Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) Read online

  Loyal to this place, Father Myron Swiebel came every day of his life. He brought his own herring, buttered pumpernickel, raw onions, and bourbon whisky. He drove a Plymouth, though he had no driver’s license. He could see well enough straight ahead, but because there were cataracts on both eyes he sideswiped many cars and did great damage in the parking lot.

  I went in to reconnoiter. I was quite anxious about George. His advice had put me in this fix. But then I knew that it was bad advice. Why did I take it? Because he had raised his voice with such authority? Because he had cast himself as an expert on the underworld and I had let him do his stuff? Well, I hadn’t used my best mind. But my best mind was now alert and I believed I could handle Cantabile. I reckoned that Cantabile had already worked off his rage against the car and I thought the debt was largely paid.

  I asked the concessionaire, Mickey, who stood in the smoke behind the counter searing fatty steaks and frying onions, “Has George come in? Does his old man expect him?”

  I thought that if George were here it was not likely that Cantabile would rush fully dressed into the steam to punch or beat or kick him. Of course Cantabile was an unknown quantity. You couldn’t guess what Cantabile might do. Either in rage or from calculation.

  “George isn’t here. The old man is steaming.”

  “Good. Is he expecting his son?”

  “No. George was here Sunday, so he won’t come again. He’s only once a week with his father.”

  “Good. Excellent!”

  Built like a bouncer with huge bar arms and an apron tied very high under his oxters, Mickey has a twisted lip. During the Depression he had to sleep in the parks and the cold ground gave him a partial paralysis of the cheek. This makes him seem to scoff or jeer. A misleading impression. He is a gentle earnest and peaceful person. A music-lover, he takes a season ticket at the Lyric Opera.

  “I haven’t seen you in a long time, Charlie. Go steam with the old man, he’ll be glad for the company.”

  But I hurried out again past the cashier’s cage with its little steel boxes where patrons left their valuables. I passed the squirming barber pole, and when I got to the sidewalk, which was as dense as the galaxy with stars of broken glass, a white Thunderbird pulled up in front of the Puerto Rican sausage shop across the street and Ronald Cantabile got out. He sprang out, I should say. I saw that he was in a terrific state. Dressed in a brown raglan coat with a matching hat and wearing tan kid boots, he was tall and good-looking. I had noted his dark dense mustache at the poker game. It resembled fine fur. But through the crackling elegance of dress there was a current, a desperate sweep, so that the man came out, so to speak, raging from the neck up. Though he was on the other side of the street I could see how furiously pale he was. He had worked himself up to intimidate me, I thought. But also he was making unusual steps. His feet behaved strangely. Cars and trucks came between us just then so that he could not cross over. Beneath the cars I could see him trying to dodge through. The boots were exquisite. At the first short break in the traffic Cantabile held open his raglan to me. He was wearing a magnificent broad belt. But surely it wasn’t a belt that he wanted to display. Just beside the buckle something was sticking out. He clapped his hand to it. He wanted me to know that he was carrying a gun. More traffic came, and Cantabile was jumping up and down, glaring at me over the tops of automobiles. Under the utmost strain he called out to me when the last truck had passed, “You alone?”

  “Alone. I’m alone.”

  He drew himself up toward the shoulders with peculiar twisting intensity. “You got anybody hiding?”

  “No. Just me. Nobody.”

