by Saul Bellow
“Why, that little operator! Billy had an underground all to himself,” I said. “He must’ve seen Leslie Howard in The Scarlet Pimpernel.”_
“Next night, the guard didn’t lock my door after supper, and when the corridor was empty I came out. I felt as if I had whiskey in my legs, but I realized they were holding me for deportation, the SS was at work already, so I opened every door, walked upstairs, downstairs, and when I got to the street there was a car waiting and people leaning on it, speaking in normal voices. When I came up, the driver pushed me in the back and drove me to the Trastevere station. He gave me new identity papers. He said nobody would be looking for me, because my whole police file had been stolen. There was a hat and coat for me in the rear seat, and he gave me the name of a hotel in Genoa, by the waterfront. That’s where I was contacted. I had passage on a Swedish ship to Lisbon.”
Europe could go to hell without Fonstein.
My father looked at us sidelong with those keen eyes of his. He had heard the story many times.
I came to know it too. I got it in episodes, like a Hollywood serial—the Saturday thriller, featuring Harry Fonstein and Billy Rose, or Bellarosa. For Fonstein, in Genoa, while he was hiding in great fear in a waterfront hotel, had no other name for him. During the voyage, nobody on the refugee ship had ever heard of Bellarosa.
When the ladies were in the kitchen and my father was in the den, reading the Sunday paper, I would ask Fonstein for further details of his adventures (his torments). He couldn’t have known what mental files they were going into or that they were being cross-referenced with Billy Rose—one of those insignificant-significant characters whose name will be recognized chiefly by show-biz historians. The late Billy, the business partner of Prohibition hoodlums, the sidekick of Arnold Rothstein; multimillionaire Billy, the protщgщ of Bernard Baruch, the young shorthand prodigy whom Woodrow Wilson, mad for shorthand, invited to the White House for a discussion of the rival systems of Pitman and Gregg; Billy the producer, the consort of Eleanor Holm, the mermaid queen of the New York World’s Fair; Billy the collector of Matisse, Seurat, and so forth… nationally syndicated Billy, the gossip columnist. A Village pal of mine was a member of his ghostwriting team.
This was the Billy to whom Harry Fonstein owed his life.
I spoke of this ghostwriter—Wolfe was his name—and thereafter Fonstein may have considered me a possible channel to Billy himself. He never had met Billy, you see. Apparently Billy refused to be thanked by the Jews his Broadway underground had rescued.
The Italian agents who had moved Fonstein from place to place wouldn’t talk. The Genoa man referred to Bellarosa but answered none of Fonstein’s questions. I assume that Mafia people from Brooklyn had put together Billy’s Italian operation. After the war, Sicilian gangsters were decorated by the British for their work in the Resistance. Fonstein said that with Italians, when they had secrets to keep, tiny muscles came out in the face that nobody otherwise saw. “The man lifted up his hands as if he was going to steal a shadow off the wall and stick it in his pocket.” Yesterday a hit man, today working against the Nazis.
Fonstein’s type was edel_—well-bred—but he also was a tough Jew. Sometimes his look was that of a man holding the lead in the hundred-meter breast-stroke race. Unless you shot him, he was going to win. He had something in common with his Mafia saviors, whose secrets convulsed their faces.
During the crossing he thought a great deal about the person who had had him smuggled out of Italy, imagining various kinds of philanthropists and idealists ready to spend their last buck to rescue their people from Treblinka.
“How was I supposed to guess what kind of man—or maybe a committee, the Bellarosa Society—did it?”
No, it was Billy acting alone on a spurt of feeling for his fellow Jews and squaring himself to outwit Hitler and Himmler and cheat them of their victims. On another day he’d set his heart on a baked potato, a hot dog, a cruise around Manhattan on the Circle Line. There were, however, spots of deep feeling in flimsy Billy. The God of his fathers still mattered. Billy was as spattered as a Jackson Pollock painting, and among the main trickles was his Jewishness, with other streaks flowing toward secrecy—streaks of sexual weakness, sexual humiliation. At the same time, he had to have his name in the paper. As someone said, he had a buglike tropism for publicity. Yet his rescue operation in Europe remained secret.
