by Bellow, Saul
By contrast, consider Tanky. He had done well out of his rackets. He was one of those burly people who need half an acre of cloth for a suit, who eat New York sirloin strip steaks at Eli’s, put together million-dollar deals, fly to Palm Springs, Las Vegas, Bermuda. Tanky was saying, “In our family, Ijah was the genius. One of them, anyway; we had a couple or three.”
I was no longer the law-school whiz kid for whom a brilliant future had been predicted—so much was true. The tone of derision was justified, insofar as I had enjoyed being the family’s “rose of expectancy.”
As for Tanky’s dark associate, I have no idea who he may have been—maybe Tony Provenzano, or Sally (Bugs) Briguglio, or Dorfman of the Teamsters Union insurance group. It was not Jimmy Hoffa. Hoffa was then in jail. Besides, I, like millions of others, would have recognized him. We knew him personally, for after the war Tanky and I had both been employed by our cousin Miltie Rifkin, who at that time operated a hotel in which Hoffa was supposed to have an interest. Whenever Hoffa and his gang came to Chicago, they stayed there. I was then tutoring Miltie’s son Hal, who was too fast and foxy to waste time on books. Longing to see action, Hal was only fourteen when Miltie put him in charge of the hotel bar. It amused his parents one summer to let him play manager, so that when liquor salesmen approached him, Miltie could say, “You’ll have to see my son Hal; he does the buying. Ask for the young fellow who looks like Eddie Cantor.” They would find a fourteen-year-old boy in the office. I was there to oversee Hal, while teaching him the rules governing the use of the ablative (he was a Latin School pupil). I kept an eye on him. A smart little kid of whom the parents were immensely proud.
Necessarily I spent much time in the bar, and so became acquainted with the Hoffa contingent. Goons, mostly, apart from Harold Gibbons, who was highly urbane and in conversation, at least with me, bookish in his interests. The others were very tough indeed, and Cousin Miltie made the mistake of trying to hold his own with them, man to man, a virile brute. He was not equal to this self-imposed challenge. He could be harsh, he accepted nihilism in principle, but the high-powered executive will simply was not there. Miltie couldn’t say, as Caesar did to a sentry who had orders not to let him pass, “It’s easier for me to kill you than to argue.” Hoffas are like that.
Tanky, then just out of the service, was employed by Miltie to search out tax-delinquent property for him. It was one of Miltie’s side rackets. Evictions were common. So it was through Miltie Rifkin that Cousin Tanky (Raphael) met Red Dorfman, the onetime boxer who acted as broker between Hoffa and organized crime in Chicago. Dorfman, then a gym teacher, inherited Tanky from his father, from Red, the old boxer. A full set of gang connections was part of the legacy.
These were some of the people who dominated the world in which it was my intention to conduct what are often called “higher activities.” To “long for the best that ever was”: this was not an abstract project. I did not learn it over a seminar table. It was a constitutional necessity, physiological, temperamental, based on sympathies which could not be acquired. Human absorption in faces, deeds, bodies, drew me toward metaphysics. I had these peculiar metaphysics as flying creatures have their radar. Maturing, I found the metaphysics in my head. And school, as I have just told you, had little to do with it. As a commuting university student sitting for hours on the elevated trains that racketed, bob-bled, squealed, pelted at top speed over the South Side slums, I boned up on Plato, Aristotle, or St. Thomas for Professor Perry’s class.
But never mind these preoccupations. Here in the Italian Village was Tanky, out on a $500,000 bond, waiting to be sentenced. He didn’t look good. He didn’t have fast colors after all. His big face was swelled out by years of brutal business. The amateur internist in me diagnosed hypertension—250 over 165 were the numbers I came up with. His inner man was toying with a stroke as the alternative to jail. Tanky kept the Edwardian beard trimmed, for his morale, and that very morning, as this was no time to show white hairs, the barber might have given it a gold rinse. The kink of high vigor had gone out of it, however. Tanky wouldn’t have cared for my sympathy. He was well braced, a man ready to take his lumps. The slightest hint that I was sorry would have irritated him. Experienced sorry-feelers will understand me, though, when I say that there was a condensed mass of troubles on his side of the booth. This mass emitted signals for which I lacked the full code.
