by Saul Bellow
The first I heard about this Cumberland was from Alain du Niveau, who was in New York during the war, in the movie industry. Mintouchian knew him, and Agnes. He was originally a friend of Agnes. When we met he told me he was a descendant of the Due de Saint-Simon. I’m always a sucker for lineage, but this du Niveau didn’t really look very good. He had blue whiskyish eyes in his tight-packed heavy face with its color of bad good-health. Although he probably meant no harm by it he had a very insolent expression. Thin and sandy, his hair was combed like a British officer’s, neat and bleak. His shoes were fleece-lined; his long overcoat was all beautiful suede, down to the ankles; his body was thick. He was a chaser and wolf after girls on the subway. He’d tell you himself how he picked up women, and as he described it these poor weak birdies when he got them alone were like confronted by a fiery god, etcetera.
When he mentioned Cumberland to me we were in the lobby of the Paramount Theatre waiting for Stella. Oliver’s name came up, and du Niveau said, “He’s still in jail.”
“Did you know the guy?” I said.
“Yes. And what a comedown for her after Cumberland. I knew him too.”
“Who?”
He didn’t realize what he had said. He hardly ever did. I felt as if I had been trapped in a shaft by a sudden fall of dirt. Terrible despair, rage, jealousy, burst out in me.
“Who? What Cumberland?”
Then he looked at me and realized that for some reason my eyes were burning and I was in pain. I think he was very surprised and tried to remove himself with dignity from this trouble.
Actually I had been aware for some time of something peculiar that would sooner or later have to be explained. People were dunning Stella constantly. There was trouble about a car. She didn’t own a car. And there was litigation about an apartment uptown. What sort of apartment had she had uptown? And as it would have been inhuman not to mention it, I guess, she had told me about a seventy-five-hundred-dollar mink coat she had had to sell, and a diamond necklace. Business envelopes came in the mail which she wouldn’t open. There’s something about those business envelopes with the transparent oblong address part that my soul runs away from.
And then, was I supposed to overlook what Mintouchian had said to me in the Turkish bath? How could I?
“Who is this Cumberland?” I said.
Just then Stella came down from the ladies’ lounge and I took her arm and hurried her out to a cab. We tore back to the apartment and I blew my top. “I should have known there was something dishonest!” I yelled at her. “Who is this Cumberland?”
“Augie! Don’t carry on,” she said, pale. “I should have told you. But what difference does it make? It proves that I love you and didn’t want to lose you by telling you.”
“He was the one that gave you the coat?”
“Yes, darling. But I married you, not him.”
“And the car?”
“It was a present, honey. But, sweetheart, it’s you I love.”
“And all the things in the house?”
“The furniture? Why, it’s just stuff. It’s only you that matters.”
Gradually she calmed me.
“When was the last time you saw him?”
“I haven’t had a thing to do with him for two years.”
“I can’t stand these fellows being brought up,” I said. “I can’t take it. There shouldn’t be these secret things jumping out.”
“But after all,” she cried, “it was rougher on me. I was the one that actually suffered from him. All you suffer from is hearing about it.”
Now that the subject was open it became very hard to put an end to. She wanted to talk about it. To prove that I had no reason to be jealous she had to tell me every last thing that had happened, and I couldn’t stop her—a gallant, active flashing temperament like that, you see, you can’t control her easily.
“What a dog!” she said. “What a coward! He didn’t have a single human feeling. He mainly wanted me to help him entertain his business friends and show off because he was ashamed of his wife.”
It didn’t absolutely square with her attitude toward the things she had enjoyed, like the summer house in New Jersey, the charge accounts, and the Mercedes-Benz automobile, which was an extremely hardheaded attitude. She was very well informed about the tax situation and the insurance and so on. Of course it’s nothing against a woman that she should understand these things. Why shouldn’t she understand them? But I was afraid I’d have to give up on an ideal explanation of her past life. Oh well, there didn’t have to be one necessarily.
“He wouldn’t let me be independent. If he found out I had a savings account he made me spend the money. He thought I should be helpless. Once the president of a lumber company whom I knew was going to open a big gambling joint on Long Island and offered me fifteen thousand a year to be hostess. Cumberland was furious about it when he heard.”
“He found out everything?”
“He hired detectives. You have a lot to learn about such people. He’d rent the moon if he had any use for it.”
“I already have learned all I want to learn.”
“Oh, Augie! Please, honey, remember that you made mistakes too. You went to smuggle immigrants from Canada. You stole. A lot of people led you astray also.”
