Saul Bellow's Heart (24 page)

I cannot alter that perception or undo the damage it has caused. If this is something you wish to alter, the initiative rests with you.

If I do not hear from you, and I mean you—not surrogates—it means to me that either you did not receive this letter, you are incapable of remedying the situation, or the absence of a relationship going into the future is your desire.

In any case I remain your son—even in absentia.
G.

(May 2003)

Dear Pop,

I thought I’d write as I did not want a repeat of our last phone conversation [which occurred when he said he was not attending]. Unfortunately, this puts me in a position of continually circumscribing our relationship. There is not much left to talk about when you don’t agree about politics, money, educational philosophy, or the nature of family obligations.

This is not my choice and it is not my desire. However, as we both get older changes have occurred. You have become less tolerant of differences between yourself and others. I have come to have faith in myself and the correctness of my own ideas.

I do not believe either of us will change because neither of us really wishes to abandon what we experience as positions which are correct for ourselves. I do not think it wise that we do. I do not believe that our relationship could withstand a truly candid discussion of our views. I wish this were not so but in my heart I believe it to be so.

Frankly I do not see a lot of positive options. But a relationship built on false confession would be worse than what we have. So here we are. As a child you are my pop and I love you. This will never change. As a man I will not abandon myself and you should not ask me to do so. I never mean to hurt you, but when it comes to a choice between my values and hurting someone—even you—my values will prevail. This is the man my parents brought me up to be and this is the man I am.
G.

Saul may have wanted to mend fences, but he was unable to bring himself to apologize to me or to his granddaughter. Instead he reverted to custom by enlisting a messenger. Though I had not been in touch with Monroe Engel, Saul’s former editor at the Viking Press, for fifty years, I received an e-mail from him, gently trying to encourage me to visit my ailing father. As
he showed no interest in my side of the story, I took him to be just another messenger on an errand from Saul.

About eighteen months later, there was a large party in Boston given by my wife JoAnn’s sister. I called Will about visiting Saul. Though I particularly disliked talking to Saul on the phone when there was unresolved business between us, but the good-hearted Will insisted on putting him on the line. I told my father I’d be in Boston in a few weeks and would like to talk to him in person.

Saul had suffered a stroke, was bedridden, and was not expected to survive. When I arrived, Janis and Rosie were out. An attendant led me up to his room, where he drifted in and out of a sleeplike state. Saul recognized me and spoke coherently though softly. The family cat was also dozing on the bed, prompting me to call my father’s present state a feline existence. “Exactly,” he said, and a spark of life shone through as he quipped that it “made him want to scratch.”

I needed to clear the air as we always had, particularly if this was to be our last conversation. With great trepidation, I said he had hurt me deeply by not attending Juliet’s wedding. He answered, “I did not mean to hurt you, but the disease takes over.” “But you did hurt me and my child!” I exclaimed. Just then his attendant came in, ostensibly to check on him, though she immediately insisted that Saul was a very sick man who could not tolerate any emotional upset. