Letting Go (29 page)

“Certainly not—my child’s drunk on Mott’s apple juice. How are you?”

“Fine.”

“
Where
are you?”

“Daddyland. New York.”

“Oh, do excuse her. She gets overexcited when she’s not in school. I think she’s reacting to the company,” she whispered.

“Who’s there?”

“An old friend. He stimulates the children.”

“And you?”

“No, no. No—that’s true. Listen, I’m sounding tragic.” But she wasn’t; only forlorn. “How’s Thanksgiving? How’s your father’s party? Is there really a father and a party or is some tootsie nestled beside you in her underwear?”

“I call in the absence of the latter.”

“It’s very sweet of you to call. Happy Thanksgiving.”

“I’m having a nice unhappy one.”

“Just a minute, will you?” She left the phone, but nevertheless I could hear her voice. “No, it is
not
Daddy! I
am
telling you the truth, Cynthia! Go talk to Sid, he’s all alone. Cynthia!” She sighed into my ear. “I’m back.”

“Good.”

Why it was good I couldn’t say; neither of us spoke.

“Well,” she admitted finally. “What else is there to say?”

She was right, of course, for we hardly knew each other; I had not realized how strange it was for me to be calling her long distance until I was in the middle of the call. I had taken her to dinner some weeks back, and we had laughed and joked until the waiters stared, but that had not increased our knowledge of each other very much. Then she had called to ask me—and a nervous little exchange it had been—to come to Thanksgiving dinner. And now this. Strangely, I found myself wanting to believe that I had some rights to her total concern and attention.

I said, “I just wanted to say Merry Thanksgiving to you.”

“Thank you.”

I was preparing to hang up when she asked, “Shall I go ahead and invite you to another meal? Will you eat leftovers when you come back?”

“I’ll be back Monday.”

“Come then for dinner.”

“Thank you, I will.” Then I said, “Who’s Sid?”

“He’s a man who just asked me to marry him.”

“I see.”

“You’ll come Monday night.”

“As long as you’re still single, I suppose so.”

“Single as ever,” she said.

“Does that upset you?”

“Specifically no; generally I’m not sure. This is some long-distance conversation.”

“Long distance should be outlawed anyway. Were you expecting a call from your husband?”

“My
ex
-husband—from whom I have no expectations whatsoever.” I heard a loud noise rise up behind her. “Oh God, my son just hit my daughter with a chair or something. Give my love to the girl in her underwear.”

“You give my love to Sidney.”

“We can’t possibly be jealous over anything,” she said, “so we shouldn’t really play at it. Should we?”

“I’m a little deranged today, Martha. I wonder if we’ll ever manage to be level with one another.”

“You come Monday, Gabe. I’ll be single.” Then, all at once, she did level with me. “They shouldn’t outlaw long distance. I feel you’ve saved my life.” It was the sort of statement I had come to expect her to qualify with an irony; she didn’t, however, and so neither did I.

Instead I said, as though it were some revelation of character, “There is a father and a party, you know. And I look forward to seeing you.”

But even while I spoke, she was explaining, “Sid is Sid Jaffe—he was my lawyer. He got me my divorce half-price, and I’m very indebted to him, Gabe, and the children are crazy about him, as crazy as they can be about anybody, anyway. And I have to stop talking on your money. Forgive me, please.”

I remained seated at the phone table. There were some eight hundred miles between us, and yet our acquaintanceship had taken a sharp and serious turn. And when I had come out into the hallway I hadn’t even been intending to call her! She had been the escape hatch, to put it crudely, through which I could crawl from that new and startling image of my father. During the previous spring he had gone to see a psychotherapist; he had been advised to travel; he had been advised to spend large quantities of money, to enjoy the company of women, and if possible to give up all mystical activities for a period of six months. He had even asked me to take his long trip with him, and when I offered my job as an excuse, he had settled upon Gruber. And now, face to face with the results of that trip, I had called Chicago.

I reached down and brought out the big Brooklyn telephone directory, mostly out of a feeling that if there was any call I should have made, it was the one I had been asked to make. Millie was charging past me, still starchy and angry and efficient. “You call this an American Thanksgiving?” she asked. “Smells to me like New Year’s Eve. Your father’s become ultra-European, you know,” she said, turning up her nose.

