Herzog (19 page)

    Her bookmarks in St. Augustine and in her missal were clippings from the Post and Mirror.

    "Favorable?" asked Moses, doubling his muffin over and pressing it-it was buttered too thickly.

    Madeleine's large, violet eyes seemed swollen. Her thoughts were strained with these difficulties, many times analyzed. "I have an appointment with an Italian priest in the Society for the Propagation of the Faith. He's a canon-law expert I phoned him yesterday."

    In the Church twelve weeks, she already knew everything.

    "It would be easier if Daisy would divorce me," said Herzog.

    "She's got to give you a divorce." Madeleine's voice rose sharply. Herzog found himself looking at the face which had been prepared for the Jesuits, uptown.

    But something had happened-some string had tightened and twisted in her breast, and her figure grew rigid.

    Her fingertips whitened as she pressed the edge of the table and glared at him, her lips thinning and the color darkening under the tubercular pallor of her makeup.

    "What makes you think I intend to have a lifelong affair with you? I want some action."

    "But Mady-you know how I feel..."

    "Feel? Don't give me that line of platitudes about feelings. I don't believe in it. I believe in God-sin- death-so don't pull any sentimental crap on me."

    "No-now listen." He put on his fedora, as if he hoped to derive some authority from it.

    "I want to be married," she said. "This other stuff is just balls! My mother had to live a bohemian life. She worked, while Pontritter carried on.

    He bribed me with nickels when I saw him with one of his broads. You know how I learned my ABC'S? From Lenin's State and Revolution.

    These people are insane!"

    Probably so, Herzog mentally agreed. But now Madeleine wants white Christmases and Easter bunnies and to live perhaps in one of those streets of brick, semi-detached parochial houses in the dull wilderness of Queens borough, fussing over Communion dresses, with a steady Irish husband who sweeps up the crumbs at the biscuit factory.

    "Maybe I have become a fanatic about conventional things," said Madeleine. "But I won't have it any other way. You and I have got to marry in the Church, otherwise I quit. Our children will be baptized and brought up in the Church." Moses gave a dumb half-nod. Compared with her he felt static, without temperament. The powdered fragrance of her face stirred him (my gratitude for art, was his present reflection, any sort of art).

    "My childhood was a grotesque nightmare," she went on. "I was bullied, assaulted, ab-ab-ab..." she stammered.

    "Abused?"

    She nodded. She had told him this before. He could not bring this sexual secret of hers to light.

    "It was a grown man," she said. "He paid me to keep it quiet."

    "Who was he?"

    Her eyes were sullenly full and her pretty mouth desperately vengeful but silent.

    "It happens to many, many people," he said. "Can't base a whole life on that. It doesn't mean that much."

    "What-a whole year of amnesia not mean much? My fourteenth year is blacked out."

    She couldn't accept this broad-minded consolation from Herzog. Perhaps it seemed to her a kind of indifference. "My parents damn near destroyed me.

    All right-it doesn't matter now," she said. "I believe in my Savior, Jesus Christ. I'm not afraid of d-death now, Moses. Pon said we all died and rotted in the grave. Saying that to a girl of six or seven. He ought to be punished for it. But now I'm willing to go on living, and to bring children into the world, provided that I have something to tell them when they ask me about death and the grave. But don't expect me to go along in the ordinary loose way-without rules. No! It'll be these rules or nothing."

    Moses watched her as though he were submerged, through the vitreous distortion of deep water.

    "Do you hear me?"

    "Oh, yes," he said. "Yes. I do."

    "I've got to go now. Father Francis is never a minute late." She picked up her handbag and hurried away, her cheeks shaken by the abruptness of her steps. She wore very high heels.

    Rushing into the subway on one of those mornings, she caught a heel in the hem of her skirt and fell, injuring her back. She limped up to the street and took a taxi to the office but Father Francis sent her to the doctor, who taped her heavily and told her to go home. There she found Moses, still half dressed, having a thoughtful cup of coffee (he was thinking continually, but nothing clear resulted).

    "Help me!" Madeleine said.

    "What happened?"

    "I fell in the subway. I'm hurt." Her voice was piercing.

