Humboldt's Gift (33 page)

  “I wish I knew what the hell made you look so pleased,” said Srole.

  “Only a thought.”

  “Lucky you, with your nice thoughts.”

  “But when do we go in?” I said.

  “When the other side comes out.”

  “Oh, are Denise and Pinsker talking to Urbanovich now? Then I think I’ll go and relax in the courtroom, my feet are beginning to hurt.” A little of Tomchek and Srole went a long way. I wasn’t going to stand chatting with them until we were summoned. My consciousness couldn’t take much more of them. They quickly tired me.

  I refreshed myself by sitting on a wooden bench. I had no book to read, I took this opportunity to meditate briefly. The object I chose for meditation was a bush covered with roses. I often summoned up this bush, but sometimes it made its appearance independently. It was filled, it was dense, it was choked with tiny dark garnet roses and fresh healthy leaves. So for the moment I thought “rose”—-”rose” and nothing else. I visualized the twigs, the roots, the harsh fuzz of the new growth hardening into spikes, plus all the botany I could remember: phloem xylem cambium chloroplasts soil sun water chemistry, attempting to project myself into the very plant and to think how its green blood produced a red flower. Ah, but new growth in rosebushes was always red before it turned green. I recalled very accurately the inset spiral order of rose petals, the whitey faint bloom over the red and the slow opening that revealed the germinating center. I concentrated all the faculties of my soul on this vision and immersed it in the flowers. Then I saw, next to these flowers, a human figure standing. The plant, said Rudolf Steiner, expressed the pure passionless laws of growth, but the human being, aiming at higher perfection, assumed a greater burden—instincts, desires, emotions. So a bush was a sleeping life. But mankind took a chance on the passions. The wager was that the higher powers of the soul could cleanse these passions. Cleansed, they could be reborn in a finer form. The red of the blood was a symbol of this cleansing process. But even if all this wasn’t so, to consider the roses always put me into a kind of bliss.

  After a while I contemplated something else. I visualized an old black iron Chicago lamppost from forty years back, the type with a lid like a bullfighter’s hat or a cymbal. Now it was night, there was a blizzard. I was a young boy and I watched from my bedroom window. It was a winter gale, the wind and snow banged the iron lamp, and the roses rotated under the light. Steiner recommended the contemplation of a cross wreathed with roses but for reasons of perhaps Jewish origin I preferred a lamppost. The object didn’t matter as long as you went out of the sensible world. When you got out of the sensible world, you might feel parts of the soul awakening that never had been awake before.

  I had made quite a lot of progress in this exercise when Denise came out of the chambers and passed through the swinging gate to join me.

  This woman, the mother of my children, though she made so much trouble for me, often reminded me of something Samuel Johnson had said about pretty ladies: they might be foolish, they might be wicked, but beauty was of itself very estimable. Denise was in this way estimable. She had big violet eyes and a slender nose. Her skin was slightly downy—you could see this down when the light was right. Her hair was piled on top of her head and gave it too much weight. If she hadn’t been beautiful you wouldn’t have noticed the disproportion. The very fact that she wasn’t aware of the top-heavy effect of her coiffure seemed at times a proof that she was a bit nutty. At court, having dragged me here with her suit, she always wanted td be chummy. And as she was unusually pleasant today I figured she had had a successful session with Urbanovich. The fact that she was going to beat me like a dog released her affections. For she was fond of me. She said, “Ah, you’re waiting?” and her voice was high and tremulous, breaking slightly, but also militant. The weak, at war, never know how hard they are hitting you. She wasn’t of course so weak. The strength of the social order was on her side. But she always felt weak, she was a burdened woman. Getting out of bed to make breakfast was almost more than she could face. Taking a cab to the hairdresser was also very hard. The beautiful head was a burden to the beautiful neck. So she sat down beside me, sighing. She hadn’t been to the beauty salon lately. When her hair was thinned out by the hairdresser she didn’t look quite so huge-eyed and goofy. There were holes in her stockings, for she always wore rags to court. “I’m absolutely exhausted,” she said. “I never get any sleep before these court days.”

  I muttered, “Dreadfully sorry.”

  “You don’t seem so well yourself.”

  “The girls tell me sometimes, ‘Daddy, you look like a million dollars—green and wrinkled.’ How are they, Denise?”

