Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [209]
“Solid rock,” said the Boston Irishman, scraping the ground with his white calfskin shoe.
He had confided to me that he wasn’t an Irishman at all, he was a Pole. His name, Casey, was shortened from Casimirz. Because I was Ulick’s brother, he took me for a businessman. With a name like Citrine what else would I be? “This guy is a real creative entrepreneur. Your brother Julius is imaginative—a genius builder,” said Casey. As he spoke, his flat freckled face gave me the false smile that swept the country about fifteen years ago. To achieve it, you drew your upper lip away from the teeth, while looking at your interlocutor with charm. Alec Szathmar did it better than anyone. Casey was a large, almost monumental and hollow-looking person who resembled a plainclothes dick from Chicago—same type. His ears were amazingly crinkled, like Chinese cabbage. He spoke with pedantic courtliness, as if he had taken a correspondence course originating in Bombay. I rather liked that. I saw that he wanted me to put in a good word for him with Ulick, and I understood his need. Casey was retired, a partial invalid, and he was seeking ways to protect his fortune from inflationary shrinkage. Also he was looking for action. Action or death. Money can’t mark time. Now that I was committed to spiritual investigation, many matters presented themselves to me in a clearer light. I saw, for instance, what volcanic emotions Ulick was dissembling. He stood on a rubble elevation, eating smoked shrimps from the paper bag, and pretended to take a cool view of this peninsula as a development site. “It’s promising,” he said. “It’s got possibilities. But there’d be some terrible headaches here. You’d have to start by blasting. There’ll be a hell of a water problem. Sewage, too. And I don’t even know how this is zoned.”
“Why, what you could do with this is a first-class hotel,” said Casey. “Apartment houses on each side, with ocean frontage, beaches, a yacht basin, tennis courts.”
“It sounds easy,” said Ulick. Oh cunning Ulick, my darling brother! I could see that he was in an ecstasy of craftiness. This was a place that might be worth hundreds of millions, and he came upon it just as the surgeons were honing up for him. A fat cumbered clogged ailing heart threatened to lay him in the grave just as his soul came into its most brilliant opportunity. You could be sure that when you were dreaming your best somebody would start banging at the door—the famous Butcher Boy from Porlock. In this case, the kid’s name was Death. I understood Ulick and his passions. Why not? I was a lifetime Ulick subscriber. So I knew what a paradise he saw in this dumping ground —the towers in a sea-haze, the imported grass gemmy with moisture, the pools surrounded by gardenias where broads sunned their beautiful bodies, and all the dark Mexican servitors in embroidered shirts murmuring “Sí, señor”—there were plenty of wetbacks crossing the border.
I also knew how Ulick’s balance sheets would look. They’d read like Chapman’s Homer, illuminated pages, realms of gold. If zoning ordinances interfered with this opportunity he was prepared to lay out a million bucks in bribes. I saw that in his face. He was the positive, I the negative sinner. He might have been wearing sultry imperial colors. I might have been buttoned into a suit of Dr. Denton’s Sleepers. Of course I had a big thing to wake up to, a very big challenge. Now I was only simmering, still, and it would be necessary at last to come to a full boil. I had business on behalf of the entire human race—a responsibility not only to fulfill my own destiny but to carry on for certain failed friends like Von Humboldt Fleisher who