Letting Go (30 page)

“I make him laugh. It’s more than anybody else in his family ever did! I make him feel important!”

“You don’t know a great deal about what’s happened, Mrs. Silberman. Lives are complicated and private.”

“I know more than you think,” she answered; and then with the wildness, the unbuttonedness of someone who has lost most of his perspective and a few of his faculties, she added irrelevantly, “Don’t
you
worry about that!”

Fifteen minutes later we all stood at attention in the living room and drank a toast to the affianced. Mrs. Silberman’s champagne ran down her chin, cutting a trail through her powder.

As soon as I pushed the buzzer to Paul Herz’s parents’ apartment, I knew I should have called in advance—perhaps simply called and left it at that. I pulled myself up to my full height, dropped my gloves into my hat and rang again, this time with a premonition that when I left this building, in fifteen or twenty minutes, I would not be the same man I had been when I entered. The boundaries of my own personality seemed as blurry and indefinite, as hazy, as the damp blowy mist above the river I had crossed from Manhattan.

A wide blubbery man with a jovial, self-pitying face answered the door; I had never seen a man so young so fat. Drifting between his voluminous trouser legs, sweeping past his thinning brown hair, came the sounds of television and talk. Friendly enough, he said, “This is four-C.”

“Do the Herzes live here?”

“Sure, sure, come on in. I’m sorry—” He raised his arms to signal some mix-up and smiled helpfully over nothing.

“I didn’t mean to interrupt anything.”

“No-no-no.” He was a very helpful person.

“Who is it, Maury?” a voice called.

“Come on in,” Maury said to me. “We’re just leaving. We live in the building.”

I followed him down a long narrow corridor that was lit by three little bulbs meant to resemble candles; along the hallway at waist level hung a row of tiny framed documents. Before entering the living room, I bent over and took a close look at one of them: it was a grammar school report card made out to Paul Herz.

A woman in her early twenties was standing before a logless fireplace, one hand on her hip and the other out in front of her, making a point to a bathrobed man in a BarcaLounger. A shiny black pump stood beside each of her feet; the lines of her cocktail dress, a close-fitting black crepe number yoked daringly in front and fitted tightly at the knee, were the lines of her almost lovely figure—unfortunately her posture and the lines were not in exact accord. All she needed, however, was to suck in her little paunch and heave backwards with her shoulders to make perfect the whole works. But it was almost as though she didn’t care to be perfect; tall and erect and exquisite, she might not have known what to make of herself. “So my sister-in-law said,” the girl was explaining, the borough of
her birth winding down through the faint arch of her nose, “this is my sister-in-law Ruthie from Roslyn. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘if the child is
not
happy there, what’s the sense? All that money, it’s ridiculous. The child’s happiness is what’s uppermost, certainly, but if the child is not
happy
, if the child is not having herself a good time,’ she said, ‘then the money is money wasted.’ And personally, Ruthie, to my way of thinking, is
right!
” The final dentalized
t
in
right
buzzed once around the room and then flew up the chimney. “I don’t believe in that kind of money being wasted on a child. My brother-in-law Harvey doesn’t find it growing on trees, believe me. The child can be perfectly happy at home.”

The bathrobed man she was addressing glanced across the room at a tired-looking woman seated in an armchair, who I took to be his wife, and Paul’s mother. “Absolutely,” he said, as if it were a foregone conclusion that everyone was better off at home. “What’s wrong with Brooklyn College?”

“Absolutely …” And then my presence was all at once recorded. Maury had been blocking me out, and now I was past him, into the living room, where despite the animated conversation, the TV set was on. The screen showed three men dressed as Pilgrims, scanning the horizon from the railing of a ship. “It looks to be land, sir,” said one of them in an Anglo-Irish accent—while I said, “How do you do, my name is Gabe Wallach.”

“Yes?” replied the man in the BarcaLounger.

“I’m a friend of your son’s,” I said. “Of Paul’s. How do you do?” I looked away from the astonished face of Mr. Herz to the face of the young woman; it had not actually collapsed into horror, but considering the stiff, pretty, frozen face it was, it did display, all at once, some marked change.