Okay, but why couldn’t she be satisfied that I loved her and stop this talk? What did she mean, about the lumberman? Had she really intended to become a hostess? I would meditate over all this and sit there feeling terrible. The very arms of the chair seemed about to stab me through the sides, and the playful flowery Bavarian bed and the knickknacks and stuffed orioles, and all were a drag on me. Was I going to be wrong again? It was the thought I had in the boat when I was adrift with Basteshaw that I had been wrong again and again.
Nevertheless I believed we would make it, finally. I don’t want to give a false impression of one hundred per cent desperation. It is not like that. I don’t know who this saint was who woke up, lifted his face, opened his mouth, and reported on his secret dream that blessedness covers the whole Creation but covers it thicker in some places than in others. Whoever he was, it’s my great weakness to respond to such dreams. This is the amor fati, that’s what it is, or mysterious adoration of what occurs.
There is a certain amount of simple-mindedness in Stella as well as deception, a sort of naive seriousness. She cries very sincerely and with utmost warmth. But it’s not a simple matter to get her to change her mind on any matter. I’ve tried, for instance, to get her to wear her nails shorter; she grows them very long, and when they tear they tear into the quick and she starts to cry. Then I say, “Good heavens, why do you let them grow like that!” and take the scissors and trim them, which she submits to. However, she only lets them grow long again. Or, in the case of the cat, Ginger, who’s very spoiled and wakes you up at night by turning over lamps and dishes so that you’ll feed him, I only made myself look foolish arguing that he ought to be shut in the kitchen at night. I couldn’t get anywhere.
She’d repeat continually how she had wanted to be independent.
“Naturally. Who doesn’t want that?”
“No, I mean I wanted to do something that was my own idea. It wasn’t just a matter of money.” He oppressed her, that was what, practically with wrung hands, she had to put across to me. “Every time he promised to let me do something he’d go back on his word. So finally I made a break and went to California. I knew someone there who once offered me a screen test. I took a wonderful test and got a part in a musical. But when the picture was released all my lines were cut out. I looked like such a fool, just smiling and getting ready to say something, and I never said it. After the preview I was sick. He used his influence to make the producer do it. I sent him a wire and told him I was through for good. Next day I had an attack of appendicitis and went to the hospital, and in about twenty-four hours he showed up by my bedside. I said to him, ‘What excuse did you give your wife for this trip!’ I was done with him forever.”
Of course I knew this was Stella’s hard work. She wasn’t done suffering from it, not by a long shot. She had to harrow his memory over and over, and in so doing she dug me up considerably too.
“All right, Stella, now, please,” I said at last.
“All right what?” she said, angry. “Am I supposed not to talk about it at all, ever?”
“But you talk about it all the time, and you talk about him more than anyone else.”
“Because I hate him. I’m still in debt because of all these obligations that were his fault.”
“We’ll get rid of them.”
“How?”
“I don’t know yet. I’ll take it up with Mintouchian.”
She didn’t want me to do that. She was seriously opposed, but I went to see him all the same.
He already knew all about Cumberland, which isn’t in the least surprising. We talked it over in his office on Fifth Avenue. “Since you bring it up,” he said, “excuse me, but she’s been a nuisance to him. He was unfair to her, but he’s an older fellow now and the whole thing is over. It’s difficult for his family. His son is now head of the firm and he says she won’t get anywhere by threatening them. She wouldn’t have much coming legally.”
“Threatening? What threat? You mean to say she’s bothering him? Why, she told me she hasn’t had anything to do with him for two years!”
“Well, she hasn’t told you the truth—strictly speaking.”
I was overthrown by this; I was very ashamed. How are you supposed to proceed? If you don’t defend yourself you can get murdered, and if you do defend yourself you’re liable to die of that too.
“I’m afraid she’s impatient to go to law,” said Mintouchian. “She’s very restless.”
I said to Stella, “You’ve got to quit this. There isn’t going to be any lawsuit. You always know where this man is and what he’s doing. You haven’t told me the truth. It has to stop immediately. I have to ship again in a week and I don’t want to be mulling it over for months and months. If you won’t promise to stop I can’t come back.”
She gave in. She cried with bitterness that I threatened her, but she promised. She has a warm, easily coloring face, Stella. When she starts to cry the pink of it begins to darken and darkens up into her eyes, which seemed so amorous the first time I saw them in Acatla. Her features rise very slightly from the surface of her face, as if she had a Javanese or Sumatran inheritance. I sat both hurt and comforted as she wept. Crying is further stubbornness with some women, but with Stella it’s the truthful moment. She knew she shouldn’t talk so much about the old man, she confessed, and try to make him take all the blame.
