Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) Read online

  “It’s one of those portmanteau expressions.”

  I am not a great poker-player. Besides, I was interested in the guests. One was a Lithuanian in the tuxedo-rental business, another a young Polish fellow getting computer training. There was a plainclothes detective from the homicide squad. Next to me sat a Sicilian-American undertaker, and last there were Rinaldo Cantabile and his cousin Emil. These two, said George, had crashed the party. Emil was a small-time hoodlum, born to twist arms and throw bricks through show windows. He must have taken part in the attack on my car. Rinaldo was extremely good-looking with a dark furry mustache as fine as mink, and he was elegantly dressed. He bluffed madly, spoke loudly, knocked the table with his knuckles, and pretended to be a cast-iron lowbrow. Still, he kept talking about Robert Ardrey, the territorial imperative, paleontology in the Olduvai Gorge, and the views of Konrad Lorenz. He said loudly and harshly that his educated wife left books around. The Ardrey book he had picked up in the toilet. God knows why we are drawn to others and become attached to them. Proust, an author to whom Humboldt introduced me and in whose work he gave me heavy instruction, said that he often was attracted to people whose faces had something in them of a hawthorn hedge in bloom. Hawthorn was not Rinaldo’s flower. White calla lily was more like it. His nose was particularly white and his large nostrils, correspondingly dark, reminded me of an oboe when they dilated. People so distinctly seen have power over me. But I don’t know which comes first, the attraction or the close observation. When I feel gross, dull, damaged in sensibility, a refined perception, coming suddenly, has great influence.

  We sat at a round pedestal table and as the clean cards flew and flickered George got the players to talk. He was the impresario and they obliged him. The homicide cop talked about killings in the street. “It’s all different, now they kill the sonofa-bitch if he doesn’t have a dollar in his pocket and they kill the sonofabitch if he gives them fifty dollars. I tell ‘em, ‘You bastards kill for money? For money? The cheapest thing in the world. I killed more guys than you but that was in the war.’ “

  The tuxedo man was in mourning for his lady friend, a telephone ad-taker at the Sun Times. He spoke with a baying Lithuanian accent, joking, bragging, but gloomy, too. As he got into his story he blazed with grief, he damn-near cried. On Mondays he collected his rented tuxedoes. After the weekend they were stained, he said, with sauce, with soup, with whisky or semen, “You name it.” Tuesdays he drove in his station wagon to a joint near the Loop where the suits were put to soak in vats of cleaning fluid. Then he spent the afternoon with a girl friend. Ah, they couldn’t even make it to the bed, they were so hot for each other. They fell to the floor. “She was a good family type of girl. She was my kind of people. But she’d do anything. I told her how, and she did it, and no questions.”

  “And you saw her on Tuesdays only, never took her to dinner, never visited her at home?” I said.

  “She went home at five o’clock to her old mother and cooked dinner. I swear I didn’t even know her last name. For twenty years I never had but her phone number.”

  “But you loved her. Why didn’t you marry her?”

  He seemed astonished, looking at the other players as if to say, What’s with this guy? Then he answered, “What, marry a hot broad who turns on in hotel rooms?”

  While everyone laughed the Sicilian undertaker explained to me in the special tone in which you tell the facts of life to educated dummies, “Look, professor, you don’t mix things up. That’s not what a wife is about. And if you have a funny foot you have to look for a funny shoe. And if you find the right fit you just let it alone.”

  “Anyhow, my honey is in her grave.”

  I am always glad to learn, grateful for instruction, good under correction, if I say so myself. I may avoid opposition, but I know when it’s true friendship. We sat with whisky, poker chips, and cigars in this South Chicago kitchen penetrated by the dark breathing of the steel mills and refineries, under webs of power lines. I often note odd natural survivals in this heavy-industry district. Carp and catfish still live in the benzine-smelling ponds. Black women angle for them with dough-bait. Woodchucks and rabbits are seen not far from the dumps. Red-winged blackbirds with their shoulder tabs fly like uniformed ushers over the cattails. Certain flowers persist.

  Grateful for this evening of human company I let myself go. I dropped nearly six hundred dollars, counting the check to Cantabile. But I’m so used to having money taken from me that I didn’t really mind. I had great pleasure that evening, drinking, laughing a good deal, and talking. I talked and talked. Evidently I discussed my interests and projects in some detail, and later I was told that I alone failed to understand what was going on. The other gamblers dropped out when they saw how the Cantabile cousins were cheating. They were flashing cards, finagling the deck, and pouncing on each pot.

