Humboldt's Gift (22 page)

  So they got to the Littlewoods’ and Demmie and I were there. Kathleen was white. Her face looked heavily powdered. Humboldt walked in silent. He wasn’t talking. This was in fact his last night as the Belisha Professor of Poetry at Princeton. Tomorrow the news would be out. Maybe it was out already. Ricketts behaved honorably but he might not have been able to resist telling everyone. But Littlewood seemed not to know anything. He was trying hard to make his party a success. His cheeks were red and jolly. He looked like Mr. Tomato with a top hat in the juice ad. He had wavy hair and a fine worldly manner. When he took a lady’s hand you wondered just what he was going to do with it. Littlewood was an upper-class bad boy, a minister’s randy son. He knew London and Rome. He especially knew Shepheard’s famous bar in Cairo, and had acquired his British Army slang there. He had friendly endearing spaces between his teeth. He loved to grin, and at every party he did imitations of Rudy Vallee. To cheer up Humboldt and Kathleen I got him to sing “I’m Just a Vagabond Lover.” It did not go over well.

  I was present in the kitchen when Kathleen made a serious mistake. Holding her drink and an unlit cigarette she reached into a man’s pocket for a match. He was not a stranger, we knew him well, his name was Eubanks, and he was a Negro composer. His wife was standing near him. Kathleen was beginning to recover her spirits and was slightly drunk herself. But just as she was getting the matches out of Eubanks’s pocket Humboldt came in. I saw him coming. First he stopped breathing. Then he clutched Kathleen with sensational violence. He twisted her arm behind her back and ran her out of the kitchen into the yard. A thing of this sort was not unusual at a Littlewood party, and others decided not to notice, but Demmie and I hurried to the window. Humboldt punched Kathleen in the belly, doubling her up. Then he pulled her by the hair into the Buick. As there was a car behind him he couldn’t back out. He wheeled over the lawn and off the sidewalk, hacking off the muffler on the curb. I saw it there next morning like the case of a super-insect, flaky with rust, and a pipe coming out of it. Also I found Kathleen’s shoes stuck by the heels in the snow. There was fog, ice, dirty cold, the bushes glassy, the elm twigs livid, the March snow brocaded with soot.

  And now I recalled that the rest of the night had been a headache because Demmie and I were overnight guests, and when the party broke up Littlewood took me aside and proposed man to man that we do a swap. “An Eskimo wife deal. What say we have a romp,” he said. “A wingding.”

  “Thanks, no, it isn’t cold enough for this Eskimo stuff.”

  “You’re refusing on your own? Aren’t you even going to ask Demmie?”

  “She’d haul off and hit me. Perhaps you’d like to try her. You wouldn’t believe how hard she can punch. She looks like a fashionable broad, and elegant, but she’s really a big honest hick.”

  I had my own reasons for giving him a soft answer. We were overnight guests here. I didn’t want to go at 2 a.m. to sit in the Pennsylvania waiting room. Entitled to my eight hours of oblivion and determined to have them, I got into bed in the smoky study through which the party had swirled. But now Demmie had put on her nightgown and was a changed person. An hour ago in a black chiffon dress and the hair brushed gold and long on her head and fastened with an ornament she was a young lady of breeding. Humboldt, when he was in a balanced state, loved to cite the important American social categories, and Demmie belonged to them all. “She’s pure Main Line. Quaker schools, Bryn Mawr. Real class,” Humboldt said. She had chatted with Little-wood, whose subject was Plautus, about Latin translation and New Testament Greek. I didn’t love the farmer’s daughter in Demmie less than the society girl. She now sat on the bed. Her toes were deformed by cheap shoes. Her large collarbones formed hollows. When they were children, she and her sister, similarly built, filled up these collarbone hollows with water and ran races.

  Anything to stave off sleep. Demmie took pills but she deeply feared to sleep. She said she had a hangnail and sat on the bed filing away, the long flexible file going zigzag. Suddenly lively, she faced me cross-legged with round knees and a show of thigh. In this position she released the salt female odor, the bacterial background of deep love. She said, “Kathleen shouldn’t have reached for Eubanks’s matches. I hope Humboldt didn’t hurt her, but she shouldn’t have done it.”

  “But Eubanks is an old friend.”

  “Humboldt’s old friend? He’s known him a long time—there’s a difference. It means something if a woman goes into a man’s pocket. And we saw her do it. ... I don’t completely blame Humboldt.”

