Everyman by Philip Roth Page A

two.

    There was a message from Phoebe waiting for him at the hotel: "Contact me immediately. Your mother gravely ill."
    When he phoned he learned that his eighty-year-old mother had had a stroke at five A.M. Monday, New York time, and was not expected to live.
    He explained to Phoebe about the weather conditions and learned that Howie was already on his way east and that his father was keeping vigil beside his mother's bed. He wrote down the telephone number of his mother's room at the hospital, and Phoebe told him that as soon as she hung up, she would be heading over to Jersey herself, to be with his father at the hospital until Howie arrived. She had only been waiting for him to call her back. "I missed you by a few minutes this morning. The desk clerk told me, 'Madame and monsieur have just departed for the airport.'"
    "Yes," he said, "I shared a cab with the photographer's rep."
    "No, you shared a cab with the Danish twenty-four-year-old with whom you are having an affair. I'm sorry, but I can no longer look the other way. I looked the other way with that secretary. But the humiliation has now gone too far. Paris," she said with disgust. "The planning. The premeditation. The tickets and the travel agent. Tell me, which of you romantic cornballs dreamed up Paris for your sneaky little undertaking? Where did you two eat? What charming restaurants did you go to?"
    "Phoebe, I don't know what you're talking about. You're not making any sense. I'll get the first plane back that I possibly can."
    His mother died an hour before he was able to reach the hospital in Elizabeth. His father and his brother were sitting beside the body that lay beneath the covers of the bed. He had never before seen his mother in a hospital bed, though of course she had seen him there more than once. Like Howie, she had enjoyed perfect health all her life. It was she who would rush to the hospital to comfort others. Howie said, "We haven't told the staff she died. We waited. We wanted you to be able to see her before they took her away." What he saw was the high-relief contour of an elderly woman asleep. What he saw was a stone, the heavy, sepulchral, stonelike weight that says, Death is just death—it's nothing more.
    He hugged his father, who patted his hand and said, "It's best this way. You wouldn't have wanted her to live the way that thing left her."
    When he took his mother's hand and held it to his lips, he realized that in a matter of hours he had lost the two women whose devotion had been the underpinning of his strength.
    With Phoebe he lied and lied and lied, but to no avail. He told her that he had gone to Paris to break off the affair with Merete. He'd had to see her face to face to do it, and that's where she was working.
    "But in the hotel, while you were breaking off the affair, didn't you sleep with her at night in the same bed?"
    "We didn't sleep. She cried all night long."
    "For four whole nights? That's a lot of crying for a twenty-four-year-old Dane. I don't think even Hamlet cried that much."
    "Phoebe, I went to tell her it was over—and it
is
over."
    "What did I do so wrong," Phoebe asked, "that you should want to humiliate me like this? Why should you want to unhinge
everything?
Has it all been so hideous? I should get over being dumbstruck, but I can't. I, who never doubted you, to whom it rarely occurred even to question you, and now I can never believe another word you say. I can never trust you to be truthful again. Yes, you wounded me with the secretary, but I kept my mouth shut. You didn't even know I knew, did you? Well, did you?"
    "I didn't, no."
    "Because I hid my thoughts from you—unfortunately I couldn't hide them from myself. And now you wound me with the Dane and you humiliate me with the lying, and now I will
not
hide my thoughts and keep my mouth shut. A mature, intelligent woman comes along, a mate who understands what reciprocity is. She rids you of Cecilia, gives you a phenomenal daughter,