Philip Roth - Letting Go

I told her that he wasn’t. We took our eyes off one another then and turned them upon that giant turtle, whose spinnings, past our gaze and back, over and over and over (endlessly, even after closing time, when no one was there), seemed nature’s inspiration for the self’s most urgent dreams. Chasing nothing, pursued by nothing, powerless to discontinue his own frantic rounds. The sight of him produced in me the kind of nervousness that makes some people want to scream and others get up and walk away as fast as they can.

Cynthia said, “Are you?”

“What?”

“Related to me.”

“Well,” I said, “I’m your friend.”

“I don’t think I like my father’s mustache,” she told me, and stood up and walked in her white anklets over to the turtle’s tank. When she came back, I asked her to mind Mark, and I walked down the long corridor and found a phone booth by the tropical fish.

All Martha said was, “You can all come home now,” and so we three left the Aquarium and came out, above water, into the silver light of that February afternoon, with downtown Chicago, the skyline to our right, looking as eternal as a city can.

In her purple suit — worn, I began to feel, only for historic occasions — and with her hair coiled up on her head, and sporting very high-heeled shoes, Martha looked solid and monumental, the type of girl who occasionally wins a beauty contest by sheer physical intimidation of the judges. Her face was lined again, as it was not in the morning but had been the night before. At the sight of the three of us, however, her manner was cheery and untrammeled. “Hi. How were the fish? Did anybody fall in?”

“Where is he?” Mark asked.

“Who?”

The boy shrugged. “Him.”

“He went back to his hotel,” Martha told him.

“I want milk and chocolate grahams,” Mark said.

“It’s in the kitchen for you, all ready. Don’t spill it on your nice suit, Markie. Hi, Cynthia, you want some milk?”

In the car, driving back from the Aquarium, I had been afraid I might say the wrong words to Cynthia and turn her back into herself. But she had managed the turning on her own. “I don’t want those lousy chocolate grahams, I’ll tell you that. Why can’t we ever have regular grahams?”

“Chocolate grahams,” I said, “are supposed to be extra special.” But the magic clearly had gone out of me, and I was left with only the stickiness of the remark and the vision of Cynthia, swishing her coat back over one shoulder and moving off into the kitchen with an unambiguous display of feeling. From the other room we could already hear her brother exhaling over his milk.

“How were the fish?” asked Martha, turning her back on the latest installment in The Plight of Cynthia Reganhart.

“I think they liked it.”

Martha sat down on the couch and crossed her legs, so that what light filtered in through the windows caught the sheen along the meaty side of her stockings. After carefully lighting a cigarette she removed a speck of tobacco from her tongue, a gesture dense, it turned out, with sexuality. She seemed to have worked up a decided air about herself. Perhaps it was only that I had grown so used to seeing her in uniforms, slacks, slips, and nightgowns, that I was confusing the elegance of her costume with some heightened emotional condition; yet cross-legged, expelling smoke, sipping brandy from one of the two glasses that had been set on the floor, she seemed to be wilfully charging the place with protestations of her womanliness.

Even when she spoke, it was like one who has decided to give expression to a part of his character to which others, he feels, have not attended sufficiently in the past. The tone was artificial and vaguely defiant. “Would you like some brandy?” she asked.

“No, thanks.”

“Do you mind if I …?”

“Of course not.”

But then Cynthia and Mark were at it in the kitchen.

“Grahams!”

“Chocolate grahams!”

“Grahams!”

“Stop it!” Martha shouted, and the bubble in which she had been trying to sit and sip her brandy instantly burst. “ Please stop it,” she cried, “the two of you! Can’t you treat each other like a brother and sister!”

“He stinks,” Cynthia shouted back, and the door slammed to her bedroom. In the silence that followed, I realized that the radio that was usually in the kitchen was behind me somewhere in the living room, and that it was softly playing. It was Saturday; in New York they were performing The Magic Flute. Dick Reganhart and his former wife — so as to lay the ground rules of their meeting, give it the dignity of their years — had been drinking brandy and listening to the opera.

During all those years that Martha had been living her life in Oregon, I had been in New York living mine … This observation was pedestrian enough, but the emotion that accompanied had considerable force. So did the recollection of the long-gone Saturdays in my life, of my mother lying on the sofa, listening to the music, and of me stretched out on the rug doing my schoolwork, and at the window, his hair the color of the sunless eastern sky, my father looking down at Central Park, which was locked in the ferocity of one New York season, or turning blade by blade into another. We had had what Mrs. Baker would call a nice fine little family, and whatever my parents’ aches and pains, there had nevertheless been a comforting net about the three of us, and the permanence of its disappearance suddenly set loose in me a longing that rose and rose, until my hand, as though afloat on the floodlike emotion, moved up and onto Martha’s breast. But the fact that at this moment it was I who was seeking support in her flesh, was surely nothing I could expect her to appreciate.

The arc of her throat was all I saw move. “He’s taking them,” she said.

“Okay,” I said.

“Then let’s get out.” She crushed her cigarette in the ash tray; she jumped up; she smoothed her skirt; she was trying to grin; perhaps without even being aware of it, she was clapping her palms together. “Well, let’s get out. Let’s go. Fresh air. I’ll get my coat.”

She went out of the room to the telephone. “You kids go down to Barbie’s,” I heard her say after hanging up. “Just go right down the back stairs. We’ll be home in a little while.”

“Where you going?”

“Cynthia, you hold Markie’s hand going down the stairs. Come on, Barbie’s waiting for you.”

“Mother—”

“Cynthia, let’s talk later. Gabe’s going to take your mother for a walk.”

We walked in the only direction one can walk for the sake of pleasure or diversion or speculation in Chicago — toward the lake. The wind came straight into our faces, and the four-o’clock sun could barely illuminate the circle of sky around it, let alone make itself felt against our backs. We passed under the I.C. tracks and walked beyond the hotels and tennis courts and through the underpass beneath the drive. Then, still arm in arm and silent, we saw the water, which before our eyes went a color just this side of black, as though a heavy tarpaulin had been dropped over it. Private and alone, in the midst of the elements, we watched the gyrating gulls.

“There’s a ship out there,” Martha said.

“Where?”

“Way out — over by Michigan.”

“Yes,” I said, not seeing it.

“I suppose,” she said, “I could go to Europe now, or stay out all night.”

“If you wanted to.”

“He’s supposed to be changed, Gabe. He’s got this big Italian mustache.”