Philip Roth - Letting Go

I gave him several seconds now to get control. “Why don’t you call Dr. Gruber?” I asked. “Why don’t you go to the theater with him? See a show, go skating at Rockefeller Plaza—”

“Gruber? Gruber’s happy. He had a wife he hated. I sit around with him all night and all he does is grin. It’s worse than being alone, being with Gruber. I went skating with him last week. All he does, Gabe, all afternoon, is little figure eights, and all the time, smiling. What kind of man is that?”

He was not laughing, but at least the worst was over; he was willing to tease himself.

“Dad,” I said, “I don’t know what to tell you.”

“That’s funny,” he said softly, “because I know just what to tell you.”

“I don’t think I’d be a help.” I felt myself losing control.

“I think you would. Look, what’s wrong with going back to Harvard? At least I’ll expect you Thanksgiving, huh?”

I knew he was wrong; everything in my experience told me he was wrong, and yet I said, “I’ll see about Thanksgiving. I can’t promise.”

“I never asked for promises, Gabe. Just try. Just meet me halfway. I’ll send you a check for the plane.”

“Why don’t you hold it off until I see—”

“It’s only a check.”

“I’ve got two checks I haven’t even cashed yet.”

“Cash them. You want to foul up my bank statements?” he asked gaily.

“I just don’t need all that money, that’s all. I’ve got the G.I. Bill. I’ve got Mother’s money—”

“Will it kill you to cash them?” he asked. “I send them off, it makes me feel good. Will it kill you if I can balance up my account at the end of the month?”

“No.”

“You cash those checks. Is that too big a favor to ask?”

I said no again, with as little conviction this time as before.

“And I’ll see you Thanksgiving,” he said.

“Please, Dad — please stop pushing me — about Thanksgiving—”

“Who’s pushing? Let’s get it straight, are you coming Thanksgiving or aren’t you? You want me to have Millie buy a turkey or not?”

“I don’t really see how I can make it, truly.”

“You have time for other things, to eat dinner out — you have time to visit people—”

“That was involved. I was doing somebody a favor.”

“Well, that’s all I’m asking for.”

“Please, stop pleading!”

“Don’t shout at me!”

“Well, don’t beg me!”

“Tell me, tell me, how else does one get through to you?”

“By making decent demands, that’s how.”

“I don’t want to push your generosity too far.”

“It’s not even generosity we’re dealing with.”

“No, you’re right. It’s supposed to be love.”

“I don’t think I deserve all this,” I said.

“Nobody told you to run away.”

“I didn’t run.”

“Iowa. Why not Canada! That’s farther.”

“That’s closer,” I said, but he wouldn’t laugh. “I don’t think either of us wants to have these kind of conversations. I don’t think this is how either of us feels. Let’s relax.”

“Gabe, I’m sitting here with a calendar in front of me. I count days. I know how many days between now and Thanksgiving, between now and Christmas, from now to Easter. Maybe I’m going nuts, I don’t know.”

“You’re just lonely.”

“Yeah,” he said, “some just.”

“Please,” I said, “I do understand. I’ll do my best.”

“All right, all right.” He sounded suddenly very tired.

“You’re feeling all right, aren’t you?”

He laughed. “Terrific.”

“Maybe you should go to sleep.”

“It’s all right, I’m watching a little television. Why aren’t you in bed? It’s midnight where you are. It’s like wearing two watches; whenever I think what time it is here, I think what time it is there. What are you doing so late?”

“I’m going to study some Anglo-Saxon.”

“That would impress your mother,” he said, wisecracking. “It doesn’t impress me.”

“It doesn’t impress me either. It bores hell out of me.”

“Then,” he began, “I don’t know why you do it—”

“Let’s go to sleep,” I said.

“Okay, okay,” he said, and when he yawned it was as though we were in the same room. “Take it easy, boy.”

“Good night.”

“See you Thanksgiving,” he said, and hung up before I could answer.

When I finally got to bed that night, I found it impossible to get any solace from feeling sorry for myself. The irritation I generally felt toward my father — for things like hanging up as calculatingly as he had — I now felt for myself. Fresh from their drafty little house, I could not help comparing my condition with the Herzes’: what I had learned at dinner was that all that my father would bless me with, the Herzes of Brooklyn and the DeWitts of Queens withheld from their struggling offspring. Once Jew had wed Gentile wounds were opened — in Brooklyn, in Queens — that were unhealable. And all that Paul and Libby could do to make matters better had apparently only made them worse. Conversion, for instance, had been a fiasco. “Switching loyalties,” Libby Herz had said, “somehow proved to them I didn’t have any to begin with. I read six thick books on the plights and flights of the Jews, I met with this cerebral rabbi in Ann Arbor once a week, and finally there was a laying on of hands. I was a daughter of Ruth, the rabbi told me. In Brooklyn,” she said, pouring me a second glassful of tinny-tasting tomato juice, “no one was much moved by the news. Paul called and they hung up. I might be Ruth’s daughter — that didn’t make me theirs. A shikse once,” she said, drinking a tomato juice toast to herself, “a shikse for all time.” As for her parents, they hadn’t even been notified. Over the spaghetti I learned that a priest and two nuns already graced Mrs. DeWitt’s side of the family; no Jew was needed to round things out.

The two families, it seemed, had chosen to withdraw help just when it was needed most. The young couple had been married at Cornell, sometime near the end of Paul’s senior year and Libby’s junior year. Apparently, in the weeks afterward, there followed some very stern phone calls from Queens. “Still,” as Libby said, “they were phone calls. Someone at least did some dialing.” When they went on to Ann Arbor, Paul for his M.A., Libby still for her B.A., the phone had gone dead. Only occasionally was there a check for twenty-five dollars, and that was to be paid to the order of Elizabeth DeWitt. The Herzes quit school and moved three suitcases and a typewriter into a housekeeping room in Detroit in order to accrue some capital. “And then,” Libby explained, ladling out the Bartlett pears, “the money stopped. Paul worked in an automobile plant, hinging trunks, and I was a waitress. And my father wrote us a little note to say that he had obligations to a daughter in school, but none to Jewish housewives in Detroit. We saved what we could, which turned out to be about half what we’d planned—” At this point a fierce look from her husband caught her up short; when she started in again it was clear that she had passed over a little of their history. “And we came to Iowa. Now we don’t hear from them at all,” she told me. “They’re my parents; I suppose I like them for some things — but mostly I despise them.”

Paul Herz had already looked down into his pears and so did not see what it had cost his wife to speak those last words. And that was too bad, for she had said them for his benefit. Having doubtless realized how much she had irritated him by chronicling so thoroughly their bad luck, she had tried to square things with him by denouncing those people who had once fed and clothed her, and probably loved her too. Whatever had befallen them — she had decided to make clear at the very end — had not been the fault of her husband, but of those despised parents in the East.