The Collected Stories Of Saul Bellow

by Bellow, Saul

  The pi ane filled up. It was some comfort that despite the mean look of the weather, practical-minded people never doubted that they would lift off from Buffalo and land in Chicago—business as usual. In the hand of God, but also routine. Katrina, who looked sensible along with the rest of the passengers, didn’t know what to do about her anxious doubts, couldn’t collect them in a single corner and turn the key on them. In one respect Dotey was dead right: Katrina jumped at any chance to rush off and be with Victor. Victor, even if he was ailing, even if no life with him was really possible—he couldn’t last long—was entirely different from other people. Other people mostly stood in a kind of bleakness. They had the marks of privation upon them. There was a lack of space and air about them, they were humanly bare, whereas Victor gave off a big light. Strange little Wrangel may have been a pretentious twerp. He wanted to exchange serious thoughts; he might be puffing himself up absurdly, a faker, as Victor suspected. But when he had talked about ecstasy as the everyday spirit or men and things set in brilliants, she had understood exactly what he was saying. She had understood even better when he said that when the current stopped, the dullness and depression were worse than ever. To spell it out further, she herself could never generate any brilliancy. If she had somebody to get her going, she could join in and perhaps make a contribution. This contribution would be feminine and sexual. It would be important, it might even be indispensable, but it would not be inventive. She could, however, be inventive in deceit. And she had made an effort to branch out with the elephant story. She had, nevertheless, had that serious setback with _M*A SH.__ The movie house itself had been part of her misfortune. They were surrounded by hippies, not very young ones, and in the row ahead there was a bearded guy slurping Popsicles and raising himself to one cheek, letting off loud farts. Victor said, “There’s change from the general for the caviar it’s eaten.” Katrina hadn’t yet figured out that_ one. Then Victor stood up and said, “I won’t sit in this stink!” When they reached the street, the disgrace and horror of being exposed_ by _M*A SH__ and associated with San Francisco degenerates made Katrina want to throw herself in front of a cable car rushing downhill from the Mark Hopkins.

  Now she made a shelf of her hand on her brow and looked away from Victor, who was staring out at the field. Was there anything she could do about that goddamn elephant? Suppose a man turned up who hypnotized ball players and could do the same with an animal. They were now discovering new mental powers in the bigger mammals. Whales, for example, sang to one another; they were even thought to be capable of rhyming. Whales built walls out of air bubbles and could encircle and entrap millions of shrimp. What if an eccentric zoologist were to visit the management with a new idea? Meanwhile the management had to send for fodder while the elephant dropped whole pyramids of dung. The creature was melancholy and wept tears as big as apricots. The mahout demanded mud. If Margey didn’t have a good wallow soon, she’d go berserk and wreck the entire fifth floor. Abercrombie & Fitch (were they still in Chicago?) offered to send over a big-game hunter. For them it would be terrific publicity to shoot her. Humane people would be outraged. Suppose a pretty high school girl were to come forward with the solution? And what if she were to be a Chinese girl? In Chinese myth, elephants and not men had once been the masters of the world. And then?

  Victor’s mind was also at work, although you couldn’t say that he was thinking. Something soft and heavy seemed to have been spread over his body. It resembled the lead apron laid over you by X-ray technicians. Victor was stretched under this suave deadly weight and feeling as you felt when waking from a deep sleep—unable to lift your arm. On the field, in the winter light, the standing machines were paler than the air, and the entire airport stood in a frame of snow, looking like a steel engraving. It reminded him of the Lower East Side in—oh, about 1912. The boys (ancients today, those who were alive) were reading the Pentateuch. The street, the stained pavement, was also like a page of Hebrew text, something you might translate if you knew how. Jacob lay dreaming of a ladder which rose into heaven. V’hinei malachi elohim_—behold the angels of God going up and down. This had caused Victor no surprise. What age was he, about six? It was not a dream to him. Jacob_ was dreaming, while Victor was awake, reading. There was no “long ago.” It was all now. The cellar classroom had a narrow window at sidewalk level, just enough to permit a restricted upward glance showing fire escapes under snow, the gold shop sign of the Chinese laundry hanging from the ironwork, and angels climbing up and down. This did not have to be interpreted. It came about in a trance, as if under the leaden weight of the flexible apron. Now the plane was starting its takeoff run, and soon the NO SMOKING sign would be turned off. Victor would have liked to smoke, but the weight of his hands made any movement impossible.

