Humboldt’s Gift

  SAUL BELLOW

  THE VIKING PRESS • NEW YORK

  Copyright © 1973, 1974, 1975 by Saul Bellow

  All rights reserved

  First published in 1975 by The Viking Press, Inc.

  625 Madison Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10022

  Published simultaneously in Canada by The Macmillan Company of Canada Limited

  Excerpts originally appeared in Playboy Magazine and Esquire.

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Bellow, Saul Humboldt’s gift.

  I. Title.

  Pz3.n41937Hu 813’.5’2 [ps3503.E4488]

  ISBN 0-670-38655-3 75-12595

  Printed in U.S.A.

  Second printing August 1975

  HUMBOLDT’S GIFT

  one

  The book of ballads published by Von Humboldt Fleisher in the Thirties was an immediate hit. Humboldt was just what everyone had been waiting for. Out in the Midwest I had certainly been waiting eagerly, I can tell you that. An avant-garde writer, the first of a new generation, he was handsome, fair, large, serious, witty, he was learned. The guy had it all. All the papers reviewed his book. His picture appeared in Time without insult and in Newsweek with praise. I read Harlequin Ballads enthusiastically. I was a student at the University of Wisconsin and thought about nothing but literature day and night. Humboldt revealed to me new ways of doing things. I was ecstatic. I envied his luck, his talent, and his fame, and I went east in May to have a look at him—perhaps to get next to him. The Grey hound bus, taking the Scranton route, made the trip in about fifty hours. That didn’t matter. The bus windows were open. I had never seen real mountains before. Trees were budding. It was like Beethoven’s Pastorale. I felt showered by the green, within. Manhattan was fine, too. I took a room for three bucks a week and found a job selling Fuller Brushes door to door. And I was wildly excited about everything. Having written Humboldt a long fan letter, I was invited to Greenwich Village to discuss literature and ideas. He lived on Bedford Street, near Chumley’s. First he gave me black coffee, and then poured gin in the same cup. “Well, you’re a nice-looking enough fellow, Charlie,” he said to me. “Aren’t you a bit sly, maybe? I think you’re headed for early baldness. And such large emotional handsome eyes. But you certainly do love literature and that’s the main thing. You have sensibility,” he said. He was a pioneer in the use of this word. Sensibility later made it big. Humboldt was very kind. He introduced me to people in the Village and got me books to review. I always loved him.

  Humboldt’s success lasted about ten years. In the late Forties he started to sink. In the early Fifties I myself became famous. I even made a pile of money. Ah, money, the money! Humboldt held the money against me. In the last years of his life when he wasn’t too depressed to talk, wasn’t locked up in a loony bin, he went about New York saying bitter things about me and my “million dollars.” “Take the case of Charlie Citrine. He arrived from Madison, Wisconsin, and knocked on my door. Now he’s got a million bucks. What kind of writer or intellectual makes that kind of dough—a Keynes? Okay. Keynes, a world figure. A genius in economics, a prince in Bloomsbury,” said Humboldt. “Married to a Russian ballerina. The money follows. But who the hell is Citrine to become so rich? We used to be close friends,” Humboldt accurately said. “But there’s something perverse with that guy. After making this dough why does he bury himself in the sticks? What’s he in Chicago for? He’s afraid to be found out.”

  Whenever his mind was sufficiently clear he used his gifts to knock me. He did a great job.

  And money wasn’t what I had in mind. Oh God, no, what I wanted was to do good. I was dying to do something good. And this feeling for good went back to my early and peculiar sense of existence—sunk in the glassy depths of life and groping, thrill-ingly and desperately, for sense, a person keenly aware of painted veils, of Maya, of domes of many-colored glass staining the white radiance of eternity, quivering in the intense inane and so on. I was quite a nut about such things. Humboldt knew this, really, but toward the end he could not afford to give me any sympathy. Sick and sore, he wouldn’t let up on me. He only stressed the contradiction between the painted veils and the big money. But such sums as I made, made themselves. Capitalism made them for dark comical reasons of its own. The world did it. Yesterday I read in The Wall Street Journal about the melancholy of affluence, “Not in all the five millennia of man’s recorded history have so many been so affluent.” Minds formed by five millennia of scarcity are distorted. The heart can’t take this sort of change. Sometimes it just refuses to accept it.

  In the Twenties kids in Chicago hunted for treasure in the March thaw. Dirty snow hillocks formed along the curbs and when they melted, water ran braided and brilliant in the gutters and you could find marvelous loot—bottle tops, machine gears, Indian-head pennies. And last spring, almost an elderly fellow now, I found that I had left the sidewalk and that I was following the curb and looking. For what? What was I doing? Suppose I found a dime? Suppose I found a fifty-cent piece? What then? I don’t know how the child’s soul had gotten back, but it was back. Everything was melting. Ice, discretion, maturity. What would Humboldt have said to this?

  When reports were brought of the damaging remarks he made I often found that I agreed with him. “They gave Citrine a Pulitzer prize for his book on Wilson and Tumulty. The Pulitzer is for the birds—for the pullets. It’s just a dummy newspaper publicity award given by crooks and illiterates. You become a walking Pulitzer ad, so even when you croak the first words of the obituary are ‘Pulitzer prizewinner passes.’ “ He had a point, I thought. “And Charlie is a double Pulitzer. First came that schmaltzy play. Which made him a fortune on Broadway. Plus movie rights. He got a percentage of the gross! And I don’t say he actually plagiarized, but he did steal something from me—my personality. He built my personality into his hero.”

  Even here, sounding wild, he had grounds, perhaps.

  He was a wonderful talker, a hectic nonstop monologuist and improvisator, a champion detractor. To be loused up by Humboldt was really a kind of privilege. It was like being the subject of a two-nosed portrait by Picasso, or an eviscerated chicken by Soutine. Money always inspired him. He adored talking about the rich. Brought up on New York tabloids, he often mentioned the golden scandals of yesteryear, Peaches and Daddy Browning, Harry Thaw and Evelyn Nesbitt, plus the Jazz Age, Scott Fitzgerald, and the Super-Rich. The heiresses of Henry James he knew cold. There were times when he himself schemed comically to make a fortune. But his real wealth was literary. He had read many thousands of books. He said that history was a nightmare during which he was trying to get a good night’s rest. Insomnia made him more learned. In the small hours he read thick books —Marx and Sombart, Toynbee, Rostovtzeff, Freud. When he spoke of wealth he was in a position to compare Roman luxus with American Protestant riches. He generally got around to the Jews—Joyce’s silk-hatted Jews outside the Bourse. And he wound up with the gold-plated skull or death mask of Agamemnon, dug up by Schliemann. Humboldt could really talk.

  His father, a Jewish Hungarian immigrant, had ridden with Pershing’s cavalry in Chihuahua, chasing Pancho Villa in a Mexico of whores and horses (very different from my own father, a small gallant person who shunned such things). His old man had plunged into America. Humboldt spoke of boots, bugles, and bivouacs. Later came limousines, luxury hotels, palaces in Florida. His father had lived in Chicago during the boom. He was in the real-estate business and kept a suite at the Edgewater Beach Hotel. Summers, his son was sent for. Humboldt knew Chicago, too. In the days of Hack Wilson and Woody English the Fleishers had a box at Wrigley Field. They drove to the game in a Pierce-Arrow or a Hispano-Suiza (Humboldt was car-crazy). And there were lovely John Held, Jr., girls, beautiful, who wore step-ins. And whisky and gangsters and the pillared doom-dark La Salle Street banks with railroad money and pork and reaper money locked in steel vaults. Of this Chicago I was completely ignorant when I arrived from Appleton. I played Piggie-move-up with Polish kids under the El tracks. Humboldt ate devil’s-food coconut-marshmallow layer cake at Henrici’s. I never saw the inside of Henrici’s.

  I did, once, see Humboldt’s mother in her dark apartment on West End Avenue. Her face was like her son’s. She was mute, fat, broad-lipped, tied up in a bathrobe. Her hair was white, bushy, Fijian. The melanin was on the back of her hands and on her dark face still darker spots as large as her eyes. Humboldt bent over to speak to her, and she answered nothing but stared out with some powerful female grievance. He was gloomy when we left the building and he said, “She used to let me go to Chicago but I was supposed to spy on the old man and copy out bank statements and account numbers and write down the names of his hookers. She was going to sue him. She’s mad, you see. But then he lost everything in the crash. Died of a heart attack down in Florida.”

  This was the background of those witty cheerful ballads. He was a manic depressive (his own diagnosis). He owned a set of Freud’s works and read psychiatric journals. Once you had read the Psychopathology of Everyday Life you knew that everyday life was psychopathology. That was all right with Humboldt. He often quoted me King Lear: “In cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in palaces, treason; and the bond cracked ‘twixt son and father. . . .” He stressed “son and father.” “Ruinous disorders follow us disquietly to our graves.”

  Well, that’s where ruinous disorders followed him seven years ago. And now as new anthologies came out I went down to Brentano’s basement and checked them. Humboldt’s poems were omitted. The bastards, the literary funeral directors and politicians who put together these collections had no use for old-hat Humboldt. So all his thinking, writing, feeling counted for nothing, all the raids behind the lines to bring back beauty had no effect except to wear him out. He dropped dead in a dismal hotel off Times Square. I, a different sort of writer, remained to mourn him in prosperity out in Chicago.

  The noble idea of being an American poet certainly made Humboldt feel at times like a card, a boy, a comic, a fool. We lived like bohemians and graduate students in a mood of fun and games. Maybe America didn’t need art and inner miracles. It had so many outer ones. The USA was a big operation, very big. The more it, the less we. So Humboldt behaved like an eccentric and a comic subject. But occasionally there was a break in his eccentricity when he stopped and thought. He tried to think himself clear away from this American world (I did that, too). I could see that Humboldt was pondering what to do between then and now, between birth and death, to satisfy certain great questions. Such brooding didn’t make him any saner. He tried drugs and drink. Finally, many courses of shock treatment had to be administered. It was, as he saw it, Humboldt versus madness. Madness was a whole lot stronger.

  I wasn’t doing so well myself recently when Humboldt acted from the grave, so to speak, and made a basic change in my life. In spite of our big fight and fifteen years of estrangement he left me something in his will. I came into a legacy.

  two

  He was a great entertainer but going insane. The pathologic element could be missed only by those who were laughing too hard to look. Humboldt, that grand erratic handsome person with his wide blond face, that charming fluent deeply worried man to whom I was so attached, passionately lived out the theme of Success. Naturally he died a Failure. What else can result from the capitalization of such nouns? Myself, I’ve always held the number of sacred words down. In my opinion Humboldt had too long a list of them—Poetry, Beauty, Love, Waste Land, Alienation, Politics, History, the Unconscious. And, of course, Manic and Depressive, always capitalized. According to him, America’s great Manic Depressive was Lincoln. And Churchill with what he called his Black Dog moods was a classic case of Manic Depression. “Like me, Charlie,” said Humboldt. “But think—if Energy is Delight and if Exuberance is Beauty, the Manic Depressive knows more about Delight and Beauty than anyone else. Who else has so much Energy and Exuberance? Maybe it’s the strategy of the Psyche to increase Depression. Didn’t Freud say that Happiness was nothing but the remission of Pain? So the more Pain the intenser the Happiness. But there is a prior origin to this, and the Psyche makes Pain on purpose. Anyway, Mankind is stunned by the Exuberance and Beauty of certain individuals. When a Manic Depressive escapes from his Furies he’s irresistible. He captures History. I think that aggravation is a secret technique of the Unconscious. As for great men and kings being History’s slaves, I think Tolstoi was off the track. Don’t kid yourself, kings are the most sublime sick. Manic Depressive heroes pull Mankind into their cycles and carry everybody away.”

  Poor Humboldt didn’t impose his cycles for very long. He never became the radiant center of his age. Depression fastened on him for good. The periods of mania and poetry ended. Three decades after Harlequin Ballads made him famous he died of a heart attack in a flophouse in the West Forties, one of those mid-town branches of the Bowery. On that night I happened to be in New York. I was there on Business—i.e., up to no good. None of my Business was any good. Estranged from everybody, he was living in a place called the Ilscombe. I went later to have a look at it. Welfare lodged old people there. He died on a rotten hot night. Even at the Plaza I was uncomfortable. Carbon monoxide was thick. Throbbing air conditioners dripped on you in the street. A bad night. And on the 727 jet, as I was flying back to Chicago next morning, I opened the Times and found Humboldt’s obituary.

  I knew that Humboldt would soon die because I had seen him on the street two months before and he had death all over him. He didn’t see me. He was gray stout sick dusty, he had bought a pretzel stick and was eating it. His lunch. Concealed by a parked car, I watched. I didn’t approach him, I felt it was impossible. For once my Business in the East was legitimate and I was not chasing some broad but preparing a magazine article. And just that morning I had been flying over New York in a procession of Coast Guard helicopters with Senators Javits and Robert Kennedy. Then I had attended a political luncheon in Central Park at the Tavern on the Green, where all the celebrities became ecstatic at the sight of one another. I was, as they say, “in great shape” myself. If I don’t look well, I look busted. But I knew that I looked well. Besides, there was money in my pockets and I had been window-shopping on Madison Avenue. If any Cardin or Hermès necktie pleased me I could buy it without asking the price. My belly was flat, I wore boxer shorts of combed Sea Island cotton at eight bucks a pair. I had joined an athletic club in Chicago and with elderly effort kept myself in shape. I played a swift hard game of paddle ball, a form of squash. So how could I talk to Humboldt? It was too much. While I was in the helicopter whopping over Manhattan, viewing New York as if I were passing in a glass-bottomed boat over a tropical reef, Humboldt was probably groping among his bottles for a drop of juice to mix with his morning gin.

  I became, after Humboldt’s death, an even more intense physical culturist. Last Thanksgiving Day I ran away from a mugger in Chicago. He jumped from a dark alley and I beat it. It was pure reflex. I leaped away and sprinted down the middle of the street. As a boy I was not a remarkable runner. How was it that in my middle fifties I became inspired with flight and capable of great bursts of speed? Later that same night I boasted, “I can still beat a junkie in the hundred-yard dash.” And to whom did I brag of this power of my legs? To a young woman named Renata. We were lying in bed. I told her how I took off —I ran like hell, I flew. And she said to me, as if on cue (ah, the courtesy, the gentility of these beautiful girls), “You’re in terrific shape, Charlie. You’re not a big fellow but you’re sturdy, solid, and you’re elegant also.” She stroked my naked sides. So my pal Humboldt was gone. Probably his very bones had crumbled in potter’s field. Perhaps there was nothing in his grave but a few lumps of soot. But Charlie Citrine was still outspeeding passionate criminals in the streets of Chicago, and Charlie Citrine was in terrific shape and lay beside a voluptuous friend. This Citrine could now perform a certain Yoga exercise and had learned to stand on his head to relieve his arthritic neck. About my low cholesterol Renata was well informed. Also I repeated to her the doctor’s comments about my amazingly youthful prostate and my supernormal EKG. Strengthened in illusion and idiocy by these proud medical reports, I embraced a busty Renata on this Posturepedic mattress. She gazed at me with love-pious eyes. I inhaled her delicious damp, personally participating in the triumph of American civilization (now tinged with the Oriental colors of Empire). But in some phantom Atlantic City boardwalk of the mind I saw a different Citrine, this one on the border of senility, his back hooked, and feeble. Oh very, very feeble, pushed in a wheelchair past the little salt ripples, ripples which, like myself, were puny. And who was pushing my chair? Was it Renata—the Renata I had taken in the wars of Happiness by a quick Patton-thrust of armor? No, Renata was a grand girl, but I couldn’t see her behind my wheelchair. Renata? Not Renata. Certainly not.

  Out in Chicago Humboldt became one of my significant dead. I spent far too much time mooning about and communing with the dead. Besides, my name was linked with Humboldt’s, for, as the past receded, the Forties began to be valuable to people fabricating cultural rainbow textiles, and the word went out that in Chicago there was a fellow still alive who used to be Von Humboldt Fleisher’s friend, a man named Charles Citrine. People doing articles, academic theses, and books wrote to me or flew in to discuss Humboldt with me. And I must say that in Chicago Humboldt was a natural subject for reflection. Lying at the southern end of the Great Lakes—twenty percent of the world’s supply of fresh water—Chicago with its gigantesque outer life contained the whole problem of poetry and the inner life in America. Here you could look into such things through a sort of fresh-water transparency.

  “How do you account, Mr. Citrine, for the rise and fall of Von Humboldt Fleisher?”

  “Young people, what do you aim to do with the facts about Humboldt, publish articles and further your careers? This is pure capitalism.”

  I thought about Humboldt with more seriousness and sorrow than may be apparent in this account. I didn’t love so many people. I couldn’t afford to lose anyone. One infallible sign of love was that I dreamed of Humboldt so often. Every time I saw him I was terribly moved, and cried in my sleep. Once I dreamed that we met at Whelan’s Drugstore on the corner of Sixth and Eighth in Greenwich Village. He was not the stricken leaden swollen man I had seen on Forty-sixth Street, but still the stout normal Humboldt of middle life. He was sitting beside me at the soda fountain with a Coke. I burst into tears. I said, “Where have you been? I thought you were dead.”

  He was very mild, quiet, and he seemed extremely well pleased, and he said, “Now I understand everything.”

  “Everything? What’s everything?”

  But he only said, “Everything.” I couldn’t get more out of him, and I wept with happiness. Of course it was only a dream such as you dream if your soul is not well. My waking character is far from sound. I’ll never get any medals for character. And all such things must be utterly clear to the dead. They have finally left the problematical cloudy earthly and human sphere. I have a hunch that in life you look outward from the ego, your center. In death you are at the periphery looking inward. You see your old pals at Whelan’s still struggling with the heavy weight of selfhood, and you hearten them by intimating that when their turn comes to enter eternity they too will begin to comprehend and at last get an idea of what has happened. As none of this is Scientific, we are afraid to think it.

  All right, then, I will try to summarize: at the age of twenty-two Von Humboldt Fleisher published his first book of ballads. You would have thought that the son of neurotic immigrants from Eighty-ninth and West End—his extravagant papa hunting Pancho Villa and, in the photo Humboldt showed me, with a head so curly that his garrison cap was falling off; his mama, from one of those Potash and Perlmutter yapping fertile baseball-and-business families, darkly pretty at first, then gloomy mad and silent—that such a young man would be clumsy, that his syntax would be unacceptable to fastidious goy critics on guard for the Protestant Establishment and the Genteel Tradition. Not at all. The ballads were pure, musical, witty, radiant, humane. I think they were Platonic. By Platonic I refer to an original perfection to which all human beings long to return. Yes, Humboldt’s words were impeccable. Genteel America had nothing to worry about. It was in a tizzy—it expected Anti-Christ to burst out of the slums. Instead this Humboldt Fleisher turned up with a love-offering. He behaved like a gentleman. He was charming. So he was warmly welcomed. Conrad Aiken praised him, T. S. Eliot took favorable notice of his poems, and even Yvor Winters had a good word to say for him. As for me, I borrowed thirty bucks and enthusiastically went to New York to talk things over with him on Bedford Street. This was in 1938. We crossed the Hudson on the Christopher Street ferry to eat clams in Hoboken and talked about the problems of modern poetry. I mean that Humboldt lectured me about them. Was Santayana right? Was modern poetry barbarous? Modern poets had more wonderful material than Homer or Dante. What they didn’t have was a sane and steady idealization. To be Christian was impossible, to be pagan also. That left you-know-what.