“Times change, Millie.”

“Thanksgiving is Thanksgiving, young man!”

Light fell into the hallway from the living room, dull, apricot light, very comforting to find creeping along the rug and up your toes. The conversations I could hear from the lighted room sounded revitalized; aside from Mrs. Norton, nobody had made a move for the exit, though it was nearly four thirty. All their houses were empty; they stayed on.

I opened the Brooklyn directory and found the name I was after. I marked it, realizing that if I had turned to Martha Reganhart to escape my father, I had also called her so as to escape an old friend as well. Libby Herz had asked me to call—to call upon—her husband’s parents. I have found in my life that I often phone one
person when I expect myself, or others expect me, to be phoning someone else; it is what the telephone company calls displacement.

Libby and I had managed well enough, respectably enough, since her arrival in Chicago. Though I had discovered that the feeling we had for one another had not changed after three years and one letter, I nevertheless got through the early fall without doing anything I can think of to make the feeling concrete. Then, just before leaving Chicago for Thanksgiving, I had run into her quite accidentally on Madison Street. I was going into Brooks Brothers, and she was headed for Goldblatt’s and then the Downtown College, where she was taking a course. My shopping expedition happened to have been of no little significance, for I was after a hat. A real man’s hat, you know—brim, crown, the works. It was to be my first; I was full with the knowledge that my father was waiting for me in New York, fresh from his world travels (“with a surprise” he had guaranteed me on the phone), and I had somehow reasoned that it would be to my advantage to confront him behatted. I felt at once gay and doubtful about the venture, and when I ran into Libby I asked her to come in with me to give her opinion. Even to myself I do not think of it as an invitation innocent of charm, nor do I think of her acceptance as so innocent either.

My taste in personal effects is conventional, running to a kind of quiet fussiness, and marked by a decided Anglomania, common enough to my profession, I think, as well as my class and generation. That afternoon, however, I indulged my cabinet-minister inclinations with the wantonness of a Turk. Actually it was only of late that I had begun appreciating the pleasures to be derived from spending money on myself; as a child and youth, others for the most part had spent it on me. But with Libby, during those two solid hours of accumulation in Brooks, I unearthed new possibilities in capitalism, I saw that things are not going to be so easy for the Russians as they may think. There is something life-giving and religious in outfitting yourself.

Back on the street we surrendered ourselves to shame. The Balboic, the Columbian emotions I had first experienced upon discovering myself in the full-length mirror, now washed right by me. And that absolute delight and sparkle in Libby’s eyes—for it was she who had egged me on, past the fedora to the homburg, and on then to the puce gloves, the tight-rolled umbrella, the long lisle stockings, the garters, the ties, and finally to the glowing, noble scarlet smoking jacket—the sparkle that had given to Libby’s face such incredible
life, that had won envy for me from every man in the store, ran out of her eyes now in two barely visible tears. I knew I should never again be able to kid myself, even if I returned the smoking jacket the following day, into feeling lofty or virginal about our relationship.

“I have to run off—I have a class at six—I have to have a bite. I’m going, Gabe.”

“I don’t feel very splendid, Libby, about this whole silly indulgence.”

“You …” She almost laughed, crying. “You look splendid. You look terribly splendid.”

“I’m walking toward the train,” I said.

“I’m going to have one of those dollar-seven steaks.” She went off in the opposite direction, toward State Street.

And so there I was, under sunny skies, tapping the pavement with the tip of my umbrella. I caught a glimpse of myself in a shop window. What a dandy! How weak and feeble! Some match for my father and his surprise! And then hurtling at me from behind, practically flying, came Libby’s reflection. I turned to catch her, and she reached out with her hands to my new—our new—gloves. There on Madison Street, just within earshot of Michigan Boulevard, we came the closest we had come to each other in Chicago.

“In New York,” she said, breathless from running, “go see Paul’s family, will you? Oh, Gabe, just tell them, will you, about his job, that I’m working, that I’m going to school, that everything is working out? Will you,
please?
”

“Yes, sure, Lib—”

“Just tell them.”

