Saul Bellow - Collected Stories

“Not to worry. I’m on top of this,” said Victor.

So he was. He had gotten her back to Chicago, too.

In the cushioned warmth of the limousine, northward bound, Katrina, as she pictured Victor in the swift, rich-men’s gilded elevator rushing upward, upward, felt a clawing at her heart and innards—pity for the man, which he didn’t feel for himself. Really, he did not. Pressed for time. He had too much to think about. All that unfinished mental business to keep him busy forever and ever. He wouldn’t have liked it that she should feel clawed around the heart for his sake.

And then, had it been right to turn on a man of his stature and stick him with a cliché? But one good thing about Victor was that he was very light on your venial sins, especially the feminine ones. Still, in that case, he might have obliged her, might have spoken the words she wanted to hear. He didn’t need to worry that she might make use of them later, against him.

The lake came very close to shore along the Outer Drive and made mad charges on the pilings and the beaches, rushing horribly white out of the hundreds of miles of darkness they had just crossed in the Cessna.

At Howard Street the white mausoleums and enormous Celtic crosses faced the water. It was a shame to spoil such fine real estate with graves. She disliked this stretch of the road and said to the driver, “This is a favorite speed trap for the cops.” He didn’t wish to answer. “Now please take me to the Orrington,” she said.

She drove her car home from the garage, and had to park in a rut some distance from the curb because her driveway hadn’t been cleared.

The house was dark. Nobody there. Her first fear was that Alfred had come and taken the girls away. She let herself into the warm hallway, pushing the handsome heavy white door against the resistance of a living creature: Sukie, of course, the poor old thing, not too deaf to hear the scratch of Katrina’s key.

Lighted, the living room showed that Soolie and Pearl had been cutting composition paper after school. Probably Ysole had ordered them to do it. Their habit was to force you to give them commands. But where had they gone? Katrina looked in the kitchen for a message. Nothing on the bulletin board. Nothing on the dining-room table. She rang Alfred’s number. If he was there, he didn’t answer. She telephoned Dorothea and after two rings there came Dotey’s little recording, which Katrina had never heard with such dislike—Dotey being playful: “When the vibrations of the gong subside, kindly leave your name and message.” The gong, to go with the bed, was also Chinese. Katrina said, “Dotey, where the hell are my kids?” Immediately she depressed the button, and when the dial tone resumed, she dialed Lieutenant Krieggstein. No one there. She considered next whether to try her lawyer. He sharply disliked being bothered at home. Just now this was not a consideration. What did matter was that she had nothing to tell him except that she feared her children had been abducted by their father while she was gone…. Gone where? Flying with her lover.

Sukie had followed her to the kitchen and pressed against her, needing to be taken out. Absentmindedly tender, Katrina stroked the animal’s black neck. The fur was thick, but it was flimsy to the touch. Might as well walk her while I think what to do, Katrina decided, and clipped the leash to Sukie’s collar. All the neighbors had been shoveled out; only the Goliger house was still under snow. The dog relieved herself at once. Obviously, no one had thought of her all day. Katrina went to the corner in her slow, hip-rich gait, the hat pushed back from her forehead—so very tired she hardly noticed the cold. Her face was aching with the strains of the day. Had Ysole taken the girls home with her? To the church bingo? That was the least likely conjecture of all.

Turning back from the corner, she saw a car parking in front of her house. Because its lights shone into her eyes, she couldn’t identify it. She began trotting in her ostrich-skin boots, pulling the dog by the leash, saying, “Come on, girl. Come on.”

The children were being lifted over the snow heaps and set down on the sidewalk. She recognized Krieggstein by his fedora. Also his storm coat, bulky and hampering, and his movements.

“Where did you go? Where have you been? There was no message.”

“I took the children to dinner.”

“Soolie. Pearl…. What kind of day did you have?” said Katrina.

They answered nothing at all, but Krieggstein said, “We had a great outing at Burger King. They don’t fry like the other fast-food joints, they grill their meat. Then we stopped at Baskin-Robbins and bought a quart of chocolate marshmallow mousse. Good stuff.”

“Did you just walk in and find them?”

“No, I took over from your Negro woman. You called her, didn’t you?”

“Of course I did.”

“I arranged to come by,” said Krieggstein. “Didn’t she tell you that?”

“She let me think she was taking off at five o’clock.”

“Her idea of a joke,” said Krieggstein. “I asked her to tell you that I’d be here.”

“Oh, thank you, Sam.”

In the hallway he helped her off with her coat. They removed it from her weary body.

Katrina’s mind at that moment made an important connection. Why should Victor declare, “I love you”? For her sake, he went on the road. Would he have made such a journey for any other reason? If he was like FDR, whose death Stalin had hastened by forcing him to come to Yalta, to Teheran, why would a woman who claimed to love him impose such hardships on him?

“Whose violin is this?” said Krieggstein. “I never saw a fiddle here before.”

He was taking off his storm coat, pulling down his gun-bulging jacket, smoothing his parboiled face, rubbing his frost-red eyes.

She had been right when she had said in the Cessna, “You don’t even mind too much.” Victor had denied it. But he could do nothing else. Her guess was that he longed to be dying. Dying would illuminate. There were ideas closely associated with dying which only dying could reveal. He probably felt that he had postponed too long; although he loved her, he couldn’t postpone much longer.

“Did you call the psychiatrist?” she said.

“I did better than that, Trina. The receptionist said you were going to be charged for the hour anyway, so I went and had a talk with the guy.”

“Me charged? Alfred will be charged. Did he talk to you?”

“Give me some credit. You don’t make the grade of police lieutenant by dumb bungling. I gave him an impression of stability. He and I speak the same language. Working on my Ph. D. in criminology, we understood each other. I said you couldn’t come because you had a female-type emergency. You had to go to the gynecologist. I came instead, as a friend of the family. I know what bad mothers are. My experiences as police officer: cocaine mothers, nymphomaniacs, armed prostitutes, alcoholic mothers. He could take it from me what a stable person you are.”

“I’ll go to the kitchen. The girls want their dessert.”

They had set out the bowls and spoons. She took the scoop to the chocolate marshmallow mousse. They didn’t say, “Where have you been, Mother?” She was not called upon for any alibis. Their small faces with identical bangs communicated nothing. They did have curious eyes, science-fiction eyes that dazzled and also threatened from afar. Wrangel might have seen that, too. Emissaries from another planet, grown from seeds that dropped from outer space, little invaders with iridium in their skulls. Victor was right, you know, about the way that Star Wars flicks corrupted everybody, implanted mistrust of your own flesh and blood. Well, okay, but now I see how to extricate my elephant.