Letting Go (16 page)

A light went on. Patricia Ann looked at her watch and then at her Asher, and gave out a soft moan. She tried to turn a smile on the nephew but only revealed impatience and loss. Her Wednesday afternoon was going, going—

“Do you have the time?” she asked.

His kindness went out to her. “I think I’ll leave,” Paul said.

Almost instantly she was at the door.

“It was nice meeting you,” Paul said. “Don’t wake him.”

“I never met a person from Asher’s family before,” she whispered, and then gave the crumpled-up, sleeping figure across the room a loving glance. “It’s very nice,” she said, and took Paul’s hand to shake it. “Asher’s a terrific painter. He’s the most wonderful person I ever met. He’s not like anybody.”

“I know,” Paul said. “I’m very fond of Asher.”

“Me too,” she said. “Are you interested in art very much?”

“Yes.”

“He’s doing me. You know? For—our anniversary. Do you really appreciate art?”

“Well, yes.”

“If you appreciate art, you wouldn’t be embarrassed …”

“I don’t understand.”

“Would you like to see it? Me. Our fifth anniversary.”

“If you think I should—”

On her toes she walked slowly to the corner behind the stool. “Here,” she said, motioning for him to follow. She flipped through several canvases piled against the wall and then reached in to take one out. First she only looked at it herself; then, somewhat uncertainly, she put it on the easel and twisted a bulb on above them.

“It’s not done,” she said immediately. Then she laughed. Then she shrugged. Then she was dead serious. “Like it?”

The idea was not original with Asher. The figure in the painting
was reclining unclothed on a sofa, one arm back of her hair, the other down beside her. But, unlike other women who had been posed in the position, Patricia Ann was not a particularly languorous specimen. She looked as though she’d just heard a knock at the door and was about to fly up after her clothes. The hand at her side was rolled into a fist, and her knees were together, discouraging entrance. The Woman Who Gets and Gives No Pleasure.

“Is it finished?” These were the only words that seemed available to him.

“I think he has to do more coloring,” she said. But he had her shade already; Asher knew exactly the depth and tone of his mistress. “It’s nice, isn’t it?” the girl asked the college boy, and then did not wait for an answer. “My girl friends and me once made a record—singing?—and when we heard it, we were hysterical. I mean laughing. But after a while, you know, we started to think it was kind of good and we were even going to send it to some disc jockey, with a photograph of us. But at first it seemed just real funny.”

“I know,” Paul said, hearing his uncle behind him release a desperate, froggy snore. “I’ve heard myself on a tape recorder. It’s a surprise.”

“It’s a surprise, all right … And,” she added gravely, “my husband Charlie, you know, don’t know anything about this. I had a whole picture painted, and Charlie don’t know. I even have a daughter, a little darling child.”

They both looked at the painting. At the door she smiled at him. “Good luck at Cordell.”

“Thank you.”

Pushing the door shut, she said, “Have a nice time at college.”

The stairs were unlit and he did not descend for a moment. He groped for a handrail, but there wasn’t any. Behind the door Paul heard, “Asher, Asher, oh wake up, pussy cat, it’s after five already.”

Uncle Jerry sent a note. If Paul felt inclined to, he could call Jerry at his office. If he chose to ignore the note, that was his prerogative as well.

“How are you holding up?” Jerry inquired when Paul telephoned.

“I think I’m all right. I’ve lost two pounds but I’ve got all my faculties.”

“How are things at home?”

“Just as you can imagine,” Paul said. “My mother keeps breaking down and my father keeps wanting to talk to me, but he gets all filled up too. I’ve explained several times, Jerry, but I’ve stopped. I’m not going to make a dent. They just say, Please don’t marry that girl. At least not now. At least put it off. And so forth, on and on and on. Honest to God, they’re going to make me hate them!”

He had not realized how menacing he had sounded until he heard Jerry protecting himself. “Paul, I feel obliged, you know—your father called me, he was in tears. I told him I would contact you. That’s why I dropped you the note. I don’t know what to say to you. I don’t want to advise you. I don’t believe in interfering.”

The intervention of Paul’s family in Jerry’s affairs lent a particular weightiness, a certain melancholy strain, to this remark. Paul felt a strong kinship with his uncle then—but it did not make him especially happy. It had not been his plan or his hope to line up, finally, against his family. He had decided to tell them about Libby in December so that their protests might wither with the months and they would come around to the idea of a wedding just after graduation. He had a sense of propriety about his parents, a realization of their responsibilities that perhaps they themselves had not. He had never given in, he thought, to any impulse to be cruel to them, and even if he had worked hard independently of them, it had been in part so as not to increase in any way their disappointments. He felt it now a filial duty to give them every chance; it humbled him not to, in the great world beyond the family to which he aspired, a world of order and decency, which, if he had not as yet experienced, he had fully imagined. Nevertheless, it began to appear that perhaps he had called Jerry for reasons no more elevated than those which had sent him on his walk with Asher: to be reassured.

“I told your father I would contact you,” Jerry said. “But of course I can’t say anything. I don’t even know the girl. Paul,
we
hardly know each other. I didn’t complicate matters explaining any of this to Leonard. It wouldn’t have interested him. I understand,” he said to Paul, softly, intimately. “Paul, you tell me, all right. What do
you
think?”

The young man’s voice was sharp when he answered. “What do I think? I think I’ll marry Libby! I don’t think any of this hysteria has anything to do with us. They hardly know her. In fact, they
don’t
know her.” Then his own chagrin swallowed him up; he had no reason whatsoever to be short-tempered with this particular uncle.

