Please, please, Carlos. Don’t speak of it. More than the heart can bear.
Cynthia’s finances were more than a little murky. Her husband, when they moved to New York, had worked for a publishing group that put out Family Days. Perhaps he got a bit overloaded on that, and he squared the circle, so to speak, and shifted to Liberty, when that magazine was around. He also shifted to an ignorant girl in the mail room. Cynthia was left to provide for her daughter, who quit Barnard College in her freshman year, took up with a boy from Columbia, and went up to New Hampshire with him to pursue carpentry and to produce two daughters. Cynthia had bits of trust funds from the old Baltimore emporium, from a childless uncle, and from her father, who declined the clothing business and went into a small local bank, not very successfully. He raised his nice, musical daughter, who ended up on the flute.
At last, toward noon, with the temperamental city sun shining one minute and disappearing the next, as if turning a corner, Cynthia found a sweater and put her arm through the arm of Carlos, and the odd tandem made its way down Lexington Avenue to the Chemical Bank. Inside the bank, the odd tandem became an alarming couple; Carlos like a thief avoiding eye contact with the teller, a young Indian woman in a sari, and Cynthia, in an old gentlewoman’s untidy fluster, withdrawing a thousand dollars in fifties and twenties.
They stood outside in humbling confusion until the money in two envelopes was passed into the hands of Carlos. Off in a gallop to the subway and to do the paperwork down there where they were impatiently holding the body of Zona. Alert the River Jordan Twenty-Four-Hour Funeral Service. And at last meet the train rolling down to Washington, D.C.; there a crunching change of cars, a wait, before wheeling through state after state, through West Virginia, passing the memory of the prehistoric Mound Builders and the rusting scaffolds of the anthracite-coal counties. On to the point of the Chattanooga Campaign, down to the grass and myrtle of the cemetery lying in the Alabama autumn. Journey’s end.
Adios, Carlos. Au revoir, Zona. Rest in peace in Opelika.
Cynthia recounted the dire circumstances to Joseph, who said, I loved Zona. A great hole in my life, this is. It’s like planting a field of seeds and none of them coming up. In a manner of speaking.
Cynthia said: Nothing for Planned Parenthood this year. But no matter, no matter.
Tony, informed, said: They love funerals.
[1993]
SAUL BELLOW
A FATHER-TO-BE
THE STRANGEST NOTIONS HAD A WAY of forcing themselves into Rogin’s mind. Just thirty-one and passable-looking, with short black hair, small eyes, but a high, open forehead, he was a research chemist, and his mind was generally serious and dependable. But on a snowy Sunday evening while this stocky man, buttoned to the chin in a Burberry coat and walking in his preposterous gait—feet turned outward—was going toward the subway, he fell into a peculiar state.
He was on his way to have supper with his fiancée. She had phoned him a short while ago and said, “You’d better pick up a few things on the way.”
“What do we need?”
“Some roast beef, for one thing. I bought a quarter of a pound coming home from my aunt’s.”
“Why a quarter of a pound, Joan?” said Rogin, deeply annoyed. “That’s just about enough for one good sandwich.”
“So you have to stop at a delicatessen. I had no more money.”
He was about to ask, “What happened to the thirty dollars I gave you on Wednesday?,” but he knew that would not be right.
“I had to give Phyllis money for the cleaning woman,” said Joan.
Phyllis, Joan’s cousin, was a young divorcée, extremely wealthy. The two women shared an apartment.
“Roast beef,” he said, “and what else?”
“Some shampoo, sweetheart. We’ve used up all the shampoo. And hurry, darling, I’ve missed you all day.”
