by Bellow, Saul
But at the wheel of the car, the faulty connection corrected itself, and I began to shout, “Swanee—Swanee—Swanee,” punching the steering wheel. Behind the windows of your car, what you do doesn’t matter. One of the privileges of liberty car ownership affords.
Of course! The Swanee. Or Suwannee (spelling preferred in the South). But this was a crisis in my mental life. I had had a double purpose in looking up George Herbert—not only the appropriateness of the season but as a test of my memory. So, too, my recollection of Fonstein_ v. Rose_ is in part a test of memory, and also a more general investigation of the same, for if you go back to the assertion that memory is life and forgetting death (“mercifully forgetting,” the commonest adverb linked by writers with the participle, reflecting the preponderance of the opinion that so much of life is_ despair), I have established at the very least that I am still able to keep up my struggle for existence.
Hoping for victory? Well, what would a victory be?
I took Rabbi X/Y’s word for it that the Fonsteins had moved away and were unlocatable. Probably they had, like me, retired. But whereas I am in Philadelphia, hanging in there, as the idiom puts it, they had very likely abandoned that ground of struggle the sullen North and gone to Sarasota or to Palm Springs. They had the money for it. America was good to Harry Fonstein, after all, and delivered on its splendid promises. He had been spared the worst we have here—routine industrial or clerical jobs and bureaucratic employment. As I wished the Fonsteins well, I was pleased for them. My much-appreciated-in-absentia friends, so handsomely installed in my consciousness.
Not having heard from me, I assumed, they had given up on me, after three decades. Freud has laid down the principle that the ллconscious does not recognize death. But as you see, consciousness is freaky too.
So I went to work digging up forgotten names of relatives from my potato-patch mind—Rosenberg, Rosenthal, Sorkin, Swerdlow, Bleistiff, Fradkin. Jewish surnames are another curious subject, so many of them imposed by German, Polish, or Russian officialdom (expecting bribes from applicants), others the invention of Jewish fantasy. How often the name of the rose was invoked, as in the case of Billy himself. There were few other words for flowers in the pale. Mar-garitka,_ for one. The daisy. Not a suitable family name for anybody.
Aunt Mildred, my stepmother, had been cared for during her last years by relatives in Elizabeth, the Rosensafts, and my investigations began with them. They weren’t cordial or friendly on the phone, because I had seldom visited Mildred toward the last. I think she began to claim that she had brought me up and even put me through college. (The funds came from a Prudential policy paid for by my own mother.) This was a venial offense, which gave me the reasons for being standoffish that I was looking for. I wasn’t fond of the Rosensafts either. They had taken my father’s watch and chain after he died. But then one can live without these objects of sentimental value. Old Mrs. Rosensaft said she had lost track of the Fonsteins. She thought the Swerdlows in Morristown might know where Harry and Sorella had gone.
Information gave me Swerdlow’s number. Dialing, I reached an answering machine. The voice of Mrs. Swerdlow, affecting an accent more suitable to upper-class Morristown than to her native Newark, asked me to leave my name, number, and the date of the call. I hate answering machines, so I hung up. Besides, I avoid giving my unlisted number.
As I went up to my second-floor office that night holding the classic Philadelphia banister, reflecting that I was pretty sick of the unshared grandeur of this mansion, I once more considered Sarasota or the sociable Florida Keys. Elephants and acrobats, circuses in winter quarters, would be more amusing. Moving to Palm Springs was out of the question. And while the Keys had a large homosexual population, I was more at home with gay people, thanks to my years in the Village, than with businessmen in California. In any case, I couldn’t bear much more of these thirty-foot ceilings and all the mahogany solitude. This mansion demanded too much from me, and I was definitely conscious of a strain. My point had long ago been made—I could achieve such a dwelling place, possess it in style. Now take it away, I thought, in a paraphrase of the old tune “I’m so tired of roses, take them all away.” I decided to discuss the subject again with my son, Henry. His wife didn’t like the mansion; her tastes were modern, and she was satirical, too, about the transatlantic rivalry of parvenu American wealth with the titled wealth of Victorian London. She had turned me down dead flat when I tried to give the place to them.