  “They don’t get away with that on my turf,” shouted George in one of his theatrical bursts of irrationality.

  “But Rinaldo is dangerous.”

  “Rinaldo is a punk!” George yelled.

  seven

  Possibly so, but in the Capone era the Cantabiles had been bad eggs. At that time the entire world identified Chicago with blood —there were the stockyards and there were the gang wars. In the Chicago blood-hierarchy the Cantabiles had stood in about the middle rank. They worked for the Mob, they drove whisky trucks, and they beat and shot people. They were average minor hoodlums and racketeers. But in the Forties a weak-minded Cantabile uncle on the Chicago police force brought disgrace upon the family. He got drunk in a bar and two playful punks took away his guns and had fun with him. They made him crawl on his belly and forced him to gobble filth and sawdust from the floor, they kicked his buttocks. After they had tormented and humiliated him and while he lay crying with rage they ran away, full of glee, throwing down the guns. This was their big mistake. He pursued them and shot them dead in the street. Since then, said George, no one would take the Cantabiles seriously. Old Ralph (Moochy) Cantabile, now a lifer at Joliet, ruined the family with the Mob by murdering two adolescents. This was why Rinaldo could not afford to be brushed off by a person like me, well known in Chicago, who lost to him at poker and then stopped his check. Rinaldo, or Ronald, may have had no standing in the underworld but he had done terrible things to my Mercedes. Whether his rage was a real hoodlum’s rage, natural or contrived, who could say? But he was evidently one of those proud sensitive fellows who give so much trouble because they are passionate about internal matters of very slight interest to any sensible person.

  I was not so completely unrealistic that I failed to ask myself whether by a sensible person I meant myself. Returning from the bank I shaved, and I noticed how my face, framed to be cheerful, taking a metaphysical premise of universal helpfulness, asserting that the appearance of mankind on this earth was on the whole a good thing—how this face, filled with premises derived from capitalist democracy, was now depressed, retracted in unhappiness, sullen, unpleasant to shave. Was I the aforementioned sensible person?

  I performed a few impersonal operations. I did a little ontogeny and phylogeny on myself. Recapitulation: the family was called Tsitrine and came from Kiev. The name was Anglicized at Ellis Island. I was born in Appleton, Wisconsin, the birthplace also of Harry Houdini with whom I think I have some affinities. I grew up in Polish Chicago, I went to the Chopin Grammar School, I spent my eighth year in the public ward of a TB sanatorium. Good people donated piles of colored funny papers to the sanatorium. These were stacked high beside each bed. The children followed the adventures of Slim Jim and Boob McNutt. In addition, day and night, I read the Bible. One visit a week was allowed, my parents taking turns, my mother with her bosom in old green serge, big-eyed, straight-nosed, and white with worry—her deep feelings inhibited her breathing—and my father the immigrant desperate battler coming from the frost, his coat saturated with cigarette smoke. Kids hemorrhaged in the night and choked on blood and were dead. In the morning the white ge
ometry of made-up beds had to be coped with. I became very thoughtful here and I think that my disease of the lungs passed over into an emotional disorder so that I sometimes felt, and still feel, poisoned by eagerness, a congestion of tender impulses together with fever and enthusiastic dizziness. Owing to the TB I connected breathing with joy, and owing to the gloom of the ward I connected joy with light, and owing to my irrationality I related light on the walls to light inside me. I appear to have become a Hallelujah and Glory type. Furthermore (concluding) America is a didactic country whose people always offer their personal experiences as a helpful lesson to the rest, hoping to hearten them and to do them good—an intensive sort of personal public-relations project. There are times when I see this as idealism. There are other times when it looks to me like pure delirium. With everyone sold on the good how does all the evil get done? When Humboldt called me an ingénu, wasn’t this what he was getting at? Crystallizing many evils in himself, poor fellow, he died as an example, his legacy a question addressed to the public. The death question itself, which Walt Whitman saw as the question of questions.

  At all events I didn’t care a bit for the way I looked in the mirror. I saw angelic precipitates condensing into hypocrisy, especially around my mouth. So I finished shaving by touch and only opened my eyes when I started to dress. I chose a quiet suit and necktie. I didn’t want to provoke Cantabile by appearing showy.

