Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [39]
However, my small daughter would say to me with deadly accuracy of instinct, “Tell me what your mother used to do. Was she pretty?”
“I think she was very pretty. I don’t look like her. And she did cooking, baking, laundry and ironing, canning and pickling. She could tell fortunes with cards and sing trembly Russian songs. She and my father took turns visiting me at the sanatorium, every other week. In February the vanilla ice cream they brought was so hard you couldn’t cut it with a knife. And what else—ah yes, at home when I lost a tooth she would throw it behind the stove and ask the little mouse to bring a better one. You see what kind of teeth those bloody mice palmed off on me.”
“You loved your mother?”
Eager swelling feeling suddenly swept in. I forgot that I was talking to a child and I said, “Oh, I loved them all terribly, abnormally. I was all torn up with love. Deep in the heart. I used to cry in the sanatorium because I might never make it home and see them. I’m sure they never knew how I loved them, Mary. I had a TB fever and also a love fever. A passionate morbid little boy. At school I was always in love. At home if I was first to get up in the morning I suffered because they were still asleep. I wanted them to wake up so that the whole marvelous thing could continue. I also loved Menasha the boarder and Julius, my brother, your Uncle Julius.”
I shall have to lay aside these emotional data.
At the moment money, checks, hoodlums, automobiles preoccupied me.
Another check was on my mind. It had been sent by my friend Thaxter, the one whom Huggins accused of being a CIA agent. You see Thaxter and I were preparing to bring out a journal, The Ark. We were all ready. Wonderful things were to be printed in it—pages from my imaginative reflections on a world transformed by Mind, for example. But meantime Thaxter had defaulted on a certain loan.
It’s a long story and one that I’d rather not go into at this point. For two reasons. One is that I love Thaxter, whatever he does. The other is that I actually do think too much about money. It’s no good trying to conceal it. It’s there and it’s base. Earlier when I described how George saved Sharon’s life when her throat was cut, I spoke of blood as a vital substance. Well, money is a vital substance, too. Thaxter was supposed to repay part of the defaulted loan. Broke but grandiose he had ordered a check from his Italian bank for me, the Banco Ambrosiano of Milan. Why the Banco? Why Milan? But all of Thaxter’s arrangements were out of the ordinary. He had had a transatlantic upbringing and was equally at home in France and in California. You couldn’t mention a region so remote that Thaxter didn’t have an uncle there, or an interest in a mine, or an old château or villa. Thaxter with his exotic ways was another of my headaches. But I couldn’t resist him. However, that too must wait. Only one last word: Thaxter wanted people to believe that he was once a CIA agent. It was a wonderful rumor and he did everything to encourage it. It greatly added to his mysterious-ness, and mystery was one of his little rackets. This was harmless and in fact endearing. It was even philanthropic, as charm always is—up to a point. Charm always is a bit of a racket.
The cab pulled up at the Bath twenty minutes early and I wasn’t going to loiter there so I said through the perforations of the bulletproof screen, “Go on, drive west. Take it easy, I just want to look around.” The cabbie heard me and nodded his Afro. It was like an enormous black dandelion in seed, blown, all its soft spindles standing out.
In the last six months more old neighborhood landmarks had been torn down. This shouldn’t have mattered much. I can’t say why it made such a difference. But I was in a state. It almost seemed to me that I could hear myself rustling and fluttering in the back seat like a bird touring the mangroves of its youth, now car dumps. I stared