Letting Go (23 page)

“A direct appeal,” Korngold said. “I’m not proud, believe me. A plea. Tell the boy for Christ sake to send
money.
I don’t need no Levy. I need a simple letter somebody should write for me. I can’t even tie my shoes with these shakes.”

“Then,” Libby said, “maybe Mr. Levy would be a help.”

“This is a crook,
lebele
, something tells me. He’ll tie the laces and steal the shoes. He’s got an eye already on an easy dollar via my underwear.”

“Why don’t you sell it?” Libby asked, coming over to him on the bed. “Is it all in your room?”

“You don’t sell to robbers. I drag a box of briefs all over Detroit, they wouldn’t give me enough to pay my bus fare. I don’t sell nothing when the market stinks. If you don’t speculate, you don’t accumulate—always my motto. Now is a buyer’s market. Let them come begging, that’s when Max Korngold does business!” he shouted.

“How did you come by all this underwear?” Paul asked.

“A three-way split with two partners, they should both go live in hell.”

“When was that?”

“Seven years already. That kind of underwear they don’t knit no more. Don’t think Levy don’t know that either …” But his mind suddenly was elsewhere. “Here,” he said. He took a wallet from his inside coat pocket; the photograph he finally coaxed out of one of the folds was of himself, from a Take Your Own Photo booth. There was Korngold, and there was his right hand, raised up beside his ear—and in it he was gripping his cane. He might have been shaking the cane at the camera; he might merely have been showing that he had
one. At the bottom of the picture were written some words that Paul could just about decipher:
Your Old Father, Feb. 3, 1951.

“You could enclose this with the letter?” he wanted to know.

Paul looked to Libby to speak for them both, but she seemed near tears. Korngold waited, then spoke again. “You see, just a few facts of my health I’m sure could make an impression. Here, take a look, please.” He pulled up his trouser legs to show a pair of knees that were not wholly unexpected but were nevertheless shocking. “Undernourishment. Bad ventilation. Improper rest. Worry. Aloneliness. Let me tell you about a wife, gets a spurt of energy one day, aged sixty-one years old, hides my cane, steals my checkbook, runs off to Florida with an eighty-year-old
shmekele
, can’t even pee straight cause he can’t see what’s doing under his belly. Excuse me. The facts are dirty and disgusting so I can’t talk clean if I want”—this last to Libby, with a tender plea in his lips and eyes. “I got myself a lawyer, a young fellow with short hair, and he takes me for a ride—three times he’s got to fly to Miami—and I got cleaned out. Now Levy keeps one eye on my underwear, another on my son, and what do you think I feel? Contented? Foolproof? Please, you write a simple note—here, I got the postage even.” He removed some crumpled three-cent stamps from his watch pocket and counted them into Libby’s hand. “One, two, three—go all-out. Don’t worry about weight. I’m a desperate man.” He patted Libby’s arm. She helped him off the bed. “And how are you?” he asked Paul. “The wrist’s improved?”

“Much better.”

“You two kiddies look tired.” He turned back once again, unable to keep his eyes from Libby’s face. “My son, my own son, why couldn’t he find a nice
yiddishe maydele
, a little dark darling. That girl—she poisoned his opinions of me!” He dragged his bad legs to the door.

“
Help
him,” Libby whispered tearfully to Paul.

“Here,” Paul said, and he was up from his chair at last and reaching after the old man’s elbow. So immune had he been feeling to anyone’s suffering but his own, so lacking in tenderness and interest, that he wondered if he had left his heart for good in that doctor’s office. “Here.” He took hold of Korngold and led him out the door and up the stairs to the front entryway. As they emerged into the hall, the bathroom door slammed shut.

In bed, neither one touching the other, Libby said, “You decided. You said yes. You never so much as asked me.”

“We can change our minds.”

“We made an appointment already. We discussed money.”

“That doesn’t bind me to a thing.”

“Where are we going to get all that money?”

“It’s in the bank.”

“Paul, that’s all we’ve got. Everything!”

“Money,” he said firmly, as though it were a truth he had known for more than a few hours, “is to get you out of trouble with.”

“You’ve decided.”

“I’ve decided.” Quickly he added. “So did you.”

“I didn’t decide anything!”

“All afternoon you were on a seesaw, Libby. If you said no, it would have been no. I wouldn’t have gone against you.”

Limply, she held out for herself. “I did say no.”

“No, then yes, then no. When you went to the doctor’s office—”

“You tricked me!”

“Lower your voice!”

“It’s my body! It’s my body he’s going to operate on!”

At last they touched: he clamped a hand over her mouth. “Libby, Libby,” he said through his teeth, “it’s been a difficult day. These old men, my hand, everything.” When he removed his hand, allowing her to breathe again, she rolled away from him. “You want to think the decision is mine,” he said, “then it’s mine.”

“It is yours.”

“All right, you think that.”

“Stop trying to get the upper hand!” she said. “I’m thinking it because it’s
so.”

“Libby, you’re twenty years old. We came down here to make some money. We want to go back to school. We’re married a year, we’re broke—”

“We’re not broke if we’ve got four hundred and fifty dollars in the bank to throw out!”

“In the end, a baby will cost more, much, much more. It’ll change our lives altogether. Honey, I’m only trying to protect us from even more crap. If there’s a baby, we have to move out of this room, you have to stop working. And we’ll never get caught up, Libby. I know it, we’ll just flounder along.”

She turned back toward him, covering her face with her hands. “You think you shouldn’t even have married me. I made you marry me.”

