The author wishes to acknowledge the generous help given to him during the writing of this book by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Institute of Arts and Letters.
About the Author
Also by Philip Roth
Dedication
Title Page
One: Debts and Sorrows
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Two: Paul Loves Libby
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Three: The Power of Thanksgiving
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Four: Three Women
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Five: Children and Men
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Six: The Mad Crusader
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Seven: Letting Go
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Acknowledgements
Copyright
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Version 1.0
Epub ISBN 9781446400326
www.randomhouse.co.uk
Published by Vintage 2007
2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3
Copyright © Philip Roth 1961, 1962
Philip Roth has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
Lines from ‘Earth Angel’ on page 378, quoted by permission of Dootsie Williams, Inc., Los Angeles, California
Portions of this book have appeared in slightly different form in Esquire, Harper’s and Mademoiselle
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
First published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, 1962
First published in Great Britain in 1984 by Penguin Books
Vintage
Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,
London SW1V 2SA
www.vintage-books.co.uk
Addresses for companies within The Random House Group Limited can be found at: www.randomhouse.co.uk/offices.htm
The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9780099485032
For Maggie
All actuality is deadly earnest; and it is morality itself that, one with life, forbids us to be true to the guileless unrealism of our youth.
—Thomas Mann
A Sketch of My Life
Men owe us what we imagine they will give us. We must forgive them this debt.
—Simone Weil
Gravity and Grace
It may be that one life is a punishment
For another, as the son’s life for the father’s.
But that concerns the secondary characters.
It is a fragmentary tragedy
Within the universal whole. The son
And the father alike and equally are spent,
Each one, by the necessity of being
Himself, the unalterable necessity
Of being this unalterable animal.
—Wallace Stevens
“Esthétique du Mal”
Dear Gabe,
The drugs help me bend my fingers around a pen. Sometimes the whole sickness feels located in my hands. I have wanted to write but not by dictating to your father. Later I don’t want to whisper last-minute messages to him at the bedside. With all the panic and breathlessness I’ll have too much influence. Now your father keeps leaning across my bed. He runs in after every patient and tells me what the weather is outside. He never once admits that I’ve done him an injustice being his wife. He holds my hand fifty times a day. None of this changes what has happened—the injustice is done. Whatever unhappiness has been in our family springs from me. Please don’t blame it on your father however I may have encouraged you over the years. Since I was a little girl I always wanted to be Very Decent to People. Other little girls wanted to be nurses and pianists. They were less dissembling. I was clever, I picked a virtue early and hung on to it. I was always doing things for another’s good. The rest of my life I could push and pull at people with a clear conscience. All I want to say now is that I don’t want to say anything. I want to give up the prerogative allowed normal dying people. Why I’m writing is to say that I have no instructions.
Your father is coming in again. He’s carrying three kinds of fruit juices. Gabe, it’s to him I should admit all this. He won’t condemn me until I do first. All through our marriage I’ve been improving his life for him, pushing, pulling. Oh decent decent. Dear, the pen keeps falling
Her letter had never been signed. The pen fell, and when the night nurse came on duty she was no longer needed. Nevertheless my father, obedient to the last, put the letter in an envelope and without examination mailed it. I was a second lieutenant in the artillery corps at this time, stationed in an unregenerate dust bowl in Oklahoma, and my one connection with the world of feeling was not the world itself but Henry James, whom I had lately begun to read. Oklahoma nights and southwestern radio stations had thrust me into an isolation wherein my concentration was exact enough for me to attend at last to the involutions of the old master. All day I listened to the booming of cannons, and all night to the words of heroes and heroines tempting one another into a complex and often tragic fate. Early in the summer that I had been called into the Army—which was the summer after I had finished college—I had spent my last six civilian weeks touring Europe; one week was spent visiting with a friend of my mother’s who lived in London, where her husband was connected with the U. S. Embassy. I remember having to hear endless incidents from my mother’s childhood while sitting with her friend in a small church in Chelsea; she had taken me there to see a little-known plaque dedicated to James. It was not a particularly successful day, for the woman really liked the idea of putting on long white gloves and showing a Harvard boy around cultural nooks and crannies a good deal more than she liked the nooks and crannies. But I do remember the words engraved onto that small gray oval tablet: it was written of James that he was “lover and interpreter of the fine amenities of brave decisions.”
