by Saul Bellow
No, Fonstein contented himself with observation. You saw a curious light in his eyes when Billy passed, talking to Noguchi. I can’t recall a moment when No guchi replied. Not once did Fonstein discuss with me Billy’s presence in the hotel. Again I was impressed with the importance of keeping your mouth shut, the kind of fertility it can induce, the hidden advantages of a buttoned lip.
I did ask Sorella how Fonstein felt at finding Billy here after their trip north.
“A complete surprise.” Not to you, it wasn’t.”
“You figured that out, did you?”
“Well, it took no special shrewdness,” I said. “I now feel what Dr. Watson must have felt when Sherlock Holmes complimented him on a deduction Holmes had made as soon as the case was outlined to him. Does your husband know about Mrs. Hamet’s file?”
I told him, but I haven’t mentioned that I brought the notebook to Jerusalem. Harry is a sound sleeper, whereas I am an insomniac, so I’ve been up half the night reading the old woman’s record, which damns the guy in the suite upstairs. If I didn’t have insomnia, this would keep me awake.”
“All about his deals, his vices? Damaging stuff?”
Sorella first shrugged and then nodded. I believe that she herself was perplexed, couldn’t quite make up her mind about it.
“If he were thinking of running for president, he wouldn’t like this information made public.”
“Sure. But he isn’t running. He’s not a candidate. He’s Broadway Billy, not the principal of a girls’ school or pastor of the Riverside Church.”
“That’s the truth. Still, he is a public person.”
I didn’t pursue the subject. Certainly Billy was an oddity. On the physical side (and in her character too), Sorella also was genuinely odd. She was so much bigger than the bride I had first met in Lakewood that I couldn’t keep from speculating on her expansion. She made you look twice at a doorway. When she came to it, she filled the space like a freighter in a canal lock. In its own right, consciousness—and here I refer to my own conscious mind—was yet another oddity. But the strangeness of souls is certainly no news in this day and age.
Fonstein loved her, that was a clear fact. He respected his wife, and I did too. I wasn’t poking fun at either of them when I wondered at her size. I never lost sight of Fonstein’s history, or of what it meant to be the survivor of such a destruction. Maybe Sorella was trying to incorporate in fatty tissue some portion of what he had lost—members of his family. There’s no telling what she might have been up to. All I can say is that it (whatever it was at bottom) was accomplished with some class or style. Exquisite singers can make you forget what hillocks of suet their backsides are. Besides, Sorella did dead sober what delirious sopranos put over on us in a state of false Wagnerian intoxication.
Her approach to Billy, however, was anything but sober, and I doubt that any sober move would have had an effect on Billy. What she did was to send him several pages, three or four items copied from the journal ofthat poor consumptive the late Mrs. Hamet. Sorella made sure that the clerk put it in Billy’s box, for the material was explosive, and in the wrong hands it might have been deadly.
When this was a fait accompli, she told me about it. Too late now to advise her not to do it. “I invited him to have a drink,” she said to me.
“Not the three of you…?”
“No. Harry hasn’t forgotten the bouncer scene at Sardi’s—you may remember—when Billy turned his face to the back of the booth. He’d never again force himself on Billy or any celebrity.”
“Billy might still ignore you.”
“Well, it’s in the nature of an experiment, let’s say.”
I put aside for once the look of social acceptance so many of us have mastered perfectly and let her see what I thought of her “experiment.” She might talk “Science” to her adolescent son, the future physicist. I was not a child you could easily fake out with a prestigious buzzword. Experiment? She was an ingenious and powerful woman who devised intricate, glittering, bristling, needling schemes. What she had in mind was confrontation, a hand-to-hand struggle. The laboratory word was a put-on. “Boldness,”
“Statecraft,”
“Passion,”
“Justice” were the real terms. Still, she may not herself have been clearly aware of this. And then, I later thought, the antagonist was_ Broadway Billy Rose. And she didn’t expect him to meet her on the ground she had chosen, did she? What did he care for her big abstractions? He was completely free to say, “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, and I couldn’t care less, lady.”
Most interesting—at least to an American mind.