  I didn’t have to wait long for the elevator. It was just past dog time in my building. During dog-walking hours it’s hopeless, you have to use the stairs. I went out to my dented car which, in maintenance alone, ran me fifteen hundred dollars per annum. In the street the air was bad. It was the pre-Christmas season, dark December, and a brown air, more gas than air, crossed the lake from the great steel-and-oil complex of South Chicago, Hammond, and Gary, Indiana. I got in and started the engine, also turning on the radio. When the music began I wished that there might be more switches to turn on, for it was somehow not enough. The cultural FM stations offered holiday concerts of Corelli, Bach, and Palestrina—Music Antiqua, conducted by the late Greenberg, with Cohen on the viola da gamba and Levi on the harpsichord. They performed pious and beautiful cantatas on ancient instruments while I tried to look through the windshield bashed by Cantabile. I had the fresh fifty-dollar bills in a packet together with my specs, billfold, and handkerchief. I hadn’t yet decided in what order to proceed. I never decide such things but wait for them to be revealed and, on the Outer Drive, it occurred to me to stop at the Downtown Club. My mind was in one of its Chicago states. How should I describe this phenomenon? In a Chicago state I infinitely lack something, my heart swells, I feel a tearing eagerness. The sentient part of the soul wants to express itself. There are some of the symptoms of an overdose of caffeine. At the same time I have a sense of being the instrument of external powers. They are using me either as an example of human error or as the mere shadow of desirable things to come. I drove. The huge pale lake washed forward. To the east was a white Siberian sky and McCormick Place, like an aircraft carrier, moored at the shore. Life had withdrawn from the grass. It had its wintry buff color. Motorists swerved up alongside to look at the Mercedes, so incredibly mutilated.

  I wanted to speak to Vito Langobardi at the Downtown Club to get his views, if any, on Rinaldo Cantabile. Vito was a big-time hoodlum, a pal of the late Murray the Camel and the Battaglias. We often played racquet ball together, I liked Langobardi. I liked him very much, and I thought him fond of me. He was a most important underworld personality, so high in the organization that he had become rarefied into a gentleman and we discussed only shoes and shirts. Among the members only he and I wore tailored shirts with necktie loops on the underside of the collar. By these loops we were in some sense joined. As in a savage tribe I once read about in which, after childhood, brother and sister do not meet until the threshold of old age because of a terrific incest taboo, when suddenly the prohibition ends . . . no, the simile is no good. But I had known many violent kids at school, terrible kids whose adult life was entirely different from mine, and now we could chat about fishing in Florida and custom-made shirts with loops or the problems of Langobardi’s Doberman. After games, in the nude democracy of the locker room we sociably sipped fruit juice, and chatted about X-rated movies. “I never go to them,” he said. “What if the show got raided and they arrested me? How would it look in the papers?” What you need for quality is a few million dollars, and Vito with millions salted away was straight quality. Rough talk he left to the commodity brokers and lawyers. On the court he tottered just a little when he ran, for his calf muscles were not strongly developed, a defect common also in nervous children. But his game was subtle. He outgeneraled me always because he always knew exactly what I was doing behind his back. I was attached to Vito.

  Racquet ball or paddle ball to which I was introduced by George Swiebel is an extremely fast and bruising game. You collide with other players or run into the walls. You are hit in the backswing, you often catch yourself in the face with your own racquet. The game has cost me a front tooth. I knocked it out myself and had to have a root-canal and a crown job. First I was a puny child, a TB patient, then I strengthened myself, then I degenerated, then George forced me to recover muscle tone. On some mornings I am lame, hardly able to straighten my back when I get out of bed but by midday I am on the court playing, leaping, flinging myself full length on the floor to scoop dead shots and throwing my legs and spinning entrechats like a Russian dancer. However, I am not a good player. I am too tangled about the heart, overdriven. I fall into a competitive striving frenzy. Then, walloping the ball, I continually say to myself, “Dance, dance, dance, dance!” Convinced that mastery of the game depends upon dancing. But gangsters and businessmen, translating their occupational style into these matches, outdance me and win. I tell myself that when I achieve mental and spiritual clarity and translate these into play nobody will be able to touch me. Nobody. I’ll beat everyone. Meantime, notwithstanding the clouded spiritual state that prevents me from winning, I play violently because I get desperate without strenuous action. Just desperate. And now and then one of the middle-aged athletes keels over. Rushed to the hospital, some players have never come back. Langobardi and I played Cut-Throat (the three-man game) with a man named Hildenfisch, who succumbed to a heart attack. We had noticed that Hildenfisch had been panting. Afterward he went to rest in the sauna and someone ran out saying, “Hildenfisch has fainted.” When the black attendants laid him on the floor he spurted water. I knew what this loss of sphincter control meant. Mechanical resuscitation equipment was sent for but nobody knew how to operate it.