So it happened that when I received the letter my mother had written and my father had posted, I was reading Portrait of a Lady, and it was into its pages that I slid the envelopes and its single sheet of barely legible prose. When I returned from the funeral, and in the weeks following, I read and reread the letter so often that I weakened the binding of the book. In my grief and confusion, I promised myself that I would do no violence to human life, not to another’s, and not to my own.
It was a year later that I loaned the book to Paul Herz, who looked to be a harried young man rapidly losing contact with his own feelings; he might have been hearing the boom of big guns going off all day himself. This was the fall after I had left the Army, the fall of 1953, when we were both enrolled as graduate students at the University of Iowa. Paul’s costume at that time was the same day in and day out: khaki trousers threadbare around the back pocket, a white T-shirt shapeless around the arms, tennis sneakers and, occasionally, socks. He was forever running—it was this that brought him to my attention—and forever barely making it. The point of his briefcase could be seen edging through the classroom door just at the moment that the first unlucky student in our Anglo-Saxon class was called upon to read aloud from Beowulf. Leaving the library at night, I would see him streaking up the stairs after some reserve book, even while the head librarian turned the key in the lock. He would stand shivering in his T-shirt until she broke down and let him in. He was a man who evoked sympathy even if he did not come right out and ask for it; even if he would not ask for it. No heart could remain unmoved by the sight of that dark, kinky-haired black-eyed head racing toward the closing doors, or into them. Once, shopping for some bread and milk, I saw him nearly break several of the major bones of his body at the entrance to a downtown grocery store. The electric eye swung the door out at him just as he had turned, arms laden with packages, to watch a cop stick a ticket under the single wiper of his battered, green, double-parked Dodge.
I lived alone at the time in a small apartment near the campus, and was having troubles of my own; I was about ready to find somebody to complain to. One day in November, as Herz was darting from Anglo-Saxon, I stuck myself in his path and asked him over to the Union for a cup of coffee. He couldn’t make it as he was supposed to have been somewhere else five minutes earlier, but on the parking lot, to which I accompanied him, and where he sat yanking and yanking at the throttle of his car, I managed to put in something about James, and the next time we had class together, I brought Portrait for him to take home and read. I awoke that night remembering that tucked in the pages of the book I had pressed upon him, somewhere between the hopes of Isabel Archer and her disappointments, was my mother’s letter. I couldn’t immediately get back to sleep.
The following morning, directly after Medieval Romances, I called Herz from a campus phone booth. Mrs. Herz answered sounding hurried and on edge—the family tone. She and her husband lived in one of those gray shells on the far side of the river, the married students’ barracks, and I was sure that directly behind her, or beneath her, there flailed a squalling infant. Herz looked harassed enough to be the father of three or four small, mean, colicky children. Mrs. Herz, in a very few words, informed me that her husband had driven over to Cedar Rapids and that she was herself about to rush off. I decided instantly not to ask if I might come over to remove something that I had left in a book I had loaned Paul. Probably neither of them had had a chance at the book anyway, and I could wait and later get to Herz himself. I explained nothing whatsoever to the wife, who struck me as more rude than chagrined; besides, it was daylight and autumn and I was no longer afflicted with thoughts of the dead. The November morning was dazzling, the dead were dead.
