The Collected Stories Of Saul Bellow Part 21

Yes yes! It was Ijah! And here was Scholem. He no longer resembled the older man of the Instamatic color photo, the person who squinted inward under heavy brows. Because he had lost much weight his face was wasted, and the tightening of the skin brought back his youthful look. Much less doomed and fanatical than the man in the picture, who breathed prophetic fire. There seemed a kind of clear innocence about him. The size of his eyes was exceptional-like the eyes of a newborn infant in the first presentation of genio_ and figura._ And suddenly I thought: What have I done? How do you tell a man like this that you have money for him? Am I supposed to say that I bring him the money he can bury himself with?

Scholem was speaking, saying to his daughter, "My cousin!" And to me he said, "You live abroad, Ijah? You got my mailings? Now I understand-you didn't answer because you wanted to surprise me. I have to make a speech, to greet the delegates. You'll sit with my daughter. We'll talk later."

"Of course...."

I'd get the girl's help; I'd inform her of the Eckstine grant. She'd prepare her father for the news.

Then I felt robbed of strength, all at once. Doesn't existence lay too much on us? I had remembered, observed, studied the cousins, and these studies seemed to fix my own essence and to keep me as I had been. I had failed to include myself among them, and suddenly I was billed for this oversight. At the presentation of this bill, I became bizarrely weak in the legs. And when the girl, noticing that I seemed unable to walk, offered me her arm, I wanted to say, "What d'you mean? I need no help. I still play a full set of tennis every day." Instead I pa.s.sed my arm through hers and she led us both down the corridor.

ZETLAND: BY A CHARACTER WITNESS.

YES, 1 KNEW THE GUY. We were boys in Chicago. He was wonderful. At fourteen, when we became friends, he had things already worked out and would willingly tell you how everything had come about. It went like this: First the earth was molten elements and glowed in s.p.a.ce. Then hot rains fell. Steaming seas were formed. For half the earth's history, the seas were azoic, and then life began. In other words, first there was astronomy, and then geology, and by and by there was biology, and biology was followed by evolution. Next came prehistory and then history-epics and epic heroes, great ages, great men; then smaller ages with smaller men; then cla.s.sical antiquity, the Hebrews, Rome, feudalism, papacy, renascence, rationalism, the industrial revolution, science, democracy, and so on. All this Zetland got out of books in the late twenties, in the Midwest. He was a clever kid. His bookishness pleased everyone. Over pale-blue eyes, which sometimes looked strained, he wore big goggles. He had full lips and big boyish teeth, widely s.p.a.ced. Sandy hair, combed straight back, exposed a large forehead. The skin of his round face often looked tight. He was short, heavyish, strongly built but not in good health. At seven years old he had had peritonitis and pneumonia at the same time, followed by pleurisy, emphysema, and TB. His recovery was complete, but he was never free from minor ailments. His skin was peculiar. He was not allowed to be in the sun for long. Exposure to sunlight caused cloudy brown subcutaneous bruises, brownish iridescences. So, often, while the sun shone, he drew the shades and read in his room by lamplight. But he was not at all an invalid. Though he played only on cloudy days, his tennis was good, and he swam a thoughtful breast-stroke with frog motions and a froggy underlip. He played the fiddle and was a good sight reader.

The neighborhood was largely Polish and Ukrainian, Swedish, Catholic, Orthodox, and Evangelical Lutheran. The Jews were few and the streets tough. Bungalows and brick three-flats were the buildings. Back stairs and porches were made of crude gray lumber. The trees were cottonwood elms and ailanthus, the gra.s.s was crabgra.s.s, the bushes lilacs, the flowers sunflowers and elephant-ears. The heat was corrosive, the cold like a guillotine as you waited for the streetcar. The family, Zet's bullheaded father and two maiden aunts who were "practical nurses" with housebound patients (dying, usually), read Russian novels, Yiddish poetry, and were mad about culture. He was encouraged to be a little intellectual. So, in short pants, he was a junior Immanuel Kant. Musical (like Frederick the Great or the Esterhazys), witty (like Voltaire), a sentimental radical (like Rousseau), bereft of G.o.ds (like Nietzsche), devoted to the heart and to the law of love (like Tolstoy). He was earnest (the early shadow of his father's grimness), but he was playful, too. Not only did he study Hume and Kant but he discovered Dada and Surrealism as his voice was changing. The mischievous project of covering the great monuments of Paris in mattress ticking appealed to him. He talked about the importance of the ridiculous, the paradox of playful sublimity. Dostoyevsky, he lectured me, had it right. The intellectual (petty bourgeois-plebeian) was a megalomaniac. Living in a kennel, his thoughts embraced the universe. Hence the funny agonies. And remember Nietzsche, the gai savoir._ And Heine and the "Aristophanes of Heaven." He was a learned adolescent, was Zetland.

Books in Chicago were obtainable. The public library in the twenties had many storefront branches along the car lines. Summers, under flipping gutta-percha fan blades, boys and girls read in the hard chairs. Crimson trolley cars swayed, cowbellied, on the rails. The country went broke in 1929. On the public lagoon, rowing, we read Keats to each other while the weeds bound the oars. Chicago was nowhere. It had no setting. It was something released into American s.p.a.ce. It was where trains arrived; where mail orders were dispatched. But on the lagoon, with turning boats, the water and the sky clear green, pure blue, the boring power of a great manufacturing center arrested (there was no smoke, the mills were crippled-industrial distress benefited the atmosphere), Zet recited "Upon the honeyed middle of the night..." Polack children threw rocks and crab apples from the sh.o.r.e.

Studying his French, German, math, and music. In his room a bust of Beethoven, a lithograph of Schubert (also with round specs) sitting at the piano, moving his friends' hearts. The shades were drawn, the lamp burned. In the alley, peddlers' horses wore straw hats to ward off sunstroke. Zet warded off the prairies, the real estate, the business and labor of Chicago. He boned away at his Kant. Just as a.s.siduously, he read Breton and Tristan Tzara. He quoted, "The earth is blue, like an orange." And he propounded questions of all sorts.