An old-time joint opposite the First National, where I have my office on the fifty-first floor (those upswept incurves rising, rising), the Italian Village is one of the few restaurants in the city with private recesses for seduction or skulduggery. It dates back to the twenties and is decorated like a saint’s-day carnival in Little Italy, with strings of electric bulbs and wheels of lights. It also suggests a shooting gallery. Or an Expressionist stage set. Prohibition fading away, the old Loop was replaced by office buildings, and the Village became a respectable place, known to all the stars of the musical world. Here visiting divas and great baritones gorged on risotto after singing at the Lyric. Signed photos of artists hung on the walls. Still, the place retained its Al Capone atmosphere—sauce as red as blood, the foot smell of cheeses, the dishes of invertebrates raked up from sea mud.
Little was said of a personal nature. I worked across the street? Tanky said. Yes. Had he asked what my days were like, 1 would have begun by saying that 1 was up at six to play indoor tennis to start the blood circulating, and that when I got to the office I read the New York Times,_ the Wall Street Journal, The Economist,_ and Barrons,_ and scanned certain printouts and messages prepared by my secretary. Having noted the outstanding facts, I put them all behind me and devoted the rest of the morning to my private interests.
But Cousin Tanky did not ask how my days were spent. He mentioned our respective ages—I am ten years his senior—and said that my voice had deepened as I grew older. Yes. My basso profundo served no purpose except to add depth to small gallantries. When I offer a chair to a lady at a dinner party, she is enveloped in a deep syllable. Or when I comfort Eunice, and God knows she needs it, my incoherent rumble seems to give assurance of stability.
Tanky said, “For some reason you keep track of all the cousins, Ijah.”
The deep sound I made in reply was neutral. I didn’t think it would be right, even by so much as a hint, to refer to his career in the union or to his recent trial.
“Tell me what happened to Miltie Rifkin, Ijah. He gave me a break when I got out of the army.”
“Miltie now lives in the Sunbelt. Married to the switchboard operator from the hotel.”
Now, Tanky might have given me_ fascinating information about Miltie, for I know that Cousin Miltie had been dying to draw Hoffa deeper into the hotel operation. Hoffa had such reservoirs of money behind him, all those billions in the pension fund. Miltie was stout, near obese, with a handsome hawk face, profile-proud, his pampered body overdressed, bedizened, his glance defiant and contentious. A clever moneymaker, he was choleric by temperament and, in his fits, dangerously quick to throw punches. It was insane of him to fight so much. His former wife, Libby, weighing upward of 250 pounds, hurrying about the hotel on spike heels, was what we used to call a “suicide blond” (dyed by her own hand). Catering, booking, managing, menacing, bawling out the garde-manger,_ firing housekeepers, hiring bartenders, Libby was all made up like a Kabuki performer. In trying to restrain Miltie (they were less man and wife than business partners), she had her work cut out for her. Several times Miltie complained to Hoffa about one of his goons, whose personal checks were not clearing. The goon—his name escapes me, but for parking purposes he had a clergy sticker on the windshield of his Chrysler—knocked Miltie down in the lobby, then choked him nearly to death. This occurrence came to the attention of Robert F. Kennedy, who was then out to get Hoffa, and Kennedy issued a subpoena for Cousin Miltie to testify before the McClellan Committee. To give evidence against Hoffa’s people would have been madness. Libby cried out when word came that a subpoena was on its way: “Now
see what you’ve done. They’ll chop you to bits!”
