Humboldt's Gift

  As I sat in the theater I allowed myself to imagine that there were spirits near, that they wished to reach us, that their breathing enlivened the red of the little dresses the kids were wearing, just as oxygen brightened fire.

  Then the children started to scream. Rip was staggering up from the mass of leaves that had dropped on him. Knowing what he was up against, I groaned. The real question was whether he could stay awake.

  During intermission I ran into Dr. Klosterman from the Downtown Club. He was the one who had urged me in the sauna to go to a plastic surgeon and do something about the bags under my eyes—a simple operation to make me look years younger. All I had for him was a cold nod when he came forward with his children. He said, “We haven’t seen you around lately.”

  Well, I hadn’t been around lately. But only last night, unconscious in Renata’s arms, I had dreamed again that I was playing paddle ball like a champion. My dream-backhand skimmed the left wall of the court and dropped with deadly english into the corner. I beat Scottie the club-player, and also the unbeatable Greek chiropractor, a skinny athlete, very hairy, pigeon-toed but a fiery competitor from whom in real life I could never win a single point. But on the court of my dreams I was a tiger. So in dreams of pure wakefulness and forward intensity I overcame my inertia, my mooning and muddiness. In dreams at any rate I had no intention of quitting.

  As I was thinking of all this in the lobby, Lish remembered that she had brought a note for me from her mother. I opened the envelope and read, “Charles: my life has been threatened!”

  There was no end to Cantabile. Before kidnaping Thaxter and me on Michigan Boulevard, perhaps at the very moment when we were admiring the beautiful Monet Sandvika winter scene, Cantabile was on the telephone with Denise, doing what he loved best, i.e., making threats.

  Once when he was speaking of Denise, George Swiebel had explained to me (although knowing his Nature System I could have provided this explanation myself), “Denise’s struggle with you is her whole sex life. Don’t talk to her, don’t argue with her, unless you still want to give her kicks.” Undoubtedly he would have interpreted Cantabile’s threats in the same way. “This is how the son of a bitch gets his nuts off.” But it was just possible that Cantabile’s death-dealing fantasy, his imaginary role as Death’s highest-ranking deputy, was intended also to wake me up—“Brutus, thou sleep’st,” etcetera. This had occurred to me in the squad car.

  But he had really done it now. “Does your mother expect an answer?” I asked the kid.

  Lish looked at me with her mother’s eyes, those wide amethyst circles. “She didn’t say, Daddy.”

  Denise had certainly reported to Urbanovich that there was a plot to murder her. This would clinch the matter with the judge. He didn’t trust or like me anyway, and he could impound my money. I could forget about those dollars, they were gone. What now? I began again with the usual haste and inaccuracy to tot up my fluid resources, twelve hundred here, eighteen hundred there, the sale of my beautiful carpets, the sale of the Mercedes, very disadvantageous given its damaged condition. So far as I knew, Cantabile was locked up at Twenty-sixth and California. I hoped he would get it in the neck. Lots of people were killed in jail. Perhaps someone would do him in. But I didn’t believe that he would spend much time behind bars. Getting out was very easy now and he’d probably draw another suspended sentence. The courts now gave them as freely as the Salvation Army gave out doughnuts. Well, it didn’t really matter, I was leaving for Milan.

