Letting Go

1

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 failing

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.

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.

Margie said, “I’d like to stay with you.”

“You can stay,” I said.

“Can I?”

“Yes.”

“Shouldn’t we go back and get some things?”

“I have eggs and orange juice,” I assured her.

“I meant stay,” she said. “Really stay.”

I spoke then not only for Kenosha but for all small towns everywhere. “Marge, we hardly know each other.”

“We can be happy as kings,” she said, very sweetly.

“What do you need to get?”

“Do you have Breck shampoo?”

“No.”

“I want to get my Breck and my Olivetti. I have an electric frying pan,” she said, a little breathlessly.

“I have gas,” I pointed out.

“Electric cooks perfect eggs,” she told me. “Oh I want to eat so many breakfasts here.”

So we drove to Margie’s room and she packed a suitcase full of skirts and underwear, and in a large cardboard carton which I took from the shelf of her closet, I began to lay her frying pan and her Olivetti and her steam iron and her Breck and her Oxford Book of Seventeenth-Century Verse. And all the time I bent over the carton I wondered what I was doing. Some things — carrying George Herbert into a sinful union! Not till I felt fully the absurdity of what I was about did I realize how clutchy I had become of late: when I had seen Paul Herz in class, I had rushed to give him a book; when Libby called for a lift, I had dropped my studies and run right over. That very morning I had tried virtually to graft the Herzes to me by loaning them my car. That was an anxious way to interpret a simple act of kindness, but with all the evidence, with Marge Howell’s soapy smell moving back and forth only a foot behind me, what else could I think about myself? I had not realized that I had been missing my father as much as he had been missing me.

She put her arms around me, this sweet empty-headed girl, and from behind me kissed my neck. With wryness, which never protected anyone from anything for very long, I said, “Oh, Margie, I am your Trotsky, your Einstein, your Moses Maimonides.” And that foe of Luther and the Middle West asked, “Was that his last name?”

Was it a feeble joke or didn’t she know? Either way, I continued to lose confidence in myself.

Mindlessly, mindlessly, mindlessly — pushing our shopping cart through the market, and late in the afternoon sipping cocoa in bed, and every few nights watching Marge let down her whirly blond hair to be washed. 1 would be sitting on the edge of the tub translating Beowulf to her while she leaned across the sink wearing her half slip and raising luxurious bubbles on her scalp. With her hair combed out straight, the wet strands just touching her back, she would turn to me with a look of perfect well-being and satisfaction. “And yet I don’t feel I have to marry you. Isn’t that something? I didn’t think I could feel so liberated.” There were nights when it was charming, but there were other nights too, and then the girl at the sink and 1 on the tub seemed no more facts of this life than those impossibilities, Hrothgar and Grendel, whose words and deeds I had just been trying to comprehend.

Margie soon came down with the grippe and was very hard to deal with. In bed she took to wearing my pajamas, and posing in them. She wanted to hear about all the girls I had made love to, and then I could hear about all the boys who had wanted to make love to her. She would not sleep with the lights out, and finally when she did sleep and I was alone, I had to face the fact that she was not much different sick from what she was well: the strain was simply purer, that was all. On the third day of her illness I was at last able to tear myself away from her by way of the necessities of shopping. Leaving our casino game, I drove to the supermarket under threatening winter skies. I knew that when Margie was fully recovered, strong and bouncy, we would have to arrange a parting; I was no gray-haired Chicago investor, no left-wing Jewish intellectual, and I could not continue to serve as either, or both. Nevertheless, because I was at the time as weak in the face of loneliness as in the face of pleasure, I shopped for two for the week, buying in the drug section of the market four bottles of Breck and three jars of the dainty underarm deodorant she used, and later the chocolate drink she was so fond of. Then as I was rounding an aisle by the meat department, I saw Libby Herz pushing a cart toward my own. I ducked away, but a few minutes later we collided in front of Detergents.

“Hi,” she said.

“Why, hello — how are you?”

“Better. How are you?”

“I’m fine. What’s the matter?” I asked. “Were you sick? Or are you just feeling generally better?”

“I had a fever.”

“There’s one going around.”

“It’s gone now,” she answered cheerily; too cheerily, for looking at her I saw the after-effects of illness still in her face.

“How’s your husband?”

“He’s fine.”

We both did not know where to go from there. She must have heard, as 1 did, that I had not called Paul Paul.

“You must come see us some night,” Libby suggested.

“I’ve been very busy.”

A strand of hair that was swept away from the side of her head suddenly engaged her; she brushed it with her hand, and pulled everything tighter through the rubber band at the back. “I want to thank you,” she said, “for the car offer. That was very nice. Paul told me.”

“I’m sorry he couldn’t use it.”

With her hair out of the way, she began fiddling with the items in her cart; she had a great deal of oleo but no Breck. “Thank you anyway,” she said, and we both looked off at the shelves of Tide and Rinso.

“How do you get all those groceries home now?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Walk.”

“It’s far.”

“Not that far.”

“Why don’t you wait—” I found myself looking at a crease that extended from the edges of her nostrils to the edges of her mouth, barely visible, but still a mark on the skin. “Maybe you shouldn’t walk …”

“Oh but I’m fine.”

“I can drive you. I’m almost finished.”

When she looked to see how finished I was, I realized that it was clear from my cartful that I was feeding and deodorizing more than one. It was also clear — to me — that the other person was not one toward whom I had a great deal of feeling. It was beginning to seem that toward those for whom I felt no strong sentiment, I gravitated; where sentiment existed, I ran. There was my father; there was even the girl before me. With her, of course, circumstances had combined with judgment to hold me back. But no circumstances had forced me, really, into a liaison with Margie Howells, whose sickroom behavior informed me that even if I had not developed feelings, I had at any rate initiated obligations. Standing there with Libby Herz, I found myself feeling rather shabby.

“Do let me drive you,” I said.

“I’ll wait just outside.”

In the car I put my bundles out of sight on the back seat. I propped up Libby’s bag in front, between us, and asked her how school was.

“I’m not in school any more.”

“I didn’t know that,” I said.

“I decided to quit a couple of weeks ago. A few days after we saw you, I guess.”

“I suppose it’s less hectic.”

She shrugged her shoulders again, and I saw that somehow I was making her nervous. “I’m working in the registrar’s office,” she said. “You’re right, it is less hectic. I mean generally.” And rather than explain, she raced ahead. “I finished your book. You don’t mind if we keep it for a while, do you? Paul hasn’t gotten around to it yet. He’s just starting to get some time.”

“That’s all right.”

“Isabel has a lot of courage in the end,” she said. “You were right. Going back to Osmond, I mean. I don’t know — I think some people might think it was stubbornness. Do you think it was?”

I thought she thought it was, so I said, yes, in a way it probably was. However, I said, stubbornness might be the other side of courage.

“That’s very hard to figure out,” she answered. “When you’re being stubborn and when you’re being courageous. I mean, if you were alone — but there are other people …” The conversation seemed suddenly to depress her. Whenever we talked principle it always wound up seeming as though we were talking about her. I could tell when she spoke next that she had told herself to stop brooding.

“Why don’t you come visit us?” she asked.

I did not answer.

“Don’t judge us by that night,” Libby said. “Please don’t. We, both of us, were preoccupied.”

“It’s not that,” I said. “Actually I’ve just been busy.”

“Paul …” she began slowly, “did appreciate your offering the car.” She looked out the side window as she spoke, and I was reminded vividly of our first interview. “It simply wasn’t a solution for us. I hope you didn’t think he was ungrateful. He did appreciate the ride. He appreciated it very much. He’s — very private. He’s sweet, you know”—she toppled one word on the next—“and, I know, I know he can look a little rude, to strangers—”

“No, no. I didn’t think him rude at all.”

“We’re much better off now, really. I thought it was awfully kind of you, considering what we’d been the night before. I realize,” she said in a voice too loud for a two-door sedan, “that I must have complained all night.”

“Oh no. I just thought you were telling some stories.”

What I said confused me, and confused Libby too. Her voice was hardly natural when she said, “Paul was just overworked. It’s not nearly so bad as I must have made it seem.”

“Doesn’t he teach at Coe any more?” I asked.

“Well, he does — but he won’t be, starting next semester. It’s too much. And I don’t mind working. Really, it’s sort of a nice change. There’s a bus, he found out, that goes up to Cedar Rapids and he’s finishing out the semester taking that. It shoots a lot of his day — but that’s okay anyway because he can read on it — and oh, I know it sounds involved, but now in fact it’s less involved than it was. Before he couldn’t write, and he was up every night marking papers, and he was too upset. We’ll finish one education at a time. I think tempers are better all around.”

“I’m glad everything is going well.”

“Oh yes. You must come to see us.”

“I will.”

“I’m sure Paul would like it.”

Then why the hell hadn’t he asked me himself? I saw him three times a week, and got from him only a hello and goodbye … But his life had only just changed, I told myself, and perhaps it was true that as his several frustrations dropped away, he would come to feel less defensive about me.

“I will come,” I said.

“Come tonight.”

“I don’t think I can make it tonight.”

As we headed up toward the barracks, Libby said, “You’re certainly welcome to bring somebody with you, if you like.”

“Maybe some other night.” Obviously I could not tell her that at the moment there was a sick girl home in my bed. “After Christmas,” I said, hoping that by then there would be no girl in my bed at all.

“Paul will return the book soon,” Libby said. She pointed up to the gray hut that was theirs. “Right here. There are a lot of things to talk about, about Isabel’s character.”

“There are, I know.”

“I’d like to talk about them,” she said. “And do, really, bring anyone you like. I think Paul would like you to bring someone.” When I looked at her pulling the bundle from the car, she tried to avoid my eyes. I knew she did not want me to suggest that I carry the bundle for her.

2

We two Wallach men, my father and I, stood in place on the tennis court, pushing dull lifeless shots back and forth at one another. Each of us had been trying for over an hour not to inconvenience his opponent by so much as a foot. For four days now, life — off the court as well as on — had consisted of just this sort of polite emotionless volleying. Running into one another in the bathroom, we bowed in our bathrobes. At dinner, eyes glued to utensils, we waited for Millie to serve, then dipped into our grapefruit as though one wrist controlled our separate hands. One of us couldn’t sneeze without the other waving a clean handkerchief in his face.

Now, when a slight powder-puff shot of my father’s twisted three feet to my left, his apology was endless. He didn’t want to see me moving — three feet to the left and next thing I’d be off the courts, out of the club, gone from New York forever. For the rest of the afternoon he aimed at a dime; all I had to do, in turn, was close my eyes and bring my racket forward and I would meet the ball. See how easy life is in New York?

