Humboldt's Gift (48 page)

  “You have read it then,” I said.

  “Hell, sure I’ve read it. What the hell else have I got to do? I couldn’t make heads or tails out of it.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of doing you out of anything,” I said. “If it has got value I’ll tell you honestly.”

  “Why don’t we get a lawyer to draw up a legal document?” said Waldemar.

  He was Humboldt’s uncle all right. I became very persuasive. I am never so reasonable as when I badly want something. I can make it seem natural justice itself that I should have it. “We can make things as legal as you like,” I said. “But shouldn’t I read it all? How can I tell without examining it?”

  “Then read it here,” said Waldemar.

  Menasha said, “You’ve always been a sport, Charlie. Take a gamble.”

  “Along that line my record isn’t so hot,” said Waldemar. I thought he would cry, he sounded so shaky. So little stood between him and death, you see. On the bald harsh crimson of the threadbare carpet, a pale patch of weak December warmth said, “Don’t cry, old boy.” Inaudible storms of light, ninety-three million miles away, used a threadbare Axminster, a scrap of human manufacture, to deliver a message through the soiled window of a nursing home. My own heart became emotional. I wished to convey something important. We have to go through the bitter gates of death, I wanted to say to him, and give back these loaned minerals that comprise us, but I want to tell you, brother Waldemar, that I deeply suspect things do not end there. The thought of the life we are now leading may pain us as greatly later on as the thought of death pains us now.

  Well, finally I got around him with my good sense and honesty and we all went down on our knees and began to pull all sorts of stuff from under his bed—bedroom slippers, an old bowling ball, a toy baseball game, playing cards, odd dice, cardboard boxes, and valises, and, finally, a relic that I could identify—Humboldt’s briefcase. It was Humboldt’s old bag with the frayed straps, the one that was always ‘riding, crammed with books and pill bottles, in the back seat of his Buick.

  “Wait, I’ve got my files in there,” Waldemar said, fussing. “You’ll screw it all up. I’ll do this.”

  Renata, on the floor with the rest of us, wiped the dust with paper tissues. She was always saying, “Here’s a Kleenex,” and producing paper tissues Waldemar removed several insurance policies and a bundle of computer-perforated Social Security cards. There were several horse photographs, which he identified as an almost complete set of Kentucky Derby winners. Then like a blindish postman, he went through numerous envelopes. “Quicker!” I wanted to say.

  “This is the one,” he said.

  There was my name written in Humboldt’s tight, scratchy hand.

  “What’s in it? Let me see,” said Renata.

  I took it from him, an outsized heavy manila envelope.

  “You’ll have to give me a receipt,” said Waldemar.

  “Certainly I will. Renata, would you mind making out a form? Like, received from Mr. Waldemar Wald, papers willed to me by Von Humboldt Fleisher. I’ll sign it.”

  “Papers of what kind? What’s actually here?”

  “What’s in them?” said Waldemar. “One thing is a long personal letter to Mr. Citrine. Then a couple of sealed envelopes which I never broke open at all because there are instructions that say if you open them something goes wrong with the copyright. Anyhow, they’re duplicates, or duplicates of duplicates. I can’t tell you. Most of it doesn’t add up, to me. Maybe for you it will. Anyhow, if I, the last member of my family, can tell you what’s on my mind, my dead are all over the place, one grave here, and the other to hell and gone, my sister in that joint they call Valhalla for the German Jews and my nephew buried in potter’s field. What I really want is to reunite the family again.”

  Menasha said, “It bugs Waldemar that Humboldt is buried in a bad place. Way out in no man’s land.”

  “If there’s any value in this legacy, the first money should be spent to dig the kid up and move him. It doesn’t have to be the Valhalla. That was my sister keeping up with the Joneses. She had a thing about them German Jews. But I want to bring us all together. Gather up my dead,” the old horse-player said.

  This solemnity was unexpected. Renata and I looked at each other.

  “Count on Charlie to do right by you,” said Menasha.

  “I’ll write and tell you what I find in these papers,” I said. “And just as soon as we get back from Europe, I promise you we’ll attend to everything. You can start lining up a cemetery. Even if these papers have no commercial value I’d be perfectly willing to pick up the burial tab.”

  “Just what I told you,” said Menasha to Waldemar. “A kid like this kid was bound to grow up into a gentleman.”

