by Bellow, Saul
So what are words? A lawyer, the first one, the one who represented me in the case against my brother’s estate (the second one was Gerdas brother)—lawyer number one, whose name was Klaussen, said to me when an important letter had to be drafted, “You_ do it, Shawmut. You’re the man with the words.”
‘And you’re the whore with ten cunts!”
But I didn’t say this. He was too powerful. I needed him. I was afraid.
But it was inevitable that I should offend him, and presently I did.
I can’t tell you why._ It’s a mystery. When I tried to discuss Freud’s epilepsy essay with Mrs. Pergamon I wanted to hint that I myself was subject to strange seizures that resembled falling sickness. But it wasn’t just brain pathology, lesions, grand mal chemistry. It was a kind of perversely happy _gaietщ de coeur.__ Elements of vengefulness, or blasphemy? Well, maybe. What about demonic inspiration, what about energumens, what about Dionysus the god? After a distressing luncheon with Klaussen the lawyer at his formidable club, where he bullied me in a dining room filled with bullies, a scene from Daumier (I had been beaten down ten or twelve times, my suggestions all dismissed, and I had paid him a twenty-five-thousand-dollar retainer, but Klaussen hadn’t bothered yet to master the elementary facts of the case)—after lunch, I say, when we were walking through the lobby of the club, where federal judges, machine politicians, paving contractors, and chairmen of boards conferred in low voices, I heard a great noise. Workmen had torn down an entire wall. I said to the receptionist, “What’s happening?” She answered, “The entire club is being rewired. We’ve been having daily power failures from the old electrical system.” I said, “While they’re at it they might arrange to have people electrocuted in the dining room.”
I was notified by Klaussen next day that for one reason or another he could no longer represent me. I was an incompatible client.
The intellect of man declaring its independence from worldly power—okay. But I had gone to Klaussen for protection. I chose him because he was big and arrogant, like the guys my brother’s widow had hired. My late brother had swindled me. Did I want to recover my money or not? Was I fighting or doodling? Because in the courts you needed brazenness, it was big arrogance or nothing. And with Klaussen as with Mrs. Pergamon there was not a thing that Gerda could do—she couldn’t send either of them flowers or ask them to lunch. Besides, she was already sick. Dying, she was concerned about my future. She remonstrated with me. “Did you have to needle him? He’s a proud man.”
“I gave in to my weakness. What’s with me? Like, am I too good to be a hypocrite?”
“Hypocrisy is a big word…. A little lip service.”
And again I said what I shouldn’t have, especially given the state of her health: “It’s a short step from lip service to ass kissing.”
“Oh, my poor Herschel, you’ll never change!”
She was then dying of leukemia, Miss Rose, and I had to promise her that I would put my case in the hands of her brother Hansl. She believed that for her sake Hansl would be loyal to me. Sure, his feeling for her was genuine. He loved his sister. But as a lawyer he was a disaster, not because he was disloyal but because he was in essence an inept conniver. Also he was plain crackers.
Lawyers, lawyers. Why did I need all these lawyers? you will ask. Because I loved my brother fondly. Because we did business, and business can’t be done without lawyers. They have built a position for themselves at the very heart of money strength at the core of what is strongest. Some of the cheerfulest passages in Walish’s letter refer to my horrible litigation. He says, “I always knew you were a fool.” Himself, he took the greatest pains never to be one. Not that any man can ever be absolutely certain that his prudence is perfect. But to retain lawyers is clear proof that you’re a patsy. There I concede that Walish is right.
My brother, Philip, had offered me a business proposition, and that, too. was my fault. I made the mistake of telling him how much money my music-appreciation book had earned. He was impressed. He said to his wife, “Tracy, guess who’s loaded!” Then he asked, “What are you doing with it? How do you protect yourself against taxes and inflation?”
