Philip Roth - Letting Go

Best,

Libby

I did not answer.

Nevertheless, on a dull afternoon late in October of 1956, I was at Midway Airport watching for a plane coming toward Chicago out of the east. In that rippled gray sky I could not be sure which plane was which, but I saw one above me lurch off to the side, tremble in the air for a moment, and I took it to be the one I was waiting to meet. Other planes landed all around, swishing beautifully in, while this one circled and circled and circled. I counted landing gear, I checked the wings, I spotted a dismal little cloud and called it smoke out of the tail. The plane made several worried turns around the clock, and then was roaring down, its nose aiming for the swinging Shell sign across the road from the airport. I closed my eyes and waited. When I looked out again I found it had cleared the sign and was motionless, one safe colossal hulk on the runway.

After most of the passengers had disembarked, a dark undernourished-looking couple stuck their heads through the door. The woman was bundled in a coat and wore a black hat that shadowed her face. The man’s suit pinched his waist as suits were supposed to in 1928. He carried a typewriter and a briefcase; the woman’s arms were filled with two brown paper bags. They whispered to one another and then peered out again at the banal geological dullness of Cook County, Illinois — they might have just made it out of some steamy Latin American country only a few hours before the regime had fallen. I called out to them several times, and finally had to run onto the field shouting their names. Only then, above their parcels and belongings, did I see Paul and Libby smile.

The character sketches which follow may help to explain the reappearance of the Herzes in my life.

John Spigliano.

Chairman of the Humanities II staff, my boss, at one time an undergraduate with me at Harvard. He is reputed now to be one of the most reasonable and scholarly young men in our midst. At staff meetings John explicates texts with the craftiest of understanding. Gibbon’s sentences grow longer — explains John, engraving the blackboard with graphs and charts — as he discusses the furthest outposts of the Empire, and shorter as he returns to the Imperial City itself. “I think we should point out to the student,” John says, having compared the number of adjectival clauses in one paragraph with the number in the next, “how Gibbon impresses upon the reader the geography of the event with the geography, as it were, of the prose.”

As it were, my ass. Spigliano is a member of that great horde of young anagramists and manure-spreaders who, finding a good deal more ambiguity in letters than in their own ambiguous lives, each year walk through classroom doors and lay siege to the minds of the young, revealing to them Zoroaster in Sam Clemens and the hidden phallus in the lines of our most timid lady poets. Structure and form are two words that pass from his lips as often as they do from any corset manufacturer’s on New York’s West Side. He is proprietary, too, about languages, knowing as he does six, or sixteen. Where a few measly syllables of some other tongue have been borrowed and absorbed into our own, John reveals the strictest loyalty to the provenance of the word. He, for instance, does not go to the Bijou Theater — he goes to the Bi jou. Only Don Quixote does he pronounce with the hard X, and he had to learn that in Cambridge, where, having been born poor and Italian, he felt it necessary for himself to swim a little with the fashion. At a party which he and his wife give once a year, John dances a jumpy peasant number that his parents brought over with them to the South End from the Abruzzi; he is not sober at the time, and afterwards those of us who cannot stand him get together, not very sober ourselves, and say that John really isn’t such a bad fellow. He is a nuisance, though, to his more slothful colleagues, because he writes, as he will tell you, an article a month, and publishes pathologically. He was trained as a child to be a Catholic, and though he has now given all that up, he apparently feels it necessary to earn everything, tenure included, for eternity. I cannot believe that all that ambition is for this life alone.

John is only recently the chairman of our department. On October 12, 1956, Edna Auerbach was attacked and beaten on S. Maryland Avenue and forced to resign for the year as both chairman and teacher. At the age of thirty-one, John was selected by the Dean to be father to ten staff members (it is a small staff — we all teach two sections of freshman English and a section of Humanities on the side), a cranky secretary, and two mimeograph machines. It is not sour grapes to say that it is a finicky scissors-and-paste job after which nobody else on the staff had particularly been whoring. But where John is concerned, there needn’t really be that much connection between the task and the promotion. If the next step up involved swabbing the latrines in Cobb Hall, John Spigliano might not have turned advancement aside without a thought. He was not considered a reasonable young man for nothing.

On October 18, after a week-long search for someone to teach Edna’s sections, John asked if I knew of anybody he might be able to get hold of right away. His preference, he told me privately, was for another Harvard man.

Pat Spigliano.

