The Collected Stories Of Saul Bellow (16 page)

“He was reminding me that he had saved Harry. For me.”

Translation: The SS would have liquidated him pretty quick. So except for the magic intervention of this little Lower East Side rat, the starved child who had survived on pastrami trimmings and pushcart apples…

Sorella went on. “I explained to Billy: it took Deborah’s journal to put me through to him. He had turned his back on us. His answer was, ‘I don’t need entanglements—what I did, I did. I have to keep down the number of relationships and contacts. What I did for you, take it and welcome, but spare me the relationship and all the rest of it.’ “

“I can understand that,” I said.

I can’t tell you how much I relished Sorella’s account of this meeting with Billy. These extraordinary revelations, and also the comments on them that were made. In what he said there was an echo of George Washington’s Farewell Address. Avoid entanglements. Billy had to reserve himself for his deals, devote himself body and soul to his superpublicized bad marriages; together with the squalid, rich residences he furnished; plus his gossip columns, his chorus lines, and the awful pursuit of provocative, teasing chicks whom he couldn’t do a thing with when they stopped and stripped and waited for him. He had to be free to work his curse out fully. And now he had arrived in Jerusalem to put a top dressing of Jewish grandeur on his chicken-scratch career, on this poor punished N. Y. soil of his. (I am thinking of the tiny prison enclosures—a few black palings—narrow slices of ground preserved at the heart of Manhattan for leaves and grass.) Here Noguchi would create for him a Rose Garden of Sculpture, an art corner within a few kilometers of the stunned desert sloping toward the Dead Sea.

“Tell me, Sorella, what were you after? The objective.”

“Billy to meet with Fonstein.”

“But Fonstein gave up on him long ago. They must pass each other at the King David every other day. What would be simpler than to stop and say, ‘You’re Rose? I’m Harry Fonstein. You led me out of Egypt
b’yad hazzakah.”
_

“What is that?”

“With a mighty hand. So the Lord God described the rescue of Israel—part of my boyhood basic training. But Fonstein has backed away from this. While you…”

“I made up my mind that Billy was going to do right by him.”

Yes, sure, of course; roger; I read you. Something is due from every man to every man. But Billy hadn’t heard and didn’t want to hear about these generalities.

“If you lived with Fonstein’s feelings as I have lived with them,” said Sorella, “you’d agree he should get a chance to complete them. To finish out.”

In a spirit of high-level discussion, I said to her, “Well, it’s a nice idea, only nobody expects to complete their feelings anymore. They have to give up on closure. It’s just not available.”

“For some it is.”

So I was obliged to think again. Sure—what about the history of Sorella’s own feelings? She had been an unwanted Newark French teacher until her Havana uncle had a lucky hunch about Fonstein. They were married, and thanks to him, she obtained her closure, she became the tiger wife, the tiger mother, grew into a biological monument and a victorious personality… a figure!

But Billy’s reply was: “So what’s it got to do with me?”

‘Spend fifteen minutes alone with my husband,” she said to him.

Billy refused her. “It’s not the kind ofthing I do.”

A handshake, and he’ll say thanks.”

First of all, I warned you already about libel, and as for the rest, what do you think you’re holding over me anyway? I wouldn’t do this. You haven’t convinced me that I must. I don’t like things from the past being laid on me. This happened one time, years ago. What’s it got to do with now—1959? If your husband has a nice story, that’s his good luck. Let him tell it to people who go for stories. I don’t care for them. I don’t care for my own story. If I had to listen to it, I d break out in a cold sweat. And I wouldn’t go around and shake everybody’s hand unless I was running for mayor. That’s why I never would run. I shake when I close a deal. Otherwise, my hands stay in my pockets.”

Sorella said, “Since Deborah Hamet had given me the goods on him and the worst could be assumed, he stood up to me on the worst basis, with all the bruises on his reputation, under every curse—grungy, weak, cheap, perverted. He made me take him for what he was—a kinky little kike finagler whose life history was one disgrace after another. Take this man: He never flew a single mission, never hunted big game, never played football or went down in the Pacific. Never even tried suicide. And this reject was a celeb!… You know, Deborah had a hundred ways to say celeb. Mostly she cut him down, but a celeb is still a celeb—you can’t take that away. When American Jews decided to make a statement about the War Against the Jews, they had to fill Madison Square Garden with big-name celebs singing Hebrew and America the Beautiful.’ Hollywood stars blowing the shofar. The man to produce this spectacular and arrange the press coverage was Billy. They turned to him, and he took total charge…. How many people does the Garden hold? Well, it was full, and everybody was in mourning. I suppose the whole place was in tears. The
Times
_ covered it, which is the paper of record, so the record shows that the American Jewish way was to assemble twenty-five thousand people, Hollywood style, and weep publicly for what had happened.”

