by Bellow, Saul
Two weeks from now, I am being sent to a conference in Europe, on the rescheduling of debts, and she wants approval for travel arrangements. Will I be landing first in Paris? I say, vaguely, yes. And putting up for two nights at the Montalembert? Then Geneva, and returning via London. All this is routine. She is aware that she isn’t getting to me. Then, because I have spoken to her about Tokyo Joe Eto (my interest in such items having increased since Tanky’s patron, Dorfman, was murdered), she hands me a clipping from the Tribune._ The two men who botched the execution of Tokyo Joe have themselves been executed. Their bodies were found in the trunk of a Buick parked in residential Naperville. A terrible stink had been rising from the car and there were flies parading over the lid of the trunk, denser than May Day in Red Square.
Eunice called me again, not about her brother this time but about her Uncle Mordecai, my father’s first cousin—the head of the family, insofar as there is a family, and insofar as it has a head. Mordecai—Cousin Motty, as we called him—had been hurt in an automobile accident, and as he was nearly ninety it was a serious matter—and so I was on the telephone with Eunice, speaking from a dark corner of my dark apartment. Evidently I can’t really say why I should have had it so dark. I have a clear preference for light and simple outlines, but I am stuck for the right atmosphere. I have made myself surroundings I was not ready for, a Holy Sepulchre atmosphere, far too many Oriental rugs bought from Mr. Hering at Marshall Field’s (he recently retired and devotes himself to his horse farm), and books with old bindings, which I long ago stopped reading. My only reading matter for months has been the reports of the Jesup Expedition, and I am attracted to certain books by Heidegger. But you can’t browse through Heidegger; Heidegger is hard work. Sometimes I read the poems of Auden as well, or biographies of Auden. That’s neither here nor there. I suspect I created these dark and antipathetic surroundings in an effort to revise or rearrange myself at the core. The essentials are all present. What they need is proper arrangement.
Now, why anybody should pursue such a project in one of the great capitals of the American superpower is also a subject of interest. I have never discussed this with anyone, but I have had colleagues say to me (sensing that I was up to something out-of-the-way) that there was so much spectacular action in a city like Chicago, there were so many things going on in the outer_ world, the city itself was so rich in opportunities for real_ development, a center of such wealth, power, drama, rich even in crimes and vices, in diseases, and intrinsic—not accidental—monstrosities, that it was foolish, querulous, to concentrate on oneself. The common daily life was more absorbing than anybody’s inmost anything. Well, yes, and I think I have fewer romantic illusions about this inmost stuff than most. Conscious inmosts when you come to look at them are mercifully vague. Besides, I avoid anything resembling a grandiose initiative._ Also I am not isolated by choice. The problem is that I can’t seem to find the contemporaries I require.
I’ll get back to this presently. Cousin Mordecai has quite a lot to do with it.
Eunice, on the telephone, was telling me about the accident. Cousin Riva, Motty’s wife, was at the wheel, Motty’s license having been lifted years ago. Too bad. He had just discovered, after fifty years of driving, what a rearview mirror was for. Riva’s license should have been taken away, too, said Eunice, who had never liked Riva (there had been a long war between Shana and Riva; it continued through Eunice). Riva overruled everybody and would not give up her Chrysler. She had become too small to drive that huge machine. Well, she had wrecked it, finally.
“Are they hurt?”
“She wasn’t at all. He_ was—his nose and his right hand, pretty bad. In the hospital he developed pneumonia.”
I felt a pang at this. Poor Motty, he was already in such a state of damage before the accident.
Eunice went on. News from the frontiers of science: “They can handle pneumonia now. It used to carry them off so fast that the doctors called it ‘the old man’s friend.’ Now they’ve sent him home….”
Ah.” We had gotten another stay. It couldn’t be put off for long, but every reprieve was a relief. Mordecai was the eldest survivor of his generation, and extinction was close, and feelings had to be prepared.
Cousin Eunice had more to tell: “He doesn’t like to leave his bed. Even before the accident they had that problem with him. After breakfast he’d get under the covers again. This was hard on Riva, because she likes to be active. She went to business with him every day of her life. She said it was spooky to have Motty covering himself up in bed. It was abnormal behavior, and she forced him to go to a family counselor in Skokie. The woman was very good. She said that all his life he had got up at five A. M. to go to the shop, and it was no wonder after all the sleep he had missed if he wanted to catch up.”
