“I want no part of that. I’m not a juice man,” I said.

  “Don’t be stupid. We’ve got to move fast.”

  I glanced at Polly. She had warned me against Cantabile and Stronson and I checked silently with her. Her smile confirmed the caution she had given me. But she was highly amused by Cantabile’s determination to drive us into the Thunderbird, to cram us into the red leather upholstery of the throbbing open car. He made it seem like a kidnap. We were on the broad sidewalk in front of the Institute, and lovers of criminal legend could tell you that the celebrated Dion O’Banion used to drive his Bugatti at a hundred mph over the very spot where we were standing while pedestrians fled. I had in fact mentioned this to Thaxter. Wherever he went, Thaxter wished to experience the characteristic thing, the essence. Getting the essence of Chicago, he was delighted, he was grinning, and he said, “If we miss Bartelstein now we can stop in the morning en route to the airport.”

  “Poll,” said Cantabile, “get behind the wheel. I see the squad car.” Buses were trying to squeeze past the parked Thunderbird. Traffic was tied up. The cops were already spinning their blue lights at Van Buren Street. Thaxter followed Polly to the car and I said to Cantabile, “Ronald, go away. Let me alone.”

  He gave me a look of open and terrible disclosure. I saw a spirit striving with complications as dense as my own, in another, faraway division. “I didn’t want to spring this on you,” he said, “but you force me to twist your arm.” His fingers in the horseman’s gloves, skin-tight, took me by the sleeve. “Your lifelong friend Alec Szathmar is in hot trouble, or could be in hot trouble—that’s up to you.”

  “Why? How come?”

  “I’m telling you. There’s this pretty young woman—her husband is one of my people—and she’s a kleptomaniac. She was caught in Field’s pinching a cashmere cardigan. And Szathmar is her lawyer, dig? It was me that recommended Szathmar. He went to court and told the judge not to send her to jail, she needed psychiatric treatment and he’d see that she got it. So the court released her in his custody. Then Szathmar brought this chick straight to a motel and took her clothes off, but before he could screw her she escaped. She didn’t have more on than the strip of paper they stretch across the toilet seat when she streaked out. There are plenty of witnesses. Now this girl is straight. She doesn’t go for the motel bit. Her only bag is stealing. For your sake, I’m restraining the husband.”

  “All I hear from you, Cantabile, is nonsense, more and more and more nonsense. Szathmar can act like a jerk, but he’s not a monster.”

  “All right, I’ll unleash the husband. You think your buddy wouldn’t be disbarred? He would be—fucking-A-right.”

  “You’ve hoked up all this for some goofy reason,” I said. “If you had anything on Szathmar you’d be blackmailing him right now.”

  “So have it your way, don’t cooperate, I’ll slaughter and butcher the son of a bitch.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “You don’t have to tell me that. You know what you are? You’re an isolationist, that’s what you really are. You don’t want to know what other people are into.”

  Everyone is forever telling me what my faults are, while I stand with great hungry eyes, believing and resenting all. Without metaphysical stability a man like me is the Saint Sebastian of the critical. The odd thing is that I hold still for it. As now, clutched by the sleeve of my checked coat, with Cantabile steaming intrigues and judgments at me from the flues of his white nose. With me it’s not how all occasions do inform against me, but how I employ occasions to extract buried information. The latest information seemed to be that I was by inclination the sort of person who needed microcosmic-macrocosmic ideas, or the belief that everything that takes place in man has world significance. Such a belief warmed the environment for me, and brought out the sweet glossy leaves, the hanging oranges of the groves where the unpolluted self was virginal and gratefully communed with its Maker, and so on. It was possible that this was the only way for me to be my own true self. But in the actual moment we were on the wide freezing pavement, on Michigan Boulevard, the Art Institute behind us, and over against us all the colored lights of Christmas traffic and the white façades of Peoples Gas and other companies.

  “Whatever I am, Cantabile, my friend and I aren’t going with you.” I hurried to the Thunderbird to try to stop Thaxter, who was getting in. He was already pulling in his cloak about him, sinking into the supple upholstery. He looked very pleased. I put my head in and said, “Come out of there. You and I are walking.”

  But Cantabile shoved me in to the car beside Thaxter. He put his hands on my rear and thrust me in. Then he jammed the front seat back to keep me there. In the next motion he pulled the door shut with a slam and said, “Take off, Polly.” Polly did just that.

  “Now what the hell do you think you’re doing, pushing and trapping me in here,” I said.

  “The cops are right on top of us. I didn’t have time to argue,” Cantabile said.

  “Well, this is nothing but a kidnap,” I told him. And as soon as I pronounced the word “kidnap” my heart was instantly swollen with a childish sense of terrible injury. But Thaxter was laughing, chuckling through his wide mouth, and his eyes were wrinkling and twinkling. He said, “Hee-hee, don’t take it so hard, Charlie. It’s a very funny moment. Enjoy it.”

  Thaxter couldn’t have been happier. He was having a real Chicago treat. For his sake, the city was living up to its reputation. Observing this, I cooled off somewhat. I guess I really love to entertain my friends. Hadn’t I brought sturgeon and fresh rolls and marmalade when the bailiff said that Thaxter was in town? I was still holding the paper bag from Stop and Shop.

  Traffic was thick but Polly’s mastery of the car was extraordinary. She worked the white Thunderbird into the left lane without touching the brake, without a jolt, with fearless competency, a marvelous driver.

  Restless Cantabile twisted about to the rear to face us and said to me, “Look what I’ve got here. An early copy of tomorrow morning’s paper. I bought it from a guy in the press room. It cost me plenty. You want to know something? You and I made Mike Schneiderman’s column. Listen,” he read. “ ‘Charlie Citrine, the Chevrolet of the French Legion and Chicago scribe, who authored the flick Von Trenck, made a card-debt payoff to an underworld figure at the Playboy Club. Better go take a poker seminar at the University, Charles.’ What do you say, Charlie. It’s a pity Mike didn’t know all the facts about your car and the skyscraper and all the rest of it. Now what do you think?”

  “What do I think? I won’t accept author as a verb. I also want to get out at Wabash Avenue.”

  Chicago was more bearable if you didn’t read the papers. We had turned west on Madison Street and passed under the black frames of the El. “Don’t pull up, Polly,” said Cantabile. We moved on toward the Christmas ornaments of State Street, the Santa Clauses and the reindeer. The only element of stability in this moment lay in Polly’s wonderful handling of the machine.

  “Tell me about the Mercedes,” said Thaxter. “What happened to it? And what was the skyscraper thing, Mr. Cantabile? Is the underworld figure at the Playboy Club you yourself?”

  “Those in the know will know,” said Cantabile. “Charlie, how much will they charge for the bodywork on your car? Did you take it back to the dealer? I hope you keep away from those rip-off specialists. Four hundred bucks a day for one grease monkey. What crooks! I know a good cheap shop.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Don’t be ironical with me. But the least I can do is make you back some of the money this will cost.”

  I made no answer. My heart hammered upon a single theme: I urgently desired to be elsewhere. I simply didn’t want to be here. It was utter misery. This was not the moment to remember certain words of John Stuart Mill, but I remembered them anyway. They went something like this: The tasks of noble spirits at a time when the works which most of us are appointed to do are trivial and contemptible—da-da-da, da-da-da, da-da-da. Well the only thing valuable in these contemptible works is the spirit in which they are done. I couldn’t see any values in the vicinity at all. But if the tasks of the durum genus hominum, said the great Mill, were performed by a supernatural agency and there was no demand for wisdom or virtue O! then there would be little that man could prize in man. This was exactly the problem America had set for itself. The Thunderbird would do as the supernatural agency. And what else was man prizing? Polly was transporting us. Under that mass of red hair lay a brain which certainly knew what to prize, if anyone cared to ask. But no one was asking, and she didn’t need much brain to drive this car.

  We now passed the towering upswept frames of the First National Bank, containing layer upon layer of golden lights. “What’s this beautiful structure?” asked Thaxter. No one answered. We charged up Madison Street. At this rate, and due west, we would have reached the Waldheim Cemetery on the outskirts of the city in about fifteen minutes. There my parents lay under snow-spattered grass and headstones; objects would still be faintly visible in the winter dusk, etcetera. But of course we were not bound for the cemetery. We turned into La Salle Street where we were held up by taxicabs and newspaper trucks and the Jaguars and Lincolns and Rolls-Royces of stockbrokers and corporation lawyers—of the deeper thieves and the loftier politicians and the spiritual elite of American business, the eagles in the heights far above the daily, hourly, and momentary destinies of men.

  “Hell, we’re going to miss Stronson. That fat little son of a bitch is always tearing off in his Aston-Martin as soon as he can lock his office,” said Cantabile.

  But Polly sat silent at the steering wheel. Traffic was jammed. Thaxter succeeded at last in getting Cantabile’s attention. And I sighed and, left to myself, tuned out. Just as I had done yesterday when forced, practically at gunpoint, into the stinking closet of the Russian Bath. This is what I thought: certainly the three other souls in the warm darkness of this glowing, pulsating and lacquered automobile had thoughts just as peculiar as my own. But they were apparently less aware of them than I. And what was it that I was so aware of? I was aware that I used to think that I knew where I stood (taking the universe as a frame of reference). But I was mistaken. However, I could at least say that I had been spiritually efficient enough not to be crushed by ignorance. However, it was now apparent to me that I was neither of Chicago nor sufficiently beyond it, and that Chicago’s material and daily interests and phenomena were neither actual and vivid enough nor symbolically clear enough to me. So that I had neither vivid actuality nor symbolic clarity and for the time being I was utterly nowhere. This was why I went to have long mysterious conversations with Professor Scheldt, Doris’s father, on esoteric subjects. He had given me books to read about the etheric and the astral bodies, the Intellectual Soul and the Consciousness Soul, and the unseen Beings whose fire and wisdom and love created and guided this universe. I was far more thrilled by Dr. Scheldt’s talks than by my affair with his daughter. She was a good kid actually. She was attractive and lively, a fair, sharp-profiled, altogether excellent small young woman. True, she insisted on serving fancy dishes like Beef Wellington and the pastry crust was always underdone, and so was the meat, but those were minor matters. I had taken up with her only because Renata and her mother had expelled me and put Flonzaley in my place. Doris couldn’t hold a candle to Renata. Renata? Why, Renata didn’t need an ignition key to start a car. One of her kisses on the hood would turn it on. It would roar for her. Moreover, Miss Scheldt was ambitious socially. In Chicago, husbands with higher mental interests aren’t easy to find, and it was obvious that Doris wanted to be Madame Chevalier Citrine. Her father had been a physicist at the old Armour Institute, an executive of IBM, a NASA consultant who improved the metal used in space ships. But he was also an anthroposophist. He didn’t wish to call this mysticism. He insisted that Steiner had been a Scientist of the Invisible. But Doris, with reluctance, spoke of her father as a crank. She told me many facts about him. He was a Rosicrucian and a Gnostic, he read aloud to the dead. Also at a time when girls have to do erotic things whether or not they have the talent for them, the recent situation being what it is, Doris behaved quite bravely with me. But it was all wrong, I was simply not myself with her and at the wrongest possible time I cried out, “Renata! Oh Renata!” Then I lay there shocked with myself and mortified. But Doris didn’t take my outcry at all hard. She was thoroughly understanding. That was her main strength. And when my talks with the Professor began she was decent about that as well, understanding that I was not going to sleep with the daughter of my guru.

  Sitting in the Professor’s clean parlor—I have seldom sat in a room so utterly clean, the parquet floors of light wood limpid with wax and the Oriental scatter rugs lint-free, and the park below with the equestrian statue of General Sherman prancing on clean air—I was entirely happy. I respected Dr. Scheldt. The strange things he said were at least deep things. In this day and age people had ceased to say such things. He was from another time, entirely. He even dressed like a country-club member of the Twenties. I had caddied for men of this type. A Mr. Masson, one of my regulars at Sunset Ridge in Winnetka, had been the image of Professor Scheldt. I assumed that Mr. Masson had long ago joined the hosts of the dead and that in all the universe there was only me to remember how he had looked when he was climbing out of a sand trap.