They deserved one another. At those parties at which her Johnny let his hair down and danced for us, Mrs. Spigliano swished about in her taffeta dress, fiercely American Young Mother, and — soon enough — fiercely The Chairman’s Wife. At a Spigliano party every contingency appeared to have been taken care of in advance. Over the door to the room where coats were to be deposited, was a handprinted sign to greet the first guest: COATS HERE. Above the table where one picked up one’s watery cocktail was written, a little misleadingly: AND DRINKS HERE. And signed, P.&J. Even Pat’s little party hors d’oeuvres were apparently prepared in the morning and refrigerated on the spot, so that by evening the bread, as I recall it, was particularly without tension. Oftentimes one’s teeth had to make their first soggy journey down into a Liverwurst Delight, with Pat at one’s elbow, waiting. Oh, we would all comment in barely audible voices, how does Pat manage to look so fresh, wondering just the opposite about the lettuce. She stays so thin, we would add — for it has come to seem that she will not move on until something like this is said — and so youthful. “Oh I’m thin,” I suppose, admits Pat, fingering her front buttons as though they were little awards for virtue, “because I’m just busy all the time.” Eleven different budgetary tins on her kitchen counter encouraged one to believe that what she kept herself busy with most of the time was portioning out pleasure to her family. A piece of adhesive tape across one of the tins read—

JOHN

Tobacco, scholarly journals, foot powder

The night I ran into them having dinner at the Faculty Club, Pat had just found a new apartment on Woodlawn into which the family was to be moved the following week. After dinner I was invited to their table for a drink, to celebrate their good fortune. “We’re so glad to be moving from Maryland,” Pat told me, “especially after what happened — Edna’s accident. And the new apartment is marvelous. I have a wonderful kitchen, and John has a wonderful study, and really,” she said, “what with his promotion, we’re having too much good luck. I expect there’ll be an earthquake or some terrible catastrophe to even things up.” What riled me was that she didn’t even expect rain. Though I had breakable possessions of my own — a new car, in fact — I wouldn’t that moment have minded hearing a rumbling under the floor and seeing the trees go sailing down outside the window on Fifty-seventh. “But our Michelle — she’s one of the twins — Michelle was bringing”—she made a quick check of the waiters—“little colored boys home from school with her. Well, that’s when I thought I’d better start looking. She was bringing them into the house for cookies, which is perfectly sweet, except Michelle is an affectionate child — I suppose she’s always had a lot of affection — and she was kissing them. On the lips. Well, sweet as it was, it was a problem. It’s difficult to explain these things to children, yet I feel you’ve got to be realists with them. They want you to be a realist — especially Michelle and Stella, at their age. How old is your little girl, Mrs. Reganhart?” She asked this of a blond woman in a purple suit who had eaten dinner with them. Mrs. Reganhart’s long hair was braided high on her head, and her features were large and Nordic and symmetrical. On no one of them had I seen a sign of any emotion, save boredom. “Seven,” the woman said. “You know then,” said Pat, “what little realists they are. We have a boy, John Junior, the twins’ older brother — and so we explained to Michelle that she couldn’t kiss little colored children for the same reason that she couldn’t marry her brother. And I believe she understood. There is a Negro problem in the neighborhood,” said Pat, “and I don’t know what’s to be gained by not recognizing it.” “There’s a Negro little-boy problem,” said Mrs. Reganhart, looking into her brandy glass, and Pat agreed. I don’t think you can insult this woman, by the way, because I don’t think she listens. “Edna, for instance,” she began, “well apparently it was a giant of a colored man. Harold came by tonight — that’s her husband, the doctor,” she explained to Mrs. Reganhart. “A chiropodist,” said John, who had till then been busy constructing a personality around his pipe. “But a very nice fellow,” Pat added. “He said Edna was badly shaken up — she’s had a very serious emotional breakdown. Perhaps I’m wrong, but speaking personally I really do think that certain women are rape prone. Carriage, for instance, has a great deal to do with it. Your psychological make-up—” she told Mrs. Reganhart while John turned to me and asked if I had picked up the essays Edna’s class had written. “I wonder if you could mark a pile of them,” he said. “I’ve read a few myself, and I’m afraid it’s not a pleasant job. Edna is an excellent grammarian, but I don’t know how much she’s able to get over to the students about structural principles—” Whenever he could, John used his pipe to enforce his meaning; it was clear he would be a maiden with it until he died. I couldn’t really look at him without feeling a little ashamed for all our puny masculine disguises. “You haven’t thought of anyone since this morning, have you?” he asked. “I’m just opposed to letting a graduate student onto the staff. Now, ideally a Harvard man was what I was think ing—”