  I had come to hear that great things might be true. This I was told on the Christopher Street ferry. Marvelous gestures had to be made and Humboldt made them. He told me that poets ought to figure out how to get around pragmatic America. He poured it on for me that day. And there I was, having raptures, gotten up as a Fuller Brush salesman in a smothering wool suit, a hand-me-down from Julius. The pants were big in the waist and the shirt ballooned out, for my brother Julius had a fat chest. I wiped my sweat with a handkerchief stitched with a J.

  Humboldt himself was just beginning to put on weight. He was thick through the shoulders but still narrow at the hips. Later he got a prominent belly, like Babe Ruth. His legs were restless and his feet made nervous movements. Below, shuffling comedy; above, princeliness and dignity, a certain nutty charm. A surfaced whale beside your boat might look at you as he looked with his wide-set gray eyes. He was fine as well as thick, heavy but also light, and his face was both pale and dark. Golden-brownish hair flowed upward—two light crests and a dark trough. His forehead was scarred. As a kid he had fallen on a skate blade, the bone itself was dented. His pale lips were prominent and his mouth was full of immature-looking teeth, like milk teeth. He consumed his cigarettes to the last spark and freckled his tie and his jacket with burns.

  The subject that afternoon was Success. I was from the sticks and he was giving me the low-down. Could I imagine, he said, what it meant to knock the Village flat with your poems and then follow up with critical essays in the Partisan and the Southern Review? He had much to tell me about Modernism, Symbolism, Yeats, Rilke, Eliot. Also, he was a pretty good drinker. And of course there were lots of girls. Besides, New York was then a very Russian city, so we had Russia all over the place. It was a case, as Lionel Abel said, of a metropolis that yearned to belong to another country. New York dreamed of leaving North America and merging with Soviet Russia. Humboldt easily went in his conversation from Babe Ruth to Rosa Luxemburg and Béla Kun and Lenin. Then and there I realized that if I didn’t read Trotsky at once I wouldn’t be worth conversing with. Humboldt talked to me about Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, the Smolny Institute, the Shakhty engineers, the Moscow trials, Sidney Hook’s From Hegel to Marx, Lenin’s State and Revolution. In fact, he compared himself to Lenin. “I know,” he said, “how Lenin felt in October when he exclaimed, ‘Es schwindelt!’ He didn’t mean that he was schwindling everyone but that he felt giddy. Lenin, tough as he was, was like a young girl waltzing. Me too. I have vertigo from success, Charlie. My ideas won’t let me sleep. I go to bed without a drink and the room is whirling. It’ll happen to you, too. I tell you this to prepare you,” Humboldt said. In flattery he had a marvelous touch.

  Madly excited, I looked diffident. Of course I was in a state of intense preparation and hoped to knock everybody dead. Each morning at the Fuller Brush sales-team pep meeting we said in unison, “I’m fine and dandy, how are you?” But I actually was fine and dandy. I didn’t have to put it on. I couldn’t have been more eager—eager to greet housewives, eager to come in and see their kitchens, eager to hear their tales and their complaints. The passionate hypochondria of Jewish women was new to me then, I was keen to hear about their tumors and their swollen legs. I wanted them to tell me about marriage, childbirth, money, sickness, and death. Yes, I tried to put them into categories as I sat there drinking coffee. They were petty bourgeois, husband-killers, social climbers, hysterics, etcetera. But it was no use, this analytical skepticism. I was too enthusiastic. So I eagerly peddled my brushes, and just as eagerly I went to the Village at night and listened to the finest talkers in New York—Schapiro, Hook, Rahv, Huggins, and Gumbein. Under their eloquence I sat like a cat in a recital hall. But Humboldt was the best of them all. He was simply the Mozart of conversation.

  On the ferryboat Humboldt said, “I made it too young, I’m in trouble.” He was off then. His spiel took in Freud, Heine, Wagner, Goethe in Italy, Lenin’s dead brother, Wild Bill Hickok’s costumes, the New York Giants, Ring Lardner on grand opera, Swinburne on flagellation, and John D. Rockefeller on religion. In the midst of these variations the theme was always ingeniously and excitingly retrieved. That afternoon the streets looked ashen but the deck of the ferry was bright gray. Humboldt was slovenly and grand, his mind undulating like the water and the waves of blond hair rising on his head, his face with widely separated gray eyes white and tense, his hands deep in his pockets, and his feet in polo boots set close together.

  If Scott Fitzgerald had been a Protestant, said Humboldt, Success wouldn’t have damaged him so much. Look at Rockefeller Senior, he knew how to handle Success, he simply said that God had given him all his dough. Of course that was stewardship. That was Calvinism. Once he had spoken of Calvinism, Humboldt was bound to go on to Grace and Depravity. From Depravity he moved to Henry Adams, who said that in a few decades mechanical progress would break our necks anyway, and from Henry Adams he went into the question of eminence in an age of revolutions, melting pots, and masses, and from this he turned to Tocqueville, Horatio Alger, and Ruggles of Red Gap. Movie-mad Humboldt followed Screen Gossip magazine. He personally remembered Mae Murray like a goddess in sequins on the stage of Loew’s inviting kids to visit her in California. “She starred in The Queen of Tasmania and Circe the Enchantress, but she ended as a poorhouse crone. And what about what’s-his-name who killed himself in the hospital? He took a fork and hammered it into his heart with the heel of his shoe, poor fellow!”

  This was sad. But I didn’t really care how many people bit the dust. I was marvelously happy. I had never visited a poet’s house, never drunk straight gin, never eaten steamed clams, never smelled the tide. I had never heard such things said about business, its power to petrify the soul. Humboldt spoke wonderfully of the wonderful, abominable rich. You had to view them in the shield of art. His monologue was an oratorio in which he sang and played all parts. Soaring still higher he began to speak about Spinoza and of how the mind was fed with joy by things eternal and infinite. This was Humboldt the student who had gotten A’s in philosophy from the great Morris R. Cohen. I doubt that he would have talked like this to anyone but a kid from the sticks. But after Spinoza Humboldt was a bit depressed and said, “Lots of people are waiting for me to fall on my face. I have a million enemies.”

  “You do? But why?”

  “I don’t suppose you’ve read about the Cannibal Society of the Kwakiutl Indians,” said learned Humboldt. “The candidate when he performs his initiation dance falls into a frenzy and eats human flesh. But if he makes a ritual mistake the whole crowd tears him to pieces.”

  “But why should poetry make you a million enemies?”

  He said this was a good question but it was obvious that he didn’t mean it. He turned gloomy and his voice went flat—plink —as though there were one note of tin in his brilliant keyboard. He struck it now. “I may think I’m bringing an offering to the •altar, but that’s not how they see it.” No, it was not a good question, for the fact that I asked it meant that I didn’t know Evil, and if I didn’t know Evil my admiration was worthless. He forgave me because I was a boy. But when I heard the tinny plink I realized that I must learn to defend myself. He had tapped my affection and admiration, and it was flowing at a dangerous rate. This hemorrhage of eagerness would weaken me and when I was weak and defenseless I would get it in the neck. And so I figured, ah ha! he wants me to suit him perfectly, down to the ground. He’ll bully me. I’d better look out.

  On the oppressive night when I achieved my success, Humboldt picketed the Belasco Theatre. He had just been let out of Bellevue. A huge sign, Von Trenck by Charles Citrine, glittered above the street. There were thousands of electric bulbs. I arrived in black tie, and there was Humboldt with a gang of pals and rooters. I swept out of the taxi with my lady friend and was caught on the sidewalk in the commotion. Police were controlling the crowd. His cronies were shouting and rioting and Humboldt carried his picket sign as though it were a cross. In streaming characters, mercurochrome on cotton, was written, “The Author of this Play is a Traitor.” The demonstrators were pushed back by the police, and Humboldt and I did not meet face to face. Did I want him run in? the producer’s assistant asked me.

  “No,” I said, wounded, trembling. “I used to be his protégé. We were pals, the crazy son of a bitch. Let him alone.”

  Demmie Vonghel, the lady who was with me, said, “Good man! That’s right, Charlie, you’re a good man!”

  Von Trenck ran for eight months on Broadway. I had the attention of the public for nearly a year, and I taught it nothing.

  three

  Now as to Humboldt’s actual death: he died at the Ilscombe around the corner from the Belasco. On his last night, as I have reconstructed it, he was sitting on his bed in this decayed place, probably reading. The books in his room were the poems of Yeats and Hegel’s Phenomenology. In addition to these visionary authors he read the Daily News and the Post. He kept up with sports and with night life, with the jet set and the activities of the Kennedy family, with used-car prices and want ads. Ravaged as he was he maintained his normal American interests. Then at about 3 a.m.—he wasn’t sleeping much toward the end—he decided to take his garbage down and suffered a heart attack in the elevator. When the pain struck he seems to have fallen against the panel and pressed all the buttons, including the alarm button. Bells rang, the door opened, he stumbled into a corridor and fell, spilling cans, coffee grounds, and bottles from his pail. Fighting for breath, he tore off his shirt. When the cops came to take the dead man to the hospital his chest was naked. The hospital didn’t want him now, so they carried him on to the morgue. At the morgue there were no readers of modern poetry. The name Von Humboldt Fleisher meant nothing. So he lay there, another derelict.

  I visited his uncle Waldemar not long ago in Coney Island. The old horse-player was in a nursing home. He said to me, “The cops rolled Humboldt. They took away his watch and his dough, even his fountain pen. He always used a real pen. He didn’t write poetry with a ball-point.”

  “Are you sure he had money?”

  “He never went out without a hundred dollars minimum in his pocket. You ought to know how he was about money. I miss the kid. How I miss him!”

  I felt exactly as Waldemar did. I was more moved by Hum-boldt’s death than by the thought of my own. He had built himself up to be mourned and missed. Humboldt put that sort of weight into himself and developed in his face all the graver, all the more important human feelings. You’d never forget a face like his. But to what end had it been created?

  Quite recently, last spring, I found myself thinking about this in an odd connection. I was in a French train with Renata, taking a trip which, like most trips, I neither needed nor desired. Renata pointed to the landscape and said, “Isn’t that beautiful out there!” I looked out, and she was right. Beautiful was indeed there. But I had seen Beautiful many times, and so I closed my eyes. I rejected the plastered idols of the Appearances. These idols I had been trained, along with everybody else, to see, and I was tired of their tyranny. I even thought, The painted veil isn’t what it used to be. The damn thing is wearing out. Like a roller-towel in a Mexican men’s room. I was thinking of the power of collective abstractions, and so forth. We crave more than ever the radiant vividness of boundless love, and more and more the barren idols thwart this. A world of categories devoid of spirit waits for life to return. Humboldt was supposed to be an instrument of this revival. This mission or vocation was reflected in his face. The hope of new beauty. The promise, the secret of beauty.

  In the USA, incidentally, this sort of thing gives people a very foreign look.

  It was consistent that Renata should direct my attention to the Beautiful. She had a personal stake in it, she was linked with Beauty.

  Still, Humboldt’s face clearly showed that he understood what was to be done. It showed, too, that he had not gotten around to doing it. And he, too, directed my attention to landscapes. Late in the Forties, he and Kathleen, newlyweds, moved from Greenwich Village to rural New Jersey, and when I visited them he was all earth, trees, flowers, oranges, the sun, Paradise, Atlantis, Rhadamanthus. He talked about William Blake at Felpham and Milton’s Eden, and he ran down the city. The city was lousy. To follow his intricate conversation you had to know his basic texts. I knew what they were: Plato’s Timaeus, Proust on Combray, Virgil on farming, Marvell on gardens, Wallace Stevens’ Caribbean poetry, and so on. One reason why Humboldt and I were so close was that I was willing to take the complete course.

  So Humboldt and Kathleen lived in a country cottage. Humboldt several times a week came to town on business—poet’s business. He was at the height of his reputation though not of his powers. He had lined up four sinecures that I knew of. There may have been more. Considering it normal to live on fifteen bucks a week I had no way of estimating his needs and his income. He was secretive but hinted at large sums. And now he got himself appointed to replace Professor Martin Sewell at Princeton for a year. Sewell was off to give Fulbright lectures on Henry James in Damascus. His friend Humboldt was his substitute. An instructor was needed in the program and Humboldt recommended me. Making good use of my opportunities in the postwar cultural boom I had reviewed bushels of books for The New Republic and the Times. Humboldt said, “Sewell has read your pieces. Thinks you’re pretty good. You seem pleasant and harmless with your dark ingenu eyes and your nice Midwestern manners. The old guy wants to look you over.”

  “Look me over? He’s too drunk to find his way out of a sentence.”

  “As I said, you seem to be a pleasant ingenu, till your touchiness is touched. Don’t be so haughty. It’s just a formality. The fix is already in.”

  “Ingénu” was one of Humboldt’s bad words. Steeped in psychological literature, he looked quite through my deeds. My mooning and unworldliness didn’t fool him for a minute. He knew sharpness and ambition, he knew aggression and death. The scale of his conversation was as big as he could make it, and as we drove to the country in his secondhand Buick Humboldt poured it on as the fields swept by—the Napoleonic disease, Julien Sorel, Balzac’s jeune ambitieux, Marx’s portrait of Louis Bonaparte, Hegel’s World Historical Individual. Humboldt was especially attached to the World Historical Individual, the interpreter of the Spirit, the mysterious leader who imposed on Mankind the task of understanding him, etcetera. Such topics were common enough in the Village, but Humboldt brought a peculiar inventiveness and a manic energy to such discussions, a passion for intricacy and for Finneganesque double meanings and hints. “And in America,” he said, “this Hegelian individual would probably come from left field. Born in Appleton, Wisconsin, maybe, like Harry Houdini or Charlie Citrine.”

  “Why start on me? With me you’re way off.”

  I was annoyed with Humboldt just then. In the country, one night, he had warned my friend Demmie Vonghel against me, blurting out at dinner, “You’ve got to watch it with Charlie. I know girls like you. They put too much into a man. Charlie is a real devil.” Horrified at what he had blurted out, he then heaved himself up from the table and ran out of the house. We heard him pounding heavily on the pebbles of the dark country road. Demmie and I sat awhile with Kathleen. Kathleen finally said, “He dotes on you, Charlie. But there’s something in his head. That you have a mission—some kind of secret thing—and that people like that arc not exactly trustworthy. And he likes Demmie. He thinks he’s protecting her. But it isn’t even personal. You aren’t sore, are you?”

  “Sore at Humboldt? He’s too fantastic to be sore at. And especially as a protector of maidens.”

  Demmie appeared amused. And any young woman would find value in such solicitude. She asked me later in her abrupt way, “What’s this mission stuff about?”

  “Nonsense.”

  “But you once said something to me, Charlie. Or is Humboldt only talking through his hat?”

  “I said I had a funny feeling sometimes, as if I had been stamped and posted and they were waiting for me to be delivered at an important address. I may contain unusual information. But that’s just ordinary silliness.”

  Demmie—her full name was Anna Dempster Vonghel—taught Latin at the Washington Irving School, just east of Union Square, and lived on Barrow Street. “There’s a Dutch corner in Delaware,” said Demmie. “And that’s where the Vonghels came from.” She had been sent to finishing school, studied classics at Bryn Mawr, but she had also been a juvenile delinquent and at fifteen she belonged to a gang of car thieves. “Since we love each other, you have a right to know,” she said. “I have a record —hubcap-stealing, marijuana, sex offenses, hot cars, chased by cops, crashing, hospital, probation officers, the whole works. But I also know about three thousand Bible verses. Brought up on hellfire and damnation.” Her Daddy, a backwoods millionaire, raced around in his Cadillac spitting from the window. “Brushes his teeth with kitchen cleanser. Tithes to his church. Drives the Sunday-school bus. The last of the old-time Fundamentalists. Except that there are scads of them down there,” she said.

  Demmie had blue eyes with clean whites and an upturned nose that confronted you almost as expressively and urgently as the eyes. The length of her front teeth kept her mouth slightly open. Her long elegant head grew golden hair and she parted it evenly, like the curtains of a neat house. Hers was the sort of face you might have seen in a Conestoga wagon a century ago, a pioneer face, a very white sort of face. But I fell first for her legs. They were extraordinary. And these beautiful legs had an exciting defect—her knees touched and her feet were turned outward so that when she walked’fast the taut silk of her stockings made a slight sound of friction. In a cocktail crowd, where I met her, I could scarcely understand what she was saying, for she muttered in the incomprehensible fashionable Eastern lockjaw manner. But in her nightgown she was the perfect country girl, the farmer’s daughter, and pronounced her words plainly and clearly. Regularly, at about 2 a.m., her nightmares woke her. Her Christianity was the delirious kind. She had unclean spirits to cast out. She feared hell. She moaned in her sleep. Then she sat up sobbing. More than half asleep myself, I tried to calm and reassure her. “There is no hell, Demmie.”

  “I know there is hell. There is a hell—there is!”

  “Just put your head on my arm. Go back to sleep.”

  On a Sunday in September 1952 Humboldt picked me up in front of Demmie’s apartment building on Barrow Street near the Cherry Lane Theatre. Very different from the young poet with whom I went to Hoboken to eat clams, he now was thick and stout. Cheerful Demmie called down from the third-floor fire escape where she kept begonias—in the morning there was not a trace of nightmare. “Charlie, here comes Humboldt driving the four-holer.” He charged down Barrow Street, the first poet in America with power brakes, he said. He was full of car mystique, but he didn’t know how to park. I watched him trying to back into an adequate space. My own theory was that the way people parked had much to do with their intimate self-image and revealed how they felt about their own backsides. Humboldt twice got a rear wheel up on the curb and finally gave up, turning off the ignition. Then in a checked sport jacket and strap-fastened polo boots he came out, swinging shut a door that seemed two yards long. His greeting was silent, the large lips were closed. His gray eyes seemed more widely separated than ever—the surfaced whale beside the dory. His handsome face has thickened and deteriorated. It was sumptuous, it was Buddhistic, but it was not tranquil. I myself was dressed for the formal professorial interview, all too belted furled and buttoned. I felt like an umbrella. Demmie had taken charge of my appearance. She ironed my shirt, chose my necktie, and brushed flat the dark hair I still had then. I went downstairs. And there we were, with the rough bricks, the garbage cans, the sloping sidewalks, the fire escapes, Demmie waving from above and her white terrier barking at the window sill.

  “Have a nice day.”

  “Why isn’t Demmie coming? Kathleen expects her.”

  “She has to grade her Latin papers. Make lesson plans,” I said.