  “Dr. Scheldt. . . .” The sun is shining clear, the water beyond is as smooth as the inner peace I have not attained, as wrinkled as perplexity, the lake is strong with innumerable powers, flexuous, hydromuscular. In the parlor is a polished crystal bowl filled with anemones. These flowers are capable of nothing except grace and they are colored with an untranslatable fire derived from infinity. “Now Dr. Scheldt,” I say. I’m speaking to his interested and plain face, calm as a bull’s face and trying to determine how dependable his intelligence is—i.e., whether we are real here or crazy here. “Let me see if I understand these things at all—thought in my head is also thought in the external world. Consciousness in the self creates a false distinction between object and subject. Am I getting it right?”

  “Yes, I think so, sir,” the strong old man says.

  “The quenching of my thirst is not something that begins in my mouth. It begins with the water, and the water is out there, in the external world. So with truth. Truth is something we all share. Two plus two for me is two plus two for everyone else and has nothing to do with my ego. That I understand. Also the answer to Spinoza’s argument that if the dislodged stone had consciousness it could think, ‘I am flying through the air,’ as if it were freely doing it. But if it were conscious, it would not be a mere stone. It could also originate movement. Thinking, the power to think and to know, is a source of freedom. Thinking will make it obvious that spirit exists. The physical body is an agent of the spirit and its mirror. It is an engine and a reflection of the spirit. It is the spirit’s ingenious memorandum to itself and the spirit sees itself in my body, just as I see my own face in a looking glass. My nerves reflect this. The earth is literally a mirror of thoughts. Objects themselves are embodied thoughts. Death is the dark backing that a mirror needs if we are to see anything. Every perception causes a certain amount of death in us, and this darkening is a necessity. The clairvoyant can actually see that when he learns how to obtain the inward view. To do this, he must get out of himself and stand far off.”

  “All this is in the texts,” says Dr. Scheldt, “I can’t be sure that you have grasped it all, but you’re fairly accurate.”

  “Well, I understand in part, I think. When our understanding wants it, divine wisdom will flow toward us.”

  Then Dr. Scheldt begins to speak on the text, I am the light of the world. To him that light is understood also as the sun itself. Then he speaks of the gospel of Saint John as drawing upon the wisdom-filled Cherubim, while the gospel of Saint Luke draws upon the fiery love the Seraphim—Cherubim, Seraphim, and Thrones being the three highest spiritual hierarchy. I am not at all certain that I am following. “I have no experience of any of this advanced stuff, Dr. Scheldt, but I still find it peculiarly good and comforting to hear it all said. I don’t at all know where I’m at. One of these days when life is quieter I’m going to buckle down to the training course and do it in earnest.”

  “When will life be quieter?”

  “I don’t know. But I suppose people have told you before this how much stronger the soul feels after such a conversation.”

  “You shouldn’t wait for things to become quieter. You must decide to make them quieter.”

  He saw that I was fairly skeptical still. I couldn’t make my peace with things like the Moon Evolution, the fire spirits, the Sons of Life, with Atlantis, with the lotus-flower organs of spiritual perception or the strange mingling of Abraham with Zarathustra, or the coming together of Jesus and the Buddha. It was all too much for me. Still, whenever the doctrine dealt with what I suspected or hoped or knew of the self, or of sleep, or of death, it always rang true.

  Moreover, there were the dead to. think of. Unless I had utterly lost interest in them, unless I were satisfied to feel only a secular melancholy about my mother and my father or Demmie Vonghel or Von Humboldt Fleisher, I was obliged to investigate, to satisfy myself that death was final, that the dead were dead. Either I conceded the finality of death and refused to have any further intimations, condemned my childish sentimentality and hankering, or I conducted a full and proper investigation. Because I simply didn’t see how I could refuse to investigate. Yes, I could force myself to think of it all as the irretrievable loss of shipmates to the devouring Cyclops. I could think of the human scene as a battlefield. The fallen are put into holes in the ground or burned to ash. After this, you are not supposed to inquire after the man who gave you life, the woman who bore you, after a Demmie whom you had last seen getting into a plane at Idlewild with her big blond legs and her make-up and her earrings, or after the brilliant golden master of conversation Von Humboldt Fleisher, whom you had last beheld eating a pretzel in the West Forties. You could simply assume that they had been forever wiped out, as you too would one day be. So if the daily papers told of murders committed in the streets before crowds of neutral witnesses, there was nothing illogical about such neutrality. On the metaphysical assumptions about death everyone in the world had apparently reached, everyone would be snatched, ravished by death, throttled, smothered. This terror and this murdering were the most natural things in the world. And these same conclusions were incorporated into the life of society and present in all its institutions, in politics, education, banking, justice. Convinced of this, I saw no reason why I shouldn’t go to Dr. Scheldt to talk about Seraphim and Cherubim and Thrones and Dominions and Exousiai and Archai and Angels and Spirits.

  I said to Dr. Scheldt at our last meeting, “Sir, I have studied the pamphlet called The Driving Force of Spiritual Powers in World History, and it contains a fascinating passage about sleep. It seems to say that mankind doesn’t know how to sleep any more. That something should be happening during sleep that simply isn’t happening and that this is why we wake up feeling so stale and unrested, sterile, bitter, and all the rest of it. So let me see if I’ve got it right. The physical body sleeps, and the etheric body sleeps, but the soul goes off.”

  “Yes,” said Professor Scheldt. “The soul, when you sleep, enters the supersensible world, or at least one of its regions. To simplify, it enters its own element.”

  “I’d like to think that.”

  “Why shouldn’t you?”

  “Well, I will, just to see if I understand it. In the supersensible world the soul meets the invisible forces which were known by initiates in the ancient world in their Mysteries. Not all the beings of the hierarchy are accessible to the living, only some of them, but these are indispensable. Now, as we sleep, the pamphlet says, the words that we have spoken all day long are vibrating and echoing about us.”

  “Not literally, the words,” Dr. Scheldt corrected.

  “No, but the feeling-tones, the joy or pain, the purpose of the words. Through the vibrations and echoes of what we have thought and felt and said we commune as we sleep with the beings of the hierarchy. But now, our daily monkeyshines are such, our preoccupations are so low, language has become so debased, the words so blunted and damaged, we’ve said such stupid and dull things, that the higher beings hear only babbling and grunting and TV commercials—the dog-food level of things. This says nothing to them. What pleasure can these higher beings take in this kind of materialism, devoid of higher thought or poetry? As a result, all that we can hear in sleep is matter creaking and hissing and washing, the rustling of plants, and the air conditioning. So we are incomprehensible to the higher beings. They can’t influence us and they themselves suffer a corresponding privation. Have I got it right?”

  “Yes, by and large.”

  “It makes me wonder about a late friend of mine who used to complain of insomnia. He was a poet. And I can see now why he may have had such a problem about sleeping. Maybe he was ashamed. Out of a sense that he had no words fit to carry into sleep. He may actually have preferred insomnia to such a nightly shame and disaster.”

  Now the Thunderbird pulled up beside the Rookery on La Salle Street. Cantabile jumped out. As he was holding the door open for Thaxter I said to Polly, “Now Polly—tell me something helpful, Polly.”

  “This Stronson fellow is in big trouble,” she said, “big, big, big trouble. Look in tomorrow’s paper.”

  We went through the tiled, balustraded Rookery lobby and up in a swift elevator, Cantabile repeating, as though he wanted to hypnotize me, “Ten grand today will get you fifteen by Thursday. That’s fifty percent in three days. Fifty percent.” We came out into a white corridor and then up against two grand cedar doors lettered Western Hemisphere Investment Corporation. On these doors Cantabile gave a coded set of knocks: three times; pause; once; then a final once. It was odd that this should be necessary, but after all a man who could give such a return on money must be fighting off investors. A beautiful receptionist let us in. The anteroom was carpeted heavily. “He’s here,” said Cantabile. “Just wait a few minutes, you guys.”

  Thaxter sat down on a low orange loveseat sort of thing. A man was vacuuming loudly around us, wearing a gray porter’s jacket. Thaxter removed his wide dude hat and smoothed the Directoire points over his irregularly formed forehead. He took the stem of his curved pipe into his straight lips and said, “Sit down.” I gave him the sturgeon and marmalade to hold and overtook Cantabile at the door to Stronson’s private office. I pulled tomorrow’s paper from under his arm. He grabbed at it and we both tugged. His coat came open and I saw the pistol in his belt but this no longer deterred me. “What do you want?” he said.

  “I just want to have a look at Schneiderman’s column.”

  “Here, I’ll tear it out for you.”

  “You do that and I’m leaving.”

  He pushed the paper at me violently and went into Stronson’s office. Rapidly leafing, I found an article in the financial section describing the difficulties of Mr. Stronson and the Western Hemisphere Investment Corporation. A complaint had been filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission against him. He was charged with violation of the federal securities regulations. He had used the mails to defraud and had dealt in unregistered securities. An explanatory affidavit filed by the SEC alleged that Guido Stronson was a complete phony, not a Harvard graduate, but only a New Jersey high-school dropout and gas-station attendant, until recently a minor employee in a bill-collecting agency in Plainfield. He had abandoned a wife and four children. They were now on welfare in the East. Coming to Chicago, Guido Stronson had opened a grand office on La Salle Street and produced glittering credentials, including a degree from the Harvard Business School. He said he had been conspicuously successful in Hartford as an insurance executive. His investment company soon had a very large clientele for hog bellies, cocoa, gold ore. He had bought a mansion on the North Shore and said he wanted to go in for fox hunting. Complaints lodged by clients had led to these federal investigations. The report concluded with the La Salle Street rumor that Stronson had many Mafia clients. He had apparently cost these clients several millions of dollars.

  By tonight Greater Chicago would know these facts and tomorrow this office would be mobbed by cheated investors and Stronson would need police protection. But who would protect him the day after tomorrow from the Mafia? I studied the man’s photograph. Newspapers distort faces peculiarly—I knew that from personal experience, but this photograph, if it did Stronson justice in any degree, inspired no sympathy. Some faces gain by misrepresentation.

  Now why had Cantabile brought me here? He promised me fast profits, but I knew something about modern life. I mean, I could read a little in the great mysterious book of urban America. I was too fastidious and skittish to study it closely—I had used the conditions of life to test my powers of immunity; the sovereign consciousness trained itself to avoid the phenomena and to be immune to their effects. Still, I did know, more or less, how swindlers like Stronson operated. They hid away a good share of their stolen dollars, they were sentenced to prison for eight or ten years, and when they got out, they retired quietly to the West Indies or the Azores. Maybe Cantabile was now trying to get his hands on some of the money Stronson had stashed—in Costa Rica, perhaps. Or maybe if he was losing twenty thousand dollars (some of it possibly Cantabile family money) he intended to make a big scene. He would want me to see such a scene. He liked me to be present. Because of me he had gotten into Mike Schneiderman’s column. He must have been thinking of something even more brilliant, more sensationally inventive. He needed me. And why was I so often involved in such things? Szathmar too did this to me; George Swiebel had staged a poker party in order to show me a thing or two; this afternoon even Judge Urbanovich had acted up in chambers for my sake. I must have been associated in Chicago with art and meaning, with certain upper values. Wasn’t I the author of Von Trenck (the movie), honored by the French government and the Zig-Zag Club? I still carried in my wallet a thin wrinkled length of silk ribbon for the buttonhole. And O! we poor souls, all of us so unstable, ignorant, perturbed, so unrested. Couldn’t even get a good night’s sleep. Failing in the night to make contact with the merciful, regenerative angels and archangels who were there to strengthen us with their warmth and their love and wisdom. Ah, poor hearts that we were, how badly we were all doing and how I longed to make changes or amends or corrections. Something!

  Cantabile had shut himself up in conference with Mr. Stronson, and this Stronson, represented in the paper with a brutally thick face and hair done in pageboy style, was probably frantic. Maybe Cantabile was offering him deals—deals upon deals upon deals. Advice on how to come to terms with his furious Mafia customers.

  Thaxter was lifting his legs to let the porter vacuum under them.

  “I think we’d better go,” I said.

  “Leave? Now?”

  “I think we should get out of here.”

  “Oh, come on, Charlie, don’t make me leave. I want to see what happens. There’ll never be another occasion like this. This man Cantabile is absolutely wild. He’s fascinating.”

