Philip Roth - Letting Go

Neither his gait nor his expression revealed anything other than sternness and decision. As he walked he leaned forward at a sharper angle than the men around him; everybody seemed younger than himself — though that, of course, was illusion. What hair he had left, it was true, he wore longer than the others, and his suit did not come up to theirs for style and newness. He felt out of his element.

Yet within an hour he apparently had a job. It was amazing, for he had not really envisioned success. He had imagined that it was all going to be demoralizing and enervating, just as at first he had imagined himself sweating out his decision in some fetid hotel rather than on Asher’s uncomfortable but unfetid sofa. He had seen the weeks ahead given over not to work but to the searching after it. But here he was back out in the reception room, while inside his office the man who had interviewed him was on the phone with a trade-magazine editor in need of somebody to write copy about the paint and wallpaper industries. He would be an associate editor. Sixty-eight hundred a year; thirty-four hundred for Libby, an equal amount for himself. All right, four thousand for Libby. There would be raises; he would manage somehow; he could live in one room. Will!

Quickly he made some plans. He would get a cheap room. He would keep a budget. Before being interviewed by the editor, he would make a quick stop at the Fifth Avenue library and look up paint and wallpaper in the encyclopedia, just to be on the ball. He would continue to lie — he was not married, he had been in Europe for the last year—

Sitting, waiting, in the reception room of the employment office, he asked himself a question: Where am I?

What am I doing here, now?

At first he was only going down to the men’s room to get a grip on himself. Passing the water cooler he wished he had a pill to pop into his mouth. He was suffering from a momentary feeling of displacement — the new-job jitters, a pheno barb could handle it. But he had no pills with him, having no faith in solutions of that kind. It was his wife who would try anything. He drank some water, but all he felt of it was what slid down the pipe to his stomach; there was no draining off, no sudden flowering of his sense of reality.

When he turned, wiping his mouth, he found that there was a smile waiting for him from the receptionist. Are you single? Are you romantically inclined? Do you like me? That was all included in the smile, which he now returned. A stunning healthy girl with a wonderful chest. What skin … But for all its smoothness, the skin of the receptionist was no more solace to him than the water. Instead of walking right up and starting a conversation, he walked by her and into the Down elevator. On the main floor he stepped out into the street. Fresh air. But all it did was move over his skin. Between where the water slid and what could be touched by a pleasant June day, he was still in a state of disequilibrium. He was in the wrong place. He began pacing up and down in the shadow of the office building, exercising his legs as though they were the props of his will. Will! Force yourself back! He summoned up all his strength, once, twice, but it didn’t work. Perhaps what he should do was walk to a Western Union office and send a telegram. What would Libby do when he didn’t come home? What had she done already? He had better telephone. Hear her voice and hang up. So long as she was not dead.

A taxi passed just then, and he waved an arm at it. His impulse had been to do something — telegram, telephone — and what he did was get into the cab. If there had been a phone hanging in the middle of the street he would doubtless have lifted it, asked for Chicago, and then waited for the voice of his wife. But instead of a phone there was the cab. He held his head in his hands all the way to Brooklyn.

Three blocks from the cemetery he asked the driver to let him out. When he paid and tipped the fellow, the feel of the change in his palm gave him a start. He would return to the agency in the afternoon, he would say he had suddenly been taken ill. Further, he would try to make a date with the receptionist. He would even buy some pills to help him through the next week or so. What did it hurt? This was no time to be stolid. He would get a new suit with a conservative cut to it. He would wind up looking like Wallach himself. He would change over, why not? He would send Libby a telegram. A letter.

He thought and thought, short, crisp, forward-looking thoughts, while he walked toward the cemetery. After all, he did not even have to go inside the place. He wanted only to catch a glimpse of the proceedings to be convinced that it had really happened.

Yes, this was a necessary, a symbolic trip for him. He was bringing (he phrased it carefully in his mind as he slid furtively along the fence surrounding the graveyard), he was bringing the first part of his life to a formal conclusion. He would see his father lowered into the ground, covered up, and that would be that. A man’s father dies only once, and regardless of their misunderstandings … no, that wasn’t precisely what had drawn him here, though that was in it. Actually it didn’t really make any difference to him, or to anybody, whether he was present or not. Staying away would, in fact, give to the event more weight than it deserved, make of his father a martyr — no, no, that wasn’t precisely so. If his coming to the cemetery meant anything — he let his lids close over his eyes, for he was exhausted — it was that he wanted to go back to Libby and give it one last try … No! He did not want to go back to Libby! As solutions went that was the most unrealistic. The trouble was that she had already picked out a name for the baby, the trouble was a father dies only—

Cramped in the bushes, peering between the iron pickets, he heard the word trouble thumping away in his head. In the distance, midway between the fence and the railroad tracks that bound the cemetery at the far side, he saw the mourners standing in the sunlight. The day kept getting bluer and bluer, and the sun rose and rose, and around him the gravestones glittered. Behind was a long line of automobiles, none of which he recognized. Wasn’t it his father being buried? Was he hiding needlessly? But time had passed — of course, everyone owned a new car. He looked back into the light. Where was the coffin? Was it over — the old man covered up? Then chapter one was history.

He tried to feel relief. He rose on stiffened legs, telling himself he would now start fresh. But inside the cemetery men were taking the arms of the women and helping them along. He couldn’t be sure; were these his relatives? He edged along the fence, holding branches down so they would not flick back at him. He had to see just one pair of familiar eyes, and then he’d make a break for it, off and away into his new life. However, all the men were wearing hats and all the women holding handkerchiefs to their faces, and what made recognition even more difficult was the brightness, the luminosity of the day—

He was out in the open. Where was the fence? Gone! Weaving along the paths, swaying around swollen burial plots, they were headed his way. And he was in the gateway. Almost at his back — the whiff first, then the sad sight — was a hearse full of flowers. A death had taken place. The thought penetrated into him all the way.

There were several choices open to Paul that moment; it was not because all the paths of escape were blocked that, instead of moving out, he moved in. He could have run away, or simply walked away, but he moved in because in was the direction of his life. In and in and in, past all kinds of tombstones, fancy ones, plain ones, old ones, past memorials to cherished mothers and beloved fathers, faithful husbands and dutiful wives, and even little children, whose dates told the whole miserable story. Levine’s youngster, 1900–1907. Rappaport’s child, 1926–1931. Abraham’s child, 1929–1940. Born the same year as Paul. Drowned? Run over? Meningitis?