by Bellow, Saul
“Just one thing more, Your Honor, if you care about the defendant’s personal background. Cousin Metzger, his father, enjoyed stepping out in the evening, and he often came to play cards with my father and my stepmother. In winter they drank tea with raspberry preserves; in summer I was sent to the drugstore to buy a quart brick of three-layered ice cream—vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry. You asked for ‘Neapolitan.’ It was a penny-ante poker game and often went on past midnight.”
“I understand you’re a friend of Gerald Eiler,” said Tanky.
“Acquaintance….”
“Ever been to his house?”
“About twenty years ago. But the house is gone, and so is his wife. I also used to meet him at parties, but the host who gave them passed away. About half of that social circle is in the cemetery.”
As usual, I gave more information than my questioner had any use for, using every occasion to transmit my sense of life. My father before me also did this. Such a habit can be irritating. Tanky didn’t care who was in the cemetery. You knew Eiler before he was on the bench?” Oh, long before….” Then you might be just the guy to write to him about me.”
By sacrificing an hour at my desk I might spare Tanky a good many years of prison. Why shouldn’t I do it for old times’ sake, for the sake of his parents, whom I held in such affection. I had_ to do it if I wanted to continue these exercises of memory. My souvenirs would stink if I let Shana’s son down. I had no space to work out whether this was a moral or a sentimental decision.
I might also write to Eiler to show off the influence I so queerly had. Tanky’s interpretation of my motives would make a curious subject. Did I want to establish that, bubble brain though I seemed to him, there were sound reasons why a letter from me might carry weight with a veteran of the federal judiciary like Eiler? Or prove that / had lived right? He would never concede me that. Anyway, with a long sentence hanging over him, he was in no mood to study life’s mysteries. He was sick, deadly depressed.
“It’s pretty snazzy across the street over at First National.”
Below, in the plaza, is the large Chagall mosaic, costing millions, the theme of which is the Soul of Man in America. I often doubt that old Chagall had the strength necessary to take such a reading. He is too levitational. Too many fancies.
I explained: “The group I’m with advises bankers on foreign loans. We specialize in international law—political economy and so forth.”
Tanky said, “Eunice is very proud of you. She sends me clippings about how you’re speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations. Or you’re sitting in the same box with the governor at the opera. Or were the escort of Mrs. Anwar Sadat when she got an honorary degree. And you play tennis, indoors, with politicians.’”_
How was it that Cousin Ijah’s esoteric interests gave him access to these prominent people—art patrons, politicians, society ladies, dictators’ widows? Tanky came down heavy on the politicians. About politicians he knew more than I ever would, knew the real_ guys; he had done business with the machine people, he had cash-flow relations with them. He could tell me_ who took from whom, which group owned what, who supplied the schools, hospitals, the county jail and other institutions, who milked public housing, handed out the franchises, made the sweetheart deals. Unless you were a longtime insider, you couldn’t find the dark crossings used by the mob and the machine. They were occasionally revealed. Very recently two hit men tried to kill a Japanese dope supplier in his car. Tokyo Joe Eto is his name. He was shot three times in the skull and ballistics experts are unable to explain why not a single bullet penetrated the brain. Having nothing more to lose, Tokyo Joe named the killers, one of whom proved to be a deputy on the county sheriff’s payroll. Were other city or county payrollers moonlighting for the Mafia? Nobody proposed to investigate. Cousin Tanky knew the answers to many such questions. Hence the gibing look he gave me in the booth. But even that look was diluted, much below full strength. Facing the shades of the prison house, he was not well. We had our share of wrongdoers in the family, but few who made it to the penitentiary. He didn’t mean to discuss this with me, however. All he wanted was that 1 should use such influence as I might have. It was worth a try. Another iron in the fire. As for my motive in agreeing to intercede, it was too obscure to be worth the labor of examination. Sentiment. Eccentric foolery. Vanity. “Okay, Raphael. I’ll try a letter to the judge.”
