Letting Go (9 page)

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.

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.”