  We now went out. I held each of the old boys by a wasted arm, by the big double knobs of the elbow where radius and ulna meet, promising to stay in touch. Sauntering behind us, Renata with her white face and great hat was incomparably more substantial in person than any of us. She said unexpectedly, “If Charles says it, Charles’ll do it. We’ll go away and he’ll be thinking of you.”

  In a corner of the cold porch stood the wheelchairs, glittering, lightweight, tubular, stainless metal, with batlike folds. “I wonder if anyone would object if I sat in one of these wheelchairs,” I said.

  I got into one of them and said to Renata, “Give us a ride.”

  The old men didn’t quite know what to make of my being trundled back and forth on the stoop by this large, laughing, brilliant woman with the wonderful teeth. “Don’t carry on like a fool. You’ll offend them, Renata,” I said. “Just push.”

  “These damn handles are damn cold,” she said.

  She drew on the long gloves with charming swagger, I must say.

  twenty-eight

  In the racketing speed of the howling, weeping subway I began to read the long letter, the preface to Humboldt’s gift, handing on the onionskin pages to Renata. Incurious after she had glanced at a few of these, she said, “When you get to the story, let me know. I’m not big on philosophy.” I can’t say that I blame her. He was not
her
precious friend hid in death’s dateless night. There was no reason why she should be moved, as I was. She made no effort to enter into my feelings, nor did I want her to try.

  “Deer Shoveleer,” wrote Humboldt. “I am in a bad position, getting more sane as I become weaker. By a damn peculiar arrangement, lunatics always have energy to burn. And if old William James was right, and happiness is living at the energetic top and we are here to pursue happiness, then madness is pure bliss and also has supreme political sanction.” This was the sort of thing that Renata objected to. I agree that it was not a restful habit of mind. “I am living in a bad place,” he went on. “And eating bad meals. I’ve now eaten sixty or seventy delicatessen dinners in a row. You can’t get sublime art on a diet like this. On the other hand pastrami and peppery potato salad seem to nourish calm judgment. I don’t go out to dinner. I stay in my room. There is a colossal interval between supper and bedtime and I sit beside a drawn window shade (who can look out eighteen hours a day?) correcting certain old mistakes. It occurs to me sometimes that I may be petitioning death to lay off because I am deep in good works. Would I be trying, also, to keep the upper hand in dying as in the sexual act?—Do this, do that, hold still, wriggle now, kiss my ear, graze my back with your nails, but don’t touch my testicles. However, death is the passionate party in this case.”

  “Poor fellow, I can see him now. I understand his type,” said Renata.

  “So, Charlie, as these weaker saner days come and go I think often about you, and think with end-of-the-line lucidity. That I wronged you is very true. I knew even when I loused you up so elaborately and fiercely that you were in Chicago trying to do me good, consulting people behind my back to get me jobs. I called you a sell-out, Judas, fink, suck-ass, climber, hypocrite. I had first a deep black rage against you, and then a red hot rage. Both were very luxurious. The fact is that I was remorseful about the blood-brother check. I knew you were mourning the death of Demmie Vonghel. I was panting with cunning and I put one over on you. You were a Success. And if that weren’t enough and you wanted to be a big moral figure as well, then the hell with you, it was going to cost you a few thousand bucks. It was entrapment. I was going to give you a chance to forgive me. In forgiving you would be lying your head off. This fool kindliness would damage your sense of reality, and with your sense of reality damaged you’d be suffering what I suffered. All this crazy intricacy was unnecessary, of course. You were going to suffer anyway because you were stricken with the glory and the gold. Your giddy flight through the florid heavens of success, and so on! Your innate sense of truth, if nothing else, would make you sick. But my ‘reasoning,’ in endless formulae like chemistry formulae on a college blackboard, put me into swoons of rapture. I was manic. I was chattering from the dusty top of my crazy head. Afterward I was depressed and silent for long, long days. I lay in the cage. Grim gorilla days.

  “I ask myself why you figured so prominently in my obsessions and fixations. You may be one of those people who arouse family emotions, you’re a son-and-brother type. Mind, you want to arouse feeling but not necessarily to return it. The idea is that the current should flow your way. You stimulated the blood-brother oath. I was certainly wild, but I acted on a suggestion emanating from you. Nevertheless, in the words of the crooner, ‘With all your faults, I love you still.’ You are a promissory nut, that’s all.