Fonstein, one of the refugee crowd sailing to New York, wondered how many others among the passengers might have been saved by Billy. Nobody talked much. Experienced people begin at a certain point to keep their own counsel and refrain from telling their stories to one another. Fonstein was eaten alive by his fantasies of what he would do in New York. He said that at night when the ship rolled he was like a weighted rope, twisting and untwisting. He expected that Billy, if he had saved scads of people, would have laid plans for their future too. Fonstein didn’t foresee that they would gather together and cry like Joseph and his brethren. Nothing like that. No, they would be put up in hotels or maybe in an old sanitarium, or boarded with charitable families. Some would want to go to Palestine; most would opt for the U. S. A. and study English, perhaps finding jobs in industry or going to technical schools.
But Fonstein was detained at Ellis Island. Refugees were not being admitted then. “They fed us well,” he told me. “I slept in a wire bin, on an upper bunk. I could see Manhattan. They told me, though, that I’d have to go to Cuba. I still didn’t know who Billy was, but I waited for his help.
“And after a few weeks a woman was sent by Rose Productions to talk to me. She dressed like a young girl—lipstick, high heels, earrings, a hat. She had legs like posts and looked like an actress from the Yiddish theater, about ready to begin to play older roles, disappointed and sad. She called herself a dramatisten_ and was in her fifties if not more. She said my case was being turned over to the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. They would take care of me. No more Billy Rose.”
“You must have been shook up.”
“Of course. But I was even more curious than dashed. I asked her about the man who rescued me. I said I would like to give Billy my thanks personally. She brushed this aside. Irrelevant. She said, After Cuba, maybe.’ I saw that she doubted it would happen. I asked, did he help lots of people. She said, ‘Sure he helps, but himself he helps first, and you should hear him scream over a dime.’ He was very famous, he was rich, he owned the Ziegfeld Building and was continually in the papers. What was he like? Tiny, greedy, smart. He underpaid the employees, and they were afraid of the boss. He dressed very well, and he was a Broadway character and sat all night in cafщs. ‘He can call up Governor Dewey and talk to him whenever he likes.’
“That was what she said. She said also, ‘He pays me twenty-two bucks, and if I even hint a raise I’ll be fired. So what then? Second Avenue is dead. For Yiddish radio there’s a talent oversupply. If not for the boss, I’d fade away in the Bronx. Like this, at least I work on Broadway. But you’re a greener, and to you it’s all a blank.’
” ‘If he hadn’t saved me from deportation, I’d have ended like others in my family. I owe him my life.’
” ‘Probably so,’ she agreed.
” ‘Wouldn’t it be normal to be interested in a man you did that for? Or at least have a look, shake a hand, speak a word?’
” ‘It would have been_ normal,’ she said. ‘Once.’
“I began to realize,” said Fonstein, “that she was a sick person. I believe she had TB. It wasn’t the face powder that made her so white. White was to her what yellow color is to a lemon. What I saw was not makeup—it was the Angel of Death. Tubercular people often are quick and nervous. Her name was Missus Hamet—_khomet__ being the Yiddish word for a horse collar. She was from Galicia, like me. We had the same accent.”
A Chinese singsong. Aunt Mildred had it too—comical to other Jews, uproarious in a Yiddish music hall.
” ‘HIAS will get work for you in Cuba. They take terrifie care of you fellas. Billy t
hinks the war is in a new stage. Roosevelt is for King Saud, and those Arabians hate Jews and keep the door to Palestine shut. That’s why Rose changed his operations. He and his friends are now chartering ships for refugees. The Romanian government will sell them to the Jews at fifty bucks a head, and there are seventy thousand of them. That’s a lot of moola. Better hurry before the Nazis take over Romania.’ “
Fonstein said very reasonably, “I told her how useful I might be. I spoke four languages. But she was hardened to people pleading, ingratiating themselves with their lousy gratitude. Hey, it’s an ancient routine,” said Fonstein, standing on the four-inch sole of his laced boot. His hands were in his pockets and took no part in the eloquence of his shrug. His face was, briefly, like a notable face in a museum case, in a dark room, its pallor spotlighted so that the skin was stippled, a curious effect, like stony gooseflesh. Except that he was not on show for the brilliant deeds he had done. As men go, he was as plain as seltzer.
