Henderson the Rain King - Saul Bellow [19]
�" "You came all this way to tell me something--is that what it is?" "You may believe that your father is not a thinking person, only your mother. Well, don't kid yourself, I have made some clear observations. First of all, few people are sane. That may surprise you, Edward, but it really is so. Next, slavery has never really been abolished. More people are enslaved to different things than you can shake a stick at. But it's no use trying to give you a resume of my thinking. It's true I'm often confused but at the same time I am a fighter. Oh, I am a fighter. I fight very hard." "What do you fight for, Dad?" said Edward. "Why," I said, "what do I fight for? Hell, for the truth. Yes, that's it, the truth. Against falsehood. But most of the fighting is against myself." I understood very well that Edward wanted me to tell him what he should live for and this is what was wrong. This was what caused me pain. For every son expects and every father wishes to provide clear principles. And moreover a man wants to protect his children from the bitterness of things if he can. A baby seal was weeping on the sand and I was very much absorbed by his situation, imagining that the herd had abandoned him, and I sent Edward to get a can of tunafish at the store while I stood guard against the roving dogs, but one of the beach combers told me that this seal was a beggar, and if I fed him I would encourage him to be a parasite on the beach. Then he whacked him on the behind and without resentment the creature hobbled to the water on his flippers, where the pelican patrols were flying slowly back and forth, and entered the white foam. "Don't you get cold at night, Eddy, on the beach?" I said. "I don't mind it much." I felt love for my son and couldn't bear to see him like this. "Go on and be a doctor, Eddy," I said. "If you don't like blood you can be an internist or if you don't like adults you can be a pediatrician, or if you don't like kids perhaps you can specialize in women. You should have read those books by Doctor Grenfell I used to give you for Christmas. I know damned well you never even opened the packages. For Christ's sake, we should commune with people." I went back alone to Connecticut, shortly after which the boy returned with a girl from Central America somewhere and said he was going to marry her, an Indian with dark blood, a narrow face, and close-set eyes. "Dad, I'm in love," he tells me. "What's the matter? Is she in trouble?" "No. I tell you I love her." "Edward, don't give me that," I say. "I can't believe it." "If it's family background that worries you, then how about Lily?" he says. "Don't let me hear a single word against your stepmother. Lily is a fine woman. Who is this Indian? I'm going to have her investigated," I say. "Then I don't understand," he says, "why you don't allow Lily to hang up her protrait with the others. You leave Maria Felucca alone." (If that was her name.) "I love her," he says, with an inflamed face. I look at this significant son, Edward, with his crew-cut hair, his hipless trunk, his button-down collar and Princeton tie, his white shoes--his practically faceless face. "Gods!" I think. "Can this be the son of my loins? What the hell goes on around here? If I leave him with this girl she will eat him in three bites." But even then, strangely enough, I felt a shock of love in my heart for this boy. My son! Unrest has made me like this, grief has made me like this. So never mind. Sauve qui peut! Marry a dozen Maria Feluccas, and if it will do any good, let her go and get her picture painted, too. So Edward went back to New York with his Maria Felucca from Honduras. I had taken down my own portrait in the National Guard uniform. Neither Lily nor I would hang in the main hall. Nor was this all I was compelled to remember as Romilayu and I waited in the Wariri village. For I several times said to Lily, "Every morning you leave to get yourself painted, and you're just as dirty as you ever were. I find kids' diapers under the bed and in the cigar humidor. The sink is full of garbage and grease, and the joint looks as if a poltergeist lived here. You are running from me. I know damned well that you go seventy miles an hour in the Buick with the children in the back seat. Don't look impatient when I bring these subjects up. They may belong to what you consider the lower world, but I have to spend quite a bit of time there." She looked very white at this and averted her face and smiled as if it would be a long time before I could understand how much good it was doing me to have this portrait painted. "I know," I said. "The ladies around here gave you the business during the Milk Fund drive. They wouldn't let you on the committee. I know all about it." But most of all what I recalled with those broken teeth in my hand on this evening in the African mountains was how I had disgraced myself with the painter's wife and dentist's cousin, Mrs. K. Spohr. Before the First World War (she's in her sixties) she was supposed to have been a famous beauty and has never recovered from the collapse of this, but dresses like a young girl with flounces and flowers. She may have been a hot lay once, as she claims, though among great beauties that is rare. But time and nature had blown the whistle on her and she was badly ravaged. However, her sex power was still there and hid in her eyes, like a Sicilian bandit, like a Giuliano. Her hair is red as chili powder and some of this same red is sprinkled on her face in freckles. One winter afternoon, Clara Spohr and I met in Grand Central Station. I had had my sessions with Spohr the dentist and Haponyi the violin teacher, and I was disgruntled, hastening to the lower level so that my shoes and pants could scarcely keep up with me--hastening through the dark brown down-tilted passage with its lights aswoon and its pavement trampled by billions of shoes, with amoeba figures of chewing gum spread flat. And I saw Clara Spohr coming from the Oyster Bar or being washed forth into this sea, dismasted, clinging to her soul in the shipwreck of her beauty. But she seemed to be sinking. As I passed she flagged me down and took my arm, the one not engaged by my violin, and we went to the club car and started, or continued, to drink. At this same winter hour, Lily was posing for her husband, so she said, "Why don't you get off with me and drive home with your wife?" What she wanted me to say was, "Baby, why go to Connecticut? Let's jump off the train and paint the town red." But the train pulled out and soon we were running along Long Island Sound, with snow, with sunset, and the atmosphere corrupting the shape of the late sun, and the black boats saying, "Foo!" and spilling their smoke on the waves. And Clara was burning and she talked and talked and worked on me with her eyes and her turned-up nose. You could see the old mischief working, the life-craving, which wouldn't quit. She was telling me how she had visited Samoa and Tonga in her youth and had experienced passionate love on the beaches, on the rafts, in the flowers. It was like Churchill's blood, sweat, and tears, swearing to fight on the beaches, and so on. I couldn't help feeling sympathetic, partly. But my attitude is that if people are going to undo themselves before you, you shouldn't do them up again. You should let them retie their own parcels. Toward the last, as we got into the station, she was weeping, this old crook, and I felt terrible. I've told you how I feel when women cry. I was also incensed. We got out in the snow, and I supported her and found a taxi. When we entered her house, I tried to help her take off her galoshes, but with a cry she lifted me up by the face and began to kiss me. Whereupon, like a fool, in stead of pushing her away I kissed back. Yes, I returned the kisses. With the bridgework, new then, in my mouth. It was certainly a peculiar moment. Her shoes had come off with the galoshes. We embraced in the over-heated lamp-lighted entry which was filled with souvenirs of Samoa and of the South Seas, and kissed as if the next moment we were going to be separated by the stroke of death. I have never understood this foolish thing, for I was not passive. I tell you, I kissed back. Oh, ho! Mr. Henderson. What? Sorrow? Lust? Kissing has-been beauties? Drunk? In tears? Mad as a horsefly on the window pane? Furthermore Lily and Klaus Spohr saw it all. The studio door was open. Within was a coal fire in the grate. "Why are you kissing each other like that?" said Lily. Klaus Spohr never said a word. Whatever Clara saw fit to do was okay by him.