Saul Bellow - Collected Stories

“I didn’t realize that she had one.”

“She often comes to talk to me. Yes, she’s in my parish.”

“Has her stomach been pumped?”

“That—oh, yes. But she took a big dose, and they’re not certain yet. You’re Ithiel Regler, I suppose?”

“I am.”

The young minister asked no other questions. No discussions occurred. You couldn’t help but be thankful for his tact. Also for the information he brought from the nurses. Word came in the morning that she would live. They were moving her upstairs to a women’s ward.

When she was able, she sent word through her clergyman friend that she didn’t want to see Ithiel, had no wish to hear from him, ever. After a day of self-torment in the luxury of the hotel on Park Avenue, he canceled his trip to Europe. He fended off the sympathy of Etta Wolfenstein, avid to hear about his torments, and went back to Washington. The clergyman made a point of seeing him off at Penn Station. There he was, extra tall, in his dickey and clerical collar. Baldness had just come over him, he had decided not to wear a hat, and he kept reaching for vanished or vanishing tufts of hair. Ithiel was made uncomfortable by his sympathy. Because the young man had nothing at all to tell him except that he shouldn’t blame himself. He may have been saying: “You with your sins, your not very good heart. I with my hair loss.” This took no verbal form. Only a mute urgency in his decent face. He said, “She’s ambulatory already. She goes around the ward and tapes back their IV needles when they work loose. She’s a help to old derelicts.”

You can always get a remedy, you can tap into solace when you need it, you can locate a mental fix. America is generous in this regard. The air is full of helpful hints. Ithiel was too proud to accept any handy fix. Like: “Suicide is a power move.”

“Suicide is punitive.”

“The poor kids never mean it.”

“It’s all the drama of rescue.” You could tell yourself such things; they didn’t mean a damn. In all the world, now, there wasn’t a civilized place left where a woman would say, “I love you with my soul.” Only this backcountry girl was that way still. If no more mystical sacredness remained in the world, she hadn’t been informed yet. Straight-nosed Ithiel, heading for Washington and the Capitol dome, symbolic of a nation swollen with world significance, set a greater value on Clara than on anything in this place, or any place. He thought, This is what I opted for, and this is what I deserve. Walking into that room at the Regency, I got what I had coming.

It was after this that Clara’s marriages began—first the church wedding in her granny’s gown, the arrangements elaborate, Tiffany engravings, Limoges china, Lalique glassware. Mom and Dad figured that after two suicide attempts, the fullest effort must be made to provide a stable life for their Clara. They were dear about it. There were no economies. Husband One was an educational psychologist who tested schoolchildren. His name was a good one—Monserrat. On the stationery she had printed, Clara was Mme de Monserrat. But as she was to say to Ithiel: “This marriage was like a Thanksgiving turkey. After a month the bird is drying out and you’re still eating breast of turkey. It needs more and more Russian dressing, and pretty soon the sharpest knife in the city won’t slice it.” If there was anything she could do to perfection, it was to invent such descriptions. “Pretty soon you’re trying to eat threads of bird meat,” she said.

Her second husband was a southern boy who went to Congress and even ran in a few presidential primaries. They lived out in Virginia for about a year, and she saw something of Ithiel in Washington. She was not very kind to him then. “Frankly,” she told him at lunch one day, “I can’t imagine why I ever wanted to embrace you. I look at you, and I say, Yuch!”

“There probably is a. yuch aspect to me,” said Ithiel, perfectly level. “It does no harm to learn about your repulsive side.”

She couldn’t flap him. In the glance she then gave him, there was a glimmer of respect.

“I was a little crazy,” she would say later.

At that time she and her southern husband were trying to have a child. She telephoned Ithiel and described the difficulties they were having. “I thought maybe you would oblige me,” she said.

“Out of the question. It would be grotesque.”

A child with classic Greek eyes. Listen, Teddy, as I sit here, what do you think I’m doing to myself? Where do you suppose my hand is, and what am I touching?”

“I’ve already done my bit for the species,” he said. “Why breed more sinners?”

“What do you suggest?”

“These utility husbands are not the answer.”

“But for you and me, it wasn’t in the cards, Ithiel. Why did you have so many women?”

“For you there were quite a few men—maybe it has something to do with democracy. There are so many eligibles, such handsome choices. Mix with your equals. And why limit yourself?”

“Okay, but it comes out so unhappy…. And why shouldn’t I be pregnant by you? Alistair and I aren’t compatible that way. Haven’t you forgiven me for what I said that day about your being yuch? I was just being perverse. Ithiel, if you were here now…”

“But I’m not going to be.”

“Just for procreation. There are even surrogate mothers these days.”

“I can see a black dude motorcycle messenger in boots, belt, and helmet, waiting with a warm box for the condom full of sperm. ‘Here you are, Billy. Rush this to the lady.’”

“You shouldn’t make fun. You should think of the old Stoic who told his buddies when they caught him in the act, ‘Mock not, I plant a Man.’ Oh, I talk this way to make an impression on you. It’s not real. I ask you—and now I’m serious—what should I do?”

“It should be Alistair’s child.”

But she divorced Alistair and married Mike Spontini, whom she had threatened in Milan to burn with the dashboard lighter coil. For Spontini she had real feeling, she said. “Even though I caught him humping another woman just before we were married.”

“He wasn’t meant to be a husband.”

“I thought once he got to know my quality I’d mean more to him. He’d finally see it. I don’t say that I’m better than other women. I’m not superior. I’m nutty, also. But I am in touch with the me in myself. There’s so much I could do for a man that I loved. How could Mike, in my bed, with the door unlocked and me in the house, ball such an awful tramp as that? Tell me.”

“Well, people have to be done with disorder, finally, and by the time they’re done they’re also finished. When they back off to take a new leap, they realize they’ve torn too many ligaments. It’s all over.”

Mike Spontini intended to do right by Clara. He bought a handsome place in Connecticut with a view of the sea. He never invested badly, never lost a penny. He doubled his money in Connecticut. The Fifth Avenue apartment was a good deal too. In the country, Clara became a gardener. She must have hoped that there was sympathetic magic in flowers and vegetables, or that the odor or soil would calm Mike’s jetting soul, bring down his fever. The marriage lasted three years. He paid the wretchedness fee, he did bad time, as convicts say, then he filed for divorce and liquidated the real estate. It took a stroke to stop Mad Mike. The left side of his face was disfigured in such a manner (this was Clara speaking) that it became a fixed commentary on the life strategy he had followed: “his failed concept.” But Clara was strong on loyalty, and she was loyal even to a stricken ex-husband. You don’t cut all bonds after years of intimacy. After his stroke, she arranged a birthday party for him at the hospital; she sent a cake to the room. However, the doctor asked her not to come.