“And I’ve missed you,” said Rogin, but to tell the truth he had been worrying most of the time. He had a younger brother whom he was putting through college. And his mother, whose annuity wasn’t quite enough in these days of inflation and high taxes, needed money, too. Joan had debts he was helping her to pay, for she wasn’t working. She was looking for something suitable to do. Beautiful, well-educated, aristocratic in her attitude, she couldn’t clerk in a dime store; she couldn’t model clothes (Rogin thought this made girls vain and stiff, and he didn’t want her to); she couldn’t be a waitress or a cashier. What could she be? Well, something would turn up, and meantime Rogin hesitated to complain. He paid her bills—the dentist, the department store, the osteopath, the doctor, the psychiatrist. At Christmas, Rogin almost went mad. Joan bought him a velvet smoking jacket with frog fasteners, a beautiful pipe, and a pouch. She bought Phyllis a garnet brooch, an Italian silk umbrella, and a gold cigarette holder. For other friends, she bought Dutch pewter and Swedish glassware. Before she was through, she had spent five hundred dollars of Rogin’s money. He loved her too much to show his suffering. He believed she had a far better nature than his. She didn’t worry about money. She had a marvelous character, always cheerful, and she really didn’t need a psychiatrist at all. She went to one because Phyllis did and it made her curious. She tried too much to keep up with her cousin, whose father had made millions in the rug business.
While the woman in the drugstore was wrapping the shampoo bottle, a clear idea suddenly arose in Rogin’s thoughts: Money surrounds you in life as the earth does in death. Superimposition is the universal law. Who is free? No one is free. Who has no burdens? Everyone is under pressure. The very rocks, the waters of the earth, beasts, men, children—everyone has some weight to carry. This idea was extremely clear to him at first. Soon it became rather vague, but it had a great effect nevertheless, as if someone had given him a valuable gift. (Not like the velvet smoking jacket he couldn’t bring himself to wear, or the pipe it choked him to smoke.) The notion that all were under pressure and affliction, instead of saddening him, had the opposite influence. It put him in a wonderful mood. It was extraordinary how happy he became and, in addition, clear-sighted. His eyes all at once were opened to what was around him. He saw with delight how the druggist and the woman who wrapped the shampoo bottle were smiling and flirting, how the lines of worry in her face went over into lines of cheer, and the druggist’s receding gums did not hinder his kidding and friendliness. And in the delicatessen, also, it was amazing how much Rogin noted and what happiness it gave him simply to be there.
DELICATESSENS on Sunday night, when all other stores are shut, will overcharge you ferociously, and Rogin would normally have been on guard, but he was not tonight, or scarcely so. Smells of pickle, sausage, mustard, and smoked fish overjoyed him. He pitied the people who would buy the chicken salad and chopped herring; they could do it only because their sight was too dim to see what they were getting—the fat flakes of pepper on the chicken, the soppy herring, mostly vinegar-soaked stale bread. Who would buy them? Late risers, people living alone, waking up in the darkness of the afternoon, finding their refrigerators empty, or people whose gaze was turned inward. The roast beef looked not bad, and Rogin ordered a pound.
While the storekeeper was slicing the meat, he yelled at a Puerto Rican kid who was reaching for a bag of chocolate cookies, “Hey, you want to pull me down the whole display on yourself? You, chico, wait a half a minute.” This storekeeper, though he looked like one of Pancho Villa’s bandits, the kind that smeared their enemies with syrup and staked them down on anthills, a man with toadlike eyes and stout hands made to clasp pistols hung around his belly, was not so bad. He was a New York man, thought Rogin—who was from Albany himself—a New York man toughened by every abuse of the city, trained to suspect everyone. But in his own realm, on the board behind the counter, there was justice. Even clemency.
The Puerto Rican kid wore a complete cowboy outfit—a green hat with white braid, guns, chaps, spurs, boots, and gauntlets—but he couldn’t speak any English. Rogin unhooked the cellophane bag of hard circu
lar cookies and gave it to him. The boy tore the cellophane with his teeth and began to chew one of those dry chocolate discs. Rogin recognized his state—the energetic dream of childhood. Once, he, too, had found these dry biscuits delicious. It would have bored him now to eat one.
What else would Joan like? Rogin thought fondly. Some strawberries? “Give me some frozen strawberries. And heavy cream. And some rolls, cream cheese, and some of those rubber-looking gherkins.”
“What rubber?”
“Those, deep green, with eyes. Some ice cream might be in order, too.”
He tried to think of a compliment, a good comparison, an endearment, for Joan when she’d open the door. What about her complexion? There was really nothing to compare her sweet, small, daring, shapely, timid, defiant, loving face to. How difficult she was, and how beautiful!
AS ROGIN went down into the stony, odorous, metallic, captive air of the subway, he was diverted by an unusual confession made by a man to his friend. These were two very tall men, shapeless in their winter clothes, as if their coats concealed suits of chain mail.
