Herzog (10 page)

    I've read your stuff about the psychological realism of Calvin. I hope you don't mind my saying that it reveals a lousy, cringing, grudging conception of human nature. This is how I see your Protestant Freudianism.

    Edvig sat calmly through Herzog's description of the assault in the bedroom, smiling a bit. Then he said, "Why do you suppose it happened?"

    "Something about the books, maybe. Interference with her studies. If I say the house is dirty, it stinks, she thinks I'm criticizing her mind and forcing her back into housework. Disrespectful of her rights as a person..."

    Edvig's emotional responses were unsatisfactory. When he needed a feeling reaction, Herzog had to get it from Valentine Gersbach. Accordingly, he took his troubles to him. But first, ringing Gersbach's doorbell, he had to face the coldness (he couldn't understand it) of Phoebe Gersbach, who answered. She was looking very gaunt, dry, pale, strained. Of course-the Connecticut landscape raced, rose, contracted, opened its depths, and the Atlantic water shone-of course, Phoebe knew her husband was sleeping with Madeleine. And Phoebe had only one business in life, one aim, to keep her husband and protect her child. Answering the bell, she opened the door on foolish, feeling, suffering Herzog. He had come to see his friend.

    Phoebe was not strong; her energy was limited; she must have been past the point of irony. And as for pity, what would she have pitied him for? Not adultery-that was too common to be taken seriously by either of them.

    Anyway, to her, having Madeleine's body could never seem a big deal. She might have pitied Herzog's stupid eggheadedness, his clumsy way of putting his troubles into high-minded categories; or simply his suffering. But she probably had only enough feeling for the conduct of her own life, and no more. Moses was sure that she blamed him for aggravating Valentine's ambitions-Gersbach the public figure, Gersbach the poet, the television-intellectual, lecturing at the Hadassah on Martin Buber. Herzog himself had introduced him to cultural Chicago.

    "Val's in his room," she said. "Excuse me, I've got to get the kid ready for Temple."

    Gersbach was putting up bookshelves.

    Deliberate, heavy, slow-moving, he measured the wood, the wall, and jotted figures on the plaster. He handled the level masterfully, looked over the toggle bolts. With his thick, ruddy-dark, judicious face and his broad chest and his artificial leg which made him stand tilted, he concentrated on the choice of a bit for the electric drill as he listened to Herzog's account of Madeleine's strange assault.

    "We were getting into bed."

    "Well?" He made an effort to be patient.

    "Both naked."

    "Did you try anything?" said Gersbach. A severe note entered his voice.

    "Me? No. She's built a wall of Russian books around herself. Vladimir of Kiev, Tikhon Zadonsky. In my bed! It's not enough they persecuted my ancestors! She ransacks the library. Stuff from the bottom of the stacks nobody has taken out in fifty years. The sheets are full of crumbs of yellow paper."

    "Have you been complaining again?"

    "Maybe I have, a little. Eggshells, chop bones, tin cans under the table, under the sofa.... It's bad for June."

    "There's your mistake! Right there-she can't bear that nagging, put-upon tone. If you expect me to help straighten this out, I've got to tell you. You and she- it's no secret from anybody-are the two people I love most. So I must warn you, chaver, get off the lousy details. Just knock off all chicken shit, and be absolutely level and serious."

    "I know," said Herzog, "she's going through a long crisis-finding herself. And I know I have a bad tone, sometimes. I've gone over this ground with Edvig. But Sunday night..."

    "Are you sure you didn't make a pass?"

    "No. It so happens we had intercourse the night before."

    Gersbach seemed extremely angry. He gazed at Moses with burning ruddy-dark eyes and said, "I didn't ask you that. My question was only about Sunday night. You've got to learn what the score is, God damn it! If you don't level with me, I can't do a frigging thing for you."

    "Why shouldn't I level with you?" Moses was astonished by this vehemence, by Gersbach's fierce, glowing look.

    "You don't. You're damn evasive."

    Moses considered the charge under Gersbach's intense red-brown gaze. He had the eyes of a prophet, a Shofat, yes, a judge in Israel, a king. A mysterious person, Valentine Gersbach. "We had intercourse the night before. But as soon as it was done she turned on the light, picked up one of those dusty Russian folios, put it on her chest, and started to read away. As I was leaving her body, she was reaching for the book. Not a kiss. Not a last touch.

