by Bellow, Saul
“Maybe it is, but do you want to spend the rest of your life battling in the courts? Why not leave the country and live abroad quietly on what’s left of your assets? Pick a place where the dollar is strong and spend the rest of your life in musical studies or what you goddamn well please. Gerda, God bless her, is gone. What’s to keep you?”
“Nobody but my old mother.”
“Ninety-four years old? And a vegetable? You can put your textbook copyright in her name and the income will take care of her. So our next step is to check out some international law. There’s a sensational chick in my office. She was on the Yale Law Journal._ They don’t come any smarter. She’ll find you a country. I’ll have her do a report on Canada. What about British Columbia, where old Canadians retire?”
“Whom do I know there? Whom will I talk to? And what if the creditors keep after me?”
“You haven’t got so much dough left. There isn’t all that much in it for them. They’ll forget you.”
I told Hansl I’d consider his proposal. I had to go and visit Mother in the nursing home.
The home was decorated with the intention of making everything seem normal. Her room was much like any hospital room, with plastic ferns and fireproof drapes. The chairs, resembling wrought-iron garden furniture, were also synthetic and light. I had trouble with the ferns. I disliked having to touch them to see if they were real. It was a reflection on my relation to reality that I couldn t tell at a glance. But then Mother didn’t know me, either, which was a more complex matter than the ferns.
I preferred to come at mealtimes, for she had to be fed. To feed her was infinitely meaningful for me. I took over from the orderly. I had long given up telling her, “This is Harry.” Nor did I expect to establish rapport by feeding her.
I used to feel that I had inherited something of her rich crazy nature and love of life, but it now was useless to think such thoughts. The tray was brought and the orderly tied her bib. She willingly swallowed the cream of carrot soup. When I encouraged her, she nodded. Recognition, nil. Two faces from ancient Kiev, similar bumps on the forehead. Dressed in her hospital gown, she wore a thread of lipstick on her mouth. The chapped skin of her cheeks gave her color also. By no means silent, she spoke of her family, but I was not mentioned.
“How many children have you got?” I said.
“Three: two daughters and a son, my son Philip.”
All three were dead. Maybe she was already in communication with them. There was little enough of reality remaining in this life; perhaps they had made connections in another. In the census of the living, I wasn’t counted.
“My son Philip is a clever businessman.”
“Oh, I know.”
She stared, but did not ask how I knew. My nod seemed to tell her that I was a fellow with plenty of contacts, and that was enough for her.
“Philip is very rich,” she said.
“Is he?”
“A millionaire, and a wonderful son. He always used to give me money. I put it into Postal Savings. Have you got children?”
“No, I haven’t.”
“My daughters come to see me. But best of all is my son. He pays all my bills.”
“Do you have friends in this place?”
“Nobody. And I don’t like it. I hurt all the time, especially my hips and legs. I have so much misery that there are days when I think I should jump from the window.”
“But you won’t do that, will you?”
“Well, I think: What would Philip and the girls do with a mother a cripple?”
I let the spoon slip into the soup and uttered a high laugh. It was so abrupt and piercing that it roused her to examine me.
Our kitchen on Independence Boulevard had once been filled with such cockatoo cries, mostly feminine. In the old days the Shawmut women would sit in the kitchen while giant meals were cooked, tubs of stuffed cabbage, slabs of brisket. Pineapple cakes glazed with brown sugar came out of the oven. There were no low voices there. In that cage of birds you couldn’t make yourself heard if you didn’t shriek, too, and I had learned as a kid to shriek with the rest, like one of those operatic woman-birds. That was what Mother now heard from me, the sound of one of her daughters. But I had no bouffant hairdo, I was bald and wore a mustache, and there was no eyeliner on my lids. While she stared at me I dried her face with the napkin and continued to feed her.
“Don’t jump, Mother, you’ll hurt yourself.”
But everyone here called her Mother; there was nothing personal about it.
