by Bellow, Saul
Continuing her report on her interview with Billy, Sorella said that he adopted what negotiators call a bargaining posture. He behaved as though he had reason to be proud of his record, of the deals he had made, and I suppose that he was standing his ground behind this front of pride. Sorella hadn’t yet formulated her threat. Beside her on a chair that decorators would have called a love seat there lay (and he saw) a large manila envelope. It contained Deborah’s papers—what else would she have brought to his suite? To make a grab for this envelope was out of the question. “I outreached him and outweighed him,” said Sorella. “I could scratch him as well, and also shriek. And the very thought of a scene, a scandal, would have made him sick. Actually, the man was looking sick. His calculation in Jerusalem was to make a major gesture, to enter Jewish history, attaining a level far beyond show biz. He had seen only a sample of the Hamet/Horsecollar file. But imagine what the newspapers, the world tabloid press, could do with this material.
“So he was waiting to hear my proposition,” said Sorella.
I said, “I’m trying to figure out just what you had in mind.”
“Concluding a chapter in Harry’s life. It should be concluded,” said Sorella. “It was a part of the destruction of the Jews. On our side of the Atlantic, where we weren’t threatened, we have a special duty to come to terms with it….”
“Come to terms? Who, Billy Rose?”
“Well, he involved himself in it actively.”
I recall that I shook my head and said, “You were asking too much. You couldn’t have gotten very far with him.”
“Well, he did say that Fonstein suffered much less than others. He wasn’t in Auschwitz. He got a major break. He wasn’t tattooed with a number. They didn’t put him to work cremating the people that were gassed. I said to Billy that the Italian police must have been under orders to hand Jews over to the SS and that so many were shot in Rome, in the Ardeatine Caves.”
“What did he say to this?”
“He said, ‘Look, lady, why do I_ have to think about all of that? I’m not the kind of guy who’s expected to. This is too much for me.’ I said, ‘I’m not asking you to make an enormous mental effort, only to sit down with my husband for fifteen minutes.’
‘Suppose I do,’ he said. ‘What’s your offer?’
‘I’ll hand over Deborah’s whole file. I’ve got it right here.’
‘And if I don’t play ball?’
‘Then I’ll turn it over to some other party, or parties.’ Then he burst out, ‘You think you’ve got me by the knackers, don’t you? You’re taking an unfair terrible advantage of me. I don’t want to talk dirty to a respectable person, but I call this kicking the shit out of a man. Right now I’m in an extrasensitive position, considering what’s my purpose in Jerusalem. I want to contribute a memorial. Maybe it would be better not to leave any reminder of my life and I should be forgotten altogether. So at this moment you come along to take revenge from the grave for a jealous woman. I can imagine the record this crazy put together, about deals I made—I know she got the business part all wrong, and the bribery and arson would never stick. So that leaves things like the private clinical junk collected from show girls who badmouthed me. But let me say one thing, Missus: Even a geek has his human rights. Last of all, I haven’t got all that many secrets left. It’s all been told.’ Almost all,’ I said.”
I observed, “You sure did bear down hard on him.”
“Yes, I did,” she admitted. “But he fought back. The libel suits he threatened were only bluff, and I told him so. I pointed out how little I was asking. Not even a note to Harry, just a telephone message would be enough, and then fifteen minutes of conversation. Mulling it over, with his eyes cast down and his little hands passive on the back of a sofa—he was on his feet, he wouldn’t sit down, that would seem like a concession—he refused me again. Once and for all he said he wouldn’t meet with Harry. ‘I already did for him all I’m able to do.’ Then you leave me no alternative,’ I said.”
On the striped chair in Billy’s suite, Sorella opened her purse to look for a handkerchief. She touched herself on the temples and on the folds of her arms, at the elbow joint. The white handkerchief looked no bigger than a cabbage moth. She dried herself under the chin. “He must have shouted at you,” I said.
He began to yell at me. It was what I anticipated, a screaming fit. He said no matter what you did, there was always somebody waiting with a switchblade to cut you, or acid to throw in your face, or claws to rip the clothes off you and leave you naked. That fucking old Hamet broad, whom he kept out of charity—as if her eyes weren’t kooky enough, she put on those giant crooked round goggles. She hunted up those girls who swore he had the sexual development of a ten-year-old boy. It didn’t matter for shit, because he was humiliated all his life long and you couldn’t do more than was done already. There was relief in having no more to cover up. He didn’t care what Hamet had written down, that bitch-eye mummy, spitting blood and saving the last glob for the man she hated most. As for me, I was a heap of fat filth!”
“You don’t have to repeat it all, Sorella.”
“Then I won’t. But I did lose my temper. My dignity fell apart.”
“Do you mean that you wanted to hit him?”
“I threw the document at him. I said, ‘I don’t want_ my husband to talk to the likes of you. You’re not fit…’ I aimed Deborah’s packet at him. But I’m not much good at throwing, and it went through the open window.”
“What a moment! What did Billy do then?”
