Collected Stories

club.

Accordingly, it didn’t surprise him that I should take so much interest in cousins. His own interest was stirred. Unless I misinterpreted the expression of his now malformed, lumpy, warm face, he was appealing to me to extend this interest to him. He wished to draw nearer.

“You aren’t being sentimental, are you, Ijah, because you and Scholem went on such wonderful walks together? You’d probably be able to judge if you read his blockbusting book. They didn’t hire dummies at the Rand Corporation—someday I’ll ask you to tell me about that super think tank.”

“I’d rather call it sympathy, not soft sentiment.”

In the moral sphere, a wild ignorance, utter anarchy.

Mendy said, “If you tried talking to him, he’d lecture you from on high, wouldn’t he? Since you don’t understand about these zygotes and gametes, you’d be forced to sit and listen….”

What Mendy intended to say was that he and I—we could understand each other, owing to our common ilk. Jews who had grown up on the sidewalks of America, we were in no sense foreigners, and we had brought so much enthusiasm, verve, love to this American life that we had become it. Odd that it should begin to roll toward oblivion just as we were perfecting ourselves in this admirable democracy. However, our democracy was passe. The new democracy with its new abstractions was cruelly disheartening. Being an American always had been something of an abstract project. You came as an immigrant. You were offered a most reasonable proposition and you said yes to it. You were found. With the new abstractions you were lost. They demanded a shocking abandonment of personal judgment. Take Eunice’s letter to the medical school as an example. By using the word “integrity” you could cheat with a good conscience. Schooled in the new abstractions, you no longer had to worry about truth and falsehood, good and evil. What excused you from good and evil was the effort you put into schooling. You worked hard at your limited lesson, you learned it, and you were forever in the clear. You could say, for instance, “Guilt has to die. Human beings are entitled to guiltless pleasure.” Having learned this valuable lesson, you could now accept the fucking of your daughters, which in the past would have choked you. You were compensated by the gratification of a lesson well learned. Well, there’s the new thoughtfulness for you. And it’s possibly on our capacity for thoughtfulness that our survival depends—all the rational decisions that have to be made. And listen here, I am not digressing at all. Cousin Scholem was a noble creature who lived in the forests of old thoughtfulness. An excellent kind of creature, if indeed he was the real thing. Cousin Mendy suggested that he was not. Cousin Mendy wished to remind me that he and I were representatives of a peculiar Jewish and American development (wiped out by history) and had infinitely more in common than any superannuated prodigy could ever understand.

“I want to do something for Scholem, Mendy.”

“I’m not sure we can spend Cousin Artie’s money to bury him in East Germany.”

“Fair enough. Now, suppose you raise the money to have his great work read… find a biologist to vet it. And a philosopher and a historian.”

“Maybe so. I’ll take it up with the executors. I’ll get back to you,” said Mendy.

I divined from this that he himself was all of the executors.

“I have to go abroad,” I said. “I may even see Scholem in Paris. His valedictory letter mentions a trip to plan the taxis-of-the-Marne business.”

I gave Mendy Miss Rodinson’s number.

“Flying the Concorde, I suppose,” said Mendy. Devoid of envy. I would have been glad of his company.

I stopped in Washington to confer with International Monetary Fund people about the intended resumption of loans from commercial banks to the Brazilians. I found time to spend a few hours at the Library of Congress, looking for Bogoras and Jochelson material, and to get inquiries under way at the East German chancery. Then I telephoned my former wife at National Public Radio. Isabel has become one of its most familiar voices. After three marriages, she has resumed her maiden name. I sometimes hear it after the prancing music of the program’s signature: “We will now hear from our correspondent Isabel Greenspan in Washington.” I invited her to have dinner with me. She said no, offended perhaps that I hadn’t called earlier from Chicago. She said she would come to the Hay-Adams Hotel to have a drink with me.

