Humboldt's Gift (47 page)

  Then Renata turned and said, “Are you sure the old dodo knows you’re coming?”

  “Sure. We’re expected. I phoned him,” I said.

  We entered one of the alley-like streets, where garment workers used to pass their summer holidays, and found the address. An old brick building. On its wooden stoop were wheelchairs and walking frames for invalids who had had strokes.

  At another time I might have been astonished by what happened next. But now that the world was being reconstituted and the old structure, death and all, was no more solid than a Japanese lantern, human matters came over me with the greatest vividness, naturalness, even with gaiety—I mustn’t leave out the gaiety. The saddest of sights might have it. Anyway, we were indeed expected. Leaning on a stick someone was watching for us between the door and the storm door of the nursing home and came out shouting, “Charlie, Charlie,” as soon as we reached the stairs.

  I said to this man, “You’re not Waldemar Wald, are you?”

  “No, Waldemar is here. But I’m not Waldemar, Charlie. Now look at me. Listen to my voice.” He began to sing something in an old raven tenor. He took me by the hand and sang “La donna è mobile” in the style of Caruso, but miserably, poor old boy. I took him in, I studied his hair, once kinky and red, the busted nose and eager nostrils, the dewlaps, the Adam’s apple, the skinny stoop of his figure. Then I said, “Ah yes, you’re Menashal Menasha Klinger! Chicago Illinois 1927.”

  “That’s right.” For him this was sublime. “It’s me. You recognized me!”

  “Holy mackerel! What a pleasure! I swear I don’t deserve such a surprise.” In putting off my search for Humboldt’s uncle it seems that I had been avoiding good luck, wonderful things, miracles almost. Immediately I met a person whom I loved way-back-when. “It’s dreamlike,” I said.

  “No,” said Menasha. “For an ordinary guy, maybe it would be. But when you turn into a personage, Charlie, it’s much less of a coincidence than you think. There must be friends and acquaintances like me all over the place who used to know you but are too shy to approach and remind you. I would have been too shy myself if it wasn’t that you were coming to see my buddy Waldemar.” Menasha turned to Renata. “And this is Mrs. Citrine,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said, looking her in the face. “This is Mrs. Citrine.”

  “I knew your husband as a kid. I boarded with his family when I came down from Ypsilanti, Michigan, to work at Western Electric as a punch-press operator. What I really came for was to study singing. Charlie was a wonderful boy. Charlie was the best-hearted little kid on the whole Northwest Side. I could talk to him when he was only nine or ten, and he was my only friend. I’d take him downtown with me Saturdays for my music lesson.”

  “Your teacher,” I said, “was Vsevelod Kolodny, room eight sixteen in the Fine Arts Building. Basso profundo with the Imperial Opera, Petersburg, bald, four-feet-ten, wore a corset and Cuban heels.”

  “He recognized me, too,” said Menasha, infinitely pleased.

  “You were a dramatic tenor,” I said. I had only to say this to see how he rose on his toes, clasping his punch-press-callused palms and singing “In questa tomba oscura,” tears of ardor filling up his eyes, and his voice so roosterish, with so much heart, so much cry and hackle and hope—tuneless. Even as a boy I knew he’d never make stardom. I did believe, however, that he might have become a singer but for the fact that on the Ypsilanti YMCA boxing team someone had hit him in the nose and this had ruined his chances in art. The songs that were sung through this disfigured nose would never be right.

  “Tell me, my boy, what else do you remember?”

  “I remember Tito Schipa, Titta Ruffo, Werrenrath, McCor-mack, Schumann-Heink, Amelita Galli-Curci, Verdi, and Boito. And when you heard Caruso sing
Pagliacci
, life was never the same again, right?”

  “Oh, yes!”

