Victorian London. She had turned me down dead flat when I tried to give the place to them.
What I was thinking was that if I could find Harry and Sorella, I’d join them in retirement, if they’d accept my company (forgiving the insult of neglect). For me it was natural to wonder whether I had not exaggerated (urged on by a desire for a woman of a deeper nature) Sorella’s qualities in my reminiscences, and I gave further thought to this curious personality. I never had forgotten what she had said about the testing of Jewry by the American experience. Her interview with Billy Rose had itself been such an American thing. Again Billy: Weak? Weak! Vain? Oh, very! And trivial for sure. Creepy Billy. Still, in a childish way, big-minded—spacious; and spacious wasn’t just a boast adjective from “America the Beautiful” (the spacious skies) but the dropping of fifteen to twenty actual millions on a rest-and-culture garden in Jerusalem, the core of Jewish history, the navel of the earth. This gesture of oddball magnificence was American. American and Oriental.
And even if I didn’t in the end settle near the Fonsteins, I could pay them a visit. I couldn’t help asking why I had turned away from such a terrific pair—Sorella, so mysteriously obese; Fonstein with his reddish skin (once stone white), his pomegranate face. I may as well include myself, as a third—a tall old man with a structural curl at the top like a fiddlehead fern or a bishop’s crook.
Therefore I started looking for Harry and Sorella not merely because I had promised Rabbi X/Y, nor for the sake of the crazy old man in Jerusalem who was destitute. If it was only money that he needed, I could easily write a check or ask my banker to send him one. The bank charges eight bucks for this convenience, and a phone call would take care of it. But I preferred to attend to things in my own way, from my mansion office, dialing the numbers myself, bypassing the Mnemosyne Institute and its secretaries.
Using old address books, I called all over the place. (If only cemeteries had switchboards. “Hello, Operator, I’m calling area code 000.”) I didn’t want to involve the girls at the Institute in any of this, least of all in my investigations. When I reached a number, the conversation was bound to be odd, and a strain on the memory of the Founder. “Why, how are you?” somebody would ask whom I hadn’t seen in three decades. “Do you remember my husband, Max? My daughter, Zoe?” Would I know what to say?
Yes, I would. But then again, why should I? How nice oblivion would be in such cases, and I could say, “Max? Zoe? No, I can’t say that I do.” On the fringes of the family, or in remote, time-dulled social circles, random memories can be an affliction. What you see first, retrospectively, are the psychopaths, the uglies, the cheapies, the stingies, the hypochondriacs, the family bores, humanoids, and tyrants. These have dramatic staying power. Harder to recover are the kind eyes, gentle faces, of the comedians who wanted to entertain you, gratis, divert you from troubles. An important part of my method is that memory chains are constructed thematically. Where themes are lacking there can be little or no recall. So, for instance, Billy, our friend Bellarosa, could not easily place Fonstein because of an unfortunate thinness of purely human themes—as contrasted with business, publicity, or sexual themes. To give a strongly negative example, there are murderers who can’t recall their crimes because they have no interest in the existence or nonexistence of their victims. So, students, only pertinent themes assure full recollection.
Some of the old people I reached put me down spiritedly: “If you remember so much about me, how come I haven’t seen you since the Korean War!…”
“No, I can’t tell you anything about Salkind’s niece Sorella. Salkind came home to New Jersey after Castro took over. He died in an old people’s nursing racket setup back in the late sixties.”
One man commented, “The pages of calendars crumble away. They’re like the dandruff of time. What d’you want from me?”
Calling from a Philadelphia mansion, I was at a disadvantage. A person in my position will discover, in contact with people from Passaic, Elizabeth, or Pa-terson, how many defenses he has organized against vulgarity or the lower grades of thought. I didn’t want to talk about Medicare or Social Security checks -r hearing aids or pacemakers or bypass surgery.
From a few sources I heard criticisms of Sorella. “Salkind was a bachelor, had no children, and that woman should have done something for the old fella.” He never married?”
Never,” said the bitter lady I had on the line. “But he married
“And you can’t tell me where I might find Sorella?”
“I could care less.”
