Saul Bellow - Collected Stories

“You put it all in the past tense.”

“That’s where it belongs. A while back, she passed away in a sanitarium near White Plains. I used to visit her. You might say a bond formed between us. She had no family to speak of….”

“A Yiddish actress, wasn’t she?”

“True, and she was personally theatrical, but not only from nostalgia for a vanished art—the Vilna Troupe, or Second Avenue. It was also because she had a combative personality. There was lots of sophistication in that character, lots of purpose. Plenty of patience. Plus a hell of a lot of stealth.”

“What did she need the stealth for?”

“For many years she kept an eye on Billy’s doings. She put everything in a journal. As well as she could, she maintained a documented file—notes on comings and goings, dated records of telephone conversations, carbon copies of letters.”

“Personal or business?”

“You couldn’t draw a clear line.”

“What’s the good of all this material?”

“I can’t say exactly.”

“Did she hate the man? Was she trying to get him?”

Actually, I don’t believe she was. She was very tolerant—as much as she could be, leading a nickel-and-dime life and feeling mistreated. But I don’t think she wanted to nail him by his iniquities. He was a celeb, to her—that was what she called him. She ate at the Automat; he was a celeb, so he took his meals at Sardi’s, Dempsey’s, or in Sherman Billingsley’s joint. No hard feelings over it. The Automat gave good value for your nickels, and she used to say she had a healthier diet.”

I seem to recall she was badly treated.”

‘So was everybody else, and they all said they detested him. What did your Mend Wolfe tell you.’

“He said that Billy had a short fuse. That he was a kind of botch. Still, it made Wolfe ecstatic to have a Broadway connection. There was glamour in the village if you were one of Billy’s ghosts. It gave Wolfe an edge with smart girls who came downtown from Vassar or Smith. He didn’t have first-class intellectual credentials in the Village, he wasn’t a big-time wit, but he was eager to go forward, meaning that he was prepared to take abuse—and they had plenty of it to give from the top wise-guy theoreticians, the heavyweight pundits, in order to get an education in modern life—which meant you could combine Kierkegaard and Birdland in the same breath. He was a big chaser. But he didn’t abuse or sponge on girls. When he was seducing, he started the young lady off on a box of candy. The next stage, always the same, was a cashmere sweater—both candy and cashmere from a guy who dealt in stolen goods. When the affair was over, the chicks were passed on to somebody more crude and lower on the totem pole….”

Here I made a citizen’s arrest, mentally—I checked myself. It was the totem pole that did it. A Jew in Jerusalem, and one who was able to explain where we were at—how Moses had handed on the law to Joshua, and Joshua to the Judges, the Judges to the Prophets, the Prophets to the Rabbis, so that at the end of the line, a Jew from secular America (a diaspora within a diaspora) could jive glibly about the swinging Village scene of the fifties and about totem poles, about Broadway lowlife and squalor. Especially if you bear in mind that this particular Jew couldn’t say what place he held in this great historical procession. I had concluded long ago that the Chosen were chosen to read God’s mind. Over the millennia, this turned out to be a zero-sum game.

I wasn’t about to get into that.

“So old Mrs. Hamet died,” I said, in a sad tone. I recalled her face as Fonstein had described it, whiter than confectioners’ sugar. It was almost as though I had known her.

“She wasn’t exactly a poor old thing,” said Sorella. “Nobody asked her to participate, but she was a player nevertheless.”

“She kept this record—why?”

“Billy obsessed her to a bizarre degree. She believed that they belonged together because they were similar—defective people. The unfit, the rejects, coming together to share each other’s burden.”

“Did she want to be Mrs. Rose?”

“No, no—that was out of the question. He only married celebs. She had no PR value—she was old, no figure, no complexion, no money, no status. Too late even for penicillin to save her. But she did make it her business to know everything about him. When she let herself go, she was extremely obscene. Obscenity was linked to everything. She certainly knew all the words. She could sound like a man.”

“And she thought she should tell you? Share her research?”

“Me, yes. She approached us through Harry, but the friendship was with me. Those two seldom met, almost never.”

“And she left you her files?”

“A journal plus supporting evidence.”

“Ugh!” I said. The tea had steeped too long and was dark. Lemon lightened the color, and sugar was just what I needed late in the afternoon to pick me up.

I said to Sorella, “Is this journal any good to you? You don’t need any help from Billy.”

“Certainly not. America, as they say, has been good to us. However, it’s quite a document she left. I think you’d find it so.”

“If I cared to read it.”

“If you started, you’d go on, all right.”

She was offering it. She had brought it with her to Jerusalem! And why had she done that? Not to show to me, certainly. She couldn’t have known that she was going to meet me here. We had been out of touch for years. I was not on good terms with the family, you see. I had married a Wasp lady, and my father and I had quarreled. I was a Philadelphian now, without contacts in New Jersey. New Jersey to me was only a delay en route to New York or Boston. A psychic darkness. Whenever possible I omitted New Jersey. Anyway, I chose not to read the journal.

Sorella said, “You may be wondering what use I might make of it.”

Well, I wondered, of course, why she hadn’t left Mrs. Hamet’s journal at home. Frankly, I didn’t care to speculate on her motives. What I understood clearly was that she was oddly keen to have me read it. Maybe she wanted my advice. “Has your husband gone through it?” I said.

“He wouldn’t understand the language.”

“And it would embarrass you to translate it.”

“That’s more or less it,” said Sorella.

“So it’s pretty hairy in places? You said she knew the words. Clinical stuff didn’t scare Mrs. Hamet, did it.”

“In these days of scientific sex studies, there’s not much that’s new and shocking,” said Sorella.

“The shock comes from the source. When it’s someone in the public eye.”

“Yes, I figured that.”

Sorella was a proper person. She was not suggesting that I share any lewdnesses with her. Nothing was further from her than evil communications. She had never in her life seduced anyone—I’d bet a year’s income on that. She was as stable in character as she was immense in her person. The square on the bosom of her dress, with its scalloped design, was like a repudiation of all trivial mischief. The scallops themselves seemed to me to be a kind of message in cursive characters, warning against kinky interpretations, perverse attributions.

She was silent. She seemed to say: Do you doubt me?

Well, this was Jerusalem, and I am unusually susceptible to places. In a moment I had touched base with the Crusaders, with Caesar and Christ, the kings of Israel. There was also the heart beating in her (in me too) with the persistence or fidelity, a faith in the necessary continuation of a radical mystery—don’t ask me to spell it out.

I wouldn’t have felt this way in blue-collar Trenton.

Sorella was too big a person to play any kind of troublemaking games or to create minor mischief. Her eyes were like vents of atmospheric blue, and their backing (the camera obscura) referred you to the black of universal space, where there is no object to reflect the flow of invisible light.