by Bellow, Saul
“What are you telling me! Did I put it off too long?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“They’re dead, then.”
I was shocked. Something essential in me caved in, broke down. At my age, a man is well prepared to hear news of death. What I felt most sharply and immediately was that I had abandoned two extraordinary people whom I had always said I valued and held dear. I found myself making a list of names: Billy is dead; Mrs. Hamet, dead; Sorella, dead; Harry, dead. All the principals, dead. “Were they sick? Did Sorella have cancer?”
“They died about six months ago, on the Jersey Turnpike. The way it’s told, a truck and trailer went out of control. But I wish I didn’t have to tell you this, sir. As a relative, you’ll take it hard. They were killed instantly. And thank God, because their car folded on them and it took welders to cut the bodies free—This must be hard for somebody who knew them well.”
He was, incidentally, giving me the business. To some extent, I had it coming. But at any moment during these thirty years, any of us might have died in an instant. I too might have. And he was wrong to assume that I was a Jew of the old type, bound to react sentimentally to such news as this.
“You are_ a senior citizen, you said. You’d have to be, given the numbers.” My voice was low. I said I was one. “Where were the Fonsteins going?”
“They were driving from New York, bound for Atlantic City.” I saw the bloodstained bodies delivered from the car and stretched out on the grass slope—the police flares, the crush of diverted traffic and the wavering of the dark, gassed atmosphere, the sucking shrieks of the ambulance, the paramedics and their body bags. Last summer’s heat was tormenting. You might say the dead sweated blood.
If you’re deciding which is the gloomiest expressway in the country, the Jersey Pike is certainly a front-runner. This was no place for Sorella, who loved Europe, to be killed. Harry’s forty American years of compensation for the destruction of his family in Poland suddenly were up. “Why were they going to Atlantic City?”
“Their son was there, having trouble.”
“Was he gambling?”
“It was pretty widely known, so I’m able to say. After all, he wrote a mathematical study on winning at blackjack. Math mavens say it’s quite a piece of work. On the real-life side, he’s gotten into trouble over this.”
They were rushing to the aid of their American son when they were killed.
“It must be very dreary to hear this,” the young man said.
“I looked forward to seeing them again. I’d been promising myself to resume contact.”
“I don’t suppose death is the worst…,” he said.
I wasn’t about to go into eschatology with this kid on the telephone and start delineating the various grades of evil. Although, God knows, the phone may encourage many forms of disclosure, and you may hear as much if not more from the soul by long distance as face to face.
“Which one was driving?”
“Mrs. Fonstein was, and maybe being reckless.”
“I see—an emergency, and a mother in a terrible hurry. Was she still huge?”
“The same for years, and right up against the wheel. But there weren’t many people like Sorella Fonstein. You don’t want to criticize.”
“I’m not criticizing,” I said. “I would have gone to the funeral to pay my respects.”
“Too bad you didn’t come and speak. It wasn’t much of a memorial service.”
“I might have told the Billy Rose story to a gathering of friends in the chapel.”
“There was no gathering,” the young man said. “And did you know that when Billy died, they say that he couldn’t be buried for a long time. He had to wait until the court decided what to do about the million-dollar tomb provision in his will. There was a legal battle over it.”
“I never heard.”
“Because you don’t read the News,_ or Newsday._ Not even the Post.”_
“Was that what_ happened!”
“He was kept on ice. This used to be discussed by the Fonsteins. They wondered about the Jewish burial rules.”
“Does Gilbert take any interest in his Jewish background—for instance, in his father’s history?”
Gilbert’s friend hesitated ever so slightly—just enough to make me think that he was Jewish himself. I don’t say that he disowned being a Jew. Evidently he didn’t want to reckon with it. The only life he cared to lead was that of an American. So hugely absorbing, that. So absorbing that one existence was too little for it. It could drink up a hundred existences, if you had them to offer, and reach out for more.
“What you just asked is—I translate—whether Gilbert is one of those science freaks with minimal human motivation,” he said. “You have to remember what a big thing gambling is to him. It never could be my_ thing. You couldn’t pay me to go to Atlantic City, especially since the double-deck disaster. They put a double-deck bus on the road, filled with passengers bound for the casino. It was too high to clear one of the viaducts, and the top was torn away.”