My father had called again the night before, and I was certain now that any judgments I had made in the dark about my mother’s ghost had been induced by my father’s presence. Two or three evenings a week my father and I had the same phone conversation, pointless on the surface, pleading beneath. The old man stood being familyless all day, what with having his patients’ mouths to look into; it was alone with his avocado and lettuce dinner that he broke down. When he called his voice shook; when he hung up—or when I did—his vibrato passed directly into the few meager objects in the room. I moved one way, my chair another; I have never sat on my reading glasses so many times in my life. I am, for good or bad, in a few ways like my father, and so have never been the same person alone that I am with people. The trouble with the phone calls, in fact, was that all the time I felt it necessary to the preservation of my life and sanity to resist the old man, I understood how it was for him sitting in that huge Victorian living room all alone. However, if I am my father’s child, I am my mother’s too. I cannot trace out exactly the influences, nor deal in any scientific way with the chromosomes passed on to me. I sometimes believe I know what it is I got from him and what from her, and when I hung up on Mrs. Herz that morning, without having said one word about the letter, I suppose I was using the decorum and good sense that has sifted down from the maternal line. I told myself that there was nothing really to fret about. Why would they read it anyway? And what if they did?
At five o’clock I was sitting in my apartment drinking coffee and finding no pleasure whatsoever in memorizing Anglo-Saxon verb endings, when Mrs. Herz called me back.
“You spoke to me this morning,” she said. “Paul Herz’s wife.”
“Is your husband home?”
“His car broke down.”
It was the sort of news that is not news as soon as one hears it—though Mrs. Herz herself sounded surprised. “That’s too bad,” I said.
“He blew a piston or he keeps blowing pistons—”
“I’ll call him some other time. It’s not urgent.”
“Well—” she said, “he asked me to call you. He wondered if you might have a car. He’s on the highway outside of Cedar Rapids.”
I put down the Old English grammar book. A long drive was just the inconvenience I wanted. “How do I get there?”
“Could you pick me up at the barracks?”
“I’m sure I could find it.”
“I know the way. We live just at the edge of Finkbine Park—could you pick me up?” Cryptically, she added, “I’m dressed.”
From the doorway the first thing I saw after seeing Libby Herz herself was my book set on the edge of the kitchen sink; I could not see what was or was not stuck between its pages. And Mrs. Herz gave me no time to check; she ran into the bedroom and then out again, her raincoat whipping around her. Then yanking a kerchief from her pocket, she rushed out the door without once looking directly at me—though she managed to let me hear her say, “Paul called again. I told him we were coming.”
As we drove, her eyes stared rigidly out the car window, while beside me her limbs fidgeted in turn. My first impression of her had been clear and sharp: profession—student; inclinations—neurotic. She moved jerkily and had the high black stockings and the underfed look. She was thin, dark, intense, and I could not imagine that she had ever once gotten anything but pain from entering a room full of people. Still, in an eager hawky way she was not bad looking. Her head was carried forward on her neck, and the result was that her large sculpted nose sailed into the wind a little too defiantly—which compromised the pride of the appendage, though not its fanciness. Her eyes were a pure black, and her shiny hair, also black, was drawn off her face in a manner so stark and exact that at the sight of it one could begin guessing at the depth and number of her anxieties. The skin was classic and pale: white with a touch of blue, making it ivory—and when she pulled off her kerchief she even had a tiny purple vein tapping at her temple; it seemed to me like an affect, something willed there to remind the rest of us how delicate and fragile is a woman. My initial feeling toward her was suspicion.
Nevertheless, by way of conversation I asked if she had any children.
“Oh, no,” she said. The deep breath she drew was to inform me that she was rushed and harried without children. She added a few mumbled words: “Thank goodness . . . children . . . burden . . .” It was difficult to understand her because she did not bother to look at me either when speaking or sighing. I knew she was avoiding my eyes—and then I knew that she had opened the book, removed the envelope, and read my mother’s letter. Since she did not strike me as a person casual about private lives, her own or others, her self-consciousness became mine too.
Darkness had dimmed my vision before either of us spoke again. “Are you in the Writers’ Workshop?” she asked.
“No. Just English. Are you?”
