Saul Bellow - Collected Stories

I believe the Swerdlows were very intelligent. They may even have been deeply intelligent. What had happened to them couldn’t have been helped.

“I can’t tell you anything about Fonstein,” Swerdlow said. “I’ve somehow lost track….”

I realized that, like the Fonsteins, Swerdlow and his wife had isolated themselves. No deliberate choice was made. You went your own way, and you found yourself in Greater New York but beyond the bedroom communities, decently situated. Your history, too, became one of your options. Whether or not having a history was a “consideration” was entirely up to you.

Cool Swerdlow, who of course remembered me (I was rich, I might have become an important client; there was, however, no reproach detectable in his tone), now was asking what I wanted with Harry Fonstein. I said that a mad old man in Jerusalem needed Fonstein’s help. Swerdlow dropped his inquiry then and there. “We never did develop a relationship,” he said. “Harry was very decent. His wife, however, was somewhat overpowering.”

Decoded, this meant that Edna Swerdlow had not taken to Sorella. One learns soon enough to fill in the simple statements to which men like Swerdlow limit themselves. They avoid putting themselves out and they shun (perhaps even hate) psychological elaboration. “When did you last see the Fonsteins?”

“During the Lakewood period,” said tactful Swerdlow—he avoided touching upon my father’s death, possibly a painful subject. “I think it was when Sorella talked so much about Billy Rose.”

“They were involved with him. He refused to be drawn in…. So you heard them talking about it?”

“Even sensible people lose their heads over celebrities. What claim did Harry have on Billy Rose, and why should Billy have done more than he did? A man like Rose has to ration the number of people he can take on.”

“Like a sign in an elevator—‘Maximum load twenty-eight hundred pounds’?”

“If you like.”

“When I think of the Fonstein-Billy thing,” I said, “I’m liable to see European Jewry also. What was all that about? To me, the operational term is Justice. Once and for all it was seen that this expectation, or reliance, had no foundation. You had to forget about Justice… whether, taken seriously for so long, it could be taken seriously still.”

Swerdlow could not allow me to go on. This was not his kind of conversation. “Put it any way you like—how does it apply to Billy? What was he supposed to do about it?”

Well, I didn’t expect Billy to take this, or anything else, upon himself. From Hyman Swerdlow I felt that speaking of Justice was not only out of place but off the wall. And if the Baron Charlus had been listening, haunting his telephone with the Quimper mouthpiece, he would have turned from this conversation with contempt. I didn’t greatly blame myself, and I certainly did not feel like a fool. At worst it had been inappropriate to call Swerdlow for information and then, without preparation, swerve wildly into such a subject, trying to carry him with me. These were matters I thought about privately, the subjective preoccupations of a person who lived alone in a great Philadelphia house in which he felt out of place, and who had lost sight of the difference between brooding and permissible conversation. I had no business out of the blue to talk to Swerdlow about Justice or Honor or the Platonic Ideas or the expectations of the Jews. Anyway, his tone now made it clear that he wanted to get rid of me, so I said, “This Rabbi X/Y from Jerusalem, who speaks better than fair English, got me to promise that I would locate Fonstein. He said he hadn’t been able to find him.”

“Are you sure that Fonstein isn’t listed in the directory?”

No, I wasn’t sure, was I? I hadn’t looked. That was just like me, wasn’t it? “I assumed the rabbi had looked,” I said. “I feel chastened. I shouldn’t have taken the man’s word for it. He should have looked. I took it for granted. You’re probably right.”

“If I can be of further use…?”

By pointing out how he would have gone about finding Fonstein, Swerdlow showed me how lopsided I was. Sure it was stupid of me not to look in the phone directory. Smart, smart, but a dope, as the old people used to say. For the Fonsteins were listed. Information gave me their number. There they were, as accessible as millions of others, in small print, row on row on row, the endless listings.

I dialed the Fonsteins, braced for a conversation—my opening words prepared, my excuses for neglecting them made with warmth, just such warmth as I actually felt. Should they be inclined to blame me—well, I was to blame.

But they were out, or had unplugged their line. Elderly people, they probably turned in early. After a dozen rings, I gave up and went to bed myself. And when I got into bed—without too much fear of being alone in this huge place, not that there aren’t plenty of murdering housebreakers in the city—I picked up a book, preparing to settle in for a long read.

Deirdre’s bedside books had now become mine. I was curious to know how she had read herself to sleep. What had been on her mind became important to me. In her last years she had turned to such books as Koré Kosmu, the Hermetica published by Oxford, and also selections from the Zohar. Like the heroine of Poe’s story “Morella.” Odd that Deirdre had said so little about it. She was not a secretive lady, but like many others she kept her own counsel in matters of thought and religion. I loved to see her absorbed in a book, mummied up on her side of the antique bed, perfectly still under the covers. A pair of lamps on each side were like bronze thornbushes. I was always after Deirdre to get sensible reading lights. Nothing could persuade her—she was obstinate when her taste was challenged—and three years after she passed away I was still shopping: Those sculpture brambles never will be replaced.

Some men fall asleep on the sofa after dinner. This often results in insomnia, and as I hate to be up in the night, my routine is to read in bed until midnight, concentrating on passages marked by Deirdre and on her notes at the back of the book. It has become one of my sentimental rituals.

But on this night I passed out after a few sentences, and presently I began to dream.

There is great variety in my dreams. My nights are often busy. I have anxious dreams, amusing dreams, desire dreams, symbolic dreams. There are, however, dreams that are all business and go straight to the point. I suppose we have the dreams we deserve, and they may even be prepared in secret.

Without preliminaries, I found myself in a hole. Night, a dark plain, a pit, and from the start I was already trying to climb out. In fact, I had been working at it for some time. This was a dug hole, not a grave but a trap prepared for me by somebody who knew me well enough to anticipate that I would fall in. I could see over the edge, but I couldn’t crawl out because my legs were tangled and caught in ropes or roots. I was clawing at the dirt for something I could grip. I had to rely on my arms. If I could hoist myself onto the edge, I might free the lower body. Only, I was already exhausted, winded, and if I did manage to pull myself out, I’d be too beat to fight. My struggles were watched by the person who had planned this for me. I could see his boots. Down the way, in a similar ditch, another man was also wearing himself out. He wasn’t going to make it either. Despair was not principally what I felt, nor fear of death. What made the dream terrible was my complete conviction of error, my miscalculation of strength, and the recognition that my forces were drained to the bottom. The whole structure was knocked flat. There wasn’t a muscle in me that I hadn’t called on, and for the first time I was aware of them all, down to the tiniest, and the best they could do was not enough. I couldn’t call on myself, couldn’t meet the demand, couldn’t put out. There’s no reason why I should ask you to feel this with me, and I won’t blame you for avoiding it; I’ve done that myself. I always avoid extremes, even during sleep. Besides, we all recognize the burden of my dream: Life so diverse, the Grand Masquerade of Mortality shriveling to a hole in the ground. Still, that did not exhaust the sense of the dream, and the remainder is essential to the interpretation of what I’ve set down about Fonstein, Sorella, or Billy even. I couldn’t otherwise have described it. It isn’t so much a dream as a communication. I was being shown—and I was aware of this in sleep—that I had made a mistake, a lifelong mistake: something wrong, false, now fully manifest.