Had Lenin really expected democratic centralism to work within the Bolshevik party? Was Dewey's argument in Human Nature and Conduct_ una.s.sailable? Was the "significant form" position fruitful for painting? What was the future of primitivism in art?

Zetland wrote surrealist poems of his own: Plum lips suck the green of sleeping hills..._ or: Foaming rabbis rub electrical fis.h.!.+_ The Zetland apartment was roomy, inconvenient, in the standard gloomy style of 1910. Built-in buffets and china closets, a wainscot in the dining room with Dutch platters, a gas log in the fireplace, and two stained-gla.s.s small windows above the mantelpiece. A windup Victrola played "Eli, Eli," the Peer Gynt_ Suite. Chaliapin sang "The Flea" from Faust,_ Galli-Curci the "Bell Song" from _Lakm,__ and there were Russian soldiers' choruses. Surly Max Zetland gave his family "everything," he said. Old Zetland had been an immigrant. His start in life was slow. He learned the egg business in the poultry market on Fulton Street. But he rose to be a.s.sistant buyer in a large department store downtown: imported cheeses, Czech ham, British biscuits and jams-fancy goods. He was built like a fullback, with a black cleft in the chin and a long mouth. You would wear yourself out to win this mouth from its permanent expression of disapproval. He disapproved because he knew life._ His first wife, Elias's mother, died in the flu epidemic of 1918. By his second wife old Zetland had a feebleminded daughter. The second Mrs. Zetland died of cancer of the brain. The third wife, a cousin of the second, was much younger. She came from New York; she had worked on Seventh Avenue; she had a past._ Because of this past_ Max Zetland gave way to jealousy and made nasty scenes, breaking dishes and shouting brutally. "Des histoiress, "_ said Zet, then practicing his French. Max Zetland was a muscular man who weighed two hundred pounds, but these were only scenes-not dangerous. As usual, the morning after, he stood at the bathroom mirror and shaved with his painstaking bra.s.s Gillette, made neat his reprehending face, flattened his hair like an American executive, with military brushes. Then, Russian style, he drank his tea through a sugar cube, glancing at the Tribune,_ and went off to his position in the Loop, more or less in Ordnung._ A normal day. Descending the back stairs, a short cut to the El, he looked through the window of the first floor at his Orthodox parents in the kitchen. Grandfather sprayed his bearded mouth with an atomizer-he had asthma. Grandmother made orange-peel candy. Peels dried all winter on the steam radiators. The candy was kept in s...o...b..xes and served with tea.

Sitting in the El, Max Zetland wet his finger on his tongue to turn the pages of the thick newspaper. The tracks looked down on small brick houses. The El ran like the bridge of the elect over the d.a.m.nation of the slums. In those little bungalows Poles, Swedes, micks, spies, Greeks, and n.i.g.g.e.rs lived out their foolish dramas of drunkenness, gambling, rape, b.a.s.t.a.r.dy, syphilis, and roaring death. Max Zetland didn't even have to look; he could read about it in the Trib._ The little trains had yellow cane seats. Hand-operated gates of bent metal, waist-high, let you out of the car. Tin paG.o.da roofs covered the El platforms. Each riser of the long staircase advertised Lydia Pinkham's Vegetable Compound. Iron loss made young girls pale. Max Zetland himself had a white face, white-jowled, a sarcastic bear, but acceptably pleasant, entering the merchandising palace on Wabash Avenue, neat in his office, smart on the telephone, fluent except for a slight Russian difficulty with initial aitches, releasing a mellow grumble when he spoke, his mind factual, tabular, prices and contracts memorized. He held in the smoke of his cigarettes as he stood by his desk. The smoke drifted narrowly from his nose. With a lowered face, he looked about. He judged with furious Jewish sn.o.bbery the laxity and brainlessness of the golf-playing goy who could afford to walk in knickers on the restricted fairway, who could be what he seemed, who had no buried fury, married no lascivious New York girls, had no idiot orphans, no house of death. Max Zetland's hard paunch subdued by the cut of his jacket, the tense muscles of his calves showing through trouser legs, the smoke-retentive nose, the rage of taciturnity-well, in the business world one must be a nice fellow. He was an executive in a great retail organization and he was_ a nice fellow. He was a short-headed man whose skull had no great depth. But his face was broad, heavily masculine, self-consciously centered between the shoulders. His hair was parted in the middle and brushed flat. There was a wide s.p.a.ce between his front teeth, which Zet inherited. Only the unshavable pucker in his father's chin was a sign of pathos, and this hint of the pitiful Max Zetland was defied by the Russian military stoutness of his bearing, by his curt style of smoking, by the snap with which he drank a gla.s.s of schnapps. Among friends his son had various names for him. The General, the Commissar, Osipovich, Ozymandias, he often called him. "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Before his third marriage, Ozymandias the widower would come home from the Loop with the Evening American,_ printed on peach-colored paper. He took a gla.s.s of whiskey before dinner and saw his daughter. Perhaps she was not feebleminded, only temporarily r.e.t.a.r.ded. His bright son tried to tell him that Casanova was hydrocphalie until he was eight and considered an imbecile, and that Einstein was a backward child. Max hoped she might be taught to sew. He started with table manners. Meals, for a time, were horrible. She was unreachable. In her the family face was compressed, reduced, condensed into a cat's face. She stammered, she tottered, her legs were long and undeveloped. She picked up her skirt in company, she trickled on the toilet without closing the door. The kid gave away all the weaknesses of the breed. Relatives were sympathetic, but this sympathy of aunts and cousins Max sensed to be self-congratulatory. He coldly rejected it, looking straight before him and lengthening his straight mouth. When people spoke sympathetically to him about his daughter, he seemed to be considering the best way to put them to death.

Father Zetland read Russian and Yiddish poetry. He preferred the company of musical people and artists, bohemian garment workers, Tolstoyans, followers of Emma Goldman and of Isadora Duncan, revolutionists who wore pince-nez, Russian blouses, Lenin or Trotsky beards. He attended lectures, debates, concerts, and readings; the Utopians amused him; he respected brains and was sold on high culture. It was obtainable in Chicago, in those days.