I chose, however, to keep my eyes open and on him. Across the court, in WSAC sweatshirt and white ducks that broke so low on his sneakers they nearly covered his toes, his undernourished figure, spidery and nervous, bounced in place awaiting my return. He had a stringy little body, a large head, and thick hair the color of iron. I am taller and heavier, like my mother, but his face, without the sags and wrinkles, could have been my own: gray eyes, flat nose, wide nostrils, and a big jaw which my father maintains has resulted in no wisdom-teeth trouble for two centuries. In his family they rise right up through the gums with room to spare. The aesthetic results of functionalism, however, are not always very satisfying; these abundant jaws of ours tend to make both my father and myself look a little like farmers. Or soldiers. You know we come from strong stock, but that’s all you know; it was on my mother’s side that all the nuance lay.

The steely Germanic strain in my father’s features may not at first seem at one with his manner — particularly with his wisecracking, which he was allowing me that day to sample after each of my returns. In part, I suppose, this wisecracking is a watered-down version of my mother’s wit; in part it arises from having lived his life in America, where he early came to admire the spirit of certain of our radio comedians. But mostly what one is witnessing when my father makes a joke, is the surface reaction of a gloomy northern disposition, the response of a man who would gush and weep if he did not kid around.

“Oh-ho,” my father called, as I, out of boredom, gave the ball a little spin. “Oh-ho, a trickster. Is that what I’ve got on my hands? What are you doing, working out your Oedipus complex?”

Subsequently I hit the ball listlessly back, a simple easy return. “So what now — giving up? Letting an old man beat your pants off? Oh-ho, a push-over, Charlie,” he called to the towel-and-soap attendant who was passing along the side of the court. “Strictly a pushover I’m up against today.”

“How are you, Doctor?” Charlie asked. “He sure has grown up.”

“Ah him, he’s still a school kid,” my father called. “Still wet behind the ears,” he added, so that Charlie laughed, and I felt provoked to give a little vent to my Oedipus complex and slammed a wicked one past his backhand. Charlie moved off, counting towels; my father quieted a moment; and I had the usual filial remorse.

At home, what was there to do? It looked as though I might at last get a chance to go out on the streets alone. Millie, the woman who had cooked and cleaned for our family for years, came into the living room directly after our return and said that there had been a phone call for me from Iowa City. My father, who had been rubbing his hands together in an anticipatory way and looking out the window at the park, asked his question without turning.

“A woman?”

“I think so. Specifically, a girl.”

“Well,” he said, “you better go ahead and phone her.” In a voice with a little edge to it, he added, “It doesn’t take you too long, huh?”

“For what?”

He looked at me, trying to grin. “To get a foot in the door. Hey, I sound dirty. To get established. You going to call?”

“Not now. I thought I might take a walk.”

“It’s freezing out. You’ll freeze to death.”

“It’s not too bad.”

“How about giving me a look at your teeth?”

“I think you looked at them in August.”

“August, September, October, November — it’s the end of December already. January is six months. (Come in the office. I’ve got new equipment you haven’t even seen yet.”

“I think I saw it in August. I thought I’d walk down—”

“Come on, it’s your vacation.”

“It’s your vacation too,” I said. “You ought to stay out of the office today. Millie says you work too hard.”

“Oh does Millie? Maybe Millie should take a couple lessons from me. Come on, you’ll get me at the top of my form. A good game of tennis makes my technique sharper. Spend an hour in the office,” he said, coming past me to put a hand to my shoulder, “you used to love it.” He started down the hallway, calling out to the maid, “Millie, we’re going out to dinner tonight.” He opened the door at the end of the apartment, and there was nothing to do but follow him into the reception room.

Up straight in the dental chair, everything was as it used to be He whistled some tuneless collection of notes, while behind me faucets dripped and little drawers were opened and closed. Over in the park, around the slickly iced reservoir, the limbs of the trees were as black this December as they’d been fifteen and twenty Decembers before. I heard my father’s rubber-soled sports shoes — his working shoes — move across the floor, just as a window at 93rd and Fifth took the sun at a wide angle and flamed out over Manhattan. A plastic bib slid past my eyes, the back rest dropped gently down, and swimming familiarly above me was my father’s face, his hand, his silver pick. Crisp from his shower at the club, his hair looked fierce as a helmet under the bluish bulb. Commanded, the patient opened wider, wider, and the slow trek began, the hunt, along the gum line into the darkest regions of the mouth. He searched deep inside me: how far down had I hidden my heart?

“Ah yes ah yes—” He lingered a while at each molar, then went on to caress the next. “Ah, this one was something. We took good care of this mouth, all right. Not a hundred mouths in all of New York like this one. People pay me to build a mouth like this — no, no, keep it open. Wider.”

Marge Howells had called. I allowed that business to occupy my mind while I obliged my father with my mouth. I closed my eyes, shutting out his gleeful face, and took stock. Just five days earlier I had repacked Marge’s cardboard carton, and had had to pack her suitcase too, while she pounded at me from behind with her fists. “You’re not folding my skirts right!” she wailed into my ear. “Stop it, you’re getting everything wrinkled! Oh Gabe, stop! I love you I love you I love you” until at last she hurled a bottle of Breck against the bathroom wall. Nevertheless I had carried her belongings to the car and driven her, weeping, to her room. Then I drove alone to the airport, and late that night had rubbed unshaven cheeks with another weeper, my father, in the freezing rainy openness of Idlewild. Now Marge had called and I was sure it was from my own phone. I was weary with the knowledge that despite all I had determined to set right, she had managed to retain her key — which I had forgotten about in my determination just to get her out — and had probably engaged some taxi driver to carry her belongings back up the two flights to my apartment.

I would not call her back.

“I just want to take some pictures,” my father was saying. He had rolled the black X-ray machine noiselessly up to my cheek and was taking aim at my back molars. “Let’s just get the lay of the land,” he said. “Remember, Gabe, how I used to carry an X-ray of your mouth in my wallet? Just for a gag—”

“Why don’t you use that one?” I asked limply.

The prints, when developed, glowed with health. What more was there to do? I made a move to leave the chair, but my father touched his fingers to my chest. “You know,” he said, “you always have to have a total picture to see the whole thing.”

I sighed. “What whole thing?”

“The X-rays, a check-up,” he said vaguely. “Hygiene aside, consider it a matter of curiosity. A matter of self-investigation. Know thyself, you know? I’m acquainted with people who think of dentists as mechanics, carpenters, nobodies. Ridiculous. Dentists are astronomers — just let me go on — dentists are geologists. Gabe, when seen from the proper angle, dentistry is a romance. Take the stars. I see the fellow next door up on the roof charting stars. ‘Charting’ them, is that right? Looking, examining, and so forth. Now I want to put it this way: what’s so different about dentistry? I’m serious now — what’s so different about getting directly at what’s in a man’s head? Not millions of light years away, but right here — God Almighty, almost touching the brain. Now there are cases, documented cases of the tooth actually piercing the brain. Can you imagine? So galaxies, solar systems — believe me, a tooth is just as much a mystery as a star. A man’s got to have a philosophy of life, why he works, and that’s mine. You get older and you wonder why you do what you do. A man doesn’t get along without reasons. To go through life, just putting on your garters and eating your food, alone, by myself, without sufficient reasons, day after day, how can a fellow do it? Unless he’s got like Gruber, smiling sickness, smiling on the brain. For myself, Gabe, I need a little mystery in life. As I get older I haven’t got a lot of the old concerns, you know. Well, I find much to think about in terms of the human mouth. The third molar alone could occupy a lifetime. Don’t laugh — that’s a fact. Just the why of it, I’m telling you … Life makes you stop and think, that’s the thing. Life changes on a man, and then he’s got to have a little something in reserve. I feel a little ashamed about what I didn’t have in reserve.” He had then to look off for a moment in another direction. “Look, I don’t have to go on and on. It’s nice to talk to someone who understands. Lean back again, I want to clean them.”

“Dad, the cleaning isn’t necessary. Everything is fine here. I’m not going anywhere. I haven’t any plans. I’ll be here until New Year’s Eve.”

“I thought New Year’s Day.”

“New Year’s Day, right.” I tried to maintain a composed expression even while I remembered how we had tussled over dates driving back from Idlewild with his wallet-sized calendar between us. “So you can relax. Take it easy. There’s no need to clean my teeth right now. I’m sure they’re fine.”

“Have you had a chance lately to look at your last molar?” He measured off a good size fish with two hands. “Tartar,” he said. “Let me be the dentist and you be the patient.”

“Fine,” I said, smiling. “If I’m the patient, I think I’ve really had enough for today.”

“You don’t care that your teeth are all furry?”

“I have to make a phone call.”

“How long will this take, ten more minutes? You’re going to have it done you might as well have it done right.”

“Oh Christ, can’t they clean teeth in Iowa?”

A hand rose up as though to find its target on my cheek. It swiped at the overhead lamp, which buzzed and died. My father reached behind him to unbutton his white jacket. “You’ve got an important phone call, go make it.” He walked to the window, as his fingers, traveling down his back, broke off a button that rattled to the floor. “Go call Alaska, call Bangkok. Go ask the operator for the furthest place she can get you — then go dial it.” His foot slammed down on the button, producing absolute quiet in the room.

“What do you expect me to do?” I began, softly. “Sit in this chair the rest of my life?”

“I happen to be a thirty-thousand-dollar-a-year dentist. People wait hours so I can reconstruct their mouths. Some of the leading stage stars in New York have sat in this chair for weeks. I change people’s looks. I give them health and beauty, two of the most wonderful things in the world. I take an interest in teeth. You’re my son, I take an interest in yours. Is that a crime these days?”

“Nobody’s talking about crimes.”

“I get the feeling somebody around here is.”

“Please,” I said, “turn around. I only meant you don’t have to trap me in the chair. I’m sorry if I was snide. I only mean that you would be better off if you take it easy about me. Just relax, that’s all.”

“I am relaxed. I know how to relax. If you don’t relax at my age you get bad pressure, sluggishness. I am relaxed.”

“If you want to go ahead,” I said, after a moment, “why don’t you just go ahead.”

“Go ahead where?”

“Clean my teeth,” I said, finding it difficult to talk.

“You have to call some girl.”

“I’ve got a mouthful of tartar. How can I talk to anybody? Go ahead, if you want to.”