“Did many die? Were heads sheared off?”
“You’d have to check the Times_ to find out.”
“I wouldn’t care to. But where is Gilbert now? He inherited, I suppose.”
Well, sure he did, and right now he’s in Las Vegas. He took a young lady with him. She’s trained in his method, which involves memorizing the deck in every deal. You keep mental lists of cards that have been played, and you apply various probability factors. They tell me that the math of it is just genius.”
“The system depends on memorizing?”
“Yes. That’s up your alley. Is Gilbert the girl’s lover? is the next consideration. Well, this wouldn’t work without sex interest. The gambling alone wouldn’t hold a young woman for long. Does she enjoy Las Vegas? How could she not? It’s the biggest showplace in the world—the heart of the American entertainment industry. Which city today is closest to a holy city—like Lhasa or Calcutta or Chartres or Jerusalem? Here it could be New York for money, Washington for power, or Las Vegas attracting people by the millions. Nothing to compare with it in the history of the whole world.”
“Ah,” I said. “It’s more in the Billy Rose vein than in the Harry Fonstein vein. But how is Gilbert making out?”
“I haven’t finished talking about the sex yet,” said the bitter-witty young man. “Is the gambling a turn-on for sex, or does sex fuel the gambling? Figuring it as a sublimation. Let’s assume that for Gilbert, abstraction is dominant. But past a certain abstraction point, people are said to be definitely mad.”
“Poor Sorella—poor Harry! Maybe it was their death that threw him.”
“I can’t make myself responsible for a diagnosis. My own narcissistic problem is plenty severe. I confess I expected a token legacy, because I was damn near a family member and looked after Gilbert.” 1 see.
“You don’t see. This brings my faith in feelings face to face with the real conditions of existence.”
“Your feelings for Fonstein and Sorella?”
“The feelings Sorella led me to believe she had for me.”
“Counting on you to take care of Gilbert.”
“Well… this has been a neat conversation. Good to talk to a person from the past who was so fond of the Fonsteins. We’ll all miss them. Harry had the dignity, but Sorella had the dynamism. I can see why you’d be upset—your timing was off. But don’t pine too much.”
On this commiseration, I cradled the phone, and there it was, on its high mount, a conversation piece from another epoch sitting before a man with an acute need for conversation. Stung by the words of the house-sitter. I also considered that owing to Gilbert, the Fonsteins from their side had avoided me—he was so promising, the prodigy they had had the marvelous luck to produce and who for mysterious reasons (Fonstein would have felt them to be mysterious American reasons) had gone awry. They wouldn’t have wanted me to know about this.
As for pining—well, that young man had been pu
tting me on. He was one of those lesser devils that come out of every pore of society. All you have to do is press the social soil. He was taunting me—for my Jewish sentiments. Dear, dear! Two more old friends gone, just when I was ready after thirty years of silence to open my arms to them: Let’s sit down together and recall the past and speak again of Billy Rose—“sad stories of the death of kings.” And the “sitter” had been putting it to me, existentialist style. Like: Whose disappearance will fill you with despair, sir? Whom can you not live without? Whom do you painfully long for? Which of your dead hangs over you daily? Show me where and how death has mutilated you. Where are your wounds? Whom would you pursue beyond the gates of death?
What a young moron! Doesn’t he think I know all that?
I had a good mind to phone the boy back and call him on his low-grade cheap-shot nihilism. But it would be an absurd thing to do if improvement of the understanding {his_ understanding) was my aim. You can never dismantle all these modern mental structures. There are so many of them that they face you like an interminable vast city.
Suppose I were to talk to him about the roots of memory in feeling—about the themes that collect and hold the memory; if I were to tell him what retention of the past really means. Things like: “If sleep is forgetting, forgetting is also sleep, and sleep is to consciousness what death is to life. So that the Jews ask even God to remember, ‘Yiskor Elohim. ‘_ “
God doesn’t forget, but your prayer requests him particularly to remember your dead. But how was I to make an impression on a kid like that? I chose instead to record everything I could remember of the Bellarosa Connection, and set it all down with a Mnemosyne flourish.
