Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [207]
Our serious Old World parents certainly had produced a pair of American clowns—one demonic millionaire clown, and one higher-thought clown. Ulick had been a fat boy I adored, he was a man precious to me, and now the fatal coastline was in view before him and I wanted to say, as he sat looking sick behind the wheel, that this brilliant, this dazing shattering delicious painful thing (I was referring to life) when it concluded, concluded only what we knew. It did not conclude the unknown, and I suspected that something further would ensue. But I couldn’t prove a thing to this hardheaded brother of mine. He was terrified by the approaching blank, the flowering pleasant-day-in-May conclusion with the cliff of coal behind it, the nice cool hole in the ground. So all I could really say to him if I spoke would go as follows: “Listen here, do you remember when we moved down to Chicago from Appleton and lived in those dark rooms on Rice Street? And you were an obese boy and I a thin boy? And Mama doted on you with black eyes, and Papa flew into a fit because you dunked your bread in the cocoa? And before he escaped into the wood business he slaved in the bakery, the only work he could find, a gentleman but laboring at night? And came home and hung his white overalls behind the bathroom door so that the can always smelled like a bakeshop and the stiff flour fell off in scales? And he slept handsome and angry, on his side all day, with one hand under his face and the other between his drawn-up knees? While Mama boiled the wash on the coal stove, and you and I disappeared to school? Do you remember all that? Well, I’ll tell you why I bring it up—there are good esthetic reasons why this should not be wiped from the record eternally. No one would put so much heart into things doomed to be forgotten and wasted. Or so much love. Love is gratitude for being. This love would be hate, Ulick, if the whole thing was nothing but a gyp.” But a speech like this was certainly not acceptable to one of the biggest builders of southeast Texas. Such communications were prohibited under the going mental rules of a civilization that proved its right to impose such rules by the many practical miracles it performed, such as bringing me to Texas from New York in four hours, or sawing open his sternum and grafting new veins into his heart. To accept the finality of death was part of his package, however. There was to be no sign of us left. Only a few holes in the ground. Only the dirt of certain mole-runs cast up by extinct creatures that once burrowed here.
Meantime Ulick was saying that he was going to help me. For fifty thousand dollars he would sell me two points in an already completed project. “That ought to throw off between twenty-five and thirty percent. So if you got an income of fifteen thousand, plus what you picked up by your scribbles, you could be comfortable in one of the cheap countries like Yugoslavia or Turkey, and tell the Chicago gang to fuck itself.”
“Lend me the fifty grand, then,” I said. “I can raise that much in a year’s time and repay you.”
“I’d have to go to the bank for it myself,” he said. But I was a Citrine, the same blood ran in our veins, and he couldn’t expect me to accept so obvious a lie. He then said, “Charlie, don’t ask me to do such an unbusinesslike thing.”
“You mean that if you