  At times when I pushed too hard at the game, Scottie, the athletic director, told me to quit. “Stop and look at yourself, Charlie. You’re purple.” In the mirror I was gruesome, gushing sweat, dark, black, my heart clubbing away inside. I felt slightly deaf. The eustachian tubes! I made my own diagnosis. Owing to the blood pressure my tubes were crinkling. “Walk it off,” said Scottie. I walked back and forth on the patch of carpet forever identified with poor Hildenfisch, surly inferior Hildenfisch. In the sight of death I was no better than Hildenfisch. And once when I had overdone things on the court and lay panting on the red plastic couch, Langobardi came over and gave me a look. When he brooded he squinted. One eye seemed to cross over like a piano-player’s hand. “Why do you push it, Charlie?” he said. “At our age one short game is plenty. Do you see me play more? One of these days you could seven out. Remember Hildenfisch.”

  Yes. Seven out. Right. I could roll bad dice. I must stop this tease-act with death. I was touched by Langobardi’s concern. Was it personal solicitude, however? These health-club fatalities were bad, and two coronaries in a row would make this a gloomy place. Still Vito wished to do what he could for me. There was little of substance that we could tell each other. When he was on the telephone I sometimes observed him. In his own way he was an American executive. Handsome Langobardi dressed far better than any board chairman. Even
his coat sleeves were ingeniously lined, and the back of his waistcoat was made of beautiful paisley material. Calls came in the name of Finch, the shoeshine man “—Johnny Finch, Johnny Finch, telephone, extension five—” and Langobardi took these Finch calls. He was manly, he had power. In his low voice he gave instructions, made rulings, decisions, set penalties, probably. Now then, could he say anything serious to me? But could I tell him what was on my mind? Could I say that that morning I had been reading Hegel’s Phenomenology, the pages on freedom and death? Could I say that I had been thinking about the history of human consciousness with special emphasis on the question of boredom? Could I say that for years now I had been preoccupied with this theme and that I had discussed it with the late poet Von Humboldt Fleisher? Never. Even with astrophysicists, with professors of economics or paleontology, it was impossible to discuss such things. There were beautiful and moving things in Chicago, but culture was not one of them. What we had was a cultureless city pervaded nevertheless by Mind. Mind without culture was the name of the game, wasn’t it? How do you like that! It’s accurate. I had accepted this condition long ago.

  Langobardi’s eyes seemed to have the periscope power of seeing around corners.

  “Get smart, Charlie. Do it the way I do,” he said.

  I had thanked him sincerely for his kindly interest. “I’m trying,” I said.

  So I parked today under the chill pillars at the rear of the club. Then I rose in the elevator and came out at the barbershop. There, the usual busy sight—the three barbers: the big Swede with dyed hair, the Sicilian, always himself (not even shaved), and the Japanese. Each had the same bouffant coiffure, each wore a yellow vest with golden buttons over a short-sleeved shirt. All three were using hot-air guns with blue muzzles and shaping the hair of three customers. I entered the club through the washroom where bulbs were bleaking over the sinks and Finch, the real Johnny Finch, was filling the urinals with heaps of ice cubes. Langobardi was there, an early bird. Lately he had taken to wearing his hair in a little fringe, like an English country churchwarden. He sat nude, glancing at The Wall Street Journal and gave me a short smile. Now what? Could I throw myself into a new relationship with Langobardi, hitch a chair forward and sit with my elbows on my knees, looking into his face and opening my own features to the warmth of impulse? Eyes dilated with doubt, with confidentiality, might I say, “Vito, I need a little help”? Or, “Vito, how bad is this fellow Rinaldo Cantabile?” My heart knocked violently—as it had knocked decades earlier when I was about to proposition a woman. Langobardi had now and then done me small favors, booking tables in restaurants where reservations were hard to get. But to ask him about Cantabile would be a professional consultation. You didn’t do that at the club. Vito had once bawled out Alphonse, one of the masseurs, for asking me a bookish question. “Don’t bug the man, Al. Charlie doesn’t come here to talk about his trade. We all come to forget business.” When I told this to Renata she said, “So you two have a relationship.” Now I saw that Langobardi and I had a relationship in the same way that the Empire State Building had an attic.