Saul Bellow - Collected Stories

“Over and above. You can guess what a medical degree is worth, the income it guarantees. A small school like Talbot, no endowment, has no funding. You can’t hire decent faculty unless you’re competitive in salaries, and you can’t get accreditation without an adequate faculty.”

“So you had to pay?”

“I made a down payment of half, with the balance promised before graduation. No degree until you deliver. It’s one of those concealed interfaces the general public never gets to see.”

“Were you able to manage all this?”

“Even though Annalou was president of her class, word came that they were expecting the final installment. It made me pretty desperate. Bear in mind that I held a five percent mortgage, and the rate is now about fourteen. Earl wouldn’t even talk to me about it. I took the problem to my psychiatrist. His advice was to write to the school director. We formulated a statement—a promise to make good on the twenty-five. I said that I was a person of ‘the highest integrity’ When I went to my lawyer to check out the language, he advised against ‘highest.’ Just ‘integrity’ was enough. So I wrote, ‘On my word as a person of known integrity.’ Then Annalou was allowed to graduate, on the strength of this.”

“And…?” I said.

My question puzzled her. “A twenty-cent stamp saved me a fortune.”

“You’re not going to pay?”

“I wrote the letter …” she said.

A difference of emphasis separated us. She sat straighter, rejecting the back of the chair, stiffening herself upward from the base of the spine. Little Eunice had become severely bony, just an old broad, except for the attraction of nobility, the high, prominent profile, the face charged with her mother’s color, part blood, part irrationality. Put together, if you can, the contemporary “smarts” she took pride in with these glimpses of patrician antiquity.

But if one of us was an anachronism, it was myself. Again, Cousin Ijah, holding out. With what motive? For unspecified reasons, I didn’t congratulate Eunice on her exploit. She longed for me to tell her what a clever thing she had done, how dandy it was, and I seemed determined to disappoint her. What could my puzzling balkiness mean?

“Those words, ‘high integrity,’ saved you twenty-five thou…?”

“Just ‘integrity.’ I told you, Ijah, I cut out the ‘high.’”

Well, why shouldn’t Eunice, too, make advantageous use of a fine word? All the words were up for grabs. Her grasp of politics was better than mine. I didn’t like to see the word “integrity” fucked up. I suppose the best reason I could advance was the defense of poetry. That was a stupid reason, given that she was defending her one-breasted body. A metastasis would bankrupt her.

The subject was changed. We talked a little about her husband. He had been busy in Grant Park, on the lakefront. Because of the alarming jump in the crime rate, the park board had decided to cut down concealing shrubbery and demolish the old-style comfort stations. Rapists used the bushes for cover, and women had been stabbed to death in the toilets, so now there were cans of the sentry-box type, admitting only one person at a time. Karger was administering the new installations. So Eunice said with pride, although the account she gave of her husband, when all references were assembled, did not make a favorable impression. Weirdly close-mouthed, he dismissed all attempts at conversation. Conversation not worthwhile. Maybe he was right, I saw his point. On the plus side, he didn’t give a damn what people thought of him. He was a stand-up eccentric. His independence appealed to me. He had no act going, anyway. “I have to pay half the rent,” said Eunice. “And also the utilities.” I didn’t buy her hard-luck story. “Why do you stay together?” She explained, “I’m covered by his Blue Cross-Blue Shield….” Most people would have been convinced by this explanation. My response was neutral; I was taking it all under consideration.

When lunch ended, she asked to see what my office was like. “My cousin the genius,” she said, very pleased by the size of the room. I must be important to rate so much space on the fifty-first floor of a great building. “I won’t ask what you do with all these gadgets, documents, and books. For instance, these huge green books. I’m sure it bores you to have to explain.”

