The Collected Stories Of Saul Bellow (33 page)

In the middle of the corporate evening Clara was attacked by one of her fierce migraines, and a head as conspicuous as hers, dominating a dinner table, affected everybody when it began to ache, so that the whole party stood up when she rose and hurried out. The Veldes went straight home. Swallowing a handful of white pills from the medicine chest, Clara went immediately to Gina’s room. To her relief, the girl was there, in bed. The reading lamp was on, but she wasn’t reading, only sitting up, her hands thoughtfully folded.

“I’m glad you didn’t go to Harlem!” I reached Frederic on the phone. He was with some of our UN friends.”

“And you’ll see him tomorrow…?”

“I didn’t mention the ring. But I am prepared to move out. You told me I had to bring it back or leave.”

“Going where…!” Clara was taken by surprise. Next she was aware of the girl’s brown gaze, the exceptional fixity of it. Unshed tears were killing her. “But if Frederic gives back the ring, you’ll stay.” While she was speaking, Clara with some shame recognized how dumb she sounded. It was the hereditary peasant in her saying this. The guy would deny the theft, and if eventually he admitted it, he still would not return the ring. This very moment he might be taking a thousand bucks for it. These people came up from the tropical slums to outsmart New York, and with all the rules crumbling here as elsewhere, so that nobody could any longer be clear in his mind about anything, they could do it.

Left standing were only property rights. With murder in second place. A stolen ring. A corpse to account for. Such were the only universals recognized, and very few others could be acknowledged. So where did love fit in? Love was down in the catacombs, those catacombs being the personal neuroses of women like herself.

She said to Gina, as one crypto lover to another, “What will you do?”

Gina said, but without resentment, not a hint of accusation in her voice, “That I can’t say. I’ve only had a couple of hours to think. There are places.”

She’d move in with her Haitian, Clara guessed, plausibly enough. But this was not sayable. Clara was learning to refrain. You didn’t
say
_ everything. “Discover silence,” she instructed herself.

Next day she rushed home from work in a cab and found Marta Elvia babysitting. Clara had already been in touch with an agency, and there was a new girl coming tomorrow. Best she could do on short notice. Lucy was upset, predictably, and Clara had to take her aside for special explanations. She said, “Gina suddenly had to go. It was an emergency. She didn’t
want
_ to. When she can, she’ll come back. It’s not
your
_ fault.” There was no guessing just how rattled Lucy was. She was silent, stoical.

Clara had rehearsed this on the telephone with the psychiatrist, Dr. Gladstone.

“With working parents,” she said to Lucy, “such problems do come up.”

“But Daddy isn’t working now.”

You’re telling
me!
_ thought Clara. He was doping out the upcoming primaries in New Hampshire.

As soon as possible, she went to see Dr. Gladstone. He was about to take one of his holidays and would be away three weeks. They had discussed this absence in the last session. In the waiting room, she studied the notes she had prepared: Where is Gina? How can I find out, keep track? Protect?

She acknowledged to Dr. Gladstone that she was in a near-hysterical state over the second disappearance, the theft. She was discovering that she had come to base her stability entirely on the ring. Such dependency was fearful. He asked how she saw this, and how Ithiel figured in it. She said, “The men I meet don’t seem to be real persons. Nobody really is anybody. There may be more somebodies than I’ve been able to see. I don’t want to write off about one half of our species. And concentrated desire for so many years may have affected my judgment. Anyway, for me, what a man is seems to be defined by Ithiel. Also, I am
his
_ truest friend, and he understands that and responds emotionally.”

Involuntarily Clara fell into Dr. Gladstone’s way of talking. To herself, she would never say “responds emotionally.” As the sessions were short, she adopted his lingo to save time, notwithstanding the danger of false statements. Hope brought her here, every effort must be made, but when she looked, looked with all her might at Dr. Gladstone, she could not justify the trust she was asked to place in that samurai beard, the bared teeth it framed, the big fashionable specs, his often baseless confidence in his science. However, it would take the better part of a year to acquaint a new doctor with the fundamentals of her case. She was stuck with this one.

“And I’m very worried about Gina. How do I find out what’s happening to her? Should I hire a private investigator? A girl like that survive in Spanish Harlem? No way.”