“All the rage was wiped out instantly. He picked up the phone and got the desk. He said, A very important document was dropped from my window. I want it brought up right now. You understand? Immediately. This minute.’ I went to the door. I don’t suppose I wanted to make a gesture, but I am a Newark girl at bottom. I said, ‘You’re the filth. I want no part of you.’ And I made the Italian gesture people used to make in a street fight, the edge of the palm on the middle of my arm.”
Inconspicuously, and laughing as she did it, she made a small fist and drew the edge of her other hand across her biceps.
“A very American conclusion.”
“Oh,” she said, “from start to finish it was a one hundred percent American event, of our own generation. It’ll be different for our children, A kid like our Gilbert, at his mathematics summer camp? Let him for the rest of his life do nothing but mathematics. Nothing could be more different from either East Side tenements or the backstreets of Newark.”
All this had happened toward the end of the Fonsteins’ visit, and I’m sorry now that I didn’t cancel a few Jerusalem appointments for their sake—take them to dinner at Dagim Benny, a good fish restaurant. It would have been easy enough for me to clear the decks. What, to spend more time in Jerusalem with a couple from New Jersey named Fonstein? Yes is the answer. Today it’s a matter of regret. The more I think of Sorella, the more charm she has for me.
I remember saying to her, “I’m sorry you didn’t hit Billy with that packet.”
My thought, then and later, was that she was too much hampered by fat under the arms to make an accurate throw.
She said, “As soon as the envelope left my hands I realized that I longed to get rid of it, and of everything connected with it. Poor Deborah—Mrs. Horsecollar, as you like to call her. I see that I was wrong to identify myself with her cause, her tragic life. It makes you think about the high and the low in people. Love is supposed to be high, but imagine falling for a creature like Billy. I didn’t want a single thing that man could give Harry and me. Deborah recruited me, so I would continue her campaign against him, keep the heat on from the grave. He was right about that.”
This was our very last conversation. Beside the King David driveway, she and I were waiting for Fonstein to come down. The luggage had been stowed in the Mercedes—at that time, every other cab in Jerusalem was a Mercedes-Benz. Sorella said to me, “How do you see the whole Billy business?”
In th
ose days I still had the Villager’s weakness for theorizing—the profundity game so popular with middle-class boys and girls in their bohemian salad days. Ring anybody’s bell, and he’d open the window and empty a basin full of thoughts on your head.
“Billy views everything as show biz,” I said. “Nothing is real that isn’t a show. And he wouldn’t perform in your show because he’s a producer, and producers don’t perform.”
To Sorella, this was not a significant statement, so I tried harder. “Maybe the most interesting thing about Billy is that he wouldn’t meet with Harry,” I said. ‘He wasn’t able to be the counterexample in a case like Harry’s. Couldn’t begin to measure up.”
Sorella said, “That may be a little more like it. But if you want my basic view, here it is: The Jews could survive everything that Europe threw at them. I mean the lucky remnant. But now comes the next test—America. Can they hold their ground, or will the U. S. A. be too much for them?”
This was our final meeting. I never saw Harry and Sorella again. In the sixties, Harry telephoned once to discuss Cal Tech with me. Sorella didn’t want Gilbert to study so far from home. An only child, and all ofthat. Harry was full of the boys perfect test scores. My heart doesn’t warm to the parents of prodigies. I react badly. They’re riding for a fall. I don’t like parental boasting. So I was unable to be cordial toward Fonstein. My time just then was unusually valuable. Horribly valuable, as I now judge it. Not one of the attractive periods in the development (gestation) of a success.
I can’t say that communication with the Fonsteins ceased. Except in Jerusalem, we hadn’t had any. I expected,_ for thirty years, to see them again. They were excellent people. I admired Harry. A solid man, Harry, and very brave. As for Sorella, she was a woman with great powers of intelligence, and in these democratic times, whether you are conscious of it or not, you are continually in quest of higher types. I don’t have to draw you maps and pictures. Everybody knows what standard products and interchangeable parts signify, understands the operation of the glaciers on the social landscape, planing off the hills, scrubbing away the irregularities. I’m not going to be tedious about this. Sorella was outstanding (or as one of my grandchildren says, “standing out”). So of course I meant to see more of her. But I saw nothing. She was in the warehouse of intentions. I was going to get around to the Fonsteins—write, telephone, have them for Thanksgiving, for Christmas. Perhaps for Passover. But that’s what the Passover phenomenon is now—it never comes to pass.
Maybe the power of memory was to blame. Remembering them so well, did I need actually to see_ them? To keep them in a mental suspension was enough. They were a part of the permanent cast of characters, in absentia permanently. There wasn’t a thing for them to do.
The next in this series of events occurred last March, when winter, with a grunt, gave up its grip on Philadelphia and began to go out in trickles of grimy slush. Then it was the turn of spring to thrive on the dirt of the city. The season at least produced crocuses, snowdrops, and new buds in my millionaire’s private back garden. I pushed around my library ladder and brought down the poems of George Herbert, looking for the one that runs “… how clean, how pure are Thy returns,” or words to that effect; and on my desk, fit for a Wasp of great wealth, the phone started to ring as I was climbing down. The following Jewish conversation began: “This is Rabbi X [or Y]. My ministry”—what a Protestant term: he must be Reform, or Conservative at best; no Orthodox rabbi would say “ministry”—“is in Jerusalem. I have been approached by a party whose name is Fonstein….”