  “If she’s so conscientious she can do it in the country. I’d take her to the early train.”

  “She won’t do it. Besides, your cats wouldn’t like her dog.”

  Humboldt did not insist. He was devoted to the cats.

  So from the present I see two odd dolls in the front seat of the roaring, grinding four-holer. This Buick was all over mud and looked like a staff car from Flanders Field. The wheels were out of line, the big tires pounded eccentrically. Through the thin sunlight of early autumn Humboldt drove fast, taking advantage of the Sunday emptiness of the streets. He was a terrible driver, making left turns from the right side, spurting, then dragging, tailgating. I disapproved. Of course I was much better with a car but comparisons were absurd, because this was Humboldt, not a driver. Steering, he was humped huge over the wheel, he had small-boy tremors of the hands and feet, and he kept the cigarette holder between his teeth. He was agitated, talking away, entertaining, provoking, informing, and snowing me. He hadn’t slept last night. He seemed in poor health. Of course he drank, and he dosed himself with pills, lots of pills. In his briefcase he carried the Merck Manual. It was bound in black like the Bible, he consulted it often, and there were druggists who would give him what he wanted. This was something he had in common with Demmie. She too was an unauthorized pill-taker.

  The car walloped the pavement, charging toward the Holland Tunnel. Close to the large form of Humboldt, this motoring giant, in the awful upholstered luxury of the front seat, I felt the ideas and illusions that went with him. He was always accompanied by a swarm, a huge volume of notions. He said how changed the Jersey swamps were, even in his lifetime, with roads, dumps, and factories, and what would a Buick like this with power brakes and power steering have meant even fifty years ago. Imagine Henry James as a driver, or Walt Whitman, or Mallarmé. We were off: he discussed machinery, luxury, command, capitalism, technology, Mammon, Orpheus and poetry, the riches of the human heart, America, world civilization. His task was to put all of this, and more, together. The car went snoring and squealing through the tunnel and came out in bright sunlight. Tall stacks, a filth artillery, fired silently into the Sunday sky with beautiful bursts of smoke. The acid smell of gas refineries went into your lungs like a spur. The rushes were as brown as onion soup. There were seagoing tankers stuck in the channels, the wind boomed, the great clouds were white. Far out, the massed bungalows had the look of a necropolis-to-be. Through the pale sun of the streets the living went to church. Under Humboldt’s polo boot the carburetor gasped, the eccentric tires thumped fast on the slabs of the highway. The gusts were so strong that even the heavy Buick fluttered. We plunged over the Pulaski Skyway while the stripes of girder shadows came at us through the shuddering windshield. In the back seat were books, bottles, beer cans, and paper bags—Tristan Corbière, I remember, Les Amours Jaunes in a yellow jacket, The Police Gazette, pink, with pictures of vulgar cops and sinful kittycats.

  Humboldt’s house was in the Jersey back country, near the Pennsylvania line. This marginal land was good for nothing but chicken farms. The approaches were unpaved and we drove in dust. Briars lashed the Roadmaster as we swayed on huge springs through rubbishy fields where white boulders sat. The busted muffler was so loud that though the car filled the lane there was no need to honk. You could hear us coming. Humboldt yelled, “Here’s our place!” and swerved. We rolled over a hummock or earth-wave. The front of the Buick rose and then dived into the weeds. He squeezed the horn, fearing for his cats, but the cats lit out and found safety on the roof of the woodshed which had collapsed under the snow last winter.

  Kathleen was waiting in the yard, large, fair-skinned, and beautiful. Her face, in the feminine vocabulary of praise, had “wonderful bones.” But she was pale, and she had no country color at all. Humboldt said she seldom went outside. She sat in the house reading books. It was exactly like Bedford Street, here, except that the surrounding slum was rural. Kathleen was glad to see me, and gave my hand a kind touch. She said, “Welcome, Charlie.” She said, “Thank you for coming. But where’s Demmie, couldn’t she come? I’m very sorry.”

  Then in my head a white flare went off. There was an illumination of curious clarity. I saw the position into which Humboldt had placed Kathleen and I put it into words: Lie there. Hold still. Don’t wiggle. My happiness may be peculiar, but once happy I will make you happy, happier than you ever dreamed. When I am satisfied the blessings of fulfillment will flow to all mankind. Wasn’t this, I thought, the message of modern power? This was the voice of the crazy tyrant speaking, with peculiar lusts to consummate, for which everyone must hold still. I grasped it at once. Then I thought that Kathleen must have secret feminine reasons for going along. I too was supposed to go along, and in another fashion I too was to hold still. Humboldt had plans also for me, beyond Princeton. When he wasn’t a poet he was a fanatical schemer. And I was peculiarly susceptible to his influence. Why that was I have only recently begun to understand. But he thrilled me continually. Whatever he did was delicious. Kathleen seemed aware of this and smiled to herself as I came out of the car. I stood on the down-beaten grass.

  “Breathe the air,” Humboldt said. “Different from Bedford Street, hey?” He then quoted, “This castle hath a pleasant seat. Also, The heaven’s breath smells wooingly here.”

  We then started to play football. He and Kathleen played all the time. This was why the grass was trampled. Kathleen spent most of the day reading. To understand what her husband was talking about she had to catch up, she said, on James, Proust, Edith Wharton, Karl Marx, Freud, and so on. “I have to make a scene to get her out of the house for a little football,” said Humboldt. She threw a very good pass—a hard, accurate spiral. Her voice trailed as she ran barelegged and made the catch on her breast. The ball in flight wagged like a duck’s tail. It flew under the maples, over the clothesline. After confinement in the car, and in my interview clothes, I was glad to play. Humboldt was a heavy choppy runner. In their sweaters he and Kathleen looked like two rookies, big, fair, padded out. Humboldt said, “Look at Charlie, jumping like Nijinsky.”

  I was as much Nijinsky as his house was Macbeth’s castle. The crossroads had eaten into the small bluff the cottage sat on, and it was beginning to tip. By and by they’d have to prop it up. Or sue the county, said Humboldt. He’d sue anyone. The neighbors raised poultry on this slummy land. Burdocks, thistles, dwarf oaks, cottonweed, chalky holes, and whitish puddles everywhere. It was all pauperized. The very bushes might have been on welfare. Across the way, the chickens were throaty—they sounded like immigrant women—and the small trees, oaks sumacs ailanthus, were underprivileged, dusty, orphaned-looking. The autumn leaves were pulverized and the fragrance of leaf-decay was pleasant. The air was empty but good. As the sun went down the landscape was like the still frame of an old movie on sepia film. Sunset. A red wash spreading from remote Pennsylvania, sheep bells clunking, dogs in the brown barnyards. I was trained in Chicago to make something of such a scant setting. In Chicago you became a connoisseur of the near-nothing. With a clear eye I looked at a clear scene, I appreciated the red sumac, the white rocks, the rust of the weeds, the wig of green on the bluff over the crossroads.

  It was more than appreciation. It was already an attachment. It was even love. The influence of a poet probably contributed to the feeling for this place that developed so quickly. I’m not referring to the privilege of being admitted to the literary life, though there may have been a touch of that. No, the influence was this: one of Humboldt’s themes was the perennial human feeling that there was an original world, a home-world, which was lost. Sometimes he spoke of Poetry as the merciful Ellis Island where a host of aliens began their naturalization and of this planet as a thrilling but insufficiently humanized imitation of that home-world. He spoke of our species as castaways. But good old peculiar Humboldt, I thought (and I was peculiar enough in my own right), now has taken on the challenge of challenges. You needed the confidence of genius to commute between this patch, Nowhere, New Jersey, and the home-world of our glorious origin. Why did the crazy son of a bitch make things so hard for himself? He must have bought this joint in a blaze of mania. But now, running far into the weeds to catch the waggle-tailed ball as it flew over the clotheslines in the dusk, I was really very happy. I thought, Maybe he can swing it. Perhaps, being lost, one should get loster; being very late for an appointment, it might be best to walk slower, as one of my beloved Russian writers advised.

  I was dead wrong. It wasn’t a challenge, and he wasn’t even trying to swing it.

  When it grew too dark to play we went inside. The house was Greenwich Village in the fields. It was furnished from thrift shops, rummage sales, and church bazaars, and seemed to rest on a foundation of books and papers. We sat in the parlor drinking from peanut-butter glasses. Big fair wan lovely pale-freckled Kathleen with that buoyant bust gave kindly smiles but mostly she was silent. Wonderful things are done by women for their husbands. She loved a poet-king and allowed him to hold her captive in the country. She sipped beer from a Pabst can. The room was low pitched. Husband and wife were large. They sat together on the Castro sofa. There wasn’t enough room on the wall for their shadows. They overflowed onto the ceiling. The wallpaper was pink—the pink of ladies’ underclothing or chocolate creams—in a rose-and-lattice pattern. Where a stovepipe had once entered the wall there was a gilt-edged asbestos plug. The cats came and glared through the window, humorless. Humboldt and Kathleen took turns letting them in. There were old-fashioned window pins to pull. Kathleen laid her chest to the panes, lifting the frame with the heel of her hand and boosting also with her bosom. The cats entered bristling with night static.

  Poet, thinker, problem drinker, pill-taker, man of genius, manic depressive, intricate schemer, success story, he once wrote poems of great wit and beauty, but what had he done lately? Had he uttered the great words and songs he had in him? He had not. Unwritten poems were killing him. He had retreated to this place which sometimes looked like Arcadia to him and sometimes looked like hell. Here he heard the bad things being said of him by his detractors—other writers and intellectuals. He grew malicious himself but seemed not to hear what he said of others, how he slandered them. He brooded and intrigued fantastically. He was becoming one of the big-time solitaries. And he wasn’t meant to be a solitary. He was meant to be in active life, a social creature. His schemes and projects revealed this.

  At this time he was sold on Adlai Stevenson. He thought that if Adlai could beat Ike in the November election, Culture would come into its own in Washington. “Now that America is a world power, philistinism is finished. Finished and politically dangerous,” he said. “If Stevenson is in, literature is in—we’re in, Charlie. Stevenson reads my poems.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I’m not free to tell you how, but I’m in touch. Stevenson carries my ballads with him on the campaign trail. Intellectuals are coming up in this country. Democracy is finally about to begin creating a civilization in the USA. That’s why Kathleen and I left the Village.”

  He had become a man of property by now. Moving into the barren backlands, among the hillbillies, he felt that he was entering the American mainstream. That at any rate was his cover. Because there were other reasons for the move—jealousy, sexual delusions. He told me once a long and tangled story. Kathleen’s father had tried to get her away from him, Hum-boldt. Before they were married the old man had taken her and sold her to one of the Rockefellers. “She disappeared one day,” said Humboldt. “Said she was going to the French bakery, and was gone for almost a year. I hired a private detective but you can guess what kind of security arrangements the Rockefellers with their billions would have. There are tunnels under Park Avenue.”

  “Which of the Rockefellers bought her?”

  “Bought is the word,” said Humboldt. “She was sold by her father. Never again smile when you read about White Slavery in the Sunday supplements.”

  “I suppose it was all against her will.”

  “She’s very pliant. You see what a dove she is. One-hundred-percent obedient to that vile old man. He said ‘Go,’ and she went. Maybe that was her real pleasure, which her pimp father only authorized. . . .”

  Masochism, of course. This was part of the Psyche Game which Humboldt had studied under its modern masters, a game far more subtle and rich than any patented parlor entertainment. Out in the country Humboldt lay on his sofa reading Proust, pondering the motives of Albertine. He seldom allowed Kathleen to drive to the supermarket without him. He hid the ignition key from her and kept her in purdah.

  He was a handsome man still, Kathleen adored him. He, however, suffered keen Jewish terrors in the country. He was an Oriental, she a Christian maiden, and he was afraid. He expected the KKK to burn a cross in his yard or shoot at him through the window as he lay on the Castro sofa reading Proust or inventing scandal. Kathleen told me that he looked under the hood of the Buick for booby traps. More than once Humboldt tried to get me to confess that I had similar terrors about Demmie Vonghel.

  A neighboring farmer had sold him green logs. These smoked in the small fireplace as we sat after dinner. On the table was the stripped skeleton of a turkey. The wine and beer were going fast. There was an Ann Page coffee cake and melting maple-walnut ice cream. A slight cesspool smell rose to the window, and the Skellgas cylinders resembled silver artillery shells. Humboldt was saying that Stevenson was a man of real culture, the first really since Woodrow Wilson. But Wilson was inferior in this respect to Stevenson and Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln knew Shakespeare well and quoted him at the crises of his life. “There’s nothing serious in mortality, All is but toys. . . . Duncan is in his grave; After life’s fitful fever he sleeps well . . .” These were Lincoln’s premonitions just as Lee was about to surrender. Frontiei-smen were never afraid of poetry. It was Big Business with its fear of femininity, it was the eunuchoid clergy capitulating to vulgar masculinity that made religion and art sissy things. Stevenson understood that. If you could believe Humboldt (and I couldn’t) Stevenson was Aristotle’s great-souled man. In his administration cabinet members would quote Yeats and Joyce. The new Joint Chiefs would know Thucydides. Humboldt would be consulted about each State of the Union message. He was going to be the Goethe of, the new government and build Weimar in Washington. “You be thinking what you might like to do, Charlie. Something in the Library of Congress, for a start.”

  Kathleen said, “There’s a good program on the Late Late Show. An old Bela Lugosi movie.”

  She saw that Humboldt was overexcited. He would not sleep tonight.

  Very good. We tuned in the horror picture. Bela Lugosi was a mad scientist who invented synthetic flesh. He daubed it on himself, making a fearful mask, and he broke into the rooms of beautiful maidens who screamed and fell unconscious. Kathleen, more fabulous than scientists, more beautiful than any of the ladies, sat with a hazy absent freckled half-smile. Kathleen was a somnambulist. Humboldt had surrounded her with the whole crisis of Western Culture. She went to sleep. What else could she do? I understand these decades of sleep. This is a subject 1 know well. Meantime Humboldt kept us from going to bed. He took Amytal to overcome the Benzedrine, on top of which he drank gin.

  I went out and walked in the cold. Light poured from the cottage into ruts and gullies, over the tangled road-crown of wild carrot and ragweed. Yapping dogs, foxes maybe, piercing stars. The late-late spooks jittered through the windows, the mad scientist shot it out with the police, his lab exploded, and he died in flames, the synthetic flesh melting from his face.

  Demmie on Barrow Street would be watching this same picture. She didn’t have insomnia. She dreaded sleep and preferred horror movies to bad dreams. Toward bedtime Demmie always grew restless. We would take in the 10 o’clock news and walk the dog and play backgammon and double solitaire. Then we would sit on the bed and watch Lon Chaney throwing knives with his feet.

  I hadn’t forgotten that Humboldt tried to make himself into Demmie’s protector, but I no longer had it in for him. As soon as they met, Demmie and Humboldt would begin at once to talk about old movies and new pills. When they discussed Dexamil so passionately and learnedly they lost me. But it pleased me that they had so much in common. “He’s a grand man,” said Demmie.

  And Humboldt said of Demmie, “This girl really knows her pharmaceuticals. This is an exceptional girl.” But not to tamper was more than he could bear, so he added, “She’s got a few things to get out of her system.”

  “Bunk. What things? She’s already been a juvenile delinquent.”

  “That’s not enough,” said Humboldt. “If life is not intoxicating, it’s nothing. Here it’s burn or rot. The USA is a romantic country. If you want to be sober, Charlie, it’s only because you’re a maverick and you’ll try anything.” Then he lowered his voice and spoke looking at the floor. “What about Kathleen, does she look wild? But she let herself be stolen and sold by her father to Rockefeller. . . .”

  “I still don’t know which Rockefeller bought her.”

  “I wouldn’t make any plans about Demmie, Charlie. That girl has a lot of agony to get through yet.”

  He was meddling, just meddling. Still, I took this to heart. For there was a lot of agony in Demmie. Some women wept as softly as a watering can in the garden. Demmie cried passionately, as only a woman who believes in sin can cry. When she cried you not only pitied her, you respected her strength of soul.

  Humboldt and I were up talking half the night. Kathleen lent me a sweater; she saw that Humboldt would sleep very little and maybe she took advantage of my visit to get a little rest, foreseeing an entire week of manic nights when there would be no guest to spell her.

  As a foreword to this Evening of Conversation with Von Humboldt Fleisher (for it was a sort of recital) I should like to offer a succinct historical statement: There came a time (Early Modern) when, apparently, life lost the ability to arrange itself. It had to be arranged. Intellectuals took this as their job. From, say, Machiavelli’s time to our own this arranging has been the one great gorgeous tantalizing misleading disastrous project. A man like Humboldt, inspired, shrewd, nutty, was brimming over with the discovery that the human enterprise, so grand and infinitely varied, had now to be managed by exceptional persons. He was an exceptional person, therefore he was an eligible candidate for power. Well, why not? Whispers of sane judgment plainly told him why not and made this comical. As long as we were laughing we were okay. At that time I was more or less a candidate myself. I, too, saw great opportunities, scenes of ideological victory, and personal triumph.

  Now a word about Humboldt’s conversation. What was the poet’s conversation actually like?

  He wore the look of a balanced thinker when he began, but he was not the picture of sanity. I myself loved to talk and kept up with him as long as I could. For a while it was a double concerto, but presently I was fiddled and trumpeted off the stage. Reasoning, formulating, debating, making discoveries Humboldt’s voice rose, choked, rose again, his mouth went wide, dark stains formed under his eyes. His eyes seemed blotted. Arms heavy, chest big, pants gathered with much belt to spare under his belly, the loose end of leather hanging down, he passed from statement to recitative, from recitative he soared into aria, and behind him played an orchestra of intimations, virtues, love of his art, veneration of its great men—but also of suspicion and skulduggery. Before your eyes the man recited and sang himself in and out of madness.