  “I wish you hadn’t rushed into his Thunderbird without asking me. So excited by gangland Chicago you just couldn’t wait. I suppose you expect to make use of this experience, send it to the Reader’s Digest or something nonsensical like that—you and I have all kinds of things to discuss.”

  “They can wait, Charles. You know I’m sort of impressed by you. You always complain that you’re isolated, then I come to Chicago and find you bang in the middle of things.” He flattered me. He knew how much I liked to be thought a Chicago expert. “Is Cantabile one of the ballplayers at your club?”

  “I don’t think Langobardi would let him join. He doesn’t suffer minor hoodlums gladly.”

  “Is that what Cantabile is?”

  “I don’t know exactly what he is. He carries on like a Mafia Don. He’s some sort of silly-billy. He has a wife who’s getting a PhD.”

  “You mean that smashing redhead with the platform shoes?”

  “She’s not the one.”

  “Wasn’t it grand how he gave that code knock on the door? And the pretty receptionist opened? Notice these glass cases with the pre-Columbian art and the collection of Japanese fans. I tell you, Charles, nobody actually knows this country. This is some country. The leading interpreters of America stink. They do nothing but swap educated formulas about it. You, yes you! Charles, should write about it, describe your life day by day and apply some of your ideas to it.”

  “Thaxter, I told you how I took my little girls to see the beavers out in Colorado. All around the lake the Forestry Service posted natural-history placards about the beaver’s life cycle. The beavers didn’t know a damn thing about this. They just went on chewing and swimming and being beavers. But we human beavers are all shook up by descriptions of ourselves. It affects us to hear what we hear. From Kinsey or Masters or Eriksen. We read about identity crisis, alienation, etcetera, and it all affects us.”

  “And you don’t want to contribute to the deformation of your fellow man with new inputs?—God, how I loathe the word “input.” But you yourself continually make high-level analyses. What about the piece for The Ark you sent me—I think it’s right here in my attaché case—in which you offer an economic interpretation of personal eccentricities. Let’s see, I’m sure I’ve got it here. You argue that there may be a connection at this particular stage of capitalism between the shrinking of investment opportunities and the quest for new roles or personality investments. You even quoted Schumpeter, Charlie. Yes, here it is: ‘These dramas may appear purely internal but they are perhaps economically determined . . . when people think they are being so subtly inventive or creative they merely reflect society’s general need for economic growth.’ “

  “Put away that paper,” I said. “For God’s sake, don’t quote my big ideas at me. If there’s one thing I can’t take today, it’s that.”

  It was really very easy for me to generate great thoughts of this sort. Instead of regretting this glib weakness with me, Thaxter envied it. He longed to be a member of the intelligentsia, to stand in the pantheon and to make a Major Statement like Albert Schweitzer or Arthur Koestler or Sartre or Wittgenstein. He didn’t see why I distrusted this. I was too grand; too snobbish, even, he said, sharply resentful. But there it was, I simply did not wish to be a leader of the world intelligentsia. Humboldt had pursued it with all his might. He believed in victorious analysis, he preferred “ideas” to poetry, he was prepared to give up the universe itself for the subworld of higher cultural values.

  “Anyway,” said Thaxter, “you should go around Chicago like Restif de la Bretonne in the streets of Paris and write a chronicle. It would be sensational.”

  “Thaxter, I want to talk to you about The Ark. You and I were going to give a new impulse to the mental life of the country and outdo the American Mercury and The Dial, or the Revista de Occidente, and so on. We discussed and planned it for years. I’ve spent a pot of money on it. I’ve paid all the bills for two and a half years. Now where is The Ark? I think you’re a great editor, a born editor, and I believe in you. We announced our magazine and people sent in material. We’ve been sitting on their manuscripts for ages, I’ve gotten bitter letters and even threats. You’ve made me the fall guy. They all blame me, and they all quote you. You’ve set yourself up as a Citrine expert and interpret me all over the place—how I function, how little I understand women, all the weaknesses of my character. I don’t take that too hard. I’d be glad though, if you didn’t interpret me quite so much. And the words you put into my mouth—that X is a moron, or Y is an imbecile. I have no prejudices against X or Y. The one who’s out to get ‘em is you.”

  “Frankly, Charles, the reason why our first number isn’t out is that you sent me so much anthroposophical material. You’re no fool so there must be something to anthroposophy. But for God’s sake, we can’t come out with all this stuff about the soul.”

  “Why not? People talk about the psyche, why not the soul?”

  “Psyche is scientific,” said Thaxter. “You have to accustom people gradually to these terms of yours.”

  I said, “Why did you buy such a huge supply of paper?”

  “I wanted to be ready to publish five issues in succession without worrying about supplies. Besides, we got a good buy.”

  “Where are all these tons of paper now?”

  “In the warehouse. But I don’t think that it’s The Ark that bothers you. It’s really Denise that’s eating at you, the courts and the dollars and all that grief and harassment.”

  “No, that’s not what it is,” I said. “Sometimes I’m grateful to Denise. You think I should be like Restif de la Bretonne, in the streets? Well, if Denise weren’t suing me, I’d never get out of the house. Because of her I have to go downtown. It keeps me in touch with the facts of life. It’s been positively enlightening.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, I realize how universal the desire to injure your fellow man is. I guess it’s the same in the democracies as in dictatorships. Only here the government of laws and lawyers puts a palisade up. They can injure you a lot, make your life hideous, but they can’t actually do you in.”

  “Your love of education really does you credit, Charles. No kidding. I can tell you after a friendship of twenty years,” said Thaxter. “Your character is a very peculiar one but there is a certain—I don’t know what to call it—dignity that you do have. If you say soul and I say psyche, you have your reason for it, probably. You probably do have a soul, Charles. And it’s a pretty startling fact about anyone.”

  “You have one yourself. Anyway, I think we had better give up our plan to publish The Ark and liquidate our assets remaining if any.”

  “Now, Charles, don’t be hasty. We can straighten this business out very easily. We’re almost there.”

  “I can’t put any more money into it. I’m not doing well, financially.”

  “You can’t compare your situation to mine,” said Thaxter. “I’ve been wiped out in California.”

  “How bad is it there?”

  “Well, I’ve kept your obligations down to a minimum. You promised to pay Blossom her salary. Don’t you remember Blossom, the secretary? You met her in September?”

  “My obligations? In September we agreed to lay Blossom off.”

  “Ah, but she was the only one who really knew how to operate all the IBM machinery.”

  “But the machinery was never operated.”

  “That wasn’t her fault. We were prepared. I was ready to go at any time.”

  “What you mean, really, is that you’re too grand a personage to do without a staff.”

  “Have a heart, Charles. Just after you left, her husband was killed in a car crash. You wouldn’t want me to fire her at such a time. I know your heart, whatever else, Charles. So I took it on myself to interpret your attitude. It’s only fifteen hundred bucks. There is actually another thing I must mention, the lumber bill for the wing we started.”

  “I didn’t tell you to build the wing. I was dead against it.”

  “Why, we agreed there was to be a separate office. You didn’t expect me to bring all of that editorial confusion into my house.”

  “I definitely said I’d have no part of it. I warned you even, that if you dug that big hole next to your house you’d undermine the foundations.”

  “Well, it isn’t very serious,” said Thaxter. “The lumber company can damn well dismantle it all and take back their wood. Now, as for the slip-up between banks—I’m damn sorry about that, but it was not my fault. The payment from the Banco Am-brosiano di Milano was delayed. It’s these damn bureaucracies! Besides, it’s just anarchy and chaos now in Italy. Anyway, you have my check. ...”

  “I have not.”

  “You haven’t? It’s got to be in the mail. Postal service is outrageous. It was my last installment of twelve hundred dollars to the Palo Alto Trust. They had already closed me out. They owe you twelve hundred.”

  “Is it possible that they never received it? Maybe it was sent out from Italy by dolphin.”

  He did not smile. The moment was solemn. We were speaking, after all, of his money. “Those California crumbs were supposed to reissue it and send you their cashier’s check.”

  “Maybe the Banco Ambrosiano’s check hasn’t cleared yet,” I said.

  “Now, then,” he took a legal pad from his attaché case. “I’ve worked out a schedule to repay the money you lost. You must have the original cost of the stock. I absolutely insist. I believe you bought it at four hundred. You overpaid, you know, it’s way down now. However, that’s not your fault. Let’s say that when you posted it for me it was worth eighteen thousand. Nor will I forget the dividends.”

  “You don’t have to do dividends, Thaxter.”

  “No, I insist. It’s easy enough to find out what sort of dividend IBM is paying. You send me the figure and I’ll send you the check.”

  “In five years you paid off less than one thousand dollars on this loan. You kept up the interest payments and little else.”

  “The interest rate was out of sight.”

  “In five years you reduced the amount of the principal by two hundred dollars a year.”

  “The exact figures don’t come to me now,” said Thaxter. “But I know that the bank will owe you something after it sells the stock.”

  “IBM is now under two hundred a share. The bank gets hurt, too. Not that I care what happens to banks.”

  But Thaxter was now busy explaining how he would return the money, dividends and all, over a five-year period. The split black pupils of his long grape-green eyes moved over the figures. He was going to do the whole thing handsomely, with dignity, aristocratically, fully sincere, shirking no part of his obligation to a friend. I could see that he entirely meant what he said. But I also knew that this elaborate plan to do right by me would be, in his mind, tantamount to doing right. These long yellow sheets from the legal pad filled with figures, these generous terms of repayment, the care for detail, the expressions of friendship, settled our business fully and forever. This was magically it.

  “It’s a good idea to be scrupulously precise with you in these petty deals. To you the small sums are more important than big ones. What sometimes surprises me is that you and I should be fooling around with trifles. You could make any amount of money. You don’t know your own resources. Odd, isn’t it? You could turn a crank and money would fall into your lap.”

  “What crank?” I said.

  “You could go to a publisher with a project and name your own advance.”

  “I’ve already taken big advances.”

  “Peanuts. You could get lots more. I’ve come up with some ideas myself. For starters you and I could do that cultural Baedeker I’m always after you about, a guide for educated Americans who go to Europe and get tired of shopping for Florentine leather and Irish linen. They’re fed up with the thundering herd of common rubbernecks. Are these cultivated Americans in Vienna, for instance? In our guide they can find lists of research institutes to visit, small libraries, private collections, chamber-music groups, the names of cafés and restaurants where one can meet mathematicians or fiddlers, and there would be listings of the addresses of poets, painters, psychologists, and so on. Visit their studios and labs. Have conversations with them.”

  “You might as well bring over a firing squad and shoot all these poets dead as put such information into the hands of culture-vulture tourists.”

  “There isn’t a ministry of tourism in Europe that wouldn’t get excited by this. They’d all cooperate fully. They might even kick in some money. Charlie, we could do this for every country in Europe, for all major cities as well as the capitals. This idea is worth a million dollars to you and me. I would take charge of the organization and research. I’d do most of the work. You’d cover atmospheric stuff and ideas. We’ll need a staff for the details. We could start in London and move on to Paris and Vienna and Rome. Say the word and I’ll go to one of the big houses. Your name will pull down an advance of two hundred and fifty thousand. We split it two ways and your worries are over.”

  “Paris and Vienna! Why not Montevideo and Bogota? There’s just as much culture there. Why are you sailing and not flying to Europe?”

  “It’s my favorite way to travel, deeply restful One of my old mother’s remaining pleasures in life is to arrange these trips for her only child. She’s done more, this time. The Brazilian football champions are touring Europe, and she knows I love football. I mean superb football. So she’s wangled me tickets for four matches. Besides, I have business reasons for going. And I want to see some of my children.”

  I refrained from asking how he could travel first class on the France when he was dead broke. Asking got me nowhere. I never succeeded in assimilating his explanations. I did remember being told, however, that the velvet suit with a blue silk scarf knotted in the Ronald Colman manner made perfectly acceptable evening wear. In fact the black-tie millionaires looked tacky by comparison. And women adored Thaxter. One evening during his last crossing an old Texas lady, if you could believe him, dropped a chamois sack full of gems into his lap, under the tablecloth. He discreetly passed them back to her. He would not service rich old Texas frumps, he told me. Not even those who were magnanimous in Oriental or Renaissance style. Because after all, he continued, this was a big gesture suitable to a big ocean and a big character. But he was remarkably dignified, virtuous, and faithful to his wife—to all his wives. He was warmly devoted to his extended family, the many children he had had by several women. If he didn’t make a Major Statement he would at least leave his genetic stamp upon the world.

