Henderson the Rain King - Saul Bellow [59]
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