by Saul Bellow
“You put it all in the past tense.”
“That’s where it belongs. A while back, she passed away in a sanitarium near White Plains. I used to visit her. You might say a bond formed between us. She had no family to speak of….”
“A Yiddish actress, wasn’t she?”
“True, and she was personally theatrical, but not only from nostalgia for a vanished art—the Vilna Troupe, or Second Avenue. It was also because she had a combative personality. There was lots of sophistication in that character, lots of purpose. Plenty of patience. Plus a hell of a lot of stealth.”
“What did she need the stealth for?”
“For many years she kept an eye on Billy’s doings. She put everything in a journal. As well as she could, she maintained a documented file—notes on comings and goings, dated records of telephone conversations, carbon copies of letters.”
“Personal or business?”
“You couldn’t draw a clear line.”
“What’s the good of all this material?”
“I can’t say exactly.”
“Did she hate the man? Was she trying to get him?”
Actually, I don’t believe she was. She was very tolerant—as much as she could be, leading a nickel-and-dime life and feeling mistreated. But I don’t think she wanted to nail him by his iniquities. He was a celeb, to her—that was what she called him. She ate at the Automat; he was a celeb, so he took his meals at Sardi’s, Dempsey’s, or in Sherman Billingsley’s joint. No hard feelings over it. The Automat gave good value for your nickels, and she used to say she had a healthier diet.”
I seem to recall she was badly treated.”
‘So was everybody else, and they all said they detested him. What did your Mend Wolfe tell you.’
“He said that Billy had a short fuse. That he was a kind of botch. Still, it made Wolfe ecstatic to have a Broadway connection. There was glamour in the village if you were one of Billy’s ghosts. It gave Wolfe an edge with smart girls who came downtown from Vassar or Smith. He didn’t have first-class intellectual credentials in the Village, he wasn’t a big-time wit, but he was eager to go forward, meaning that he was prepared to take abuse—and they had plenty of it to give from the top wise-guy theoreticians, the heavyweight pundits, in order to get an education in modern life—which meant you could combine Kierkegaard and Birdland in the same breath. He was a big chaser. But he didn’t abuse or sponge on girls. When he was seducing, he started the young lady off on a box of candy. The next stage, always the same, was a cashmere sweater—both candy and cashmere from a guy who dealt in stolen goods. When the affair was over, the chicks were passed on to somebody more crude and lower on the totem pole….”
Here I made a citizen’s arrest, mentally—I checked myself. It was the totem pole that did it. A Jew in Jerusalem, and one who was able to explain where we were at—how Moses had handed on the law to Joshua, and Joshua to the Judges, the Judges to the Prophets, the Prophets to the Rabbis, so that at the end of the line, a Jew from secular America (a diaspora within a diaspora) could jive glibly about the swinging Village scene of the fifties and about totem poles, about Broadway lowlife and squalor. Especially if you bear in mind that this particular Jew couldn’t say what place he held in this great historical procession. I had concluded long ago that the Chosen were chosen to read God’s mind. Over the millennia, this turned out to be a zero-sum game.
I wasn’t about to get into that.
“So old Mrs. Hamet died,” I said, in a sad tone. I recalled her face as Fonstein had described it, whiter than confectioners’ sugar. It was almost as though I had known her.
“She wasn’t exactly a poor old thing,” said Sorella. “Nobody asked her to participate, but she was a player nevertheless.”
“She kept this record—why?”
“Billy obsessed her to a bizarre degree. She believed that they belonged together because they were similar—defective people. The unfit, the rejects, coming together to share each other’s burden.”
“Did she want to be Mrs. Rose?”
“No, no—that was out of the question. He only married celebs. She had no PR value—she was old, no figure, no complexion, no money, no status. Too late even for penicillin to save her. But she did make it her business to know everything about him. When she let herself go, she was extremely obscene. Obscenity was linked to everything. She certainly knew all the words. She could sound like a man.”
“And she thought she should tell you? Share her research?”
“Me, yes. She approached us through Harry, but the friendship was with me. Those two seldom met, almost never.”
“And she left you her files?”
