Herzog (7 page)

    But he checked himself, for she did not understand, and this offended her, especially as she believed she was no common hausfrau. She said, "It sounds very grand.

    Of course it must be important. But that's not the point. You were a fool to bury yourself and her, a young woman, in the Berkshires, with nobody to talk to."

    "Except Valentine Gersbach, and Phoebe."

    "That's right. That was bad. Especially winters. You should have had more sense. That house made a prisoner of her. It must have been just dreary, washing and cooking, and to have to hush the baby, or you'd raise hell, she said. You couldn't think when June was crying, and you'd rush from your room hollering."

    "Yes, I was stupid-a blockhead. But that was one of the problems I was working on, you see, that people can be free now but the freedom doesn't have any content.

    It's like a howling emptiness. Madeleine shared my interests, I thought-she's a studious person."

    "She says you were a dictator, a regular tyrant. You bullied her."

    I do seem to be a broken-down monarch of some kind, he was thinking, like my old man, the princely immigrant and ineffectual bootlegger. And life was very bad in Ludeyville-terrible, I admit.

    But then didn't we buy the house because she wanted to, and move out when she wanted to? And didn't I make all the arrangements, even for the Gersbachs-so we could all leave the Berkshires together?

    "What else did she complain of?" said Herzog.

    Zelda considered him for a moment as though to see whether he was strong enough to take it, and said, "You were selfish."

    Ah, that! He understood. The ejaculatio praecox! His look became stormy, his heart began to pound, and he said, "There was some trouble for a while. But not in the last two years. And hardly ever with other women." These were humiliating explanations. Zelda did not have to believe them, and that made him the pleader, and put him at a frightful disadvantage. He couldn't invite her upstairs for a demonstration, or produce affidavits from Wanda or Zinka. (recalling, in the still standing train, the thwarted and angry eagerness of these attempted explanations, he had to laugh. Nothing but a wan smile passed over his face.) What crooks they were-Madeleine, Zelda... others. Some women didn't care how badly they damaged you. A girl, in Zelda's view, had a right to expect from her husband nightly erotic gratification, safety, money, insurance, furs, jewelry, cleaning women, drapes, dresses, hats, night clubs, country clubs, automobiles, theater!

    "No man can satisfy a woman who doesn't want him," said Herzog.

    "Well, isn't that your answer?"

    Moses started to speak but he felt that he was going to make another foolish outcry. His face paled again and he kept his mouth shut. He was in terrible pain. It was so bad that he was far past claiming credit for his power to suffer as he had at times done. He sat silent, and heard the clothes dryer below whirling.

    "Moses," said Zelda, "I want to make sure of one thing."

    "What-was "Our relationship." He was no longer looking at her darkened, painted lids but into her eyes, bright and brown. Her nostrils tensed softly. She showed him her sympathetic face. "We still are friends," she said.

    "Well..." said Moses. "I'm fond of Herman. Of you."

    "I am your friend. And I'm a truthful person."

    He saw himself in the train window, hearing his own words clearly. "I think you're on the level."

    "You believe me, don't you?"

    "I want to, naturally."

    "You should. I've got your interests at heart, too. I keep an eye on little June."

    "I'm grateful for that."

    "But Madeleine is a good mother. And you don't have to worry. She doesn't run around with men. They phone her all the time, chasing after her. Well comshe is a beauty, and a very rare type, too, because she is so brilliant. Down there in Hyde Park-as soon as everybody knew about the divorce, you'd be surprised who all started to call her."

    "Good friends of mine, you mean."

    "If she was just a fly-by-night, she could have her choice of men. But you know how serious she is.

    Anyhow, people like Moses Herzog don't grow on bushes, either. With your brains and charm, you won't be easy to replace. Anyhow, she's always at home.

    She's rethinking everything-her whole life. And there is nobody else. You know you can believe me."

    Of course if you considered me dangerous it was your duty to lie.

    And I know I looked bad, my face swelled up, eyes red and wild.

    Female deceit, though, is a deep subject.

    Thrills of guile. Sexual complicity, conspiracy. Getting in on it. I watched you bully Herman to get a second car, and I know how you can bitch! You thought I might kill Mady and Valentine. But when I found out, why didn't I go to the pawnshop and buy a gun?

