Humboldt's Gift (45 page)

  Working himself up, George got to his feet, a broad healthy figure of a man, rosy and vigorous, his nose bent like an Indian’s, and his thin hair centered like a scalp lock. As always when he expounded his Nature-philosophy he started to shout. “This is no ordinary cunt. She’s worth taking a chance on. All right, you might be humiliated, you might have to take a lot of shit, you might be robbed and plundered, you might lie sick with nobody looking after you or have a coronary or lose a leg. Okay, but you’re alive, a flesh and blood brave instinct person. You’ve got guts. And I’ll be standing by you. Cable me from anywhere and I’ll arrive. I liked you all right when you were younger, but not the way I love you now. When you were younger you were on the make. You may not realize it but you were damn clever and canny about your career. But now, thank God, you’re in a real dream and a fever over this young woman. You don’t know what you’re doing. And that’s just what’s great about it.”

  “You make it sound much too romantic, George.”

  “Never mind,” he said. “Now Renata’s ‘real father’ bit is baloney. Let’s figure this out together. What does a broad like that need with a real father? She’s already got this old pimp mother. Renata wouldn’t know what to do with a father. She’s got just the daddy she needs, a sex daddy. No, the whole thing was hoked up to get these trips to Europe. But that’s just the finest part of it. Go on and blow all your money. Go broke, and the hell with the whole courthouse gang. Now you told me before about April in Paris with Renata but brief me again.”

  “Here it is,” I said. “Until Renata was twelve she thought her father was a certain Signor Biferno, a fancy leather-goods dealer from the Via Monte Napoleone, in Milan. That’s the big luxury-goods street. But when she was thirteen or so the old girl told her that Biferno might not be the man. The Señora and Biferno had been skiing in Cortina, she broke her ankle, her foot was in a cast, she quarreled with Biferno and he went home to his wife and kids. She revenged herself on him with a young Frenchman. Now when Renata was ten her mother had taken her to Milan to confront Biferno. They got all dressed up and made a scene on the Via Monte Napoleone.”

  “That old broad is one of the big-time troublemakers.”‘

  “The real Mrs. Biferno called the police. And much later, back in Chicago, her mother told Renata, ‘Biferno may not be your father after all.’ “

  “So you went to Paris to see the young Frenchman, who is now an old Frenchman? That was a hell of a thing for a mother to tell a girl just as she enters adolescence.”

  “I had to be in London anyway and we were at the Ritz. Then Renata said she must go to Paris to look over this man who was perhaps her father and she wanted to go alone. She planned to come back three days later. So I took her to Heathrow. She was carrying a large bag, which was open. Right at the top, like a large compact, was her diaphragm case.”

  “Why was she taking her birth control?”

  “You can never tell when the chance of a lifetime may present itself.”

  “Tactics, Charlie, just stupid tactics. Keep the fellow guessing. She was putting you off balance. I think she’s really okay. She just does certain stupid things. One thing I want to say, Charlie. I don’t know what our habits are but don’t let her blow you. You’ll be dead in a year. Now tell me the rest about Paris.”

  “Well, the man was homosexual, elderly, tedious, and garrulous. When she didn’t return to London on the fourth day I went to look for her at the Hotel Meurice. She said she hadn’t had the nerve to face him yet and she’d been shopping and going to the Louvre and seeing Swedish films—
I Am Curious Yellow
or something. The old guy remembered her mother and he was pleased to think that he might have a daughter but he was cagey and said that legal recognition was absolutely out of the question. His family would disinherit him. But he wasn’t the man anyway. Renata said there was no resemblance. I looked him over myself. She was right. Of course, there’s no way of knowing how nature does its stuff. An angry woman with a cast on her ankle gets a gay skier to make an exception for her, and they beget this beautiful daughter with the perfect skin and dark eyes and those eyebrows. Think of an El Greco beauty raising her eyes to heaven. Then substitute sex for heaven. That’s Renata’s pious look.”

  “Well, I know you love her,” said George. “When she locked you out because she had another guy in there with her and you came to me crying—you remember what I said? A man your age sobbing over a girl is a man I respect. Furthermore, you’ve still got all your strength.”

  “I should have, I never used any of it.”

