6. Herzog, by Saul Bellow, pp. 224-261

From He took Ramona to her shop after breakfast.... through ... Some kill, then cry. Others, not even that.

_____

Herzog and Ramona indulge in a public display of affection in front of her store. "Had he had trouble enough, and paid his debt to suffering and earned the right to ignore what anyone might think?" Still, the experience leads him to some soul-searching when he returns home: What, at the age of forty-seven, "did he have to show for himself at the bar of judgment? He had had two wives; there were two children; he had once been a scholar, and in the closet his old valise was swelled like a scaly crocodile with his uncompleted manuscript," whose thesis had been published two years ago by a Berkeley professor, "confounding, overwhelming, stunning everyone in the field, as Herzog had meant to do."

He is spurred to do two things: write to Daisy that he would, after all, visit Marco at camp on Parents' Day, and "have a talk with lawyer Simkin. Immediately." He telephones Harvey Simkin for advice about his daughter, telling Simkin that he doesn't necessarily want to sue for custody but that he's concerned about her  welfare. Simkin suggests a private investigator, but warns that they are very expensive. He also suggests that Herzog "Get a clean-cut gentile lawyer from one of the big firms. Don't have a lot of Jews yelling in the court. Give your case dignity." Simkin has a history with Madeleine and her family, having been "like an uncle to her" during her neglected bohemian childhood. But Madeleine turned against him when he disapproved of her conversion to Catholicism. He also claims that Madeleine "injured a little cousin of mine, an epileptic girl, a sickly immature, innocent frail mouse of a woman who couldn't take care of herself," but when Herzog presses for details, Simkin only says, "That's another long story."

Herzog says, "I often think, if she died I'd get my daughter back. There are times when I now I could look at Madeleine's corpse without pity," but Simkin's reaction to the remark makes him cautious about saying more. "He wants me to say that I actually feel capable of mudering them both. Well, it's true. I've tested it in my mind with a gun, a knife, and felt no horror, no guilt. None." But he decides not to say anything of the sort to the lawyer. Simkin explains that he would have to prove that Madeleine and Gersbach "have an adulterous relationship to which the child is exposed." Merely being sexually intimate is not enough. "But if the fucking is at home and the child exposed to it, the judicial attitude is different. Damage to the little psyche." He also warns Herzog that the case would attract the attention of the Chicago papers. But Herzog thinks that Gersbach, who has become a local celebrity, would be more damaged by the publicity than he would be.

Herzog again feels himself "in the grip of that eccentric, dangerous force that had been capturing him," and he opens up to Simkin, admitting, "I sent him a telegram from the airport as I was leaving. I wanted to say that 'd kill him on sight. But Western Union doesn't accept such messages. So I wired five words -- Dirt Enters At The Heart. The first letters spell death." Simkin backs off from Herzog's increasingly obsessive talk, however. His client, he says, is waiting for him.  He gives Herzog the phone number of a cousin who works in the district attorney's office, and says he'll meet with Herzog later that day.

Left on his own again, Herzog tries to pull himself together, but he can't shake the obsession.

What really is on my mind? Probably this: shall I put those two on the stand under oath, torture them, hold a blowtorch to their feet? Why? They have a right to each other; they seem even to belong together. Why, let them alone. But what about justice? --- Justice! Look who wants justice! Most of mankind has lived and died without -- totally without it. People by the billions and for ages sweated, gypped, enslaved, suffocated, bled to death, buried with no more justice than cattle. But Moses E. Herzog, at the top of his lungs, bellowing with pain and anger has to have justice.

While he gets dressed, he thinks again about his other decision of the day: to visit Marco at camp. It would relieve Daisy of a burden, because she has been dealing with her mother's descent into senility. Polina "had got it into her head that Moses had divorced Daisy because she was a streetwalker" and had been badgering her to stop prostituting herself. Daisy, of course, in no way resembles a streetwalker: "An utterly steady, reliable woman, responsible to the point of grimness, Daisy was a statistician for the Gallup Poll." Finally, Polina had been sent to "a home for the aged somewhere on Long Island. So this is how the strongest characters end!"