  He threw upen the door and brought up two baseball bats from the floor of the Thunderbird. A bat in each hand, he started toward me. A van came between us. Now I could see nothing but his feet moving rapidly in the fancy boots. I thought, He sees I’ve come to pay. Why should he clobber me? He’s got to know I wouldn’t pull anything. He’s proved his point on the car. And I’ve seen the gun. Should I run? Since I had discovered on Thanksgiving Day how fast I could still run, I seemed oddly eager to use this ability. Speed was one of my resources. Some people are too fast for their own good, like Asahel in the Book of Samuel. Still it occurred to me that I might dash up the stairs of the Bath and take shelter in the cashier’s office where the little steel boxes were. I could crouch on the floor and ask the cashier to pass the four hundred and fifty dollars through the grille to Cantabile. I knew the cashier quite well. But he’d never let me in. He couldn’t. I wasn’t bonded. He had once referred to this special circumstance when we were having a chat. But I couldn’t believe that Cantabile would batter me down. Not in the street. Not as I waited and bowed my head. And just at that moment I remembered Konrad Lorenz’s discussion of wolves. The defeated wolf offered his throat, and the victor snapped but wouldn’t bite. So I was bowing my head. Yes, but damn my memory! What did Lorenz say next? Humankind was different, but in what respect? How! I couldn’t remember. My brain was disintegrating. The day before, in the bathroom, I hadn’t been able to find the word for the isolation of the contagious, and I was in agony. I thought, whom should I telephone about this? My mind is going! And then I stood and clutched the sink until the word “quarantine” mercifully came back to me. Yes, quarantine, but I was losing my grip. I take such things hard. In old age my father’s memory also failed. So I was shaken. The difference between man and other species such as the wolves never did come back to me. Perhaps the lapse was excusable at a time like this. But it served to show how carelessly I was reading, these days. This inattentiveness and memory-failure boded no good.

  As the last of a string of cars passed, Cantabile took a long stride with both bats as if to rush upon me without a pause. But I yelled, “For Christ’s sake, Cantabile!”

  He paused. I held up open hands. Then he flung one of the bats into the Thunderbird and started for me with the other.

  I called out to him, “I brought the money. You don’t have to beat my brains out.”

  “You got a gun?”

  “I’ve got nothing.”

  “You come over here,” he said.

  I started willingly to cross the street. He made me stop in the middle.

  “Stay right there,” he said. I was in the center of heavy traffic, cars honking and the provoked drivers rolling down their windows, already fighting mad. He tossed the second bat back into the T-bird. Then he strode up and took hold of me roughly. He treated me as if I deserved the extreme penalty. I held out the money, I offered it to him on the spot. But he refused to look at it. Furious he pushed me onto the sidewalk and toward the stairs of the Bath and past the squirming barbershop cylinders of red white and blue. We hurried in, past the cashier’s cage and along the dirty corridor.

  “Go on, go on,” said Cantabile.

  “Where do you want to go?”

  “To the can. Where is it?”

  “Don’t you want the dough?”

  “I said the can! The can!”

  I then understood, his bowels were acting up, he had been caught short, he had to go to the toilet, and I was to go with him. He wouldn’t allow me to wait in the street. “Okay,” I said, “just take it easy and I’ll lead you.” He followed me through the locker room. The John entrance was doorless. Only the individual stalls have doors. I motioned him forward and was about to sit down on one of the locker-room benches nearby but he gave me a hard push on the shoulder and drove me forward. These toilets are the Bath at its worst. The radiators put up a stunning dry heat. The tiles are never washed, never disinfected. A hot dry urine smell rushes to your eyes like onion fumes. “Jesus!” said Cantabile. He kicked open a stall, still keeping me in front of him. He said, “You go in first.”

  “The both of us?” I said.

  “Hurry up.”

  “There’s space only for one.”

  He tugged out his gun and shook the butt at me. “You want this in your teeth?” The black fur of his mustache spread as the lip of h
is distorted face stretched. His brows were joined above the nose like the hilt of a large dagger. “In the corner, you!” He slammed the door and panting, took off his things. He thrust the raglan and the matching hat into my arms, although there was a hook. There was even a piece of hardware I had never before noticed. Attached to the door was a brass fitting, a groove labeled Cigar, a touch of class from the old days. He was seated now with the gun held in both palms, his hands between his knees, his eyes first closing then dilating greatly.

