Saul Bellow - Collected Stories

Fonstein, one of the refugee crowd sailing to New York, wondered how many others among the passengers might have been saved by Billy. Nobody talked much. Experienced people begin at a certain point to keep their own counsel and refrain from telling their stories to one another. Fonstein was eaten alive by his fantasies of what he would do in New York. He said that at night when the ship rolled he was like a weighted rope, twisting and untwisting. He expected that Billy, if he had saved scads of people, would have laid plans for their future too. Fonstein didn’t foresee that they would gather together and cry like Joseph and his brethren. Nothing like that. No, they would be put up in hotels or maybe in an old sanitarium, or boarded with charitable families. Some would want to go to Palestine; most would opt for the U. S. A. and study English, perhaps finding jobs in industry or going to technical schools.

But Fonstein was detained at Ellis Island. Refugees were not being admitted then. “They fed us well,” he told me. “I slept in a wire bin, on an upper bunk. I could see Manhattan. They told me, though, that I’d have to go to Cuba. I still didn’t know who Billy was, but I waited for his help.

“And after a few weeks a woman was sent by Rose Productions to talk to me. She dressed like a young girl—lipstick, high heels, earrings, a hat. She had legs like posts and looked like an actress from the Yiddish theater, about ready to begin to play older roles, disappointed and sad. She called herself a dramatisten and was in her fifties if not more. She said my case was being turned over to the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. They would take care of me. No more Billy Rose.”

“You must have been shook up.”

“Of course. But I was even more curious than dashed. I asked her about the man who rescued me. I said I would like to give Billy my thanks personally. She brushed this aside. Irrelevant. She said, After Cuba, maybe.’ I saw that she doubted it would happen. I asked, did he help lots of people. She said,’sure he helps, but himself he helps first, and you should hear him scream over a dime.’ He was very famous, he was rich, he owned the Ziegfeld Building and was continually in the papers. What was he like? Tiny, greedy, smart. He underpaid the employees, and they were afraid of the boss. He dressed very well, and he was a Broadway character and sat all night in cafés. ‘He can call up Governor Dewey and talk to him whenever he likes.’

“That was what she said. She said also, ‘He pays me twenty-two bucks, and if I even hint a raise I’ll be fired. So what then? Second Avenue is dead. For Yiddish radio there’s a talent oversupply. If not for the boss, I’d fade away in the Bronx. Like this, at least I work on Broadway. But you’re a greener, and to you it’s all a blank.’

“ ‘If he hadn’t saved me from deportation, I’d have ended like others in my family. I owe him my life.’

“ ‘Probably so,’ she agreed.

“ ‘Wouldn’t it be normal to be interested in a man you did that for? Or at least have a look, shake a hand, speak a word?’

“ ‘It would have been normal,’ she said. ‘Once.’

“I began to realize,” said Fonstein, “that she was a sick person. I believe she had TB. It wasn’t the face powder that made her so white. White was to her what yellow color is to a lemon. What I saw was not makeup—it was the Angel of Death. Tubercular people often are quick and nervous. Her name was Missus Hamet—khomet being the Yiddish word for a horse collar. She was from Galicia, like me. We had the same accent.”

A Chinese singsong. Aunt Mildred had it too—comical to other Jews, uproarious in a Yiddish music hall.

“ ‘HIAS will get work for you in Cuba. They take terrifie care of you fellas. Billy thinks the war is in a new stage. Roosevelt is for King Saud, and those Arabians hate Jews and keep the door to Palestine shut. That’s why Rose changed his operations. He and his friends are now chartering ships for refugees. The Romanian government will sell them to the Jews at fifty bucks a head, and there are seventy thousand of them. That’s a lot of moola. Better hurry before the Nazis take over Romania.’”

Fonstein said very reasonably, “I told her how useful I might be. I spoke four languages. But she was hardened to people pleading, ingratiating themselves with their lousy gratitude. Hey, it’s an ancient routine,” said Fonstein, standing on the four-inch sole of his laced boot. His hands were in his pockets and took no part in the eloquence of his shrug. His face was, briefly, like a notable face in a museum case, in a dark room, its pallor spotlighted so that the skin was stippled, a curious effect, like stony gooseflesh. Except that he was not on show for the brilliant deeds he had done. As men go, he was as plain as seltzer.