I did it for Cousin Metzger ‘s tic. For the three bands of Neapolitan ice cream. For the furious upright growth of Cousin Shana’s ruddy hair, and the avid veins of her temples and in the middle of her forehead. For the strength with which her bare feet advanced as she mopped the floor and spread the pages of the Tribune_ over it. It was also for Cousin Eunice’s stammer, and for the elocution lessons that cured it, for the James Whitcomb Riley recitations she gave to the captive family and the determination of the “a-a-a-a” with which she stood up to the challenge of “When the Frost Is on the Punkin.” I did it because I had been present at Cousin Tanky’s circumcision and heard his cry. And because his cumbersome body was now wrapped in defeat. The curl had gone out of his beard. He looked like Death’s sparring partner and his cheeks were battered under the eyes. And if he thought that /was the sentimentalist and he_ the nihilist, he was mistaken. I myself have some experience of evil and of the dissolution of the old bonds of existence; of the sores that have broken out on the body of mankind, which I, however, have the impulse to touch with my own hands.
I wrote the letter because the cousins are the elect of my memory.
“Raphael Metzger’s parents, Your Honor, were hardworking, law-abiding people, not so much as a traffic violation on their record. Over fifty years ago, when the Brodskys came to Chicago, the Metzgers sheltered them for weeks. We slept on the floor, as penniless immigrants did in those days. We children were clothed and bathed and fed by Mrs. Metzger. This was before the birth of the defendant. Admittedly, Raphael Metzger became a tough guy. Still, he has committed no violent crimes and it is possible, with such a family background, that he may yet become a useful citizen. In presentencing hearings, doctors have testified that he suffers from emphysema and also from high blood pressure. If he has to serve a sentence in one of the rougher prisons, his health may be irreparably damaged.”
This last was pure malarkey. A good federal prison is like a sanatorium. I have been told by more than one ex-convict: “They made a new man out of me in jail. They fixed my hernia and operated my cataracts, they gave me false teeth and fitted me with a hearing aid. On my own, I could never afford it.”
A veteran like Eiler has received plenty of clemency letters. Thousands of them are sent by civic leaders, by members of the Congress, and, sure as shooting, by other federal judges, all of them using the low language of high morals—payola letters putting in a good word for well-connected constituents or political buddies, or old friends in the rackets. You can leave it to Judge Eiler to read between the lines.
I may even have been effective. Tanky got a short sentence. Eiler certainly understood that Tanky was acting on instructions from the higher-ups. If there were kickbacks, he didn’t keep much of the money. Presumably a few bucks did stick to his fingers, but he never would have owned four large homes, like some of his bosses. I take it, too, that the judge was aware of secret investigations then going on and of indictments being prepared by grand juries. The government was after bigger game. These are not matters which Eiler will ever discuss with me. When we meet, we talk music or tennis, sometimes foreign trade. We gossip about the university. But Eiler was aware that a stiff sentence might have endangered Tanky’s life. He would have been suspected of giving information to get out sooner. It is generally agreed that Tanky’s patron, Dorfman, was killed last year after his conviction in the Nevada bribery case because he would have been sent to prison for life and he might therefore well have chosen to make a deal with the authorities. Dorfman was shot in the head last winter by two men, executed with smooth skill in a parking lot.
The TV cameras took many close-ups of the bloodstained slush. Nobody bothered to wash it away, and in my fantasy the rats came at night to lap it. Expecting to die, Dorfman made no arrangement to protect himself. He hired no bodyguards. A free-for-all shoot-out between bodyguards and hit men might have brought reprisals against his family. So he silently endured the emotions of a doomed man, as he waited for the inevitable hit.