The huge faded green books, dating from the beginning of the century, had nothing at all to do with my salaried functions. When I read them I was playing hooky. They were two volumes in the series of reports of the Jesup Expedition, published by the American Museum of Natural History. Siberian ethnography. Fascinating. I was beguiled of my griefs (considerable griefs) by these monographs. Two tribes, the Koryak and the Chukchee, as described by Jochelson and Bogoras, absorbed me totally. Just as old Metzger had been drawn magnetically from the Boston Store (charmed from his clerk’s duties) by bump-and-grinders, so I neglected office work for these books. Political radicals Waldemar Jochelson and Waldemar Bogoras (curious Christian names for a pair of Russian Jews) were exiled to Siberia in the 1890s and, in the region where the Soviets later established the worst of their labor camps, Magadan and Kolyma, the two Waldemars devoted years to the study of the native tribes.

About this arctic desert, purified by frosts as severe as fire, I read for my relief as if I were reading the Bible. In winter darkness, even within a Siberian settlement you might be lost if the wind blew you down, for the speed of the snow was such as to bury you before you could recover your feet. If you tied up your dogs you would find them sometimes smothered when you dug them out in the morning. In this dark land you entered the house by a ladder inside the chimney. As the snows rose, the dogs climbed up to smell what was cooking. They fought for places at the chimney tops and sometimes fell into the cauldron. There were photographs of dogs crucified, a common form of sacrifice. The powers of darkness surrounded you. A Chukchee informant told Bogoras that there were invisible enemies who beset human beings from all sides, demanding spirits whose mouths were always gaping. The people cringed and gave ransom, buying protection from these raving ghosts.

The geography of mental travel can’t be the same from century to century; the realms of gold move away. They float into the past. Anyway, a wonderful silence formed around me in my office as I read about these tribes and their spirits and shamans—it doubled, quadrupled. It became a tenfold silence, right in the middle of the Loop. My windows look toward Grant Park. Now and then I rested my eyes on the lakefront, where Cousin Karger had sheared away the flowering shrubs to deprive sex maniacs of their cover, and set up narrow single-occupancy toilets. The monumental park, and the yacht basin, with sleek boats owned by lawyers and corporate executives. Sexual brutalities weekdays, at anchor; on Sundays the same frenzied erotomaniacs sail peacefully with the wife and kids. And whether we are preparing a new birth of spirit or the agonies of final dissolution (and this is the suspense referred to some pages back) depends on what you think, feel, and will about such manifestations or apparitions, on the kabbalistic skill you develop in the interpretation of these contemporary formations. My intuition is that the Koryak and the Chukchee lead me in the right direction.

So I go into trances over Bogoras and Jochelson at the office. Nobody bothers me much. At conference time I wake up. I become seerlike and the associates like to listen to my analyses. I was right about Brazil, right about Iran. I foresaw the revolution of the mullahs, which the president’s advisers did not. But my views had to be rejected. Returns so huge for the lending institutions, and protected by government guarantees—I couldn’t expect my recommendations to be accepted. My reward is to be praised as “deep” and “brilliant.” Where the kids in Logan Square used to see the eyes of an orangutan, my colleagues see the gaze of a clairvoyant. Nobody comes right out with it, but everybody reads my reports and the main thing is that I am left alone to pursue my spiritual investigation. I pore over an old photograph of Yukaghir women on the bank of the Nalemna River. The far shore barren—snow, rocks, spindling trees. The women are squatting, stringing a catch of big whitefish piled in the foreground, working with needle and thread at thirty degrees below zero, Fahrenheit. Their labor makes them sweat so that they take off their fur bodices and are half naked. They even thrust large cakes of snow into their bosoms.” Primitive women overheating at thirty below and cooling their breasts with snow lumps. As I read I ask myself who in this building, this up-up-upward skyscraper containing thousands, has the strangest imaginations. Who knows what secret ideas others are having, the dreams of these bankers, lawyers, career women—their fancies and mantic visions? They themselves couldn’t bring them out, frightened by their crazy intensity. Human beings, by definition, half the time mad.