Philip Roth - Letting Go

“Run away? Oh no— ”

“I meant fly. Sprout wings.”

“Oh,” she said. “Yes, I am.”

The hospital had not yet been landscaped. It was a huge new concrete building, one wing of which was still unfinished. The grassless, treeless ground that sloped down to the street revealed the gutted markings of trucks and tractors; the light, reflecting off the packed-in earth and the flush cement walls of the hospital, had a powdery quality, as though it were not substanceless but a film of particles that upon contact would settle over one’s clothing and leave a coating on the teeth. At the sight of the hospital, the little jokes and pleasantries we had all of us been making — even Paul at the last — stopped abruptly.

The only ornament the gaunt hospital showed was a narrow-armed gold cross that hung over the central glass doorway and rose three stories high. Four nuns in flowing black habits happened to be standing under the cross as we drove by, and the cross, the flat, gray, sunlit walls and the four sisters all came together to make time seem at a standstill, nonexistent even, the illusion one is troubled by in certain anxious dreams. The surrealistic arrangement of the objects appeared to be the outward sign of a world static and impersonal, a world into which one moved with an overpowering consciousness of the sound of one’s shoes, and of the slight tremulous noise of the breath, the life, in one’s nostrils; where every human gesture, once made, seemed either an exaggeration or a diminution of the gesture intended; where words spoken into the boundless landscape were either inaudible or too loud — a place where one found oneself with little control over the image one wished to convey, or the effects one hoped to produce.

If no one in the car shared my several chilling illusions, they all seemed to share the solemnity that those illusions produced in me. None of us spoke as Sid continued right on past the crescent-shaped drive that led up to the hospital entrance; no one asked any questions when he turned left at the corner. Passing the unfinished wing of the hospital, on whose gently swaying scaffolds overalled workmen appeared carrying buckets and leaning into wheelbarrows, Sid proceeded halfway down the block before he pulled over to the curb and parked. We were in the shade now, and though neither nuns, nor cross, nor hard glary walls were before our eyes, my sense of imminence did not diminish. I had never been in this section of Chicago before and I had never been in a situation quite like this one either, and yet I had a very deep sense of repeating an old event. I had been through all this, precisely this, in another life.

But of course that is a feeling we all experience on occasion, and it too is illusion. If and when we allow ourselves to be convinced of other lives and other incarnations, it is to be spared the necessity of facing up to futility, of confronting the boredom and the limitation of our own predicament; for no one is particularly happy about those endless repetitions that make us predictable and contained and therefore sane — and therefore fallible, the subjects and objects of pain. Thus this event for me, this adoption we were about to set in motion, this rearrangement of people, was really not the repetition of an act in any other life; it was only a crystallization of several acts in this one. I felt the impact then of all the shufflings of parents and offspring that I had witnessed and been a part of in the last few years — the rearranging and the rearranging, as though we could administrate anguish out of our lives. I leave my father; the Brooklyn Herzes throw out their son; Martha cuts loose from her children; now Libby opens her arms to Theresa Haug’s bastard child …

After Sid Jaffe pulled up the hand brake, no one in the car moved, no one said a word. It lasted but a second, our collective inaction, but the uncertainty, the fear, the humility — whatever had caused us all to take in our breath and delay for a moment more that which we were about to do — seemed to me a recognition by the four of us of the powers outside ourselves, a tribute to a presence, or a lack of presence, so solid, so monumental, so stark and immeasurable, that it rendered quite inconsequential the blankness of those hospital walls we were about to enter. But then Sid turned a little in his seat and said, “Well …” and I felt a flow of energy in me, and for all that had failed to come out of the shufflings and separations we had each of us been party to in the past, for all the confusion that had grown out of the rejections and the yearnings, the demands and the hesitations and the betrayals, I put my hand to the door and half opened it.

In the back seat Paul was leaning forward.

“I think it’ll be best,” Sid was saying, “if you two wait here. It shouldn’t take us too long — okay?”

“We just wait here?” Paul asked.

“That’s right. And we’ll bring the baby to the car, and”—he smiled—“that’ll be that.”

“And the girl?” Paul asked; it seemed suddenly very important to him to hear all the details.

“She’s fine,” Jaffe said. “She’ll just go home.”

But Paul was still listening, apparently to hear what he had to do; it did not quite satisfy him, it seemed, that he had to do nothing.

Jaffe said again, almost helplessly, “And that’ll be that.”

A silence began to develop once more, and I rushed to fill it. “I’ll take care of her, Paul. Everything will be all right.”

“Oh,” he said, looking up at me. He slid his hand down into his trouser pocket, in a gesture almost of panic, and withdrew his wallet. He removed a check from the billfold section, examined it, and then handed it to me. I did not look at the figures as I put it in my pocket.

“Don’t lose it,” Libby said, pointing at my pocket.

I shook my head. “I won’t.”

Jaffe tried to laugh. “I guess we’ve all got Libby’s shakes.”

“I guess so,” Paul said. “Libby included.” He took one of his wife’s hands, and he too worked up a smile.

“Oh, my hands are just freezing though,” she said.

“Baloney,” Sid said.

Libby extended one hand over the seat. “Feel.”

Sid took it. “What are you talking about? They’re warm as toast. Here,” and he put Libby’s hand in mine.

“As cold toast,” I said, and everyone volunteered a little laugh, while Libby’s hands were held, one by her husband, one by me. Until I let the hand go, she was not very relaxed, but sat stiffly as though a Current were being conducted through her.

“Let’s go,” Sid said, and though his words were those of the gallant soldier leading his men over the top, he seemed, like the rest of us, to have been overcome by this last strong wave of confusion.

In front of the hospital was a row of yellow and black taxis in which drivers sat, reading newspapers. Sid said, “I’ll meet you right down here,” and went off to get a cab.

At the reception desk inside the lobby I asked for a pass to go up to the maternity ward. Then I went to the cashier’s counter and paid Theresa’s bill with the check that Paul had given to me.

The sister behind the desk asked, “Is this you, sir?”

“No.”

“Who is Mr. Paul Herz?”

“He’s a friend of the patient’s.” I did not know whether to refer to her as Miss Haug or Mrs. Haug. I could have simply said Theresa Haug, but that did not occur to me.

“And you are?” she asked.

Had Jaffe told me how to identify myself? Had I not been listening, or hadn’t we really talked everything over — or didn’t it matter, one way or the other? He had probably imagined that I could figure some things out for myself. What I did remember, of course, was Sid telling all of us that it was best for the hospital to know nothing of the adoption; should they find out the exact circumstances, they would most certainly bring pressure upon Theresa to give up the child to a Catholic family, or even to an orphanage. Jaffe had instructed Theresa herself not to discuss the future of the child with anyone in the hospital. If asked, she was simply to say that the infant would be raised by her own mother and father in Kentucky.