Mr. Sammler Planet

II

The mean radius of the moon, 1737 kilometers; that of the earth, 6371 kilometers. The moon's gravity, 161 cm./sec.2; the earth's, 981 cm./sec.2. Faults and crevices in the lunar bedrock and mountains caused by extremes of temperature. Of course there is no wind. Five billion windless years. Except for solar wind. Stone crumbles but without the usual erosion. The split rock is slow to fall, the gravitational force being lower and the angle of fall correspondingly sharper. Moreover, in the moon's vacuum stones, sand, dust, or explorers' bodies would all have the same rate of fall, so before attempting to climb, it is essential to study the avalanche perils from all sides. Information organs are rapidly developing. Mass spectrometers. Solar batteries. Electricity produced by radioactive isotopes, strontium go, polonium zro, by thermoelectric energy conversion. Dr. Lal had thoroughly considered telemetry, data transmission. Had he neglected anything? Supplies could be put in orbit and brought down as needed by a braking system. The computers would have to be exceedingly accurate. If you needed a ton of dynamite at point X, you didn't want to bring it down 800 kilometers away. And what if it were essential oxygen? And because of the greater curvature of the moon's surface the horizons are shorter and present apparatus cannot send order signals beyond the horizon. Even more precise coordination will be necessary. For the good of the moon personnel, to increase their inventiveness, and simply as a desirable stimulus to the mind, Dr. Lal recommended the brewing of beer in the pioneer colonies. For beer oxygen is necessary, for oxygen gardens, for gardens hothouses. A brief chapter was devoted to the selection of lunar flora. Well, tough members of the plant kingdom lived in Margotte's parlor. Open two doors, and there they were: potato vines, avocados, rubber plants. Dr. Lal had hops and sugar beets in mind.

Sammler thought, This is not the way to get out of spatial-temporal prison. Distant is still finite. Finite is still feeling through the veil, examining the naked inner reality with a gloved hand. However, one could see the advantage of getting away from here, building plastic igloos in the vacuum, dwelling in quiet colonies, necessarily austere, drinking the fossil waters, considering basic questions only. No question of it. Shula-Slawa had brought him this time a document worth his attention. She was always culling idiotic titles on Fourth Avenue, from sidewalk bins, books with bleached spines and rain spots-England in the twenties and thirties, Bloomsbury, Downing Street, Clare Sheridan. His shelves were stacked with eight for-a-dollar rubbish bargains hauled in splitting shopping bags. And even the books he himself had bought were largely superfluous. After you had expended great effort on serious writers you found out little you hadn't known already. So many false starts, blind alleys, postulates which decayed before the end of the argument. Even the ablest thinkers groping as they approached their limits, running out of evidence, running out of certainties. But whether they were optimists or pessimists, whether the final vision was dark or bright, it was generally terra cognita to old Sammler. So Dr. Lal had a certain value. He brought news. Of course it should be possible still to follow truth on the inward track, without elaborate preparations, computers, telemetry, all the technological expertise and investment and complex organization required for visiting Mars, Venus, the moon. Nevertheless, it was perhaps for the same human activities that had shut us up like this to let us out again. The powers that had made the earth too small could free us from confinement. By the homeopathic principle. Continuing to the end the course of the Puritan revolution which had forced itself onto the material world, given all power to material processes, translated and exhausted religious feeling in so doing. Or, in the crushing summary of Max Weber, known by heart to Sammler, "Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart, this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved." So conceivably there was no alternative but to push further in the same direction, to wait for a neglected force, left in the rear, to fly forward again and recover ascendancy. Perhaps by a growing agreement among the best minds, not unlike the Open Conspiracy of H. G. Wells. Maybe the old boy (Sammler, himself an old boy, considering this) was right after all.

But he laid aside the sea-textured cardboard notebook, the gilt-ink sentences of V. Govinda Lal written in formal Edwardian pedantic Hindu English to go back-under mental compulsion, in fact-to the pickpocket and the thing he had shown him. What had that been about? It had given a shock. Shocks stimulated consciousness. Up to a point, true enough. But what was the object of displaying the genitalia? Quest-ce que cela preuve? Was it a French mathematician who had asked this after seeing a tragedy of Racine? To the best of Mr. Sammler's recollection. Not that he liked playing the old European culture game. He had had that. Still, unsummoned, sentences came to him in this way. At any rate, there was the man's organ, a huge piece of sex flesh, half-tumescent in its pride and shown in its own right, a prominent and separate object intended to communicate authority. As, within the sex ideology of these days, it well might. It was a symbol of superlegitimacy or sovereignty. It was a mystery. It was unanswerable. The whole explanation. This is the wherefore, the why. See? Oh, the transcending, ultimate, and silencing proof. We hold these things, man, to be self-evident. And yet, such sensitive elongations the anteater had, too, uncomplicated by assertions of power, even over ants. But make Nature your God, elevate creatureliness, and you can count on gross results. Maybe you can count on gross results under any circumstances.

Sammler knew a lot about such superstressed creatureliness without even wanting to know. For singular reasons he was much in demand these days, often visited, often consulted and confessed to. Perhaps it was a matter of sunspots or seasons, something barometric or even astrological. But there was always someone arriving, knocking at the door. As he was thinking of anteaters, of the fact that he had been spotted long ago and shadowed by the black man, there was a knock at his back door.

Who was it? Sammler may have sounded more testy than he felt. What he felt was rather that others had more strength for life than he. This caused secret dismay. And there was an illusion involved, for, given the power of the antagonist, no one had strength enough.

Entering was Walter Bruch, one of the family. Walter, Margotte's cousin, was related also to the Gruners.

Cousin Angela once had taken Sammler to a Rouault exhibition. Beautifully dressed, fragrant, subtly made up, she led Sammler from room to room until it seemed to him that she was a rolling hoop of marvelous gold and gem colors and that he, following her, was an old stick from which she needed only an occasional touch. But then, stopping together before a Rouault portrait, both had had the same association: Walter Bruch. It was a broad, low, heavy, ruddy, thick-featured, wool-haired, staring, bake-faced man, looking bold enough but obviously incapable of bearing his own feelings. The very man. There must be thousands of such men. But this was our Walter. In a black raincoat, in a cap, gray hair bunched before the ears; his reddish-swarthy teapot cheeks; his big mulberry-tinted lips-well, imagine the Other World; imagine souls there by the barrelful; imagine them sent to incarnation and birth with dominant qualities ab initio. In Bruch's case the voice would have been significant from the very first. He was a voice-man, from the soul barrels. He sang in choruses, in temple choirs. By profession he was a baritone and musicologist. He found old manuscripts and adapted or arranged them for groups performing ancient and baroque music. His own little racket, he said. He sang well. His singing voice was fine, but his speaking voice gruff, rapid, throaty. He gobbled, he quacked, grunted, swallowed syllables.

Approaching when Sammler was so preoccupied, Bruch, in his idiosyncrasy, got a very special reception. Roughly, this: Things met with in this world are tied to the forms of our perception in space and time and to the forms of our thinking. We see what is before us, the present, the objective. Eternal being makes its temporal appearance in this way. The only way out of captivity in the forms, out of confinement in the prison of projections, the only contact with the eternal, is through freedom. Sammler thought he was Kantian enough to go along with this. And he saw a man like Walter Bruch as wearing out his heart within the forms. This was what he came to Sammler about. This was what his clowning was about, for he was always clowning. Shula-Slawa would tell you how she was run down while absorbed in a Look article by mounted policemen pursuing an escaped deer. Bruch might very suddenly begin to sing like the blind man on Seventy-second Street, pulling along the seeing-eye dog, shaking pennies in his cup: "What a friend we have in Jesus-God bless you, sir." He also enjoyed mock funerals with Latin and music, Monteverdi, Pergolesi, the Mozart C Minor Mass; he sang "Et incarnatus est" in falsetto. In his early years as a refugee, he and another German Jew, employed in Macy's warehouse, used to hold Masses over each other, one lying down in a packing case with dime-store beads wound about the wrists, the other doing the service. Bruch still enjoyed this, loved playing corpse. Sammler had often enough seen it done. Together with other clown routines. Nazi mass meetings at the Sportspalast. Bruch using an empty pot for sound effects, holding it over his mouth to get the echo, ranting like Hitler and interrupting himself to cry "Sieg Heil." Sammler never enjoyed this fun. It led, soon, to Bruch's Buchenwald reminiscences. All that dreadful, comical, inconsequent senseless stuff. How, suddenly, in 1937, saucepans were offered to the prisoners for sale. Hundreds of thousands, new, from the factory. Why? Bruch bought as many pans as he could. What for? Prisoners tried to sell saucepans to one another. And then a man fell into the latrine trench. No one was allowed to help him, and he was drowned there while the other prisoners were squatting helpless on the planks. Yes, suffocated in the feces!

"Very well, Walter, very well!" Sammler severely would say.

"Yes, I know, I wasn't even there for the worst part, Uncle Sammler. And you were in the middle of the whole war. But I was sitting there with diarrhea and pain. My guts! Bare arschloch."

"Very well, Walter, don't repeat so much."

