Boswell (27 page)

“Dry up,” she said, and moved off into the trees.

A youth, I thought. You can’t con youth with youth.

I strolled some more. I interrupted conversations; I started others. Almost everywhere I was welcome. Once I spotted Mrs. Gibbenjoy and ducked behind a tree until she passed by. Another time I saw Hope Fayespringer. I tried to turn away, but it was too late; she had seen me. She shook her head and made shame-shame everybody- knows-your-name with her fingers. I smiled and gave her my caught-with-my-fingers-in-the-cookie-jar special and followed it with my boys-will-be boys-bangsmasher. She sighed deeply and walked away.

At about eleven o’clock the band came out of the house and set up their stands near a fountain and played while people danced among the trees. Servants were on ladders everywhere, hurriedly stringing lights.

I had stopped drinking. I didn’t want to get sick. Throwing up is amusing, too, of course, but not for the person doing it.

I went up to people. “Have you seen Perlmutter?” I asked. “Is Perlmutter here yet?” “Where’s Perlmutter?”

I went up to a dark, Jewish-looking man. “Dr. Perlmutter?”

“Sorry,” he said.

“Sorry,” I said.

Gabrielle Gail was singing a Greek song while the band faked it. As phony as it sounded to me on records, it seemed beautiful there, and I danced in Greek on the lawn while she sang. I raised one leg and turned around slowly on my heel, digging a neat little divot in the Garden of the Gibbenjoys.

“Eureka,” somebody said.

“Is good my dance? You like it?” I said. “In old countrys is used to do all nights. Is ruins grow like flowers in my countrys. Is dig hole with heel once while dance and to discover temples. Like Dr. Morton Perlmutter.”

“Perlmutter’s an anthropologist.”

“Sure, but a terrific dancer.”

Gabrielle Gail stopped singing and I stopped dancing. “Is Perlmutter here?” I asked.

“Over there,” someone said, pointing to a group of people about fifty feet away. From where I stood, they looked like players in a huddle. The moonlight shone on the backs of evening dresses and dinner jackets. Strangely, the formal dress increased the impression that I was looking at some sort of a team of athletes.

“What are they doing?” I asked.

“Listening,” the man said who had pointed out the group. “The little Yid is making a speech.”

I walked toward them. As I got closer I saw that even more people than I thought were gathered around Perlmutter. The ones in the back were standing behind others who sat on the damp grass. I thought about the abandon of the rich, of their scorn for the indelible stains of chlorophyll. Real class, I thought. I moved closer, stalking the group from an oblique angle. (I have learned never to waste an important first view from a conventional position.) I walked past them, tracing behind their backs their semicircle on the lawn. Going by quickly, my gaze fixed on the interstices between their ears, I looked instinctively downward where Perlmutter appeared and disappeared rapidly like an object seen through the pickets in a fence. When I had twice moved past them in this way, I made a place for myself at one end of the semicircle.

My first thought was that something terrible had happened to Perlmutter and that these people had gathered around to watch while he died. He was stretched out in front of me on his belly, moving erotically up and down. In his left hand was a fistful of earth which he kneaded through his fingers.

“Like that,” he said suddenly, sitting up. “None of this occidental crap about beds or anything like that. They’ll screw in rivers, in fields, on the sides of mountains. I’ve seen them nail each other amongst a herd of their sheep, and on the day’s catch from the sea. You understand? Always against some natural background. Never in a house. Now, you noticed I had some earth in my hands. That’s necessary. The man holds one clod and the woman another. They smear it over each other’s organs when they begin and again when they finish. It’s very clear. ‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.’”

“That’s amazing,” a woman said.

“What’s so amazing about it, lady?” Perlmutter demanded.

“Well, it’s amazing, that’s all,” the woman said uneasily.

“There I beg to disagree,” Perlmutter said fiercely. “Where are my pills? Where are they? They must have dropped out of my pocket during the demonstration. Who has a flashlight? Darling, run get a flashlight from the house. Ask for the gardener. The gardener has to come out sometimes in the middle of the night after rainstorms to see the damage to the flowers. He’d have a flashlight.”

“Here they are, Doctor,” a man said, handing him a small flat box.