He takes a cab to the courthouse, and accidentally gets the same cabbie who had driven him and Ramona to her shop that morning. The driver, Teodoro Valdepenas, is full of admiration for Herzog because of the ardor that Herzog and Ramona had demonstrated on parting. "When I get old I'm going to be doing just like you," he tells Herzog.

At the courthouse he has time to kill, so he takes a seat in a courtroom and watches a magistrate arraign a black man accused of assault and a young German who had been lured into making a pass at a plainclothes detective in a men's room. Herzog "opposed this perverse development in law enforcement. Sexual practices of any sort, provided they didn't disturb the peace, provided they didn't injure minor children, were a private matter. Except for the children. Never children. There one must be strict." That case is followed by a male prostitute accused of attempted robbery. Herzog realizes that he has been watching all of this attentively

with his look of intelligent composure, of charm and sympathy -- like the old song, he thought, the one that goes, "There's flies on me, there's flies on you, but there ain't no flies on Jesus." A man who looked so fine and humane would be outside police jurisdiction, immune to lower forms of suffering and punishment. 

He looks in his pocket for a dime for the pay phone, and stands up to reach the coins. "As soon as he was on his feet, he realized that there was something the matter with him." He wonders if he's having a heart attack, and he hurries out of the courtroom, gasping for air. In a few minutes he feels better: "The burning within his chest subsided. It had felt like swallowing a mouthful of poison.... To see people in the hands of the law agitated him."

Simkin seemed to see him as he saw that sickly innocent girl, the epileptic cousin whom Madeleine supposedly injured. Young Jews, brought up on moral principles as Victorian ladies were on pianoforte and needlepoint, though Herzog. And I have come here today for a look at something different. That evidently is my purpose.

He remembers when he was six or seven, he had asked his mother how Adam had been created from dust. She had taken him to a window and rubbed the palm of her hand, "rubbed until something dark appeared on the deep-lined skin, a particle of what certainly looked to him like earth. 'You see? It's true.'" And then he remembers when she died. He was sixteen, and his father worked nights. Herzog would sit in the kitchen reading books he had bought "out of the thirty-nine-cent barrel at Walgreen's -- The World as Will and Idea and The Decline of the West." He was reading the Spengler when his mother came from the sickroom to scold him for sitting up so late. She "thought I would need my eyesight and my strength on a certain day of reckoning." A few days later she lost the ability to speak, and "lifted up her hands and showed him her fingernails. They were blue. As he stared, she slowly began to nod her head up and down as if to say, 'That's right, Moses, I am dying now.'" He remembers how his brother Willie cried at the funeral. "Moses shook his head to be rid of such thoughts. The more he thought, the worse his vision of the past."

He telephones Wachsel, the man whose number Simkin had given him, but Wachsel hadn't heard from Simkin. He tells Herzog that Simkin is in a trial somewhere in the building and gives him some room numbers. Herzog goes into a courtroom where the trial of a couple accused of killing their three-year-old child is being held. He listens to one of the witnesses, who had known the defendant and had tried to be kind to the child.

I fail to understand! thought Herzog, as this good man, jowls silently moving, got off the stand. I fail to ... but this is the difficulty with people who spend their lives in humane studies and therefore imagine once cruelty has been described in books it is ended. Of course he really knew better -- understood that human beings would not live so as to be understood by the Herzogs. Why should they?

The description of the death of the child affects him even more. "Again he wondered if he was going to come down with sickness. Or was it the terror of the child that had gotten into him?" As he hurries from the courtroom, tasting "an acrid fluid in his mouth that had to be swallowed," he bumps into a woman walking with a cane. "She did not speak at all but was not ready to let him off. Her eyes, prominent, severe, still kept him standing, identifying him thoroughly, fully, deeply, as a fool."

He tries to focus on the murdered child, but "Herzog experienced nothing but his own human feelings, in which he found nothing of use."