Unfortunately, Bruch was obliged to repeat, and Sammler was sorry. He was annoyed and he was sorry. And with Walter, as with so many others, it was always, it was ever and again, it was still, interminably, the sex business. Bruch fell in love with women's arms. They had to be youngish, plump women. Dark as a rule. Often they were Puerto Ricans. And in the summer, above all in the summer, without coats, when women's arms were exposed. He saw them in the subway. He went along to Spanish Harlem. He pressed himself against a metal rod. Way up in Harlem, he was the only white passenger. And the whole thing-the adoration, the disgrace, the danger of swooning when he came! Here, telling this, he began to finger the hairy base of that thick throat of his. Clinical! At the same time, as a rule, he was having a highly idealistic and refined relationship with some lady. Classical! Capable of sympathy, of sacrifice, of love. Even of fidelity, in his own Cynara-Dowson fashion.

At present be was, as be said, "hung up" on the arms of a cashier in the drugstore.

"I go as often as I can."

"Ah, yes," said Sammler.

"It is madness. I have my attachй case under my arm. Very strong. First-class leather. I paid for it thirty-eight fifty at Wilt Luggage on Fifth Avenue. You see?"

"I get the picture."

"I buy something for a quarter, a dime. Gum. A package of Sight-Savers. I give a large bill a ten, even a twenty. I go in the bank and get fresh money."

"I understand."

"Uncle Sammler, you have no idea what it is for me in that round arm. So dark! So heavy!

"No, I probably do not."

"I put the attachй case against the counter, and I press myself. While she is making the change, I press."

"All right, Walter, spare me the rest."

"Uncle Sammler, forgive me. What can I do? For me it is the only way."

"Well, that is your business. Why tell me?"

"There is a reason. Why shouldn't I tell you? There must be a reason. Please don't stop me. Be kind."

"You should stop yourself."

"I can't."

"Are you sure?"

"I press. I have a climax. I wet myself."

Sammler raised his voice. "Can't you leave out anything?"

"Uncle Sammler, what shall I do? I am over sixty years old."

Then Bruch raised the backs of his thick short hands to his eyes. His flat nose dilated, his mouth open, he was spurting tears and, apelike, twisting his shoulders, his trunk. And with those touching gaps between his teeth. And when he wept he was not gruff. You heard the musician then.

"My whole life has been like that."

"I'm sorry, Walter."

"I am hooked."

"Well, you haven't harmed anybody. And really people take these things much less seriously than they once did. Couldn't you concentrate more on other interests, Walter? Besides, your plight is so similar to other people's, you are so contemporary, Walter, that it should do something for you. Isn't it a comfort that there is no more isolated Victorian sex suffering? Everybody seems to have these vices, and tells the whole world about them. By now you are even somewhat old-fashioned. Yes, you have an old nineteenth-century Krafft-Ebing trouble."

But Sammler stopped himself, disapproving of the light tone that was creeping into his words of comfort. But as to the past he meant what he said. The sexual perplexities of a man like Bruch originated in the repressions of another time, in images of woman and mother which were disappearing. He himself, born in the old century and in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, could discern these changes. But it also struck him as unfair to lie in bed making such observations. However, the old, the original Cracow Sammler was never especially kind. He was an only son spoiled by a mother who had herself been a spoiled daughter. An amusing recollection: When Sammler was a little boy he had covered his mouth, when he coughed, with the servant's hand, to avoid getting germs on his own hand. A family joke. The servant, grinning, red-faced, kindly, straw-haired, gummy (odd lumps in her gums) Wadja, had allowed little Sammler to borrow the hand. Then, when he was older, his mother herself, not Wadja, used to bring lean, nervous young Sammler his chocolate and croissants as he sat in his room reading Trollope and Bagehot, making an "Englishman" of himself. He and his mother had had a reputation for eccentricity, irritability in those days. Not compassionate people. Not easily pleased. Haughty. Of course all this, for Sammler, had changed considerably in the last thirty years. But then Walter Bruch with his old urchin knuckles in his eyes sat in his room and sobbed, having told on himself. And when was there nothing to tell? There was always something. Bruch told how he bought himself toys. At F. A. O. Schwarz or in antique shops he bought wind-up monkeys who combed their hair in a mirror, who banged cymbals and danced jigs, in little green jackets or red caps. Nigger minstrels had fallen in price. He played in his room with the toys, alone. He also sent denunciatory, insulting letters to musicians. Then he came and confessed and wept. He didn't weep for display. He wept because he felt he had lost his life. Would it have been possible to tell him that he hadn't?

It was easier with a man like Bruch to transfer to broad reflections, to make comparisons, to think of history and themes of general interest. For instance, in the same line of sexual neurosis Bruch was exceeded by individuals like Freud's Rat Man, with his delirium of rats gnawing into the anus, persuaded that the genital also was ratlike, or that he himself was some sort of rat. By comparison an individual like Bruch had a light case of fetishism. If you had the comparative or historical outlook you would want only the most noteworthy, smashing instances. When you had those you could drop, junk and forget the rest, which were only a burden or excess baggage. If you considered what the historical memory of mankind would retain, it would not bother to retain the Bruchs; nor, come to that, the Sammlers. Sammler didn't much mind his oblivion, not with such as would do the remembering, anyway. He thought he had found out the misanthropy of the whole idea of the "most memorable." It was certainly possible that the historical outlook made it easier to dismiss the majority of instances. In other words, to jettison most of us. But here was Walter Bruch, who had come to his mom because he felt he could talk to him. And probably Walter, when his crying stopped, would be hurt by the Krafft-Ebing reference, by the assertion that his deviation was not too unusual. Nothing seemed to hurt quite so much as being ravaged by a vice that was not a top vice. And this brought to mind Kierkegaards comical account of people traveling around the world to see rivers and mountains, new stars, birds of rare plumage, queerly deformed fishes, ridiculous breeds of men-tourists abandoning themselves to the bestial stupor which gapes at existence and thinks it has seen something. This could not interest Kierkegaard. He was looking for the Knight of Faith, the real prodigy. That real prodigy, having set its relations with the infinite, was entirely at home in the finite. Able to carry the jewel of faith, making the motions of the infinite, and as a result needing nothing but the finite and the usual. Whereas others sought the extraordinary in the world. Or wished to be what was gaped at. They themselves wanted to be the birds of rare plumage, the queerly deformed fishes, the ridiculous breeds of men. Only Mr. Sammler, extended, a long old body with brickish cheekbones and the often electrified back hair riding the back of the head-only Mr. Sammler was worried. He was concerned about the test of crime which the Knight of Faith had to meet. Should the Knight of Faith have the strength to break humanly appointed laws in obedience to God? Oh, yes, of course! But maybe Sammler knew things about murder which might make the choices just a little more difficult. He thought often what a tremendous appeal crime had made to the children of bourgeois civilization. Whether as revolutionists, as supermen, as saints, Knights of Faith, even the best teased and tested themselves with thoughts of knife or gun. Lawless. Raskolnikovs. Ah yes…

"Walter, I'm sorry-sorry to see you suffer."

The odd things occurring in Sammler's room, with its papers, books, humidor, sink, electric coil, Pyrex flask, documents.

"I'll pray for you, Walter." Bruch stopped crying, clearly startled.

"What do you mean, Uncle Sammler? You pray?"

The baritone music left his voice, and it was gruff again, and he gruffly gobbled his words.

"Uncle Sammler, I have my arms. You have prayers?" He pave a belly laugh. He laughed and snorted, swinging his trunk comically back and forth, holding both his sides, blindly showing both his nostrils. He was not, however, mocking Sammler. Not really. One had to learn to distinguish. To distinguish and distinguish and distinguish. It was distinguishing, not explanation, that mattered. Explanation was for the mental masses. Adult education. The upswing of general consciousness. A mental level comparable with, say, that of the economic level of the proletariat in 1848. But distinguishing? A higher activity.

"I will pray for you," said Sammler.

After this the conversation sank for a while into mere sociability. Sammler had to look at letters Bruch had sent to the Post, Newsday, the Times, tangling with their music reviewers. This again was the contentious, ludicrous side of things, the thick-smeared, self-conscious, performing loutish Bruch. Just when Sammler wanted to rest. To recover a little. To put himself in order. And Bruch's rollicking, guttural Dada routine was contagious. Go, Walter, go away so that I can pray for you, Sammler felt like saying, falling into Bruch's style. But then Bruch asked, "And when are you expecting your son-in-law?"

"Who? Eisen?"

"Yes, he's coming. He's maybe here already."

"I didn't know that. He's threatened to come, many times, to set up as an artist in New York. He doesn't want Shula at all."

"I know that," said Bruch. "And she is so afraid of him."

"Certainly it would not work. He is too violent. Yes, she will be frightened. She will also feel flattered, imagining that he has come to win her back. But he's not thinking of wives and marriage. He wants to show his paintings on Madison Avenue."

"He thinks he is that good?"

