The Collected Stories Of Saul Bellow (23 page)

And rhis was only rhe beginning. Isaac became a millionaire. He filled rhe Mohawk Valley with housing developmenrs. And he began ro speak of “my people,” meaning rhose who lived in rhe buildings he had raised. He was sringy wirh land, he builr too densely, ir was rrue, bur he builr wirh benevolence. Ar six in rhe morning, he was our wirh his crews. He lived very simply. Walked humbly wirh his God, as rhe rabbi said. A Madison Avenue rabbi, by rhis rime. The little synagogue was wiped out. It was as dead as the Dutch painters who would have appreciated irs dimness and its shaggy old peddlers. Now rhere was a
temple
_ like a World’s Fair pavilion. Isaac was presidenr, having bearen our rhe farher of a famous hoodlum, once executioner for rhe Mob in rhe Norrheasr. The worldly rabbi wirh his rrained voice and railored suirs, like a Christian minister excepr for rhe play of Jewish cleverness in his face, hinred ro rhe old-fashioned parr of rhe congregarion rhar he had ro pour ir on for rhe sake of rhe young people. America. Exrraordinary rimes. If you wanted rhe young women ro bless Sabbarh candles, you had ro srarr rheir rabbi ar twenty thousand dollars, and add a house and a Jaguar.

Cousin Isaac, meanrime, grew more old-fashioned. His car was ren years old. Bur he was a srrong sorr of man. Self-assured, a dark head scarcely rhinning ar rhe rop. Upsrare women said he gave our rhe posirive male energy rhey were beginning ro miss in men. He had ir. Ir was in rhe manner wirh which he picked up a fork ar rhe rable, rhe way he poured from a borde. Of course, rhe world had done for him exactly what he had demanded. That meant he had made the right demand and in the right place. It meant his reading of life was metaphysically true. Or that the Old Testament, the Talmud, and Polish Ashkenazi Orthodoxy were irresistible.

But that wouldn’t altogether do, thought Dr. Braun. There was more there than piety. He recalled his cousin’s white teeth and scar-twisted smile when he was joking. “I fought on many fronts,” Cousin Isaac said, meaning women’s bellies. He often had a sound American way of putting things. Had known the back stairs in Schenectady that led to the sheets, the gripping arms and spreading thighs of workingwomen. The Model T was parked below. Earlier, the horse waited in harness. He got great pleasure from masculine reminiscences. Recalling Dvorah the greenhorn on her knees, hiding her head in pillows while her buttocks soared, a burst of kinky hair from the walls of whiteness, and her feeble voice crying, ‘TVл’╗.” But she did not mean it.

Cousin Mutt had no such anecdotes. Shot in the head at Iwo Jima, he came back from a year in the hospital to sell Zenith, Motorola, and Westinghouse appliances. He married a respectable girl and went on quietly amid a bewildering expansion and transformation of his birthplace. A computer center taking over the bush-league park where a scout had him spotted before the war as material for the majors. On most important matters, Mutt went to Tina. She told him what to do. And Isaac looked out for him, whenever possible buying appliances through Mutt for his housing developments. But Mutt took his problems to Tina. For instance, his wife and her sister played the horses. Every chance they got, they drove to Saratoga, to the trotting races. Probably no great harm in this. The two sisters with gay lipstick and charming dresses. And laughing continually with their pretty jutting teeth. And putting down the top of the convertible.

Tina took a mild view of this. Why shouldn’t they go to the track? Her fierceness was concentrated, all of it, on Braun the millionaire.

“That whoremaster!” she said.

“Oh, no. Not in years and years,” said Mutt.

“Come, Mutt. I know whom he’s been balling. I keep an eye on the Orthodox. Believe me, I do. And now the governor has put him on a commission. Which is it?”

“Pollution.”

“Water pollution, that’s right. Rockefeller’s buddy.”

“Well, you shouldn’t, Tina. He’s our brother.”

“He feels
for you.”
_

“Yes, he does.”

“A multimillionaire—lets you go on drudging in a little business? He’s heartless. A heartless man.”

“It’s not true.”

“What? He never had a tear in his eye unless the wind was blowing,” said Tina.

Hyperbole was Tina’s greatest weakness. They were all like that. The mother had bred it in them.

