Henderson the Rain King - Saul Bellow [58]
face, barely able to keep her chin still from intensity of feeling, she was in Spohr's studio. The picture of her was a cause of trouble between me and my eldest son, Edward. The one with the red MG. He is like his mother and thinks himself better than me. Well, he's wrong. Great things are done by Americans but not by the likes of either of us. They are done by people like that man Slocum who builds the great dams. Day and night, thousands of tons of concrete, machinery that moves the earth, lays mountains flat and fills the Punjab Valley with cement grout. That's the type that gets things done. On this my class, Edward's class, the class Lily was so eager to marry into, gets zero. Edward has always gone with the crowd. The most independent thing he ever did was to dress up a chimpanzee in a cowboy suit and drive it around New York in his open car. After the animal caught cold and died, he played the clarinet in a jazz band and lived on Bleecker Street. His income was $20,000 at least, and he was living next door to the Mills Hotel flophouse where the drunks are piled in tiers. But a father is a father after all, and I had gone as far as California to try to talk to Edward. I found him living in a bathing cabin beside the Pacific in Malibu, so there we were on the sand trying to have a conversation. The water was ghostly, lazy, slow, stupefying, with a vast dull shine. Coppery. A womb of white. Pallor; smoke; vacancy; dull gold; vastness; dimness; fulgor; ghostly flashing. "Edward, where are we?" I said. "We are at the edge of the earth. Why here?" Then I told him. "This looks like a hell of a place to meet. It's got no foundation except smoke. Boy, I must talk to you about things. It's true I'm rough. It may be true I am nuts, but there is a reason for it all. 'The good that I would that I do not.' " "Well, I don't get it, Dad." "You should become a doctor. Why don't you go to medical school? Please go to medical school, Edward." "Why should I?" "There are lots of good reasons. I happen to know that you worry about your health. You take Queen Bee tablets. Now I _know__ that �" "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