Philip Roth - Letting Go

My father had called again the night before, and I was certain now that any judgments I had made in the dark about my mother’s ghost had been induced by my father’s presence. Two or three evenings a week my father and I had the same phone conversation, pointless on the surface, pleading beneath. The old man stood being familyless all day, what with having his patients’ mouths to look into; it was alone with his avocado and lettuce dinner that he broke down. When he called his voice shook; when he hung up — or when I did — his vibrato passed directly into the few meager objects in the room. I moved one way, my chair another; I have never sat on my reading glasses so many times in my life. I am, for good or bad, in a few ways like my father, and so have never been the same person alone that I am with people. The trouble with the phone calls, in fact, was that all the time I felt it necessary to the preservation of my life and sanity to resist the old man, I understood how it was for him sitting in that huge Victorian living room all alone. However, if I am my father’s child, I am my mother’s too. I cannot trace out exactly the influences, nor deal in any scientific way with the chromosomes passed on to me. I sometimes believe I know what it is I got from him and what from her, and when I hung up on Mrs. Herz that morning, without having said one word about the letter, I suppose I was using the decorum and good sense that has sifted down from the maternal line. I told myself that there was nothing really to fret about. Why would they read it anyway? And what if they did?

At five o’clock I was sitting in my apartment drinking coffee and finding no pleasure whatsoever in memorizing Anglo-Saxon verb endings, when Mrs. Herz called me back.

“You spoke to me this morning,” she said. “Paul Herz’s wife.”

“Is your husband home?”

“His car broke down.”

It was the sort of news that is not news as soon as one hears it — though Mrs. Herz herself sounded surprised. “That’s too bad,” I said.

“He blew a piston or he keeps blowing pistons—”

“I’ll call him some other time. It’s not urgent.”

“Well—” she said, “he asked me to call you. He wondered if you might have a car. He’s on the highway outside of Cedar Rapids.”

I put down the Old English grammar book. A long drive was just the inconvenience I wanted. “How do I get there?”

“Could you pick me up at the barracks?”

“I’m sure I could find it.”

“I know the way. We live just at the edge of Finkbine Park — could you pick me up?” Cryptically, she added, “I’m dressed.”

From the doorway the first thing I saw after seeing Libby Herz herself was my book set on the edge of the kitchen sink; I could not see what was or was not stuck between its pages. And Mrs. Herz gave me no time to check; she ran into the bedroom and then out again, her raincoat whipping around her. Then yanking a kerchief from her pocket, she rushed out the door without once looking directly at me — though she managed to let me hear her say, “Paul called again. I told him we were coming.”

As we drove, her eyes stared rigidly out the car window, while beside me her limbs fidgeted in turn. My first impression of her had been clear and sharp: profession — student; inclinations — neurotic. She moved jerkily and had the high black stockings and the underfed look. She was thin, dark, intense, and I could not imagine that she had ever once gotten anything but pain from entering a room full of people. Still, in an eager hawky way she was not bad looking. Her head was carried forward on her neck, and the result was that her large sculpted nose sailed into the wind a little too defiantly — which compromised the pride of the appendage, though not its fanciness. Her eyes were a pure black, and her shiny hair, also black, was drawn off her face in a manner so stark and exact that at the sight of it one could begin guessing at the depth and number of her anxieties. The skin was classic and pale: white with a touch of blue, making it ivory — and when she pulled off her kerchief she even had a tiny purple vein tapping at her temple; it seemed to me like an affect, something willed there to remind the rest of us how delicate and fragile is a woman. My initial feeling toward her was suspicion.

Nevertheless, by way of conversation I asked if she had any children.

“Oh, no,” she said. The deep breath she drew was to inform me that she was rushed and harried without children. She added a few mumbled words: “Thank goodness … children … burden …” It was difficult to understand her because she did not bother to look at me either when speaking or sighing. I knew she was avoiding my eyes — and then I knew that she had opened the book, removed the envelope, and read my mother’s letter. Since she did not strike me as a person casual about private lives, her own or others, her self-consciousness became mine too.

Darkness had dimmed my vision before either of us spoke again. “Are you in the Writers’ Workshop?” she asked.

“No. Just English. Are you?”

“Paul’s the writer,” she said. “I’m still getting my B.A.”

“I see.”

“I’ve been getting it for about a decade.” There was a frank and simple note of exasperation in her voice, and it engaged me. I looked away from the highway and she gave off staring into the countryside, and with a glance as distinct, as audible as a camera snapping, we registered each other’s features.

“Paul said you’re interested in James,” she quickly said, flushing. Then, “I’m Libby.”

“I’m Gabe Wallach—” I stopped as once again the words flew out of her.

“Neither of us know anything really outside the Edmund Wilson one—” she said, “the ghost story.”

“Turn of the Screw,” I said, a good half minute after she had not resumed talking.

“ Portrait of a Lady is much better.” She spoke these words as though to please.

“You like it?”

“The first scene is wonderful.”

“When they’re all on the lawn.”

“Yes,” she said, “when Isabel comes. I’ve been living so long in barracks, elegance has an abnormal effect on me.”

“The prose?”

“The rug on the lawn. You know, they’re all sitting on chairs on that immense lawn outside the Touchett’s house. Ralph and his father and Lord Warburton. James says the place was furnished as though it were a room. There’s a rug on the lawn. I don’t know, perhaps it’s just across somebody’s legs, one of those kind of rugs. I’ve read it over several times, and since you can’t be sure, I like to think of it the other way, on the lawn. That appeals to me.” She stopped, violently — and I was left listening for the next few words. I looked over and saw that she was drawing on her top lip so that her nose bent a little at the bottom. All that was dark, her eyes and hair, came to dominate her face. “That sounds terribly private,” she said. “Sometimes I miss the point, I know.” The little forced laugh that followed admitted to fallibilities not solely literary. I was touched by her frailty, until I wondered if perhaps I was supposed to be. “The rug,” she was saying, “knocked me over anyway.” Whereupon her gaze dropped to the floorboard of the car.

“It knocked Isabel over,” I said.

She received the remark blankly. “Yes,” she said.

I tried to remember where in the book the letter was stuck. “How far have you read?” I asked.

“Up to where she meets Osmond. I think I can see what’s coming. Though,” she rushed to add, “perhaps I can’t. I really shouldn’t say that.”