    "You'd better lie down," he said. He unpinned her hat, and carefully unbuttoned her jacket and sweater, took off her skirt and slip. The clear, pink color of her body was disclosed below the makeup line at the base of her neck. He took off the pectoral cross.

    "Get me pajamas." She was shivering. The broad tapes had a strongly medicated smell. He led her to the bed and lay down with her to warm and comfort her, just as she wanted him to. There was a March snow, that grimy day. He did not go back to Philadelphia.

    "I punished myself for my sins," Madeleine repeated.

    I thought it might interest you to learn the true history of one of your converts, Monsignor.

    Ecclesiastical dolls-gold-threaded petticoats, whining organ pipes. The actual world, to say nothing of the infinite universe, demanded a sterner, a real masculine character.

    Like whose? thought Herzog. Mine, for instance? And, instead of concluding this letter to Monsignor, he wrote out, for his own use, one of June's favorite nursery rhymes.

    I love little pussy, her coat is so warm

    And if I don't hurt her, she'll do me no harm.

    I'll sit by the fire and give her some food,

    And pussy will love me because I am good.

    That's more like it, he thought. Yes. You must aim the imagination also at yourself, point-blank.

    But when all was said and done, Madeleine didn't marry in the Church, nor did she baptize her daughter. Catholicism went the way of zithers and tarot cards, bread-baking and Russian civilization. And life in the country.

    With Madeleine, Herzog had made his second attempt to live in the country. For a big-city Jew he was peculiarly devoted to country life.

    He had forced Daisy to endure a freezing winter in eastern Connecticut while he was writing Romanticism and Christianity, in a cottage where the pipes had to be thawed with candles and freezing blasts penetrated the clapboard walls while Herzog brooded over his Rousseau or practiced on the oboe. The instrument had been left to him at the death of Aleck Hirshbein, his roommate at Chicago, and Herzog with his odd sense of piety (much heavy love in Herzog; grief did not pass quickly, with him) taught himself to play the instrument and, come to think of it, the sad music must have oppressed Daisy even more than the months of cold fog. Perhaps Marco's character had been affected by the experience, too; at times he showed a streak of melancholy.

    But with Madeleine it was going to be altogether different. She dropped from the Church and after a struggle with Daisy and her lawyers and his own, and under pressure from Tennie and Madeleine, Moses was divorced and remarried. The wedding supper was cooked by Phoebe; Gersbach. Herzog, at his desk, gazing at great scrolls of cloud (the sky unusually clear for New York), remembered the Yorkshire pudding and the home-made cake.

    Phoebe baked incomparable banana cakes, light, moist, white icing. A doll bride and groom. And Gersbach, boisterous, yucking it up, poured whisky, wine, pounded the table, danced, stumping, with the bride. He wore one of his favorite loose sports shirts, which opened on his big chest and slipped away from his shoulders softly.

    Male d@ecollet`e. There were no other guests.

    The house in Ludeyville was bought when Madeleine became pregnant. It seemed the ideal place to work out the problems Herzog had become involved with in The Phenomenology of Mind comthe importance of the "law of the heart" in Western traditions, the origins of moral sentimentalism and related matters, on which he had distinctly different ideas. He was going-he smiled secretly now, admitting it-to wrap the subject up, to pull the carpet from under all other scholars, show them what was what, stun them, expose their triviality once and for all. It was not simple vanity, but a sense o responsibility that was the underlying motive. That the would say for himself. He was a bien pensant type. He took seriously Heinrich Heine's belief that the words of Rousseau had turned into the bloody machine of Robespierre, that Kant and Fichte were deadlier than armies. He had a small foundation grant, and his twenty-thousand-dollar legacy from Father Herzog went into the country place.

    He turned into its caretaker. Twenty thousand and more would have gone down the drain if he hadn't thrown himself into the work-Papa's savings, representing forty years of misery in America. I don't understand how it was possible, thought Herzog.

    I was in a fever when I wrote the check. I didn't even look.

    But after the papers were signed he inspected the house as if for the first time. It was unpainted, gloomy, with rotting Victorian ornaments. Nothing on the ground floor but a huge hole like a shell crater.

    The plaster was coming down-moldy, thready, sickening stuff hung from the laths. The old fashioned knob-and-tube wiring was dangerous. Bricks were dropping from the foundations. The windows leaked.