“A journal plus supporting evidence.”
“Ugh!” I said. The tea had steeped too long and was dark. Lemon lightened the color, and sugar was just what I needed late in the afternoon to pick me up.
I said to Sorella, “Is this journal any good to you? You don’t need any help from Billy.”
“Certainly not. America, as they say, has been good to us. However, it’s quite a document she left. I think you’d find it so.”
“If I cared to read it.”
“If you started, you’d go on, all right.”
She was offering it. She had brought it with her to Jerusalem! And why had she done that? Not to show to me, certainly. She couldn’t have known that she was going to meet me here. We had been out of touch for years. I was not on good terms with the family, you see. I had married a Wasp lady, and my father and I had quarreled. I was a Philadelphian now, without contacts in New Jersey. New Jersey to me was only a delay en route to New York or Boston. A psychic darkness. Whenever possible I omitted New Jersey. Anyway, I chose not to read the journal.
Sorella said, “You may be wondering what use I might make of it.”
Well, I wondered, of course, why she hadn’t left Mrs. Hamet’s journal at home. Frankly, I didn’t care to speculate on her motives. What I understood clearly was that she was oddly keen to have me read it. Maybe she wanted my advice. “Has your husband gone through it?” I said.
“He wouldn’t understand the language.”
“And it would embarrass you to translate it.”
“That’s more or less it,” said Sorella.
“So it’s pretty hairy in places? You said she knew the words. Clinical stuff didn’t scare Mrs. Hamet, did it.”
“In these days of scientific sex studies, there’s not much that’s new and shocking,” said Sorella.
“The shock comes from the source. When it’s someone in the public eye.”
“Yes, I figured that.”
Sorella was a proper person. She was not suggesting that I share any lewdnesses with her. Nothing was further from her than evil communications. She had never in her life seduced anyone—I’d bet a year’s income on that. She was as stable in character as she was immense in her person. The square on the bosom of her dress, with its scalloped design, was like a repudiation of all trivial mischief. The scallops themselves seemed to me to be a kind of message in cursive characters, warning against kinky interpretations, perverse attributions.
She was silent. She seemed to say: Do you doubt me?
Well, this was Jerusalem, and I am unusually susceptible to places. In a moment I had touched base with the Crusaders, with Caesar and Christ, the kings of Israel. There was also the heart beating in her (in me too) with the persistence or fidelity, a faith in the necessary continuation of a radical mystery—don’t ask me to spell it out.
I wouldn’t have felt this way in blue-collar Trenton.
Sorella was too big a person to play any kind of troublemaking games or to create minor mischief. Her eyes were like vents of atmospheric blue, and their backing (the camera obscura) referred you to the black of universal space, where there is no object to reflect the flow of invisible light.
Clarification came in a day or two, from an item in that rag the Post._ Expected soon in Jerusalem were Billy Rose and the designer, artistic
planner, and architectural sculptor Isamu Noguchi. Magnificent Rose, always a friend of Israel, was donating a sculpture garden here, filling it with his collection of masterpieces. He had persuaded Noguchi to lay it out for him—or, if that wasn’t nifty enough, to preside over its creation, for Billy, as the reporter said, had the philanthropic impulses but was hopeless with the aesthetic requirements. Knew what he wanted; even more, he knew what he didn’t_want.
Any day now they would arrive. They would meet with Jerusalem planning officials, and the prime minister would invite them to dinner.
I couldn’t talk to Sorella about this. The Fonsteins had gone to Haifa. Their driver would take them to Nazareth and the Galil, up to the Syrian border. Gen-nesaret, Capernaum, the Mount of the Beatitudes were on the itinerary. There was no need for questions; I now understood what Sorella was up to. From the poor old Hamet lady, possibly (that sapper, that mole, that dedicated researcher), she had had advance notice, and it wouldn’t have been hard to learn the date of Billy’s arrival with the eminent Noguchi. Sorella, if she liked, could read Billy the riot act, using Mrs. Hamet’s journal as her promptbook. I wondered just how this would happen. The general intention was all I could make out. If Billy was ingenious in getting maximum attention (half magnificence, half baloney and smelling like it), if Noguchi was ingenious in the department of beautiful settings, it remained to be seen what Sorella could come up with in the way of ingenuity.