“No, no,” he said, “you go ahead. You have a life in Iowa. Go conduct it.”

“Why don’t you clean my teeth? I’m asking you to clean my teeth.”

“You’ll sit there fidgeting. I don’t do a rush job. I’m not a plumber.”

“I won’t fidget.”

Without looking at me, he walked around the chair. “I just won’t work with somebody fidgeting.” A hand appeared over my head and I was in the glare of the light again. He spoke from behind, like Marge, “I don’t know when you became so casual about your health. You used to love to have your teeth cleaned; you used to say your mouth tasted pink afterward. I still tell that to patients. I don’t know where you suddenly picked up such bad habits.” Behind me he was scratching together a sweet-smelling paste, “It’s funny,” he went on, “how a mouth doesn’t change, how yours is the same mouth now it was then. I can remember it, you know that? I can remember your mother’s mouth. I find that I can remember every single tooth in her head.” Then his face appeared above my own. I could have reached up and pulled him down and kissed him. But would he understand that I was not prepared to surrender my life to his? He was a wholehearted man, and such people are hard to kiss half-heartedly.

My mouth was tasting pink when I asked the operator for Iowa. I waited to be connected while my father’s tuneless peppy little whistle came from the bedroom. Removing my tartar had restored his belief in the future. He walked past me into the living room, a white terry-cloth bathrobe around his shoulders and oriental slippers on his feet. He was back to Yoga again. I should have guessed it.

At the other end of the line, Margie said hello.

“Marge — it’s me.”

“Oh sweetie,” she said, “how are you?”

“I’m all right. How are you?”

“I’m a little tired. I’ve been scrubbing shampoo off the walls all afternoon.”

“Have you moved back in?”

“Gabe, this disengagement policy wasn’t working at all. I was so lonely. I love you, honey.”

“Margie, we can’t keep living together. It’s bad for our characters.”

“I love you. It’s good for my character.”

“Stop being kittenish.”

“Is that kittenish too?” she whined.

“Marge, why don’t you go to Kenosha for a week? It’s a holiday. You’re lonely because there’s no one on the campus. You don’t miss me as much as you think. Why don’t you go home for a while?”

“Because those people bore me.”

“Margie, you just have to move out.”

“You come back, you’ll see. We’ll have fun.”

“You have to move out.”

“I miss you. Don’t you miss anything? How can you live with someone for a month and not miss them?”

“Missing is just more indulgence for us. The whole thing was very indulgent of both of us.”

“I feel,” she said, “very used …”

“Please, honey, don’t talk too much like a movie, all right?”

“You’re cynical about love. I’m only telling you how I feel.”

“The truth is we were both used. We used each other. Now let’s stop it.”

“I can’t.”

“Why?”

“I love you.”

“You don’t,” I said.

“Gabe, I don’t want to fight with you. I didn’t call to fight. The campus is empty. It’s depressing me.”

“What have you been doing?” I asked.

“I’m trying to read Proust,” she said. “I think the translation must be lousy. He just doesn’t seem that great. Sweetheart, I’ve written nearly fifty letters. I think all I’ve done is wash my damn hair and mail letters. Gabe, you’ve got to come back — for New Year’s at least. Oh Gabe, New Year’s Eve?”

“Marge,” I said, not really knowing where to go from here, “why don’t you go out and talk to people?” It began to seem that I had found my Bartleby: I would have to go back to Iowa City and find a new apartment, leaving Marge behind in the old one. “Why don’t you go to the movies, go swimming. Make a life for yourself, baby, please?”

“I don’t like movies alone. I’m not being obstinate — I don’t. I had coffee with a friend of yours in the Union today.”

It depressed me considerably to hear her settling down to be chatty. “Who?”

“Paul Kurtz.”

“Herz.”

“He seemed very nice. A little lugubrious.”

“I hardly know him. What did he have to say?”

“We just chatted. His wife’s sick. I think she had what I had. She’s in the hospital. Gabe, is she really his wife, or is he just living with her?”

“Oh, Marge—”

“Gabe, he’s the only person I’ve spoken with in five days. Aren’t you going to come back for New Year’s Eve?”

“I’m visiting with my father. Look, you’ve got to move out. You just can’t keep being indulgent like this.”

“Hasn’t indulgence turned into anything?” she demanded to know. “You just can’t walk out!” she cried into the phone.

“We’re both walking out.”

“I’m not walking anywhere! Don’t tell me what I’m doing!”

“All right, I won’t. Just call a taxi, and take your stuff, and get out.”

“You don’t respond — that’s your trouble! You’re heartless!”

“I expect you to be gone when I get back.”

“How can you say that to me if you love me!”

“But I don’t love you. I never said I did.”

“You used me, you bastard.” And she began to weep.

“Oh, Margie, nobody uses anybody for four weeks.”

“Five weeks!”

“Look, hang up now, pack your bags, and leave.”

“I’ll ruin this place, you,” she screamed. “I really will!”

“You’re hysterical—” I said, astounding nobody with the insight.

“I’ll tear up all your books! I’ll break all the rotten spines — you’ll have to come back!”

“I’m coming back on the first of January.”

“Oh—” she wept, “I never expected this of you.”

“Margie, you romanticized—”

“You romanticized!” and at her end the phone slammed down.

When my mother was alive she had done everything possible to prevent my father from assuming the Cobra Posture on her prized living room rug. However, she was gone, and I did not live with the man, so after my phone call — determined to put out of my mind those long-distance protestations of love — I sat down on the orange raw silk of our scrolly Victorian sofa, and I watched. And for the first time since my arrival, I found my father oblivious to me. It pleased me to think that we two were occupants of the same room, and that he was not investigating my plans for next month, or fiddling around inside my mouth. Not me, but the Cobra Posture — Bhujungasana — was the object upon which he focused all his soul and all his body. Clad in a blue jockey bathing suit, he was stretched rigidly before me on the floor, his stomach down, his toes pointed back, his chest nobly arched. All that moved, while he held himself aloft on locked wrists and elbows, were the muscles in his forearms, which jiggled at a high speed against the thin pale shell of his skin. The features of his face moved around a bit too as he tried to work them into a picture of repose. It was all very familiar, even down to the hour of the day; over in the Park, everything was growing dim.

“That rug,” my mother used to say, dying to kick one arm out from under him, but knitting instead, “was woven by an entire village in North Africa, Gabriel, so that your father could make a damn fool of himself on it.” She had a strategy of making certain matters that were important to her sound unimportant; but she was, after all, a strenuous woman and I knew she wasn’t kidding. She had disapproved of his Yoga, as she had disapproved of his Reichian analysis, his health foods, and his allegiance in 1948 to Henry Wallace. She was a dedicated opponent of the impossible, which my father happened to be for; but he was for her too, and that was what had weakened him. Even so, it was no easy job for her to restore him to reason. It had finally been necessary, where his orgone box was concerned, to shame him out of the thing by hinting of its existence one night to a group of his colleagues at a convention of the American Dental Association in Miami. What had forced her to such a cruel extreme was something my father had done with his box one afternoon in her absence: he had put me in it. After the ADA convention, a length of wooden rod was purchased, some nails driven in the right places, and the next thing Millie knew she had a zinc lined wardrobe closet in the corner of her room. The end result of my mother’s maneuver was that it managed to bring my father back into his family living room in the evenings, the proper place, my mother told him, to be collecting sexual energy in the first place.

As for the avocado and fresh vegetable dinners, she had put up with them and put up with them, until finally she had forbidden Millie to set anything green and uncooked on our table. We all had to go without vitamin C until it was certain that my father was on the wagon. My mother claimed she would hold out until the entire family had scurvy, though my father gave in before the first symptoms of the disease made an appearance. Henry Wallace is a more complicated story. He had been entertained in the Wallach apartment, and treated graciously. My father, as I had told Marge, had been chairman of an organization of doctors and lawyers in New York City who had dedicated themselves to campaigning for the third party. One would imagine, of course, that my father would then have voted for Wallace, but he did not; election eve my mother had kept him up, feeding him coffee, until she had finally convinced him that a vote for Wallace was a vote for Dewey. What a moment it must have been for him in the booth, pulling down that Truman lever. How he must have hated the woman he loved.

It was Hatha Yoga that she had not been able to lick. Even when my father had ceased being a damned fool on her Moroccan rug, his nurse reported persistence after hours in the waiting room. The fact was that his wife could have as easily shamed him out of Yoga as out of dentistry. He was much too attached to the idea of healing. At least that was the way he might have thought of it himself. More likely, for all his belief in restitution, progress, reform, reconstruction — he had rebuilt some of the most talked-about mouths in New York — he was more attracted to ideas of disease. Wilhelm Reich, Henry Wallace, leafy green vegetables: all somehow were antibodies. And the disease? He apparently blamed some bug, some germ, for his perennially swollen heart. The disease was the doctor’s feelings. Not that he ever said this to anyone; to the worlds, professional and lay, he claimed dedication only to science. To the upper Fifth Avenue rabbis who made their way through our apartment, he was open-faced about his atheism. I have myself heard him explain his high colonic Yogic enema to the biggest internist in New York, absolutely physiologically, no mention of the soul at all. And Bhujangansa, of course, stimulated the autonomous and sympathetic nervous systems.

Well, that all may or may not have been so. My own suspicion, even as a growing boy, was that my father’s particular trouble wasn’t with his sympathetic nervous system at all. It was, as a matter of fact, with his sympathies: his passions ached him. Whatever terror he saw in life, whatever turbulence gave him inward hell, he was unable to answer it with reason. So he took to magic.

My mother was a different kind of person, which may be obvious by now. She was the one in our family with the expressive face — baggy eyes, long nose, wide clown’s mouth — but she had controlled it like a master. On the surface she was neither overly affectionate nor overly retiring, and as for surface manners, people have said on occasion that I take after her. Love her as I did, I don’t know how much that pleases me. What with my father’s steely physiognomy and my mother’s crafty rule over her responses, I don’t suppose I look much like a young man giving things away. I don’t believe I look out-and-out mean, so much perhaps as self-concerned. My mother was more fortunate: she looked self-aware. She gave one the feeling that she knew precisely what she was doing when she made her offer of reason to my father. It was that — reason — which she had given him. Since no marriage is so simple, there were of course other offerings as well; but it was reason more than anything else, for that was what my father seemed most desperately in need of. And that may have been what she had an excess of herself.

