The Collected Stories Of Saul Bellow Part 19

He speaks in his deeper tones, a beautiful depth, three notes bowed out on the double ba.s.s, or the strange baryton-an ancient stringed instrument, part guitar, part ba.s.s viol; Haydn, who loved the baryton, wrote moving trios for it.

Eunice said, "My special a.s.signment is to get him out of there alive."

To resume his existence deeper within the sphere of illicit money, operating out of hotels of the Las Vegas type, looking well (in sickness) amid glittering fixtures designed to make everybody the picture of perfect health.

Eunice was crowded with ma.s.ses of feeling for which there was no language. She transferred her articulate powers to accessible themes. What made communication difficult was that she was very proud of the special vocabulary she had mastered. She was vain of her degree in educational psychology. "I am a professional person," she said. She got this in as often as possible. She was the fulfillment of her mother's obscure, powerful drive, her ambition for her child. Eunice was not pretty, but to Shana she was infinitely dear. She had been as daintily dressed as other small girls, in print party dresses with underpants (visible) of the same print material, in the fashion of the twenties. Among other kids her age she was, however, a giantess. Besides, the strain of stammering would congest her face. But then she learned to speak bold declarative sentences and these absorbed and contained the terrible energy of her stammer. With formidable discipline, she had harnessed the forces of her curse.

She said, "You've always been willing to advise me. I always felt I could turn to you. I'm grateful, Ijah, that you have so much compa.s.sion. It's no secret that my husband is not a supportive individual. He says no to everything I suggest. All money has to be totally separate. 'I keep mine, you hang on to yours,' he tells me. He wouldn't educate the girls beyond high school-as much education as he got. I had to sell Mother's building-I took the mortgage myself. It's a shame that the rates were so low then. They're sky high now. Financially, I took a bath on that deal."

"Didn't Raphael advise you?"

"He said I was crazy to spend my whole inheritance on the girls. What would I do in old age? Earl made the same argument. n.o.body should be dependent. He says we must all stand on our own two feet."

"You're unusually devoted to your daughters...."

I knew only the younger one-Carlotta-who had the dark bangs and the arctic figure of an Eskimo. With me this is not a pejorative. I am fascinated by polar regions and their peoples. Carlotta had long, sharp, painted nails, her look was febrile, her conversation pa.s.sionate and inconsequent. At a family dinner I attended, she played the piano so crashingly that conversation was out of the question, and when Cousin Pearl asked her to play more softly she burst into tears and locked herself in the toilet. Eunice told me that Carlotta was going to resign from the Peace Corps and join an armed settlement on the West Bank.

Annalou, the older daughter, had steadier ambitions. Her grades hadn't been good enough for the better medical schools. Cousin Eunice now gave me an astonishing account of her professional education. "I had to pay extra," she said. "Yes, I had to commit myself to make a big donation to the school."

"Did you say the Talbot Medical School?"

"That's what I said. Even to get to talk to the director, a payoff was necessary. You need a clearance from a trustworthy person. I had to promise Scharfer-"

"Which Scharfer?"

"Our cousin Scharfer the fundraiser. You have to have a go-between. Scharfer said he would arrange the interview if I would make a gift first to his_ organization."

"Under the table, at a medical school?" I said.

"Otherwise I couldn't get into the director's office. Well, I made a contribution to Scharfer of twelve-five. His price. And then I had to pledge myself to Talbot for fifty thousand dollars."

"Over and above tuition?"

"Over and above. You can guess what a medical degree is worth, the income it guarantees. A small school like Talbot, no endowment, has no funding. You can't hire decent faculty unless you're compet.i.tive in salaries, and you can't get accreditation without an adequate faculty."

"So you had to pay?"

"I made a down payment of half, with the balance promised before graduation. No degree until you deliver. It's one of those concealed interfaces the general public never gets to see."

"Were you able to manage all this?"

