The Collected Stories Of Saul Bellow (17 page)

This was our final meeting. I never saw Harry and Sorella again. In the sixties, Harry telephoned once to discuss Cal Tech with me. Sorella didn’t want Gilbert to study so far from home. An only child, and all ofthat. Harry was full of the boys perfect test scores. My heart doesn’t warm to the parents of prodigies. I react badly. They’re riding for a fall. I don’t like parental boasting. So I was unable to be cordial toward Fonstein. My time just then was unusually valuable. Horribly valuable, as I now judge it. Not one of the attractive periods in the development (gestation) of a success.

I can’t say that communication with the Fonsteins ceased. Except in Jerusalem, we hadn’t had any. I
expected,
_ for thirty years, to see them again. They were excellent people. I admired Harry. A solid man, Harry, and very brave. As for Sorella, she was a woman with great powers of intelligence, and in these democratic times, whether you are conscious of it or not, you are continually in quest of higher types. I don’t have to draw you maps and pictures. Everybody knows what standard products and interchangeable parts signify, understands the operation of the glaciers on the social landscape, planing off the hills, scrubbing away the irregularities. I’m not going to be tedious about this. Sorella was outstanding (or as one of my grandchildren says, “standing out”). So of course I meant to see more of her. But I saw nothing. She was in the warehouse of intentions. I was going to get around to the Fonsteins—write, telephone, have them for Thanksgiving, for Christmas. Perhaps for Passover. But that’s what the Passover phenomenon is now—it never comes to pass.

Maybe the power of memory was to blame. Remembering them so well, did I need actually to
see
_ them? To keep them in a mental suspension was enough. They were a part of the permanent cast of characters, in absentia permanently. There wasn’t a thing for them to do.

The next in this series of events occurred last March, when winter, with a grunt, gave up its grip on Philadelphia and began to go out in trickles of grimy slush. Then it was the turn of spring to thrive on the dirt of the city. The season at least produced crocuses, snowdrops, and new buds in my millionaire’s private back garden. I pushed around my library ladder and brought down the poems of George Herbert, looking for the one that runs “… how clean, how pure are Thy returns,” or words to that effect; and on my desk, fit for a Wasp of great wealth, the phone started to ring as I was climbing down. The following Jewish conversation began: “This is Rabbi X [or Y]. My ministry”—what a Protestant term: he must be Reform, or Conservative at best; no Orthodox rabbi would say “ministry”—“is in Jerusalem. I have been approached by a party whose name is Fonstein….”

“Not Harry,” I said.

“No. I was calling to ask
you
_ about locating Harry. The Jerusalem Fonstein says that he is Harry’s uncle. This man is Polish by birth, and he is in a mental institution. He is a very difficult eccentric and lives in a world of fantasy. Much of the time he hallucinates. His habits are dirty—filthy, even. He’s totally without resources and well known as a beggar and local character who makes prophetic speeches on the sidewalk.”

“I get the picture. Like one of our own homeless,” I said.

“Precisely,” said Rabbi X or Y, in that humane tone of voice one has to put up with.

“Can we come to the point?” I asked.

“Our Jerusalem Fonstein swears he is related to Harry, who is very rich….”

“I’ve never seen Harry’s financial statement.”

“But in a position to help.”

I went on, “That’s just an opinion. At a hazard…” One does get pompous. A solitary, occupying a mansion, living up to his surroundings. I changed my tune; I dropped the “hazard” and said, “It’s been years since Harry and I were in touch. You can’t locate him?”

“I’ve tried. I’m on a two-week visit. Right now I’m in New York. But L. A. is my destination. Addressing…” (He gave an unfamiliar acronym.) Then he went on to say that the Jerusalem Fonstein needed help. Poor man, absolutely bananas, but under all the tatters, physical and mental (I paraphrase), humanly so worthy. Abused out of his head by persecution, loss, death, and brutal history; beside himself, crying out for aid—human and supernatural, no matter in what mixture. There may have been something phony about the rabbi, but the case, the man he was describing, was a familiar type, was real enough.

“And you, too, are a relative?” he said.

“Indirectly. My father’s second wife was Harry’s aunt.”

I never loved Aunt Mildred, nor even esteemed her. But, you understand, she had a place in my memory, and there must have been a good reason for that.