  In a situation like this I can always switch out and think about the human condition over-all. Of course he wanted to humiliate me. Because I was a chevalier of the Légion d’honneur? Not that he actually knew of this. But he was aware that I was as they would say in Chicago a Brain, a man of culture or intellectual attainments. Was this why I had to listen to him rumbling and slopping and smell his stink? Perhaps fantasies of savagery and monstrosity, of beating my brains out, had loosened his bowels. Humankind is full of nervous invention of this type, and I started to think (to distract myself) of all the volumes of ape behavior I had read in my time, of Kohler and Yerkes and Zuckerman, of Marais on baboons and Schaller on gorillas, and of the rich repertory of visceral-emotional sensitivities in the anthropoid branch. It was even possible that I was a more limited person than a fellow like Cantabile in spite of my concentration on intellectual achievement. For it would never have occurred to me to inflict anger on anyone by such means. This might have been a sign that his vital endowment or natural imagination was more prodigal and fertile than mine. In this way, thinking improving thoughts, I waited with good poise while he crouched there with his hardened dagger brows. He was a handsome slender man whose hair had a natural curl. It was cropped so close that you could see the roots of his curls and I observed the strong contraction of his scalp in this moment of stress. He wanted to inflict a punishment on me but the result was only to make us more intimate.

  As he stood and then wiped, and then pulled his shirttails straight, belting his pants with the large oval buckle and sticking back the gun (I hoped the safety catch was on), as I say, when he pulled his shirttails straight and buckled his stylish belt on the hip-huggers, thrusting the gun in, flushing the toilet with his pointed soft boot, too fastidious to touch the lever with his hand—he said, “Christ, if I catch the crabs here . , . !” As if that would be my fault. He was evidently a violent reckless blâmer. He said, “You don’t know how I hated to sit here. These old guys must piss on the seats.” This too he entered on the debit side against me. Then he said, “Who owns this joint?”

  Now this was a fascinating question. It had never occurred to me, you know. The Bath was so ancient, it was like the Pyramids of Egypt, the Gardens of Ashurbanipal. It was like water seeking its level, or like gravitational force. But who in fact was its proprietor? “I’ve never heard of an owner,” I said. “For all I know it’s some old party out in British Columbia.”

  “Don’t get smart. You’re too fucking smart. I only asked for information. I’ll find out.”

  To turn the faucet he used a piece of toilet paper. He washed his hands without soap, none was provided by the management. At this moment I offered him the nine fifty-dollar bills again. He refused to look at them. He said, “My hands are wet.” He wouldn’t use the roller towel. It was, I must admit, repulsively caked, filthy, with a certain originality in the way of filth. I held out my pocket handkerchief, but he ignored it. He didn’t want his anger to diminish. Spreading his fingers wide he shook them dry. Full of the nastiness of the place he said, “Is this what they call a Bath?”

  “Well,” I said, “the bathing is all downstairs.”

  They had two long rows of showers, below, which led to the heavy wooden doors of the steam room. There also was a small cistern, the cold plunge. The water was unchanged from year to year, and it was a crocodile’s habitat if I ever saw one.

  Cantabile now hurried out to the lunch counter, and I followed him. There he dried his hands with paper napkins which he pulled from the metal dispenser angrily. He crumpled these embossed flimsy papers and threw them on the floor. He said to Mickey, “Why don’t you have soap and towels in the can? Why don’t you wash the goddamn place out? There’s no disinfectant in there.”

  Mickey was very mild, and he said, “No? Joe is supposed to take care of it. I buy him Top Job, Lysol.” He spoke to Joe. “Don’t you put in mothballs any more?” Joe was black and old, and hé answered nothing. He was leaning on the shoe-shine chair with its brass pedestals, the upside-down legs and rigid feet (reminiscent of my own feet and legs during the Yoga headstand). He was there to remind us all of some remote, grand considerations and he would not answer any temporal questions.

  “You guys are gonna buy supplies from me,” said Cantabile. “Disinfectant, liquid soap, paper towels, everything. The name is Cantabile. I’ve got a supply business on Clybourne Avenue.” He took out a long pitted ostrich-skin wallet and threw several business cards on the counter.

  “I’m not the boss,” said Mickey. “All I have is the restaurant concession.” But he picked up a card with deference. His big fingers were covered with black knife-marks.