  “If I had no cash, I’d ask my mother to put me in steerage. How much do you tip when you get off the France in Le Havre?” I asked him.

  “I give the chief steward five bucks.”

  “You’re lucky to leave the boat alive.”

  “Perfectly adequate,” said Thaxter. “They bully the American rich and despise them for their cowardice and ignorance.”

  He told me now, “My business abroad is with an international consortium of publishers for whom I’m developing a certain idea. Originally, I got it from you, Charlie, but you won’t remember. You said how interesting it would be to go around the world interviewing a lot of second-, third-, and fourth-rank dictators—the General Amins, the Qaddafis, and all that breed.”

  “They’d have you drowned in their fishpond if they thought you were going to call them third-rate.”

  “Don’t be silly, I’d never do such a thing. They’re leaders of the developing world. But it’s actually a fascinating subject. These shabby foreign-student-bohemians a few years ago, future petty blackmailers, now they’re threatening the great nations, or formerly great nations, with ruin. Dignified world leaders are sucking up to them.”

  “What makes you think they’ll talk to you?” I said.

  “They’re dying to see somebody like me. They’re longing for a touch of the big time, and I have impeccable credentials. They all want to hear about Oxford and Cambridge and New York and the London season, and discuss Karl Marx and Sartre. If they want to play golf or tennis or ping-pong, I can do all of that. To prepare myself for writing these articles I’ve been reading some good things to get the right tone—Marx on Louis Napoleon is wonderful. I’ve also looked into Suetonius and Saint-Simon and Proust. Incidentally, there’s going to be an international poets’ congress in Taiwan. I may cover that. You have to keep your ear to the ground.”

  “Whenever I try that I get nothing but a dirty ear,” I said.

  “Who knows, I may get to interview Chiang Kai-shek before he kicks off.”

  “I can’t imagine that he has anything to tell you.”

  “Oh, I can take care of that,” said Thaxter.

  “How about getting out of this office?” I said.

  “Why don’t you, for once, go along with me and do the thing my style. Not to overprotect. Let the interesting thing happen. How bad can it be? We can talk just as well here as anywhere. Tell me what’s going on personally, what’s with you?”

  Whenever Thaxter and I met we had at least one intimate conversation. I spoke freely to him and let myself go. In spite of his eccentric nonsense, and my own, there was a bond between us. I was able to talk to Thaxter. At times I told myself that talking to him was as good for me as psychoanalysis. Over the years, the cost had been about the same. Thaxter could elicit what I was really thinking. A more serious learned friend like Richard Durnwald would not listen when I tried to discuss the ideas of Rudolf Steiner. “Nonsense!” he said. “Simply nonsense! I’ve looked into that.” In the learned world anthroposophy was not respectable. Durnwald dismissed the subject sharply because he wished to protect his esteem for me. But Thaxter said, “What is this Consciousness Soul, and how do you explain the theory that our bones are crystallized out of the cosmos itself?”

  “I’m glad you asked me that,” I said. But before I could begin I saw Cantabile approaching. No, he didn’t approach, he descended on us in a peculiar way, as if he weren’t using the floor with its carpeting but had found some other material basis.

  “Let me borrow this,” he said, and took up the black dude hat with the swerving brim. “All right,” he said, promotional and tense. “Get up, Charlie. Let’s go and visit the man.” He gave my body a rough lift. Thaxter also rose from the orange loveseat but Cantabile pushed him down again and said, “Not you. One at a time.” He took me with him to the presidential door. There, he paused. “Look,” he said, “you let me do the talking. It’s a special situation.”

  “This is one more of your original productions, I see. But no money is going to change hands.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t really have done that to you. Who else but a guy in bad trouble would give you three for two? You saw the item in the paper, hey?”

  “I certainly did,” I said. “And what if I hadn’t?”

  “I wouldn’t let you get hurt. You passed my test. We’re friends. Come meet the guy anyway. I figure it’s like your duty to examine American society from White House to Skid Row. Now all I want you to do is stand still while I say a few words. You were a terrific straight man yesterday. There was no harm in that, was there?” He belted my coat tightly as he spoke and put Thaxter’s hat on my head. The door to Stronson’s office opened before I could get away.

  The financier was standing beside his desk, one of those deep executive desks of the Mussolini type. The picture in the paper was misleading in one respect only—I had expected a bigger man. Stronson was a fat boy, his hair light brown and his face sallow. In build he resembled Billy Srole. Brown curls covered his short neck. The impression he made was not agreeable. There was something buttocky about his cheeks. He wore a tur-tleneck shirt, and swinging ornaments, chains, charms hung on his chest. The pageboy bob gave him a pig-in-a-wig appearance. Platform shoes increased his height.

  Cantabile had brought me here to threaten this man. “Take a good look at my associate, Stronson,” he said. “He’s the one I told you about. Study him. You’ll see him again. He’ll catch up with you. In a restaurant, in a garage, in a movie, in an elevator.” To me he said, “That’s all. Go wait outside.” He faced me toward the door.

  I had turned to ice. Then I was horrified. Even to be a dummy impersonating a murderer was dreadful. But before I could indignantly deny, remove the hat, stop Cantabile’s bluff, the voice of Stronson’s receptionist came, enormously amplified and room-filling, from the slotted box on the desk. “Now?” she said.

  And he answered, “Now!”

  Immediately the porter in the gray jacket entered the office, pushing Thaxter before him. His I.D. card was open in his hand. He said, “Police, Homicide!” and he pushed all three of us against the wall.

  “Wait a minute. Let’s see that card. What do you mean, homicide?” said Cantabile.

  “What do you think, I was just going to let you make threats and hold still? After you said how you’d have me killed I went to the State’s Attorney and swore a warrant,” said Stronson. “Two warrants. One John Doe for the hit man, your friend.”

  “Are you supposed to be Murder Incorporated?” said Thaxter to me. Thaxter seldom laughed aloud. His deepest delight was always more than half-silent, and his delight at this moment was wonderfully deep.

  “Who’s the hit man, me?” I said, trying to smile.

  No one replied.

  “Who has to threaten you, Stronson?” said Cantabile. His brown eyes, challenging, were filled with moisture, while his face turned achingly dry and pale. “You lost more than a million bucks for the guys in the Troika, and you’re finished, kid. You’re dead! Why should anybody else get in the act? You’ve got no more chance than a shit-house rat. Officer, this man is unreal. You want to see the story in tomorrow’s paper. Western Hemisphere Investment Corporation is wiped out. Stronson wants to pull a few people down with him. Charlie, go and get the paper. Show it to the man.”

  “Charlie ain’t going anywhere. Everybody just lean on the wall. I hear you carry a gun, and your name is Cantabile. Bend over, sweetheart—that’s the way.” We all obeyed. His own weapon was under his arm. His harness creaked. He took the pistol from Cantabile’s ornate belt. “No ordinary .38, a Saturday-Night Special. It’s a Magnum. You could kill an elephant with this.”

  “There it is, just as I told you. That’s the gun he shoved under my nose,” said Stronson.

  “It must run in the Cantabile family to be silly with guns. That was your Uncle Moochy, wasn’t it, who wasted those two kids? No effing class at all. Goofy people. Now we’ll see if you’ve got any grass on you. It would also be nice if there was a little parole violation to go with this too. We’ll fix you fine, buddy boy. Goddamn bunch of kid-killers.”

  Thaxter was now being frisked under the cloak. His mouth was wide and his nose strongly distorted and flaming across the bridge with all the mirth, the joy of this marvelous Chicago experience. I was angry with Cantabile. I was furious. The detective ran his hands over my sides, under the arms, up between my legs and said, “You two gentlemen can turn around. You’re quite a pair of dressers. Where did you get those shoes with the canvas sides?” he asked Thaxter. “Italy?”

  “The King’s Road,” said Thaxter pleasantly.

  The detective took off the gray porter’s jacket—under it he wore a red turtlenecked shirt—and emptied Cantabile’s long black ostrich-skin wallet on the desk. “And which one is supposed to be the hit man? Errol Flynn in the cape, or the check coat?”

  “The coat,” said Stronson.

  “I should let you make a fool of yourself and arrest him,” said Cantabile, still facing the wall. “Go ahead. On top of the rest.”

  “Why, is he somebody?” said the policeman. “A big shot?”

  “Fucking-A-right,” said Cantabile. “He’s a well-known distinguished man. Look in tomorrow’s paper and you’ll see his name in Schneiderman’s column—Charles Citrine. He’s an important Chicago personality.”

  “So what, we’re sending important personalities to jail by the dozen. Governor Kerner didn’t even have the brains to get a smart bagman.” The detective was enjoying himself. He had a plain seamed face, now jolly, a thoroughly experienced police face. Under the red shirt his breasts were fat. The dead hair of his wig did not agree with his healthy human color and was lacking in organic symmetry. It took off from his head in the wrong places. You saw such wigs on the playful, gaily-colored seats of the changing booths at the Downtown Club—hair pieces like Skye terriers waited for their masters.

  “Cantabile came to see me this morning with wild propositions,” said Stronson. “I said, no way. Then he threatened he’d murder me, and he showed me the gun. He’s really crazy. Then he said he’d be back with his hit man. He described how the hit would be done. The guy would track me for weeks. Then he’d shoot half my face off like a rotten pineapple. And the smashed bone and the brains and blood running out of my nose. He even told me how the murder weapon, the evidence, would be destroyed, how the killer would saw it up with a power hacksaw and hammer the pieces out and drop them down different manholes in all the suburbs. Every little detail!”

  “You’re dead anyway, fat-ass,” said Cantabile. “They’ll find you in a sewer in a few months and they’ll have to scrape an inch of shit off your face to see who it was.”

  “There’s no permit for a gun. Beautiful!”

  “Now take these guys out of here,” said Stronson.

  “Are you going to charge everybody? You only got two warrants.”

  “I’m going to charge everybody.”

  I said, “Mr. Cantabile himself has just told you that I had nothing to do with this. My friend Thaxter and I were coming out of the Art Institute and Cantabile made us come here to discuss an investment, supposedly. I can sympathize with Mr. Stronson. He’s terrified. Cantabile is out of his mind with some kind of vanity, eaten up with conceit, violent egomania—bluff. This is just one of his original hoaxes. Maybe the officer can tell you, Mr. Stronson, that I’m not the Lepke type of hired killer. I’m sure he’s seen a few.”

  “This man never killed anybody,” said the cop.

  “And I have to leave for Europe and I have lots of things to attend to.”

  This last point was the main one. The worst of this situation was that it interfered with my anxious preoccupations, my complicated subjectivity. It was my inner civil war versus the open life which is elementary, easy for everyone to read, and characteristic of this place, Chicago, Illinois.

  As a fanatical reader, walled in by his many books, accustomed to look down from his high windows on police cars, fire engines, ambulances, an involuted man who worked from thousands of private references and texts, I now found relevance in the explanation T. E. Lawrence had given for enlisting in the RAF—”To plunge crudely among crude men and find for myself . . .” How did it go, now? “. . . for these remaining years of my prime life.” Horseplay, roughhouse, barracks obscenity, garbage detail. Yes, many men, Lawrence said, would take the death-sentence without a whimper to escape the life-sentence which fate carries in her other hand. I saw what he meant. So it was time that someone—and why not someone like me?—did more with this baffling and desperate question than had been done by other admirable men who attempted it. The worst thing about this absurd moment was that my stride was broken. I was expected at seven o’clock for dinner. Renata would be upset. It vexed her to be stood up. She had a temper, her temper always worked in a certain way; and also, if my suspicions were correct, Flonzaley was never far off. Substitutes are forever haunting people’s minds. Even the most stable and balanced individuals have a secretly chosen replacement in reserve somewhere, and Renata was not one of the stablest. As she often fell spontaneously into rhymes, she had surprised me once by coming out with this:

              When the dear

              Disappear

              There are others

              Waiting near.

