invite Sorella to sit, but at her weight, on her small feet, she wasn’t going to be kept standing, and she settled her body in a striped chair, justifying herself by the human sound she made when she seated herself—exhaling as the cushions exhaled.
This was her first opportunity to look Billy over, and she had a few unforeseeable impressions: so this was Billy from the world of the stars. He was very Well dressed, in the clothes he had made such a fuss about. At moments you had the feeling that his sleeves were stuffed with the paper tissue used by high-grade cleaners. I had mentioned that there was something birdlike about the cut of his coat, and she agreed with me, but where I saw a robin or a thrush, plump under the shirt, she said (through having installed a bird feeder in New Jersey) that he was more like a grosbeak; he even had some of the color. One eye was set a little closer to the nose than the other, giving a touch of Jewish pathos to his look. Actually, she said, he was a little like Mrs. Hamet, with the one sad eye in her consumptive, theatrical death-white face. And though his hair was groomed, it wasn’t absolutely in place. There was a grosbeak disorder about it.
“At first he thought I was here to put the arm on him,” she said. “Money?”
“Sure—probably money.”
I kept her going, with nods and half words, as she described this meeting. Of course: blackmail. A man as deep as Billy could call on years of savvy; he had endless experience in handling the people who came to get something out of him—anglers, con artists, crazies.
Billy said, “I glanced over the pages. How much of it is there, and how upset am I supposed to be about it?”
“Deborah Hamet gave me a stack of material before she died.”
“Dead, is she?”
“You know she is.”
“I don’t know anything,” said Billy, meaning that this was information from a sector he cared nothing about.
“Yes, but you do,” Sorella insisted. “That woman was mad for you.”
“That didn’t have to be my business, her emotional makeup. She was part of my office force and got her pay. Flowers were sent to White Plains when she got sick. If I had an idea how she was spying, I wouldn’t have been so considerate—the dirt that wild old bag was piling up against me.”
Sorella told me, and I entirely believed her, that she had come not to threaten but to discuss, to explore, to sound out. She refused to be drawn into a dispute. She could rely on her bulk to give an impression of the fullest calm. Billy had a quantitative cast of mind—businessmen do—and there was lots of woman here. He couldn’t deal even with the slenderest of girls. The least of them had the power to put the sexual whammy (Indian sign) on him. Sorella herself saw this. “If he could change my gender, then he could fight me.” This was a hint at the masculinity possibly implicit in her huge size. But she had tidy wrists, small feet, a feminine, lyrical voice. She was wearing perfume. She set her lady self before him, massively…. What a formidable, clever wife Fonstein had. The protection he lacked when he was in flight from Hitler he had found on our side of the Atlantic.
“Mr. Rose, you haven’t called me by name,” she said to him. “You read my letter, didn’t you? I’m Mrs. Fonstein. Does that ring a bell?”
“And why should it…?” he said, refusing recognition.
“I married Fonstein.”
“And my neck size is fourteen. So what?”
“The man you saved in Rome—one of them. He wrote so many letters. I can’t believe you don’t remember.”
“Remember, forget—what’s the difference to me?”
“You sent Deborah Hamet to Ellis Island to talk to him.”
“Lady, this is one of a trillion incidents in a life like mine. Why should I recollect it?”
Why, yes, I see his point. These details were like the scales of innumerable shoals of fish—the mackerel- crowded seas: like the particles of those light-annihilating masses, the dense matter of black holes.
“I sent Deborah to Ellis Island—so, okay….”
“With instructions for my husband never to approach you.”
“It’s a blank to me. But so what?”
“No personal concern for a man you rescued?”
“I did all I could,” said Billy. “And for that point of time, that’s more than most can say. Go holler at Stephen Wise. Raise hell with Sam Rosenman. Guys were sitting on their hands. They would call on Roosevelt and Cordell Hull, who didn’t care a damn for Jews, and they were so proud and happy to be close enough to the White House, even getting the runaround was such a delicious privilege. FDR snowed those famous rabbis when they visited him. He blinded them with his footwork, that genius cripple. Churchill also was in on this with him. The goddamn white paper. So? There were refugees by the hundred thousands to ship to Palestine. Or there wouldn’t have been a state here today. That’s why I gave up the single-party rescue operation and started to raise money to get through the British blockade in those rusty Greek tramp ships…. Now what do you want from me—that I didn’t receive your husband! What’s the matter? I see you did all right. Now you have to have special recognition?”
The level, as Sorella was to say to me, being dragged down, down, downward, the greatness of the events being beyond anybody’s personal scope…. At times she would make such remarks.
‘Now,” Billy asked her, “what do you want with this lousy scandal stuff collected by that cracked old bitch? To embarrass me in Jerusalem, when I came to start this major project?”
Sorella said that she raised both her hands to slow him down. She told him she had come to have a sensible discussion. Nothing threatening had been hinted….
No! Except that Hamet woman was collecting poison in bottles, and you have the whole collection. Try and place this material in the papers—you’d have to be crazy in the head. If you did try, the stuff would come flying back on you faster than shit through a tin whistle. Look at these charges—that I bribed Robert Moses’s people to put across my patriotic Aquacade at the Fair. Or I hired an arsonist to torch a storefront for revenge. Or I sabotaged Baby Snooks because I was jealous of Fanny’s big success, and I even tried to poison her. Listen, we still have libel laws. That Hamet was one sick lady. And you—you should stop and think. If not for me, where would you be, a woman like you…?” The meaning was, a woman deformed by obesity.
“Did he say
“He was reminding me that he had saved Harry. For me.”
Translation: The SS would have liquidated him pretty quick. So except for the magic intervention of this little Lower East Side rat, the starved child who had survived on pastrami trimmings and pushcart apples…
Sorella went on. “I explained to Billy: it took Deborah’s journal to put me through to him. He had turned his back on us. His answer was, ‘I don’t need entanglements—what I did, I did. I have to keep down the number of relationships and contacts. What I did for you, take it and welcome, but spare me the relationship and all the rest of it.’”
“I can understand that,” I said.
I can’t tell you how much I relished Sorella’s account of this meeting with Billy. These extraordinary revelations, and also the comments on them that were made. In what he said there was an echo of George Washington’s Farewell Address. Avoid entanglements. Billy had to reserve himself for his deals, devote himself body and soul to his superpublicized bad marriages; together with the squalid, rich residences he furnished; plus his gossip columns, his chorus lines, and the awful pursuit of provocative, teasing chicks whom he couldn’t do a thing with when they stopped and stripped and waited for him. He had to be free to work his curse out fully. And now he