I went about my Mnemosyne business in Jerusalem at a seminar table, unfolding my methods to the Israelis. In the end, Mnemosyne didn’t take root in Tel Aviv. (It did thrive in Taiwan and Tokyo.)
On the terrace next day, Sorella, looking pleased and pleasant over her tea, said, “We’re going to meet. But he wants me to come to his suite at five o’clock.”
“Doesn’t want to be seen in public, discussing this…?”
“Exactly.”
So she did have real clout, after all. I was sorry now that I hadn’t taken the opportunity to read Mrs. Hamet’s record. (So much zeal, malice, fury, and tenderness I missed out on.) And I didn’t even feel free to ask why Sorella thought Billy had agreed to talk to her. I was sure he wouldn’t want to discuss moral theory upstairs. There weren’t going to be any revelations, confessions, speculations. People like Billy didn’t worry about their deeds, weren’t in the habit of accounting to themselves. Very few of us, for that matter, bother about accountability or keep spreadsheets of conscience.
What follows is based on Sorella’s report and supplemented by my observations. I don’t have to say, “If memory serves.” In my case it serves, all right. Besides, I made tiny notes, while she was speaking, on the back pages of my appointment book (the yearly gift to depositors in my Philadelphia bank).
Billy’s behavior throughout was austere-to-hostile. Mainly he was displeased. His conversation from the first was negative. The King David suite wasn’t up to his standards. You had to rough it here in Jerusalem, he said. But the state was young. They’d catch up by and by. These comments were made when he opened the door. He didn’t invite Sorella to sit, but at her weight, on her small feet, she wasn’t going to be kept standing, and she settled her body in a striped chair, justifying herself by the human sound she made when she seated herself—exhaling as the cushions exhaled.
This was her first opportunity to look Billy over, and she had a few unforeseeable impressions: so this was Billy from the world of the stars. He was very Well dressed, in the clothes he had made such a fuss about. At moments you had the feeling that his sleeves were stuffed with the paper tissue used by high-grade cleaners. I had mentioned that there was something birdlike about the cut of his coat, and she agreed with me, but where I saw a robin or a thrush, plump under the shirt, she said (through having installed a bird feeder in New Jersey) that he was more like a grosbeak; he even had some of the color. One eye was set a little closer to the nose than the other, giving a touch of Jewish pathos to his look. Actually, she said, he was a little like Mrs. Hamet, with the one sad eye in her consumptive, theatrical death-white face. And though his hair was groomed, it wasn’t absolutely in place. There was a grosbeak disorder about it.
“At first he thought I was here to put the arm on him,” she said. “Money?”
“Sure—probably money.”
I kept her going, with nods and half words, as she described this meeting. Of course: blackmail. A man as deep as Billy could call on years of savvy; he had endless experience in handling the people who came to get something out of him—anglers, con artists, crazies.
Billy said, “I glanced over the pages. How much of it is there, and how upset am I supposed to be about it?”
“Deborah Hamet gave me a stack of material before she died.”
“Dead, is she?”
/> “You know she is.”
“I don’t know anything,” said Billy, meaning that this was information from a sector he cared nothing about.
“Yes, but you do,” Sorella insisted. “That woman was mad for you.”
“That didn’t have to be my business, her emotional makeup. She was part of my office force and got her pay. Flowers were sent to White Plains when she got sick. If I had an idea how she was spying, I wouldn’t have been so considerate—the dirt that wild old bag was piling up against me.”
Sorella told me, and I entirely believed her, that she had come not to threaten but to discuss, to explore, to sound out. She refused to be drawn into a dispute. She could rely on her bulk to give an impression of the fullest calm. Billy had a quantitative cast of mind—businessmen do—and there was lots of woman here. He couldn’t deal even with the slenderest of girls. The least of them had the power to put the sexual whammy (Indian sign) on him. Sorella herself saw this. “If he could change my gender, then he could fight me.” This was a hint at the masculinity possibly implicit in her huge size. But she had tidy wrists, small feet, a feminine, lyrical voice. She was wearing perfume. She set her lady self before him, massively…. What a formidable, clever wife Fonstein had. The protection he lacked when he was in flight from Hitler he had found on our side of the Atlantic.