"Even though Annalou was president of her cla.s.s, word came that they were expecting the final installment. It made me pretty desperate. Bear in mind that I held a five percent mortgage, and the rate is now about fourteen. Earl wouldn't even talk to me about it. I took the problem to my psychiatrist. His advice was to write to the school director. We formulated a statement-a promise to make good on the twenty-five. I said that I was a person of 'the highest integrity' When I went to my lawyer to check out the language, he advised against 'highest.' Just 'integrity' was enough. So I wrote, 'On my word as a person of known integrity.' Then Annalou was allowed to graduate, on the strength of this."

"And...?"_ said.

My question puzzled her. "A twenty-cent stamp saved me a fortune."

"You're not going to pay?"

"I wrote the letter_..." she said.

A difference of emphasis separated us. She sat straighter, rejecting the back of the chair, stiffening herself upward from the base of the spine. Little Eunice had become severely bony, just an old broad, except for the attraction of n.o.bility, the high, prominent profile, the face charged with her mother's color, part blood, part irrationality. Put together, if you can, the contemporary "smarts" she took pride in with these glimpses of patrician antiquity.

But if one of us was an anachronism, it was myself. Again, Cousin Ijah, holding out. With what motive? For unspecified reasons, I didn't congratulate Eunice on her exploit. She longed for me to tell her what a clever thing she had done, how dandy it was, and I seemed determined to disappoint her. What could my puzzling balkiness mean?

' Those words, 'high integrity,' saved you twenty-five thou...?"

"Just 'integrity.' I told you, Ijah, I cut out the 'high.' "

Well, why shouldn't Eunice, too, make advantageous use of a fine word? All the words were up for grabs. Her grasp of politics was better than mine. I didn't like to see the word "integrity" f.u.c.ked up. I suppose the best reason I could advance was the defense of poetry. That was a stupid reason, given that she was defending her one-breasted body. A metastasis would bankrupt her.

The subject was changed. We talked a little about her husband. He had been busy in Grant Park, on the lakefront. Because of the alarming jump in the crime rate, the park board had decided to cut down concealing shrubbery and demolish the old-style comfort stations. Rapists used the bushes for cover, and women had been stabbed to death in the toilets, so now there were cans of the sentry-box type, admitting only one person at a time. Karger was administering the new installations. So Eunice said with pride, although the account she gave of her husband, when all references were a.s.sembled, did not make a favorable impression. Weirdly close-mouthed, he dismissed all attempts at conversation. Conversation not worthwhile. Maybe he was right, I saw his point. On the plus side, he didn't give a d.a.m.n what people thought of him. He was a stand-up eccentric. His independence appealed to me. He had no act going, anyway. "I have to pay half the rent," said Eunice. "And also the utilities." I didn't buy her hard-luck story. "Why do you stay together?" She explained, "I'm covered by his Blue Cross-Blue Shield...." Most people would have been convinced by this explanation. My response was neutral; I was taking it all under consideration.

When lunch ended, she asked to see what my office was like. "My cousin the genius," she said, very pleased by the size of the room. I must be important to rate so much s.p.a.ce on the fifty-first floor of a great building. "I won't ask what you do with all these gadgets, doc.u.ments, and books. For instance, these huge green books. I'm sure it bores you to have to explain."

The huge faded green books, dating from the beginning of the century, had nothing at all to do with my salaried functions. When I read them I was playing hooky. They were two volumes in the series of reports of the Jesup Expedition, published by the American Museum of Natural History. Siberian ethnography. Fascinating. I was beguiled of my griefs (considerable griefs) by these monographs. Two tribes, the Koryak and the Chukchee, as described by Jochelson and Bogoras, absorbed me totally. Just as old Metzger had been drawn magnetically from the Boston Store (charmed from his clerk's duties) by b.u.mp-and-grinders, so I neglected office work for these books. Political radicals Waldemar Jochelson and Waldemar Bogoras (curious Christian names for a pair of Russian Jews) were exiled to Siberia in the 1890s and, in the region where the Soviets later established the worst of their labor camps, Magadan and Kolyma, the two Waldemars devoted years to the study of the native tribes.