  “As well as they can be. They miss you.”

  “That’s normal, I suppose.”

  “Nothing is normal for them. They miss you painfully.”

  “You are to sorrow what Vermont is to syrup.”

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “Only ‘okay,’ or ‘not okay,’ “ I said.

  “Syrup! As soon as something enters your head you blurt it out. That’s your big weakness, your worst temptation.”

  This was my day to see the other fellow’s point of view. How does anyone strengthen himself? Denise had it right, you know— by overcoming the persistent temptation. There’ve been times when just because I kept my mouth shut and didn’t say what I thought, I felt my strength increasing. Still, I don’t seem to know what I think till I see what I say.

  “The girls are making Christmas plans. You’re supposed to take them to the pageant at the Goodman Theater.”

  “No, nothing doing. That’s your idea.”

  “Are you too big a figure to take them to a show like any ordinary father? You told them you would.”

  “Me? Never. You did that yourself, and now you imagine that I told them.”

  “You’re going to be in town, aren’t you?”

  I wasn’t in fact. I was leaving on Friday. I hadn’t gotten around to informing Denise of this, and I said nothing now.

  “Or are you planning a trip with Renata Fat-Tits?”

  On this level, I was no match for Denise. Again, Renata! She wouldn’t even allow the children to play with little Roger Koffritz. She once said, “Later they’ll become immune to that kind of whore influence. But they came home once shaking their little behinds and I knew you had broken your promise to keep them away from Renata.” Denise’s information network was unusually effective. She knew all about Harold Flonzaley, for instance. “How is your rival the undertaker?” she sometimes asked me. For Renata’s suitor Flonzaley owned a chain of funeral parlors. One of her ex-husband’s business connections, Flonzaley had a ton of money, but his degree from the state university, it couldn’t be denied, was in embalming. This gave our romance a gloomy tinge. I quarreled once with Renata because her apartment was filled with flowers and I knew that they were surplus funeral flowers abandoned by heartbroken mourners and delivered in Flonzaley’s special flower-Cadillac. I made her throw them down the rubbish chute. Flonzaley was still wooing her.

  “Are you working at all?” said Denise.

  “Not too much.”

  “Just playing paddle ball with Langobardi, relaxing with the Mafia? I know you aren’t seeing any of your serious friends on the Midway. Durnwald would give you what-for but he’s in Scotland. Too bad. I know he doesn’t like Fat-Tits much more than I do. And he told me once how he disapproved of your buddy Thaxter, and your being involved in
The Ark
. You’ve spent a barrel of money probably on that magazine, and where is the first issue?
Nessuno sa
.” Denise was an opera lover and she took a season ticket at the Lyric and quoted often from Mozart or from Verdi.
Nessuno sa
was from
Cosi Fan Tutte
. Where does one find the fidelity of women, sings Mozart’s worldly wiseman—
dove sia? dove sia? Nes-su-no sa
! Again she was referring to the curious delinquency of Renata, and I knew it perfectly well.

  “As a matter of fact, I’m expecting Thaxter. Maybe today.”

  “Sure, he’ll blow into town like the entire cast of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
. You’d rather foot his bills than give the money to your children.”

  “My children have plenty of money. You have the house and hundreds of thousands. You got all the
Trench
money, you and the lawyers.”

  “I can’t keep that barn going. The fourteen-foot ceilings. You haven’t seen the fuel bills. But then again you could squander your money on worse people than Thaxter, and you do. Thaxter at least has some style. He took us to Wimbledon in plenty of style. Remember? With a hamper. With champagne and smoked salmon from Harrods. From what I understand, it was the CIA that was picking up his tab in those days. Why not get the CIA to pay for
The Ark
?”

  “Why the CIA?”

  “I read your prospectus. I thought this was just the kind of serious intellectual magazine the CIA could use abroad for propaganda. You imagine you’re some kind of cultural statesman.”

  “All I wanted to say in the prospectus was that America didn’t have to fight scarcity and we all felt guilty before people who still had to struggle for bread and freedom in the old way, the old basic questions. We weren’t starving, we weren’t bugged by the police, locked up in madhouses for our ideas, arrested, deported, slave laborers sent to die in concentration camps. We were spared the holocausts and nights of terror. With our advantages we should be formulating the new basic questions for mankind. But instead we sleep. Just sleep and sleep, and eat and play and fuss and sleep again.”