  He started by talking about the place of art and culture in the first Stevenson administration—his role, our role, for we were going to make hay together. He began this with an appreciation of Eisenhower. Eisenhower had no courage in politics. See what he allowed Joe McCarthy and Senator Jenner to say about General Marshall. He had no guts. But he shone in logistics and public relations, and he was no fool. He was the best type of garrison officer, easygoing, a bridge-player, he liked girls and read Zane Grey Westerns. If the public wanted a relaxed government, if it had recovered sufficiently from the Depression and now wanted a holiday from war, and felt strong enough to get along without New Dealers and prosperous enough to be ungrateful, it would vote for Ike, the sort of prince who could be ordered from a Sears Roebuck catalogue. Maybe it had had enough of great personalities like FDR and energetic men like Truman. But he didn’t wish to underrate America. Stevenson might make it. Now we would see where art would go in a liberal society, whether it was compatible with social progress. Meantime, having mentioned Roosevelt, Humboldt hinted that FDR might have had something to do with the death of Bronson Cutting. Senator Cutting’s plane had crashed while he was flying from his home state after a vote recount. How did that happen? Maybe J. Edgar Hoover was involved. Hoover kept his power by doing the dirty work of presidents. Remember how he tried to damage Burton K. Wheeler of Montana. From this Humboldt turned to Roosevelt’s sex life. Then from Roosevelt and J. Edgar Hoover to Lenin and Dzerzhinsky of the GPU. Then back to Sejanus, and the origins of secret police in the Roman Empire. Next he spoke of Trotsky’s literary theories and how heavy a load great art made in the baggage train of the Revolution. Then he went back to Ike and the peacetime life of professional soldiers in the Thirties. The drinking habits of the military. Churchill and the bottle. Confidential arrangements to protect the great from scandal. Security measures in the male brothels of New York. Alcoholism and homosexuality. The married and domestic lives of pederasts. Proust and Charlus. Inversion in the German Army before 1914. Late at night Humboldt read military history and war memoirs. He knew Wheeler-Bennett, Chester Wilmot, Lid-dell Hart, Hitler’s generals. He also knew Walter Winchell and Earl Wilson and Leonard Lyons and Red Smith, and he moved easily from the tabloids to General Rommel and from Rommel to John Donne and T. S. Eliot. About Eliot he seemed to know strange facts no one else had ever heard. He was filled with gossip and hallucination as well as literary theory. Distortion was inherent, yes, in all poetry. But which came first? And this rained down on me, part privilege, part pain, with illustrations from the classics and the sayings of Einstein and Zsa Zsa Gabor, with references to Polish socialism and the football tactics of George Halas and the secret motives of Arnold Toynbee, and (somehow) the used-car business. Rich boys, poor boys, jewboys, goyboys, chorus girls, prostitution and religion, old money, new money, gentlemen’s clubs, Back Bay, Newport, Washington Square, Henry Adams, Henry James, Henry Ford, Saint John of the Cross, Dante, Ezra Pound, Dostoevski, Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio, Gertrude Stein and Alice, Freud and Ferenczi. With Ferenczi he always made the same observation: nothing could be further from instinct than rationality and therefore, according to Ferenczi, rationality was also the height of madness. As proof, how crazy Newton became! And at this point Humboldt generally spoke of Antonin Artaud. Artaud, the playwright, invited the most brilliant intellectuals in Paris to a lecture. When they were assembled there was no lecture. Artaud came on stage and screamed at them like a wild beast. “Opened his mouth and screamed,” said Humboldt. “Raging screams. While those Parisian intellectuals sat frightened. For them it was a delicious event. And why? Artaud as the artist was a failed priest. Failed priests specialize in blasphemy. Blasphemy is aimed at a community of believers. In this case, what kind of belief? Belief only in intellect, which a Ferenczi has now charged with madness. But what does it mean in a larger sense? It means that the only art intellectuals can be interested in is an art which celebrates the primacy of ideas. Artists must interest intellectuals, this new class. This is why the state of culture and the history of culture become the subject matter of art. This is why a refined audience of Frenchmen listens respectfully to Artaud screaming. For them the whole purpose of art is to suggest and inspire ideas and discourse. The educated people of modern countries are a thinking rabble at the stage of what Marx called primitive accumulation. Their business is to reduce masterpieces to discourse. Artaud’s scream is an intellectual thing. First, an attack on the nineteenth-century ‘religion of art,’ which the religion of discourse wants to replace. . . .

  “And you can see for yourself, Charlie,” said Humboldt after more of this, “how important it is for the Stevenson administration to have a cultural adviser like me who understands this worldwide process. Somewhat.”

  Above us, Kathleen was getting into bed. Our ceiling was her floor. The boards were bare and you heard every movement. I rather envied her. I was now shivering and would have liked to get under the covers myself. But Humboldt was pointing out that we were only fifteen minutes from Trenton and two hours from Washington by train. He could shoot right in. He confided that Stevenson had already been in touch with him and that a meeting was being arranged. Humboldt asked me to help him prepare notes for this conversation, and until three in the morning we discussed this. Then I went to my room and left Humboldt pouring himself a last cup of gin.

  Next day he was still going strong. It made me giddy to hear so much subtle analysis and to have so much world history poured over my head at breakfast. He hadn’t slept at all.

  To calm himself he took a run. With slovenly shoes he pounded the gravel. Waist-high in dust, his arms bunched against his chest, he descended the road. He seemed to sink down into it under the sumacs and small oaks, between banks of brittle crab grass, thistle, milkweed, puffballs. Burrs were sticking to his pants when he returned. For running, too, he had a text. When Jonathan Swift was secretary to Sir Wm. Temple he ran miles every day to blow off steam. Thoughts too rich, emotions too dense, dark expressive needs? You could do some roadwork. That way, you sweated out the gin, too.

  He took me for a stroll and the cats accompanied us through the dead leaves and brush. They practiced pouncing. They attacked ground gossamers. With grenadier tails they bounded to sharpen their claws on trees. Humboldt was extremely fond of them. The morning air was infused with something very nice. Humboldt went in and shaved and then we drove in the fateful Buick to Princeton.

  My job was in the bag. We met Sewell for lunch—a muttering subtle drunken backward-leaning hollow-faced man. He had little to say to me. At the French restaurant he wanted to gossip with Humboldt about New York and Cambridge. Sewell, a cosmopolitan if there ever was one (in his own mind), had never gone abroad before. Humboldt didn’t know Europe either. “If you’d like to go, old friend,” said Sewell, “we could arrange that.”

  “I don’t feel quite ready,” said Humboldt. He was afraid that he would be kidnaped by former Nazis or by GPU agents.

  And as Humboldt walked me to the train, he said, “I told you it was just a formality, this interview. We’ve known each other for years, and we’ve written about each other, Sewell and I. But there are no hard feelings at all. Only I wonder why Damascus wants to know about Henry James. Well, Charlie, it should be a cheerful season for us. And if I should have to go to Washington, I know I can count on you to run things here.”

  “Damascus!” I said. “Among those Arabs he’ll be the Sheik of Apathy.”

  Pale Humboldt opened his mouth. Through small teeth he gave his near-silent laugh.

  At that time I was an apprentice and a bit player and Sewell had treated me like one. He had seen, I expect, a soft-fibered young man, handsome enough but slack, with large sleepy-looking eyes, a bit overweight, and with a certain reluctance (it showed in his glance) to become enthusiastic about other people’s enterprises. That he failed to appreciate me made me sore. But such vexatious lions always filled me with energy as well. And if I later became such a formidable mass of credentials it was because I put such slights to good use. I avenged myself by making progress. So I owed Sewell quite a lot and it was ungrateful of me, years later when I read in the Chicago paper that he was dead, to say, as I sipped my whisky, what I occasionally did say at such moments —death is good for some people. I remembered then the wisecrack I had made to Humboldt as we walked to the Princeton Dinkey connecting with the Junction. People die and the stinging things I said about them come winging back to attach themselves to me. What about this apathy? Paul of Tarsus woke up on the road to Damascus but Sewell of Princeton would sleep even deeper there. Such was my wicked meaning. I confess I am sorry now that I had said such a thing. I should add, about that interview, that it was a mistake to let Demmie Vonghel send me down dressed in charcoal gray, in a button-down collar, a knitted maroon necktie, and maroon cordovan shoes, an instant Prince-tonian.

  Anyway, it was not long after I read Sewell’s obituary in the Chicago Daily News, leaning on the kitchen counter at 4 p.m. with a glass of whisky and a snack of pickled herring, that Humboldt, who had been dead for five or six years, re-entered my life. He came from left field. I shan’t be too exact about the time of this. I was then becoming careless about time, a symptom of my increasing absorption in larger questions.

  four

  And now the present. A different side of life—entirely con-temporary.

  It was in Chicago, and not very long ago by the calendar, that I left the house one morning in December to see Murra, my accountant, and when I got downstairs I found that my Mercedes-Benz had been attacked in the night. I don’t mean that it had been banged and scraped by a reckless or drunken driver who ran away without leaving a note under my wipers. I mean that my car had been pounded all over, I assume with baseball bats. This elite machine, no longer new but worth eighteen thousand dollars three years ago, had been mauled with a ferocity difficult to grasp—to grasp, I mean, even in an esthetic sense, for these Mercedes coupes are beautiful, the silver-gray ones in particular. My dear friend George Swiebel had even said once, with a certain bitter admiration, “Murder Jews and make machines, that’s what those Germans really know how to do.”

  The attack on this car was hard on me also in a sociological sense, for I always said that I knew my Chicago and I was convinced that hoodlums, too, respected lovely automobiles. Recently a car was sunk in the Washington Park lagoon and a man was found in the trunk who had tried to batter his way out with tire-tools. Evidently he was the victim of robbers who decided to drown him—get rid of the witness. But I recall thinking that his car was only a Chevrolet. They would never have clone such a thing to a Mercedes 280-SL. I said to my friend Renata that / might be knifed or stomped on an Illinois Central platform but that this car of mine would never be hurt.

  So on this morning I was wiped out as an urban psychologist. I recognized that it hadn’t been psychology but only swagger, or perhaps protective magic. I knew that what you needed in a big American city was a deep no-affect belt, a critical mass of indifference. Theories also were very useful in the building of such a protective mass. The idea, anyway, was to ward off trouble. But now the moronic inferno had caught up with me. My elegant car, my shimmering silver motor tureen which I had had no business to buy—a person like me, hardly stable enough to drive this treasure—was mutilated. Everything! The delicate roof with its sliding panel, the fenders, hood, trunk, doors, locks, lights, the smart radiator emblem had been beaten and clubbed. The shatterproof windows had held up, but they looked spat on all over. The windshield was covered with white fracture-blooms. It had suffered a kind of crystalline internal hemorrhage. Appalled, I nearly broke down, I felt like swooning.

  Someone had done to my car as rats, I had heard, did when they raced through warehouses by the thousands and tore open sacks of flour for the hell of it. I felt a similar rip at my heart. The machine belonged to a time when my income was in excess of a hundred thousand dollars. Such an income had attracted the attention of the 1RS, which now examined all my returns, yearly. I had set out this morning to see William Murra, that well-dressed marvelous smooth expert, the CPA who was defending me in two cases against the federal government. Although my income had now dropped to its lowest level in many years they were still after me.

  I had really bought this Mercedes 280-SL because of my friend Renata. When she saw the Dodge compact I was driving when we met she said, “What kind of car is this for a famous man? There’s some kind of mistake.” I tried to explain to her that I was too susceptible to the influence of things and people to drive an eighteen-thotisand-dollar automobile. You had to live up to such a grand machine, and consequently you were not yourself at the wheel. But Renata dismissed this. She said that I didn’t know how to spend money, that I neglected myself, and that I shirked the potentialities of my success and was afraid of it. She was an interior decorator by trade, and style or panache came natural to her. Suddenly I got the idea. I went into what I called an Antony and Cleopatra mood. Let Rome in Tiber melt. Let the world know that such a mutual pair could wheel through Chicago in a silver Mercedes, the engines ticking like wizard-made toy millipedes and subtler than a Swiss Accutron—no, an Audemars Piguet with jeweled Peruvian butterfly wings! In other words, I had allowed the car to become an extension of my own self (on the folly and vanity side), so that an attack on it was an attack on myself. It was a moment terribly fertile in reactions.

  How could such a thing happen on a public street? The noise must have been louder than rivet guns. Of course the lessons of jungle guerrilla tactics were being applied in all the great cities of the world. Bombs were exploding in Milan and London. Still, mine is a relatively quiet Chicago neighborhood. I was parked around the corner from my high-rise, in a narrow side street. But wouldn’t the doorman have heard such clattering in the middle of the night? No, people generally hide under the covers when there are disturbances. Hearing pistol shots they say, “Backfire,” to one another. As for the night-man he locks up at 1 a.m. and washes the floors. He changes in the cellar into a gray denim suit saturated with sweat. Entering the lobby late you smell the combined odors of soap powder and the musk of his denims (like rotting pears). No, the criminals who battered my car would have had no problems with the doorman. Nor with the police. As soon as the squad car had passed, knowing that it wouldn’t return for fifteen minutes, they had jumped out of hiding and fallen on my car with bats, clubs, or hammers.

  I knew perfectly well who was responsible for this. I had been warned over and over again. Late at night the phone often rang. Stumbling toward consciousness I picked it up and even before I could bring it to my ear I already heard my caller yelling, “Citrine! You! Citrine!”

  “Yes? Yes, this is Citrine. Yes?”

  “You son of a bitch. Pay me. Look what you’re doing to me.”

  “Doing to you?”

  “To me! Fucking-A-right. The check you stopped was to me. Make good, Citrine. Make that lousy check good. Don’t force me to do something.”

  “I was fast asleep—”

  “I’m not sleeping, why should you be?”

  “I’m trying to wake up, Mr.—”

  “No names! All we have to talk about is a stopped check. No names! Four hundred and fifty bucks. That’s our only subject.”

  These gangster threats in the night against me—me! of all people! a peculiar soul and, in my own mind, almost comically innocent—made me laugh. My way of laughing has often been criticized. Well-disposed people are amused by it. Others can be offended.

  “Don’t laugh,” said my night caller. “Knock it off. That’s not a normal sound. Anyhow, who the hell do you think you’re laughing at? Listen, Citrine, you lost the dough to me in a poker game. You’ll say it was just a family evening, or you were drunk, but that’s a lot of crap. I took your check, and I won’t hold still for a slap in the face.”

  “You know why I stopped payment. You and your buddy were cheating.”

  “Did you see us?”

  “The host saw. George Swiebel swears you were flashing cards to each other.”

  “Why didn’t he speak up, that dumb prick. He should have thrown us out.”

  “He may have been afraid to tackle you.”

  “Who, that health fiend, with all the color in his face? For Christ sake he looks like an apple, with all that jogging five miles a day, and the vitamins I saw in his medicine chest. There were seven, eight people at the game. They could have bounced us. Your friend has no guts.”

  I said, “Well, it wasn’t a good evening. I was high, though you don’t believe it. Nobody was rational. Everyone was out of character. Let’s be sensible.”

  “What, I have to hear from my bank about your stop order, which is like a kick in the ass, and then be sensible? You think I’m a punk? It was a mistake to get into all that talk about education and colleges. I saw the look you gave when I told the name of the cow-college I went to.”

  “What’s colleges got to do with it?”

  “Don’t you understand what you’re doing to me? You’ve written all that stuff. You’re in Who’s Who. But you dumb asshole you don’t understand anything.”

  “At two in the morning it’s hard for me to understand. Can’t we meet in the daytime when my head is clear?”

  “No more talk. Talk is finished.”

  He said this many times, however. I must have received ten such calls from Rinaldo Cantabile. The late Von Humboldt Fleisher had also used the dramatic properties of night to bully and harass people.

  George Swiebel had ordered me to stop the check. My friendship with George goes back to the fifth grade, and to me such pals are a sacred category. I have been warned often against this terrible weakness or dependency on early relationships. Once an actor, George had given up the stage decades ago and become a contractor. He was a wide-built fellow with a ruddy color. There was nothing subdued about his manner, his clothing, his personal style. For years he had been my self-designated expert on the underworld. He kept me informed about criminals, whores, racing, the rackets, narcotics, politics, and Syndicate operations. Having been in radio and television and journalism, his connections were unusually extensive, “from putrid, to pure,” he would say. And I was well up among the pure. I make no such claims for myself. This is to explain how George saw me.

  “You lost that money at my kitchen table, and you’d better listen,” he said. “Those punks were cheating.”

  “Then you should have called them on it. Cantabile has a point.”

  “He’s got nothing, and he’s nobody. If he owed you three bucks, you’d have to chase him for it. Also he was spaced out on drugs.”

  “I didn’t notice.”

  “You didn’t notice anything. I gave you the high sign a dozen times.”

  “I didn’t see. I can’t remember. , . .”

  “Cantabile was working on you every minute. He snowed you. He was smoking pot. He was talking art and culture and psychology and the Book-of-the-Month Club and bragging about his educated wife. You bet every hand you were dealt. And every single subject I ever asked you not to mention you were discussing freely.”

  “George, these night calls of his are wearing me down. I’ll pay him. Why not? I pay everybody. I have to get rid of this creep.”

  “No pay!” Trained as an actor, George had learned to swell his voice theatrically, to glare, to seem startled and to have a startling effect. He shouted at me, “Charlie, you listen!”

  “But I’m dealing with a gangster.”

  “There are no Cantabiles in the rackets any more. They all got thrown out years ago. I told you. . . .”

  “He puts on a damned good imitation then. At two a.m. I’m convinced that he’s a real hoodlum.”

  “He’s seen The Godfather or something, and he’s grown a dago mustache. He’s only a confused big-mouth kid and a dropout. I shouldn’t have let him and his cousin into the house. Now you forget this. They were playing gangster and they cheated. I tried to stop you giving him the check. Then I made you stop payment. I won’t let you give in. Anyhow, the whole thing— take it from me—is over.”

  So I submitted. I couldn’t challenge George’s judgment. Now Cantabile had hit my car with everything he had. The blood left my heart when I saw what he had done. I dropped back against the building for support. I had gone out one evening to amuse myself in vulgar company and I had fallen into the moronic inferno.

  Vulgar company was not my own expression. What I was in fact hearing was the voice of my ex-wife. It was Denise who used terms like “common clay” and “vulgar company.” The fate of my poor Mercedes would have given her very deep satisfaction. This was something like war, and she had an intensely martial personality. Denise hated Renata, my lady friend. She correctly identified Renata with this automobile. And she loathed George Swiebel. George, however, took a complex view of Denise. He said that she was a great beauty but not altogether human. Certainly Denise’s huge radial amethyst eyes in combination with a low-lined forehead and sharp sibylline teeth supported this interpretation. She is exquisite, and terribly fierce. Down-to-earth George is not without myths of his own, especially where women are concerned. He has Jungian views, which he expresses coarsely. He has fine feelings which frustrate him because they fiddle his heart, and he overreacts grossly. Anyway, Denise would have laughed with happiness at the sight of this ruined car. And I? You would have thought that being divorced I had escaped the marital “I-told-you-so.” But here I was, supplying it myself.

  For Denise continually spoke to me about myself. She would say, “I just can’t believe the way you are. The man who’s had all those wonderful insights, the author of all these books, respected by scholars and intellectuals all over the world. I sometimes have to ask myself, ‘Is that my husband? The man I know?’ You’ve lectured at the great Eastern universities and had grants and fellowships and honors. De Gaulle made you a knight of the Legion of Honor and Kennedy invited us to the White House. You had a successful play on Broadway. Now what the hell do you think you’re doing? Chicago! You hang around with your old Chicago school chums, with freaks. It’s a kind of mental suicide, death wish. You’ll have nothing to do with really interesting people, with architects or psychiatrists or university professors. I tried to make a life for you when you insisted on moving back here. I put myself out. You wouldn’t have London or Paris or New York, you had to come back to this—this deadly, ugly, vulgar, dangerous place. Because at heart you’re a kid from the slums. Your heart belongs to the old West Side gutters. I wore myself out being a hostess. . . .”

