“No,” said Menasha. “For an ordinary guy, maybe it would be. But when you turn into a personage, Charlie, it’s much less of a coincidence than you think. There must be friends and acquaintances like me all over the place who used to know you but are too shy to approach and remind you. I would have been too shy myself if it wasn’t that you were coming to see my buddy Waldemar.” Menasha turned to Renata. “And this is Mrs. Citrine,” he said.
“Yes,” I said, looking her in the face. “This is Mrs. Citrine.”
“I knew your husband as a kid. I boarded with his family when I came down from Ypsilanti, Michigan, to work at Western Electric as a punch-press operator. What I really came for was to study singing. Charlie was a wonderful boy. Charlie was the best-hearted little kid on the whole Northwest Side. I could talk to him when he was only nine or ten, and he was my only friend. I’d take him downtown with me Saturdays for my music lesson.”
“Your teacher,” I said, “was Vsevelod Kolodny, room eight sixteen in the Fine Arts Building. Basso profundo with the Imperial Opera, Petersburg, bald, four-feet-ten, wore a corset and Cuban heels.”
“He recognized me, too,” said Menasha, infinitely pleased.
“You were a dramatic tenor,” I said. I had only to say this to see how he rose on his toes, clasping his punch-press-callused palms and singing “In questa tomba oscura,” tears of ardor filling up his eyes, and his voice so roosterish, with so much heart, so much cry and hackle and hope—tuneless. Even as a boy I knew he’d never make stardom. I did believe, however, that he might have become a singer but for the fact that on the Ypsilanti YMCA boxing team someone had hit him in the nose and this had ruined his chances in art. The songs that were sung through this disfigured nose would never be right.
“Tell me, my boy, what else do you remember?”
“I remember Tito Schipa, Titta Ruffo, Werrenrath, McCormack, Schumann-Heink, Amelita Galli-Curci, Verdi, and Boito. And when you heard Caruso sing Pagliacci, life was never the same again, right?”
“Oh, yes!”
Love made these things unforgettable. In Chicago fifty years ago, we had been passengers on the double-deck open-topped bus down to the Loop on Jackson Boulevard, Menasha explaining to me what bel canto was, telling me, radiant, about Aida, envisioning himself in brocade robes as a priest or warrior. After his singing lesson he took me to Kranz’s for a chocolate-fudge sundae. We went to hear Paul Ash’s sizzling band, we also heard vaudeville seals who played “Yankee Doodle” by nipping the syringe bulbs of automobile horns. We swam at Clarendon Beach, where everyone peed in the water. At night he taught me astronomy. He explained Darwin to me. He married his high-school sweetheart from Ypsilanti. Her name was Marsha. She was obese. She was homesick and she lay in bed and cried. I once saw her sitting in the bathtub trying to wash her hair. She took water in her hands but her arms were too fat to raise it in her palms as high as the head. This dear girl was dead. Menasha had been an electrician in Brooklyn for most of his life. Of his dramatic tenor nothing was left but the yelping of an old man, greatly moved. Of his stiff red hair there remained only this orange-whitey cirrhus formation. “Very kind people, the Citrines. Maybe not Julius. He was rough. Is Julius still Julius? Your mother was so helpful to Marsha. Your kind poor mother…. But let’s go and see Waldemar. I’m only the greeting committee and he’s waiting. They keep him in a back room by the kitchen.”
We found Waldemar sitting on the edge of his bed, a man with wide shoulders, and his hair wet-brushed very like Humboldt’s, the same broad face, and the eyes gray and set wide. Within ten miles of Coney Island, perhaps, sucking in and straining tons of water, puffing vapor from his head, there was a whale with eyes similarly positioned.
“So you were my nephew’s buddy,” said the old gambler.
“This is Charlie Citrine,” said Menasha. “You know, Waldemar, he recognized me. The boy recognized me all right. Gosh, Charlie, you should, you know. I paid out a fortune on sodas and treats. There ought to be some justice.”
Through Humboldt I knew Uncle Waldemar, of course. He was an only son, with four older sisters and a doting mother, much pampered, idle, a poolroom bum, a dropout, mooching from his sisters and stealing from their purses. Eventually he placed Humboldt in the senior position as well. Becoming rather a brother than an uncle. The kid role was the only role he understood.
