Humboldt's Gift (11 page)

  Yes. Seven out. Right. I could roll bad dice. I must stop this tease-act with death. I was touched by Langobardi’s concern. Was it personal solicitude, however? These health-club fatalities were bad, and two coronaries in a row would make this a gloomy place. Still Vito wished to do what he could for me. There was little of substance that we could tell each other. When he was on the telephone I sometimes observed him. In his own way he was an American executive. Handsome Langobardi dressed far better than any board chairman. Even his coat sleeves were ingeniously lined, and the back of his waistcoat was made of beautiful paisley material. Calls came in the name of Finch, the shoeshine man “—Johnny Finch, Johnny Finch, telephone, extension five—” and Langobardi took these Finch calls. He was manly, he had power. In his low voice he gave instructions, made rulings, decisions, set penalties, probably. Now then, could he say anything serious to me? But could I tell him what was on my mind? Could I say that that morning I had been reading Hegel’s
Phenomenology
, the pages on freedom and death? Could I say that I had been thinking about the history of human consciousness with special emphasis on the question of boredom? Could I say that for years now I had been preoccupied with this theme and that I had discussed it with the late poet Von Humboldt Fleisher? Never. Even with astrophysicists, with professors of economics or paleontology, it was impossible to discuss such things. There were beautiful and moving things in Chicago, but culture was not one of them. What we had was a cultureless city pervaded nevertheless by Mind. Mind without culture was the name of the game, wasn’t it? How do you like that! It’s accurate. I had accepted this condition long ago.

  Langobardi’s eyes seemed to have the periscope power of seeing around corners.

  “Get smart, Charlie. Do it the way I do,” he said.

  I had thanked him sincerely for his kindly interest. “I’m trying,” I said.

  So I parked today under the chill pillars at the rear of the club. Then I rose in the elevator and came out at the barbershop. There, the usual busy sight—the three barbers: the big Swede with dyed hair, the Sicilian, always himself (not even shaved), and the Japanese. Each had the same bouffant coiffure, each wore a yellow vest with golden buttons over a short-sleeved shirt. All three were using hot-air guns with blue muzzles and shaping the hair of three customers. I entered the club through the washroom where bulbs were bleaking over the sinks and Finch, the real Johnny Finch, was filling the urinals with heaps of ice cubes. Langobardi was there, an early bird. Lately he had taken to wearing his hair in a little fringe, like an English country churchwarden. He sat nude, glancing at
The Wall Street Journal
and gave me a short smile. Now what? Could I throw myself into a new relationship with Langobardi, hitch a chair forward and sit with my elbows on my knees, looking into his face and opening my own features to the warmth of impulse? Eyes dilated with doubt, with confidentiality, might I say, “Vito, I need a little help”? Or, “Vito, how bad is this fellow Rinaldo Cantabile?” My heart knocked violently—as it had knocked decades earlier when I was about to proposition a woman. Langobardi had now and then done me small favors, booking tables in restaurants where reservations were hard to get. But to ask him about Cantabile would be a professional consultation. You didn’t do that at the club. Vito had once bawled out Alphonse, one of the masseurs, for asking me a bookish question. “Don’t bug the man, Al. Charlie doesn’t come here to talk about his trade. We all come to forget business.” When I told this to Renata she said, “So you two have a relationship.” Now I saw that Langobardi and I had a relationship in the same way that the Empire State Building had an attic.

  “You want to play a short game?” he said.

  “No, Vito, I came to get something from my locker.”

  The usual casting about, I was thinking as I went back to the beat-up Mercedes. How typical of me. The usual craving. I looked for help. I longed for someone to do the stations of the cross with me. Just like Pa. And where was Pa? Pa was in the cemetery.

  eight

  At the Mercedes shop the distinguished official and technician in the white smock was naturally curious but I refused to answer questions. “I don’t know how this happened, Fritz. I found it this way. Fix it. I don’t want to see the bill, either. Just send it to the Continental Illinois. They’ll pay it.” Fritz charged like a brain surgeon.

