Philip Roth - Letting Go

Well, that all may or may not have been so. My own suspicion, even as a growing boy, was that my father’s particular trouble wasn’t with his sympathetic nervous system at all. It was, as a matter of fact, with his sympathies: his passions ached him. Whatever terror he saw in life, whatever turbulence gave him inward hell, he was unable to answer it with reason. So he took to magic.

My mother was a different kind of person, which may be obvious by now. She was the one in our family with the expressive face — baggy eyes, long nose, wide clown’s mouth — but she had controlled it like a master. On the surface she was neither overly affectionate nor overly retiring, and as for surface manners, people have said on occasion that I take after her. Love her as I did, I don’t know how much that pleases me. What with my father’s steely physiognomy and my mother’s crafty rule over her responses, I don’t suppose I look much like a young man giving things away. I don’t believe I look out-and-out mean, so much perhaps as self-concerned. My mother was more fortunate: she looked self-aware. She gave one the feeling that she knew precisely what she was doing when she made her offer of reason to my father. It was that — reason — which she had given him. Since no marriage is so simple, there were of course other offerings as well; but it was reason more than anything else, for that was what my father seemed most desperately in need of. And that may have been what she had an excess of herself.

She checked cockeyed enthusiasms left and right, and for those of us up close it was almost impressive. During the early years, however, my father did not apparently understand fully the exchange he had entered into. From time to time he would try to model himself after the handsome woman he had chosen, and for two or three weeks would defect from Yoga and charge at life from a reasonable angle. It was a change his very essence deplored; exercising a painful self-control, he wound up constipating himself. It was clear even to me, the child in the house, that he was not a logical man; while I listened to his explanations I knew that truth, whatever it was, plunged deeper than what he was telling me. But the difference between reason and unreason was for a child nothing more than a distinction. In the beginning I had no favorites. It was eventually under my mother’s tutelage — and that consisted primarily of just being around her — that I came to have attitudes toward the objects of my father’s passions. But then all the young finally get sophistication and go around the house feeling themselves surrounded by second-rate minds; it is to first-rate hearts that they cling, with innocence and greed. Red twilights in the park, every last patient having taken home his reconstructed jaw, my father would toss his darling son up toward the branches of the trees. Miles below me the grass would twirl, so that even I knew it was too high for safety. My father, however, was a turbulent man, and since nine in the morning he’d been working in millimeters.

But one evening, which it seems I will not forget, I came down into his arms wailing not with joy, but with fright. Up near the trees I had looked still higher, and from our living-room window I had seen a pair of hands stretching out and down, toward me. The hands were my mother’s. I came back to earth whimpering, and my father had to hold me and then to carry me home on his shoulders, chattering all the while of circuses we would go to and fun we would have. I quickly got over my fantasy, but that made it no less significant: there had always been a struggle for me in the Wallach household. Each apparently saw my chances in life diminished if I grew in the image of the other. So I was pulled and tugged between these two somewhat terrorized people — a woman who gripped at life with taste and reason and a powerful self-control, and a man who preferred the strange forces to grip him. And still, I managed to move up through adolescence and into manhood without biting my nails or wetting my bed or stealing hubcaps off parked cars. Whatever it was in that apartment on Central Park West that had been compounded out of the polar personalities of my parents, I myself experienced it as love.

Death upset everything. When my mother died in 1952 she was clearly no less dedicated to helping my father keep his footing in this world than she had been in 1942; that he could not keep his footing alone had been the cause of much of the grief she chose to keep to herself. Immediately after her death I found myself blaming my father for having been unworthy of her. But then her letter was sent on to me, and heartbroken as I was, awed as I was by what had been the circumstance of its composition, the confession it contained forced upon me a truth that I had never permitted myself to see. She had been so attractive a person in life that it had been hard to judge her. But in death she came to seem a kind of villain, and I left the Army willing to believe that it was she who had ruined my father’s life. He was the worthy one, for he had accepted the woman he had married. Mordecai Wallach loved Anna Wallach; she had loved what he was to be alchemized into six months hence. A woman of moderate emotions and good sense, and yet she had apparently had her love affair with power. Her restraint hadn’t been all it had looked to be.

Or had it? Was she not, finally, loyal and honest and good? She did the best she could in balancing the emotional budget in the house of an extravagant man. When I speak of her as having acted villainously, I wonder if I am not speaking as a member of that vast and treacherous populace that has lately come out for Compassion. We seem called upon more and more to make very pious, very public, demonstrations of our feelings. You turn a corner and there’s a suburban lady in a pillbox hat, jingling a container full of coins at you, demanding, give. Watch television, and fifty entertainers and ten disc jockeys are staging “a marathon”; they lose sleep, take their meals on the run, sing, make jokes and display themselves, and none of this for their own benefit. It is a peculiar age indeed, when even the corrupt and the unfeeling are out collecting so as to beat down hardening of the arteries. It’s the age to feel sorry — a bleeding heart is standard equipment.

And the fact is that there are few of us who can resist an appeal. After all, you could free the slaves and hang the tyrants by their heels, but as for the rest, the other horrors, what do you do after you’ve bought your Christmas seals? We feel a debt, I know, hearing of the other fellow’s sorrows, but the question I want to raise here is, What good is the bleeding heart? What’s to be done with all this pitying? Look, even my mother had it; she pitied my father. Isabel Archer pitied Osmond. I pity you, you may pity me. I don’t know if it makes any of us behave better, or wiser. Terrible struggles go on in the heart, to which the heart itself will not admit, when pity is mistaken for love.

As I was traveling west, away from a cold glittery day in New York, a fierce snowstorm had been traveling east from the great plains, and we met on the evening of New Year’s Day, the moment I stepped off the plane. By seven o’clock the storm had gotten the upper hand over the population; on the street there were few cars and no pedestrians, and behind living-room windows I could see people peering out from between the curtains, gauging the power of the enemy.

I raced for the front door, but once inside the hallway took my time mounting the stairs. There was nothing for me in the mailbox, and upstairs no envelope was thumbtacked to my door. I waited to hear music playing, or water running, and then I entered the kitchen, turned the light on, and saw something glitter on the sink. To the key was attached a note, a note written on pink stationery with scalloped edges.