The Collected Stories Of Saul Bellow

by Bellow, Saul

  Her own ideas at this moment were not less wild. She rang Gina’s number in East Harlem. What she got was an answering machine, from which came Frederic’s voice, whose Frenchy slickness was offensive. (Clara disliked those telephone devices anyway, and her prejudice extended to the sound of the signal—in this instance a pig squeal.) “This is Mrs. Wilder Velde calling Miss Wegman.” Inasmuch as Gina might have prevailed by reasonable means over him, Clara was ready to revise her opinion of Frederic too. (On her scale often, she could upgrade him from less than zero to one.)

  Next Clara phoned Gottschalk and entered on his tape her request that he call back. She then tried Laura Wong, and finally Wilder in New Hampshire. It was primary time up there; his candidate lagged far behind the field, and you couldn’t expect Wilder to be in his hotel room. Ithiel was in Central America. There was no one to share the recovery of the ring with. The strongest lights in the house were in the bathroom, and she turned them on, pressing against the sink to examine the stone and the setting, making sure that the small diamonds were all there. Since Mrs. Peralta had been in that day, she tried her number—she had a crying need to talk with somebody—and this time actually succeeded. “Did anybody come into the house today?”

  “Only deliveries, by the service elevator.”

  During this unsatisfactory conversation Clara had a view of herself in the hall mirror—a bony woman, not young, blond but not fair, gaunt, a long face, a hollow cheek, not rejoicing, and pressing the ringed hand under the arm that held the phone. The big eyes ached, and looked it. Feeling so high, why did she appear so low? But did she think that recovering the ring would make her young?

  What she believed—and it was more than a belief; there was triumph in it—was that Gina Wegman had come into the bedroom and placed the ring on the nightstand.

  And how had Gina obtained the ring, what had she had to promise, or sacrifice, or pay? Maybe her parents had wired money from Vienna. Suppose that her only purpose during four months had been nothing but restitution, and that the girl had done her time in East Harlem for no other reason? It struck Clara that if Gina had stolen the emerald back from Frederic and run away, then leaving a message on his machine had been a bad mistake. He might put it all together and come after Gina with a gun. There was even a private eye in this quickly fermenting plot. Except that Gottschalk was no Philip Marlowe in a Raymond Chandler story. Nevertheless he was a detective of some kind. He must be licensed to carry a gun. And everybody’s mind ran in these psychopathic-melodrama channels streaming with blood, or children’s fingerpaints, or blood that naяve people took for fingerpaint. The fancy (or hope) that Gottschalk would kill Frederic in a shoot-out was so preposterous that it helped Clara to calm herself.

  When she received Gottschalk in her office next day, she was wearing the ring and showed it to him. He said, “That’s a high-value object. I hope you don’t take public transportation to work.” She looked disdainful. There was a livery service. He didn’t seem to realize how high her executive bracket was. But he said, “There are people in top positions who insist on using the subway. I could name you a Wall Street woman who goes to work disguised as a bag lady so it isn’t worthwhile to hassle her.”

  “I believe Gina Wegman entered my apartment yesterday and left the emerald by my bed.”

  “Must’ve been her.”

  Gottschalk’s personal observation was that Mrs. Velde hadn’t slept last night.

  “It couldn’t have been the man,”_ she said. “What’s your professional conclusion about him?”

  “Casual criminal. Not enough muscle for street crime.”

  “She didn’t marry him, did she?”

  “I could run a check on that. My guess is no.”

  “What you can find out for me is whether she’s still on One hundred twenty-eighth Street. If she grabbed the ring and brought it back, he may do her some harm.”

  “Well, ma’am, he’s been in the slammer a few times for petty stuff. He wouldn’t do anything major.” Frederic had been one of those boat people lucky enough to reach Florida a few years back. So much Clara knew.

  “After stealing your ring, he didn’t even know how to fence it.”

  Clara said, “I have to find out where she’s living. I have to see the girl. Get hold of her. I’ll pay a bonus—within reason.”

  “Send her to your house?”

  “That might embarrass her—the girls, Mrs. Peralta, my husband. Say I want to have lunch with her. Ask her whether she received my note.”