I was thinking that life was a hell of a lot more bounteous than I had ever realized. It rushed over us with more than our senses and our judgment could take in. One life with its love affairs, its operatic ambitions, its dollars and horse races and marriage-designs and old people’s homes is, after all, only a tin dipperful of this superabundance. It rushes up also from within. Take a room like Uncle Waldemar’s, smelling of wieners boiling for lunch, with Waldemar squatting on the edge of the bed, all dressed up for a visit, his face, his head blearily similar to Humboldt’s, but with the effect of a blown dandelion, all the yellow gone gray; take the old gentleman’s green shirt, buttoned to the collar; take his good suit on the wire hanger in the corner (he would have a dressy funeral); take the satchels under his bed and the pin-ups of horses and prizefighters and the book-jacket photograph of Humboldt in the days when Humboldt was impossibly beautiful. If this is literally all what life is, then Renata’s little rhyme about Chicago is right on the head: “Without O’Hare, it’s sheer despair.” And all O’Hare can do is change the scene for you and take you from dismal to dismal, from boredom to boredom. But why did a kind of faintness come over me at the start of this interview with Uncle Waldemar in the presence of Menasha and Renata? Because there is far more to any experience, connection, or relationship than ordinary consciousness, the daily life of the ego, can grasp. Yes. You see, the soul belongs to a greater, an all-embracing life outside. It’s got to. Learning to think of this existence of mine as merely the present existence, one in a series, I was not really surprised to meet Menasha Klinger. He and I obviously held permanent membership in some larger, more extended human outfit, and his desire to stand in brocade and sing Rhadames in Aida was like my eagerness to go far, far beyond fellow intellectuals of my generation who had lost the imaginative soul. Oh, I admired some of these intellectuals without limits. Especially the princes of science, astrophysicists, pure mathematicians, and the like. But nothing had been done about the main question. The main question, as Walt Whitman had pointed out, was the death question. And music drew me toward Menasha. By means of music a man affirmed that the logically unanswerable was, in a different form, answerable. Sounds without determinate meaning became more and more pertinent, the greater the music. This was such a man’s assignment. I, too, in spite of lethargy and weakness, was here for a big reason. Just what this was I would consider later, when I looked back on my life in the twentieth century. Calendars would disintegrate under the gaze of the spirit. But there would be a December spot for a subway ride in cars disfigured by youth gangs, and a beautiful woman whom I followed on. the boardwalk while hearing the peppery pang of shooting galleries and smelling popcorn and hot dogs, thinking of the sex of her figure, the consumerism of her garments, and of my friendship with Von Humboldt Fleisher which had brought me to Coney Island. In my reflective purgatory I would see it all from a different perspective and know, perhaps, how all these peculiarities added up—know why an emotional estuary should have opened up in me when I laid eyes on Waldemar Wald.
Waldemar was now saying, “What a dog’s age since anybody visited. I’ve been forgot. Humboldt would never have stuck me in a dump like this. It was temporary. The chow is awful, and the help is rough. They say, ‘Shut up, you’re gaga.’ They’re all from the Caribbean. Everybody else is a kraut. Menasha and me are practically the only Americans. Humboldt once made a joke, ‘Two is company, three is a kraut!’ ”
“But he did put you here,” said Renata.
“Just till he could iron out some problems. The whole week before he died he was looking for an apartment for us both. Once we lived together for thre
e months and that was heaven. Up in the morning like a real family, bacon and eggs, and then we’d talk baseball. I made a real fan of him, you know that? Fifty years ago I bought him a first-baseman’s mitt. I taught him to field a grounder and throw a guy out. Football, too. I showed him how to toss a forward pass. My mother’s railroad apartment had a long, long corridor where we played. When his dad took off it was a houseful of women and it was up to me to make an American boy out of him. Those women did plenty of damage. Look at the names they gave us—Waldemar! The kids called me Walla-Walla. And he had it rough, too. Humboldt! My goofy sister named him after a statue in Central Park.”