  I doubt that anyone appreciated Renata’s wit more deeply than I did. It always opened breath-taking perspectives of candor. But Humboldt and I had agreed long ago that I could take anything that was well said. That was true. Renata made me laugh. I was willing to deal later with the terror implicit in her words, the naked perspectives suddenly disclosed. She had for instance also said to me, “Not only are the best things in life free, but you can’t be too free with the best things in life.”

  A lover in the lockup gave Renata a classic floozy opportunity for free behavior. Because of my habit of elevating such mean considerations to the theoretical level it will surprise no one that I started to think about the lawlessness of the unconscious and its independence from the rules of conduct. But it was only antinomian, not free. According to Steiner, true freedom lived in pure consciousness. Each microcosm had been separated from the macrocosm. In the arbitrary division between Subject and Object the world had been lost. The zero self sought diversion. It became an actor. This was the situation of the Consciousness Soul as I interpreted it. But there now passed through me a qualm of dissatisfaction with Rudolf Steiner himself. This went back to an uncomfortable passage in Kafka’s Diaries pointed out to me by my friend Durnwald, who felt that I was still capable of doing serious intellectual work and wanted to save me from anthroposophy. Kafka too had been attracted by Steiner’s visions and found the clairvoyant states he described similar to his own, feeling himself on the outer boundaries of the human. He made an appointment with Steiner at the Victoria Hotel on Jungmannstrasse. It is recorded in the Diaries that Steiner was wearing a dusty and spotted Prince Albert and that he had a terrible head cold. His nose ran and he kept working his handkerchief deep into his nostrils with his fingers while Kafka, observing this with disgust, told Steiner that he was an artist stuck in the insurance business. Health and character, he said, prevented him from following a literary career. If he added theosophy to literature and the insurance business, what would become of him? Steiner’s answer is not recorded.

  Kafka himself of course was crammed to the top with this same despairing fastidious mocking Consciousness Soul. Poor fellow, the way he stated his case didn’t do him much credit. The man of genius trapped in the insurance business? A very banal complaint, not really much better than a head cold. Humboldt would have agreed. We used to talk about Kafka and I knew his views. But now Kafka and Steiner and Humboldt were together in death where, presently, all the folk in Stronson’s office would join them. Reappearing, perhaps, centuries hence in a more sparkling world. It wouldn’t have to sparkle much to sparkle more than this one. Nevertheless, Kafka’s description of Steiner upset me.

  While I was engaged in these reflections, Thaxter had gotten into the act. He came on with malice toward none. He was going to straighten matters out most amiably, not patronizing people too much. “I really don’t think you want to take Mr. Citrine away on this warrant,” he said, gravely smiling.

  “Why not?” said the cop, with Cantabile’s pistol, the fat nickel-plated Magnum, stuck in his belt.

  “You agreed that Mr. Citrine doesn’t resemble a killer.”

  “He’s tired-out and white. He should go to Acapulco for a week.”

  “It’s preposterous, a hoax like this,” said Thaxter. He was showing me the beauty of his common touch, how well he understood and got around his fellow Americans. But it was obvious to me how exotic the cop found Thaxter, his elegance, his Peter Wimsey airs. “Mr. Citrine is internationally known as an historian. He really was decorated by the French government.”

  “Can you prove that?” said the cop. “You wouldn’t have your medal on you by any chance, would you?”

  “People don’t carry medals around,” I said.

  “Well, what kind of proof have you got?”

  “All I have is this bit of ribbon. I have the right to wear it in my buttonhole.”

  “Let’s have a look at that,” he said.

  I drew out the tangled faded insignificant bit of lime green silk.

  “That?” said the cop. “I wouldn’t tie it on a chicken leg.”

  I agreed with the cop completely, and as a Chicagoan I scoffed inwardly with him at these phony foreign honors. I was the Shoveleer, burning with self-ridicule. It served the French right, too. This was not one of their best centuries. They were doing everything badly. What did they mean by handing out these meager bits of kinky green string? Because Renata insisted in Paris that I must wear it in my buttonhole, we had been exposed to the insults of the real chevalier whom Renata and I met at dinner, the man with the red rosette, the “hard scientist,” to use his own term. He gave me the snubbing of my life. “American slang is deficient, nonexistent,” he said. “French has twenty words for ‘boot.’ “ Then he was snooty about the Behavioral Sciences—he took me for a behavioral scientist—and he was very rough on my green ribbon. He said, “I am sure you have written some estimable books but this is the kind of decoration given to people who improve the poubelles.” Nothing but grief had ever come of my being honored by the French. Well, that would have to pass. The only real distinction at this dangerous moment in human history and cosmic development has nothing to do with medals and ribbons. Not to fall asleep is distinguished. Everything else is mere popcorn.

  Cantabile was still facing the wall. The cop, I was glad to note, had it in for him. “You just hold it, there,” he said. It seemed to me that we in this office were under something like a huge transparent wave. This enormous transparent thing stood still above us, flashing like crystal. We were all within it. When it broke and detonated we would be scattered for miles and miles along some far white beach. I almost hoped that Cantabile would have his neck broken. But, no, when it happened I saw each of us cast up safe and separate on a bare white pearly shore.

  As all parties continued—Stronson, stung by Cantabile’s evocation of his corpse fished from the sewer, crying in a kind of pig’s soprano voice, “I’ll see that you get it, anyway!” while Thaxter was coming in underneath, trying to be persuasive—I tuned out and gave my mind to one of my theories. Some people embrace their gifts with gratitude. Others have no use for them and can think only of overcoming their weaknesses. Only their defects interest and challenge them. Thus those who hate people may seek them out. Misanthropes often practice psychiatry. The shy become performers. Natural thieves look for positions of trust. The frightened make bold moves. Take the case of Stron-son, a man who entered into desperate schemes to swindle gangsters. Or take myself, a lover of beauty who insisted on living in Chicago. Or Von Humboldt Fleisher, a man of powerful social instincts burying himself in the dreary countryside.

  Stronson didn’t have the strength to carry through. Seeing how self-deformed he was, fat but elegant; short of leg and ham, on platform shoes; given to squealing, but sending his voice deep, I was sorry, oh! deeply sorry for him. It seemed to me that his true nature was quickly reclaiming him. Had he forgotten to shave that morning or did terror make his beard suddenly rush out? And long awful bristles were coming up from his collar. A woodchuck look was coming over him. The pageboy wave went lank with sweat. “I want all these guys handcuffed,” he said to the plainclotliesman.

  “What, with one pair of cuffs?”

  “Well, put ‘em on Cantabile. Go, put ‘em on.”

  I completely agreed with him, in silence. Yes, manacle the son of a bitch, twist his arms behind him, and cut into the flesh. But having said these savage things to myself, I didn’t necessarily wish to see them happen.

  Thaxter drew the cop aside and said a few words in an undertone. I wondered later whether he hadn’t passed him a secret CIA code word. You couldn’t be sure with Thaxter. To this day I have never been able to decide whether or not he had ever been a secret agent. Years ago he invited me to be his guest in Yucatan. Three times I changed planes to get there, and then I was met at a dirt landing strip by a peon in sandals who drove me in a new Cadillac to Thaxter’s villa, fully staffed with Indian servants. There were cars and jeeps, and a wife and little children, and Thaxter had already mastered the local dialect and ordered people around. A linguistic genius, he quickly learned new languages. But he was having trouble with a bank in Mérida, and there was, of all things, a country club in his neighborhood where he had run up a tab. I arrived just as he was completing the invariable pattern. He said on the second day that we were leaving this damn place. We packed his steamer trunks with fur coats and tennis equipment, with temple treasures and electrical appliances. As we drove away I was holding one of his babies on my lap.

  The cop took us out of Stronson’s office. Stronson called after us, “You bastards are going to get it. I promise you. No matter what happens to me. Especially you, Cantabile.”

  Tomorrow he himself would get it.

  As we waited for the elevator, Thaxter and I had time to confer. “No, I’m not being booked,” said Thaxter. “I’m almost sorry about that. I’d love to go along, really.”

  “I expect you to get busy,” I said. “I felt that Cantabile was going to pull something like this. And Renata’s going to be very upset, that’s the worst of it. Don’t go off and forget me now, Thaxter.”

  “Don’t be absurd, Charles. I’ll get the lawyers right on this. Give me some names and numbers.”

  “First thing is to call up Renata. Take Szathmar’s number. Also Tomchek and Srole.”

  Thaxter wrote the information on an American Express receipt form. Could it be that he was still a cardholder?

  “You’ll lose that flimsy bit of paper,” I said.

  Thaxter spoke to me rather seriously about this. “Watch it, Charlie,” he said. “You’re being a nervous Nellie. This is a trying moment, sure. Exactly why you have to watch it all the more. A plus forte raison.”

  You knew that Thaxter was in earnest when he spoke French. And whereas George Swiebel always shouted at me not to abuse my body, Thaxter forever warned me about my anxiety level. Now there was a man whose nerves were strong enough for his chosen way of life. And notwithstanding his weakness for French expressions, Thaxter was a real American in that, like Walt Whitman, he offered himself as an archetype—”What I assume you will assume.” At the moment, that didn’t particularly help. I was under arrest. My feelings toward Thaxter were those of a man with many bundles trying to find the doorkey and hampered by the house cat. But the truth was that the people from whom I looked for help were by no means my favorites. Nothing was to be expected from Thaxter. I even suspected that his efforts to help might be downright dangerous. If I cried out that I was drowning, he would come running and throw me a life preserver of solid cement. If odd feet call for odd shoes, odd souls have odd requirements and affection comes to them in odd modes. A man who longed for help was fond of someone incapable of giving any.

  I suppose that it was the receptionist who had sent for the blue-and-white squad car now waiting for us. She was a very pretty young woman. I had looked at her as we were leaving the office and thought, Here’s a sentimental girl. Well brought up. Lovely. Distressed to see people arrested. Tears in her eyes.

  “In the back seat, you,” said the plainclothesman to Canta-bile, who, in his pinch hat, white in the face, hair sticking out at the sides, got in. At this moment, disheveled, he seemed for the first time genuinely Italian.

  “The main thing is Renata. Get in touch with Renata,” I told Thaxter as I got into the front seat. “I’ll be in trouble if you don’t—trouble!”

  “Don’t worry. People won’t let you disappear from sight forever,” said Thaxter.

  His words of comfort gave me my first moment of deeper anxiety.

  He did indeed try to get in touch with Renata and with Szathmar. But Renata was still at the Merchandise Mart with her client, picking fabrics, and Szathmar had already closed his office. Somehow Thaxter forgot what I had told him about Tomchek and Srole. To kill time, therefore, he went to a Black Kung Fu movie on Randolph Street. When the show let out he reached Renata at home. He said that since she knew Szathmar so well he thought he could leave things to her, entirely. After all, he was a stranger in town. The Boston Celtics were playing the Chicago Bulls and Thaxter bought a ticket to the basketball game from a scalper. En route to the Stadium the cab stopped at Zimmerman’s and he bought a bottle of Piesporter. He couldn’t get it chilled properly, but it went well with the sturgeon sand-wiches.