  “Well, okay, you saved it. Now you’re coming down the stretch and it’s time to pull ahead. Maybe you should marry Renata. Only don’t get faint on your way to the license bureau. Do the whole thing like a man. Otherwise she’ll never forgive you. Otherwise she’ll turn you into an old errand boy. Poor old Charlie with a watering eye going out to buy cigars for his missus.”

  twenty-six

  We made our approach over the steely patch of evening water and landed at La Guardia in the tawny sundown. We then rode to the Plaza Hotel imprisoned in the low seats in one of New York’s dog-catcher taxis. They make you feel that you have bitten someone and are being rushed to the pound, frothing with rabies, to be put down. I said this to Renata and she appeared to feel that I was using my imagination to spoil her pleasure, already somewhat damaged by the fact that we traveled, unlicensed, as a married pair. The doorman helped her out at the Plaza and, in her high boots, she strode under the heated marquee with its glowing orange rods. Over her mini-skirt she wore a long suède Polish coat lined with lambskin. I had bought it for her from Cepelia. Her beautifully pliant velvet hat inspired by seventeenth-century Dutch portrait painters was pushed off from her forehead. Her face, evenly and purely white, broadened toward the base. This gourdlike fullness was her only defect. Her throat was ever so slightly ringed or rippled by some enriching feminine deposit. This slight swell appears also on her hips and on the inside of her thighs. The first joint of her fingers revealed the same signs of sensual superabundance. Following her, admiring, thinking, I walked in the checked coat. Cantabile and Stronson had agreed that it gave me the cut of a killer. But I couldn’t have looked less killer-like than I now did. My hair was blown out of position so that I felt the radiant heat of the marquee on my bald spot. The winter air swept into my face and made my nose red. Under my eyes the pouches were heavy. Teatime musicians in the Palm Court played their swooning, ingratiating, kiss-ass music. I registered Mr. and Mrs. Citrine under a false Chicago address, and we went up in the elevator with a crowd of charming college girls down for the holidays. They seemed to give out a wonderful fragrance of unripeness, a sort of green-banana odor.

  “You certainly got a load of those darling kids,” said Renata, perfectly good-humored again—we were in an endless corridor of golden carpet, endlessly repeating its black scrolls and flourishes, flourishes and scrolls. My manner of observing people entertained her. “You’re such an eager looker,” she said.

  Yes, but for decades I had neglected my innate manner of doing it, my personal way of looking. I saw no reason why I shouldn’t resume it now. Who cared?

  “But what’s this?” said Renata as the bellhop opened the door. “What kind of room did they give us?”

  “These are the accommodations with mansard windows. The very top of the Plaza. The best view in the house,” I said.

  “We had a marvelous suite last time. What the hell are we doing in the attic? Where’s our suite?”

  “Oh, come, come, my darling. What’s the difference? You sound like my brother, Julius. He gets into such a state when hotels don’t give him the best—so haughty and furious.”

  “Charles, are you having one of your stingy fits? Don’t forget what you told me once about the observation car.”

  I was sorry now that I had ever made her familiar with Gene Fowler’s saying that money was something to throw off the back end of a train. That was journalistic Hollywood of the golden age, the boozy night-club magnificence of the Twenties, the Big-Spender Syndrome. “But they’re right, Renata. This is the best spot in the whole hotel for seeing Fifth Avenue.”

  Indeed the view, if you cared for views, was remarkable. I was very good myself at putting other people on to views for the purpose of absenting myself. Below, Fifth Avenue glowed with Christmas decorations and the headlights of the jammed traffic, solid between the Seventies and the Thirties, and shop illuminations, multicolored, crystalline, and like the cells in a capillary observed through a microscope, elastically changing shape, bumping and pulsatory. All this I saw in a single instant. I was like a deft girl, scooping all the jacks before the ball bounced back. It was as it had been with Renata last spring when we took the train to Chartres, “Isn’t that beautiful out there!” she had said. I looked and yes, it was indeed beautiful. No more than a glance was necessary. You saved yourself a lot of time that way. The question was what you were going to do with the minutes gained by these economies. This, I may say, was all due to the operation of what Steiner describes as the Consciousness Soul.

  Renata didn’t know that Urbanovich was about to rule on the impounding of my money. By the movement of her eyes, however, I saw that money thoughts were on her mind. Her brows often were tilted heavenward with love but now and then a strongly practical look swept over her which, however, I also liked very much. But then she gave her head a quick lift and said, “As long as you’re in New York, you may as well see a few editors and peddle your essays. Did Thaxter give them back?”

  “Reluctantly. He still expects to bring out
The Ark
.”

  “Sure. He himself is every kind of animal.”

  “He called me yesterday and invited us to a Bon Voyage party on the
France
.”

  “His aging mother is throwing him a party too? She must be quite an old dame.”

  “She understands style. For generations she’s arranged the coming out of debutantes and she’s connected with the Rich. She always knows where there’s a chalet vacant for her boy or a shooting box or a yacht. If he feels run-down she sends him to the Bahamas or the Aegean. You ought to see her. She’s skinny clever capable and she glowers at me, I’m low company for Pierre. She stands on guard for monied families defending their right to drink themselves to death, their ancient privilege to amount to nothing.”