I didn’t go with this interpretation. I let it pass, however. “Now let me tell you the very latest,” said Eunice. “He still has fluid in the lungs and they have to make him sit up. They force him.”
“How do they do it?”
“He has to be strapped into a chair.”
“I think I’d rather skip this visit.”
“You can’t do that. You always were a pet of his.”
This was true, and I saw now what I had done: claimed Motty’s affection, given him my own, treated him with respect, observed his birthdays, extended to him the love I had felt for my own parents. By such actions, I had rejected certain revolutionary developments of the past centuries, the advanced views of the enlightened, the contempt for parents illustrated with such charm and sharpness by Samuel Butler, who had said that the way to be born was alone, with a twenty-thousand-pound note pinned to your diaper; I had missed the classic lessons of a Mirabeau and his father, of Frederick the Great, of Old Goriot and his daughters, of Dostoyevsky’s parricides—shunning what Heidegger holds up before us as “the frightful,” using the old Greek words deinon_ and deinotaton_ and telling us that the frightful is the gate to the sublime. The very masses are turning their backs on the family. Cousin Motty in his innocence was unaware of these changes. For these and other reasons—mixed reasons—I was reluctant to visit Cousin Motty, and Eunice was quite right to remind me that this put my affection in doubt. I was in a box. Once under way, these relationships have to be played to the end. I couldn’t fink out on him. Now, Tanky, who was Motty’s nephew, hadn’t set eyes on the old man in twenty years. This was fully rational and consistent. When I last saw him the old man couldn’t speak, or wouldn’t. He was shrunken. He turned away from me. “He always loved you, Ijah.”
“And I love him.”
Eunice said, “He’s aware of everything.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
Self-examination, all theoretical considerations set aside, told me that I loved the old man. Imperfect love, I admit. Still, there it was. It had always been there. Eunice, having discovered to what extent I was subject to cousinly feelings, was increasing her influence over me. So here I was picking her up in my car and driving her out to Lincolnwood, where Motty and Riva lived in a ranch-style house.
When we entered the door, Cousin Riva threw up her now crooked arms in a “hurrah” gesture and said, “Motty will be so happy….”
Quite separate from this greeting was the look her shrewd blue eyes gave us. She didn’t at all care for Eunice, and for fifty years she had taken a skeptical view of me, not lacking in sympathy but waiting for me to manifest trustworthy signs of normalcy. To me she had become a dear old lady who was also very tough-minded. I remembered Riva as a full-figured, dark-haired, plump, straight-legged woman. Now all the geometry of her figure had changed. She had come down in the knees like the jack of a car, to a diamond posture. She still made an effort to move with speed, as if she were dancing after the Riva she had once been. But that she was no longer. The round face had lengthened, and a Voltairean look had come into it. Her blue stare put it to you directly: Read me the riddle of this absurd transformation, the white hair, the cracked
voice. My transformation, and for that matter yours. Where is your hair, and why are you stooped? And perhaps there were certain common premises. All these physical alterations seem to release the mind. For me there are further suggestions: that as the social order goes haywire and the constraints of centuries are removed, and the seams of history open, as it were, walls come apart at the corners, bonds dissolve, and we are freed to think for ourselves—provided we can find the strength to make use of the opportunity—to escape through the gaps, not succumbing in lamentations but getting on top of the collapsed pile.
There were children and grandchildren, and they satisfied Riva, undoubtedly, but she was not one of your grannies. She had been a businesswoman. She and Motty had built a large business out of a shop with two delivery wagons. Sixty years ago Cousin Motty and his brother Shimon, together with my father, their first cousin, and a small workforce of Polish bakers, had supplied a few hundred immigrant grocery stores with bread and kaiser rolls, and with cakes—fry cakes, layer cakes, coffee cakes, cream puffs, bismarcks, and eclairs. They had done it all in three ovens fired with scrap wood—mill edgings with the bark still on them, piled along the walls—and with sacks of flour and sugar, barrels of jelly, tubs of shortening, crates of eggs, long hod-shaped kneading vats, and fourteen-foot slender peels that slipped in and out of the heat to bring out loaves. Everybody was coated in flour except Cousin Riva, in an office under the staircase, where she kept the books and did the billing and the payroll. My father’s title at the shop was Manager, as if the blasting ovens and the fragrance filling the whole block had anything to do with “Management.” He could never Manage anything. Nerve Center of Anxieties would have been a better title, with the chief point of concentration in the middle of his forehead, like a third eye for all that might go wrong in the night, when he was in charge. They built a large business (not my father, who went out on his own and was never connected with any sizable success), and the business expanded until it reached the limits of its era, when it could not adapt itself to the conditions set by supermarkets—refrigerated long-distance shipping, uniformity of product, volume (demands for millions of dozens of kaiser rolls). So the company was liquidated. Nobody was to blame for that.