  It wasn’t like him to cherish such recollections, although he had them, and they had lately been more frequent. He began now to remember that his mother had given him the windpipe of a goose after drying it in the Dutch oven of the coal stove, and that he had cut a notch in the windpipe with his father’s straight razor and made a whistle of it. When it was done, he disliked it. Even when dry it had kept its terrible red color, and it was very harsh to the touch and had left an unpleasant taste in his mouth. This was not exactly Marx’s nightmare of history from which mankind had to be liberated. The raw fowl taste was nasty. The angels on the fire escape, however, were very pleasing, and his consciousness of them, while it was four thousand years old, had also been exactly contemporary. Different ideas of time and space had not yet been imposed upon him. One comprehensive light contained everybody. Among the rest—parents, patriarchs, angels, God—there was yourself. Victor did not feel bound to get to the bottom of this; it was only a trance, probably an effect of fatigue and injury. He gave a side thought to Mass. General, where a tumor had been lifted out of a well of blood in his belly, and he reminded himself that he was still a convalescent—reminded himself also that Baudelaire had believed the artist to be always in a spiritually convalescent state. (This really was Baudelaire Day; just a while ago it had been the touch that brought the dead to life.) Only just returned from the shadow of death, the convalescent inhaled with delight the close human odors of the plane. Pollution didn’t matter, the state of a convalescent being the state of a child drunk with impressions. Genius must be_ the recovery of the powers of childhood by an act of the creative will._ Victor knew all this like the palm of his hand or the nose on his face. By combining the strength of a man (analytic power) with the ecstasy of a child you could discover the New. What God’s Revelation implied was that the Jews (his children) would obstinately will (with mature intelligence) the divine adult promise. This would earn them the hatred of the whole world. They were always archaic, and_ they were always contemporary—we could sort that out later.

  But now suppose that this should not_ be convalescence but something else, and that he should be on the circuit not because he was recovering but because he was losing ground. Falling apart? This was where Katrina entered the picture. Hers was the touch that resurrected, or that reunited, reintegrated his otherwise separating physical powers. He asked himself: That she turns me on, does that mean that I love her, or does it simply mean that she belongs to the class of women that turn me on? He didn’t like the question he was asking. But he was having many difficult sensations, innumerable impressions of winter, winters of seven decades superimposed. The winter world even brought him a sound, not for the ear but for some other organ. And none of this was clearly communicable, nor indeed worth communicating. It was simply part of the continuing life of every human being. Everybody was filled with visions that had been repressed, and amassed involuntarily, and when you were sick they were harder to disperse.

  “I can tell you, now that we’re in the air, Victor, that I am relieved._ I wasn’t sure we’d get back.” The banking plane gave them a single glimpse of Lake Erie slanting green to the right, and then rose into dark-gray snow clouds. It was a bumpy flight. The headwin
d was strong. “Have I ever told you about my housekeeper’s husband? He’s a handsome old Negro who used to be a dining-car waiter. Now he gambles. Impressive to look at. Ysole’s afraid of him.”

  “Why are we discussing him?”

  “I wonder if I shouldn’t have a talk with her husband about Ysole. If she takes money from Alfred, my ex-husband, if she should testify against me in the case, it would be serious. Alfred’s lawyer could bring out that she raised_ me, and therefore has my number.”

  “Would she want to harm you as much as that?”

  “Well, she’s always been somewhat cracked. She used to call herself a conjure -woman. She’s shrewd and full of the devil.”

  “I wonder why we’re flying at this altitude. By now we should have been above the clouds,” said Victor.

  They had fifteen minutes of open sky and then dropped back again into the darkness. “Yes, why are we so low?” said Katrina. “We’re not getting anywhere.”