    Simpler yet, my father left a revolver in his desk. It's still there. But I'm no criminal, don't have it in me; frightful to myself, instead.

    Anyway, Zelda, I see you had tremendous pleasure, double excitement, lying from an overflowing heart, All at once the train left the platform and entered the tunnel. Temporarily in darkness, Herzog held his pen. Smoothly the trickling walls passed. In dusty niches bulbs burned. Without religion. Then came a long incline and the train rose from underground and rode in sudden light on the embankment above the slums, upper Park Avenue.

    In the east Nineties an open hydrant gushed and kids in clinging drawers leaped screaming. Now came Spanish Harlem, heavy, dark, and hot, and Queens far off to the right, a thick document of brick, veiled in atmospheric dirt.

    Herzog wrote, Will never understand what women want. What do they want? They eat green salad and drink human blood.

    Over Long Island Sound the air grew clearer.

    It gradually became very pure. The water was level and easy, soft blue, the grass brilliant, spattered with wildflowers-plenty of myrtle among these rocks, and wild strawberries blossoming.

    I now know the whole funny, nasty, perverted truth about Madeleine. Much to think about.

    He now had ended.

    But at the same high rate of speed, Herzog streaked off on another course, writing to an old friend in Chicago, Lucas Asphalter, a zoologist at the university.

    What's gotten into you? I often read "human-interest" paragraphs but I never expect them to be about my friends. You can imagine how it shook me to see your name in the Post.

    Have you gone crazy? I know you adored that monkey of yours, and I'm sorry he's dead. But you should have known better than to try to revive him by mouth-to-mouth respiration. Especially as Rocco died of TB and must have been jumping with bugs.

    Asphalter was queerly attached to his animals.

    Herzog suspected that he tended to humanize them.

    That macaque monkey of his, Rocco, was not an amusing creature, but obstinate and cranky, with a poor color, like a glum old Jewish uncle. But of course if he was slowly dying of consumption, he couldn't have looked very optimistic. Asphalter, so cheerful himself and indifferent to practical interests, something of a marginal academic type, without his Ph. d., taught comparative anatomy. With thick crepe-soled shoes, he wore a stained smock; he was bereaved of hair, of his youth, too, poor Luke. The sudden loss of his hair had left him with only one lock at the front, and made his handsome eyes, his arched brows prominent, his nostrils darker, hairier. I hope he hasn't swallowed Rocco's bacilli. There's a new, deadlier strain at large, they say, and tuberculosis is coming back. Asphalter was a bachelor at forty-five. His father had owned a flophouse on Madison Street. In his youth, Moses had been there often, visiting. And although for an interval of ten or fifteen years he and Asphalter had not been close friends, they had found, suddenly, a great deal in common. In fact it had been from Asphalter that Herzog learned what Madeleine was up to, and the part Gersbach had been playing in his life.

    "Hate to tell you this, Mose," said Asphalter, in his office, "but you're mixed up with some awful nuts."

    This was two days after the March blizzard. You wouldn't have known it had been raging winter that same week. The casement window was open on the Quadrangle. All the grimy cottonwoods had sprung to life, released red catkins from their sheaths. These dangled everywhere, perfuming the gray courtyard with its shut-in light. Rocco with sick eyes sat on his own straw chair, his look lusterless, his coat the color of stewed onions.

    "I can't stand to see you knock yourself out,"

    Asphalter said. "I'd better tell you-we have a lab assistant here who sits with your little girl, and she's been telling me about your wife."

    "What about her?"

    "And Valentine Gersbach. He's always there, on Harper Avenue."

    "Sure. I know. He's the only reliable person on the scene. I trust him. He's been an awfully good friend."

    "Yes, I know-I know, I know," said Asphalter. His pale round face was freckled, and his eyes large, fluid, dark, and, for Moses' sake, bitter in their dreaminess. "I certainly know. Valentine's quite an addition to the social life of Hyde Park, what's left of it. How did we ever get along without him. He's so genial comhe's so noisy, with those Scotch and Japanese imitations, and that gravel voice. He drowns all conversation out. Full of life! Oh, yes, he's full of it! And because you brought him here, everybody thinks he's your special pal. He says so himself. Only..."