“Don’t talk stupidly, please.”

“When I think of all the stuff I said I’m just so ashamed. You’ve changed me, now you’ve got to marry me—how can I ever go out with other boys—”

“Lib,” Paul said, not sure that he wasn’t lying, “you never said any of that.”

“I thought it.”

“I wanted to marry you. I went out of my way to marry you.”

“I made you want to.”

“Go to sleep. Nobody’s talking sense at this hour.”

“I can’t go to sleep. My mind’s a whirlpool … What does an osteopath know about uteruses?”

“Osteopaths are like doctors. Smith is very well known.”

“They’re bone-crackers.”

“The man’s been doing this for years.”

“What about infection?”

“This is a doctor, Libby, not just anybody. Would he do it if it was risky?”

“Paul?”

“Yes.”

“Give me your hand. Feel my breasts. Do they feel bigger?”

“I think so, honey.”

She brought his hand up to her mouth and kissed it; she tried to be funny. “It’s what I’ve always wanted.” Then, as he knew she would, she wept. “And it’s going to last one day. Oh Paul …” She lay still, holding his hand to her, and then because she was exhausted she soon fell asleep.

He himself had no such luck. His own whirlpool went round and round and round … Infection was Libby’s worry; his own mind turned and turned now on a single word: jail. Korngold had been showing his pathetic photograph, and all he had been thinking was
jail!
Suppose the police should come in before Libby was in the operating room. Couldn’t he simply say she was there for an examination? Couldn’t they deny everything? Unless she were already on the table—then what? Whom do they put in jail? After all, he was her husband, not just a man who had got a girl into trouble. But what weight, if any, did that carry? Did that not make it seem worse? He tried to remember accounts of eases reported in the newspapers. Was
the boy friend or husband an accomplice? The girl? Surely they didn’t throw
her
in jail! But in the headlines she was always dead.

Through the hectic night, at the center of his imaginings, stood the police. You’re an accomplice to an abortion. No, my wife said she had to come here to have a cyst removed. All right, says the Captain, ask the wife … Libby, if anything should happen, if anybody should question you, say I didn’t know, say you told me it was a cyst—

In the morning neither of them heard the alarm clock. They dressed in a frenzy, couldn’t get into the bathroom, and had no time for coffee on the hot plate. They parted at the bus stop without even a kiss. Only a few hours earlier, Paul had tried to force his way into sleep by telling himself that all this preoccupation with the police was only his super-ego asserting itself. But that had in no way been able to increase his self-respect; he felt lucky then to have avoided a morning conversation with his wife, for he might have confessed to her the nature of his fears and so shaken her even further. He was aware of his momentum again, carrying him forward.

The bus started away from the corner, then stopped; someone was hammering on the side. The driver swung back the doors and Mr. Levy charged up the stairs, eyebrows floating and sinking, cane swinging disastrously near the driver’s head. “Don’t be disrespectful! I’ll take your number!” He started up the aisle, a little eager old man, sun-tanned from the ultraviolet bulb in his room. He snapped a sharp look into each seat until he spotted Paul. “Ah, nice morning,” he said; refining himself down into an oily friendliness, he slid in beside the young man. “A little chilly, but bracing.”

“Good morning,” Paul said. He had to free his coat from Levy’s backside.

“Heigh ho, heigh ho, off to work you go?”

“Yes,” Paul said. “Yourself?”

“Enterprises, enterprises. I’m moving some gloves for a friend. You wrote the letter?”

He found himself looking out the window as he said, “I haven’t gotten around to it yet.”

“I thought maybe Korngold picked it up last night.”

“No.”

“I thought maybe it was his limp I heard dragging down the hall. Must be some mistake.”

Paul’s eyes fixed on the dull two-storied rooming houses along the street.

“You look a little underneath the weather,” commented Levy. “Up too late at night, no?”

“No.”

“Funny.”

“What’s funny?”

“Over sixty-five you can’t trust your senses. My hearing is a tricky item where I’m concerned.” Levy made a quick survey of the ads posted in the bus, checking the competition. He said, “Korngold, of course, is an old old friend, but senility will rob him of his sense of fair play, I’m afraid.”

Paul at last forced himself to engage Levy’s excited glittery eyes. “He doesn’t seem senile. Maybe a little fatigued. He seems to have had a lot of trouble.”

“Oh, nobody’s taking his troubles away from him. A sad case, that man. Fleeced all his life, then health goes, whew! No wonder he’s such a suspicious specimen. It’s pathetic how he doesn’t know the best road no longer. Needs help. Good thing you and me are around, because drowning would be his end. Starvation probably.”

They rode on a little further. Paul’s growing discomfort with Levy arose in part from a sense of incongruity; it was not simply that he did not like the fellow—it was that here was a crisis in his life,
the
crisis perhaps, and these two old men had somehow gotten tied up in it. It was all he could do not to get up and change his seat.

“So,” said Levy, with a flourish of his cane, “you’ll have it typed up this afternoon, righto?”

“I’ve got to work all day.”

“So tonight?”

“Tonight I’m busy.”

“More doctors?”

“What?”

“I didn’t say nothing.”

“What is it, Mr. Levy? What are you following me around this morning for?”

“My boy, my boy, don’t be paranoyal. I got kid gloves I’m moving for a friend.”

But when Paul rose to leave, Levy followed. The bus pulled away and the two of them were alone on the corner, within sight of the gate to the plant. “What is it, Levy? What do you want to tell me?”