  Demmie was often like this. Just as I was ready to close my eyes for the night, having had enough of my conscious and operating self, Demmie wanted to talk. At this hour she preferred exciting topics—sickness, murder, suicide, eternal punishment, and hellfire. She got into a state. Her hair bristled and her eyes deepened with panic and her deformed toes twisted in all directions. She then closed her long hands upon her smallish breasts. With baby tremors of the lip she sank at times into a preverbal baby stammer. It was now three o’clock in the morning and I thought I heard the depraved Littlewoods carrying on above us in the master bedroom, perhaps to give us an idea of what we were missing. This was probably imaginary.

  I rose, anyway, and took away Demmie’s nail file. I tucked her in. Her mouth was naively open as she gave up the file. I got her to lie down but she was disturbed. I could see that. As she laid her head on the pillow, in profile, one large lovely eye stared out childishly. “Off you go,” I said. She shut the staring eye. Her sleep was instantaneous and seemed deep.

  But in a few minutes I heard what I expected to hear—her night voice. It was low hoarse and deep almost mannish. She moaned. She spoke broken words. She did this almost every night. The voice expressed her terror of this strange place, the earth, and of this strange state, being. Laboring and groaning she tried to get out of it. This was the primordial Demmie beneath the farmer’s daughter beneath the teacher beneath the elegant Main Line horsewoman, Latinist, accomplished cocktail-sipper in black chiffon, with the upturned nose, this fashionable conversationalist. Thoughtful, I listened to this. I let her go on awhile, trying to comprehend. I pitied her and loved her. But then I put an end to it. I kissed her. She knew who it was. She pressed her toes to my shins and held me with powerful female arms. She cried “I love you” in the same deep voice, but her eyes were still shut blind. I think she never actually woke up.

  seventeen

  In May, when the Princeton term was ended, Humboldt and I met, as blood-brothers, for the last time.

  As deep as the huge cap of December blue behind me entering the window with thermal distortions from the sun, I lay on my Chicago sofa and saw again everything that had happened. One’s heart hurt from this sort of thing. One thought, How sad, about all this human nonsense which keeps us from the large truth. But perhaps I can get through it once and for all by doing what I am doing now.

  Very good, Broadway was the word then. I had a producer, a director, and an agent. I was part of the theater world, in Hum-boldt’s eyes. There were actresses who said “dahling” and kissed you when you met. There was a Hirschfeld caricature of me in the
Times
. Humboldt took much credit for this. By bringing me to Princeton he had put me in the majors. Through him I met useful people in the Ivy League. Besides, he felt I had modeled Von Trenck, my Prussian hero, on him. “But look out, Charlie,” he said. “Don’t be taken in by the Broadway glamour and the commercial stuff.”

  Humboldt and Kathleen descended on me in the repaired Buick. I was in a cottage on the Connecticut shore, down the road from Lampton, the director, making revisions under his guidance—writing the play he wanted, for that was what it amounted to. Demmie was with me every weekend, but the Fleishers arrived on a Wednesday, when I was alone. Humboldt had just given a reading at Yale and they were going home. We sat in the small stone kitchen drinking coffee and gin, having a reunion. Humboldt was being “good,” serious, high-minded. He had been reading
De Anima
and was full of ideas about the origins of thought. I noticed, however, that he didn’t let Kathleen out of his sight. She had to tell him where she was going. “I’m just getting my cardigan.” Even to go to the bathroom, she needed permission. Also he seemed to have punched her in the eye. She sat quietly and low in her chair, arms folded and long legs crossed, but she had a shiner. Humboldt finally spoke of it himself. “It wasn’t me this time,” he said. “You won’t believe it, Charlie, but she fell against the dashboard when I made a fast stop. Some clunk in a truck came barreling out of a side road and I had to jump the brakes.”

  Perhaps he hadn’t hit her, but he did watch her; he watched like a bailiff escorting a prisoner from one jail to another. He moved his chair all the while he was lecturing about
De Anima
, to make sure we didn’t exchange eye-signals. He laid it on so thick that we were bound to try to outwit him. And we did. We managed at last to have a few words at the clothesline in the garden. She had rinsed her stockings and came out into the sunshine to hang them. Humboldt was probably satisfying a natural need.

  “Did he sock you or not?”

  “No, I fell on the dashboard. But it’s hell, Charlie. Worse than ever.”

  The clothesline was old and dark gray. It had burst open and was giving up its white pith.

  “He says I’m carrying on with a critic, a young, unimportant, completely innocent fellow named Magnasco. Very nice, but my God! And I’m tired of being treated like a nymphomaniac and told how I’m doing it on fire escapes or standing up, in clothes closets, every chance I get. And at Yale he made me sit on the platform during his reading. Then he blamed me for showing my legs. At every service station he forces his way into the ladies’ room with me. I can’t go back to New Jersey with him.”