She asked me to switch on the TV set so that she could watch Dallas._
I said it wasn’t time yet, and I entertained her by singing snatches of the Sta-bat Mater._ I sang, “Eja mater, fonsamo-o-ris. “_ Pergolesi’s sacred chamber music (different from his formal masses for the Neapolitan church) was not to her taste. Of course I loved my mother, and she had once loved me. I well remember having my hair washed with a bulky bar of castile soap and how pained she was when I cried from the soap in my eyes. When she dressed me in a pongee suit (short pants of Chinese silk) to send me off to a surprise party, she kissed me ecstatically. These were events that might have occurred just before the time of the Boxer Rebellion or in the back streets of Siena six centuries ago. Bathing, combing, dressing, kissing—these now are remote antiquities. There was, as I grew older, no way to sustain them.
When I was in college (they sent me to study electrical engineering but I broke away into music) I used to enjoy saying, when students joked about their families, that because I was born just before the Sabbath, my mother was too busy in the kitchen to spare the time and my aunt had to give birth to me.
I kissed the old girl—she felt lighter to me than wickerwork. But I wondered what I had done to earn this oblivion, and why fat-assed Philip the evildoer should have been her favorite, the true son. Well, he didn’t lie to her about Dallas,_ or try for his own sake to resuscitate her emotions, to appeal to her maternal memory with Christian music (fourteenth-century Latin of J. da Todi). My mother, two-thirds of her erased, and my brother—who knew where his wife had buried him?—had both been true to the present American world and its liveliest material interests. Philip therefore spoke to her understanding. I did not. By waving my long arms, conducting Mozart’s Great Mass_ or Handel’s Solomon,_ I wafted myself away into the sublime. So for many years I had not made sense, had talked strangely to my mother. What had she to remember me by? Haifa century ago I had refused to enter into her_ kitchen performance. She had belonged to the universal regiment of Stanislavski mothers. During the twenties and thirties those women were going strong in thousands of kitchens across the civilized world from Salonika to San Diego. They had warned their daughters that the men they married would be rapists to whom they must submit in duty. And when I told her that I was going to marry Gerda, Mother opened her purse and gave me three dollars, saying, “If you need it so bad, go to a whorehouse.” Nothing but histrionics, of course.
“Realizing how we suffer,” as Ginsberg wrote in “Kaddish,” I was wickedly tormented. I had come to make a decision about Ma, and it was possible that J was fiddling with the deck, stacking the cards, telling myself, Miss Rose, “It was always me that took care of this freaked-in-the-brain, afflicted, calamitous, s hrill old mother, not Philip. Philip was too busy building himself up into an imperial American.” Yes, that was how I put it, Miss Rose, and I went even further. The consummation of Philip’s upbuilding was to torpedo me. He got me under the waterline, a direct hit, and my fortunes exploded, a sacrifice to Tracy and his children. And now I’m supposed to be towed away for salvage.
I’ll tell you the truth, Miss Rose, I was maddened by injustice. I think you’d have to agree not only that I’d been had but that I was singularly foolish, a burlesque figure. I could have modeled Simple Simon for the nursery-rhyme wallpaper of the little girl’s room in Texas.
As I was brutally offensive to you without provocation, these disclosures, the record of my present state, may gratify you. A
lmost any elderly person, chosen at random, can provide such gratification to those he has offended. One has only to see the list of true facts, the painful inventory. Let me add, however, that while I, too, have reason to feel vengeful, I haven’t experienced a Dionysian intoxication of vengefulness. In fact I have had feelings of increased calm and of enhanced strength—my emotional development has been steady, not fitful.
The Texas partnership, what was left of it, was being administered by my brother’s lawyer, who answered all my inquiries with computer printouts. There were capital gains, only on paper, but I was obliged to pay taxes on them, too. The $300,000 remaining would be used up in litigation, if I stayed put, and so I decided to follow Hansl’s plan even if it led to the _GЎtterdфmmerung__ of my remaining assets. All the better for your innocence and peace of mind if you don’t understand these explanations. Time to hit back, said Hansl. His crafty looks were a study. That a man who was able to look so crafty shouldn’t really_ be a genius of intrigue was the most unlikely thing in the world. His smiling wrinkles of deep cunning gave me confidence in Hansl. The bonds that the plaintiffs (creditors) had recorded were secretly traded for new ones. My tracks were covered, and I took off for Canada, a foreign country in which my own language, or something approaching it, is spoken. There I was to conclude my life in peace, and at an advantageous rate of exchange. I have developed a certain sympathy with Canada. It’s no easy thing to share a border with the U.S.A. Canada’s chief entertainment—it has no choice—is to watch (from a gorgeous setting) what happens in our country. The disaster is that there is no other show. Night after night they sit in darkness and watch us on the lighted screen.
