Philip Roth - Letting Go

Five times during the day he had walked up the stairs of Cobb Hall to Spigliano’s office, and five times turned and walked back down again to his own. At the dinner table there had been at least five more occasions when he had been tempted to speak. In fact, all the while Pat congratulated herself on her good fortune, he ruminated silently on the brandy that slides down the throats of the undeserving, and the fevers, the popped pistons, the ugly iron beds of those who deserve, if not more, surely no less than the others. But when asked again by John Spigliano, he only shook his head and took his leave. It was walking home with Martha Reganhart — touching her hand, actually — that he had cause to remind himself that Libby Herz was not the only woman in the world who could engage his feelings. Not that Mrs. Reganhart, in their manic hour together, had engaged feelings of a sustaining and vibrant sort. The moon and stars, as much as she, had combined to prickle his easiest sentiments. But he had liked her, and in her frame and voice, her country stride, he had recognized something open and direct to which he could respond. She might turn out to be a little motherly and instructive, but if so he could move on. After all, the decision was not whether he should or should not marry Martha Reganhart. All he cared to make clear to himself was that if the Herzes should come to Chicago he could manage to have an active life of his own, independent of theirs. There was Martha Reganhart, and there were dozens of others too. It was not changing his own life that was finally uppermost in his mind; it was changing theirs. It was much too easy to imagine Herz out there in Reading resigning himself to no money and depressing surroundings and calling it “life.” A message from Chicago might well be what would lift the Herzes up into life. A job at the University would be an improvement for Herz in every way — and for his wife as well. And if that was so, then it had been dishonorable of him not to have suggested Paul right off.

He would have lifted the phone then, had it not been that he knew the situation was not nearly so black and white as that. He was not (let a truth be repeated that is probably known already) a strong man. He was prone to self-deceptions, and some of his impetuosities were rehearsed as much as two or three months in advance. He had reason to believe that he might have fallen in love with Libby Herz. He had reason to believe that she might have fallen in love with him. So for whom, for what end, was he doing favors?

He marked three unstructured freshman papers, took a bath — but finally, he called.

“Pat, is John home?”

She said he was out at the Dean’s. “Gabe, we do hope you liked Mrs. Reganhart. It must be hard for her to find a man as tall as she is, but when you walked out John commented on how well you went together. She has to wear Tall Gals’ shoes, you know, so she is a tall person.”

“She seems very nice. I didn’t get a good look at her shoes. Will you ask John to call me?”

“She’s divorced and has children and works as a waitress to support them— and takes courses. We think that’s quite admirable.”

When the phone rang twenty minutes later, he told John that a fellow he had known at Iowa was now teaching in Pennsylvania, and from what he understood he might be willing to leave his job. “His name is Paul Herz,” he said.

“Didn’t he have something in Modern Philology recently? Herz?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “He’s a writer.”

“A creative writer?”

“A novelist.”

“What’s he published?”

“I don’t believe anything yet. He’s just finishing a book. He was finishing it last year.”

“Then he hasn’t his degree yet?” John asked.

“Everything but the dissertation — the novel.”

“You mean—” The voice on the other end was Pat Spigliano’s. “You mean they do some kind of creative writing instead of a work of scholarship?”

He waited patiently for Spigliano to tell his wife to get the hell off the extension.

“Isn’t that something?” Still Patricia. “I had thought you did a dissertation on James.”

“I did.”

“Oh, one has a choice then. I suppose Harvard is a little more traditional, though that is very up to date. We wondered why you didn’t stay on for graduate work at Cambridge, but I see now that you probably preferred the freedom—”

“John, are you still there?”

“I’m here. I’m thinking.”

“Well, it’s only a suggestion.”

“This is very considerate of you, Gabe, but you know the difficulty with creative writers.”

“What?”

“They’re apt to be a little too personal about literature.”

“Oh.”

“Most of them are without any real critical system. I’ve never really known a writer who finally understood writing.”

There was no sense, he knew, in bringing up old Henry James; there was no sense in bringing up anything.

He said, “Paul is a very bright guy. He’s an excellent man.”

An hour later, when he had already settled into a chair convinced that he had at least done the decent thing, the phone rang again.

“Look, do you think this Herz could come out here right away? Within a day or two?”

“You’d have to ask him. It would probably depend on whether he could get out of the job he has.”

“Will you call him for us?”

“What?”

“Call him for us.”

He found himself terribly unsettled by this very obvious suggestion. “Don’t you think you’d better call, John? As chairman? I can give you his address. Just wait a minute.”

He left the receiver hanging off the edge of the desk and hunted through the bookshelf for his copy of Portrait of a Lady. In its middle pages were two envelopes. He carried one back to the phone and read the return address to John Spigliano. After he hung up he read the letter itself. Then he settled into a chair and read the other letter too.

He had uncles who had failed. He had a father who had failed too, but that was in the world of commerce. Mr. Herz bought and sold with little talent and saved where interest amounted to pennies; when he finally emerged from his fourth failure — this last in frozen foods — he had nothing to show for himself save a sinus condition and holy dread of heart failure. He took to melting Vicks in a spoon under his nose and arranged for a small bank loan so as to purchase, for his heart’s ease, a BarcaLounger; and then he settled down to wait for the end. Still, there is a hierarchy of failures; better bankruptcy than tension in the kitchen and in the bed. There was a man’s home life to judge him by. Uncle Asher might have clear nasal passages but he had a ruined life: he had never married. Up close you could see and smell his single condition — suits swollen at the knee, heels a disgrace, and as far as anyone could tell, only one tie to his name. His sister, who was Paul Herz’s mother, said that from Asher’s smell alone she didn’t even have to guess what shape his linens were in. One foul snowy evening she had seen her baby brother emerge from Riker’s with a toothpick in his mouth. Riker’s! For an Asher! She had cried herself to sleep for a week.

Asher had begun life a genius, having begun to play Mozart at just about the same age Mozart had begun to play Mozart. At sixteen he had received free tuition to pose life models at the Art Students League; he was allowed to touch and arrange their bare limbs, so advanced for his years was his sense of grace. When he brought home his charcoal drawings they were tacked up in the living room. “You don’t even think dirty when you look at such pictures,” Asher’s mother had reassured the neighbors. “Look how artistic he makes those fat girls.” A piano was brought into the house for Asher; later a violin and a cello. He spent a summer in the Louvre, copying; he did his first commissioned portrait at eighteen — the captain of the Mauritania! But that captain was long dead, and other captains had come and gone, and in the meantime no girl had married Asher. Didn’t he know girls were soft? asked Paul’s father. Didn’t he know they were nice to hold? Had he never kissed one? Was he a— Absolutely not! He wasn’t a good mixer, that’s all. He was just a little scholarly.