by Saul Bellow
“If you had to come, you could have gone direct to Houston,” he said. “That’s where we go tomorrow.” I could see that he was fighting his brotherly feelings. They were heavily present still. Ulick had by no means gotten rid of them all.
“Oh, I didn’t mind the extra trip. And I had nothing special to do in New York.”
“Well, I have to go and look at some property this afternoon. You want to come with me or do you want to swim in the pool? It’s heated.” Last time I slid into his pool one of his great dogs had bitten me in the ankle and drawn quite a lot of blood. And I hadn’t come for the bathing, he knew that. He said, “Well, I’m pleased you’re here.” He turned away his powerful face and stared elsewhere while his brain, intensely trained in calculation, calculated his chances. “This operation is fucking up the kids’ Christmas,” he said, “and you’re not even going to be with yours.”
“I sent them a load of toys from F. A. O. Schwarz. I’m sorry to say I didn’t think of bringing presents for your boys.”
“What would you give them? They’ve got everything. It’s a goddamn guessing game to buy them a toy. I’m set for the operation. They kept me in bed for all the tests, up in Houston. I made a twenty-thousand-dollar donation to that joint in memory of Papa and Mama. And I’m ready for the operation except that I’m a few pounds overweight. Chuck, they saw you open and I even think the bastards lift the heart right out of your chest. Their team does these heart jobs by the thousands. I expect to be back in my office by the first of February. Are you fluid? Have you got about fifty thousand? I may be able to put you into something.”
From time to time Ulick telephoned me from Texas and said, “Send me a check for thirty, no, make it forty-five.” I simply wrote the check and mailed it. There were no receipts. Occasionally a contract arrived six months later. Invariably my money was doubled. It pleased him to do this for me, although it also irritated him that I failed to understand the details of these deals and that I didn’t appreciate his business subtlety. As for my profits, they had been entrusted to Zitterbloom, they paid Denise, they subsidized Thaxter, they were taken by the IRS, they kept Renata in the Lake Point Towers, they went to Tomchek and Srole.
“What have you got in mind?” I said.
“A few things,” he said. “You know what bank rates are. I’d be surprised if they didn’t hit eighteen percent before long.” Three different television sets were turned on, adding to the streaming colors of the room. The wallpaper was gold-embossed. The carpet seemed a continuation of the dazzling lawn. Indoors and outdoors fell into each other through a picture window, garden and bedroom mingling. There was a blue Exercycle, and there were trophies on the shelves, for Hortense was a famous golfer. Enormous closets, specially built, were thick with suits and with dozens of pairs of shoes arranged on long racks and with hundreds of neckties and stacks of hatboxes. Showy, proud of his possessions, in matters of taste he was a fastidious critic and he reviewed my appearance as if he were the Douglas Mac-Arthur of dress. “You were always a slob, Chuckie, and now you spend money on clothes and go to a tailor, but you’re still a slob. Who sold you those goddamn shoes? And that horse-blanket overcoat? Hustlers used to sell shoes like that to the greenhorns fifty years ago with a buttonhook for a bonus. Now take this coat.” He threw into my arms a black vicuna with a Chesterfield collar. “Down here it’s too warm to get much use out of it. It’s yours. The boys will take your coat to the stable, where it belongs. Take it off, put this on.” I did as I was ordered. This was the form his affection took. When it was necessary to resist Ulick, I did it silently. He put on a pair of double-knit slacks, beautifully cut, with flaring cuffs, but he couldn’t fasten them over his belly. He shouted to Hortense in the next room that the cleaner had shrunk them.
“Yah, they shrank,” she answered.
This was the style of the house. None of your Ivy League muttering and subdued statement.
