Philip Roth - Letting Go

“I feel fine, Mr. Jaffe. I—”

The taxi stopped, swaying us all forward. Without turning, the driver reached around with his left arm and opened the door on Sid’s side; we were almost directly across the street from Sid’s four-door automobile. As planned, I handed the baby to Sid; I wondered why we had not arranged for the two of us to sit side by side, so that we would not have to pass the bundle over Theresa. Jaffe stepped out of the car and then the driver reached around again and closed the door. It all happened very quickly.

“What …” Theresa said feebly. She looked at me and then out the window to follow Sid crossing the street. He stepped into the car across the way and Theresa leaned even further across me; evidently she wanted to see whom he was handing the baby to. Then she turned back to me, stunned, but not crying.

“Do you feel all right?” I asked. “Are you okay?”

“I’m okay.” Looking down, she saw the nail polish on my jacket and on both our hands.

“That’s all right,” I said. “It’s nothing at all.”

The driver sat with his large hands on the wheel, while the motor ran and the meter ticked.

“But you feel all right?” I asked.

She dropped her fingers limply into her lap. “Sister Mary Frances is very strict,” she said.

“That’s all over.”

“I don’t think she liked that I said I was married.”

“Well, that was silly of her.”

“I said the baby was in the incubator. I said you were away on business—”

“That’s all right, Theresa.”

“Otherwise,” the girl said, looking down still at her hands, “who would I have had to talk to?”

The driver was looking at us now in the rear-view mirror. I didn’t know what more to say. “Do you have any pains? Anything at all?”

After considering an answer for a while, she said, “Uh-uh. No.”

I reached into my wallet and took out a five-dollar bill which I handed across to the driver. On the other side of the street I heard Jaffe’s car start up.

“Mr. Jaffe gave you the money, didn’t he? For the next couple of weeks?”

She whispered so the driver would not hear. “Yes.”

“Okay then.”

“… Mr. Wallace?”

“Yes.”

“Are you going to take me home?”

“The driver will take you home, Theresa. Right to the door. Everything’s going to be all right.”

She never gave me an answer.

I said to the driver, hesitating. “Would you help her into the house?”

“Yes, sir.”

For lack of anything more I could think to do, I reached into my wallet and handed the fellow another dollar.

Just before I left the cab I said, “You’ve been very brave, Theresa. Good luck to you,” and then I was headed across the street. I saw that in the other car Jaffe’s head was turned and he was speaking to the Herzes. On the street, I turned back; there was Theresa’s face in the taxi window. She was saying something — she seemed to be shouting something. I thought the worst: she is going to push the door open, she is going to come running across the street to demand her child back. In fact, her window did begin to roll down, and I heard, or imagined I heard her calling my name. My first name. I did not remain on the street to find out. I moved around the back of Jaffe’s car, opened the door and slid in beside him just as the automobile was beginning to move. When Jaffe looked over at me I saw that he was startled. I wondered if I had nail polish on my face, if I looked as though I were bleeding — if he thought that there had been some violence between Theresa and myself. Then I realized that he had not been waiting for me. But he said nothing, and we drove away.

In the back seat Libby had begun to talk softly to the baby. It sounded as though she were doing what she thought she was supposed to be doing, and it added a final pathetic note to the day’s dealings. And yet, despite Libby’s theatrics, despite the misunderstanding between Jaffe and myself, I knew that a series of events in which I had taken a hand had at last come to a happy ending. I turned to the back seat to appreciate the tableau of baby, mother, and father, but what I saw was out beyond the rear window: Theresa’s taxi moving off in the opposite direction. I thought of the girl going back to Gary alone, and 1 knew that nothing had really ended. In not staying with her I had made another mistake.

No, yes, yes, no, no, yes … on to infinity. Had I remained in the cab, would she not have wanted me to accompany her into her little room? And once in the room, would that have been enough? Would that have been anything? If I was not to tease, or to make false promises, or to dangle before her the hope of a better or a different future, what else could I do about Theresa Haug’s suffering except turn my back on it?

At the Herzes we all went upstairs and watched as Libby gently laid Rachel in her crib, which had been set up in the room that had been Paul’s study. Watching Libby bend across the brand new crib, Paul was near tears. Finally he went off to the bathroom, so that I did not get a chance to say goodbye to him. When we left, his tear-filled wife kissed both Sid and me.

Jaffe drove me back to Martha’s. After some three or four minutes of silence, he glanced over, and without much of an attempt at hiding his opinion of me, said, “I thought you were going to stay with her.”

When I answered him, I tried to find some comfort in the fact that I had learned something; I tried to engage Jaffe’s eye and let him know that I believed I meant what I was saying, but he was only waiting for me to get out of the car. “Actually,” I said, “I didn’t see that it made much sense.”

It was easier than it should have been for Dr. Wallach to imagine an old age other than this one. He set an elbow onto the sand, leaned back, and little by little he was able to bring his breathing under control. He felt encouraged by the sun’s ability to dry the water on his skin, and soon his chest was moving up and down at its normal speed. He slapped his belly where it was still flat and hard; he made a fist, one hand, then the other. He had taken care of this small body of his, he had exercised it daily and fed it upon foods rich in protein and vitamins; he may have been the victim of a fad or two, but at least he had gotten through life on a minimum of fried foods. Looking down at himself in a bathing suit, he did not experience the repugnance or shame that another man sixty years of age might have felt. He looked as he had always hoped and expected he would; it was not the appearance that he could imagine to be different, it was the circumstances.

Fifty feet out from the beach, his only child continued to swim back and forth through the surf. Now and then a wave rolled in to cover the moving form, but then an arm glistened, that shock of brown hair broke the surface, and he could follow again the progress of his son, cutting effortlessly through the water. Yes, he could imagine it all to have turned out another way. He could imagine that when Gabe had returned from the Army, he had moved back into his old room in the Central Park West apartment; he could imagine that the two of them had taken up a calm and amiable life together. Gabe could have done graduate work at Columbia, and then there would have been someone with whom Dr. Wallach could have eaten his dinner in the evening and discussed the Times in the morning, someone with whom he could have played tennis at the club and with whom he might have gone for pleasant walks in the park when the weather was right. Someone he loved.

He had not for a moment expected that his son would live with him forever. A year, two, three, and Gabe would have found the right girl in New York — well-bred, intelligent, kind — whom Dr. Wallach would have accepted without question as a daughter, and subsequently loved like his own child. The young couple would have been married and would have settled down in the city, Gabe teaching at Columbia, or NYU, or Hunter, or any of a dozen places. Dr. Wallach could imagine his son and his son’s young wife — he could even see her, a slender girl with brown hair and a soft voice — living just across the way from him on the East Side. On Sunday afternoons he would bundle up and take an invigorating walk through the park to visit them, to stay for a light supper, and then take a taxi home. And in the summers there would have been morning swims just like this one — the son and the father (perhaps even a grandchild) coming down to the beach before breakfast and diving together into the cold blue sea, while back in the sunny white house they had all rented for the season, his daughter-in-law, a pink pegnoir over her nightgown, was pouring orange juice into sparkling cut-glass goblets.