"He learned printing and engraving in Haifa and I was told in his shop that he was a dependable worker. But then he discovered Art, and began to paint in his spare time and make etchings. Then he sent each member of the family a portrait of himself copied from photographs. Did you see any? They were appalling, Walter. An insane mind and a frightening soul made those paintings. I don't know how he did it, but by using color he robbed every subject of color. Everybody looked like a corpse, with black lips and red eyes, with faces a kind of leftover cooked-liver green. At the same time it was like a little schoolgirl learning to draw pretty people, with cupid mouths and long eyelashes. Frankly, I was stunned when I saw myself like a kewpie doll from the catacombs. In that shiny varnish he uses, I looked really done for. It was as if one death was not enough for me, but I had to have a double death. Well, let him come. His crazy intuition about New York may be right. He is a cheerful maniac. Now so many highbrows have discovered that madness is higher knowledge. If he painted Lyndon Johnson, General Westmoreland, Rusk, Nixon, or Mr. Laird in that style he might become a celebrity of the art world. Power and money of course do drive people crazy. So why shouldn't people also gain power and wealth through being crazy? They should go together."

Sammler had taken off his shoes, and now the long frail feet in brown stockings felt cold and he laid over them the blanket with its frayed silk binding. Bruch took this to mean that he was going to sleep. Or was it that the conversation had taken a turn that didn't interest Sammler? The singer said good-by.

When Bruch bustled out-black coat, short legs, sack-wide bottom, cap tight, bicycle clips at the bottoms of his trousers (the suicidal challenge of cycling in Manhattan)-Sammler was again thinking of the pickpocket, the pressure of his body, the lobby and the hernial canvas walls, the two pairs of dark glasses, the lizard-thick curving tube in the hand, dusty stale pinkish chocolate color and strongly suggesting the infant it was there to beget. Ugly, odious; laughable, but nevertheless important. And Mr. Sammler himself (one of those mental invasions there was no longer any point in attempting to withstand) was accustomed to put his own very different emphasis on things. Of course he and the pickpocket were different. Everything was different. Their mental, characterological, spiritual profiles were miles apart. In the past, Mr. Sammler had thought that in this same biological respect he was comely enough, in his own Jewish way. It had never greatly mattered, and mattered less than ever now, in the seventies. But a sexual madness was overwhelming the Western world. Sammler now even vaguely recalled hearing that a President of the United States was supposed to have shown himself in a similar way to the representatives of the press (asking the ladies to leave), and demanding to know whether a man so well hung could not be trusted to lead his country. The story was apocryphal, naturally, but it was not a flat impossibility, given the President, and what counted was that it should spring up and circulate so widely that it reached even the Sammlers in their West Side bedrooms. Take as another instance the last exhibit of Picasso. Angela had brought him to the opening at the Museum of Modern Art. It was in the strictly sexual sense also an exhibition. Old Picasso was wildly obsessed by sexual fissures, by phalluses. In the frantic and funny pain of his farewell, creating organs by the thousands, perhaps tens of thousands. Lingam and Yoni. Sammler thought it might be enlightening to recall the Sanskrit words. Bring in a little perspective. But it didn't really do much for such a troubled theme. And it was very troubled. He fetched back, for example, a statement by Angela Gruner, blurted out after several drinks when she was laughing, gay, and evidently feeling free (to the point of brutality) with old Uncle Sammler. "A Jew brain, a black cock, a Nordic beauty," she had said, "is what a woman wants." Putting together the ideal man. Well, after all, she had charge accounts at the finest shops in New York, and access to the best of everything in the world. If Pucci didn't have what she wanted, she ordered from Hermиs. All that money could buy, luxury could offer, personal beauty could bear upon the person, or that sexual sophistication could reciprocate. If she could find the ideal male, her divine synthesis-well, she was sure she could make it worth his while. The best was not too good for her. There seemed to be no question about that. At moments like this Mr. Sammler was more than ever pleasantly haunted by moon-visions. Artemis-lunar chastity. On the moon people would have to work hard simply to stay alive, to breathe. They would have to keep a strict watch over the gauges of all the devices. Conditions altogether different. Austere technicians-almost a priesthood.

If it wasn't Bruch forcing his way in with confessions, if it wasn't Margotte (for she was now beginning to think about affairs of the heart after three years of decent widowhood-more discussion than prospects, surely: discussion, earnest examination ad infinitum), if it wasn't Feffer with his indiscriminate bedroom adventures, it was Angela who came to confide. If confidence was the word for it. Communicating chaos. Getting to be oppressive. Especially since her father had recently been unwell. At this moment actually in the hospital. Sammler had ideas about this chaos-he had his own view of everything, an intensely peculiar one, but what else was there to go by? Of course he made allowances for error. He was a European, and these were American phenomena. Europeans often misunderstood America comically. He could remember that many refugees had packed their bags to take off for Mexico or Japan after Stevenson's first defeat, certain that Ike would bring a military dictatorship. Certain European importations were remarkably successful in the United States-psychoanalysis, existentialism. Both related to the sexual revolution.

In any case, a mass of sadness had been waiting for free, lovely, rich, ever-so-slightly coarse Angela Gruner, and she was now flying under thick clouds. For one thing she was having trouble with Wharton Horricker. She was fond of, she liked, probably she loved, Wharton Horricker. In the last two years Sammler had heard of few other men. Fidelity, strict and literal, was not Angela's dish, but she had an old-fashioned need for Horricker. He was from Madison Avenue, some sort of market-research expert and statistical wizard. He was younger than Angela. A physical culturist (tennis, weight lifting). Tall, from California, marvelous teeth. There was gymnastic apparatus in his house. Angela described the slanted board with footstraps for sit-ups, the steel bar in the doorway for chinning. And the chrome-metal, cold marble furniture, the leather straps and British folding officers' chairs, the op and pop objets d'art, the indirect lighting, and the prevalence of mirrors. Horricker was handsome. Sammler agreed. Cheerful, somewhat unformed as yet, Horricker was perhaps intended by nature to be rascally (what was all that muscle for? Health? Not banditry?). "And what a dresser!" said Angela with husky, comedienne's delight. With long California legs, small hips, crisp long hair with a darling curl at the back, he was a mod dandy. Extremely critical of other people's clothes. Even Angela had to submit to West Point inspection. Once when he thought her improperly dressed, he abandoned her on the street. He crossed to the other side. Custom-made shirts, shoes, sweaters were continually arriving from London and Milan. You could play sacred music while he had his hair cut (no, "styledl"), said Angela. He went to a Greek on East Fifty-sixth Street. Yes, Sammler knew a good deal about Wharton Horricker. His health foods. Horricker had even brought him bottles of yeast powder. Sammler found the yeast beneficial. Then there was the matter of neckties. Horricker's collection of beautiful neckties! By now the comparison with his own black pickpocket was unavoidable. This cult of masculine elegance must be thought about. Something important, still nebulous, about Solomon in all his glory versus the lilies of the field. We would see. Still, despite his self-pampering fastidiousness, his intolerance of badly clothed people, despite his dressy third-generation-Jew name, Wharton received serious consideration from Sammler. He sympathized with him, understanding the misleading and corrupting power of Angela, insidious without intending to be. What she intended to be was gay, pleasure-giving, exuberant, free, beautiful, healthy. As young Americans (the Pepsi generation, wasn't it?) saw the thing. And she told old Uncle Sammler everything -the honor of her confidences belonged to him. Why? Oh, she thought he was the most understanding, the most European-worldly-wise-nonprovincialmentally-diversified-intelligent-young-in-heart of old refugees, and really interested in the new phenomena. To deserve this judgment had he perhaps extended himself a little? Hadn't he lent himself, played the game, acted the ripe old refugee? If so, he was offended with himself. And, yes, it was so. If he heard things he didn't want to hear, there was a parallel-on the bus he had seen things he didn't want to see. But hadn't he gone a dozen times to Columbus Circle to look for the black thief?

Without restraint, in direct terms, Angela described events to her uncle. Coming into his room, taking off the coat, the head scarf, shaking free the hair with its dyed streaks like raccoon fur, smelling of Arabian musk, an odor which clung afterward to the poor fabrics, seat cushions, to the coverlet, even to the curtains, as stubborn as walnut stain on one's fingers, she sat down in white textured stockings-bas de poule as the French called them. Cheeks bursting with color, eyes dark sexual blue, a white vital heat in the flesh of the throat, she carried a great statement to males, the powerful message of gender. In this day and age people felt obliged to temper all such powerful messages with comedy, and she provided that, too. In America certain forms of success required an element of parody, self-mockery, a satire on the-thing-itself. Mae West had this. Senator Dirksen had it. One caught glimpses of the strange mind-revenge on the alleged thing-itself in Angela. She crossed her legs on a chair too fragile to accommodate her thighs, too straight for her hips. She opened her purse for a cigarette, and Sammler offered a light. She loved his manners. The smoke came from her nose, and she looked at him, when she was in good form, cheerfully, with a touch of slyness. The beautiful maiden. He was the old hermit. When she became hearty with him and laughed, she turned out to have a big mouth, and a large tongue. Inside the elegant woman he saw a coarse one. The lips were red, the tongue was often pale. That tongue, a woman's tongue-evidently it played an astonishing part in her free, luxurious life.