She checked cockeyed enthusiasms left and right, and for those of us up close it was almost impressive. During the early years, however, my father did not apparently understand fully the exchange he had entered into. From time to time he would try to model himself after the handsome woman he had chosen, and for two or three weeks would defect from Yoga and charge at life from a reasonable angle. It was a change his very essence deplored; exercising a painful self-control, he wound up constipating himself. It was clear even to me, the child in the house, that he was not a logical man; while I listened to his explanations I knew that truth, whatever it was, plunged deeper than what he was telling me. But the difference between reason and unreason was for a child nothing more than a distinction. In the beginning I had no favorites. It was eventually under my mother’s tutelage — and that consisted primarily of just being around her — that I came to have attitudes toward the objects of my father’s passions. But then all the young finally get sophistication and go around the house feeling themselves surrounded by second-rate minds; it is to first-rate hearts that they cling, with innocence and greed. Red twilights in the park, every last patient having taken home his reconstructed jaw, my father would toss his darling son up toward the branches of the trees. Miles below me the grass would twirl, so that even I knew it was too high for safety. My father, however, was a turbulent man, and since nine in the morning he’d been working in millimeters.

But one evening, which it seems I will not forget, I came down into his arms wailing not with joy, but with fright. Up near the trees I had looked still higher, and from our living-room window I had seen a pair of hands stretching out and down, toward me. The hands were my mother’s. I came back to earth whimpering, and my father had to hold me and then to carry me home on his shoulders, chattering all the while of circuses we would go to and fun we would have. I quickly got over my fantasy, but that made it no less significant: there had always been a struggle for me in the Wallach household. Each apparently saw my chances in life diminished if I grew in the image of the other. So I was pulled and tugged between these two somewhat terrorized people — a woman who gripped at life with taste and reason and a powerful self-control, and a man who preferred the strange forces to grip him. And still, I managed to move up through adolescence and into manhood without biting my nails or wetting my bed or stealing hubcaps off parked cars. Whatever it was in that apartment on Central Park West that had been compounded out of the polar personalities of my parents, I myself experienced it as love.

Death upset everything. When my mother died in 1952 she was clearly no less dedicated to helping my father keep his footing in this world than she had been in 1942; that he could not keep his footing alone had been the cause of much of the grief she chose to keep to herself. Immediately after her death I found myself blaming my father for having been unworthy of her. But then her letter was sent on to me, and heartbroken as I was, awed as I was by what had been the circumstance of its composition, the confession it contained forced upon me a truth that I had never permitted myself to see. She had been so attractive a person in life that it had been hard to judge her. But in death she came to seem a kind of villain, and I left the Army willing to believe that it was she who had ruined my father’s life. He was the worthy one, for he had accepted the woman he had married. Mordecai Wallach loved Anna Wallach; she had loved what he was to be alchemized into six months hence. A woman of moderate emotions and good sense, and yet she had apparently had her love affair with power. Her restraint hadn’t been all it had looked to be.

Or had it? Was she not, finally, loyal and honest and good? She did the best she could in balancing the emotional budget in the house of an extravagant man. When I speak of her as having acted villainously, I wonder if I am not speaking as a member of that vast and treacherous populace that has lately come out for Compassion. We seem called upon more and more to make very pious, very public, demonstrations of our feelings. You turn a corner and there’s a suburban lady in a pillbox hat, jingling a container full of coins at you, demanding, give. Watch television, and fifty entertainers and ten disc jockeys are staging “a marathon”; they lose sleep, take their meals on the run, sing, make jokes and display themselves, and none of this for their own benefit. It is a peculiar age indeed, when even the corrupt and the unfeeling are out collecting so as to beat down hardening of the arteries. It’s the age to feel sorry — a bleeding heart is standard equipment.

And the fact is that there are few of us who can resist an appeal. After all, you could free the slaves and hang the tyrants by their heels, but as for the rest, the other horrors, what do you do after you’ve bought your Christmas seals? We feel a debt, I know, hearing of the other fellow’s sorrows, but the question I want to raise here is, What good is the bleeding heart? What’s to be done with all this pitying? Look, even my mother had it; she pitied my father. Isabel Archer pitied Osmond. I pity you, you may pity me. I don’t know if it makes any of us behave better, or wiser. Terrible struggles go on in the heart, to which the heart itself will not admit, when pity is mistaken for love.

As I was traveling west, away from a cold glittery day in New York, a fierce snowstorm had been traveling east from the great plains, and we met on the evening of New Year’s Day, the moment I stepped off the plane. By seven o’clock the storm had gotten the upper hand over the population; on the street there were few cars and no pedestrians, and behind living-room windows I could see people peering out from between the curtains, gauging the power of the enemy.

I raced for the front door, but once inside the hallway took my time mounting the stairs. There was nothing for me in the mailbox, and upstairs no envelope was thumbtacked to my door. I waited to hear music playing, or water running, and then I entered the kitchen, turned the light on, and saw something glitter on the sink. To the key was attached a note, a note written on pink stationery with scalloped edges.

I gave too much to you. I don’t think anybody can ever

hurt me the way you have. I don’t know what I’ll do.

That was all: my extra key and these twenty-four words, no one of them too much influenced by her reading of Proust. I unpacked my bags and emptied my pockets of the dental floss my father had given me at the airport, and then walked around my three rooms, picking up seven hairpins, a copy of Swarm’s Way—the corner of page seven turned back — and a tube of the neutral polish that I remembered Marge massaging into her buff pumps. The Proust went back on the shelf, and what she had left behind, including the note, went into the empty garbage pail.

That, of course, was not the end. I then paced from room to room, turning up three more of her hairpins; I suppose I was looking for them. If New York had turned out better, I probably would not have been so susceptible to Marge’s indictment, but as always happened with my father, our final hours together were as strained as our first; the dental floss, in fact, had been something more than hygienic: it was a last-minute attempt to bind us together across some thousand miles of this vast republic. “Take care of your teeth, sonny,” he had said to me, and I had looked back to see that the smile on his face, like the one on the face of the stewardess, involved none of the deeper muscles. “See you when, Washington’s Birthday?” were the last gallant, murderous words he had called out to me as I stepped aboard the plane. That was the state to which I had reduced him, anticipating patriotic holidays.

But that was mild compared to the night before, when my father and Dr. Gruber and I had celebrated the coming of the New Year at the theater. While to my right Gruber howled every time some character on the stage said “Oh God damn you” to some other character on the stage, to my left my father cried. Not until the middle of the last act did I notice. Then I inched my hand over the chair arm that separated us, until I touched his sleeve. Under my Playbill—so that Gruber would not see — I took his hand and held it until the final curtain and the light. I told myself he was impossible and I told myself he was unfair, but in the darkness there was nothing I could tell myself that was able to make him less unhappy.

With all this in the very recent past, I had now to confront the final, condemnatory words of my late mistress. To defend myself I tried to work up defamatory thoughts about her. I had no trouble at all imagining her going around the apartment planting hairpins. But the knowledge that she had soap-opera passions and a moral fiber as soft as her skin only worked to soften my own melting sense of dignity. I went to the window and must have watched an inch of snow pile against the houses across the street. Twice I circled the phone before deciding I would call Marge’s rooming house and explain to her, as calmly and exactly as I could, why it was to her benefit that we discontinue seeing one another.

“Miss Howells?” said Mr. Trumbull, husband of the landlady. “Just a minute.”

In a minute he was back. “Miss Howells don’t live here, no sir.” There was a great deal of television racket behind him, so that I could hardly hear what he was saying.

I tried to be polite. “But she does live there.”

“Just a minute.” When he returned, he said, “Nope. She don’t.”

“You mean she’s left?”

“Just a minute.” When he came back to the phone he told me yep, she’d left.

“Where? When?” I asked.

“None of my business.”

“Look, did she leave a forwarding address?”

“Look, yourself,” he said, “we don’t give out that kind of personal information on the phone. Who is this?”

After I hung up I searched the apartment again, but found nothing that would serve as a clue to Marge’s whereabouts. Had she run away? What was she up to? I fished the note out of the garbage can. I don’t know what I’ll do. I had dismissed the statement earlier as a generalized expression of her frustration; it had not been for exactness that I had valued her. Now I tried to tell myself just exactly what Marge was and was not capable of, and thereby regain my composure. But could she have done something stupid, like kill herself? I thought to call the rooming house again and if possible get Mrs. Trumbull from the TV set to ask her some questions. I even thought for a second about calling Kenosha, or the police. Then I remembered that Marge had had coffee with Paul Herz. I hung back from involving him in what might turn out to be a very complicated personal matter; yet my anxiety was by this time a little greater than my shame, and so I looked up the Herz number and dialed it. The phone rang so long that I was ready to hang up when Libby Herz said hello.

“Libby? This is Gabe Wallach.”

“My goodness, how are you?”

“I’m fine. How are you?”

“Oh, I’m okay.”

“I heard you were in the hospital. Are you all right now?”

“I’m convalescing.” Her tone informed me just how boring that could be. “How — how did you know?”

“Oh, a friend of Paul’s. Is Paul around?”

“He’s in the bathroom. He’s taking a bath. I’m not even supposed to be out of bed,” she whispered.

“Never mind then. You go back to bed.”

“No, no, it’s all right. The phone ringing is the most exciting thing that’s happened here in a month. I’m all right.”

“It’s not important,” I said.

“Paul will be out soon. Should I give him a message?”

“Would you — Look, I’ll see him tomorrow. It’s not important.”

“Why don’t you come over?” she asked. “Are you busy? Come over and tell us about New York.”

“I’m not busy. But if you’re resting …”

“That’s just it. All I do is rest. Paul will be out of his bath in a few minutes. Uh-uh, he’s getting out. I’d better hang up — I’m not supposed to be out of bed even for the toilet. It’s awful. Hey, do come over!”

Driving through the storm, I realized how groundless were my fears about Marge. She had probably taken a room in the graduate dormitory. Perhaps she was skiing in Colorado, or had moved in with a friend. I realized as I crossed the bridge over the river that it is the futureless who are found buried under two feet of snow or twenty feet of icy water, not girls who put their underwear on the radiator at night so that it will be warm for them in the morning. By the time I had reached the Herzes’ my motive for visiting had nearly disappeared. Nevertheless, while I waited for the front door to open, the wind blew a handful of snow down my coat collar: I closed my eyes and prayed that wherever Margie had decided to take her broken heart, it was warm and safe.

Paul Herz opened the front door wearing his beggar’s overcoat and holding his briefcase.

