Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [204]
Ulick put on a shirt of flame-blue Italian silk, a beautiful garment. It seemed to hunger for an ideal body. He drew it over his chest. On my last visit Ulick was slender and wore magnificent hip-huggers, melon-striped and ornamented on the seams with Mexican silver pesos. He had achieved this new figure in a crash diet. But even then the floor of his Cadillac was covered with peanut shells, and now he was fat again. I saw the fat old body which I had always known and which was completely familiar to me—the belly, the freckles on his undisciplined upper arms, and his elegant hands. I still saw in him the obese, choked-looking boy, the lustful conniving kid whose eyes continually pleaded not guilty. I knew him inside-out, even physically, remembering how he gashed open his thigh on a broken bottle in a Wisconsin creek fifty years ago and that I stared at the yellow fat, layers and layers of fat through which the blood had to well. I knew the mole on the back of his wrist, his nose broken and reset, his fierce false look of innocence, his snorts, and his smells. Wearing an orange football jersey, breathing through the mouth (before we could afford the nose-job), he held me on his shoulders so that I could watch the GAR parade on Michigan Boulevard. The year must have been 1923. He held me by the legs. His own legs were bulky in ribbed black stockings and he wore billowing, bloomerlike golf knickers. Afterward he stood behind me in the men’s room of the Public Library, the high yellow urinals like open sarcophagi, helping me to fish my child’s thing out from the complicated underclothes. In 1928 he became a baggage-smasher at American Express. Then he worked at the bus terminal changing the huge tires. He slugged it out with bullies in the street, and was a bully himself. He put himself through the Lewis Institute, nights, and through law school. He made and lost fortunes. He took his own Packard to Europe in the early Fifties and had it airlifted from Paris to Rome because driving over mountains bored him. He spent sixty or seventy thousand dollars a year on himself alone. I never forgot any fact about him. This flattered him. It also made him sore. And if I put so much heart into remembering, what did it prove? That I loved Ulick? There are clinical experts who think that such completeness of memory is a hysterical symptom. Ulick himself said he had no memory except for business transactions.
“So that screwball friend of yours Von Humboldt is dead. He talked complicated gobbledygook and was worse dressed than you, but I liked him. He sure could drink. What did he die of?”
“Brain hemorrhage.” I had to tell this virtuous lie. Heart disease was taboo today. “He left me a legacy.”
“What, he had dough?”
“No. Just papers. But when I went to the nursing home to get them from his old uncle, whom should I run into but Menasha Klinger.”
“Don’t tell me—Menasha! The dramatic tenor, the redhead! The fellow from Ypsilanti who boarded with us in Chicago? I never saw such a damn deluded crazy bastard. He couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket. Spent his factory wages on lessons and concert tickets. The one time he tried to do himself some good he caught a dose, and then the clap-doctor shared his wages with the music teacher. Is he old enough to be in a nursing home? Well, I’m in my middle sixties and he was about eight years ahead of me. You know what I found the other day? The deed to the family burial plots in Waldheim. There are two graves left. You wouldn’t want to buy mine, would you? I’m not going to lie around. I’m having myself cremated. I need action. I’d rather go into the atmosphere. Look for me in the weather reports.”
He too had a thing about the grave. He said to me on the day of Papa’s funeral, “The weather is too damn warm and nice. It’s awful. Did you ever see such a perfect afternoon?” The artificial grass carpet was rolled back by the diggers and under it in the tan sandy ground was a lovely cool hole. Aloft, far behind the pleasant May weather stood something like a cliff of coal. Aware