Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [87]
Attempts to touch were often made. Her dentist as he worked on her fillings took her hand and placed it on what she assumed to be the armrest of the chair. It was no such thing. It was his excited member. Her physician concluded an examination by kissing her violently wherever he could reach. “I can’t say that I blame the man for being carried away, Demmie. You have a bottom like a white valentine greeting.”
“I punched him right in the neck,” she said.
On a warm day when the air conditioning had broken down, her psychiatrist said to her, “Why don’t you take off your dress, Miss Vonghel.” A millionaire host on Long Island spoke through the ventilator of his bathroom into hers. “I need you. Give me your bod. . . .” He said in a choking perishing voice, “Give me! I am dying. Save, save . . . save me!” And this was a burly strong jolly man who piloted his own airplane.
Sexual ideas had distorted the minds of people who were under oath, who were virtually priests. Were you inclined to believe that mania and crime and catastrophe were the destiny of mankind in this vile century? Demmie by her innocence, by beauty and virtue, drew masses of evidence from the environment to support this. A strange demonism revealed itself to her. But she was not intimidated. She told me that she was sexually fearless. “And they’ve tried to pull everything on me,” she said. I believed her.
Dr. Ellenbogen said that she was a bad marriage-risk. He was not amused by the anecdotes I related about Mother and Daddy Vonghel. The Vonghels had made a bus tour of the Holy Land, obese Mother Vonghel bringing her own peanut-butter jars and Daddy his cans of Elberta cling peaches. Mother squeezed into the tomb of Lazarus but could not get out again. Arabs had to be sent for to free her. But I was delighted, despite Ellenbogen’s warnings, with the oddities of Demmie and her family. When she lay suffering, her deep eye sockets filled with tears and she gripped the middle finger of her left hand convulsively with the other fingers. She was strongly drawn to sickbeds, hospitals, terminal cancers, and funerals. But her goodness was genuine and deep. She bought me postage stamps and commuter tickets, she cooked briskets of beef and pots of paella for me, lined my dresser drawers with tissue paper, put away my scarf in moth-flakes. She couldn’t do elementary arithmetic but she could repair complicated machines. Guided by instinct she went into the colored wires and tubes of the radio and made it play. It seldom stopped broadcasting hillbilly music and religious services from everywhere. She received from home The Upper Room, A Devotional Guide for Family and Individual Use, with its Thought of the Month: “Christ’s Renewing Power.” Or “Read and consider: Habakkuk 2:2-4.” I read this publication myself. The Song of Solomon 8:7: “Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it.” I loved her clumsy knuckles, her long head growing gold hair. We sat on Barrow Street playing gin rummy. She gripped and shuffled the deck, growling, “I’m going to clean you out, sucker.” She snapped down the cards and shouted, “Gin! Count ‘em up!” Her knees were apart.
“It’s the open view of Shangri-La that takes my mind off these cards, Demmie,” I said.
We also played double solitaire hearts and Chinese checkers. She led me to antique-jewelry shops. She loved old brooches and rings all the more because dead ladies once had worn them, but what she mostly wanted