Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [178]
“Wait, I’ve got my files in there,” Waldemar said, fussing. “You’ll screw it all up. I’ll do this.”
Renata, on the floor with the rest of us, wiped the dust with paper tissues. She was always saying, “Here’s a Kleenex,” and producing paper tissues Waldemar removed several insurance policies and a bundle of computer-perforated Social Security cards. There were several horse photographs, which he identified as an almost complete set of Kentucky Derby winners. Then like a blindish postman, he went through numerous envelopes. “Quicker!” I wanted to say.
“This is the one,” he said.
There was my name written in Humboldt’s tight, scratchy hand.
“What’s in it? Let me see,” said Renata.
I took it from him, an outsized heavy manila envelope.
“You’ll have to give me a receipt,” said Waldemar.
“Certainly I will. Renata, would you mind making out a form? Like, received from Mr. Waldemar Wald, papers willed to me by Von Humboldt Fleisher. I’ll sign it.”
“Papers of what kind? What’s actually here?”
“What’s in them?” said Waldemar. “One thing is a long personal letter to Mr. Citrine. Then a couple of sealed envelopes which I never broke open at all because there are instructions that say if you open them something goes wrong with the copyright. Anyhow, they’re duplicates, or duplicates of duplicates. I can’t tell you. Most of it doesn’t add up, to me. Maybe for you it will. Anyhow, if I, the last member of my family, can tell you what’s on my mind, my dead are all over the place, one grave here, and the other to hell and gone, my sister in that joint they call Valhalla for the German Jews and my nephew buried in potter’s field. What I really want is to reunite the family again.”
Menasha said, “It bugs Waldemar that Humboldt is buried in a bad place. Way out in no man’s land.”
“If there’s any value in this legacy, the first money should be spent to dig the kid up and move him. It doesn’t have to be the Valhalla. That was my sister keeping up with the Joneses. She had a thing about them German Jews. But I want to bring us all together. Gather up my dead,” the old horse-player said.
This solemnity was unexpected. Renata and I looked at each other.
“Count on Charlie to do right by you,” said Menasha.
“I’ll write and tell you what I find in these papers,” I said. “And just as soon as we get back from Europe, I promise you we’ll attend to everything. You can start lining up a cemetery. Even if these papers have no commercial value I’d be perfectly willing to pick up the burial tab.”
“Just what I told you,” said Menasha to Waldemar. “A kid like this kid was bound to grow up into a gentleman.”
We now went out. I held each of the old boys by a wasted arm, by the big double knobs of the elbow where radius and ulna meet, promising to stay in touch. Sauntering behind us, Renata with her white face and great hat was incomparably more substantial in person than any of us. She said unexpectedly, “If Charles says it, Charles’ll do it. We’ll go away and he’ll be thinking of you.”
In a corner of the cold porch stood the wheelchairs, glittering, lightweight, tubular, stainless metal, with batlike folds. “I wonder if anyone would object if I sat in one of these wheelchairs,” I said.
I got into one of them and said to Renata, “Give us a ride.”
The old men didn’t quite know what to make of my being trundled back and forth on the stoop by this large, laughing, brilliant woman with the wonderful teeth. “Don’t carry on like a fool. You’ll offend them, Renata,” I said. “Just push.”
“These damn handles are damn cold,” she said.
She drew on the long gloves with charming swagger, I must say.
twenty-eight
In the racketing speed of the howling, weeping subway I began to read the long letter, the preface to Humboldt’s gift, handing on the onionskin pages to Renata. Incurious after she had glanced at a few of these, she said, “When you get to the story, let me know. I’m not big on philosophy.” I can’t say that I blame her. He was not her precious friend hid in death’s dateless night. There was no reason why