  There were large grains of truth in all of this. My old mother’s words for Denise would have been “Edel, gebildet, gelassen,” for Denise was an upper-class person. She grew up in Highland Park. She went to Vassar College. Her father, a federal judge, also came from the West Side Chicago gutters. His father had been a precinct captain under Morris Eller in the stormy days of Big Bill Thompson. Denise’s mother had taken the judge when he was a mere boy, only the son of a crooked politician, and straightened him out and cured him of his vulgarity. Denise had expected to do as much with me. But oddly enough her paternal inheritance was stronger than the maternal. On days when she was curt and tough, in her high tense voice you heard that old precinct captain and bagman, her grandfather. Because of this background, perhaps, she hated George fiercely. “Don’t bring him to the house,” she said. “I can’t bear to see his ass on my sofa, his feet on my rug.” Denise said, “You’re like one of those overbred race horses that must have a goat in his stall to calm his nerves. George Swiebel is your billy goat.”

  “He’s a good friend to me, an old friend.”

  “Your weakness for your school chums isn’t to be believed. You have the nostalgie de la boue. Does he take you around to the whores?”

  I tried to give a dignified answer. But as a matter of fact I wanted the conflict to increase, and I provoked Denise. On the maid’s night out I once brought George home to dinner. Maid’s night out threw Denise into an anguish of spirit. Housework was insufferable. It killed her to have to cook. She wanted to go to a restaurant, but I said I didn’t feel like dining out. So at six o’clock, she hastily mixed ground meat with tomatoes, kidney beans, and chili powder. I said to George, “Share our chili con carne tonight. We can open a few bottles of beer.”

  Denise signaled me to come into the kitchen. She said, “I won’t have this.” She was warlike and shrill. Her voice was clear, thrilling, and minutely articulate—the rising arpeggios of hysteria.

  “Oh, come on. Denise, he can hear you.” I lowered my voice and said, “Let George have some of this chili con carne.”

  “There’s not enough. It’s just half a pound of hamburger. But that’s not the point. The point is I won’t serve him.”

  I laughed. Partly from embarrassment. I am normally a low baritone, almost basso profundo, but under certain kinds of provocation my voice disappears into the higher registers, perhaps into the bat range.

  “Listen to that screeching,” said Denise. “You give yourself away when you laugh like this. You were born in a coal scuttle. Brought up in a parrot-house.”

  Her great violet eyes were unyielding.

  “All right,” I said. I took George to the Pump Room. We ate shashlik brought in flaming by turbaned Moors.

  “I don’t want to interfere in your marriage, but I notice you’ve stopped breathing,” said George.

  George feels that he can speak for Nature. Nature, instinct, heart guide him. He is biocentric. To see him rub his large muscles, his Roman Ben Hur chest and arms with olive oil is a lesson in piety toward the organism. Concluding, he takes a long swig from the bottle. Olive oil is the sun and the ancient Mediterranean. Nothing is better for the bowels, the hair, the skin. He holds his own body in numinous esteem. He is a priest to the inside of his nose, his eyeballs, his feet. “You’re not getting enough air with that woman. You look as if you’re suffocating. Your tissues aren’t getting any oxygen. She’ll give you cancer.”

  “Oh,” I said. “She may think she’s offering me the blessings of an American marriage. Real Americans are supposed to suffer with their wives, and wives with husbands. Like Mr. and Mrs. Abraham Lincoln. It’s the classic US grief, and a child of immigrants like me ought to be grateful. For à Jew it’s a step up.”

  Yes, Denise would be overjoyed to hear of this atrocity. She had seen Renata speeding past in the silver Mercedes. “And you, the passenger,” said Denise, “getting to be as bald as a barber pole, even if you comb your side-hair over to hide it, and grinning. She’ll give you something to grin about, that fat broad.” From insult Denise went into prophecy. “Your mental life is going to dry out. You’re sacrificing it to your erotic needs (if that’s the term for what you have). After sex, what can you two talk about. . . ? Well, you wrote a few books, you wrote a famous play, and even that was half ghosted. You associated with people like Von Humboldt Fleisher. You took it into your head that you were some kind of artist. We know better, don’t we. And what you really want is to get rid of everybody, to tune out and be a law unto yourself. Just you and your misunderstood heart, Charlie. You couldn’t bear a serious relationship, that’s why you got rid of me and the children. Now you’ve got this tramp with the fat figure who wears no bra and shows her big nipples to the world. You’ve got ignorant kikes and hoodlums around you. You’re crazy with your own brand of pride and snobbery. There’s nobody good enough for you. ... I could have helped you. Now it’s too late!”

  I would not argue with Denise. I felt a certain sympathy with her. She said I was living badly. I agreed. She thought I wasn’t all there, and I would have had to be completely crazy to deny it. She said I was writing stuff that made sense to no one. Maybe so. My last book, Some Americans, subtitled The Sense of Being in the USA, was quickly remaindered. The publishers had begged me not to print it. They offered to forget a debt of twenty thousand dollars if I would shelve it. But now I was perversely writing Part II. My life was in great disorder.

  I was, however, loyal to something. I had an idea.

  “Why did you ever bring me back to Chicago?” said Denise. “Sometimes I think you did it because your dead are buried here. Is that the reason? Land where my Jewish fathers died? And you dragged me to your graveyard so you could get into the anthem? And what’s it about? All because you have delusions about being a marvelous noble person. Which you are—like hell!”

  Such abuse does Denise more good than vitamins. As for me, I find that certain kinds of misunderstanding are full of useful hints. But my final though silent answer to Denise was always the same. Despite her intelligence, she had been bad for my idea. From that standpoint, Renata was the better woman—better for me.

  Renata had forbidden me to drive a Dart. I tried to negotiate with the Mercedes salesman for a secondhand 250-C, but in the showroom Renata—roused, florid, fragrant, large—had put her hand on the silver hood and said, “This one—the coupe.” The touch of her palm was sensual. Even what she did to the car I felt in my own person.

  five

  But now something had to be done about this wreck. I went to the Receiving Room and fetched Roland the doorman—skinny, black, elderly, never-shaven Roland. Roland Stiles, unless I deceived myself (a strong likelihood), was on my side. In my fantasies of solitary death it was Roland whom I saw in my bedroom filling a flight bag with a few articles before calling the police. He did so with my blessing. He particularly needed my electric razor. His intensely black face was pitted and spiky. Shaving with a blade must have been nearly impossible.

  Roland, in the electric-blue uniform, was perturbed. He had seen the ruined car when he came to work in the morning but, he said, “I couldn’t be the one to tell you, Mist’ Citrine.” Tenants on their way to work had seen it, too. They knew of course to whom it belonged. “This is a real bitch,” said Roland soberly, his lean old face twisted and his mouth and mustache puckered. Quickwitted, he had always kidded me about the beautiful ladies who called on me. “They come in Volkswagens and Cadillacs, on bikes and motorcycles, in taxis and walkin’. They ask when you went out, and when you comin’ back, and they leave notes. They come, they come, they come. You some ladies’ man. Plenty of husbands got it in for you, I bet.” But the amusement was gone. Roland hadn’t been a black man sixty years for nothing. He knew moronic infernos. I had lost the immunity which made my ways so entertaining. “You in trouble,” he said. He muttered something about “Miss Universe.” He called Renata Miss Universe. Sometimes she paid him to entertain her little boy in the Receiving Room. The child played with parcels while his mother lay in my bed. I didn’t like it, but you can’t be a ridiculous lover by halves.

  “Now what?”

  Roland twisted his hands outward. He lifted his shoulders. Shrugging, he said, “Call the cops.”

  Yes, a report had to be filed, if only because of the insurance. The insurance company would find this a very queer case. “Well, flag the squad car when it passes. Have those useless fellows look at this ruin,” I said. “And then send them up.”

  I gave him a dollar for his trouble. I usually did that. And now the flow of malevolence had to be reversed.

  Through my apartment door I heard the telephone. It was Cantabile.

  “All right, smart-ass.”

  “Insane!” I said. “Vandalism! Beating a machine. . . !”

  “You’ve seen your car—you saw what you made me do!” He yelled. He forced his voice. Nevertheless it shook.

  “What’s that? You’re blaming me?”

  “You were warned.”

  “I made you hammer that beautiful automobile?”

  “You made me. Yes, you. You sure did. You think I don’t have feelings? You wouldn’t believe how I feel about a car like that. You’re stupid. This is nobody’s fault but yours.” I tried to answer but he shouted me down. “You forced me! You made me! Okay, last night was only step one.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Don’t pay me and you’ll see what it means.”

  “What kind of threat is that? This is getting out of hand. Do you mean my daughters?”

  “I’m not going to a collection agency. You don’t know what you’re into. Or who I am. Wake up!”

  I often said “Wake up!” to myself, and many people also have cried, “Wake, wake!” As if I had a dozen eyes, and stubbornly kept them sealed. “Ye have eyes and see not.” This, of course, was absolutely true.

  Cantabile was still speaking. I heard him say, “So, go and ask George Swiebel what to do. He gave you the advice. He, like, smashed your car.”

  “Let’s stop all this. I want to settle.”

  “No settle. Pay. Make good the check. The full amount. And cash. No money orders, no cashier’s check, no more fucking around. Cash. I’ll call you later. We’ll make a date. I want to see you.”

  “When?”

  “Never mind when. You stick by the telephone till I call.”

  Next instant I heard the interminable universal electronic miaow of the phone. And I was desperate. I had to tell what had happened. I needed to consult.

  A sure sign of distress: telephone numbers stormed through my head—area codes, digits. I must telephone someone. The first person I called was George Swiebel, of course; I had to tell him what had happened. I also had to warn him. Cantabile might attack him, too. But George was out with a crew. They were pouring a concrete footing somewhere, said Sharon, his secretary. George, before he became a businessman, was, as I have said, an actor. He started out in the Federal Theater. Afterward he was a radio announcer. He had tried television and Hollywood as well. Among business people he spoke of his show-business experience. He knew his Ibsen and his Brecht and he often flew to Minneapolis to see plays at the Guthrie Theatre. In South Chicago he was identified with Bohemia and the Arts, with creativity, with imagination. And he was vital, generous, had an open nature. He was a good guy. People formed strong attachments to him. Look at this little Sharon, his secretary. She was a hillbilly, dwarfish and queer-faced, and looked like Mammy Yokum in the funnies. Yet George was her brother, her doctor, her priest, her tribe. She had, as it were, surveyed South Chicago and found only one man there, George Swiebel. When I spoke to her, I had enough presence of mind to dissemble, for if I had told Sharon how shocking things were she would not have given George the message. George’s average day, as he and his people saw it, was one crisis after another. Her job was to protect him. “Ask George to call me,” I said. I hung up thinking of the crisis-outlook in the USA, a legacy from old frontier times, etcetera. I thought these things from force of habit. Just because your soul is being torn to pieces doesn’t mean that you stop analyzing the phenomena.

  I restrained my real desire, which was to scream. I recognized that I would have to recompose myself unassisted. I didn’t dial Renata. Renata is not especially good at giving consolation over the phone. You have to get it from her in person.

  Now I had Cantabile’s ring to wait for. And the police as well. I had to explain to Murra the CPA that I wouldn’t be coming in. He’d charge me for the hour anyway, after the manner of psychiatrists and other specialists. That afternoon I was to have taken my small daughters Lish and Mary to their piano teacher. For, as the Gulbransen Piano Co. used to say on the brick walls of Chicago, “The richest child is poor without a musical education.” And mine were rich man’s daughters, and it would be a disaster if they grew up unable to play “Fur Elise” and the “Happy Farmer.”

  I had to recover my calm. Seeking stability, I did the one Yoga exercise I know. I took the small change and the keys out of my pockets, I removed my shoes, took a position on the floor, advancing my toes, and, with a flip, I stood on my head. My loveliest of machines, my silver Mercedes 280, my gem, my love-offering, stood mutilated in the street. Two thousand dollars’ worth of bodywork would never restore the original smoothness of the metal skin. The headlights were crushed blind. I hadn’t the heart to try the doors, they might be jammed shut. I tried to concentrate on hatred and fury—revenge, revenge! But I couldn’t get anywhere with that. I could only see the German steward at the shop in his long white smock, like a dentist, telling me that parts would have to be imported. And I, clutching my half-bald head in both hands as if in despair, fingers interlocked, had my trembling aching legs in the air, tufts of side-hair sticking out, and the green Persian carpet flowing under me. I was heart-injured. I was desolate. The beauty of the carpet was one of my comforts. I have become deeply attached to carpets, and this one was a work of art. The green was soft and varied with great subtlety. The red was one of those surprises that seem to spring straight from the heart. Stribling, my downtown expert, told me that I could get far more than I had paid for this rug. Everything that wasn’t mass-produced was zooming in value. Stribling was an obese excellent man who kept horses but now was too heavy to ride. Few people seemed to be consummating anything good, these days. Look at me. I couldn’t be serious, becoming involved in this sort of grotesque comic Mercedes-and-Underworld thing. As I stood on my head, I knew (I would know!) that there was a sort of theoretical impulse behind this grotesqueness too, one of the powerful theories of the modern world being that for self-realization it’s necessary to embrace the deformity and absurdity of the inmost being (we know it’s there!). Be healed by the humiliating truth the Unconscious contains. I didn’t buy this theory, but that didn’t mean that I was free from it. I had a talent for absurdity, and you don’t throw away any of your talents.

  I was thinking that I’d never get a penny from the insurance company on a queer claim like this. I had bought every kind of protection they offered, but somewhere in the small print they were sure to have the usual foxy clauses. Under Nixon the great corporations became drunk with immunity. The good old bourgeois virtues, even as window dressing, are gone forever.

  It was from George that I had learned this upside-down position. George warned that I was neglecting my body. Several years ago he began to point out that my throat was becoming crepy, my color was poor, and I was easily winded. At a certain point in middle age you had to make a stand, he argued, before the abdominal wall gives, the thighs get weak and thin, the breasts female. There was a way to age that was physically honorable. George interpreted this for himself with peculiar zeal. Immediately after his gall-bladder operation he got out of bed and did fifty push-ups—his own naturopath. From this exertion, he got peritonitis and for two days we thought he was dying. But ailments seemed to inspire him, and he had his own cures for everything. Recently he told me, “I woke up day before yesterday and found a lump under my arm.”

  “Did you go to the doctor?”

  “No. I tied it with dental floss. I tied it tight, tight, tight. . . .”

  “What happened?”

  “Yesterday when I examined it, it had swelled up to the size of an egg. Still I didn’t call the doctor. To hell with that! I took more dental floss and tied it tight, tight, even tighter. And now it’s cured, it’s gone. You want to see?”

  It was when I told him of my arthritic neck that he prescribed standing on my head. Though I threw up my palms and shrieked with laughter (looking like one of Goya’s frog caricatures in the Vision Burlesca—the creature with the locks and bolts) I did as he advised. I practiced and learned the headstand, and I was cured of the neck pains. Next, when I had a stricture, I asked George for a remedy. He said, “It’s the prostate gland. You start, then you stop, then you trickle again, it burns a bit, you feel humiliated?”

  “All correct.”

  “Don’t worry. Now as you stand on your head, tighten your buttocks. Just suck them in as if you were trying to bring the cheeks together.”

  “Why must this be done as you stand on your head? I already feel like Old Father William.”

  But he was adamant and said, “On your head.”

  Again his method worked. The stricture went away. Others may see in George a solid high-colored good-humored building contractor; I see a hermetical personage; I see a figure from the tarot deck. If I was on my head now I was invoking George. When I’m in despair he’s always the first person I telephone. I’ve reached an age at which you can see your neurotic impulses advancing on you. There’s not much that I can do when the dire need of help comes over me. I stand at the edge of a psychic pond and I know that if crumbs are thrown in, my carp will come swimming up. You have, like the external world, your own phenomena inside. At one time I thought the civilized thing to do was to make a park and a garden for them, to keep these traits, your quirks, like birds, fishes, and flowers.

  However, the fact that I had no one but myself to turn to was awful. Waiting for bells to ring is a torment. The suspense claws at my heart. Actually, standing on my head did relieve me. I breathed again. But I saw, when I was upside-down, two large circles in front of me, very bright. These occasionally appear during this exercise. Reversed on your cranium, of course you do think of being caught by a cerebral hemorrhage. A physician advising against the headstand said to me that a chicken held upside-down would die in seven or eight minutes. But that’s obviously because of terror. The bird is scared to death. I figure that the bright rings are caused by pressure on the cornea. The weight of the body set upon the skull buckles the cornea and produces an illusion of big diaphanous rings. Like seeing eternity. Which, believe me, I was ready for on this clay.

  Behind me, I had a view of the bookcase, and when my head was readjusted, with more weight shifted to the forearms, the pellucid rings swam away, the shades of a fatal hemorrhage with them. In reverse, I saw rows and rows of my own books. I had stacked them at the back of my closets, but Renata had brought them out again to make a display. I prefer, when I’m on my head, to have a view of the sky and the clouds. It’s good fun to study the clouds upside-down. But now I was looking at the titles which had brought me money, recognition, prizes, my play, Von Trench, in many editions and languages, and a few copies of my favorite, the failure Some Americans: The Sense of Being in the USA. Von Trench while it was running brought in about eight thousand dollars a week. The government, which had taken no previous interest in my soul, immediately claimed seventy percent in the result of its creative efforts. But this was not supposed to affect me. You rendered unto Caesar what was Caesar’s. At least you knew that you should. Money belonged to Caesar. There was also Radix malorum est cupiditas. I knew all that, too.

  I knew everything I was supposed to know and nothing I really needed to know. I had bungled the whole money thing. It was highly educational, of course, and education has become the great and universal American recompense. It has even replaced punishment in the federal penitentiaries Every great prison is now a thriving seminar. The tigers of wrath are crossed with the horses of instruction, making a hybrid undreamed of in the Apocalypse. Not to labor the matter too much, I had lost most of the money that Humboldt had accused me of making. The dough came between us immediately. He put through a check for thousands of dollars. I didn’t contest this. I didn’t want to go to law. Humboldt would have been fiercely delighted with a trial. He was very litigious. But the check he cashed was actually signed by me, and I would have had a hard time explaining this in court. Besides, courts kill me. Judges, lawyers, bailiffs, stenotypists, the benches, the woodwork, the carpets, even the water glasses I hate like death. Moreover, I was actually in South America when he cashed the check. He was then running wild in New York, having been released from Bellevue. There was no one to restrain him. Kathleen had gone into hiding. His nutty old mother was in a nursing home. His uncle Waldemar was one of those eternal kid brothers to whom responsibilities are alien. Humboldt was jumping and prancing about New York being mad. Perhaps he was aware dimly of the satisfaction he was giving to the cultivated public which gossiped about his crack-up. Frantic desperate doomed crazy writers and suicidal painters are dramatically and socially valuable. And at that time he was a fiery Failure and I was a newborn Success. Success baffled me. It filled me with guilt and shame. The play performed nightly at the Belasco was not the play I had written. I had only provided a bolt of material from which the director had cut shaped basted and sewn his own Von Trenck. Brooding, I muttered to myself that after all Broadway adjoins the garment district and blends with it.

