Humboldt's Gift (36 page)

  I was even willing now to consider George Swiebel’s scheme for mining beryllium in Africa. I had scoffed at this when George proposed it but wilder ideas were commercially sound and no man ever knew what form his Dick Whittington’s cat might take. A man named Ezekiel Kamuttu, George’s guide to the Olduvai Gorge two years ago, claimed to own a mountain of beryllium and semiprecious stones. A sack of exotic burlap was at this moment lying under George’s bed, filled with peculiar minerals. George had given me a sweat sock filled with these and asked me to get them assayed at the Field Museum by Ben Isvolsky, one of our schoolmates, now a geologist. Sober Ben said they were the real thing. At once he lost his scholar’s air and began to put business questions to me. Could we get these stones in marketable quantities on a regular basis? And with what machinery, and how get into the bush and out? And who was this Kamuttu? Kamuttu, George said, would lay down his life for him. He had invited George to marry into his family. He wanted to sell him his sister. “But,” I said to Ben, “you know George’s boon-companion complex. He has a few drinks with natives, they see how real he is and that his heart is bigger than the Mississippi. It really is, too. But how can we be sure that this Kamuttu hasn’t got some con? Maybe he’s stolen these beryllium samples. Or maybe he’s bonkers. There’s no world shortage of that.”

  Knowing Isvolsky’s domestic troubles, I understood why he dreamed of making a killing in minerals. “Anything,” he told me, “to get away from Winnetka for a while.” Then he said, “Okay, Charlie, I know what’s on your mind. When you come back here to see me you want to be shown those birds.” He referred to the museum’s great collection of birds, hoarded up over decades and stored in classified drawers. The huge workshops and laboratories behind the scenes, the sheds, storerooms, and caverns were infinitely more fascinating than the museum’s public exhibits. The preserved birds were collapsed, their legs tagged. And mainly I liked to see the hummingbirds, thousands upon thousands of little bodies, some no bigger than my fingertip, endless varieties of them, all spattered minutely with a whole Louvre of iridescent colors. So Ben took me to inspect them again. He had full cheeks and woolly hair, a bad skin but an agreeable face. The museum treasures now bored him and he said, “If this Kamuttu really has a mountain of beryllium we should go there and grab it.”

  “I’m leaving soon for Europe,” I said.

  “Ideal. George and I can pick you up. We can all fly to Nairobi together.”

  Thoughts of beryllium and Oriental rugs showed how nervous I was, and impractical. When I was in this state only one man in all the world could help me, my practical brother Julius, a real-estate operator in Corpus Christi, Texas. I loved my stout and now elderly brother. Perhaps he loved me too. In principle he was not in favor of strong family bonds. Possibly he saw brotherly love as an opening for exploitation. My feelings for him were vivid, almost hysterically intense, and I could not blame him for trying to resist them. He wished to be a man entirely of today, and he had forgotten or tried to forget the past. Unassisted he could remember nothing, he said. For my part there was nothing that I could forget. He often said to me, “You inherited the old man’s terrific memory. And before him there was that old bastard, his old man. Our grandfather was one of ten guys in the Jewish Pale who knew the Babylonian Talmud by heart. Lots of good that did. I don’t even know what it is. But that’s where you get your memory.” The admiration was not unmixed. I don’t think he was always grateful to me for remembering so well. My own belief was that without memory existence was metaphysically injured, damaged. And I couldn’t conceive of my own brother, irreplaceable Julius, having metaphysical assumptions different from mine. So I would talk to him about the past, and he would say, “Is that so? Is that a fact? And you know I can’t remember a thing, not even the way Mama looked, and I was her favorite, after all.”

  “You must remember how she looked. How could you forget her? I don’t believe that,” I said. My family sentiments tormented my stout brother sometimes. He thought me some sort of idiot. He himself, a wizard with money, built shopping centers, condominiums, motels, and contributed greatly to the transformation of his part of Texas. He wouldn’t refuse to help me. But this was purely theoretical, for although the idea of help was continually in the air between us, I never actually asked him to give me any. In fact I was extremely reserved about making such a request. I was, if I may say so, merely obsessed, filled by the need to make it.

  As I was picking up my coat, Urbanovich’s bailiff came up to me and took a piece of paper from the pocket of his cardigan. “Tomchek’s office phoned this message in,” he said. “There’s a fellow with a foreign name—is it Pierre?” said the old man.