I admired my brother, not because he was a “creative businessman,” as they said in the family—that meant little to me—but because… Well, there is in fact no “because,” there’s only the given,_ a lifelong feeling, a mystery. His interest in my finances excited me. For once he spoke seriously to me, and this turned my head. I told him, “I never even tried to make money, and now I’m knee-deep in the stuff.” Such a statement was a little disingenuous. It was, if you prefer, untrue. To take such a tone was also a mistake, for it implied that money wasn’t so hard to make. Brother Philip had knocked himself out for it, while Brother Harry had earned heaps of it, incidentally, while fiddling. This, I now acknowledge, was a provocative booboo. He made a dark note of it. I even saw the note being made.
As a boy, Philip was very fat. We had to sleep together when we were children and it was like sharing the bed with a dugong. But since then he had firmed up quite a lot. In profile his face was large, with bags under the eyes, a sharp serious face upon a stout body. My late brother was a crafty man. He laid long-distance schemes. Over me he enjoyed the supreme advantage of detachment. My weakness was my fondness for him, contemptible in an adult male. He slightly resembled Spencer Tracy, but was more avid and sharp. He had a Texas tan, his hair was “styled,” not barbered, and he wore Mexican rings on every one of his fingers.
Gerda and I were invited to visit his estate near Houston. Here he lived in grandeur, and when he showed me around the place he said to me, “Every morning when I open my eyes I say, ‘Philip, you’re living right in the middle of a park. You own a whole park.’ “
I said, “It certainly is as big as Douglas Park in Chicago.”
He cut me short, not wishing to hear about the old West Side, our dreary origins. Roosevelt Road with its chicken coops stacked on the sidewalks, the Tal-mudist horseradish grinder in the doorway of the fish store, or the daily drama of the Shawmut kitchen on Independence Boulevard. He abominated these reminiscences of mine, for he was thoroughly Americanized. On the other hand, he no more belonged on this Texas estate than I did. Perhaps no one belonged here. Numerous failed entrepreneurs had preceded him in this private park, the oilmen and land developers who had caused this monument to be built. You had the feeling that they must all have died in flophouses or on state funny farms, cursing the grandiose fata morgana that Philip now owned, or seemed to own. The truth was that he didn’t like it, either; he was stuck with it. He had bought it for various symbolic reasons, and under pressure from his wife.
He told me in confidence that he had a foolproof investment for me. People were approaching him with hundreds of thousands, asking to be cut into the deal, but he would turn them all down for my sake. For once he was in a position to do something for me. Then he set his conditions. The first condition was that he was never to be questioned, that was how he did business, but I could be sure that he would protect me as a brother should and that there was nothing to fear. In the fragrant plantation gardens, he flew for one instant (no more) into Yiddish. He’d never let me lay my sound head in a sickbed. Then he flew out again. He said that his wife, who was the best woman in the world and the soul of honor, would respect his commitments and carry out his wishes with fanatical fidelity if anything were to happen to him. Her fanatical fidelity to him was fundamental. I didn’t understand Tracy, he said. She was difficult to know but she was a true woman, and he wasn’t going to have any clauses in our partnership agreement that would bind her formally. She would take offense at that and so would he. And you wouldn’t believe, Miss Rose, how all these clichщs moved me. I responded as if to an accelerator under his fat, elegantly shod foot, pumping blood, not gasoline, into my mortal engine. I was wild with feeling and said yes to it all. Yes, yes! The plan was to create an auto-wrecking center, the biggest in Texas, which would supply auto parts to the entire
South and to Latin America as well. The big German and Italian exporters were notoriously short of replacement parts; I had experienced this myself—I had once had to wait four months for a BMW front-wheel stabilizer unobtainable in the U. S. But it wasn’t the business proposition that carried me away, Miss Rose. What affected me was that my brother and I should be really associated for the first time in our lives. As our joint enterprise could never in the world be Pergolesi, it must necessarily be business. I was unreasonably stirred by emotions that had waited a lifetime for expression; they must have worked their way into my heart at a very early age, and now came out in full strength to drag me down.
“What have you got to do with wrecking automobiles?” said Gerda. “And grease, and metal, and all that noise?”
I said, “What has the 1RS ever done for music that it should collect half my royalties?”
