Humboldt's Gift (17 page)

  I had begun to think a lot about the immortal spirit. Still, night after night, I kept dreaming that I had become the best player in the club, a racquet demon, that my backhand shot skimmed the left wall of the court and fell dead in the corner, it had so much English on it. I dreamed that I was beating all the best players—all those skinny, hairy, speedy fellows who in reality avoided playing with me because I was a dud. I was badly disappointed by the shallow interests such dreams betrayed. Even my dreams were asleep. And what about money? Money is necessary for the protection of the sleeping. Spending drives you into wakefulness. As you purge the inner film from the eye and rise into higher consciousness, less money should be required.

  Under the circumstances (and it should now be clearer what I mean by circumstances: Renata, Denise, children, courts, lawyers, Wall Street, sleep, death, metaphysics, karma, the presence of the universe in us, our being present in the universe itself) I had not paused to think about Humboldt, a precious friend hid in death’s dateless night, a camerado from a former existence (almost), well-beloved but dead. I imagined at times that I might see him in the life to come, together with my mother and my father. Demmie Vonghel, too. Demmie was one of the most significant dead, remembered every day. But I didn’t expect him to come at me as in life, driving ninety miles an hour in his Buick fourholer. First I laughed. Then I shrieked. I was transfixed. He bore down on me. He struck me with blessings. Humboldt’s gift wiped out many immediate problems.

  The role played by Ronald and Lucy Cantabile in this is something else again.

  Dear friends, though I was about to leave town and had much business to attend to, I decided to suspend all practical activities for one morning. I did this to keep from cracking under strain. I had been practicing some of the meditative exercises recommended by Rudolf Steiner in
Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment
. As yet I hadn’t attained much, but then my soul was well along in years and very much stained and banged up, and I had to be patient. Characteristically, I had been trying too hard, and I remembered again that wonderful piece of advice given by a French thinker:
Trouve avant de chercher
— Valéry, it was. Or maybe Picasso. There are times when the most practical thing is to lie down.

  And so the morning after my day with Cantabile I took a holiday. The weather was fine and clear. I drew the openwork drapes which shut out the details of Chicago and let in the bright sun and the high blue (which in their charity shone and towered even over a city like this). Cheerful, I dug out my Humboldt papers. I piled notebooks, letters, diaries, and manuscripts on the coffee table and on the covered radiator behind the sofa. Then I lay down, sighing, pulling off my shoes. Under my head I put a needlepoint cushion embroidered by a young lady (what a woman-filled life I always led. Ah, this sexually-disturbed century!), a Miss Doris Scheldt, the daughter of the anthroposophist I consulted now and then. She had given me this handmade Christmas gift the year before. Small and lovely, intelligent, strikingly strong in profile for such a pretty young woman, she liked to wear old-fashioned dresses that made her look like Lillian Gish or Mary Pickford. Her footwear, however, was provocative, quite far out. In my private vocabulary she was a little
noli me tangerine
. She did and did not wish to be touched. She herself knew a great deal about anthroposophy and we spent a lot of time together last year, when Renata and I had a falling-out. I sat in her bentwood rocking chair while she put her tiny patent-leather boots up on a hassock, embroidering this red-and-green, fresh-grass-and-hot-embers cushion. We chatted, etcetera. It was an agreeable relationship, but it was over. Renata and I were back together.

  This is by way of explaining that I took Von Humboldt Fleisher as the subject of my meditation that morning. Such meditation supposedly strengthened the will. Then, gradually strengthened by such exercises, the will might become an organ of perception.

  A wrinkled postcard fell to the floor, one of the last Humboldt had sent me. I read the phantom strokes, like a fuzzy graph of the northern lights:

        Mice hide when hawks are high;

        Hawks shy from airplanes;

        Planes dread the ack-ack-ack;

        Each one fears somebody.

        Only the heedless lions

        Under the Booloo tree

        Snooze in each other’s arms

        After their lunch of blood—

        I call that living good!

