Saul Bellow - Collected Stories

You didn’t expect replies from these doctors. You paid them to lend you their ears. Clara said as much to Ithiel Regler, with whom she remained very much in touch—frequent phone calls, occasional letters, and when Ithiel came up from Washington they had drinks, even dinner from time to time.

“If you think this Gladstone is really helping… I suppose some of those guys can be okay,” said Ithiel, neutral in tone. With him there was no trivial meddling. He never tried to tell you what to do, never advised on family matters.

“It’s mostly to relieve my heart,” said Clara. “If you and I had become husband and wife that wouldn’t have been necessary. I might not be so overcharged. But even so, we have open lines of communication to this day. In fact, you went through a shrink period yourself.”

“I sure did. But my doctor had even more frailties than me.”

“Does that matter?”

“I guess not. But it occurred to me one day that he couldn’t tell me how to be Teddy Regler. And nothing would go well unless I was Teddy Regler. Not that I make cosmic claims for precious Teddy, but there never was anybody else for me to be.”

Because he thought things out he spoke confidently, and because of his confidence he sounded full of himself. But there was less conceit about Ithiel than people imputed to him. In company, Clara, speaking as one who knew, really knew him—and she made no secret of that—would say, when his name was mentioned, when he was put down by some restless spirit or other, that Ithiel Regler was more plainspoken about his own faults than anybody who felt it necessary to show him up.

At this turn in their psychiatry conversation, Clara made a move utterly familiar to Ithiel. Seated, she inclined her upper body toward him.” Tell me!” she said. When she did that, he once more saw the country girl in all the dryness of her ignorance, appealing for instruction. Her mouth would be slightly open as he made his answer. She would watch and listen with critical concentration. “Tell!” was one of her code words.

Ithiel said, “The other night I watched a child-abuse program on TV, and after a while I began to think how much they were putting under that heading short of sexual molestation or deadly abuse—mutilation and murder. Most of what they showed was normal punishment in my time. So today I could be a child-abuse case and my father might have been arrested as a child-beater. When he was in a rage he was transformed—he was like moonshine from the hills compared to store-bought booze. The kids, all of us, were slammed two-handed, from both sides simultaneously, and without mercy. So? Forty years later I have to watch a TV show to see that I, too, was abused. Only, I loved my late father. Beating was only an incident, a single item between us. I still love him. Now, to tell you what this signifies: I can’t apply the going terms to my case without damage to reality. My father beat me passionately. When he did it, I hated him like poison and murder. I also loved him with a passion, and I’ll never think myself an abused child. I suspect that your psychiatrist would egg me on to hate, not turn hate into passivity. So he’d be telling me from the height of his theoretical assumptions how Teddy Regler should be Teddy Regler. The real Teddy, however, rejects this grudge against a dead man, whom he more than half expects to see in the land of the dead. If that were to happen, it would be because we loved each other and wished for it. Besides, after the age of forty a moratorium has to be declared—earlier, if possible. You can’t afford to be a damaged child forever. That’s my argument with psychiatry: it encourages you to build on abuses and keeps you infantile. Now the heart of this whole country aches for itself. There may be occult political causes for this as well. Foreshadowings of the fate of this huge superpower…”

Clara said, “ Tell!” and then she listened like a country girl. That side of her would never go away, thank God, Ithiel thought; while Claras secret observation was, How well we’ve come to understand each other. If only we’d been like this twenty years back.

It wasn’t as if she hadn’t been able to follow him in the early years. She always had understood what Ithiel was saying. If she hadn’t, he wouldn’t have taken the trouble to speak—why waste words? But she also recognized the comic appeal of being the openmouthed rube. Gee! Yeah! Of course! And I could kick myself in the head for not having thought of this myself! But all the while the big-city Clara had been in the making, stockpiling ideas for survival in Gogmagogsville.

“But let me tell you,” she said, “what I was too astonished to mention when we were first acquainted… when we lay in bed naked in Chelsea, and you sent thoughts going around the world, but then they always came back to us, in bed. In bed, which in my mind was for rest, or sex, or reading a novel. And back to me, whom you never overlooked, wherever your ideas may have gone.”

This Ithiel, completely black-haired then, and now grizzled, had put some weight on. His face had filled, rounded out at the bottom. It had more of an urn shape. Otherwise his looks were remarkably unchanged. He said, “I really didn’t have such a lot of good news about the world. I think you were hunting among the obscure things I talked about for openings to lead back to your one and only subject: love and happiness. I often feel as much curiosity about love and happiness now as you did then listening to my brainstorms.”

Between jobs, Ithiel had been able to find time to spend long months with Clara—in Washington, his main base, in New York, on Nantucket, and in Montauk. After three years together, she had actually pressured him into buying an engagement ring. She was at that time, as she herself would tell you, terribly driven and demanding (as if she wasn’t now). “I needed a symbolic declaration at least,” she would say, “and I put such heat on him, saying that he had dragged me around so long as his girl, his lay, that at last I got this capitulation from him.” He took Clara to Madison Hamilton’s shop in the diamond district and bought her an emerald ring—the real thing, conspicuously clear, color perfect, top of its class, as appraisers later told Clara. Twelve hundred dollars he paid for it, a big price in the sixties, when he was especially strapped. He was like that, though: hard to convince, but once decided, he dismissed the cheaper items. “Take away all this other shit,” he muttered. Proper Mr. Hamilton probably had heard this. Madison Hamilton was a gentleman, and reputable and dignified in a decade when some of those qualities were still around: “Before our fellow Americans had lied themselves into a state of hallucination—bullshitted themselves into inanity,” said Ithiel. He said also, still speaking of Hamilton, who sold antique jewelry, “I think the weird moniker my parents gave me predisposed me favorably toward vanishing types like Hamilton—Wasps with good manners…. For all I know, he might have been an Armenian, passing.”

Clara held out her engagement finger, and Ithiel put on the ring. When the check was written and Mr. Hamilton asked for identification, Ithiel was able to show not only a driver’s license but a Pentagon pass. It made a great impression. At that time Ithiel was flying high as a Wunderkind in nuclear strategy, and he might have gone all the way to the top, to the negotiating table in Geneva, facing the Russians, if he had been less quirky. People of great power set a high value on his smarts. Well, you only had to look at the size and the evenness of his dark eyes—“The eyes of Hera in my Homeric grammar,” said Clara. “Except that he was anything but effeminate. No way!” All she meant was that he had a classic level look.