Otherwise, she was simply a gloomy, obese woman, sternly combed, the hair tugged back from her forehead, tight, so that the hairline was a fighting barrier. She had a totalitarian air—and not only toward others. Toward herself, also. Absorbed in the dictatorship of her huge person. In a white dress, and with the ring on her finger she had seized from her dead mother. By a putsch in the bedroom.

In her generation—Dr. Braun had given up his afternoon to the hopeless pleasure of thinking affectionately about his dead—in her generation, Tina was also old-fashioned for all her modern slang. People of her sort, and not only the women, cultivated charm. But Tina consistently willed for nothing, to have no appeal, no charm. Absolutely none. She never tried to please. Her aim must have been majesty. Based on what? She had no great thoughts. She built on her own nature. On a primordial idea, hugely blown up. Somewhat as her flesh in its dress of white silk, as last seen by Cousin Braun some years ago, was blown up. Some sub-suboffice of the personality, behind a little door of the brain where the restless spirit never left its work, had ordered this tremendous female form, all of it, to become manifest. With dark hair on the forearms, conspicuous nostrils in the white face, and black eyes staring. Her eyes had an affronted expression; sometimes a look of sulphur; a clever look, also a malicious look—they had all the looks, even the look of kindness that came from Uncle Braun. The old man’s sweetness. Those who try to interpret humankind through its eyes are in for much strangeness—perplexity.

The quarrel between Tina and Isaac lasted for years. She accused him of shaking off the family when the main chance came. He had refused to cut them in. He said that they had all deserted him at the zero hour. Eventually, the brothers made it up. Not Tina. She wanted nothing to do with Isaac. In the first phase of enmity she saw to it that he should know exactly what she thought of him. Brothers, aunts, and old friends told him what she was saying about him: He was a crook, Mama had lent him money; he would not repay; that was why she had collected those house rents. Also, Isaac had been a silent partner of Zaikas, the Greek, the racketeer from Troy. She said that Zaikas had covered for Isaac, who was implicated in the state-hospital scandal. Zaikas took the fall, but Isaac had to put fifty thousand dollars in Zaikas’s box at the bank. The Stuyvesant Bank, that was. Tina said she even knew the box number. Isaac said little to these slanders, and after a time they stopped.

And it was when they stopped that Isaac actually began to feel the anger of his sister. He felt it as head of the family, the oldest living Braun. After he had not seen his sister for two or three years, he began to remind himself of Uncle Brauns affection for Tina. The only daughter. The youngest. Our baby sister. Thoughts of the old days touched his heart. Having gotten what he wanted, Tina said to Mutt, he could redo the past in sentimental colors. Isaac would remember that in 1920 Aunt Rose wanted fresh milk, and the Brauns kept a cow in the pasture by the river. What a beautiful place. And how delicious it was to crank the Model T and drive at dusk to milk the cow beside the green water. Driving, they sang songs. Tina, then ten years old, must have weighed two hundred pounds, but the shape of her mouth was very sweet, womanly—perhaps the pressure of the fat, hastening her maturity. Somehow she was more feminine in childhood than later. It was true that at nine or ten she sat on a kitten in the rocker, unaware, and smothered it. Aunt Rose found it dead when her daughter stood up. “You huge thing,” she said to her daughter, “you animal.” But even this Isaac recollected with amused sadness. And since he belonged to no societies, never played cards, never spent an evening drinking, never went to Florida, never went to Europe, never went to see the State of Israel, Isaac had plenty of time for reminiscences. Respectable elms about his house sighed with him for the past. The squirrels were Orthodox. They dug and saved. Mrs. Isaac Braun wore no cosmetics. Except a touch of lipstick when going out in public. No mink coats. A comfortable Hudson seal, yes. With a large fur button on the belly. To keep her, as he liked her, warm. Fair, pale, round, with a steady innocent look, and hair worn short and symmetrical. Light brown, with kinks of gold. One gray eye, perhaps, expressed or came near expressing slyness. It must have been purely involuntary. At least there was not the slightest sign of conscious criticism or opposition. Isaac was master. Cooking, baking, laundry, all housekeeping, had to meet his standard. If he didn’t like the smell of the cleaning woman, she was sent away. It was an ample old-fashioned respectable domestic life on an Eastern European model completely destroyed in 1939 by Hitler and Stalin. Those two saw to the eradication of the old conditions, made sure that certain modern race notions became social realities. Maybe the slightest troubling ambiguity in one of Cousin Sylvia’s eyes was the effect of a suppressed historical comment. As a woman, Dr. Braun considered, she had more than a glimmering of this modern transformation. Her husband was a multimillionaire. Where was the life this might have bought? The houses, servants, clothes, and cars? On the farm she had operated machines. As his wife, she was obliged to forget how to drive. She was a docile, darling woman, and she was in the kitchen baking sponge cake and chopping liver, as Isaac’s mother had done. Or should have done. Without the mother’s flaming face, the stern meeting brows, the rigorous nose, and the club of powerful braid lying on her spine. Without Aunt Rose’s curses.