THE OLD SYSTEM
IT WAS a thoughtful day for Dr. Braun. Winter. Saturday. The short end of December. He was alone in his apartment and woke late, lying in bed until noon, in the room kept very dark, working with a thought—a feeling: Now you see it, now you don’t. Now a content, now a vacancy. Now an important individual, a force, a necessary existence; suddenly nothing. A frame without a picture, a mirror with missing glass. The feeling of necessary existence might be the aggressive, instinctive vitality we share with a dog or an ape. The difference being in the power of the mind or spirit to declare / am._ Plus the inevitable inference I am not._ Dr. Braun was no more pleased with being than with its opposite. For him an age of equilibrium seemed to be coming in. How nice! Anyway, he had no project for putting the world in rational order, and for no special reason he got up. Washed his wrinkled but not elderly face with freezing tap water, which changed the nighttime white to a more agreeable color. He brushed his teeth. Standing upright, scrubbing the teeth as if he were looking after an idol. He then ran the big old-fashioned tub to sponge himself, backing into the thick stream of the Roman faucet, soaping beneath with the same cake of soap he would apply later to his beard. Under the swell of his belly, the tip of his parts, somewhere between his heels. His heels needed scrubbing. He dried himself with yesterday’s shirt, an economy. It was going to the laundry anyway. Yes, with the self-respecting expression human beings inherit from ancestors for whom bathing was a solemnity. A sadness.
But every civilized man today cultivated an unhealthy self-detachment. Had learned from art the art of amusing self-observation and objectivity. Which, since there had to be something amusing to watch, required art in one’s conduct. Existence for the sake of such practices did not seem worthwhile. Mankind was in a confusing, uncomfortable, disagreeable stage in the evolution of its consciousness. Dr. Braun (Samuel) did not like it. It made him sad to feel that the thought, art, belief of great traditions should be so misemployed. Elevation? Beauty? Torn into shreds, into ribbons for girls’ costumes, or trailed like the tail of a kite at Happenings. Plato and the Buddha raided by looters. The tombs of Pharaohs broken into by desert rabble. And so on, thought Dr. Braun as he passed into his neat kitchen. He was well pleased by the blue-and-white Dutch dishes, cups hanging, saucers standing in slots.
He opened a fresh can of coffee, much enjoyed the fragrance from the punctured can. Only an instant, but not to be missed. Next he sliced bread for the toaster, got out the butter, chewed an orange; and he was admiring long icicles on the huge red, circular roof tank of the laundry across the alley, the clear sky, when he discovered that a sentiment was approaching. It was said of him, occasionally, that he did not love anyone. This was not true. He did not love anyone steadily. But unsteadily he loved, he guessed, at an average rate.
The sentiment, as he drank his coffee, was for two cousins in upstate New York, the Mohawk Valley. They were dead. Isaac Braun and his sister Tina. Tina was first to go. Two years later, Isaac died. Braun now discovered that he and Cousin Isaac had loved each other. For whatever use or meaning this fact might have within the peculiar system of light, movement, contact, and perishing in which he tried to find stability. Toward Tina, Dr. Braun’s feelings were less clear. More passionate once, but at present more detached.
Isaac’s wife, after he died, had told Braun, “He was proud of you. He said, ‘Sammy has been written up in Time,_ in all the papers, for his research. But he never says a word about his scientific reputation!’ “
“I see. Well, computers do the work, actually.”
“But you have to know what to put into these computers.”
This was more or less the case. But Braun had not continued the conversation. He did not care much for being first_ in his field. People were boastful in America. Matthew Arnold, a not entirely appetizing figure himself, had correctly observed this in the U. S. Dr. Braun thought this native American boastfulness had aggravated a certain weakness in Jewish immigrants. But a proportionate reaction of self-effacement was not praiseworthy. Dr. Braun did not want to be interested in this question at all. However, his cousin Isaac’s opinions had some value for him.