Miltie fled. He drove to New York, where he loaded his Cadillac on the Queen Elizabeth. _ He didn’t flee alone. The switchboard operator kept him company. They were guests in Ireland of the American ambassador (linked through Senator Dirksen and the senator’s special assistant, Julius Farkash). While staying at the U. S. embassy, Miltie bought land for what was to have become the new Dublin airport. He bought, however, in the wrong location. After which, he and his wife-to-be flew to the Continent in a transport plane carrying the Cadillac. They did crossword puzzles during the flight. Landing in Rome…
I spared Tanky these details, many of which he probably knew. Besides, the man had seen so much action that they wouldn’t have been worth mentioning. It would have been an infraction of something to speak of Hoffa or to refer to the evasion of a subpoena. Tanky, of course, had been forced to say no to the usual federal immunity offer. It would have been fatal to accept it. One understands this better now that the FBI wiretaps and other pieces of evidence in the Williams-Dorfman trial have been made public. Messages like: “Tell Merkle that if he doesn’t sell us the controlling interest in his firm on our terms, we’ll waste him. Not only him. Say that we’ll also hack up his wife and strangle his kids. And while you’re at it, pass the word to his lawyer that we’ll do the same to him and his wife, and his kids.”
Tanky personally was no killer. He was Dorfman’s man of business, one of his legal and financial team. He was, however, sent to intimidate people who were slow to cooperate or repay. He crushed his cigar on the fine finish of desks, and broke the framed photographs of wives and children (which I think in some cases a good idea). Millions of dollars had to be involved. He didn’t get violent over trifles.
And naturally it would have been offensive to speak of Hoffa, for Tanky might be one of the few who knew how Hoffa had disappeared. I myself, reading widely (with the motives of a concerned cousin), was persuaded that Hoffa had entered a car on his way to a “reconciliation” meeting in Detroit. He was immediately knocked on the head and probably murdered in the backseat. His body was shredded in one machine, and incinerated in another.
Much knowledge of such happenings was in Tanky’s looks, in the puffiness of his face—an edema of deadly secrets. This knowledge made him dangerous. Because of it he would go to prison. The organization, convinced that he was steadfast, would take care of him. What he needed from me was nothing but a private letter to the judge. “Your honor, I submit this statement to you on behalf of the defendant in U.S._ v. Raphael Metzger._ The family have asked me to intercede as a friend of the court, and 1 do so fully convinced that the jury has done its job well. I shall try to persuade you, however, to be lenient in sentencing.
Metzger’s parents were decent, good people….” Adding, perhaps, “I knew him in his infancy” or “I was present at his circumcision.”
These are not matters to bring to the court’s attention: that he was a whopping kid; that nothing so big was ever installed in a high chair; or that he still wears the expression he was born with, one of assurance, of cheerful insolence. His is a case of the Spanish proverb: Genio y figura Hasta la sepultura._
The divine or, as most would prefer to say, the genetic stamp visible even in corruption and ruin. And we belong to the same genetic pool, with a certain difference in scale. My frame is much narrower. Nevertheless, some of the same traits are there, creases in the cheeks, a turn at the end of the nose, and most of all, a tendency to fullness in the underlip—the way the mouth works toward the sense-world. You could identify these characteristics also in family pictures from the old country—the Orthodox, totally different human types. Yet the cheekbones of bearded men, a band of forehead under a large skullcap, the shock of a fixed stare from two esoteric eyes, are recognizable still in their descendants.
Cousins in an Italian restaurant, looking each other over. It was no secret that Tanky despised me. How could it be a secret? Cousin Ijah Brodsky, speaking strange words, never really making sense, acting from peculiar motives, obviously flaky. Studied the piano, was touted as some kind of prodigy, made a sensation in the Kimball Building (the Noah’s ark of stranded European music masters), worked at Comptons Encyclopedia, edited a magazine, studied languages—Greek, Latin, Russian, Spanish—and also linguistics.
I had taken America up in the wrong way. There was only one language for a realist, and that was Hoffa language. Tanky belonged to the Hoffa school—in more than half its postulates, virtually identical with the Kennedy school. If you didn’t speak real, you spoke phony. If you weren’t hard, you were soft. And let’s not forget that at one time, when his bosses were in prison, Tanky, their steward, managed an institution that owns more real estate than the Chase Manhattan Bank.