  So, as I said, I paid a sentimental visit to Naomi Lutz, now Wolper. I hired a limousine from the livery service to take me out to Marquette Park—why stint myself now? It was wintry, wet, sleety, a good day for a schoolboy to fight the weather with his satchel and feel dauntless. Naomi was at her post, stopping traffic while kids trotted, straggled, dragged their raincapes and stamped through the puddles. Under the police uniform she wore layers of sweaters. On her head was a garrison cap and a Sam Browne belt crossed her chest—the works: fleece boots, mittens, her neck protected by an orange havelock, her figure obliterated. She waved her coat-hampered wet arms, gathering kids about her, she stopped the traffic and then, heavy in the back, she turned and footed slowly to the curb on her thick soles. And this was the woman for whom I once felt perfect love. She was the person with whom I should have been allowed to sleep for forty years in my favorite position (the woman backed up to me and her breasts in my hands). In a city like brutal Chicago could a man really expect to survive without such intimate, such private comfort? When I came up to her I saw the young woman within the old one. I saw her in the neat short teeth, the winsome gums, the single dimple in the left cheek. I thought I could still breathe in her young woman’s odor, damp and rich, and I heard the gliding and drawling of her voice, an affectation she and I had both thought utterly charming once. And even now, I thought, Why not? The rain of the Seventies looked to me like the moisture of the Thirties when our adolescent lovemaking brought out tiny drops in a little band, a Venetian mask across the middle of her face. But I knew better than to try to touch her, to take off the police coat and the sweaters and the dress and the underclothes. Nor would she want me to see what had happened to her thighs and her breasts. That was all right for her friend Hank—Hank and Naomi had grown old together—but not for me, who knew her way-back-when. There was no prospect of this. It was not indicated, not hinted, not possible. It was only one of those things that had to be thought.

  We drank coffee in her kitchen. She had invited me to brunch and served fried eggs, smoked salmon, nutbread, and comb honey. I felt completely at home with her old ironware and hand-knitted pot holders. The house was all that Wolper left her, she said. “When I saw how fast he was losing money on the horses I insisted that he should make the title over.”

  “Smart thinking.”

  “A little later my husband’s nose and ankle were broken, just as a warning, by a juice man. Till then I didn’t know Wolper was paying the gangsters juice. He came home from the hospital with his face all purple around the bandages. He said I shouldn’t sell the bungalow to save his life. He cried and said he was no damn good and he decided to disappear. I know you’re surprised that I live in this Czech neighborhood. But my father-in-law, a smart old Jew, bought investment property in this nice safe Bohunk district. So this was where we wound up. Well, Wolper was a jolly man. He didn’t give me trouble the way you would have. For a wedding present he made me a present of my own convertible and a charge account at Field’s. That was what I wanted most in life.”

  “I always felt it would have given me strength to be married to you, Naomi.”

  “Don’t idealize so much. You were a violent kid. You almost choked me to death because I went to a dance with some basketball player. And once, in the garage, you put a rope on your neck and threatened to hang yourself if you didn’t get your way. Do you remember?”

  “I’m afraid I do, yes. Superkeen needs were swelling up in me.”

  “Wolper is married again and has a bikeshop in New Mexico. He may feel safer near the border. Yes, you were thrilling but I never knew where you were at with your Swinburne and your Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde and Karl Marx. Boy, you certainly did carry on.”

  “Those were intoxicating books and I was in the thick of beauty and wild about goodness and thought and poetry and love. Wasn’t that merely adolescence?”

  She smiled at me and said, “I don’t really think so. Doc told Mother that your whole family were a bunch of greenhorns and aliens, too damn emotional, the whole bunch of you. Doc died last year.”

  “Your daughter told me that.”

  “Yes, he fell apart finally. When old men put two socks on one foot and pee into the bathtub I suppose it’s the end.”

  “I’m afraid so. I myself think that Doc overdid the Yankee Doodle stuff. Being a Babbitt inspired him almost the way Swinburne did me. He was dying to say good-by to Jewry, or to feudalism….”

  “Do me a favor—I still freeze when you use a word
like feudalism on me. That was the trouble between us. You came down from Madison raving about that poet named Humboldt Park or something and borrowed my savings to go to New York on a Greyhound bus. I really and truly loved you, Charlie, but when you rolled away to see this god of yours, I went home and painted my nails and turned on the radio. Your father was furious when I told him you were a Fuller Brush salesman in Manhattan. He needed your help in the wood business.”

  “Nonsense, he had Julius.”

  “Jesus, your father was handsome. He looked like—what the girls used to say—The Spaniard Who Ruined My Life. And Julius?”

  “Julius is disfiguring south Texas with shopping centers and condominiums.”

  “But you people all loved each other. You were like real primitive that way. Maybe that’s why my father called you greenhorns.”