  Renata laughed and said, “Spare me his party. Let’s get your Humboldt business over and go on to Milan. I have a deep anxiety about it.”

  “Do you think this Biferno really is your father? Better he than that queer Henri.”

  “Honestly I wouldn’t think about a father if we were married. My insecure position forces me to look for solid ground. You’ll say I have been married, but the ground with Koffritz wasn’t very solid. And now there’s my responsibility for Roger. By the way, we must send out toys to all the kids from F. A. O. Schwarz and I haven’t got a cent. Koffritz is six months behind in payments. He says I have a rich man-friend. I will not drag him into court though, or throw him in jail. As for you, you carry so many freeloaders and I don’t want to come under that heading. If I may say so, though, I at least care for you and do you some good. If you fell into the hands of that anthroposophist’s daughter, that little blonde fox, you’d soon known the difference. She’s a toughie.”

  “What has Doris Scheldt got to do with anything?”

  “What? You wrote her a note before we left Chicago. I read the impression on your note pad. Don’t look so truthful, Charlie. You’re the world’s worst liar. I wish I knew how many ladies you had in reserve.”

  I was not indignant over her spying. I no longer made scenes. Pleasant in themselves, our European trips also took me away from Miss Scheldt. Renata considered her a dangerous person and even the Señora had tried to scold me about her.

  “But Señora,” I had replied, “Miss Scheldt didn’t enter the picture until the Flonzaley incident.”

  “Now, Charles, the matter of Mr. Flonzaley must be dropped. You are not just a middle-class provincial person but a man of letters,” said the old Spanish lady. “Flonzaley belongs to the past. Renata is very sensitive to pain and when the man was in agony what could you expect her to do? She cried the entire night he was there. He is in a vulgar business and there is no comparison between you. She simply felt she owed him the consideration. And as you are an
homme de lettres
and he is an undertaker, the higher person must be more tolerant.”

  I couldn’t argue with the Señora. I had seen her one morning before she was made up, hurrying toward the bathroom, completely featureless, a limp and yellow banana skin, without brows or lashes and virtually without lips. The sorrow of this sight took me by the heart, I never again wanted to win a point from the Señora. When I played backgammon with her I cheated against myself.

  “The main thing about Miss Scheldt,” I told Renata at the Plaza, “is her father. I couldn’t have a love affair with the daughter of a man who was teaching me so much.”

  “He fills you with such bunk,” she said.

  “Renata, let me quote you a text: ‘Though you are said to be alive you are dead. Wake up and put some strength into what is left, which must otherwise die.’ That’s from the Revelation of Saint John, more or less.”

  Indulgently smiling, Renata rose and straightened her miniskirt, saying, “You’ll wind up with bare feet in the Loop carrying one of those where-will-you-spend-eternity signs. Get on the phone, for God’s sake, and talk to this man Huggins, Humboldt’s executor. And for dinner don’t try to take me to Rumpelmayer’s again.”

  Huggins was going to an opening at the Kootz Gallery and invited me to meet him there when I mentioned my business.

  “Is there anything to this. What is this legacy stuff?” I said.

  “There is something,” said Huggins.

  In the late Forties when Huggins was a celebrity in Greenwich Village I was a very minor member of the group that discussed politics, literature, and philosophy in his apartment. There were people like Chiaramonte and Rahv and Abel and Paul Goodman and Von Humboldt Fleisher. What Huggins and I had in common was our love for Humboldt. There wasn’t much else. In many respects we irritated each other. Some years ago at the Democratic convention in Atlantic City, that old pleasure-slum, we watched Hubert Humphrey pretending to relax with his delegation while Johnson dangled him, and something about the dinky desolation, the torn fibers of holiday gaiety provoked Hug-gins against me. We went out on the boardwalk and as we faced the horrid Atlantic, tamed here to saltwater taffy and the foam-like popcorn pushed by the sweeper’s brush, Huggins became disagreeable to me. Fearing no man and urging home his arguments with his white billy-goat beard, he made hostile comments on the book about Harry Hopkins I had published that spring. Huggins was covering the convention for the
Women’s Wear Daily
. A better journalist than I would ever be, he was also a famous bohemian dissenter and revolutionist. Why had I been so kind to the New Deal and seen so much merit in Hopkins? I was forever sneaking praises of the American system of government into my books. I was an apologist, a front man and stooge, practically an Andrei Vishinsky. At Atlantic City as elsewhere, he was informal in chino wash pants and tennis sneakers, tall, rosy, bearded, stammering, and argumentative.