Life entered a new phase, a wonderful or supposedly wonderful period of retirement—Florida and all that, places where the warm climate favors dreaming, and people, if they haven’t become too restless and distorted, may recover the exaltation of a prior state of being. Out of the question, as we all know. Well, Motty made an earnest effort to be a good American. A good American makes propaganda for whatever existence has forced him to become. In Chicago, Motty went to his downtown club for a daily swim. He was a “character” down there. For a decade he entertained the membership with jokes. These were excellent jokes. I had heard most of them from my father. Many of them required some knowledge of the old country—Hebrew texts, parables, proverbs. Much of it was fossil material, so that if you were unaware that in the shtetl the Orthodox, as they went about their tasks, recited the Psalms to themselves in an undertone, you had to ask for footnotes. Motty wished, and deserved, to be identified as a fine, cheerful old man who had had a distinguished career, perhaps the city’s best baker, rich, magnanimous, a person of known integrity. But when the older members of the club died off, there was nobody to exchange such weighty values with. Motty, approaching ninety, still latched on to people to tell them funny things. These were his gift offerings. He repeated himself. The commodity brokers, politicians, personal-injury lawyers, bagmen and fixers, salesmen and promoters who worked out at the club lost patience with him. He was offensive in the locker room, wrapped in his sheet. Nobody knew what he was talking about. Too much Chinese in his cantos, too much Provenчal. The club asked the family to keep him at home.
“Forty years a member,” said Riva.
“Yes, but all his contemporaries are dead. The new people don’t appreciate him.”
I had always thought that Motty with his endless jokes was petitioning for acceptance, pleading his case, and that by entertaining in the locker room he suffered a disfigurement of his nature. He had spoken much less when he was younger. As a young boy at the Russian bath among grown men, I had admired Motty’s size and strength when we squatted in the steam. Naked, he resembled an Indian brave. Crinkly hair grew down the center of his head. His dignity was a given of his nature. Now there was no band of hair down the middle. He had shrunk. His face was reduced. During his decade of cheer when he swam and beamed, pure affection, he was always delighted to see me. He said, “I have reached the shmonim”_—eighties—“and I do twenty lengths a day in the pool. Then, “Have you heard this one?”
“I’m sure I haven’t.”
“Listen. A Jew enters a restaurant. Supposed to be good, but it’s filthy”
“Yes.”
“And there isn’t any menu. You order your meal from the tablecloth, which is stained. You point to a spot and say, “What’s this? Tzimmes?_ Bring me some.’ “
“Yes.”
“And the waiter writes no check. The customer goes straight to the cashier. She picks up his necktie and says, ‘You ate tzimmes.’_ But then the customer belches and she says, ‘Ah, you had radishes, too.’ “
This is no longer a joke but a staple of your mental life. When you’ve heard it a hundred times it becomes mythic, like Raven crawling into his wife’s interior and finding himself in a vast chamber. All jokes, however, have now stopped.
Before we go upstairs, Cousin Riva says, “I see where the FBI has done a Greylord Sting operation on your entire profession and there will be hundreds of indictments.”
No harm intended. Riva is being playful, without real wickedness, simply exercising her faculties. She likes to tease me, well aware that I don’t practice law, don’t play the piano, don’t do any of the things I was famous for (with intramural fame). Then she says, her measured way of speaking unchanged, “We mustn’t allow Motty to lie down, we have to force him to sit up, otherwise the fluid will accumulate in his lungs. The doctor has ordered us to strap him in.”
“He can’t take that well.”
“Poor Motty, he hates it. He’s escaped a couple of times. I feel bad about it. We all do….”