To her first meeting with Wharton Horricker, she had come running uptown from East Village. Something she couldn't get out of. She had used no grass that night, only whisky, she said. Grass didn't turn her on as she best liked turning on. Four telephone calls she made to Wharton from a crowded joint. He said he had to get his sleep; it was after 1 a.m.; he was a crank about sleep, health. Finally she burst in on him with a big kiss. She cried, "We're going to fuck all night!" But first she said she had to have a bath. Because she had been longing all evening for him. "Oh, a woman is a skunk. So many odors, Uncle," she said. Taking off everything, but overlooking the tights she fell into the tub. Wharton was astonished and sat on the commode in his dressing gown while she, so ruddy with whisky, soaped her breasts. Sammler knew quite well how the breasts must look. Little, after all, was concealed by her low-cut dresses. So she soaped and rinsed, and the wet tights with joyful difficulty were removed, and she was let to the bed by the hand. Or did the leading. For Horricker walked behind her and kissed her on the neck and shoulders. She cried "Oh!" and was mounted.

Mr. Sammler was supposed to listen benevolently to all kinds of intimate reports. Curiously enough, though with more thought and decency, H. G. Wells had also talked to him about sexual passion. From such a superior individual one might have expected views more in line with those of Sophocles in old age. "Most gladly have I escaped the thing of which you speak; I feel as if I had escaped from the hands of a mad and furious master." No such thing. As Sammler remembered it, Wells in his seventies was still obsessed with girls. He had powerful arguments for a total revision of sexual attitudes to accord with the increased life span. When the average individual died at thirty, toil-ruined, ill-fed, sickly mankind was sexually finished before the third decade. Romeo and Juliet were adolescents. But as the civilized life expectancy approaches seventy, the old standards of brutal brevity, early exhaustion, and doom must be set aside. Rancor, and gradually even rage, came over Wells at a certain point as he talked about the powers of the brain, its expansive limits, the ability in old age to take a fresh interest in new events diminishing. Utopian, he didn't even imagine that the hoped-for future would bring excess, pornography, sexual abnormality. Rather, as the old filth and gloomy sickness were cleared away, there would emerge a larger, stronger, older, brainier, better-nourished, better-oxygenated, more vital human type, able to eat and drink sanely, perfectly autonomous and well regulated in desires, going nude while attending tranquilly to duties, performing his fascinating and useful mental work. Yes, gradually the long shudder of mankind at the swift transitoriness of mortal beauty, pleasure, would cease, to be replaced by the wisdom born of prolongation.

Oh, wrinkled faces, gray beards, eyes purging thick amber or gum, a plentiful lack of wit together with weak hams, out of the air, crabwise, into the grave: Hamlet had his own view of it. And Sammler on many occasions, listening to Angela as he lay in bed, considering two sets of problems (at least) with two different looking eyes, a tense stitch between rib and hip making him draw up one leg for an ease he did not attain, had a slight look of rebuke as well as the look of receptivity. His daily tablespoon of nutritional yeast, a primary product from natural sugars, dissolved and shaken to a pink foam in fruit juice, kept him in fresh color. One result, possibly, of longevity was divine entertainment. You could appreciate God's entertainment from the formation of patterns which needed time for their proper development. Sammler had known Angela's grandparents. They had been Orthodox. This gave a queer edge to his acquaintance with her paganism. Somewhere he doubted the fitness of these Jews for this erotic Roman voodoo primitivism. He questioned whether release from long Jewish mental discipline, hereditary training in lawful control, was obtainable upon individual application. Although claims for erotic leadership had also been made by modern Jewish spiritual and mental doctors, Sammler had his doubts.

Accept and grant that happiness is to do what most other people do. Then you must incarnate what others incarnate. If prejudices, prejudice. If rage, then rage. If sex, then sex. But don't contradict your time. Just don't contradict it, that's all. Unless you happened to be a Sammler and felt that the place of honor was outside. However, what was achieved by remoteness, by being simply a vestige, a visiting consciousness which happened to reside in a West Side bedroom, did not entitle one to the outside honors. Moreover, inside was so roomy and took in so many people that if you were in the West Nineties, if you were in fact here, you were an American. And the charm, the ebullient glamour, the almost unbearable agitation that came from being able to describe oneself as a twentieth-century American was available to all. To everyone who had eyes to read the papers or watch the television, to everyone who shared the collective ecstasies of news, crisis, power. To each according to his excitability. But perhaps it was an even deeper thing. Humankind watched and described itself in the very turns of its own destiny. Itself the subject, living or drowning in night, itself the object, seen surviving or succumbing, and feeling in itself the fits of strength and the lapses of paralysis-mankind's own passion simultaneously being mankind's great spectacle, a thing of deep and strange participation, on all levels, from melodrama and mere noise down into the deepest layers of the soul and into the subtlest silences, where undiscovered knowledge is. This sort of experience, in Mr. Sammler's judgment, might bring to some people fascinating opportunities for the mind and the soul, but a man would have to be unusually intelligent to begin with, and in addition unusually nimble and discerning. He didn't even think that he himself qualified by his own standard. Because of the high rate of speed, decades, centuries, epochs condensing into months, weeks, days, even sentences. So that to keep up, you had to run, sprint, waft, fly over shimmering waters, you had to be able to see what was dropping out of human life and what was staying in. You could not be an old-fashioned sitting sage. You must train yourself. You had to be strong enough not to be terrified by local effects of metamorphosis, to live with disintegration, with crazy streets, filthy nightmares, monstrosities come to life, addicts, drunkards, and perverts celebrating their despair openly in midtown. You had to be able to bear the tangles of the soul, the sight of cruel dissolution. You had to be patient with the stupidities of power, with the fraudulence of business. Daily at five or six a. m. Mr. Sammler woke up in Manhattan and tried to get a handle on the situation. He didn't think he could. Nor, if he could, would he be able to convince or convert anyone. He could leave the handle to Shula in his will. She could disclose possession to Rabbi Ipsheimer. She could whisper to Father Robles in the confessional that she had it. What could the main thing be? Consciousness and its pains? The flight from consciousness into the primitive? Liberty? Privilege? Demons? The expulsion of those demons and spirits from the air, where they had always been, by enlightenment and rationalism? And mankind had never lived without its possessing demons and had to have them back! Oh, what a wretched, itching, bleeding, needing, idiot, genius of a creature we were dealing with here! And how queerly it was playing (he, she) with all the strange properties of existence, with all varieties of possibility, with antics of all types, with the soul of the world, with death. Could it be condensed into a statement or two? Humankind could not endure futurelessness.

As of now, death was the sole visible future. A family, a circle of friends, a team of the living got things going, and then death appeared and no one was prepared to acknowledge death. Dr. Gruner, it was given out, had had minor surgery, a little operation. Was it so? An artery to the brain, the carotid, had begun to leak through weak walls. Sammler had been slow, reluctant to grasp what this might mean. He had perhaps a practical reason for such reluctance. Since 1947, he and Shula had been Dr. Gruner's dependents. He paid their rents, invented work for Shula, supplemented the Social Security and German indemnity checks. He was generous. Of course he was rich, but the rich were usually mean. Not able to separate themselves from the practices that had made the money: infighting, habitual fraud, mad agility in compound deceit, the strange conventions of legitimate swindling. To old Sammler, considering, with smallish ruddy face, the filmed bubble of the eye, and slightly cat-whiskered-a meditative island on the island of Manhattan-it was plain that the rich men he knew were winners in struggles of criminality, of permissible criminality. In other words, triumphant in forms of deceit and hardness of heart considered by the political order as a whole to be productive; kinds of cheating or thieving or (at best) wastefulness which on the whole caused the gross national product to increase. Wait a minute, though: Sammler denied himself the privilege of the high-principled intellectual who must always be applying the purest standards and thumping the rest of his species on the head. When he tried to imagine a just social order, he could not do it. A noncorrupt society? He could not do that either. There were no revolutions that he could remember which had not been made for justice, freedom, and pure goodness. Their last state was always more nihilistic than the first. So if Dr. Gruner had been corrupt, one should glance also at the other rich, to see what hearts they had. No question. Dr. Gruner, who had made a great deal of money as a gynecologist and even more, later, in real estate, was on the whole kindly and had a lot of family feeling, far more than Sammler, who in his youth had taken the opposite line, the modern one of Marx-Engels-private-property-the-origins-of-the-state-and-the-family.

Sammler was only six or seven years older than Gruner, his nephew by an amusing technicality. Sammler was the child of a second marriage, born when his father was sixty. (Evidently Sammler's own father had been sexually enterprising.) And Dr. Gruner had longed for a European uncle. He was elaborately deferential, positively Chinese in observing old forms. He had left the old country at the age of ten, he was sentimental about Cracow, and wanted to reminisce about grandparents, aunts, cousins with whom Sammler had never had much to do. He couldn't easily explain that these were people from whom he had thought he must free himself and because of whom he became so absurdly British. But Dr. Gruner himself after fifty years was still something of an immigrant. In spite of the grand Westchester house and the Rolls Royce glittering like a silver tureen, covering his courteous Jewish baldness. Dr. Gruner's wrinkles were mild. They expressed patience and sometimes even delight. He had large, noble lips. Irony and pessimism were also there. It was a pleasant, pleasantly illuminated face.

And Sammler, an uncle through his half-sister-an uncle really by courtesy, by Gruner's pious antiquarian wish-was seen (tall, elderly, foreign) as the last of a marvelous old generation. Mama's own brother, Uncle Artur, with big pale tufts over the eyes, with thin wrinkles augustly flowing under the big-brimmed perhaps romantically British hat. Sammler understood from his "nephew's" face with the grand smile and conspicuous ears that his historical significance for Gruner was considerable. Also his experiences were respected. The war. Holocaust. Suffering.

