Saul Bellow - Collected Stories

There were children and grandchildren, and they satisfied Riva, undoubtedly, but she was not one of your grannies. She had been a businesswoman. She and Motty had built a large business out of a shop with two delivery wagons. Sixty years ago Cousin Motty and his brother Shimon, together with my father, their first cousin, and a small workforce of Polish bakers, had supplied a few hundred immigrant grocery stores with bread and kaiser rolls, and with cakes—fry cakes, layer cakes, coffee cakes, cream puffs, bismarcks, and eclairs. They had done it all in three ovens fired with scrap wood—mill edgings with the bark still on them, piled along the walls—and with sacks of flour and sugar, barrels of jelly, tubs of shortening, crates of eggs, long hod-shaped kneading vats, and fourteen-foot slender peels that slipped in and out of the heat to bring out loaves. Everybody was coated in flour except Cousin Riva, in an office under the staircase, where she kept the books and did the billing and the payroll. My father’s title at the shop was Manager, as if the blasting ovens and the fragrance filling the whole block had anything to do with “Management.” He could never Manage anything. Nerve Center of Anxieties would have been a better title, with the chief point of concentration in the middle of his forehead, like a third eye for all that might go wrong in the night, when he was in charge. They built a large business (not my father, who went out on his own and was never connected with any sizable success), and the business expanded until it reached the limits of its era, when it could not adapt itself to the conditions set by supermarkets—refrigerated long-distance shipping, uniformity of product, volume (demands for millions of dozens of kaiser rolls). So the company was liquidated. Nobody was to blame for that.

Life entered a new phase, a wonderful or supposedly wonderful period of retirement—Florida and all that, places where the warm climate favors dreaming, and people, if they haven’t become too restless and distorted, may recover the exaltation of a prior state of being. Out of the question, as we all know. Well, Motty made an earnest effort to be a good American. A good American makes propaganda for whatever existence has forced him to become. In Chicago, Motty went to his downtown club for a daily swim. He was a “character” down there. For a decade he entertained the membership with jokes. These were excellent jokes. I had heard most of them from my father. Many of them required some knowledge of the old country—Hebrew texts, parables, proverbs. Much of it was fossil material, so that if you were unaware that in the shtetl the Orthodox, as they went about their tasks, recited the Psalms to themselves in an undertone, you had to ask for footnotes. Motty wished, and deserved, to be identified as a fine, cheerful old man who had had a distinguished career, perhaps the city’s best baker, rich, magnanimous, a person of known integrity. But when the older members of the club died off, there was nobody to exchange such weighty values with. Motty, approaching ninety, still latched on to people to tell them funny things. These were his gift offerings. He repeated himself. The commodity brokers, politicians, personal-injury lawyers, bagmen and fixers, salesmen and promoters who worked out at the club lost patience with him. He was offensive in the locker room, wrapped in his sheet. Nobody knew what he was talking about. Too much Chinese in his cantos, too much Provençal. The club asked the family to keep him at home.

“Forty years a member,” said Riva.

“Yes, but all his contemporaries are dead. The new people don’t appreciate him.”

I had always thought that Motty with his endless jokes was petitioning for acceptance, pleading his case, and that by entertaining in the locker room he suffered a disfigurement of his nature. He had spoken much less when he was younger. As a young boy at the Russian bath among grown men, I had admired Motty’s size and strength when we squatted in the steam. Naked, he resembled an Indian brave. Crinkly hair grew down the center of his head. His dignity was a given of his nature. Now there was no band of hair down the middle. He had shrunk. His face was reduced. During his decade of cheer when he swam and beamed, pure affection, he was always delighted to see me. He said, “I have reached the shmonim” —eighties—“and I do twenty lengths a day in the pool. Then, “Have you heard this one?”

“I’m sure I haven’t.”

“Listen. A Jew enters a restaurant. Supposed to be good, but it’s filthy”

“Yes.”

“And there isn’t any menu. You order your meal from the tablecloth, which is stained. You point to a spot and say, “What’s this? Tzimmes? Bring me some.’”

“Yes.”

“And the waiter writes no check. The customer goes straight to the cashier. She picks up his necktie and says, ‘You ate tzimmes.’ But then the customer belches and she says, ‘Ah, you had radishes, too.’”

This is no longer a joke but a staple of your mental life. When you’ve heard it a hundred times it becomes mythic, like Raven crawling into his wife’s interior and finding himself in a vast chamber. All jokes, however, have now stopped.

Before we go upstairs, Cousin Riva says, “I see where the FBI has done a Greylord Sting operation on your entire profession and there will be hundreds of indictments.”

No harm intended. Riva is being playful, without real wickedness, simply exercising her faculties. She likes to tease me, well aware that I don’t practice law, don’t play the piano, don’t do any of the things I was famous for (with intramural fame). Then she says, her measured way of speaking unchanged, “We mustn’t allow Motty to lie down, we have to force him to sit up, otherwise the fluid will accumulate in his lungs. The doctor has ordered us to strap him in.”

“He can’t take that well.”

“Poor Motty, he hates it. He’s escaped a couple of times. I feel bad about it. We all do….”

Motty is belted into an armchair. The buckles are behind him. My first impulse is to release him, despite doctor’s orders. Doctors prolong life, but how Motty feels about the rules they impose cannot be known. He acknowledges our visit with a curt sign, slighter than a nod, then turns his head away. It is humiliating to be seen like this. It occurs to me that in the letter to Judge Eiler it had crossed my mind that Tanky in his high chair had struggled in silence, determined to tear free from his straps.

Motty is not ready to talk—not able. So nothing at all is said. It is a visit and we stand visiting. What do I want with Motty anyway, and why have I made a trip from the Loop to molest him? His face is even smaller than when I saw him ‘ast—genio and figura making their last appearance, the components about to get lost. He is down to nature now, and reckons directly with death. It’s no great kindness to come to witness this.

In my first recollections, Eunice stood low, sucking her thumb. Now Eunice is standing high, and it’s Riva who is low. Cousin Riva’s look is contracted. No way of guessing what she thinks. The TV is switched off. Its bulging glass is like the forehead of an intrusive somebody who has withdrawn into his evil secret, inside the cokey (brittle gray) cells of the polished screen. Behind the drawn drapes is North Richmond Street, static and empty like all other nice residential streets, all the human interest in them siphoned off by bigger forces, by the main action. Whatever is not plugged into the main action withers and is devoured by death. Motty became the patriarch-comedian when his business was liquidated. Now there are no forms left for life to assume.

Something has to be said at last, and Eunice calls upon her strengths, which are scientific and advisory. She seems, moreover, to be prompted by a kind of comic instinct. She says, “You ought to have physiotherapy for Uncle Motty’s hand, otherwise he’ll lose the use of it. I’m very surprised that this has been neglected.”