Philip Roth - Letting Go

When he looked up it was because he had regained his control. “It should have weight. We give it the weight. You’re not Jewish, Libby.”

“But you are!”

He said nothing.

She blew her nose. “But … but we are basically religious people. Our values — oh stop giving me that sour look!”

“Well stop talking like that. I’m not Jerry.”

“Why do you think I’m so stupid!”

“Libby, I don’t. Don’t cry, please. Lib, I’m sorry. It’s just”—he tried it slowly—“we’re not, honey, basically Jewish people.”

“Paul, they’re not going to make me into a nothing. I refuse to let them force me to be married in City Hall! I’ll go to a priest then. Anything!”

“I couldn’t go to a priest. I couldn’t be married by a priest, that’s all there is to it.”

“Because you are Jewish finally! Sweetie, just be a little Jewish, will you? Just till we’re married? After that — oh I don’t want to sound so silly. I only want this one thing—”

And then never my own way again.

He heard these last words like an echo. At nineteen she had already given him whatever she had; now she would promise him the rest forever. All she wanted satisfied was her sense of decency, which was what he had cared for and nurtured in her. She had a knowledge, this frail girl, of what her rights were in love, and for that too he was thankful and proud. They need not crawl along the ground because others wanted them to.

But they were married in Yonkers by a Justice of the Peace they found in the Yellow Pages. No rabbi would handle their case, which came as a surprise to both of them. Their astonishment did not, however, keep them above having dirty feelings about themselves for very long. In the study of the third rabbi they visited, Paul rose up out of his seat and cursed him.

“Isn’t there a hot rabbi who performs marriages on kitchen tables? In all of this city is there no man low enough to unite two people who want to be united?”

“Try City Hall,” the rabbi said, a heavy dark-jowled man who hadn’t liked him from the start. “Get united civilly.”

“We can try City Hall without your advice!”

“Paul,” Libby pleaded, stretching out a hand to him. But he didn’t even want to see her face. Was he to compromise himself forever, honoring this girl’s weaknesses? Attending to her wishes, did he not dissolve into a spineless ass! A hypocrite! A softie!

“I marry Jew and Jew,” scowled Lichtman, the rabbi. “That’s all.”

“We’re Jew and Gentile.”

“The ceremony doesn’t fit such occasions.”

“God damn you!” Paul shouted.

“Don’t raise your voice in this office! This isn’t the street! Next, you don’t know anything! A twenty-year-old snotnose! You should be as wise as you are loud, then come around here! If you believe, believe; if no, turn your back! Otherwise look other places! Go be religious your own way! Don’t run here to make it all right with Mama! I’m no moral out for you. I’m not here to be amiable. That’s a disgusting thought!”

“I’m not asking for my mama, Lichtman, I’m asking for my wife.”

“Some improvement! You should be ashamed! Are you Catholic?” he demanded of Libby, a kind of agony suddenly in his face.

“Yes.”

“So why not ask a priest? Why not ask him to unite you and this Jew? They have City Hall for mixtures like this.”

“You don’t have to be so nasty to her!”

“Shut up! You’re a secular, be secular! Don’t come tramping your muddy feet in my synagogue for sentimental reasons! I wouldn’t marry you if you were two Jews! Now get out! You’re stupid and you curse and you’re a coward! Get out!”

The Justice of the Peace displayed no such force; for one thing, he had the gout. It was necessary for him to remain seated while he married them, though he compensated for his posture with a clear, loud, nondenominational voice. It was a Sunday afternoon and when Paul and Libby entered, they found the JP pulled up close to an old cabinet-model radio, a large scrolly piece with WEAF WJZ WOR WABC marked on the yellowed station selector. The JP’s wife turned off the radio during the ceremony. She was an elderly lady who wore glasses and a print dress that was a little longer in back than in front; below were nurse’s white oxfords. She touched the bride ten times at least, then removed some artificial flowers from the closet and put them in a blue vase behind her husband, whose bandage was in need of a change. She called him “the Judge,” and she called his gout “the Judge’s difficulty.” “I hope you won’t mind the Judge’s difficulty,” she whispered, and then raised his bandaged foot up onto a cushioned chair. It stared at them throughout the proceedings.

When it was all over the Judge’s wife put the flowers back in the closet and turned on the radio. The couple from next door, who had been called in to serve as witnesses, hugged the newlyweds; the woman hugged Paul, the man Libby. The Judge’s wife looked from Libby’s ring to Paul’s ring and said all there actually was to say about them; she managed more excitement than one really even had the right to expect from the wife of an old sick Yonkers JP. “They match,” she said. The Judge said, “Elizabeth, Paul, will you step up here, please?” After a quick glance at each other, they approached and stood on either side of his difficulty, expecting his blessing. He said, “Now you know how to get back into the city, don’t you?”

“Yes,” they said.

“That’ll be ten,” said the Judge.

He preferred not to take a check on Paul’s Ithaca bank. “We’re dealing with strangers all the time,” the Judge’s wife reminded the young couple. Libby had to give them the cash.

Two buses and a subway carried them back to New York in an hour and a half; Libby got out before Paul in order to change trains for Queens — husband and wife would meet at Grand Central with their suitcases at six that night. When they parted, so preoccupied were they, that they forgot to embrace. Paul traveled the rest of the way alone, back to Brooklyn to tell his family what he had done.

He got off the subway at Atlantic Avenue, where he was struck with how familiar he was with every trash can, every last signpost and pillar. On the way up the street to his family’s apartment he slipped the ring off his finger and into his coat pocket. He would begin his accounting slowly, give them a chance to … But then he saw before him the grave, ironic, savage face of Lichtman; he remembered the insults and the pain, and he put the ring that matched his wife’s back on his finger and entered with his news.

And his father threw him out of the house. Mr. Herz had not summoned up so much courage since he had invested his life’s savings in frozen foods and gone under for the fourth time. But he wouldn’t go under again! In one life, how many times can a man fail?

On the train back to Ithaca, Paul wept.

“We don’t need them,” Libby said, cradling his head in the dark car. “We don’t need anybody.”

“That isn’t it,” her husband replied. “That isn’t it …” And it was and it wasn’t.

“How?”

“Paul, I don’t know how. Maybe it’s not even so.”

“Well, it is so, isn’t it? If it’s not, what are we getting upset about?”

“Well — I think it is so, then.”

“You haven’t gone to a doctor, have you? By yourself?”

“Paul, I’m just always very regular — you could set your watch by me.”

“Maybe you’re upset. Maybe it’s working at that place, all the running around you have to do. Maybe you should take a day off.”