The Collected Stories Of Saul Bellow (40 page)

“Remember that my mother idolized you, Ijah. She said you were a genius.”

“That she did. It was an intramural opinion. The world didn’t agree.”

Anyway, here was Eunice pleading for Raphael (Tanky’s real name). For his part, Tanky didn’t care a damn about his sister.

“Have you been in touch, you two?”

“He doesn’t answer letters. He hasn’t been returning calls. Ijah! I want him to know that I care!”

Here my feelings, brightened and glowing in the recollection of old times, grew dark and leaden on me. I wish Eunice wouldn’t use such language. I find it hard to take. Nowadays WE CARE is stenciled on the walls of supermarkets and loan corporations. It may be because her mother knew no English and also because Eunice stammered when she was a kid that it gives her great satisfaction to be so fluent, to speak as the most advanced Americans now speak.

I couldn’t say, “For Christ’s sake don’t talk balls to me.” Instead I had to comfort her because she was heartsick—a layer cake of heartsickness. I said, “You may be sure he knows how you feel.”

Gangster though he may be.

No, I can’t swear that Cousin Raphael (Tanky) actually is a gangster. I mustn’t let his sister’s clichщs drive me (madden me) into exaggeration. He associates with gangsters, but so do aldermen, city officials, journalists, big builders, fundraisers for charitable institutions—the Mob gives generously. And gangsters aren’t the worst of the bad guys. I can name greater evildoers. If I had been a Dante, I’d have worked it all out in full detail.

I asked Eunice pro forma why she had approached me. (I didn’t need to be a clairvoyant to see that Tanky had put her up to it.) She said, “Well, you are a public personality.”

She referred to the fact that many years ago I invented the famous-trials TV program, and appeared also as moderator, or master of ceremonies. I was then in a much different phase of existence. Having graduated near the top of my law-school class, I had declined good positions offered by leading firms because I felt too active, or kinetic (hyperkinetic). I couldn’t guarantee my good behavior in any of the prestigious partnerships downtown. So I dreamed up a show called
Court of Law,
_ in which significant, often notorious, cases from the legal annals were retried by brilliant students from Chicago, Northwestern, De Paul, or John Marshall. Cleverness, not institutional rank, was where we put the accent. Some of our most diabolical debaters were from the night schools. The opportunities for dialectical subtlety, imposture, effrontery, eccentric display, nasty narcissism, madness, and other qualifications for the practice of law were obvious. My function was to pick entertaining contestants (defense and prosecution), to introduce them, to keep up the pace—to set the tone. With the help of my wife (my then wife, who was a lawyer, too), I chose the cases. She was attracted by criminal trials with civil rights implications. My preference was for personal oddities, mysteries of character, ambiguities of interpretation—less likely to make a good show. But I proved to have a knack for staging these dramas. Before the program I always gave the contestants an early dinner at Fritzel’s on Wabash Avenue. Always the same order for me—a strip steak, rare, over which I poured a small pitcher of Roquefort salad dressing. For dessert, a fudge sundae, with which I swallowed as much cigarette ash as chocolate. I wasn’t putting on an act. This early exuberance and brashness I later chose to subdue; it presently died down. Otherwise I might have turned into “a laff riot,” in the language of
Variety,
_ a zany. But I saw soon enough that the clever young people whom I would lead in debate (mainly hustlers about to take the bar exam, already on the lookout for clients and avid for publicity) were terribly pleased by my odd behavior. The Fritzel dinner loosened up the participants. During the program I would guide them, goad them, provoke, pit them against one another, override them. At the conclusion, my wife Sable (Isabel: I called her Sable because of her dark coloring) would read the verdict and the decision of the court. Many of our debaters have since become leaders of the bar, rich celebrities. After our divorce, Sable married first one and then another of them. Eventually she made it big in communications—on National Public Radio.

Judge Eiler, then a young lawyer, was more than once a guest on the program. So to my cousins I remained thirty years later the host and star of
Court of Law,
_ a media personality. Something magical, attributes of immortality. Almost as though I had made a ton of money, like a Klutznik or a Pritzker. And now I learned that to Eunice I was not only a media figure, but a mystery man as well. “In the years when you were gone from Chicago, didn’t you work for the CIA, Ijah?”

“I did not. For five years, out in California, I was in the Rand Corporation, a think tank for special studies. I did research and prepared reports and analyses. Much the kind of thing the private group I belong to here now does for banks….”

