Herzog (31 page)

    "Anyway, he convinced Madeleine that he was superior to the original," said Ramona. She lowered her eyes. They moved and then came to rest beneath the lids. By candlelight, he observed this momentary disquiet of her face. Perhaps she thought she had spoken tactlessly.

    "Madeleine's greatest ambition, I think, is to fall in love. This is the deepest part of the joke about her. Then there's her grand style. Her tics.

    To give the bitch her due, she is beautiful. She adores being the center of attention. In one of those fur-trimmed suits she struts in, with her deep color and blue eyes. And when she has an audience and begins spellbinding, there's a kind of flat pass she makes with the palm of her hand, and her nose twitches like a little rudder, and by and by one brow joins in and begins to rise, rise."

    "You make her sound adorable," said Ramona.

    "We lived together on a high level, all of us.

    Except Phoebe. She merely went along."

    "What is she like?"

    "She has attractive features but she looks severe. She comes on like the head nurse."

    "She didn't care for you?"

    "... Her husband was a cripple. He knows how to make the most of it, emotionally, with his lurid sob stuff. She had bought him cheap because he was factory damaged. New and perfect, she could never have afforded such a luxury. He knew and she knew and we knew. Because this is an age of insight. The laws of psychology are known to all educated people.

    Anyway, he was only a one-legged radio announcer but she had him to herself. Then Madeleine and I arrived, and a glamorous life began in Ludeyville."

    "It must have upset her when he began to imitate you."

    "Yes. But if I was going to be swindled the best way was to do the job in my own style. Poetic justice. Philosophical piety describes the style."

    "When did you first notice?"

    "When Mady began to stay away from Ludeyville.

    A few times she holed up in Boston. She said she simply had to be alone and think things over. So she took the kid-just an infant. And I asked Valentine to go and reason with her."

    "And this was when he began to give you those lectures?"

    Herzog tried to smile away the quick-welling rancor whose source had been touched. He might not be able to control it. "They all lectured. Everyone lectured. People legislate continually by means of talk. I have Madeleine's letters from Boston. I have letters from Gersbach, too. All kinds of documents. I even have a bundle of letters written by Madeleine to her mother. They came in the mail."

    "But what did Madeleine say?"

    "She's quite a writer. She writes like Lady Hester Stanhope. First of all, she said I resembled her father in too many ways. That when we were in a room together I seemed to swallow and gulp up all the air and left nothing for her to breathe. I was overbearing, infantile, demanding, sardonic, and a psychosomatic bully."

    "Psychosomatic?"

    "I had pains in my belly to dominate her, and got my way by being sick. They all said that, all three of them. Madeleine had another lecture about the only basis for a marriage. A marriage was a tender relationship resulting from the overflow of feeling, and all the rest of that. She even had a lecture about the right way to perform the conjugal act."

    "Incredible."

    "She must have been describing what she had learned from Gersbach."

    "You don't need to go into it," said Ramona. "I'm sure she made it as painful as possible."

    "In the meantime, I was supposed to wind up this study of mine, and become the Lovejoy of my generation-that's the silly talk of scholarly people, Ramona, I didn't think of it that way. The more Madeleine and Gersbach lectured me, the more I thought that my only purpose was to lead a quiet, regular life. She said this quietness was more of my scheming. She accused me of being on "a meek kick," and said that I was now trying to keep her in line by a new tactic."

    "How curious! What were you supposed to be doing?"

    "She thought I had married her in order to be "saved," and now I wanted to kill her because she wasn't doing the job. She said she loved me, but couldn't do what I demanded, because this was so fantastic, and so she was going to Boston one more time to think it all through and find a way to save this marriage."

    "I see."

    "About a week later, Gersbach came to the house to pick up some of her things. She had phoned him from Boston. She needed her clothes. And money. He and I took a long walk in the woods. It was early autumn-sunny, dusty, marvelous ... melancholy. I helped him over the rough ground. He poles Ms way along, with that leg...."

    "As you told me. Like a gondolier. And what did he say?"