  Cantabile’s dark form was riding before me in the front seat of the squad car. I addressed my thoughts to it. A man like Can-tabile took advantage of my inadequate theory of evil, wasn’t that it? He filled all the gaps in it to the best of his histrionic ability with his plunging and bluffing. Or did I, as an American, have a theory of evil? Perhaps not. So he entered the field from that featureless and undemarcated side where I was weak, with his ideas and conceits. This pest delighted the ladies, it seemed— he pleased Polly and, apparently, his wife the graduate student as well. It was my guess that he was an erotic lightweight. But after all it’s the imagination that counts for most with women. So he made his progress through life with his fine riding gloves and his calfskin boots, and the keenly gleaming fuzz of his tweeds, and the Magnum he carried in his waistband, threatening everybody with death. Threats were what he loved. He had called me in the night to threaten me. Threats had affected his bowels yesterday on Division Street. This morning he had gone to threaten Stronson. In the afternoon he offered, or threatened, to have Denise knocked off. Yes, he was a queer creature, with his white face, his long ecclesiastical-wax nose with its dark flues. He was very restless in the front seat. He seemed to be trying to get a look at me. He was almost limber enough to twist his head about and preen his own back feathers. What might it mean that he had tried to pass me off as a murderer? Did he find the original suggestion for that in me? Or was he trying in his own way to bring me out, to carry me into the world, a world from which I had the illusion that I was withdrawing? On the Chicago level of judgment I dismissed him as ready for the bughouse. Well, he was ready for the bughouse, certainly. I was sophisticated enough to recognize that in what he proposed that we two should do with Polly there was a touch of homosexuality, but that wasn’t very serious. I hoped that they would send him back to prison. On the other hand I sensed that he was doing something for me. In his gleaming tweed fuzz, the harshness of which suggested nettles, he had materialized in my path. Pale and crazy, with his mink mustache, he seemed to have a spiritual office to perform. He had appeared in order to move me from dead center. Because I came from Chicago no normal and sensible person could do anything of this sort for me. I couldn’t be myself with normal sensible people. Look at my relations with a man like Richard Durnwald. Much as I admired him, I couldn’t be mentally comfortable with Durnwald. I was slightly more successful with Dr. Scheldt the anthroposophist, but I had my troubles with him too, troubles of a Chicago nature. When he spoke to me of esoteric mysteries I wanted to say to him, “Don’t give me that spiritual hokum, friend!” And after all, my relations with Dr. Scheldt were tremendously important. The questions I raised with him couldn’t have been more serious.

  All this went to my head, or flowed to my head, and I recalled Humboldt in Princeton quoting to me, “Es schwindelt!” The words of V. I. Lenin at the Sniolny Institute. And things were schwindling now. Now was it because, like Lenin, I was about to found a police state? It was from a flux or inundation of sensations, insights, and ideas.

  Of course the cop was right. Strictly speaking, I was no killer. But I did incorporate other people into myself and consume them. When they died I passionately ‘mourned. I said I would continue their work and their lives. But wasn’t it a fact that I added their strength to mine? Didn’t I have an eye on them in the days of their vigor and glory? And on their women? I could already see the outline of my soul’s purgatorial tasks, when it entered the next place.

  “Watch it, Charlie,” Thaxter had admonished me. He wore his cape and held the ideal attaché case and the natural hook umbrella, as well as the sturgeon sandwiches. I watched it. A plus forte raison, I watched it. Watching, I was aware that in the squad car I was following in Humboldt’s footsteps. Twenty years ago in the hands of the law, he had wrestled with the cops. They had forced him into a strait jacket. He had had diarrhea in the police wagon as they rushed him to Bellevue. They were trying to cope, to do something with a poet. What did the New York police know about poets! They knew drunks and muggers, they knew rapists, they knew women in labor and hopheads, but they were at sea with poets. Then he had called me from a phone booth in the hospital. And I had answered from that hot grimy flaking dressing room at the Belasco. And he had yelled, “This is life, Charlie, not literature!” Well, I don’t suppose the Powers, Thrones and Dominions, the Archai, the Archangels and the Angels read poetry. Why should they? They are shaping the universe. They’re busy. But when Humboldt cried, “Life!” he didn’t mean the Thrones, Exousiai, and Angels. He only meant realistic, naturalistic life. As if art hid the truth and only the sufferings of the mad revealed it. This was impoverished imagination?

  We arrived and Cantabile and I were separated. They kept him at the desk, I went inside.

  Anticipating the job I had cut out for me in purgatory, I didn’t find it necessary to take jail too seriously. What was it, after all? A lot of bustle, and people who specialized in giving you a hard time. They photographed me, front and sides. Good. After these mug shots I was fingerprinted too. Very well. Following this, I expected to go into the lockup. There was a fat domestic-looking policeman waiting to take me to the slammer. Inside duties make these cops obese. There he was, housewifely, in a coat sweater and slippers, with belly and gun, a big pouting lip, and fat furrows at the back of his head. He was steering me in when someone said, “You! Charles Citrine! Outside!” I went back into the main corridor. I wondered how Szathmar had gotten here so fast. But it wasn’t Szathmar who was waiting for me, it was Stronson’s young receptionist. This beautiful girl said that her employer had decided to drop the case against me. He was going to concentrate on Cantabile.

  “And did Stronson send you over?”

  She explained, “Well, I really wanted to come. I knew who you were. As soon as I found out your name, I did. So I explained it to my boss. He’s been like in shock these days. You can’t exactly blame Mr. Stronson, when people come and say he’s going to be murdered. But I finally got him to understand that you were a famous person, not a hit man.”

  “Ah, I see. And you’re a dear girl as well as a beautiful one. I can’t tell you how grateful I am. Talking to him couldn’t have been easy.”

  “He really was scared. Now he’s mostly depressed. Why are your hands so dirty?” she said.

  “Fingerprinting. The ink they used.”

  She was upset. “My God! Imagine fingerprinting a man like you!” She opened her purse and began to moisten paper tissues and to rub my stained fingertips.

  “No, thank you. No, no, don’t do that,” I said. Such attentions always get to me, and it seemed a dreadfully long time since anyone had done me any intimate kindness like this. There are days when one wants to go to the barber, not for a haircut (there’s not much hair to cut) but just for the sake of the touch.

  “Why not?” said the girl. “I feel that I’ve always known you.”

  “From books?”

  “Not books. I’m afraid I never read any of your books. I understand they’re history books and history has never been my bag. No, Mr. Citrine, through my mother.”

  “Do I know your mother?”

  “Since I was a kid, I’ve heard you were her school-days sweetheart.”

  “Your mother isn’t Naomi Lutz!”

  “Yes, she was. I can’t tell you how thrilled she and Doc were when they ran into you at that bar downtown.”

  “Yes, Doc was with her.”

  “When Doc passed away, Mother was going to call you. She says now you’re the only one she can talk old times with. There are things she wants to remember and can’t place. Just the other day she couldn’t recall the name of the town where her Uncle Asher lived.”

  “Her Uncle Asher lived in Paducah, Kentucky. Of course I’ll call her. I loved your mother, Miss . . .”

  “Maggie,” she said.

  “Maggie. You’ve inherited her curves from the waist down. I never saw another back-curve so lovely till this moment, and in jail, of all places. You also have her gums and teeth, a bit short in the teeth, and the same smile. Your mother was beautiful. You’ll excuse me for saying this, it’s an exciting moment, but I always felt that if I could have embraced your mother every night for forty years, as her husband, of course, my life would have been completely fulfilled, a success—instead of this. How old are you, Maggie?”

  “Twenty-five.”

  “O Lord!” I said as she washed my fingers in the freezing drinking water. My hand is very sensitive to a feminine touch. A kiss in the palm can send me out of my head.

  She took me home in her Volkswagen, weeping a little as she drove. She was thinking perhaps of the happiness her mother and I had missed. And when, I wondered, would I rise at last above all this stuff, the accidental, the merely phenomenal, the wastefully and randomly human, and be fit to enter higher worlds?

  twenty-four

  So before leaving town I paid a visit to Naomi. Her married name was Wolper.

  But I didn’t go immediately to see her. I had a hundred chores to do first.

  The last days in Chicago were crowded. As if to make up for the hours Cantabile’s mischief had cost me, I followed a busy schedule. My accountant, Murra, gave me a whole hour of his time. In his smooth offices, decorated by the famous Richard Himmel and overlooking the lightest green part of the Chicago River, he told me that he had failed to convince the 1RS that it had no case against me. His own bill was high. I owed him fifteen hundred dollars for getting nowhere. When I left his building I found myself in the gloom of Michigan Avenue in front of the electric-light shop near Wacker Drive. Always drawn to this place, with its ingenious new devices, the tints and shapes of bulbs and tubes, I bought a 300-watt flood reflector. I had no use for this article. I was going away. What did I need it for? The purchase only expressed my condition. I was still furnishing my retreat, my sanctuary, my Fort Dearborn deep in Indian (Materialistic) Territory. Also I was in the grip of departure anxieties—jet engines would tear me from the ground at two thousand miles per hour but where was I going, and what for? The reasons for this terrific speed remained unclear.

  No, buying a bulb didn’t help much. What did give me great comfort was to talk with Dr. Scheldt. I questioned him about the Spirits of Form, the Exousiai, known in Jewish antiquity by another name. These shapers of destiny should long ago have surrendered their functions and powers to the Archai, the Spirits of Personality who stand one rank closer to man in the universal hierarchy. But a number of dissident Exousiai, playing a backward role in world history, had for centuries refused to let the Archai take over. They obstructed the development of a modern sort of consciousness. Refractory Exousiai belonging to an earlier phase of human evolution were responsible for tribalism and the persistence of peasant or folk consciousness, hatred of the West and of the New, they nourished atavistic attitudes. I wondered whether this might not explain how Russia in 1917 had put on a revolutionary mask to disguise reaction; and whether the struggle between these same forces might not lie behind Hitler’s rise to power as well. The Nazis also adopted the modern disguise. But you couldn’t entirely blame these Russians, Germans, Spaniards, and Asiatics. The terrors of freedom and modernity were fearful. And this was what made America appear so giddy and monstrous in the eyes of the world. It also made certain countries seem, to American eyes, desperately, monumentally dull. Fighting to retain their inertias the Russians had produced their incomparably boring and terrifying society. And America, under the jurisdiction of the Archai, or Spirits of Personality, produced autonomous modern individuals with all the giddiness and despair of the free, and infected with a hundred diseases unknown during the long peasant epochs.

  After visiting with Dr. Scheldt I took my small daughters, Lish and Mary, to the Christmas pageant after all, outmaneu-vered by Denise, who had put them on the phone in tears. Unexpectedly, however, the pageant was very stirring. I do love theatricals, with their breaking voices, missed cues, and silly costumes. All the fine costumes were in the audience. Hundreds of excited kiddies were brought by their Mamas, many of these Mamas being tigresses of the subtlest sort. And dressed, arrayed, perfumed to a degree! Rip van Winkle was given as a curtain raiser. To me it was immensely relevant. It was all very well to blame the dwarfs for making Rip drunk, but he had his own good reasons for passing out. The weight of the sense world is too heavy for some people, and getting heavier all the time. His twenty years of sleep, let me tell you, went straight to my heart. My heart was sensitive today—worry, anticipated problems, and remorse made it tender and vulnerable. An idiotic old lecher was leaving two children to follow an obvious gold digger to corrupt Europe. As one of the few fathers in the audience I felt how wrong this was. I was encompassed by feminine judgment. The views of all these women were unmistakably expressed. I saw for instance that the mothers resented the portrayal of Mrs. van Winkle, clearly the American Bitch in an early version. Myself, I reject all such notions about American Bitches. The mothers, however, were angry, they smiled but were hostile. The kids, though, were innocent, and they clapped and cheered when Rip was told that his wife had died of apoplexy during a fit of rage.