I wanted to dispel the mystery—scatter the myth of Ijah Brodsky. But of course words like “research” and “analysis” only sounded to her like spying.

A few years ago, when Eunice came out of the hospital after major surgery, she told me she had no one in all the world to talk to. She said that her husband, Earl, was “not emotionally supportive” (she hinted that he was close-fisted). Her daughters had left home. One was in the Peace Corps and the other, about to graduate from medical school, was too busy to see her. I asked Eunice out to dinner—drinks first in my apartment on Lake Shore Drive. She said, “All these dark old rooms, dark old paintings, these Oriental rugs piled one on top of the other, and books in foreign languages—and living alone” (meaning that I didn’t have horrible marital fights over an eight-dollar gas bill). “But you must have girls—lady friends?”

She was hinting at the “boy question.” Did the somber luxury I lived in disguise the fact that I had turned queer?

Oh, no. Not that, either. Just singular (to Eunice). Not even a different drummer. I do no marching.

But, to return to our telephone conversation, I finally got it out of Eunice that she had called me at the suggestion of Tanky’s lawyer. She said, “Tanky is flying in tonight from Atlantic City”—gambling—“and asked to meet you for dinner tomorrow.”

“Okay, say that I’ll meet him at the Italian Village on Monroe Street, upstairs in one of the little private rooms, at seven P. M. To ask the headwaiter for me.”

I hadn’t really talked with Tanky since his discharge from the army, in 1946, when conversation was still possible. Once, at O’Hare about ten years ago, we ran into each other when I was about to board a plane and he was on the incoming flight. He was then a power in his union. ( Just what this signified I have lately learned from the papers.) Anyway, he spotted me in the crowd and introduced me to the man he was traveling with. “I want you to meet my famous cousin, Ijah Brodsky,” he said. At which moment I was gifted with a peculiar vision: I saw how we might have appeared to a disembodied mind above us both. Tanky was built like a professional football player who had gotten lucky and in middle age owned a ball club of his own. His wide cheeks were like rosy Meissen. He sported a fair curly beard. His teeth were large and square. What are the right words for Tanky at this moment? Voluminous, copious, full of vitamins, potent, rich, insolent. By way of entertainment he was putting his cousin on display—bald Ijah with the eyes of an orangutan, his face flat and round, transmitting a naяvetщ more suited to a brute from the zoo—long arms, orange hair. I was someone who emitted none of the signals required for serious consideration, a man who was not concerned with the world’s work in any category which made full sense. It passed through my thoughts that once, early in the century, when Picasso was asked what young men in France were doing, he answered,
“La jeunesse, c’est moi.
_ “But I had never been in a position to illustrate or represent
anything.
_ Tanky, in fun, was offering me to his colleague as an intellectual, and while I don’t mind being considered clever, I confess I do feel the disgrace of being identified as an intellectual.

By contrast, consider Tanky. He had done well out of his rackets. He was one of those burly people who need half an acre of cloth for a suit, who eat New York sirloin strip steaks at Eli’s, put together million-dollar deals, fly to Palm Springs, Las Vegas, Bermuda. Tanky was saying, “In our family, Ijah was the genius. One of them, anyway; we had a couple or three.”

I was no longer the law-school whiz kid for whom a brilliant future had been predicted—so much was true. The tone of derision was justified, insofar as I had enjoyed being the family’s “rose of expectancy.”

As for Tanky’s dark associate, I have no idea who he may have been—maybe Tony Provenzano, or Sally (Bugs) Briguglio, or Dorfman of the Teamsters Union insurance group. It was not Jimmy Hoffa. Hoffa was then in jail. Besides, I, like millions of others, would have recognized him. We knew him personally, for after the war Tanky and I had both been employed by our cousin Miltie Rifkin, who at that time operated a hotel in which Hoffa was supposed to have an interest. Whenever Hoffa and his gang came to Chicago, they stayed there. I was then tutoring Miltie’s son Hal, who was too fast and foxy to waste time on books. Longing to see action, Hal was only fourteen when Miltie put him in charge of the hotel bar. It amused his parents one summer to let him play manager, so that when liquor salesmen approached him, Miltie could say, “You’ll have to see my son Hal; he does the buying. Ask for the young fellow who looks like Eddie Cantor.” They would find a fourteen-year-old boy in the office. I was there to oversee Hal, while teaching him the rules governing the use of the ablative (he was a Latin School pupil). I kept an eye on him. A smart little kid of whom the parents were immensely proud.

