Herzog (20 page)

    When she was gone, he dried the oboe, looked over the reeds, shut the frowzy plush case. He wore field glasses about his neck. Once in a while he tried to examine a bird. Usually it was gone before he could get it in focus. Abandoned, he sat at his desk, a flush door on wrought-iron legs. Philodendrons grew from the base of his lamp, twining about the iron. With a rubber band he shot wads of paper at the horseflies on the paint-streaked windows. He was not a skillful painter. He tried a spray gun at first, attaching it to the rear of the vacuum cleaner, a very efficient blower. Muffled in rags to protect the lungs, Moses sprayed ceilings, but the gun speckled the windows and banisters and he went back to the brush. Dragging the ladder and buckets and rags and thinners, scraping with his putty knife, he patched and painted, reaching left, right, above, this stretch, beyond, way out, to the corner, to the molding, his taut hand trying to achieve a straight line, laying paint on in big strokes or in an agony of finesse.

    Spattered and streaming sweat when the frenzy wore off, he went into the garden. Stripped naked, he fell in the hammock.

    Meanwhile, Madeleine toured the antique shops with Phoebe Gersbach, or brought home loads of groceries from the Pittsfield supermarkets.

    Moses was continually after her about money. Beginning his reproaches, he tried to keep his voice low. It was always something trivial that set him off-a bounced check, a chicken that had rotted in the icebox, a new shirt torn up for rags.

    Gradually his feelings became very fierce.

    "When are you going to stop bringing home this junk, Madeleine-those busted commodes, these spinning wheels."

    "We have to furnish the place. I can't stand these empty rooms."

    "Where's all the dough going? I'm working myself sick." He felt black with rage inside.

    "I pay the bills-what do you think I do with it?"

    "You said you had to learn to handle money. No one ever trusted you. Well, you're being trusted now and the checks are bouncing. The dress shop just phoned-Milly Crozier. Five hundred bucks on a maternity outfit. Who's going to be born-Louis Quatorze?"

    "Yes, I know, your darling mother wore flour sacks."

    "You don't need a Park Avenue obstetrician.

    Phoebe Gersbach used the Pittsfield hospital. How can I get you to New York from here? It's three and a half hours."

    "We'll go ten days before."

    "What about all this work?"

    "You can carry your Hegel to the city. You haven't cracked a book in months anyway. The whole thing is a neurotic mess. These bushels of notes.

    It's grotesque how disorganized you are. You're no better than any other kind of addict-sick with abstractions. Curse Hegel, anyway, and this crappy old house. It needs four servants, and you want me to do all the work."

    Herzog made himself dull by repeating what was right.

    He was maddening, too. He realized it. He appeared to know how everything ought to go, down to the smallest detail (under the category of "Free Concrete Mind," misapprehension of a universal by the developing consciousness-reality opposing the "law of the heart," alien necessity gruesomely crushing individuality, und so weiter).

    Oh, Herzog granted that he was in the wrong. But all he asked, it seemed to him, was a bit of cooperation in his effort, benefiting everyone, to work toward a meaningful life. Hegel was curiously significant but also utterly cockeyed. Of course. That was the whole point Simpler and without such elaborate metaphysical rigmarole was Spinoza's Prop. XXXVII; man's desire to have others rejoice in the good in which he rejoices, not to make others live according to his way of thinking- ex ipsius ingenio.

    Herzog, mulling over these ideas as he all alone painted his walls in Ludeyville, building Versailles as well as Jerusalem in the green hot Berkshire summers. Time and again he was brought down from the ladder to the telephone. Madeleine's checks were bouncing.

    "Jesus Christ!" he cried out. "Not again, Mady!"

    She was ready for him in a bottle-green maternity blouse and knee-length stockings. She was becoming very stout. The doctor had warned her not to eat candy.

    On the sly, she greedily devoured enormous Hershey bars, the thirty-cent size.

    "Can't you add! There's not a damn reason in the world for these checks to come back." Moses glared at her.

    "Oh-here we go with this same petty stuff."

    "It's not petty. It's damn serious...."

    "I suppose you'll start on my upbringing now-my lousy, free-loading bohemian family, all chiselers. And you gave me your good name. I know this routine backwards."

    "Do I repeat myself? Well, so do you, Madeleine, with these checks."

