Philip Roth - Letting Go

No. In Marshall Field’s she will have eyes for baby clothes and bassinets. She will bring home with her (written in her little spiral pad purchased for just this purpose) a list of what they will have to buy (page one); what they might have to buy (page two); and (pages three and four) what it would be oh so nice to have, Paul, if and when we can afford it. One short month, darling, and we’ll have our little Nahum. Our comfort.

Doris set a tray down on the coffee table in front of the couch; Paul noticed that she had applied lipstick and eye shadow in the kitchen. The tray settled, Doris reached behind her and lowered the pulley lamp that extended from the wall. She tugged at it without even looking, and the carelessness, the at-homeness, of her movement had its effect upon him. It led him to believe that she was very happy. She was wearing little black sequined house slippers and they too somehow encouraged him to believe that she was happy. “Do you like French crescents?” she asked. “You get them ready-made and you just warm them. In the oven, and that’s it.”

“They look very good.”

“Maury likes anything European.”

“Maury was always a bon vivant ,” he mumbled.

“Are you being sarcastic?” she asked. “Cause you were always sarcastic, Paul. I mean you could always cut somebody if you made up your mind to. The intellectual,” she said. “You even look the same, really.”

“That’s very nice of you, Doris. Except I’ve lost half my hair.”

“Oh,” she said kindly, “not half.” Yes, the same cuddly Doris. All right, dolly, let the young man open the door for himself and let us hear his footsteps lightly down the hallway, what do you say , young man—

“I’ll bet Maury’s got every strand.”

“Maury”—she knocked on wood; that is, she looked for wood and found formica—“Maury always had a nice head of hair. With him it’s in the family.” She flushed again; even while she spoke, Mr. Herz lay in the hospital, a bald spot the size of a half dollar at the back of his skull. “You’d recognize him right off, Paul. You really would. Paul”—she turned serious all at once—“you know Heshy Lerner got killed in Korea. You know that?”

“I knew that,” he said.

“It’s hard to imagine, isn’t it? He was such a good dancer, remember? And he was always, you know — you remember the type of fella Heshy was. He was very much the life of the party.”

“He was a very funny guy.”

“Look,” she said, as though he had just disparaged himself, “so were you. You could really make very funny comments, Paul, when you wanted to. Paul, you were a very popular fella, and then you went away. For that matter,” she rushed to say, “everybody’s moving away and it’s just not the same. If you don’t live in the suburbs today, you don’t live anywhere. Maury and I believe, however, in being individualists.”

“How’s my mother, Doris?”

She closed her eyes to answer. “She had to get a shot to calm her, that’s how your mother is.” A grave statement, intended to have a humbling effect upon the prodigal son. “Now it’s a little better, but not much.”

“When did it happen?” It! “His heart attack,” he added.

“What’s today, Saturday? Tuesday night. We were at the show and when we got back there was an ambulance and a whole crowd, and they were carrying him out on a stretcher. Maury went in the ambulance with him, and then he came back, I think it was three in the morning, maybe later, and we put your mother to sleep in Jeffrey’s room, and we talked whether we should send you the telegram, and we sent it. I guess you got it, when — yesterday?”

“I got it Wednesday morning. Three days ago.”

Apparently she had been expecting him to lie, or wanting him to. All she could finally do was pour coffee into his cup, from which he had as yet taken only a small sip.

“He’s going to die, is that right, Doris?”

“Look, I don’t think so …” It was as though she wanted, by minimizing the crisis, to excuse Paul’s not running to his father’s bedside.

“What do the doctors say?”

“They don’t know.”

“He’s in a coma?”

“Since Tuesday night.”

“Did he have any attacks before, recently?”

“Well, he always had heart trouble; he was never a well man, Paul, let’s not kid ourselves.”

“He never had heart trouble.”

“He certainly did have heart trouble, I beg your pardon.”

“He thought he had heart trouble, Doris.”

“What do you call what he had then, a belly-ache?”

“I don’t know.”

She jumped up from the couch and began picking up toys from around the room and throwing them into the playpen. “You don’t have to hate him, Paul,” she said, “when he’s in the hospital! ”

“I don’t hate him.” And those few words seemed to render him helpless.

Doris apparently sensed his condition, for she rose on her toes now when she spoke. “If a man had a heart attack, and three of the biggest heart men say he had a heart attack, then I don’t see how you can get here about a week later and say he didn’t have one.”

“I was talking about six years ago, Doris, seven, eight years back.”

“You can have premonitions, can’t you? You can have terrible troubles, believe me, that can bring things on.”

“I suppose you can. I suppose you can sit around having premonitions all your life.”

“You always had to believe different from everybody else. The whole world is wrong and you’re right!”

It was the proper moment to get up and go. But the colorful airy apartment, Doris’s bad posture and pretty face, the playpen, the scattered toys, the pulley lamp, the French crescents that you warm and serve — all of them together took most of the starch out of their argument. Even Doris’s chastisements didn’t seem original. The simple truth was — and it was a simple truth both must have understood, for both calmed down at the same speed — that some nice affection still lived between these two old playmates. What did any of this have to do with all that heavy breathing back when they were seventeen? On this day particularly, he was not anxious to dismiss whatever little kindnesses came his way.

Doris must have had a soft spot for kindness, for remembered affection, herself. She asked, “Another crescent?”

They ate and drank, and then they heard the baby turn in his crib and the bottle clunk onto the floor. Doris put her finger to her mouth and they were both absolutely quiet; when the crisis was over, she smiled in a motherly way.

“You’re still teaching?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“English?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, you used to read all the time, so I guess we should have guessed then … Oh it’s really funny, Paul, talking to you. It gives me the gooseflesh. Eleven o’clock in the morning, I’m dusting my house, and I’m married, and I’ve just given my little boy his bottle, and my husband’s just left, and I’m trying to think of shopping and a thousand things, and in walks Paul Herz. I’m sorry if I’m babbling, but that’s what happens to me. Maury and I were down in Miami in January and who should we run into on Lincoln Road, just window-shopping, but Peanuts Ackerman, from Ocean Avenue, who I used to go out with for a couple months in high school. And I’m telling you, he’s married, and he has this wife with him, a really terrific blonde — and three kids, and I don’t know, it just gives me such a feeling whenever I see a guy I used to date, and now I’m married and he’s married, and we got fur niture and cars and kids. I just get this feeling—”