A word about how people think of such things in Chicago, about this life to which all have consented. Buy cheap, sell dear is the very soul of business. The foundations of political stability, of democracy, according even to its eminent philosophers, are swindle and fraud. Now, smoothness in fraud arranges immunity for itself. The top executives, the lawyers at the nucleus of power, the spreaders of the most fatal nets—they_ are never shredded and incinerated, they_ never leave the blood of their brains in parking lots. Therefore Chicagoans accord a certain respect to those four-mansion crooks who risk their lives in crimes of high visibility. We are looking at the fear of death that defines your essential bourgeois. The Chicago public doesn’t examine its attitudes as closely as this, but there you are: the Mob big shot has prepared his soul for execution. He must._ For such elementary reminders that justice in some form still exists the plain man is grateful. (I am having a moment of impotent indignation; let’s drop it.)
I have to relate that I was embarrassed by the delivery of a case of Lafite-Rothschild prior to the sentencing. I hadn’t yet mailed my letter to the judge. As a member (inactive) of the bar, I record this impropriety with discomfort. Nobody need know. Zimmerman’s liquor truck brought me a dozen delicious bottles too conscience-contaminated to be drunk. I gave them to hostesses, as dinner gifts. At least Tanky knew good wine.
At the Italian Village I had ordered Nozzole, a decent Chianti which Tanky barely tasted. Too bad he didn’t allow himself to become tipsy. I might have made him an amusing cousinly confidence (off the record for us both). I, too, am involved in the lending of big sums. Tanky dealt in millions. As one who prepares briefing documents, I am involved with the lending of billions to Mexico, Brazil, Poland, and other hopeless countries. That very day, the representative of a West African state had been sent into my office to discuss aspects of his country’s hard-currency problems; in particular, restrictions on the importing of European luxury products, especially German and Italian automobiles used by the executive class (in which they made Sunday excursions with their ladies and all the kids to watch the public executions—the big entertainment of the week: he told this to me in his charming Sorbonnish English).
But Tanky would never have responded with confidences about the outfit. So I never did get a chance to open this potentially intriguing exchange between two Jewish cousins who dealt in megabucks.
Where this private, confidential wit might have been, there occurred instead a deep silence. Gulfs of silence are what give a basso profundo like mine its oceanic resonance when talk resumes.
It should be said that it’s not my office work that most absorbs me. I am consumed by different interests, passions. I am coming to that.
With time off for good behavior, Tanky would have only about eight full months to serve in a decent jail in the Sunbelt, where as a trained accountant he could reckon on being assigned light work, mostly fooling with computers. You would have thought that this would satisfy him. No, he was restless and pressing. He apparently thought that Eiler might have a soft spot for low-rumbling, off-the-wall Cousin Ijah. He may even have concluded that Ijah “had something” on the judge, if I know anything about the way minds work in Chicago.
In any case, Cousin Eunice telephoned again, to say, “I must_ see you.” In her own behalf, she would have said, “I’d like_ to see you.” So I knew it was Tanky. What now?
I recognized that I couldn’t refuse. I was trapped. For when Coolidge was president the Brodskys had slept on Cousin Shana’s floor. We were hungry and she fed us. The words of Jesus and the prophets can never be extracted from the blood of certain people.
Mind, I absolutely agree with Hegel (lectures at Jena, 1806) that the whole mass of ideas that have been current until now, “the very bonds of the world,” are dissolving and collapsing like a vision in a dream. A new emergence of Spirit ls—or had better be—at hand. Or as another thinker and visionary has put it, mankind was long supported by an unheard music which buoyed it, gave it now, continuity, coherence. But this humanistic music has ceased, and now there is a different, barbarous music welling up, and a different elemental force has begun to manifest itself, without form as yet.