    "Spending your dead father's money. Dear Daddy!

    That's what you choke on. Well, he was your father. I don't ask you to share my horrible father. So don't try to force your old man down my throat."

    "We've got to have a little order in these surroundings."

    Madeleine said quickly, firmly, and accurately, "You'll never get the surroundings you want. Those are in the twelfth century somewhere.

    Always crying for the old home and the kitchen table with the oilcloth on it and your Latin book.

    Okay-let's hear your sad old story. Tell me about your poor mother. And your father. And your boarder, the drunkard. And the old synagogue, and the bootlegging, and your Aunt Zipporah... Oh, what balls!"

    "As if you didn't have a past of your own."

    "Oh, balls! So now we're going to hear how you saved me. Let's hear it again. What a frightened puppy I was. How I wasn't strong enough to face life. But you gave me love, from your big heart, and rescued me from the priests. Yes, cured me of menstrual cramps by servicing me so good. You saved me. You sacrificed your freedom.

    I took you away from Daisy and your son, and your Japanese screw. Your important time and money and attention." Her wild blue glare was so intense that her eyes seemed twisted.

    "Madeleine!"

    "Oh-shit!"

    "Just think a minute."

    "Think? What do you know about thinking?"

    "Maybe I married you to improve my mind!" said Herzog. "I'm learning."

    "Well, I'll teach you, don't worry!" said the beautiful, pregnant Madeleine between her teeth.

    Herzog noted from a favorite source- Opposition is true friendship. His house, his child, yea, all that a man hath will he give for wisdom.

    The husband-a beautiful soul-the exceptional wife, the angelic child and the perfect friends all dwelt in the Berkshires together. The learned professor sat at his studies.... Oh, he had really been asking for it. Because he insisted on being the ing@enue whose earnestness made his own heart flutter - zisse n'shamele, a sweet little soul, Tennie had called Moses.

    At forty; to earn such a banal reputation! His forehead grew wet. Such stupidity deserved harsher punishment-a sickness, a jail sentence. Again, he was only being "lucky" (ramona, food and wine, invitations to the seashore). Still, extreme self-abuse was not really interesting to him, either. It was not the most relevant thing.

    Not to be a fool might not be worth the difficult alternatives. Anyway, who was that non-fool?

    Was it the power-lover, who bent the public to his will-the scientific intellectual who administered a budget of billions? Clear eyes, a hard head, a penetrating political intelligence-the organizational realist? Now wouldn't it be nice to be one? But Herzog worked under different orders-doing, he trusted, the work of the future. The revolutions of the twentieth century, the liberation of the masses by production, created private life but gave nothing to fill it with. This was where such as he came in. The progress of civilization-indeed, the survival of civilization-depended on the successes of Moses E. Herzog. And in treating him as she did, Madeleine injured a great project. This was, in the eyes of Moses E. Herzog, what was so grotesque and deplorable about the experience of Moses E. Herzog.

    A very special sort of lunatic expects to inculcate his principles.

    Sandor Himmelstein, Valentine Gersbach, Madeleine P. Herzog, Moses himself.

    Reality instructors. They want to teach you - to punish you with - the lessons of the Real.

    Moses, a collector of pictures, had kept a photograph of Madeleine, aged twelve, in riding habit. She was posed with the horse, about to mount, a stocky long-haired girl with fat wrists and desperate dark shadows under her eyes, premature signs of suffering andofa craving for revenge. In jodhpurs, boots, and bowler she had the hauteur of the female child who knows it won't be long before she is nubile and has the power to hurt.

    This is mental politics. The strength to do evil is sovereignty. She knew more at twelve than I did at forty.

    Now Daisy had been a very different sort of person comcooler, more regular, a conventional Jewish woman. Herzog had photographs of her, too, in his foot locker under the bed, but there was no need to examine pictures, he could evoke her face at will- slant green eyes, large ones, kinky, golden but luster-less hair, a clear skin. Her manner was shy but also rather stubborn. Without difficulty, Herzog saw her as she had appeared on a summer morning beneath the El on 51st Street, Chicago, a college student with grimy texts-Park and Burgess, Ogburn and Nimkoff. Her dress was simple, thin-striped green-and-white seersucker, square at the neck.