And what was there in modern, post ... post-Christian America to pray for? Justice -- justice and mercy? And pray away the monstrousness of life, the wicked dream it was. He opened his mouth to relieve the pressure he felt. He was wrung, and wrung again, and wrung again, again.

4. Herzog, by Saul Bellow, pp. 112-163

From He was at his letter writing again in in the morning.... through ... Poor thing, poor thing -- she too must be in the cemetery.

_____

Today's correspondence starts with a letter to the priest, Monsignor Hilton, who presided over Madeleine's conversion to Catholicism shortly after she graduated from Radcliffe. Herzog recalls commuting from Philadelphia to see her three or four times a week. He was separated from Daisy but not yet divorced, and for a while lived with Sono Oguki. "Herzog smiled at this earlier avatar of his life, at Herzog the victim, Herzog the would-be lover, Herzog the man on whom the world depended for certain intellectual work, to change history, to influence the development of civilization."

He sought the approval of Madeleine's parents, the impresario Fitz Pontritter and Tennie, who was divorcing Pontritter but told him, "I had to stand by Fitz. He was blacklisted for years. I couldn't be disloyal. After all, he is a great artist ..." She was manipulating him into marrying Madeleine, who was working at Fordham and concerned about confessing about having sex with him -- "the worn, unshaven, sinful Jew, endangering her reputation.... She had been a Catholic for only three months, and already because of Herzog she couldn't be confessed, not by Monsignor, anyway."

Herzog thinks he's being played by Madeleine: "He thought difficulty was the whole object. She wanted Moses and the Monsignor to struggle over her. It heightened the sexual excitement. He fought her apostasy in the sack. And certainly the Monsignor made female converts with his burning eyes." She is also pleading with him to persuade Daisy to give him a divorce so they can get married. She is rebelling against the bohemianism -- the "grotesque nightmare" -- of her childhood, calling her parents "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.

She tells him that she was sexually assaulted by a man and "My fourteenth year is blacked out."  

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. 

By moving to the country with Madeleine, Herzog was repeating the experience he had with Daisy, with whom he spent "a freezing winter in eastern Connecticut while he was writing Romanticism and Christianity." He read Rousseau and practiced the oboe that had been left him by his roommate in Chicago: "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 he was sure it would be different with Madeleine, whom he married after she left the church and he persuaded Daisy to give him a divorce.

He bought the house in Ludeyville when Madeleine was pregnant, and then spent a year of do-it-yourself labor keeping it from falling down. But he encountered a kind of writer's block and spent a lot of time playing the oboe when he could have been working. Madeleine escaped from the music and went shopping, and they quarreled over how much she spent and how little work he was doing. "You're no better than any other kind of addict -- sick with abstractions. Curse Hegel, anyway, and this crappy old house. It needs four servants, and you want me to do all the work." She rejects the idea that he saved her from her bohemian parents and the priests and that "I took you away from Daisy and your son, and your Japanese screw."

He flirts with self-pity:

The progress of civilization -- indeed, the survival of civilization -- depended on the successes of Moses E. Herzog. And in treating him as she did, Madeleine injured a great project. This was, in the eyes of Moses E. Herzog, what was so grotesque and deplorable about the experience of Moses E. Herzog.

He contemplates a photograph of Madeleine in a riding costume at age twelve:

In jodhpurs, boots, and bowler she had the hauteur of the female child who knows it won't be long before she is nubile and has the power to hurt. This is mental politics. The strength to do evil is sovereignty. She knew more at twelve than I did at forty. 

Where Madeleine is slovenly and ambitious, Daisy was organized and dutiful:

Daisy was a country girl, a Buckeye who grew up near Zanesville. She was childishly systematic about things.... Stability, symmetry, order, containment were Daisy's strengths.... By my irregularity and turbulence of spirit I brought out the very worst in Daisy. I caused the seams of her stockings to be so straight, and the buttons to be buttoned symmetrically.... She took Moses' word for it that he was seriously occupied. Of course a wife's duty was to stand by this puzzling and often disagreeable Herzog.