Continuing her report on her interview with Billy, Sorella said that he adopted what negotiators call a bargaining posture. He behaved as though he had reason to be proud of his record, of the deals he had made, and I suppose that he was standing his ground behind this front of pride. Sorella hadn’t yet formulated her threat. Beside her on a chair that decorators would have called a love seat there lay (and he saw) a large manila envelope. It contained Deborah’s papers—what else would she have brought to his suite? To make a grab for this envelope was out of the question. “I outreached him and outweighed him,” said Sorella. “I could scratch him as well, and also shriek. And the very thought of a scene, a scandal, would have made him sick. Actually, the man was looking sick. His calculation in Jerusalem was to make a major gesture, to enter Jewish history, attaining a level far beyond show biz. He had seen only a sample of the Hamet/Horsecollar file. But imagine what the newspapers, the world tabloid press, could do with this material.

“So he was waiting to hear my proposition,” said Sorella.

I said, “I’m trying to figure out just what you had in mind.”

“Concluding a chapter in Harry’s life. It should be concluded,” said Sorella. “It was a part of the destruction of the Jews. On our side of the Atlantic, where we weren’t threatened, we have a special duty to come to terms with it….”

“Come to terms? Who, Billy Rose?”

“Well, he involved himself in it actively.”

I recall that I shook my head and said, “You were asking too much. You couldn’t have gotten very far with him.”

“Well, he did say that Fonstein suffered much less than others. He wasn’t in Auschwitz. He got a major break. He wasn’t tattooed with a number. They didn’t put him to work cremating the people that were gassed. I said to Billy that the Italian police must have been under orders to hand Jews over to the SS and that so many were shot in Rome, in the Ardeatine Caves.”

“What did he say to this?”

“He said, ‘Look, lady, why do
I
_ have to think about all of that? I’m not the kind of guy who’s expected to. This is too much for me.’ I said, ‘I’m not asking you to make an enormous mental effort, only to sit down with my husband for fifteen minutes.’

‘Suppose I do,’ he said. ‘What’s your offer?’

‘I’ll hand over Deborah’s whole file. I’ve got it right here.’

‘And if I don’t play ball?’

‘Then I’ll turn it over to some other party, or parties.’ Then he burst out, ‘You think you’ve got me by the knackers, don’t you? You’re taking an unfair terrible advantage of me. I don’t want to talk dirty to a respectable person, but I call this kicking the shit out of a man. Right now I’m in an extrasensitive position, considering what’s my purpose in Jerusalem. I want to contribute a memorial. Maybe it would be better not to leave any reminder of my life and I should be forgotten altogether. So at this moment you come along to take revenge from the grave for a jealous woman. I can imagine the record this crazy put together, about deals I made—I know she got the business part all wrong, and the bribery and arson would never stick. So that leaves things like the private clinical junk collected from show girls who badmouthed me. But let me say one thing, Missus: Even a geek has his human rights. Last of all, I haven’t got all that many secrets left. It’s all been told.’ Almost all,’ I said.”

I observed, “You sure did bear down hard on him.”

“Yes, I did,” she admitted. “But he fought back. The libel suits he threatened were only bluff, and I told him so. I pointed out how little I was asking. Not even a note to Harry, just a telephone message would be enough, and then fifteen minutes of conversation. Mulling it over, with his eyes cast down and his little hands passive on the back of a sofa—he was on his feet, he wouldn’t sit down, that would seem like a concession—he refused me again. Once and for all he said he wouldn’t meet with Harry. ‘I already did for him all I’m able to do.’ Then you leave me no alternative,’ I said.”

On the striped chair in Billy’s suite, Sorella opened her purse to look for a handkerchief. She touched herself on the temples and on the folds of her arms, at the elbow joint. The white handkerchief looked no bigger than a cabbage moth. She dried herself under the chin. “He must have shouted at you,” I said.