  “Let me look into it.”

  “Quickly. I don’t want this dragging on.”

  “Top priority,” said Gottschalk.

  She counted on the suite of offices to impress him, and she was glad now that she had paid his bills promptly. Keeping on his good side, taking care from every standpoint to be a desirable client. As for Gottschalk, he was exactly what she had ordered from Ithiel—minimum sleaze. Not much more.

  “I’d like a progress report by Friday,” she said.

  That afternoon she met with Ms. Wong. Moved to talk. And with the gesture of a woman newly engaged, she held out her hand, saying, “Here’s the ring. I thought it had gone into the muck for good. It’s getting to be a fairy-tale object. With me it’s had the funny effect of those trick films they used to show kids—first a building demolished by dynamite. They show it coming down. Then they reverse it in slow motion, and it’s put together again.”

  “Done by means of a magic ring?” said Ms. Wong.

  It occurred to Clara that Laura was a mysterious lady too. She was exotic in externals, but in what she said she was perfectly conventional. While your heart was moved, she would still murmur along. If you came and told her you were going to kill yourself, what would she do? Probably nothing. Yet one must talk.

  “I can’t say what state I’m in,” said Clara, “whether I’m pre-dynamite or post-dynamite. I don’t suppose I look demolished.

  “Certainly not.”

  “Yet I feel as if something had come down. There are changes. Gina, for instance, was a girl I took into the house to help with the kids. Little was ever said. I didn’t think well of her Caribbean romance, or sex experiment. Just another case of being at sea among collapsing cultures—I sound like Ithiel now, and I don’t actually take much stock in the collapsing-culture bit: I’m beginning to see it instead as the conduct of life without input from your soul. Essential parts of people getting mislaid or crowded out—don’t ask me for specifics; I can’t give them. They’re always flitting by me. But what I started to say was how I’ve come to love that girl. Just as she immediately understood Lucy, how needy Lucy was, in one minute she also got the whole meaning of this ring. And on the decision to get it back for me she left the house. Moving to East Harlem, yet.”

  “If her Vienna family had a notion…”

  “I intend to do something for her. That’s a special young woman. I certainly will do something. I have to think what it should be. Now, I don’t expect her to describe what she went through, and I don’t intend to ask her. There are things I wouldn’t want anybody to ask me,” said Clara. Clifford from Attica was on her mind. On the whole, she kept this deliberately remote, yet if pressed she could recover quite a lot from her memory.

  “Have you any idea…?” said Laura Wong.

  “About her, not yet, not until I’ve spoken to her. About myself, however, I do have different views as a result of this. Twice losing and recovering this ring is a sign, a message. It forces me to interpret. For instance, when Francine came in a van and emptied Ithiel’s house—that woman is about as human as a toilet plunger!—Ithiel didn’t turn to me. He didn’t come and say, ‘You’re unhappy with Wilder. And between us we’ve had seven marriages. Now, shouldn’t you and I…?’ “

  “Clara, you wouldn’t have done that?” said Laura. For once her voice was more real. Clara was struck by the difference.

  “I might have_ done it. So far it’s been change and change and change. There’s pl
easure change, and acquisitive change, and there’s the dynamic of… oh, I don’t know. Perhaps of power. Is there no point of rest? Won’t the dynamic ever let you go? I felt that Ithiel might be a point of rest. Or I for him. But that was simply goofy. I have an anti-rest character. I think there’s too much basic discord in me.”

  “So the ring stood for hope of Teddy Regler,” said Laura Wong.

  “The one exception. Teddy. A repeatedly proven exception. There must be others, but I never came across them.”

  “And do you think…?”

  “He’ll ever accomplish his aim? I can’t say. He can’t, either. What he says is that no trained historian will ever do it, only a singular person with a singular eye. Looking at the century with his singular inborn eye, with a genius for observing politics: That’s about the way he says it, and perhaps he’ll take hold one day and do a wrap-up of the century, the wrap-up of wrap-ups. As for me,” said Clara, “I have the kids, with perhaps Wilder thrown in as a fourth child. The last has been unacceptable. What I’d most like now is a quiet life.”