But to return to Cousin Ijah: music, no; linguistics, no; he next distinguished himself at the University of Chicago Law School, after he had been disappointed in the university’s metaphysicians. He didn’t practice law, either; that was just another phase. A star who never amounted to anything. He fell in love with a concert harpist who had only eight fingers. Unrequited, it didn’t pan out; she was faithful to her husband. Ijah’s wife, who organized the TV show, had been as shrewd as the devil. She couldn’t make anything of him, either. Ambitious, she dismissed him when it became plain that Ijah was not cut out for a team player, lacked the instincts of a go-getter. She was like Cousin Miltie’s wife, Libby, and thought of herself as one of an imperial pair, the dominant one.
What was Tanky to make of someone like Ijah? Ijah was not_ passive. Ijah did_ have a life plan. But this plan was incomprehensible to his contemporaries. In fact, he didn’t appear to have any contemporaries. He had contacts with the living. Not quite the same thing.
The principal characteristic of our existence is suspense._ Nobody—nobody at all—can say how it’s going to turn out.
What was curious and comical to Tanky was that Ijah should be so highly respected and connected. This deep-toned Ijah, a member of so many upper-class clubs and associations, was a gentleman. Tanky’s cousin a gentleman! Isatis_ bald head with the reasonably composed face was in the papers. He obviously made pretty good money (peanuts to Tanky). Maybe he would be reluctant to disclose to a federal judge that he was closely related to a convicted felon. If that was what Tanky thought, he was mistaken.
Years ago, Ijah was a kind of wild-ass type. His TV show was like a Second City act, a Marx Brothers routine. It went on in a fever of absurdities.
Ijah’s conduct is much different now. Today he’s quiet, he’s a gentleman. What does it take to be a gentleman? It used to require hereditary lands, breeding, conversation. Toward the end of the last century, Greek and Latin did it, and I have some of each. If it comes to that, I enjoy an additional advantage in that I don’t have to be anti-Semitic or strengthen my credentials as a civilized person by putting down Jews. But never mind that.
“Your Honor, it may be instructive to hear the real facts in a case you have tried. On the bench, one seldom learns what the wider human circumstances are. As Metzger’s cousin, I can be amicus curiae in a larger sense.
“I remember Tanky in his high chair. Tanky is what he was called on the Schurz High football squad. To his mother he was R’foel. She called him Folya, or Folka, for she was a village woman, born behind the pale. A tremendous infant, strapped in, struggling with his bonds. A powerful voice and a strong color. Like other infants he must have fed on Pablum or farina, but Cousin Shana also gave him more potent things to eat. She cooked primitive dishes like calf ‘s-foot jelly in her kitchen, and I remember eating stewed lungs, which had a spongy texture, savory but chewy, much gristle. The family lived on Hoyne Street in a brick bungalow with striped awnings, alternating broad bands of white and cantaloupe. Cousin Shana was a person of great force, and she kept house as it had been kept for hundreds of years. She was a wide woman, a kind of human blast furnace. Her style of conversation was exclamatory. She began by saying, in Yiddish, ‘H
ear! Hear! Hear! Hear!’ And then she told you her opinion. It may be that persons of her type have become extinct in America. She made an immense impression on me. We were fond of each other, and I went to the Metzgers’ because I was at home there, and also to see and hear primordial family life.
“Shana’s aunt was my grandmother. My paternal grandfather was one of a dozen men who had memorized the whole of the Babylonian Talmud (or was it the Jerusalem one? here I am ignorant). All my life I have asked, ‘Why do that?’ But it was done.
“Metzger’s father sold haberdashery in the Boston Store down in the Loop. In the Austro-Hungarian Empire he had been trained as a cutter and also as a designer of men’s clothing. A man of many skills, he was always nicely dressed, stocky, bald except for a lock at the front, combed to swerve to the right. Some men are mutely bald; his baldness was expressive; stressful lumps would form in his skin, which dissolved with the return of calm. He said little; he grinned and beamed instead, and if there is a celestial meridian of good nature, it intersected his face. He had guileless abbreviated teeth with considerable spaces between them. What else? He was a stickler for respect. Nobody was to take his amiability for granted. When his temper rose, failure to find words gave him a stifled look, while large lumps came up under his scalp. One seldom saw this, however. He suffered from a tic of the eyelids. Also, to show his fondness (to boys) he used harmless Yiddish obscenities—a sign that he took you into his confidence. You would be friends when you were old enough.