    Herzog learned masonry, glazing, plumbing. He sat up nights studying the Do-It-Yourself Encyclopedia, and with hysterical passion he painted, patched, tarred gutters, plastered holes. Two coats of paint counted for nothing on old, open-grained wood. In the bathroom the nails hadn't been set and their heads worked through the vinyl tiles, which came loose like playing cards. The gas radiator was suffocating. The electric heater blew fuses.

    The tub was a relic; it rested on four metal talons, toy-like. You had to crouch in it and sponge yourself. Still, Madeleine had come back from Sloane's Bath Shop with luxurious fixtures, scallop-shell silver soap dishes and bars of Ecusson soap, thick Turkish towels.

    Herzog worked in the rusty slime of the toilet tank, trying to get the cock and ball to work. At night he heard the trickle that was exhausting the well.

    A year of work saved the house from collapse.

    In the cellar was another lavatory with thick walls like a bunker. In summer the crickets liked it best, and so did Herzog. Here he loitered over a ten-cent bargain Dryden and Pope. Through a chink he saw the fiery morning of high summer, the wicked spiny green of vines, and the tight, shapely heads of wild roses, the huge elm in front, dying on him, the oriole's nest, gray and heart-shaped.

    He read, "I am His Highness" dog at Kew." But Herzog had a touch of arthritis in the neck. The stony cell became too damp. He removed the top of the tank with a grating noise and pulled the rubber fitting to release the water. The parts were rusty, stiff.

    ... His Highness' dog at Kew, Pray tell me, Sir, whose dog are you?

    Mornings he tried to reserve for brainwork. He corresponded with the Widener Library to try to get the Abhandlungen der Koniglich Sdchsischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaft.

    His desk was covered with unpd bills, unanswered letters. To raise money, he took on hackwork.

    University presses sent manuscripts for his professional judgment. They lay in bundles, unopened. The sun grew hot, the soil was damp and black, and Herzog looked with despair on the thriving luxuriant life of the plants. He had all this paper to get through, and no help. The house was waiting-huge, hollow, urgent Quos Vult Perdere Dementat, he lettered in dust. The gods were working on him, but they hadn't demented him enough yet In commenting on monographs, Moses' very hand rebelled. Five minutes at a letter and he got writer's cramp. His look turned wooden. He was running out of excuses.

    I regret the delay. A bad case of poison ivy has kept me from my desk.

    Elbows on his papers, Moses stared at half-painted walls, discolored ceilings, filthy windows. Something had come over him. He used to be able to keep going, but now he worked at about two per cent of efficiency, handled every piece of paper five or ten times and misplaced everything. It was too much!

    He was going under.

    He picked up the oboe. In his dark study, vines clutching the bulging screen, Herzog played Handel and Purcell-jigs, bourrees, contredanses, his face puffed out, fingers fleet on the keys, the music hopping and tumbling, absent-minded and sad.

    Below, the washing machine ran, two steps clockwise, one step counter. The kitchen was foul enough to breed rats. Egg yolks dried on the plates, coffee turned green in the cups-toast, cereal, maggots breeding in marrow bones, fruit flies, house flies, dollar bills, postage stamps and trading stamps soaking on the formica counter.

    Madeleine, to get away from his music, slammed the screen door, slammed the car door. The motor roared. The Studebaker had a split in the muffler. She started down the slope. Unless you remembered to bear right the tailpipe would scrape on the rocks. Herzog played softer as he waited for the sound. That muffler would come off one of these days, but he had stopped mentioning it to her. He had too many subjects of this sort. They made her angry.

    Through a cover of honeysuckle that bent the screen inward he watched for her to reappear on the second curve of the slope. Pregnancy had thickened her features but she was still beautiful. Such beauty makes men breeders, studs and servants. As she drove, her nose worked involuntarily under the sight-obscuring fringe of her hair (all part of the process of steering). Her fingers, some elegant, some nail-bitten, gripped the agate steering wheel.

    He declared it was unsafe for a pregnant woman to drive. He thought she must at least get a driver's license. She said if a state trooper stopped her, she could sweet-talk him.