  Love made these things unforgettable. In Chicago fifty years ago, we had been passengers on the double-deck open-topped bus down to the Loop on Jackson Boulevard, Menasha explaining to me what bel canto was, telling me, radiant, about
Aida
, envisioning himself in brocade robes as a priest or warrior. After his singing lesson he took me to Kranz’s for a chocolate-fudge sundae. We went to hear Paul Ash’s sizzling band, we also heard vaudeville seals who played “Yankee Doodle” by nipping the syringe bulbs of automobile horns. We swam at Clarendon Beach, where everyone peed in the water. At night he taught me astronomy. He explained Darwin to me. He married his high-school sweetheart from Ypsilanti. Her name was Marsha. She was obese. She was homesick and she lay in bed and cried. I once saw her sitting in the bathtub trying to wash her hair. She took water in her hands but her arms were too fat to raise it in her palms as high as the head. This dear girl was dead. Menasha had been an electrician in Brooklyn for most of his life. Of his dramatic tenor nothing was left but the yelping of an old man, greatly moved. Of his stiff red hair there remained only this orange-whitey cirrhus formation. “Very kind people, the Citrines. Maybe not Julius. He was rough. Is Julius still Julius? Your mother was so helpful to Marsha. Your kind poor mother. . . . But let’s go and see Waldemar. I’m only the greeting committee and he’s waiting. They keep him in a back room by the kitchen.”

  We found Waldemar sitting on the edge of his bed, a man with wide shoulders, and his hair wet-brushed very like Hum-boldt’s, the same broad face, and the eyes gray and set wide. Within ten miles of Coney Island, perhaps, sucking in and straining tons of water, puffing vapor from his head, there was a whale with eyes similarly positioned.

  “So you were my nephew’s buddy,” said the old gambler.

  “This is Charlie Citrine,” said Menasha. “You know, Waldemar, he recognized me. The boy recognized me all right. Gosh, Charlie, you should, you know. I paid out a fortune on sodas and treats. There ought to be some justice.”

  Through Humboldt I knew Uncle Waldemar, of course. He was an only son, with four older sisters and a doting mother, much pampered, idle, a poolroom bum, a dropout, mooching from his sisters and stealing from their purses. Eventually he placed Humboldt in the senior position as well. Becoming rather a brother than an uncle. The kid role was the only role he understood.

  I was thinking that life was a hell of a lot more bounteous than I had ever realized. It rushed over us with more than our senses and our judgment could take in. One life with its love affairs, its operatic ambitions, its dollars and horse races and marriage-designs and old people’s homes is, after all, only a tin dipperful of this superabundance. It rushes up also from within. Take a room like Uncle Waldemar’s, smelling of wieners boiling for lunch, with Waldemar squatting on the edge of the bed, all dressed up for a visit, his face, his head blearily similar to Humboldt’s, but with the effect of a blown dandelion, all the yellow gone gray; take the old gentlemen’s green shirt, buttoned to the collar; take his good suit on the wire hanger in the corner (he would have a dressy funeral); take the satchels under his bed and the pin-ups of horses and prizefighters and the book-jacket photograph of Humboldt in the days when Humboldt was impossibly beautiful. If this is literally all what life is, then Renata’s little rhyme about Chicago is right on the head: “Without O’Hare, it’s sheer despair.” And all O’Hare can do is change the scene for you and take you from dismal to dismal, from boredom to boredom. But why did a kind of faintness come over me at the start of this interview with Uncle Waldemar in the presence of Menasha and Renata? Because there is far more to any experience, connection, or relationship than ordinary consciousness, the daily life of the ego, can grasp. Yes. You see, the soul belongs to a greater, an all-embracing life outside. It’s got to. Learning to think of this existence of mine as merely the present existence, one in a series, I was not really surprised to meet Menasha Klinger. He and I obviously held permanent membership in some larger, more extended human outfit, and his desire to stand in brocade and sing Rhadames in
Aida
was like my eagerness to go far, far beyond fellow intellectuals of my generation who had lost the imaginative soul. Oh, I admired some of these intellectuals without limits. Especially the princes of science, astrophysicists, pure mathematicians, and the like. But nothing had been done about the main question. The main question, as Walt Whitman had pointed out, was the death question. And music drew me toward Menasha. By means of music a man affirmed that the logically unanswerable was, in a different form, answerable. Sounds without determinate meaning became more and more pertinent, the greater the music. This was such a man’s assignment. I, too, in spite of lethargy and weakness, was here for a big reason. Just what this was I would consider later, when I looked back on my life in the twentieth century. Calendars would disintegrate under the gaze of the spirit. But there would be a December spot for a subway ride in cars disfigured by youth gangs, and a beautiful woman whom I followed on the boardwalk while hearing the peppery pang of shooting galleries and smelling popcorn and hot dogs, thinking of the sex of her figure, the consumerism of her garments, and of my friendship with Von Humboldt Fleisher which had brought me to Coney Island. In my reflective purgatory I would see it all from a different perspective and know, perhaps, how all these peculiarities added up—know why an emotional estuary should have opened up in me when I laid eyes on Waldemar Wald.