    Beneath its laundered purity, she had small white shoes, bare legs, and her hair was held at the top by a barrette. The red streetcar came from the slums to the west. It clanged, swayed, wallowed, its trolley shedding thick green sparks, tatters of paper flying in its wake. Moses had stood behind her on the carbolic-reeking platform when she gave her transfer slip to the conductor. From her bare neck and shoulders he inhaled the fragrance of summer apples. Daisy was a country girl, a Buckeye who grew up near Zanesville. She was childishly systematic about things. It sometimes amused Moses to recall that she had a file card, clumsily printed out, to cover every situation. Her awkward form of organization had had a certain charm. When they were married she put his pocket money in an envelope, in a green metal file bought for budgeting. Daily reminders, bills, conceit tickets were pinned by thumbtacks to the bulletin board. Calendars were marked well in advance. Stability, symmetry, order, containment were Daisy's strength.

    Dear Daisy, I have a few things to say to you.

    By my irregularity and turbulence of spirit I brought out the very worst in Daisy. I caused the seams of her stockings to be so straight, and the buttons to be buttoned symmetrically. I was behind those rigid curtains and underneath the square carpets. Roast breast of veal every Sunday with bread stuffing like clay was due to my disorders, my huge involvement comhuge but evidently formless-in the history of thought. She took Moses' word for it that he was seriously occupied. Of course a wife's duty was to stand by this puzzling and often disagreeable Herzog. She did so with heavy neutrality, recording her objections each time-once but not more. The rest was silence-such heavy silence as he felt in Connecticut when he was finishing Romanticism and Christianity.

    The chapter on "Romantics and Enthusiasts" nearly did him in-it almost ended them both. (the Enthusiastic reaction against the scientific mode of suspending belief, intolerable to the expressive needs of certain temperaments.) Here Daisy picked up and left him alone in Connecticut.

    She had to go back to Ohio. Her father was dying.

    Moses read the literature of Enthusiasm in his cottage, by the small nickel-trimmed kitchen stove. Wrapped in a blanket like an Indian, he listened to the radio-debated the pros and cons of Enthusiasm with himself.

    It was a winter of rocklike ice. The pond like a slab of halite-green, white, resonant ice, bitterly ringing underfoot. The trickling mill dam froze in twisting pillars. The elms, giant harp shapes, made cracking noises. Herzog, responsible to civilization in his icy outpost, lying in bed in an aviator's helmet when the stoves were out, fitted together Bacon and Locke from one side and Methodism and William Blake from the other. His nearest neighbor was a clergyman, Mr. Idwal.

    Idwal's automobile, a Model A Ford, was running when Herzog's Whippet had frozen solid. They drove to the market together. Mrs.

    Idwal made graham-cracker pies filled with chocolate gelatin, and left them, neighborly, on Moses' table. He returned from his solitary walks on the pond, in the woods, and found pies in big Pyrex plates on which he warmed his numb cheeks and fingertips. In the morning, eating gelatin pie for breakfast, he saw Idwal, ruddy and small, with steel spectacles, in his bedroom swinging Indian clubs, doing knee-bends in his long underwear. His wife sat in her parlor, hands folded, the spidery design of lace curtains thrown on her face by sunlight. Moses was invited to play his oboe, accompanying Mrs. Idwal, who played a melodeon, on Sunday evenings while the farm families sang hymns. And were they farmers?

    No, they were the country poor-odd-job people. The little parlor was hot, the air bad, the hymns pierced with Jewish melancholy by Moses and his reeds.

    His relations with the Reverend and Mrs. Idwal were excellent until the minister started to give him testimonials by orthodox rabbis who had embraced the Christian faith. The photos of these rabbis in fur hats, bearded, were put down with the pies. The large eyes of those men and especially their lips thrust out from foaming beards began to seem crazy to Moses, and he thought it time to get away from the snowbound cottage. He was afraid for his own sanity, living like this, especially after the death of Daisy's father. Moses thought he saw him, met him in the woods, and when he opened doors he encountered his father-in-law, vivid and characteristic, waiting by a table or sitting in the bathroom.

    Herzog made a mistake in rejecting Idwal's rabbis. The clergyman was keener than ever to convert him and dropped in every afternoon for theological discussions until Daisy returned. Sad, clear-eyed, mostly mute, resistant. But a wife. And the child!