  “Pierre Thaxter?”

  “I wrote down what they gave me. He wants you to meet him at three at the Art Institute. Also a couple came to ask for you. Fellow with a mustache. Girl with red hair, mini-skirt.”

  “Cantabile,” I said.

  “He didn’t leave no name.”

  It was now half past two. Much had happened in a short time. I went to Stop and Shop and bought sturgeon and fresh rolls, also Twining’s breakfast tea and Cooper’s vintage marmalade. If Thaxter was staying overnight I wanted to give him the breakfast he was accustomed to. He always fed me extremely well. He took pride in his table and told me in French what I was eating. I ate no mere tomatoes but
salade de tomates
, no bread and butter but
tartines
, and so it went with
bouilli
,
brûlé
,
farci
,
fumé
, and excellent wines. He dealt with the best tradespeople and nothing disagreeable to eat or drink was ever set before me.

  As a matter of fact I looked forward to Thaxter’s visit. I was always delighted to see him. Perhaps I even had the illusion that I could open my oppressed heart to him, although I really knew better than that. He would blow in from California wearing his hair long like a Stuart courtier and, under his carabiniere cloak, dressed in a charming blue velvet lounging suit from the King’s Road. His broad-brimmed hat was bought in a shop for black swingers. About his neck would be apparently valuable chains, and also a piece of knotted, soiled, but uniquely tinted silk. His light-tan boots, which came up to the ankle, were ingeniously faced with canvas, and on each of the canvas sides there was an ingenious fleur-de-lis of leather. His nose was strongly distorted, his dark face flaming, and when I saw his leopard eyes I’d give a secret cheer. There was a reason why, when the bailiff told me that he was in town, I immediately laid out five dollars on sturgeon. I was extremely fond of Thaxter. Now, then, the great question: did he or did he not know what he was doing? In a word, was he a crook? This was a question a shrewd man should be able to answer, and I couldn’t answer. Renata, when she did me the honor of treating me as her future husband, often said, “Don’t drop any more money on Thaxter. Charm? All charm. Talent? Buckets of talent. But a phony.”

  “He’s really not.”

  “What? Have a little self-respect, Charlie, about what you swallow. All that Social Register stuff of his?”

  “Oh that! Yes, but people have to boast. They’re dead if they can’t say good things about themselves. Good things
have
to be said. Have a heart.”

  “All right then, his special wardrobe. His special umbrella. The only umbrella with class is a natural-hook umbrella. You don’t buy an umbrella with a manufactured steam-bent hook. For Christ’s sake it’s got to grow that way. Then there’s his special wine cellar, and his special attaché case which you can buy only in one shop in London, and his special water bed with special satin sheets, where he was lying in Palo Alto with his special tootsie-roll and they were watching Davis Cup tennis on a special color TV. Not to mention a special putz named Charlie Citrine who pays for everything. Why the guy’s delirious.”

  The above conversation had taken place when Thaxter telephoned to say that he was en route to New York to sail on the
France
and would stop in Chicago to discuss
The Ark
.

  “What’s he going to Europe for?” said Renata.

  “Well, he is a crack journalist, you know.”

  “Why is a crack journalist sailing First Class on the
France
? That’s five days. Has he got all that time to kill?”

  “He must have a little, yes.”

  “And we’re flying Economy,” said Renata.

  “Yes, but he has a cousin who’s a director of the French Line. His mother’s cousin. They never pay. The old woman knows all the plutocrats in the world. She brings out their debutante daughters.”

  “I notice he doesn’t stick those plutocrats for fifty shares of anything. The rich know their deadbeats. How could you do such a dumb thing?”

  “Really, the bank might have waited a few days more. His check was on the way from the Banco Ambrosiano of Milano.”

  “How did the Italians get in the act? He told you his family funds were in Brussels.”

  “No, in France. You see his share of his aunt’s estate was in the Crédit Lyonnais.”

  “First he swindles you, then he fills you with garbage explanations which you go around repeating. All those high European connections are straight out of old Hitchcock movies. So now he’s coming to Chicago, and what does he do, he has his office girl get you on the phone. It’s beneath him to dial a number or answer a ring. But you answer in person and the chick says, ‘Hold the line, Mr. Thaxter is coming,’ so you stand waiting with the phone to your ear. And the whole thing, mind you, is charged to your bill. Then he tells you he’s arriving but later he’ll let you know when.”