Billy didn’t want his gratitude. First your suppliant takes you by the knees. Then he asks for a small loan. He wants a handout, a pair of pants, a pad to sleep in, a meal ticket, a bit of capital to go into business. One man’s gratitude is poison to his benefactor. Besides, Billy was fastidious about persons. In principle they were welcome to his goodwill, but they drove him to hysteria when they put their moves on him.
“Never having set foot in Manhattan, I had no clue,” said Fonstein. “Instead there were bizarre fantasies, but what good were those? New York is a collective fantasy of millions. There’s just so much a single mind can do with it.”
Mrs. Horsecollar (her people had had to be low-caste teamsters in the Old Country) warned Fonstein, “Billy doesn’t want you to mention his name to HIAS.”
“So how did I get to Ellis Island?”
Make up what you like. Say that a married Italian woman loved you and stole money from her husband to buy papers for you. But no leaks on Billy.”
Here my father told Fonstein, “I can mate you in five moves.” My old man would have made a mathematician if he had been more withdrawn from human affairs. Only, his motive for concentrated thought was winning. My father Wouldn’t apply himself where there was no opponent to beat.
I have my own fashion of testing my powers. Memory is my field. But also my faculties are not what they once were. I haven’t got Alzheimer’s, absit omen_ or nicht da gedacht_—no sticky matter on my recollection cells. But I am growing slower. Now who was the man that Fonstein had worked for in Havana? Once I had instant retrieval for such names. No electronic system was in it with me. Today I darken and grope occasionally. But thank God I get a reprieve—Fonstein’s Cuban employer was Salkind, and Fonstein was his legman. All over South America there were Yiddish newspapers. In the Western Hemisphere, Jews were searching for surviving relatives and studying the published lists of names. Many DPs were dumped in the Caribbean and in Mexico. Fonstein quickly added Spanish and English to his Polish, German, Italian, and Yiddish. He took engineering courses in a night school instead of hanging out in bars or refugee cafщs. To tourists, Havana was a holiday town for gambling, drinking, and whoring—an abortion center as well. Unhappy single girls came down from the States to end their love pregnancies. Others, more farsighted, flew in to look among the refugees for husbands and wives. Find a spouse of a stable European background, a person schooled in suffering and endurance. Somebody who had escaped death. Women who found no takers in Baltimore, Kansas City, or Minneapolis, worthy girls to whom men never proposed, found husbands in Mexico, Honduras, and Cuba.
After five years, Fonstein’s employer was prepared to vouch for him, and sent for Sorella, his niece. To imagine what Fonstein and Sorella saw in each other when they were introduced was in the early years beyond me. Whenever we met in Lakewood, Sorella was dressed in a suit. When she crossed her legs and he noted the volume of her underthighs, an American observer like me could, and would, picture the entire woman unclothed, and depending on his experience of life and his acquaintance with art, he might attribute her type to an appropriate painter. In my mental picture of Sorella I chose Rembrandt’s Saskia over the nudes of Rubens. But then Fonstein, when he took off his surgical boot, was… well, he had imperfections too. So man and wife could forgive each other. I think my tastes would have been more like those of Billy Rose—water nymphs, Loreleis, or chorus girls. Eastern European men had more sober standards. In my father’s place, I would have had to make the sign of the cross over Aunt Mildred’s face while getting into bed with her—something exorcistic (far-fetched) to take the curse off. But you see, I was not my father, I was his spoiled American son. Your stoical forebears took their lumps in bed. As for Billy, with his trousers and shorts at his ankles, chasing girls who had come to be auditioned, he would have done better with Mrs. Horsecollar. If he’d forgive her bagpipe udders and estuary leg veins, she’d forgive his unheroic privates, and they could pool their wretched mortalities and stand by each other for better or worse.