About this arctic desert, purified by frosts as severe as fire, I read for my relief as if I were reading the Bible. In winter darkness, even within a Siberian settlement you might be lost if the wind blew you down, for the speed of the snow was such as to bury you before you could recover your feet. If you tied up your dogs you would find them sometimes smothered when you dug them out in the morning. In this dark land you entered the house by a ladder inside the chimney. As the snows rose, the dogs climbed up to smell what was cooking. They fought for places at the chimney tops and sometimes fell into the cauldron. There were photographs of dogs crucified, a common form of sacrifice. The powers of darkness surrounded you. A Chukchee informant told Bogoras that there were invisible enemies who beset human beings from all sides, demanding spirits whose mouths were always gaping. The people cringed and gave ransom, buying protection from these raving ghosts.

The geography of mental travel can't be the same from century to century; the realms of gold move away. They float into the past. Anyway, a wonderful silence formed around me in my office as I read about these tribes and their spirits and shamans-it doubled, quadrupled. It became a tenfold silence, right in the middle of the Loop. My windows look toward Grant Park. Now and then I rested my eyes on the lakefront, where Cousin Karger had sheared away the flowering shrubs to deprive s.e.x maniacs of their cover, and set up narrow single-occupancy toilets. The monumental park, and the yacht basin, with sleek boats owned by lawyers and corporate executives. s.e.xual brutalities weekdays, at anchor; on Sundays the same frenzied erotomaniacs sail peacefully with the wife and kids. And whether we are preparing a new birth of spirit or the agonies of final dissolution (and this is the suspense_ referred to some pages back) depends on what you think, feel, and will about such manifestations or apparitions, on the kabbalistic skill you develop in the interpretation of these contemporary formations. My intuition is that the Koryak and the Chukchee lead me in the right direction.

So I go into trances over Bogoras and Jochelson at the office. n.o.body bothers me much. At conference time I wake up. I become seerlike and the a.s.sociates like to listen to my a.n.a.lyses. I was right about Brazil, right about Iran. I foresaw the revolution of the mullahs, which the president's advisers did not. But my views had to be rejected. Returns so huge for the lending inst.i.tutions, and protected by government guarantees-I couldn't expect my recommendations to be accepted. My reward is to be praised as "deep" and "brilliant." Where the kids in Logan Square used to see the eyes of an orangutan, my colleagues see the gaze of a clairvoyant. n.o.body comes right out with it, but everybody reads my reports and the main thing is that I am left alone to pursue my spiritual investigation. I pore over an old photograph of Yukaghir women on the bank of the Nalemna River. The far sh.o.r.e barren-snow, rocks, spindling trees. The women are squatting, stringing a catch of big whitefish piled in the foreground, working with needle and thread at thirty degrees below zero, Fahrenheit. Their labor makes them sweat so that they take off their fur bodices and are half naked. They even thrust large cakes of snow into their bosoms." Primitive women overheating at thirty below and cooling their b.r.e.a.s.t.s with snow lumps. As I read I ask myself who in this building, this up-up-upward skysc.r.a.per containing thousands, has the strangest imaginations. Who knows what secret ideas others are having, the dreams of these bankers, lawyers, career women-their fancies and mantic visions? They themselves couldn't bring them out, frightened by their crazy intensity. Human beings, by definition, half the time mad.

So who will mind if I eat up these books? Actually, I am rereading them. My first acquaintance with them goes back many years. I was piano player in a bar near the capitol in Madison, Wisconsin. I even sang some specialty numbers, one of which was "The Princess Papooli Has Plenty Papaya." I was rooming with my cousin Ezekiel on the wrong side of the tracks. Zeke, called Seckel in the family, was then lecturing in primitive languages at the state university, but his main enterprise took him to the north woods every week. He drove off each Wednesday in his dusty Plymouth to record Mohican folktales. He had found some Mohican survivors and, in the upper peninsula, he did just as Jochelson had done, with the a.s.sistance of his wife, Dr. Dina Brodsky, in eastern Siberia. Seckel a.s.sured me that this Dr. Brodsky was a cousin. At the turn of the century, the two Jochelsons had come to New York City to work at the American Museum of Natural History with Franz Boas. Seckel insisted that at that time Dr. Brodsky had looked up the family.