“So, how long have you known me?” said one.
“Twelve years.”
“Well, I have an admission to make,” he said. “I’ve decided that I might as well. For years I’ve been a heavy drinker. You didn’t know. Practically an alcoholic.”
But his friend was not surprised, and he answered immediately, “Yes, I did know.”
“You knew? Impossible! How could you?”
Why, thought Rogin, as if it could be a secret! Look at that long, austere, alcohol-washed face, that drink-ruined nose, the skin by his ears like turkey wattles, and those whiskey-saddened eyes.
“Well, I did know, though.”
“You couldn’t have. I can’t believe it.” He was upset, and his friend didn’t seem to want to soothe him. “But it’s all right now,” he said. “I’ve been going to a doctor and taking pills, a new revolutionary Danish discovery. It’s a miracle. I’m beginning to believe they can cure you of anything and everything. You can’t beat the Danes in science. They do everything. They turned a man into a woman.”
“That isn’t how they stop you from drinking, is it?”
“No. I hope not. This is only like aspirin. It’s super-aspirin. They call it the aspirin of the future. But if you use it, you have to stop drinking.”
Rogin’s illuminated mind asked of itself while the human tides of the subway swayed back and forth, and cars linked and transparent like fish bladders raced under the streets: How come he thought nobody would know what everybody couldn’t help knowing? And, as a chemist, he asked himself what kind of compound this new Danish drug might be, and started thinking about various inventions of his own, synthetic albumen, a cigarette that lit itself, a cheaper motor fuel. Ye gods, but he needed money! As never before. What was to be done? His mother was growing more and more difficult. On Friday night, she had neglected to cut up his meat for him, and he was hurt. She had sat at the table motionless, with her long-suffering face, severe, and let him cut his own meat, a thing she almost never did. She had always spoiled him and made his brother envy him. But what she expected now! Oh, Lord, how he had to pay, and it had never even occurred to him formerly that these things might have a price.
Seated, one of the passengers, Rogin recovered his calm, happy, even clairvoyant state of mind. To think of money was to think as the world wanted you to think; then you’d never be your own master. When people said they wouldn’t do something for love or money, they meant that love and money were opposite passions and one the enemy of the other. He went on to reflect how little people knew about this, how they slept through life, how small a light the light of consciousness was. Rogin’s clean, snub-nosed face shone while his heart was torn with joy at these deeper thoughts of our ignorance. You might take this drunkard as an example, who for long years thought his closest friends never suspected he drank. Rogin looked up and down the aisle for this remarkable knightly symbol, but he was gone.
However, there was no lack of things to see. There was a small girl with a new white muff; into the muff a doll’s head was sewn, and the child was happy and affectionately vain of it, while her old man, stout and grim, with a huge scowling nose, kept picking her up and resettling her in the seat, as if he were trying to change her into something else. Then another child, led by her mother, boarded the car, and this other child carried the very same doll-faced muff, and this greatly annoyed both parents. The woman, who looked like a difficult, contentious woman, took her daughter away. It seemed to Rogin that each child was in love with its own muff and didn’t even see the other, but it was one of his foibles to think he understood the hearts of little children.
A foreign family next engaged his attention. They looked like Central Americans to him. On one side the mother, quite old, dark-faced, white-haired, and worn out; on the other a son with the whitened, porous hands of a dishwasher. But what was the dwarf who sat between them—a son or a daughter? The hair was long and wavy and the cheeks smooth, but the shirt and tie were masculine. The overcoat was feminine, but the shoes—the shoes were a puzzle. A pair of brown oxfords with an outer seam like a man’s, but Baby Louis heels like a woman’s—a plain toe like a man’s, but a strap across the instep like a woman’s. No stockings. That didn’t help much. The dwarf’s fingers were beringed, but without a wedding band. There were small grim dents in the cheeks. The eyes were puffy and concealed, but Rogin did not doubt that they could reveal strange things if they chose and that this was a creature of remarkable understanding. He had for many years owned De la Mare’s “Memoirs of a Midget.” Now he took a resolve; he would read it. As soon as he had decided, he was free from his consuming curiosity as to the dwarf’s sex and was able to look at the person who sat beside him.