  The seat-belt sign went on and the pilot announced, “Owing to the weather, O’Hare Airport is closed, briefly. We will be landing in Detroit in five minutes.”

  “I can’t_ be stuck in Detroit!” said Katrina.

  “Easy, Katrina. In Chicago it isn’t even one o’clock. We’ll probably sit on the ground awhile and take right off again.”

  Suddenly fields were visible beneath—warehouses, hangars, highways, water. The landing gear came into position as Katrina, watching from the ground, had often seen it do, when the belly of the Boeing opened and the black bristling innards descended. Victor was able to stop one of the busy stewardesses, and she told them that it was a bad scene in Chicago. “Blitzed by snow.”

  When they disembarked they found themselves immediately in a crowd of grounded passengers. Once you got into such a crowd your fear was that you’d never get out. How lucky that Victor was not fazed. He was going forward in that rising-falling gait of his, his brows resembling the shelf mushrooms that grow on old tree trunks. For her part, Katrina was paralyzed by tension. Signs signified little. BAGGAGE CLAIM: there was no baggage. She was carrying Vanessa’s precious fiddle. TERMINAL: Why should Victor limp all the way to the terminal only to be sent back to some gate? “There should be agents here to give information.”

  “No way. They’re not organized for this,” said Victor. “And we can’t get near the phones. They’re lined up ten deep. Let’s see if we can find two seats and try to figure out what to do.”

  It was slow going. Alternate blasts of chill from the gates and heat from the blowers caught them about the legs and in the face. They found a single seat, and Victor sat himself down. He had that superlative imperturbability in the face of accident and local disturbances that Katrina was welcome to share if she could. Beila seemed to have learned how to do it. Trina had not acquired the knack. Victor laid his heel on the duffel bag. The violin case he took between his legs. With his stick he improvised a barrier to keep people from tripping over him.

  Going off to gather information, Katrina found a man in a blue-gray uniform who looked as if he might be a flight engineer. He was leaning, arms crossed, against the wall. She noticed how well shined his black shoes were, and that he had a fresh complexion. She thought that he should be able to direct her. But when she said, “Excuse me,” he refused to take notice of her, he turned his face away. She said, “I wonder if you could tell me. My flight is grounded. Where can I find out what’s happening?”

  “How would I know!”

  “Because you’re in uniform, I thought…”

  He put his hand to her chest and pushed her away. “What are you doing?”_ she said. She felt her eyes flooding, growing turbid, smarting. “What’s the matter_ with you?” What followed was even worse. While he looked into her face, not downward, his heel ground her instep. He was stomping her foot. And this was not being done in anger. It didn’t seem anger at all; it was a different kind of intensity She tried to read the name on the bar clipped to his chest, but he was gone before she could make it out. She thought: I’ve put myself in a position where people can hurt me and get away with it. As if I came out of Evanston to do wrong and it’s written all over me. It might have been a misogynist, or other psychopath in uniform. A bitter hot current came from low underneath, going through her bowels like fainting heat, then moved up her chest and into her throat and cheeks. Hurt as she was, she conjectured that it might have been disrespect for his profession that put him in a fury, an engineer being approached like a cabin steward. Or he might have been putting out waves of hate magnetism and praying for somebody to approach, to give the works to. Victor, if he had been there, would have hit the guy on the head with his stick. Sick or well, he had presence of mind.

  While she waited in a flight information line, Katrina concentrated on shrinking down the incident and restoring scale. He was just a person from a nice family in the suburbs probably, average comfortable people, judging from the way he wore his uniform—what Victor, when he got going, called the “animal human average” and, quoting one of his writers, “the dark equivocal crowd saturated with falsity.” He liked such strong expressions. Good thing she had on the ostrich boots. Otherwise the man might have broken something.

  When her turn came, the woman behind the counter had little information to give. New flights would be announced as soon as O’Hare opened its runways. “There’ll be a rush for seats. Maybe I’d better buy first-class tickets,” said Katrina.