“Libby’s in the bedroom,” he said.

“Are you going somewhere?”

“You’re letting in the cold,” he said, giving me an agreeable look that only mystified me more. “Come in.”

I stepped in, asking, “Are you going out?”

He held up his briefcase. “I’m afraid I’ve got some work.” He stepped around me and was out the door. “Good night,” he said, “nice to see you.” His head went into his collar, and the overcoat was swinging down the path like a bell.

“Can I drive you anywhere?” I called after him.

Herz turned, but continued walking backwards; the snow had caked instantly on his shoulders. “You better close the door,” he said.

“Gabe?” Libby’s voice called out to me from the other end of the little apartment.

“Yes?”

“Could you close the door? There’s a draft.”

I was still looking out after her husband, however. I wanted to shout for him to come back: I wanted to demand a reason for his leaving.

“I’m in the bedroom,” Libby said, directing me.

Herz walked further into the white mist, until at last I couldn’t see him any more.

Libby was sitting in bed, propped up by two pillows, her knees bent girlishly under the blankets. The bed was made of iron and painted silver and had an institutional air. There was not much more furniture in the room. A floor lamp threw a saucer of light up on the water-damaged ceiling; poor for reading, it was at first generous to the sick. From the doorway Libby looked, in that dim light, no more ravaged than she had in the supermarket early in December; the man’s woolen muffler thrown over her greenish shetland sweater even gave her somewhat of a rakish air. Only after I pulled up to the bed a cracking wicker chair, the room’s only chair, could I see where the fever had turned against her. The fine polished edge of her complexion had been altered; the hollows, the curves, the distinctive shape of her face had been consumed by fatigue. And when she spoke, it was with her voice as with her features: no vigor. There were spurts of pep, as there had been on the phone, but nothing sustaining, nothing to signal a strong will and solid feelings. She was without energy, and that almost made her seem without sweetness. But perhaps she was simply nervous — I know I was. What kind of joke, after all, was Herz’s departure? I remembered the day he had turned down my car, and after all these weeks I was disliking him again. I saw myself being made a pawn in another domestic argument.

“I wish Paul could have stayed a few minutes,” I said.

“I told him you wanted to ask him something. He said he’ll be back. Your coming gave him a chance to get out. I went into the hospital Christmas Eve. He’s been up twenty-four hours a day since.”

“Where did he have to go? It’s storming out.”

“To do some work. To his office.”

“Can’t he work in the living room?”

“We’d be talking. He’d be distracted. He hasn’t written in weeks, you see. He — well, I’ve been sick, and time — oh his time is just all fouled up. He’ll be back soon.” She blushed at this point and looked away.

By no means did I find this a satisfactory explanation of Herz’s behavior — or my reaction to it — but I nodded my head.

Libby said, “It hasn’t been easy for him.”

“It’s probably not been easy for you,” I replied.

“I don’t know. I think maybe it’s easier sometimes being sick.”

“Easier than what?”

Clearly, she was sorry now for having made the distinction in the first place. Most of what Libby was sorry for or about, one saw just that way — clearly. “Oh — being well.” She took a deep breath and pushed her back into the pillows. “I complain too much. I must have had my development arrested somewhere. I’m twenty-two; I should know enough not to go around having expectations all the time. I should be able to get used to things.” She appeared to be making her resolves right in front of me. “Paul’s the one who should be complaining,” she said.

“Oh, doesn’t he?”

She looked at me with real surprise. Immediately I regretted having been so openly skeptical about her husband’s character; it only increased her uneasiness.

Vaguely she said, “His attitude toward life is better, I think. In the situation.”

“Well,” I said, smiling, “I suppose you have some right to complain,” and tried to end it with that.

She shook her head, defending her husband by annihilating herself.

I said, “Well,” again, and looked over her head, where there hung a rather pedestrian Utrillo print. I examined it while she organized her thoughts. The picture encouraged me to reorganize my own, for it managed to make me overwhelmingly aware that Libby Herz and Paul Herz were married. In all that institutional and cast-off furniture (the wicker chair must surely have been bought off some Iowan’s back porch) it alone looked to have been really chosen. Together they had hung it over the bed they shared.

“What’s Paul working on?” I asked, trying to appear more kindly disposed toward the pursuits of the man who was her husband.

“A novel. He does one for a degree. Instead of a dissertation.”

“How’s it going?”

“Fine, wonderful,” she said. “It’s just, well, as I said — time. I mean that’s why I went to work, to give him a little time. Now I haven’t been in that damn office for almost three weeks.”

“You’ll be better soon. The flu has been going around.”

“Oh yes, I know.” The rapidity with which she answered indicated that she didn’t want me to think that she felt she didn’t deserve to get the flu. What made talking to her almost impossible for me was this incredible pendulum action of hers, the swiftness with which she swung back and forth between valuing herself too much and then valuing herself not at all. I realized now that, having had no questions for Herz, I should have turned around and gone home. One did not idly enter the door of this house.

“It’s actually ironic,” Libby was telling me. “When I was a student I could have gone into the hospital free, under student health. But I quit so we could get the tuition back, and then I got sick, and already it’s cost even more than the tuition we got back. You see, it’s not the flu,” she corrected me. “They don’t know what it is, but I don’t think it’s flu or grippe. It’s just — it’s just ironic was all I meant to point out. At least I call it ironic. Paul doesn’t call it anything.” She spoke her next words with some disbelief. “He calls it life.”

“Well,” I said, while she waited to hear what I would say, “I suppose people have to expect a little trouble.”

“Oh I know that,” she interrupted. “I’m not that underdeveloped. I know people get sick. It’s better to have to struggle when you’re young, I think, than when you’re older,” she platitudinized. “I expect trouble, of course, but … but this is such a funny sickness, you know? What do I have? Maybe it’s something psychosomatic — I mean that’s always a possibility. God, everything enters your mind when they can’t diagnose the thing. You think about it, and you think that here Paul wants to write — so I get sick. Do you think maybe I don’t want him to write? Does that make any sense?”

“No. Does it make any sense to you?”

“Well if it’s my unconscious, how can I know? Does it look to you as though I’m giving up? Because I’m not giving up. At least I don’t think I’m giving up. Not consciously, at least. But then I’ve got this thing and they can’t diagnose it. I left all that blood there and all that pee — you’d think they could find something. It’s not a joke either; I just give in to myself, damn it.”

“Maybe you’re anemic. Maybe you’re not eating right. Maybe it’s Iowa. Everybody gets sick some time without their knowing why. I’d worry about my psyche last of all.”

“You’re trying to make me feel better.”

“You try to make yourself feel worse.”

“You’ve really been very kind to us,” she said. “Paul appreciates it—”

I don’t believe I could have done anything to keep my face from again registering my skepticism.

“—probably more than you think,” she finished.

“Yes.” Though I went on to ask none of the obvious questions, she started in answering them anyway.

“You see,” she said, “if he acted grateful — well, he just can’t. Not now.”

I said that I understood.

“He doesn’t want to look needy. He doesn’t think he is needy. You see, I’ve had it so easy. I never had to pay for anything in my life. And I had lots of brothers and sisters, and everybody looking after me — and Paul, well, Paul had to work for everything. It’s not so bad really if you had things and then you have to give them up. It’s better than sacrificing at the beginning and then still sacrificing later on. The worst thing about poverty is it’s so boring. He — he has to give up so many things.” She paused here to fix her blankets; when she went on, the sacrifice of Paul’s which she chose to speak about did not strike me as the specific one she’d had in mind. “He was an only child and very attached to his family, and now they’ve really been hideous. Do you know what a mikvah is? A ritual bath? Well, I had one. The rabbi in Ann Arbor took me to the swimming pool at the Y, and in my old blue Jantzen I had this mikvah. And his parents still won’t lift the phone when he calls. We call and they hang up. I could just kill them for that. Really take a knife and drive it right in them.”

“It doesn’t sound very pleasant.”

“It isn’t.”

For her sake, I generalized again. “Everybody has some kind of trouble with their family,” I said.

“I know. It’s just that sometimes the accident of things gets you. If Paul had had another set of parents … Oh this is silly.”

But only a little later she rode on in the same direction. “When—” she said, “when I read your mother’s letter— Is this rude?” she asked, and answered herself with a surge of blood to the forehead. “But I did read the letter, Gabe, and I saw she was intelligent, and I thought, Oh what a relief if Paul’s parents could just be a little like that. I didn’t think anybody was going to act the way they did. I thought it would be exciting to have Jewish in-laws. I was all ready to be — well, Christ, I had that mikvah in my Jantzen, what else could I do? But not them. They don’t want to be happy. They want to be miserable, that makes them happy. Well, it doesn’t make anybody else happy.”

“My mother,” I said, taking a final stab at cheering her up, “might not have been much of a help, you know. She was a very willful woman.”

“She was intelligent.”

“All I’m saying is that she was no less firm in her opinions than the Herzes apparently are.”

“Yes?” Libby said. “But suppose you had married a Gentile. You’re Jewish, aren’t you?”

“I am, but I don’t think that particular thing would have made any difference to her.”

“Ah, you see …”

What I saw I did not like. I pretended to be straightening her out about my mother while I worked to squelch a regret she seemed momentarily to have developed over marrying Paul and not me! “Libby, look, you read the letter. My mother was a woman of strong likes and dislikes. She liked her way. There were plenty of things she wouldn’t put up with. That Gentile business just wasn’t one of them.”

“Well, it’s one of them with the Herzes all right.”

I did not like her for the remark. I experienced my first real fellow-feeling for Paul Herz since that night out on the highway when Libby had behaved so badly. “What about the DeWitts?” I asked.

“I don’t care about them any more. Not a single one of them!”

It was a fierce remark, and courageous mostly because it was so clearly a lie. Libby leaned over toward the wicker table — also porch furniture — and took a pill. When she turned back to me she was almost pleading. “Paul’s my husband,” she said. “I prefer him to them. I have to. But Paul—” I had to wait a long time for her to decide whether to finish what she had begun to say, or perhaps to decide how to finish it. “Paul,” she said finally, “was very attached to his family. I mean he wants us all — he’d like us all. Together.”

There was no sense in my saying anything but, “It’s too bad he can’t have that.”

She looked up at me gratefully. “It is.”

“Maybe you should begin to have a family of your own.”

“Oh no!”

Apparently I had gone too far, but I simply didn’t care. What was intimacy for this girl and what wasn’t? I was close to exasperation when, looking down and fingering the binding of the blanket, Libby said, “I had a miscarriage in Detroit.”

