Letting Go Read Free Page A

one is a man, strangers who happen also to be women. Perhaps offering the book to be read in the first place had been my way of offering the letter to be read as well. For I was beginning really to be exhausted with standing over my mother’s memory, makingsure the light didn’t go out. I had never even been willing to believe that my mother had treated my father badly, until she had gone ahead and told me so. Much as I loved him, he had seemed to me, while she still lived, unworthy of her; it was her letter that had made me see her as unworthy of him. And that is a strange thing to have happen to you—to feel yourself, after death, turning on a person you have always cherished. I had come to feel it was true that she had not merely handled him all her life, as one had to, but that she had mishandled him … At least I believed this with part of my mind. I had, curiously, over a period of a year, come to distrust the woman of whom the letter spoke, all the while I continued to honor and admire the memory of the woman who could have written it. And now, when I had begun to have to handle her husband myself, the letter came accidentally back into my life, to decrease in no way my confusion as to what to do with my father’s overwhelming love.
    “I’m sorry,” Libby Herz was saying. “It was habit. Which makes it even worse. I am sorry.”
    “It’s okay.”
    “It’s not. I had to open it. I’m the sort of person who does that.”
    Now I was irritated at the way she seemed to be glorifying herself by way of her weaknesses. “Other people do it too,” I said.
    “Paul doesn’t.” And that fact seemed to depress her most of all; she worried it while we passed a tall white farmhouse with gingerbread ornament hanging from the frame of every window and door.
    After some time had passed, I felt it necessary to caution her. “It’s rather an easy letter to misunderstand,” I said.
    “I suppose so, yes,” she answered, in a whisper. “I don’t think—” But she said no more. Her disturbance was private and deep, and I could not help but feel that she was behaving terribly. If she was going to feel so bad about somebody’s feelings, I believed they should at least have been mine. But she seemed unable to work up sympathy for anyone but herself:
she
was still getting her B.A., after “a decade”;
she
lived in barracks, so that elegance had a special poignancy for her … Her own condition occupied her totally, and I knew that she could no more appreciate my mother’s dilemma than she could Isabel Archer’s. I was, at last, fed up with her.
“Portrait of a Lady”
I said, “is an easy book to misunderstand too. You’re too harsh with Isabel Archer.”
    “I only meant—”
    “Why don’t you wait until you read it all.”
    “I read half—”
    “She shows herself to have a lot of guts in the end,” I said, again not allowing her to finish. “It’s one thing marrying the wrong person for the wrong reasons; it’s another sticking it out with them.”
    To that she had no answer; I had not really permitted one, and perhaps she realized that I was not talking only about the book.
    Crushed, she answered finally, “I didn’t mean to be so flip. Or nosey.”
    “All right, let’s forget it.” Though I was myself unable to. “I don’t usually leave letters in books,” I said. “It was a peculiar time. I was in the Army—” I heard myself becoming, in front of this girl, as momentous about my life as she had been about her own, and I stopped talking.
    “Mr. Wallach,” she said, “I didn’t show it to Paul, if that alleviates anything.”
    “We’re making much too much of this. Let’s do forget it.”
    The next time she spoke it was only to point up ahead and say, “There he is.”
    On the other side of the highway a figure in a long coat was leaning against the darkened headlamp of a car. I moved onto the shoulder at the right-hand side of the road just as Libby took my arm.
    “Please