Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [79]
“Charlie, I think you do know. I saw her talking to you.”
“But she didn’t tell me.”
He hung up. Then Magnasco called. He said, “Mr. Citrine? Your friend is going to hurt me. I’ll have to swear out a warrant.”
“Is it really that bad?”
“You know how it is, people go further than they mean to, and then where are you? I mean, where am I? I’m calling because he threatens me in your name. He says you’ll get me if he doesn’t—his blood-brother.”
“I won’t lay a hand on you,” I said. “Why don’t you leave town for a while?”
“Leave?” said Magnasco. “I only just got here. Down from Yale.”
I understood. He was on the make, had long prepared for his career.
“The Trib is trying me out as a book reviewer.”
“I know how it is. I have a show opening on Broadway. My first.”
When I met Magnasco, he proved to be overweight, round-faced, young in calendar years only, steady, unflappable, born to make progress in cultural New York. “I won’t be driven out,” he said. “I’ll put him on a peace bond.”
“Well, do you need my permission?” I said.
“It won’t exactly make me popular in New York to do this to a poet.”
I then said to Demmie, “Magnasco is afraid of getting in bad with the New York culture crowd by calling the cops.”
Night-moaning, hell-fearing, pill-addicted Demmie was also a most practical person, a supervisor and programmer of genius. When she was in her busy mood, domineering and protecting me, I used to think what a dolls’ generalissimo she must have been in childhood. “And where you’re concerned,” she would say, “I’m a tiger-mother and a regular Fury. Isn’t it about a month since you saw Humboldt? He’s staying away. That means he’s beginning to blame you. Poor Humboldt, he’s flipped out, hasn’t he! We have to help him. If he keeps attacking this Magnasco character they’re going to lock him up. If the police put him in Bellevue, what you have to do is get ready to bail him out. He’ll have to be sobered up, calmed down, and cooled off. The best place for that is Payne Whitney. Listen, Charlie, Ginnie’s cousin Albert is the admitting physician at Payne Whitney. Bellevue is hell. We should raise some money and transfer him to Payne Whitney. Maybe we could get him a sort of scholarship.”
She went into this with Ginnie’s cousin Albert, and, in my name, she telephoned people and collected money for Humboldt, taking over because I was busy with Von Trenck. We had come back from Connecticut and were going into rehearsal at the Belasco. Efficient Demmie soon raised about three thousand dollars. Hildebrand alone contributed two thousand but he was still sore at Humboldt. He stipulated that the money was for psychiatric treatment and for bare necessities only. A Fifth Avenue lawyer, Simkin, held this fund in escrow. Hildebrand knew, by now we all knew, that Humboldt had hired a private detective, a man named Scaccia, and that this Scaccia had already gotten most of Humboldt’s Guggenheim grant. Kathleen herself had done an uncharacteristic thing. Leaving New York at once she headed for Nevada to file for divorce. But Scaccia kept telling Humboldt that she was still in New York and doing lascivious things. Humboldt elaborated a new Proustian sensational scandal involving, this time, a vice ring of Wall Street brokers. If he could catch her in adultery, he would get the “property,” the shack in New Jersey, worth about eight thousand dollars, with a mortgage of five, as Orlando Huggins told me—Orlando was one of those radical bohemians who knew money. In avant-garde New York everybody knew money.
The summer went quickly. In August rehearsals began. The nights were hot, tense, and tiring. Each morning I rose already worn out and Demmie gave me several cups of coffee and at the breakfast table also a good deal of counsel about the theater and Humboldt and the conduct of life. The little white terrier, Cato, begged for crusts and snapped his teeth while dancing backward on his hind legs. I thought that I too would prefer sleeping all day on his cushion by the window, near Demmie’s begonias, than sit in the antique filth of the Belasco and