“Paul’s the writer,” she said. “I’m still getting my B.A.”
“I see.”
“I’ve been getting it for about a decade.” There was a frank and simple note of exasperation in her voice, and it engaged me. I looked away from the highway and she gave off staring into the countryside, and with a glance as distinct, as audible as a camera snapping, we registered each other’s features.
“Paul said you’re interested in James,” she quickly said, flushing. Then, “I’m Libby.”
“I’m Gabe Wallach—” I stopped as once again the words flew out of her.
“Neither of us know anything really outside the Edmund Wilson one—” she said, “the ghost story.”
“Turn of the Screw,” I said, a good half minute after she had not resumed talking.
“Portrait of a Lady is much better.” She spoke these words as though to please.
“You like it?”
“The first scene is wonderful.”
“When they’re all on the lawn.”
“Yes,” she said, “when Isabel comes. I’ve been living so long in barracks, elegance has an abnormal effect on me.”
“The prose?”
“The rug on the lawn. You know, they’re all sitting on chairs on that immense lawn outside the Touchett’s house. Ralph and his father and Lord Warburton. James says the place was furnished as though it were a room. There’s a rug on the lawn. I don’t know, perhaps it’s just across somebody’s legs, one of those kind of rugs. I’ve read it over several times, and since you can’t be sure, I like to think of it the other way, on the lawn. That appeals to me.” She stopped, violently—and I was left listening for the next few words. I looked over and saw that she was drawing on her top lip so that her nose bent a little at the bottom. All that was dark, her eyes and hair, came to dominate her face. “That sounds terribly private,” she said. “Sometimes I miss the point, I know.” The little forced laugh that followed admitted to fallibilities not solely literary. I was touched by her frailty, until I wondered if perhaps I was supposed to be. “The rug,” she was saying, “knocked me over anyway.” Whereupon her gaze dropped to the floorboard of the car.
“It knocked Isabel over,” I said.
She received the remark blankly. “Yes,” she said.
I tried to remember where in the book the letter was stuck. “How far have you read?” I asked.
“Up to where she meets Osmond. I think I can see what’s coming. Though,” she rushed to add, “perhaps I can’t. I really shouldn’t say that.”
“You must . . . you must have read all night,” was all I finally said.
She flushed again. “Almost,” she told me. “Paul hasn’t started the book yet—” I was looking ahead at the road; I heard her voice stop, and then I felt her move a little toward me. I believe she touched my arm. “Mr. Wallach, there was a letter in your book.”
“Was there?”
“You must have forgotten it.”
The quality of her voice had altered so as to make the whole occasion much too momentous; I heard myself saying that I didn’t remember any letter.
“I brought it with me,” she said, and from the pocket of her shabby raincoat she took the envelope; it must have been this she had raced back into her bedroom to fetch while I had waited at the doorstep. Now she handed it to me. “It was in the book.”
“Thank you.” I put the letter immediately into my own jacket pocket. Out of sight I fumbled with it, but there was no evidence either way—the flap was tucked in. Nevertheless, I drove ahead with only one hand on the wheel. Mrs. Herz pulled at her black stockings, then stuck a fist under each knee. For two miles neither of us said anything.
In the tone of one musing she finally spoke. “She marries and is miserable.”
I had been musing myself, and so I misunderstood at first who exactly was the subject of her observation. My misunderstanding must have produced a very strange expression on my face, for when I turned to demand an explanation, Libby Herz seemed nearly to dissolve in her seat. “Isabel will marry Osmond,” she said, “and be miserable. She’s—she’s a romantic . . . isn’t she?” she asked shakily.
I had not meant to threaten her. I forgot my family as rapidly as I could, and tried hard to be graceful. “I guess so,” I said. “She likes rugs on lawns.”
“She likes rugs on lawns,” Mrs. Herz said, grinning. “That’s the least of it. She wants to put rugs on other peoples’ lawns.”
“Osmond?”