He turns from his thoughts about his wives to his intellectual pursuits -- in other words, from one field of failed endeavor to another. He begins drafting a letter to one of his critics, a Dr. Mossbach, about the conservative classicist critic T.E. Hulme's "definition of Romanticism as 'spilt religion.'" But after wrangling with that for a while, he "abandoned this theme with characteristic abruptness," and begins a letter to Nachman, whom he first knew "nearly forty years ago -- playmates on Napoleon Street. The Montreal slums." He has recently seen Nachman on the street in New York, but "The stooped poet took one look at Moses and ran away."

Herzog and Nachman had also seen each other in Paris after the war, when Nachman came to him in distress because the father of his girlfriend, Laura, with whom Nachman had been wandering around Europe, had arrived and taken Laura home. Nachman needed to borrow money to follow her back to America. Herzog thinks that Nachman's recent flight from him was owing to the guilt he felt for never repaying the loan. He had seen Nachman again some years later when Laura had attempted suicide for a third time, and Herzog accompanied him to the asylum on Long Island. Nachman blamed Laura's instability on her family: "The bourgeois world of Westchester! Wedding announcements, linens, charge accounts, that was what her father and mother expected of her." He promised then that he would repay Herzog's loan.

"This is a crude world of finery and excrement. A proud, lazy civilization that worships its own boorishness. You and I were brought up in the old poverty. I don't know how American you've become since the old days in Canada -- you've lived here a long time. But I will never worship the fat gods." 

And recalling this sends Herzog back in time: "it was the child with his fresh face, the smiling gap in his front teeth, buttoned blouse and the short pants that was real, not this gaunt apparition of crazy lecturing Nachman." In this conversation on the bus on the way back to Manhattan from the asylum, fifteen years ago, Nachman mentioned Herzog's mother's kindness to his Uncle Ravitch. And now Herzog recalls Ravitch, who had boarded with his family back in 1922.

Ravitch worked in a fruit store. "The project of his life was to send for his family, a wife and two children who were still in Russia. He's have to find them first, for they were lost during the Revolution." But Ravitch's alcoholism gets the better of him. Herzog recalls Ravitch coming home drunk one night and his father, Jonah Herzog, going out to get him. His father "wore a Russian sleeping suit of linen with a pleated front, the last of his gentleman's wardrobe from Petersburg." The three brothers, Moses, Willie, and Shura, slept in a single bed. Herzog remembers his father standing "under the bulb, which had a spike at the end like a German helmet. The large loose twist of tungsten filament blazed."

Jonah Herzog saw Ravitch as "one of the symbols of his changed condition. In Petersburg there were servants. In Russia, Father Herzog had been a gentleman." Jonah "was not a big man, one of the small-boned Herzogs, finely made, round-headed, keen, nervous, handsome." And he was a failure: "First Father Herzog failed in Petersburg.... He had been importing onions from Egypt. Under Pobedonostsev [the conservative anti-Semitic adviser to Alexander III] the police caught up with him for illegal residence. He was convicted and sentenced." But he fled to Canada "where his sister Zipporah Yaffe was living," and bought some land near Valleyfield, Quebec. He "failed as a farmer ... and failed as a baker; failed in the dry-goods business; failed as a jobber; failed as a sack manufacturer in the War, when no one else failed. He failed as a junk dealer. Then he became a marriage broker and failed.... And now he was failing as a boot-legger."

On Napoleon Street he had five mouths to feed. Willie and Moses were sickly. Helen studied the piano. Shura was fat, greedy, disobedient, a plotting boy. The rent, back rent, notes due, doctors' bills to pay, and he had no English, no friends, no influence, no trade, no assets but his still -- no help in all the world. His sister Zipporah in St. Anne was rich, very rich, which only made matters worse. 

Mother Herzog had also been used to "linens and servents in Petersburg, the dacha in Finland (all founded on Egyptian onions). Now she was cook, washerwoman, seamstress on Napoleon Street in the slum. Her hair  turned gray, and she lost her teeth, her very fingernails wrinkled. Her hands smelled of the sink."