    "Only what?"

    Tense and quiet, Asphalter asked, "Don't you know?" He became very pale.

    "What should I know?"

    "I took it for granted because your intelligence is so high-way off the continuum-that you knew something or suspected."

    Something frightful was about to descend on him. Herzog nerved himself for it.

    "Madeleine, you mean? I understand, of course, that by and by, because she's still a young woman, she must'

    ' she will."

    "No, no," said Asphalter. "Not by and by." He blurted it out. "All the while."

    "Who!" said Herzog. All his blood rose, and just as quickly and massively left his brain. "You mean Gersbach?"

    "That's right." Asphalter now had no control whatever over the nerves of his face; it had gone soft with the pain he felt. His mouth looked chapped, with black lines.

    Herzog began to shout, "You can't talk like that! You can't say that!" He stared at Lucas, outraged.

    A dim, sick, faint feeling came over him. His body seemed to shrink, abruptly drained, hollow, numbed. He almost lost consciousness.

    "Open your collar," said Asphalter. "My God, you aren't fainting, are you?" He began to force Herzog's head down. "Between the knees," he said.

    "Let up," said Moses, but his head was hot and damp and he sat doubled over while Asphalter gave him first aid.

    All the while, the large brown monkey, with arms folded over his chest, and red, dry eyes, was looking on, silently disseminating his grimness. Death, thought Herzog. The real thing. The animal was dying.

    "You better?" Asphalter said.

    "Just open a window. These zoology buildings stink."

    "The window is open. Here, drink some water." He handed Moses a paper cup. "Take one of these.

    Take this first, and then the green and white. Prozine.

    I can't get the cotton out of the bottle.

    My hands are shaking."

    Herzog refused the pills. "Luke... Is this really true, about Madeleine and Gersbach?" he said.

    Intensely nervous, pale, warm, looking at him with his dark eyes, his mottled face, Asphalter said, "Christ! you don't think I'd invent such a thing.

    I probably haven't been tactful. I thought you must have had a pretty good idea.... But it's absolutely true." Asphalter in his soiled lab coat put it to him with a complicated helpless gesture-I lay it all before you, was what it said. His breathing was labored. "You didn't know anything?"

    "No."

    "But doesn't it make sense? Doesn't it add up now?"

    Herzog rested his weight on the desk, knitting his fingers tightly. He stared at the dangling catkins, reddish and violet. Not to burst, not to die-to stay alive, was all he could hope for.

    "Who told you?" he said.

    "Geraldine."

    "Who?"

    "Gerry-Geraldine Portnoy. I thought you knew her. Mady's sitter. She's down in the anatomy lab."

    "What..."

    "Human anatomy, in the Med School, around the corner. I go out with her. In fact, you know her, she was in one of your classes. Do you want to talk to her?"

    "No," said Herzog violently.

    "Well, she's written you a letter. She gave it to me and said she'd leave it up to me, whether I should hand it over or not."

    "I can't read it now."

    "Take it," said Asphalter. "You may want to read it later."

    Herzog stuffed the envelope into his pocket.

    He was wondering, as he sat in the plush seat of the train, holding his valise desk, and leaving New York State at seventy m. p. h., why he hadn't cried in Asphalter's office. He could burst into tears easily enough, and he was not inhibited with Asphalter, they were such old friends, so similar in their lives- their backgrounds, their habits, temperaments. But when Asphalter raised the lid, revealed the truth, something bad was released in his office overlooking the Quadrangle; like an odor, hot and raw; or a queer human fact, almost palpable. Tears were not relevant. The cause was too perverse, altogether too odd for all concerned.

    And then, too, Gersbach was a frequent weeper of distinguished emotional power. The hot tear was often in his magnanimous ruddy-brown eye. Only a few days earlier, when Herzog landed at O'Hare and hugged his little daughter, Gersbach had been there, a powerful, burly figure with tears of compassion in his eyes. So evidently, thought Moses, he's fucked up weeping for me, too. At moments I dislike having a face, a nose, lips, because he has them.