“Maury,” the girl said, stepping into her shoes, “I really think we have to run, doll.” The heels gave her legs their final touch of beauty. “I keep tasting turkey,” she said, half-smiling at me. I smiled back, with understanding; it was not that I had brought the plague into the room, it was simply that she had eaten too much.

Maury came up now to Mr. Herz, and smoothing for him the collar of his white terry cloth robe, said, “Look, take it easy, kiddo. Give yourself a couple more days rest. Stay off your feet, you’ll wear the carpet out, huh?”

“Don’t run on my account—” I said to Maury, who seemed a kind of bulwark to me against the worst. “Please don’t,” I said, and my eyes settled at last on Mrs. Herz, whose own eyes had been
settled on me since I had come in and announced whose friend I was.

“No-no-no.” Maury’s meaty comforting hands moved away from Mr. Herz and onto my shoulders. “We had Thanksgiving out in Great Neck, and I’m telling you, kid, we’re exhausted. We left the kids out there with their grandparents, and now we’re going to enjoy a little peace and quiet. Look, take it easy, Leonard,” he said, turning back to Mr. Herz, “stay off the carpet, will you, for a few days—”

“Leonard, I’ll lend you
Marjorie Morningstar.
”

“Look, Doris, I’ll be all right.”

I heard a sigh of hope rise from Mrs. Herz. Her husband went on. “It was indigestion. Something stuck in my chest, overexcitement. I’m fine.” But he became vague even while he spoke.

“Just don’t rush back,” Maury said. “I’ve got everything under control, Leonard. Harry is taking care of yours.” Now he strode to the club chair where Mrs. Herz was sitting and he placed one hand on either of the plastic coverlets that protected the arms. I could see only his back, but I heard lips smack together, and Mrs. Herz’s hand came up onto his neck. “God bless you, Maury,” she said.

Maury stood up and ran his thumb across her cheek. “How are you? Are you all right, sweetheart?”

“Look,” said Mrs. Herz. “I’m all right if he’s all right.” And the voice of the martyr was heard in the land.

Just then Doris approached me. My heart went out to something in her that was simple and bored and satisfied; I actually had an impulse to take her hand as she went past me, and felt a personal sense of loss when she and her husband slammed the door of the Herzes’ apartment behind them.

“I hope I haven’t interrupted,” I said. “I should have called.” But behind me—a sound sweet as a rescue plane buzzing a life raft—a key turned in the lock and a hinge squeaked. There was a whispered exchange, then Maury’s voice. “Mr. Wallach,” he called, “I think you dropped something out here in the hall.”

Dutifully, unthinkingly, Mrs. Herz rose from her chair to serve my needs.

“No, please, I’ll get it,” I said. “Excuse me.”

In the doorway, Maury’s tiny hooked nose, droopy cheeks, fleshy lips, and round little gray eyes all tried to come together in a smile, but mostly worry was written on his face. Doris took my hand and whispered, “Stop on the way out,
please.
Six-D. Horvitz.”

“Okay.”

“Be careful, kid, will you?” Maury said. Doris still held one of my hands; Maury took the other. “I’m Paul’s oldest friend,” he told me, and then the two of them turned down the hallway, past everybody’s milk bottles. They went the first few feet on their toes.

When I came back into the living room I was met by the image of a united front. Mrs. Herz, with something of the pioneer woman about her, was standing beside her husband. I smiled at her, making believe that I was returning to my pocket something that I had dropped outside. But the woman had a bitter, drawn face that would not respond. She was tall, like Paul, but not skinny; rather she was hefty, large in the hips and feet and shoulders. Her hair had thinned on either side of the part and it bushed out from her head around the ears and neck—the genetic source of Paul’s black kinks. Her coloring was spiritless, a brownish-gray. Mr. Herz was also old and worn. Coming directly from scenes of middle-age rejuvenation, the sight of them was uncomfortably shocking; I had almost forgotten that most of those within earshot of eternity look as if they hear just what they hear. Not everyone can afford a mask, or wants one.