Facing Humboldt Park, on California Avenue, the Chicago anarchists and Wobblies had their forum; the Scandinavians had their fraternal lodges, churches, a dance hall; the Galician Jews a synagogue; the Daughters of Zion their charity day nursery. On Division Street, after 1929, little savings banks crashed. One became a fish store. A tank for live carp was made of the bank marble. The vault became an icebox. A movie house turned into a funeral parlor. Nearby, the red carbarn rose from slummy weeds. The vegetarians had a grand photo of old Count Tolstoy in the window of the Tolstoy Vegetarian Restaurant. What a beard, what eyes, and what a nose! Great men repudiated the triviality of ordinary and merely human things, including what was merely human in themselves. What was a nose? Cartilage. A beard? Cellulose. A count? A caste figure, a thing produced by epochs of oppression. Only Love, Nature, and G.o.d are good and great.

In one-hundred-percent-industrial contemporary Chicago, where shadows of loveliness were lacking, a flat wheel of land meeting a flat wheel of fresh water, intelligent boys like Zet, though fond of the world, too, were not long detained by surface phenomena. No one took Zet fis.h.i.+ng. He did not go to the woods, was not taught to shoot, nor to clean a carburetor, nor even to play billiards or to dance. Zet concentrated on his books-his astronomy, geology, etc. First the blazing ma.s.s of matter, then the lifeless seas, then pulpy creatures crawling ash.o.r.e, simple forms, more complex forms, and so on; then Greece, then Rome, then Arabian algebra, then history, poetry, philosophy, painting. Still wearing knickers, he was invited by neighborhood study groups to speak on the lan vital, on the differences between Kant and Hegel. He was professorial, Germanic, the Wunderkind, Max Zetland's secret weapon. Old Zet would be the man_ ol the family and young Zet its genius._ "He wanted me to be a John Stuart Mill," said Zet. "Or some shrunken little Itzkowitz of a prodigy-Greek and calculus at the age of eight, d.a.m.n him!" Zet believed he had been cheated of his childhood, robbed of the angelic birthright.

He believed all that old stuff about the sufferings of childhood, the lost paradise, the crucifixion of innocence. Why was he sickly, why was he myopic, why did he have a greenish color? Why, grim old Zet wanted him to be all marrow, no bone. He caged him in reprehending punitive silence, he demanded that he dazzle the world. And he never-but never-approved of anything.

To be an intellectual was the next stage of human development, the historical fate of mankind, if you prefer. Now the ma.s.ses were reading, and we were off in all directions, Zet believed. The early phases of this expansion of mind could not fail to produce excesses, crime, madness. Wasn't that, said Zet, the meaning of books like The Brothers Karamazov,_ the decay produced by rationalism in the feudal peasant Russian? And parricide the first result of revolution? The resistance to the modern condition and the modern theme? The terrible wrestling of Sin and Freedom? The megalomania of the pioneers? To be an intellectual was to be a parvenu. The business of these parvenus was to purge themselves of their first wild impulses and of their crazy baseness, to change themselves, to become disinterested. To love truth. To become great.

Naturally Zetland was sent to college. College was waiting for him. He won prizes in poetry, essay contests. He joined a literary society, and a Marxist study group. Agreeing with Trotsky that Stalin had betrayed the October Revolution, he joined the Spartacus Youth League, but as a revolutionist he was fairly vague. He studied logic under Carnap, and later with Bertrand Russell and Morris R. Cohen.

The best of it was that he got away from home and lived in rooming houses, the filthier the better. The best was a whitewashed former coalbin on Woodlawn Avenue. Soft coal, still stored in the adjoining shed, trickled between the whitewashed planks. There was no window. On the cement floor was a rag rug, worried together out of tatters and coming unbound. An old oak library table with cigarette burns and a shadeless floorlamp were provided. The meters for the whole house were over Zet's cot. Rent was $2.50 a week. The place was jolly-it was bohemian, it was European. Best of all, it was Russian! The landlord, Perchik, said that he had been game-beater for Grand Duke Cyril. Abandoned in Kamchatka when the j.a.panese War began, he trudged back across Siberia. With him Zet had Russian conversations. Long in the teeth, Perchik wore a meager beard, and the wires of his dime-store specs were twisted. In the back he had built a little house out of pop bottles, collected in a coaster in the alleys. Rags and garbage were burned in the furnace, and the fumes blew through the hot-air registers. The landlord sang old ballads and hymns, falsetto. Really, the place couldn't have been better. Disorderly, dirty, irregular, free, and you could talk all night and sleep late. Just what you wanted for thought, for feeling, for invention. In his happiness, Zet entertained the Perchik house with his charades, speeches, jokes, and songs. He was a laundry mangle, a time clock, a tractor, a telescope. He did Don Giovanni_ in all parts and voices-_"Non sperar, se non m'uccidi... Donna folle, indarno gridi. "__ He reproduced the harpsichord background in the recitatives or the oboe weeping when the Commendatore's soul left his body. To follow up he might do Stalin addressing a party congress, a Fuller Brush salesman in German, or a submarine commander sinking an amerikanische_ freighter. Zet also was practically useful. He helped people to move. He minded kids for married graduate students. He cooked for the sick. He looked after people's dogs and cats when they went out of town, and shopped for old women in the house when it snowed. Now he was something between the stout boy and the nearsighted young man with odd ideas and exotic motives. Loving, virtually Franciscan, a simpleton for G.o.d's sake, easy to cheat. An ingnu. At the age of nineteen he had a great deal of d.i.c.kensian heart. When he earned a little money mopping floors at Billings Hospital, he shared it with clinic patients, bought them cigarettes and sandwiches, lent them carfare, walked them across the Midway. Sensitive to suffering and to symbols of suffering and misery, his eyes filled when he went into some Depression grocery. The withered potatoes, the sprouting onions, the unhappy face of the storekeeper got him. His cat had a miscarriage, and he wept about that, too, because the mother cat was grieving. I flushed the stillborn cats down the boardless grimy toilet in the cellar. He made me testy, carrying on like that. Practicing his feelings on everyone, I said. He warned me not to be hard-hearted. I said he exaggerated everything. He accused me of a lack of sensibility. It was an odd argument for two adolescents. I suppose the power of Americanization faltered during the Depression. We broke away, and seized the opportunity to be more foreign._ We were a laughable pair of university highbrows who couldn't have a spat without citing William James and Karl Marx, or Villiers de l'lsle-Adam or Whitehead. We decided that we were the tender-minded and tough-minded of William James, respectively. But James had said that to know everything that happened in one city on a single day would crush the toughest mind. No one could be as tough as he needed to be. "You'll be barren of sympathy if you don't look out," Zet said. That was the way he talked. His language was always elegant. Lord knows where his patrician style came from-Lord Bacon, perhaps, plus Hume and a certain amount of Santayana. He debated with his friends in the whitewashed cellar. His language was very pure and musical.

