Collected Stories

You don’t want to criticize.”

“I’m not criticizing,” I said. “I would have gone to the funeral to pay my respects.”

“Too bad you didn’t come and speak. It wasn’t much of a memorial service.”

“I might have told the Billy Rose story to a gathering of friends in the chapel.”

“There was no gathering,” the young man said. “And did you know that when Billy died, they say that he couldn’t be buried for a long time. He had to wait until the court decided what to do about the million-dollar tomb provision in his will. There was a legal battle over it.”

“I never heard.”

“Because you don’t read the News, or Newsday. Not even the Post.”

“Was that what happened!”

“He was kept on ice. This used to be discussed by the Fonsteins. They wondered about the Jewish burial rules.”

“Does Gilbert take any interest in his Jewish background—for instance, in his father’s history?”

Gilbert’s friend hesitated ever so slightly—just enough to make me think that he was Jewish himself. I don’t say that he disowned being a Jew. Evidently he didn’t want to reckon with it. The only life he cared to lead was that of an American. So hugely absorbing, that. So absorbing that one existence was too little for it. It could drink up a hundred existences, if you had them to offer, and reach out for more.

“What you just asked is—I translate—whether Gilbert is one of those science freaks with minimal human motivation,” he said. “You have to remember what a big thing gambling is to him. It never could be my thing. You couldn’t pay me to go to Atlantic City, especially since the double-deck disaster. They put a double-deck bus on the road, filled with passengers bound for the casino. It was too high to clear one of the viaducts, and the top was torn away.”

“Did many die? Were heads sheared off?”

“You’d have to check the Times to find out.”

“I wouldn’t care to. But where is Gilbert now? He inherited, I suppose.”

Well, sure he did, and right now he’s in Las Vegas. He took a young lady with him. She’s trained in his method, which involves memorizing the deck in every deal. You keep mental lists of cards that have been played, and you apply various probability factors. They tell me that the math of it is just genius.”

“The system depends on memorizing?”

“Yes. That’s up your alley. Is Gilbert the girl’s lover? is the next consideration. Well, this wouldn’t work without sex interest. The gambling alone wouldn’t hold a young woman for long. Does she enjoy Las Vegas? How could she not? It’s the biggest showplace in the world—the heart of the American entertainment industry. Which city today is closest to a holy city—like Lhasa or Calcutta or Chartres or Jerusalem? Here it could be New York for money, Washington for power, or Las Vegas attracting people by the millions. Nothing to compare with it in the history of the whole world.”

“Ah,” I said. “It’s more in the Billy Rose vein than in the Harry Fonstein vein. But how is Gilbert making out?”

“I haven’t finished talking about the sex yet,” said the bitter-witty young man. “Is the gambling a turn-on for sex, or does sex fuel the gambling? Figuring it as a sublimation. Let’s assume that for Gilbert, abstraction is dominant. But past a certain abstraction point, people are said to be definitely mad.”

“Poor Sorella—poor Harry! Maybe it was their death that threw him.”

“I can’t make myself responsible for a diagnosis. My own narcissistic problem is plenty severe. I confess I expected a token legacy, because I was damn near a family member and looked after Gilbert.” I see.

“You don’t see. This brings my faith in feelings face to face with the real conditions of existence.”

“Your feelings for Fonstein and Sorella?”

“The feelings Sorella led me to believe she had for me.”

“Counting on you to take care of Gilbert.”

“Well… this has been a neat conversation. Good to talk to a person from the past who was so fond of the Fonsteins. We’ll all miss them. Harry had the dignity, but Sorella had the dynamism. I can see why you’d be upset —your timing was off. But don’t pine too much.”

On this commiseration, I cradled the phone, and there it was, on its high mount, a conversation piece from another epoch sitting before a man with an acute need for conversation. Stung by the words of the house-sitter. I also considered that owing to Gilbert, the Fonsteins from their side had avoided me—he was so promising, the prodigy they had had the marvelous luck to produce and who for mysterious reasons (Fonstein would have felt them to be mysterious American reasons) had gone awry. They wouldn’t have wanted me to know about this.

As for pining—well, that young man had been putting me on. He was one of those lesser devils that come out of every pore of society. All you have to do is press the social soil. He was taunting me—for my Jewish sentiments. Dear, dear! Two more old friends gone, just when I was ready after thirty years of silence to open my arms to them: Let’s sit down together and recall the past and speak again of Billy Rose—“sad stories of the death of kings.” And the “sitter” had been putting it to me, existentialist style. Like: Whose disappearance will fill you with despair, sir? Whom can you not live without? Whom do you painfully long for? Which of your dead hangs over you daily? Show me where and how death has mutilated you. Where are your wounds? Whom would you pursue beyond the gates of death?

What a young moron! Doesn’t he think I know all that?

I had a good mind to phone the boy back and call him on his low-grade cheap-shot nihilism. But it would be an absurd thing to do if improvement of the understanding {his understanding) was my aim. You can never dismantle all these modern mental structures. There are so many of them that they face you like an interminable vast city.

Suppose I were to talk to him about the roots of memory in feeling—about the themes that collect and hold the memory; if I were to tell him what retention of the past really means. Things like: “If sleep is forgetting, forgetting is also sleep, and sleep is to consciousness what death is to life. So that the Jews ask even God to remember, ‘Yiskor Elohim. ‘”

God doesn’t forget, but your prayer requests him particularly to remember your dead. But how was I to make an impression on a kid like that? I chose instead to record everything I could remember of the Bellarosa Connection, and set it all down with a Mnemosyne flourish.

The Old System

IT WAS A THOUGHTFUL DAY for Dr. Braun. Winter. Saturday. The short end of December. He was alone in his apartment and woke late, lying in bed until noon, in the room kept very dark, working with a thought—a feeling: Now you see it, now you don’t. Now a content, now a vacancy. Now an important individual, a force, a necessary existence; suddenly nothing. A frame without a picture, a mirror with missing glass. The feeling of necessary existence might be the aggressive, instinctive vitality we share with a dog or an ape. The difference being in the power of the mind or spirit to declare I am. Plus the inevitable inference I am not. Dr. Braun was no more pleased with being than with its opposite. For him an age of equilibrium seemed to be coming in. How nice! Anyway, he had no project for putting the world in rational order, and for no special reason he got up. Washed his wrinkled but not elderly face with freezing tap water, which changed the nighttime white to a more agreeable color. He brushed his teeth. Standing upright, scrubbing the teeth as if he were looking after an idol. He then ran the big old-fashioned tub to sponge himself, backing into the thick stream of the Roman faucet, soaping beneath with the same cake of soap he would apply later to his beard. Under the swell of his belly, the tip of his parts, somewhere between his heels. His heels needed scrubbing. He dried himself with yesterday’s shirt, an economy. It was going to the laundry anyway. Yes, with the self-respecting expression human beings inherit from ancestors for whom bathing was a solemnity. A sadness.

But every civilized man today cultivated an unhealthy self-detachment. Had learned from art the art of amusing self-observation and objectivity. Which, since there had to be something amusing to watch, required art in