  “I better hear from you.”

  “I’ll pass it along to the Management. They’re downtown.”

  “Mickey, who owns the Bath?” I said.

  “All I know is the Management, downtown.”

  It would be curious, I thought, if the Bath should turn out to belong to the Syndicate.

  “Is George Swiebel here?” said Cantabile.

  “No.”

  “Well, I want to leave him a message.”

  “I’ll give you something to write on,” said Mickey.

  “There’s nothing to write. Tell him he’s a dumb shit. Tell him I said so.”

  Mickey had put on his specs to look for a piece of paper, and now he turned his spectacled face toward us as if to say that his only business was the coleslaw and skirt-steaks and whitefish. Cantabile did not ask for old Father Myron, who was steaming himself below.

  We went out into the street. The weather had suddenly cleared. I couldn’t decide whether gloomy weather suited the environment better than bright. The air was cold, the light was neat, and the shadows thrown by blackened buildings divided the sidewalks.

  I said, “Well, now let me give you this money. I brought new bills. This ought to wrap the whole thing up, Mr. Cantabile.”

  “What—just like that? You think it’s so easy?” said Rinaldo.

  “Well, I’m sorry. It shouldn’t have happened. I really regret it.”

  “You regret it! You regret your hacked-up car. You stopped a check on me, Citrine. Everybody blabbed. Everybody knows. You think I can allow it?”

  “Mr. Cantabile, who knows—who is everybody? Was it really so serious? I was wrong—”

  “Wrong, you fucking ape. . . !”

  “Okay, I was stupid.”

  “Your pal George tells you to stop a check, so you stop it. Do you take that asshole’s word for everything? Why didn’t he catch Emil and me in the act? He has you pull this sneaky stunt and then you and he and the undertaker and the tuxedo guy and the other dummies spread around the gossip that Ronald Cantabile is a punk. Man! You could never get away with that. Don’t you realize!”

  “Yes, now I realize.”

  “No, I don’t know what you realize. I was watching at the game, and I don’t dig you. When are you going to do something and know what you’re doing?” Those last words he spaced, he accented vehemently and uttered into my face. Then he snatched away his coat, which I was still holding for him, the rich brown raglan with its large buttons. Circe might have had buttons like those in her sewing box. They were very beautiful, really, rather Oriental-treasure buttons.

  The last garment I had seen resembling this one was worn by the late Colonel McCormick. I was then about twelve years old. His limousine had stopped in front of the Tribune Tower, and two short men came out. Each man held two pistols, and they circled on
the pavement, crouching low. Then, in this four-gun setting, the Colonel stepped out from his car in just such a tobacco-colored coat as Cantabile’s and a pinch hat with gleaming harsh fuzz. The wind was stiff, the air pellucid, the hat glistened like a bed of nettles.

  “You don’t think I know what I’m doing, Mr. Cantabile?”

  “No you don’t. You couldn’t find your ass with both hands.”

  Well, he may have been right. But at least I wasn’t crucifying anyone. Apparently life had not happened to me as it had happened to other people. For some indiscernible reason it happened differently to them, and so I was not a fit judge of their concerns and desires. Aware of this I acceded to more of these desires than was practical. I gave in to George’s low-life expertise. Now I bent before Cantabile. My only resource was to try to remember useful things from my ethological reading about rats, geese, sticklebacks, and dancing flies. What good is all this reading if you can’t use it in the crunch? All I asked was a small mental profit.

  “Anyway, what about these fifty-dollar bills?” I said.

  “I’ll let you know when I’m ready to take them,” he said. “You didn’t like what happened to your car, did you?”

  I said, “It’s a beautiful machine. It was really heartless to do that.”

  Apparently the bats he had threatened me with were what he had used on the Mercedes and there were probably more assault weapons in the back seat of the Thunderbird. He made me get into this showy auto. It had leather bucket seats red as spilt blood and an immense instrument panel. He took off at top speed from a standstill, like an adolescent drag-racer, the tires wildly squealing.