Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [158]
“I always felt it would have given me strength to be married to you, Naomi.”
“Don’t idealize so much. You were a violent kid. You almost choked me to death because I went to a dance with some basketball player. And once, in the garage, you put a rope on your neck and threatened to hang yourself if you didn’t get your way. Do you remember?”
“I’m afraid I do, yes. Superkeen needs were swelling up in me.”
“Wolper is married again and has a bikeshop in New Mexico. He may feel safer near the border. Yes, you were thrilling but I never knew where you were at with your Swinburne and your Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde and Karl Marx. Boy, you certainly did carry on.”
“Those were intoxicating books and I was in the thick of beauty and wild about goodness and thought and poetry and love. Wasn’t that merely adolescence?”
She smiled at me and said, “I don’t really think so. Doc told Mother that your whole family were a bunch of greenhorns and aliens, too damn emotional, the whole bunch of you. Doc died last year.”
“Your daughter told me that.”
“Yes, he fell apart finally. When old men put two socks on one foot and pee into the bathtub I suppose it’s the end.”
“I’m afraid so. I myself think that Doc overdid the Yankee Doodle stuff. Being a Babbitt inspired him almost the way Swinburne did me. He was dying to say good-by to Jewry, or to feudalism. . . .”
“Do me a favor—I still freeze when you use a word like feudalism on me. That was the trouble between us. You came down from Madison raving about that poet named Humboldt Park or something and borrowed my savings to go to New York on a Greyhound bus. I really and truly loved you, Charlie, but when you rolled away to see this god of yours, I went home and painted my nails and turned on the radio. Your father was furious when I told him you were a Fuller Brush salesman in Manhattan. He needed your help in the wood business.”
“Nonsense, he had Julius.”
“Jesus, your father was handsome. He looked like—what the girls used to say—The Spaniard Who Ruined My Life. And Julius?”
“Julius is disfiguring south Texas with shopping centers and condominiums.”
“But you people all loved each other. You were like real primitive that way. Maybe that’s why my father called you greenhorns.”
“Well, Naomi, my father became an American too and so did Julius. They stopped all that immigrant loving. Only I persisted, in my childish way. My emotional account was always overdrawn. I never have forgotten how my mother cried out when I fell down the stairs or how she pressed the lump on my head with the blade of a knife. And what a knife—it was her Russian silver with a handle like a billy club. So there you are. Whether it was a lump on my head, or Julius’s geometry, or how Papa could raise the rent, or poor Mama’s toothaches, it was the most momentous thing on earth for us all. I never lost this intense way of caring—no, that isn’t so. I’m afraid the truth is that I did lose it. Yes, sure I lost it. But I still required it. That’s always been the problem. I required it and apparently I also promised it. To women, I mean. For women I had this Utopian emotional love aura and made them feel I was a cherishing man. Sure, I’d cherish them in the way they all dreamed of being cherished.”
“But it was a phony,” said Naomi. “You yourself lost it. You didn’t cherish.”
“I lost it. Although anything so passionate probably remains in force somewhere.”
“Charlie, you put it over on lots of girls. You must have made them awfully unhappy.”
“I wonder whether mine is such an exceptional case of longing-heart-itis. It’s unreal, of course, perverse. But it’s