  I was thinking of the higher significance of these things— naturally. For me the real question was how Rip would have spent his time if the dwarfs had not put him to sleep. He had an ordinary human American right, of course, to hunt and fish and roam the woods with his dog—much like Huckleberry Finn in the Territory Ahead. The following question was more intimate and difficult: what would I have done if I hadn’t been asleep in spirit for so long? Amid the fluttering and squealing and clapping and writhing of little children, so pure of face, so fragrant (even the small gases released, inevitably, by a crowd of children were pleasant if you breathed them in a paternal spirit), so savable, I forced myself to stop and answer—I was obliged to do it. If you believed one of the pamphlets Dr. Scheldt had given me to read, this sleeping was no trifling matter. Our unwillingness to come out of the state of sleep was the result of a desire to evade an impending revelation. Certain spiritual beings must achieve their development through men, and we betray and abandon them by this absenteeism, this will-to-snooze. Our duty, said one bewitching pamphlet, is to collaborate with the Angels. They appear within us (as the Spirit called the Maggid manifested himself to the great Rabbi Joseph Karo). Guided by the Spirits of Form, Angels sow seeds of the future in us. They inculcate certain pictures into us of which we are “normally” unaware. Among other things they wish to make us see the concealed divinity of other human beings. They show man how he can cross by means of thought the abyss that separates him from Spirit. To the soul they offer freedom and to the body they offer love. These facts must be grasped by waking consciousness. Because, when he sleeps, the sleeper sleeps. Great world events pass him by. Nothing is momentous enough to rouse him. Decades of calendars drop their leaves on him just as the trees dropped leaves and twigs on Rip. Moreover, the Angels themselves are vulnerable. Their aims must be realized in earthly humanity itself. Already the brotherly love they put into us has been corrupted into sexual monstrosity. What are we doing with each other in the sack? Love is being disgracefully perverted. Then, too, the Angels send us radiant freshness and we, by our own sleeping, make it all dull. And in the political sphere we can hear, semi-conscious though we are, the grunting of the great swine empires of the earth. The stink of these swine dominions rises into the upper air and darkens it. Is it any wonder that we invite slumber to come quickly and seal our spirits? And, said the pamphlet, the Angels, thwarted by our sleep during waking hours, have to do what they can with us in the night. But then their work cannot touch our feeling or thinking, for these are absent during sleep. Only the unconscious body and the sustaining vital principle, the ether body, lie there in bed. The great feelings and the thoughts are gone. So also in the day, sleepwalking. And if we will not awaken, if the Spiritual Soul can’t be brought to participate in the work of the Angels, we will be sunk. For me the clinching argument was that the impulses of higher love were corrupted into sexual degeneracy. That really went home. Perhaps I had more basic, ultimate reasons for going off with Renata, leaving two little girls in dangerous Chicago, than I was aware enough to produce at a moment’s notice. I might, just possibly, justify what I was doing. After all, Christian in Pilgrim’s Progress had taken off, too, and left his family to pursue salvation. Before I could do the children any real good, I had to wake up. This muddiness, this failure to focus and to concentrate, was very painful. I could see myself as I had been thirty years ago. I didn’t need to look in the picture album. That damning photograph was unforgettable. There I was, a pretty young man under a tree, holding hands with an attractive girl. But I might as well have been wearing flannel pajamas as that flapping double-breasted suit—the gift of my brother Julius —for in the flower of my youth and at the height of my powers I was out cold.

  As I sat in the theater I allowed myself to imagine that there were spirits near, that they wished to reach us, that their breathing enlivened the red of the little dresses the kids were wearing, just as oxygen brightened fire.

  Then the children started to scream. Rip was staggering up from the mass of leaves that had dropped on him. Knowing what he was up against, I groaned. The real question was whether he could stay awake.

  During intermission I ran into Dr. Klosterman from the Downtown Club. He was the one who had urged me in the sauna to go to a plastic surgeon and do something about the bags under my eyes—a simple operation to make me look years younger. All I had for him was a cold nod when he came forward with his children. He said, “We haven’t seen you around lately.”

  Well, I hadn’t been around lately. But only last night, unconscious in Renata’s arms, I had dreamed again that I was playing paddle ball like a champion. My dream-backhand skimmed the left wall of the court and dropped with deadly english into the corner. I beat Scottie the club-player, and also the unbeatable Greek chiropractor, a skinny athlete, very hairy, pigeon-toed but a fiery competitor from whom in real life I could never win a single point. But on the court of my dreams I was a tiger. So in dreams of pure wakefulness and forward intensity I overcame my inertia, my mooning and muddiness. In dreams at any rate I had no intention of quitting.

  As I was thinking of all this in the lobby, Lish remembered that she had brought a note for me from her mother. I opened the envelope and read, “Charles: my life has been threatened!”

  There was no end to Cantabile. Before kidnaping Thaxter and me on Michigan Boulevard, perhaps at the very moment when we were admiring the beautiful Monet Sandvika winter scene, Cantabile was on the telephone with Denise, doing what he loved best, i.e., making threats.

  Once when he was speaking of Denise, George Swiebel had explained to me (although knowing his Nature System I could have provided this explanation myself), “Denise’s struggle with you is her whole sex life. Don’t talk to her, don’t argue with her, unless you still want to give her kicks.” Undoubtedly he would have interpreted Cantabile’s threats in the same way. “This is how the son of a bitch gets his nuts off.” But it was just possible that Cantabile’s death-dealing fantasy, his imaginary role as Death’s highest-ranking deputy, was intended also to wake me up—”Brutus, thou sleep’st,” etcetera. This had occurred to me in the squad car.

  But he had really done it now. “Does your mother expect an answer?” I asked the kid.

  Lish looked at me with her mother’s eyes, those wide amethyst circles. “She didn’t say, Daddy.”

  Denise had certainly reported to Urbanovich that there was a plot to murder her. This would clinch the matter with the judge. He didn’t trust or like me anyway, and he could impound my money. I could forget about those dollars, they were gone. What now? I began again with the usual haste and inaccuracy to tot up my fluid resources, twelve hundred here, eighteen hundred there, the sale of my beautiful carpets, the sale of the Mercedes, very disadvantageous given its damaged condition. So far as I knew, Cantabile was locked up at Twenty-sixth and California. I hoped he would get it in the neck. Lots of people were killed in jail. Perhaps someone would do him in. But I didn’t believe that he would spend much time behind bars. Getting out was very easy now and he’d probably draw another suspended sentence. The courts now gave them as freely as the Salvation Army gave out doughnuts. Well, it didn’t really matter, I was leaving for Milan.

  So, as I said, I paid a sentimental visit to Naomi Lutz, now Wolper. I hired a limousine from the livery service to take me out to Marquette Park—why stint myself now? It was wintry, wet, sleety, a good day for a schoolboy to fight the weather with his satchel and feel dauntless. Naomi was at her post, stopping traffic while kids trotted, straggled, dragged their raincapes and stamped through the puddles. Under the police uniform she wore layers of sweaters. On her head was a garrison cap and a Sam Browne belt crossed her chest—the works: fleece boots, mittens, her neck protected by an orange havelock, her figure obliterated. She waved her coat-hampered wet arms, gathering kids about her, she stopped the traffic and then, heavy in the back, she turned and footed slowly to the curb on her thick soles. And this was the woman for whom I once felt perfect love. She was the person with whom I should have been allowed to sleep for forty years in my favorite position (the woman backed up to me and her breasts in my hands). In a city like brutal Chicago could a man really expect to survive without such intimate, such private comfort? When I came up to her I saw the young woman within the old one. I saw her in the neat short teeth, the winsome gums, the single dimple in the left cheek. I thought I could still breathe in her young woman’s odor, damp and rich, and I heard the gliding and drawling of her voice, an affectation she and I had both thought utterly charming once. And even now, I thought, Why not? The rain of the Seventies looked to me like the moisture of the Thirties when our adolescent lovemaking brought out tiny drops in a little band, a Venetian mask across the middle of her face. But I knew better than to try to touch her, to take off the police coat and the sweaters and the dress and the underclothes. Nor would she want me to see what had happened to her thighs and her breasts. That was all right for her friend Hank—Hank and Naomi had grown old together—but not for me, who knew her way-back-when. There was no prospect of this. It was not indicated, not hinted, not possible. It was only one of those things that had to be thought.

  We drank coffee in her kitchen. She had invited me to brunch and served fried eggs, smoked salmon, nutbread, and comb honey. I felt completely at home with her old ironware and hand-knitted pot holders. The house was all that Wolper left her, she said. “When I saw how fast he was losing money on the horses 1 insisted that he should make the title over.”

  “Smart thinking.”

  “A little later my husband’s nose and ankle were broken, just as a warning, by a juice man. Till then I didn’t know Wolper was paying the gangsters juice. He came home from the hospital with his face all purple around the bandages. He said I shouldn’t sell the bungalow to save his life. He cried and said he was no damn good and he decided to disappear. I know you’re surprised that I live in this Czech neighborhood. But my father-in-law, a smart old Jew, bought investment property in this nice safe Bohunk district. So this was where we wound up. Well, Wolper was a jolly man. He didn’t give me trouble the way you would have. For a wedding present he made me a present of my own convertible and a charge account at Field’s. That was what I wanted most in life.”

  “I always felt it would have given me strength to be married to you, Naomi.”

  “Don’t idealize so much. You were a violent kid. You almost choked me to death because I went to a dance with some basketball player. And once, in the garage, you put a rope on your neck and threatened to hang yourself if you didn’t get your way. Do you remember?”

  “I’m afraid I do, yes. Superkeen needs were swelling up in me.”

  “Wolper is married again and has a bikeshop in New Mexico. He may feel safer near the border. Yes, you were thrilling but I never knew where you were at with your Swinburne and your Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde and Karl Marx. Boy, you certainly did carry on.”

  “Those were intoxicating books and I was in the thick of beauty and wild about goodness and thought and poetry and love. Wasn’t that merely adolescence?”

  She smiled at me and said, “I don’t really think so. Doc told Mother that your whole family were a bunch of greenhorns and aliens, too damn emotional, the whole bunch of you. Doc died last year.”

  “Your daughter told me that.”

  “Yes, he fell apart finally. When old men put two socks on one foot and pee into the bathtub I suppose it’s the end.”

  “I’m afraid so. I myself think that Doc overdid the Yankee Doodle stuff. Being a Babbitt inspired him almost the way Swinburne did me. He was dying to say good-by to Jewry, or to feudalism. . . .”

  “Do me a favor—I still freeze when you use a word like feudalism on me. That was the trouble between us. You came down from Madison raving about that poet named Humboldt Park or something and borrowed my savings to go to New York on a Greyhound bus. I really and truly loved you, Charlie, but when you rolled away to see this god of yours, I went home and painted my nails and turned on the radio. Your father was furious when I told him you were a Fuller Brush salesman in Manhattan. He needed your help in the wood business.”

  “Nonsense, he had Julius.”

  “Jesus, your father was handsome. He looked like—what the girls used to say—The Spaniard Who Ruined My Life. And Julius?”

  “Julius is disfiguring south Texas with shopping centers and condominiums.”

  “But you people all loved each other. You were like real primitive that way. Maybe that’s why my father called you greenhorns.”

  “Well, Naomi, my father became an American too and so did Julius. They stopped all that immigrant loving. Only I persisted, in my childish way. My emotional account was always overdrawn. I never have forgotten how my mother cried out when I fell down the stairs or how she pressed the lump on my head with the blade of a knife. And what a knife—it was her Russian silver with a handle like a billy club. So there you are. Whether it was a lump on my head, or Julius’s geometry, or how Papa could raise the rent, or poor Mama’s toothaches, it was the most momentous thing on earth for us all. I never lost this intense way of caring—no, that isn’t so. I’m afraid the truth is that I did lose it. Yes, sure I lost it. But I still required it. That’s always been the problem. I required it and apparently I also promised it. To women, I mean. For women I had this Utopian emotional love aura and made them feel I was a cherishing man. Sure, I’d cherish them in the way they all dreamed of being cherished.”

  “But it was a phony,” said Naomi. “You yourself lost it. You didn’t cherish.”

  “I lost it. Although anything so passionate probably remains in force somewhere.”

  “Charlie, you put it over on lots of girls. You must have made them awfully unhappy.”

  “I wonder whether mine is such an exceptional case of longing-heart-itis. It’s unreal, of course, perverse. But it’s also American, isn’t it? When I say American I mean uncorrected by the main history of human suffering.”

  Naomi sighed as she listened to me and then said, “Ah, Charlie, I’ll never understand how or why you reach your conclusions. When you used to lecture me, I never could follow you at all. ‘But at the time your play opened on Broadway, you were in love with a girl, they tell me. What happened to her?”

  “Demmie Vonghel. Yes. She was the real thing, too. She was killed in South America with her father. He was a millionaire from Delaware. They took off from Caracas in a DC-3 and crashed in the jungle.”

  “Oh how sad and terrible.”

  “I went down to Venezuela to look for her.”

  “I’m glad you did that. I was going to ask.”

  “I took the same flight out of Caracas. They were old planes and patched up. Indians flying around with their chickens and goats. The pilot invited me to sit in the cockpit. There was a big crack in the windshield and the wind rushed in. Flying over the mountains I was afraid we wouldn’t make it either, and I thought, O Lord, let it happen to me the way it happened to Demmie. Looking at those mountains I frankly didn’t care much for the way the world was made, Naomi.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Oh I don’t know, but you get disaffected from nature and all its miracles and stupendous achievements, from subatomic to galactic. Things play too rough with human beings. They chafe too hard. They stick you in the veins. As we came over the mountains and I saw the Pacific throwing a fit of epilepsy against the shore I thought, To hell with you, then. You can’t always like the way in which the world was molded. Sometimes I think, Who wants to be an eternal spirit and have more existences! Screw all that! But I was telling you about the flight. Up and down about ten times. We landed on bare earth. Strips of red dirt on coffee plantations. Waving at us under the trees were little naked kids with their brown bellies and bent dinguses hanging.”