Billy didn’t want his gratitude. First your suppliant takes you by the knees. Then he asks for a small loan. He wants a handout, a pair of pants, a pad to sleep in, a meal ticket, a bit of capital to go into business. One man’s gratitude is poison to his benefactor. Besides, Billy was fastidious about persons. In principle they were welcome to his goodwill, but they drove him to hysteria when they put their moves on him.

“Never having set foot in Manhattan, I had no clue,” said Fonstein. “Instead there were bizarre fantasies, but what good were those? New York is a collective fantasy of millions. There’s just so much a single mind can do with it.”

Mrs. Horsecollar (her people had had to be low-caste teamsters in the Old Country) warned Fonstein, “Billy doesn’t want you to mention his name to HIAS.”

“So how did I get to Ellis Island?”

Make up what you like. Say that a married Italian woman loved you and stole money from her husband to buy papers for you. But no leaks on Billy.”

Here my father told Fonstein, “I can mate you in five moves.” My old man would have made a mathematician if he had been more withdrawn from human affairs. Only, his motive for concentrated thought was winning. My father Wouldn’t apply himself where there was no opponent to beat.

I have my own fashion of testing my powers. Memory is my field. But also my faculties are not what they once were. I haven’t got Alzheimer’s, absit omen or nicht da gedacht —no sticky matter on my recollection cells. But I am growing slower. Now who was the man that Fonstein had worked for in Havana? Once I had instant retrieval for such names. No electronic system was in it with me. Today I darken and grope occasionally. But thank God I get a reprieve—Fonstein’s Cuban employer was Salkind, and Fonstein was his legman. All over South America there were Yiddish newspapers. In the Western Hemisphere, Jews were searching for surviving relatives and studying the published lists of names. Many DPs were dumped in the Caribbean and in Mexico. Fonstein quickly added Spanish and English to his Polish, German, Italian, and Yiddish. He took engineering courses in a night school instead of hanging out in bars or refugee cafés. To tourists, Havana was a holiday town for gambling, drinking, and whoring—an abortion center as well. Unhappy single girls came down from the States to end their love pregnancies. Others, more farsighted, flew in to look among the refugees for husbands and wives. Find a spouse of a stable European background, a person schooled in suffering and endurance. Somebody who had escaped death. Women who found no takers in Baltimore, Kansas City, or Minneapolis, worthy girls to whom men never proposed, found husbands in Mexico, Honduras, and Cuba.

After five years, Fonstein’s employer was prepared to vouch for him, and sent for Sorella, his niece. To imagine what Fonstein and Sorella saw in each other when they were introduced was in the early years beyond me. Whenever we met in Lakewood, Sorella was dressed in a suit. When she crossed her legs and he noted the volume of her underthighs, an American observer like me could, and would, picture the entire woman unclothed, and depending on his experience of life and his acquaintance with art, he might attribute her type to an appropriate painter. In my mental picture of Sorella I chose Rembrandt’s Saskia over the nudes of Rubens. But then Fonstein, when he took off his surgical boot, was… well, he had imperfections too. So man and wife could forgive each other. I think my tastes would have been more like those of Billy Rose—water nymphs, Loreleis, or chorus girls. Eastern European men had more sober standards. In my father’s place, I would have had to make the sign of the cross over Aunt Mildred’s face while getting into bed with her—something exorcistic (far-fetched) to take the curse off. But you see, I was not my father, I was his spoiled American son. Your stoical forebears took their lumps in bed. As for Billy, with his trousers and shorts at his ankles, chasing girls who had come to be auditioned, he would have done better with Mrs. Horsecollar. If he’d forgive her bagpipe udders and estuary leg veins, she’d forgive his unheroic privates, and they could pool their wretched mortalities and stand by each other for better or worse.