Saul Bellow - Collected Stories

The parents, stifled in the clay. Two crates, side by side. Grass of burning green sweeping over them, and Isaac repeating a prayer to the God of Mercy. And in Hebrew with a Baltic accent, at which modern Israelis scoffed. September trees, yellow after an icy night or two, now that the sky was blue and warm, gave light instead of shadow. Isaac was concerned about his parents. Down there, how were they? The wet, the cold, above all the worms worried him. In frost, his heart shrank for Aunt Rose and Uncle Braun, though as a builder he knew they were beneath the frost line. But a human power, his love, affected his practical judgment. It flew off. Perhaps as a builder and housing expert (on two of the governor’s commissions, not one) he especially felt his dead to be unsheltered. But Tina—they were her dead, too—felt he was still exploiting Papa and Mama and that he would have exploited her, too, if she had let him.

For several years, at the same season, there was a scene between them. The pious thing before the Day of Atonement was to visit the dead and to forgive the living—forgive and ask forgiveness. Accordingly, Isaac went annually to the old home. Parked his Cadillac. Rang the bell, his heart beating hard. He waited at the foot of the long, enclosed staircase. The small brick building, already old in 1915 when Uncle Braun had bought it, passed to Tina, who tried to make it modern. Her ideas came out of House Beautiful. The paper with which she covered the slanted walls of the staircase was unsuitable. It did not matter. Tina, above, opened the door, saw the masculine figure and scarred face of her brother and said, “What do you want?”

Tina! For God’s sake, I’ve come to make peace.”

“What peace! You swindled us out of a fortune.”

‘The others don’t agree. Now, Tina, we are brother and sister. Remember Father and Mother. Remember…”

She cried down at him, “You son of a bitch, I do remember! Now get the hell out of here.”

Banging the door, she dialed her brother Aaron, lighting one of her long cigarettes. “He’s been here again,” she said. “What shit! He’s not going to practice his goddamn religion on me.”

She said she hated his Orthodox cringe. She could take him straight. In a deal. Or a swindle. But she couldn’t bear his sentiment.

As for herself, she might smell like a woman, but she acted like a man. And in her dress, while swooning music came from the radio, she smoked her cigarette after he was gone, thundering inside with great flashes of feeling. For which, otherwise, there was no occasion. She might curse him, thought Dr. Braun, but she owed him much. Aunt Rose, who had been such a harsh poet of money, had left her daughter needs—such needs! Quiet middle-age domestic decency (husband, daughter, furnishings) did nothing for needs like hers.

So when Isaac Braun told his wife that he had visited the family graves, she knew that he had gone again to see Tina. The thing had been repeated. Isaac, with a voice and gesture that belonged to history and had no place or parallel in upstate industrial New York, appealed to his sister in the eyes of God, and in the name of souls departed, to end her anger. But she cried from the top of the stairs, “Never! You son of a bitch, never!” and he went away.

He went home for consolation, and walked to the synagogue later with an injured heart. A leader of the congregation, weighted with grief. Striking breast with fist in old-fashioned penitence. The new way was the way of understatement. Anglo-Saxon restraint. The rabbi, with his Madison Avenue public-relations airs, did not go for these European Judaic, operatic fist-clenchings. Tears. He made the cantor tone it down. But Isaac Braun, covered by his father’s prayer shawl with its black stripes and shedding fringes, ground his teeth and wept near the ark.

These annual visits to Tina continued until she became sick. When she went into the hospital, Isaac phoned Dr. Braun and asked him to find out how things really stood.

“But I’m not a medical doctor.”

“You’re a scientist. You’ll understand it better.”

Anyone might have understood. She was dying of cancer of the liver. Cobalt radiation was tried. Chemotherapy. Both made her very sick. Dr. Braun told Isaac, “There is no hope.”

“I know.”

“Have you seen her?”

“No. I hear from Mutt.”

Isaac sent word through Mutt that he wanted to come to her bedside.

Tina refused to see him.

And Mutt, with his dark sloping face, unhandsome but gentle, dog-eyed, softly urged her, “You should, Tina.”

But Tina said, “No. Why should I? A Jewish deathbed scene, that’s what he wants. No.”

“Come, Tina.”

“No,” she said, even firmer. Then she added, “I hate him.” As though explaining that Mutt should not expect her to give up the support of this feeling. And a little later she added, in a lower voice, as though speaking generally, “I can’t help him.”

But Isaac phoned Mutt daily, saying, “I have to see my sister.”

“I can’t get her to do it.”

“You’ve got to explain it to her. She doesn’t know what’s right.”

Isaac even telephoned Fenster, though, as everyone was aware, he had a low opinion of Fenster’s intelligence. And Fenster answered, “She says you did us all dirt.”

“I? She got scared and backed out. I had to go it alone.”

“You shook us off.”

Quite simplemindedly, with the directness of the biblical fool (this was how Isaac saw him, and Fenster knew it), he said, “You wanted it all for yourself, Isaac.”

That they should let him, ungrudgingly, enjoy his great wealth, Isaac told Dr. Braun, was too much to expect. And he admitted that he was very rich. He did not say how much money he had. This was a mystery to the family. The old people said, “He himself don’t know.”

Isaac confessed to his cousin Dr. Braun, “I never understood her.” He was much moved, even then, a year later.

Cousin Tina had discovered that one need not be bound by the old rules. That, Isaac’s painful longing to see his sister’s face being denied, everything was put into a different sphere of advanced understanding, painful but truer than the old. From her bed she appeared to be directing this research.

‘You ought to let him come,” said Mutt.

Because I’m dying?”

Mutt, plain and dark, stared at her, his black eyes momentarily vacant as he chose an answer. “People recover,” he said.

But she said, with peculiar indifference to the fact, “Not this time.” She had already become gaunt in the face and high in the belly. Her ankles were swelling. She had seen this in others and understood the signs.

“He calls every day,” said Mutt.

She had had her nails done. A dark-red, almost maroon color. One of those odd twists of need or desire. The ring she had taken from her mother was now loose on the finger. And, reclining on the raised bed, as if she had found a moment of ease, she folded her arms and said, pressing the lace of the bed jacket with her fingertips, “Then give Isaac my message, Mutt. I’ll see him, yes, but it’ll cost him money.”

“Money?”

“If he pays me twenty thousand dollars.”

“Tina, that’s not right.”

“Why not! For my daughter. She’ll need it.”

“No, she doesn’t need that kind of dough.” He knew what Aunt Rose had left. “There’s plenty and you know it.”

“If he’s got to come, that’s the price of admission,” she said. “Only a fraction of what he did us out of.”

Mutt said simply, “He never did me out of anything.” Curiously, the shrewdness of the Brauns was in his face, but he never practiced it. This was not because he had been wounded in the Pacific. He had always been like that. He sent Tina’s message to Isaac on a piece of business stationery, BRAUN APPLIANCES, 42 CLINTON. Like a contract bid. No word of comment, not even a signature. For 20 grand cash Tina says yes otherwise no.