Herzog (44 page)

    Asphalter stood by, smiling but feeling somewhat awkward, his bald scalp perspiring, his new particolored beard looking hot. They were on the long gray staircase of the Museum of Science in Jackson Park. Busloads of children were entering, black and white flocks, herded by teachers and parents. The bronze-trimmed glass doors flashed in and out, and all these little bodies, redolent of milk and pee, blessed heads of all hues, shapes, the promise of the world to come, in the eyes of benevolent Herzog, its future good and evil, hurried in and out.

    "My sweet June. Papa missed you."

    "Poppy!"

    "You know, Luke," Herzog spoke out with a burst, his face both happy and twisted. "Sandor Himmelstein told me this kid would forget me. He was thinking of his own Himmelstein breed-guinea pigs, hamsters."

    "Herzogs are made of finer clay?" Asphalter put it in the interrogative form. But it was courteous, he meant it kindly. "... I can meet you right at this spot at four p. m.," he said.

    "Only three and a half hours? Where does she get off! Well, all right, I won't quarrel.

    I don't want any conflict. There's another day tomorrow."

    One of his units of mental extension swelling and passing, a lengthy aside (much heartbreak to relinquish this daughter. To become another lustful she-ass? Or a melancholy beauty like Sarah Herzog, destined to bear children ignorant of her soul and her soul's God? Or would humankind find a new path, making his type-he would be glad of that!-obsolete? In New York, after giving a lecture, he had been told by a young executive who came up rapidly, "Professor, Art is for Jews!" Seeing this slender, blond, and violent figure before him, Herzog had only nodded and said, "It used to be usury"), departed with another of those twinges. That's the new realism, he thought.

    "Luke? Thank you. I'll be here at four. Now don't you spend the day brooding."

    Moses carried his daughter into the museum to see the chickens hatching. "Did Marco send you a postcard, baby?"

    "Yes. From the camp."

    "You know who Marco is?"

    "My big brother."

    So Madeleine was not trying to estrange her from the Herzogs, whatever course of madness she was running.

    "Have you gone down in the coal mine, here in the museum?"

    "It scared me."

    "Do you want to see the chickies?"

    "I seen them."

    "Don't you want to see them more?"

    "Oh, yes. I like them. Uncle Val took me last week."

    "Do I know Uncle Val?"

    "Oh, Papa! You fooler." She hugged his neck, snickering.

    "Who is he?"

    "He's my stepfather, Papa. You know it."

    "Is that what Mama tells you?"

    "He's my stepfather."

    "Was he the one who locked you up in the car?"

    "Yes."

    "And what did you do?"

    "I was crying. But not long."

    "And do you like Uncle Val?"

    "Oh, yes, he's fun. He makes faces. Can you make good faces?"

    "Some," he said. "I have too much dignity to make good faces."

    "You tell better stories."

    "I expect I do, sweetheart."

    "About the boy with the stars."

    So she remembered his best inventions. Herzog nodded his head, wondering at her, proud of her, thankful.

    "The boy with all the freckles?"

    "They were like the sky."

    "Each freckle was just like a star, and he had them all. The Big Dipper, Little Dipper, Orion, the Bear, the Twins, Betelgeuse, the Milky Way. His face had each and every star on it, in the right position."

    "Only one star nobody knew."

    "They took him to all the astronomers."

    "I saw astronomers on television."

    "And the astronomers said, "Pooh, pooh, an interesting coincidence. A little freak." his "M. M."

    "At last he went to see Hiram Shpitalnik, who was an old old old man, very tiny, with a long beard down to his feet. He lived in a hatbox.

    And he said, "You must be examined by my grandfather." his "He lived in a walnut shell."

    "Exactly. And all his friends were bees. The busy bee has no time for sorrow. Great-grandfather Shpitalnik came out of the shell with a telescope, and looked at Rupert's face."

    "The boy's name was Rupert."

    "Old Shpitalnik had the bees lift him into position, and he looked and said it was a real star, a new discovery. He had been watching for that star.... Now, here are the chicks." He held the child on the railing; to his left, so that she would not press against the pistol, wrapped in her great-grandfather's rubles. These were in his right breast pocket still.

    "They're yellow," she said.