Napoleon Street, rotten, toylike, crazy and filthy, riddled, flogged with harsh weather -- the bootlegger's boys reciting ancient prayers. To this Moses' heart was attached with great power. Here was a wider range of human feelings than he had ever again been able to find. 

His rich Aunt Zipporah harshly criticized Moses' mother for her "ambition for her children, because she wanted them to be lawyers, gentlemen, rabbis, or performers." Helen is taking music lessons. Zipporah asks, "Why must your children go to the conservatory, the Baron de Hirsch school, and all those special frills. Let them go to work, like mine."

To haunt the past like this -- to love the dead! Moses warned himself not to yield so greatly to the temptation, this peculiar weakness of his character. He was a depressive. Depressives cannot surrender childhood -- not even the pains of childhood. He understood the hygiene of the matter. But somehow his heart had come open at this chapter of his life and he didn't have the strength to shut it. So it was again a winter day in St. Anne, in 1923 -- Aunt Zipporah's kitchen.

So he yields himself to memories: Zipporah urging economies: "Let your Helen and your Shura go to work. Sell the piano. Cut expenses." His father's bootleg truck is hijacked and he is beaten up, and Herzog recalls being "suffocated by this horror. I thought I would die of it. Whom did I ever love as I loved them?" But he attempts to put it in perspective:

What happened during the War abolished Father Herzog's claim to exceptional suffering. We are on a more brutal standard now, a new terminal standard, indifferent to persons. Part of the program of destruction into which the human spirit has poured itself with energy, even with joy. These personal histories, old tales from old times that may not be worth remembering. I remember. I must. But who else -- to whom can this matter? So many millions -- multitudes -- go down in terrible pain.

And he recalls where these recollections started, with Nachman. He concludes that Nachman's wife must be dead, that she must have succeeded in committing suicide, and that "Nachman ran away because (who could blame him) he would have had to tell Moses all about it.

1. Herzog, by Saul Bellow, pp. 1-30

Through How do you say blond little cushioned knuckles in French?

_____

Moses Elkanah Herzog has ex-wives named Daisy and Madeleine, children named Marco and June, brothers named Shura and Willie, a sister named Helen, an arch-enemy named Valentine Gersbach, a psychiatrist named Dr. Edvig, a lawyer named Sandor Himmelstein, a physician named Dr. Emmerich, and girlfriends named Wanda, Zinka, Libbie, Ramona, and Sono. And when we first meet him he is deciding that if he's going crazy, it's all right.

When we begin, he is in the house he owns in the Berkshires, eating beans from the can and sleeping on a bare mattress. He is also writing letters that he carries around with him in a valise: "He had carried this valise from New York to Martha's Vineyard, but returned from the Vineyard immediately; two days later he flew to Chicago, and from Chicago he went to a village in western Massachusetts." And there he is questioning whether the rumor spread by Madeleine and Valentine that "his sanity had collapsed" is true.

We flash back to spring, when he is giving lectures on "The Roots of Romanticism" to night-school adult-education classes in New York City. But sometimes he interrupts his lectures to write things down as his class waits in silence for as long as five minutes.

At first there was no pattern to the notes he made. They were fragments -- nonsense syllables, exclamations, twisted proverbs and quotations or, in the Yiddish of his long-dead mother, Trepverter -- retorts that came too late, when you were already on your way down the stairs. 

(Trepverter, literally "staircase words," is also known as esprit de l'escalier, or staircase wit.) Herzog's terse little notes make me imagine what he might be like in the age of Twitter. He fears that they are "a symptom of disintegration."

We now learn that he is -- or thinks himself to be -- "a formerly handsome man," and that he wrote a brilliant Ph.D. thesis on The State of Nature in 17th and 18th Century English and French Political Philosophy and a book, Romanticism and Christianity. He feels guilt over his treatment of his first wife, Daisy, though "Madeleine, his second, had tried to do him in." He is "a loving but bad father" to his children, "an ungrateful child" to his parents, "affectionate but remote" to his siblings. "With his friends, an egotist. With love, lazy. With brightness, dull. With power, passive. With his own soul, evasive." He is, in short, a mess.