    Only her nose, twitching."

    Valentine gave a faint smile. "Maybe you should sleep separately."

    "I could move into the kid's room, I suppose.

    But June is restless as it is. She wanders around at night in her Denton sleepers. I wake up and find her by my bed. Often wet. She's feeling the strain."

    "Now knock it off, about the kid. Don't use her in this."

    Herzog bowed his head. He felt threatened by tears.

    Gersbach sighed and walked along his wall slowly, bending and straightening like a gondolier. "I explained to you last week..." he said.

    "You'd better tell me once more. I'm in a state," said Herzog.

    "Now you listen to me. We'll go over the ground again."

    Grief greatly damaged-it positively wounded- Herzog's handsome face. Anyone he had ever injured by his conceit might now feel revenged to see how ravaged he looked. The change was almost ludicrous. And the lectures Gersbach read him-those were so spirited, so vehement, gross, they were ludicrous, too, a parody of the intellectual's desire for higher meaning, depth, quality. Moses sat by the window in raw sunlight, listening. The drapery with gilt-grooved rods lay on the table with planks and books. "One thing you can be sure, bruder," said Valentine. "I have no ax to grind. In this thing, I just have no prejudice." Valentine loved to use Yiddish expressions, to misuse them, rather.

    Herzog's Yiddish background was genteel. He heard with instinctive snobbery Valentine's butcher's, teamster's, commoner's accent, and he put himself down for it-My God! those ancient family prejudices, absurdities from a lost world.

    "Let's cut out all the shtick," said Gersbach. "Let's say you're a crumb.

    Let's say even you're a criminal. There's nothing-nothing!-you could do to shake my friendship. That's no shit, and you know it! I can take what you've done to me."

    Moses, astonished again, said, "What have I done to you?"

    "Hell with that.

    Hob es in drerd.

    I know Mady is a bitch. And maybe you think I never wanted to kick Phoebe in the ass.

    That klippa!

    But that's the female nature." He shook his abundant hair into place. It had fiery-dark depths. At the back it was brutally barbered.

    "You've taken care of her for some time, okay, I know. But if she's got a disgusting father and a kvetsch of a mother, what else should a man do? And expect nothing in return."

    "Well, of course. But I spent twenty grand in about a year. Everything I inherited. Now we've got this rotten hole on Lake Park with the I. c. trains passing all night. The pipes stink. The house is all trash and garbage and Russian books and the kid's unwashed clothes. And there I am, returning Coke bottles and vacuuming, burning paper and picking up veal bones."

    "The bitch is testing you. You're an important professor, invited to conferences, with an international correspondence. She wants you to admit her importance. You're a jerimmter mensch."

    Moses, to save his soul, could not let this pass.

    He said quietly, "Berimmter."

    "Fe - be, who cares. Maybe it's not so much your reputation as your egotism. You could be a real mensch.

    You've got it in you. But you're effing it up with all this egotistical shit. It's a big deal-such a valuable person dying for love. Grief. It's a lot of bull!"

    Dealing with Valentine was like dealing with a king. He had a thick grip. He might have held a scepter.

    He was a king, an emotional king, and the depth of his heart was his kingdom. He appropriated all the emotions about him, as if by divine or spiritual right.

    He could do more with them, and therefore he simply took them over. He was a big man, too big for anything but the truth. (again, the truth!) Herzog had a weakness for grandeur, and even bogus grandeur (was it ever entirely bogus?).

    They went out to clear their heads in the fresh winter air. Gersbach in his great storm coat, belted, bareheaded, exhaling vapor, kicking through the snow with the all-battering leg. Moses held down the brim of his dead-green velours hat. His eyes couldn't bear the glitter.

    Valentine spoke as a man who had risen from terrible defeat, the survivor of sufferings few could comprehend. His father had died of sclerosis. He'd get it, too, and expected to die of it. He spoke of death majestically-there was no other word for it-his eyes amazingly spirited, large, rich, keen, or, thought Herzog, like the broth of his soul, hot and shining.

    "Why when I lost my leg," said Gersbach.

    "Seven years old, in Saratoga Springs, running after the balloon man; he blew his little fifel.

