Collected Stories

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We do not live in bottles—Mosby’s reply.

Lustgarten said, when Ruskin left us, “Who is that fellow? He mooched you for the coffee.”

“Ruskin,” said Mosby.

“That is Ruskin?”

“Yes, why?”

“I hear my wife was going out with Ruskin while I was in the hospital.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t believe such rumors,” said Mosby. “A cup of coffee, an aperitif together, maybe.”

“When a man is down on his luck,” said Lustgarten, “it’s the rare woman who won’t give him hell in addition.”

“Sorry to hear it,” Mosby replied.

And then, as Mosby in Oaxaca recalled, shifting his seat from the sun—for he was already far too red, and his face, bones, eyes, seemed curiously thirsty—Lustgarten had said, “It’s been a terrible experience.”

“Undoubtedly so, Lustgarten. It must have been frightening.”

“What crashed was my last stake. It involved family. Too bad in a way that I wasn’t killed. My insurance would at least have covered my kid brother’s loss. And my mother and uncle.”

Mosby had no wish to see a man in tears. He did not care to sit through these moments of suffering. Such unmastered emotion was abhorrent. Though perhaps the violence of this abomination might have told Mosby something about his own moral constitution. Perhaps Lustgarten did not want his face to be working. Or tried to subdue his agitation, seeing from Mosby’s austere, though not unkind, silence that this was not his way. Mosby was by taste a Senecan. At least he admired Spanish masculinity—the varonil of Lorca. The clavel varonil, the manly red carnation, the clear classic hardness of honorable control.

“You sold the wreck for junk, I assume?”

“Klonsky took care of it. Now look, Mosby. I’m through with that. I was reading, thinking, in the hospital. I came over to make a pile. Like the gold rush. I really don’t know what got into me. Trudy and I were just sitting around during the war. I was too old for the draft. And we both wanted action. She in music. Or life. Excitement. You know, dreaming at Montclair Teachers’ College of the Big Time. I wanted to make it possible for her. Keep up with the world, or something. But really—in my hospital bed I realized—I was right the first time. I am a socialist. A natural idealist. Reading about Attlee, I felt at home again. It became clear that I am still a political animal.”

Mosby wished to say, “No, Lustgarten. You’re a dandier of swarthy little babies. You’re a piggyback man—a giddyap horsie. You’re a sweet old Jewish Daddy.” But he said nothing.

“And I also read,” said Lustgarten, “about Tito. Maybe the Tito alternative is the real one. Perhaps there is hope for socialism somewhere between the Labour Party and the Yugoslav type of leadership. I feel it my duty,” Lustgarten told Mosby, “to investigate. I’m thinking of going to Belgrade.”

“As what?”

“As a matter of fact, that’s where you could come in,” said Lustgarten. “If you would be so kind. You’re not just a scholar. You wrote a book on Plato, I’ve been told.”

“On the Laws.”

“And other books. But in addition you know the Movement. Lots of people. More connections than a switchboard….”

The slang of the forties.

“You know people at the New Leader?”

“Not my type of paper,” said Mosby. “I’m actually a political conservative. Not what you would call a Rotten Liberal but an out-and-out conservative. I shook Franco’s hand, you know.”

“Did you?”

“This very hand shook the hand of the Caudillo. Would you like to touch it for yourself?”

“Why should I?”

“Go on,” said Mosby. “It may mean something. Shake the hand that shook the hand.”

Very strangely, then, Lustgarten extended padded, swarthy fingers. He looked partly subtle, partly ill. Grinning, he said, “Now I’ve made contact with real politics at last. But I’m serious about the New Leader. You probably know Bohn. I need credentials for Yugoslavia.”

“Have you ever written for the papers?”

“For the Militant.”

“What did you write?”

Guilty Lustgarten did not lie well. It was heartless of Mosby to amuse himself in this way.

“I have a scrapbook somewhere,” said Lustgarten.

But it was not necessary to write to the New Leader. Lustgarten, encountered two days later on the boulevard, near the pork butcher, had taken off the sling and scarcely needed the cane. He said, “I’m going to Yugoslavia. I’ve been invited.”

“By whom?”

“Tito. The government. They’re asking interested people to come as guests to tour the country and see how they’re building socialism. Oh, I know,” he quickly said, anticipating standard doctrinal objection, “you don’t build socialism in one country, but it’s no longer the same situation. And I really believe Tito may redeem Marxism by actually transforming the dictatorship of the proletariat. This brings me back to my first love—the radical movement. I was never meant to be an entrepreneur.”

“Probably not.”

“I feel some hope,” Lustgarten shyly said. “And then also, it’s getting to be spring.” He was wearing his heavy moose-colored bristling hat, and bore many other signs of interminable winter. A candidate for resurrection. An opportunity for the grace of life to reveal itself. But perhaps, Mosby thought, a man like Lustgarten would never, except with supernatural aid, exist in a suitable form.

“Also,” said Lustgarten touchingly, “this will give Trudy time to reconsider.”

“Is that the way things are with you two? I’m sorry.”

“I wish I could take her with me, but I can’t swing that with the Yugoslavs. It’s sort of a VIP deal. I guess they want to affect foreign radicals. There’ll be seminars in dialectics, and so on. I love it. But it’s not Trudy’s dish.”

Steady-handed, Mosby on his patio took ice with tongs, and poured more mescal flavored with gusano de maguey—a worm or slug of delicate flavor. These notes on Lustgarten pleased him. It was essential, at this point in his memoirs, to disclose new depths. The preceding chapters had been heavy. Many unconventional things were said about the state of political theory. The weakness of conservative doctrine, the lack, in America, of conservative alternatives, of resistance to the prevailing liberalism. As one who had personally tried to create a more rigorous environment for slovenly intellectuals, to force them to do their homework, to harden the categories of political thought, he was aware that on the right as on the left the results were barren. Absurdly, the college-bred dunces of America had longed for a true leftwing movement on the European model. They still dreamed of it. No less absurd were the rightwing idiots. You cannot grow a rose in a coal mine. Mosby’s own rightwing graduate students had disappointed him. Just a lot of television actors. Bad guys for the Susskind interview programs. They had transformed the master’s manner of acid elegance, logical tightness, factual punctiliousness, and merciless laceration in debate into a sort of shallow Noыl Coward style. The real, the original Mosby approach brought Mosby hatred, got Mosby fired. Princeton University had offered Mosby a lump sum to retire seven years early. One hundred and forty thousand dollars. Because his mode of discourse was so upsetting to the academic community. Mosby was invited to no television programs. He was like the Guerrilla Mosby of the Civil War. When he galloped in, all were slaughtered.

Most carefully, Mosby had studied the memoirs of Santayana, Malraux, Sartre, Lord Russell, and others. Unfortunately, no one was reliably or consistently great. Men whose lives had been devoted to thought, who had tried mightily to govern the disorder of public life, to put it under some sort of intellectual authority, to get ideas to save mankind or to offer it mental aid in saving itself, would suddenly turn into gruesome idiots. Wanting to kill everyone. For instance, Sartre calling for the Russians to drop A-bombs on American bases in the Pacific because America was now presumably monstrous. And exhorting the blacks to butcher the whites. This moral philosopher! Or Russell, the Pacifist of World War I, urging the West to annihilate Russia after World War II. And sometimes, in