Saul Bellow - Collected Stories

“Concluding a chapter in Harry’s life. It should be concluded,” said Sorella. “It was a part of the destruction of the Jews. On our side of the Atlantic, where we weren’t threatened, we have a special duty to come to terms with it….”

“Come to terms? Who, Billy Rose?”

“Well, he involved himself in it actively.”

I recall that I shook my head and said, “You were asking too much. You couldn’t have gotten very far with him.”

“Well, he did say that Fonstein suffered much less than others. He wasn’t in Auschwitz. He got a major break. He wasn’t tattooed with a number. They didn’t put him to work cremating the people that were gassed. I said to Billy that the Italian police must have been under orders to hand Jews over to the SS and that so many were shot in Rome, in the Ardeatine Caves.”

“What did he say to this?”

“He said, ‘Look, lady, why do I have to think about all of that? I’m not the kind of guy who’s expected to. This is too much for me.’ I said, ‘I’m not asking you to make an enormous mental effort, only to sit down with my husband for fifteen minutes.’

‘Suppose I do,’ he said. ‘What’s your offer?’

‘I’ll hand over Deborah’s whole file. I’ve got it right here.’

‘And if I don’t play ball?’

‘Then I’ll turn it over to some other party, or parties.’ Then he burst out, ‘You think you’ve got me by the knackers, don’t you? You’re taking an unfair terrible advantage of me. I don’t want to talk dirty to a respectable person, but I call this kicking the shit out of a man. Right now I’m in an extrasensitive position, considering what’s my purpose in Jerusalem. I want to contribute a memorial. Maybe it would be better not to leave any reminder of my life and I should be forgotten altogether. So at this moment you come along to take revenge from the grave for a jealous woman. I can imagine the record this crazy put together, about deals I made—I know she got the business part all wrong, and the bribery and arson would never stick. So that leaves things like the private clinical junk collected from show girls who badmouthed me. But let me say one thing, Missus: Even a geek has his human rights. Last of all, I haven’t got all that many secrets left. It’s all been told.’ Almost all,’ I said.”

I observed, “You sure did bear down hard on him.”

“Yes, I did,” she admitted. “But he fought back. The libel suits he threatened were only bluff, and I told him so. I pointed out how little I was asking. Not even a note to Harry, just a telephone message would be enough, and then fifteen minutes of conversation. Mulling it over, with his eyes cast down and his little hands passive on the back of a sofa—he was on his feet, he wouldn’t sit down, that would seem like a concession—he refused me again. Once and for all he said he wouldn’t meet with Harry. ‘I already did for him all I’m able to do.’ Then you leave me no alternative,’ I said.”

On the striped chair in Billy’s suite, Sorella opened her purse to look for a handkerchief. She touched herself on the temples and on the folds of her arms, at the elbow joint. The white handkerchief looked no bigger than a cabbage moth. She dried herself under the chin. “He must have shouted at you,” I said.

He began to yell at me. It was what I anticipated, a screaming fit. He said no matter what you did, there was always somebody waiting with a switchblade to cut you, or acid to throw in your face, or claws to rip the clothes off you and leave you naked. That fucking old Hamet broad, whom he kept out of charity—as if her eyes weren’t kooky enough, she put on those giant crooked round goggles. She hunted up those girls who swore he had the sexual development of a ten-year-old boy. It didn’t matter for shit, because he was humiliated all his life long and you couldn’t do more than was done already. There was relief in having no more to cover up. He didn’t care what Hamet had written down, that bitch-eye mummy, spitting blood and saving the last glob for the man she hated most. As for me, I was a heap of fat filth!”

“You don’t have to repeat it all, Sorella.”

“Then I won’t. But I did lose my temper. My dignity fell apart.”

“Do you mean that you wanted to hit him?”

“I threw the document at him. I said, ‘I don’t want my husband to talk to the likes of you. You’re not fit…’ I aimed Deborah’s packet at him. But I’m not much good at throwing, and it went through the open window.”

“What a moment! What did Billy do then?”

“All the rage was wiped out instantly. He picked up the phone and got the desk. He said, A very important document was dropped from my window. I want it brought up right now. You understand? Immediately. This minute.’ I went to the door. I don’t suppose I wanted to make a gesture, but I am a Newark girl at bottom. I said, ‘You’re the filth. I want no part of you.’ And I made the Italian gesture people used to make in a street fight, the edge of the palm on the middle of my arm.”

Inconspicuously, and laughing as she did it, she made a small fist and drew the edge of her other hand across her biceps.

“A very American conclusion.”

“Oh,” she said, “from start to finish it was a one hundred percent American event, of our own generation. It’ll be different for our children, A kid like our Gilbert, at his mathematics summer camp? Let him for the rest of his life do nothing but mathematics. Nothing could be more different from either East Side tenements or the backstreets of Newark.”

All this had happened toward the end of the Fonsteins’ visit, and I’m sorry now that I didn’t cancel a few Jerusalem appointments for their sake—take them to dinner at Dagim Benny, a good fish restaurant. It would have been easy enough for me to clear the decks. What, to spend more time in Jerusalem with a couple from New Jersey named Fonstein? Yes is the answer. Today it’s a matter of regret. The more I think of Sorella, the more charm she has for me.

I remember saying to her, “I’m sorry you didn’t hit Billy with that packet.”

My thought, then and later, was that she was too much hampered by fat under the arms to make an accurate throw.

She said, “As soon as the envelope left my hands I realized that I longed to get rid of it, and of everything connected with it. Poor Deborah—Mrs. Horsecollar, as you like to call her. I see that I was wrong to identify myself with her cause, her tragic life. It makes you think about the high and the low in people. Love is supposed to be high, but imagine falling for a creature like Billy. I didn’t want a single thing that man could give Harry and me. Deborah recruited me, so I would continue her campaign against him, keep the heat on from the grave. He was right about that.”

This was our very last conversation. Beside the King David driveway, she and I were waiting for Fonstein to come down. The luggage had been stowed in the Mercedes—at that time, every other cab in Jerusalem was a Mercedes-Benz. Sorella said to me, “How do you see the whole Billy business?”

In those days I still had the Villager’s weakness for theorizing—the profundity game so popular with middle-class boys and girls in their bohemian salad days. Ring anybody’s bell, and he’d open the window and empty a basin full of thoughts on your head.

“Billy views everything as show biz,” I said. “Nothing is real that isn’t a show. And he wouldn’t perform in your show because he’s a producer, and producers don’t perform.”

To Sorella, this was not a significant statement, so I tried harder. “Maybe the most interesting thing about Billy is that he wouldn’t meet with Harry,” I said. ‘He wasn’t able to be the counterexample in a case like Harry’s. Couldn’t begin to measure up.”