    When I took that short cut through the freight yards, crawling under cars. Lucky the brakeman found me as soon as the wheel took off my leg. Wrapped me in his coat and rushed me to the hospital. When I came to, my nose was bleeding. Alone in the room." Moses listened, white, the frost did not change his color. "I leaned over," Gersbach went on, as if relating a miracle. "A drop of blood fell on the floor, and as it splashed I saw a little mouse under the bed who seemed to be staring at the splash. It backed away, it moved its tail and whiskers. And the room was just full of bright sunlight...." (there are storms on the sun itself, but here all is peaceful and temperate, thought Moses.) "It was a little world, underneath the bed.

    Then I realized that my leg was gone."

    Valentine would have denied that the tears in his eyes were for himself. No, curse that, he'd have said.

    Not for him. They were for that little kid. There were stories about himself, too, that Moses had told a hundred times, so he couldn't complain of Gersbach's repetitiveness. Each man has his own batch of poems. But Gersbach almost always cried, and it was strange, because his long curling coppery lashes stuck together; he was tender but he looked rough, his face broad and rugged, heavy-bristled, and his chin positively brutal. And Moses recognized that under his own rules the man who had suffered more was more special, and he conceded willingly that Gersbach had suffered harder, that his agony under the wheels of the boxcar must have been far deeper than anything Moses had ever suffered. Gersbach's tormented face was stony white, pierced by the radiant bristles of his red beard. His lower lip had almost disappeared beneath the upper. His great, his hot sorrow!

    Molten sorrow!

    Dr. Edvig, Herzog wrote, Your opinion, repeated many times, is that Madeleine has a deeply religious nature.

    At the time of her conversion, before we were married, I went to church with her more than once. I clearly remember... In New York...

    At her insistence. One morning when Herzog brought her to the church door in a cab she said he had to come in. He must. She said no relationship between them was possible if he didn't respect her faith. "But I don't know anything about churches," said Moses.

    She got out of the cab and went up the stairs quickly, expecting that he would follow. He paid the driver and caught up with her. She pushed the swinging door open with her shoulder. She put her hand in the font and crossed herself, as if she'd been doing it all her life. She'd learned that in the movies, probably. But the look of terrible eagerness and twisted perplexity and appeal on her face-where did that come from? Madeleine in her gray suit with the squirrel collar, her large hat, hurried forward on high heels. He followed slowly, holding his salt-and-pepper topcoat at the neck as he took off his hat. Madeleine's body seemed gathered upward in the breast and shoulders, and her face was red with excitement. Her hair was pulled back severely under the hat but escaped in wisps to form sidelocks. The church was a new building-small, cold, dark, the varnish shining hard on the oak pews, and blots of flame standing motionless near the altar. Madeleine genuflected in the aisle.

    Only it was more than genuflection. She sank, she cast herself down, she wanted to spread herself on the floor and press her heart to the boards-he recognized that. Shading his face on both sides, like a horse in blinders, he sat in the pew. What was he doing here? He was a husband, a father. He was married, he was a Jew. Why was he in church?

    The bells tinged. The priest, quick and arid, rattled off the Latin. In the responses, Madeleine's high clear voice led the rest. She crossed herself.

    She genuflected in the aisle. And then they were in the street again and her face had recovered its normal color. She smiled and said, "Let's go to a nice place for breakfast."

    Moses told the cabbie to go to the Plaza.

    "But I'm not dressed for it," she said.

    "In that case I'll take you to Steinberg's Dairy, which I prefer anyway."

    But Madeleine was putting on lipstick, and fluffing out her blouse, and checking her hat. How lovely she could be! Her face was gay and round, pink, the blue of her eyes was clear. Very different from the terrifying menstrual ice of her rages, the look of the murderess. The doorman ran down from his rococo shelter in front of the Plaza. The wind was blowing hard. She swept into the lobby. Palms and pink-toned carpets, gilding, footmen...

    I don't quite understand what you mean by "religious." A religious woman may find she doesn't love her lover or her husband. But what if she should hate him? What if she should wish continually for his death? What if she should wish it most fervently when they were making love? What if in the act of love he should see that wish shining in her blue eyes like a maiden's prayer? Now, I am not simple-minded, Dr. Edvig. I often wish I were. It hardly does much good to have a complex mind without actually being a philosopher. I don't expect a religious woman to be lovable, a saintly pussycat. But I would like to know how you decided that she is deeply religious.