“Take a seat,” said Mr. Herz, for I was the soul of politeness, and that finally got to him. “Would you like a glass of soda?”

“No, thank you. I only dropped in.”

“Darling,” he addressed his wife, “get me a little seltzer.”

“Are you all right?”

“Sure, sure, I’m fine. I’m excellent. Only my mouth tastes bad.”

No sooner had Mrs. Herz left the room than her husband shot straight up in the BarcaLounger, almost as though he’d been ripped down the center with the electric pains of a stroke. His face like a piece of crumpled white paper against the ruddy leather of the chair, he turned his palms down and supplicated with them, up and down—the motion of the umpire when the runner has slid in under the tag. “Please, please,” he whispered, “she’s having a very bad day.
Please.
” A fizzing sound approached from the kitchen, and he settled back into a posture that struck me as an open invitation to death. In that one moment he appeared to have used up a week’s energy.

His wife handed him a little glass on a coaster. “The glass is warm,” he said. “It’s practically hot.”

“I put it in a warm glass. Cold is a shock to the system.”

“Who likes warm seltzer, for God’s sake.”

“Drink it, please.” It was as though now that he didn’t like it, it would do him some good. While he drank, his hand went up to his chest and he performed various stretching gestures with his neck.
Having thus coped successfully with the carbonation, he turned back to cope with me. Mrs. Herz returned to her chair—the edge of it—and her husband cupped his glass on his belly and took a businesslike but civil approach.

“Very nice to meet a friend of Paul’s.”

“I’m pleased to meet you. Paul asked that I stop in to say hello.”

Nobody responded; was it so blatantly a lie?

“You live here?” Mrs. Herz demanded, putting the question not so much to me as to the puce gloves. “In Brooklyn?”

“My father lives in Manhattan,” I said.

“What are you, a lawyer?” I was numbed by her particular brand of naïveté: it seemed a cross between xenophobia and plain old hate.

“I teach English at the University of Chicago. Paul is a colleague of mine.”

“A colleague already.” She made a face of mock awe toward her husband. “Next thing we know he’ll be president of the college.”

“He’s doing very well. It’s a very good university.”

She put me quickly in my place. “Schools are wonderful things wherever they are,” she said. “I was a teacher myself.”

“He teaches English?” Mr. Herz asked. “What is that, spelling, grammar, that business?”

“One course is Freshman Composition. Then he also teaches Humanities.”

“I see,” they both said. Mrs. Herz seemed pressed to add something knowledgeable about the humanities but gave up and only grunted general disapproval of whatever that title encompassed.

“Libby works for the Dean of the College, you know.”

No one knew; no one cared. “She’s one of my favorite people,” I said, and was rewarded for that complicated extravagance with a flush that took minutes to subside. Fortunately, the Herzes were now immune to anyone’s feelings but their own. “She also takes courses in the evenings. She’s a very hard-working girl.”

“Sure, sure, sure,” mumbled Mr. Herz, but the object of his certainty did not seem to be the subject of my conversation.

“I was visiting in Manhattan for the holiday, and so I came-over here. I hope I haven’t interrupted anything,” I said, limp with my own repetitiveness.

“Mr. Herz has been sick,” his wife informed me, having actually stared me into silence. “We decided to stay home for the day. Who wants to get tied up in all that traffic?”

“Yeah, we decided to stay home,” Mr. Herz said. “We were going to go to Rio de Janeiro for the weekend, but we decided to stay home. Look, I think maybe I can move my bowels,” he told his wife, and instantly she was out of her chair and freeing him from the languorous curves of the BarcaLounger. He insisted on walking under his own steam to the bathroom.

“Leave the door open a little,” she said to him.

“All right, all right.” Newspapers covered the floor at the entrance to the kitchen, and he crossed over them as though they were ice. Some seconds later the bathroom door shut. Mrs. Herz left the room hastily; I heard her call, “Are you all right?”