The Collected Stories Of Saul Bellow (57 page)

“Well, what do you think I eat?” she said with that round, defiant movement of her shoulders which she herself recognized as characteristic
{me all over,
_ she thought). But he opened the cash register and took out thirty cents and crossed the street to the butcher’s and brought back a steak. He threw it on the griddle. “Fry it,” he said. She did, and watched him eat.

And when he was through she could bear her rage no longer. “Now,” she said, “you’ve had your meat. Get out. Never come back.” She kept a pistol under the counter. She picked it up, cocked it, pointed it at his heart. “If you ever come in that door again, I’ll kill you,” she said.

She saw it all.
I couldn’t bear to fall so low,
_ she thought,
to be slave to a shifiless cowboy.
_

Wicks said, “Don’t do that, Hat. Guess I went too far. You’re right.”

“You’ll never have a chance to make it up,” she cried. “Get out!”

On that cry he disappeared, and since then she had never seen him.

“Wicks, dear,” she said. “Please! I’m sorry. Don’t condemn me in your heart. Forgive me. I hurt myself in my evil. I always had a thick idiot head. I was born with a thick head.”

Again she wept, for Wicks. She was too proud. A snob. Now they might have lived together in this house, old friends, simple and plain.

She thought,
He really was my good fiend.
_

But what would Wicks do with a house like this, alone, if he was alive and survived her? He was too wiry for soft beds or easy chairs.

And she was the one who had said stiffly to India, “I’m a Christian person. I do not bear a grudge.”

Ah yes,
_ she said to herself. /
have caught myself out too of en. How long can this go on? And
_ she began to think, or try to think, of Joyce, her cousin’s daughter. Joyce was like herself, a woman alone, getting on in years, clumsy. Probably never been laid. Too bad. She would have given much, now, to succor Joyce.

But it seemed to her now that that too, the succor, had been a story. First you heard the pure story. Then you heard the impure story. Both stories. She had paid out years, now to one shadow, now to another shadow.

Joyce would come here to the house. She had a little income and could manage. She would live as Hattie had lived, alone. Here she would rot, start to drink, maybe, and day after day read, day after day sleep. See how beautiful it was here? It burned you out. How empty! It turned you into ash.

How can I doom a younger person to the same life? asked Hattie. It’s for somebody like me. When I was younger it wasn’t right. But now it is, exactly. Only I fit in here. It was made for my old age, to spend my last years peacefully. If I hadn’t let Jerry make me drunk that night—if I hadn’t sneezed! Because of this arm, I’ll have to live with Angus. My heart will break there away from my only home.

She was now very drunk, and she said to herself,
Take what God brings. He gives no gifis unmixed. He makes loans.
_

She resumed her letter of instructions to lawyer Claiborne: “Upon the following terms,” she wrote a second time. “Because 1 have suffered much. Because I only lately received what I have to give away, I can’t bear it.” The drunken blood was soaring to her head. But her hand was clear enough. She wrote, “It is too soon! Too soon! Because I do not find it in my heart to care for anyone as I would wish. Being cast off and lonely, and doing no harm where I am. Why should it be? This breaks my heart. In addition to everything else, why must I worry about this, which I must leave? I am tormented out of my mind. Even though by my own fault I have put myself into this position. And I am not ready to give up on this. No, not yet. And so I’ll tell you what, I leave this property, land, house, garden, and water rights, to Hattie Simmons Waggoner. Me! I realize this is bad and wrong. Not possible. Yet it is the only thing I really wish to do, so may God have mercy on my soul.”

How could that happen? She studied what she had written (and finally acknowledged there was no alternative). “I’m drunk,” she said, “and don’t know what I’m doing. I’ll die, and end. Like India. Dead as that lilac bush.”

Then she thought that there was a beginning, and a middle. She shrank from the last term. She began once more—a beginning. After that, there was the early middle, then middle middle, late middle middle, quite late middle. In fact the middle is all I know. The rest is just a rumor.

Only tonight I can’t give the house away. I’m drunk and so I need it. And tomorrow, she promised herself, I’ll think again. I’ll work it out, for sure.

WHAT KIND OF DAY DID YOU HAVE?