That, too, is a good way to put the matter: a cosmic orchestra sending out music has suddenly canceled its performance. And where, with regard to the cousins, does that leave us? I confine myself to cousins. I do have brothers, but one of them is a foreign service officer whom I never see, while the other operates a fleet of taxicabs in Tegucigalpa and has written off Chicago altogether. I am blockaded in a small historical port, as it were. I can’t sail forth; I can’t even extricate myself from the ties of Jewish cousinhood. It may be that the dissolution of the bonds of the world affects Jews in different ways. The whole mass of ideas that have been current until now, the very bonds of the world…
What has Tanky to do with bonds or ties? Years in the underworld. Despises his sister. Thinks his cousin Ijah a creep. Here before us is a life to which all have consented. But not Cousin Ijah. Why is he a holdout? What sphere does he think he_ is from? If he doesn’t get into the action so gratifying for the most significant and potent people around, where does he satisfy his instincts?
Well, we met in the Italian Village to drink Nozzole. The Village has three stories and three dining rooms, which I call Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. We ate our veal limone in Paradiso. In his need, Tanky turned to Ijah. Jewish consanguinity—a special phenomenon, an archaism of which the Jews, until the present century stopped them, were in the course of divesting themselves. The world as it was dissolving apparently collapsed on top of them, and the divestiture could not continue.
Okay, now I take Eunice to lunch atop the First National skyscraper, one of the monuments of the most curious present (how weird can these presents get?). I show her the view, and far, far below us is the Italian Village, a thin slice of old-world architecture from Hansel-and-Gretel time. The Village is squeezed on one side by the green opulent swellings of the new Xerox headquarters and on the other by the Bell Savings Corporation.
I am painfully aware that Eunice has had cancer surgery. I know that there is a tormenting rose of scar tissue under her blouse, and she told me when we last met about the pains in her armpit and her terror of recurrence. Her command of medical terminology, by the way, is terrific. And you never get a chance to forget how much behavioral science she has studied. To counteract old affections and pity, I round up in self-defense any number of negative facts about the Metzger family. First, brutal Tanky. Then the fact that old Metzger used to frequent burlesque prick-tease shows when he could spare an hour from his duties at the Boston Store, and I would see him in those horny dark joints on South State Street when I was cutting school. But that was not so negative. It was more touching than sinful. It was his way of coming to life; it was artificial resuscitation. A man of any sexual delicacy may feel himself hit in the genitals by a two-by-four after doing his conjugal duty in the bungalow belt. Cousin Shana was a dear soul but there was nothing of the painted erotic woman about her. Anyway, South State Street was nothing but meat-and-potatoes lewdness in meat-and-potatoes Chicago. In the refined Orient, even in holy cities, infinitely more corrupt exhibitions were offered to the public.
Then I tried to see what I might convict Cousin Shana of, and how I might disown even her. Toward the end of her life, owner of a large apartment building, she hitchhiked on Sheridan Road to save bus fare. So as to leave more money to Eunice she starved herself, some of the cousins said. They added that she, Eunice, would need every penny of it because her husband, Earl, a Park District employee, depo
sited his weekly check as soon as he was paid, locked it in his personal savings account. Rejected all financial responsibility. Eunice put the children through school entirely on her own. She was a psychologist with the Board of Education. Mental testing was her profession. (Her racket,_ Tanky might have called it.)
Eunice and I sit down at our reserved table atop the First National Bank and she transmits Tanky s new request. Eagerness to serve her brother consumes her. She is a mother like her own mother, all-sacrificing, and a sister to match. Tanky, who would get to see Eunice once in five years, is now in frequent communication with her. She brings his messages to me. I am like the great fish in the Grimm fairy tale. The fisherman freed him from his net and has been granted three wishes. We are now at wish number two. The fish is listening in the executive dining room. What does Tanky ask? Another letter to the judge, requesting more frequent medical examinations, a visit to a specialist, a special diet. “The stuff he has to eat makes him sick.”
The great fish should now say, “Beware!”
Instead he says, “I can try.”
He speaks in his deeper tones, a beautiful depth, three notes bowed out on the double bass, or the strange baryton—an ancient stringed instrument, part guitar, part bass viol; Haydn, who loved the baryton, wrote moving trios for it.
Eunice said, “My special assignment 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 masses 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.