What I was thinking was that if I could find Harry and Sorella, I’d join them in retirement, if they’d accept my company (forgiving the insult of neglect). For me it was natural to wonder whether I had not exaggerated (urged on by a desire for a woman of a deeper nature) Sorella’s qualities in my reminiscences, and 1 gave further thought to this curious personality. I never had forgotten what she had said about the testing of Jewry by the American experience. Her interview with Billy Rose had itself been such an American thing. Again Billy: Weak? Weak! Vain? Oh, very! And trivial for sure. Creepy Billy. Still, in a childish way, big-minded—spacious; and spacious wasn’t just a boast adjective from “America the Beautiful” (the spacious skies) but the dropping of fifteen to twenty actual millions on a rest-and-culture garden in Jerusalem, the core of Jewish history, the navel of the earth. This gesture of oddball magnificence was American. American and Oriental.
And even if I didn’t in the end settle near the Fonsteins, I could pay them a visit. I couldn’t help asking why I had turned away from such a terrific pair—Sorella, so mysteriously obese; Fonstein with his reddish skin (once stone white), his pomegranate face. I may as well include myself, as a third—a tall old man with a structural curl at the top like a fiddlehead fern or a bishop’s crook.
Therefore I started looking for Harry and Sorella not merely because I had promised Rabbi X/Y, nor for the sake of the crazy old man in Jerusalem who was destitute. If it was only money that he needed, I could easily write a check or ask my banker to send him one. The bank charges eight bucks for this convenience, and a phone call would take care of it. But I preferred to attend to things in my own way, from my mansion office, dialing the numbers myself, bypassing the Mnemosyne Institute and its secretaries.
Using old address books, I called all over the place. (If only cemeteries had switchboards. “Hello, Operator, I’m calling area code 000.”) I didn’t want to involve the girls at the Institute in any of this, least of all in my investigations. When I reached a number, the conversation was bound to be odd, and a strain on the memory of the Founder. “Why, how are you?” somebody would ask whom I hadn’t seen in three decades. “Do you remember my husband, Max? My daughter, Zoe?” Would I know what to say?
Yes, I would. But then again, why should I? How nice oblivion would be in such cases, and I could say, “Max? Zoe? No, I can’t say that I do.” On the fringes of the family, or in remote, time-dulled social circles, random memories can be an affliction. What you see first, retrospectively, are the psychopaths, the uglies, the cheapies, the stingies, the hypochondriacs, the family bores, humanoids, and tyrants. These have dramatic staying power. Harder to recover are the kind eyes, gentle faces, of the comedians who wanted to entertain you, gratis, divert you from troubles. An important part of my method is that memory chains are constructed thematically. Where themes are lacking there can be little or no recall. So, for instance, Billy, our friend Bellarosa, could not easily place Fonstein because of an unfortunate thinness of purely human themes—as contrasted with business, publicity, or sexual themes. To give a strongly negative example, there are murderers who can’t recall their crimes because they have no interest in the existence or nonexistence of their victims. So, students, only pertinent themes assure full recollection.
Some of the old people I reached put me down spiritedly: “If you remember so much about me, how come I haven’t seen you since the Korean War!…”
“No, I can’t tell you anything about Salkind’s niece Sorella. Salkind came home to New Jersey after
Castro took over. He died in an old people’s nursing racket setup back in the late sixties.”
One man commented, “The pages of calendars crumble away. They’re like the dandruff of time. What d’you want from me?”
Calling from a Philadelphia mansion, I was at a disadvantage. A person in my position will discover, in contact with people from Passaic, Elizabeth, or Pa-terson, how many defenses he has organized against vulgarity or the lower grades of thought. I didn’t want to talk about Medicare or Social Security checks ░r hearing aids or pacemakers or bypass surgery.
From a few sources I heard criticisms of Sorella. “Salkind was a bachelor, had no children, and that woman should have done something for the old fella.” He never married?”
Never,” said the bitter lady I had on the line. “But he married her_ off, for his own brother’s sake. Anyway, they’ve all checked out, so what’s the diff.”
“And you can’t tell me where 1 might find Sorella?”
“I could care less.”
“No,” I said. “You couldn’t care less.”
So the matchmaker himself had been a lifelong bachelor. He had disinterestedly found a husband for his brother’s daughter, bringing together two disadvantaged people.