In Schenectady there were two more Brauns of the same family, living. Did Dr. Braun, drinking his coffee this afternoon, love them too? They did not elicit such feelings. Then did he love Isaac more because Isaac was dead? There one might have something.
But in childhood, Isaac had shown him great kindness. The others, not very much.
Now Braun remembered certain things. A sycamore tree beside the Mohawk River. Then the river couldn’t have been so foul. Its color, anyhow, was green, and it was powerful and dark, an easy, level force—crimped, green, blackish, glassy. A huge tree like a complicated event, with much splitting and thick chalky extensions. It must have dominated an acre, brown and white. And well away from the leaves, on a dead branch, sat a gray-and-blue fish hawk. Isaac and his little cousin Braun passed in the wagon—the old coarse-tailed horse walking, the steady head in blinders, working onward. Braun, seven years old, wore a gray shirt with large bone buttons and had a short summer haircut. Isaac was dressed in work clothes, for in those days the Brauns were in the secondhand business—furniture, carpets, stoves, beds. His senior by fifteen years, Isaac had a mature business face. Born to be a man, in the direct Old Testament sense, as that bird on the sycamore was born to fish in water. Isaac, when he had come to America, was still a child. Nevertheless his old-country Jewish dignity was very firm and strong. He had the outlook of ancient generations on the New World. Tents and kine and wives and maidservants and manservants. Isaac was handsome, Braun thought—dark face, black eyes, vigorous hair, and a long scar on the cheek. Because, he told his scientific cousin, his mother had given him milk from a tubercular cow in the old country. While his father was serving in the Russo-Japanese War. Far away. In the Yiddish metaphor, on the lid of hell. As though hell were a cauldron, a covered pot. How those old-time Jews despised the goy wars, their vainglory and obstinate Dummheit._ Conscription, mustering, marching, shooting, leaving the corpses everywhere. Buried, unburied. Army against army. Gog and Magog. The czar, that weak, whiskered arbitrary and woman-ridden man, decreed that Uncle Braun would be swept away to Sakhalin. So by irrational decree, as in The Arabian Nights,_ Uncle Braun, with his greatcoat and short hum
iliated legs, little beard, and great eyes, left wife and child to eat maggoty pork. And when the war was lost, Uncle Braun escaped through Manchuria. Came to Vancouver on a Swedish ship. Labored on the railroad. He did not look so strong, as Braun remembered him in Schenectady. His chest was deep and his arms long, but the legs like felt, too yielding, as if the escape from Sakhalin and trudging in Manchuria had been too much. However, in the Mohawk Valley, monarch of used stoves and fumigated mattresses—dear Uncle Braun! He had a small, pointed beard, like George V, like Nick of Russia. Like Lenin, for that matter. But large, patient eyes in his wizened face, filling all of the space reserved for eyes.
A vision of mankind Braun was having as he sat over his coffee Saturday afternoon. Beginning with those Jews of 1920.
Braun as a young child was protected by the special affection of his cousin Isaac, who stroked his head and took him on the wagon, later the truck, into the countryside. When Brauns mother had gone into labor with him, it was Isaac whom Aunt Rose sent running for the doctor. He found the doctor in the sa-loon. Faltering, drunken Jones, who practiced among Jewish immigrants before those immigrants had educated their own doctors. He had Isaac crank the Model T. And they drove. Arriving, Jones tied Mother Brauns hands to the bedposts, a custom of the times.
Having worked as a science student in laboratories and kennels, Dr. Braun had himself delivered cats and dogs. Man, he knew, entered life like these other creatures, in a transparent bag or caul. Lying in a bag filled with transparent fluid, a purplish water. A color to mystify the most rational philosopher. What is this creature that struggles for birth in its membrane and clear fluid? Any puppy in its sac, in the blind terror of its emergence, any mouse breaking into the external world from this shining, innocent-seeming blue-tinged transparency!
Dr. Braun was born in a small wooden house. They washed him and covered him with mosquito netting. He lay at the foot of his mother’s bed. Tough Cousin Isaac dearly loved Braun’s mother. He had great pity for her. In intervals of his dealing, of being a Jewish businessman, there fell these moving reflections of those who were dear to him.