I couldn’t believe her. No well was so bottomless, no storm so unrelenting; even the worst rocks have a little greenery sticking to the bottom, not just bugs. I was convinced now that she was a liar and a nut.

I said that I was sorry to hear it.

“We weren’t,” she answered icily. “We — we don’t want any children now. We didn’t want that one actually. I had to go to the hospital — but truly it made me happy. It was a mistake, you see — we … I — oh I don’t know what I want!”

She covered her tears with the tips of her fingers. “I worked myself into this,” she said. “I think I’ve been trying for this.” She dried her face with her muffler and then reached under the pillow for a handkerchief. “We just don’t want any children now, that’s all. How can we afford children? We can’t even really risk having any …”

Her white hands and her handkerchief flitted about her face, and just when I was hoping she was at the edge of self-control, having only to step across, she fell back the other way. The lower half of her face became just mouth, and her body shook and shook.

I did not leave my seat or lean forward. Yet all my impulses were directing me toward movement, one way or another. The girl was not a nut and she was not a liar, and that knowledge produced in me a feeling of helplessness that was almost a presence in my limbs. I just couldn’t sit there, being witness to Libby Herz’s troubles. “Please,” I said, “please, Lib … Please, try to relax. Libby, you’re sick, you’re a little upset … Libby, you were in school,” I said, “you were busy, you didn’t want children then. There’ll always—”

“I don’t want them now! I just want him to sleep with me! Oh, Christ, that’s all!” She twisted herself away from me and toward the wall, carrying the blanket with her up over her head.

When she spoke next it was in a voice so breathless with humiliation I could hardly hear her. “I’ve overstated things. We just feel … we feel we have to be extra careful. We — could you get me another glass of water?”

I took her old full glass and poured it out in the kitchen sink, and then I let the faucet run a very long time. The little kitchen was really nothing more than the end of the living room. Over the sink was a small window, and outside I could see that the storm had lost most of its strength; it was simply snowing now. Down the street someone starved for exercise had already begun to scrape the sidewalks with a shovel, and the rasping of the metal hitting the concrete floated all the way up to the Herz barrack.

When I came back into the bedroom again, Libby was sitting in her bed just as I had found her when I’d entered earlier. Only now she looked even more completely the victim of her undiagnosed illness.

“I managed it,” she said.

I looked at her from the doorway. “What?”

“To tell somebody everything.”

I walked over and handed her the water. She took only a sip and then handed it back. I felt the touch of both the cool glass and her fingers. I sat down on the edge of the bed and without too much confusion, we kissed each other. We held together afterwards, but for only a second.

“I’ll be all right, I think,” she said.

I stood, and then I sat again, very upright in the wicker chair.

“I’ll be fine,” she said. “You don’t have to stay until Paul gets back.” Her husband’s name gave her trouble.

“I think I’d rather stay,” I said.

“But I don’t mind being alone.”

“That’s all right.”

“I just don’t want you to think I expect anything.”

“I don’t think you expect anything!” I answered. “Jesus, Libby.”

She raised her hands to her face again so that the fingers barely touched it, as though the bone beneath were sore and fragile. “I wormed that out of you too,” she said.

Following our embrace I had been visited with a mess of emotions, no one of which I could clearly identify. It wasn’t so much emotion, in fact, as emotionality: much strong feeling, no particular object. Now all I’d felt refined itself down into anger. “Listen, you didn’t have to do any worming of anything out of anybody. I did what I wanted to do. Stop feeling guilty about everything, will you? I don’t even believe it. You wanted me to kiss you, and I wanted to. I was glad I had, in fact, until you started talking. I’m not going to run off now, Libby, and I’m not sneaking out of any bedroom windows. I’ll wait till Paul gets back—” The name, short and simple as it was, gave me some trouble too. “I came over here to ask him something anyway.” I had difficulty, momentarily, remembering what it was.

“I’m sorry,” she said meekly. “You’re right.”

Now, sitting straight in my wicker chair, I found it impossible to look at anything other than the Utrillo print. I saw that they had used thumb tacks to secure the two top corners to the wall, and two pieces of ragged Scotch tape to secure the bottom.

“I’m something,” Libby said.

“Why don’t you rest? Why don’t you try to get to sleep?”

“That’s a good idea … Oh Gabe, what am I? Am I awful or am I crazy?”

“Go to sleep.”

She turned her head on the pillow, closed her eyes, and tried for thirty seconds to follow my directions. Then her eyes opened. “Excuse me, but I don’t think I can with you sitting there.”

“I’ll sit in the other room.”

“That might be a help,” she said.

I got up and went to the door and behind me I heard her say, very softly, “I’ll really be all right, you know. I mean you could go home.”

“It was only a kiss, Libby,” I said, turning to face her.

She looked up at me hopelessly. “Still,” she said.

And then, along with her, I felt ashamed for our having turned out to be just about as unreliable as Paul Herz had given us the opportunity to be. I went out of her room and in the kitchen found my copy of Portrait of a Lady. I left, telling myself that I had no business in the lives of these people and that I would not come back, no matter who invited me. I got into my car and started away, and as I slowly took the first corner I saw Herz trudging home through the snow. He was no more innocent than any of us, and no braver, and yet he was Libby’s husband, and I felt moved to pull the car over and confess to him that I had held his wife — and that my holding her was as good as saying to her that her husband gave her a rotten life. Which perhaps he did.

I passed snow banks and moved cautiously around stalled cars, and heard the trees creaking under the storm’s weight. Soon I was worrying all over again as to the whereabouts of Marge Howells. I should have pulled over to Herz to ask … But what business of mine was she any more? If Marge Howells wanted to run, let her run! If my father wanted to pine, let him pine! If Libby Herz wanted to weep, let her weep!

When I had crossed the bridge and was turning into Dubuque Street, I had to slow up because of an accident ahead. A police car and an ambulance and half a dozen people were gathered under the street light. There was a tow truck on the scene too, the driver of which I recognized, and down on the icy street I saw a stretcher. I was ready to drive around the squad car and head up the next cross street when I saw that on the stretcher there was a blanket, and under the blanket a person. I stopped my car and got out and walked straight toward the center of the circle. I suppose the policemen must have thought I was a friend or relative who had been summoned, for the two of them stepped aside and let me through. What I saw surprised me. The face sticking up above the blanket belonged to nobody I knew.

3

December 14, 1955

Reading, Pa.

Dear Gabe,

I have had so much time to correspond with old friends lately and it has been so long since either Paul or myself has had a chance to hear how you’re doing, that I thought to write to you. When I mentioned it Paul thought it would be a good idea, and he wants to send along his good wishes. He is doing well in the department here, though the quality of the students isn’t all one could ask for. The novel is coming along, despite interruptions and distractions and those omnipresent freshman essays. We are hoping, however, that he’ll be able to finish it by the end of the year and get his degree and perhaps move on then to a college a little further from the coal fields. There’s still the German to pass, but he’s getting on top of that and with a little time will probably be able to pass it with ease. I had an excellent job here up until a few months ago when that old fever business started and I finally wound up in the hospital. It turns out I’ve got some kind of kidney disturbance, but now that it’s been properly diagnosed, I’ve gotten the proper drugs and am out of the hospital and feel much better. I’ve had much time and even tried writing a story — which was awful — but have been able to read volumes and volumes. I finally got around to Wings of the Dove, which I think is the best of them all. Didn’t you do your dissertation on it? Kate Croy engaged me so very much — does that say bad things about my character? Aside from my almost dying — which I almost did and which I repeat merely for the romance of it — the next most exciting thing of the last six months was that we met a famous poet. Through some fluke, D— came to the campus to read his poetry. (He’d been invited by the head of the dept. — the only man in the state of Pennsylvania who reads a little bit of the Faerie Queene at bedtime each night — and apparently thought it was some other school, because he showed up.) He was older than I had thought, but I was consoled by the fact that he was thin, had tight skin, and a youthful manner. He seems to me everything his poems indicate. After an evening reading in the chapel, D. and his wife were given a party by the dept. head. The entire English staff was invited, along with other greater or lesser folks, so I got to see and hear him informally. I’d memorized a little speech beforehand, but I got too shy to say anything to him, so I stared instead. And I wasn’t disappointed at all. Both D. and his very beautiful wife are all that you would like — kind, quiet in a shy way and not distant, deeply in love with each other (I could tell, of course) and naturally, most intelligent. When I saw them together, I kept thinking of how happy they are, and I loved her for being the inspiration of all those nice husbandly poems etc. The party went on, with people drinking nervously, talking nervously, and those younger ones of us feeling ill at ease and clinging to those we knew. After a while, bolstered by Scotch of course, I followed D. into another room and sat on a long chintzy couch opposite him and watched and listened to the general chatter which never got very profound about anything (including poetry) and glowed from my Scotch and my fever and the new red dress I had on — two dollars a week saved from my job here in the Dean’s office, but beautiful I think anyway. So red dress and all, I was hardly inconspicuous, though most silent. But to get to the point, finally the Dean came to say goodnight to D. and noticed me sitting there and said, “Have you met my secretary yet?” And as I was walking across that long room to say hello (finally), D replied, “Not officially, but we’ve been staring at each other all evening.” And they all laughed, and I said in an exaggeratedly low voice I was happy to meet him and then thank God the Dean introduced our poet (published in the obscurest of quarterlies) Charlie Regan and I retreated awkwardly to my couch. Then after a confused while, D. and his wife decided to leave — the whole thing must have been awful for them — and again I followed, staring, and stood with the others waving goodbye. And I was desperately wishing to say something to him, when he noticed me, said “Oh,” and came in again, walked over to me, took my hand and then KISSED me on the forehead and said something, but I don’t know what, I was so stunned. And then I said, “Thank you for your poetry,” and he looked pleased and bowed thank-you and left. And I went soaring up to the stars literally; I’ve never in my life had such a feeling. I thought at the time that it all was most symbolic, even though I realized that he thought I was a sweet silly girl, in love with the idea of a poet. Reading all this over I see that it sounds just like that, like so much honey and roses. But 1 can’t help it because it’s all true. And I was very happy. I’m looking forward now to getting up and around, and even to getting back to the filing cabinets in the Dean’s office, so you see that I must be well, having become so edgey. I’ve written letters to dozens of people, and since you helped us out so long ago, when we were both down in the dumps, I thought it might be pleasant to write to you. The sad thing in life is that we don’t see friends and let small things separate us, and after a while you just think that even a greeting is insignificant. I know that Paul does send his best, and the two of us hope your life at Chicago and your job at the university is going well. It seems like a marvelous opportunity for you, and we would of course be interested in hearing how everything is going and how you like teaching there. It’s time for me to take one of my pills, they’re as big as stones and expensive as jewels, so I must close …

Best,

Libby

I did not answer.

