The Collected Stories Of Saul Bellow (34 page)

Having done what you could, you went ahead with your life: showered and powdered with talcum in the morning, put on underthings and stockings, chose a skirt and blouse for the day, made up your face for the office, took in the paper, and, if Wilder was sleeping in (he did often), ground your coffee and as the water dripped turned the pages of the
Times
_ professionally. For a group of magazines owned by a publishing corporation, she was the lady overseeing women’s matters. Almost too influential to have a personal life, as she sometimes observed to Ms. Wong. High enough in the power structure, you can be excused from having one, “an option lots of people are glad to exercise.”

Nobody called for the money envelope. Marta Elvia’s instructions were to give it to Gina only. After a period of keen interest, Clara stopped asking about it. Gottschalk, doing little, sent an occasional memo: “Status quo unchanged.” To go with his Latin, Clara figured that Gina had found a modus vivendi with her young Haitian. The weeks, week after week, subdued Clara. You can say that you’re waiting only if there is something definite to wait for. During this time it often seemed there wasn’t anything. And, “I never feel so bad as when the life I lead stops being characteristic—when it could be anybody else’s life,” she told Laura Wong.

But coming home one afternoon after a session with Dr. Gladstone (things were so bad that she was seeing him regularly again), she entered her bedroom for an hour’s rest before the kids returned from ballet class. She had dropped her shoes and was crawling toward the pillows, her mouth open in the blindness of fatigue, surrendering to the worst of feelings, when she saw that her ring had been placed on the night table. It had been set on a handkerchief, a new object from a good shop. She slipped on her ring and lunged for the phone across the bed, rapidly punching out Marta Elvia’s number.

“Marta Elvia,” she said, “has anybody been here today? Did anybody come to leave an article for me?” Fifteen years in the U. S. and the woman still spoke incomplete English. “Listen,” said Clara. “Did Gina come here today? Did you or anybody let Gina into the apartment?… No? Somebody did come in, and Gina gave up her house keys when she left…. Sure she could have made a duplicate—she or her boyfriend…. Of course I should have changed the lock…. No, nothing was taken. On the contrary, the person gave back something. I’m glad I didn’t change the lock.”

Now Marta Elvia was upset that an outside somebody had got in. Security in this building was one hundred percent. She was sending her husband up to make sure the door hadn’t been jimmied open.

“No, no!” said Clara. “There hasn’t been illegal entry. What a wild idea!”

Her own ideas at this moment were not less wild. She rang Gina’s number in East Harlem. What she got was an answering machine, from which came Frederic’s voice, whose Frenchy slickness was offensive. (Clara disliked those telephone devices anyway, and her prejudice extended to the sound of the signal—in this instance a pig squeal.) “This is Mrs. Wilder Velde calling Miss Wegman.” Inasmuch as Gina might have prevailed by reasonable means over him, Clara was ready to revise her opinion of Frederic too. (On her scale often, she could upgrade him from less than zero to one.)

Next Clara phoned Gottschalk and entered on his tape her request that he call back. She then tried Laura Wong, and finally Wilder in New Hampshire. It was primary time up there; his candidate lagged far behind the field, and you couldn’t expect Wilder to be in his hotel room. Ithiel was in Central America. There was no one to share the recovery of the ring with. The strongest lights in the house were in the bathroom, and she turned them on, pressing against the sink to examine the stone and the setting, making sure that the small diamonds were all there. Since Mrs. Peralta had been in that day, she tried her number—she had a crying need to talk with somebody—and this time actually succeeded. “Did anybody come into the house today?”

“Only deliveries, by the service elevator.”

During this unsatisfactory conversation Clara had a view of herself in the hall mirror—a bony woman, not young, blond but not fair, gaunt, a long face, a hollow cheek, not rejoicing, and pressing the ringed hand under the arm that held the phone. The big eyes ached, and looked it. Feeling so high, why did she appear so low? But did she think that recovering the ring would make her young?

What she believed—and it was more than a belief; there was triumph in it—was that Gina Wegman had come into the bedroom and placed the ring on the nightstand.