  Waldemar was now saying, “What a dog’s age since anybody visited. I’ve been forgot. Humboldt would never have stuck me in a dump like this. It was temporary. The chow is awful, and the help is rough. They say, ‘Shut up, you’re gaga.’ They’re all from the Caribbean. Everybody else is a kraut. Menasha and me are practically the only Americans. Humboldt once made a joke, ‘Two is company, three is a kraut!’ “

  “But he did put you here,” said Renata.

  “Just till he could iron out some problems. The whole week before he died he was looking for an apartment for us both. Once we lived together for three months and that was heaven. Up in the morning like a real family, bacon and eggs, and then we’d talk baseball. I made a real fan of him, you know that? Fifty years ago I bought him a first-baseman’s mitt. I taught him to field a grounder and throw a guy out. Football, too. I showed him how to toss a forward pass. My mother’s railroad apartment had a long, long corridor where we played. When his dad took off it was a houseful of women and it was up to me to make an American boy out of him. Those women did plenty of damage. Look at the names they gave us—Waldemar! The kids called me Walla-Walla. And he had it rough, too. Humboldt! My goofy sister named him after a statue in Central Park.”

  All this was familiar to me from Humboldt’s charming poem “Uncle Harlequin.” Waldemar Harlequin, in the old days on West End Avenue, after his wage-earning sisters went to business, rose at eleven, bathed for an hour, shaved with a new Gillette blade, and then lunched. His mother sat beside him to butter his rolls, to skin his whitefish and bone it, to pour his coffee while he read the papers. Then he took a few bucks from her and went out. He talked at the dinner table about Jimmy Walker and Al Smith. He, in Humboldt’s opinion, was his family’s American. This was his function among the ladies and with his nephew. When the national conventions were broadcast on the radio he could call the roll of the states together with the announcer—^ “Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa”—and patriotic tears filled his eyes.

  “Mr. Wald, I’ve come to see you about the papers Humboldt left. I told you on the phone. I have a note from Orlando Huggins.”

  “Yes, I know Huggins, that long drink of water. Now I want to ask you about the papers. Is this stuff valuable or ain’t it?”

  “Sometimes we see in the
Times
,” said Menasha, “a letter by Robert Frost fetches eight hundred bucks. As for Edgar Allan Poe, don’t ask.”

  “What’s actually in those papers, Mr. Wald?” asked Renata.

  “Well, I have to tell you,” said Waldemar. “
I
never understood any of his stuff. I’m not a big reader. What he wrote was way over my head. Humboldt could hit like a sonofabitch on the sandlot. With his shoulders, just imagine how much beef there went into his swing. If I had my way he would have ended up in the majors. But he started in to hanging around the Forty-second Street library and bull-shitting with those bums on the front steps. First thing I knew he was printing highbrow poems in the magazines. I mean, the kind of magazines without pictures.”

  “Come on, Waldemar,” said Menasha. His chest was high with feeling and his voice rose and rose. “I’ve known Charlie from a kid. I want to tell you you can trust Charlie. Long ago, soon as I laid eyes on him, I said to myself, This kid’s heart is right up there in his face. He’s getting along in years himself. Although compared to us he’s a strong fellow still. Now Waldemar, whyn’t you come clean and tell him what’s on your mind?”

  “In Humboldt’s papers, as papers, there probably isn’t much money,” I said. “One might try to sell them to a collector. But perhaps there is something in what he left that could be published.”

  “It’s mostly the sentiment,” said Renata. “Like a message from an old friend in the next world.”

  Waldemar looked at her, obstinate. “But suppose it
is
valuable, why should I get screwed? Am I entitled to get something out of it or not? I mean, why should I stick in this lousy home here? As soon as they showed me Humboldt’s obituary in the
Times
—Christ! Imagine what that did to me! Like my own kid, the last of the family, my own flesh and blood! I got on the BMT as fast as I could and went up to his room. His stuff was half gone already. The cops and the hotel management were grabbing it off. The cash and the watch and his fountain pen and the typewriter disappeared.”

  “What’s the use of sitting on this stuff and dreaming you’ll make a killing?” said Menasha. “Hand it over to somebody who knows.”

  “Don’t fink on me,” said Waldemar to Menasha. “We’re in here together. This much I’m willing—I’ll level with you, Mr. Citrine. I could have peddled this stuff long ago. If you ask me there is a real property in this.”