Philip Roth - Letting Go

“He doesn’t want to look needy. He doesn’t think he is needy. You see, I’ve had it so easy. I never had to pay for anything in my life. And I had lots of brothers and sisters, and everybody looking after me — and Paul, well, Paul had to work for everything. It’s not so bad really if you had things and then you have to give them up. It’s better than sacrificing at the beginning and then still sacrificing later on. The worst thing about poverty is it’s so boring. He — he has to give up so many things.” She paused here to fix her blankets; when she went on, the sacrifice of Paul’s which she chose to speak about did not strike me as the specific one she’d had in mind. “He was an only child and very attached to his family, and now they’ve really been hideous. Do you know what a mikvah is? A ritual bath? Well, I had one. The rabbi in Ann Arbor took me to the swimming pool at the Y, and in my old blue Jantzen I had this mikvah. And his parents still won’t lift the phone when he calls. We call and they hang up. I could just kill them for that. Really take a knife and drive it right in them.”

“It doesn’t sound very pleasant.”

“It isn’t.”

For her sake, I generalized again. “Everybody has some kind of trouble with their family,” I said.

“I know. It’s just that sometimes the accident of things gets you. If Paul had had another set of parents … Oh this is silly.”

But only a little later she rode on in the same direction. “When—” she said, “when I read your mother’s letter— Is this rude?” she asked, and answered herself with a surge of blood to the forehead. “But I did read the letter, Gabe, and I saw she was intelligent, and I thought, Oh what a relief if Paul’s parents could just be a little like that. I didn’t think anybody was going to act the way they did. I thought it would be exciting to have Jewish in-laws. I was all ready to be — well, Christ, I had that mikvah in my Jantzen, what else could I do? But not them. They don’t want to be happy. They want to be miserable, that makes them happy. Well, it doesn’t make anybody else happy.”

“My mother,” I said, taking a final stab at cheering her up, “might not have been much of a help, you know. She was a very willful woman.”

“She was intelligent.”

“All I’m saying is that she was no less firm in her opinions than the Herzes apparently are.”

“Yes?” Libby said. “But suppose you had married a Gentile. You’re Jewish, aren’t you?”

“I am, but I don’t think that particular thing would have made any difference to her.”

“Ah, you see …”

What I saw I did not like. I pretended to be straightening her out about my mother while I worked to squelch a regret she seemed momentarily to have developed over marrying Paul and not me! “Libby, look, you read the letter. My mother was a woman of strong likes and dislikes. She liked her way. There were plenty of things she wouldn’t put up with. That Gentile business just wasn’t one of them.”

“Well, it’s one of them with the Herzes all right.”

I did not like her for the remark. I experienced my first real fellow-feeling for Paul Herz since that night out on the highway when Libby had behaved so badly. “What about the DeWitts?” I asked.

“I don’t care about them any more. Not a single one of them!”

It was a fierce remark, and courageous mostly because it was so clearly a lie. Libby leaned over toward the wicker table — also porch furniture — and took a pill. When she turned back to me she was almost pleading. “Paul’s my husband,” she said. “I prefer him to them. I have to. But Paul—” I had to wait a long time for her to decide whether to finish what she had begun to say, or perhaps to decide how to finish it. “Paul,” she said finally, “was very attached to his family. I mean he wants us all — he’d like us all. Together.”

There was no sense in my saying anything but, “It’s too bad he can’t have that.”

She looked up at me gratefully. “It is.”

“Maybe you should begin to have a family of your own.”

“Oh no!”

Apparently I had gone too far, but I simply didn’t care. What was intimacy for this girl and what wasn’t? I was close to exasperation when, looking down and fingering the binding of the blanket, Libby said, “I had a miscarriage in Detroit.”

I couldn’t believe her. No well was so bottomless, no storm so unrelenting; even the worst rocks have a little greenery sticking to the bottom, not just bugs. I was convinced now that she was a liar and a nut.

I said that I was sorry to hear it.

“We weren’t,” she answered icily. “We — we don’t want any children now. We didn’t want that one actually. I had to go to the hospital — but truly it made me happy. It was a mistake, you see — we … I — oh I don’t know what I want!”

She covered her tears with the tips of her fingers. “I worked myself into this,” she said. “I think I’ve been trying for this.” She dried her face with her muffler and then reached under the pillow for a handkerchief. “We just don’t want any children now, that’s all. How can we afford children? We can’t even really risk having any …”

Her white hands and her handkerchief flitted about her face, and just when I was hoping she was at the edge of self-control, having only to step across, she fell back the other way. The lower half of her face became just mouth, and her body shook and shook.

I did not leave my seat or lean forward. Yet all my impulses were directing me toward movement, one way or another. The girl was not a nut and she was not a liar, and that knowledge produced in me a feeling of helplessness that was almost a presence in my limbs. I just couldn’t sit there, being witness to Libby Herz’s troubles. “Please,” I said, “please, Lib … Please, try to relax. Libby, you’re sick, you’re a little upset … Libby, you were in school,” I said, “you were busy, you didn’t want children then. There’ll always—”

“I don’t want them now! I just want him to sleep with me! Oh, Christ, that’s all!” She twisted herself away from me and toward the wall, carrying the blanket with her up over her head.

When she spoke next it was in a voice so breathless with humiliation I could hardly hear her. “I’ve overstated things. We just feel … we feel we have to be extra careful. We — could you get me another glass of water?”

I took her old full glass and poured it out in the kitchen sink, and then I let the faucet run a very long time. The little kitchen was really nothing more than the end of the living room. Over the sink was a small window, and outside I could see that the storm had lost most of its strength; it was simply snowing now. Down the street someone starved for exercise had already begun to scrape the sidewalks with a shovel, and the rasping of the metal hitting the concrete floated all the way up to the Herz barrack.

When I came back into the bedroom again, Libby was sitting in her bed just as I had found her when I’d entered earlier. Only now she looked even more completely the victim of her undiagnosed illness.

“I managed it,” she said.

I looked at her from the doorway. “What?”

“To tell somebody everything.”

I walked over and handed her the water. She took only a sip and then handed it back. I felt the touch of both the cool glass and her fingers. I sat down on the edge of the bed and without too much confusion, we kissed each other. We held together afterwards, but for only a second.

“I’ll be all right, I think,” she said.

I stood, and then I sat again, very upright in the wicker chair.