Technically, she was a housewife. On any questionnaire or application she would have put a check in the housewife box. None of what goes with that—home decoration, the choice of place mats, flatware, wallpapers, cooking utensils, the control of salt, cholesterol, carcinogens, preoccupation with hairdressers and nail care, cosmetics, shoes, dress lengths, the time devoted to shopping malls, department stores, health clubs, luncheons, cocktails—none of these things, or forces, or powers (for I see them also as powers, or even spirits), could keep a woman like Sorella in subjection. She was no more a housewife than Mrs. Hamet had been a secretary. Mrs. Hamet was a dramatic artist out of work, a tubercular, moribund, and finally demonic old woman. In leaving her dynamite journal to Sorella, she made a calculated choice, dazzlingly appropriate. Since Billy and Noguchi arrived at the King David while Sorella and Fonstein were taking time off on the shore of Galilee, and although I was busy with Mnemosyne business, I nevertheless kept an eye on the newcomers as if I had been assigned by Sorella to watch and report. Predictably, Billy made a stir among the King David guests—mainly Jews from the United States. To some, it was a privilege to see a legendary personality in the lobby and the dining room, or on the terrace. For his part, he didn’t encourage contacts, didn’t particularly want to know anybody. He had the high color of people who are observed—the cynosure flush.
Immediately he made a scene in the pillared, carpeted lobby. El Al had lost his luggage. A messenger from the prime minister’s office came to tell him that it was being traced. It might have gone on to Jakarta. Billy said, “You better fuckin’ find it fast. I order_ you! All I got is this suit I traveled in, and how’m I supposed to shave, brush my teeth, change socks, underpants, and sleep without pajamas?” The government would take care of this, but the messenger was forced to hear that the shirts were made at Sulka’s and the suits by the Fifth Avenue tailor who served Winchell, or Jack Dempsey, or top executives at RCA. The designer must have chosen a model from the bird family. The cut of Billy’s jacket suggested the elegance of thrushes or robins, dazzling fast walkers, fat in the breast and folded wings upcurved. There the analogy stopped. The rest was complex vanity, peevish haughtiness, cold outrage—a proud-peewee performance, of which the premises were that he was a considerable figure, a Broadway personage requiring special consideration, and that he himself owed it to his high show-biz standing to stamp and scream and demand and threaten. Yet all the while, if you looked close at the pink, histrionic, Oriental little face, you saw a small but distinct private sector. It contained quite different data. Billy looked as if he, the personal_ Billy, had other concerns, arising from secret inner reckonings. He had come up from the gutter. That was okay, though, in America the land of opportunity. If he had some gutter in him still, he didn’t have to hide it much. In the U. S. A. you could come from nowhere and still stand tall, especially if you had the cash. If you pushed Billy he’d retaliate, and if you can retaliate you’ve got your self-respect. He could even be a cheapie, it wasn’t worth the trouble of covering up. He didn’t give a shit who thought what. On the other hand, if he wanted a memorial in Jerusalem, a cultural beauty spot, that_ noble gift was a Billy Rose concept, and don’t you forget it. Such components made Billy worth looking at. He combed his hair back like George Raft, or that earlier dude sweetheart Rudolph Valentino. (In the Valentino days, Billy had been a tunesmith in Tin Pan Alley—had composed a little, stolen a little, promoted a whole lot; he still held valuable copyrights.) His look was simultaneously weak and strong. He could claim nothing classic that a well-bred Wasp might claim—a man, say, whose grandfather had gone to Groton, whose remoter ancestors had had the right to wear a breastplate and carry a sword. Weapons were a no-no for Jews in those remoter times, as were blooded horses.