But then he was musical. He didn't walk down the street without practicing a Haydn quartet, or Borodin or Prokofiev. Overcoat b.u.t.toned at the neck, he hauled his briefcase and made the violin stops inside his fuzz-lined gloves and puffed the music in his throat and cheeks. In good heart, with skin the color of yellow grapes, he did the cello in his chest and the violins high in the nose. The trees were posted in the broom-swept, dust-mixed snow and were bound to the subpavement soil and enriched by sewer seepage. Zetland and the squirrels enjoyed the privileges of motility.

Heat overpowered him when he entered Cobb Hall. Its interior was Baptist brown, austere, varnished, very like old churches. The building was kept very hot, and he felt the heat on his face immediately. It struck him on the cheeks. His goggles fogged up. He dropped the slow movement of his Borodin quartet and sighed. After the sigh he wore an intellectual, not a musical, expression. He now was ready for semiotics, symbolic logic-the reader of Tarski, Carnap, Feigl, and Dewey. A stoutish young man whose color was poor, whose sandy hair, brushed flat, had greenish lights, he sat in the hard seminar chair and fetched out his cigarettes. Playing parts, he was here a Brain. With Skinny Jones in his raveled sweater and missing front teeth, with Tisewitch whose eyebrows were kinky, with Dark Dewie-a lovely, acid, pale girl-and Miss Krehayn, a redhead and hard stutterer, he was a leading logical positivist.

For a while. In the way of mental work, he could do anything, but he was not about to become a logician. He was, however, attracted by rational a.n.a.lysis. The emotional struggles of mankind were never resolved. The same things were done over and over, with pa.s.sion, with pa.s.sionate stupidity, insectlike, the same emotional struggles repeated in daily reality-urge, drive, desire, self-preservation, aggrandizement, the search for happiness, the search for justification, the experience of coming to be and of pa.s.sing away, from nothingness to nothingness. Very boring. Frightening. Doom. Now, mathematical logic could extricate you from all this nonsensical existence. "See here," said Zet in his soiled canvas Bauhaus chair, the dropped gla.s.ses shortening his short nose. "As propositions are either true or false, whatever is_ is right. Leibnitz was no fool. Provided that you really know that what is, indeed is._ Still, I haven't entirely made up my mind about the religious question, as a true positivist should."

Just then from straight-ruled Chicago, blue with winter, brown with evening, crystal with frost, the factory whistles went off. Five o'clock. The mouse-gray snow and the hutchy bungalows, the furnace blasting, and Perchik's shovel gritting in the coalbin. The radio boomed through the floors, to us below. It was the Anschluss_-Schuschnigg and Hitler. Vienna was just as cold as Chicago now; much gloomier.

"Lottie is expecting me," said Zetland.

Lottie was pretty. She was also, in her own way, theatrical-the party girl, the pagan beauty with hibiscus in her teeth. She was a witty young woman, and she loved an amusing man. She visited his coalbin. He stayed in her room. They found an English bas.e.m.e.nt together which they furnished with an oak table and rose velvet junk. They kept cats and dogs, a squirrel, and a pet crow. After their first quarrel Lottie smeared her b.r.e.a.s.t.s with honey as a peace gesture. And before graduation she borrowed an automobile and they drove to Michigan City and were married. Zet had gotten a fellows.h.i.+p in philosophy at Columbia. There was a wedding and good-bye party for them on Kimbark Avenue, in an old flat. After being separated for five minutes, Zet and Lottie ran the whole length of the corridor, embracing, trembling, and kissing. "Darling, suddenly you weren't there!"

"Sweetheart, I'm always there. I'll always be there!"

Two young people from the sticks, overdoing the thing, acting out their love in public. But there was more to it than display. They adored each other. Besides, they had already lived as man and wife for a year with all their dogs and cats and birds and fishes and plants and fiddles and books. Ingeniously, Zet mimicked animals. He washed himself like a cat and bit fleas on his haunch like a dog, and made goldfish faces, wagging his fingertips like fins. When they went to the Orthodox church for the Easter service, he learned to genuflect and make the sign of the cross Eastern style. Charlotte kept time with her head when he played the violin, just a bit off, his loving metronome. Zet was forever acting something out and Lottie was also demonstrative. There is probably no way for human beings to avoid playacting, Zet said. As long as you know where the soul is, there is no harm in being Socrates. It is when the soul can't be located that the play of being someone turns desperate.

So Zet and Lottie were not simply married but delightfully married. Instead of a poor Macedonian girl whose muttering immigrant mother laid spells and curses on Zet and whose father sharpened knives and scissors, and went up and down alleys ringing a hand bell, Zet had das Ewig-Weibliche,_ a natural, universal, gorgeous power. As for Lottie, she said, "There's no one in the world like Zet." She added, "In every way." Then she dropped her voice, speaking from the side of her mouth with absurd Dietrich charm, in tough Chicago style, saying, "I'm not exactly inexperienced, I want you to know." That was no secret. She had lived with a fellow named Huram, an educational psychologist, who had a mended harelip, over which he grew a mustache. Before that there had been someone else. But now she was a wife and overflowed with wifely love. She ironed his s.h.i.+rts and b.u.t.tered his toast, lit his cigarette, and gazed like a little Spanish virgin at him, all aglow. It amused some, this melting and _Schwrmerei.__ Others were irritated. Father Zetland was enraged.