Because of his high color, Gruner always looked healthy to Sammler. But the doctor one day said, "Hypertension, Uncle, not health."

"Maybe you shouldn't play cards."

Twice a week, at his club, in very long sessions, Gruner played gin rummy or canasta for high stakes. So Angela said, and she was pleased with her father's vice. She had hereditary vices to point to-she and her younger brother, Wallace. Wallace was a born plunger. He had already gone through his first fifty thousand, investing with a Mafia group in Las Vegas. Or perhaps they were only would-be Mafia, for they hadn't made it. Dr. Gruner himself had grown up in a hoodlum neighborhood and sometimes dropped into the hoodlum manner, speaking out of the corner of his mouth. He was a widower. His wife had been a German Jewess, above him socially, so she thought. Her family had been 1848 pioneers. Gruner was an Ostjude immigrant. Her job was to refine him, to help him build his practice. The late Mrs. Gruner had been decent, proper, with thin legs, bouffant hair sprayed stiffly, and Peck amp; Peck outfits, geometrically correct to the millimeter. Gruner had believed in the social superiority of his wife.

"It's not the rummy that aggravates my blood pressure. If there were no cards, there would still be the stock market, and if there weren't the stock market, there would be the condominium in Florida, there would be the suit with the insurance company, or there would still be Wallace. There would be Angela."

Tempering his great glowing affection, mixing fatherly love with curses, Gruner would mutter "Bitch" when his daughter approached with all her flesh in motion-thighs, hips, bosom displayed with a certain fake innocence. Presumably maddening men and infuriating women. Under his breath, Gruner said "Cow!" or "Sloppy cunt!" Still, he had settled money on her so that she could live handsomely on the income. Millions of corrupt ladies, Sammler saw, had fortunes to live on. Foolish creatures, or worse, squandering the wealth of the land. Gruner would never have been able to bear the details that Sammler heard from Angela. She was always warning him, "Daddy would die if he knew this." Sammler did not agree; Elya probably knew plenty. The truth was naturally known by all concerned. It was all in Angela's calves, in the cut of her blouses, in the motions of her finger tips, the musical brass of her whispers.

Dr. Gruner had taken to saying, "Oh, yes, I know that broad. I know my Angela. And Wallace!"

Sammler didn't at first understand what an aneurysm meant; he heard from Angela that Gruner was in the hospital for throat surgery. The day after the pickpocket had cornered him, he went to the East Side to visit Gruner. He found him with a bandaged neck.

"Well, Uncle Sammler?"

"Elya-how are you? You look all right." And the old man, reaching beneath himself with a long arm, smoothing the underside of the trench coat, bending thin legs, sat down. Between the tips of cracked wrinkled black shoes he set the tip of his umbrella and leaned with both palms on the curved handle, stooping toward the bed with Polish-Oxonian politeness. Meticulously, the sickroom caller. Finely, intricately wrinkled, the left side of his face was like the contour map of difficult terrain.

Dr. Gruner sat straight, unsmiling. His expression after a lifetime of good-humored appearance was still mainly pleasant. This was not pertinent at present, merely habitual.

"I am in the middle of something."

"The surgery was successful?"

"There is a gimmick in my throat, Uncle."

"For what?"

"To regulate the flow of blood in the artery-the carotid."

"Is that so? Is it a valve or something?"

"More or less."

"It's supposed to reduce the pressure?"

"Yes, that's the idea."

"Yes. Well, it seems to be working. You look as usual. Normal, Elya."

Evidently there was something which Dr. Gruner had no intention of letting out. His expression was neither dire nor grim. Instead of hardness Mr. Sammler thought he could observe a curious kind of tight lightness. The doctor in the hospital, in pajamas, was a good patient. He said to the nurses, "This is my uncle. Tell him what kind of patient I am."

"Oh, the doctor is a wonderful patient."

Gruner had always insisted on having affectionate endorsements, approbation, the good will of all who drew near.

"I am completely in the surgeon's hands. I do exactly as he says."

"He is a good doctor?"

"Oh, yes. He's a hillbilly. A Georgia red-neck. He was a football star in college. I remember reading about him in the papers. He played for Georgia Tech. But he's professionally very able; and I take orders from him, and I never discuss the case."

"So you're satisfied completely with him?"

"Yesterday the screw was too tight."

"What did that do?"

"Well, my speech got thick. I lost some coordination. You know the brain needs its blood supply. So they had to loosen me up again."

"But you are better today?"

"Oh, yes."

The mail was brought, and Dr. Gruner asked Uncle Sammler to read a few items from the Market Letter. Sammler lifted the paper to his right eye, concentrating window light upon it. "The U. S. Justice Department will file suit to force Ling-Temco-Vought to divest its holdings of Jones and Laughlin Steel. Moving against the huge conglomerate…"

"Those conglomerates are soaking up all the business in the country. One of them, I understand, has acquired all the funeral parlors in New York. I hear reports that Campbell, Riverside, have been bought by the same company that publishes Mad magazine."

"How curious."

"Youth is big business. Schoolchildren spend fantastic amounts. If enough kids get radical, that's a new mass market, then it's a big operation."

"I have a general idea."

"Very little is holding still. First making your money, then keeping your money from shrinking by inflation. How you invest it, whom you trust-you trust nobody-what you get with it, how you save it from those Federal taxation robbers, the gruesome Revenue Service. And how you leave it… wills! Those are the worst problems in life. Excruciating."

Uncle Sammler now understood fully how it was. His nephew Gruner had in his head a great blood vessel, defective from birth, worn thin and frayed with a lifetime of pulsation. A clot had formed from leakage. The whole jelly trembled. One was summoned to the brink of the black. Any beat of the heart might open the artery and spray the brain with blood. These facts shimmered their way into Sammler's mind. Was it the time? The time? How terrible! But yes! Elya would die of a hemorrhage. Did he know this? Of course he did. He was a physician, so he must know. But he was human, so he could arrange many things for himself. Both knowing and not knowing-one of the more frequent human arrangements. Then Sammler, making himself intensely observant, concluded after ten or twelve minutes that Gruner definitely knew. He believed that Gruner's moment of honor had come, that moment at which the individual could call upon his best qualities. Mr. Sammler had lived a long time and understood something about these cases of final gallantry. If there were time, occasionally good things were done. If one had a certain kind of luck.

"Uncle, try some of these fruit jellies. The lime and orange are the best. From Beersheba."

"Aren't you watching your weight, Elya?"

"No, I'm not. They're making terrific stuff in Israel these days." The doctor had been buying Israel bonds and real estate. In Westchester, he served Israeli wine and brandy. He gave away heavily embossed silver ball-point pens, made in Israel. You could sign checks with them. For ordinary purposes they were not useful. And on two occasions Dr. Gruner, as he was picking up his fedora, had said, "I believe I'll go to Jerusalem for a while."

"When are you leaving?"

"Now."

"Right away?"

"Certainly."

"Just as you are?"

"Just as I am. I can buy my toothbrush and razor when I land. I love it there."

He had his chauffeur drive him to Kennedy Airport.

"I'll cable you, Emil, when Tm coming back."

In Jerusalem were more old relatives like Sammler, and Gruner did genealogies with them, one of his favorite pastimes. More than a pastime. He had a passion for kinships. Sammler found this odd, especially in a physician. As one whose prosperity had been founded in the female generative slime, he might have had less specific sentiment about his own tribe. But now, seeing a fatal dryness in the circles under his eyes, Sammler better understood the reason for this. To each according to his intimations. Gruner had not worked in his profession for ten years. He had had a heart attack and retired on insurance. After a year or two of payments, the insurance company insisted that he was well enough to practice, and there had been a lawsuit. Then Dr. Gruner learned that insurance companies kept the finest legal talent in the city on retainer. The best lawyers were tied up, and the courts were deliberately choked with trivial suits by the companies, so that it was years before his case came to trial. But he won. Or was about to win. He had disliked his trade-the knife, blood. He had been conscientious. He had done his duty. But he hadn't liked his trade. He was still, however, fastidiously manicured like a practicing surgeon. Here in the hospital the manicurist was sent for, and during Sammler's visit Gruner's fingers were being soaked in a steel basin. The strange tinge of male fingers in the suds. The woman in her white smock, every single hair of the neckless head the same hue of dyed black, without variation, was gloomy, sloven-footed in orthopedic white shoes. Heavy-shouldered, she bent with instruments over his nails, concentrating on her work. She had quite a wide, tear-pregnant nose. Dr. Gruner had to woo reactions from her. Even from such a dismal creature.

As it might not be many times more (for Elya) the room was filled with sunny light. In which familiar human postures were struck. From which no great results had come in the past. From which little could be expected at this late hour. What if the manicurist were to take a liking to Dr. Gruner? What if she should requite his longing? What was his longing? Mr. Sammler had a thing about these unprofitable instants of clarity. Seeing the singular human creature demand more when the sum of human facts could not yield more. Sammler did not like such instants, but they came nevertheless.

The woman pushed back the cuticle. She would not be tempted up from her own underground galleries. Intimacy was refused.

"Uncle Artur, can you tell me anything about my grandmother 's brother in the old country?"

"Who?"

"Hessid was the man's name."

"Hessid? Hessid? Yes, there was a Hessid family."