  “The point of rest?”

  “No, I don’t expect that. A quiet life in lieu of the point of rest. The point of rest might have been with Ithiel. I have to settle for what I can get—peaceful evenings. Let there be a convent atmosphere, when the kids have gone to bed and I can disconnect the phones and concentrate on Yeats or somebody like that. Not to be too ambitious; it would be enough to get rid of your demons—they’re like patients who drift in and out of the mental hospital. In short, come to terms with my anti-rest character.”

  “So all these years you’ve never given up hope that Teddy Regler and you…”

  “Might make a life together, in the end…?” said Clara. Something caused her to hesitate. As they had always done in problematic situations, her eyes turned sideways, looking for an exit, and her country-girl mouth was open but silent.

  On Madison Avenue, walking uptown, Clara was thinking, saying to herself in her contralto grumble, This is totally_ off the wall. There’s no limit, is there? She wanted me to say that Ithiel and I were finished, so that she could put her own moves on him. Everybody feels free to picture what they like, and I talked Ithiel up until he became too desirable for her to resist, and how long has the little bitch been dreaming of having him for herself! No way! Clara was angry, but she was also laughing about this. So I choose friends, so I choose lovers, so I choose husbands and bankers and accountants and psychiatrists and ministers, all the way down the line. And just now lost my principal confidante. But 1 have to spin her off very slowly, for if I cut the relationship, she’s in a position to hurt me with Wilder. There’s also the insurance company, remember, the real owner of this ring. Also, she’s so gifted professionally. We still need her layouts.

  Meanwhile she had in mind an exceptional, a generous action.

  From her office next day, on her private line, she had a preliminary talk about it with Ithiel, just back from Central America. Naturally she couldn’t tell him what her goal was. She began by describing the return of her ring, all the strange circumstances. “This very minute, I’m looking at it. Wearing it, I don’t feel especially girlish. I’m more like contemplating it.

  She could see Ithiel trying on this new development, matching the contemplative Clara against the Clara who had once sunk her long nails into his forearm and left scars that he might have shown General Haig or Henry Kissinger if he had wanted to emphasize a point about violence. He had quite a sense of humor, Ithiel did. He enjoyed telling how, in a men’s room at the White House, Mr. Armand Hammer was at the next urinal, and about the discussion on Soviet intentions they had had between the opening and the closing zips.

  Or thinking back to the passionate Clara, or to the Clara who had wanted them buried side by side or even in the same grave. This had lately begun to amuse him.

  From her New York office, she had continued to talk. So far he had had little to say other than to congratulate her on the recovery of this major symbol, Madison Hamilton’s emerald. “This Gina is a special young woman, Ithiel,” she told him. “You would have expected such behavior from a Sicilian or a Spanish woman, and not a contemporary, either, but a romantic Stendhal character—a Happy Few type, or a young woman of the Italian Renaissance in one of those Venetian chronicles the Elizabethans took from.”

  “Not what you would expect from the Vienna of Kurt Waldheim,” he said.

  “You’ve got it. And a young person of that quality shouldn’t go on tending kids in New York—Gogmagogsville. Now, what I want to suggest is that she go to Washington.”

  “And you’d like me to find her a job?”

  “That wouldn’t be easy. She has a student visa, not a green card. I need to get her away from here.”

  “Save her from the Haitian. I see. However, she may not want to be saved.’

  “I’ll have to find out how she sees it. My hunch is that the Haitian episode is over and she’s ready for some higher education….”

  “And that’s where I come in, isn’t it?”

  “Don’t be light with me about this. I’m asking you to take me seriously. Remember what you said to me not long ago about my moral logic, worked out on my own feminine premises under my own power…. Now, I’ve never known you to talk through your hat on any real subject.”

  She had been centered, unified, concentrated, heartened, oriented by his description of her, and she couldn’t let him withdraw any part of it.

  “What I saw was what I said. Years of observation to back it. Does she want to come to Washington?”