“Osmond—and more than Osmond.” She raised her hands and opened them, slowly and expressively. “Everything,” she said, drawing the word out. “She wants to alter what can’t be altered.”
“She believes in change.”
“Change? My God!” She put her hand to her forehead.
It was the first time I was amused by her. “You don’t believe in change?”
Without warning she turned momentous on me again. “I suppose I do.” She stared a little tragically into her college girl’s raincoat: change, alteration, was not so much the condition of all life as it was some sad and private principle of her own. The hands tugged again at the stockings, went under the knees, and she withdrew. I drove faster and hunted the highway for Paul Herz.
“Well, do you believe,” Mrs. Herz suddenly put in, “in altering that way? Isabel’s trouble is she wants to change others, but a man comes along who can alter her, Warburton or what’s his name, Ramrod—”
“Goodwood. Caspar Goodwood.”
“Caspar Goodwood—and what happens? She gets the shakes, she gets scared. She’s practically frigid, at least that’s what it looks like a case of to me. She’s not much different finally from her friend, that newspaper lady. She’s one of those powerful women, one of those pushers-around of men—”
Before she went off the deep end, I interrupted and said, “I’ve always found her virtuous and charming.”
“Charming?” Incredulity rendered her helpless. Slumping down in her seat, as though konked on the head, she said, “For marrying Osmond?”
“For liking rugs on lawns,” I said.
It was as though I had touched her. She pushed up into a dignified posture and raised her chin. Actually I had only mildly been trying to charm her—and with the truth no less; but in the diminished light, alone on the highway, it had had for her all the earmarks of a pass. And perhaps, after all, that’s what it was; I remembered the seriousness with which we had looked at each other some ten miles back.
To inform me of the depths of her loyalty to her husband, she insulted me. “Perhaps you just like pushy women. Some men do.” I didn’t answer, which did not stop her. Since I had asked for the truth, I was going to get all of it. “That book, as a matter of fact, is really full of people pushing and pulling at each other, and most often with absolutely clear—”
She had been speaking passionately, and leaving off there was leaving off entirely too late. There was no need for her to speak that final word of my mother’s: conscience. I was not sure whether to be offended or humiliated or relieved; for a moment I managed to be all three. It actually seemed as though she had deliberately challenged me with my secret—and at bottom I did not know if I really minded. The worst part of certain secrets is their secrecy. There is a comfort to be derived from letting strangers in on our troubles, especially, if one is a man, strangers who happen also to be women. Perhaps offering the book to be read in the first place had been my way of offering the letter to be read as well. For I was beginning really to be exhausted with standing over my mother’s memory, making sure the light didn’t go out. I had never even been willing to believe that my mother had treated my father badly, until she had gone ahead and told me so. Much as I loved him, he had seemed to me, while she still lived, unworthy of her; it was her letter that had made me see her as unworthy of him. And that is a strange thing to have happen to you—to feel yourself, after death, turning on a person you have always cherished. I had come to feel it was true that she had not merely handled him all her life, as one had to, but that she had mishandled him . . . At least I believed this with part of my mind. I had, curiously, over a period of a year, come to distrust the woman of whom the letter spoke, all the while I continued to honor and admire the memory of the woman who could have written it. And now, when I had begun to have to handle her husband myself, the letter came accidentally back into my life, to decrease in no way my confusion as to what to do with my father’s overwhelming love.
“I’m sorry,” Libby Herz was saying. “It was habit. Which makes it even worse. I am sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
“It’s not. I had to open it. I’m the sort of person who does that.”
Now I was irritated at the way she seemed to be glorifying herself by way of her weaknesses. “Other people do it too,” I said.
“Paul doesn’t.” And that fact seemed to depress her most of all; she worried it while we passed a tall white farmhouse with gingerbread ornament hanging from the frame of every window and door.
After some time had passed, I felt it necessary to caution her. “It’s rather an easy letter to misunderstand,” I said.