  “You never found anything? Didn’t you search in the jungle?”

  “Sure I searched. We even found a plane, but not the missing DC-3. This was a Cessna that went down with some Japanese mining engineers. Vines and flowers were growing all over their bones, and God knows what spiders and other animals were making themselves at home in their skulls. I didn’t want to discover Demmie in that condition.”

  “You didn’t like the jungle much.”

  “No. I drank lots of gin. I developed a taste for straight gin, like my friend Von Humboldt Fleisher.”

  “The poet! What happened to him?”

  “He’s dead, too, Naomi.”

  “Isn’t all this dying something, Charlie!”

  “The whole thing is disintegrating and reintegrating all the time, and you have to guess whether it’s always the same cast of characters or a lot of different characters.”

  “I suppose you finally got to the mission,” said Naomi.

  “Yes, and there were lots of Demmies there, about twenty Vonghels. They were all cousins. All with the same long heads golden hair knock-knees and upturned noses, and the same mumbling style of speech. When I said that I was Demmie’s fiancé from New York they thought I was some sort of nut. I had to attend services and sing hymns, because the Indians wouldn’t understand a white visitor who was not a Christian.”

  “So you sang hymns while your heart was breaking.”

  “I was glad to sing the hymns. And Dr. Tim Vonghel gave me a bucket of gentian violet to sit in. He told me I had a bad case of tinia crura. So I stayed among these cannibals, hoping that Demmie would show up.”

  “Were they cannibals?”

  “They had eaten the first group of missionaries that came there. As you sang in the chapel and saw the filed teeth of somebody who had probably eaten your brother—Dr. Timothy’s brother was eaten, and he knew the fellows who had done it— well, Naomi, there’s lots of peculiar merit in people. I wouldn’t be surprised if my experiences in the jungle put me in a forgiving frame of mind.”

  “Who was there to forgive?” said Naomi.

  “This friend of mine, Von Humboldt Fleisher. He drew a check on my account while I was knocking myself out over Demmie in the jungle.”

  “Did he forge your signature?”

  “I had given him a blank check, and he put it through for more than six thousand dollars.”

  “No! But you, of course, you didn’t expect a poet to act that way about money, did you? Excuse me for laughing. But you always did provoke people into doing the dirty human thing to you by insisting that they should do the Goody Two-Shoes bit. I’m awfully sorry you lost that girl in the jungle. She sounds to me like your type. She was like you, wasn’t she? You could both have been out of it together, and perfectly happy.”

  “I see what you mean, Naomi. I failed to understand the deeper side of human nature. Until recently I couldn’t bear to think of it.”

  “Only you could get mixed up with this goofy fellow that threatened Stronson. This Italian Maggie described to me.”

  “You may be right,” I said. “And I must try to analyze my motives for going along with people of the Cantabile type. But think how I felt to have a child of yours, that beautiful girl, come and get me out of jail—the daughter of the woman I loved.”

  “Don’t get sentimental, Charlie. Please!” she said.

  “I have to tell you, Naomi, that I loved you cell by cell. To me you were a completely nonalien person. Your molecules were my molecules. Your smell was my smell. And your daughter reminded me of you—same teeth, same smile, same everything, for all I know.”

  “Don’t get carried away. You’d marry her, wouldn’t you, you old sex pot. Are you testing to see if I’d say go ahead? It’s a real compliment that you’re ready to marry her because she reminds you of me. Well, she’s a wonderful kid, but what you need is a woman with a heart as big as a washing machine, and that’s not my daughter. Anyway, you’re still with that chick I saw in the bar—the gorgeous kind of Oriental one, built like a belly dancer, and big dark eyes. Aren’t you?”

  “Yes, she is gorgeous, and I’m still the boyfriend.”

  “A boyfriend! I wonder what it is with you—a big important clever man going around so eager from woman to woman. Haven’t you got anything more important to do? Boy, have women ever sold you a bill of goods! Do you think they’re really going to give you the kind of help and comfort you’re looking for? As advertised?”

  “Well, it is advertised, isn’t it?”

  “It’s like an instinct with women,” she said. “You communicate to them what you have to have and right away they tell you they’ve got exactly what you need, although they never even heard of it until just now. They’re not even necessarily lying. They just have an instinct that they can supply everything that a man can ask for, and they’re ready to take on any size or shape or type of man. That’s what they’re like. So you go around looking for a woman like yourself. There ain’t no such animal. Not even this Demmie could have been. But the girls tell you, ‘Your search is ended. Stop here. I’m it.’ Then you award the contract. Of course nobody can deliver and everybody gets sore as hell. Well, Maggie isn’t your type. Why don’t you tell me about your wife?”

  “Don’t put temptation before me. Just pour me another cup.”

  “What’s the temptation?”

  “Oh, the temptation? The temptation is to complain. I could tell you how bad Denise is with the kids, how she dumps them when she can, has the court tie me in knots and the lawyers rip me off, and so on. Now that’s a Case, Naomi. A Case can be a work of art, the beautiful version of one’s sad life. Humboldt the poet used to perform his Case all over New York. But these Cases are bad art, as a rule. How will all this complaining seem when the soul has flowed out into the universe and looks back on the complete scene of earthly suffering?”

  “You’ve only changed physically,” said Naomi. “This is how you used to talk. What do you mean, ‘the soul flows out into the universe’? . . . When I was an ignorant girl and loved you, you tried out your ideas on me.”

  “I found when I made my living by writing people’s personal memoirs that no successful American had ever made a real mistake, no one had sinned or ever had a single thing to hide, there have been no liars. The method practiced is concealment through candor to guarantee duplicity with honor. The writer would be drilled by the man who hired him until he believed it all himself. Read the autobiography of any great American— Lyndon Johnson for instance—and you’ll see how faithfully his brainwashed writers reproduce his Case. Many Americans—”

  “Never mind many Americans,” said Naomi. How comfortable she looked in slippers, smiling in the kitchen, her fat arms crossed. I kept repeating that it would have been bliss to sleep with her for forty years, that it would have defeated death, and so on. But could I really have borne it? The fact was that I became more and more fastidious as I grew older. So now I was honor-bound to face the touchy question: could I really have embraced this faded Naomi and loved her to the end? She really didn’t look good. She had been beaten about by biological storms (the mineral body is worn out by the developing spirit). But this was a challenge that I could have met. Yes, I could have done it. Yes, it would have worked. Molecule for molecule she was still Naomi. Each cell of those stout arms was still a Naomi cell. The charm of those short teeth still went to my heart. Her drawl was as effective as ever. The Spirits of Personality had done a real job on her. For me the Anima, as C. G. Jung called it, was still there. The counterpart soul, the missing half described by Aristophanes in the Symposium.

  “So you’re going away to Europe with that young broad?” she said.

  I was astonished. “Who told you that?”

  “I ran into George Swiebel.”

  “I wish George wouldn’t tell my plans to everyone.”

  “Oh, come, we’ve all known each other a lifetime.”

  “These things get back to Denise.”

  “You think you have secrets from that woman? She could see through a wall of steel, and you’re no wall of steel. She doesn’t have to figure you, anyway, she only has to figure out what the young lady wants you to do. Why are you going twice a year to Europe with this broad?”

  “She’s got to find her father. Her mother isn’t certain which of two men . . . And last spring I had to be in London on business. So we stopped in Paris, too.”

  “You must be right at home, over there. The French made you a knight. I kept the clipping.”

  “I’m the cheapest type of low-grade chevalier.”

  “And did it tickle your vanity to travel with a great big beautiful doll? How did she make out with your high-class European friends?”

  “Do you know that Woodrow Wilson sang ‘Oh You Beautiful Doll’ on the honeymoon train with Edith Boiling? The Pullman porter saw him dancing and singing in the morning when he came out.”

  “That’s just the sort of fact you’d know.”

  “And he was just about our most dignified President,” I added. “No, Renata wasn’t a big hit with women abroad. I took her to a fancy dinner in London and the hostess thought her terribly vulgar. It wasn’t the beige lace see-through dress. Nor even her wonderful coloring, her measurements, her vital emanations. She was just Sugar Ray Robinson among the paraplegics. She turned on the Chancellor of the Exchequer. He compared her to a woman in the Prado, by one of the Spanish masters. But the ladies were rough on her and she cried afterward and said it was because we weren’t married.”

  “So next day you bought her thousands of dollars’ worth of gorgeous clothes instead, I bet. But be you what you may, I get a big kick out of seeing you. You’re a sweet fellow. This visit is a wonderful treat for a poor plain old broad. But would you humor me about one thing?”

  “Sure, Naomi, if I can.”

  “I was in love with you, but I married a regular kind of Chicago person because I never really knew what you were talking about. However, I was only eighteen. I’ve often asked myself, now that I’m fifty-three, whether you’d make more sense today. Would you talk to me the way you talk to one of your intelligent friends—better yet, the way you talk to yourself? Did you have an important thought yesterday, for instance?”

  “I thought about sloth, about how slothful I’ve been.”

  “Ridiculous. You’ve worked hard. I know you have, Charlie.”

  “There’s no real contradiction. Slothful people work the hardest.”

  “Tell me about this. And remember, Charlie, you’re not going to tone this down. You’re going to say it to me as you would to yourself.”

  “Some think that sloth, one of the capital sins, means ordinary laziness,” I began. “Sticking in the mud. Sleeping at the switch. But sloth has to cover a great deal of despair. Sloth is really a busy condition, hyperactive. This activity drives off the wonderful rest or balance without which there can be no poetry or art or thought—none of the highest human functions. These slothful sinners are not able to acquiesce in their own being, as some philosophers say. They labor because rest terrifies them. The old philosophy distinguished between knowledge achieved by effort (ratio) and knowledge received (intellectus) by the listening soul that can hear the essence of things and comes to understand the marvelous. But this calls for unusual strength of soul. The more so since society claims more and more and more of your inner self and infects you with its restlessness. It trains you in distraction, colonizes consciousness as fast as consciousness advances. The true poise, that of contemplation or imagination, sits right on the border of sleep and dreaming. Now, Naomi, as I was lying stretched out in America, determined to resist its material interests and hoping for redemption by art, I fell into a deep snooze that lasted for years and decades. Evidently I didn’t have what it took. What it took was more strength, more courage, more stature. America is an overwhelming phenomenon, of course. But that’s no excuse, really. Luckily, I’m still alive and perhaps there’s even some time still left.”

  “Is this really a sample of your mental processes?” asked Naomi.

  “Yes,” I said. I didn’t dare mention the Exousiai and the Archai and the Angels to her.

  “Oh Christ, Charlie,” said Naomi, sorry for me. She pitied me, really, and reaching over and breathing kindly into my face she patted my hand. “Of course you’ve probably become even more peculiar with time. I see now it’s lucky for us both that we never got together. We would have had nothing but maladjustment and conflict. You would have had to speak all this high-flown stuff to yourself, and everyday gobbledygook to me. In addition, there may be something about me that provokes you to become incomprehensible. Anyway you already took one trip to Europe with your lady and you didn’t find Daddy. But when you go away, there are two more little girls with a missing father.”

  “I’ve had that very thought.”

  “George says that the little one is your favorite.”

  “Yes, Lish is just like Denise. I do love Mary more. I fight my prejudice, however.”

  “I’d be surprised if you didn’t love those children a lot in your dippy way. Like everybody else I have my own child worries.”

  “Not with Maggie.”

  “No, I didn’t like the job she had with Stronson, but now that he’s washed up she’ll get another, easy. It’s my son that upsets me. Did you ever get around to reading his articles in the neighborhood paper on kicking the drug habit? I sent them to you for your opinion.”

  “I didn’t read them.”

  “I’ll give you another set of clippings. I want you to tell me if he has talent. Will you do that for me?”

  “I wouldn’t dream of refusing.”

  “You ought to dream of it oftener. People lay too much on you. I know I shouldn’t be doing this. You’re leaving town and must have plenty to do. But I want to know.”

  “Is the young man like his sister?”