  “Well, Ithiel, I haven’t had an opportunity to ask her. But… so that you’ll understand me, I’ve come to love that girl. I’ve examined minutely every aspect of what probably happened, and I believe that the man stole the ring because their relationship was coming to an end. Their affair was about over. So he made her an accessory to the theft and she went with him only to get my emerald back.”

  Ithiel said, “And why do you believe this… this scenario of yours—that she was through with him, and he was so cunning, and she had such a great sense of honor, or responsibility? All of it sounds more like you_ than like any sample of the general population.”

  “But what I’m telling you,” she said with special emphasis, “is that Gina isn’t a sample from the population, and that I love her.”

  “And you want us to meet. And she’ll come under my influence. She’ll fall in love with me. So you and I will increase our number. She’ll enlist with us. And she and I will cherish each other, and you will have the comfort of seeing me in safe hands, and this will be your blessing poured over the two of us.”

  “Teddy, you’re making fun of me,” she said, but she knew perfectly well that he wasn’t making fun, that wasn’t where the accent fell, and his interpretation was more or less correct, as far as it went.

  “We’ll never get each other out of trouble,” said Ithiel. “Not the amount of trouble we’re in. And even that is not so exceptional. And we all know what to expect. Only a few mavericks fight on. That’s you I’m speaking of. I like to think that I’m at home with what is real. Your idea of the real is different. Maybe it’s deeper than mine. Now, if your young lady has her own reasons for moving down here to Washington, I’ll be happy to meet her for your sake and talk to her. But the sort of arrangements that are ideal for your little children—play school, parties, and concerned teachers—can’t be extended to the rest of us.”

  ‘Oh, Teddy, I’m not such a fool as you take me for,” Clara said.

  After this conversation, she drew up a memo pad to try to summarize Ithiel’s underlying view: The assumptions we make as to one another’s motives are so circumscribed, our understanding of the universe and its forces is so false, that the more we analyze, the more injury we do. She knew perfectly well that this memo, like all the others, would disappear. She’d ask herself, “What was I thinking after my talk with Teddy?” and she’d never see this paper anymore.

  N
ow she had to arrange a meeting with Gina Wegman, and that turned out to be a difficult thing to do. She would never have anticipated that it would be so hard. She repeatedly called Gottschalk, who said he was in touch with Gina. He hadn’t actually seen her yet. He now had a midtown number for her and occasionally was able to reach her. “Have you said that I’d like a meeting?” said Clara. She thought, It’s shame. The poor kid is ashamed.

  “She said she was extremely busy, and I believe there’s a plan for her to go home.”

  “To Austria?”

  “She speaks English okay, only I’m not getting a clear signal.”

  Unkindly, Clara muttered that if he’d keep his glasses clean he’d see more. Also, to increase his importance and his fees, he was keeping information from her—or pretending that he had more information than he actually did have. “If you’d give me the number, I could try a direct call,” she said. “Now, is the young man with her, there in midtown?”

  “That wouldn’t be my guess. I think she’s with friends, relatives, and I think she’s going back to Vienna real soon. I’ll give you her number, but before you call her, let me have a few hours more to get supplementary information for you.”

  “Fine,” said Clara, and as soon as Gottschalk was off the line she dialed Gina. She reached her at once. As simple as that.

  “Oh, Mrs. Velde. I meant to call you,” said Gina. “I was a little put off by that Mr. Gottschalk. He’s a detective, and I worried about your attitude, that you thought it was a police matter.”

  “He’s not police at all, he’s strictly private. I needed to find out. I would never have threatened. I wanted to know where you were. The man’s a moron. Never mind about him. Is it true, Gina, that you’re going to Vienna?”

  The young woman said, “Tonight, Lufthansa. Via Munich.”

  “Without seeing me? Why, that’s not possible. I must have made you angry. But it’s not anger that I feel toward you; just the opposite. And we have to meet before you leave. You must be rushed with last-minute things.” Horrified to be losing her, and dilated with heat and breath, her heart swelling suddenly she was hardly able to speak because of the emotional stoppage of her throat. “Won’t you make some time for me, Gina? There’s so much to work out, so much between us. Why the rush home?”