The couple departed from La Salle Street Station for New York, by day coach. The depot looked archaic, mineral. The steam foamed up to the sooty skylights. The El pillars vibrated on Van Buren Street, where the hockshops and the army-navy stores and the two-bit barbershops were. The redcap took the valises. Zet tried to say something to Ozymandias about the kingly airs of the black porters. The aunts were also there. They didn't easily follow when Zet made one of his odd statements about the black of the station and the black redcaps and their ceremonious African style. The look that went between the old girls agreed that he was not making sense, poor Elias. They blamed Lottie. Excited at starting out in life, married, a fellow at Columbia University, he felt that his father was casting his own glumness on him, making him heavy-hearted. Zet had grown a large brown mustache. His big boyish teeth, wide-s.p.a.ced, combined oddly with these mature whiskers. The low, chesty, almost burly figure was a shorter version of his father's. But Ozymandias had a Russian military posture. He did not believe in grinning and ducking and darting and mimicry. He stood erect. Lottie cried out affectionate things to everyone. She wore an apple-blossom dress and matching turban and apple-blossom high-heeled shoes. The trains clashed and huffed, but you could hear the rapid stamping of Lottie's gaudy heels. Her Oriental eyes, her humorous peasant nose, her pleasant bosom, her smooth s.e.xual rear with which Zet's hand kept contact all the while, drew the silent, harsh attention of Ozymandias. She called him "Pa." He strained cigarette smoke between his teeth with an expression that pa.s.sed for a smile. Yes, he managed to look pleasant through it all. The Macedonian in-laws didn't show up at all. They were on a streetcar and caught in a traffic jam.

On this sad, jolly occasion Ozymandias restrained himself. He looked very European despite the straw summer skimmer he was wearing, with a red-white-and-blue band. The downtown buyer, well trained in dissembling, subdued the snarls of his heart and by pressing down his chin with the black hole in it cooled his rage. Temporarily he was losing his son. Lottie kissed her father-in-law. She kissed the aunts, the two practical nurses who read Romain Rolland and Warwick Deeping beside the wheelchair and the deathbed. Their opinion was that Lottie might be more fastidious in her feminine hygiene. Aunt Masha thought the herringy odor was due to dysmenorrhea. Virginal, Aunt Masha was unfamiliar with the odor of a woman who had been making love on a warm day. The young people took every opportunity to strengthen each other.

Imitating their brother, the aunts, too, gave false kisses with inexperienced lips. Lottie then cried with joy. They were leaving Chicago, the most boring place in the world, and getting rid of surly Ozymandias and of her mother the witch and her poor daddy the knife grinder. She was married to Zet, who had a million times more charm and warmth and brains than anyone else.

'Oh, Pa! Goodbye!" Zet emotionally took his iron father in his arms.

'Do right. Study. Make something of yourself. If you get in trouble, wire for money."

"Dear Pa, I love you. Masha, Dounia, I love you, too," said Lottie, now red-faced with tears. She gave them all sobbing kisses. Then at the coach window, waving, the young people embraced and the train slid off.

As the Pacemaker_ departed, Father Zetland shook his fist at the observation car. He stamped his feet. At Lottie, who was ruining his son, he cried, "You wait! I'll get you. Five years, ten years, but I'll get you." He shouted, "You b.i.t.c.h-you nasty c.u.n.t."

Russian in his rage, he cried out, "CW/"His sisters did not understand.

Zet and Lottie swam into New York City from the skies-that was how it felt in the Pacemaker,_ rus.h.i.+ng along the Hudson at sunrise. First many blue twigs overhanging the water, then a rosy color, and then the heavy flas.h.i.+ng of the river under the morning sun. They were in the dining car, their eyes weary with an overflow of impressions. They were drained by a night of broken sleep in the day coach, and they were dazzled. They drank coffee from cups as grainy as soapstone, and poured from New York Central pewter. They were in the East, where everything was better, where objects were different. Here there was deeper meaning in the air.

After changing at Harmon to an electric locomotive, they began a more quick and eager ride. Trees, water, sky, and the sky raced off, floating, and there came bridges, structures, and at last the tunnel, where the air brakes gasped and the streamliner was checked. There were yellow bulbs in wire mesh, and subterranean air came through the vents. The doors opened, the pa.s.sengers, pulling their clothing straight, flowed out and got their luggage, and Zet and Lottie, reaching Forty-second Street, refugees from arid and inhibited Chicago, from Emptyland, embraced at the curb and kissed each other repeatedly on the mouth. They had come to the World City, where all behavior was deeper and more resonant, where they could freely be themselves, as demonstrative as they liked. Intellect, art, the transcendent, needed no excuses here. Any cabdriver understood, Zet believed.

"Ah, darling, darling-thank G.o.d," said Zet. "A place where it's normal to be a human being."

"Oh, Zet, amen!" said Lottie with tremors and tears.

At first they lived uptown, on the West Side. The small, chinging trolleys still rolled on slant Broadway. Lottie chose a room described as a studio, at the rear of a brownstone. There was a studio bedroom, and the bathroom was also the kitchen. Covered with a heavy, smooth board, the tub became the kitchen table. You could reach the gas ring from the bath. Zet liked that. Frying your eggs while you sat in the water. You could hear the largo of the drain as you drank your coffee, or watch the c.o.c.kroaches come and go about the cupboards. The toaster spring was tight. It snapped out the bread. Sometimes a toasted c.o.c.kroach was flung out. The ceilings were high. There was little daylight. The fireplace was made of small tiles. You could bring home an apple crate from Broadway and have a ten-minute fire, which left a little ash and many hooked nails. The studio turned into a Zet habitat, a Zet-and-Lottie place: dark, dirty portieres, thriftshop carpets, upholstered chairs with bald arms that shone, said Zetland, like gorilla hide. The window opened on an air shaft, but Zet had lived even in Chicago behind drawn shades or in a whitewashed coalbin. Lottie bought lamps with pink porcelain shades flounced at the edges like ancient b.u.t.ter dishes. The room had the agreeable dimness of a chapel, the gloom of a sanctuary. When I visited Byzantine churches in Yugoslavia, I thought I had found the master model, the archetypal Zet habitat.