“Mr. Rose, you haven’t called me by name,” she said to him. “You read my letter, didn’t you? I’m Mrs. Fonstein. Does that ring a bell?”
“And why should it…?” he said, refusing recognition.
“I married Fonstein.”
“And my neck size is fourteen. So what?”
“The man you saved in Rome—one of them. He wrote so many letters. I can’t believe you don’t remember.”
“Remember, forget—what’s the difference to me?”
“You sent Deborah Hamet to Ellis Island to talk to him.”
“Lady, this is one of a trillion incidents in a life like mine. Why should I recollect it?”
Why, yes, I see his point. These details were like the scales of innumerable shoals of fish—the mackerel-crowded seas: like the particles of those light-annihilating masses, the dense matter of black holes.
“I sent Deborah to Ellis Island—so, okay….”
“With instructions for my husband never to approach you.”
“It’s a blank to me. But so what?”
“No personal concern for a man you rescued?”
“I did all I could,” said Billy. “And for that point of time, that’s more than most can say. Go holler at Stephen Wise. Raise hell with Sam Rosenman. Guys were sitting on their hands. They would call on Roosevelt and Cordell Hull, who didn’t care a damn for Jews, and they were so proud and happy to be close enough to the White House, even getting the runaround was such a delicious privilege. FDR snowed those famous rabbis when they visited him. He blinded them with his footwork, that genius cripple. Churchill also was in on this with him. The goddamn white paper. So? There were refugees by the hundred thousands to ship to Palestine. Or there wouldn’t have been a state here today. That’s why I gave up the single-party rescue operation and started to raise money to get through the British blockade in those rusty Greek tramp ships…. Now what do you want from me—that I didn’t receive your husband! What’s the matter? I see you did all right. Now you have to have special recognition?”
The level, as Sorella was to say to me, being dragged down, down, downward, the greatness of the events being beyond anybody’s personal scope…. At times she would make such remarks.
‘Now,” Billy asked her, “what do you want with this lousy scandal stuff collected by that cracked old bitch? To embarrass me in Jerusalem, when I came to start this major project?”
Sorella said that she raised both her hands to slow him down. She told him she had come to have a sensible discussion. Nothing threatening had been hinted….
No! Except that Hamet woman was collecting poison in bottles, and you have the whole collection. Try and place this material in the papers—you’d have to be crazy in the head. If you did try, the stuff would come flying back on you faster than shit through a tin whistle. Look at these charges—that I bribed Robert Moses’s people to put across my patriotic Aquacade at the Fair. Or I hired an arsonist to torch a storefront for revenge. Or I sabotaged Baby Snooks because I was jealous of Fanny’s big success, and I even tried to poison her. Listen, we still have libel laws. That Hamet was one sick lady. And you—you should stop and think. If not for me, where would you be, a woman like you…?” The meaning was, a woman deformed by obesity.
“Did he say that?”_ I interrupted. But what excited me was not what he_ said. Sorella stopped me in my tracks. I never knew a woman to be so candid about herself. What a demonstration this was of pure objectivity and self-realism. What it signified was that in a time when disguise and deception are practiced so extensively as to numb the powers of awareness, only a major force of personality could produce such admissions. “I am_ built like a Mack truck. My flesh is_ boundless. An Everest of lipoids,” she told me. Together with this came, unspoken, an auxiliary admission: she confessed that she was guilty of self-indulgence. This deformity, my outrageous size, an imposition on Fonstein, the brave man who loves me. Who else would want me? All this was fully implicit in the plain, unforced style of her comment. Greatness is the word for such candor, for such an admission, made so naturally. In this world of liars and cowards, there are_ people like Sorella. One waits for them in the blind faith that they do_ exist.
“He was reminding me that he had saved Harry. For me.”
Translation: The SS would have liquidated him pretty quick. So except for the magic intervention of this little Lower East Side rat, the starved child who had survived on pastrami trimmings and pushcart apples…
Sorella went on. “I explained to Billy: it took Deborah’s journal to put me through to him. He had turned his back on us. His answer was, ‘I don’t need entanglements—what I did, I did. I have to keep down the number of relationships and contacts. What I did for you, take it and welcome, but spare me the relationship and all the rest of it.’ “
“I can understand that,” I said.
