Humboldt's Gift (55 page)

  “Pretty bad. The court ordered me to post a bond. Two hundred thousand.”

  The figure made him pale. “They tied up your money? You’ll never see it again. Who’s your lawyer, still your boyhood chum, that fat-ass Szathmar?”

  “No, it’s Forrest Tomchek.”

  “I knew Tomchek at law school. The legal-statesman type of crook. He’s smoother than a suppository, only his suppositories contain dynamite. And the judge is who?”

  “A man named Urbanovich.”

  “Him I don’t know. But he’s been ruling against you and it’s all clear to me. They’ve gotten to him. Dirty work at the crossroads. He’s using you to make some payoff. He owes somebody something and he’s settling the score with your dough. I’ll check it out for you right now. You know a guy named Flanko, in Chicago?”

  “Solomon Flanko? He’s a Syndicate lawyer.”

  “He’ll know.” Ulick rapidly punched out the numbers on the telephone. “Flanko,” he said when he got through, “this is Julius Citrine down in Texas. There’s a guy in domestic-relations court named Urbanovich. Is he on the take?” He listened keenly. He said, “Thanks, Flanko, I’ll get back to you later.” After hanging up, he chose a sport shirt. He said, “No, Urbanovich doesn’t seem to be on the take. He wants to make a record on the bench. He’s very slick. He’s callous. If he is after you, you and that money are going to be separated like yolks and whites. Okay, write it off. We’ll make you some more. Did you put anything aside?”

  “No.”

  “Nothing in a box? No numbered account anywhere? No bagman?”

  “No.”

  He stared at me sternly. And then his face, grooved with age with worry and with indurated attitudes, relented somewhat and he smiled under the Acheson mustache. “To think that we should be brothers,” he said. “It’s positively a subject for a poem. You ought to suggest it to your pal Von Humboldt Fleisher. What ever happened, by the way, to your sidekick the poet? I came in a cab and took you night-clubbing in New York once in the Fifties. We had fun at the Copacabana, you remember?”

  “That night on the town was great. Humboldt loved it. He’s dead,” I said.

  Ulick put on a shirt of flame-blue Italian silk, a beautiful garment. It seemed to hunger for an ideal body. He drew it over his chest. On my last visit Ulick was slender and wore magnificent hip-huggers, melon-striped and ornamented on the seams with Mexican silver pesos. He had achieved this new figure in a crash diet. But even then the floor of his Cadillac was covered with peanut shells, and now he was fat again. I saw the fat old body which I had always known and which was completely familiar to me—the belly, the freckles on his undisciplined upper arms, and his elegant hands. I still saw in him the obese, choked-looking boy, the lustful conniving kid whose eyes continually pleaded not guilty. I knew him inside-out, even physically, remembering how he gashed open his thigh on a broken bottle in a Wisconsin creek fifty years ago and that I stared at the yellow fat, layers and layers of fat through which the blood had to well. I knew the mole on the back of his wrist, his nose broken and reset, his fierce false look of innocence, his snorts, and his smells. Wearing an orange football jersey, breathing through the mouth (before we could afford the nose-job), he held me on his shoulders so that I could watch the GAR parade on Michigan Boulevard. The year must have been 1923. He held me by the legs. His own legs were bulky in ribbed black stockings and he wore billowing, bloomerlike golf knickers. Afterward he stood behind me in the men’s room of the Public Library, the high yellow urinals like open sarcophagi, helping me to fish my child’s thing out from the complicated underclothes. In 1928 he became a baggage-smasher at American Express. Then he worked at the bus terminal changing the huge tires. He slugged it out with bullies in the street, and was a bully himself. He put himself through the Lewis Institute, nights, and through law school. He made and lost fortunes. He took his own Packard to Europe in the early Fifties and had it airlifted from Paris to Rome because driving over mountains bored him. He spent sixty or seventy thousand dollars a year on himself alone. I never forgot any fact about him. This flattered him. It also made him sore. And if I put so much heart into remembering, what did it prove? That I loved Ulick? There are clinical experts who think that such completeness of memory is a hysterical symptom. Ulick himself said he had no memory except for business transactions.

  “So that screwball friend of yours Von Humboldt is dead. He talked complicated gobbledygook and was worse dressed than you, but I liked him. He sure could drink. What did he die of?”

  “Brain hemorrhage.” I had to tell this virtuous lie. Heart disease was taboo today. “He left me a legacy.”

