The Collected Stories Of Saul Bellow (41 page)

Tanky said, “For some reason you keep track of all the cousins, Ijah.”

The deep sound I made in reply was neutral. I didn’t think it would be right, even by so much as a hint, to refer to his career in the union or to his recent trial.

“Tell me what happened to Miltie Rifkin, Ijah. He gave me a break when I got out of the army.”

“Miltie now lives in the Sunbelt. Married to the switchboard operator from the hotel.”

Now, Tanky might have given
me
_ fascinating information about Miltie, for I know that Cousin Miltie had been dying to draw Hoffa deeper into the hotel operation. Hoffa had such reservoirs of money behind him, all those billions in the pension fund. Miltie was stout, near obese, with a handsome hawk face, profile-proud, his pampered body overdressed, bedizened, his glance defiant and contentious. A clever moneymaker, he was choleric by temperament and, in his fits, dangerously quick to throw punches. It was insane of him to fight so much. His former wife, Libby, weighing upward of 250 pounds, hurrying about the hotel on spike heels, was what we used to call a “suicide blond” (dyed by her own hand). Catering, booking, managing, menacing, bawling out the
garde-manger,
_ firing housekeepers, hiring bartenders, Libby was all made up like a Kabuki performer. In trying to restrain Miltie (they were less man and wife than business partners), she had her work cut out for her. Several times Miltie complained to Hoffa about one of his goons, whose personal checks were not clearing. The goon—his name escapes me, but for parking purposes he had a clergy sticker on the windshield of his Chrysler—knocked Miltie down in the lobby, then choked him nearly to death. This occurrence came to the attention of Robert F. Kennedy, who was then out to get Hoffa, and Kennedy issued a subpoena for Cousin Miltie to testify before the McClellan Committee. To give evidence against Hoffa’s people would have been madness. Libby cried out when word came that a subpoena was on its way: “Now see what you’ve done. They’ll chop you to bits!”

Miltie fled. He drove to New York, where he loaded his Cadillac on the
Queen Elizabeth.
_ He didn’t flee alone. The switchboard operator kept him company. They were guests in Ireland of the American ambassador (linked through Senator Dirksen and the senator’s special assistant, Julius Farkash). While staying at the U. S. embassy, Miltie bought land for what was to have become the new Dublin airport. He bought, however, in the wrong location. After which, he and his wife-to-be flew to the Continent in a transport plane carrying the Cadillac. They did crossword puzzles during the flight. Landing in Rome…

I spared Tanky these details, many of which he probably knew. Besides, the man had seen so much action that they wouldn’t have been worth mentioning. It would have been an infraction of something to speak of Hoffa or to refer to the evasion of a subpoena. Tanky, of course, had been forced to say no to the usual federal immunity offer. It would have been fatal to accept it. One understands this better now that the FBI wiretaps and other pieces of evidence in the Williams-Dorfman trial have been made public. Messages like: “Tell Merkle that if he doesn’t sell us the controlling interest in his firm on our terms, we’ll waste him. Not only him. Say that we’ll also hack up his wife and strangle his kids. And while you’re at it, pass the word to his lawyer that we’ll do the same to him and his wife, and his kids.”

Tanky personally was no killer. He was Dorfman’s man of business, one of his legal and financial team. He was, however, sent to intimidate people who were slow to cooperate or repay. He crushed his cigar on the fine finish of desks, and broke the framed photographs of wives and children (which I think in some cases a good idea). Millions of dollars had to be involved. He didn’t get violent over trifles.

And naturally it would have been offensive to speak of Hoffa, for Tanky might be one of the few who knew how Hoffa had disappeared. I myself, reading widely (with the motives of a concerned cousin), was persuaded that Hoffa had entered a car on his way to a “reconciliation” meeting in Detroit. He was immediately knocked on the head and probably murdered in the backseat. His body was shredded in one machine, and incinerated in another.

Much knowledge of such happenings was in Tanky’s looks, in the puffiness of his face—an edema of deadly secrets. This knowledge made him dangerous. Because of it he would go to prison. The organization, convinced that he was steadfast, would take care of him. What he needed from me was nothing but a private letter to the judge. “Your honor, I submit this statement to you on behalf of the defendant in
U.S.
_ v.
Raphael Metzger.
_ The family have asked me to intercede as a friend of the court, and 1 do so fully convinced that the jury has done its job well. I shall try to persuade you, however, to be lenient in sentencing.