  Cops have their own way of ringing a doorbell. They ring like brutes. Of course, we are entering an entirely new stage in the history of human consciousness. Policemen take psychology courses and have some feeling for the comedy of urban life. The two heavy men who stood on my Persian carpet carried guns, clubs, cuffs, bullets, walkie-talkies. Such an unusual case—a Mercedes beaten in the street—amused them. This pair of black giants had a squad-car odor, the smell of close quarters. Their hardware clinked, their hips and bellies swelled and bulged.

  “I never saw such massacre on an automobile,” said one of them. “You in trouble with some real bad actors.” He was probing, hinting. He didn’t actually want to hear about the Mob, about juice men or gang-entanglements. Not one word. But it was all obvious. I didn’t look like a fellow in the rackets, but maybe I was one. Even the cops had seen The Godfather, The French Connection, The Valachi Papers, and other blast-and-bang thrillers. I was drawn to this gang stuff myself, as a Chicagoan, and I said, “I don’t know anything.” I dummied up, and I believe the police approved of this.

  “You keep your car in the street?” said one of the cops—he had volumes of muscle and a great slack face. “If I didn’t have a garage, I wouldn’t own but a piece of junk.” Then he saw my medal, which Renata had framed in plush on the wall, and he said, “Were you in Korea?”

  “No,” I said. “The French government gave me that. The Legion of Honor. I’m a knight, a chevalier. Their ambassador decorated me.”

  On that occasion, Humboldt had sent me one of his unsigned post cards. “Shoveleer! Your name is now lesion!”

  He had been on a Finnegans Wake kick for years. I remembered our many discussions of Joyce’s view of language, of the poet’s passion for charging speech with music and meaning, of the dangers that hover about all the works of the mind, of beauty falling into abysses of oblivion like the snow chasms of the Antarctic, of Blake and Vision versus Locke and the tabula rasa. As I saw the cops out I was remembering with sadness of heart the lovely conversations Humboldt and I used to have. Humanity divine incomprehensible!

  “You better square this thing,” the cop advised me, low and kindly. His great black weight moved toward the elevator. The Shoveleer inclined politely. I felt my eyes ache with a helpless craving for help.

  Yes, the medal reminded me of Humboldt. Yes, when Napoleon gave the French intellectuals ribbons stars and baubles, he knew what he was doing. He took a boatload of scholars with him to Egypt. He ditched them. They came up with the Rosetta stone. From the time of Richelieu and earlier, the French had been big in the culture business. You’d never catch De Gaulle wearing one of these ridiculous trinkets. He had too much self-esteem. The fellows who bought Manhattan from the Indians didn’t wear beads themselves. I would gladly have given this gold medal to Humboldt. The Germans tried to honor him. He was invited to Berlin in 1952 to lecture at the Free University. He wouldn’t go. He was afraid of being abducted by the GPU or the NKVD. He was a longtime contributor to the Partisan Review and a prominent anti-Stalinist, so he was afraid that the Russians would try to kidnap and kill him. “Also, if I spent a year in Germany I’d be thinking of one thing only,” he stated publicly (I was the only one listening). “For twelve months I’d be a Jew and nothing else. I can’t afford to give an entire year to that.” But I think a better explanation is that he was having a grand time being mad in New York. He was seeing psychiatrists and making scenes. He invented a lover for Kathleen and then he tried to kill the man. He smashed up the Buick Roadmaster. He accused me of stealing his personality for the character of Von Trenck. He drew a check on my account for six thousand seven hundred and sixty-three dollars and fifty-eight cents and bought an Oldsmobile with it, among other things. Anyway, he didn’t want to go to Germany, a country where no one could follow his conversation.

  From the papers he later learned that I had become a Shoveleer. I had heard that he was living with a gorgeous black girl who studied the French horn at the Juilliard School. But when I last saw him on Forty-sixth Street I knew that he was too destroyed to be living with anyone. He was destroyed—I can’t help repeating this. He wore a large gray suit in which he was floundering. His face was dead gray, East River gray. His head looked as if the gypsy moth had gotten into it and tented in his hair. Nevertheless I should have approached and spoken to him. I should have drawn near, not taken cover behind the parked cars. But how could I? I had had my breakfast in the Edwardian Room of the Plaza, served by rip-off footmen. Then I had flown in a helicopter with Javits and Bobby Kennedy. I was skirring around New York like an ephemerid, my jacket lined with jolly psychedelic green. I was dressed up like Sugar Ray Robinson. Only I didn’t have a fighting spirit, and seeing that my old and close friend was a dead man I beat it. I went to La Guardia and took a 727 back to Chicago. I sat afflicted in the plane, drinking whisky on the rocks, overcome with horror, ideas of Fate and other humanistic lah-de-dah—compassion. I had gone around the corner and gotten lost on Sixth Avenue. My legs trembled and my teeth were set hard. I said to myself, Humboldt good-by, I’ll see you in the next world. And two months after this in the Ilscombe Hotel, which has since collapsed, he started down at 3 a.m. with his garbage pail and died in the corridor.

  At a Village cocktail party in the Forties I heard a beautiful girl tell Humboldt, “Do you know what you’re like? You’re like a person from a painting.” Sure, women dreaming of love might have visions of Humboldt at twenty stepping down from a Renaissance or an Impressionist masterpiece. But the picture on the obituary page of the Times was frightful. I opened the paper one morning and there was Humboldt, ruined, black and gray, a disastrous newspaper face staring at me from death’s territory. That day, too, I was flying from New York to Chicago—wafting back and forth, not always knowing why. I went to the can and locked myself in. People knocked but I was weeping and wouldn’t come out.

  six

  “Actually Cantabile didn’t make me wait too long. He phoned just before noon. Maybe he was getting hungry. I remembered that someone or other in Paris toward the end of the nineteenth century used to see Verlaine drunken and bloated pounding his cane wildly on the sidewalk as he went to lunch, and shortly afterward the great mathematician Poincaré, respectably dressed and following his huge forehead while describing curves with his fingers, also on his way to lunch. Lunchtime is lunchtime, whether you are a poet or a mathematician or a gangster. Can-tabile said, “All right, you dumb prick, we’re going to meet right after lunch. Bring cash. And that’s all you bring. Don’t make any more bad moves.”

  “I wouldn’t know what or how,” I said.

  “That’s true, as long as you don’t cook up anything with George Swiebel. You come alone.”

  “Of course. It never even occurred to me—”

  “Well now I’ve said it, but it better not occur. Alone, and bring new bills. Go to the bank and get clean money. Nine bills of fifty. New. I don’t want any grease stains on those dollars. And be glad if I don’t make you eat that fucking check.”

  What a fascist! But maybe he was only priming or haranguing himself to keep up the savagery level. By now, however, my only object was to get rid of him by submission and agreement. “Any way you want it,” I said. “Where shall I bring this money?”

  “The Russian Bath on Division Street,” he said.

  “That old joint? For the love of God!”

  “You be in front, there, at one-forty-five and wait. And alone!” he said.

  I answered, “Right.” But he hadn’t waited for agreement. Again I heard the dial tone. I identified this interminable squalling with the anxiety level of the disengaged soul.

  I had to put myself into motion. And I couldn’t expect Renata to do anything for me. Renata, at business today, was attending an auction, and she’d have been miffed if I had called the auction rooms to ask her to take me to the Northwest Side. She’s an obliging and beautiful woman, she has marvelous breasts, but she takes offense at certain kinds of slights and quickly flares up. Well, I’d manage it all somehow. Perhaps the Mercedes could be driven to the shop. A tow truck might not be needed. And then I’d have to find a taxi or call the Emery Livery Service or Rent-a-Car. I wouldn’t ride the bus. There are too many armed drunkards and heroin users on the buses and trains. But, no, wait! First, I must call Murra and then run to the bank. Also I had to explain that I couldn’t drive Lish and Mary to their piano lesson. This made my heart particularly heavy, because I’m somewhat afraid of Denise. She still wields a certain power. Denise made a great production of these lessons. But with her everything was a production, everything was momentous, critical. All psychological problems relating to the children were presented with great intensity. Questions of child development were desperate, dire, mortal. If these kids were ruined it would be my fault. I had abandoned them at a most perilous moment in the history of civilization to take up with Renata. “That whore with fat tits”—was what Denise regularly called her. She spoke of beautiful Renata always as a gross tough broad. The trend of her epithets, it seemed, was to make a man of Renata and a woman of me.

  Denise, like my wealth, goes back to the Belasco Theatre. Trenck was played by Murphy Verviger and the star had a retinue (a dresser, a press agent, an errand boy). Denise, who was living with Verviger at the St. Moritz, arrived with his other attendants daily, carrying his script. Dressed in a plum velvet jump-suit she wore her hair down. Elegant, slender, slightly flat-chested, high-shouldered, wide across the top like an old-fashioned kitchen chair, she had large violet eyes, a marvelously rich subtle color in her face and a mysterious, seldom visible down, even over her nose. Because of the August heat the great doors offstage were open on the cement alleys and the daylight stealing in showed the appalling baldness and decay of the antique luxury. The Belasco was like a gilded cake-platter with grimed frosting. Verviger, his face deeply grooved at the mouth, was big and muscular. He resembled a skiing instructor. Some concept of intense refinement was eating at him. His head was shaped like a busby, a high solid arrogant rock covered with thick moss. Denise kept rehearsal notes for him. She wrote with terrible concentration, as if she were the smartest pupil in the class and the rest of the fifth grade were in pursuit. When she came to ask a question she held the script to her chest and spoke to me in a condition of operatic crisis. Her voice seemed to make her own hair bristle and to dilate her astonishing eyes. She said, “Verviger wants to know how you’d like him to pronounce this word”— she printed it out for me, FINITE. “He says he can do it fin-it, or fine-it, or fine-ite. He doesn’t take my word for it—fine-ite!”

  I said, “Why so fancy? ... I don’t care what he does with it.” I didn’t add that I despaired of Verviger anyway. He had the play wrong from top to bottom. Maybe he was getting things right at the St. Moritz. That didn’t concern me then. I went home and told my friend Demmie Vonghel about the glaring bristling beauty at the Belasco, Verviger’s girlfriend.

  Well, ten years later Denise and I were husband and wife. And we were invited to the White House by the President and Mrs. Kennedy in black tie for a cultural evening. Denise consulted twenty or thirty women about dresses, shoes, gloves. Very intelligent, she always read up on national and world problems at the beauty parlor. Her hair was heavy and worn high. It wasn’t easy to be sure when she had had it done, but I could always tell from her dinner conversation whether she’d been to the hairdresser that afternoon, because she was a speed reader and covered every detail of world crisis under the dryer. “Do you realize what Khrushchev did in Vienna?” she said. So at the beauty salon, to prepare for the White House, she mastered Time and Newsweek and The U.S. News and World Report. On the flight to Washington we reviewed the Bay of Pigs and the Missile Crisis and the Diem problem. Her nervous intensity is constitutional. After dinner she got hold of the President and spoke to him privately. I saw her cornering him in the Red Room. I knew that she was driving urgently over the tangle of lines dividing her own terrible problems—and they were all terrible!—from the perplexities and disasters of world politics. It was all one indivisible crisis. I knew that she was saying, “Mr. President, what can be done about this?” Well, we woo one another with everything we’ve got. I tittered to myself when I saw them together. But JFK could take care of himself, and he liked pretty women. I suspected that he read The U.S. News and World Report, too, and that his information might not be much better than her own. She’d have made him an excellent Secretary of State, if some way could be found to wake her before 11 a.m. For she’s quite marvelous. And a real beauty. And much more litigious than Humboldt Fleisher. He mainly threatened. But from the time of the divorce I have been entangled in endless ruinous lawsuits. The world has seldom seen a more aggressive subtle resourceful plaintiff than Denise. Of the White House I mainly remembered the impressive hauteur of Charles Lindbergh, the complaint of Edmund Wilson that the government had made a pauper of him, the Catskill resort music played by the Marine Corps orchestra, and Mr. Tate keeping time with his fingers on the knee of a lady.

  One of Denise’s big grievances was that I wouldn’t allow her to lead this kind of life. The great captain Citrine who once had burst the buckles of his armor in heroic scuffles now cooled gypsy Renata’s lust and in his dotage had bought a luxury Mercedes-Benz. When I came to call for Lish and Mary, Denise told me to make sure the car was well aired. She didn’t want it smelling of Renata. Butts stained with her lipstick had to be emptied from the ashtray. She once marched out of the house and did this herself. She said there must be no Kleenexes smeared with God-knows-what.

  Apprehensive, I picked out Denise’s number on the telephone. I was in luck, the maid answered, and I told her, “I can’t fetch the girls today. I’ve got car trouble.”

  Downstairs I found that I could squeeze into the Mercedes and though the windshield was bad, I thought I could manage the driving if the police didn’t stop me. I tested this by going to the bank where I drew the new money. It was given to me in a plastic envelope. I didn’t fold this packet but laid it next to my wallet. Then from a phone booth I made an appointment at the Mercedes shop. You’ve got to have an appointment—you don’t barge in to the garage as you did in the old mechanic days. Then, still on the pay phone, I tried again to get hold of George Swiebel. Apparently I had said, while sounding off during the card game, that George enjoyed going with his old father to the Baths on Division Street near what used to be Robey Street. Probably Cantabile hoped to catch George there.

  As a kid I went to the Russian Bath with my own father. This old establishment has been there forever, hotter than the tropics and rotting sweetly. Down in the cellar men moaned on the steam-softened planks while they were massaged abrasively with oak-leaf besoms lathered in pickle buckets. The wooden posts were slowly consumed by a wonderful decay that made them soft brown. They looked like beaver’s fur in the golden vapor. Perhaps Cantabile hoped to trap George here naked. Could there be any other reason why he had named this rendezvous? He might beat him, he might shoot him. Why had I talked so much!

  I said to George’s secretary, “Sharon? He’s not back? Now listen, tell him not to go to the schwitz on Division Street today. Not! It’s serious.”

  George said of Sharon, “She digs emergencies.” This is understandable. Two years ago she had her throat cut by a total stranger. This unknown black man stepped into George’s South Chicago office with an open razor. He swept it over Sharon’s throat like a virtuoso and disappeared forever. “The blood fell like a curtain,” said George. He knotted a towel about Sharon’s neck and rushed her to the hospital. George digs emergencies himself. He’s always looking for something basic, “honest,” “of the earth,” primordial. When he saw blood, a vital substance, he knew what to do. But of course George is also theoretical; he is a primitivist. This ruddy, big-muscled, blunt-handed George with his brown, humanly comprehensive eyes is not stupid except when he proclaims his ideas. He does this loudly, fiercely. And then I only grin at him because I know how kindly he is. He takes care of his old parents, of his sisters, of his ex-wife and their grown children. He denounces eggheads, but he really loves culture. He spends whole days trying to read difficult books, knocking himself out. Not with great success. And when I introduce him to intellectuals like my learned friend Durnwald, he shouts and baits them and talks dirty, his face gets red. Well, it’s that sort of curious moment in the history of human consciousness when the mind universally awakens and democracy originates, an era of turmoil and ideological confusion, the principal phenomenon of the present age. Humboldt, boyish, loved the life of the mind and I shared his enthusiasm. But the intellectuals one meets are something else again. I didn’t behave well with the mental beau monde of Chicago. Denise invited superior persons of all kinds to the house in Kenwood to discuss politics and economics, race, psychology, sex, crime. Though I served the drinks and laughed a great deal I was not exactly cheerful and hospitable. I wasn’t even friendly. “You despise these people!” Denise said, angry. “Only Durnwald is an exception, that curmudgeon.” This accusation was true. I hoped to lay them all low. In fact it was one of my cherished dreams and dearest hopes. They were against the True, the Good, the Beautiful. They denied the light. “You’re a snob,” she said. This was not accurate. But I wouldn’t have a thing to do with these bastards, the lawyers, Congressmen, psychiatrists, sociology professors, clergy, and art-types (they were mostly gallery-owners) she invited.

  “You’ve got to meet real people,” George said to me later. “Denise surrounded you with phonies, and now day in, day out you’re alone with tons of books and papers in that apartment and I swear you’re going to go nuts.”

  “Why no,” I said, “there’s yourself and Alec Szathmar, and my friend Richard Durnwald. And also Renata. And what about the people at the Downtown Club.”

  “Lots of good this guy Durnwald will do you. He’s the professor’s professor. And nobody can interest him. He’s heard it or read it all. When I try to talk to him I feel that I’m playing the ping-pong champion of China. I serve the ball, he smashes it back, and that’s the end of that. I have to serve again and pretty soon I’m out of balls.”

  He always came down heavily on Durnwald. There was a certain rivalry. He knew how attached I was to Dick Durnwald. In crude Chicago Durnwald, whom I admired and even adored, was the only man with whom I exchanged ideas. But for six months Durnwald had been at the University of Edinburgh, lecturing on Comte, Durkheim, Tönnies, Weber, and so on. “This abstract stuff is poison to a guy like you,” said George. “I’m going to introduce you to guys from South Chicago.” He began to shout. “You’re too exclusive, you’re going to dry out.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  So the fateful poker game was organized around me. But the guests knew that they had been invited as low company. Nowadays the categories are grasped by those who belong to them. It would have been obvious to them that I was some sort of mental fellow even if George hadn’t advertised me as such, boasting that my name was in reference books and that I was knighted by the French government. So what? It wasn’t as if I had been a Dick Cavett, a true celebrity. I was just another educated nut and George was showing me off to them and exhibiting them to me. It was nice of them to forgive me this great public-relations buildup. I was brought there by George to relish their real American qualities, their peculiarities. But they enriched the evening with their own irony and reversed the situation so that in the end my peculiarities were far more conspicuous. “As the game went on they liked you more and more,” said George. “They thought you were pretty human. Besides, there was Rinaldo Cantabile. He and his cousin were flashing cards to each other, and you were getting drunk and didn’t know what the hell was happening.”

  “So I was merely a contrast-gainer,” I said.

  “I thought contrast-gainer was just your term for married couples. You like a lady because she’s got a husband, a real stinker, who makes her look good.”

  “It’s one of those portmanteau expressions.”

  I am not a great poker-player. Besides, I was interested in the guests. One was a Lithuanian in the tuxedo-rental business, another a young Polish fellow getting computer training. There was a plainclothes detective from the homicide squad. Next to me sat a Sicilian-American undertaker, and last there were Rinaldo Cantabile and his cousin Emil. These two, said George, had crashed the party. Emil was a small-time hoodlum, born to twist arms and throw bricks through show windows. He must have taken part in the attack on my car. Rinaldo was extremely good-looking with a dark furry mustache as fine as mink, and he was elegantly dressed. He bluffed madly, spoke loudly, knocked the table with his knuckles, and pretended to be a cast-iron lowbrow. Still, he kept talking about Robert Ardrey, the territorial imperative, paleontology in the Olduvai Gorge, and the views of Konrad Lorenz. He said loudly and harshly that his educated wife left books around. The Ardrey book he had picked up in the toilet. God knows why we are drawn to others and become attached to them. Proust, an author to whom Humboldt introduced me and in whose work he gave me heavy instruction, said that he often was attracted to people whose faces had something in them of a hawthorn hedge in bloom. Hawthorn was not Rinaldo’s flower. White calla lily was more like it. His nose was particularly white and his large nostrils, correspondingly dark, reminded me of an oboe when they dilated. People so distinctly seen have power over me. But I don’t know which comes first, the attraction or the close observation. When I feel gross, dull, damaged in sensibility, a refined perception, coming suddenly, has great influence.