I was given a pair of his shoes, too. Our feet were exactly the same. So were the big extruded eyes and the straight noses. I don’t clearly know what these features did for me. His gave him an autocratic look. And now that I was beginning to think of every earthly life as one of a series, I puzzled over Ulick’s spiritual career. What had he been before? Biological evolution and Western History could never create a person like Ulick in sixty-five lousy years. He had brought his deeper qualities here with him. Whatever his earlier form, I was inclined to believe that in this life, as a rich rough American, he had lost some ground. America was a harsh trial to the human spirit. I shouldn’t be surprised if it set everyone back. Certain higher powers seemed to be in abeyance, and the sentient part of the soul had everything its own way, with its material conveniences. Oh the creature comforts, the animal seductions. Now which journalist was it that had written that there were countries in which our garbage would have been delicatessen?
“So you’re going to Europe. Any special reason? Are you on a job? Or just running, as usual? You never go alone, always with some bim. What kind of cunt is taking you this time? … I can force myself into these slacks, but we’re going to do a lot of driving and I won’t be comfortable.” He pulled them off angrily and threw them on the bed. “I’ll tell you where we’re going. There’s a gorgeous piece of property, forty or fifty acres of a peninsula into the Gulf and it belongs to some Cubans. Some general who was dictator before Batista ripped it off years ago. I’ll tell you what his racket was. When currency wore out, the old bills were picked up at the Havana banks and trucked away to be destroyed. But this currency was never burned. No sir, it was shipped out of the country and deposited to the old general’s account. With this he bought US property. Now the descendants are sitting on it. They’re no damn good, a bunch of playboys. The daughters and daughters-in-law are after these playboy heirs to act like men. All they do is sail and drink and sleep and whore and play polo. Drugs, fast cars, planes—you know the scene. The women want a developer to size this property up. Bid on it. It’ll take millions, Charlie, it’s a whole damn peninsula. I’ve got some Cubans of my own, exiles who knew these heirs in the old country. I believe we have the inside track. By the way, I got a letter about you from Denise’s lawyer. You owned one point in my Peony Condominiums and they wanted to know what it was worth. Did you have to tell them everything? Who is this fellow Pinsker?”
“I had no choice. They subpoenaed my tax returns.”
“Ah, you poor nut, you overeduca.ted boob. You come from good stock, and you weren’t born dumb, you thrust it on yourself. And if you had to be an intellectual, why couldn’t you be the tough type, a Herman Kahn or a Milton Friedman, one of those aggressive guys you read in The Wall Street Journal! You with your Woodrow Wilson and other dead numbers. I can’t read the crap you write. Two sentences and I’m yawning. Pa should have slapped you around the way he did me. It would have woken you up. Being his favorite did you no good. Then you up and marry this fierce broad. She’d fit in with the Sym-bionese or the Palestine Liberation terrorists. When I saw her sharp teeth and the way her hair grew twisty at the temples I knew you were bound for outer space. You were born trying to prove that life on this earth was not feasible. Okay, your case is practically complete. Christ I wish I had your physical condition. You still play ball with Langobardi? Christ they say he’s a gentleman now. Tell me, how is your lawsuit?”
“Pretty bad. The court ordered me to post a bond. Two hundred thousand.”
The figure made him pale. “They tied up your money? You’ll never see it again. Who’s your lawyer, still your boyhood chum, that fat-ass Szathmar?”
“No, it’s Forrest Tomchek.”
“I knew Tomchek at law school. The legal-statesman type of crook. He’s smoother than a suppository, only his suppositories contain dynamite. And the judge is who?”
“A man named Urbanovich.”
“Him I don’t know. But he’s been ruling against you and it’s all clear to me. They’ve gotten to him. Dirty work at the crossroads. He’s using you to
make some payoff. He owes somebody something and he’s settling the score with your dough. I’ll check it out for you right now. You know a guy named Flanko, in Chicago?”
“Solomon Flanko? He’s a Syndicate lawyer.”
“He’ll know.” Ulick rapidly punched out the numbers on the telephone. “Flanko,” he said when he got through, “this is Julius Citrine down in Texas. There’s a guy in domestic-relations court named Urbanovich. Is he on the take?” He listened keenly. He said, “Thanks, Flanko, I’ll get back to you later.” After hanging up, he chose a sport shirt. He said, “No, Urbanovich doesn’t seem to be on the take. He wants to make a record on the bench. He’s very slick. He’s callous. If he is after you, you and that money are going to be separated like yolks and whites. Okay, write it off. We’ll make you some more. Did you put anything aside?”