  I flagged a taxi in the street. The driver was wild-looking with an immense Afro Jike a shrub from the gardens at Versailles. The back of his cab was dusty with cigarette ashes and had a tavern odor. There was a bullet-proof screen between us. He made a fast turn and charged due west on Division Street. I could see little, because of the blurred Plexiglas and the Afro, but I didn’t really need to look, I knew it all by heart. Large parts of Chicago decay and fall down. Some are rebuilt, others just lie there. It’s like a film montage of rise fall and rise. Division Street where the old Bath stands used to be Polish and now is almost entirely Puerto Rican. In the Polish days, the small brick bungalows were painted fresh red, maroon, and candy green. The grass plots were fenced with iron pipe. I always thought that there must be Baltic towns that looked like this, Gdynia for instance, the difference being that the Illinois prairie erupted in vacant lots and tumbleweed rolled down the streets. Tumbleweed is so melancholy.

  In the old days of ice wagons and coal wagons householders used to cut busted boilers in half, set them out on the grass plots, and fill them with flowers. Big Polish women in ribboned caps went out in the spring with cans of Sapolio and painted these boiler-planters so that they shone silver against the blaring red of the brick. The double rows of rivets stood out like the raised-skin patterns of African tribes. Here the women grew geraniums, sweet William, and other low-grade dusty flowers. I showed all of this to Humboldt Fleisher years ago. He came to Chicago to give a reading for
Poetry
magazine and asked me for a tour of the city. We were dear friends then. I had come back to see my father and to put the last touches on my book,
New Deal Personalities
, at the Newberry Library. I took Humboldt on the El to the stockyards. He saw the Loop. We went to the lakeshore and listened to the foghorns. They bawled melancholy over the limp silk fresh lilac drowning water. But Humboldt responded mostly to the old neighborhood. The silvered boiler rivets and the blazing Polish geraniums got him. He listened pale and moved to the buzzing of roller-skate wheels on the brittle cement. I too am sentimental about urban ugliness. In the modern spirit of ransoming the commonplace, all this junk and wretchedness, through art and poetry, by the superior power of the soul.

  Mary, my eight-year-old daughter, has discovered this about me. She knows my weakness for ontogeny and phylogeny. She always asks to hear what life was like way-back-when.

  “We had coal stoves,” I tell her. “The kitchen range was black, with a nickel trim—huge. The parlor stove had a dome like a little church, and you could watch the fire through the isinglass. I had to carry up the scuttle and take down the ashes.”

  “What did you wear?”

  “A leatherette war-ace cap with rabbit-fur flaps, high-top boots with a sheath for a rusty jackknife, long black stockings, and plus fours. Underneath, woolly combinations which left lint in my navel and elsewhere.”

  “What else was it like?” my younger daughter wanted to know. Lish, who is ten years old, is her mother’s child and such information would not interest her. But Mary is less pretty, though to my mind she is more attractive (more like her father). She is secretive and greedy. She lies and steals more than most small girls, and this is also endearing. She hides chewing gum and chocolates with stirring ingenuity. I find her candy buried under the upholstery or in my filing cabinet. She has learned that I don’t often look at my research materials. She flatters and squeezes me precociously. And she wants to hear about old times. She has her own purposes in evoking and manipulating my emotions. But Papa is quite willing to manifest the old-time feelings. In fact I must transmit these feelings. For I have plans for Mary. Oh, nothing so definite as plans, perhaps. I have an idea that I may be able to pervade the child’s mind with my spirit so that she will later take up the work I am getting too old or too weak or too silly to continue. She alone, or perhaps she and her husband. With any luck. I worry about the girl. In a locked drawer of my desk I keep notes and memos for her, many of them written under the influence of liquor. I promise myself to censor these one day, before death catches me off base on the racquet-ball court or on the Posturepedic mattress of some Renata or other. Mary is sure to be an intelligent woman. She interprets “Fur Elise” much better than Lish. She feels the music. My heart is often troubled for Mary, however. She will be a straight-nosed thin broad who feels the music. And personally I prefer plump women with fine breasts. So I felt sorry for her already. As for the project or purpose I want her to carry on, it is a very personal overview of the Intellectual Comedy of the modern mind. No one person could do this comprehensively. By the end of the nineteenth century what had been the ample novels of Balzac’s Comedy had already been reduced to stories by Chekhov in his Russian
Comédie Humaine
. Now it’s even less possible to be comprehensive. I never had a work of fiction in mind but a different kind of imaginative projection. Different also from Whitehead’s
Adventures of Ideas
. . . . This is not the moment to explain it. Whatever it was, I conceived of it while still a youngish man. It was actually Humboldt who lent me the book of Valéry that suggested it. Valéry wrote of Leonardo, “
Cet Apollon me ravissait au plus haut degré de moi-même
.” I too was ravished with permanent effect—perhaps carried beyond my mental means. But Valéry had added a note in the margin: “
Trouve avant de chercher
.” This finding before seeking was my special gift. If I had any gift.