Another lady said about Sorella, “She was remote. She looked down on my type of conversation. I think she was a snob. I tried to sign her up once for a group tour in Europe. My temple sisterhood put together a real good charter-flight package. Then Sorella told me that French was her second language, and she didn’t need anybody to interpret for her in Paris. I should have told her, ‘I knew you when no man would give you a second look and would even take back the first look if he could.’ So that’s how it was. Sorella was too good for everybody….”
I saw what these ladies meant (this was a trend among my informants). They accused Mrs. Fonstein of being uppish, too grand. Almost all were offended. She preferred the company of Mrs. Hamet, the old actress with the paraffin-white tubercular face. Sorella was too grand for Billy too; hurling Mrs. Hamet’s deadly dossier at him was the gesture of a superior person, a person of intelligence and taste. Queenly, imperial, and inevitably isolated. This was the consensus of all the gossips, the elderly people I telephoned from the triple isolation of my Philadelphia residence.
The Fonsteins and I were meant to be company for one another. They weren’t going to force themselves on me, however. They assumed that 1 was above them socially, in upper-class Philadelphia, and that I didn’t want their friendship. I don’t suppose that my late wife, Deirdre, would have cared for Sorella, with her pince-nez and high manner, the working of her intellect and the problems of her cumulous body—trying to fit itself into a Hepplewhite chair in our dining room. Fonstein would have been comparatively easy for Deirdre to be with. Still, if I was not an assimilationist, I was at least an avoider of uncomfortable mixtures, and in the end I am stuck with these twenty empty rooms.
I can remember driving with my late father through western Pennsylvania. He was struck by the amount of land without a human figure in it. So much space! After long silence, in a traveler’s trance resembling the chessboard trance, he said, “Ah, how many Jews might have been settled here! Room enough for everybody.”
At times I feel like a socket that remembers its tooth.
As I made call after call, 1 was picturing my reunion with the Fonsteins .1 had them placed mentally in Sarasota, Florida, and imagined the sunny strolls we might take in the winter quarters of Ringling or Hagenbeck, chatting about events long past at the King David Hotel—Billy Rose’s lost suitcases, Noguchi s Oriental reserve. In old manila envelopes I found color snapshots from Jerusalem, among them a photograph of Fonstein and Sorella against the background of the Judean desert, the burning stones of Ezekiel, not yet (even today) entirely cooled, those stones of fire among which the cherubim had walked. In that fierce place, two modern persons, the man in a business suit, the woman in floating white, a married couple holding hands—her fat palm in his inventor’s fingers. I couldn’t help thinking that Sorella didn’t have a real biography until Harry entered her life. And he, Harry, whom Hitler had intended to kill, had a biography insofar as Hitler had marked him for murder, insofar as he had fled, was saved by Billy, reached America, invented a better thermostat. And here they were in color, the Judean desert behind them, as husband and wife in a once-upon-a-time Coney Island might have posed against a painted backdrop or sitting on a slice of moon. As tourists in the Holy Land where were they, I wondered, biographically speaking? How memorable had this trip been for them? The question sent me back to myself and, Jewish style, answered itself with yet another question: What was there worth remembering?
When I got to the top of the stairs—this was the night before last—I couldn’t bring myself to go to bed just yet. One does grow weary of taking care of this man-sized doll, the elderly retiree, giving him his pills, pulling on his socks, spooning up his cornflakes, shaving his face, seeing to it that he gets his sleep. Instead of opening the bedroom door, I went to my second-floor sitting room.
To save myself from distraction by concentrating every kind of business in a single office, I do bills, bank statements, legal correspondence on the ground floor, and my higher activities I carry upstairs. Deirdre had approved of this. It challenged her to furnish each setting appropriately. One of my diversions is to make the rounds of antiques shops and look at comparable pieces, examining and pricing them, noting what a shrewd buyer Deirdre had been. In doing this, I build a case against remaining in Philadelphia, a town in which a man finds little else to do with himself on a dull afternoon.
Even the telephone in my second-story room is a French instrument with a porcelain mouthpiece—blue-and-white Quimper. Deirdre had bought it on the boulevard Haussmann, and Baron Charlus might have romanced his boyfriends with it, speaking low and scheming intricately into this very phone. It would have amused him, if he haunted objects of common use, to watch me dialing the Swerdlows’ number again, pursuing my Fonstein inquiries.