And how had Gina obtained the ring, what had she had to promise, or sacrifice, or pay? Maybe her parents had wired money from Vienna. Suppose that her only purpose during four months had been nothing but restitution, and that the girl had done her time in East Harlem for no other reason? It struck Clara that if Gina had stolen the emerald back from Frederic and run away, then leaving a message on his machine had been a bad mistake. He might put it all together and come after Gina with a gun. There was even a private eye in this quickly fermenting plot. Except that Gottschalk was no Philip Marlowe in a Raymond Chandler story. Nevertheless he was a detective of some kind. He must be licensed to carry a gun. And everybody’s mind ran in these psychopathic-melodrama channels streaming with blood, or children’s fingerpaints, or blood that naяve people took for fingerpaint. The fancy (or hope) that Gottschalk would kill Frederic in a shoot-out was so preposterous that it helped Clara to calm herself.

When she received Gottschalk in her office next day, she was wearing the ring and showed it to him. He said, “That’s a high-value object. I hope you don’t take public transportation to work.” She looked disdainful. There was a livery service. He didn’t seem to realize how high her executive bracket was. But he said, “There are people in top positions who insist on using the subway. I could name you a Wall Street woman who goes to work disguised as a bag lady so it isn’t worthwhile to hassle her.”

“I believe Gina Wegman entered my apartment yesterday and left the emerald by my bed.”

“Must’ve been her.”

Gottschalk’s personal observation was that Mrs. Velde hadn’t slept last night.

“It couldn’t have been the
man,”
_ she said. “What’s your professional conclusion about him?”

“Casual criminal. Not enough muscle for street crime.”

“She didn’t marry him, did she?”

“I could run a check on that. My guess is no.”

“What you can find out for me is whether she’s still on One hundred twenty-eighth Street. If she grabbed the ring and brought it back, he may do her some harm.”

“Well, ma’am, he’s been in the slammer a few times for petty stuff. He wouldn’t do anything major.” Frederic had been one of those boat people lucky enough to reach Florida a few years back. So much Clara knew.

“After stealing your ring, he didn’t even know how to fence it.”

Clara said, “I have to find out where she’s living. I have to see the girl. Get hold of her. I’ll pay a bonus—within reason.”

“Send her to your house?”

“That might embarrass her—the girls, Mrs. Peralta, my husband. Say I want to have lunch with her. Ask her whether she received my note.”

“Let me look into it.”

“Quickly. I don’t want this dragging on.”

“Top priority,” said Gottschalk.

She counted on the suite of offices to impress him, and she was glad now that she had paid his bills promptly. Keeping on his good side, taking care from every standpoint to be a desirable client. As for Gottschalk, he was exactly what she had ordered from Ithiel—minimum sleaze. Not much more.

“I’d like a progress report by Friday,” she said.

That afternoon she met with Ms. Wong. Moved to talk. And with the gesture of a woman newly engaged, she held out her hand, saying, “Here’s the ring. I thought it had gone into the muck for good. It’s getting to be a fairy-tale object. With me it’s had the funny effect of those trick films they used to show kids—first a building demolished by dynamite. They show it coming down. Then they reverse it in slow motion, and it’s put together again.”

“Done by means of a magic ring?” said Ms. Wong.

It occurred to Clara that Laura was a mysterious lady too. She was exotic in externals, but in what she said she was perfectly conventional. While your heart was moved, she would still murmur along. If you came and told her you were going to kill yourself, what would she do? Probably nothing. Yet one must talk.

“I can’t say what state I’m in,” said Clara, “whether I’m pre-dynamite or post-dynamite. I don’t suppose I look demolished.

“Certainly not.”

“Yet I feel as if something had come down. There are changes. Gina, for instance, was a girl I took into the house to help with the kids. Little was ever said. I didn’t think well of her Caribbean romance, or sex experiment. Just another case of being at sea among collapsing cultures—I sound like Ithiel now, and I don’t actually take much stock in the collapsing-culture bit: I’m beginning to see it instead as the conduct of life without input from your soul. Essential parts of people getting mislaid or crowded out—don’t ask me for specifics; I can’t give them. They’re always flitting by me. But what I started to say was how I’ve come to love that girl. Just as she immediately understood Lucy, how needy Lucy was, in one minute she also got the whole meaning of this ring. And on the decision to get it back for me she left the house. Moving to East Harlem, yet.”