"He had a mill for cornmeal, and a shop near the Castle. Just a small place with a few barrels."

"You must be mistaken. I remember no one in the family who ground anything. However, you have an excellent memory. Better than mine."

"Hessid. A fine-looking old man with a broad white beard. He wore a derby, and a very fancy vest with watch and chain. Called up often to read from the Torah, though he couldn't have been a heavy contributor to the synagogue."

"Ah, the synagogue. Well, you see, Elya, I didn't have much to do with the synagogue. We were almost freethinkers. Especially my mother. She had a Polish education. She gave me an emancipated name: Artur."

Sammler regretted that he was so poor at family reminiscences. Contemporary contacts being somewhat unsatisfactory, he would gladly have helped Gruner to build up the past.

"I loved old Hessid. You know, I was a very affectionate child."

"I'm sure you were," said Sammler. He could hardly remember Gruner as a boy. Standing, he said, "I won't tire you with a long visit."

"Oh, you aren't tiring me. But you probably have things to do. At the public library. One thing, before you go, Uncle-you're in pretty good shape still. You took that last trip to Israel very well, and that was a tough one. Do you still like to run in Riverside Park, as you used to do?"

"Not lately. I feel too stiff for it."

"I was going to say, it's not safe to run down there. I don't want you mugged. When you're winded from running, some crazy sonofabitch jumps out and cuts your throat! Anyway, if you are too stiff to run you're far from feeble. I know you're not a sickly type, apart from your nervous trouble. You still get that small payment from the West Germans? And the Social Security? Yes, I'm glad we had the lawyer set that up, about the Germans. And I don't want you to worry, Uncle Artur."

"About what?"

"About anything at all. Security in old age. Being in a home. You stay with Margotte. She's a good woman. Shell look after you. I realize Shula is a little too nutty for you. She amuses other people but not her own father. I know how that can be."

"Yes, Margotte is decent. You couldn't ask for better."

"So, remember, Uncle, no worries."

"Thank you, Elya."

A confusing, frowning moment, and, getting into the breast, the head, and even down into the bowels and about the heart, and behind the eyes-something gripping, aching, smarting. The woman was buffing Gruner's nails, and he sat straight in the fully buttoned pajama coat; above it, the bandage hiding the throat with its screw. His large ruddy face was mainly unhandsome, his baldness, his big-eared plainness, the large tip of the nose; Gruner belonged to the common branch of the family. It was, however, a virile face, and, when superficial objections were removed, a kindly face. Sammler knew the defects of his man. Saw them as dust and pebbles, as rubble on a mosaic which might be swept away. Underneath, a fine, noble expression. A dependable man-a man who took thought for others.

"You've been good to Shula and me, Elya."

Gruner neither acknowledged nor denied this. Perhaps by the rigidity of his posture he fended off gratitude he did not deserve in full.

In short, if the earth deserves to be abandoned, if we are now to be driven streaming into other worlds, starting with the moon, it is not because of the likes of you, Sammler would have said. He put it more briefly, "I'm grateful."

"you're a gentleman, Uncle Artur."

"I'll be in touch."

"Yes, come back. It does me good."

Sammler, outside the rubber-silenced door, put on his Augustus John hat. A hat from the Soho that was. He went down the corridor in his usual quick way, favoring the sightful side slightly, putting forward the right leg and the right shoulder. When he came to the anteroom, a sunny bay with soft plastic orange furniture, he found Wallace Gruner there with a doctor in a white coat. This was Elya's surgeon.

"My dad's uncle-Dr. Cosbie."

"How do you do, Dr. Cosbie." The conceivably wasted fragrance of Mr. Sammler's manners. Who was there now to be aware of such Old World stuff! Here and there perhaps a woman might appreciate his style of greeting. But not a Doctor Cosbie. The ex-football star, famous in Georgia, struck Sammler as a sort of human wall. High and flat. His face was mysteriously silent, and very white. The upper lip was steep and prominent. The mouth itself thin and straight. Somewhat unapproachable, he kept his hands behind his back. He had the air of a general whose mind is on battalions in a bloody struggle, just out of sight over a hill. To a civilian pest who came up to him at that moment he had nothing to say.

"How is Dr. Gruner?"

"Makin' good progress, suh. A very fine patient."

Dr. Gruner was being seen as he wished to be seen. Every occasion had its propaganda. Democracy was propaganda. From government, propaganda entered every aspect of life. You had a desire, a view, a line, and you disseminated it. It took, everyone spoke of the event in the appropriate way, under your influence. In this case Elya, a doctor, a patient, made it known that he was the patient of patients. An allowable foible; boyish, but what of it? It had a certain interest.

Faced with a doctor, Sammler had his own foible, for he often wanted to ask about his symptoms. This was repressed of course. But the impulse was there. He wanted to mention that he woke up with a noise inside his head, that his good eye built up a speck at the corner which he couldn't scratch out, it stuck in the fold, that his feet burned intolerably at night, that he suffered from pruritis ani. Doctors loathed laymen with medical phrases. All, naturally, was censored The tachycardia last of all. Nothing was shown to Cosbie but a certain cool, elderly cosiness. A winter apple. A busy-minded old man. Colored specs. A wide wrinkled hat brim. An umbrella on a sunny day-inconsequent. Long narrow shoes, cracked but highly polished.

Was he cold-hearted about Elya? No, he was grieving. But what could he do? He went on thinking, and seeing.

As usual, even in the midst of conversation, Wallace with round black eyes was dreaming away. Profoundly dreaming. He also had a very white color. In his late twenties he was still little brother with the curls, the lips of a small boy. A bit careless perhaps in his toilet habits, also like a small boy, he often transmitted to Sammler in warm weather (perhaps Sammler's nose was hypersensitive) a slightly unclean odor from the rear. The merest hint of fecal carelessness. This did not offend his great-uncle. It was simply observed, by a peculiarly delicate recording system. Actually, Sammler rather sympathized with the young man. Wallace fell into the Shula category. There was even a family resemblance, especially in the eyes- round, dark, wide, filling the big bony orbits, capable of seeing all, but adream, dreamy, as if drugged. He was a kinky cat, said Angela. With Dr. Cosbie he was discussing sports. Wallace took no common interest in any subject. With him all interests were uncommon. He caught a tearing fever. Horses, football, hockey, baseball. He knew averages, performance records, statistics. You could test him by the almanac. Dr. Gruner said that he would be up at four a. m. memorizing tables and jotting away left-handed at top speed across the body. With this, the intellectual if slightly pedomorphic forehead, the refinement of the nose, somewhat too small, and the middle of the face, somewhat too concave, and a look of mental power, virility, nobility, all slightly spoiled. Wallace nearly became a physicist, he nearly became a mathematician, nearly a lawyer (he had even passed the bar and opened an office, once), nearly an engineer, nearly a Ph. D. in behavioral science. He was a licensed pilot. Nearly an alcoholic, nearly a homosexual. At present he seemed to be a handicapper. He had yellow pages of legal foolscap covered with team names and ciphers, and he and Dr. Cosbie, who seemed to be a gambler, too, were going over these intricate, many-factored calculations, and plainly the doctor was fascinated, not simply humoring Wallace. Slender Wallace in the dark suit was very handsome. A young man with stunning gifts. It was puzzling.

"You may be out of line on the Rose Bowl," said the doctor. 'Not at all," said Wallace. "Just examine this yardage analysis. I broke down last year's figures and fitted them into my own special equation: Now look…"

This was as much of the conversation as Sammler could follow. He waited awhile at the window observing traffic, women with dogs, leashed and unleashed. A vacant building opposite marked for demolition. Large white X's on the windowpanes. On the plate glass of the empty shop were strange figures or nonfigures in thick white. Most scrawls could be ignored. These for some reason caught on with Mr. Sammler as pertinent. Eloquent. Of what? Of future nonbeing. (Elya!) But also of the greatness of eternity which shall lift us from this present shallowness. At this time forces, energies that might carry mankind up carried it down. For finer purposes of life, little was available. Terror of the sublime maddened all minds. Capacities, impressions, visions amassed in human beings from the time of origin, perhaps since matter first glinted with grains of consciousness, were bound up largely with vanities, negations, and revealed only in amorphous hints or ciphers smeared on the windows of condemned shops. All naturally were frightened of the future. Not death. Not that future. Another future in which the full soul concentrated upon eternal being. Mr. Sammler believed this. And in the meantime there was the excuse of madness. A whole nation, all of civilized society, perhaps, seeking the blameless state of madness. The privileged, the almost aristocratic state of madness. Meantime there spoke out those thick loops and open curves across an old tailor-shop window.