Why were the Jews such avid anthropologists? Among the founders of the science were Durkheim and Lvy-Bruhl, Marcel Mauss, Boas, Sapir, Lowie. They may have believed that they were demystifiers, that science was their motive and that their ultimate aim was to increase universalism. I don't see it that way myself. A truer explanation is the nearness of ghettos to the sphere of Revelation, an easy move for the mind from rotting streets and rancid dishes, a direct ascent into transcendence. This of course was the situation of Eastern Jews. The Western ones were prancing and preening like learned Germans. And were Polish and Russian Jews (in disgrace with civilized judgment, afflicted with tuberculosis and diseased eyes) so far from the imagination of savage practices? They didn't have to make a Symbolist decision to derange their senses; they were born that way. Exotics going out to do science upon exotics. And then it all came out in Rabbinic-Germanic or Cartesian-Talmudic forms.

Cousin Seckel, by the way, had no theorizing bent. His talent was for picking up strange languages. He went down to the Louisiana bayou country to learn an Indian dialect from its last speaker, who was moribund. In a matter of months he spoke the language perfectly. So on his deathbed, the old Indian at last had somebody to talk to, and when he was gone there was only Seckel in possession of the words. The tribe lived on in him alone. I learned one of the Indian love songs from him: "Haiy'hee, y'heey'ho_-Kiss me before you go." He urged me to play it in the c.o.c.ktail lounge. He pa.s.sed on to me also a recipe for Creole jam-balaya (ham, rice, crawfish, peppers, chicken, and tomatoes), which as a single man I have no occasion to cook. He had great skill also as a maker of primitive cat's cradles, and had a learned paper on Indian string-figures to his credit. Some of these cat's cradles I can still manage myself, when there are kids to entertain.

A stout young man, round-backed, Seckel had a Hasidic pallor. His plump face wore earnest lines, and the creases of his forehead resembled the frets of a musical instrument. Dark hair covered his head in virile curls, somewhat dusty from his five-hundred-mile weekly trips to Indian country. Seckel didn't bathe much, didn't often change his underclothes. It didn't matter to the woman who loved him. She was Dutch, Jennie Bouwsma, and carried her books in a rucksack. She appears in my memory wearing a tarn and knee socks, legs half bare and looking inflamed in the Wisconsin winter. While in the sack with Seckel, she shouted out loudly. There were no doors, only curtains in our little rooms. Seckel hurried back and forth. His calves and b.u.t.tocks were strongly developed, white, muscular. I wonder how this cla.s.sic musculature got into the family.

We rented from the widow of a locomotive engineer. We had the ground floor of an old frame house.

The only book that Seckel picked up that year was The Last of the Mohicans,_ of which he would read the first chapter to put himself to sleep. On the theoretical side, he said he was a pluralist. Marxism was out._ He also denied the possibility of a science of history-he took a strong position on this. He described himself as a Diffusionist. All culture was invented once,_ and spread from a single source. He had actually read G. Elliot Smith and was committed to a theory of the Egyptian origins of everything.

His sleepy eyes were deceiving. Their dazed look was a screen for labors of linguistics that never stopped. His dimples did double duty, for they were sometimes critical (I refer here to the modern crisis, the source of the suspense)._ I ran into Seckel in Mexico City in 1947, not too long before he died. He was leading a delegation of Indians who knew no Spanish, and since no one in the Mexican civil service could speak their lingo, Seckel was their interpreter and no doubt the instigator of their complaints as well. These silent Indians, men in sombreros and white droopy drawers, the black hair growing at the corners of their lips, came out of the sun, which was their element, into the colonnades of the government building.

All this I remember. The one thing I forget is what I myself was doing in Mexico.