  “Well, Naomi, my father became an American too and so did Julius. They stopped all that immigrant loving. Only I persisted, in my childish way. My emotional account was always overdrawn. I never have forgotten how my mother cried out when I fell down the stairs or how she pressed the lump on my head with the blade of a knife. And what a knife—it was her Russian silver with a handle like a billy club. So there you are. Whether it was a lump on my head, or Julius’s geometry, or how Papa could raise the rent, or poor Mama’s toothaches, it was the most momentous thing on earth for us all. I never lost this intense way of caring—no, that isn’t so. I’m afraid the truth is that I did lose it. Yes, sure I lost it. But I still required it. That’s always been the problem. I required it and apparently I also promised it. To women, I mean. For women I had this utopian emotional love aura and made them feel I was a cherishing man. Sure, I’d cherish them in the way they all dreamed of being cherished.”

  “But it was a phony,” said Naomi. “You yourself lost it. You didn’t cherish.”

  “I lost it. Although anything so passionate probably remains in force somewhere.”

  “Charlie, you put it over on lots of girls. You must have made them awfully unhappy.”

  “I wonder whether mine is such an exceptional case of longing-heart-itis. It’s unreal, of course, perverse. But it’s also American, isn’t it? When I say American I mean uncorrected by the main history of human suffering.”

  Naomi sighed as she listened to me and then said, “Ah, Charlie, I’ll never understand how or why you reach your conclusions. When you used to lecture me, I never could follow you at all. But at the time your play opened on Broadway, you were in love with a girl, they tell me. What happened to her?”

  “Demmie Vonghel. Yes. She was the real thing, too. She was killed in South America with her father. He was a millionaire from Delaware. They took off from Caracas in a DC-3 and crashed in the jungle.”

  “Oh how sad and terrible.”

  “I went down to Venezuela to look for her.”

  “I’m glad you did that. I was going to ask.”

  “I took the same flight out of Caracas. They were old planes and patched up. Indians flying around with their chickens and goats. The pilot invited me to sit in the cockpit. There was a big crack in the windshield and the wind rushed in. Flying over the mountains I was afraid we wouldn’t make it either, and I thought, O Lord, let it happen to me the way it happened to Demmie. Looking at those mountains I frankly didn’t care much for the way the world was made, Naomi.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Oh I don’t know, but you get disaffected from nature and all its miracles and stupendous achievements, from subatomic to galactic. Things play too rough with human beings. They chafe too hard. They stick you in the veins. As we came over the mountains and I saw the Pacific throwing a fit of epilepsy against the shore I thought, To hell with you, then. You can’t always like the way in which the world was molded. Sometimes I think, Who wants to be an eternal spirit and have more existences! Screw all that! But I was telling you about the flight. Up and down about ten times. We landed on bare earth. Strips of red dirt on coffee plantations. Waving at us under the trees were little naked kids with their brown bellies and bent dinguses hanging.”

  “You never found anything? Didn’t you search in the jungle?”

  “Sure I searched. We even found a plane, but not the missing DC-3. This was a Cessna that went down with some Japanese mining engineers. Vines and flowers were growing all over their bones, and God knows what spiders and other animals were making themselves at home in their skulls. I didn’t want to discover Demmie in that condition.”

  “You didn’t like the jungle much.”

  “No. I drank lots of gin. I developed a taste for straight gin, like my friend Von Humboldt Fleisher.”

  “The poet! What happened to him?”

  “He’s dead, too, Naomi.”

  “Isn’t all this dying something, Charlie!”

  “The whole thing is disintegrating and reintegrating all the time, and you have to guess whether it’s always the same cast of characters or a lot of different characters.”

  “I suppose you finally got to the mission,” said Naomi.

  “Yes, and there were lots of Demmies there, about twenty Vonghels. They were all cousins. All with the same long heads golden hair knock-knees and upturned noses, and the same mumbling style of speech. When I said that I was Demmie’s fiancé from New York they thought I was some sort of nut. I had to attend services and sing hymns, because the Indians wouldn’t understand a white visitor who was not a Christian.”