The Zetlands settled in. Crusts, b.u.t.ts, coffee grounds, dishes of dog food, books, journals, music stands, odors of Macedonian cookery (mutton, yogurt, lemon, rice), and white Chilean wine in bulbous bottles. Zetland reconnoitered the philosophy department, brought home loads of books from the library, and put himself to work. His industry might have pleased Ozymandias. But nothing, he would say, could really please the old guy. Or perhaps his ultimate pleasure was never to be pleased, and never to approve. With an M. A. of her own in sociology, Lottie went to work in an office. Look at her, said Zet, such an impulsive young woman, and so efficient, such a crack executive secretary. See how steady she was, how uncomplaining about getting up in the dark, and what a dependable employee this Balkan Gypsy had turned out to be. He found a sort of sadness in this, and he was astonished. Office work would have killed him. He had tried that. Ozymandias had found jobs for him. But routine and paperwork paralyzed him. He had worked in the company warehouse helping the zoologist to see what ailed the filberts and the figs and the raisins, keeping parasites in check. That was interesting, but not for long. And one week he had worked in the shops of the Field Museum, learning to make plastic leaves for habitats. Dead animals, he learned, were preserved in many poisons and that, he said, was how he felt about being an employee-a toxic condition.

So it was Lottie who worked, and the afternoons were very long. Zet and the dog waited for her at five o'clock. At last she came, with groceries, hurrying westward from Broadway. In the street Zet and Miss Katusha ran toward her. Zet called out, "Lottie!" and the brown dog scrabbled on the pavement and whined. Lottie was wan from the subway, and warm, and made contralto sounds in her throat when she was kissed. She brought home hamburger meat and yogurt, bones for Katusha, and small gifts for Zetland. They were still honeymooners. They were ecstatic in New York. They had the animal ecstasies of the dog for emphasis or a.n.a.logy. They made friends in the building with a pulp writer and his wife-Giddings and Gertrude. Giddings wrote Westerns: the Balzac of the Badlands, Zet named him. Giddings called him the Wittgenstein of the West Side. Zetland thus had an audience for his cheerful inventions. He read aloud funny sentences from the Encyclopedia of Unified Sciences_ and put H. Rider Haggard, Gidding's favorite novelist, into the language of symbolic logic. Evenings, Lottie became again a Macedonian Gypsy, her mama's daughter. Mama was a necromancer from Skoplje, said Zetland, and made spells with cats' urine and snakes' navels. She knew the erotic secrets of antiquity. Evidently Lottie knew them, too. It was established that Lottie's female qualities were rich, and deep and sweet. Romantic Zetland said fervent and grateful things about them.

From so much sweetness, this chocolate life, nerves glowing too hotly, came pangs of anxiety. In its own way the anxiety was also delicious, he said. He explained that he had two kinds of ecstasy, sensuous and sick. Those early months in New York were too much for him. His lung trouble came back, and he ran a fever; he ached, pa.s.sed urine painfully, and he lay in bed, the faded wine-colored pajamas binding him at the crotch and under the plump arms. His skin developed its old irritability.

It was his invalid childhood all over again for a few weeks. It was awful that he should fall into it, a grown man, just married, but it was delectable, too. He remembered the hospital very well, the booming in his head when he was etherized and the horrible open wound in his belly. It was infected and wouldn't heal. He drained through a rubber tube which an ordinary diaper pin secured. He understood that he was going to die, but he read the funny papers. All the kids in the ward had to read were funny papers and the Bible: Slim Jim, b.o.o.b Mc.n.u.tt, Noah's ark, Hagar, Ishmael ran into each other like the many colors of the funnies. It was a harsh Chicago winter, there were golden icon rays at the frosted windows in the morning, and the streetcars droned and ground, clanged. Somehow he had made it out of the hospital, and his aunts nursed him at home with marrow broth and scalded milk and melted b.u.t.ter, soda biscuits as big as playing cards. His illness in New York brought back the open wound with its rotten smell and the rubber tube which a diaper pin kept from falling into his belly, and bedsores and his having to learn again at the age of eight how to walk. A very early and truthful sense of the seizure of matter by life energies, the painful, difficult, intricate chemical-electrical transformation and organization, gorgeous, streaming with radiant colors, and all the scent and the stinking. This combination was too harsh. It whirled too much. It troubled and intimidated the soul too much. What were we here for, of all strange beings and creatures the strangest? Clear colloid eyes to see with, for a while, and see so finely, and a palpitating universe to see, and so many human messages to give and to receive. And the bony box for thinking and for the storage of thoughts, and a cloudy heart for feelings. Ephemerids, grinding up other creatures, flavoring and heating their flesh, devouring this flesh. A kind of being filled with death-knowledge, and also filled with infinite longings. These peculiar internal phrases were not intentional. That was just it, they simply came to Zetland, naturally, involuntarily, as he was consulting with himself about this tangle of bright and terrifying qualities.

So Zet laid aside his logic books. They had lost their usefulness. They joined the funny papers he had put away when he was eight years old. He had no more use for Rudolf Carnap than for b.o.o.b Mc.n.u.tt. He said to Lottie, "What other books are there?" She went to the shelf and read off the t.i.tles. He stopped her at Moby d.i.c.k,_ and she handed him the large volume. After reading a few pages he knew that he would never be a Ph. D. in philosophy. The sea came into his inland, Lake Michigan soul, he told me. Oceanic cold was just the thing for his fever. He felt polluted, but he read about purity. He had reached a bad stage of limited selfhood, disaffection, unwillingness to be; he was sick; he wanted out._ Then he read this dazzling book. It rushed over him. He thought he would drown. But he didn't drown; he floated.

The creature of flesh and blood, and ill, went to the toilet. Because of his intestines he shuffled to sit on the board and over the porcelain, over the sewer-connected hole and its water-the necessary disgrace. And when the dizzy floor tiles wavered under his sick eyes like chicken wire, the amethyst of the ocean was also there in the bevels of the medicine-chest mirror, and the white power of the whale, to which the bathtub gave a fleeting gauge. The cloaca was there, the nausea, and also the coziness of bowel smells going back to childhood, the old brown colors. And the dismay and sweetness of ragged coughing and the tropical swampiness of the fever. But also there rose up the seas. Straight through the air shaft, west, and turn left at the Hudson. The Atlantic was there.