“No,” I said. “You couldn’t care less.”
So the matchmaker himself had been a lifelong bachelor. He had disinterestedly found a husband for his brother’s daughter, bringing together two disadvantaged people.
Another lady said about Sorella, “She was remote. She looked down on my type of conversation. I think she was a snob. I tried to sign her up once for a group tour in Europe. My temple sisterhood put together a real good charter-flight package. Then Sorella told me that French was her second language, and she didn’t need anybody to interpret for her in Paris. I should have told her, ‘I knew you when no man would give you a second look and would even take back the first look if he could.’ So that’s how it was. Sorella was too good for everybody….”
I saw what these ladies meant (this was a trend among my informants). They accused Mrs. Fonstein of being uppish, too grand. Almost all were offended. She preferred the company of Mrs. Hamet, the old actress with the paraffin-white tubercular face. Sorella was too grand for Billy too; hurling Mrs. Hamet’s deadly dossier at him was the gesture of a superior person, a person of intelligence and taste. Queenly, imperial, and inevitably isolated. This was the consensus of all the gossips, the elderly people I telephoned from the triple isolation of my Philadelphia residence.
The Fonsteins and I were meant to be company for one another. They weren’t going to force themselves on me, however. They assumed that I was above them socially, in upper-class Philadelphia, and that I didn’t want their friendship. I don’t suppose that my late wife, Deirdre, would have cared for Sorella, with her pince-nez and high manner, the working of her intellect and the problems of her cumulous body—trying to fit itself into a Hepplewhite chair in our dining room. Fonstein would have been comparatively easy for Deirdre to be with. Still, if I was not an assimilationist, I was at least an avoider of uncomfortable mixtures, and in the end I am stuck with these twenty empty rooms.
I can remember driving with my late father through western Pennsylvania. He was struck by the amount of land without a human figure in it. So much space! After long silence, in a traveler’s trance resembling the chessboard trance, he said, “Ah, how many Jews might have been settled here! Room enough for everybody.”
At times I feel like a socket that remembers its tooth.
As I made call after call, I was picturing my reunion with the Fonsteins .1 had them placed mentally in Sarasota, Florida, and imagined the sunny strolls we might take in the winter quarters of Ringling or Hagenbeck, chatting about events long past at the King David Hotel—Billy Rose’s lost suitcases, Noguchi s Oriental reserve. In old manila envelopes I found color snapshots from Jerusalem, among them a photograph of Fonstein and Sorella against the background of the Judean desert, the burning stones of Ezekiel, not yet (even today) entirely cooled, those stones of fire among which the cherubim had walked. In that fierce place, two modern persons, the man in a business suit, the woman in floating white, a married couple holding hands—her fat palm in his inventor’s fingers. I couldn’t help thinking that Sorella didn’t have a real biography until Harry entered her life. And he, Harry, whom Hitler had intended to kill, had a biography insofar as Hitler had marked him for murder, insofar as he had fled, was saved by Billy, reached America, invented a better thermostat. And here they were in color, the Judean desert behind them, as husband and wife in a once-upon-a-time Coney Island might have posed against a painted backdrop or sitting on a slice of moon. As tourists in the Holy Land where were they, I wondered, biographically speaking? How memorable had this trip been for them? The question sent me back to myself and, Jewish style, answered itself with yet another question: What was there worth remembering?
When I got to the top of the stairs—this was the night before last—I couldn’t bring myself to go to bed just yet. One does grow weary of taking care of this man-sized doll, the elderly retiree, giving him his pills, pulling on his socks, spooning up his cornflakes, shaving his face, seeing to it that he gets his sleep. Instead of opening the bedroom door, I went to my second-floor sitting room.
To save myself from distraction by concentrating every kind of business in a single office, I do bills, bank statements, legal correspondence on the ground floor, and my higher activities I carry upstairs. Deirdre had approved of this. It challenged her to furnish each setting appropriately. One of my diversions is to make the rounds of antiques shops and look at comparable pieces, examining and pricing them, noting what a shrewd buyer Deirdre had been. In doing this, I build a case against remaining in Philadelphia, a town in which a man finds little else to do