“I suppose so, yes,” she answered, in a whisper. “I don’t think—” But she said no more. Her disturbance was private and deep, and I could not help but feel that she was behaving terribly. If she was going to feel so bad about somebody’s feelings, I believed they should at least have been mine. But she seemed unable to work up sympathy for anyone but herself: she was still getting her B.A., after “a decade”; she lived in barracks, so that elegance had a special poignancy for her . . . Her own condition occupied her totally, and I knew that she could no more appreciate my mother’s dilemma than she could Isabel Archer’s. I was, at last, fed up with her. “Portrait of a Lady,” I said, “is an easy book to misunderstand too. You’re too harsh with Isabel Archer.”
“I only meant—”
“Why don’t you wait until you read it all.”
“I read half—”
“She shows herself to have a lot of guts in the end,” I said, again not allowing her to finish. “It’s one thing marrying the wrong person for the wrong reasons; it’s another sticking it out with them.”
To that she had no answer; I had not really permitted one, and perhaps she realized that I was not talking only about the book.
Crushed, she answered finally, “I didn’t mean to be so flip. Or nosey.”
“All right, let’s forget it.” Though I was myself unable to. “I don’t usually leave letters in books,” I said. “It was a peculiar time. I was in the Army—” I heard myself becoming, in front of this girl, as momentous about my life as she had been about her own, and I stopped talking.
“Mr. Wallach,” she said, “I didn’t show it to Paul, if that alleviates anything.”
“We’re making much too much of this. Let’s do forget it.”
The next time she spoke it was only to point up ahead and say, “There he is.”
On the other side of the highway a figure in a long coat was leaning against the darkened headlamp of a car. I moved onto the shoulder at the right-hand side of the road just as Libby took my arm.
“Please forgive me. I’m a snoop, and I’m dumb about novels,” she said. “About people.”
It was supposed to have been a genuine admission, but once made I realized that it was not true; she was not so dumb finally about either.
“I’m sure you’re right about everything,” she said to me.
“Maybe we’re both right,” I answered, though not overgenerously, and turned off the motor and headlights.
Before she reached for the door handle, she turned her face toward me once again. When people have much to say to you, and hardly any time in which to say it, their eyes are sometimes like Libby Herz’s were that moment; above all, they were kind. “Mr. Wallach, I stayed up to read the book because I was very moved by the letter,” and then, as though we were being watched, we both jumped from the car.
All that had to be removed from Paul Herz’s Dodge was a briefcase stuffed with freshman themes, a flashlight, and an old army blanket that had been used to cover the torn upholstery in the front seat. We had to sit for half an hour in my car waiting for the wrecker; Herz had asked a state trooper to call one for him. There was little conversation: Libby discovered that her husband had ripped his new coat, and Herz said that he’d caught it on the hood, and from the back seat I thought I heard his wife begin to sob. Finally the wrecker arrived and the four of us gathered solemnly in the dark around the damaged hood. A sinewy little grease monkey, the wrecker flexed his knuckles and then stuck his hand down through the hole which the flying piston had made in the engine.
“Ten dollars,” he said.
“For repairs?” Libby asked.
“For the car,” the wrecker replied.
Headlights flashed by on the highway, illuminating on Libby Herz’s face astonishment and woe. “Ten dollars! That’s ridiculous. Paul, that’s ridiculous.”
The wrecker addressed the husband. “It’s junk.”
“It’s a ’47,” Libby said feebly.
“Lady, it’s got five pistons. It’s junk.”
“Five?”
“It’s gotta have six to go,” said the wrecker.
“Still.” Then she looked toward her husband. “Paul . . .”
The wrecker stuck his hand in again, and Libby turned quickly back to him as though perhaps he’d miscounted the first time. He only looked at me and shrugged his shoulders. Herz looked at none of us; I saw him shut his eyes.
“How much would it cost . . . to fix it?” Libby asked the question generally, as she had to; she was being ignored all around. The wrecker folded his arms and made me once again special witness to his exasperation. The two of us, thank God, were not married to this woman: he gave off a slow hiss for our side.