  As far as it went this was all true. By no means did I tell Renata everything about Thaxter. There were also blacklists and scandals at country clubs and gossip about larceny charges. My friend’s taste in trouble was old-fashioned. There were no more bounders unless, from pure love of antiquity, someone like Thaxter revived the type. But I also felt that something deep was at work and that Thaxter’s eccentricities would eventually reveal a special spiritual purpose. I knew it was risky to put up the collateral because I had seen him do other people in the eye. But not me, I thought. There has to be
one
exception. Thus I gambled on immunity and I lost. He was a dear friend. I loved Thaxter. I knew also that I was the last man in the world he would wish to harm. But it came to that, finally. He had run out of harmable men. As there was no one else left, it was friendship versus his life-principle. Besides, I could now call myself a patron of Thaxter’s form of art. Such things must be paid for.

  He had just lost his house in the Bay Area with the swimming pool and the tennis court, the orange grove he had had put in, the formal garden, the MG, the station wagon, and the wine cellar.

  Last September I flew to California to find out why our magazine,
The Ark
, was not appearing. It was a wonderfully pleasant affectionate visit. We walked out to inspect his estate under the California sunshine. At the time I was beginning to develop a new cosmological feeling for the sun. That it was in part our Creator. That there was a sun-band in our spirits. That light rose within us and came forward to meet the sun’s light. That this sun light was not just an external glory revealed to our dark senses and that as light was to the eye, thought was to the mind. So here we were. A happy blessed day. The sky was giving its marvelous temperate pulsating blue heat, while oranges hung about us. Thaxter wore his favorite outdoor garment, the black cloak, and the toes of his bare feet were pressed together like Smyrna figs. He was now having roses put in and asked me not to talk to the Ukrainian gardener. “He was a concentration-camp guard and still insanely anti-Semitic. I don’t want him to start raving.” So in this beautiful place I felt that demon-selves and silly-selves and loving-selves were intermingling. Some of Thaxter’s newest children, fair and innocent, were allowed to play with dangerous knives and poisonous rose-dust containers. Nobody came to harm. Lunch was a big production, served beside the sparkling swimming pool with two wines poured by himself in somber dignity and intense connoisseurship, with cloak and curved pipe and bare toes writhing. His darkly pretty young wife gladly attended to all preparations and presided practically in the background. She was utterly delighted with her life and there was no dough, absolutely none. The gas station at the corner refused to take his check for five dollars. I had to pay with my credit card. And behind the scenes the young woman was holding off the tennis-court and swimming-pool people, the wine people, the car people, the grand-piano people, the bank people.

  
The Ark
was going to be produced on new IBM equipment without expensive compositors. Never has any country given its people so many toys to play with or sent such highly gifted individuals to the remotest corners of idleness, as close as possible to the frontiers of pain. Thaxter was building a wing to house
The Ark
. Our magazine had to have its own premises and not interfere with his private life. He recruited some college students on a Tom Sawyer basis to dig a foundation. He went about in his MG visiting building sites to get construction hints from the hard-hats and scrounge pieces of plywood. This was an expansion I refused to subsidize. “I predict your house will slide into this hole,” I said. “Are you sure you’re within the building code?” But Thaxter had that willingness to try that makes field marshals and dictators. “We’ll throw twenty thousand men into this sector, and if we lose more than half, we’ll take a different tack.”

  In
The Ark
we were going to publish brilliant things. Where were we to find such brilliancy? We knew it must be there. It was an insult to a civilized nation and to humankind to assume that it was not. Everything possible must be done to restore the credit and authority of art, the seriousness of thought, the integrity of culture, the dignity of style. Renata, who must have had an unauthorized look at my bank statements, apparently knew how much I was spending as a patron. “Who needs this
Ark
of yours, Charlie, and who are these animals you’re gonna save? You’re not really such an idealist—you’re full of hostility, dying to attack a lot of people in your very own magazine and insult everyone right and left. Thaxter’s arrogance is nothing compared to yours. You let him think he’s getting away with murder, but that’s really because you can double his arrogance in spades.”