Humboldt's Gift (53 page)

  “Well, if there had been a rich literary life, and if he had been able to drink tea with Edith Wharton and see Robert Frost and T. S. Eliot twice a week, poor Humboldt would have felt supported and appreciated and rewarded for his talent. He just didn’t feel able to fill up all the vacancy he felt around him,” said Kathleen. “Of course he was a wizard. He made me feel so slow, slow slow! He invented the most ingenious things to accuse me of. All that invention should have gone into his poetry. Humboldt had too many personal arrangements. Too much genius went into the arrangements. As his wife I had to suffer the consequences. But let’s not go on talking about it. Let me ask . . . you two wrote a scenario once. . . ?”

  “Just some nonsense to pass the time in Princeton. You said something about it to that young woman, Mrs. Cantabile. What is Mrs. Cantabile like?”

  “She’s pretty. She’s polite in an old-fashioned Emily Post way, and sends proper notes to thank you for a delicious lunch. At the same time she paints her nails in gaudy colors, wears flashy clothes, and has a harsh voice. When she chats with you she’s screaming. She sounds like a gun-moll but asks graduate-student questions. Anyway I’m getting into the film business now, and I’m curious about something that you and Humboldt did together. After all a successful movie was made of your play.”

  “Oh, our scenario could never have made a picture. Our cast included Mussolini, the Pope, Stalin, Calvin Coolidge, Amundsen, and Nobile. Our hero was a cannibal. We had a dirigible and a Sicilian village. W. C. Fields might have loved it, but only a mad producer would ever have put a penny into it. Of course no one ever does know about these things. In 1913, who would have looked twice at an advance-scenario of World War One? Or if, before I was born, you had submitted the tale of my own life to me and invited me to live with it, wouldn’t I have turned you down flat?”

  “But what about your hit play?”

  “Kathleen, believe me. I was just the worm that spit out the silk thread. Other people created the Broadway garment. Now tell me, what did Humboldt leave you?”

  “Well, first of all, he wrote me an extraordinary letter.”

  “Me too. And a perfectly sane one.”

  “Mine is more mixed. It’s too personal to show, even now. He spelled out all the crimes I was supposed to have committed. His purpose was to forgive me, whatever I had done, but he forgave in full detail and he was still talking about the Rockefellers. But there were patches of perfect sanity. Really moving, true things.”

  “Was that all you got from him?”

  “Well, no, Charlie, there was something else he gave me. A document. Another idea for a movie. This is why I was asking you about the thing you two invented in Princeton. Tell me, what did he leave you, apart from this letter?”

  “Astonishing!” I said.

  “What’s astonishing?”

  “What Humboldt did. Sick as he was, dying, decaying, but still so ingenious.”

  “I don’t understand you.”

  “Tell me, Kathleen, is this document, this film idea, about a writer? And does the writer have a domineering wife? And does he also have a beautiful young mistress? And do they take a journey? And does he then write a book he can’t publish?”

  “Ah, yes. I see. Of course. That’s it, Charlie.”

  “What a son of a bitch. How marvelous! He duplicated everything. The same journey with the wife. And the same document for us both.”

  Silent, she studied me. Her mouth moved. She smiled. “Why do you suppose he gave the same gift to each of us?”

  “Are you perfectly sure that we’re his only heirs? Ha-ha, well, let’s drink to his crazy memory. He was a dear man.”

  “Yes, he was a dear man. And how I wish—you think it was all done according to plan?” said Kathleen.

  “Who was it, Alexander Pope, who couldn’t drink a cup of tea without a stratagem? That was Humboldt, too. And he kept dreaming about miraculous money until the end. He was dying and still he wanted to make us both rich. Anyway, if he kept his sense of humor, or traces of it, to the last, that was astonishing. And crazy as he was he wrote two sane letters at least. I’m going to make an odd comparison—Humboldt had to break out of his case of hardened madness to do that. You might say that he had emigrated into this madness long ago. Became a settler there. For us, maybe, he managed a visit to the Old Country. To see his friends once more? And it may have been as hard for him to do it as it might be for someone—myself, for instance—to go from this world to the spirit world. Or, another odd comparison —he made a Houdini escape from the hardened projections of paranoia, or manic depression, or whatever it was. Sleepers do awaken. Exiles and emigrants do make it back, and dying genius can revive. ‘End-of-the-line lucidity,’ he wrote in my letter.”