The thought persistently suggested by Isabel when we meet is that man is the not-yet-stabilized animal. By this I mean not only that defective, diseased, abortive types are common (Isabel is neither defective nor sick, by the way) but that the majority of human beings will never attain equilibrium and that they are by nature captious, fretful, irritable, uncomfortable, looking for relief from their travail and angry that it does not come. A woman like Isabel, determined to make an impression of perfect balance, reflects this unhappy instability. She identifies me with errors she has freed herself from; she measures her progress by our ever-more-apparent divergence. Clever enough to be a member of the Mensa (high-IQ) society, and, on the air, a charming person, she is always somewhat somber with me, as if she weren’t altogether satisfied with her “insights.” As a national figure in a program offering enlightened interpretation to millions of listeners, Sable is “committed,” “engaged”; but as an intelligent woman, she is secretly rueful about this enlightenment.

She talked to me about Chicago, with which, in certain respects, she identified me. “White machine aldermen tying the black mayor in knots while they strip the city of its last buck. While you, of course, see it all. You always see it all. But you’d rather go on mooning.” There was a noteworthy difference in Sable this afternoon. At cocktail time, she was made up like the dawn of day. Her dark color was the departing night. She was more perfumed than the dawn. It was otherwise a very good resemblance. No denying that she is an attractive woman. She was dressed in dark, tea-colored silk with a formal design in scarlet. She didn’t always make herself so attractive for our meetings.

Vain to pretend that I “see it all,” but what she meant when she said “mooning” was quite clear. It had two distinct and associated meanings: (1) my special preoccupations, and (2) my lifelong dream-connection with Virgie Dunton nee Miletas, the eight-fingered concert harpist. Despite her congenital defect, Virgie had mastered the entire harp repertoire, omitting a few impossible works, and had a successful career. It’s perfectly true that I had never been cured of my feeling for Virgie—her black eyes, her round face, its whiteness, its frontal tendency, its feminine emanations, the assurances of humanity or pledges of kindness which came from it. Even the slight mutilation of her short nose—it was the result of a car accident; she refused plastic surgery—was an attraction. It’s perfectly true that for me the word “female” had its most significant representation in her. Whenever possible, I attended her concerts; I walked in her neighborhood in hopes of running into her, imagined that I saw her in department stores. Chance meetings—five in thirty years—were remembered in minute actuality. When her husband, a heavy drinker, lent me Galbraith’s book on his accomplishments in India, I read every word of it, and this can only be explained by the swollen affect or cathexis that had developed. Virgie Miletas, the Venus of rudimentary thumbs, with her electric binding power, was the real object of Sable’s “you’d rather go on mooning.” The perfect happiness I might have known with Mrs. Miletas-Dunton, like the longed-for union of sundered beings in the love myth of Aristophanes—I refrain from invoking the higher Eros described by Socrates during the long runs of the blatting El trains that used to carry me, the inspired philosophy student, from Van Buren Street and its hockshops to Sixty-third Street and its throng of junkies—was an artificial love dream and Sable was quite right to despise it.

At the Hay-Adams, where we were drinking gin and tonic, Sable now made a comment which was surprising, nothing like her usual insights, which were not. She said, “I don’t think mooning is such a satisfactory word. To be more exact, you have an exuberance that you keep to yourself. You have a crazy high energy absolutely peculiar to you. Because of this high charge you can defy the plain dirty facts that other people have to suffer through, whether they like it or not. What you are is an exuberance-hoarder, Ijah. You live on your exuberant hoard. It would kill you to be depressed, as others are.”

This was a curious attack. There was something to it. I gave her full credit for this. I preferred, however, to think it over at leisure instead of answering at once. So I started to talk to her about Cousin Scholem. I described his case to her. If he were to be interviewed on National Public Radio and received the attention he deserved (the war hero-philosopher—cabby), he might succeed in stimulating the interest and, more important, the queer generosity of the public. Sable rejected this immediately. She said he’d be too heavy. If he announced that in him Kant and Darwin had a successor at last, listeners would say, Who is this nut! She admitted that the taxis of the Marne would be rich in human interest, but the celebration would not take place until 1984; it was still a year away. She also observed that her program didn’t encourage fundraising initiatives. She said, “Are you sure the man is really dying? You have only his word for it.”