  “When you get solemn you’re a riot, Charlie. And now you’re going in for mysticism, as well as keeping that fat broad, as well as becoming an athlete, as well as dressing like a dude—all symptoms of mental and physical decline. I’m so sorry, really. Not just because I’m the mother of your children, but because you once had brains and talent. You might have stayed productive if the Kennedys had lived. Their kind of action kept you responsible and sane.”

  “You sound like the late Humboldt. He was going to be Czar of Culture under Stevenson.”

  “The old Humboldt hang-up, too. You’ve still got that. He was the last serious friend you had,” she said.

  In these conversations, always somewhat dreamlike, Denise believed that she was concerned, solicitous, even loving. The fact that she had gone into judge’s chambers and dug another legal pit for me was irrelevant. In her view we were like England and France, dear enemies. For her it was a special relationship, permitting intelligent exchanges.

  “People tell me about this Dr. Scheldt, your anthroposophist guru. They say he’s very kind and nice. But his daughter is a real little popsie. A small opportunist. She wants you to marry her, too. You’re a fearful challenge to females who have dreams of glory about you. But you can always hide behind poor Demmie Vonghel.”

  Denise was pelting me with the ammunition she stored up daily in her mind and heart. Again, however, her information was accurate. Like Renata and the old Señora, Miss Scheldt also spoke of May-December marriages, of the happiness and creativity of Picasso’s declining years, of Casals and Charlie Chaplin and Justice Douglas.

  “Renata doesn’t want you to be a mystic, does she?”

  “Renata doesn’t meddle that way. I’m not a mystic. Anyway I don’t know why mystic should be such a bad word. It doesn’t mean much more than the word religion, which some people still speak of with respect. What does religion say? It says that there’s something in human beings beyond the body and brain and that we have ways of knowing that go beyond the organism and its senses. I’ve always believed that. My misery comes, maybe, from ignoring my own metaphysical hunches. I’ve been to college so I know the educated answers. Test me on the scientific world-view and I’d score high. But it’s just head stuff.”

  “You’re a born crank, Charlie. When you said you were going to write that essay on boredom, I thought, There he goes! Now you’re degenerating quickly, without me. Sometimes I feel you might be certifiable or committable. Why don’t you go back to the Washington-in-the-Sixties book? The stuff you published in magazines was fine. You’ve told me lots more that never got into print. If you’ve lost your notes, I could remind you. I can still straighten you out, Charlie.”

  “You think you can?”

  “I understand the mistakes we both made. And the way you live is too grotesque—-all these girls, and the athletics and trips, and now the anthroposophy. Your friend Durnwald is upset about you. And I know your brother Julius is worried. Look, Charlie, why don’t you marry me again? For starters we could stop the legal fight. We should become reunited.”

  “Is this a serious proposition?”

  “It’s what the girls want more than anything. Think it over. You’re not exactly leading a life of joy. You’re in bad shape. I’d be taking a risk.” She stood up and opened her purse. “Here are a few letters that came to the old address.”

  I looked at the postmarks. “They’re months old. You might have turned them over before, Denise.”

  “What’s the difference? You get too much mail as it is. You don’t answer most of it, and what good does it do you?”

  “You’ve opened this one and resealed it. It’s from Humboldt’s widow.”

  “Kathleen? They were divorced years before he died. Anyway, here comes your legal talent.”

  Tomchek and Srole entered the courtroom, and from the other side came Cannibal Pinsker in a bright yellow double-knit jazzy suit and a large yellow cravat that lay on his shirt like a cheese omelette, and tan shoes in two tones. His head was brutally hairy. He was grizzled and he carried himself like an old prizefighter. What might he have been in an earlier incarnation, I wondered. I wondered about us all.

  twenty-two

  We were not meeting with Denise and Pinsker after all, only with the judge. Tomchek, Srole, and I entered his chambers. Judge Urbanovich, a Croatian, perhaps a Serbian, was plump and bald, a fatty, and somewhat flat-faced. But he was cordial, he was very civilized. He offered us a cup of coffee. I referred his cordiality to the Department of Vigilance. “No, thanks,” I said.