I can’t tell you how much I relished Sorella’s account of this meeting with Billy. These extraordinary revelations, and also the comments on them that were made. In what he said there was an echo of George Washington’s Farewell Address. Avoid entanglements. Billy had to reserve himself for his deals, devote himself body and soul to his superpublicized bad marriages; together with the squalid, rich residences he furnished; plus his gossip columns, his chorus lines, and the awful pursuit of provocative, teasing chicks whom he couldn’t do a thing with when they stopped and stripped and waited for him. He had to be free to work his curse out fully. And now he had arrived in Jerusalem to put a top dressing of Jewish grandeur on his chicken-scratch career, on this poor punished N. Y. soil of his. (I am thinking of the tiny prison enclosures—a few black palings—narrow slices of ground preserved at the heart of Manhattan for leaves and grass.) Here Noguchi would create for him a Rose Garden of Sculpture, an art corner within a few kilometers of the stunned desert sloping toward the Dead Sea.
“Tell me, Sorella, what were you after? The objective.”
“Billy to meet with Fonstein.”
“But Fonstein gave up on him long ago. They must pass each other at the King David every other day. What would be simpler than to stop and say, ‘You’re Rose? I’m Harry Fonstein. You led me out of Egypt b’yad hazzakah.”_
“What is that?”
“With a mighty hand. So the Lord God described the rescue of Israel—part of my boyhood basic training. But Fonstein has backed away from this. While you…”
“I made up my mind that Billy was going to do right by him.”
Yes, sure, of course; roger; I read you. Something is due from every man to every man. But Billy hadn’t heard and didn’t want to hear about these generalities.
“If you lived
with Fonstein’s feelings as I have lived with them,” said Sorella, “you’d agree he should get a chance to complete them. To finish out.”
In a spirit of high-level discussion, I said to her, “Well, it’s a nice idea, only nobody expects to complete their feelings anymore. They have to give up on closure. It’s just not available.”
“For some it is.”
So I was obliged to think again. Sure—what about the history of Sorella’s own feelings? She had been an unwanted Newark French teacher until her Havana uncle had a lucky hunch about Fonstein. They were married, and thanks to him, she obtained her closure, she became the tiger wife, the tiger mother, grew into a biological monument and a victorious personality… a figure!
But Billy’s reply was: “So what’s it got to do with me?”
‘Spend fifteen minutes alone with my husband,” she said to him.
Billy refused her. “It’s not the kind ofthing I do.”
A handshake, and he’ll say thanks.”
First of all, I warned you already about libel, and as for the rest, what do you think you’re holding over me anyway? I wouldn’t do this. You haven’t convinced me that I must. I don’t like things from the past being laid on me. This happened one time, years ago. What’s it got to do with now—1959? If your husband has a nice story, that’s his good luck. Let him tell it to people who go for stories. I don’t care for them. I don’t care for my own story. If I had to listen to it, I d break out in a cold sweat. And I wouldn’t go around and shake everybody’s hand unless I was running for mayor. That’s why I never would run. I shake when I close a deal. Otherwise, my hands stay in my pockets.”
Sorella said, “Since Deborah Hamet had given me the goods on him and the worst could be assumed, he stood up to me on the worst basis, with all the bruises on his reputation, under every curse—grungy, weak, cheap, perverted. He made me take him for what he was—a kinky little kike finagler whose life history was one disgrace after another. Take this man: He never flew a single mission, never hunted big game, never played football or went down in the Pacific. Never even tried suicide. And this reject was a celeb!… You know, Deborah had a hundred ways to say celeb. Mostly she cut him down, but a celeb is still a celeb—you can’t take that away. When American Jews decided to make a statement about the War Against the Jews, they had to fill Madison Square Garden with big-name celebs singing Hebrew and America the Beautiful.’ Hollywood stars blowing the shofar. The man to produce this spectacular and arrange the press coverage was Billy. They turned to him, and he took total charge…. How many people does the Garden hold? Well, it was full, and everybody was in mourning. I suppose the whole place was in tears. The Times_ covered it, which is the paper of record, so the record shows that the American Jewish way was to assemble twenty-five thousand people, Hollywood style, and weep publicly for what had happened.”