  “What will you do?” said eager, heart-melting, concerned Citrine.

  “Tomorrow when we get back to New York I’m going to get lost. I love him but I can’t take any more. I’m telling you to prepare you, because you guys love each other, and you’ll have to help him. He has some money. Hildebrand fired him. But he did get a Guggenheim, you know.”

  “I didn’t even know he applied.”

  “Oh he puts in for everything. . . . Now he’s watching us from the kitchen.”

  And there indeed was Humboldt bulging out the coppery webbing of the screen door like a fisherman’s strange catch.

  “Good luck.”

  As she went back to the house her legs were eagerly beaten by the grass of May. Through stripes of shrub shadow and country sunshine, the cat was strolling. The clothesline surrendered the pith of its soul, and Kathleen’s stockings, hung at the wide end, now suggested lust. Such was Humboldt’s effect. He came straight to me at the clothesline and ordered me to tell him what we had been talking about.

  “Oh lay off, will you Humboldt? Don’t force me into this neurotic superdrama.” I was appalled by what I foresaw. I wished they would go—pile into their Buick (more than ever the muddy Flanders Field staff car) and pull out, leaving me with my Trenck troubles, the tyranny of Lampton, and the clean Atlantic shore.

  But they stayed over. Humboldt didn’t sleep. The wooden treads of the backstairs creaked all night under his weight. The tap ran and the refrigerator door slammed. When I came into the kitchen in the morning I found that the quart of Beefeater’s gin, the house present they had brought was empty on the table. The cotton wads of his pill bottles were all over the place, like rabbit droppings.

  So Kathleen disappeared from Rocco’s Restaurant on Thompson Street and Humboldt went wild. He said she was with Mag-nasco, that Magnasco kept her hidden in his room at the Hotel Earle. Somewhere Humboldt obtained a pistol and he hammered on Magnasco’s door with the butt until he shredded the wood. Magnasco called the desk, and the desk sent for the cops, and Humboldt took off. But next day he jumped Magnasco on Sixth Avenue in front of Howard Johnson’s. A group of lesbians gotten up as longshoremen rescued the young man. They had been having ice-cream sodas, and they came out and broke up the fight, pinning Humboldt’s arms behind him. It was a blazing afternoon and the women prisoners at the detention center on Greenwich Avenue were shrieking from the open windows and unrolling toilet-paper streamers.

  Humboldt phoned me in the country and said, “Charlie, where is Kathleen?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Charlie, I think you do know. I saw her talking to you.”

  “But she didn’t tell me.”

  He hung up. Then Magnasco called. He said, “Mr. Citrine? Your friend is going to hurt me. I’ll have to swear out a warrant.”

  “Is it really that bad?”

  “You know how it is, people go further than they mean to, and then where are you? I mean, where am I? I’m calling because he threatens me in your name. He says you’ll get me if he doesn’t—his blood-brother.”

  “I won’t lay a hand on you,” I said. “Why don’t you leave town for a while?”

  “Leave?” said Magnasco. “I only just got here. Down from Yale.”

  I understood. He was on the make, had long prepared for his career.

  “The
Trib
is trying me out as a book reviewer.”

  “I know how it is. I have a show opening on Broadway. My first.”

  When I met Magnasco, he proved to be overweight, round-faced, young in calendar years only, steady, unflappable, born to make progress in cultural New York. “I won’t be driven out,” he said. “I’ll put him on a peace bond.”

  “Well, do you need my permission?” I said.

  “It won’t exactly make me popular in New York to do this to a poet.”

  I then said to Demmie, “Magnasco is afraid of getting in bad with the New York culture crowd by calling the cops.”

  Night-moaning, hell-fearing, pill-addicted Demmie was also a most practical person, a supervisor and programmer of genius. When she was in her busy mood, domineering and protecting me, I used to think what a dolls’ generalissimo she must have been in childhood. “And where you’re concerned,” she would say, “I’m a tiger-mother and a regular Fury. Isn’t it about a month since you saw Humboldt? He’s staying away. That means he’s beginning to blame you. Poor Humboldt, he’s flipped out, hasn’t he! We have to help him. If he keeps attacking this Magnasco character they’re going to lock him up. If the police put him in Bellevue, what you have to do is get ready to bail him out. He’ll have to be sobered up, calmed down, and cooled off. The best place for that is Payne Whitney. Listen, Charlie, Ginnie’s cousin Albert is the admitting physician at Payne Whitney. Bellevue is hell. We should raise some money and transfer him to Payne Whitney. Maybe we could get him a sort of scholarship.”