4

Nevertheless, on a dull afternoon late in October of 1956, I was at Midway Airport watching for a plane coming toward Chicago out of the east. In that rippled gray sky I could not be sure which plane was which, but I saw one above me lurch off to the side, tremble in the air for a moment, and I took it to be the one I was waiting to meet. Other planes landed all around, swishing beautifully in, while this one circled and circled and circled. I counted landing gear, I checked the wings, I spotted a dismal little cloud and called it smoke out of the tail. The plane made several worried turns around the clock, and then was roaring down, its nose aiming for the swinging Shell sign across the road from the airport. I closed my eyes and waited. When I looked out again I found it had cleared the sign and was motionless, one safe colossal hulk on the runway.

After most of the passengers had disembarked, a dark undernourished-looking couple stuck their heads through the door. The woman was bundled in a coat and wore a black hat that shadowed her face. The man’s suit pinched his waist as suits were supposed to in 1928. He carried a typewriter and a briefcase; the woman’s arms were filled with two brown paper bags. They whispered to one another and then peered out again at the banal geological dullness of Cook County, Illinois — they might have just made it out of some steamy Latin American country only a few hours before the regime had fallen. I called out to them several times, and finally had to run onto the field shouting their names. Only then, above their parcels and belongings, did I see Paul and Libby smile.

The character sketches which follow may help to explain the reappearance of the Herzes in my life.

John Spigliano.

Chairman of the Humanities II staff, my boss, at one time an undergraduate with me at Harvard. He is reputed now to be one of the most reasonable and scholarly young men in our midst. At staff meetings John explicates texts with the craftiest of understanding. Gibbon’s sentences grow longer — explains John, engraving the blackboard with graphs and charts — as he discusses the furthest outposts of the Empire, and shorter as he returns to the Imperial City itself. “I think we should point out to the student,” John says, having compared the number of adjectival clauses in one paragraph with the number in the next, “how Gibbon impresses upon the reader the geography of the event with the geography, as it were, of the prose.”

As it were, my ass. Spigliano is a member of that great horde of young anagramists and manure-spreaders who, finding a good deal more ambiguity in letters than in their own ambiguous lives, each year walk through classroom doors and lay siege to the minds of the young, revealing to them Zoroaster in Sam Clemens and the hidden phallus in the lines of our most timid lady poets. Structure and form are two words that pass from his lips as often as they do from any corset manufacturer’s on New York’s West Side. He is proprietary, too, about languages, knowing as he does six, or sixteen. Where a few measly syllables of some other tongue have been borrowed and absorbed into our own, John reveals the strictest loyalty to the provenance of the word. He, for instance, does not go to the Bijou Theater — he goes to the Bijou. Only Don Quixote does he pronounce with the hard X, and he had to learn that in Cambridge, where, having been born poor and Italian, he felt it necessary for himself to swim a little with the fashion. At a party which he and his wife give once a year, John dances a jumpy peasant number that his parents brought over with them to the South End from the Abruzzi; he is not sober at the time, and afterwards those of us who cannot stand him get together, not very sober ourselves, and say that John really isn’t such a bad fellow. He is a nuisance, though, to his more slothful colleagues, because he writes, as he will tell you, an article a month, and publishes pathologically. He was trained as a child to be a Catholic, and though he has now given all that up, he apparently feels it necessary to earn everything, tenure included, for eternity. I cannot believe that all that ambition is for this life alone.

John is only recently the chairman of our department. On October 12, 1956, Edna Auerbach was attacked and beaten on S. Maryland Avenue and forced to resign for the year as both chairman and teacher. At the age of thirty-one, John was selected by the Dean to be father to ten staff members (it is a small staff — we all teach two sections of freshman English and a section of Humanities on the side), a cranky secretary, and two mimeograph machines. It is not sour grapes to say that it is a finicky scissors-and-paste job after which nobody else on the staff had particularly been whoring. But where John is concerned, there needn’t really be that much connection between the task and the promotion. If the next step up involved swabbing the latrines in Cobb Hall, John Spigliano might not have turned advancement aside without a thought. He was not considered a reasonable young man for nothing.

On October 18, after a week-long search for someone to teach Edna’s sections, John asked if I knew of anybody he might be able to get hold of right away. His preference, he told me privately, was for another Harvard man.

Pat Spigliano.

They deserved one another. At those parties at which her Johnny let his hair down and danced for us, Mrs. Spigliano swished about in her taffeta dress, fiercely American Young Mother, and — soon enough — fiercely The Chairman’s Wife. At a Spigliano party every contingency appeared to have been taken care of in advance. Over the door to the room where coats were to be deposited, was a handprinted sign to greet the first guest: COATS HERE. Above the table where one picked up one’s watery cocktail was written, a little misleadingly: AND DRINKS HERE. And signed, P.&J. Even Pat’s little party hors d’oeuvres were apparently prepared in the morning and refrigerated on the spot, so that by evening the bread, as I recall it, was particularly without tension. Oftentimes one’s teeth had to make their first soggy journey down into a Liverwurst Delight, with Pat at one’s elbow, waiting. Oh, we would all comment in barely audible voices, how does Pat manage to look so fresh, wondering just the opposite about the lettuce. She stays so thin, we would add — for it has come to seem that she will not move on until something like this is said — and so youthful. “Oh I’m thin,” I suppose, admits Pat, fingering her front buttons as though they were little awards for virtue, “because I’m just busy all the time.” Eleven different budgetary tins on her kitchen counter encouraged one to believe that what she kept herself busy with most of the time was portioning out pleasure to her family. A piece of adhesive tape across one of the tins read—

JOHN

Tobacco, scholarly journals, foot powder

The night I ran into them having dinner at the Faculty Club, Pat had just found a new apartment on Woodlawn into which the family was to be moved the following week. After dinner I was invited to their table for a drink, to celebrate their good fortune. “We’re so glad to be moving from Maryland,” Pat told me, “especially after what happened — Edna’s accident. And the new apartment is marvelous. I have a wonderful kitchen, and John has a wonderful study, and really,” she said, “what with his promotion, we’re having too much good luck. I expect there’ll be an earthquake or some terrible catastrophe to even things up.” What riled me was that she didn’t even expect rain. Though I had breakable possessions of my own — a new car, in fact — I wouldn’t that moment have minded hearing a rumbling under the floor and seeing the trees go sailing down outside the window on Fifty-seventh. “But our Michelle — she’s one of the twins — Michelle was bringing”—she made a quick check of the waiters—“little colored boys home from school with her. Well, that’s when I thought I’d better start looking. She was bringing them into the house for cookies, which is perfectly sweet, except Michelle is an affectionate child — I suppose she’s always had a lot of affection — and she was kissing them. On the lips. Well, sweet as it was, it was a problem. It’s difficult to explain these things to children, yet I feel you’ve got to be realists with them. They want you to be a realist — especially Michelle and Stella, at their age. How old is your little girl, Mrs. Reganhart?” She asked this of a blond woman in a purple suit who had eaten dinner with them. Mrs. Reganhart’s long hair was braided high on her head, and her features were large and Nordic and symmetrical. On no one of them had I seen a sign of any emotion, save boredom. “Seven,” the woman said. “You know then,” said Pat, “what little realists they are. We have a boy, John Junior, the twins’ older brother — and so we explained to Michelle that she couldn’t kiss little colored children for the same reason that she couldn’t marry her brother. And I believe she understood. There is a Negro problem in the neighborhood,” said Pat, “and I don’t know what’s to be gained by not recognizing it.” “There’s a Negro little-boy problem,” said Mrs. Reganhart, looking into her brandy glass, and Pat agreed. I don’t think you can insult this woman, by the way, because I don’t think she listens. “Edna, for instance,” she began, “well apparently it was a giant of a colored man. Harold came by tonight — that’s her husband, the doctor,” she explained to Mrs. Reganhart. “A chiropodist,” said John, who had till then been busy constructing a personality around his pipe. “But a very nice fellow,” Pat added. “He said Edna was badly shaken up — she’s had a very serious emotional breakdown. Perhaps I’m wrong, but speaking personally I really do think that certain women are rape prone. Carriage, for instance, has a great deal to do with it. Your psychological make-up—” she told Mrs. Reganhart while John turned to me and asked if I had picked up the essays Edna’s class had written. “I wonder if you could mark a pile of them,” he said. “I’ve read a few myself, and I’m afraid it’s not a pleasant job. Edna is an excellent grammarian, but I don’t know how much she’s able to get over to the students about structural principles—” Whenever he could, John used his pipe to enforce his meaning; it was clear he would be a maiden with it until he died. I couldn’t really look at him without feeling a little ashamed for all our puny masculine disguises. “You haven’t thought of anyone since this morning, have you?” he asked. “I’m just opposed to letting a graduate student onto the staff. Now, ideally a Harvard man was what I was think ing—”

Martha Reganhart

The first words I ever heard her speak were, “There’s a Negro little-boy problem”; the second: “What a dumb, silly, impossible bitch.” The dry whistling autumn air outside seemed to give to Martha Reganhart’s voice a special quality of exuberance; since she seemed to have no intention of being secretive in the first place, she ended up practically shouting. We had managed to escape from the club at the same time and had turned east toward Woodlawn together, under a perfectly beautiful evening sky. “What a thing—rape prone! Don’t you feel like stamping her out? Don’t you want to grind her into something? God, she makes me ferocious! She doesn’t read contemporary novels, do you know that? And she thinks water should be fluoridated. And her little girl can’t kiss her little brother for the same reason he can’t marry Negroes. Oh, you were there for that. You should have stopped by a little earlier — you missed all the casserole recipes, my friend. Do you know John speaks sixty — oh, you know all this. You don’t happen to be a pal of theirs …? Did you think I was? I sat there thinking, This fellow is going to hang me by association. Not that I read many contemporary novels myself, but I’m not against it for others, you know? Which is probably my fluoridation opinion too. What is fluoridation exactly? What? Oh I don’t even know how I got invited to dinner — Oh I do know. I’m a gay divorcée and Spigliano is in on the folklore.”

“He made a pass? John?”