So I sailed in a better frame of mind, and this was when she bought me a book on bee culture. I studied it with devotion and learned a lot about bees and honey, which I knew, however, wouldn’t likely be of any practical use.
Of course the whole movie enterprise is to show Cumberland that she could make the grade independently. She doesn’t have any terrific talent for acting, but that’s how it appears to go. People don’t do what they have a talent for but what the preoccupation leads to. If they’re good at auto-repairing they have to sing Don Giovanni; if they can sing they have to be architects; and if they have a gift for architecture they wish to become school superintendents or abstract painters or anything else. Anything! It’s a spite. It’s having to prove full and ultimate self-sufficiency or some such monster dream that you don’t need anyone else to do these things for you.
Well, Stella is in du Niveau’s film company, and I am in illicit dealing—to discriminate against myself, more than half the business of Europe being the same. It is indeed cockeyed. But there is nothing I can do about it. It must be clear, however, that I am a person of hope, and now my hopes have settled themselves upon children and a settled life. I haven’t been able to convince Stella as yet. Therefore while I knock around on rapides over falling horizons, over Alps, in steam and haste, or blast the air in my black Citroën, smoking cigars and watching the road through polaroid glasses, it’s unborn children I pore over far oftener than business deals.
I wonder if it’s a phase, or what, but sometimes I feel I already am a father.
Recently in Rome a whore tried to pick me up on the Via Veneto. The circumstances were peculiar; I am a tall man and the girl who propositioned me was very small, plump, and dressed in second- or third-year mourning. A sad face. “Come with me,” she said. Now let me not be a liar and say I was not in the least drawn. You always are, somewhat. However, it cost no great effort to refuse, and when I said no, she looked deeply wounded, personally, and said, “What’s the matter, am I not good enough for you?” I said, “Oh, of course, signorina, but I’m married. I have children. Io ho bambini.” So she was overwhelmed entirely and said, “I’m very sorry, I didn’t know you had children,” and she was about to cry over this error. To have been perfectly fair I should have explained this to her, that it was hokum and that I just had an impulse. But let me say that I am aware where this deception of bambini came from. It came from that picture of Stella’s that I mentioned to Frazer, Les Orphelines. I had to see it several times, in the course of events, and one part of it made a deep impression on me once in the cutting room, this boarded, insulated, burlap-deadened room where it stunk of Gauloise cigarettes and high-grade perfume. The scene was one in which Stella pleaded with an Italian doctor for a woman and her baby. They had coached her on the Italian lines and so she cried out, “Ma Maria, ed il bambino. II bambino!” And the doctor, who couldn’t offer help, shrugged and said, “Che posso fare! Che posso fare!”
I saw this run over and over and was full of sorrow, almost provoked to an outburst of tears and ripe to exclaim to Stella, “Here, here, if you want something to cry out about! Right here! What do you need theoretical people for and these ghosts of emotions never of this world anyway?” The grief was about to drop down from my eyes.
It’s supposed to be easier to suffer for hypothetical people too, for Hecubas. It ought to be easier than for the ones you yourself hurt, for you can see their enemies or persecutors better than you can see yourself balking someone of life or doing him wrong.
Be that as it may, this was why I imagined I already had the bambini.
Simon and Charlotte came to Paris and put up at the Crillon. I wished that they had brought Mama too, although it would have been probably lost on her. Something big would have to be done for her one of these days, I thought; I’d have to decide what was appropriate, and I could now swing it by myself, having the money. It satisfied Simon that I was now in business. Charlotte thought better of me also, though she wanted to know more particulars. Some chance she had of getting them out of me! I took them around to the Tour d’Argent and the Lapin Agile and Casino de Paris, The Rose Rouge and other gaiety haunts, and picked up the tab. This made Simon say proudly to Charlotte, “Well, what do you think now? My kid brother has turned out to be a regular man of the world.”
Stella and I smiled across the Rose Rouge table.
Charlotte, this solid and suspecting woman in her early thirties, handsome, immovable in her opinions, was full of grudges. Whatever she had against Simon she formerly would take out on me. Now that I looked a little more substantial than I used to and seemed to have a few right ideas anyhow, she could complain about him to me. I was eager to know the score. The first week or so there was not much I could find out, because we were on the town. Du Niveau helped a lot; he made a big hit with them because of being a genuine aristocrat and the deference of flunkies to him in restaurants and night clubs and haute-couture joints. Stella helped too. “What a dish!” said Simon. “She’s good for you also; she’ll keep you on your toes.” He meant that to provide for a beautiful woman is stabilizing; it makes a man earn money. “The only thing,” said Simon, “is why you keep her in such a pigpen.”
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