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By Root 6004 0

soul. Oh, I admired some of these intellectuals without limits. Especially the princes of science, astrophysicists, pure mathematicians, and the like. But nothing had been done about the main question. The main question, as Walt Whitman had pointed out, was the death question. And music drew me toward Menasha. By means of music a man affirmed that the logically unanswerable was, in a different form, answerable. Sounds without determinate meaning became more and more pertinent, the greater the music. This was such a man’s assignment. I, too, in spite of lethargy and weakness, was here for a big reason. Just what this was I would consider later, when I looked back on my life in the twentieth century. Calendars would disintegrate under the gaze of the spirit. But there would be a December spot for a subway ride in cars disfigured by youth gangs, and a beautiful woman whom I followed on the boardwalk while hearing the peppery pang of shooting galleries and smelling popcorn and hot dogs, thinking of the sex of her figure, the consumerism of her garments, and of my friendship with Von Humboldt Fleisher which had brought me to Coney Island. In my reflective purgatory I would see it all from a different perspective and know, perhaps, how all these peculiarities added up—know why an emotional estuary should have opened up in me when I laid eyes on Waldemar Wald.

Waldemar was now saying, “What a dog’s age since anybody visited. I’ve been forgot. Humboldt would never have stuck me in a dump like this. It was temporary. The chow is awful, and the help is rough. They say, ‘Shut up, you’re gaga.’ They’re all from the Caribbean. Everybody else is a kraut. Menasha and me are practically the only Americans. Humboldt once made a joke, ‘Two is company, three is a kraut!’ “

“But he did put you here,” said Renata.

“Just till he could iron out some problems. The whole week before he died he was looking for an apartment for us both. Once we lived together for three months and that was heaven. Up in the morning like a real family, bacon and eggs, and then we’d talk baseball. I made a real fan of him, you know that? Fifty years ago I bought him a first-baseman’s mitt. I taught him to field a grounder and throw a guy out. Football, too. I showed him how to toss a forward pass. My mother’s railroad apartment had a long, long corridor where we played. When his dad took off it was a houseful of women and it was up to me to make an American boy out of him. Those women did plenty of damage. Look at the names they gave us—Waldemar! The kids called me Walla-Walla. And he had it rough, too. Humboldt! My goofy sister named him after a statue in Central Park.”

All this was familiar to me from Humboldt’s charming poem “Uncle Harlequin.” Waldemar Harlequin, in the old days on West End Avenue, after his wage-earning sisters went to business, rose at eleven, bathed for an hour, shaved with a new Gillette blade, and then lunched. His mother sat beside him to butter his rolls, to skin his whitefish and bone it, to pour his coffee while he read the papers. Then he took a few bucks from her and went out. He talked at the dinner table about Jimmy Walker and Al Smith. He, in Humboldt’s opinion, was his family’s American. This was his function among the ladies and with his nephew. When the national conventions were broadcast on the radio he could call the roll of the states together with the announcer—^ “Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa”—and patriotic tears filled his eyes.

“Mr. Wald, I’ve come to see you about the papers Humboldt left. I told you on the phone. I have a note from Orlando Huggins.”

“Yes, I know Huggins, that long drink of water. Now I want to ask you about the papers. Is this stuff valuable or ain’t it?”

“Sometimes we see in the Times,” said Menasha, “a letter by Robert Frost fetches eight hundred bucks. As for Edgar Allan Poe, don’t ask.”

“What’s actually in those papers, Mr. Wald?” asked Renata.

“Well, I have to tell you,” said Waldemar. “I never understood any of his stuff. I’m not a big reader. What he wrote was way over my head. Humboldt could