All this was familiar to me from Humboldt’s charming poem “Uncle Harlequin.” Waldemar Harlequin, in the old days on West End Avenue, after his wage-earning sisters went to business, rose at eleven, bathed for an hour, shaved with a new Gillette blade, and then lunched. His mother sat beside him to butter his rolls, to skin his whitefish and bone it, to pour his coffee while he read the papers. Then he took a few bucks from her and went out. He talked at the dinner table about Jimmy Walker and Al Smith. He, in Humboldt’s opinion, was his family’s American. This was his function among the ladies and with his nephew. When the national conventions were broadcast on the radio he could call the roll of the states together with the announcer— “Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa”—and patriotic tears filled his eyes.
“Mr. Wald, I’ve come to see you about the papers Humboldt left. I told you on the phone. I have a note from Orlando Huggins.”
“Yes, I know Huggins, that long drink of water. Now I want to ask you about the papers. Is this stuff valuable or ain’t it?”
“Sometimes we see in the Times,” said Menasha, “a letter by Robert Frost fetches eight hundred bucks. As for Edgar Allan Poe, don’t ask.”
“What’s actually in those papers, Mr. Wald?” asked Renata.
“Well, I have to tell you,” said Waldemar. “I never understood any of his stuff. I’m not a big reader. What he wrote was way over my head. Humboldt could hit like a sonofabitch on the sandlot. With his shoulders, just imagine how much beef there went into his swing. If I had my way he would have ended up in the majors. But he started in to hanging around the Forty-second Street library and bull-shitting with those bums on the front steps. First thing I knew he was printing highbrow poems in the magazines. I mean, the kind of magazines without pictures.”
“Come on, Waldemar,” said Menasha. His chest was high with feeling and his voice rose and rose. “I’ve known Charlie from a kid. I want to tell you you can trust Charlie. Long ago, soon as I laid eyes on him, I said to myself, This kid’s heart is right up there in his face. He’s getting along in years himself. Although compared to us he’s a strong fellow still. Now Waldemar, whyn’t you come clean and tell him what’s on your mind?”
“In Humboldt’s papers, as papers, there probably isn’t much money,” I said. “One might try to sell them to a collector. But perhaps there is something in what he left that could be published.”
“It’s mostly the sentiment,” said Renata. “Like a message from an old friend in the next world.”
Waldemar looked at her, obstinate. “But suppose it is valuable, why should I get screwed? Am I entitled to get something out of it or not? I mean, why should I stick in this lousy home here? As soon as they showed me Humboldt’s obituary in the Times—Christ! Imagine what that did to met Like my own kid, the last of the family, my own flesh and blood! I got on the BMT as fast as I could and went up to his room. His stuff was half gone already. The cops and the hotel management were grabbing it off. The cash and the watch and his fountain pen and the typewriter disappeared.”
“What’s the use of sitting on this stuff and dreaming you’ll make a killing?” said Menasha. “Hand it over to somebody who knows.”
“Don’t fink on me,” said Waldemar to Menasha. “We’re in here together. This much I’m willing—I’ll level with you, Mr. Citrine. I could have peddled this stuff long ago. If you ask me there is a real property in this.”
“You have read it then,” I said.
“Hell, sure I’ve read it. What the hell else have I got to do? I couldn’t make heads or tails out of it.”
“I wouldn’t dream of doing you out of anything,” I said. “If it has got value I’ll tell you honestly.”
“Why don’t we get a lawyer to draw up a legal document?” said Waldemar.
He was Humboldt’s uncle all right. I became very persuasive. I am never so reasonable as when I badly want something. I can make it seem natural justice itself that I should have it. “We can make things as legal as you like,” I said. “But shouldn’t I read it all? How can I tell without examining it?”
“Then read it here,” said Waldemar.
Menasha said, “You’ve always been a sport, Charlie. Take a gamble.”
“Along that line my record isn’t so hot,” said Waldemar. I thought he would cry, he sounded so shaky. So little stood between him and death, you see. On the bald harsh crimson of the threadbare carpet, a pale patch of weak December warmth said, “Don’t cry, old boy.” Inaudible storms of light, ninety-three million miles away, used a threadbare Axminster, a scrap of human manufacture, to deliver a message through the soiled window of a nursing home. My own heart became emotional. I wished to convey something important. We have to go through the bitter gates of death, I wanted to say to him, and give back these loaned minerals that comprise us, but I want to tell you, brother Waldemar, that I deeply suspect things do not end there. The thought of the life we are now leading may pain us as greatly later on as the thought of death pains us now.
