“Oh yes, I know.” The rapidity with which she answered indicated that she didn’t want me to think that she felt she didn’t deserve to get the flu. What made talking to her almost impossible for me was this incredible pendulum action of hers, the swiftness with which she swung back and forth between valuing herself too much and then valuing herself not at all. I realized now that, having had no questions for Herz, I should have turned around and gone home. One did not idly enter the door of this house.
“It’s actually ironic,” Libby was telling me. “When I was a student I could have gone into the hospital free, under student health. But I quit so we could get the tuition back, and then I got sick, and already it’s cost even more than the tuition we got back. You see, it’s not the flu,” she corrected me. “They don’t know what it is, but I don’t think it’s flu or grippe. It’s just — it’s just ironic was all I meant to point out. At least I call it ironic. Paul doesn’t call it anything.” She spoke her next words with some disbelief. “He calls it life.”
“Well,” I said, while she waited to hear what I would say, “I suppose people have to expect a little trouble.”
“Oh I know that,” she interrupted. “I’m not that underdeveloped. I know people get sick. It’s better to have to struggle when you’re young, I think, than when you’re older,” she platitudinized. “I expect trouble, of course, but … but this is such a funny sickness, you know? What do I have? Maybe it’s something psychosomatic — I mean that’s always a possibility. God, everything enters your mind when they can’t diagnose the thing. You think about it, and you think that here Paul wants to write — so I get sick. Do you think maybe I don’t want him to write? Does that make any sense?”
“No. Does it make any sense to you?”
“Well if it’s my unconscious, how can I know? Does it look to you as though I’m giving up? Because I’m not giving up. At least I don’t think I’m giving up. Not consciously, at least. But then I’ve got this thing and they can’t diagnose it. I left all that blood there and all that pee — you’d think they could find something. It’s not a joke either; I just give in to myself, damn it.”
“Maybe you’re anemic. Maybe you’re not eating right. Maybe it’s Iowa. Everybody gets sick some time without their knowing why. I’d worry about my psyche last of all.”
“You’re trying to make me feel better.”
“You try to make yourself feel worse.”
“You’ve really been very kind to us,” she said. “Paul appreciates it—”
I don’t believe I could have done anything to keep my face from again registering my skepticism.
“—probably more than you think,” she finished.
“Yes.” Though I went on to ask none of the obvious questions, she started in answering them anyway.
“You see,” she said, “if he acted grateful — well, he just can’t. Not now.”
I said that I understood.
“He doesn’t want to look needy. He doesn’t think he is needy. You see, I’ve had it so easy. I never had to pay for anything in my life. And I had lots of brothers and sisters, and everybody looking after me — and Paul, well, Paul had to work for everything. It’s not so bad really if you had things and then you have to give them up. It’s better than sacrificing at the beginning and then still sacrificing later on. The worst thing about poverty is it’s so boring. He — he has to give up so many things.” She paused here to fix her blankets; when she went on, the sacrifice of Paul’s which she chose to speak about did not strike me as the specific one she’d had in mind. “He was an only child and very attached to his family, and now they’ve really been hideous. Do you know what a mikvah is? A ritual bath? Well, I had one. The rabbi in Ann Arbor took me to the swimming pool at the Y, and in my old blue Jantzen I had this mikvah. And his parents still won’t lift the phone when he calls. We call and they hang up. I could just kill them for that. Really take a knife and drive it right in them.”
“It doesn’t sound very pleasant.”
“It isn’t.”
For her sake, I generalized again. “Everybody has some kind of trouble with their family,” I said.
“I know. It’s just that sometimes the accident of things gets you. If Paul had had another set of parents … Oh this is silly.”
But only a little later she rode on in the same direction. “When—” she said, “when I read your mother’s letter— Is this rude?” she asked, and answered herself with a surge of blood to the forehead. “But I did read the letter, Gabe, and I saw she was intelligent, and I thought, Oh what a relief if Paul’s parents could just be a little like that. I didn’t think anybody was going to act the way they did. I thought it would be exciting to have Jewish in-laws. I was all ready to be — well, Christ, I had that mikvah in my Jantzen, what else could I do? But not them. They don’t want to be happy. They want to be miserable, that makes them happy. Well, it doesn’t make anybody else happy.”
“My mother,” I said, taking a final stab at cheering her up, “might not have been much of a help, you know. She was a very willful woman.”
“She was intelligent.”
“All I’m saying is that she was no less firm in her opinions than the Herzes apparently are.”
“Yes?” Libby said. “But suppose you had married a Gentile. You’re Jewish, aren’t you?”
“I am, but I don’t think that particular thing would have made any difference to her.”
“Ah, you see …”
What I saw I did not like. I pretended to be straightening her out about my mother while I worked to squelch a regret she seemed momentarily to have developed over marrying Paul and not me! “Libby, look, you read the letter. My mother was a woman of strong likes and dislikes. She liked her way. There were plenty of things she wouldn’t put up with. That Gentile business just wasn’t one of them.”
“Well, it’s one of them with the Herzes all right.”
I did not like her for the remark. I experienced my first real fellow-feeling for Paul Herz since that night out on the highway when Libby had behaved so badly. “What about the DeWitts?” I asked.
“I don’t care about them any more. Not a single one of them!”
It was a fierce remark, and courageous mostly because it was so clearly a lie. Libby leaned over toward the wicker table — also porch furniture — and took a pill. When she turned back to me she was almost pleading. “Paul’s my husband,” she said. “I prefer him to them. I have to. But Paul—” I had to wait a long time for her to decide whether to finish what she had begun to say, or perhaps to decide how to finish it. “Paul,” she said finally, “was very attached to his family. I mean he wants us all — he’d like us all. Together.”
There was no sense in my saying anything but, “It’s too bad he can’t have that.”
She looked up at me gratefully. “It is.”
“Maybe you should begin to have a family of your own.”
“Oh no!”
Apparently I had gone too far, but I simply didn’t care. What was intimacy for this girl and what wasn’t? I was close to exasperation when, looking down and fingering the binding of the blanket, Libby said, “I had a miscarriage in Detroit.”
I couldn’t believe her. No well was so bottomless, no storm so unrelenting; even the worst rocks have a little greenery sticking to the bottom, not just bugs. I was convinced now that she was a liar and a nut.