“It does sound pretty unstructured of him, doesn’t it? I took a course from him downtown this summer. I was leaning over my Ibsen in his office and he snuck up from behind. He put his hands on my waist. My hips, I suppose. But that’s really all. I guess he felt, given that, I ought to meet his wife. Look, I don’t know what he thought. He invited me and since it’s nice to get out of the house once in a while, I came.”

“How did it end?”

“I said, Cut it out.”

“And John?”

“He said something about my not understanding his passionate Latin soul and then pole-vaulted out of the room. Excuse me, really. That woman makes me want to talk bawdy just as a kind of declaration of humanity. He wasn’t as silly as that. I shouldn’t even have been in that class in the first place. As I said, I get interested from time to time in getting out of— Does this all seem a little too defensive? I know what night school sounds like for a grown woman. Hiking up your earning ability. Improving your word power. But for me it was different, truly. I wore all kinds of jazzy clothes, and heels — so I suppose poor John’s not so much to blame. But tonight I didn’t know whether to apologize to that fastidious Arid-soaked little ladies’ magazine of his, or whether he had brought us all together to confess. She said he’d been talking about me all summer. I was one of his best students and so on, and I just sat there looking stony as I could. Did I look stony?”

“Bored.”

“Really? I wasn’t. After a while I thought maybe it was a joke. Go explain men’s consciences … I’m sorry if I’m being loud. It was a trying experience. You just had brandy — I sat there for two and a half hours. I thought I acted pretty well, though, didn’t you? Oh I said that thing about Negroes, but how could I help myself? And she doesn’t hear anyway. But you were wonderful, by the way-You were really excellent. I mean you know how to be stony, kid. After a while I began to wonder if you were one of them. I live down on Fifty-third, I have to turn off here.”

“Would you like to have a beer with me?”

“I have a baby-sitter waiting.”

“A short beer. I’ll explain fluoridation.”

“Explain the conscience of John Spigliano, if you want to do some explaining. Now that’s something, isn’t it?” She stood for a moment with her hands on her substantial hips, just a little off balance, contemplating the problem. In heels she was my equal, and when she stopped meditating and looked straight on at me, it was directly in the eye. Right off I liked Martha Reganhart a good deal. “To make a pass and then invite me to dinner with her,” she said. “Who in hell was he trying to prove what to? I mean it about men’s consciences. I don’t understand them. They can’t let go, you know? If they know they’re so guilty, then why do they keep acting like bastards? I’m sounding unladylike again, but a woman at least realizes there are certain rotten things she’s got to do in life and she does them. Men want to be heroes. They want to be noble and responsible, but they’re so soft about it. Do you agree with this or are you laughing at me?”

We had a beer and on the way home, crossing Kenwood, I took her hand to guide her onto the curb. And then, with only sidewalk ahead, I kept it. Her next remark left me feeling rather feeble. “It’s only a hand,” she said. I released it. “I was only holding it,” I said. At the corner of Kimbark and Fifty-third she stopped. “The fifth ugly porch down is mine. I think I can make it alone. Thanks for walking me. Thanks for making everything clear about water fluoridation. I’d like to be against it, what with Mrs. Spigliano being for it, but I’m as cavity-oriented as the next parent. Good night, Gabe,” she said. I am of a forgiving nature, and if somebody wants to charm me, I let them. For a moment Martha Reganhart looked up at the white moon, showing the underside of what looked to be — despite my hospitable feelings toward her — a very uncompromising chin. She made a slight but weary sound. She was not so big, really, as she seemed.

“Maybe we could have dinner some night,” I said. “Without the Spiglianos.”

She looked from the heavens back to me with what I thought was genuine interest. Then she turned formal and altogether strange. “That’s very nice of you. Perhaps we can work that out some time.” Her smile didn’t help matters any. “I work, you know, at night. Tonight is — was — an exception. Thanks again for the beer.” As she was about to move off finally, she said, “Please excuse me, will you, if I sounded like a grande dame just now. It’s just the handholding. I don’t see the … I was going to say I don’t see the sense.” She turned here and hurried up the street. I saw that for the most part she took the width of her hips and the breadth of her thighs without very much complaint; in walking she made no attempt to be languorous or statuesque, nor did she hide her neck and slouch off inches in the shoulders, or even give in to buxomness and gyrate belly and can. She walked with an unquestionable solidity; not mannish, mind you, but not tinkley-tinkley or snap-snap either. I imagine that women over five eight have decisions to make that other women don’t; there’s no absolute relaxing, and probably they know best whether to be snugglers and handholders. On the stairway of her front stoop Martha Reganhart suddenly disappeared, and I wondered if she had fallen. But she had only bent over to pick up something from one of the steps. Throwing a child’s doll over her shoulder, she proceeded into the house.

Gabe Wallach.

Knows only two languages, and one badly, so perhaps he is snotty out of envy. Unlike his boss, he has no wife whom he deserves. As for girl friends, he would not be willing to say that he has actually deserved any of them. He is better, he believes, than anything that he has done in life has shown him to be. Often upon parting from friends and acquaintances, he has the suspicion that he has behaved badly; what may or may not have really happened alters very little his attitude toward himself. He has the malaise of many wealthy but ordinary young men: he does not exactly know what to do with himself. Though subject to his share of depressions, nightmares and melancholy, he cannot enjoy any of it thoroughly (and thereby feel his true and tragic worth) because of a nagging doubt that he is very lucky and ought to be thankful and shut up. It would help if he would imagine himself without hope. He has an income, he has perfect health, and he believes not only in the pursuit, but the catching by the tail and dragging down into the clover, of happiness. Unfortunately, all these beliefs don’t get too much in the way of his actions. If his own good fortune were inevitable, he should not have so much trouble making up his mind. For an optimist, he is very nervous and indecisive. Suppose happiness should twitch her butt and dance merrily off the side of a cliff — should he follow?

Five times during the day he had walked up the stairs of Cobb Hall to Spigliano’s office, and five times turned and walked back down again to his own. At the dinner table there had been at least five more occasions when he had been tempted to speak. In fact, all the while Pat congratulated herself on her good fortune, he ruminated silently on the brandy that slides down the throats of the undeserving, and the fevers, the popped pistons, the ugly iron beds of those who deserve, if not more, surely no less than the others. But when asked again by John Spigliano, he only shook his head and took his leave. It was walking home with Martha Reganhart — touching her hand, actually — that he had cause to remind himself that Libby Herz was not the only woman in the world who could engage his feelings. Not that Mrs. Reganhart, in their manic hour together, had engaged feelings of a sustaining and vibrant sort. The moon and stars, as much as she, had combined to prickle his easiest sentiments. But he had liked her, and in her frame and voice, her country stride, he had recognized something open and direct to which he could respond. She might turn out to be a little motherly and instructive, but if so he could move on. After all, the decision was not whether he should or should not marry Martha Reganhart. All he cared to make clear to himself was that if the Herzes should come to Chicago he could manage to have an active life of his own, independent of theirs. There was Martha Reganhart, and there were dozens of others too. It was not changing his own life that was finally uppermost in his mind; it was changing theirs. It was much too easy to imagine Herz out there in Reading resigning himself to no money and depressing surroundings and calling it “life.” A message from Chicago might well be what would lift the Herzes up into life. A job at the University would be an improvement for Herz in every way — and for his wife as well. And if that was so, then it had been dishonorable of him not to have suggested Paul right off.

He would have lifted the phone then, had it not been that he knew the situation was not nearly so black and white as that. He was not (let a truth be repeated that is probably known already) a strong man. He was prone to self-deceptions, and some of his impetuosities were rehearsed as much as two or three months in advance. He had reason to believe that he might have fallen in love with Libby Herz. He had reason to believe that she might have fallen in love with him. So for whom, for what end, was he doing favors?

He marked three unstructured freshman papers, took a bath — but finally, he called.

“Pat, is John home?”

She said he was out at the Dean’s. “Gabe, we do hope you liked Mrs. Reganhart. It must be hard for her to find a man as tall as she is, but when you walked out John commented on how well you went together. She has to wear Tall Gals’ shoes, you know, so she is a tall person.”

“She seems very nice. I didn’t get a good look at her shoes. Will you ask John to call me?”

“She’s divorced and has children and works as a waitress to support them—and takes courses. We think that’s quite admirable.”

When the phone rang twenty minutes later, he told John that a fellow he had known at Iowa was now teaching in Pennsylvania, and from what he understood he might be willing to leave his job. “His name is Paul Herz,” he said.

“Didn’t he have something in Modern Philology recently? Herz?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “He’s a writer.”

“A creative writer?”

“A novelist.”

“What’s he published?”

“I don’t believe anything yet. He’s just finishing a book. He was finishing it last year.”

“Then he hasn’t his degree yet?” John asked.

“Everything but the dissertation — the novel.”

“You mean—” The voice on the other end was Pat Spigliano’s. “You mean they do some kind of creative writing instead of a work of scholarship?”

He waited patiently for Spigliano to tell his wife to get the hell off the extension.

“Isn’t that something?” Still Patricia. “I had thought you did a dissertation on James.”

“I did.”

“Oh, one has a choice then. I suppose Harvard is a little more traditional, though that is very up to date. We wondered why you didn’t stay on for graduate work at Cambridge, but I see now that you probably preferred the freedom—”

“John, are you still there?”

“I’m here. I’m thinking.”

“Well, it’s only a suggestion.”

“This is very considerate of you, Gabe, but you know the difficulty with creative writers.”

“What?”

“They’re apt to be a little too personal about literature.”

“Oh.”

“Most of them are without any real critical system. I’ve never really known a writer who finally understood writing.”

There was no sense, he knew, in bringing up old Henry James; there was no sense in bringing up anything.

He said, “Paul is a very bright guy. He’s an excellent man.”

An hour later, when he had already settled into a chair convinced that he had at least done the decent thing, the phone rang again.

“Look, do you think this Herz could come out here right away? Within a day or two?”

“You’d have to ask him. It would probably depend on whether he could get out of the job he has.”

“Will you call him for us?”

“What?”

“Call him for us.”

He found himself terribly unsettled by this very obvious suggestion. “Don’t you think you’d better call, John? As chairman? I can give you his address. Just wait a minute.”

He left the receiver hanging off the edge of the desk and hunted through the bookshelf for his copy of Portrait of a Lady. In its middle pages were two envelopes. He carried one back to the phone and read the return address to John Spigliano. After he hung up he read the letter itself. Then he settled into a chair and read the other letter too.