And one of his chief problems is that he lost Madeleine to Valentine Gersbach, a radio announcer with "a thick chin, flaming copper hair that literally gushed from his head" and "a wooden leg" on which he walks "gracefully bending and straightening like a gondolier." Herzog had worked to please her, quitting an academic position, using the twenty thousand dollars he inherited from his father to buy a house in the apparently fictional Berkshire town of Ludeyville, and then closing it up and moving to Chicago where he even found a job for Valentine. And then she decided she wanted a divorce after all.


Madeleine is evidently no prize:

Only a week before she demanded a divorce, she had his things cleaned and pressed, but on the day he left the house, she flung them all into a carton which she then dumped down the cellar stairs. She said she needed more closet space.

She presents her demand for a divorce with "a certain theatrical genius," which she evidently inherited from her father, "a famous impresario -- sometimes called the American Stanislavsky," whom she hated. But Herzog's relationship with her was peculiarly masochistic: "There was a flavor of subjugation in his love for Madeleine. Since she was domineering, and since he loved her, he had to accept the flavor he was given." She informs him that she is humiliated "to admit defeat in this marriage. I've put all I had into it. I'm crushed by this?" And he thinks, "Crushed? She had never looked more glorious."


"Dr. Edvig, the Chicago psychiatrist who treated both Herzogs, agreed that perhaps it was best for Moses to leave town," so he borrows money from his brother Shura and goes to Europe, where he lectures in Copenhagen, Warsaw, Cracow, Berlin, Belgrade, Istanbul, and Jerusalem. In Poland he has an affair with a woman named Wanda, but also contracts a disease that he thinks is gonorrhea, but isn't. When he returns to Chicago, Madeleine regards his behavior as "so strange and to her mind so menacing" that she sends word through Gersbach for him to stay away, and gives a picture of him to the police with instructions that he should be arrested if he shows up in the neighborhood.

Herzog now wonders "what might have happened if instead of listening so intensely and thoughtfully" on the day she announced she wanted a divorce, "he had hit Madeleine in the face." But he rejects "this mental violence, sighing. He was afraid he was really given in secret to this sort of brutality." She had also told him she had seen a lawyer, who turns out to be Herzog's friend, Sandor Himmelstein. "He says you can stay with him until you make your new arrangements."

And so he spends his time writing letters, for example:

Dear Mr. President, Internal Revenue regulations will turn us into a nation of bookkeepers. The life of every citizen is becoming a business. This, it seems to me, is one of the worst interpretations of the meaning of human life history has ever seen. Man's life is not a business.

He also writes Daisy explaining that he won't be seeing Marco at camp on Parents' Day because the boy apparently blames him for breaking up with Madeleine and deserting his half-sister. He also claims to have been sick and under a doctor's care. "Herzog did not care for his own personality, and at the moment there was apparently nothing he could do about its impulses."

In June, "when the general revival of life troubles many people, the new roses, even in shop windows, reminding them of their own failures, of sterility and death, Herzog went to have a medical checkup." Dr. Emmerich, "an elderly refugee," tells him his health is fine. "He had been hoping for some definite sickness which would send him to a hospital for a while. He would not have to look after himself." His brothers and his sister, Helen, would take care of him. But even the infection he contracted in Poland had turned out to be easily curable.

Dr. Emmerich, who treated "the truly weak, the desperately sick, stricken women, dying men," is puzzled by Herzog's reaction to the news that he is all right. He offers him Miltown, a tranquilizer much prescribed in the 1950s, or snakeroot, the source of reserpine, an anti-anxiety drug, and offers to refer him to a psychiatrist. Herzog shrugs off the suggestions, and the doctor continues to ask him about "the big fellow with red hair, with the wooden leg" and to commiserate about Herzog's divorce. In turn, Herzog tries to get the doctor to talk about Madeleine, who had been his patient too, but the doctor deflects the questions, even after Herzog says, "She's a violent, hysterical woman." He suggests that Herzog see other women: "Do you have to eat dinner alone tonight?"

