Philip Roth - Letting Go

To that Great Battery

Much Horvitz and

Paul Herz—

Your pal

Kirby Higbe

“Mush was my nickname,” Maury said. “Higbe spelled it wrong. Everybody was screaming at him anyway.” He placed before me next a photograph that he’d been holding in his other hand. I took it just as Doris came back into the room, carrying a tray. I felt Maury’s fingers on my shoulder. “That’s Paul, there. That’s me, with my arm around him. Christ,” he said, “we were like this,” and he showed me with two fingers, one twisted around the other.

In the picture Paul looked at twelve or thirteen pretty much what he was now, except that his kinky hair came down in an even line almost to his eyebrows. Maury was a round-faced bar mitzvah boy, all cream sodas and smiles and surprises. “That’s Heshy Lerner,” Maury said. “He was killed in Korea, and the rest of the guys are everywhere. A lot of the guys have moved to the suburbs, but I don’t know, I love this block. To me there’s nothing like the city. Does Paul ever mention Heshy?” he asked, making the ball roll up his forearm and bounce off his elbow. “I wonder if he even knows he’s dead.”

“Heshy dead is just impossible to believe. Just thinking about it,” Doris said, setting out some frozen strudel she had heated for us, “is something. He was a terrific dancer, remember, Maur?”

“Heshy was a terrific everything. He was going to be a commercial artist. He used to draw caricatures of everybody, and Paul used to write little captions for them. They were the two talented guys, all right. Boy, I’m telling you …” He shook his head — a man of eighty walking through his small-town graveyard.

Now all three of us were on cushions around the coffee table; I was the only one still wearing shoes. We all drank out of demitasse cups that the Horvitzes had picked up on a cruise to St. Thomas, and every time Maury finished one of the tiny portions, Doris — with one hand on his leg — poured him another. I envied him his wife, nearly to the point of covetousness; and curiously, the envy did not diminish, the muscles in my chest only tightened another notch when Doris said, in the purest Brooklynese I’d ever heard, “Oy am I really tired. I mean I’m really beat, Maur.”

But Maury brooded, even while he ate his strudel; he seemed occupied with the disappearance of the past. Then back in the present, he asked, “How did it go?”

“Mr. Herz seems sick,” I said. “They both seemed very tired.”

“He looked awful today, Maur.” Doris was resting her head on her husband’s knee and she tipped her throat back so as to look up at him when she spoke. “They both make me feel sad. They both have no life at all. Maury tried to get them interested at least in books, you know? We get Book of the Month, we get Harper’s and Look , we belong to Play of the Month—” She threw an arm toward the wall behind me, to which I turned to find half a dozen framed Playbills. “We go to the Temple lectures, and we volunteer, we’ll drive them there, right to the door. Last week we heard Dore Schary, and they wouldn’t even go. They won’t do anything! They sit, they mope, they worry, they live in the dead past. Personally, to my way of thinking, I don’t know what the end is going to be for them.”

“How come Paul didn’t come himself?” Maury asked.

“What?”

“How come Paul asked you to come?” He reminded me of father’s accountant trying to get to the bottom of some tax problem.

“Paul didn’t ask me,” I said. “Libby did.”

“We never met her. Neither did the folks, you know.”

“The Herzes?”

“Never met her,” Doris said.

“They did, though,” I said. “They met her twice.”

“I mean Paul never had her for dinner or anything,” Maury said.

I agreed, though I knew I had been taken advantage of — rather, Paul had.

“What is she like?” The question was Doris’s.

“I’m very fond of her,” I said. “She’s sweet and fragile and a very loving girl.”

I had the feeling that not one word I had spoken had sunk in.

“I used to go out with Paul myself,” Doris informed me. “Then he went away, you know, and I don’t know, he came back, and we just didn’t have the same interests. He was very gloomy to talk to. Remember, Maur?”

“He became an intellectual,” Maury explained.

“I see,” I said, and I suppose that at that moment I began really to tire of them and that damn leaning over the coffee table. Maury, however, was not nearly so insensitive as I thought; he caught whatever small flicker of boredom and resentment had crossed my face.

He said, “Paul just carried it too far there for a while, that was all. I mean he was all right,” he added, cuing his wife, “he was always Paul. ”

“Oh he was a terrific fella ,” Doris chimed in. “Nobody ever said anything about that. You know, my interests must have changed too. I’m not saying it was strictly one-sided.”

Here Maury decided to direct us all to the heart of the matter. “But the tragedy,” he said, “is his folks. That’s what you’ve got to face.”

“They seemed very unhappy,” I said.

“They’re losing out on a lot of fun in their late years. This could be a terrific time for them, but they’ve just given up. They live like hermits.”

“Hermits is right,” Doris said. “It’s terrible.” She offered me more coffee.

“No thanks,” I said.

“I’ll just have to throw it out,” she said. “I can’t reheat espresso, it loses something.” To pour she had to lean her face very close to mine; meanwhile, Maury did some serious thinking. It was clear that there was a good deal of satisfaction for these two in caring for Paul Herz’s parents, if not his memory. But the way I had heard it, the tragedy the elder Herzes were suffering was a tragedy they had themselves constructed.

I said, “Don’t you think, somehow, his parents might call Paul?”

I went no further; Maury looked at Doris, Doris at Maury. “Please,” Doris said.

What seemed a solution to me was a cut-and-dried impossibility to those in the know. No, no, absolutely not! However, if there was something that Paul wanted to do at long last, if there was any humanity left in him (the humanities!), then perhaps what he should begin to think about was getting to work — that was Maury’s phrase, getting to work — and bringing into the world a child for his mother and father to cherish as once they had cherished him.

“When they have a baby,” said Doris, the last word on the struggle of the generations, “then that’ll be that. What else?” she asked, showing me her palms. “We have two, and my parents, believe me, are having a whole new life through the grandchildren.”

“Gabe,” Maury said, frank and serious, “you know Paul probably better now than I do.” But with his practical business head, I knew he did not believe I knew anything better than he did, except perhaps how to parse a sentence. “Gabe, would you do me a favor, do us all a favor? When you go back there to the University, when you see Paul and his wife, would you tell them that Maury Horvitz, Mushie, sends his regards? As far as I’m concerned, personally, I mean, whatever Paul did was all right with me—”

“Look, nobody’s objecting to that ,” Doris announced. “Whatever he thought he wanted to do, he should have done. Nobody’s denying him that.”

“But his father is a sick man, we see how sick he is every day. This is something Paul doesn’t see. And his mother is giving herself up to that man, she waits on him hand and foot. Just like she always waited on Paul. That woman has aged in three years in a most terrific way. As far as I’m concerned there’s only one thing that can keep those two from just drying up and dying—”