  “What, he had dough?”

  “No. Just papers. But when I went to the nursing home to get them from his old uncle, whom should I run into but Menasha Klinger.”

  “Don’t tell me—Menasha! The dramatic tenor, the redhead! The fellow from Ypsilanti who boarded with us in Chicago? I never saw such a damn deluded crazy bastard. He couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket. Spent his factory wages on lessons and concert tickets. The one time he tried to do himself some good he caught a dose, and then the clap-doctor shared his wages with the music teacher. Is he old enough to be in a nursing home? Well, I’m in my middle sixties and he was about eight years ahead of me. You know what I found the other day? The deed to the family burial plots in Waldheim. There are two graves left. You wouldn’t want to buy mine, would you? I’m not going to lie around. I’m having myself cremated. I need action. I’d rather go into the atmosphere. Look for me in the weather reports.”

  He too had a thing about the grave. He said to me on the day of Papa’s funeral, “The weather is too damn warm and nice. It’s awful. Did you ever see such a perfect afternoon?” The artificial grass carpet was rolled back by the diggers and under it in the tan sandy ground was a lovely cool hole. Aloft, far behind the pleasant May weather stood something like a cliff of coal. Aware of this coal cliff bearing down on the flowery cemetery—lilac time!—I broke out into a sweat. A small engine began to lower the coffin on smooth-running canvas bands. There never was a man so unwilling to go down, to pass through the bitter gates as Father Citrine—never a man so unfit to lie still. Papa, that great sprinter, that broken-field runner, and now brought down by the tackle of heavy death.

  Ulick wanted to show me how Hortense had redecorated the children’s rooms, he said. I knew that he was looking for candy bars. In the kitchen the cupboards were padlocked, and the refrigerator was out of bounds. “She’s absolutely right,” he said, “I must stop eating. I know you always said it was all false appetite. You advised me to put my finger down my throat and gag when I thought I was hungry. What’s that supposed to do, reverse the diaphragm muscle or something? You were always a strong-willed fellow and a jock, chinning yourself and swinging clubs and dumbbells and punching the bag in the closet and running around the block and hanging from the trees like Tar-zan of the Apes. You must have had a bad conscience about what you did when you locked yourself in the toilet. You’re a sexy little bastard, never mind your big-time mental life. All this fucking art! I never understood the play you wrote. I went away in the second act. The movie was better, but even that had dreary parts. My old friend Ev Dirksen had a literary period, too. Did you know the Senator wrote poems for greeting cards? But he was a deep old phony—he was a real guy, as cynical as they come. He at least kidded his own hokum. Say, listen, I knew the country was headed for trouble as soon as there began to be big money in art.”

  “I don’t know about that,” I said. “To make capitalists out of artists was a humorous idea of some depth. America decided to test the pretensions of the esthetic by applying the dollar measure. Maybe you read the transcript of Nixon’s tape where he said he’d have no part of this literature and art shit. That was because he was out of step. He lost touch with the spirit of Capitalism. Misunderstood it completely.”

  “Here, here, don’t start one of your lectures on me. You were always spouting some theory to us at the table—Marx, or Darwin, or Schopenhauer, or Oscar Wilde. If it wasn’t one damn thing it was another. You had the biggest collection of Modern Library books on the block. And I’d bet you fifty to one you’re ass-deep in a crank theory this minute. You couldn’t live without it. Let’s get going. We have to pick up the two Cubans and that Boston Irishman who’s coming along.
I
never went for this art stuff, did I?”

  “You tried becoming a photographer,” I said.

  “Me? When was that?”

  “When they had funerals in the Russian Orthodox church—you remember, the stucco one with the onion dome on Leavitt, corner of Haddon?—they opened the coffins on the front steps and took pictures of the family with the corpse. You tried to make a deal with the priest and be appointed official photographer.”

  “Did I? Good for me!” It pleased Ulick to hear this. But somehow he smiled quietly, with mild fixity, musing at himself. He felt his hanging cheeks and said that he had shaved too close today, his skin was tender. It must have been a rising soreness from the breast that made him touchy about the face. This visit of mine, with its intimations of final parting, bothered him. He acknowledged that I had done right to come but he loathed me for it, too. I could see it his way. Why did I come flapping around him with my love, like a death-pest? There was no way for me to win, because if I hadn’t come here he’d have held it against me. He needed to be wronged. He luxuriated in anger, and he kept accounts.