On this art nouveau article—for those who escape from scientific ignorance (how do_ telephones operate?) with the aid of high-culture toys—I tried Morristown again, and this time Hyman Swerdlow himself answered. As soon as I heard his voice, he appeared before me, and presently his wife also was reborn in my memory and stood beside him. Swerdlow, who was directly related to Fonstein, had been an investment counselor. Trained on Wall Street, he settled in stylish New Jersey. He was a respectable, smooth person, very quiet in manner, “understated,” to borrow a term from the interior decorators. His look was both saturnine and guilt-free. He probably didn’t like what he had made of his life, but there was no way to revise that now. He settled for good manners—he was very polite, he wore Brooks Brothers grays and tans. His tone was casual. One could assimilate now without_ converting. You didn’t have to choose between Jehovah and Jesus. I had known old Swerdlow. His son had inherited an ancient Jewish face from him, dark and craggy. Hyman had discovered a way to drain the Jewish charge from it. What replaced it was a look of perfect dependability. He was well spoken. He could be trusted with your pension funds. He wouldn’t dream of making a chancy investment. His children were a biochemist and a molecular biologist, respectively. His wife could now devote herself to her watercolor box.
I believe the Swerdlows were very intelligent. They may even have been deeply intelligent. What had happened to them couldn’t have been helped.
“I can’t tell you anything about Fonstein,” Swerdlow said. “I’ve somehow lost track….”
I realized that, like the Fonsteins, Swerdlow and his wife had isolated themselves. No deliberate choice was made. You went your own way, and you found yourself in Greater New York but beyond the bedroom communities, decently situated. Your history, too, became one of your options. Whether or not having a history was a “consideration” was entirely up to you.
Cool Swerdlow, who of course remembered me (I was rich, I might have become an important client; the
re was, however, no reproach detectable in his tone), now was asking what I wanted with Harry Fonstein. I said that a mad old man in Jerusalem needed Fonstein’s help. Swerdlow dropped his inquiry then and there. “We never did develop a relationship,” he said. “Harry was very decent. His wife, however, was somewhat overpowering.”
Decoded, this meant that Edna Swerdlow had not taken to Sorella. One learns soon enough to fill in the simple statements to which men like Swerdlow limit themselves. They avoid putting themselves out and they shun (perhaps even hate) psychological elaboration. “When did you last see the Fonsteins?”
“During the Lakewood period,” said tactful Swerdlow—he avoided touching upon my father’s death, possibly a painful subject. “I think it was when Sorella talked so much about Billy Rose.”
“They were involved with him. He_ refused to be drawn in…. So you heard them talking about it?”
“Even sensible people lose their heads over celebrities. What claim did Harry have on Billy Rose, and why should_ Billy have done more than he did? A man like Rose has to ration the number of people he can take on.”
“Like a sign in an elevator—‘Maximum load twenty-eight hundred pounds’?”
“If you like.”
“When I think of the Fonstein-Billy thing,” I said, “I’m liable to see European Jewry also. What was all that_ about? To me, the operational term is Justice. Once and for all it was seen that this expectation, or reliance, had no foundation. You had to forget about Justice… whether, taken seriously for so long, it could be taken seriously still.”
Swerdlow could not allow me to go on. This was not his kind of conversation. “Put it any way you like—how does it apply to Billy? What was he_ supposed to do about it?”
Well, I didn’t expect Billy to take this, or anything else, upon himself. From Hyman Swerdlow I felt that speaking of Justice was not only out of place but off the wall. And if the Baron Charlus had been listening, haunting his telephone with the Quimper mouthpiece, he would have turned from this conversation with contempt. I didn’t greatly blame myself, and I certainly did not feel like a fool. At worst it had been inappropriate to call Swerdlow for information and then, without preparation, swerve wildly into such a subject, trying to carry him with me. These were matters I thought about privately, the subjective preoccupations of a person who lived alone in a great Philadelphia house in which he felt out of place, and who had lost sight of the difference between brooding and permissible conversation. I had no business out of the blue to talk to Swerdlow about Justice or Honor or the Platonic Ideas or the expectations of the Jews. Anyway, his tone now made it clear that he wanted to get rid of me, so I said, “This Rabbi X/Y from Jerusalem, who speaks better than fair English, got me to promise that I would locate Fonstein. He said he hadn’t been able to find him.”
