Philip Roth - Letting Go

The streets of the neighborhood had a black sheen, like the backs of animals. He drove aimlessly around. Every few blocks there were washed-out-looking Christmas trees stacked up against buildings. The men trying to sell the trees stood by, hands in the pockets of their overcoats; some stirred at little fires they kept going in old paint buckets. The drizzle stopped and started, changed from rain to snow and back again. Still, he did not head home.

Where he met with one-way signs he had a stronger sense of purpose than he had at those intersections where he had a choice of directions — where he might head east, west, north or south, drive a thousand or two thousand miles to a place where nothing would suggest the past and he could turn into his old old self again. He remembered a self of his that was more substantial than the one he was saddled with now; he remembered being in the saddle. He remembered being happier. Well then, he would just take off — except there were certain practical matters to restrain him. His father’s wedding was the day after Christmas. It would only add to the wear and tear to move between now and then. Directly after the wedding, however, there was nothing to stop him from taking off for Europe …

Except his having made up his mind to the contrary. He would not depart until he had a definite commitment about the future; he would depart in a dignified fashion, affairs in order. He was not the kind of man who could walk off a job, whatever the extremes of depression led him to believe about himself. Furthermore, there was no need for him to run away, not so long as he could continue to be realistic about what he had and had not done. He had only to distinguish for himself between the impact one had on the lives of others and the sheer momentum of fate — chance, luck, accident, for which no man who had merely crossed another’s path could be held accountable.

But having a lucid moment, he was forced to contemplate the crossing of paths … The same impulse that had led him to want to tidy up certain messy lives had led him also to turn his back upon others that threatened to engulf his own. He had finally come to recognize in himself a certain dread of the savageness of life. Tenderness, grace, affection: they struck him now as toys with which he had set about to hammer away at mountains. He had tried to be reasonable with everyone — but the demands made upon him had been made by unreasonable people. But the demands made on them had not been reasonable. Still, he had tried to be true to his feelings, to what he was … So on the one hand he still believed himself put upon; on the other, he saw — or was willing to see — where he had not been savage enough. And he doubted that he ever could be, for it did not seem that he knew how to be; and he was not finally sure that he should be. Or had he been savage? Circles …

Fortunately the choice now was not between extremes of impotence or savagery. He had simply to get back on his feet. There were two applications to make out, a wedding present to buy for his father.

On the Midway he turned left and started for the Outer Drive. He would try it again. He should not have permitted himself to have been so indecisive all afternoon. The stores would be open late because of the holiday; he had only to go into one (which one?) and pick something out (what?). He couldn’t turn up at his father’s wedding empty-handed … though he would just as soon not turn up at all. The only reason he had wandered around all afternoon unable to make a choice was because he had not even wanted to recognize the necessity for making one.

When he reached Stoney Island, he swung the car to the right, away from the Drive — no, he would not fly East on Christmas Day, he would invent an excuse — Then at Sixty-third he turned left, out toward the streaming lights headed for the Loop. How could he ignore a wedding he had helped bring about?

Against his will! Almost on the Drive, he made a wild U-turn, and with cars bleating all around him he leaned over the wheel and headed into Sixty-third again, for he refused to be responsible for his father’s fate. In his aggravated mood he was finding it necessary to believe either in fate, blind fate, as having arranged for his father’s condition, or in himself as the agent of misery; himself as a kind of witch, mindless, malevolent … And in time past what was it he had seemed to others — Libby, Martha, his father — but an agent of deliverance? Well, he had delivered his father all right — into a lifeless, hopeless union! How could he buy a present for what was not a wedding but a funeral? As a life went slipping away — oh how she would feed on his father’s good heart! — he was to stand by in his tuxedo, smiling!

Impotence and savagery, that was precisely the choice. Either do nothing, or put his foot down and call a halt to the whole thing. Then what? The circumstances of his father’s union seemed to render him impotent. When he had the rights, he did not seem able to muster the power; when he had the power, he did not know if he had the rights — which washed away what power he had.

With no plan at all — a condition no more comfortable for having become regular — he continued west on busy Sixty-third, under the iron structure of the El. A Salvation Army band, five men and two maidens, made a thin blue line across the intersection at Dorchester. “Silent Night, Holy Night” beat valiantly up into the thick wet air. A cornet lashed out at a high note, the neon lights sizzled in the rain, and then all was consumed in the roar of a train shooting by overhead. For evangelical reasons of its own, the band turned and was marching back toward the curb it had just stepped down from, missing a few beats in the change-over. Gabe slouched in his seat as horns blew behind him.

Out his side window he saw a lanky colored man hustling in and out of a flock of evergreens. Wet, dark, and limp, the branches tipped against the wall of a brick apartment building. Moving amongst them, holding her coat together under her chin, was Martha. Parked at the curb was the little beat-up convertible that he knew she had bought for herself; the bumpers were crusty and one door wasn’t shut tight. He saw her remove her wallet from her purse. She handed a bill to the Negro — and traffic was moving again, horns blowing down his neck. But he did not start forward — he couldn’t. A train overhead drove down on the piles of the El with all its force. An equivalent force drove down in him. For the moment he had been stripped of his clothing and thrown in a dark cell for a crime he had not committed. But the bars, the blackness, the disgrace, the humiliation — he must have committed it! Unwatched, he followed Martha’s face; he had not seen it since he had stood across from her in the little graveyard near the tip of Long Island, where Markie had been buried — and where he had felt, with the same intensity, the confusion he felt now.

His second trip to the Loop was not altogether unsuccessful. A small package sat on the seat beside him when he arrived back on the South Side a little after eight. Carrying it up the dim stairway to the Herz apartment, he could feel the muddiness of the stairs under his shoes. Galoshes stood outside doorways on each landing. Beneath an exhausted bulb on the third floor, he rubbed his feet on the welcome mat and knocked. A slender girlish figure swung the door back; she was wearing slacks and a sweater, and her hair was in her face. She made a small noiseless clap with her hands. It was a gamble dropping in on someone as unpredictable as Libby, and he was relieved that she seemed pleased to see him.