    "He said he didn't know how the fuck he would survive this terrible trouble between the two people he loved most in the world. He repeated that-the two people who meant more to him than wife and child. It was tearing him to pieces. His faith in things was going to be smashed."

    Ramona laughed, and Herzog joined her.

    "And then?"

    "Then?" said Herzog. He remembered the tremor in Gersbach's dark-red powerful face which seemed at first brutal, the face of a butcher, until you came to understand the depth and subtlety of his feelings. "Then we went back to the house and Gersbach packed her things. And what he had mainly come for-her diaphragm."

    "You don't mean it!"

    "Of course I mean it."

    "But you seem to accept it...."

    "What I accept is that my idiocy inspired them, and sent them to greater heights of perversity."

    "Didn't you ask her what this meant?"

    "I did. She said I had lost my right to an answer. It was more of the same from me-pettiness. Then I asked her whether Valentine had become her lover."

    "And what kind of answer did you get?"

    Ramona's curiosity was greatly excited.

    "That I didn't understand what Gersbach had given me-the kind of love, the kind of feeling. I said, "But he took the thing from the medicine chest." And she said, "Yes, and he stays overnight with June and me when he comes to Boston, but he's the brother I never had, and that's all." I hesitated to accept this, so she added, "Now don't be a fool, Moses. You know how coarse he is.

    He's not my type at all. Our intimacy is a different kind altogether. Why, when he uses the toilet in our little Boston apartment it fills up with his stink.

    I know the smell of his shit. Do you think I could give myself to a man whose shit smells like that!" That was her answer."

    "How frightful, Moses! Is that what she said?

    What a strange woman. She's a strange, strange creature."

    "Well, it shows how much we know about one another, Ramona. Madeleine wasn't just a wife, but an education. A good, steady, hopeful, rational, diligent, dignified, childish person like Herzog who thinks human life is a subject, like any other subject, has to be taught a lesson. And certainly anyone who takes dignity seriously, old-fashioned individual dignity, is bound to get the business. Maybe dignity was imported from France. Louis Quatorze. Theater.

    Command. Authority. Anger. Forgiveness.

    Majeste.

    The plebeian, bourgeois ambition was to inherit this.

    It all belongs in the museum now."

    "But I thought Madeleine herself was always so dignified."

    "Not always. She could turn against her own pretensions.

    And don't forget, Valentine is a great personality, too. Modern consciousness has this great need to explode its own postures. It teaches the truth of the creature. It throws shit on all pretensions and fictions. A man like Gersbach can be gay. Innocent. Sadistic. Dancing around.

    Instinctive. Heartless. Hugging his friends.

    Feeble-minded. Laughing at jokes. Deep, too.

    Exclaiming "I love you!" or "This I believe."

    And while moved by these "beliefs" he steals you blind. He makes realities nobody can understand. A radio-astronomer will sooner understand what's happening in space ten billion light years away than what Gersbach is fabricating in his brain."

    "You're far too excited about it," said Ramona.

    "My advice is to forget them both. How long did this stupidity go on?"

    "Years. Several years, anyway. Madeleine and I got together again, a while after this. And then she and Valentine ran my life for me. I didn't know a thing about it. All the decisions were made by them- where I lived, where I worked, how much rent I paid.

    Even my mental problems were set by them. They gave me my homework. And when they decided that I had to go, they worked out all the details-property settlement, alimony, child support. I'm sure Valentine thought he acted in my best interests. He must have held Madeleine back.

    He knows he's a good man. He understands, and when you understand you suffer more. You have higher responsibilities, responsibilities that come with suffering. I couldn't take care of my wife, poor fish. He took care of her. I wasn't fit to bring up my own daughter. He has to do it for me, out of friendship, out of pity and sheer greatness of soul. He even agrees that Madeleine is a psychopath."

    "No, you can't mean it!"

    "I do. "The poor crazy bitch," he'd say.

    "My heart goes out to that cracked broad!" his "So he's mysterious, too. What a strange pair!" she said.

    "Of course he is," said Herzog. "Moses," said Ramona. "Let's stop talking about this, please. I feel there's something wrong in it....