It was in Poland, in wartime, particularly during three or four months when Sammler was hidden in a mausoleum, that he first began to turn to the external world for curious ciphers and portents. The dead life of that summer and into autumn when he had been a portent watcher, and very childish, for many larger forms of meaning had been stamped out, and a straw, or a spider thread or a stain, a beetle or a sparrow had to be interpreted. Symbols everywhere, and metaphysical messages. In the tomb of a family called Mezvinski he was, so to speak, a boarder. The peacetime caretaker of the cemetery let him have bread. Water, too. Some days were missed, but not many, and anyway Sammler saved up a small bread reserve and did not starve. Old Cieslakiewicz was dependable. He brought bread in his hat. It smelled of scalp, of head. And during this period there was a yellow tinge to everything, a yellow light in the sky. In this light, bad news for Sammler, bad news for humankind, bad information about the very essence of being was diffused. Something hateful, and at times overwhelming. At its worst it seemed to go something like this: You have been summoned to be. Summoned out of matter. Therefore here you are. And though the vast over-all design may be of the deepest interest, whether originating in a God or in an indeterminate source which should have a different name, you yourself, a finite instance, are obliged to wait, painfully, anxiously, heartachingly, in this yellow despair. And why? But you must! So he lay and waited. There was more to this, when Sammler was boarding in the tomb. No time to be thinking, perhaps, but what else was there to do? There were no events. Events had stopped. There was no news. Cieslakiewicz with hanging mustache, swollen hands, palsy, his ugly blue eyes-Sammlers savior-had no news or would not give it. Cieslaldewicz had risked his life for him. The basis of this fact was a great oddity. They didn't like each other. What had there been to like in Sammler?-half-naked, famished, caked hair and beard, crawling out of the forest. Long experience of the dead, handling of human bones, had perhaps prepared the caretaker for the apparition of Sammler. He had let him into the Mezvinski tomb, brought him some rags for cover. After the war Sammler had sent money, parcels, to Cieslakiewicz. There was correspondence with the family. Then, after some years, the letters began to contain anti-Semitic sentiments. Nothing very vicious. Only a touch of the old stuff. This was no great surprise, or only a brief one. Cieslakiewicz had had his time of honor and charity. He had risked his life to save Sammler. The old Pole was also a hero. But the heroism ended. He was an ordinary human being and wanted again to be himself. Enough was enough. Didn't he have a right to be himself? To relax into old prejudices? It was only the "thoughtful" person with his exceptional demands who went on with self-molestation-responsible to "higher values," to "civilization," pressing forward and so on. It was the Sammlers who kept on vainly trying to to perform some kind of symbolic task. The main result of which was unrest, exposure to trouble. Mr. Sammler had a symbolic character. He, personally, was a symbol. His friends and family had made him a judge and a priest. And of what was he a symbol? He didn't even know. Was it because he had survived? He hadn't even done that, since so much of the earlier person had disappeared. It wasn't surviving, it was only lasting. He had lasted. For a time yet he might last. A little longer, evidently, than Elya Gruner with the clamp or screw in his throat. That couldn't hold death off very long. A sudden escape of red fluid, and the man was gone. With all his will, purpose, his virtues, his good record as a physician, his enterprises, card games, his loyalty to Israel, dislike of de Gaulle, with all his kindness of heart, greediness of heart, with his mouth making passionate love to the manifest, with his money talk, his Jewish fatherhood, his love and despair over son and daughter. When his life-or this life, that life, the other life-was gone, taken away, there would remain for Sammler, while he lasted, that bad literalness, the yellow light of Polish summer heat behind the mausoleum door. It was the light also of that china-cabinet room in the apartment where he had suffered confinement with Shula-Slaws. Endless literal hours in which one is internally eaten up. Eaten because coherence is lacking. Perhaps as a punishment for having failed to find coherence. Or eaten by a longing for sacredness. Yes, go and find it when everyone is murdering everyone. When Antonina was murdered. When he himself underwent murder beside her. When he and sixty or seventy others, all stripped naked and having dug their own grave, were fired upon and fell in. Bodies upon his own body. Crushing. His dead wife nearby somewhere. Struggling out much later from the weight of corpses, crawling out of the loose soil. Scraping on his belly. Hiding in a shed. Finding a rag to wear. Lying in the woods many days.

Nearly thirty years after which, in April days, sunshine, springtime, another season, the rush and intensity of New York City about to be designated as spring; leaning on a soft, leatherlike orange sofa; feet on an umber Finnish rug with a yellow core or nucleus-with mitotic spindles; looking down to a street; in that street, a tailor's window on which the spirit of the time through the unconscious agency of a boy's hand had scrawled its augury.

Is our species crazy?

Plenty of evidence.

All of course seems man's invention. Including madness. Which may be one more creation of that agonizing inventiveness. At the present level of human evolution propositions were held (and Sammler was partly swayed by them) by which choices were narrowed down to sainthood and madness. We are mad unless we are saintly, saintly only as we soar above madness. The gravitational pull of madness drawing the saint crashwards. A few may comprehend that it is the strength to do one's duty daily and promptly that makes saints and heroes. Not many. Most have fantasies of vaulting into higher states, feeling just mad enough to qualify.

Take someone like Wallace Gruner. The doctor was gone and Wallace, with his yellow papers, was standing gracefully, handsomely, with his long lashes. How much normalcy, what stability was Wallace prepared to sacrifice to obtain the grace of madness?

"Uncle?"

"Ah, yes, Wallace."

Some were eccentric, some were histrionic. Probably Wallace was genuinely loony. For him it required a powerful effort to become interested in common events. This was possibly why sporting statistics cast him into such a fever, why so often he seemed to be in outer space. Dans la lune. Well, at least he didn't treat Sammler as a symbol, and he apparently had no use for priests, judges, or confessors. Wallace said that what he appreciated in Uncle Sammler was his wit. Sammler, especially when greatly irritated or provoked, when he felt galled, said witty things. In the old European style. Often these witticisms signaled the approach of a nervous fit.

But Wallace, when he began a conversation with Sammler, was immediately smiling, and sometimes he repeated the punch lines of Sammler's witticisms.

"Not a well-rounded person, Uncle?"

Referring to himself, Sammler once had observed, "I am more stupid about some things than about others; not equally stupid in all directions; I am not a well-rounded person."

Or else, a recent favorite with Wallace: "The billiard table, Uncle. The billiard table."

This had to do with Angela's trip to Mexico. She and Horricker had had an unhappy Mexican holiday. In January she had had enough of New York and winter. She wanted to go to Mexico, to a hot place, she said, where she could see something green. Then abruptly, before he could check himself, Sammler had said, "Hot? Something green? A billiard table in hell would answer the description."

"Oh, wow! That really cracked me up," said Wallace.

Later he would ask Sammler if he had the exact words. Sammler smiled, his small cheeks began to flush, but he refused to repeat his sayings. Wallace was not witty. He had no such sayings. But he did have experiences, he invented curious projects. Several years ago he flew out to Tangiers with the purpose of buying a horse and visiting Morocco and Tunisia on horseback. Not taking his Honda, he said, because backward people should be seen from a horse. He had borrowed Jacob Burckhardt's Force and Freedom from Sammler, and it affected him strongly. He wanted to examine peoples in various stages of development. In Spanish Morocco he was robbed in his hotel. By a man with a gun, hidden in his closet. He then flew on to Turkey and tried again. Somehow he managed to enter Russia on his horse. In Soviet Armenia he was detained by the police. After Gruner had gone five or six times to see Senator Javits, Wallace was released from prison. Then, once again in New York, Wallace, taking a young lady to see the film The Birth of a Child, fainted away at the actual moment of birth, struck his head on the back of a seat, and was knocked unconscious. Reviving, he was on the floor. He found that his date had moved away from him in embarrassment, changed her seat. He had a row with her for abandoning him. Wallace, borrowing his father's Rolls, let it somehow get away from him; carelessly parked, it ended up at the bottom of a reservoir somewhere near Croton. He drove a city bus crosstown to pay off debts. The Mafia was after him. His bookie gave him two months to pay. The handicapping hadn't worked. He flew with a friend to Peru to climb in the Andes. Said to be quite a good pilot. He offered to take Sammler into the air ("No, I believe not. Thank you just the same, Wallace "). He volunteered for the domestic Peace Corps. He wanted to be of use to little black children, to be a basketball coach in playgrounds.

"What does this surgeon really think of Elya's chances, Wallace?"

"He's going to take new X rays of his head."

"Are they planning brain surgery now?"

"It depends on whether they can get to the place. They may not be able to reach it. Of course if they can't reach it, they can't reach it."

"To look at him you'd never think… He looks so well."

"Oh, yes," said Wallace. "Why not?"

Sammler sighed at this. He guessed how well pleased the late Mrs. Gruner must have been with her Wallace, his shapely head, long neck, crisp hair, and fine eyebrows, the short clean line of the nose, and the neat nakedness of his teeth, the work of skilled orthodontia.

"It's hereditary, having an aneurysm. You happen to be born with a thin wall in an artery. I may have it. Angela may, too, though I'd be surprised if she had a thin place anywhere. But people, young people, too, perfect in every other respect sometimes, drop dead of it. Walking along strong, beautiful, full of beans, when it explodes inside. They die. There's a bubble first. Such as lizards blow from the throat, maybe. Then death. You've lived so long, you've probably come across this before."

"Even for me, there's always something a little new."

"I had a lot of trouble with last week's crossword puzzle, the Sunday one. Did you work on it?"

"No."

"You sometimes do."

"Margotte didn't bring home the Times."

"Amazing how you know words."