DIZZY WITH PERPLEXITIES, seduced by a restless spirit, Katrina Goliger took a trip she shouldn’t have taken. What was the matter with her, why was she jumping around like this? A divorced suburban matron with two young kids, was she losing ground, were her looks going or her options shrinking so fast that it made her reckless? Looks were not her problem; she was pretty enough, dark hair, nice eyes. She had a full figure, a little on the plump side, but she handled it with some skill. Victor Wulpy, the man in her life, liked her just as she was. The worst you could say of her was that she was clumsy. Clumsiness, however, might come out as girlishness if it was well managed. But there were few things which Trina managed well. The truth, to make a summary of it, was that she was passably pretty, she was awkward, and she was wildly restless.

In all fairness, her options were increasingly limited by Wulpy. It wasn’t that he was being capricious. He had very special difficulties to deal with—the state of his health, certain physical disabilities, his advanced age, and, in addition to the rest, his prominence. He was a major figure, a world-class intellectual, big in the art world, and he had been a bohemian long before bohemianism was absorbed into everyday life. The civilized world knew very well who Victor Wulpy was. You couldn’t discuss modern painting, poetry—any number of important topics—without referring to him.

Well, then, toward midnight, and in the dead of winter—Evanston, Illinois, where she lives at the bottom of a continental deep freeze—Katrina’s phone rings and Victor asks her—in effect he tells her—“I have to have you here first thing in the morning.”

“Here” is Buffalo, New York, where Victor has been lecturing.

And Katrina, setting aside all considerations of common sense or of self-respect, says, “I’ll get an early flight out.”

If she had been having an affair with a younger man, Katrina might have passed it off with a laugh, saying, “That’s a real brainstorm. It would be a gas, wouldn’t it, and just what this zero weather calls for. But what am I supposed to do with my kids on such short notice?” She might also have mentioned that her divorced husband was suing for custody of the little girls, and that she had a date downtown tomorrow with the court-appointed psychiatrist who was reporting on her fitness. She would have mixed these excuses with banter, and combined them with a come-on: “Let’s do it Thursday. I’ll make it up to you.” With Victor refusal was not one of her options. It was almost impossible, nowadays, to say no to him. Poor health was a euphemism. He had nearly died last year.

Various forces—and she wasn’t altogether sorry—robbed her of the strength to resist. Victor was such a monument, and he went back so far in modern cultural history. You had to remember that he had begun to publish in
transition,
_ an avant-garde magazine, and always in lowercase, and
Hound and Horn
_ before she was born. He was beginning to have an avant-garde reputation while she was still in her playpen. And if you thought he was not tired out and had no more surprises up his sleeve, you were thinking of the usual threescore and ten, not of Victor Wulpy. Even his bitterest detractors, the diehard grudgers, had to admit that he was still first-rate. And about how many Americans had leaders of thought like Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Hannah Arendt said,
“Chapeau bas!
_ This is a man of genius.” Merleau-Ponty was especially impressed with Victor’s essays on Karl Marx.

Besides, Victor was personally so impressive—he had such a face, such stature; without putting it on, he was so commanding that he often struck people as being a king, of an odd kind. A New York-style king, thoroughly American—good-natured, approachable, but making it plain that he was a sovereign; he took no crap from anybody. But last year—it was that time of life for him, the midseventies—he went down with a crash. It happened at Harvard, and he was taken to Mass. General for surgery. The doctors there had dragged him from the edge of the grave. Or maybe he had spurned the grave himself, wrapped in bandages as he was and with pipes up his nose and drugged to the limit. Seeing him on his back, you would never have believed that he would walk through the door again. But he did just that.

Suppose, however, that Victor had died, what would Katrina have done? To think of it confused her. But Katrina’s sister, Dorothea, who never spared anybody, spelled out the consequences of Victor’s death. Dorothea, in plain truth, couldn’t let the subject alone. “This has been the main event of your life. This time, kid, you really came out swinging.” (An odd figure for Katrina, who was pretty and plump and seldom so much as raised her voice.) “You’re going to be up against it when it finally happens. You must have known you could only have a short run.” Katrina knew all that Dotey had to say. The resume ran as follows: You dumped your husband to have this unusual affair. Sexual excitement and social ambition went together. You aimed to break into high cultural circles. I don’t know what you thought
you
_ had to offer. If you took Daddy’s word for it, and he’d repeat it from the next world, you’re just an average Dumb Dora from north-suburban Chicagoland.