It was through Seckel, via Dr. Dina Brodsky, that I learned of the work of Waldemar Jochelson (presumably a cousin by marriage) on the Koryak. At a ladies' auxiliary sale I bought a charming book called To the Ends of the Earth_ (by John Perkins and the American Museum of Natural History), and found in it a chapter on the tribes of eastern Siberia. Then I recalled the monographs I had first seen years ago in Madison, Wisconsin, and borrowed the two Jesup volumes from the Regenstein Library. The women of Koryak myth, I read, were able to detach their genitalia when necessary and hang them up on the trees; and Raven, an unearthly comedian, the mythic father of the tribe, when he explored his wife's innards, entering her from behind, found himself first of all standing in a vast chamber. In contemplating such inventions or fantasies, one should bear in mind how hard a life the Koryak led, how they struggled to survive. In winter the fishermen had to hack holes in solid ice to a depth of six feet to drop their lines in the river. Overnight these holes were filled and frozen again. Koryak huts were cramped. A woman, however, was roomy. The tribe's mythic mother was palatial.

Very sympathetic to me (I'm sure she isn't being merely nosy), my a.s.sistant, Miss Rodinson, comes into the office to ask why I have been bent over at the window for an hour, apparently staring down into Monroe Street. It's only that these giant mat-green monographs borrowed from the Regenstein are hard to hold, and I rest them on the windowsill. In the eagerness of her sympathy Miss Rodinson perhaps wishes she might enter my thoughts, make herself useful. But what help can she be? Better not enter this l.u.s.terless pelagic green, the gateway to a savage Siberia that no longer exists.

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 pa.s.s, 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 ill.u.s.trated 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 cla.s.sic 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 ma.s.ses 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 succ.u.mbing 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 sc.r.a.p 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 t.i.tle 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 t.i.tle, 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. n.o.body 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 n.o.body 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. n.o.body knew what he was talking about. Too much Chinese in his cantos, too much Provenal. 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 pet.i.tioning 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 acc.u.mulate 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 gla.s.s is like the forehead of an intrusive somebody who has withdrawn into his evil secret, inside the c.o.key (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 a.s.sume.

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 ought 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 circ.u.mstantial. 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 b.u.mpers 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 sh.o.r.e 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.) Cousin Shana was on the wrong track. What she said is best interpreted as metaphysics. It wasn't the head_ that was open. It was something else. We enter the world without prior notice, we are manifested before we can be aware of manifestation. An original self exists or, if you prefer, an original soul. It may be as Goethe suggested, that the soul is a theater in which Nature can show itself, the only such theater that it has. And this makes sense when you attempt to account for some kinds of pa.s.sionate observation-the observation of cousins, for example. If it were just observation in the usual sense of the term, what would it be worth? But if it is expressed "As a man is, so he sees. As the eye is formed, such are its powers," that is a different matter. When I ran into Tanky and his hoodlum colleague at O'Hare and thought what a disembodied William Blake eye above us might see, I was invoking my own fundamental perspective, that of a person who takes into reckoning distortion in the ordinary way of seeing but has never given up the habit of referring all truly important observations to that original self or soul.

I believed that Motty in his silence was consulting the "original person." The distorted one could die without regrets, perhaps was already dead.

The seams open, the bonds dissolve, and the untenability of existence releases you back again to the original self. Then you are free to look for real being under the debris of modern ideas, and in a magical trance, if you like, or with a lucidity altogether different from the lucidity of approved_types of knowledge.

It was at about this moment that Cousin Motty beckoned me with his head. He had something to say. It was very little. Almost nothing. Certainly he said nothing that I was prepared to hear. I didn't expect him to ask to be unbuckled. As I bent toward him I put one hand on his shoulder, sensing that he would want me to. I'm sure he did. And perhaps it would have been appropriate to speak to him in his native language, as Seckel in the bayous had spoken to his Indian, the last of his people. The word Motty now spoke couldn't have been Shalom."Why_ should he give such a conventional greeting? Seeing how he had puzzled me, he turned his eyes earnestly on me-they were very large. He tried again.

So I asked Riva why he was saying this, and she explained, "Oh, he's saying Scholem.' Over and over he reminds me that we've been receiving mail for you from Scholem Stavis...."

"From Cousin Scholem?... Not Shalom."_ "He must not have an address for you."

"I'm unlisted. And we haven't seen each other in thirty years. You could have told him where to reach me."

"My dear, I had my hands full. I wish you would take all this stuff away. It fills a whole drawer in my pantry, and it's been on Motty's mind as unfinished business. He'll feel much better. When you take it."