  We sat at a round pedestal table and as the clean cards flew and flickered George got the players to talk. He was the impresario and they obliged him. The homicide cop talked about killings in the street. “It’s all different, now they kill the sonofa-bitch if he doesn’t have a dollar in his pocket and they kill the sonofabitch if he gives them fifty dollars. I tell ‘em, ‘You bastards kill for money? For money? The cheapest thing in the world. I killed more guys than you but that was in the war.’ “

  The tuxedo man was in mourning for his lady friend, a telephone ad-taker at the Sun Times. He spoke with a baying Lithuanian accent, joking, bragging, but gloomy, too. As he got into his story he blazed with grief, he damn-near cried. On Mondays he collected his rented tuxedoes. After the weekend they were stained, he said, with sauce, with soup, with whisky or semen, “You name it.” Tuesdays he drove in his station wagon to a joint near the Loop where the suits were put to soak in vats of cleaning fluid. Then he spent the afternoon with a girl friend. Ah, they couldn’t even make it to the bed, they were so hot for each other. They fell to the floor. “She was a good family type of girl. She was my kind of people. But she’d do anything. I told her how, and she did it, and no questions.”

  “And you saw her on Tuesdays only, never took her to dinner, never visited her at home?” I said.

  “She went home at five o’clock to her old mother and cooked dinner. I swear I didn’t even know her last name. For twenty years I never had but her phone number.”

  “But you loved her. Why didn’t you marry her?”

  He seemed astonished, looking at the other players as if to say, What’s with this guy? Then he answered, “What, marry a hot broad who turns on in hotel rooms?”

  While everyone laughed the Sicilian undertaker explained to me in the special tone in which you tell the facts of life to educated dummies, “Look, professor, you don’t mix things up. That’s not what a wife is about. And if you have a funny foot you have to look for a funny shoe. And if you find the right fit you just let it alone.”

  “Anyhow, my honey is in her grave.”

  I am always glad to learn, grateful for instruction, good under correction, if I say so myself. I may avoid opposition, but I know when it’s true friendship. We sat with whisky, poker chips, and cigars in this South Chicago kitchen penetrated by the dark breathing of the steel mills and refineries, under webs of power lines. I often note odd natural survivals in this heavy-industry district. Carp and catfish still live in the benzine-smelling ponds. Black women angle for them with dough-bait. Woodchucks and rabbits are seen not far from the dumps. Red-winged blackbirds with their shoulder tabs fly like uniformed ushers over the cattails. Certain flowers persist.

  Grateful for this evening of human company I let myself go. I dropped nearly six hundred dollars, counting the check to Cantabile. But I’m so used to having money taken from me that I didn’t really mind. I had great pleasure that evening, drinking, laughing a good deal, and talking. I talked and talked. Evidently I discussed my interests and projects in some detail, and later I was told that I alone failed to understand what was going on. The other gamblers dropped out when they saw how the Cantabile cousins were cheating. They were flashing cards, finagling the deck, and pouncing on each pot.

  “They don’t get away with that on my turf,” shouted George in one of his theatrical bursts of irrationality.

  “But Rinaldo is dangerous.”

  “Rinaldo is a punk!” George yelled.

  seven

  Possibly so, but in the Capone era the Cantabiles had been bad eggs. At that time the entire world identified Chicago with blood —there were the stockyards and there were the gang wars. In the Chicago blood-hierarchy the Cantabiles had stood in about the middle rank. They worked for the Mob, they drove whisky trucks, and they beat and shot people. They were average minor hoodlums and racketeers. But in the Forties a weak-minded Cantabile uncle on the Chicago police force brought disgrace upon the family. He got drunk in a bar and two playful punks took away his guns and had fun with him. They made him crawl on his belly and forced him to gobble filth and sawdust from the floor, they kicked his buttocks. After they had tormented and humiliated him and while he lay crying with rage they ran away, full of glee, throwing down the guns. This was their big mistake. He pursued them and shot them dead in the street. Since then, said George, no one would take the Cantabiles seriously. Old Ralph (Moochy) Cantabile, now a lifer at Joliet, ruined the family with the Mob by murdering two adolescents. This was why Rinaldo could not afford to be brushed off by a person like me, well known in Chicago, who lost to him at poker and then stopped his check. Rinaldo, or Ronald, may have had no standing in the underworld but he had done terrible things to my Mercedes. Whether his rage was a real hoodlum’s rage, natural or contrived, who could say? But he was evidently one of those proud sensitive fellows who give so much trouble because they are passionate about internal matters of very slight interest to any sensible person.

  I was not so completely unrealistic that I failed to ask myself whether by a sensible person I meant myself. Returning from the bank I shaved, and I noticed how my face, framed to be cheerful, taking a metaphysical premise of universal helpfulness, asserting that the appearance of mankind on this earth was on the whole a good thing—how this face, filled with premises derived from capitalist democracy, was now depressed, retracted in unhappiness, sullen, unpleasant to shave. Was I the aforementioned sensible person?

  I performed a few impersonal operations. I did a little ontogeny and phylogeny on myself. Recapitulation: the family was called Tsitrine and came from Kiev. The name was Anglicized at Ellis Island. I was born in Appleton, Wisconsin, the birthplace also of Harry Houdini with whom I think I have some affinities. I grew up in Polish Chicago, I went to the Chopin Grammar School, I spent my eighth year in the public ward of a TB sanatorium. Good people donated piles of colored funny papers to the sanatorium. These were stacked high beside each bed. The children followed the adventures of Slim Jim and Boob McNutt. In addition, day and night, I read the Bible. One visit a week was allowed, my parents taking turns, my mother with her bosom in old green serge, big-eyed, straight-nosed, and white with worry—her deep feelings inhibited her breathing—and my father the immigrant desperate battler coming from the frost, his coat saturated with cigarette smoke. Kids hemorrhaged in the night and choked on blood and were dead. In the morning the white geometry of made-up beds had to be coped with. I became very thoughtful here and I think that my disease of the lungs passed over into an emotional disorder so that I sometimes felt, and still feel, poisoned by eagerness, a congestion of tender impulses together with fever and enthusiastic dizziness. Owing to the TB I connected breathing with joy, and owing to the gloom of the ward I connected joy with light, and owing to my irrationality I related light on the walls to light inside me. I appear to have become a Hallelujah and Glory type. Furthermore (concluding) America is a didactic country whose people always offer their personal experiences as a helpful lesson to the rest, hoping to hearten them and to do them good—an intensive sort of personal public-relations project. There are times when I see this as idealism. There are other times when it looks to me like pure delirium. With everyone sold on the good how does all the evil get done? When Humboldt called me an ingénu, wasn’t this what he was getting at? Crystallizing many evils in himself, poor fellow, he died as an example, his legacy a question addressed to the public. The death question itself, which Walt Whitman saw as the question of questions.

  At all events I didn’t care a bit for the way I looked in the mirror. I saw angelic precipitates condensing into hypocrisy, especially around my mouth. So I finished shaving by touch and only opened my eyes when I started to dress. I chose a quiet suit and necktie. I didn’t want to provoke Cantabile by appearing showy.

  I didn’t have to wait long for the elevator. It was just past dog time in my building. During dog-walking hours it’s hopeless, you have to use the stairs. I went out to my dented car which, in maintenance alone, ran me fifteen hundred dollars per annum. In the street the air was bad. It was the pre-Christmas season, dark December, and a brown air, more gas than air, crossed the lake from the great steel-and-oil complex of South Chicago, Hammond, and Gary, Indiana. I got in and started the engine, also turning on the radio. When the music began I wished that there might be more switches to turn on, for it was somehow not enough. The cultural FM stations offered holiday concerts of Corelli, Bach, and Palestrina—Music Antiqua, conducted by the late Greenberg, with Cohen on the viola da gamba and Levi on the harpsichord. They performed pious and beautiful cantatas on ancient instruments while I tried to look through the windshield bashed by Cantabile. I had the fresh fifty-dollar bills in a packet together with my specs, billfold, and handkerchief. I hadn’t yet decided in what order to proceed. I never decide such things but wait for them to be revealed and, on the Outer Drive, it occurred to me to stop at the Downtown Club. My mind was in one of its Chicago states. How should I describe this phenomenon? In a Chicago state I infinitely lack something, my heart swells, I feel a tearing eagerness. The sentient part of the soul wants to express itself. There are some of the symptoms of an overdose of caffeine. At the same time I have a sense of being the instrument of external powers. They are using me either as an example of human error or as the mere shadow of desirable things to come. I drove. The huge pale lake washed forward. To the east was a white Siberian sky and McCormick Place, like an aircraft carrier, moored at the shore. Life had withdrawn from the grass. It had its wintry buff color. Motorists swerved up alongside to look at the Mercedes, so incredibly mutilated.

  I wanted to speak to Vito Langobardi at the Downtown Club to get his views, if any, on Rinaldo Cantabile. Vito was a big-time hoodlum, a pal of the late Murray the Camel and the Battaglias. We often played racquet ball together, I liked Langobardi. I liked him very much, and I thought him fond of me. He was a most important underworld personality, so high in the organization that he had become rarefied into a gentleman and we discussed only shoes and shirts. Among the members only he and I wore tailored shirts with necktie loops on the underside of the collar. By these loops we were in some sense joined. As in a savage tribe I once read about in which, after childhood, brother and sister do not meet until the threshold of old age because of a terrific incest taboo, when suddenly the prohibition ends . . . no, the simile is no good. But I had known many violent kids at school, terrible kids whose adult life was entirely different from mine, and now we could chat about fishing in Florida and custom-made shirts with loops or the problems of Langobardi’s Doberman. After games, in the nude democracy of the locker room we sociably sipped fruit juice, and chatted about X-rated movies. “I never go to them,” he said. “What if the show got raided and they arrested me? How would it look in the papers?” What you need for quality is a few million dollars, and Vito with millions salted away was straight quality. Rough talk he left to the commodity brokers and lawyers. On the court he tottered just a little when he ran, for his calf muscles were not strongly developed, a defect common also in nervous children. But his game was subtle. He outgeneraled me always because he always knew exactly what I was doing behind his back. I was attached to Vito.

  Racquet ball or paddle ball to which I was introduced by George Swiebel is an extremely fast and bruising game. You collide with other players or run into the walls. You are hit in the backswing, you often catch yourself in the face with your own racquet. The game has cost me a front tooth. I knocked it out myself and had to have a root-canal and a crown job. First I was a puny child, a TB patient, then I strengthened myself, then I degenerated, then George forced me to recover muscle tone. On some mornings I am lame, hardly able to straighten my back when I get out of bed but by midday I am on the court playing, leaping, flinging myself full length on the floor to scoop dead shots and throwing my legs and spinning entrechats like a Russian dancer. However, I am not a good player. I am too tangled about the heart, overdriven. I fall into a competitive striving frenzy. Then, walloping the ball, I continually say to myself, “Dance, dance, dance, dance!” Convinced that mastery of the game depends upon dancing. But gangsters and businessmen, translating their occupational style into these matches, outdance me and win. I tell myself that when I achieve mental and spiritual clarity and translate these into play nobody will be able to touch me. Nobody. I’ll beat everyone. Meantime, notwithstanding the clouded spiritual state that prevents me from winning, I play violently because I get desperate without strenuous action. Just desperate. And now and then one of the middle-aged athletes keels over. Rushed to the hospital, some players have never come back. Langobardi and I played Cut-Throat (the three-man game) with a man named Hildenfisch, who succumbed to a heart attack. We had noticed that Hildenfisch had been panting. Afterward he went to rest in the sauna and someone ran out saying, “Hildenfisch has fainted.” When the black attendants laid him on the floor he spurted water. I knew what this loss of sphincter control meant. Mechanical resuscitation equipment was sent for but nobody knew how to operate it.

  At times when I pushed too hard at the game, Scottie, the athletic director, told me to quit. “Stop and look at yourself, Charlie. You’re purple.” In the mirror I was gruesome, gushing sweat, dark, black, my heart clubbing away inside. I felt slightly deaf. The eustachian tubes! I made my own diagnosis. Owing to the blood pressure my tubes were crinkling. “Walk it off,” said Scottie. I walked back and forth on the patch of carpet forever identified with poor Hildenfisch, surly inferior Hildenfisch. In the sight of death I was no better than Hildenfisch. And once when I had overdone things on the court and lay panting on the red plastic couch, Langobardi came over and gave me a look. When he brooded he squinted. One eye seemed to cross over like a piano-player’s hand. “Why do you push it, Charlie?” he said. “At our age one short game is plenty. Do you see me play more? One of these days you could seven out. Remember Hildenfisch.”

  Yes. Seven out. Right. I could roll bad dice. I must stop this tease-act with death. I was touched by Langobardi’s concern. Was it personal solicitude, however? These health-club fatalities were bad, and two coronaries in a row would make this a gloomy place. Still Vito wished to do what he could for me. There was little of substance that we could tell each other. When he was on the telephone I sometimes observed him. In his own way he was an American executive. Handsome Langobardi dressed far better than any board chairman. Even his coat sleeves were ingeniously lined, and the back of his waistcoat was made of beautiful paisley material. Calls came in the name of Finch, the shoeshine man “—Johnny Finch, Johnny Finch, telephone, extension five—” and Langobardi took these Finch calls. He was manly, he had power. In his low voice he gave instructions, made rulings, decisions, set penalties, probably. Now then, could he say anything serious to me? But could I tell him what was on my mind? Could I say that that morning I had been reading Hegel’s Phenomenology, the pages on freedom and death? Could I say that I had been thinking about the history of human consciousness with special emphasis on the question of boredom? Could I say that for years now I had been preoccupied with this theme and that I had discussed it with the late poet Von Humboldt Fleisher? Never. Even with astrophysicists, with professors of economics or paleontology, it was impossible to discuss such things. There were beautiful and moving things in Chicago, but culture was not one of them. What we had was a cultureless city pervaded nevertheless by Mind. Mind without culture was the name of the game, wasn’t it? How do you like that! It’s accurate. I had accepted this condition long ago.

  Langobardi’s eyes seemed to have the periscope power of seeing around corners.

  “Get smart, Charlie. Do it the way I do,” he said.

  I had thanked him sincerely for his kindly interest. “I’m trying,” I said.

  So I parked today under the chill pillars at the rear of the club. Then I rose in the elevator and came out at the barbershop. There, the usual busy sight—the three barbers: the big Swede with dyed hair, the Sicilian, always himself (not even shaved), and the Japanese. Each had the same bouffant coiffure, each wore a yellow vest with golden buttons over a short-sleeved shirt. All three were using hot-air guns with blue muzzles and shaping the hair of three customers. I entered the club through the washroom where bulbs were bleaking over the sinks and Finch, the real Johnny Finch, was filling the urinals with heaps of ice cubes. Langobardi was there, an early bird. Lately he had taken to wearing his hair in a little fringe, like an English country churchwarden. He sat nude, glancing at The Wall Street Journal and gave me a short smile. Now what? Could I throw myself into a new relationship with Langobardi, hitch a chair forward and sit with my elbows on my knees, looking into his face and opening my own features to the warmth of impulse? Eyes dilated with doubt, with confidentiality, might I say, “Vito, I need a little help”? Or, “Vito, how bad is this fellow Rinaldo Cantabile?” My heart knocked violently—as it had knocked decades earlier when I was about to proposition a woman. Langobardi had now and then done me small favors, booking tables in restaurants where reservations were hard to get. But to ask him about Cantabile would be a professional consultation. You didn’t do that at the club. Vito had once bawled out Alphonse, one of the masseurs, for asking me a bookish question. “Don’t bug the man, Al. Charlie doesn’t come here to talk about his trade. We all come to forget business.” When I told this to Renata she said, “So you two have a relationship.” Now I saw that Langobardi and I had a relationship in the same way that the Empire State Building had an attic.

  “You want to play a short game?” he said.

  “No, Vito, I came to get something from my locker.”

  The usual casting about, I was thinking as I went back to the beat-up Mercedes. How typical of me. The usual craving. I looked for help. I longed for someone to do the stations of the cross with me. Just like Pa. And where was Pa? Pa was in the cemetery.

  eight

  At the Mercedes shop the distinguished official and technician in the white smock was naturally curious but I refused to answer questions. “I don’t know how this happened, Fritz. I found it this way. Fix it. I don’t want to see the bill, either. Just send it to the Continental Illinois. They’ll pay it.” Fritz charged like a brain surgeon.

  I flagged a taxi in the street. The driver was wild-looking with an immense Afro Jike a shrub from the gardens at Versailles. The back of his cab was dusty with cigarette ashes and had a tavern odor. There was a bullet-proof screen between us. He made a fast turn and charged due west on Division Street. I could see little, because of the blurred Plexiglas and the Afro, but I didn’t really need to look, I knew it all by heart. Large parts of Chicago decay and fall down. Some are rebuilt, others just lie there. It’s like a film montage of rise fall and rise. Division Street where the old Bath stands used to be Polish and now is almost entirely Puerto Rican. In the Polish days, the small brick bungalows were painted fresh red, maroon, and candy green. The grass plots were fenced with iron pipe. I always thought that there must be Baltic towns that looked like this, Gdynia for instance, the difference being that the Illinois prairie erupted in vacant lots and tumbleweed rolled down the streets. Tumbleweed is so melancholy.

  In the old days of ice wagons and coal wagons householders used to cut busted boilers in half, set them out on the grass plots, and fill them with flowers. Big Polish women in ribboned caps went out in the spring with cans of Sapolio and painted these boiler-planters so that they shone silver against the blaring red of the brick. The double rows of rivets stood out like the raised-skin patterns of African tribes. Here the women grew geraniums, sweet William, and other low-grade dusty flowers. I showed all of this to Humboldt Fleisher years ago. He came to Chicago to give a reading for Poetry magazine and asked me for a tour of the city. We were dear friends then. I had come back to see my father and to put the last touches on my book, New Deal Personalities, at the Newberry Library. I took Humboldt on the El to the stockyards. He saw the Loop. We went to the lakeshore and listened to the foghorns. They bawled melancholy over the limp silk fresh lilac drowning water. But Humboldt responded mostly to the old neighborhood. The silvered boiler rivets and the blazing Polish geraniums got him. He listened pale and moved to the buzzing of roller-skate wheels on the brittle cement. I too am sentimental about urban ugliness. In the modern spirit of ransoming the commonplace, all this junk and wretchedness, through art and poetry, by the superior power of the soul.