  “I don’t think at the end he had the strength for two separate gifts, one for each of us,” she said.

  “Or look at it this way,” I said. “He showed us what he had most of—scheming, plotting, and paranoia. He did as much with it as any man could. Don’t you remember the famous Longstaff scheme?”

  “Do you think he might have had anything else in mind?” said Kathleen.

  “One single thing?” I said.

  “A kind of posthumous character test,” she said.

  “He was absolutely sure that my character was hopeless. Yours, too, maybe. Well, he’s given us a very lively moment. Here we are laughing and admiring, and how sad it is. I’m very touched. We both are.”

  Quiet and large, Kathleen was mildly smiling, but the color of her large eyes suddenly changed. Tears came into them. Still she sat passive. That was Kathleen. It was not appropriate to mention this, but possibly Humboldt’s idea was to bring us together. Not to become man and wife necessarily, but perhaps to combine our feelings for him and create a sort of joint memorial. For after he died, we would continue (for a time) to be active in life in this deluded human scene, and perhaps it would be a satisfaction to him and ease the boredom of the grave to think that we were busy with his enterprises. For when a Plato or a Dante or Dostoevski argued for immortality, Humboldt, a deep admirer of these men couldn’t say, “They were geniuses, but we don’t have to take their ideas seriously.” But did he himself take immortality seriously? He didn’t say. What he said was that we were supernatural, not natural. I would have given anything to find out what he meant.

  “These scenarios or treatments are very hard to copyright,” Kathleen explained. “And Humboldt must have gotten professional advice about legal protection. . . . He sealed a copy of his script in an envelope and went to the post office and registered it and had it delivered to himself by registered mail. So that it’s never been opened. We’ve read the duplicates.”

  “That’s right. I have two such sealed envelopes.”

  “Two?”

  “Yes,” I said. “The other is the one we’d dreamed up at Princeton. Now I know how Humboldt was amusing himself in that rotten hotel. He spent his time working all this out in meticulous detail and with ceremonious formalities. That was right up his alley.”

  “Listen, Charles, we must go fifty-fifty,” Kathleen said.

  “Bless you, commercially it’s zero,” I told her.

  “On the contrary,” Kathleen said firmly. I looked again at her, hearing this. It was out of character for Kathleen, normally diffident, to be so positively contradictory. “I submitted this to people in the business and I actually signed a contract and took an option payment of three thousand dollars. Half of that is yours.”

  “You mean that someone has actually paid out money for this?”

  “I had two offers to choose from. I accepted the one from Steinhals Productions. Where shall I send your check?”

  “At the moment I have no address. I’m in transit. But no, Kathleen, I won’t take any of this money.” I was thinking how I would give this news to Renata. She had ridiculed Humboldt’s gift so brilliantly, and on behalf of our vanishing generation, Humboldt’s and mine, I had felt hurt. “And is a script being written?”

  “It’s receiving serious consideration,” said Kathleen. Occasionally her voice soared into a girlish treble. It broke.

  “How interesting. How goofy. A solid mass of improbabilities,” I said. “Although I’ve always been a little proud of my personal oddities, I’ve begun to suspect that they may be only faint images of a thousand real and much more powerful oddities out there, somewhere—that they may not be so personal after all and that maybe this is a general condition. That’s why Humboldt’s burlesque of love and ambition and all the rest of those monkey-shines can sound plausible to business people.”

  “I had good legal advice and my contract with Steinhals is for a minimum of thirty thousand dollars if the option is picked up. We could go over seventy thousand, depending on the budget. We should know in about two months. End of February. And what I feel now, Charlie, is that as joint owners you and I should draw a separate contract.”

  “Now, Kathleen, let’s not add to the unreality of things. No contracts. And I don’t need this money.”

  “I would have thought so too, before today, with everybody talking about your million-dollar fortune. But before you signed the check at the Palm Court you added it twice from top to bottom and again from the bottom. You lost your color. And then I saw you struggling to decide on a tip. Now don’t be embarrassed, Charles.”