Necessarily I spent much time in the bar, and so became acquainted with the Hoffa contingent. Goons, mostly, apart from Harold Gibbons, who was highly urbane and in conversation, at least with me, bookish in his interests. The others were very tough indeed, and Cousin Miltie made the mistake of trying to hold his own with them, man to man, a virile brute. He was not equal to this self-imposed challenge. He could be harsh, he accepted nihilism in principle, but the high-powered executive will simply was not there. Miltie couldn’t say, as Caesar did to a sentry who had orders not to let him pass, “It’s easier for me to kill you than to argue.” Hoffas are like that.

Tanky, then just out of the service, was employed by Miltie to search out tax-delinquent property for him. It was one of Miltie’s side rackets. Evictions were common. So it was through Miltie Rifkin that Cousin Tanky (Raphael) met Red Dorfman, the onetime boxer who acted as broker between Hoffa and organized crime in Chicago. Dorfman, then a gym teacher, inherited Tanky from his father, from Red, the old boxer. A full set of gang connections was part of the legacy.

These were some of the people who dominated the world in which it was my intention to conduct what are often called “higher activities.” To “long for the best that ever was”: this was not an abstract project. I did not learn it over a seminar table. It was a constitutional necessity, physiological, temperamental, based on sympathies which could not be acquired. Human absorption in faces, deeds, bodies, drew me toward metaphysics. I had these peculiar metaphysics as flying creatures have their radar. Maturing, I found the metaphysics in my head. And school, as I have just told you, had little to do with it. As a commuting university student sitting for hours on the elevated trains that racketed, bob-bled, squealed, pelted at top speed over the South Side slums, I boned up on Plato, Aristotle, or St. Thomas for Professor Perry’s class.

But never mind these preoccupations. Here in the Italian Village was Tanky, out on a $500,000 bond, waiting to be sentenced. He didn’t look good. He didn’t have fast colors after all. His big face was swelled out by years of brutal business. The amateur internist in me diagnosed hypertension—250 over 165 were the numbers I came up with. His inner man was toying with a stroke as the alternative to jail. Tanky kept the Edwardian beard trimmed, for his morale, and that very morning, as this was no time to show white hairs, the barber might have given it a gold rinse. The kink of high vigor had gone out of it, however. Tanky wouldn’t have cared for my sympathy. He was well braced, a man ready to take his lumps. The slightest hint that I was sorry would have irritated him. Experienced sorry-feelers will understand me, though, when I say that there was a condensed mass of troubles on his side of the booth. This mass emitted signals for which I lacked the full code.

An old-time joint opposite the First National, where I have my office on the fifty-first floor (those upswept incurves rising, rising), the Italian Village is one of the few restaurants in the city with private recesses for seduction or skulduggery. It dates back to the twenties and is decorated like a saint’s-day carnival in Little Italy, with strings of electric bulbs and wheels of lights. It also suggests a shooting gallery. Or an Expressionist stage set. Prohibition fading away, the old Loop was replaced by office buildings, and the Village became a respectable place, known to all the stars of the musical world. Here visiting divas and great baritones gorged on risotto after singing at the Lyric. Signed photos of artists hung on the walls. Still, the place retained its Al Capone atmosphere—sauce as red as blood, the foot smell of cheeses, the dishes of invertebrates raked up from sea mud.

Little was said of a personal nature. I worked across the street? Tanky said. Yes. Had he asked what my days were like, 1 would have begun by saying that 1 was up at six to play indoor tennis to start the blood circulating, and that when I got to the office I read the
New York Times,
_ the
Wall Street Journal, The Economist,
_ and
Barrons,
_ and scanned certain printouts and messages prepared by my secretary. Having noted the outstanding facts, I put them all behind me and devoted the rest of the morning to my private interests.

But Cousin Tanky did not ask how my days were spent. He mentioned our respective ages—I am ten years his senior—and said that my voice had deepened as I grew older. Yes. My basso profundo served no purpose except to add depth to small gallantries. When I offer a chair to a lady at a dinner party, she is enveloped in a deep syllable. Or when I comfort Eunice, and God knows she needs it, my incoherent rumble seems to give assurance of stability.