. They couldn’t even see each other’s face. She knew he made believe he was doing it to Wanda. Well, she could make believe she was doing it to somebody else, too! She had, many times—even with Dewey she had made believe she was doing it with somebody else. But that was because she knew that Dewey was making believe he was doing it with somebody else. Nobody who did it to her ever made believe he was doing it to her.
Well, she might not be a beauty queen, but at least she was clean and she had nice clothes.
But when could she ever wear them?
She put her ear to the door. She could hear hardly any of what was being said. Apparently he had been there for some time now, even while she had been on the bed, thinking things over. Little by little the voices were getting louder, and more frightening, and she was afraid to open the door. Harry had told her it was none of her business.
Why did she have to listen to him? She wasn’t his slave!
But she wasn’t going to run away again. Harry took care of her.
She thought of how she could get out of the room. Quietly she opened the door, and then tiptoed down the hallway to the room where the children slept. Once inside the children’s room, she quickly closed the door, but then she couldn’t hear anything again. Though in the corridor she had heard Mr. Wallace’s voice, and then some terrible thing that Harry was saying. When he got mad, he could really get mad.
Melinda was sleeping; the little baby, George, was sleeping too. And Walter was pretending to sleep. He was trying to trick her again. Her excuse for coming in was to make sure none of them had kicked off a blanket, but she wasn’t going to do anything for Walter if he was going to try to trick her. She stood over his bed.
“All right, Walter, why are you actin’ like you’re sleepin’?”
He did not answer.
“That’s just like you act like you can’t do it in the bowl. I’m goin’ to take your diaper away from you, then what you goin’ to do, huh?”
She shook him. “Don’t you pretend you’re sleepin’, Walter.” She shook him again.
The child’s eyes opened.
She gave him a good crack across the face.
He began to howl. “Well, that’s what you deserve,” she said, but he only howled louder. She knew he hated her. She would have cracked him again, just for good measure, but he was howling like an animal.
The door swung open. “What’s going on in here!” Harry shouted.
She could hear Vic and Gabe arguing in the other room. “He spit at me—so I hit him, to teach him—”
“He don’t spit at nobody!” Harry said. His face was red; he was shaking a finger at her.
“Well, he spits at me! So I gave him a good crack.”
“You don’t give nobody a good crack! I’ll give you a crack!”
“I got a right to come out in the living room. It’s my house too.”
“I’ll tell you whether to come out in the living room or not!”
“I’m not your slave—”
“You get back in your bedroom!”
“I got a right to see Mr. Wallace, if I want—”
But Mr. Wallace was in the doorway, with Vic. Melinda was sitting up in bed, and now George was crying too. And she was only twenty years old! What were any of these strangers to her? Christmas Eve without even a tree!
From the doorway Mr. Wallace was shouting—at her. “—you agreed, Theresa—” His face was red too. Vic had his hand on Mr. Wallace’s shoulder.
“Yes—”
“—extortion—”
“—back in your own room and stay—”
“—money already! months ago—”
“—baby—”
“It’s my living room too!” she screamed, and raced into it.
On the sofa was a laundry basket, and there was a small baby in it. She heard the men shouting—heading back to where she stood.
Nobody would hit a woman with a child. Her child! She picked it up and held it in her arms. It was her child! She looked at its face.
“It’s my baby—I’m holdin’ my baby—” she screamed, as they came at her.
“Put that baby down!”
“Theresa—” Wallace said.
“I
t’s mine! I ain’t goin’ to sign nothin’!”
“It’s not yours!” Mr. Wallace was moving his arms. “It’s not yours!”
“—it’s not yours—” Harry was saying, but not to her.
Mr. Wallace was screaming, “I’ll kill you!”
“Hey—”
Vic had grabbed Mr. Wallace’s shoulder. Mr. Wallace’s mouth was open, and his face was huge and red, almost as though it would pop. God, he wasn’t really handsome at all. “That baby—” he roared, but Harry was lunging toward her. She broke for the bedroom.
But she couldn’t lock the door in time; he barged through. What was she doing?
“You nuts—crazy?”
“Walter spit at me!”
“Put that baby down, God damn you. Put it down!”
“You ain’t goin’ to order—”
“I got five hundred bucks! I’m going to get two hundred more, you miserable little bitch! You give me that baby!”
“You can’t sell my baby!”
“Oh it’s not your damn—”
“I’m only twenty—”
He was coming at her. “You want to go out in the cold? You don’t want me to go in a business? You want to starve?”
She thrust the baby at him. “I just want you to know, Harry,” she said, “that I just ain’t no—”
But he wasn’t listening. He was heading back to the living room with the baby in his arms. “You got to know, Harry,” she said, following after, mumbling, “I want to get dressed up and go out every once in a while, I want, every once in a while—”
A few minutes earlier there had been all that screaming in the living room; now no one was speaking. Vic was standing, and Mr. Wallace was on the floor. On his knees. His forehead was touching the rug, his arms were over his ears. He was not moving.
Harry said, “Hey, did you hit …?” She knew right off how scared he was.
“Uh-uh,” Vic said. “He just crumpled up. You all run out—and he fell down. Like that.”