“Now that you’ve made your arrangements, I can tell you,” said Hansl, “how proud I am that you’re hitting back. To go on taking punishment from those pricks would be a disgrace.”
Busy Hansl really was crackers, and even before I took off for Vancouver I began to see that. I told myself that his private quirks didn’t extend to his professional life. But before I fled, he came up with half a dozen unsettling ideas of what I had to do for him. He was a little bitter because, he said, 1 hadn’t let him make use of my cultural prestige. I was puzzled and asked for an example. He said that for one thing I had never offered to put him up for membership in the University Club .1 had had him to lunch there and it turned out that he was deeply impressed by the Ivy League class, the dignity of the bar, the leather seats, and the big windows of the dining room, decorated with the seals of the great universities in stained glass. He had graduated from De Paul, in Chicago. He had expected me to ask whether he’d like to join, but I had been too selfish or too snobbish to do that. Since he was now saving me, the least I could do was to use my influence with the membership committee. I saw his point and nominated him willingly, even with relish.
He next asked me to help him with one of his ladies. “They’re Kenwood people, an old mail-order-house fortune. The family is musical and artistic. Babette is an attractive widow. The first guy had the Big C, and to tell the truth I’m a little nervous of getting in behind him, but I can fight that. I don’t think I’ll catch it, too. Now, Babette is impressed by you, she’s heard you conduct and read some of your music criticism, watched you on Channel Eleven. Educated in Switzerland, knows languages, and this is a case where I can use your cultural clout. What I suggest is that you take us to Les Nomades—private dining without crockery noise. I gave her the best Italian food in town at the Roman Rooftop, but they not only bang the dishes there, they poisoned her with the sodium glutamate on the veal. So feed us at the Nomades. You can deduct the amount of the tab from my next bill. I always believed that the class you impressed people with you picked up from my sister. After all, you were a family of Russian peddlers and your brother was a lousy felon. My sister not only loved you, she taught you some style. Someday it’ll be recognized that if that goddamn Roosevelt hadn’t shut the doors on Jewish refugees from Germany this country wouldn’t be in such trouble today. We could have had ten Kissingers, and nobody will ever know how much scientific talent went up in smoke at the camps.”
Well, at Les Nomades I did it again, Miss Rose. On the eve of my flight I was understandably in a state. Considered as a receptacle, I was tilted to the pouring point. The young widow he had designs on was attractive in ways that you had to come to terms with. It was fascinating to me that anybody with a Hapsburg lip could speak so rapidly, and I would have said that she was a little uncomfortably tall. Gerda, on whom my taste was formed, was a short, delicious woman. However, there was no reason to make comparisons.
When there are musical questions I always try earnestly to answer them. People have told me that I am comically woodenheaded in this respect, a straight man. Babette had studied music, her people were patrons of the Lyric Opera, but after she had asked for my opinion on the production of Monteverdi’s Coro-_
nation ofPoppaea,_ she took over, answering all her own questions. Maybe her recent loss had made her nervously talkative. I am always glad to let somebody else carry the conversation, but this Babette, in spite of her big underlip, was too much for me. A relentless talker, she repeated for half an hour what she had heard from influential relatives about the politics surrounding cable-TV franchises in Chicago. She followed this up with a long conversation on films. I seldom go to the movies. My wife had no taste for them. Hansl, too, was lost in all this discussion about directors, actors, new developments in the treatment of the relations between the sexes, the progress of social and political ideas in the evolution of the medium. I had nothing at all to say. I thought about death, and also about the best topics for reflection appropriate to my age, the on the whole agreeable openness of things toward the end of the line, the outskirts of the City of Life. I didn’t too much mind Babette’s chatter, I admired her taste in clothing, the curved white and plum stripes of her enchanting blouse from Bergdorfs. She was well set up. Conceivably her shoulders were too heavy, proportional to the Hapsburg lip. It wouldn’t matter to Hansl; he was thinking about Brains wedded to Money.