    "They keep it hot and bright in there. See that egg wobble? The chick is trying to get out. Soon his bill will go through the shell. Watch."

    "Papa, you don't shave at our house any more, why not?"

    He must stiffen his resistance to heartache now. A kind of necessary hardness was demanded. Otherwise it was as the savage described the piano, "You fight "im 'e cry." And this Jewish art of tears must be suppressed. In measured words he answered, "I have my razor in another place.

    What does Madeleine say?"

    "She says you didn't want to live with us any more."

    He kept his anger from the child. "Did she? Well, I always want to be with you. I just can't."

    "Why?"

    "Because I'm a man, and men have to work, and be in the world."

    "Uncle Val works. He writes poems and reads them to Mama."

    Herzog's sober face brightened. "Splendid."

    She had to listen to his trash. Bad art and vice hand in hand. "I'm glad to hear it."

    "He looks ooky when he says them."

    "And does he cry?"

    "Oh, yes."

    Sentiment and brutality-never one without the other, like fossils and oil. This news is priceless. It's sheer happiness to hear it.

    June had bent her head, and held her wrists to her eyes.

    "What's the matter, darling?"

    "Mama said I shouldn't talk about Uncle Val."

    "Why?"

    "She said you'd be very very angry."

    "But I'm not. I'm laughing my head off. All right. We won't talk about him. I promise. Not one word."

    An experienced father, he prudently waited until they reached the Falcon before he said, "I have presents for you in the trunk!"

    "Oh, Papa-what did you bring!"

    Against the clumsy, gray, gaping Museum of Science she looked so fresh, so new (her milk teeth and sparse freckles and big expectant eyes, her fragile neck). And he thought how she would inherit this world of great instruments, principles of physics and applied science. She had the brains for it. He was already intoxicated with pride, seeing another Madame Curie in her. She loved the periscope. They spied on each other from the sides of the car, hiding behind tree trunks and in the arches of the comfort station. Crossing the bridge on the Outer Drive they walked by the lake. He let her take off her shoes and wade, drying her feet afterward in his shirttail, carefully brushing out the sand between her toes. He bought her a box of Cracker Jack, which she nibbled on the grass. The dandelions had blown their fuses and were all loose silk; the turf was springy, neither damp as in May nor dry and hard as in August, when the sun would scorch it. The mechanical mower was riding in circles, barbering the slopes, raising a spray of clippings.

    Lighted from the south the water was a marvelous, fresh heavy daylight blue; the sky rested on the mild burning horizon, clear except toward Gary, where the dark thin pillars of the steel hearths purled out russet and sulphur streams of smoke. By now the lawns at Ludeyville, uncut for two years, must be simply hayfields, and local hunters and lovers were breaking in again, most likely, shattering windows, lighting fires.

    "I want to go to the aquarium, Papa," said June. "Mama said you should take me."

    "Oh, did she? Well, come on then." The Falcon had grown hot in the sun. He opened the windows to cool it. He had an extraordinary number of keys, by now, and must organize them better in his pockets. There were his New York house keys, the key Ramona had given him, the Faculty Men's Lounge key from the university, and the key to Asphalter's apartment, as well as several Ludeyville keys. "You must sit in the back seat, honey. Creep in, now, and pull down your dress because the plastic is very hot."

    The air from the west was drier than the east air.

    Herzog's sharp senses detected the difference. In these days of near-delirium and wide-ranging disordered thought, deeper currents of feeling had heightened his perceptions, or made him instill something of his own into his surroundings. As though he painted them with moisture and color taken from his own mouth, his blood, liver, bowels, genitals. In this mingled way, therefore, he was aware of Chicago, familiar ground to him for more than thirty years. And out of its elements, by this peculiar art of his own organs, he created his version of it. Where the thick walls and buckled slabs of pavement in the Negro slums exhaled their bad smells. Farther west, the industries; the sluggish South Branch dense with sewage and glittering with a crust of golden slime; the Stockyards, deserted; the tall red slaughterhouses in lonely decay; and then a faintly buzzing dullness of bungalows and scrawny parks; and vast shopping centers; and the cemeteries after these-Waldheim, with its graves for Herzogs past and present; the Forest Preserves for riding parties, Croatian picnics, lovers" lanes, horrible murders; airports; quarries; and, last of all, cornfields. And with this, infinite forms of activity-Reality. Moses had to see reality.

