The Collected Stories Of Saul Bellow (11 page)

“So you knew him?”

“Yes, but he didn’t know me, not by name. When he gave a party and needed extra translators, I was sent for. There was a reception for Hitler—”

“You mean you saw Hitler?”

“My little boy says it that way too: ‘My daddy saw Adolf Hitler.’ Hitler was at the far end of the
grande salle.
_ “

“Did he give a speech?”

“Thank God I wasn’t close by. Maybe he made a statement. He ate some pastry. He was in military uniform.”

“Yes, I’ve seen pictures of him on company manners, acting sweet.”

“One thing,” said Fonstein. “There was no color in his face.”

“He wasn’t killing anybody that day.”

“There was nobody he couldn’t kill if he liked, but this was a reception. I was happy he didn’t notice me.”

“I think I would have been grateful too,” I said. “You can even feel love for somebody who can kill you but doesn’t. Horrible love, but it is a kind of love.”

“He would have gotten around to me. My trouble began with this reception. A police check was run, my papers were fishy, and that’s why I was arrested.”

My father, absorbed in his knights and rooks, didn’t look up, but Sorella Fonstein, sitting in state as obese ladies seem to do, took off her pince-nez (she had been copying a recipe) and said, probably because her husband needed help at this point in his story, “He was locked up.”

“Yes, I see.”

“You
can’t see,”
_ said my stepmother. “Nobody could guess who saved him.”

Sorella, who had been a teacher in the Newark school system, made a teacherly gesture. She raised her arm as though to mark a check on the blackboard beside a student’s sentence. “Here comes the strange element. This is where Billy Rose plays a part.”

I said, “Billy Rose, in Rome? What would he be doing there? Are we talking about Broadway Billy Rose? You mean Damon Runyon’s pal, the guy who married Fanny Brice?”

“He can’t believe it,” said my stepmother.

In Fascist Rome, the child of her sister, her own flesh and blood, had seen Hitler at a reception. He was put in prison. There was no hope for him. Roman Jews were then being trucked to caves outside the city and shot. But he was saved by a New York celebrity.

You’re telling me,” I said, “that Billy was running an underground operation in Rome?”

“For a while, yes, he had an Italian organization,” said Sorella. Just then I needed an American intermediary. The range of Aunt Mildred’s English was limited. Besides, she was a dull lady, slow in all her ways, totally unlike my hasty, vivid father. Mildred had a powdered look, like her own Strudel. Her Strudel was the best. But when she talked to you she lowered her head. She too had a heavy head. You saw her parted hair oftener than her face.

Billy Rose did good things too,” she said, nursing her fingers in her lap. On Sundays she wore a green, beaded dark dress.

‘
That
_ character! I can’t feature it. The Aquacade man? He saved you from the Roman cops?”

From the Nazis.” My stepmother again lowered her head when she spoke. It was her dyed and parted hair that I had to interpret.

“How did you find this out?” I asked Fonstein.

“I was in a cell by myself. Those years, every jail in Europe was full, I guess. Then one day, a stranger showed up and talked to me through the grille. You know what? I thought maybe Ciano sent him. It came in my mind because this Ciano could have asked for me at the hotel. Sure, he dressed in fancy uniforms and walked around with his hand on a long knife he carried in his belt. He was a playactor, but I thought he was civilized. He was pleasant. So when the man stood by the grille and looked at me, I went over and said, ‘Ciano?’ He shook one finger back and forth and said, ‘Billy Rose.’ I had no idea what he meant. Was it one word or two? A man or a woman? The message from this Italianer was: ‘Tomorrow night, same time, your door will be open. Go out in the corridor. Keep turning left. And nobody will stop you. A person will be waiting in a car, and he’ll take you to the train for Genoa.’ “

“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 thinks 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.”