Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [33]
“And you saw her on Tuesdays only, never took her to dinner, never visited her at home?” I said.
“She went home at five o’clock to her old mother and cooked dinner. I swear I didn’t even know her last name. For twenty years I never had but her phone number.”
“But you loved her. Why didn’t you marry her?”
He seemed astonished, looking at the other players as if to say, What’s with this guy? Then he answered, “What, marry a hot broad who turns on in hotel rooms?”
While everyone laughed the Sicilian undertaker explained to me in the special tone in which you tell the facts of life to educated dummies, “Look, professor, you don’t mix things up. That’s not what a wife is about. And if you have a funny foot you have to look for a funny shoe. And if you find the right fit you just let it alone.”
“Anyhow, my honey is in her grave.”
I am always glad to learn, grateful for instruction, good under correction, if I say so myself. I may avoid opposition, but I know when it’s true friendship. We sat with whisky, poker chips, and cigars in this South Chicago kitchen penetrated by the dark breathing of the steel mills and refineries, under webs of power lines. I often note odd natural survivals in this heavy-industry district. Carp and catfish still live in the benzine-smelling ponds. Black women angle for them with dough-bait. Woodchucks and rabbits are seen not far from the dumps. Red-winged blackbirds with their shoulder tabs fly like uniformed ushers over the cattails. Certain flowers persist.
Grateful for this evening of human company I let myself go. I dropped nearly six hundred dollars, counting the check to Cantabile. But I’m so used to having money taken from me that I didn’t really mind. I had great pleasure that evening, drinking, laughing a good deal, and talking. I talked and talked. Evidently I discussed my interests and projects in some detail, and later I was told that I alone failed to understand what was going on. The other gamblers dropped out when they saw how the Cantabile cousins were cheating. They were flashing cards, finagling the deck, and pouncing on each pot.
“They don’t get away with that on my turf,” shouted George in one of his theatrical bursts of irrationality.
“But Rinaldo is dangerous.”
“Rinaldo is a punk!” George yelled.
seven
Possibly so, but in the Capone era the Cantabiles had been bad eggs. At that time the entire world identified Chicago with blood —there were the stockyards and there were the gang wars. In the Chicago blood-hierarchy the Cantabiles had stood in about the middle rank. They worked for the Mob, they drove whisky trucks, and they beat and shot people. They were average minor hoodlums and racketeers. But in the Forties a weak-minded Cantabile uncle on the Chicago police force brought disgrace upon the family. He got drunk in a bar and two playful punks took away his guns and had fun with him. They made him crawl on his belly and forced him to gobble filth and sawdust from the floor, they kicked his buttocks. After they had tormented and humiliated him and while he lay crying with rage they ran away, full of glee, throwing down the guns. This was their big mistake. He pursued them and shot them dead in the street. Since then, said George, no one would take the Cantabiles seriously. Old Ralph (Moochy) Cantabile, now a lifer at Joliet, ruined the family with the Mob by murdering two adolescents. This was why Rinaldo could not afford to be brushed off by a person like me, well known in Chicago, who lost to him at poker and then stopped his