and monogrammed. Not from Tiffany, but from the Italian manufacturer who would have supplied Tiffany if Tiffany had sold luggage (obtained through contacts, like the candy and cashmeres of Wolfe the ghostwriter: why should you pay full retail price just because you’re a multimillionaire?). Billy gave a press interview and complimented Israel on being part of the modern world. The peevish shadow left his face, and he and Noguchi went out every day to confer on the site of the sculpture garden. The atmosphere at the King David became friendlier. Billy stopped hassling the desk clerks, and the clerks for their part stopped lousing him up. Billy on arrival had made the mistake of asking one of them how much to tip the porter who carried his briefcase to his suite. He said he was not yet at home with the Israeli currency. The clerk had flared up. It made him indignant that a man of such wealth should be miserly with nickels and dimes, and he let him have it. Billy saw to it that the clerk was disciplined by the management. When he heard of this, Fonstein said that in Rome a receptionist in a class hotel would never in the world have made a scene with one of the guests.
“Jewish assumptions,” he said. “Not clerks and guests, but one Jew letting another Jew have it—plain talk.”
I had expected Harry Fonstein to react strongly to Billy’s presence—a guest in the same hotel at prices only the affluent could afford. Fonstein, whom Billy had saved from death, was no more than an undistinguished Jewish American, two tables away in the restaurant. And Fonstein was strong-willed. Under no circumstances would he have approached Billy to introduce himself or to confront him: “I am the man your organization smuggled out of Rome. You brought me to Ellis Island and washed your hands of me, never gave a damn about the future of this refugee. Cut me at Sardi’s.” No, no, not Harry Fonstein. He understood that there is such a thing as making too much of the destiny of an individual. Besides, it’s not really in us nowadays to extend ourselves, to become involved in the fortunes of anyone who happens to approach us.
“Mr. Rose, I am the person you wouldn’t see—couldn’t fit into your schedule.” A look of scalding irony on Fonstein’s retributive face. “Now the two of us, in God’s eye of terrible judgment, are standing here in this holy city…”
Impossible words, an impossible scenario. Nobody says such things, nor would anyone seriously listen if they were said.
No, Fonstein contented himself with observation. You saw a curious light in his eyes when Billy passed, talking to Noguchi. I can’t recall a moment when No guchi replied. Not once did Fonstein discuss with me Billy’s presence in the hotel. Again I was impressed with the importance of keeping your mouth shut, the kind of fertility it can induce, the hidden advantages of a buttoned lip.
I did ask Sorella how Fonstein felt at finding Billy here after their trip north.
“A complete surprise.” Not to you, it wasn’t.”
“You figured that out, did you?”
“Well, it took no special shrewdness,” I said. “I now feel what Dr. Watson must have felt when Sherlock Holmes complimented him on a deduction Holmes had made as soon as the case was outlined to him. Does your husband know about Mrs. Hamet’s file?”
I told him, but I haven’t mentioned that I brought the notebook to Jerusalem. Harry is a sound sleeper, whereas I am an insomniac, so I’ve been up half the night reading the old woman’s record, which damns the guy in the suite upstairs. If I didn’t have insomnia, this would keep me awake.”
“All about his deals, his vices? Damaging stuff?”
Sorella first shrugged and then nodded. I believe that she herself was perplexed, couldn’t quite make up her mind about it.
“If he were thinking of running for president, he wouldn’t like this information made public.”
“Sure. But he isn’t running. He’s not a candidate. He’s Broadway Billy, not the principal of a girls’ school or pastor of the Riverside Church.”
“That’s the truth. Still, he is a public person.”
I didn’t pursue the subject. Certainly Billy was an oddity. On the physical side (and in her character too), Sorella also was genuinely odd. She was so much bigger than the bride I had first met in Lakewood that I couldn’t keep from speculating on her expansion. She made you look twice at a doorway. When she came to it, she filled the space like a freighter in a canal lock. In its own right, consciousness—and here I refer to my own conscious mind —was yet another oddity. But the strangeness of souls is certainly no news in this day and age.
Fonstein loved her, that was a clear fact. He respected his wife, and I did too. I wasn’t poking fun at either of them when I wondered at her size. I never lost sight of Fonstein’s history, or of what it meant to be the survivor of such a destruction. Maybe Sorella was trying to incorporate in fatty tissue some portion of what he had lost— members of his family. There’s no telling what she might have been up to. All I can say is that it (whatever it was at bottom) was accomplished with some class or style. Exquisite singers can make you forget what hillocks of suet their backsides are. Besides, Sorella did dead sober what delirious sopranos put over on us in a state of false Wagnerian intoxication.
Her approach to Billy, however, was anything but sober, and I doubt that any sober move would have had an effect on Billy. What she did was to send him several pages, three or four items copied from the journal ofthat poor consumptive the late Mrs. Hamet. Sorella made sure that the clerk put it in Billy’s box, for the material was explosive, and in the wrong hands it might have been deadly.
When this was a fait accompli, she told me about it. Too late now to advise her not to do it. “I invited him to have a drink,” she said to me.
“Not the three of you…?”
“No. Harry hasn’t forgotten the bouncer scene at Sardi’s—you may remember—when Billy turned his face to the back of the booth. He’d never again force himself on Billy or any celebrity.”
“Billy might still ignore you.”
“Well, it’s in the nature of an experiment, let’s say.”
I put aside for once the look of social acceptance so many of us have mastered perfectly and let her see what I thought of her “experiment.” She might talk “Science” to her adolescent son, the future physicist. I was not a child you could easily fake out with a prestigious buzzword. Experiment? She was an ingenious and powerful woman who devised intricate, glittering, bristling, needling schemes. What she had in mind was confrontation, a hand-to-hand struggle. The laboratory word was a put-on. “Boldness,”
“Statecraft,”
“Passion,”
“Justice” were the real terms. Still, she may not herself have been clearly aware of this. And then, I later thought, the antagonist
Most interesting—at least to an American mind.
I went about my Mnemosyne business in Jerusalem at a seminar table, unfolding my methods to the Israelis. In the end, Mnemosyne didn’t take root in Tel Aviv. (It did thrive in Taiwan and Tokyo.)
On the terrace next day, Sorella, looking pleased and pleasant over her tea, said, “We’re going to meet. But he wants me to come to his suite at five o’clock.”
“Doesn’t want to be seen in public, discussing this…?”
“Exactly.”
So she did have real clout, after all. I was sorry now that I hadn’t taken the opportunity to read Mrs. Hamet’s record. (So much zeal, malice, fury, and tenderness I missed out on.) And I didn’t even feel free to ask why Sorella thought Billy had agreed to talk to her. I was sure he wouldn’t want to discuss moral theory upstairs. There weren’t going to be any revelations, confessions, speculations. People like Billy didn’t worry about their deeds, weren’t in the habit of accounting to themselves. Very few of us, for that matter, bother about accountability or keep spreadsheets of conscience.
What follows is based on Sorella’s report and supplemented by my observations. I don’t have to say, “If memory serves.” In my case it serves, all right. Besides, I made tiny notes, while she was speaking, on the back pages of my appointment book (the yearly gift to depositors in my Philadelphia bank).
Billy’s behavior throughout was austere-to-hostile. Mainly he was displeased. His conversation from the first was negative. The King David suite wasn’t up to his standards. You had to rough it here in Jerusalem, he said. But the state was young. They’d catch up by and by. These comments were made when he opened the door. He didn’t