My wife was an educated woman, Miss Rose, and she began to reread certain books and to tell me about them, especially at bedtime. We went through much of Balzac. _Pшre Goriot__ (what daughters can do to a father), Cousin Ports_ (how an elderly innocent was dragged down by relatives who coveted his art collection)… One swindling relative after another, and all of them merciless. She related the destruction of poor Cщsar Birotteau, the trusting perfumer. She also read me selections from Marx on the obliteration of the ties of kinship by capitalism. But it never occurred to me that such evils could affect a man who had read about them. I had read about venereal diseases and had never caught any. Besides, it was now too late to take a warning.
On my last trip to Texas I visited the vast, smoking wrecking grounds, and on our way back to the mansion Philip told me that his wife had become a breeder of pit bulldogs. You may have read about these creatures, which have scandalized American animal lovers. They are the most terrifying of all dogs. Part terrier, part English bulldog, smooth-skinned, broad-chested, immensely muscular, they attack all strangers, kids as well as grownups. As they do not bark, no warning is given. Their intent is always to kill, and once they have begun to tear at you they can’t be called off. The police, if they arrive in time, have to shoot them. In the pit, the dogs fight and die in silence. Aficionados bet millions of dollars on the fights (which are illegal, but what of it?). Humane societies and civil liberties groups don’t quite know how to defend these murderous animals or the legal rights of their owners. There is a Washington lobby trying to exterminate the breed, and meantime enthusiasts go on experimenting, doing everything possible to create the worst of all possible dogs.
Philip took an intense pride in his wife. “Tracy is a wonder, isn’t she?” he said. “There’s terrific money in these animals. Trust her to pick up a new trend. Guys are pouring in from all over the country to buy pups from her.”
He took me to the dog-runs to show the pit bulls off. As we passed, they set their paws on the wire meshes and bared their teeth. I didn’t enjoy visiting the pens. My own teeth were on edge. Philip himself wasn’t comfortable with the animals, by any means. He owned them, they were assets, but he wasn’t the master. Tracy, appearing among the dogs, gave me a silent nod. The Negro employees who brought meat were tolerated. “But Tracy,” Philip said, “she’s their goddess.”
I must have been afraid, because nothing satirical or caustic came to mind. I couldn’t even make up funny impressions to take home to Gerda, with whose amusement I was preoccupied in those sad days.
But as a reverberator, which it is my nature to be, I tried to connect the breeding of these terrible dogs with the mood of the country. The pros and cons of the matter add some curious lines to the spiritual profile of the U. S. A. Not long ago, a lady wrote to the Boston Globe_ that it had been a failure of judgment in the Founding Fathers not to consider the welfare of cats and dogs in our democracy, people being what they are. The Founders were too lenient with human viciousness, she said, and the Bill of Rights ought to have made provision for the safety of those innocents who are forced to depend upon us. The first connection to come to mind was that egalitarianism was now being extended to cats and dogs. But it’s not simple egalitarianism, it’s a merging of different species; the line between man and other animals is becoming blurred. A dog will give you such simple heart’s truth as you will never get from a lover or a parent. I seem to recall from the thirties (or did I read this in the memoirs of Lionel Abel?) how scandalized the French Surrealist Andrщ Breton was when he visited Leon Trotsky in exile. While the two men were discussing World Revolution, Trotsky’s dog came up to be caressed and Trotsky said, “This is my only true friend.” What? A dog the friend of this Marxist theoretician and hero of the October Revolution, the organizer of the Red Army? Symbolic Surrealist acts, like shooting at random into a crowd in the street, Breton could publicly recommend, but to be sentimental about a dog like any bourgeois was shocking. Today’s psychiatrists would not be shocked. Asked whom they love best, their patients reply in increasing numbers, “My dog.” At this rate, a dog in the White House becomes a real possibility. Not a pit bulldog, certainly, but a nice golden retriever whose veterinarian would become Secretary of State.