  “So you sang hymns while your heart was breaking.”

  “I was glad to sing the hymns. And Dr. Tim Vonghel gave me a bucket of gentian violet to sit in. He told me I had a bad case of tinia crura. So I stayed among these cannibals, hoping that Demmie would show up.”

  “Were they cannibals?”

  “They had eaten the first group of missionaries that came there. As you sang in the chapel and saw the filed teeth of somebody who had probably eaten your brother—Dr. Timothy’s brother was eaten, and he knew the fellows who had done it—well, Naomi, there’s lots of peculiar merit in people. I wouldn’t be surprised if my experiences in the jungle put me in a forgiving frame of mind.”

  “Who was there to forgive?” said Naomi.

  “This friend of mine, Von Humboldt Fleisher. He drew a check on my account while I was knocking myself out over Demmie in the jungle.”

  “Did he forge your signature?”

  “I had given him a blank check, and he put it through for more than six thousand dollars.”

  “No! But you, of course, you didn’t expect a poet to act that way about money, did you? Excuse me for laughing. But you always did provoke people into doing the dirty human thing to you by insisting that they should do the Goody Two-Shoes bit. I’m awfully sorry you lost that girl in the jungle. She sounds to me like your type. She was like you, wasn’t she? You could both have been out of it together, and perfectly happy.”

  “I see what you mean, Naomi. I failed to understand the deeper side of human nature. Until recently I couldn’t bear to think of it.”

  “Only you could get mixed up with this goofy fellow that threatened Stronson. This Italian Maggie described to me.”

  “You may be right,” I said. “And I must try to analyze my motives for going along with people of the Cantabile type. But think how I felt to have a child of yours, that beautiful girl, come and get me out of jail—the daughter of the woman I loved.”

  “Don’t get sentimental, Charlie. Please!” she said.

  “I have to tell you, Naomi, that I loved you cell by cell. To me you were a completely nonalien person. Your molecules were my molecules. Your smell was my smell. And your daughter reminded me of you—same teeth, same smile, same everything, for all I know.”

  “Don’t get carried away. You’d marry her, wouldn’t you, you old sex pot. Are you testing to see if I’d say go ahead? It’s a real compliment that you’re ready to marry her because she reminds you of me. Well, she’s a wonderful kid, but what you need is a woman with a heart as
big as a washing machine, and that’s not my daughter. Anyway, you’re still with that chick I saw in the bar—the gorgeous kind of Oriental one, built like a belly dancer, and big dark eyes. Aren’t you?”

  “Yes, she is gorgeous, and I’m still the boyfriend.”

  “A boyfriend! I wonder what it is with you—a big important clever man going around so eager from woman to woman. Haven’t you got anything more important to do? Boy, have women ever sold you a bill of goods! Do you think they’re really going to give you the kind of help and comfort you’re looking for? As advertised?”

  “Well, it is advertised, isn’t it?”

  “It’s like an instinct with women,” she said. “You communicate to them what you have to have and right away they tell you they’ve got exactly what you need, although they never even heard of it until just now. They’re not even necessarily lying. They just have an instinct that they can supply everything that a man can ask for, and they’re ready to take on any size or shape or type of man. That’s what they’re like. So you go around looking for a woman like yourself. There ain’t no such animal. Not even this Demmie could have been. But the girls tell you, ‘Your search is ended. Stop here. I’m it.’ Then you award the contract. Of course nobody can deliver and everybody gets sore as hell. Well, Maggie isn’t your type. Why don’t you tell me about your wife?”

  “Don’t put temptation before me. Just pour me another cup.”

  “What’s the temptation?”

  “Oh, the temptation? The temptation is to complain. I could tell you how bad Denise is with the kids, how she dumps them when she can, has the court tie me in knots and the lawyers rip me off, and so on. Now that’s a Case, Naomi. A Case can be a work of art, the beautiful version of one’s sad life. Humboldt the poet used to perform his Case all over New York. But these Cases are bad art, as a rule. How will all this complaining seem when the soul has flowed out into the universe and looks back on the complete scene of earthly suffering?”