Saul Bellow - Collected Stories

Miltie fled. He drove to New York, where he loaded his Cadillac on the Queen Elizabeth. He didn’t flee alone. The switchboard operator kept him company. They were guests in Ireland of the American ambassador (linked through Senator Dirksen and the senator’s special assistant, Julius Farkash). While staying at the U. S. embassy, Miltie bought land for what was to have become the new Dublin airport. He bought, however, in the wrong location. After which, he and his wife-to-be flew to the Continent in a transport plane carrying the Cadillac. They did crossword puzzles during the flight. Landing in Rome…

I spared Tanky these details, many of which he probably knew. Besides, the man had seen so much action that they wouldn’t have been worth mentioning. It would have been an infraction of something to speak of Hoffa or to refer to the evasion of a subpoena. Tanky, of course, had been forced to say no to the usual federal immunity offer. It would have been fatal to accept it. One understands this better now that the FBI wiretaps and other pieces of evidence in the Williams-Dorfman trial have been made public. Messages like: “Tell Merkle that if he doesn’t sell us the controlling interest in his firm on our terms, we’ll waste him. Not only him. Say that we’ll also hack up his wife and strangle his kids. And while you’re at it, pass the word to his lawyer that we’ll do the same to him and his wife, and his kids.”

Tanky personally was no killer. He was Dorfman’s man of business, one of his legal and financial team. He was, however, sent to intimidate people who were slow to cooperate or repay. He crushed his cigar on the fine finish of desks, and broke the framed photographs of wives and children (which I think in some cases a good idea). Millions of dollars had to be involved. He didn’t get violent over trifles.

And naturally it would have been offensive to speak of Hoffa, for Tanky might be one of the few who knew how Hoffa had disappeared. I myself, reading widely (with the motives of a concerned cousin), was persuaded that Hoffa had entered a car on his way to a “reconciliation” meeting in Detroit. He was immediately knocked on the head and probably murdered in the backseat. His body was shredded in one machine, and incinerated in another.

Much knowledge of such happenings was in Tanky’s looks, in the puffiness of his face—an edema of deadly secrets. This knowledge made him dangerous. Because of it he would go to prison. The organization, convinced that he was steadfast, would take care of him. What he needed from me was nothing but a private letter to the judge. “Your honor, I submit this statement to you on behalf of the defendant in U.S. v. Raphael Metzger. The family have asked me to intercede as a friend of the court, and I do so fully convinced that the jury has done its job well. I shall try to persuade you, however, to be lenient in sentencing.

Metzger’s parents were decent, good people….” Adding, perhaps, “I knew him in his infancy” or “I was present at his circumcision.”

These are not matters to bring to the court’s attention: that he was a whopping kid; that nothing so big was ever installed in a high chair; or that he still wears the expression he was born with, one of assurance, of cheerful insolence. His is a case of the Spanish proverb: Genio y figura Hasta la sepultura.

The divine or, as most would prefer to say, the genetic stamp visible even in corruption and ruin. And we belong to the same genetic pool, with a certain difference in scale. My frame is much narrower. Nevertheless, some of the same traits are there, creases in the cheeks, a turn at the end of the nose, and most of all, a tendency to fullness in the underlip—the way the mouth works toward the sense-world. You could identify these characteristics also in family pictures from the old country—the Orthodox, totally different human types. Yet the cheekbones of bearded men, a band of forehead under a large skullcap, the shock of a fixed stare from two esoteric eyes, are recognizable still in their descendants.

Cousins in an Italian restaurant, looking each other over. It was no secret that Tanky despised me. How could it be a secret? Cousin Ijah Brodsky, speaking strange words, never really making sense, acting from peculiar motives, obviously flaky. Studied the piano, was touted as some kind of prodigy, made a sensation in the Kimball Building (the Noah’s ark of stranded European music masters), worked at Comptons Encyclopedia, edited a magazine, studied languages—Greek, Latin, Russian, Spanish—and also linguistics.

I had taken America up in the wrong way. There was only one language for a realist, and that was Hoffa language. Tanky belonged to the Hoffa school—in more than half its postulates, virtually identical with the Kennedy school. If you didn’t speak real, you spoke phony. If you weren’t hard, you were soft. And let’s not forget that at one time, when his bosses were in prison, Tanky, their steward, managed an institution that owns more real estate than the Chase Manhattan Bank.

But to return to Cousin Ijah: music, no; linguistics, no; he next distinguished himself at the University of Chicago Law School, after he had been disappointed in the university’s metaphysicians. He didn’t practice law, either; that was just another phase. A star who never amounted to anything. He fell in love with a concert harpist who had only eight fingers. Unrequited, it didn’t pan out; she was faithful to her husband. Ijah’s wife, who organized the TV show, had been as shrewd as the devil. She couldn’t make anything of him, either. Ambitious, she dismissed him when it became plain that Ijah was not cut out for a team player, lacked the instincts of a go-getter. She was like Cousin Miltie’s wife, Libby, and thought of herself as one of an imperial pair, the dominant one.

What was Tanky to make of someone like Ijah? Ijah was not passive. Ijah did have a life plan. But this plan was incomprehensible to his contemporaries. In fact, he didn’t appear to have any contemporaries. He had contacts with the living. Not quite the same thing.

The principal characteristic of our existence is suspense. Nobody—nobody at all—can say how it’s going to turn out.

What was curious and comical to Tanky was that Ijah should be so highly respected and connected. This deep-toned Ijah, a member of so many upper-class clubs and associations, was a gentleman. Tanky’s cousin a gentleman! Isatis bald head with the reasonably composed face was in the papers. He obviously made pretty good money (peanuts to Tanky). Maybe he would be reluctant to disclose to a federal judge that he was closely related to a convicted felon. If that was what Tanky thought, he was mistaken.

Years ago, Ijah was a kind of wild-ass type. His TV show was like a Second City act, a Marx Brothers routine. It went on in a fever of absurdities.

Ijah’s conduct is much different now. Today he’s quiet, he’s a gentleman. What does it take to be a gentleman? It used to require hereditary lands, breeding, conversation. Toward the end of the last century, Greek and Latin did it, and I have some of each. If it comes to that, I enjoy an additional advantage in that I don’t have to be anti-Semitic or strengthen my credentials as a civilized person by putting down Jews. But never mind that.

“Your Honor, it may be instructive to hear the real facts in a case you have tried. On the bench, one seldom learns what the wider human circumstances are. As Metzger’s cousin, I can be amicus curiae in a larger sense.

“I remember Tanky in his high chair. Tanky is what he was called on the Schurz High football squad. To his mother he was R’foel. She called him Folya, or Folka, for she was a village woman, born behind the pale. A tremendous infant, strapped in, struggling with his bonds. A powerful voice and a strong color. Like other infants he must have fed on Pablum or farina, but Cousin Shana also gave him more potent things to eat. She cooked primitive dishes like calf’s-foot jelly in her kitchen, and I remember eating stewed lungs, which had a spongy texture, savory but chewy, much gristle. The family lived on Hoyne Street in a brick bungalow with striped awnings, alternating broad bands of white and cantaloupe. Cousin Shana was a person of great force, and she kept house as it had been kept for hundreds of years. She was a wide woman, a kind of human blast furnace. Her style of conversation was exclamatory. She began by saying, in Yiddish, ‘Hear! Hear! Hear! Hear!’ And then she told you her opinion. It may be that persons of her type have become extinct in America. She made an immense impression on me. We were fond of each other, and I went to the Metzgers’ because I was at home there, and also to see and hear primordial family life.