“Not Harry,” I said.
“No. I was calling to ask you_ about locating Harry. The Jerusalem Fonstein says that he is Harry’s uncle. This man is Polish by birth, and he is in a mental institution. He is a very difficult eccentric and lives in a world of fantasy. Much of the time he hallucinates. His habits are dirty—filthy, even. He’s totally without resources and well known as a beggar and local character who makes prophetic speeches on the sidewalk.”
“I get the picture. Like one of our own homeless,” I said.
“Precisely,” said Rabbi X or Y, in that humane tone of voice one has to put up with.
“Can we come to the point?” I asked.
“Our Jerusalem Fonstein swears he is related to Harry, who is very rich….”
“I’ve never seen Harry’s financial statement.”
“But in a position to help.”
I went on, “That’s just an opinion. At a hazard…” One does get pompous. A solitary, occupying a mansion, living up to his surroundings. I changed my tune; I dropped the “hazard” and said, “It’s been years since Harry and I were in touch. You can’t locate him?”
“I’ve tried. I’m on a two-week visit. Right now I’m in New York. But L. A. is my destination. Addressing…” (He gave an unfamiliar acronym.) Then he went on to say that the Jerusalem Fonstein needed help. Poor man, absolutely bananas, but under all the tatters, physical and mental (I paraphrase), humanly so worthy. Abused out of his head by persecution, loss, death, and brutal history; beside himself, crying out for aid—human and supernatural, no matter in what mixture. There may have been something phony about the rabbi, but the case, the man he was describing, was a familiar type, was real enough.
“And you, too, are a relative?” he said.
“Indirectly. My father’s second wife was Harry’s aunt.”
I never loved Aunt Mildred, nor even esteemed her. But, you understand, she had a place in my memory, and there must have been a good reason for that.
“May I ask you to find him for me and give him my number in L. A.? I’m carrying a list of family names and Harry Fonstein will recognize, will identify him. Or will not, if the man is not_ his uncle. It would be a mitzvah.”
Christ, spare me these mitzvahs.
I said, “Okay, Rabbi, I’ll trace Harry, for the sake of this pitiable lunatic.”
The Jerusalem Fonstein gave me a pretext for getting in touch with the Fonsteins. (Or at least an incentive.) I entered the rabbi’s number in my book, under the last address I had for Fonstein. At the moment, there were other needs and duties requiring my attention; besides, I wasn’t yet ready to speak to Sorella and Harry. There were preparations to make. This, as it appears under my ballpoint, reminds me of the title of Stanislavski’s famous book, An Actor Prepares_—again, a datum relating to my memory, a resource, a vocation, to which a lifetime of cultivation has been devoted, and which in old age also oppresses me.
For just then (meaning now: “Now, now, very now”) I was, I am, having difficulties with it. I had had a failure of memory the other morning, and it had driven me almost mad (not to hold back on an occurrence of such importance). I had had a dental appointment downtown. I drove, because I was already late and couldn’t rely on the radio cab to come on time. I parked in a lot blocks away, the best I could do on a busy morning, when closer lots were full. Then, walking back from the dentist’s office, I found (under the influence of my walking rhythm, I presume) that I had a tune in my head. The words came to me: Way down upon the.._.
_Way down upon the…
… upon the__ River_…
But what was the river called! A song I’d sung from childhood, upwards of seventy years, part of the foundation of one’s mind. A classic song, known to all Americans. Of my generation anyway.
I stopped at the window of a sports shop, specializing, as it happened, in horsemen’s boots, shining boots, both men’s and women’s, plaid saddle blankets, crimson coats, fox-hunting stuff—even brass horns. All objects on display were ultrasignificantly distinct. The colors of the plaid were especially bright and orderly—enviably orderly to a man whose mind was at that instant shattered.
What was that river’s name!
I could easily recall the rest of the words: There’s where my heart is yearning ever,_
That’s where the old folks stay._
All the world is [am?] sad and dreary_
Everywhere I roam._
O darkies, how my heart grows weary…_
And the rest.
All the world was_ dark and dreary. Fucking-A right! A chip, a plug, had gone dead in the mental apparatus. A forerunning omen? Beginning of the end? There are psychic causes of forgetfulness, of course. I’ve lectured on those myself. Not everyone, needless to say, would take such a lapsus so to heart. A bridge was broken: I could not cross the River. I had an impulse to hammer the window of the riding shop with the handle of my umbrella, and when people ran out, to cry to them, “Oh, God! You must tell me the words. I can’t get past ‘Way down upon the… upon the!’ ” They would—I saw it—throw that red saddle cloth, a brilliant red, threads of fire, over my shoulders and take me into the shop to wait for the ambulance.
At the parking lot, I wanted to ask the cashier—out of desperation. When she said, “Seven dollars,” I would begin singing the tune through the round hole in the glass. But as the woman was black, she might be offended by “O darkies.” And could I assume that she, like me, had been brought up on Stephen Foster? There were no grounds for this. For the same reason, I couldn’t ask the car jockey either.
