Humboldt's Gift (69 page)

  “Don’t say no to everything.” This was Cantabile who had taken the phone. “And listen, Charlie, I should get a cut on the other thing because if it wasn’t for me none of this would have started. Besides, you owe me for planes, taxis, hotels, and meals.”

  “Mr. Barbash will settle your bill,” I said. “Now go away, Cantabile, our relationship has drawn to a close. Let’s become strangers again.”

  “Oh, you ungrateful, intellectual, ass-hole bastard,” he said.

  Barbash recovered the phone. “Where shall we be in touch? Are you staying in Madrid for a while?”

  “I may fly down to Almería for a week or so, and then return to the USA,” I said. “I’ve got a houseful of things in Chicago to dispose of. Children to see, and I’ve got to talk to Mr. Fleisher’s uncle. When I’ve taken care of these necessary items and tied up a few loose ends I’m coming back to Europe. To take up a different kind of life,” I added.

  Inquire a little and I’ll tell you all. I was still explaining myself in full to people who couldn’t have cared less.

  forty-one

  So this this was how, in warm April, it happened that Waldemar Wald and I, together with Menasha Klinger, reburied Humboldt and his mother side by side in new graves at the Valhalla Cemetery. I took a very sad pleasure in doing this handsomely, in real style. Humboldt had been buried not in potter’s field but far out in Deathsville, New Jersey, one of those vast, necropolitan developments described by Koffritz, Renata’s first husband, to old Myron Swiebel in the steam room of the Division Street Bath. “They cheat,” he had said about those places, “they skimp, they don’t give the statutory number of feet. You lie there with your legs up, short-sheeted. Aren’t you entitled to a full stretch for eternity?”

  Investigating, I found that Humboldt’s funeral had been arranged by someone at the Belisha Foundation. Some sensitive person there, subordinate to Longstaff, recalling that Humboldt had once been an employee, had gotten him out of the morgue and had given him a send-off from the Riverside Chapel.

  So Humboldt was exhumed and brought in a new casket over the George Washington Bridge. I had stopped for the old boys at their recently rented flat on the Upper West Side. A woman came to cook and clean for them and they were properly fixed up. Turning over a large sum to Uncle Waldemar made me uneasy and I told him so. He answered, “Charlie, my boy, listen —all the horses I ever knew became spooks years ago. And I wouldn’t even know how to contact a bookie. It’s all Puerto Rican up there in the old neighborhood now. Anyway, Menasha is keeping an eye on me. I want to tell you, kid, not many younger fellows would have given me the full split the way you did. If anything is left over at the end, you’ll get it back.”

  We waited in the hired limousine at the New York end of the cabled bridge, the Hudson before us, till the hearse crossed over and we followed it to the cemetery. A blustery day might have been easier to tolerate than this heavy watered-silk blue close day. In the cemetery we wound about among dark trees. These should have been giving shade already but they stood brittle and schematic among the graves. For Humboldt’s mother a new coffin also was provided, and this was already in position, ready to be lowered. Two attendants were opening the hearse as we came around to the back, moving slowly. Waldemar was wearing all the mourning he could find in his gambler’s wardrobe. Hat, trousers, and shoes were black, but his sport coat had large red houndstooth checks and in the sunshine of a delayed overwarm spring the fuzz was shining. Menasha, sad, smiling in thick glasses, felt his way over grass and gravel, his feet all the more cautious because he was looking up into the trees. He couldn’t have been seeing much, a few sycamores and elms and birds and the squirrels coming and going in their fits-and-starts fashion. It was a low moment. There was a massive check threatened, as if a general strike against nature might occur. What if blood should not circulate, if food should not digest, breath fail to breathe, if the sap should not overcome the heaviness of the trees? And death, death, death, death, like so many stabs, like murder—the belly, the back, the breast and heart. This was a moment I could scarcely bear. Humboldt’s coffin was ready to move. “Pallbearers?” said one of the funeral directors. He looked the three of us over. Not much manpower here. Two old fuddyduddies and a distracted creature not far behind them in age. We took honorific positions along the casket. I held a handle—my first contact with Humboldt. There was very little weight within. Of course I no longer believed that any human fate could be associated with such remains and superfluities. The bones were very possibly the signature of spiritual powers, the projection of the cosmos in certain calcium formations. But perhaps even such elegant white shapes, thigh bones, ribs, knuckles, skull, were gone. Exhuming, the grave diggers might have shoveled together certain tatters and sooty lumps of human origin, not much of the charm, the verve and feverish invention, the calamity-making craziness of Humboldt. Humboldt, our pal, our nephew and brother, who loved the Good and the Beautiful, and one of whose slighter inventions was entertaining the public on Third Avenue and the Champs-Elysées and earning, at this moment, piles of dollars for everyone.