In America, the abuses of the Old World were righted. It was appointed to be the land of historical redress. However, Dr. Braun reflected, new uproars filled the soul. Material details were of the greatest importance. But still the largest strokes were made by the spirit. Had to be! People who said this were right.

Cousin Isaac’s thoughts: a web of computations, of frontages, elevations, drainage, mortgages, turnaround money. And since, in addition, he had been a strong, raunchy young man, and this had never entirely left him (it remained only as witty comment), his piety really did appear to be put on. Superadded. The Psalm-saying at building sites.
When I consider the heavens, the work of Thy fingers… what is Man that Thou art mindful of him?
_ But he evidently meant it all. He took off whole afternoons before high holidays. While his fair-faced wife, flushed with baking, noted with the slightly biblical air he expected of her that he was bathing, changing upstairs. He had visited the graves of his parents and announced on his return, “I’ve been to the cemetery.”

“Oh,” she said with sympathy, the one beautiful eye full of candor. The other fluttering with a minute quantity of slyness.

The parents, stifled in the clay. Two crates, side by side. Grass of burning green sweeping over them, and Isaac repeating a prayer to the God of Mercy. And in Hebrew with a Baltic accent, at which modern Israelis scoffed. September trees, yellow after an icy night or two, now that the sky was blue and warm, gave light instead of shadow. Isaac was concerned about his parents. Down there, how were they? The wet, the cold, above all the worms worried him. In frost, his heart shrank for Aunt Rose and Uncle Braun, though as a builder he knew they were beneath the frost line. But a human power, his love, affected his practical judgment. It flew off. Perhaps as a builder and housing expert (on two of the governor’s commissions, not one) he especially felt his dead to be unsheltered. But Tina—they were her dead, too—felt he was still exploiting Papa and Mama and that he would have exploited her, too, if she had let him.

For several years, at the same season, there was a scene between them. The pious thing before the Day of Atonement was to visit the dead and to forgive the living—forgive and ask forgiveness. Accordingly, Isaac went annually to the old home. Parked his Cadillac. Rang the bell, his heart beating hard. He waited at the foot of the long, enclosed staircase. The small brick building, already old in 1915 when Uncle Braun had bought it, passed to Tina, who tried to make it modern. Her ideas came out of
House Beautiful.
_ The paper with which she covered the slanted walls of the staircase was unsuitable. It did not matter. Tina, above, opened the door, saw the masculine figure and scarred face of her brother and said, “What do you want?”

Tina! For God’s sake, I’ve come to make peace.”

“What peace! You swindled us out of a fortune.”

‘The others don’t agree. Now, Tina, we are brother and sister. Remember Father and Mother. Remember…”

She cried down at him, “You son of a bitch, I
do
_ remember! Now get the hell out of here.”

Banging the door, she dialed her brother Aaron, lighting one of her long cigarettes. “He’s been here again,” she said. “What shit! He’s not going to practice his goddamn religion on me.”

She said she hated his Orthodox cringe. She could take him straight. In a deal. Or a swindle. But she couldn’t bear his sentiment.

As for herself, she might smell like a woman, but she acted like a man. And in her dress, while swooning music came from the radio, she smoked her cigarette after he was gone, thundering inside with great flashes of feeling. For which, otherwise, there was no occasion. She might curse him, thought Dr. Braun, but she owed him much. Aunt Rose, who had been such a harsh poet of money, had left her daughter needs—such needs! Quiet middle-age domestic decency (husband, daughter, furnishings) did nothing for needs like hers.

So when Isaac Braun told his wife that he had visited the family graves, she knew that he had gone again to see Tina. The thing had been repeated. Isaac, with a voice and gesture that belonged to history and had no place or parallel in upstate industrial New York, appealed to his sister in the eyes of God, and in the name of souls departed, to end her anger. But she cried from the top of the stairs, “Never! You son of a bitch, never!” and he went away.