Letting Go (5 page)

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.

I finished my dessert and went off to the bathroom, where I stood looking in the mirror for a long time, hoping that when I returned to the table the both of them would be better able to face me as a guest again. Paul Herz may have smiled from time to time during dinner, but I knew he was not happy with his wife’s performance. So I took my time, but coming out of the bathroom I was probably more stealthy than I had intended. I had given them no signal—I neither flushed the toilet, nor did I slam the door, the last only to spare the beaverboard interior of the house, which looked as though a little too much force might well bring down the works. From the hallway I was able to see into the living room, where the two Herzes were standing beside the dining table. Paul’s arms were around his wife’s waist, and his chin rested on her black hair. I stood with my hand on the bathroom door, unable to move one way or the other; I saw what Libby could not: her husband’s face. His eyes were closed like a man in prayer. I heard him say, “
Please
don’t complain. All you’ve done all night is complain.” Earlier Libby had changed into a black full skirt, and now her hands were held close up against it; her head was bowed and no part of her touched her husband that could be prevented from touching him. “I’m not complaining,” she said. “Every time I tell a story
you
think I’m complaining.” Herz took his hands from her. “Well, you
were
complaining.” I did not know what might come next and did not want to know; at the risk of unhinging the whole place, I laid my shoulder into the door and came clomping down the hallway, a man with shoes and ears entirely too large for himself. For our separate reasons, we were all uncomfortable saying good night.

From this I had come home to hear myself indicted for spitting on parental benevolence. Here was I (I had been reminded) with all that these Herzes were without. When my mother died, in fact, she had left to me all that her family had left to her, which, if not a fortune, was enough to spare me from calamity for the rest of my life; on top of this there was my father and his checks. Phone calls. Love. Money. It did not seem very manly of me to be suffering over my abundance, and I began to wonder, as I went to sleep that night, how I would perform if I were Paul Herz.

The following morning, out in the sunlight, I got a good look at Herz’s new coat. It could have been handed down from a beggar; it had, I’m afraid, that much class. A big brown tent, it enveloped him; for all anyone knew, within it he might be living a separate life. When he walked no knees were to be seen anywhere. Cloth shuffled and he moved three feet closer to wherever he was going. Standing still and seated he picked up more dignity. Swimming brown eyes, good dark skin, and hair that rose in tenacious kinky ridges off a marked brow gave him a grim and cocky air. On the first of November he had had to give up on the T-shirt; now in a dark brown shirt and a frayed green tie he had the look about him of a dissatisfied civil servant, a product of some nineteenth-century Russian imagination. In class he inhabited not the room but just his own chair. Where the others skittered on the syntax of their
Beowulf
like a pack of amateur mountain climbers, Herz, when asked to recite aloud, delivered Old English so that the blackboards shook; the vowels were from Brooklyn, but the force was strictly for meadhalls. Finished, he slid his books into a crumpling tan briefcase—the smell of egg salad wafted up from its bottom—and head down, left the room, silent as the North Pole. The separate life lived under the new coat was dead serious.

The morning after our evening together, this same coat—whose cuff I noticed had already been sewn into one piece again—was swinging to and fro beside me. No words came from its owner, which made speech somewhat difficult for me. Upon arising I had thought of how I might be able to help Herz alleviate one of his problems; now his reticence made me hesitate to say what was on my mind. I had the feeling that he was nettled at me for having been witness to all that had happened the night before. If I were to make my suggestion, it would probably seem to him that I was prying into his affairs.

I asked him how Libby was and he replied with the shortest of answers: fine. I invited him to the Union for coffee, but by the time we reached the stairs I couldn’t think of anything more to say that wouldn’t really have been beside the point—so I went ahead and offered him my car to drive up to Cedar Rapids on the afternoons he taught there.

He turned and fastened on me a look whose penetration sent my own eyes up to the treetops for a moment. “That’s very nice of
you,” he said, and in his voice, as in his gaze, there was something more than gratitude. Later I realized that what he’d been searching for was my motive.

“I don’t need it in the afternoon,” I said. “I’m usually at the library.”

“I appreciate the offer,” he said.

Thinking that perhaps he could not accept until I assured him that the arrangement would inconvenience me in no way, I added, “I live close enough to the library to walk—”

“Yes, but you see, my wife and I had a talk.”

“Oh, yes?”

“We’re changing our plans.”

He smiled; but there was in his manner something stiff and withdrawn, particularly when he had referred to Libby as “my wife.” I asked him, after a moment’s silence, if perhaps they had decided to leave Iowa. I said that I hoped they had not.

