Philip Roth - Letting Go

“Can’t you get another section on the campus?” Libby Herz was asking her husband.

“Honey, I’m just not quitting Coe,” Herz explained.

“How are you going to get there?”

“I’ll work it out.”

“Don’t you have a class there tomorrow?”

“Yes.”

“How are you going to get there?”

“Why don’t you wait until we get home, all right?”

Small sounds of brooding followed. Someone crossed a limb, someone sniffed, someone tapped for several minutes against an ash tray. I felt pressed to say something, and finally, innocuously, asked Herz if he taught at Coe College.

“That’s where I was coming from.” He seemed almost relieved to answer my question. “I teach two sections of composition.”

“I thought you taught on the campus,” I said.

“Just one section.”

“I don’t understand,” Libby butted in, leaning forward from the back seat, “how a piston just explodes. Out of nowhere.”

No one answered her.

“Wasn’t there enough oil? It was probably the what-do-you-call-its,” she said, “the tappets. Didn’t the man say something once about tappets?”

It’s the little questions from women about tappets that finally push men over the edge. Herz practically rose in his seat. “Libby, what do you think has been knocking in the engine since Michigan? A piston has been cracking or whatever the hell it’s been doing for two years. Since Detroit. Why don’t you consider us lucky — we’ve driven that car thousands of miles. Stop thinking of the bad — think of all the use we got out of it. Let’s not worry about the car. I sold it. We don’t have it. For get it!”

“I’m just upset,” she said.

That seemed a good enough explanation for Herz; a patient and forgiving man, he said, “We’ll work something out.”

“How?”

“We’ll work something out, please.”

“Oh how ,” she burst out, “like in Michigan?”

“Will you please shut up! ”

Three gas stations, two roadhouses, and no words later we were in Iowa City. Paul Herz instructed me with terse lefts and mumbled rights until we turned a corner and were rewarded with a panoramic view of the settlement of barracks. Lights were on in the undersized windows and smoke curled from all the metallic funnels, and I felt a little like the enemy sneaking up on the ambushed. It might have seemed that an army was encamped here, were it not for the tricycles tipped over on the gravel lawns, and the few pieces of clothing that had been forgotten, and still hung on the lines that crisscrossed from one gray rectangle to another. When the motor of the car was slowed down, I could hear a creaking and a straining and a clanging, as though the metal sides of the barracks and the concrete foundations were slowly sabotaging themselves in the dark.

“Thanks,” Herz said to me. “Right here is fine.”

I heard Libby stir in the back seat. Without turning, I said, “You’re welcome. And good night.”

Libby was opening the back door; Herz himself had a hand on the front door handle, where for a moment he hesitated. I felt he wanted to apologize to me for what I had had to see and hear. I only smiled as a signal of my sympathy, while his wife moved wordlessly out of the car.

After a moment he asked, “Have you had dinner?”

“That’s all right,” I said.

“Maybe you’d like to join us. What are we having?” he asked his wife.

“I don’t know.”

He looked back at me and asked quickly, “Would you care to have some spaghetti with us?”

“I don’t really think I can … I’m expecting a phone call.”

He reached out then and shook my hand; I saw him try to eradicate with a smile his rotten mood. He didn’t begin to succeed.

Suddenly his wife was speaking. “We have plenty—” Libby Herz seemingly had risen out of twenty feet of water. She spoke with that desperate breathlessness of hers, a girl who’d just discovered air. “Spaghetti, with garlic and oil. We’d love to have you.”

Paul Herz had already swung his briefcase through the door, and was stuck, half-in, half-out; he looked just as shabby and defeated as a man can who has been made a fool of by his wife. I imagined that even living with another, he was no less alone than I was.

“I don’t want to inconvenience you,” I said, looking at neither of them.

“It’s no inconvenience,” Libby Herz said. “Please come,” she said. “We have plenty.”

Plenty! From her mouth no word could have sounded more pathetic.

When I returned home I went directly to the phone, picked it up, and said hello.

“Hello, Gabe? Where were you?”

“I had dinner out.”

“Since five in the afternoon?”

“I was out before that for something else.”

“Well,” he said, working at being cheerful, “you’re a tough man to catch at home. I don’t know why you pay rent on an apartment, you’re hardly there.”

“Well, I had a busy day. How are you? I didn’t expect you’d call again,” I said. “You called last night.”

“I was thinking it was two or three nights already,” he said. “What’s new?”

“Nothing. How’s New York?”

“I took a walk after dinner. Millie made me an early dinner. What are you doing, still eating in restaurants? They overcook vegetables, I’ll tell you that.”

“I had dinner with friends.”

“Look, when is your vacation again? I’ve got a calendar right in front of me.”

“Christmas.”

“I thought Thanksgiving.”

“I don’t get off then,” I said. “Only Thanksgiving Day. I’m really busy with work, you know.”

“You have dinner with friends, maybe you can have dinner with your father sometimes.”

“It isn’t just dinner with you,” I said firmly, trying to keep separate my emotions and the facts. “It’s all the traveling. It wouldn’t be worth it coming all the way East for one or two days.”

“Worth it.” He simply repeated my words; then, having made his point, went on. “It’s not my fault you went a million miles away,” he reminded me. “There’s NYU, there’s Columbia, there’s City College. I could name them all night.”

“Don’t,” I said. “Please.”

“Do you think I call up to be insulted?”

“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to insult you. But these phone calls, these phone calls are driving me nuts.”

“Well, I’m sorry,” he said, after a pause. “I don’t mean to drive you nuts. I just thought a father had a right to call his son when he wanted to. Five minutes a couple times a week …”

“You’re right,” I said.

“Gabe — Gabe, I sit around here and I look at that orange sofa and I think of your mother. And I look at that Moroccan rug and I think of her. What am I supposed to do, get rid of all this furniture? We had it thirty years.”

“I understand.”

“Why don’t you fly in Thanksgiving? I’ll send you a check, get a ticket, come home for a little while. Millie will make a regular Thanksgiving dinner. We’ll have Dr. Gruber here. We’ll go down to the Penn-Cornell game. How does that strike you?”

“Why don’t we wait until Christmas. It’s only a few weeks later, and I’ll have plenty of time—”

“But Thanksgiving is traditional! ” he exploded. “What’s the matter with you?” he said, and I heard him trying not to cry at the other end.

“I know it’s traditional,” I said. “I only get the day off. Just Thanksgiving Day. It’s just not enough time. But Christmas I’ll be home for two weeks.”

“Your mother’s been gone sixty -two weeks!” His unreason was nothing to the shaking in his voice. Yet there were no longer any patient explanations for me to make. Here it was November, 1953, the funeral had been in September of 1952, and still he was spinning down and around, deeper in his morbid sea. When I had been released from the Army early in August I had only suspicions about what it would be like; but three weeks with a drowning roommate had been all that I could bear. I could not help him out with his loneliness: I could not prop him up, counsel him, direct him, run him. I could not be Anna Wallach. I had finally to tell him (it had been a cold and nasty scene) that I was not his wife or his mother, but his son. A son, he said, a son exactly! What he wanted to know was if all sons run off, leaving fathers to sink forever by themselves.