  Mary, my eight-year-old daughter, has discovered this about me. She knows my weakness for ontogeny and phylogeny. She always asks to hear what life was like way-back-when.

  “We had coal stoves,” I tell her. “The kitchen range was black, with a nickel trim—huge. The parlor stove had a dome like a little church, and you could watch the fire through the isinglass. I had to carry up the scuttle and take down the ashes.”

  “What did you wear?”

  “A leatherette war-ace cap with rabbit-fur flaps, high-top boots with a sheath for a rusty jackknife, long black stockings, and plus fours. Underneath, woolly combinations which left lint in my navel and elsewhere.”

  “What else was it like?” my younger daughter wanted to know. Lish, who is ten years old, is her mother’s child and such information would not interest her. But Mary is less pretty, though to my mind she is more attractive (more like her father). She is secretive and greedy. She lies and steals more than most small girls, and this is also endearing. She hides chewing gum and chocolates with stirring ingenuity. I find her candy buried under the upholstery or in my filing cabinet. She has learned that I don’t often look at my research materials. She flatters and squeezes me precociously. And she wants to hear about old times. She has her own purposes in evoking and manipulating my emotions. But Papa is quite willing to manifest the old-time feelings. In fact I must transmit these feelings. For I have plans for Mary. Oh, nothing so definite as plans, perhaps. I have an idea that I may be able to pervade the child’s mind with my spirit so that she will later take up the work I am getting too old or too weak or too silly to continue. She alone, or perhaps she and her husband. With any luck. I worry about the girl. In a locked drawer of my desk I keep notes and memos for her, many of them written under the influence of liquor. I promise myself to censor these one day, before death catches me off base on the racquet-ball court or on the Posturepedic mattress of some Renata or other. Mary is sure to be an intelligent woman. She interprets “Fur Elise” much better than Lish. She feels the music. My heart is often troubled for Mary, however. She will be a straight-nosed thin broad who feels the music. And personally I prefer plump women with fine breasts. So I felt sorry for her already. As for the project or purpose I want her to carry on, it is a very personal overview of the Intellectual Comedy of the modern mind. No one person could do this comprehensively. By the end of the nineteenth century what had been the ample novels of Balzac’s Comedy had already been reduced to stories by Chekhov in his Russian Comédie Humaine. Now it’s even less possible to be comprehensive. I never had a work of fiction in mind but a different kind of imaginative projection. Different also from Whitehead’s Adventures of Ideas. . . . This is not the moment to explain it. Whatever it was, I conceived of it while still a youngish man. It was actually Humboldt who lent me the book of Valéry that suggested it. Valéry wrote of Leonardo, “Cet Apollon me ravissait au plus haut degré de moi-même.” I too was ravished with permanent effect—perhaps carried beyond my mental means. But Valéry had added a note in the margin: “Trouve avant de chercher.” This finding before seeking was my special gift. If I had any gift.

  However, my small daughter would say to me with deadly accuracy of instinct, “Tell me what your mother used to do. Was she pretty?”

  “I think she was very pretty. I don’t look like her. And she did cooking, baking, laundry and ironing, canning and pickling. She could tell fortunes with cards and sing trembly Russian songs. She and my father took turns visiting me at the sanatorium, every other week. In February the vanilla ice cream they brought was so hard you couldn’t cut it with a knife. And what else—ah yes, at home when I lost a tooth she would throw it behind the stove and ask the little mouse to bring a better one. You see what kind of teeth those bloody mice palmed off on me.”

  “You loved your mother?”

  Eager swelling feeling suddenly swept in. I forgot that I was talking to a child and I said, “Oh, I loved them all terribly, abnormally. I was all torn up with love. Deep in the heart. I used to cry in the sanatorium because I might never make it home and see them. I’m sure they never knew how I loved them, Mary. I had a TB fever and also a love fever. A passionate morbid little boy. At school I was always in love. At home if I was first to get up in the morning I suffered because they were still asleep. I wanted them to wake up so that the whole marvelous thing could continue. I also loved Menasha the boarder and Julius, my brother, your Uncle Julius.”

  I shall have to lay aside these emotional data.

  At the moment money, checks, hoodlums, automobiles preoccupied me.

  Another check was on my mind. It had been sent by my friend Thaxter, the one whom Huggins accused of being a CIA agent. You see Thaxter and I were preparing to bring out a journal, The Ark. We were all ready. Wonderful things were to be printed in it—pages from my imaginative reflections on a world transformed by Mind, for example. But meantime Thaxter had defaulted on a certain loan.

  It’s a long story and one that I’d rather not go into at this point. For two reasons. One is that I love Thaxter, whatever he does. The other is that I actually do think too much about money. It’s no good trying to conceal it. It’s there and it’s base. Earlier when I described how George saved Sharon’s life when her throat was cut, I spoke of blood as a vital substance. Well, money is a vital substance, too. Thaxter was supposed to repay part of the defaulted loan. Broke but grandiose he had ordered a check from his Italian bank for me, the Banco Ambrosiano of Milan. Why the Banco? Why Milan? But all of Thaxter’s arrangements were out of the ordinary. He had had a transatlantic upbringing and was equally at home in France and in California. You couldn’t mention a region so remote that Thaxter didn’t have an uncle there, or an interest in a mine, or an old château or villa. Thaxter with his exotic ways was another of my headaches. But I couldn’t resist him. However, that too must wait. Only one last word: Thaxter wanted people to believe that he was once a CIA agent. It was a wonderful rumor and he did everything to encourage it. It greatly added to his mysterious-ness, and mystery was one of his little rackets. This was harmless and in fact endearing. It was even philanthropic, as charm always is—up to a point. Charm always is a bit of a racket.

  The cab pulled up at the Bath twenty minutes early and I wasn’t going to loiter there so I said through the perforations of the bulletproof screen, “Go on, drive west. Take it easy, I just want to look around.” The cabbie heard me and nodded his Afro. It was like an enormous black dandelion in seed, blown, all its soft spindles standing out.

  In the last six months more old neighborhood landmarks had been torn down. This shouldn’t have mattered much. I can’t say why it made such a difference. But I was in a state. It almost seemed to me that I could hear myself rustling and fluttering in the back seat like a bird touring the mangroves of its youth, now car dumps. I stared with pulsatory agitation through the soiled windows. A whole block had gone down. Lovi’s Hungarian Restaurant had been swept away, plus Ben’s Pool Hall and the old brick carbarn and Gratch’s Funeral Parlor, out of which both my parents had been buried. Eternity got no picturesque interval here. The ruins of time had been bulldozed, scraped, loaded in trucks, and dumped as fill. New steel beams were going up. Polish kielbasa no longer hung in butchers’ windows. The sausages in the carniceria were Caribbean, purple and wrinkled. The old shop signs were gone. The new ones said HOY. MUDANZAS. IGLESIA.

  “Keep going west,” I said to the driver. “Past the park. Turn right on Kedzie.”

  The old boulevard now was a sagging ruin, waiting for the wreckers. Through great holes I could look into apartments where I had slept, eaten, done my lessons, kissed girls. You’d have to loathe yourself vividly to be indifferent to such destruction or, worse, rejoice at the crushing of the locus of these middle-class sentiments, glad that history had made rubble of them. In fact I know such tough guys. This very neighborhood produced them. Informers to the metaphysical-historical police against fellows like me whose hearts ache at the destruction of the past. But I had come here to be melancholy, to be sad about the wrecked walls and windows, the missing doors, the fixtures torn out, and the telephone cables ripped away and sold as junk. More particularly, I had come to see whether the house in which Naomi Lutz had lived was still standing. It was not. That made me feel very low.

  In my highly emotional adolescence I had loved Naomi Lutz. I believe she was the most beautiful and perfect young girl I have ever seen, I adored her, and love brought out my deepest peculiarities. Her father was a respectable chiropodist. He gave himself high medical airs, every inch the Doctor. Her mother was a dear woman, slipshod, harum-scarum, rather chin-less, but with large glowing romantic eyes. Night after night I had to play rummy with Dr. Lutz, and on Sundays I helped him to wash and simonize his Auburn. But that was all right. When I loved Naomi Lutz I was safely within life. Its phenomena added up, they made sense. Death was an after all acceptable part of the proposition. I had my own little Lake Country, the park, where I wandered with my Modern Library Plato, Wordsworth, Swinburne, and Un Coeur Simple. Even in winter Naomi petted behind the rose garden with me. Among the frozen twigs I made myself warm inside her raccoon coat. There was a delicious mixture of coon skin and maiden fragrance. We breathed frost and kissed. Until I met Demmie Vonghel many years later, I loved no one so much as Naomi Lutz. But Naomi, while I was away in Madison, Wisconsin, reading poetry and studying rotation pool at the Rathskeller, married a pawnbroker. He dealt also in rebuilt office machinery and had plenty of money. I was too young to give her the charge accounts she had to have at Field’s and Saks, and I believe the mental burdens and responsibilities of an intellectual’s wife had frightened her besides. I had talked all the time about my Modern Library books, of poetry and history, and she was afraid that she would disappoint me. She told me so. I said to her, if a tear was an intellectual thing how much more intellectual pure love was. It needed no cognitive additives. But she only looked puzzled. It was this sort of talk by which I had lost her. She did not look me up even when her husband lost all his money and deserted her. He was a sporting man, a gambler. He had to go into hiding at last, because the juice men were after him. I believe they had even broken his ankles. Anyway, he changed his name and went or limped to the Southwest. Naomi sold her classy Winnetka house and moved to Marquette Park, where the family owned a bungalow. She took a job in the linen department at Field’s.

  As the cab went back to Division Street I was making a wry parallel between Naomi’s husband’s Mafia troubles and my own. He had muffed it, too. I couldn’t help thinking what a blessed life I might have led with Naomi Lutz. Fifteen thousand nights embracing Naomi and I would have smiled at the solitude and boredom of the grave. I would have needed no bibliography, no stock portfolios, no medal from the Legion of Honor.

  So we drove again through what had become a tropical West Indies slum, resembling the parts of San Juan that stand beside lagoons which bubble and smell like stewing tripe. There was the same crushed plaster, smashed glass, garbage in the streets, the same rude amateur blue chalk lettering on the shops.

  But the Russian Bath where I was supposed to meet Rinaldo Cantabile stood more or less unchanged. It was also a proletarian hotel or lodging house. On the second floor there had always lived aged workingstiffs, lone Ukrainian grandfathers, retired car-line employees, a pastry cook famous for his icings who had to quit because his hands became arthritic. I knew the place from boyhood. My father, like old Mr. Swiebel, had believed it was healthful, good for the blood to be scrubbed with oak leaves lathered in old pickle buckets. Such retrograde people still exist, resisting modernity, dragging their feet. As Menasha the boarder, an amateur physicist (but mostly he wanted to be a dramatic tenor and took voice lessons: he had worked at Brunswick Phonograph Co. as a punch-press operator), once explained to me, human beings could affect the rotation of the earth. How? Well, if the whole race at an agreed moment were to scuff its feet the revolution of the planet would actually slow down. This might also have an effect on the moon and on the tides. Of course Menasha’s real topic was not physics but concord, or unity. I think that some through stupidity and others through perversity would scuff the wrong way. However, the old guys at the Bath do seem to be unconsciously engaged in a collective attempt to buck history.

  These Division Street steam-bathers don’t look like the trim proud people downtown. Even old Feldstein pumping his Exercycle in the Downtown Club at the age of eighty would be out of place on Division Street. Forty years ago Feldstein was a swinger, a high roller, a good-time Charlie on Rush Street. In spite of his age he is a man of today, whereas the patrons of the Russian Bath are cast in an antique form. They have swelling buttocks and fatty breasts as yellow as buttermilk. They stand on thick pillar legs affected with a sort of creeping verdigris or blue-cheese mottling of the ankles. After steaming, these old fellows eat enormous snacks of bread and salt herring or large ovals of salami and dripping skirt-steak and they drink schnapps. They could knock down walls with their hard stout old-fashioned bellies. Things are very elementary here. You feel that these people are almost conscious of obsolescence, of a line of evolution abandoned by nature and culture. So down in the super-heated subcellars all these Slavonic cavemen and wood demons with hanging laps of fat and legs of stone and lichen boil themselves and splash ice water on their heads by the bucket. Upstairs, on the television screen in the locker room, little dudes and grinning broads make smart talk or leap up and down. They are unheeded. Mickey who keeps the food concession fries slabs of meat and potato pancakes, and, with enormous knives, he hacks up cabbages for coleslaw and he quarters grapefruits (to be eaten by hand). The stout old men mounting in their bed sheets from the blasting heat have a strong appetite. Below, Franush the attendant makes steam by sloshing water on the white-hot boulders. These lie in a pile like Roman ballistic ammunition. To keep his brains from baking Franush wears a wet felt hat with the brim torn off. Otherwise he is naked. He crawls up like a red salamander with a stick to tip the latch of the furnace, which is too hot to touch, and then on all fours, with testicles swinging on a long sinew and the clean anus staring out, he backs away groping for the bucket. He pitches in the water and the boulders flash and sizzle. There may be no village in the Carpathians where such practices still prevail.

  Loyal to this place, Father Myron Swiebel came every day of his life. He brought his own herring, buttered pumpernickel, raw onions, and bourbon whisky. He drove a Plymouth, though he had no driver’s license. He could see well enough straight ahead, but because there were cataracts on both eyes he sideswiped many cars and did great damage in the parking lot.

  I went in to reconnoiter. I was quite anxious about George. His advice had put me in this fix. But then I knew that it was bad advice. Why did I take it? Because he had raised his voice with such authority? Because he had cast himself as an expert on the underworld and I had let him do his stuff? Well, I hadn’t used my best mind. But my best mind was now alert and I believed I could handle Cantabile. I reckoned that Cantabile had already worked off his rage against the car and I thought the debt was largely paid.

  I asked the concessionaire, Mickey, who stood in the smoke behind the counter searing fatty steaks and frying onions, “Has George come in? Does his old man expect him?”

  I thought that if George were here it was not likely that Cantabile would rush fully dressed into the steam to punch or beat or kick him. Of course Cantabile was an unknown quantity. You couldn’t guess what Cantabile might do. Either in rage or from calculation.

  “George isn’t here. The old man is steaming.”

  “Good. Is he expecting his son?”

  “No. George was here Sunday, so he won’t come again. He’s only once a week with his father.”

  “Good. Excellent!”

  Built like a bouncer with huge bar arms and an apron tied very high under his oxters, Mickey has a twisted lip. During the Depression he had to sleep in the parks and the cold ground gave him a partial paralysis of the cheek. This makes him seem to scoff or jeer. A misleading impression. He is a gentle earnest and peaceful person. A music-lover, he takes a season ticket at the Lyric Opera.

  “I haven’t seen you in a long time, Charlie. Go steam with the old man, he’ll be glad for the company.”

  But I hurried out again past the cashier’s cage with its little steel boxes where patrons left their valuables. I passed the squirming barber pole, and when I got to the sidewalk, which was as dense as the galaxy with stars of broken glass, a white Thunderbird pulled up in front of the Puerto Rican sausage shop across the street and Ronald Cantabile got out. He sprang out, I should say. I saw that he was in a terrific state. Dressed in a brown raglan coat with a matching hat and wearing tan kid boots, he was tall and good-looking. I had noted his dark dense mustache at the poker game. It resembled fine fur. But through the crackling elegance of dress there was a current, a desperate sweep, so that the man came out, so to speak, raging from the neck up. Though he was on the other side of the street I could see how furiously pale he was. He had worked himself up to intimidate me, I thought. But also he was making unusual steps. His feet behaved strangely. Cars and trucks came between us just then so that he could not cross over. Beneath the cars I could see him trying to dodge through. The boots were exquisite. At the first short break in the traffic Cantabile held open his raglan to me. He was wearing a magnificent broad belt. But surely it wasn’t a belt that he wanted to display. Just beside the buckle something was sticking out. He clapped his hand to it. He wanted me to know that he was carrying a gun. More traffic came, and Cantabile was jumping up and down, glaring at me over the tops of automobiles. Under the utmost strain he called out to me when the last truck had passed, “You alone?”

  “Alone. I’m alone.”

  He drew himself up toward the shoulders with peculiar twisting intensity. “You got anybody hiding?”

  “No. Just me. Nobody.”

  He threw upen the door and brought up two baseball bats from the floor of the Thunderbird. A bat in each hand, he started toward me. A van came between us. Now I could see nothing but his feet moving rapidly in the fancy boots. I thought, He sees I’ve come to pay. Why should he clobber me? He’s got to know I wouldn’t pull anything. He’s proved his point on the car. And I’ve seen the gun. Should I run? Since I had discovered on Thanksgiving Day how fast I could still run, I seemed oddly eager to use this ability. Speed was one of my resources. Some people are too fast for their own good, like Asahel in the Book of Samuel. Still it occurred to me that I might dash up the stairs of the Bath and take shelter in the cashier’s office where the little steel boxes were. I could crouch on the floor and ask the cashier to pass the four hundred and fifty dollars through the grille to Cantabile. I knew the cashier quite well. But he’d never let me in. He couldn’t. I wasn’t bonded. He had once referred to this special circumstance when we were having a chat. But I couldn’t believe that Cantabile would batter me down. Not in the street. Not as I waited and bowed my head. And just at that moment I remembered Konrad Lorenz’s discussion of wolves. The defeated wolf offered his throat, and the victor snapped but wouldn’t bite. So I was bowing my head. Yes, but damn my memory! What did Lorenz say next? Humankind was different, but in what respect? How! I couldn’t remember. My brain was disintegrating. The day before, in the bathroom, I hadn’t been able to find the word for the isolation of the contagious, and I was in agony. I thought, whom should I telephone about this? My mind is going! And then I stood and clutched the sink until the word “quarantine” mercifully came back to me. Yes, quarantine, but I was losing my grip. I take such things hard. In old age my father’s memory also failed. So I was shaken. The difference between man and other species such as the wolves never did come back to me. Perhaps the lapse was excusable at a time like this. But it served to show how carelessly I was reading, these days. This inattentiveness and memory-failure boded no good.

  As the last of a string of cars passed, Cantabile took a long stride with both bats as if to rush upon me without a pause. But I yelled, “For Christ’s sake, Cantabile!”

  He paused. I held up open hands. Then he flung one of the bats into the Thunderbird and started for me with the other.

  I called out to him, “I brought the money. You don’t have to beat my brains out.”

  “You got a gun?”

  “I’ve got nothing.”

  “You come over here,” he said.

  I started willingly to cross the street. He made me stop in the middle.

  “Stay right there,” he said. I was in the center of heavy traffic, cars honking and the provoked drivers rolling down their windows, already fighting mad. He tossed the second bat back into the T-bird. Then he strode up and took hold of me roughly. He treated me as if I deserved the extreme penalty. I held out the money, I offered it to him on the spot. But he refused to look at it. Furious he pushed me onto the sidewalk and toward the stairs of the Bath and past the squirming barbershop cylinders of red white and blue. We hurried in, past the cashier’s cage and along the dirty corridor.