Well, finally I got around him with my good sense and honesty and we all went down on our knees and began to pull all sorts of stuff from under his bed—bedroom slippers, an old bowling ball, a toy baseball game, playing cards, odd dice, cardboard boxes, and valises, and, finally, a relic that I could identify—Humboldt’s briefcase. It was Humboldt’s old bag with the frayed straps, the one that was always riding, crammed with books and pill bottles, in the back seat of his Buick.
“Wait, I’ve got my files in there,” Waldemar said, fussing. “You’ll screw it all up. I’ll do this.”
Renata, on the floor with the rest of us, wiped the dust with paper tissues. She was always saying, “Here’s a Kleenex,” and producing paper tissues. Waldemar removed several insurance policies and a bundle of computer-perforated Social Security cards. There were several horse photographs, which he identified as an almost complete set of Kentucky Derby winners. Then like a blindish postman, he went through numerous envelopes. “Quicker!” I wanted to say.
“This is the one,” he said.
There was my name written in Humboldt’s tight, scratchy hand.
“What’s in it? Let me see,” said Renata.
I took it from him, an outsized heavy manila envelope.
“You’ll have to give me a receipt,” said Waldemar.
“Certainly I will. Renata, would you mind making out a form? Like, received from Mr. Waldemar Wald, papers willed to me by Von Humboldt Fleisher. I’ll sign it.”
“Papers of what kind? What’s actually here?”
“What’s in them?” said Waldemar. “One thing is a long personal letter to Mr. Citrine. Then a couple of sealed envelopes which I never broke open at all because there are instructions that say if you open them something goes wrong with the copyright. Anyhow, they’re duplicates, or duplicates of duplicates. I can’t tell you. Most of it doesn’t add up, to me. Maybe for you it will. Anyhow, if I, the last member of my family, can tell you what’s on my mind, my dead are all over the place, one grave here, and the other to hell and gone, my sister in that joint they call Valhalla for the German Jews and my nephew buried in potter’s field. What I really want is to reunite the family again.”
Menasha said, “It bugs Waldemar that Humboldt is buried in a bad place. Way out in no man’s land.”
“If there’s any value in this legacy, the first mon
ey should be spent to dig the kid up and move him. It doesn’t have to be the Valhalla. That was my sister keeping up with the Joneses. She had a thing about them German Jews. But I want to bring us all together. Gather up my dead,” the old horse-player said.
This solemnity was unexpected. Renata and I looked at each other.
“Count on Charlie to do right by you,” said Menasha.
“I’ll write and tell you what I find in these papers,” I said. “And just as soon as we get back from Europe, I promise you we’ll attend to everything. You can start lining up a cemetery. Even if these papers have no commercial value I’d be perfectly willing to pick up the burial tab.”
“Just what I told you,” said Menasha to Waldemar. “A kid like this kid was bound to grow up into a gentleman.”
We now went out. I held each of the old boys by a wasted arm, by the big double knobs of the elbow where radius and ulna meet, promising to stay in touch. Sauntering behind us, Renata with her white face and great hat was incomparably more substantial in person than any of us. She said unexpectedly, “If Charles says it, Charles’ll do it. We’ll go away and he’ll be thinking of you.”
In a corner of the cold porch stood the wheelchairs, glittering, lightweight, tubular, stainless metal, with batlike folds. “I wonder if anyone would object if I sat in one of these wheel-chairs,” I said.
I got into one of them and said to Renata, “Give us a ride.”
The old men didn’t quite know what to make of my being trundled back and forth on the stoop by this large, laughing, brilliant woman with the wonderful teeth. “Don’t carry on like a fool. You’ll offend them, Renata,” I said. “Just push.”
“These damn handles are damn cold,” she said.
She drew on the long gloves with charming swagger, I must say.
In the racketing speed of the howling, weeping subway I began to read the long letter, the preface to Humboldt’s gift, handing on the onionskin pages to Renata. Incurious after she had glanced at a few of these, she said, “When you get to the story, let me know. I’m not big on philosophy.” I can’t say that I blame her. He was not her precious friend hid in death’s dateless night. There was no reason why she should be moved, as I was. She made no effort to enter into my feelings, nor did I want her to try.