Saul Bellow - Collected Stories

Sorella’s obesity, her beehive coif, the preposterous pince-nez—a “lady” put-on—made me wonder: What is it with such people? Are they female impersonators, drag queens?

This was a false conclusion reached by a middle-class boy who considered himself an enlightened bohemian. I was steeped in the exciting sophistication of the Village.

I was altogether wrong, dead wrong about Sorella, but at the time my perverse theory found some support in Fonstein’s story of his adventures. He told me how he had sailed from New York and gone to work for Salkind in Havana while learning Spanish together with English and studying refrigeration and heating in a night school. “Till I met an American girl, down there on a visit.”

“You met Sorella. And you fell in love with her?”

He gave me a hardedged Jewish look when I spoke of love. How do you distinguish among love, need, and prudence?

Deeply experienced people—this continually impresses me—will keep things to themselves. Which is all right for those who don’t intend to go beyond experience. But Fonstein belonged to an even more advanced category, those who don’t put such restraints on themselves and feel able to enter the next zone; in that next zone, their aim is to convert weaknesses and secrets into burnable energy. A first-class man subsists on the matter he destroys, just as the stars do. But I am going beyond Fonstein, needlessly digressing. Sorella wanted a husband, while Fonstein needed U. S. naturalization papers. Mariage de convenance was how I saw it.

It’s always the falsest formulation that you’re proudest of.

Fonstein took a job in a New Jersey shop that subcontracted the manufacture of parts in the heating-equipment line. He did well there, a beaver for work, and made rapid progress in his sixth language. Before long he was driving a new Pontiac. Aunt Mildred said it was a wedding present from Sorella’s family. “They are so relieved,” Mildred told me. “A few years more, and Sorella would be too old for a baby.” One child was what the Fonsteins had, a son, Gilbert. He was said to be a prodigy in mathematics and physics. Some years down the line, Fonstein consulted me about the boy’s education. By then he had the money to send him to the best schools. Fonstein had improved and patented a thermostat, and with Sorella’s indispensable help he became a rich man. She was a tiger wife, without her, he was to tell me, there would have been no patent. “My company would have stolen me blind. I wouldn’t be the man you’re looking at today.”

I then examined the Fonstein who stood before me. He was wearing an Italian shirt, a French necktie, and his orthopedic boot was British-made—bespoke on Jermyn Street. With that heel he might have danced the flamenco. How different from the crude Polish article, boorishly ill-made, in which he had hobbled across Europe and escaped from prison in Rome. That boot, as he dodged the Nazis, he had dreaded to take off, nights, for if it had been stolen he would have been caught and killed in his short-legged nakedness. The SS would not have bothered to drive him into a cattle car.

How pleased his rescuer, Billy Rose, should have been to see the Fonstein of today: the pink, white-collared Italian shirt, the rue de Rivoli tie, knotted under Sorella’s instruction, the easy hang of the imported suit, the good color of his face, which, no longer stone white, had the full planes and the color of a ripe pomegranate.

But Fonstein and Billy never actually met. Fonstein had made it his business to see Billy, but Billy was never to see Fonstein. Letters were returned. Sometimes there were accompanying messages, never once in Billy’s own hand. Mr. Rose wished Harry Fonstein well but at the moment couldn’t give him an appointment. When Fonstein sent Billy a check accompanied by a note of thanks and the request that the money be used for charitable purposes, it was returned without acknowledgment. Fonstein came to his office and was turned away. When he tried one day to approach Billy at Sardi’s he was intercepted by one of the restaurant’s personnel. You weren’t allowed to molest celebrities here.

Finding his way blocked, Fonstein said to Billy in his Galician-Chinese singsong, “I came to tell you I’m one of the people you rescued in Italy.” Billy turned toward the wall of his booth, and Fonstein was escorted to the street.

In the course of years, long letters were sent. “I want nothing from you, not even to shake hands, but to speak man to man for a minute.”

It was Sorella, back in Lakewood, who told me this, while Fonstein and my father were sunk in a trance over the chessboard. “Rose, that special party, won’t see Harry,” said Sorella.

My comment was “I break my head trying to understand why it’s so important for Fonstein. He’s been turned down? So he’s been turned down.”

“To express gratitude,” said Sorella. “All he wants to say is ‘Thanks.’”

“And this wild pygmy absolutely refuses.”

“Behaves as if Harry Fonstein never existed.”

“Why, do you suppose? Afraid of the emotions? Too Jewish a moment for him? Drags him down from his standing as a full-fledged American? What’s your husband’s opinion?”

“Harry thinks it’s some kind of change in the descendants of immigrants in this country,” said Sorella.

And I remember today what a pause this answer gave me. I myself had often wondered uncomfortably about the Americanization of the Jews. One could begin with physical differences. My father’s height was five feet six inches, mine was six feet two inches. To my father, this seemed foolishly wasteful somehow. Perhaps the reason was biblical, for King Saul, who stood head and shoulders above the others, was verrucht —demented and doomed. The prophet Samuel had warned Israel not to take a king, and Saul did not find favor in God’s eyes.

Therefore a Jew should not be unnecessarily large but rather finely made, strong but compact. The main thing was to be deft and quick-witted. That was how my father was and how he would have preferred me to be. My length was superfluous, I had too much chest and shoulders, big hands, a wide mouth, a band of black mustache, too much voice, excessive hair; the shirts that covered my trunk had too many red and gray stripes, idiotically flashy. Fools ought to come in smaller sizes. A big son was a threat, a parricide. Now Fonstein, despite his short leg, was a proper man, well arranged, trim, sensible, and clever. His development was hastened by Hitlerism. Losing your father at the age of fourteen brings your childhood to an end. Burying your mother in a foreign cemetery, no time to mourn, caught with false documents, doing time in the slammer (“sitting” is the Jewish term for it: “ Er hat gesessen”). A man acquainted with grief. No time for froth or moronic laughter, for vanities and games, for climbing the walls, for effeminacies or infantile plaintiveness.

I didn’t agree, of course, with my father. We were bigger in my generation because we had better nutrition. We were, moreover, less restricted, we had wider liberties. We grew up under a larger range of influences and thoughts—we were the children of a great democracy, bred to equality, living it up with no pales to confine us. Why, until the end of the last century, the Jews of Rome were still locked in for the night; the Pope ceremonially entered the ghetto once a year and spat ritually on the garments of the chief rabbi. Were we giddy here? No doubt about it. But there were no cattle cars waiting to take us to camps and gas chambers.

One can think of such things—and think and think —but nothing is resolved by these historical meditations. To think doesn’t settle anything. No idea is more than an imaginary potency, a Los Alamos mushroom cloud (destroying nothing, making nothing) rising from blinding consciousness.