On the train back to the South Side I could not work out in my head exactly how the lines and angles of our triangle had altered; nor could I begin to see what my visiting the elder Herzes would do for everybody’s well-being that it might not do to their detriment. I did not care either for the tone the mission had of a soldier paying a call on the family of a dead buddy. Despite definite feelings of obligation, I had a very imprecise sense of who I was feeling obliged
to.
In Chicago that day (and once again, sitting at the little phone table in my father’s apartment), Martha Regenhart began to loom in my head—and subsequently in my heart too—as a green, watery spot in a dry land; I felt in her something solid to which I could anchor my wandering and strained affections.

Why I had called her now seemed perfectly clear. I slipped the Brooklyn directory back into the table and went into the kitchen,
ostensibly because my mouth had gone dry, but actually, I think, to come close as I could to the pure, unspoiled realities of the holiday—the greasy turkey pan, the dirty dishes, the still-warm oven, the aromas of a happy and spontaneous American family life.

Fay Silberman was there, her head over a coffee cup.

Since I couldn’t simply turn and walk out, I went to the sink and ran some cold water into a glass. Mrs. Silberman rose and smoothed her shaky hands over her smart velvet suit. My admiration for the fight she was trying to put up against her condition did not particularly alter my attitude toward the condition itself. She had made a silly fool of herself in the living room.

“We haven’t had a chance to talk,” she said. “You resemble your father remarkably.”

The father, I realized, was about to be courted through the son. All the desperation I had been witness to during the long afternoon suddenly centered for me on this hungover, handsome, game, miserable woman, who had been beauty-parlored nearly to death. Her hair floated and glowed like a sky, and her face had been lifted and was too tight; her nails, ten roses, were long enough to sink deep, to hang on, tenaciously. She was heartbreaking, finally, but I wasn’t in the mood.

“I look a little like my mother too.”

“I haven’t seen any pictures of her,” she said.

“There are several in the living room.”

She smiled hard, the end of round one. I summoned up whatever good sense I had accumulated over the years and came out like a small, affectionate dog for round two. “My father looks fine—he hasn’t looked this well in years. The trip seems to have done him a lot of good.”

“All he did was laugh. He laughed all the way through Europe.”

“He can be a very happy man,” I said.

Her answer confused me a moment. “Thank you,” she said. “Nobody …” She swayed, tilting in some private breeze, but found strength against the sink. “Nobody should miss it. Europe. It’s just another culture.”

“Are you feeling all right?”

“I feel fine!” Then, focusing her eyes on the wall clock, she added, “I had too much to eat.”

“So did I—”

“Don’t hate me, young man. You have no right to hate me!” She slumped down into a kitchen chair and covered her eyes. I did not
know now what to say or do, and only prayed that no one would come into the kitchen. “I have children of my own in California,” she said, as though that were some threat against our house.

“Excuse me, Mrs. Silberman. I have to be going.”

“Your father said you were here for the weekend.” She spoke almost with alarm.

“I have to go to Brooklyn.”

“I’ve never been to Brooklyn in my life.” I wondered if that was supposed to have been a gay remark. Was she soused, or stupid, or both? “You better stay,” said Mrs. Silberman, turning regal before my eyes. “After coffee, your father is going to announce our engagement.” She stood up, quite steady now—the weather in the kitchen having calmed for her purposes—and turned to face me. I took a sip of water, waiting for my own responses (which were slow, very slow), and when I looked up again what I saw was that her face had gone all to pieces. “This is a wonderful thing in everybody’s life. Don’t you go throw a monkey wrench,” she begged. “You’re
supposed
to be an educated person!” Her whole body stiffened with that last plea.

“Maybe you better calm yourself.”

“I’m not an invalid. I’m a very young woman. I’m fifty-four. What’s wrong with that? I’ve had a shock in my life. I chose your father, after all, not Dr. Gruber.”

I had to admit that her choice was meritorious, and whatever she might have thought, I had no intention of being caustic, nor anything to gain thereby; in fact, I wanted for personal reasons to give her all the credit her selection deserved. Unfortunately for all our futures, I chose the wrong words. “You did well for yourself.”