Metzger’s parents were decent, good people….” Adding, perhaps, “I knew him in his infancy” or “I was present at his circumcision.”

These are not matters to bring to the court’s attention: that he was a whopping kid; that nothing so big was ever installed in a high chair; or that he still wears the expression he was born with, one of assurance, of cheerful insolence. His is a case of the Spanish proverb:
Genio y figura Hasta la sepultura.
_

The divine or, as most would prefer to say, the genetic stamp visible even in corruption and ruin. And we belong to the same genetic pool, with a certain difference in scale. My frame is much narrower. Nevertheless, some of the same traits are there, creases in the cheeks, a turn at the end of the nose, and most of all, a tendency to fullness in the underlip—the way the mouth works toward the sense-world. You could identify these characteristics also in family pictures from the old country—the Orthodox, totally different human types. Yet the cheekbones of bearded men, a band of forehead under a large skullcap, the shock of a fixed stare from two esoteric eyes, are recognizable still in their descendants.

Cousins in an Italian restaurant, looking each other over. It was no secret that Tanky despised me. How could it be a secret? Cousin Ijah Brodsky, speaking strange words, never really making sense, acting from peculiar motives, obviously flaky. Studied the piano, was touted as some kind of prodigy, made a sensation in the Kimball Building (the Noah’s ark of stranded European music masters), worked at Comptons Encyclopedia, edited a magazine, studied languages—Greek, Latin, Russian, Spanish—and also linguistics.

I had taken America up in the wrong way. There was only one language for a realist, and that was Hoffa language. Tanky belonged to the Hoffa school—in more than half its postulates, virtually identical with the Kennedy school. If you didn’t speak real, you spoke phony. If you weren’t hard, you were soft. And let’s not forget that at one time, when his bosses were in prison, Tanky, their steward, managed an institution that owns more real estate than the Chase Manhattan Bank.

But to return to Cousin Ijah: music, no; linguistics, no; he next distinguished himself at the University of Chicago Law School, after he had been disappointed in the university’s metaphysicians. He didn’t practice law, either; that was just another phase. A star who never amounted to anything. He fell in love with a concert harpist who had only eight fingers. Unrequited, it didn’t pan out; she was faithful to her husband. Ijah’s wife, who organized the TV show, had been as shrewd as the devil. She couldn’t make anything of him, either. Ambitious, she dismissed him when it became plain that Ijah was not cut out for a team player, lacked the instincts of a go-getter. She was like Cousin Miltie’s wife, Libby, and thought of herself as one of an imperial pair, the dominant one.

What was Tanky to make of someone like Ijah? Ijah was
not
_ passive. Ijah
did
_ have a life plan. But this plan was incomprehensible to his contemporaries. In fact, he didn’t appear to have any contemporaries. He had contacts with the living. Not quite the same thing.

The principal characteristic of our existence is
suspense.
_ Nobody—nobody at all—can say how it’s going to turn out.

What was curious and comical to Tanky was that Ijah should be so highly respected and connected. This deep-toned Ijah, a member of so many upper-class clubs and associations, was a gentleman. Tanky’s cousin
a gentleman! Isatis
_ bald head with the reasonably composed face was in the papers. He obviously made pretty good money (peanuts to Tanky). Maybe he would be reluctant to disclose to a federal judge that he was closely related to a convicted felon. If that was what Tanky thought, he was mistaken.

Years ago, Ijah was a kind of wild-ass type. His TV show was like a Second City act, a Marx Brothers routine. It went on in a fever of absurdities.

Ijah’s conduct is much different now. Today he’s quiet, he’s a gentleman. What does it take to be a gentleman? It used to require hereditary lands, breeding, conversation. Toward the end of the last century, Greek and Latin did it, and I have some of each. If it comes to that, I enjoy an additional advantage in that I don’t have to be anti-Semitic or strengthen my credentials as a civilized person by putting down Jews. But never mind that.

“Your Honor, it may be instructive to hear the real facts in a case you have tried. On the bench, one seldom learns what the wider human circumstances are. As Metzger’s cousin, I can be amicus curiae in a larger sense.