“May I ask you to find him for me and give him my number in L. A.? I’m carrying a list of family names and Harry Fonstein will recognize, will identify him. Or will not, if the man is
not
_ his uncle. It would be a mitzvah.”

Christ, spare me these mitzvahs.

I said, “Okay, Rabbi, I’ll trace Harry, for the sake of this pitiable lunatic.”

The Jerusalem Fonstein gave me a pretext for getting in touch with the Fonsteins. (Or at least an incentive.) I entered the rabbi’s number in my book, under the last address I had for Fonstein. At the moment, there were other needs and duties requiring my attention; besides, I wasn’t yet ready to speak to Sorella and Harry. There were preparations to make. This, as it appears under my ballpoint, reminds me of the title of Stanislavski’s famous book,
An Actor Prepares
_—again, a datum relating to my memory, a resource, a vocation, to which a lifetime of cultivation has been devoted, and which in old age also oppresses me.

For just then (meaning now: “Now, now, very now”) I was, I am, having difficulties with it. I had had a failure of memory the other morning, and it had driven me almost mad (not to hold back on an occurrence of such importance). I had had a dental appointment downtown. I drove, because I was already late and couldn’t rely on the radio cab to come on time. I parked in a lot blocks away, the best I could do on a busy morning, when closer lots were full. Then, walking back from the dentist’s office, I found (under the influence of my walking rhythm, I presume) that I had a tune in my head. The words came to me:
Way down upon the..
_.

_Way down upon the…

… upon the__
River
_…

But what was the river called! A song I’d sung from childhood, upwards of seventy years, part of the foundation of one’s mind. A classic song, known to all Americans. Of my generation anyway.

I stopped at the window of a sports shop, specializing, as it happened, in horsemen’s boots, shining boots, both men’s and women’s, plaid saddle blankets, crimson coats, fox-hunting stuff—even brass horns. All objects on display were ultrasignificantly distinct. The colors of the plaid were especially bright and orderly—enviably orderly to a man whose mind was at that instant shattered.

What was that river’s name!

I could easily recall the rest of the words:
There’s where my heart is yearning ever,
_

That’s where the old folks stay.
_

All the world is [am?] sad and dreary
_

Everywhere I roam.
_

O darkies, how my heart grows weary…
_

And the rest.

All the world
was
_ dark and dreary. Fucking-A right! A chip, a plug, had gone dead in the mental apparatus. A forerunning omen? Beginning of the end? There are psychic causes of forgetfulness, of course. I’ve lectured on those myself. Not everyone, needless to say, would take such a lapsus so to heart. A bridge was broken: I could not cross the River. I had an impulse to hammer the window of the riding shop with the handle of my umbrella, and when people ran out, to cry to them, “Oh, God! You must tell me the words. I can’t get past ‘Way down upon the… upon the!’ ” They would—I saw it—throw that red saddle cloth, a brilliant red, threads of fire, over my shoulders and take me into the shop to wait for the ambulance.

At the parking lot, I wanted to ask the cashier—out of desperation. When she said, “Seven dollars,” I would begin singing the tune through the round hole in the glass. But as the woman was black, she might be offended by “O darkies.” And could I assume that she, like me, had been brought up on Stephen Foster? There were no grounds for this. For the same reason, I couldn’t ask the car jockey either.

But at the wheel of the car, the faulty connection corrected itself, and I began to shout, “Swanee—Swanee—Swanee,” punching the steering wheel. Behind the windows of your car, what you do doesn’t matter. One of the privileges of liberty car ownership affords.

Of course! The Swanee. Or Suwannee (spelling preferred in the South). But this was a crisis in my mental life. I had had a double purpose in looking up George Herbert—not only the appropriateness of the season but as a test of my memory. So, too, my recollection of
Fonstein
_ v.
Rose
_ is in part a test of memory, and also a more general investigation of the same, for if you go back to the assertion that memory is life and forgetting death (“mercifully forgetting,” the commonest adverb linked by writers with the participle, reflecting the preponderance of the opinion that so much of life
is
_ despair), I have established at the very least that I am still able to keep up my struggle for existence.

Hoping for victory? Well, what would a victory be?