“Thank you.” Perlmutter opened the box and took out two shiny white pills and popped them into his mouth. He waited until they dissolved before he spoke again. “Interesting about these pills,” he said. “There’s a direct correlation between a society and the form of its medicines. In Ur-societies—in no place in my forty-seven published works do I ever use the pejorative word ‘primitive’—among people whose cultures the lady here describes as ‘amazing,’ the medicines are always taken in their raw states. Bark. Herbs. Grasses. Flowers. That’s natural, of course, but I mean they aren’t even
cooked.
But wait. In cultures like Tahiti where the people have seen Europeans—let’s face it, white men are Europeans—but live apart from them, they begin to prepare the medicines. The bark is scraped, the flowers are pressed for their juices. Now, in only partially industrialized societies, or in economically underprivileged areas like Poland or Nazi Spain, the medicines are almost invariably in a liquid solution. Only in technocracies do you find tablets, pills. Why? It’s no cheaper to prepare a liquid solution than a pill. The only reason for this phenomenon is that a liquid solution is closer to a natural form and has a counterpart in nature—water, sap, flowing lava, et cetera. The pill, however, has no counterpart in nature and thus flourishes only in a society like ours.”

“That’s amazing,” the same woman said.

Perlmutter glared at her. “It’s obvious to me, lady, that you’ve had no formal intercourse either with science or with scientists. Everything
amazes
you! The world exists as a fiction for you, does it?” He put another pill in his mouth and, impatient for it to dissolve, began to speak thickly, careful not to crunch it with his teeth. He had a very strong New York accent, but pronounced his words, burdened even as they were by the pill, with a distinctness that made me believe English was a second language for him. One felt he might have learned the language and the accent at two different times; he sounded somehow like a ventriloquist who had confused his normal voice with the voice of his dummy. Even in the dim light, and though he was still sitting, I could tell that he was an extraordinarily slight man. His face was clear, and very pale. He seemed indeed a little Yid, everybody’s tailor, everybody’s Talmudic scholar—like someone who still took piano lessons at forty. Nevertheless, his head, brittle as it seemed in the watery light, gave the same impression of weight and value that I had observed in other great men. He had the same odd precision about his body, the same carved aspect to his features, and, despite the fact that he was the only man there not in a tuxedo, the same faint dapperness. Of course, I realized, hadn’t I been thinking in terms of the ventriloquist and his dummy? Of the miniature reproductions of statues? There was something doll-like about the great. Here was a new substance, that’s all, something satirical and a little vicious.

“You’re a victim of a Philadelphia civilization which smothers credulity,” Dr. Perlmutter said.
“That’s
the difference between you and the so-called primitive—only a difference of the heart. The savage isn’t shocked by the world, and you are. He can believe in appeasable rain gods, in implacable demons, and you can’t. You say he’s more naïve. I say he’s more sophisticated. Your sophistication consists in saying ‘No, no,’ or, when the evidence or the authority is irrefutable, ‘Amazing. Amazing,’ while his sophistication, like my own, consists in a willingness to concede
everything.
Tell me, lady, when you saw the newsreels of Buchenwald did you say then, as you do to me, ‘Amazing, amazing’?” He looked accusingly at the rest of us. “The Philadelphia fascist mentality makes me sick,” he said. “Help me up!”

Whether by design or unconsciously, he offered his hand to the same woman he had been attacking. With a terrible self-effacement she reached down and pulled him to his feet. She was not a tall woman, but when he stood he came only to her shoulders. He pushed through the crowd. “I’m going inside,” he announced.

The others made room for him. I ran after him. He was going toward the house. I couldn’t risk going inside after him, so I stopped him on the lawn.

“Dr. Perlmutter,” I said.

He looked around at me. “Call me Morty,” he said.

“I’m James Boswell.”

A little piece of Dr. Perlmutter’s index finger was missing. We shook hands. “There’s a little piece of my index finger missing,” Dr. Perlmutter said, “but nobody ever notices it until I tell them about it.”

We walked along toward the house. Morty had a slight limp. “I’ll let you don’t notice my limp,” he said.

“Are you limping, Morty?” I asked. His left shoulder was slightly higher than his right.

“Yes,” he said. “It’s my left shoulder. It’s just a little higher than my right. I try to have my clothes cut to compensate for it. You’ve got to be loyal to your own culture.”

“That’s right,” I said.

