Philip Roth - Letting Go

“Are you all right?” he called. “Cynthia, hey, come here — give me your hand. What’s the matter? Are you okay?”

“You let me go,” she said.

“We got knocked into, honey. Come on, give me your hand. Are you all right? What is it—?”

She allowed herself to be helped up. But she refused to cry. She knew that he had let her go. She started up toward the blanket by herself.

Then it was dark again and she was in bed. Downstairs Mrs. Griffin was reading a book. Cynthia had not seen her father all day, and a little while ago June had gone off to the hospital too. She had left directly after dinner, when Mrs. Griffin had come to sit with Cynthia. June had said she was only going to kiss Markie good night and then would be back. The drive to the hospital was fourteen miles; for herself Cynthia did not believe that kissing anybody good night was that essential. It was mostly for babies. Gabe had used to kiss her good night in Chicago, and that was because he thought of her as some sort of baby who could be tricked by a kiss; she had never liked that. She had never liked him; now she remembered. He had made her mother unhappy. If it hadn’t been for him, her mother would have married her father again. But he took her mother into the bedroom and closed the door and made her get into bed with him and say she wouldn’t marry Cynthia’s father. Whenever Gabe was nice it was only a trick. Today was a perfect example — he had wanted to get back at her for what she had told her father. He would probably try to get his hands on Markie too, and drown him; she had better warn her little brother about that.

She leaned her head over the side of the bunk so that it would be upside-down and make Markie laugh. “Hey, Markie — look at me, booo-aaaa!”

His pillow was puffed up, but he wasn’t there. He was still in the hospital — how could she forget that? His bed had been made for him and the floor had been mopped up too. The sight of his pillow, all ready for his bleeding head, gave her the shivers; it almost made her cry, but she wouldn’t allow it to. It wasn’t her fault that he had fallen. He had no right to get in bed with her. She did not want to marry him. She did not want to marry anybody. When she had a baby she didn’t want to have a strange baby that she didn’t even know; she wanted the baby to be her. Little Cynthia. She would have a lot of regard for her baby. When the baby wanted to cry she would hold it so that it could put its head on her breasts. By then she would have them … She picked up her pillow, doubled it over, and sank her own head down into it. The pillow was a mother … And then she couldn’t help it, she was crying. She was all in a jumble. She missed her mother. She really did. She wanted to see her, to put her head right into her mother’s breasts — and yet two days later, when all the adults had returned to the house from the funeral, Cynthia had her chance and did not even use it. She sat beside June all through the afternoon, and it pleased her that her mother saw when June reached out and smoothed her hair back for her.

If someone had asked Gabe what he had been doing for the last five minutes, he could not have given a satisfactory answer. He couldn’t remember — at least not until he looked around and saw where he was. His faith in his own ability to tell where and what he was about had diminished with the oncoming of winter. It had already begun to diminish in the autumn, when he had returned to Chicago. Of late he was not always very lucid; however, the realization that he wasn’t came to him only in moments when he was. Otherwise he did not fully sense that he was no longer observing and understanding in the ways that he was used to. In the most lucid moments, he could not decide whether that might not be a form of self-improvement. But mostly he was without irony.

The crowds weren’t helping him any. He was — yes, shopping! Despite the complaints of merchants that the recession had cut Christmas trade by a third, the downtown shops were no less tumultuous than he remembered them to be at this season. Registers rang; clerks called, “Mr. M! Mr. R! Miss Gloria!”; the faces around him glowed red from the cold of the streets, from the heat of indoors. He spent the darkening hours of the afternoon walking out of one store and into another, through the blowy Loop and then straight into the wind up Michigan Boulevard — most of the time with no idea of what he was after. He opened the doors of shops that were completely inappropriate, or would have seemed so had he been able to establish what sort of gift was appropriate. As the day wore on, his fuzziness became indistinguishable from his apathy. Around five he pulled his car out of the garage on Wabash and found himself heading south in the murderous rush of homeward traffic.

It was snowing — or sleeting, or sooting — when he pulled off the Outer Drive. His watch showed five-thirty. Since he did not want to go back and sit around his apartment for an hour before eating, he decided he would eat now, hungry or not, and have a long evening. He tried to relish the idea of a long evening. He had two applications to fill out later, one for a job teaching American literature in Greece, another for a position in Istanbul. Though he doubted that either was exactly the place he had been looking for, he was certain that he could not stay on much longer in Chicago; it was one of the few things he was certain of. In filling out the applications he would at least have begun to make a plan for departing. What was to be avoided was resigning and subsequently having no place to which he had to go. He might not even have returned after the summer, had it not been that there wasn’t any place he could think of to which he could migrate, no place where there would be a chance of a little peace and some happiness. Of course, it was not exactly happiness he had discovered in choosing to remain amidst familiar surroundings — it was just that by staying he had avoided the onus of running. Whether sailing off to the Middle East this coming September would be any less what it might have been a year before, he could not tell in advance. He could only make out the applications and wait to see what happened.

He parked outside a delicatessen on Fifty-fifth Street. He tried hard to work up an appetite by looking at the salamis hanging in the window. The disorder that he had come to feel as an undercurrent in his life had arisen, he knew, out of just such absurdities as eating when he didn’t want to. He must try to bring together his actions and his appetites. Yet there always seemed to be extra bits of time to juggle with: a stretch between classes, a dull period after lunch, the solitary hours when the sun was setting. In more pleasant weather he might have taken a walk, but they were having a miserable December — and where was there to walk to? He thought of phoning Bill Lake, or calling Mona, and then he remembered a pleasant-looking, slightly assertive girl he had met at the Harnaps’ after a Moody lecture; but he did not know where she lived, and besides, he did not want new friends. Not now — he was leaving town. He should have left, he thought, watching his wipers deal with the sluggish precipitation, he should have left long before this. But at the end of the summer he had had strong feelings about “facing up” to what had happened, so he had returned from the East — and what was there to face up to? He had not come back for facing up’s sake; he had returned to Chicago to assert his sense of his own innocence.

Forcefully he entered the delicatessen. Like someone’s mother, he pushed upon himself two sandwiches and then dessert. He did his best to stretch out the meal; he ate a pickle; he asked the waitress for a newspaper to read while he downed a second cup of coffee; nevertheless he was back out on the street in time to hear the grim old church on Kimbark ring out six o’clock — and there it was before him: his long evening.