The real business of his life was with comprehensive vision, he decided. He had been working in philosophy with the resemblance theory of universals. He had an original approach to the predicate "resemble." But that was finished. When sick, he was decisive. He had the weak sweats and was coughing up blue phlegm with his fist to his mouth and his eyes swelling. He cleared his throat and said to Lottie, who sat on the bed holding his tea for him during this coughing fit, "I don't think I can go on in the philosophy department."

"It's really worrying you, isn't it? You were talking philosophy in your sleep the other night."

"Was I?"

"Talking in your sleep about epistemology or something. I don't understand that stuff, you know that."

"Ah, well, it's not really for me, either."

"But, honey, you don't have to do anything you don't like. Switch to something else. I'll back you all the way."

"Ah, you're a dear woman. But we'll have to get along without the fellows.h.i.+p." What's it worth? Those cheap b.a.s.t.a.r.ds don't give you enough to live on anyway. Zet, dear, screw the money. I can see you've gone through a change of heart because ofthat book."

'Oh, Lottie, it's a miracle, that book. It takes you out of this human world."

"What do you mean?"

'I mean it takes you out of the universe of mental projections or insulating fictions of ordinary social practice or psychological habit. It gives you elemental liberty. What really frees you from these insulating social and psychological fictions is the other fiction, of art. There really is no human life without this poetry. Ah, Lottie, I've been starving on symbolic logic."

"I've got_ to read that book now," she said.

But she didn't get far with it. Sea books were for men, and anyway she wasn't bookish; she was too impulsive to sit long with any book. That was Zet's department. He would tell her all she needed to know about Moby d.i.c.k._ "I'll have to go and talk to Professor Edman."

"As soon as you're strong enough, go on down and quit. Just quit. All the better. What the h.e.l.l do you want to be a professor for? Oh, that dog!" Katusha had gotten into a barking duel with an animal in the next yard. "Shut up, you b.i.t.c.h! Sometimes I really hate that lousy dog. I feel her barking right in the middle of my head."

"Give her to the Chinese laundryman; he likes her."

"Likes her? He'd cook her. Now look, Zet, don't you worry about a thing. Screw that logic. Okay? You can do a hundred things. You know French, Russian, German, and you're a real brain. We don't need much to live on. No fancy stuff for me. I shop on Union Square. So what?"

"With that beautiful Macedonian body," said Zet, "Klein's is just as good as haute couture. Blessings on your bust, your belly, and your bottom."

"If your fever goes down by the weekend, we'll go to the country, to Giddings and Gertrude."

"Pa will be upset when he hears I've dropped out of Columbia."

"So what? I know you love him, but he's such a grudger, you can't please him anyway. Well, screw him, too."

They moved downtown in 1940 and lived on Bleecker Street for a dozen years. They were soon prominent in Greenwich Village. In Chicago they had been bohemians without knowing it. In the Village Zet was identified with the avant-garde in literature and with radical politics. When the Russians invaded Finland, radical politics became absurd. Marxists debated whether the workers' state could be imperialistic. This was too nonsensical for Zetland. Then there was the n.a.z.i-Soviet pact, there was the war. Constantine was born during the war-Lottie wanted him to have a Balkan name. Zetland wanted to enter the service. When he behaved with spirit, Lottie was always for him, and she supported him against his father, who of course disapproved.

LEAVING THE YELLOW HOUSE.

THE NEIGHBORS-there were in all six white people who lived at Sego Desert Lake-told one another that old Hattie could no longer make it alone. The desert life, even with a forced-air furnace in the house and butane gas brought from town in a truck, was still too difficult for her. There were women even older than Hattie in the county. Twenty miles away was Amy Walters, the gold miner's widow. She was a hardy old girl, more wiry and tough than Hattie. Every day of the year she took a bath in the icy lake. And Amy was crazy about money and knew how to manage it, as Hattie did not. Hattie was not exactly a drunkard, but she hit the bottle pretty hard, and now she was in trouble and there was a limit to the help she could expect from even the best of neighbors.

They were fond of her, though. You couldn't help being fond of Hattie. She was big and cheerful, puffy, comic, boastful, with a big round back and stiff, rather long legs. Before the century began she had graduated from finis.h.i.+ng school and studied the organ in Paris. But now she didn't know a note from a skillet. She had tantrums when she played canasta. And all that remained of her fine fair hair was frizzled along her forehead in small gray curls. Her forehead was not much wrinkled, but the skin was bluish, the color of skim milk. She walked with long strides in spite of the heaviness of her hips. With her shoulders, she pushed on, round-backed, showing the flat rubber bottoms of her shoes.

Once a week, in the same cheerful, plugging but absent way, she took off her short skirt and the dirty aviator's jacket with the wool collar and put on a girdle, a dress, and high-heeled shoes. When she stood on these heels her fat old body trembled. She wore a big brown Rembrandt-like tarn with a tencent-store brooch, eyelike, carefully centered. She drew a straight line with lipstick on her mouth, leaving part of the upper lip pale. At the wheel of her old turret-shaped car, she drove, seemingly methodical but speeding dangerously, across forty miles of mountainous desert to buy frozen meat pies and whiskey. She went to the Laundromat and the hairdresser, and then had lunch with two martinis at the Arlington. Afterward she would often visit Marian Nabot's Silvermine Hotel at Miller Street near skid row and pa.s.s the rest of the day gossiping and drinking with her cronies, old divorces like herself who had settled in the West. Hattie never gambled anymore and she didn't care for the movies. And at five o'clock she drove back at the same speed, calmly, partly blinded by the smoke of her cigarette. The fixed cigarette gave her a watering eye.

