Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [144]
“I have not.”
“You haven’t? It’s got to be in the mail. Postal service is outrageous. It was my last installment of twelve hundred dollars to the Palo Alto Trust. They had already closed me out. They owe you twelve hundred.”
“Is it possible that they never received it? Maybe it was sent out from Italy by dolphin.”
He did not smile. The moment was solemn. We were speaking, after all, of his money. “Those California crumbs were supposed to reissue it and send you their cashier’s check.”
“Maybe the Banco Ambrosiano’s check hasn’t cleared yet,” I said.
“Now, then,” he took a legal pad from his attaché case. “I’ve worked out a schedule to repay the money you lost. You must have the original cost of the stock. I absolutely insist. I believe you bought it at four hundred. You overpaid, you know, it’s way down now. However, that’s not your fault. Let’s say that when you posted it for me it was worth eighteen thousand. Nor will I forget the dividends.”
“You don’t have to do dividends, Thaxter.”
“No, I insist. It’s easy enough to find out what sort of dividend IBM is paying. You send me the figure and I’ll send you the check.”
“In five years you paid off less than one thousand dollars on this loan. You kept up the interest payments and little else.”
“The interest rate was out of sight.”
“In five years you reduced the amount of the principal by two hundred dollars a year.”
“The exact figures don’t come to me now,” said Thaxter. “But I know that the bank will owe you something after it sells the stock.”
“IBM is now under two hundred a share. The bank gets hurt, too. Not that I care what happens to banks.”
But Thaxter was now busy explaining how he would return the money, dividends and all, over a five-year period. The split black pupils of his long grape-green eyes moved over the figures. He was going to do the whole thing handsomely, with dignity, aristocratically, fully sincere, shirking no part of his obligation to a friend. I could see that he entirely meant what he said. But I also knew that this elaborate plan to do right by me would be, in his mind, tantamount to doing right. These long yellow sheets from the legal pad filled with figures, these generous terms of repayment, the care for detail, the expressions of friendship, settled our business fully and forever. This was magically it.
“It’s a good idea to be scrupulously precise with you in these petty deals. To you the small sums are more important than big ones. What sometimes surprises me is that you and I should be fooling around with trifles. You could make any amount of money. You don’t know your own resources. Odd, isn’t it? You could turn a crank and money would fall into your lap.”
“What crank?” I said.
“You could go to a publisher with a project and name your own advance.”
“I’ve already taken big advances.”
“Peanuts. You could get lots more. I’ve come up with some ideas myself. For starters you and I could do that cultural Baedeker I’m always after you about, a guide for educated Americans who go to Europe and get tired of shopping for Florentine leather and Irish linen. They’re fed up with the thundering herd of common rubbernecks. Are these cultivated Americans in Vienna, for instance? In our guide they can find lists of research institutes to visit, small libraries, private collections, chamber-music groups, the names of cafés and restaurants where one can meet mathematicians or fiddlers, and there would be listings of the addresses of poets, painters, psychologists, and so on. Visit their studios and labs. Have conversations with them.”
“You might as well bring over a firing squad and shoot all these poets dead as put such information into the hands of culture-vulture tourists.”
“There isn’t a ministry of tourism in Europe that wouldn’t get excited