“An expensive proposition,” said Dr. Gladstone. “Any alternatives in mind?”

“Wilder does nothing.
He
_ could get on the case. Like shadow her, make practical use of the thrillers he’s read. But he’s negotiating with some hopeless wimp who wants to go for the White House.”

“Let’s get back to the theft, if it
is
_ a theft.”

“It
has
_ to be. I didn’t misplace it again.”

“However, it gave you daily anxiety. Why did it occupy so big a place in you?”

“What did I come up with last time we discussed it? I cheated the insurance company and had the ring
and
_ the money. You could call that white-collar crime. It all added to the importance of my emerald, but I would never have guessed that it would be so shattering to lose it.”

“I can suggest a coincidence,” said the doctor. “At this bad moment for you I am going on a holiday. My support is removed. And my name is
Gladstone.
_ Is that why you take the loss so hard?”

Astonished, she gave him a real stare, not a fitting or becoming one. She said, You may be a stone, but you’re not a gem.”

When she returned to her office she telephoned Ithiel, her only dependable adviser, to discuss matters.

‘I wish you were coming up to New York,” she said. “I used to call on Steinsalz when things were urgent.”

“He was a great loss to me too.”

“He took such interest in people. Short of lending them money. He’d treat you to dinner but never lend a cent. He did listen, though.”

“It so happens,” said Ithiel (when he was being methodical, a sort of broken flatness entered his voice), “that I have a lunch date next Tuesday with a man in New York.”

“Let’s say half past three, then?”

Their customary meeting place was St. Patrick’s cathedral, near Clara’s office, a central location and a shelter in bad weather. “Like a drop for secret agents,” Ithiel said. They left the cathedral and went directly to the Helmsley Palace. A quiet corner of the bar was still available at that early hour. “This is on my Gold Card,” said Clara. “Now let’s see how you look—somewhere between a Spanish grandee and a Mennonite.”

Then with executive rapidity she set forth the main facts.

“What’s your opinion of Frederic—an occasional stealer or a pro?”

“I think he improvises,” said Clara. “Dope? Probably.”

“You could find out about his police record, if any. Then ask the Austrian consulate about her. Not telephone her folks in Vienna.”

“I knew it would be a relief to talk to you. Now tell me… about the ring.”

“A loss, I’d guess. Write it off.”

“I suppose I’ll have to. I indulged myself about it, and look at the trouble it made. There’s nothing appropriate. For instance, this luxury bar that fits neither you nor me. In my true feelings you and I are as naked as Adam and Eve. I’m not being suggestive, either. It’s not an erotic suggestion, just a simile.”

Talk like this, the hint of wildness in it, had the effect of forcing him into earnestness. She could see him applying his good mind to her difficulties, like a person outside pressing his forehead on the windowpane to see what’s going on.

As she figured it, he counted on the executive Clara to gain on the subjective Clara. She
did
_ have the ability to put her house in order. Yet his sympathy for the subjective, personal Clara was very strong. Considering the greater tumult in her, she had done better than he. Even now her life was more coherent than his.

“For a few hundred bucks, I think you can find out where the girl is. Investigators are easy to hire.”

“Tell me! I can see why General Haig and such people call on you to analyze the Iranians or the Russians. By the way, Wilder thought you were great on TV with Dobrynin, week before last.”

When Ithiel smiled, his teeth were so good you suspected Hollywood dentistry, but they were all his own.

“Dobrynin has some genius, of a low kind. He convinces Americans that Russians are exactly like them. Sometimes he behaves as if he were the senior senator from a fifty-first, ail-Russian state. Just a slight accent, but the guys from the Deep South have one also. He sold Gorbachev on this completely, and Gorbachev is selling the whole U. S. A. Which craves to be sold. Deceived, if you prefer.”

“Like me, in a way, about the Human Pair.”

“You’re close to that girl, I see.”

“Very close. It would be easy for you to put her down as a well-brought-up kid with a taste for low sex. Resembling me. You’d be wrong. Too bad you can’t see her yourself. Your opinion would interest me.”

“So she isn’t like you?”

