Saul Bellow - Collected Stories

Some of the old people I reached put me down spiritedly: “If you remember so much about me, how come I haven’t seen you since the Korean War!…”

“No, I can’t tell you anything about Salkind’s niece Sorella. Salkind came home to New Jersey after Castro took over. He died in an old people’s nursing racket setup back in the late sixties.”

One man commented, “The pages of calendars crumble away. They’re like the dandruff of time. What d’you want from me?”

Calling from a Philadelphia mansion, I was at a disadvantage. A person in my position will discover, in contact with people from Passaic, Elizabeth, or Pa-terson, how many defenses he has organized against vulgarity or the lower grades of thought. I didn’t want to talk about Medicare or Social Security checks ░r hearing aids or pacemakers or bypass surgery.

From a few sources I heard criticisms of Sorella. “Salkind was a bachelor, had no children, and that woman should have done something for the old fella.” He never married?”

Never,” said the bitter lady I had on the line. “But he married her off, for his own brother’s sake. Anyway, they’ve all checked out, so what’s the diff.”

“And you can’t tell me where I might find Sorella?”

“I could care less.”

“No,” I said. “You couldn’t care less.”

So the matchmaker himself had been a lifelong bachelor. He had disinterestedly found a husband for his brother’s daughter, bringing together two disadvantaged people.

Another lady said about Sorella, “She was remote. She looked down on my type of conversation. I think she was a snob. I tried to sign her up once for a group tour in Europe. My temple sisterhood put together a real good charter-flight package. Then Sorella told me that French was her second language, and she didn’t need anybody to interpret for her in Paris. I should have told her, ‘I knew you when no man would give you a second look and would even take back the first look if he could.’ So that’s how it was. Sorella was too good for everybody….”

I saw what these ladies meant (this was a trend among my informants). They accused Mrs. Fonstein of being uppish, too grand. Almost all were offended. She preferred the company of Mrs. Hamet, the old actress with the paraffin-white tubercular face. Sorella was too grand for Billy too; hurling Mrs. Hamet’s deadly dossier at him was the gesture of a superior person, a person of intelligence and taste. Queenly, imperial, and inevitably isolated. This was the consensus of all the gossips, the elderly people I telephoned from the triple isolation of my Philadelphia residence.

The Fonsteins and I were meant to be company for one another. They weren’t going to force themselves on me, however. They assumed that I was above them socially, in upper-class Philadelphia, and that I didn’t want their friendship. I don’t suppose that my late wife, Deirdre, would have cared for Sorella, with her pince-nez and high manner, the working of her intellect and the problems of her cumulous body—trying to fit itself into a Hepplewhite chair in our dining room. Fonstein would have been comparatively easy for Deirdre to be with. Still, if I was not an assimilationist, I was at least an avoider of uncomfortable mixtures, and in the end I am stuck with these twenty empty rooms.

I can remember driving with my late father through western Pennsylvania. He was struck by the amount of land without a human figure in it. So much space! After long silence, in a traveler’s trance resembling the chessboard trance, he said, “Ah, how many Jews might have been settled here! Room enough for everybody.”

At times I feel like a socket that remembers its tooth.

As I made call after call, I was picturing my reunion with the Fonsteins .1 had them placed mentally in Sarasota, Florida, and imagined the sunny strolls we might take in the winter quarters of Ringling or Hagenbeck, chatting about events long past at the King David Hotel—Billy Rose’s lost suitcases, Noguchi s Oriental reserve. In old manila envelopes I found color snapshots from Jerusalem, among them a photograph of Fonstein and Sorella against the background of the Judean desert, the burning stones of Ezekiel, not yet (even today) entirely cooled, those stones of fire among which the cherubim had walked. In that fierce place, two modern persons, the man in a business suit, the woman in floating white, a married couple holding hands—her fat palm in his inventor’s fingers. I couldn’t help thinking that Sorella didn’t have a real biography until Harry entered her life. And he, Harry, whom Hitler had intended to kill, had a biography insofar as Hitler had marked him for murder, insofar as he had fled, was saved by Billy, reached America, invented a better thermostat. And here they were in color, the Judean desert behind them, as husband and wife in a once-upon-a-time Coney Island might have posed against a painted backdrop or sitting on a slice of moon. As tourists in the Holy Land where were they, I wondered, biographically speaking? How memorable had this trip been for them? The question sent me back to myself and, Jewish style, answered itself with yet another question: What was there worth remembering?

When I got to the top of the stairs—this was the night before last—I couldn’t bring myself to go to bed just yet. One does grow weary of taking care of this man-sized doll, the elderly retiree, giving him his pills, pulling on his socks, spooning up his cornflakes, shaving his face, seeing to it that he gets his sleep. Instead of opening the bedroom door, I went to my second-floor sitting room.

To save myself from distraction by concentrating every kind of business in a single office, I do bills, bank statements, legal correspondence on the ground floor, and my higher activities I carry upstairs. Deirdre had approved of this. It challenged her to furnish each setting appropriately. One of my diversions is to make the rounds of antiques shops and look at comparable pieces, examining and pricing them, noting what a shrewd buyer Deirdre had been. In doing this, I build a case against remaining in Philadelphia, a town in which a man finds little else to do with himself on a dull afternoon.

Even the telephone in my second-story room is a French instrument with a porcelain mouthpiece—blue-and-white Quimper. Deirdre had bought it on the boulevard Haussmann, and Baron Charlus might have romanced his boyfriends with it, speaking low and scheming intricately into this very phone. It would have amused him, if he haunted objects of common use, to watch me dialing the Swerdlows’ number again, pursuing my Fonstein inquiries.

On this art nouveau article—for those who escape from scientific ignorance (how do telephones operate?) with the aid of high-culture toys—I tried Morristown again, and this time Hyman Swerdlow himself answered. As soon as I heard his voice, he appeared before me, and presently his wife also was reborn in my memory and stood beside him. Swerdlow, who was directly related to Fonstein, had been an investment counselor. Trained on Wall Street, he settled in stylish New Jersey. He was a respectable, smooth person, very quiet in manner, “understated,” to borrow a term from the interior decorators. His look was both saturnine and guilt-free. He probably didn’t like what he had made of his life, but there was no way to revise that now. He settled for good manners—he was very polite, he wore Brooks Brothers grays and tans. His tone was casual. One could assimilate now without converting. You didn’t have to choose between Jehovah and Jesus. I had known old Swerdlow. His son had inherited an ancient Jewish face from him, dark and craggy. Hyman had discovered a way to drain the Jewish charge from it. What replaced it was a look of perfect dependability. He was well spoken. He could be trusted with your pension funds. He wouldn’t dream of making a chancy investment. His children were a biochemist and a molecular biologist, respectively. His wife could now devote herself to her watercolor box.