So Herzog thinks of Ramona Donsell, a woman in her thirties who had been a student in his class. She owns a flower shop on Lexington Avenue. "She come from Buenos Aires. Her background was international -- Spanish, French, Russian, Polish, and Jewish. She had gone to school in  Switzerland and still spoke with a slight accent, full of charm." She has firm breasts, which matters to Herzog greatly. On the other hand, "She was thirty-seven or thirty-eight years of age, he shrewdly reckoned, and this mean that she was looking for a husband."

So he decides on a trip to the Vineyard and gets in touch with "his friend Libbie Vane (Libbie Vane-Erikson-Sissler; she had just married for the third time and the house in the Haven belonged to her husband, an industrial chemist)." She invites him to stay with them and he accepts, then goes shopping for clothes "after shaving more closely than usual and brushing his hair (could he bear to see himself in the brilliant triple mirrors of a clothing store?)." But he is afraid that he will look ridiculous in the "reckless and gaudy" new styles.

Putzi Hanfstaengl

Undoubtedly Valentine Gersbach, who had beat him out with Madeleine, surmounting the handicap of a wooden leg, could wear those handsome brilliant candy stripes. Valentine was a dandy. He had a thick face and heavy jaws; Moses thought he somewhat resembled Putzi Hanfstaengl, Hitler's own pianist. But Gersbach had a pair of extraordinary eyes for a red-haired man, brown, deep, hot eyes, full of life. The lashes, too, were vital, ruddy-dark, long and childlike. And that hair was bearishly thick. Valentine, furthermore, was exquisitely confident of his appearance. You could see it. He knew he was a terribly handsome man. He expected women -- all women -- to be mad about him. And many were, weren't they? Including the second Mrs. Herzog.

So Herzog buys "a coat of crimson and white stripes" in a Fifth Avenue shop. But he gets crosswise with the salesman, who has "dog's breath" and when Herzog tells him his waist is thirty-four says, "Don't boast." And the triple mirror still intimidates him, especially when he recalls Madeleine standing nude in front of the bathroom mirror: "'Still young,' she said, taking inventory, 'young, beautiful, full of life. Why should I waste it all on you.'"

He buys swim trunks and a straw hat, which makes him look like "his father's cousin Elias Herzog, the flour salesman who had entered the northern Indiana territory for General Mills in the twenties." And he is off on a memory trip, recalling when he was eight years old and in the hospital in Montreal, where a Christian woman read aloud to him from the Bible.

"Where do you live, little boy?"

"On Napoleon Street."

Where the Jews live.

 "What does your father do?"

My father is a bootlegger. He has a still in Point-St. Charles. The spotters are after him. He has no money.

Only of course Moses would never have told her any of this. Even at five he would have known better. His mother had instructed him. "You must never say." 

He now packs his new summer clothes and makes "his getaway from Ramona." He also packs "the plastic container of Furadantin tablets." (Generic nitrofurantoin, an antibiotic for urinary tract infections.) Although he is cured of the infection he caught in Poland, he still "took an occasional pill just to be on the safe side." And he remembers the disapproving British doctor who treated him in Cracow. He thinks of writing in French to Wanda: "Every third-, fourth-, tenth-rate man of the world knew how to woo a woman in French, and so did Herzog. Though he was not the type. The feelings he wanted to express were genuine." She had insisted on his meeting her husband, "a poor, reproachful-looking man, with heart disease." Wanda had been Herzog's guide in Poland.

Still, he had been continually aware of drab Poland, in all directions freezing, drab, and ruddy gray; the stones still smellling of war-time murders. He thought he scented blood. He went many times to visit the ruins of the ghetto.

He regrets telling her about the infection, and now wants to write that he is cured: "Guéri de cette peite maladie. He ought not to have mentioned it to Wanda, for she was simply shocked and hurt.... He had made her cry."