  “I can’t reserve for you. The computer has no information, no matter how I punch it.”

  “Still, I’ll buy two open first-class flights. On my credit card. They can be turned in if I don’t use them.”

  As she approached Victor from the side, he looked pleasant enough in his cap—silent, bemused, amused. It was in the lower face that the signs of aging were most advanced, in the shortening of his jaw and the sharpening of its corners. In profile the signs were more noticeable, touched off more worry, inspired more sorrow. Katrina did not think that her full face, the just-repainted mouth, and the carriage of her bosom gave it away, but she was in low spirits: his condition, the jam of passengers, the spite of the man who had stomped her, the agony of being stuck here. From the front Victor was as “rich” in looks as ever. Yet she could not borrow much strength from him. There were Wulpy fans even here in Detroit who would have rushed out to the airport in a fleet of cars if they had known that he was here. They were better qualified to appreciate him than a woman who had twisted his arm to see _M*ASH.__ These fans from the city would talk, drink, or take him home. All she could do was to stand on Square One—a woman from Evanston, not vivid with desperation but dull with it, without a particle of invention to her.

  You seldom saw Victor in a flap. He wasn’t greatly disturbed—not yet anyway. “Aren’t you getting hungry? I am,” he said.

  “We should eat, I suppose.”

  “I guess we could find a fast-food spot.”

  “Something more substantial than a hamburger.”

  “… Not to spoil tonight’s banquet,” he said.

  Their march through the concourse began. Normally Victor was a fair walker, patient with his infirmity. But a solid mass like this was daunting. Movement was further complicated by baggage carts, sweepers, and wheelchairs, and Katrina soon said, “We aren’t getting anywhere. It’s after one o’clock in Chicago.”

  Victor said, “I wouldn’t panic just yet. The housekeeper is there. Your sister. Your friend the cop.”

  “My sister isn’t exactly in sympathy.”

  “You often say how critical she is. Still, she may not let you down.”

  “Even through bad times, I stood by her. Last summer she drove up with a shovel in the trunk of her car and said she was on her way to the cemetery to dig up her husband. She said she just had to see him again. I took her into the garden and made her drunk. Then she told me I had let her down, that I had gone to Boston to be with you when she_ was having surgery. They removed that tumor from the cervix.”

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sp; Victor, far from shocked, nodded as she spoke—grieving wives, hysterical sisters. To read about such matters in a well-written book might have been of interest; to hear about them, no. Katrina could not convey how awful it had been to get her sister plastered—the damp heat, Dotey’s thin face sweating. Because of the smell of clay underfoot you were reminded of graves. Just try to picture Dotey with neurasthenic stick arms, digging. She would have passed out in a matter of minutes.

  Victor was filled with scenes from world history, fully documented knowledge of evil, battles, deportations to the murder camps from the Umschlagplatz_ in Warsaw, the terrible scenes during the evacuation from Saigon, and certainly he could imagine Dorothea trying to dig up her husband’s corpse. But when to turn your imagination to phenomena of this class remained unclear. He had written about the “inhuman” as an element of the Modern, about the feebleness, meanness, drunkenness of modern man and of the consequences of this for art and for politics. His reputation was based upon the analyses he had made of Modernist extremism. He was the teacher of famous painters and writers. She had pored over his admirable books, yet she, you see, had to deal with him on the personal level. And on the personal level, well, he had more to say about art as a remedy for the bareness, as a cover for modern nakedness, than about the filling of personal_ gaps, or deficiencies. Yet even there he was not entirely predictable. He never ran out of surprises.

  “I see you favoring your left foot. Does the boot pinch?”

  “It was stepped on.”

  “You bumped into somebody?”

  “A nice fair-haired young man rushed away from me when I stopped to get information, but before he rushed away he stomped me.”

  Victor stopped, looking at her from his height. “Why didn’t you report him?”

  “He disappeared.”

  “More and more new kinds of crazies coming at you. How changed everything is!… It was women and children first when the Titanic_ went down. Middle-class gallantry is gone with the Biedermeier.”