For some months Wallace had actually practiced law. His father had rented the office; his mother had furnished it, calling in Croze the interior decorator. For six months Wallace rose punctually like any commuter and went to business. But at business it came out that he worked on nothing but crossword puzzles, locking the door, taking the phone off the hook, lying on the leather sofa. That was all. No, one thing more: he unbuttoned the stenographer's dress and examined her breasts. This information came from Angela, who had it from the girl, direct. Why did the girl permit it? Maybe she thought it would lead to marriage. Placing hopes in Wallace? No sane woman would. But his interest in the breasts had evidently been scientific. Something about nipples. Like Jean Jacques Rousseau, who became so engrossed in the breasts of a Venetian whore that she pushed him away and told him to go study mathematics. (More of Uncle Sammlers wide reading, his European culture.)

"I don't like the people who make up the puzzles. They have low-grade minds," said Wallace. "Why should people know so much trash? It's Eastern-Seaboardeducated trash. Smart-ass Columbia University quiz-kid miscellaneous information. I actually telephoned you about an old English dance. Jig, reel, and hornpipe were all I could come up with. But this one began with an m."

"An m? Might it have been morrice?"

"Oh, damn! Of course it was morrice. Jesus, your mind is in good order. How do you happen to remember?"

"Milton, Comus. A wavering morrice to the moon."

"Oh, that's pretty. Oh, that's really lovely, a wavering morrice."

"Now to the Moon in wavering Morrice move. It's the fishes, by the billions, I believe, and the seas themselves, performing the dance."

"Why, that's splendid. You must be living right, to remember such pretty things. Your mind is not devoured by fool business. You're a good old guy, Uncle Artur. I don't like old people. I don't respect many individuals-a few physical scientists. But you-you're very austere in a way, but you have a good sense of humor. The only jokes I tell are the ones I hear from you. By the way, let me make sure I have the de Gaulle joke right. He said he didn't want to be buried under the Arc de Triomphe next to an unknown. А cфtй d'un inconnu. Right?"

"So far."

"My father has it in for de Gaulle because he woos the Arabs. I'm fond of de Gaulle because he's a monument. And he wouldn't go into the Invalides with Napoleon, who was only a lousy corporal."

"Yes."

"But the Israelis wanted to charge him a hundred thousand bucks for space in the Holy Sepulcher."

"That's the joke."

"And de Gaulle said, `For three days? It's too much money.' `Pour trois jours?' He was going to be resurrected, right? Now that, I think, is very funny." Wallace's grave judgment. "Poles love to tell jokes," he said. He had no sense of humor. Sometimes he had occasion to laugh.

"Conquered people tend to be witty."

"You don't like Poles very much, Uncle."

"I think on the whole I like them better than they liked me. Besides, a Pan once saved my life."

"And Shula in the convent."

"Yes, that too. Nuns hid her."

"I can remember Shula years ago in New Rochelle, coming downstairs in her nightgown, and she was no kid, she must have been twenty-seven or so, kneeling in front of everybody in the parlor and praying. Did she use Latin? Anyway that nightgown was damn flimsy. I thought she was trying to get your goat, with her Christian act. It was a put-down, wasn't it, in a Jewish house? Some Jews, anyhow! Is she still such a Christian?"

"At Christmas and Easter, somewhat."

"And she bugs you about H. G. Wells. But fathers are soft on daughters. Look how Dad favors Angela. He gave her ten times more. Because she reminded him of Mae West. He was always smiling at her boobs. He wasn't aware of it. Mother and I saw it."

"What do you think will happen, Wallace?"

"My dad? He won't make it. He's got about a two percent chance. What good is that screw?"

"He's struggling."

"Any fish will fight. A hook in the gill. It gets jerked into the wrong part of the universe. It must be like drowning in air."

"Ah, that is terrifying," said Sammler.

"Still, to some people death is very welcome. If they've spoiled their piece of goods, I'm sure many would rather be dead. What I'm finding out is that when the parents are living, they stand between you and death. They have to go first, so you feel pretty safe. But when they die, you're next, and there's nobody ahead of you in line. At the same time I see already that I'm taking the wrong slant emotionally, and I know I'll pay for it later. I'm part of the system, whether I like it or not." Another moment of silent aberrant reflection-Mr. Sammler felt the density and the unruliness of Wallace's thoughts. Then Wallace said, "I wonder why Dr. Cosbie is so keen on football pools."

"Aren't you?"

"Not the way I was. Dad told him how much I know about pro football. College football, too. That's all behind me now. But it was like Dad offering me to the surgeon, so I would do something for him, so that we would all be close and friendly."

"But it's something else you're keen on now?"

"Yes. Feffer and I have a business idea. It's practically all I can think about."

"Ah, Feffer. He abandoned me at Columbia, and I haven't seen him since. I wondered even whether he was trying to make money on me."

"He's a terribly imaginative businessman, He'd con anyone. But maybe not you. Here's what we've come up with, as an enterprise. Aerial photographs of country houses. Then the salesman arrives with the picture-not just contacts but the fully developed picture-and offers you a package deal. We will identify the trees and shrubs on the place and band them handsomely, in Latin and English. People feel ignorant about the plants on their property."

"Does Feffer know trees?"

"In every neighborhood we'd hire a graduate student in botany. In Dutchess County, for instance, we could get someone from Vassar."

Mr. Sammler could not keep from smiling. "Feffer would seduce her, and also the lady of the house."

"Oh, no. I'd see he didn't get out of hand. I can control that character. He's a top salesman. Spring is a good time to start. Right now. Before the leaves are too thick for aerial photography. In the summer we could work Montauk, Chilmark, Wellfleet, Nantucket from the sea. My father won't give me the money."

"Is it a great deal?"

"A plane and equipment? Yes, it's considerable."

"You intend to buy a plane, not rent one?"

"Rent doesn't make sense. If you buy you get the tax write-off-depreciation. The secret of business is to make the government cover your risk. In Dad's bracket we'd save seventy cents on the dollar. The IRS is murder. He doesn't file a joint return and isn't head of a family since Mother died. He doesn't want to give me another lump sum. It's set up for me in trust so I'll have to live on the income. When I had my chance I dropped fifty thousand in that boutique."

"Gambling, I thought. Las Vegas."

"No, no, it was a motel complex in Vegas, and we had the clothing shop, the men's boutique."

A furious dresser and adorner of men's bodies, Wallace would have been.

"Uncle Artur, I'd like to put you on our payroll. Feffer agrees. Feffer loves you, you know. If you don't want to do it, well put Shula on at fifty bucks a week."

"And in return for this? You want me to talk to your father?"

"Use your influence."

"No, Wallace, I'm afraid I couldn't. Why, think what's going on. It's dreadful. I'm terrified."

"You wouldn't upset him. He thinks the same thoughts whether you talk to him or not. Six of one, half a dozen of the other. He's brooding about this anyway."

"No, no."

"Well, that's your decision. There is something else, though. There's money at home, in New Rochelle. In the house."

"Excuse me?" From curiosity, uncertainty, Sammler's voice went up.

"Hidden cash. A large amount. Never declared."

"It can't be, can it?"

"Oh yes it can, Uncle. You're surprised. If the inside of a person were only as simple as a watermelon-red meat, black seeds. Now and then, as a favor to highly placed people, Papa performed operations. Dilatation and curettage. Only when there was a terrific crisis, when some young socialite heiress got knocked up. Top secret. Only out of pity. My dad pitied famous families, and got big gifts of cash."

"Wallace, look. Let's talk straight. Elya is a good man. He stands close to the end. You're his son. You've been brought up to think that for your health you have to throw a father down. You've had a troubled life, I know. But this old-fashioned capitalistic-family-and-psychological struggle has to be given up, finally. I'm telling you this because you're basically intelligent. You've done a lot of peculiar things. No one can call you boring. But you may become boring if you don't stop. You could retire honorably now with plenty of interesting experience to point to. Enough. You should try something different."

"Well, Uncle Sammler, you have good manners. I know it. In some ways, you're aloof too. Sort of distant from life. But you put up with people's shenanigans and shtick. It's just your old-fashioned Polish politeness. All the same, there is also a practical question here. Nothing but practical."

"Practical?"

"My father has X thousands of dollars in the house, and he won't tell where it is. He's sore at us. He's in the capitalistic-family-psychology struggle. You're perfectly right-why should a person burn himself out with neurotic fever? There are higher aims in life. I don't think those are shit. Far from it. But you see, Uncle, if I have that plane, I can make a nice income with a few hours of flying. I can spend the rest of my time reading philosophy. I can finish up my Ph. D. In mathematics. Now listen to this. People are like simple whole numbers. Do you see?"

"No, of course not, Wallace."

"Numbers also bear an important relation to people. The series of numbers is like the series of human beings-infinite numbers of individuals. The characteristics of numbers are like the characteristics of matter, otherwise mathematical expressions could not tell us what matter will or may do. Mathematical equations lead us to physical realities. Things not yet seen. Like the turbulence of heated gases. Do you see now?"

"Only in the vaguest way."

"The equations preceded the actual observations. So what we need is a similar system of signs for human beings. In this system, what is One? What is the human integer like? Now you see, you've made me talk seriously to you. But just for a minute or two, I want to go on with that other thing. There is money in the house. I think there are phony pipes through the attic in which he hid the bills. He borrowed a Mafia plumber once. I know it. You might just slip in a reference to pipes or to attics in your next conversation. See how he reacts. He may decide to tell you. I don't want to have to tear apart the house."

"No, certainly not," said Sammler.

What is One?