THOUGHTS very often grow fertile in the subway, because of the motion, the great company, the subtlety of the rider’s state as he rattles under streets and rivers, under the foundations of great buildings, and Rogin’s mind had already been strangely stimulated. Clasping the bag of groceries from which there rose odors of bread and pickle spice, he was following a train of reflections, first about the chemistry of sex determination, the X and Y chromosomes, hereditary linkages, the uterus, afterward about his brother as a tax exemption. He recalled two dreams of the night before. In one, an undertaker had offered to cut his hair, and he had refused. In another, he had been carrying a woman on his head. Sad dreams, both! Very sad! Which was the woman—Joan or Mother? And the undertaker—his lawyer? He gave a deep sigh, and by force of habit began to put together his synthetic albumen that was to revolutionize the entire egg industry.
Meanwhile, he had not interrupted his examination of the passengers and had fallen into a study of the man next to him. This was a man whom he had never in his life seen before but with whom he now suddenly felt linked through all existence. He was middle-aged, sturdy, with clear skin and blue eyes. His hands were clean, well-formed, but Rogin did not approve of them. The coat he wore was a fairly expensive blue check such as Rogin would never have chosen for himself. He would not have worn blue suede shoes, either, or such a faultless hat, a cumbersome felt animal of a hat encircled by a high, fat ribbon. There are all kinds of dandies, not all of them are of the flaunting kind; some are dandies of respectability, and Rogin’s fellow-passenger was one of these. His straight-nosed profile was handsome, yet he had betrayed his gift, for he was flat-looking. But in his flat way he seemed to warn people that he wanted no difficulties with them, he wanted nothing to do with them. Wearing such blue suede shoes, he could not afford to have people treading on his feet, and he seemed to draw about himself a circle of privilege, notifying all others to mind their own business and let him read his paper. He was holding a Tribune, and perhaps it would be overstatement to say that he was reading. He was holding it.
His clear skin and blue eyes, his straight and purely Roman nose—even the way he sat—all strongly suggested one person to Rogin: Joan. He tri
ed to escape the comparison, but it couldn’t be helped. This man not only looked like Joan’s father, whom Rogin detested; he looked like Joan herself. Forty years hence, a son of hers, provided she had one, might be like this. A son of hers? Of such a son, he himself, Rogin, would be the father. Lacking in dominant traits as compared with Joan, his heritage would not appear. Probably the children would resemble her. Yes, think forty years ahead, and a man like this, who sat by him knee to knee in the hurtling car among their fellow-creatures, unconscious participants in a sort of great carnival of transit—such a man would carry forward what had been Rogin.
This was why he felt bound to him through all existence. What were forty years reckoned against eternity! Forty years were gone, and he was gazing at his own son. Here he was. Rogin was frightened and moved. “My son! My son!” he said to himself, and the pity of it almost made him burst into tears. The holy and frightful work of the masters of life and death brought this about. We were their instruments. We worked toward ends we thought were our own. But no! The whole thing was so unjust. To suffer, to labor, to toil and force your way through the spikes of life, to crawl through its darkest caverns, to push through the worst, to struggle under the weight of economy, to make money—only to become the father of a fourth-rate man of the world like this, so flat-looking, with his ordinary, clean, rosy, uninteresting, self-satisfied, fundamentally bourgeois face. What a curse to have a dull son! A son like this, who could never understand his father. They had absolutely nothing, but nothing, in common, he and this neat, chubby, blue-eyed man. He was so pleased, thought Rogin, with all he owned and all he did and all he was that he could hardly unfasten his lip. Look at that lip, sticking up at the tip like a little thorn or egg tooth. He wouldn’t give anyone the time of day. Would this perhaps be general forty years from now? Would personalities be chillier as the world aged and grew colder? The inhumanity of the next generation incensed Rogin. Father and son had no sign to make to each other. Terrible! Inhuman! What a vision of existence it gave him. Man’s personal aims were nothing, illusion. The life force occupied each of us in turn in its progress toward its own fulfillment, trampling on our individual humanity, using us for its own ends like mere dinosaurs or bees, exploiting love heartlessly, making us engage in the social process, labor, struggle for money, and submit to the law of pressure, the universal law of layers, superimposition!
Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker Page 62