Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [77]
Demmie was often like this. Just as I was ready to close my eyes for the night, having had enough of my conscious and operating self, Demmie wanted to talk. At this hour she preferred exciting topics—sickness, murder, suicide, eternal punishment, and hellfire. She got into a state. Her hair bristled and her eyes deepened with panic and her deformed toes twisted in all directions. She then closed her long hands upon her smallish breasts. With baby tremors of the lip she sank at times into a preverbal baby stammer. It was now three o’clock in the morning and I thought I heard the depraved Littlewoods carrying on above us in the master bedroom, perhaps to give us an idea of what we were missing. This was probably imaginary.
I rose, anyway, and took away Demmie’s nail file. I tucked her in. Her mouth was naively open as she gave up the file. I got her to lie down but she was disturbed. I could see that. As she laid her head on the pillow, in profile, one large lovely eye stared out childishly. “Off you go,” I said. She shut the staring eye. Her sleep was instantaneous and seemed deep.
But in a few minutes I heard what I expected to hear—her night voice. It was low hoarse and deep almost mannish. She moaned. She spoke broken words. She did this almost every night. The voice expressed her terror of this strange place, the earth, and of this strange state, being. Laboring and groaning she tried to get out of it. This was the primordial Demmie beneath the farmer’s daughter beneath the teacher beneath the elegant Main Line horsewoman, Latinist, accomplished cocktail-sipper in black chiffon, with the upturned nose, this fashionable conversationalist. Thoughtful, I listened to this. I let her go on awhile, trying to comprehend. I pitied her and loved her. But then I put an end to it. I kissed her. She knew who it was. She pressed her toes to my shins and held me with powerful female arms. She cried “I love you” in the same deep voice, but her eyes were still shut blind. I think she never actually woke up.
seventeen
In May, when the Princeton term was ended, Humboldt and I met, as blood-brothers, for the last time.
As deep as the huge cap of December blue behind me entering the window with thermal distortions from the sun, I lay on my Chicago sofa and saw again everything that had happened. One’s heart hurt from this sort of thing. One thought, How sad, about all this human nonsense which keeps us from the large truth. But perhaps I can get through it once and for all by doing what I am doing now.
Very good, Broadway was the word then. I had a producer, a director, and an agent. I was part of the theater world, in Hum-boldt’s eyes. There were actresses who said “dahling” and kissed you when you met. There was a Hirschfeld caricature of me in the Times. Humboldt took much credit for this. By bringing me to Princeton he had put me in the majors. Through him I met useful people in the Ivy League. Besides, he felt I had modeled Von Trenck, my Prussian hero, on him. “But look out, Charlie,” he said. “Don’t be taken in by the Broadway glamour and the commercial stuff.”
Humboldt and Kathleen descended on me in the repaired Buick. I was in a cottage on the Connecticut shore, down the road from Lampton, the director, making revisions under his guidance—writing the play he wanted, for that was what it amounted to. Demmie was with me every weekend, but the Fleishers arrived on a Wednesday, when I was alone. Humboldt had just given a reading at Yale and they were going home. We sat in the small stone kitchen drinking coffee and gin, having a reunion. Humboldt was being “good,” serious, high-minded. He had been reading De Anima and was full of ideas about the origins of thought. I noticed, however, that he didn’t let Kathleen out of his sight. She had to tell him where she was going. “I’m just getting my cardigan.” Even to go to the bathroom, she needed permission. Also he seemed to have punched her in the eye. She sat quietly and low in her chair, arms folded