    Perhaps he was somewhat spared from it so that he might see it better, not fall asleep in its thick embrace. Awareness was his work; extended consciousness was his line, his business. Vigilance. If he borrowed time to take his tiny daughter to see the fishes he would find a way to make it up to the vigilance-fund. This day was just like-he braced himself and faced it- like the day of Father Herzog's funeral.

    Then, too, it was flowering weather-roses, magnolias. Moses, the night before, had cried, slept, the air was wickedly perfumed; he had had luxuriant dreams, painful, evil, and rich, interrupted by the rare ecstasy of nocturnal emission-how death dangles freedom before the enslaved instincts: the pitiful sons of Adam whose minds and bodies must answer strange signals.

    Much of my life has been spent in the effort to live by more coherent ideas. I even know which ones.

    "Papa, you must turn here. This is where Uncle Val always turns."

    "Okay." He observed in the mirror that the slip had distressed her. She had mentioned Gersbach again.

    "Hey, Pussycat," he said. "If you say anything about Uncle Val to me, I'll never tell. I'll never ask you any questions about him. Now don't you ever worry about it. It's all silliness."

    He had been no older than June when Mother Herzog instructed him to say nothing about that still in Verdun. He remembered the contraption well. Those pipes were beautiful. And the reeking mash. If he was not mistaken, Father Herzog emptied sacks of stale rye bread into the vat. In any case, secrets were not too bad.

    "There's nothing wrong with a few secrets," he said.

    "I know lots of them." She stood directly behind him in the back seat and stroked his head. "Uncle Val is very nice."

    "Why of course he is."

    "But I don't like him. He doesn't smell good."

    "Ha, ha! Well, we'll get him a bottle of perfume and make him smell terrific."

    He held her hand as they mounted the aquarium staircase, feeling himself to be the father whose strength and calm judgment she could trust. The center court of the building, whitened by the skylight, was very warm. The splashing pool and luxuriant plants and soft tropical fishy air forced Moses to take a grip on himself, to keep up his energy.

    "What do you want to see first?"

    "The big turtles."

    They went up and down the obscure gold and green alleys.

    "This fast little fish is called the humuhumuu-elee-elee, from Hawaii. This slithering beast is the sting ray and has teeth and venom in its tail. And these are lampreys, related to hagfish, they fasten then-sucker mouths on other fish and drink until they kill them. Over there you see the rainbow fish. No turtles in this aisle, but look at those great things at the end. Sharks?"

    "I saw the dolphins at Brookfield," said June. "They wear sailor hats, ring a bell.

    They can dance on their tails and play basketball."

    Herzog picked her up and carried her. These children's outings, perhaps because they were pervaded with so much emotion, were always exhausting. Often, after a day with Marco, Moses had to put a cold compress on his eyes and lie down. It seemed his fate to be the visiting father, an apparition who faded in and out of the children's lives. But this peculiar sensitivity about meeting and parting had to be tamed. Such trembling sorrow-he tried to think what term Freud had for it: partial return of repressed traumatic material, ultimately traceable to the death instinct? comshd not be imparted to children, not that tremulous lifelong swoon of death. This same emotion, as Herzog the student was aware, was held to the womb of cities, heavenly as well as earthly, mankind being unable to part with its beloved or its dead in this world or the next. But to Moses E. Herzog as he held his daughter in his arms, looking through aqueous green at the hagfish and smooth sharks with their fanged bellies, this emotion was nothing but tyranny. For the first time he took a different view of the way in which Alexander V. Herzog had run Father Herzog's funeral. No solemnity in the chapel.

    Shura's portly, golf-tanned friends, bankers and corporation presidents, forming an imposing wall of meat as heavy in the shoulders, hands, and cheeks as they were thin in the hair. Then there was the cortege. City Hall had sent a motorcycle escort in recognition of Shura Herzog's civic importance. The cops ran ahead with screaming sirens, booting cars and trucks aside so that the hearse could speed through lights. No one ever got to Waldheim so fast. Moses said to Shura, "While he lived, Papa had the cops at his back. Now..." Helen, Willie, all four children in the limousine, laughed softly at this remark.