I didn’t try these reflections out on Gerda. Nor, since it would have been unsettling, did I tell her that Philip, too, was unwell. He had been seeing a doctor. Tracy had him on a physical-fitness program. Mornings he entered the annex to the master bedroom, in which the latest gymnastic equipment had been set up. Wearing overlong silk boxer shorts (I reckon that their theme was the whiskey sour, since they were decorated with orange slices resembling wheels), he hung by his fat arms from the shining apparatus, he jogged on a treadmill with an odometer, and he tugged at the weights. When he worked out on the Exercycle, the orange-slice wheels of his underpants extended the vehicular fantasy, but he was going nowhere. The queer things he found himself doing as a rich man, the false position he was in! His adolescent children were rednecks. The druidic Spanish moss vibrated to the shocks of rock music. The dogs bred for cruelty bided their time. My brother, it appeared, was only the steward of his wife and children.
Still, he wanted me to observe him at his exercises and to impress me with his strength. As he did push-ups, his dipping titties touched the floor before his chin did, but his stern face censored any comical comments I might be inclined to make. I was called upon to witness that under the fat there was a block of primal powers, a strong heart in his torso, big veins in his neck, and bands of muscle across his back. “I can’t do any of that,” I told him, and indeed I couldn’t, Miss Rose. My behind is like a rucksack that has slipped its straps.
I made no comments, because I was a general partner who had invested $600,000 in the wreckage of rusty automobiles. Two miles behind the private park, there were cranes and compactors, and hundreds of acres were filled with metallic pounding and dust. I understood by now that the real power behind this enterprise was Philip’s wife, a short round blond of butch self-sufficiency, as dense as a meteorite and, somehow, as spacey But no, it was I who was spacey, while she was intricately shrewd.
And most of my connubial ideas derived from the gentleness and solicitude of my own Gerda!
During this last visit with Brother Philip, I tried to get him to speak about Mother. The interest he took in her was minimal. Family sentiment was not his dish. All that he had was for the new family; for the old family, nix. He said he couldn’t recall Hammond, Indiana, or Independence Boulevard. “You were the only one I ever cared for,” he said. He was aware that there were two departed sisters, but their names didn’t come to him. Without half trying, he was far ahead of Andrщ Breton, and could never be overtaken. Surrealism wasn’t a theory, it was an anticipation of the future.
“What was Chink’s real name?” he said.
I laughed. “What, you’ve forgotten Helen’s name? You’re bluffing. Next you’ll tell me you can’t remember her husband, either. What about Kramm? He bought you your first pair of long pants. Or Sabina? She got you the job in the bucket shop in the Loop.”
“They fade from m
y mind,” he said. “Why should I keep those dusty memories? If I want details I can get you to fill me in. You’ve got such a memory hang-up—what use is it?”
As I grow older, Miss Rose, I don’t dispute such views or opinions but tend instead to take them under consideration. True, I counted on Philip’s memory. I wanted him to remember that we were brothers. I had hoped to invest my money safely and live on an income from wrecked cars—summers in Corsica, handy to London at the beginning of the musical season. Before the Arabs sent London real estate so high, Gerda and I discussed buying a flat in Kensington. But we waited and waited, and there was not a single distribution from the partnership. “We’re doing great,” said Philip. “By next year I’ll be able to remortgage, and then you and I will have more than a million to cut up between us. Until then, you’ll have to be satisfied with the tax write-offs.”
I started to talk about our sister Chink, thinking my only expedient was to stir such family sentiments as might have survived in this atmosphere where the Spanish moss was electronicized by rock music (and, at the back, the pit bulldogs were drowning silently in the violence of their blood-instincts). I recalled that we had heard very different music on Independence Boulevard. Chink would play “Jimmy Had a Nickel” on the piano, and the rest of us would sing the chorus, or yell it out. Did Philip remember that Kramm, who drove a soda-pop truck (it was from affection, because he doted on Helen, that he called her Chink), could accurately pitch a case filled with bottles into a small opening at the very top of the pyramid? No, the pop truck wasn’t exactly stacked like a pyramid, it was a ziggurat. “What’s a ziggurat?”