“Your father says they met her?” Jerry inquired, still delicate.

“I brought her here Thanksgiving. I wanted to please them.” Those words, like the rest of his familial generosity, suddenly turned a little sour on him. If his family wouldn’t please him, why must he be trying so hard to please them? “They knew I was going with a girl—I let them see her. She came for half an hour last week too, before I told them our plans.”

“Your father said something about her being a sickly girl. I’m only repeating him, believe me.”

“Jerry, she gets
colds,”
he answered wearily. “Jerry, let’s even say she’s a frail girl. But she’s not going to be a farmer. She’s going to be my wife. This is all very silly. Jerry, you know what they object to?”

“She’s Catholic.”

“She’s Catholic.” He himself knew that to be, however, only a strand in the whole tapestry of rejection. It was not just one crime they wanted to hang the girl on—there was her faith, plus her health, her youth, their son’s youth, and a dozen things more. If they had known the word they would have claimed that their sense of Paul’s error was intuitive; it was the word with which he had begun to argue with himself in
favor
of his decision. “Jerry, she’s a Catholic like I’m a Jew. It’s not the kind of thing that’ll have much to do with our lives. It hasn’t to do with us. It’s another ruse.”

“Paul, I’m put in a position where I’m asking questions I don’t even want to ask. How could I hope to reason with you, anyway, one way or the other? Even if I had the foolish impulse to. We’re not dealing with the mind, with the practical senses anyway. This is the mysterious, spontaneous choice—the choice of the heart. The unencumbered heart,” Jerry said.

“Yes,” Paul answered, unhinged slightly by his uncle’s reverent tones.

“The heart, Paul,
knows.
It cost me half a lifetime to learn such a simple fact. I had such neuroses pressing in upon me, they were the size of mountains. Tremendous pathetic pressures building and building, cutting me off from what you think of as your inside self. Paul, I didn’t do a spontaneous thing in twenty-seven years. Because the heart was under this terrific pressure. But what the heart decides, Paul,
must be.
I’m telling you, it won’t give you peace if it’s defied Love!” Jerry cried.

And Paul cried back, “Jerry, I love her.”

And his uncle replied sweetly, “That’s all then. That’s all that counts.”

Then, for having provoked such wholesale approval, Paul felt wave upon wave of indecency wash over him. True as they may have been, his words had been spoken out of nothing less than design. And why had he to convince Jerry? So Jerry could turn around and convince him? It was an unavoidable fact that, ever since his afternoon on Third Avenue, certainty had somehow been seeping away. He could not believe that Asher and his bird-brained mistress had demonstrated anything other than what everybody knew about squandered lives, yet he had begun to think of himself as being not so courageous as fearful. Fear began to seem the springboard of much that he had done in his short life. He was a scholarship holder all right, a planner, a young man investing emotions one day to accumulate love and admiration the next. He had come to see his marrying Libby in two distinct ways, both of which, unfortunately, cast doubt on his manliness and dignity.

On the one hand, it all seemed so safe. Husband, wage-earner, father—right on down the line, all the duties and offices laid out for him. From home to college to a wife, no chances taken. Without much effort, he could recall from his past more than a few risks he had worked a little hard at avoiding. Even recently with his parents: he knocked against the walls of their house in December, hoping that somehow by May they would find a way to prevent the roof from falling in. He wanted to remain the good son. Even to himself he seemed to be working strenuously at being upright.

Otherwise he would tell them to go to hell. Run off, marry the girl and leave them to drip tears till their eyes fell out. It was what Asher would have done, he thought. And because he saw it as being a choice that Asher might have made, it too caused him discomfort. If marrying Libby was taking no risks, it was also taking every risk. Asher’s life had unnerved him deeply; with a little twisting and turning he could think of it as his own. Way down, he had begun to bend an ear toward his parents’ objections. He was no longer so sure that he was seeing Libby as clearly as his uncle saw Patricia Ann, at least as he saw her in paint, if not in life. He did not know that he
wanted
to see that clearly. He only knew that he did not want merely to stick it right up in Libby; he wanted to love her.

Feeling something less than a daredevil, he listened to Uncle Jerry on the other end comforting him. “Paul, good luck then. I think that’s the only proper thing for any of us to say.”

“Thank you.”

“Tell Libby good luck too.” Jerry pronounced her name easily, and Paul knew they would like each other right off. “When will you be married?”

“Not till May. Around graduation.”

“Will I get to see you before you go back? I’d like to take you to dinner. I’ll invite Claire and her husband. She’d love to see you.”

“That’s very kind, Jerry. I’ll call Libby. I think tomorrow night, if you could, would be best for us. We were going to meet with news from both fronts.”

“How is she bearing up?”

“Fine,” Paul said, lying, as if he had to spare that two-time loser from any further knowledge of the hardships of loving.

“I know I’ve got character in my face, but won’t someone say I’m pretty?” Well, on the steps of the Plaza, with all that swank hurrying by, she had her wish. Character had been bled from her for the evening, and in its place was prettiness. She had made up her eyes heavily, and managed even to reduce the proud leap of her nose—its sailing proportions were lost beneath the great mast of her black hair, which was piled atop her head, revealing a slender boyish back of the head. The doorman bowed and opened the door for both the lady and her escort, who even in dark suit and tie made a slightly seedy appearance—seedy perhaps only by comparison to the glitter and chic of the slender girl beside him.