Saul Bellow - Collected Stories

Put all this together, and my idyll of Virgie Miletas might be construed as a fainthearted evasion of the reigning coldness.

Well, I could have told Sable that she couldn’t win against an unconsummated amour of so many years. It’s after all the woman you didn’t have whose effect is mortal.

I concede, however, that the real challenge is to capture and tame wickedness. Without this you remain suspended. At the mercy of the suspense over the new emergence of spirit…

But on this I sacked out.

In the morning on my breakfast tray was an express envelope from Miss Rodinson. I was in no mood to open it now; it might contain information about a professional engagement, and I didn’t want that. I was on my way to the Invalides to meet with Scholem, if he had made it there. The world cabbies’ organizing session, attended, as I noted in Le Monde, by some two hundred delegates from fifty countries, would begin at eleven o’clock. I put Miss Rodinson’s mail in my pocket with my wallet and my passport.

I was rushed to the great dome in a cab, and went in. A wonderful work of religious architecture—Bruant in the seventeenth century, Mansart in the eighteenth. I took note of its grandeur intermittently. There were gaps in which the dome was no more to me than an egg cup, owing to my hectic excitement—derangement. The stains were growing under my arms. Loss of moisture dried my throat. I went to get information about the taxis of the Marne and had the corner pointed out to me. The drivers had not yet begun to arrive. I had to wander about for half an hour or so, and I climbed up to the first étage to look down in the crypt of the Chapelle Saint-JérЇme. Hoo! what grandeur, what beauties! Such arches and columns and statuary, and floating and galloping frescoes. And the floor so sweetly tessellated. I wanted to kiss it. And also the mournful words ofNapol eon from Saint Helena. “Je désire que mes cendres reposent sur les bords dt la Seine in the middle ofthat nation, ce peuple Français, that I loved so much.” Now Napoleon was crammed under thirty-five tons of polished porphyry or alizarin in a shape suggestive of Roman pomp.

As I was descending the stairs I took out Miss Rodinson’s envelope, and I felt distinctly topsy-turvy, somewhat intoxicated, as I read the letter from Eunice—that was all it contained. Here came Tanky’s third wish: that I write once again to Judge Eiler to request that the final months of his prison term be served in a halfway house in Las Vegas. In a halfway house, Eunice explained, you had minimal supervision. You signed out in the morning, and signed in again at night. The day was your own, to attend to private business. Eunice wrote, “I think that prison has been a tremendous learning experience for my brother. As he is very intelligent, under it all, he has already absorbed everything there was to absorb from jail. You might try that on the judge, phrasing it in your own way.”

Well, to phrase it in my own way, the great fish tottered on the grandiose staircase, filled with drunken darkness and hearing the turbulent seas. An inner voice told him, “This is it!” and he felt like opening a great crimson mouth and tearing the paper with his teeth.

I wanted to send back a message, too: “I am not Cousin Schmuck, I am a great fish who can grant wishes and in whom there are colossal powers!”

Instead I calmed myself by tearing Eunice’s notepaper six, eight, ten times, and then seeking discipline in a wastepaper basket. By the time I reached the gathering place, my emotions were more settled, although not entirely normal. There was a certain amount of looping and veering still.

Upward of a hundred delegates had gathered in the taxi corner, if gathered is the word to apply to such a crowd of restless exotics. There were people from all the corners of the earth. They wore caps, uniforms, military insignia, batik pants, Peruvian hats, pantaloons, wrinkled Indian breeches, crimson gowns from Africa, kilts from Scotland, skirts from Greece, Sikh turbans. The whole gathering reminded me of the great UN meeting that Khrushchev and Castro had attended, and where I had seen Nehru in his lovely white garments with a red rose in his lapel and a sort of baker’s cap on his head—I had been present when Khrushchev pulled off his shoe to bang his desk in anger.

Then it came to me how geography had been taught in the Chicago schools when I was a kid. We were issued a series of booklets: “Our Little Japanese Cousins,”

“Our Little Moroccan Cousins,”

“Our Little Russian Cousins,”

“Our Little Spanish Cousins.” I read all these gentle descriptions about little Ivan and tiny Conchita, and my eager heart opened to them. Why, we were close, we were one under it all (as Tanky was very intelligent “under it all”). We were not guineas, dagos, krauts; we were cousins. It was a splendid conception, and those of us who opened our excited hearts to the world union of cousins were happy, as I was, to give our candy pennies to a fund for the rebuilding of Tokyo after the earthquake of the twenties. After Pearl Harbor, we were obliged to bomb the hell out of the place. It’s unlikely that Japanese children had been provided with books about their little American cousins. The Chicago Board of Education had never thought to look into this.

Two French nonagenarians were present, survivors of 1914. They were the center of much eager attention. A most agreeable occasion, I thought, or would have thought if I had been less agitated.

I didn’t see Scholem anywhere. I suppose I should have told Miss Rodinson to phone his Chicago number for information, but they would have asked who was calling, and for what purpose. I wasn’t sorry to have come to this mighty hall. In fact I wouldn’t have missed it. But I was emotionally primed for a meeting with Scholem. I had even prepared some words to say to him. I couldn’t bear to miss him. I came out of the crowd and circled it. The delegates were already being conducted to their meeting place, and I stationed myself strategically near a door. The gorgeous costumes increased the confusion.

In any case, it wasn’t I who found Scholem. I couldn’t have. He was too greatly changed—emaciated. It was he who spotted me. A man being helped by a young woman—his daughter, as it turned out—glanced up into my face. He stopped and said, “I don’t dream much because I don’t sleep much, but if I’m not having hallucinations, this is my cousin Ijah.”

Yes yes! It was Ijah! And here was Scholem. He no longer resembled the older man of the Instamatic color photo, the person who squinted inward under heavy brows. Because he had lost much weight his face was wasted, and the tightening of the skin brought back his youthful look. Much less doomed and fanatical than the man in the picture, who breathed prophetic fire. There seemed a kind of clear innocence about him. The size of his eyes was exceptional—like the eyes of a newborn infant in the first presentation of genio and figura. And suddenly I thought: What have I done? How do you tell a man like this that you have money for him? Am I supposed to say that I bring him the money he can bury himself with?

Scholem was speaking, saying to his daughter, “My cousin!” And to me he said, “You live abroad, Ijah? You got my mailings? Now I understand—you didn’t answer because you wanted to surprise me. I have to make a speech, to greet the delegates. You’ll sit with my daughter. We’ll talk later.”

“Of course….”

I’d get the girl’s help; I’d inform her of the Eckstine grant. She’d prepare her father for the news.

Then I felt robbed of strength, all at once. Doesn’t existence lay too much on us? I had remembered, observed, studied the cousins, and these studies seemed to fix my own essence and to keep me as I had been. I had failed to include myself among them, and suddenly I was billed for this oversight. At the presentation of this bill, I became bizarrely weak in the legs. And when the girl, noticing that I seemed unable to walk, offered me her arm, I wanted to say, “What d’you mean? I need no help. I still play a full set of tennis every day.” Instead I passed my arm through hers and she led us both down the corridor.