“We can’t fix it,” Herz said. “Please, Lib.”
“Paul, ten dollars. The parts alone—the heater alone.”
“Lady,” the wrecker said, and he seemed to have summoned his patience for an explanation of engine dynamics. “Lady, it’s junk,” he said.
“Will you stop saying junk!” She was seeing through teary eyes, and talking with a full nose, and she turned her back to all of us and walked off toward the tow truck. Under the thick iron hook that swung off the crane, she stopped and blew her nose; she looked up, whether at the clear moony sky or the iron hook I didn’t know, but one or the other must have made an ungenerous comment to her about her fate, for she shuddered, and holding her arms around her front like a sick woman, climbed into the back seat of my car.
Paul Herz took his hands out of his coat pockets. “She’s upset,” he explained.
I nodded; the wrecker said, “I haven’t got all night.”
Herz looked at him and then, by himself, took a little walk around his car, staring down at each of the tires as though above all else he hated losing those four old friends. When he came back to us he tried to smile at me. “Okay,” he said.
The wrecker took a tight fat wad from his pocket; he flashed it a little at us college boys and peeled off two fives. He rubbed them a moment with his black fingers and handed the cash to Herz.
“Is that all?” Herz said.
The grease monkey was overcome suddenly with cheeriness. He lifted his arms in the air. “That’s all, professor.”
We drove back to Iowa City with Paul Herz sitting alongside me in the front. As soon as we got in the car Herz had said to me, “Thanks for being so patient. I’m sorry about all this.”
“It’s okay.”
“The thief,” Libby Herz said. In the rear-view mirror I saw she was sitting on her knees looking out the back window.
Herz seemed at first to decide not to be provoked, but at last he spoke. “Libby, the car blew a piston. It’s junk.”
“That’s what the man said,” his wife answered.
“Okay,” Herz said.
“Ten dollars . . . the fenders alone—”
Herz glanced my way to see if I was listening. I tried my best to attend only to the black road, but of course there were my ears to contend with. “Libby,” he said, “will you please? You don’t know anything about cars, honey.”
“I know about thieves.”
“Damn it,” Herz said, turning in his seat, “nobody cheated me!”
“I didn’t say he cheated you—”
“What did you expect me to do? Bargain with him for a couple of dollars in the middle of the highway? I’ve been standing there for over an hour!”
“We’re not millionaires!”
“You don’t know anything about cars. Will you please be quiet!”
“Why did the piston come through like that?” she whined.
Herz turned to the front window again; he was fingering his coat where the cuff was torn. “I don’t know.”
“What are we going to do?”
“I don’t know!”
By this time I was practically hunched behind the wheel, feeling the emotions of an eavesdropper—and having the thoughts of one too. Like most people with an ear to the wall, I had taken a side: the impossible one to live with, I could see now, was clearly the wife. Her husband’s car had been raised on a hook and towed away; his briefcase was splitting with ungraded themes; his new coat, which looked to me to be a pretty old coat, was torn in the sleeve; and to top things off, his Anglo-Saxon verbs, like mine, had been waiting for centuries to be memorized, and waited still. And she wouldn’t let the poor guy alone. Without being too obvious about it, I pushed the accelerator into the floor, though I realized that by outracing Paul Herz’s temper, and avoiding what I could of his familial difficulty, I was of course racing back to familial problems of my own. I would walk through the door, the phone would ring, I would lift it, and my father would say: “Where were you—I’ve been calling all night?” I could race up the stairs and crash through the apartment and catch the phone on the second ring, and he still wouldn’t be satisfied: What’s the matter I wasn’t there for the first? In short, why hadn’t I called him? In short, why had I run off to Iowa for graduate work when Columbia was only two subway stops north? I could go back to Harvard, couldn’t I? At least it wasn’t six million miles away!
“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. Forget 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.
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.