Inez’s eyes made Martin think of the Bellows’ pond, over in Vermont, with its gradations of temperature. Gradations of trust, hope, uncertainty, and dread seemed to swim in Inez’s eyes.
—————
To get from East Hampton, NY, to Brattleboro, VT, you drove to North Haven and took the little ferry to Shelter Island, which you then cut across before taking another little ferry to Greenport; these little voyages (one of the adornments of North American life) lasted about ten minutes each, and the flat boats were old and low-slung, so you could stand on deck and briefly commune with the even ripples and wrinkles of the Sound.*3 From Greenport you drove to Orient Point and boarded the big ferry (the size of a liner, with a bar and a cinema) for the eighty-minute cruise to New London, CT. Then the final leg: a drive of 130 miles, due north, through Massachusetts to Vermont.
The Bellows would of course be coming the other way. Usually the journey went on for about seven hours, and today the temperature was very close to that of human blood. On June 10, 2001, in addition, Inez had turned two and Saul had turned eighty-six.
Then you step out the caw and the heat hits you like a brick…Radger! Radger! Radger, get over here! The accent on that little girl!…I could listen to it all day lawng.
This was the house imitation of the most vivid and expressive character the Amises had ever met on the ferry from New London to Orient Point (the little girl with the accent was Eliza). I said,
‘And I got her name. Desirée Squadrino.’
Saul sipped his tea and said, ‘Well she was right about the heat. Getting in and out of the hold was pretty rough, but apart from that…I didn’t spot Desirée. All the people on board had spent the day playing craps and roulette. They’d just lost their shirts in a casino over the state line.’
‘And the scale of them,’ said Rosamund. ‘Really unbelievable. As if they’d got that way on purpose. Through sheer willpower. And the kids.’
For a while they all talked about a report on the financial toll of pandemic childhood obesity. That generation would be sickly, true, and very expensive to treat; on the other hand, they would cost practically nothing to police, being too bulky and cumbrous to brawl, burgle, mug, rape, or flee. Elena said,
‘I keep thinking the ferry’s going to sink,’ said Elena. ‘It’s the cheap food. Cheap food is drenched in what they call saturated fats.’
‘We all know it’s not their fault,’ said Rosamund, ‘but you still feel they couldn’t get that way without buckling down to it.’
I said, ‘Saul, your Sorella. In Bellarosa. She got that way on purpose. For a reason.’
‘Yes, she did in a sense. And for a good reason.’
‘A noble reason. Obeying a noble instinct.’*4
In the kitchen other shapes and figures moved round about us, eating, slurping, tottering, lurching – namely Eliza and Inez Amis and Rosie Bellow (Eliza, five, was the eldest); also present were Catarina, the Amis nanny, and Sharon, the Bellow nanny, plus an auxiliary nanny, Rosamund’s (very popular) niece, Rachael…Soon it would be time for baths, naps, and nappies – before the principals met again for evening drinks.
‘If you’d come a week earlier,’ said Elena, ‘you’d’ve coincided with Hitch.’
Rosamund closed her eyes and said slowly, ‘…Uch.’*5
‘Well Rosamund,’ I said, ‘if it’s any comfort I gave him a right slagging about that review. He didn’t answer back. Which means he knew he’d done wrong.’
Nobodaddy
Late morning the following day…I asked,
‘Do you still believe in him, in it?’
‘I do. I find that I still do.’
We were on the deck, with our heavily spiced Virgin Marys (‘A good drink,’ said Saul, weighing his glass)…Although he seemed to me to be intact and entire, there were differences. In earlier times our sessions resembled the best and friendliest kind of one-on-one tutorial – where the subject would’ve been RI or RK, and R would’ve stood for Reality (and there was no category shift when we turned to Saul’s religious urges; they were part of his reality). The dialogue retained its slightly formal aspect but it was more like a panel or an ‘in conversation with’. And he was dreamier, noticeably dreamier; unaccustomed pauses opened up, and I found myself doing more and more of the talking.
‘It’s impossible to justify,’ he said. ‘But I still do…believe.’
‘Well it is uh, anomalous. “God’s veil over everything.” “Praise God – praise God.” Arresting to see that in a work of high modernism.’*6
Saul shrugged and smiled.
‘A religious frame of reference’, I persisted, ‘comes naturally to poetry. Religion and poetry feel somehow co-eternal, don’t you think? But the mainstream novel is a rational form…I think I know what you are, Saul. Technically. You’re not a theist. You don’t believe in a god that interferes with the world. You’re a deist. You believe in a supreme being that minds its own business.’
He said, ‘Is belief the right word? There’s no logical ground for it. Why should I do without proof in this one case? You reject scripture of course. You reject the idea that God writes books. Why would God write books? We write books.’
‘So what’s it look like, your supreme being?’ I waited. Then I stepped in and paraphrased a couple of sentences from Ravelstein. Which are: God appeared very early to me. In childhood. His hair was parted down the middle. I understood that we were related because he had made Adam in his image, breathed life into him. ‘I think that’s lovely, but…Does he still wear his hair like that?’
Head back, chin up, Saul laughed (uh, uh, uh) – as he did not only at all jokes (however feeble) but at all quotes from his work (however sombre).
‘I think,’ he said, ‘I think I was mingling him with my eldest brother. He wore his hair like that.’
‘Maury. Rest in peace.’
‘Those were early or primal impressions. And older brothers are as