  For fifty years, ritualistically, he had been repeating the same jokes, laughing at them because they were so infantile and stupid. “You know who’s in the hospital? Sick people”; and, “I took first prize in history once, but they seen me taking it and made me put it back.” And in the days when I still argued with him I would say, “You’re a real populist and know-nothing, you’ve given your Russian Jewish brains away out of patriotism. You’re a self-made ignoramus and a true American.” But I had long ago stopped saying such things. I knew that he shut himself up in his office with a box of white raisins and read Arnold Toynbee and R. H. Tawney, or Cecil Roth and Salo Baron on Jewish history. When any of this reading cropped up in conversation he made sure to mispronounce the key words.

  He drove his Cadillac under the glittering sun. Shadows that might have been cast by all the peoples of the earth flickered over it. He was an American builder and millionaire. The souls of billions fluttered like spooks over the polish of the great black hood. In distant Ethiopia people with dysentery as they squatted over ditches, faint and perishing, opened copies of
Business Week
, abandoned by tourists, and saw his face or faces like his. But it seemed to me that there were few faces like his, with the ferocious profile that brought to mind the Latin word
rapax
or one of Rouault’s crazed death-dealing arbitrary kings. We passed his enterprises, the Peony Condominiums, the Trumbull Arms. We reviewed his many building projects. “Peony almost did me in. The architect talked me into putting the swimming pool on the roof. The concrete estimate was short by tons and tons, to say nothing of the fact that we overran the lot by a whole foot. Nobody ever found out, and I got rid of the damn thing. I had to take lots of paper.” He meant a large second mortgage. “Now listen, Chuck, I know you need income. That crazy broad won’t be satisfied until she’s got your liver in her deepfreeze. I’m astonished, really astonished, that you didn’t put away some dough. You must be bananas. People must be into you for some pretty good sums. You ve invested plenty with this fellow Zitterbloom in New York who promised to shelter you, protect your income from Uncle Sam. He screwed you good. You’ll never get a penny out of him. But others must owe you thousands. Make them offers. Take half, but in cash. I’ll show you how to launder your money and we’ll make it disappear. Then you go to Europe and stay there. What the hell do you want to be in Chicago for? Haven’t you had enough of that boring place? For me it wasn’t boring, because I went out and saw action. But you? You get up, look out, it’s gray, you pull the curtain, and pick up a book. The town is roaring, but you don’t hear it. If it hasn’t killed your fucking heart you must be a man of iron, living like that. Listen, I have an idea. We’ll buy a house on the Mediterranean together. My kids ought to learn a foreign language, have a little culture. You can tutor them. Listen, Chuck, if you can scrape together fifty thousand bucks I’ll guarantee you a twenty-five-percent return, and you can live abroad on that.”

  So he talked to me, and I kept thinking about his fate. His fate! And I couldn’t tell him my thoughts. They were not transmissible. Then what good were they? Their oddity and idiosyncrasy was a betrayal. Thoughts should be real. Words should have a definite meaning, and a man should believe what he said. This was Hamlet’s complaint to Polonius when he said, “Words, words, words.” The words are not
my
words, the thoughts not
my
thoughts. It’s wonderful to have thoughts. They can be about the starry heavens and the moral law, the majesty of the one, the grandeur of the other. Ulick was not the only one that took lots of paper. We were all taking paper, plenty of it. And I wasn’t about to pass any paper off on Ulick at a time like this. My new ideas, yes. They were more to the point. But I wasn’t ready to mention them to him. I should have been ready. In the past, thoughts were too real to be kept like a cultural portfolio of stocks and bonds. But now we have mental assets. As many world views as you like. Five different epistemologies in an evening. Take your choice. They’re all agreeable, and not one is binding or necessary or has true strength or speaks straight to the soul. It was this paper-taking, this passing of highbrow currency that had finally put my back up. But my back had gone up slowly, reluctantly. So now I wasn’t ready to tell Ulick anything of genuine interest. I had nothing to offer my brother, bracing himself for death. He didn’t know what to think about it and was furious and frightened. It was my business as the thoughtful brother to tell him something. And actually I had important intimations to communicate as he faced the end. But intimations weren’t much use. I hadn’t done my homework. He’d say, “What do you mean, Spirit! Immortality? You mean that?” And I wasn’t yet prepared to explain. I was just about to go into it seriously myself. Maybe Renata and I would take a train to Taormina and there I could sit in a garden and concentrate on this, giving it my whole mind.