“I sure hope not.” Clara made a gesture, as if saying, Wipe out these Helmsley Palace surroundings and listen to me. “Don’t forget my two suicide attempts. I have a spoonful of something wild in my mixture, my whole sense of…”

“Of life…”

“Listen to me. You have no idea really how wild and how mixed, or how much territory it takes in. The territory stretches over into death. When I’m drunk with agitation—and it is like being drunk—there’s one pulse in me that’s a death-beat pulse, and it tempts me to make out with death. It says, Why wait! When I get as intense as that, existence won’t hold me. That’s the internal horror side of the thing. I’m open to seduction by death. Now you’re going to remind me that I’m the mother of three kids.”

“Exactly what I was about to do.”

“There’s no one in the world but you that I’d say this to. You’re the one human being I fully confide in. Neither do you have secrets from me. Whatever you didn’t admit I saw for myself.”

“You certainly did, Clara.”

“But we’ll never be man and wife. Oh, you don’t have to say anything. You love me, but the rest is counterindicated. It’s one of those damn paradoxes that have to be waited out. There may even be a parallel to it in your field, in politics. We have the power to destroy ourselves, and maybe the desire, and we keep ourselves in permanent suspense—waiting. Isn’t that wild, too? You could tell
me.
_ You’re the expert. You’re going to write the book of books about it.”

“Now you’re making fun of me.”

“Not really, Ithiel. If it is the book of books on the subject, it should be written. You may be the man to write it, and I’m not making fun. For
me
_ it would be funny. Think of a great odalisque, nude and beautiful. And now think of her in eyeglasses and writing books on a lap board.”

Over the table they smiled briefly at each other.

‘But I want to get back to Gina,” said Clara. “You’re going to find me a dependable investigator to check out Frederic, and the rest of it. I doubt that she is like me, except in taking chances. But when I told her that the ring was given by a man who loved me, the fact registered completely. What I didn’t add was that I bullied you into giving it to me. Don’t deny it. I twisted your arm. Then I sentimentalized it. Then I figured out that you continued to love me
because
_ we didn’t marry. And now the ring… The girl understands about the ring. The love part of it.”

Teddy was stirred, and looked aside. He wasn’t ready, and perhaps never would be ready, to go further. No, they never would be man and wife. When they stood up to go, they kissed like friends.

“You’ll get me an investigator with a little class… the minimum sleaze?”

“I’ll tell the man to go to your office, so you can look him over.”

“A few things have to be done for you too,” said Clara. “That Francine left you in bad shape. You have that somber look that you get when you’re up against it.”

“Is that what you mean by the Mennonite?”

“There were plenty of Mennonites in Indiana—I can tell that you didn’t have any business in New York today except me.”

Within ten days she had Gina’s address—a fourth-floor walk-up on East 128th Street, care of F. Vigneron. She had a phone number as well. Call? No, she wouldn’t speak to her yet. She brought her executive judgment to bear on this, and the advice from this source was to send a note. In her note, she wrote that the children asked for Gina often. Lucy missed her. Even so, she had done Lucy good. You could see the improvements. There was a lot of woman in that small girl, already visible. Then, speaking for herself, she said that she was sorry to have come down so hard on a matter that needn’t be spelled out now. She had left Gina few options. She had had no choice but to go. The mystery was why she had gone “uptown” when other choices were possible. However, Gina owed her no explanations. And Clara hoped that she would not feel that she had to turn away from her forever or decide that she, Clara, was an enemy. Anything but a hostile judge, Clara respected her sense of honor.

Asked for a reference on her unlisted mental line, Clara, when reached, would have said about Gina: soft face, soft bust, brown bourgeois-maiden gaze, but firm at decision time. Absolutely ten on a scale often.

But in the note she sent to Gina she went on, ladylike, matronly and fair-minded, to wish her well, and concluded, “You should have had some notice, and I believe it only fair that the month should have been rounded out, so since I am not absolutely certain of the correct address, I will leave an envelope with Marta Elvia. Two hundred dollars in cash.”

Frederic Vigneron would send her for the money, if he got wind of it.

Gottschalk, the private eye, did his job responsibly; that was about the best that could be said of him. Perhaps half an eye. And not much more ear. Still, he did obtain the facts she asked for. He said of the building in East Harlem, “Of course the city can’t run around and condemn every joint it should, or there’d be lots more street people sleeping in the West Side Terminal. But I wouldn’t want any nieces of mine living there.”