Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [80]
Demmie, I felt, could understand Humboldt better than I because she too swallowed mysterious pills. (There were other affinities as well.) An obese child, she had weighed two hundred and eighty pounds at the age of fourteen. She showed me pictures I could hardly believe. She was given hormone injections and pills and she grew slender. Judging by the exophthalmic bulge, it must have been thyroxine that they put her on. She thought her pretty breasts disfigured by the rapid weight loss. The insignificant wrinkles in them were a grief to her. She sometimes cried, “They hurt my titties with their goddamn medicine.” Brown-paper packets were still arriving from the Mount Coptic Drugstore. “But I am attractive, though.” Indeed she was. Her Dutch hair positively gave light. She wore it sometimes combed to the side, sometimes with bangs, depending on what she had done to herself at the hairline with her nails. She often scratched herself. Her face was either childishly circular or like a frontierwoman’s, gaunt. She was sometimes a van der Weyden beauty, sometimes Mortimer Snerd, sometimes a Ziegfeld girl. The slight silken scrape of her knock-knees when she walked quickly was, I repeat, highly prized by me. I thought that if I were a locust such a sound would send me soaring over mountain ranges. When Demmie’s face with the fine upturned nose was covered with pancake make-up her big eyes, all the more mobile and clear because she had laid on so much dust, revealed two things: one was that she had a true heart and the other that she was a dynamic sufferer. More than once I rushed into Barrow Street to flag down a cab and take Demmie to the emergency room at St. Vincent’s. She sun-bathed on the roof and was burned so badly that she became delirious. Then, slicing veal, she cut her thumb to the bone. She went to throw garbage down the incinerator and a gush of flame from the open chute singed her. As a good girl, she did her Latin lesson-plans for an entire term, she laid away scarves and gloves in labeled boxes, she scrubbed the house. As a bad girl she drank whisky, she had hysterics, or took up with thieves and desperadoes. She stroked me like a fairy princess or punched me in the ribs like a cowhand. In hot weather she stripped herself naked to wax the floors on her knees. Then there appeared big tendons, lanky arms, laboring feet. And when it was seen from behind the organ I adored in a different context as small, fine, intricate, rich in delightful difficulties of access, stood out like a primitive limb. But after the waxing, a seizure of sweating labor, she sat with lovely legs in a blue frock having a martini. Fundamentalist Father Vonghel owned Mount Coptic. He was a violent man. There was a scar on Demmie’s head where he had banged the child’s head on a radiator, there was another on her face where he had jammed a wastepaper basket over it—the tinsmith had to cut her free. With all this she knew the gospels by heart, she had been a field-hockey star, she could break Western horses, and she wrote charming bread-and-butter notes on Tiffany paper. Still, when she took a spoonful of her favorite vanilla custard, she was again the fat child. She savored the dessert at the tip of her tongue, open-mouthed, and the great blue mid-summer ocean-haze eyes in a trance, so that she started when I said, “Swallow your pudding.” Evenings we played backgammon, we translated Lucretius, she expounded Plato to me. “People take credit for their