“I remember Tanky in his high chair. Tanky is what he was called on the Schurz High football squad. To his mother he was R’foel. She called him Folya, or Folka, for she was a village woman, born behind the pale. A tremendous infant, strapped in, struggling with his bonds. A powerful voice and a strong color. Like other infants he must have fed on Pablum or farina, but Cousin Shana also gave him more potent things to eat. She cooked primitive dishes like calf ‘s-foot jelly in her kitchen, and I remember eating stewed lungs, which had a spongy texture, savory but chewy, much gristle. The family lived on Hoyne Street in a brick bungalow with striped awnings, alternating broad bands of white and cantaloupe. Cousin Shana was a person of great force, and she kept house as it had been kept for hundreds of years. She was a wide woman, a kind of human blast furnace. Her style of conversation was exclamatory. She began by saying, in Yiddish, ‘Hear! Hear! Hear! Hear!’ And then she told you her opinion. It may be that persons of her type have become extinct in America. She made an immense impression on me. We were fond of each other, and I went to the Metzgers’ because I was at home there, and also to see and hear primordial family life.

“Shana’s aunt was my grandmother. My paternal grandfather was one of a dozen men who had memorized the whole of the Babylonian Talmud (or was it the Jerusalem one? here I am ignorant). All my life I have asked, ‘Why do that?’ But it was done.

“Metzger’s father sold haberdashery in the Boston Store down in the Loop. In the Austro-Hungarian Empire he had been trained as a cutter and also as a designer of men’s clothing. A man of many skills, he was always nicely dressed, stocky, bald except for a lock at the front, combed to swerve to the right. Some men are mutely bald; his baldness was expressive; stressful lumps would form in his skin, which dissolved with the return of calm. He said little; he grinned and beamed instead, and if there is a celestial meridian of good nature, it intersected his face. He had guileless abbreviated teeth with considerable spaces between them. What else? He was a stickler for respect. Nobody was to take his amiability for granted. When his temper rose, failure to find words gave him a stifled look, while large lumps came up under his scalp. One seldom saw this, however. He suffered from a tic of the eyelids. Also, to show his fondness (to boys) he used harmless Yiddish obscenities—a sign that he took you into his confidence. You would be friends when you were old enough.

“Just one thing more, Your Honor, if you care about the defendant’s personal background. Cousin Metzger, his father, enjoyed stepping out in the evening, and he often came to play cards with my father and my stepmother. In winter they drank tea with raspberry preserves; in summer I was sent to the drugstore to buy a quart brick of three-layered ice cream—vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry. You asked for ‘Neapolitan.’ It was a penny-ante poker game and often went on past midnight.”

“I understand you’re a friend of Gerald Eiler,” said Tanky.

“Acquaintance….”

“Ever been to his house?”

“About twenty years ago. But the house is gone, and so is his wife. I also used to meet him at parties, but the host who gave them passed away. About half of that social circle is in the cemetery.”

As usual, I gave more information than my questioner had any use for, using every occasion to transmit my sense of life. My father before me also did this. Such a habit can be irritating. Tanky didn’t care who was in the cemetery. You knew Eiler before he was on the bench?” Oh, long before….” Then you might be just the guy to write to him about me.”

By sacrificing an hour at my desk I might spare Tanky a good many years of prison. Why shouldn’t I do it for old times’ sake, for the sake of his parents, whom I held in such affection. I
had
_ to do it if I wanted to continue these exercises of memory. My souvenirs would stink if I let Shana’s son down. I had no space to work out whether this was a moral or a sentimental decision.

I might also write to Eiler to show off the influence I so queerly had. Tanky’s interpretation of my motives would make a curious subject. Did I want to establish that, bubble brain though I seemed to him, there were sound reasons why a letter from me might carry weight with a veteran of the federal judiciary like Eiler? Or prove that / had lived right? He would never concede me that. Anyway, with a long sentence hanging over him, he was in no mood to study life’s mysteries. He was sick, deadly depressed.

“It’s pretty snazzy across the street over at First National.”

Below, in the plaza, is the large Chagall mosaic, costing millions, the theme of which is the Soul of Man in America. I often doubt that old Chagall had the strength necessary to take such a reading. He is too levitational. Too many fancies.