Motty is belted into an armchair. The buckles are behind him. My first impulse is to release him, despite doctor’s orders. Doctors prolong life, but how Motty feels about the rules they impose cannot be known. He acknowledges our visit with a curt sign, slighter than a nod, then turns his head away. It is humiliating to be seen like this. It occurs to me that in the letter to Judge Eiler it had crossed my mind that Tanky in his high chair had struggled in silence, determined to tear free from his straps.
Motty is not ready to talk—not able. So nothing at all is said. It is a visit and we stand visiting. What do I want with Motty anyway, and why have I made a trip from the Loop to molest him? His face is even smaller than when I saw him ‘ast—_genio__ and figura_ making their last appearance, the components about to get lost. He is down to nature now, and reckons directly with death. It’s no great kindness to come to witness this.
In my first recollections, Eunice stood low, sucking her thumb. Now Eunice is standing high, and it’s Riva who is low. Cousin Riva’s look is contracted. No way of guessing what she thinks. The TV is switched off. Its bulging glass is like the forehead of an intrusive somebody who has withdrawn into his evil secret, inside the cokey (brittle gray) cells of the polished screen. Behind the drawn drapes is North Richmond Street, static and empty like all other nice residential streets, all the human interest in them siphoned off by bigger forces, by the main action. Whatever is not plugged into the main action withers and is devoured by death. Motty became the patriarch-comedian when his business was liquidated. Now there are no forms left for life to assume.
Something has to be said at last, and Eunice calls upon her strengths, which are scientific and advisory. She seems, moreover, to be prompted by a kind of comic instinct. She says, “You oug
ht to have physiotherapy for Uncle Motty’s hand, otherwise he’ll lose the use of it. I’m very_ surprised that this has been neglected.”
Cousin Riva is furious at this. She already blames herself for the accident, she had been warned not to drive, and also for the strapped chair, but she will not allow Cousin Eunice to take such a critical tone. “I think I can be relied upon to look after my husband,” she says, and leaves the room. Eunice follows her, and I can hear her making a fuller explanation to the “layman,” persisting. The cure of her stutter fifty years ago sold her forever on professional help. “Send for the best” is her slogan.
To sit on the bed, I move aside Riva’s books and magazines. It comes back to me that she used to like Edna Ferber, Fannie Hurst, and Mary Roberts Rinehart. Once at Lake Zurich, Illinois, she let me read her copy of The Circular Staircase._ With this came all of the minute particulars, unnecessarily circumstantial. The family drove out one summer day in three cars and on the way out of town Cousin Motty stopped at a hardware store on Milwaukee Avenue and bought a clothesline to secure the picnic baskets on the roof of the Dodge. He stood on the bumpers and on the running board and lashed the baskets every-which way, crisscross.
Like the dish in which you clean watercolor brushes, Lake Zurich is yellow-green, the ooze is deep, the reeds are thick, the air is close, and the grove smells not of nature but of sandwiches and summer bananas. At the picnic table there is a poker game presided over by Riva’s mother, who has drawn down the veil of her big hat to keep off the mosquitoes and perhaps also to conceal her looks from the other players. Tanky, about two years old, escapes naked from his mother and the mashed potatoes she cries after him to eat. Shana’s brothers, Motty and Shimon, walk in the picnic grounds, discussing bakery matters. Mountainous Shimon has a hump, but it is a hump of strength, not a disfigurement. Huge hands hang from his sleeves. He cares nothing for the seersucker jacket that covers his bulging back. He bought it, he owns it, but by the way he wears it he turns it against itself. It becomes some sort of anti-American joke. His powerful step destroys small vegetation. He is deadly shrewd and your adolescent secrets burn up in the blue fire of his negating gaze. Shimon didn’t like me. My neck was too long, my eyes were too alien. I was studious. I held up a false standard, untrue to real life. Cousin Motty defended me. I can’t say that he was entirely in the right. Cousin Shana used to say of me, “The boy has an open head.” What she meant was that book learning was easy for me. As far as they went, Cousin Shimon’s intuitions were more accurate. On the shore of Lake Zurich I should have been screaming in the ooze with the other kids, not reading a stupid book (it had an embossed monochrome brown binding) by Mary Roberts Rinehart. I was refusing to hand over my soul to “actual conditions,” which are the conditions uncovered now by the FBI’s sting. (The disclosures of corruption won’t go very far; the worst of the bad guys have little to fear.)