I took Rabbi X/Y’s word for it that the Fonsteins had moved away and were unlocatable. Probably they had, like me, retired. But whereas I am in Philadelphia, hanging in there, as the idiom puts it, they had very likely abandoned that ground of struggle the sullen North and gone to Sarasota or to Palm Springs. They had the money for it. America was good to Harry Fonstein, after all, and delivered on its splendid promises. He had been spared the worst we have here—routine industrial or clerical jobs and bureaucratic employment. As I wished the Fonsteins well, I was pleased for them. My much-appreciated-in-absentia friends, so handsomely installed in my consciousness.

Not having heard from me, I assumed, they had given up on me, after three decades. Freud has laid down the principle that the ллconscious does not recognize death. But as you see, consciousness is freaky too.

So I went to work digging up forgotten names of relatives from my potato-patch mind—Rosenberg, Rosenthal, Sorkin, Swerdlow, Bleistiff, Fradkin. Jewish surnames are another curious subject, so many of them imposed by German, Polish, or Russian officialdom (expecting bribes from applicants), others the invention of Jewish fantasy. How often the name of the rose was invoked, as in the case of Billy himself. There were few other words for flowers in the pale.
Mar-garitka,
_ for one. The daisy. Not a suitable family name for anybody.

Aunt Mildred, my stepmother, had been cared for during her last years by relatives in Elizabeth, the Rosensafts, and my investigations began with them. They weren’t cordial or friendly on the phone, because I had seldom visited Mildred toward the last. I think she began to claim that she had brought me up and even put me through college. (The funds came from a Prudential policy paid for by my own mother.) This was a venial offense, which gave me the reasons for being standoffish that I was looking for. I wasn’t fond of the Rosensafts either. They had taken my father’s watch and chain after he died. But then one can live without these objects of sentimental value. Old Mrs. Rosensaft said she had lost track of the Fonsteins. She thought the Swerdlows in Morristown might know where Harry and Sorella had gone.

Information gave me Swerdlow’s number. Dialing, I reached an answering machine. The voice of Mrs. Swerdlow, affecting an accent more suitable to upper-class Morristown than to her native Newark, asked me to leave my name, number, and the date of the call. I hate answering machines, so I hung up. Besides, I avoid giving my unlisted number.

As I went up to my second-floor office that night holding the classic Philadelphia banister, reflecting that I was pretty sick of the unshared grandeur of this mansion, I once more considered Sarasota or the sociable Florida Keys. Elephants and acrobats, circuses in winter quarters, would be more amusing. Moving to Palm Springs was out of the question. And while the Keys had a large homosexual population, I was more at home with gay people, thanks to my years in the Village, than with businessmen in California. In any case, I couldn’t bear much more of these thirty-foot ceilings and all the mahogany solitude. This mansion demanded too much from me, and I was definitely conscious of a strain. My point had long ago been made—I could achieve such a dwelling place, possess it in style. Now take it away, I thought, in a paraphrase of the old tune “I’m so tired of roses, take them all away.” I decided to discuss the subject again with my son, Henry. His wife didn’t like the mansion; her tastes were modern, and she was satirical, too, about the transatlantic rivalry of parvenu American wealth with the titled wealth of Victorian London. She had turned me down dead flat when I tried to give the place to them.

What I was thinking was that if I could find Harry and Sorella, I’d join them in retirement, if they’d accept my company (forgiving the insult of neglect). For me it was natural to wonder whether I had not exaggerated (urged on by a desire for a woman of a deeper nature) Sorella’s qualities in my reminiscences, and 1 gave further thought to this curious personality. I never had forgotten what she had said about the testing of Jewry by the American experience. Her interview with Billy Rose had itself been such an American thing. Again Billy: Weak? Weak! Vain? Oh, very! And trivial for sure. Creepy Billy. Still, in a childish way, big-minded—spacious; and spacious wasn’t just a boast adjective from “America the Beautiful” (the spacious skies) but the dropping of fifteen to twenty actual millions on a rest-and-culture garden in Jerusalem, the core of Jewish history, the navel of the earth. This gesture of oddball magnificence was American. American and Oriental.

And even if I didn’t in the end settle near the Fonsteins, I could pay them a visit. I couldn’t help asking why I had turned away from such a terrific pair—Sorella, so mysteriously obese; Fonstein with his reddish skin (once stone white), his pomegranate face. I may as well include myself, as a third—a tall old man with a structural curl at the top like a fiddlehead fern or a bishop’s crook.