  Eight or nine years ago, reading this poem, I thought, Poor Humboldt, those shock-treatment doctors have lobotomized him, they’ve ruined the guy. But now I saw this as a communication, not as a poem. The imagination must not pine away—that was Humboldt’s message. It must assert again that art manifests the inner powers of nature. To the savior-faculty of the imagination sleep was sleep, and waking was true waking. This was what Humboldt now appeared to me to be saying. If that was so, Humboldt was never more sane and brave than at the end of his life. And I had run away from him on Forty-sixth Street just when he had most to tell me. I had spent that morning, as I have mentioned, grandly dressed up and revolving elliptically over the city of New York in that Coast Guard helicopter, with the two US Senators and the Mayor and officials from Washington and Albany and crack journalists, all belted up in puffy life jackets, each jacket with its sheath knife. (I’ve never gotten over those knives.) And then, after the luncheon in Central Park (I am compelled to repeat), I walked out and saw Humboldt, a dying man eating a pretzel stick at the curb, the dirt of the grave already sprinkled on his face. Then I rushed away. It was one of those ecstatically painful moments when I couldn’t hold still. I had to run. I said, “Oh, kid, good-by. I’ll see you in the next world!”

  There was nothing more to be done for him in this world, I had decided. But was that true? The wrinkled postcard now made me reconsider. It struck me that I had sinned against Humboldt. Lying down on the goose-down sofa in order to meditate, I found myself getting hot with self-criticism and shame, flushing and sweating. I pulled Doris Scheldt’s pillow from behind my head and wiped my face with it. Again I saw myself taking cover behind the parked cars on Forty-sixth Street. And Humboldt like a bush tented all over by the bagworm and withering away. I was stunned to see my old pal dying and I fled, I went back to the Plaza and phoned Senator Kennedy’s office to say that I had been called to Chicago suddenly. I’d return to Washington next week. Then I took a cab to La Guardia and caught the first plane to O’Hare. I return again and again to that day because it was so dreadful. Two drinks, the limit in flight, did nothing for me—nothing! When I landed I drank several double shots of Jack Daniel’s in the O’Hare bar, for strength. It was a very hot evening. I telephoned Denise and said, “I’m back.”

  “You’re days and days early. What’s up, Charles?”

  I said, “I’ve had a bad experience.”

  “Where’s the Senator?”

  “Still in New York. I’ll go back to Washington in a day or two.”

  “Well, come on home, then.”

  
Life
had commissioned an article on Robert Kennedy. I had now spent five days with the Senator, or rather near him, sitting on a sofa in the Senate Office Building, observing him. It was, from every point of view, a singular inspiration, but the Senator had allowed me to attach myself to him and even seemed to like me. I say “seemed” because it was his business to leave such an impression with a journalist who proposed to write about him. I liked him, too, perhaps against my better judgment. His way of looking at you was odd. His eyes were as blue as the void, and there was a slight lowering in the skin of the lids, an extra fold. After the helicopter trip we drove from La Guardia to the Bronx in a limousine, and I was in there with him. The heat was dismal in the Bronx but we were in a sort of crystal cabinet. His desire was to be continually briefed. He asked questions of everyone in the party. From me he wanted historical information —”What should I know about William Jennings Bryan?” or, “Tell me about H. L. Mencken”—receiving what I said with a kind of inner glitter that did not tell me what he thought or whether he could use such facts. We pulled up at a Harlem playground. There were Cadillacs, motorcycle cops, bodyguards, television crews. A vacant lot between two tenements had been fenced in, paved, furnished with slides and sandboxes. The playground director in his Afro and dashiki and beads received the two Senators. Cameras stood above us on trestles. The black director, radiant, ceremonious, held a basketball between the two Senators. A space was cleared. Twice the slender Kennedy, carelessly elegant, tossed the ball. He nodded his ruddy, foxy head high with hair and smiled when he missed. Senator Javits could not afford to miss. Compact and bald he too was smiling but squared off at the basket drawing the ball to his breast and binding himself by strength of will to the objective. He made two smart shots. The ball did not arch. It flew straight at the loop and went in. There was applause. What vexation, what labor to keep up with Bobby. But the Republican Senator managed very well.

  And this was what Denise wanted me to occupy myself with. Denise had arranged all this for me, phoning the people at
Life
, supervising the whole deal. “Come on home,” she said. But she was displeased. She didn’t want me in Chicago now.