“If her Vienna family had a notion…”

“I intend to do something for her. That’s a special young woman. I certainly will do something. I have to think what it should be. Now, I don’t expect her to describe what she went through, and I don’t intend to ask her. There are things I wouldn’t want anybody to ask me,” said Clara. Clifford from Attica was on her mind. On the whole, she kept this deliberately remote, yet if pressed she could recover quite a lot from her memory.

“Have you any idea…?” said Laura Wong.

“About her, not yet, not until I’ve spoken to her. About myself, however, I do have different views as a result of this. Twice losing and recovering this ring is a sign, a message. It forces me to interpret. For instance, when Francine came in a van and emptied Ithiel’s house—that woman is about as human as a toilet plunger!—Ithiel didn’t turn to me. He didn’t come and say, ‘You’re unhappy with Wilder. And between us we’ve had seven marriages. Now, shouldn’t you and I…?’ “

“Clara, you wouldn’t have done that?” said Laura. For once her voice was more real. Clara was struck by the difference.

“I
might have
_ done it. So far it’s been change and change and change. There’s pleasure change, and acquisitive change, and there’s the dynamic of… oh, I don’t know. Perhaps of power. Is there no point of rest? Won’t the dynamic ever let you go? I felt that Ithiel might be a point of rest. Or I for him. But that was simply goofy. I have an anti-rest character. I think there’s too much basic discord in me.”

“So the ring stood for hope of Teddy Regler,” said Laura Wong.

“The one exception. Teddy. A repeatedly proven exception. There must be others, but I never came across them.”

“And do you think…?”

“He’ll ever accomplish his aim? I can’t say. He can’t, either. What he says is that no trained historian will ever do it, only a singular person with a singular eye. Looking at the century with his singular inborn eye, with a genius for observing politics: That’s about the way he says it, and perhaps he’ll take hold one day and do a wrap-up of the century, the wrap-up of wrap-ups. As for me,” said Clara, “I have the kids, with perhaps Wilder thrown in as a fourth child. The last has been unacceptable. What I’d most like now is a quiet life.”

“The point of rest?”

“No, I don’t expect that. A quiet life in lieu of the point of rest. The point of rest might have been with Ithiel. I have to settle for what I can get—peaceful evenings. Let there be a convent atmosphere, when the kids have gone to bed and I can disconnect the phones and concentrate on Yeats or somebody like that. Not to be too ambitious; it would be enough to get rid of your demons—they’re like patients who drift in and out of the mental hospital. In short, come to terms with my anti-rest character.”

“So all these years you’ve never given up hope that Teddy Regler and you…”

“Might make a life together, in the end…?” said Clara. Something caused her to hesitate. As they had always done in problematic situations, her eyes turned sideways, looking for an exit, and her country-girl mouth was open but silent.

On Madison Avenue, walking uptown, Clara was thinking, saying to herself in her contralto grumble, This is
totally
_ off the wall. There’s no limit, is there? She wanted me to say that Ithiel and I were finished, so that she could put her own moves on him. Everybody feels free to picture what they like, and I talked Ithiel up until he became too desirable for her to resist, and how long has the little bitch been dreaming of having him for herself! No way! Clara was angry, but she was also laughing about this. So I choose friends, so I choose lovers, so I choose husbands and bankers and accountants and psychiatrists and ministers, all the way down the line. And just now lost my principal confidante. But 1 have to spin her off very slowly, for if I cut the relationship, she’s in a position to hurt me with Wilder. There’s also the insurance company, remember, the real owner of this ring. Also, she’s so gifted professionally. We still need her layouts.

Meanwhile she had in mind an exceptional, a generous action.

From her office next day, on her private line, she had a preliminary talk about it with Ithiel, just back from Central America. Naturally she couldn’t tell him what her goal was. She began by describing the return of her ring, all the strange circumstances. “This very minute, I’m looking at it. Wearing it, I don’t feel especially girlish. I’m more like contemplating it.

She could see Ithiel trying on this new development, matching the contemplative Clara against the Clara who had once sunk her long nails into his forearm and left scars that he might have shown General Haig or Henry Kissinger if he had wanted to emphasize a point about violence. He had quite a sense of humor, Ithiel did. He enjoyed telling how, in a men’s room at the White House, Mr. Armand Hammer was at the next urinal, and about the discussion on Soviet intentions they had had between the opening and the closing zips.