Philip Roth - Letting Go

Mark and Cynthia — and here was one of the mysteries that held their mother’s world together — were strolling twenty feet in front, holding hands. Mark was wearing long pants and his blue coat, and Cynthia her red jacket with the hood; above them the sun was a dull light behind the clouds. Cynthia was helping Markie across the street and seeing to it that he did not toss his cap up into the branches of the bare trees. For twenty minutes she had been as well-behaved a child as one could ask for; outside the apartment building she had taken her brother aside and silently buttoned his fly.

“It comes over her,” Martha said, “every once in a while. I think she’s going to take flight and join God’s angels. Maybe it’s fresh air that does it.”

“She’s going to be a knockout,” Sid said. “She has those blue eyes, and then she rolls them …”

“She’s a sweet child,” Martha said. “She’s just a little frantic.”

“She’ll be all right. They’re perfectly decent, lively, charming kids,” Sid told her. “Stop worrying.”

They were inspiring words, upon which she was willing to lean. Sid himself was looking like something to lean upon — husky in his raglan coat, jaunty in his tweed hat with the green feather. She would have kissed him for his dependability, except that she was supposed to be deciding, even while they walked, whether to marry him for it; she had thought she had already made up her mind, but it appeared — to her own surprise — that she hadn’t.

“It looks,” Sid said, “as though Dick is coming up in the world.” It looked, too, as though he were changing the subject, though he wasn’t.

“Yes, doesn’t it?” She took his arm as they crossed the street. Memory carried her all the way back to Oregon. “It’s a lovely time of day,” she said.

“What do you think he’s going to do? Will he start sending money?”

She breathed in a good supply of the autumn air. “I don’t think he could have made an awful lot from four or five pictures.”

“I don’t think that’s our business. How much is he behind?”

She shrugged.

“Martha, I’ve asked you to simply keep a record—”

“He’s probably going back to Arizona. He’s probably as broke as ever.”

“Then maybe he ought to stay in New York and get a job.”

All she wanted to do now was to point out a house that reminded her of her family’s big frame house back in Oregon; she did not care to dilute the day’s pleasure any further with talk of her former husband. In 1953, when he had disappeared into the canyons of the Southwest, she had given up on chasing after him for the support payments. It was not only because she could not find him that she chose not to have any papers served. Dick’s running off had told her what she had always wanted to know: paying all the bills, every nickel, dime, and quarter, had permitted her to stop condemning herself. She was not mean, bitchy, immoral, selfish, stupid and dishonest — all the words he had hurled at her when she had fled finally from Mexico with the children; it could not be she who was the betrayer of their children — not so long as she was as harried and unhappy as she was.

Martha said, “He has a job. He’s a painter.”

“I meant a real job, to meet his obligations.”

All she knew about painting was what Dick had taught her; still, it was no pleasure to see the Philistine in Sid oozing out. “It’s not important,” she said. “Please.”

“Well, I’ll tell you, that painting looked like hell to me, I’ll tell you that.”

“In black and white it’s hard to know.”

“Oh yes? Did you like it? Would you like to tell me what it was supposed to be?”

“… Cynthia had it — it’s all of us in Mexico, I suppose. Look, it’s a kind of painting I guess you’re not in sympathy with. You’ve got to see a lot of it”—and the voice she heard was not her own, but her ex-instructor’s—“before you start to get it.”

“What am I supposed to get? That’s what I’d like to find out.”

“Oh Sid, are you asking me to defend that whole God damn bunch of phonies? The guy doesn’t have any money — what am I supposed to do, bleed him? He’s a pathetic neurotic whom we should really all pity, except that he happens to be a son of a bitch. Sid, he couldn’t get a regular job. If he worked in a factory or had to pump gas, well, he just couldn’t. He’s a painter — that’s actually what he is, for some unfathomable reason, and there’s nothing we can do to make him not one. So let’s forget it for today, please.”

“What are you so pigheaded for, Martha?”

“I’m not pigheaded. I don’t need him.” Sharply she added, “They’re my children.”

But Sid went right on, not figuring her anger to be directed in any way at him. “He’s having a success, right? He’s obviously made a little money, isn’t that so? Then now is the time to open up correspondence. Honestly, honey, now is the time to slap him in court—”

“Why don’t we wait? Why don’t we just wait and see what he does, all right?” But when she squeezed his hand, it made it even more obvious that she had trampled once again on his concern for her. “Sid, I appreciate everything you’ve done—”

He stopped her. “Do you?”

There was no further conversation until they reached the playground, where Stephanie Parrino and her two little brothers were playing on the seesaw while their grandmother, Mrs. Baker, watched over them.

“My father sent me a picture,” Cynthia told Stephanie’s grandmother, and then went off with Mark to the swings.

Stephanie’s grandmother had once been the mother-in-law of Billy Parrino, the man who had sat in this very playground and asked Martha to run off to Paris with five children and himself. Billy had finally divorced Bev, and Bev had tried to drown herself in the toilet. She was now on the ninth floor of Billings receiving shock treatment, though all discussion of her condition was carried on as though she were down with a bad cold.

“How is she feeling?” Martha asked.

“Oh not perfect yet, of course, but coming right along,” said Mrs. Baker.

“That’s fine.”

“She’s responding beautifully,” Mrs. Baker said, and they all looked off at the children, rising on swings into the gray rough sky, a sky aching to plunge them directly from November to January. On the apartment-house wall directly behind them, some waggish University student had scrawled:

John Keats

1/2 loves

Easeful Death

The words were enclosed in a heart. It did not strike her (as it might have on a day when there was a little sun in the sky) as witty at all. Keats had been dropped into his grave at the age of twenty-six. Thinking of the death of Keats, she thought of her own: for three years she had been meaning to scrape together enough to take out $10,000 worth of insurance on her life … She suddenly plunged headlong into gloom. Twenty-six.

Mrs. Baker, meanwhile, was saying that every day another kind mother invited Bev’s children for lunch. A friend of Mrs. Baker’s had sent a basket of fruit from Florida directly to the hospital, and though Bev wasn’t quite up to peeling things yet, her mother had brought the oranges home and marked them with nail polish and put them in the refrigerator so Bev could have them when she got out. Tomorrow, Mrs. Baker said, she was taking all the youngsters bright and early down to see Don McNeill’s “Breakfast Club.”

Martha reached out for Sid’s hand. She sat stone still, wondering how much worse off Bev Parrino would be if some doctor up in Billings shot too much juice through her one day and sent her from this impossible life. As they left the little park, silent but for the creaking of the swings, she managed to put down a strange noise that wanted to make itself heard in her throat. Then Markie began to cry that all he had done was push.