The Rolfes and the Paces were her only white neighbors at Sego Desert Lake. There was Sam Jervis too, but he was only an old gandy walker who did odd jobs in her garden, and she did not count him. Nor did she count among her neighbors Darly, the dudes' cowboy who worked for the Paces, nor Swede, the telegrapher. Pace had a guest ranch, and Rolfe and his wife were rich and had retired. Thus there were three good houses at the lake, Hattie's yellow house, Pace's, and the Rolfes'. All the rest of the population-Sam, Swede, Watchtah the section foreman, and the Mexicans and Indians and Negroes-lived in shacks and boxcars. There were very few trees, cottonwoods and box elders. Everything else, down to the sh.o.r.es, was sagebrush and juniper. The lake was what remained of an old sea that had covered the volcanic mountains. To the north there were some tungsten mines; to the south, fifteen miles, was an Indian village-shacks built of plywood or railroad ties.

In this barren place Hattie had lived for more than twenty years. Her first summer was spent not in a house but in an Indian wickiup on the sh.o.r.e. She used to say that she had watched the stars from this almost roofless shelter. After her divorce she took up with a cowboy named Wicks. Neither of them had any money-it was the Depression-and they had lived on the range, trapping coyotes for a living. Once a month they would come into town and rent a room and go on a bender. Hattie told this sadly, but also gloatingly, and with many tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs. A thing no sooner happened to her than it was transformed into something else. "We were caught in a storm," she said, "and we rode hard, down to the lake, and knocked on the door of the yellow house"-now her house. "Alice Parmenter took us in and let us sleep on the floor." What had actually happened was that the wind was blowing-there had been no storm-and they were not far from the house anyway; and Alice Parmenter, who knew that Hattie and Wicks were not married, offered them separate beds; but Hattie, swaggering, had said in a loud voice, "Why get two sets of sheets dirty?" And she and her cowboy had slept in Alice's bed while Alice had taken the sofa.

Then Wicks went away. There was never anybody like him in the sack; he was brought up in a wh.o.r.ehouse and the girls had taught him everything, said Hattie. She didn't really understand what she was saying but believed that she was being Western. More than anything else she wanted to be thought of as a rough, experienced woman of the West. Still, she was a lady, too. She had good silver and good china and engraved stationery, but she kept canned beans and A-1 sauce and tuna fish and bottles of catsup and fruit salad on the library shelves of her living room. On her night table was the Bible her pious brother Angus-the other brother was a h.e.l.ler-had given her; but behind the little door of the commode was a bottle of bourbon. When she awoke in the night she tippled herself back to sleep. In the glove compartment of her old car she kept little sample bottles for emergencies on the road. Old Darly found them after her accident.

The accident did not happen far out in the desert as she had always feared, but very near home. She had had a few martinis with the Rolfes one evening, and as she was driving home over the railroad crossing she lost control of the car and veered off the crossing onto the tracks. The explanation she gave was that she had sneezed, and the sneeze had blinded her and made her twist the wheel. The motor was killed and all four wheels of the car sat smack on the rails. Hattie crept down from the door, high off the roadbed. A great fear took hold of her-for the car, for the future, and not only for the future but spreading back into the past-and she began to hurry on stiff legs through the sagebrush to Pace's ranch.

Now the Paces were away on a hunting trip and had left Darly in charge; he was tending bar in the old cabin that went back to the days of the pony express, when Hattie burst in. There were two customers, a tungsten miner and his girl.

"Darly, I'm in trouble. Help me. I've had an accident," said Hattie.

How the face of a man will alter when a woman has bad news to tell him! It happened now to lean old Darly; his eyes went flat and looked unwilling, his jaw moved in and out, his wrinkled cheeks began to flush, and he said, "What's the matter-what's happened to you now?"

"I'm stuck on the tracks. I sneezed. I lost control of the car. Tow me off, Darly. With the pickup. Before the train comes."

Darly threw down his towel and stamped his high-heeled boots. "Now what have you gone and done?" he said. "I told you to stay home after dark."

"Where's Pace? Ring the fire bell and fetch Pace."

There's n.o.body on the property except me," said the lean old man. "And I m not supposed to close the bar and you know it as well as I do."

"Please, Darly. I can't leave my car on the tracks."

"Too bad!" he said. Nevertheless he moved from behind the bar. "How did you say it happened?"

"I told you, I sneezed," said Hattie.

Everyone, as she later told it, was as drunk as sixteen thousand dollars: Darly, the miner, and the miner's girl.

Darly was limping as he locked the door of the bar. A year before, a kick from one of Pace's mares had broken his ribs as he was loading her into the trailer, and he hadn't recovered from it. He was too old. But he dissembled the pain. The high-heeled narrow boots helped, and his painful bending looked like the ordinary stooping posture of a cowboy. However, Darly was not a genuine cowboy, like Pace who had grown up in the saddle. He was a latecomer from the East and until the age of forty had never been on horseback. In this respect he and Hattie were alike. They were not genuine Westerners.

Hattie hurried after him through the ranch yard.

"d.a.m.n you!" he said to her. "I got thirty bucks out of that sucker and I would have skinned him out of his whole paycheck if you minded your business. Pace is going to be sore as h.e.l.l."

"You've got to help me. We're neighbors," said Hattie.

"You're not fit to be living out here. You can't do it anymore. Besides, you're swacked all the time."

Hattie couldn't afford to talk back. The thought of her car on the tracks made her frantic. If a freight came now and smashed it, her life at Sego Desert Lake would be finished. And where would she go then? She was not fit to live in this place. She had never made the grade at all, only seemed to have made it. And Darly-why did he say such hurtful things to her? Because he himself was sixty-eight years old, and he had no other place to go, either; he took bad treatment from Pace besides. Darly stayed because his only alternative was to go to the soldiers' home. Moreover, the dude women would still crawl into his sack. They wanted a cowboy and they thought he was one. Why, he couldn't even raise himself out of his bunk in the morning. And where else would he get women? "After the dude season," she wanted to say to him, "you always have to go to the Veterans' Hospital to get fixed up again." But she didn't dare offend him now.

The moon was due to rise. It appeared as they drove over the ungraded dirt road toward the crossing where Hattie's turret-shaped car was sitting on the rails. Driving very fast, Darly wheeled the pickup around, spraying dirt on the miner and his girl, who had followed in their car.

"You get behind the wheel and steer," Darly told Hattie.