  However, my small daughter would say to me with deadly accuracy of instinct, “Tell me what your mother used to do. Was she pretty?”

  “I think she was very pretty. I don’t look like her. And she did cooking, baking, laundry and ironing, canning and pickling. She could tell fortunes with cards and sing trembly Russian songs. She and my father took turns visiting me at the sanatorium, every other week. In February the vanilla ice cream they brought was so hard you couldn’t cut it with a knife. And what else—ah yes, at home when I lost a tooth she would throw it behind the stove and ask the little mouse to bring a better one. You see what kind of teeth those bloody mice palmed off on me.”

  “You loved your mother?”

  Eager swelling feeling suddenly swept in. I forgot that I was talking to a child and I said, “Oh, I loved them all terribly, abnormally. I was all torn up with love. Deep in the heart. I used to cry in the sanatorium because I might never make it home and see them. I’m sure they never knew how I loved them, Mary. I had a TB fever and also a love fever. A passionate morbid little boy. At school I was always in love. At home if I was first to get up in the morning I suffered because they were still asleep. I wanted them to wake up so that the whole marvelous thing could continue. I also loved Menasha the boarder and Julius, my brother, your Uncle Julius.”

  I shall have to lay aside these emotional data.

  At the moment money, checks, hoodlums, automobiles preoccupied me.

  Another check was on my mind. It had been sent by my friend Thaxter, the one whom Huggins accused of being a CIA agent. You see Thaxter and I were preparing to bring out a journal,
The Ark
. We were all ready. Wonderful things were to be printed in it—pages from my imaginative reflections on a world transformed by Mind, for example. But meantime Thaxter had defaulted on a certain loan.

  It’s a long story and one that I’d rather not go into at this point. For two reasons. One is that I love Thaxter, whatever he does. The other is that I actually do think too much about money. It’s no good trying to conceal it. It’s there and it’s base. Earlier when I described how George saved Sharon’s life when her throat was cut, I spoke of blood as a vital substance. Well, money is a vital substance, too. Thaxter was supposed to repay part of the defaulted loan. Broke but grandiose he had ordered a check from his Italian bank for me, the Banco Ambrosiano of Milan. Why the Banco? Why Milan? But all of Thaxter’s arrangements were out of the ordinary. He had had a transatlantic upbringing and was equally at home in France and in California. You couldn’t mention a region so remote that Thaxter didn’t have an uncle there, or an interest in a mine, or an old château or villa. Thaxter with his exotic ways was another of my headaches. But I couldn’t resist him. However, that too must wait. Only one last word: Thaxter wanted people to believe that he was once a CIA agent. It was a wonderful rumor and he did everything to encourage it. It greatly added to his mysterious-ness, and mystery was one of his little rackets. This was harmless and in fact endearing. It was even philanthropic, as charm always is—up to a point. Charm always is a bit of a racket.

  The cab pulled up at the Bath twenty minutes early and I wasn’t going to loiter there so I said through the perforations of the bulletproof screen, “Go on, drive west. Take it easy, I just want to look around.” The cabbie heard me and nodded his Afro. It was like an enormous black dandelion in seed, blown, all its soft spindles standing out.

  In the last six months more old neighborhood landmarks had been torn down. This shouldn’t have mattered much. I can’t say why it made such a difference. But I was in a state. It almost seemed to me that I could hear myself rustling and fluttering in the back seat like a bird touring the mangroves of its youth, now car dumps. I stared with pulsatory agitation through the soiled windows. A whole block had gone down. Lovi’s Hungarian Restaurant had been swept away, plus Ben’s Pool Hall and the old brick carbarn and Gratch’s Funeral Parlor, out of which both my parents had been buried. Eternity got no picturesque interval here. The ruins of time had been bulldozed, scraped, loaded in trucks, and dumped as fill. New steel beams were going up. Polish kielbasa no longer hung in butchers’ windows. The sausages in the
carniceria
were Caribbean, purple and wrinkled. The old shop signs were gone. The new ones said HOY. MUDANZAS. IGLESIA.