    Wrong for us. Now come..."

    "You haven't heard it all. There's Geraldine's letter, telling how they mistreat the kid."

    "I know. I've read it. Moses, no more."

    "But... Yes, you're right," said Herzog.

    "Okay, I'll stop it right now. I'll help you clear the table."

    "There's no need to."

    "I'll wash the dishes."

    "No, you certainly will not wash dishes. You're a guest here. I intend to put them all in the sink, for tomorrow."

    He thought, I prefer to accept as a motive not the thing I fully understand but the thing I partly understand.

    Utter clarity of explanation to me is false.

    However, I must take care of June.

    "No, no, Ramona, there's something about washing dishes that calms me. Now and then, anyway." He fixed the drain, put in soap powder, ran the water, hung his coat on the knob of a cupboard, tucked up his sleeves. He refused the apron Ramona offered. "I'm an old hand. I won't splash."

    As even Ramona's fingers were sexual, Herzog wanted to see how she would do ordinary tasks. But the kitchen towel in her hands as she dried the glasses and silver looked natural. So she was not simply pretending to be a homebody. Herzog had at times wondered whether it wasn't Aunt Tamara who prepared the shrimp remoulade before she slipped out The answer was no. Ramona did her own cooking.

    "You should be thinking about your future," said Ramona.

    "What are you planning to do next year?"

    "I can pick up a job of some sort."

    "Where?"

    "I can't decide whether to be near my son Marco, in the east, or go back to Chicago to keep an eye on June."

    "Listen, Moses, it's no disgrace to be practical. Is it a point of honor or something, not to think clearly? You want to win by; sacrificing yourself? It doesn't work, as you ought to know by now.

    Chicago would be a mistake. You'd only suffer."

    "Perhaps, and suffering is another bad habit."

    "Are you joking?"

    "Not at all," he said.

    "It's hard to imagine a more masochistic situation.

    Everybody in Chicago knows your story by now. You'd be in the middle of it. Fighting, arguing, getting hurt. That's too humiliating for a man like you. You don't respect yourself enough. Do you want to be torn to pieces? Is that what you're offering to do for little June?"

    "No, no. What good is that? But can I turn the child over to those two? You read what Geraldine said."

    He knew that letter by heart, and was prepared to recite it.

    "Still, you can't take the child from her mother."

    "She's my kind. She has my genes. She's a Herzog. They're mentally alien types."

    He grew tense again. Ramona tried to draw him away from this subject.

    "Didn't you tell me that your friend Gersbach has become a kind of figure in Chicago?"

    "Yes, yes. He started out in educational radio, and now he's all over the place. On committees, in the papers. He gives lectures to the Hadassah... readings of his poems. In the Temples. He's joining the Standard Club.

    He's on television! Fantastic! He was such a provincial character, he thought there was only one railroad station in Chicago. And now he's turned out to be a terrific operator-covers the city in his Lincoln Continental, wearing a tweed coat of a sort of salmon-puke color."

    "You're getting into a state just thinking about it," said Ramona. "Your eyes get feverish."

    "Gersbach hired a hall, did I tell you?"

    "No."

    "He sold tickets to a reading of his poems. My friend Asphalter told me about it. Five dollars for the front seats, three bucks at the back of the hall. Reading a poem about his grandfather who was a street sweeper, he broke down and cried.

    Nobody could get out. The hall was locked."

    Ramona could not help laughing.

    "Ha-ha!" Herzog let out the water, wringing the rag, sprinkling scouring powder. He scrubbed and rinsed the sink. Ramona brought him a slice of lemon for the fishy smell. He squeezed it over his hands. "Gersbach!"

    "Still," said Ramona earnestly. "You ought to get back to your scholarly work."

    "I don't know. I feel I'm stuck with it. But what else is there for me to do?"

    "You only say that because you're agitated. You'll think differently when you're calm."

    "Maybe."

    She led the way to her room. "Shall I play more of that Egyptian music? It has a good effect." She went to the machine. "And why don't you take your shoes off, Moses. I know you like to remove them in this weather."