He began to yell at me. It was what I anticipated, a screaming fit. He said no matter what you did, there was always somebody waiting with a switchblade to cut you, or acid to throw in your face, or claws to rip the clothes off you and leave you naked. That fucking old Hamet broad, whom he kept out of charity—as if her eyes weren’t kooky enough, she put on those giant crooked round goggles. She hunted up those girls who swore he had the sexual development of a ten-year-old boy. It didn’t matter for shit, because he was humiliated all his life long and you couldn’t do more than was done already. There was relief in having no more to cover up. He didn’t care what Hamet had written down, that bitch-eye mummy, spitting blood and saving the last glob for the man she hated most. As for me, I was a heap of fat filth!”

“You don’t have to repeat it all, Sorella.”

“Then I won’t. But I did lose my temper. My dignity fell apart.”

“Do you mean that you wanted to hit him?”

“I threw the document at him. I said, ‘I don’t
want
_ my husband to talk to the likes of you. You’re not fit…’ I aimed Deborah’s packet at him. But I’m not much good at throwing, and it went through the open window.”

“What a moment! What did Billy do then?”

“All the rage was wiped out instantly. He picked up the phone and got the desk. He said, A very important document was dropped from my window. I want it brought up right now. You understand? Immediately. This minute.’ I went to the door. I don’t suppose I wanted to make a gesture, but I am a Newark girl at bottom. I said, ‘You’re the filth. I want no part of you.’ And I made the Italian gesture people used to make in a street fight, the edge of the palm on the middle of my arm.”

Inconspicuously, and laughing as she did it, she made a small fist and drew the edge of her other hand across her biceps.

“A very American conclusion.”

“Oh,” she said, “from start to finish it was a one hundred percent American event, of our own generation. It’ll be different for our children, A kid like our Gilbert, at his mathematics summer camp? Let him for the rest of his life do nothing but mathematics. Nothing could be more different from either East Side tenements or the backstreets of Newark.”

All this had happened toward the end of the Fonsteins’ visit, and I’m sorry now that I didn’t cancel a few Jerusalem appointments for their sake—take them to dinner at Dagim Benny, a good fish restaurant. It would have been easy enough for me to clear the decks. What, to spend more time in Jerusalem with a couple from New Jersey named Fonstein? Yes is the answer. Today it’s a matter of regret. The more I think of Sorella, the more charm she has for me.

I remember saying to her, “I’m sorry you didn’t hit Billy with that packet.”

My thought, then and later, was that she was too much hampered by fat under the arms to make an accurate throw.

She said, “As soon as the envelope left my hands I realized that I longed to get rid of it, and of everything connected with it. Poor Deborah—Mrs. Horsecollar, as you like to call her. I see that I was wrong to identify myself with her cause, her tragic life. It makes you think about the high and the low in people. Love is supposed to be high, but imagine falling for a creature like Billy. I didn’t want a single thing that man could give Harry and me. Deborah recruited me, so I would continue her campaign against him, keep the heat on from the grave. He was right about that.”

This was our very last conversation. Beside the King David driveway, she and I were waiting for Fonstein to come down. The luggage had been stowed in the Mercedes—at that time, every other cab in Jerusalem was a Mercedes-Benz. Sorella said to me, “How do you see the whole Billy business?”

In those days I still had the Villager’s weakness for theorizing—the profundity game so popular with middle-class boys and girls in their bohemian salad days. Ring anybody’s bell, and he’d open the window and empty a basin full of thoughts on your head.

“Billy views everything as show biz,” I said. “Nothing is real that isn’t a show. And he wouldn’t perform in your show because he’s a producer, and producers don’t perform.”

To Sorella, this was not a significant statement, so I tried harder. “Maybe the most interesting thing about Billy is that he wouldn’t meet with Harry,” I said. ‘He wasn’t able to be the counterexample in a case like Harry’s. Couldn’t begin to measure up.”

Sorella said, “That may be a little more like it. But if you want my basic view, here it is: The Jews could survive everything that Europe threw at them. I mean the lucky remnant. But now comes the next test—America. Can they hold their ground, or will the U. S. A. be too much for them?”