Or the big wars. But the best you could do in the present age if you were of privileged descent was to dress in drab expensive good taste and bear yourself with what was left of the Brahmin or Knickerbocker style. By now that, too, was tired and hokey. For Billy, however, the tailored wardrobe was indispensable—like having an executive lavatory of your own. He couldn’t present himself without his suits, and this was what fed his anger with El Al and also his despair. This, as he threw his weight around, was how I read him. Noguchi, in what I fancied to be a state of Zen calm, also watched silently as Billy went through his nerve-storm display.
In quieter moments, when he was in the lounge drinking fruit juice and reading messages from New York, Billy looked as if he couldn’t stop lamenting the long sufferings of the Jews and, in addition, his own defeats at the hands of fellow Jews. My guess was that his defeats by lady Jews were the most deeply wounding of all. He could win against men. Women, if I was correctly informed, were too much for him.
If he had been an old-time Eastern European Jew, he would have despised such sex defeats. His main connection being with his God, he would have granted no such power to a woman. The sexual misery you read in Billy’s looks was an American torment—straight American. Broadway Billy was, moreover, in the pleasure business. Everything, on his New York premises, was resolved in play, in jokes, games, laughs, put-ons, cock teases. And his business efforts were crowned with money. Uneasy lies the head that has no money crown to wear. Billy didn’t have to worry about that._
Combine these themes, and you can understand Billy’s residual wistfulness, his resignation to forces he couldn’t control. What he could control he controlled with great effectiveness. But there was so much that counted—how it counted! And how well he knew that he could do nothing about it.
The Fonsteins returned from Galilee sooner than expected. “Gorgeous, but more for the Christians,” Sorella said to me. “For instance, the Mount of Beatitudes.” She also said, “There wasn’t a rowboat big enough for me to sit in. As for swimming, Harry went in, but I didn’t bring a bathing suit.”
Her comment on Billy’s lost luggage was “It must have embarrassed the hell out of the government. He came to build them a major tourist attraction. If he had kept on hollering, I could see Ben-Gurion himself sitting down at the sewing machine to make him a suit.”
The missing bags by then had been recovered—fine-looking articles, like slim leather trunks, brass-bound, and monogrammed. Not from Tiffany, but from the Italian manufacturer who would have supplied Tiffany if Tiffany had sold luggage (obtained through contacts, like the candy and cashmeres of Wolfe the ghostwriter: why should you pay full retail price just because you’re a multimillionaire?). Billy gave a press interview and complimented Israel on being part of the modern world. The
peevish shadow left his face, and he and Noguchi went out every day to confer on the site of the sculpture garden. The atmosphere at the King David became friendlier. Billy stopped hassling the desk clerks, and the clerks for their part stopped lousing him up. Billy on arrival had made the mistake of asking one of them how much to tip the porter who carried his briefcase to his suite. He said he was not yet at home with the Israeli currency. The clerk had flared up. It made him indignant that a man of such wealth should be miserly with nickels and dimes, and he let him have it. Billy saw to it that the clerk was disciplined by the management. When he heard of this, Fonstein said that in Rome a receptionist in a class hotel would never in the world have made a scene with one of the guests.
“Jewish assumptions,” he said. “Not clerks and guests, but one Jew letting another Jew have it—plain talk.”
I had expected Harry Fonstein to react strongly to Billy’s presence—a guest in the same hotel at prices only the affluent could afford. Fonstein, whom Billy had saved from death, was no more than an undistinguished Jewish American, two tables away in the restaurant. And Fonstein was strong-willed. Under no circumstances would he have approached Billy to introduce himself or to confront him: “I am the man your organization smuggled out of Rome. You brought me to Ellis Island and washed your hands of me, never gave a damn about the future of this refugee. Cut me at Sardi’s.” No, no, not Harry Fonstein. He understood that there is such a thing as making too much of the destiny of an individual. Besides, it’s not really in us nowadays to extend ourselves, to become involved in the fortunes of anyone who happens to approach us.
“Mr. Rose, I am the person you wouldn’t see—couldn’t fit into your schedule.” A look of scalding irony on Fonstein’s retributive face. “Now the two of us, in God’s eye of terrible judgment, are standing here in this holy city…”
Impossible words, an impossible scenario. Nobody says such things, nor would anyone seriously listen if they were said.