We walked along. “You know what a lot of that Nobel Prize dough is going for?” Morty said. “Suits.”

“You can get a lot of suits with all that money,” I said.

“Appearance is very important in our culture,” Morty said solemnly.

Walking next to him I could see that his nose had an odd down-plunging aspect to it.

“My nose was broken once in the jungle and improperly set by a medicine man. It was so long before I got back to a non-Ur civilization that the bones had already healed. I think it’s too late to do anything about it. Probably people don’t notice, but I’m conscious of it.”

“Was your nose broken, Morty?”

“Kid,” he said, “I’m a dying Jewish anthropologist.”

We were on the steps of the Gibbenjoys’. “Morty, don’t let’s go in there,” I said.

“Why not? Gibbenjoy is all right.”

“He called you a little Yid,” I said desperately.

“He what?”
Morty exploded. “When did he say that?”

“Before. When you were saying all those interesting things on the lawn to his guests.”

“He did, did he? Let go of my arm. Let go of my arm, damn it, I need a pill.” I let him put a pill in his mouth. He pushed past me.

“Where’s Gibbenjoy?” he asked Miller angrily.

“I think Gibbenjoy is in the library, sir.”

“Come on, Morty,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”

I looked at Miller nervously, but he didn’t seem to remember who I was so I brushed past him and rushed after Morty. He must have been familiar with the house, for he was hurrying in what I supposed was the direction of the library. “The library’s always on the ground floor in these places,” he called back, stretching his neck over the shoulder that was slightly higher than the other one. “Conspicuous consumption,” he explained spitefully. He pushed through a double door. We were in the dining room. “Come on,” he said. I followed him into another room, a sort of office. An elderly man was kissing the young lady I had spoken to on the bench. “Where’s the damn library?” Morty yelled.

“Downtown, I should think,” the old man said calmly, “but it’s probably closed.”

“Oh, come on,” Morty said impatiently.

We went up a staircase. Morty kept putting pills into his mouth. “It’s even worse than I thought,” he said, talking this time over the lower shoulder and appearing oddly taller, “inconspicuous conspicuous consumption. Did you know that there is no word for ’snob’ in any but the Indo-European family of languages?” On the second- floor landing he chose a huge set of double doors and marched through.

There were about a half dozen men in the room. They were smoking cigars and drinking sherry. It was the first time I had ever seen anything quite like it and I was sorry that Morty was about to spoil it.

“Gibbenjoy?” Morty demanded.

By this time he had so many pills in his mouth that it was hard to understand him. “Gibbenjoy?”

“Yes?” Gibbenjoy said, breaking away from the men to whom he had been talking. “Ah, Perlmutter.”

“So I’m a little Yid, am I? Evidently the Nobel committee in Stockholm takes a different view of little Yids than people in Philadelphia. I’m a little Yid with the Nobel Prize. A little Yid with four brothers, all of them brilliant psychiatrists. A little Yid who earned the only doctoral degree ever awarded by the Columbia University Night School. A little Yid who’s been married six times and never had to bury a single wife and who during one of those times was married to a full-blooded black African princess six feet two inches tall. A little Yid who used to drive a taxi in the streets of New York and pulled a rickshaw for ten months in the city of Hong Kong, the only occidental ever so privileged. Also I speak fluently eight European languages, and thirty-one dialects of African and Indian tribes, including Hopi and Shawnee in this country. So that’s your idea of a little Yid, is it? Well, fuck you, Gibbenjoy.”

“Come on, Morty,” I said.

Gibbenjoy stared open-mouthed. If I had bewildered him before, Perlmutter astonished him now. He looked from Morty to me. “What have you to do with all this?” he asked me.

I looked at Morty. He was waiting patiently for me to deliver my evidence. I looked back at Gibbenjoy, rapidly calculating which of my hopelessly severed loyalties was liable to produce the most enduring results.

“You and the whole anti-Semitic crew aren’t worth the little piece of index finger Morty gave to science,” I said drunkenly. “Come on, Morty, let’s get away from these Nazis.” I pulled him with me out of the room. Since his angry speech to Gibbenjoy he seemed calmer, almost sedate.

“You were wonderful, Morty,” I said. I could believe in Morty’s courage though I had no reason to believe in the need for it.