“No.”
“Nothing in a box? No numbered account anywhere? No bagman?”
“No.”
He stared at me sternly. And then his face, grooved with age with worry and with indurated attitudes, relented somewhat and he smiled under the Acheson mustache. “To think that we should be brothers,” he said. “It’s positively a subject for a poem. You ought to suggest it to your pal Von Humboldt Fleisher. What ever happened, by the way, to your sidekick the poet? I came in a cab and took you night-clubbing in New York once in the Fifties. We had fun at the Copacabana, you remember?”
“That night on the town was great. Humboldt loved it. He’s dead,” I said.
Ulick put on a shirt of flame-blue Italian silk, a beautiful garment. It seemed to hunger for an ideal body. He drew it over his chest. On my last visit Ulick was slender and wore magnificent hip-huggers, melon-striped and ornamented on the seams with Mexican silver pesos. He had achieved this new figure in a crash diet. But even then the floor of his Cadillac was covered with peanut shells, and now he was fat again. I saw the fat old body which I had always known and which was completely familiar to me—the belly, the freckles on his undisciplined upper arms, and his elegant hands. I still saw in him the obese, choked-looking boy, the lustful conniving kid whose eyes continually pleaded not guilty. I knew him inside-out, even physically, remembering how he gashed open his thigh on a broken bottle in a Wisconsin creek fifty years ago and that I stared at the yellow fat, layers and layers of fat through which the blood had to well. I knew the mole on the back of his wrist, his nose broken and reset, his fierce false look of innocence, his snorts, and his smells. Wearing an orange football jersey, breathing through the mouth (before we could afford the nose-job), he held me on his shoulders so that I could watch the GAR parade on Michigan Boulevard. The year must have been 1923. He held me by the legs. His own legs were bulky in ribbed black stockings and he wore billowing, bloomerlike golf knickers. Afterward he stood behind me in the men’s room of the Public Library, the high yellow urinals like open sarcophagi, helping me to fish my child’s thing out from the complicated underclothes. In 1928 he became a baggage-smasher at American Express. Then he worked at the bus terminal changing the huge tires. He slugged it out with bullies in the street, and was a bully himself. He put himself through the Lewis Institute, nights, and through law school. He made and lost fortunes. He took his own Packard to Europe in the early Fifties and had it airlifted from Paris to Rome because driving over mountains bored him. He spent sixty or seventy thousand dollars a year on himself alone. I never forgot any fact about him. This flattered him. It also made him sore. And if I put so much heart into remembering, what did it prove? That I loved Ulick? There are clinical experts who think that such completeness of memory is a hysterical symptom. Ulick himself said he had no memory except for business transactions.
“So that screwball friend of yours Von Humboldt is dead. He talked complicated gobbledygook and was worse dressed than you, but I liked him. He sure could drink. What did he die of?”
“Brain hemorrhage.” I had to tell this virtuous lie. Heart disease was taboo today. “He left me a legacy.”
“What, he had dough?”
“No. Just papers. But when I went to the nursing home to get them from his old uncle, whom should I run into but Menasha Klinger.”
“Don’t tell me—Menasha! The dramatic tenor, the redhead! The fellow from Ypsilanti who boarded with us in Chicago? I never saw such a damn deluded crazy bastard. He couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket. Spent his factory wages on lessons and concert tickets. The one time he tried to do himself some good he caught a dose, and then the clap-doctor shared his wages with the music teacher. Is he old enough to be in a nursing home? Well, I’m in my middle sixties and he was about eight years ahead of me. You know what I found the other day? The deed to the family burial plots in Waldheim. There are two graves left. You wouldn’t want to buy mine, would you? I’m not going to lie around. I’m having myself cremated. I need action. I’d rather go into the atmosphere. Look for me in the weather reports.”