  Home was a grand house in Kenwood on the South Side. Rich German Jews had built Victorian-Edwardian mansions here early in the century. When the mail-order tycoons and other nobs departed, university professors, psychiatrists, lawyers, and Black Muslims moved in. Since I had insisted on returning to become the Malthus of boredom, Denise bought the Kahnheim house. She had done this under protest, saying, “Why Chicago! We can live wherever we like, can’t we? Christ!” She had in mind a house in Georgetown, or in Rome, or in London SW3. But I was obstinate, and Denise said she hoped it wasn’t a sign that I was headed for a nervous breakdown. Her father the federal judge was a keen lawyer. I know she often consulted him downtown about property, joint-tenancy, widows’ rights in the State of Illinois. He advised us to buy Colonel Kahnheim’s mansion. Daily at breakfast Denise asked when I was going to make my will.

  Now it was night and she was waiting for me in the master bedroom. I hate air conditioning. I kept Denise from installing it. The temperature was in the nineties, and on hot nights Chicagoans feel the city body and soul. The stockyards are gone, Chicago is no longer slaughter-city, but the old smells revive in the night heat. Miles of railroad siding along the streets once were filled with red cattle cars, the animals waiting to enter the yards lowing and reeking. The old stink still haunts the place. It returns at times, suspiring from the vacated soil, to remind us all that Chicago had once led the world in butcher-technology and that billions of animals had died here. And that night the windows were open wide and the familiar depressing multilayered stink of meat, tallow, blood-meal, pulverized bones, hides, soap, smoked slabs, and burnt hair came back. Old Chicago breathed again through leaves and screens. I heard fire trucks and the gulp and whoop of ambulances, bowel-deep and hysterical. In the surrounding black slums incendiarism shoots up in summer, an index, some say, of psychopathology. Although the love of flames is also religious. However, Denise was sitting nude on the bed rapidly and strongly brushing her hair. Over the lake, steel mills twinkled. Lamplight showed the soot already fallen on the leaves of the wall ivy. We had an early drought that year. Chicago, this night, was panting, the big urban engines going, tenements blazing in Oakwood with great shawls of flame, the sirens weirdly yelping, the fire engines, ambulances, and police cars— mad-dog, gashing-knife weather, a rape and murder night, thousands of hydrants open, spraying water from both breasts. Engineers were staggered to see the level of Lake Michigan fall as these tons of water poured. Bands of kids prowled with handguns and knives. And—dear-dear—this tender-minded mourning Mr. Charlie Citrine had seen his old buddy, a dead man eating a pretzel in New York, so he abandoned
Life
and the Coast Guard and helicopters and two Senators and rushed home to be comforted. For this purpose his wife had taken off everything and was brushing her exceedingly dense hair. Her enormous violet and gray eyes were impatient, her tenderness was mixed with glowering. She was asking tacitly how long I was going to sit on the chaise longue in my socks, heart-wounded and full of obsolete sensibility. A nervous and critical person, she thought I suffered from morbid aberrations about grief, that I was pre-modern or baroque about death. She often declared that I had come back to Chicago because my parents were buried here. Sometimes she said with sudden alertness, “Ah, here comes the cemetery bit!” What’s more she was often right. Soon I myself could hear the chain-dragging monotony of my low voice. Love was the remedy for these death moods. And here was Denise, impatient but dutiful, sitting stripped on the bed, and I didn’t even take off my necktie. I know this sorrow can be maddening. And it tired Denise to support me emotionally. She didn’t take much stock in these emotions of mine. “Oh, you’re on
that
kick again. You must quit all this operatic bullshit. Talk to a psychiatrist. Why are you hung up on the past and always lamenting some dead party or other?” Denise pointed out with a bright flash of the face, a sign that she had had an insight, that while I shed tears for my dead I was also patting down their graves with my shovel. For I did write biographies, and the deceased were my bread and butter. The deceased had earned my French decoration and got me into the White House. (The loss of our White House connections after the death of JFK was one of Denise’s bitterest vexations.) Don’t get me wrong, I know that love and scolding often go together. Durnwald did this to me, too. Whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth. The whole thing was mixed with affection. When I came home in a state over Humboldt, she was ready to comfort me. But she had a sharp tongue, Denise did. (I sometimes called her Rebukah.) Of course my lying there so sad, so heart-injured, was provoking. Besides, she suspected that I would never finish the
Life
article. There she was right again.