I hoped I wouldn’t have a stroke in Canada. There would be no one to look after me, neither a discreet, gentle Gerda nor a gabby Babette.
I wasn’t aware of the approach of one of my seizures, but when we were at the half-open door of the checkroom and Hansl was telling the attendant that the lady’s coat was a three-quarter-length sable wrap, Babette said, “I realize now that I monopolized the conversation, I talked and talked all evening. I’m so sorry….”
“That’s all right,” I told her. “You didn’t say a thing.”
You, Miss Rose, are in the best position to judge the effects of such a remark.
Hansl next day said to me, “You just can’t be trusted, Harry, you’re a born betrayer. I was feeling sorry for you, having to sell your car and furniture and books, and about your brother who shafted you, and your old mother, and my poor sister passing, but you have no gratitude or consideration in you. You insult everybody”
“I didn’t realize that I was going to hurt the lady’s feelings.”
“I could have married the woman. I had it wrapped up. But I was an idiot. I had to bring you_ into it. And now, let me tell you, you’ve made one more enemy”
“Who, Babette?”
Hansl did not choose to answer. He preferred to lay a heavy, ambiguous silence on me. His eyes, narrowing and dilating with his discovery of my wicked habit, sent daft waves toward me. The message of those waves was that the foundations of his goodwill had been wiped out. In all the world, I had had only Hansl to turn to. Everybody else was estranged. And now I couldn’t count on him, either. It was not a happy development for me, Miss Rose. I can’t say that it didn’t bother me, although I could no longer believe in my brother-in-law’s dependability. By the standards of stability at the strong core of American business society, Hansl himself was a freak. Quite apart from his disjunctive habits of mind, he was disqualified by the violinist’s figure he cut, the noble hands and the manicured
filbert fingernails, his eyes, which were like the eyes you glimpse in the heated purple corners of the small-mammal house that reproduces the gloom of nocturnal tropics. Would any Aramco official have become his client? Hansl had no reasonable plans but only crafty fantasies, restless schemes. They puffed out like a lizard’s throat and then collapsed like bubble gum.
As for insults, I never intentionally insulted anyone. I sometimes think that I don’t have to say a word for people to be insulted by me, that my existence itself insults them. I come to this conclusion unwillingly, for God knows that I consider myself a man of normal social instincts and am not conscious of any will to offend. In various ways I have been trying to say this to you, using words like seizure, rapture, demonic possession, frenzy, Fatum,_ divine madness, or even solar storm—on a microcosmic scale. The better people are, the less they take offense at this gift, or curse, and I have a hunch that you will judge me less harshly than Walish. He, however, is right in one respect. You did nothing to offend me. You were the meekest, the only one of those I wounded whom I had no reason whatsoever to wound. That’s what grieves me most of all. But there is still more. The writing of this letter has been the occasion of important discoveries about myself, so I am even more greatly in your debt, for I see that you have returned me good for the evil I did you. I opened my mouth to make a coarse joke at your expense and thirty-five years later the result is a communion.
But to return to what I literally am: a basically unimportant old party, ailing, cut off from all friendships, scheduled for extradition, and with a future of which the dimmest view is justified (shall I have an extra bed put in my mothers room and plead illness and incompetency?).
Wandering about Vancouver this winter, I have considered whether to edit an anthology of sharp sayings. Make my fate pay off. But I am too demoralized to do it. I can’t pull myself together. Instead, fragments of things read or remembered come to me persistently while I go back and forth between my house and the supermarket. I shop to entertain myself, but Canadian supermarkets unsettle me. They aren’t organized the way ours are. They carry fewer brands. Items like lettuce and bananas are priced out of sight while luxuries like frozen salmon are comparatively cheap. But how would I cope with a big frozen salmon? couldn’t fit it into my oven, and how, with arthritic hands, could I saw it into chunks?
