Philip Roth - Letting Go

“You must … you must have read all night,” was all I finally said.

She flushed again. “Almost,” she told me. “Paul hasn’t started the book yet—” I was looking ahead at the road; I heard her voice stop, and then I felt her move a little toward me. I believe she touched my arm. “Mr. Wallach, there was a letter in your book.”

“Was there?”

“You must have forgotten it.”

The quality of her voice had altered so as to make the whole occasion much too momentous; I heard myself saying that I didn’t remember any letter.

“I brought it with me,” she said, and from the pocket of her shabby raincoat she took the envelope; it must have been this she had raced back into her bedroom to fetch while I had waited at the doorstep. Now she handed it to me. “It was in the book.”

“Thank you.” I put the letter immediately into my own jacket pocket. Out of sight I fumbled with it, but there was no evidence either way — the flap was tucked in. Nevertheless, I drove ahead with only one hand on the wheel. Mrs. Herz pulled at her black stockings, then stuck a fist under each knee. For two miles neither of us said anything.

In the tone of one musing she finally spoke. “She marries and is miserable.”

I had been musing myself, and so I misunderstood at first who exactly was the subject of her observation. My misunderstanding must have produced a very strange expression on my face, for when I turned to demand an explanation, Libby Herz seemed nearly to dissolve in her seat. “Isabel will marry Osmond,” she said, “and be miserable. She’s — she’s a romantic … isn’t she?” she asked shakily.

I had not meant to threaten her. I forgot my family as rapidly as I could, and tried hard to be graceful. “I guess so,” I said. “She likes rugs on lawns.”

“She likes rugs on lawns,” Mrs. Herz said, grinning. “That’s the least of it. She wants to put rugs on other peoples’ lawns.”

“Osmond?”

“Osmond — and more than Osmond.” She raised her hands and opened them, slowly and expressively. “ Every thing,” she said, drawing the word out. “She wants to alter what can’t be altered.”

“She believes in change.”

“Change? My God!” She put her hand to her forehead.

It was the first time I was amused by her. “You don’t believe in change?”

Without warning she turned momentous on me again. “I suppose I do.” She stared a little tragically into her college girl’s raincoat: change, alteration, was not so much the condition of all life as it was some sad and private principle of her own. The hands tugged again at the stockings, went under the knees, and she withdrew. I drove faster and hunted the highway for Paul Herz.

“Well, do you believe,” Mrs. Herz suddenly put in, “in altering that way? Isabel’s trouble is she wants to change others, but a man comes along who can alter her, Warburton or what’s his name, Ramrod—”

“Goodwood. Caspar Goodwood.”

“Caspar Goodwood — and what happens? She gets the shakes, she gets scared. She’s practically frigid, at least that’s what it looks like a case of to me. She’s not much different finally from her friend, that newspaper lady. She’s one of those powerful women, one of those pushers-around of men—”

Before she went off the deep end, I interrupted and said, “I’ve always found her virtuous and charming.”

“Charming?” Incredulity rendered her helpless. Slumping down in her seat, as though konked on the head, she said, “For marrying Osmond? ”

“For liking rugs on lawns,” I said.

It was as though I had touched her. She pushed up into a dignified posture and raised her chin. Actually I had only mildly been trying to charm her — and with the truth no less; but in the diminished light, alone on the highway, it had had for her all the earmarks of a pass. And perhaps, after all, that’s what it was; I remembered the seriousness with which we had looked at each other some ten miles back.

To inform me of the depths of her loyalty to her husband, she insulted me. “Perhaps you just like pushy women. Some men do.” I didn’t answer, which did not stop her. Since I had asked for the truth, I was going to get all of it. “That book, as a matter of fact, is really full of people pushing and pulling at each other, and most often with absolutely clear—”

She had been speaking passionately, and leaving off there was leaving off entirely too late. There was no need for her to speak that final word of my mother’s: conscience. I was not sure whether to be offended or humiliated or relieved; for a moment I managed to be all three. It actually seemed as though she had deliberately challenged me with my secret — and at bottom I did not know if I really minded. The worst part of certain secrets is their secrecy. There is a comfort to be derived from letting strangers in on our troubles, especially, if one is a man, strangers who happen also to be women. Perhaps offering the book to be read in the first place had been my way of offering the letter to be read as well. For I was beginning really to be exhausted with standing over my mother’s memory, making sure the light didn’t go out. I had never even been willing to believe that my mother had treated my father badly, until she had gone ahead and told me so. Much as I loved him, he had seemed to me, while she still lived, unworthy of her; it was her letter that had made me see her as unworthy of him. And that is a strange thing to have happen to you — to feel yourself, after death, turning on a person you have always cherished. I had come to feel it was true that she had not merely handled him all her life, as one had to, but that she had mishandled him … At least I believed this with part of my mind. I had, curiously, over a period of a year, come to distrust the woman of whom the letter spoke, all the while I continued to honor and admire the memory of the woman who could have written it. And now, when I had begun to have to handle her husband myself, the letter came accidentally back into my life, to decrease in no way my confusion as to what to do with my father’s overwhelming love.

“I’m sorry,” Libby Herz was saying. “It was habit. Which makes it even worse. I am sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

“It’s not. I had to open it. I’m the sort of person who does that.”

Now I was irritated at the way she seemed to be glorifying herself by way of her weaknesses. “Other people do it too,” I said.

“Paul doesn’t.” And that fact seemed to depress her most of all; she worried it while we passed a tall white farmhouse with gingerbread ornament hanging from the frame of every window and door.

After some time had passed, I felt it necessary to caution her. “It’s rather an easy letter to misunderstand,” I said.

“I suppose so, yes,” she answered, in a whisper. “I don’t think—” But she said no more. Her disturbance was private and deep, and I could not help but feel that she was behaving terribly. If she was going to feel so bad about somebody’s feelings, I believed they should at least have been mine. But she seemed unable to work up sympathy for anyone but herself: she was still getting her B.A., after “a decade”; she lived in barracks, so that elegance had a special poignancy for her … Her own condition occupied her totally, and I knew that she could no more appreciate my mother’s dilemma than she could Isabel Archer’s. I was, at last, fed up with her. “Portrait of a Lady” I said, “is an easy book to misunderstand too. You’re too harsh with Isabel Archer.”

“I only meant—”

“Why don’t you wait until you read it all.”

“I read half—”

“She shows herself to have a lot of guts in the end,” I said, again not allowing her to finish. “It’s one thing marrying the wrong person for the wrong reasons; it’s another sticking it out with them.”