Philip Roth - Letting Go

“Okay.”

“Be careful, kid, will you?” Maury said. Doris still held one of my hands; Maury took the other. “I’m Paul’s oldest friend,” he told me, and then the two of them turned down the hallway, past everybody’s milk bottles. They went the first few feet on their toes.

When I came back into the living room I was met by the image of a united front. Mrs. Herz, with something of the pioneer woman about her, was standing beside her husband. I smiled at her, making believe that I was returning to my pocket something that I had dropped outside. But the woman had a bitter, drawn face that would not respond. She was tall, like Paul, but not skinny; rather she was hefty, large in the hips and feet and shoulders. Her hair had thinned on either side of the part and it bushed out from her head around the ears and neck — the genetic source of Paul’s black kinks. Her coloring was spiritless, a brownish-gray. Mr. Herz was also old and worn. Coming directly from scenes of middle-age rejuvenation, the sight of them was uncomfortably shocking; I had almost forgotten that most of those within earshot of eternity look as if they hear just what they hear. Not everyone can afford a mask, or wants one.

“Take a seat,” said Mr. Herz, for I was the soul of politeness, and that finally got to him. “Would you like a glass of soda?”

“No, thank you. I only dropped in.”

“Darling,” he addressed his wife, “get me a little seltzer.”

“Are you all right?”

“Sure, sure, I’m fine. I’m excellent. Only my mouth tastes bad.”

No sooner had Mrs. Herz left the room than her husband shot straight up in the BarcaLounger, almost as though he’d been ripped down the center with the electric pains of a stroke. His face like a piece of crumpled white paper against the ruddy leather of the chair, he turned his palms down and supplicated with them, up and down — the motion of the umpire when the runner has slid in under the tag. “Please, please,” he whispered, “she’s having a very bad day. Please. ” A fizzing sound approached from the kitchen, and he settled back into a posture that struck me as an open invitation to death. In that one moment he appeared to have used up a week’s energy.

His wife handed him a little glass on a coaster. “The glass is warm,” he said. “It’s practically hot.”

“I put it in a warm glass. Cold is a shock to the system.”

“Who likes warm seltzer, for God’s sake.”

“Drink it, please.” It was as though now that he didn’t like it, it would do him some good. While he drank, his hand went up to his chest and he performed various stretching gestures with his neck. Having thus coped successfully with the carbonation, he turned back to cope with me. Mrs. Herz returned to her chair — the edge of it — and her husband cupped his glass on his belly and took a businesslike but civil approach.

“Very nice to meet a friend of Paul’s.”

“I’m pleased to meet you. Paul asked that I stop in to say hello.”

Nobody responded; was it so blatantly a lie?

“You live here?” Mrs. Herz demanded, putting the question not so much to me as to the puce gloves. “In Brooklyn?”

“My father lives in Manhattan,” I said.

“What are you, a lawyer?” I was numbed by her particular brand of naïveté: it seemed a cross between xenophobia and plain old hate.

“I teach English at the University of Chicago. Paul is a colleague of mine.”

“A colleague already.” She made a face of mock awe toward her husband. “Next thing we know he’ll be president of the college.”

“He’s doing very well. It’s a very good university.”

She put me quickly in my place. “Schools are wonderful things wherever they are,” she said. “I was a teacher myself.”

“He teaches English?” Mr. Herz asked. “What is that, spelling, grammar, that business?”

“One course is Freshman Composition. Then he also teaches Humanities.”

“I see,” they both said. Mrs. Herz seemed pressed to add something knowledgeable about the humanities but gave up and only grunted general disapproval of whatever that title encompassed.

“Libby works for the Dean of the College, you know.”

No one knew; no one cared. “She’s one of my favorite people,” I said, and was rewarded for that complicated extravagance with a flush that took minutes to subside. Fortunately, the Herzes were now immune to anyone’s feelings but their own. “She also takes courses in the evenings. She’s a very hard-working girl.”

“Sure, sure, sure,” mumbled Mr. Herz, but the object of his certainty did not seem to be the subject of my conversation.

“I was visiting in Manhattan for the holiday, and so I came-over here. I hope I haven’t interrupted anything,” I said, limp with my own repetitiveness.

“Mr. Herz has been sick,” his wife informed me, having actually stared me into silence. “We decided to stay home for the day. Who wants to get tied up in all that traffic?”

“Yeah, we decided to stay home,” Mr. Herz said. “We were going to go to Rio de Janeiro for the weekend, but we decided to stay home. Look, I think maybe I can move my bowels,” he told his wife, and instantly she was out of her chair and freeing him from the languorous curves of the BarcaLounger. He insisted on walking under his own steam to the bathroom.

“Leave the door open a little,” she said to him.

“All right, all right.” Newspapers covered the floor at the entrance to the kitchen, and he crossed over them as though they were ice. Some seconds later the bathroom door shut. Mrs. Herz left the room hastily; I heard her call, “Are you all right?”

“I’m all right.”

“Don’t strain,” she said. “Leave the door open.”

Back in the living room those eyes that had so examined my habit and person now were kept carefully averted; she fussed about, straightening things.

“Is he very sick?” I asked.

“He has a terrible heart.” She folded and refolded the afghan that had lain across her husband’s feet.

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“What kind of courses—” she asked suddenly though her back was all she would show me. “She’s going to school forever?”

“Who? What?”

“Her.”

“Libby,” I said, and waited for Mrs. Herz herself to repeat the name. I waited; then I said that Libby had not yet finished with her A.B.

“Sure — she was in a big rush.” She came back to her chair, acting as though we hadn’t been conversing at all. “You all right?” she called into the other room.

We both hung now on the reply, which was not forthcoming.

“Leonard, is everything all right in there?” And again she was up and off to the bathroom.

“I’m all right,” her husband called. “I’m all right.”

“Don’t strain. If nothing happens, nothing happens. You’re not engaged in some contest, Leonard.” When she returned to the living room, she said, “He’s having the worst day he’s had in years.”

“That’s too bad. I’m sorry.” I was sure that now I was in for some lecture from her. But I did not depart; I felt bound to wait for Mr. Herz’s ascension back into his easeful chair.

“You teach what — law?” she asked.

My garb, my prosperity, my Harvard tones — and Mrs. Herz’s colossal disappointment. I had not suspected that what she had always wanted her little Paul to be was an attorney. “No. I teach English, too.”

“And what’s humanities? What does Paul know about humanities?”

There was an intention in her words that I did not understand immediately. “It’s a kind of literature course,” I explained. “It’s an introduction to literature. Paul teaches it very well. He’s a very good critic, very sharp.”