  “No, no, Kathleen. I’ve got plenty. It’s only one of my Depression hang-ups. Besides, what a rip-off! It makes old-timers indignant.”

  “But I know you’re being sued. I know what happens when the judges and lawyers get after a man. I haven’t run a Nevada dude ranch for nothing.”

  “Hanging on to money is hard, of course. It’s like clutching an ice cube. And you can’t just make it and then live easy. There’s no such thing. That’s what Humboldt probably didn’t understand. I wonder, did he think money made the difference between success and failure? Then he didn’t understand. When you get money you go through a metamorphosis. And you have to contend with terrific powers inside and out. There’s almost nothing personal in success. Success is always money’s own success.”

  “You’re merely trying to change the subject. You’ve always been a great observer. For years I’ve watched you looking at people cannily. As if you saw them but they didn’t see you. But come now, Charlie, you aren’t the only observer.”

  “Would I be staying at the Plaza if I were going broke?”

  “With a young lady you might, yes.”

  This large, altered but still handsome woman with the occasionally breaking piercing voice, her cheeks looped inward with attractive melancholy, had been studying me. Her glance, though still a bit averted and oblique from the long habit of passivity, was warm and kindly. I am quickly and deeply touched when people take the trouble to note my situation.

  “I understand you’re on your way to Europe with this lady. So Huggins told me.”

  “True,” I said, “that’s right.” ‘

  “To. . . ?”

  “To what?” I said, “God knows.” I might have told her more. I might have confessed that I no longer took seriously questions taken seriously by many serious people, questions of metaphysics or of politics, wrongly formulated. Was there then any reason why I should have a precise or practical motive for flying to Italy with a beautiful creature? I was pursuing a special tenderness, I was pursuing love and gratification from motives that would have been appropriate thirty years ago. What would it be like to overtake in my sixties what I had longed for in my twenties? What would I do with it when I got it? I had half a mind to open my heart to this fine woman. I believed that I saw signs that she too was coming out of a state of spiritual sleep. We might have discussed lots of fascinating subjects—for instance, why slumber sealed people’s spirits, why waking was so convulsive, and whether she thought that the spirit could move independently of the body and if she felt that there might not be a kind of consciousness that needed no biological footing. I was tempted to tell her that I, personally, had some notion of doing something about the problem of death. I considered whether to discuss with her seriously the assignment set for writers by Walt Whitman, who was convinced that democracy would fail unless its poets gave it great poems of death. I felt that Kathleen was a woman to whom I could talk. But the position was an embarrassing one. An old chaser who had lost his head over a beautiful gold-digging palooka, a romancer who was going to fulfill the dreams of his youth, suddenly wanting to discuss supersensible consciousness and democracy’s great poem of death! Come, Charlie, let’s not make the world queerer than it already is. It was precisely because Kathleen
was
a woman to whom I could talk that I kept silent. Out of respect. I thought I would wait until I had considered all these questions more ripely, until I knew more.

  She said, “I’ll be at the Metropol in Belgrade next week. Let’s stay in touch. I’m going to have a contract drawn, and I’ll sign it and send it to you.”

  “No, no, let’s not bother.”

  “Why, because I’m a widow you won’t accept your own money from me? But
I
don’t want
your
share. Think of it that way.”

  She was a kind woman. And she recognized the truth—I was spending big money on Renata and I was quickly going broke.

  thirty-one

  My dear, why did you steal my shoe?”

  “I couldn’t resist,” said great Renata. “How did you hobble upstairs on one shoe? What did your friend think? I bet it was a riot. Charlie, humor is a bond we have. That I know for a fact.”

  Humor had an edge over love in this relationship. My character and my ways entertained Renata. This entertainment was so extensive that I thought it might merge by degrees with love. For I didn’t under any circumstances propose to do without love.

  “You also took off my boot under the table in Paris.”

  “Yes, that was the night that horrible fellow told you how worthless your Legion ribbon was and put you in a class with garbage collectors and pig breeders. It was like revenge, consolation, kicks, all at the same time,” said Renata. “Do you remember what I said afterward, that I thought was so funny?”