He too had a thing about the grave. He said to me on the day of Papa’s funeral, “The weather is too damn warm and nice. It’s awful. Did you ever see such a perfect afternoon?” The artificial grass carpet was rolled back by the diggers and under it in the tan sandy ground was a lovely cool hole. Aloft, far behind the pleasant May weather stood something like a cliff of coal. Aware of this coal cliff bearing down on the flowery cemetery—lilac time!—I broke out into a sweat. A small engine began to lower the coffin on smooth-running canvas bands. There never was a man so unwilling to go down, to pass through the bitter gates as Father Citrine—never a man so unfit to lie still. Papa, that great sprinter, that broken-field runner, and now brought down by the tackle of heavy death.
Ulick wanted to show me how Hortense had redecorated the children’s rooms, he said. I knew that he was looking for candy bars. In the kitchen the cupboards were padlocked, and the refrigerator was out of bounds. “She’s absolutely right,” he said, “I must stop eating. I know you always said it was all false appetite. You advised me to put my finger down my throat and gag when I thought I was hungry. What’s that supposed to do, reverse the diaphragm muscle or something? You were always a strong-willed fellow and a jock, chinning yourself and swinging clubs and dumbbells and punching the bag in the closet and running around the block and hanging from the trees like Tar-zan of the Apes. You must have had a bad conscience about what you did when you locked yourself in the toilet. You’re a sexy little bastard, never mind your big-time mental life. All this fucking art! I never understood the play you wrote. I went away in the second act. The movie was better, but even that had dreary parts. My old friend Ev Dirksen had a literary period, too. Did you know the Senator wrote poems for greeting cards? But he was a deep old phony—he was a real guy, as cynical as they come. He at least kidded his own hokum. Say, listen, I knew the country was headed for trouble as soon as there began to be big money in art.”
“I don’t know about that,” I said. “To make capitalists out of artists was a humorous idea of some depth. America decided to test the pretensions of the esthetic by applying the dollar measure. Maybe you read the transcript of Nixon’s tape where he said he’d have no part of this literature and art shit. That was because he was out of step. He lost touch with the spirit of Capitalism. Misunderstood it completely.”
“Here, here, don’t start one of your lectures on me. You were always spouting some theory to us at the table—Marx, or Darwin, or Schopenhauer, or Oscar Wilde. If it wasn’t one damn thing it was another. You had the biggest collection of Modern Library books on the block. And I’d bet you fifty to one you’re ass-deep in a crank theory this minute. You couldn’t live without it. Let’s get going. We have to pick up the two Cubans and that Boston Irishman who’s coming along. I never went for this art stuff, did I?”
“You tried becoming a photographer,” I said.
“Me? When was that?”
“When they had funerals in the Russian Orthodox church—you remember, the stucco one with the onion dome on Leavitt, corner of Haddon?—they opened the cof
fins on the front steps and took pictures of the family with the corpse. You tried to make a deal with the priest and be appointed official photographer.”
“Did I? Good for me!” It pleased Ulick to hear this. But somehow he smiled quietly, with mild fixity, musing at himself. He felt his hanging cheeks and said that he had shaved too close today, his skin was tender. It must have been a rising soreness from the breast that made him touchy about the face. This visit of mine, with its intimations of final parting, bothered him. He acknowledged that I had done right to come but he loathed me for it, too. I could see it his way. Why did I come flapping around him with my love, like a death-pest? There was no way for me to win, because if I hadn’t come here he’d have held it against me. He needed to be wronged. He luxuriated in anger, and he kept accounts.
For fifty years, ritualistically, he had been repeating the same jokes, laughing at them because they were so infantile and stupid. “You know who’s in the hospital? Sick people”; and, “I took first prize in history once, but they seen me taking it and made me put it back.” And in the days when I still argued with him I would say, “You’re a real populist and know-nothing, you’ve given your Russian Jewish brains away out of patriotism. You’re a self-made ignoramus and a true American.” But I had long ago stopped saying such things. I knew that he shut himself up in his office with a box of white raisins and read Arnold Toynbee and R. H. Tawney, or Cecil Roth and Salo Baron on Jewish history. When any of this reading cropped up in conversation he made sure to mispronounce the key words.