Quite true, the late Billy Weigal had called his daughters Dumb Dora One and Dumb Dora Two. He sent them down to the state university at Champaign-Urbana, where they joined a sorority and studied Romance languages. The girls wanted French? Good. Theater arts? Sure, why not. Old Doc Weigal pretended to think that it was all jibber-jabber. He had been a politician, mainly a tax fixer with high connections in the Chicago Democratic machine. His wife, too, was a mental lightweight. It was part of the convention that the womenfolk be birdbrains. It pleased his corrupt, protective heart. As Victor pointed out (all higher interpretation came from him), this was plain old middle-class ideology, the erotic components of which were easy to make out. Ignorance in women, a strong stimulus for men who considered themselves rough. On an infinitely higher level, Baudelaire had advised staying away from learned ladies. Bluestockings and bourgeois ladies caused sexual paralysis. Artists could trust only women of the people.

Anyway, Katrina had been raised to consider herself a nitwit. That she knew she was not one was an important secret postulate of her feminine science. And she didn’t really object to Dorothea’s way of discussing her intricate and fascinating problem with Victor. Dorothea said, “I want to get you to look at it from every angle.” What this really meant was that Dotey would try to shaft her from every side. “Let’s start with the fact that as Mrs. Alfred Goliger nobody in Chicago would take notice of you. When Mr. Goliger invited people to look at his wonderful collections of ivory, jade, semiprecious stones, and while he did all the talking, he only wanted you to serve the drinks and eats. And to the people with whom he tried to make time, the Lyric Opera types, the contemporary arts crowd, the academics, and those other shits, you were just a humdrum housewife. Then all of a sudden, through Wulpy, you’re meeting all the Mother-wells and Rauschenbergs and Ashberys and Frankenthalers, and you leave the local culture creeps groveling in the dust. However, when your old wizard dies, what then? Widows are forgotten pretty fast, except those with promotional talent. So what happens to girlfriends?”

Arriving at Northwestern University to give his seminars on American painting, Victor had been lionized by the Goligers. Alfred Goliger, who, flying to Bombay and to Rio, had branched out from gems to antiques and objets d’art and bought estate jewelry and also china, sterling, pottery, statuary in all continents, longed to be a part of the art world. He wasn’t one of your hobbled husbands; he did pretty much as he liked in Brazil and India. He misjudged Katrina if he thought that in her he had a homebody who spent her time choosing wallpapers and attending PTA meetings. Victor, the perfect lion, relaxing among Evanston admirers while he drank martinis and ate hors d’oeuvres, took in the eager husband, aggressively on the make, and then considered the pretty wife—in every sense of the word a dark lady. He perceived that she was darkest where darkness counted most. Circumstances had made Katrina look commonplace. She did what forceful characters do with such imposed circumstances; she used them as camouflage. Thus she approached Wulpy like a nearsighted person, one who has to draw close to study you. She drew so near that you could feel her breath. And then her lowering, almost stubborn look rested on you for just that extra beat that carried a sexual message. It was the incompetency with which she presented herself, the nearsighted puzzled frown, that made the final difference. Her first handshake informed him of a disposition, an inclination. He saw that all her preparations had been set. With a kind of engraved silence about the mouth under the wide bar of his mustache, Wulpy registered all this information. All he had to do was give the countersign. He intended to do just that.

At first it was little more than the fooling of a visiting fireman, an elderly, somewhat spoiled celebrity. But Wulpy was too big a man for crotchets. He was a disciplined intellectual. He stood for something. At the age of seventy, he had arranged his ideas in well-nigh final order: none of the weakness, none of the drift that made supposedly educated people contemptible. How can you call yourself a modern thinker if you lack the realism to identify a weak marriage quickly, if you don’t know what hypocrisy is, if you haven’t come to terms with lying—if, in certain connections, people can still say about you, “He’s a sweetheart!”? Nobody would dream of calling Victor “a sweetheart.” Wickedness? No, well-seasoned judgment. But whatever his first intentions might have been, the affair became permanent. And how do you assess a woman who knows how to bind such a wizard to her? She’s got to be more than a dumpy suburbanite sex-pot with clumsy ankles. And this is something more than the cruel absurdity, the decline and erotic enslavement, of a distinguished man grown (how suddenly!) old.