  The laborers took over from us, setting Humboldt’s coffin on the canvas bands of the electrical lowering device. The dead were now side by side in their bulky boxes.

  “Did you know Bess?” said Waldemar.

  “Once I saw her, on West End Avenue,” I said.

  He may have been thinking of money taken from her purse and lost in horse races long ago, of quarrels and scandalous scenes and curses.

  In the long years since I had last attended a burial, many mechanical improvements had been made. There stood a low yellow compact machine which apparently did the digging and bull-dozed back the earth. It was also equipped as a crane. Seeing this, I started off on the sort of reflection Humboldt himself had trained me in. The machine in every square inch of metal was a result of collaboration of engineers and other artificers. A system built upon the discoveries of many great minds was always of more strength than what is produced by the mere workings of any one mind, which of itself can do little. So spoke old Dr. Samuel Johnson, and added in the same speech, that the French writers were superficial because they were not scholars and had proceeded upon the mere power of their own minds. Well, Humboldt had admired these same French writers and he too had proceeded for some time upon the mere power of his own mind. Then he began to look, himself, toward the collective phenomena. As his own self, he had opened his mouth and uttered some delightful verses. But then his heart failed him. Ah, Humboldt, how sorry I am. Humboldt, Humboldt—and this is what becomes of us.

  The funeral director said, “Does anybody have a prayer to say?”

  Nobody seemed to have or to know a prayer. But Menasha said he would like to sing something. He then did so. His style had not changed.

  He announced, “I’m going to sing a selection from
Aida
, ‘In questa tomba oscura.’ “ Aged Menasha now prepared himself. He turned up his face. The Adam’s apple thus revealed was not what it had been when he was a young man operating a punch press in a Chicago factory, but it was there still. So was the old excitement. He clasped his hands, rising on his toes, and as emotionally as in our kitchen on Rice Street, weaker in voice, missing the tune still, and crowing but moved, terribly moved, he sang his aria. But this was only the warm-up. When he was done, he declared that he was going to perform “Coin’ Home,” an old American spiritual—used by DvoMk in the
New World
Symphony, he added as a program note. Then, oh Lord! I remembered that he had been homesick for Ypsilanti, and that he had pined for his sweetheart, back in the Twenties, longing for his girl, singing “Goin’ home, goin’ home, I’m a’goin’ home,” until my mother said, “For heaven’s sake, go then.” And when he came back with his obese, gentle, weeping bride, this girl who sat in the tub, her arms too fat and defeating her efforts to bring the water as high as her head, Mama came into the bathroom and washed her hair for her, and toweled it.

  They were all gone but ourselves.

  And looking into open graves was no pleasanter than it had ever been. Brown clay and lumps and pebbles—why must it all be so heavy. It was too much weight, oh, far too much to bear. I observed, however, another innovation in burials. Within the grave was an open concrete case. The coffins went down and then the yellow machine moved forward and the little crane, making a throaty whir, picked up a concrete slab and laid it atop the concrete case. So the coffin was enclosed and the soil did not come directly upon it. But then, how did one get out? One didn’t, didn’t, didn’t! You stayed, you stayed! There was a dry light grating as of crockery when contact was made, a sort of sugar-bowl sound. Thus, the condensation of collective intelligences and combined ingenuities, its cables silently spinning, dealt with the individual poet. The same was done to the poet’s mother. A gray lid was set upon her too and then Waldemar took the spade and weakly dug out clods and threw one into each grave. The old gambler wept and we turned aside to spare him. He stood beside the graves while the bulldozer began its work.

  Menasha and I went toward the limousine. The side of his foot brushed away some of last autumn’s leaves and he said, looking through his goggles, “What’s this, Charlie, a spring flower?”

  “It is. I guess it’s going to happen after all. On a warm day like this everything looks ten times deader.”

  “So it’s a little flower,” Menasha said. “They used to tell one about a kid asking his grumpy old man when they were walking in the park, ‘What’s the name of this flower, Papa?’ and the old guy is peevish and he yells, ‘How should I know? Am I in the millinery business?’ Here’s another, but what do you suppose they’re called, Charlie?”

  “Search me,” I said. “I’m a city boy myself. They must be crocuses.”

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