Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [169]
Renata laughed and said, “Spare me his party. Let’s get your Humboldt business over and go on to Milan. I have a deep anxiety about it.”
“Do you think this Biferno really is your father? Better he than that queer Henri.”
“Honestly I wouldn’t think about a father if we were married. My insecure position forces me to look for solid ground. You’ll say I have been married, but the ground with Koffritz wasn’t very solid. And now there’s my responsibility for Roger. By the way, we must send out toys to all the kids from F. A. O. Schwarz and I haven’t got a cent. Koffritz is six months behind in payments. He says I have a rich man-friend. I will not drag him into court though, or throw him in jail. As for you, you carry so many freeloaders and I don’t want to come under that heading. If I may say so, though, I at least care for you and do you some good. If you fell into the hands of that anthroposophist’s daughter, that little blonde fox, you’d soon known the difference. She’s a toughie.”
“What has Doris Scheldt got to do with anything?”
“What? You wrote her a note before we left Chicago. I read the impression on your note pad. Don’t look so truthful, Charlie. You’re the world’s worst liar. I wish I knew how many ladies you had in reserve.”
I was not indignant over her spying. I no longer made scenes. Pleasant in themselves, our European trips also took me away from Miss Scheldt. Renata considered her a dangerous person and even the Señora had tried to scold me about her.
“But Señora,” I had replied, “Miss Scheldt didn’t enter the picture until the Flonzaley incident.”
“Now, Charles, the matter of Mr. Flonzaley must be dropped. You are not just a middle-class provincial person but a man of letters,” said the old Spanish lady. “Flonzaley belongs to the past. Renata is very sensitive to pain and when the man was in agony what could you expect her to do? She cried the entire night he was there. He is in a vulgar business and there is no comparison between you. She simply felt she owed him the consideration. And as you are an homme de lettres and he is an undertaker, the higher person must be more tolerant.”
I couldn’t argue with the Señora. I had seen her one morning before she was made up, hurrying toward the bathroom, completely featureless, a limp and yellow banana skin, without brows or lashes and virtually without lips. The sorrow of this sight took me by the heart, I never again wanted to win a point from the Señora. When I played backgammon with her I cheated against myself.
“The main thing about Miss Scheldt,” I told Renata at the Plaza, “is her father. I couldn’t have a love affair with the daughter of a man who was teaching me so much.”
“He fills you with such bunk,” she said.
“Renata, let me quote you a text: ‘Though you are said to be alive you are dead. Wake up and put some strength into what is left, which must otherwise die.’ That’s from the Revelation of Saint John, more or less.”
Indulgently smiling, Renata rose and straightened her miniskirt, saying, “You’ll wind up with bare feet in the Loop carrying one of those where-will-you-spend-eternity signs. Get on the phone, for God’s sake, and talk to this man Huggins, Humboldt’s executor. And for dinner don’t try to take me to Rumpelmayer’s again.”
Huggins was going to an opening at the Kootz Gallery and invited me to meet him there when I mentioned my business.
“Is there anything to this. What is this legacy stuff?” I said.
“There is something,” said Huggins.
In the late Forties when Huggins was a celebrity in Greenwich Village I was a very minor member of the group that discussed politics, literature, and philosophy in his apartment. There were people like Chiaramonte and Rahv and Abel and Paul Goodman and Von Humboldt Fleisher. What Huggins and I had in common was our love for Humboldt.