Sorella’s obesity, her beehive coif, the preposterous pince-nez—a “lady” put-on—made me wonder: What is_ it with such people? Are they female impersonators, drag queens?
This was a false conclusion reached by a middle-class boy who considered himself an enlightened bohemian. I was steeped in the exciting sophistication of the Village.
I was altogether wrong, dead wrong about Sorella, but at the time my perverse theory found some support in Fonstein’s story of his adventures. He told me how he had sailed from New York and gone to work for Salkind in Havana while learning Spanish together with English and studying refrigeration and heating in a night school. “Till I met an American girl, down there on a visit.”
“You met Sorella. And you fell in love with her?”
He gave me a hardedged Jewish look when I spoke of love. How do you distinguish among love, need, and prudence?
Deeply experienced people—this continually impresses me—will keep things to themselves. Which is all right for those who don’t intend to go beyond experience. But Fonstein belonged to an even more advanced category, those who don’t put such restraints on themselves and feel able to enter the next zone; in that next zone, their aim is to convert weaknesses and secrets into burnable energy. A first-class man subsists on the matter he destroys, just as the stars do. But I am going beyond Fonstein, needlessly digressing. Sorella wanted a husband, while Fonstein needed U. S. naturalization papers. Mariage de convenance_ was how I saw it.
It’s always the falsest formulation that you’re proudest of.
Fonstein took a job in a New Jersey shop that subcontracted the manufacture of parts in the heating-equipment line. He did well there, a beaver for work, and made rapid progress in his sixth language. Before long he was driving a new Pontiac. Aunt Mildred said it was a wedding present from Sorella’s family. “They are so_ relieved,” Mildred told me. “A few years more, and Sorella would be too old for a baby.” One child was what the Fonsteins had, a son, Gilbert. He was said to be a prodigy in mathematics and physics. Some years down the line, Fonstein consulted me about the boy’s education. By then he had the money to send him to the best schools. Fonstein had improved and patented a thermostat, and with Sorella’s indispensable help he became a rich man. She was a tiger wife, without her, he was to tell me, there would have been no patent. “My company would have stolen me blind. I wouldn’t be the man you’re looking at today.”
I then examined the Fonstein who stood before me. He was wearing an Italian shirt, a French necktie, and his orthopedic boot was British-made—bespoke on Jermyn Street. With that heel he might have danced the flamenco. How different from the crude Polish article, boorishly ill-made, in which he had hobbled across Europe and escaped from prison in Rome. That_ boot, as he dodged the Nazis, he had dreaded to take off, nights, for if it had been stolen he would have been caught and killed in his short-legged nakedness. The SS would not have bothered to drive him into a cattle car.
How pleased his rescuer, Billy Rose, sh
ould have been to see the Fonstein of today: the pink, white-collared Italian shirt, the rue de Rivoli tie, knotted under Sorella’s instruction, the easy hang of the imported suit, the good color of his face, which, no longer stone white, had the full planes and the color of a ripe pomegranate.
But Fonstein and Billy never actually met. Fonstein had made it his business to see Billy, but Billy was never to see Fonstein. Letters were returned. Sometimes there were accompanying messages, never once in Billy’s own hand. Mr. Rose wished Harry Fonstein well but at the moment couldn’t give him an appointment. When Fonstein sent Billy a check accompanied by a note of thanks and the request that the money be used for charitable purposes, it was returned without acknowledgment. Fonstein came to his office and was turned away. When he tried one day to approach Billy at Sardi’s he was intercepted by one of the restaurant’s personnel. You weren’t allowed to molest celebrities here.
Finding his way blocked, Fonstein said to Billy in his Galician-Chinese singsong, “I came to tell you I’m one of the people you rescued in Italy.” Billy turned toward the wall of his booth, and Fonstein was escorted to the street.
In the course of years, long letters were sent. “I want nothing from you, not even to shake hands, but to speak man to man for a minute.”
It was Sorella, back in Lakewood, who told me this, while Fonstein and my father were sunk in a trance over the chessboard. “Rose, that special party, won’t see Harry,” said Sorella.