No one spoke. Vic was scared; she was scared too.
“You didn’t hit him?”
“He just crumpled up.”
Harry walked around Mr. Wallace. His face was no longer red. “Hey, Mr. Wallace?”
A very thin sound rose from the figure on the floor.
“He said telephone,” Vic said. “He said something.”
“He wants to use the telephone,” she said.
“It ain’t connected.”
“Downstairs,” she said. She was shivering. She wished Mr. Wallace would get up off the floor.
Harry was still holding that baby. It was a good baby—it didn’t even cry. But she didn’t want an extra baby anyway.
“Better take him to the phone,” Harry said finally.
She said, “Me?”
“Who’s he going to call?” asked Vic.
“He’s gotta call somebody. Somebody gotta get him …”
Mr. Wallace was rising off the floor. He did not take his arms from his ears. He did not look up. He did not smile—she thought he might; that it might be a joke he had pulled to make them all quiet down.
Vic and Harry were whispering. She led Mr. Wallace down the stairs. When Mr. Phelps opened the door, she said, “Something’s happened to this man …” She couldn’t look at him, and neither could Mr. Phelps, who stepped aside.
At the phone she watched his fingers dialing. But he was not able to speak very well. He handed her the phone—but she didn’t want it either. Mr. and Mrs. Phelps were standing back, watching; when she turned to pass the phone on to them, neither of them stepped forward.
She had to speak into it. “Hello?” she said. “… That was Mr. Wallace. Somebody better come help him … He had some kind of attack.”
The man on the other end asked where she was calling from; in terror, she gave him the address. Had he dialed the police?
She whispered, “Are you the man who’s got a little baby?”
He said that he was.
“Come get it then!” she pleaded. “We don’t want it!” and hung up. She turned to the Phelpses. “Don’t tell Harry—”
But all of a sudden she felt gypped. While she had been holding that baby she should have made Harry promise her something. She should have made him promise to take her out some place nice to eat on Sundays. She should at least have made him promise that! But she had missed her chance. And she was only twenty. Tears came to her eyes again. She could not believe that her good times were all gone.
3
London, November 3
Dear Libby,
Only just a moment ago I opened the envelope from you. I should tell you that I thought I had thrown it away, unopened, months ago. But today it is rainy, and I am about to leave for Italy, and my bags are packed—I am sitting in the hotel lobby, in fact, in the midst of my luggage, waiting before I take a taxi to the airport. Fishing around in my raincoat pocket for my tickets I discovered your letter. I suppose I would have come upon it earlier if it had not been such a fine, dry fall here. Coming upon it another day, I might have thrown it away a second time, despite the numerous forwarding addresses on its face, which give to it an air of earnestness something like your own. It may be that I choose to sit down and answer you now because I am all packed and ready to go. It may be that I have not changed too much, or at all. Nevertheless, I have tried to find enjoyment in traveling, and I think mostly about what I see.
I cannot, of course, come to Rachel’s first birthday celebration, what with four months having elapsed since it was held. However, had I been in America in July, near you and your family, I don’t believe I would have come then either. I am not even sure what to make of your having asked me. Nor am I entirely certain why, once having decided to send me an invitation, you sent only the invitation, and no other word, no further remark.
Sitting here, my first thought as to your motive was not pleasant. I saw you standing above me, saying: We have survived, not you. But I can’t hold that image in my mind—nor the image of you fastening the envelope and slipping it into the box for no other reason than to be arrogant. I may be deceiving myself, but I believe what you hoped was that your invitation would catch up with me and inform me, wherever I was, that Rachel was now one year old, and yours—still and for good. That would have been kindness enough, surely, considering how close I brought all of you to an awful end. But your kindness is even larger, is it not? Knowing you, I think: why wouldn’t it be?
However, if this little card you sent is an invitation to be forgiven—for me to feel free to accept your forgiveness—I must say that I am unable to accept. Because I don’t know that I’m properly penitent. And I feel, perhaps wrongly, that this attitude might qualify your forgiveness.
I can’t bring myself yet to ask forgiveness for that night. If you’ve lived for a long while as an indecisive man, you can’t simply forget, obliterate, bury, your one decisive moment. I can’t—in the name of the future, perhaps—accept forgiveness for my time of strength, even if that time was so very brief, and was followed so quickly and humiliatingly by the dissolution of character, of everything. Others—you—may see my decisiveness—my doing something—anything—that!—as born only of desperation, and therefore without value. I, nevertheless, have to wonder about it a little more. You see, I thought at the time that I was sacrificing myself. Whatever broken explanations I offered to others in the days that followed, whatever—I find I cannot finish this sentence.
The rain has slackened and I must go. I don’t believe that for you and me to correspond, on this matter or others, would be beneficial to either of us. But, of course, you are the one who knows that. I take it now that that was why you thought to have your card say nothing, just the time and the place of the event, and its nature. Thank you. It is only kind of you, Libby, to feel that I would want to know that I am off the hook. But I’m not, I can’t be, I don’t even want to be—not until I make some sense of the larger hook I’m on.
Yours,
> Gabe