  “Let me say a word about money. When I used your blood-brother check, I didn’t expect it to clear the bank. I put it through, outraged because you didn’t come to see me at Bellevue. I was suffering; you didn’t draw near, as a loving friend should I decided to punish hurt and fine you. You accepted the penalty, and therefore the sin, too. You borrowed my spirit to put into Trenck. My ghost was a Broadway star. All this daylight delusion, cracked, spoiled, and dirty! I don’t know how else to put it. Your girl died in the jungle. She wouldn’t let you come to Belle-vue—I found that out. Oh! the might of money and the entanglement of art with it—the dollar as the soul’s husband: a marriage nobody has had the curiosity to study.

  “And do you know what I did with the six thousand bucks? I bought an Oldsmobile with part of it. What I thought I was going to do with this big powerful car on Greenwich Street, I can’t tell you. It cost me lots of dough to keep it in a garage, more than the rent in my fifth-floor walk-up. And what happened to this automobile? I had to be hospitalized and when I got out, after a course of shock treatments, I couldn’t remember where I left it. I couldn’t find the claim check, or the registration either. I had to forget about it. But for a while I drove a hell of a car. I became capable of observing some of my own symptoms. My eyelids became deep violet with manic insomnia. Late at night I drove past the Belasco Theatre with some buddies and I said, ‘There’s the hit that paid for this powerful machine.’ I declare I had it in for you because you thought I was going to be the great American poet of the century. You came down from Madison, Wisconsin, and told me so. But I wasn’t! And how many people were waiting for that poet! How many souls hoped for the strength and sweetness of visionary words to purge consciousness of its stale dirt, to learn from a poet what had happened to the three-fourths of life that are obviously missing! But during these last years I haven’t been able to even read poetry, much less write it. Opening the
Phaedrus
a few months ago, I just couldn’t do it. I broke down. My gears are stripped. My lining is shot. It is all shattered. I didn’t have the strength to bear Plato’s beautiful words, and started to cry. The original, fresh self isn’t there any more. But then I think, Maybe I can recover. If I play it smart. Playing it smart means simpler kinds of enjoyment. Blake had it right with Enjoyment the food of Intellect. And if the intellect can’t digest meat (the
Phaedrus
) you coddle it with zwieback and warm milk.”

  When I read his words about the original fresh self, I began to cry myself, and big benign Renata shook her head when she observed this as if to say, “Men!” As if to say, “These poor mysterious monsters. You work your way down into the labyrinth and there you find the minotaur breaking his heart over a letter.” But I saw Humboldt in the days of his youth, covered in rainbows, uttering inspired words, affectionate, intelligent. In those days his evil was only an infinitesimal black point, an amoeba. The mention of zwieback brought back to me, also, the pretzel he was chewing on the curb on that hot day. On that day I made a poor showing. I behaved very badly. I should have gone up to him. I should have taken his hand. I should have kissed his face. But is it true that such actions are effective? And he was dreadful. His head was all gray webbing, like an infested bush. His eyes were red and his big body was floundering in the gray suit. He looked like an old bull bison on his last legs, and I beat it. Maybe that was the very day on which he wrote this beautiful letter to me. “Now come on, kid,” said Renata, kindly. “Dry your eyes.” She gave me a fragrant hankie, oddly redolent, as if she kept it not in her pocketbook but between her legs. I put it to my face and curiously enough it did something, it gave me some comfort. That young woman had a good understanding of certain fundamentals.

  “This morning,” Humboldt went on, “the sun was bright. For certain of the living it was a very fine day. Though without sleep for several nights I remembered how it used to be to bathe and shave and breakfast and go into the world. A mild lemon light rinsed the streets. (Hope for this wild combined human operation called America?) I thought I would stroll to Brentano’s and look into a copy of Keats’s
Letters
. During the night I had thought of something Keats had said about Robert Burns. How a luxurious imagination deadens its delicacy in vulgarity and in things attainable. For the first Americans were surrounded by thick forests, and then they were surrounded by things attainable, and these were just as thick. The problem became one of faith—a faith in the equal sovereignty of the imagination. Standing at Brentano’s I started to copy out this sentence but a clerk came up to me and took the Keats
Letters
away. He thought I was from the Bowery. So I went out, and that was the end of the fine day. I felt like Emil Jannings in one of his pictures. The former tycoon ruined by drink and whores comes home an old bummer and tries to peep into the window of his own house where his daughter’s wedding is being celebrated. The cop makes him move on, and so he shuffles away and a cello plays Massenet’s ‘Elégie.’