Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [157]
But he had really done it now. “Does your mother expect an answer?” I asked the kid.
Lish looked at me with her mother’s eyes, those wide amethyst circles. “She didn’t say, Daddy.”
Denise had certainly reported to Urbanovich that there was a plot to murder her. This would clinch the matter with the judge. He didn’t trust or like me anyway, and he could impound my money. I could forget about those dollars, they were gone. What now? I began again with the usual haste and inaccuracy to tot up my fluid resources, twelve hundred here, eighteen hundred there, the sale of my beautiful carpets, the sale of the Mercedes, very disadvantageous given its damaged condition. So far as I knew, Cantabile was locked up at Twenty-sixth and California. I hoped he would get it in the neck. Lots of people were killed in jail. Perhaps someone would do him in. But I didn’t believe that he would spend much time behind bars. Getting out was very easy now and he’d probably draw another suspended sentence. The courts now gave them as freely as the Salvation Army gave out doughnuts. Well, it didn’t really matter, I was leaving for Milan.
So, as I said, I paid a sentimental visit to Naomi Lutz, now Wolper. I hired a limousine from the livery service to take me out to Marquette Park—why stint myself now? It was wintry, wet, sleety, a good day for a schoolboy to fight the weather with his satchel and feel dauntless. Naomi was at her post, stopping traffic while kids trotted, straggled, dragged their raincapes and stamped through the puddles. Under the police uniform she wore layers of sweaters. On her head was a garrison cap and a Sam Browne belt crossed her chest—the works: fleece boots, mittens, her neck protected by an orange havelock, her figure obliterated. She waved her coat-hampered wet arms, gathering kids about her, she stopped the traffic and then, heavy in the back, she turned and footed slowly to the curb on her thick soles. And this was the woman for whom I once felt perfect love. She was the person with whom I should have been allowed to sleep for forty years in my favorite position (the woman backed up to me and her breasts in my hands). In a city like brutal Chicago could a man really expect to survive without such intimate, such private comfort? When I came up to her I saw the young woman within the old one. I saw her in the neat short teeth, the winsome gums, the single dimple in the left cheek. I thought I could still breathe in her young woman’s odor, damp and rich, and I heard the gliding and drawling of her voice, an affectation she and I had both thought utterly charming once. And even now, I thought, Why not? The rain of the Seventies looked to me like the moisture of the Thirties when our adolescent lovemaking brought out tiny drops in a little band, a Venetian mask across the middle of her face. But I knew better than to try to touch her, to take off the police coat and the sweaters and the dress and the underclothes. Nor would she want me to see what had happened to her thighs and her breasts. That was all right for her friend Hank—Hank and Naomi had grown old together—but not for me, who knew her way-back-when. There was no prospect of this. It was not indicated, not hinted, not possible. It was only one of those things that had to be thought.
We drank coffee in her kitchen. She had invited me to brunch and served fried eggs, smoked salmon, nutbread, and comb honey. I felt completely at home with her old ironware and hand-knitted pot holders. The house was all that Wolper left her, she said. “When I saw how fast he was losing money on the horses 1 insisted that he should make the title over.”
“Smart thinking.”
“A little later my husband’s nose and ankle were broken, just as a warning, by a juice man. Till then I didn’t know Wolper was paying the gangsters juice. He came home from the hospital with his face all purple around the bandages. He said I shouldn’t sell the bungalow to save his life. He cried