“We’ve just worked something out,” he answered, and started down the stairs. I followed, too confused as yet to believe that I was simply being rebuffed. While we drank our coffee there came a moment (at least for me) when I felt that one or the other of us could have said, “Look, all I meant …” and so on. But neither of us felt called upon to be the one to say it. After all, it was only a car I was offering him a few afternoons a week, not a new overcoat. Why so curt?

I waited, but he volunteered no further information. For someone whose clothing made such a strenuous appeal, it was a little silly of him, I thought, not to admit to his neediness out loud. Not that I expected him to come begging; I simply did not care for my offer to be written off as patronizing … unless of course he really did have a new plan, which made my car unnecessary. Perhaps it was prying of me, but I thought I had a right to an explanation somewhat more detailed than the one with which he had shut me up.

I never got it. Outside the Union he was abrupt but by no means discourteous; he extended a hand, I shook it, and we said goodbye. But as I walked off I said to myself, So much for Mrs. Herz and her silent husband. And though we had an acquaintanceship of only some twenty-four hours, and not a particularly gracious one at that, I was saddened. Whether Herz was more proud than wise was beside the point for me; I had awakened that morning positively elated that I could come to his aid. Denying my help, he’d managed to deny me my elation as well.

Finally I discovered myself piqued with him. However he chose to increase his discomfort, I realized, he chose to increase Libby Herz’s discomfort as well. Clearly, she had not the talent for misery that he had. Were she to go out after a new coat, she would not come back, I was sure, with such a wailing piece of goods. It seemed to me that Herz actually found pleasure in saying to the world: Woe is me. There was a scale moving inside me, and as my irritation with Herz grew weightier, my sympathy rose for his wife. The remark she had made late in the afternoon of the day before sounded clear once again in my ear.

The stresses and strains of the previous day had allowed me to forget that this girl, whose husband wouldn’t sit behind the wheel of my car, had said to me that she had been moved by my mother’s words; doubtless, too, by my mother’s circumstance. And by my own? I wanted all at once to sit down with Libby Herz and explain to her why it was that my poor father had to be manipulated by the people with whom he shared his life. I wanted to explain why I had had to desert him. And for my explanation I would not have minded receiving the balm of sympathy. Which might have been the reason—might it not?—for Paul Herz finding it necessary to turn down my offer. When there’s trouble at home, why encourage a sympathy-hunting young man to hang around? One can never tell—if there happens to be a sympathy-hunting young wife at the other end—just how the balm may find expression. That deep gaze Herz had given me then was explained: he hadn’t been looking for a motive, he’d come up with one. Perhaps he did not see what Libby might give to me quite so clearly as he saw what he thought I could give to Libby, and what she might accept. But that had been enough to force him to rule me out as a friend or aid. And it was enough, I decided, to persuade me to rule myself out. We would each have to work out the problems of family life within the confines of the family in which the problem had arisen. I only hoped for Herz’s wife that she would come through her tribulations with her energy and her complexion undamaged. Both, I discovered, had touched me more than I had thought.

We come now to an interlude about which there is not too much that need be explained. The girl’s name was Marjorie Howells and she was in revolt against Kenosha, Wisconsin. For several months she had been sitting beside me in Bibliography, and the morning
that I was rejected by Paul Herz, I happened to run into her in the library. I was feeling at the time somewhat superfluous—and here was this girl, very pretty, albeit a little overhealthy. I did not know, when I asked her to have a beer with me that night, that she was in revolt against Kenosha, Wisconsin; I only believed that few complications could thrive behind such a perfect set of teeth. We had many beers, it turned out, and after a while she was looking across at me with flames flashing in her eyes, and asking me how it felt to be a Jew in America. I asked her how it felt to be a Protestant in America—and she told me. It was very dry and very typical. Jews, she explained, were different. Marge’s father, a white-haired investor in Chicago, of whom she showed me a rather intimidating photograph (high tariff written all over his face)—her father thought Jews were different too, but Margie thought they were different from the way her father thought they were different. When I told her that in 1948 my own father had been chairman of an organization called New York City Professional Men for, Wallace, I only fed the furnace. It wound up that I could not say anything that did not produce in her a larger and larger passion for me and my background: even the fact that the living room of my family’s apartment looked out over Central Park seemed to impress her disproportionately. Halvah and Harvard and Henry Wallace—I suppose I cut an exotic figure. We wound up back in my apartment with no lights on and my sense of reality—as happens in the dark—out the window. It was all as typical as Protestantism: I held the girl and kissed her and soon enough the two of us were revolting against Kenosha as though Caligula himself were city manager. Margie had spent four years at Northwestern and later in the night we got in our licks against that bourgeois institution too. When we spoke again I teased her about her image of me—me, a delicious specimen of Hebraic, Marxist exotica—which was not exactly my image of myself. But by then teasing was only another endearment.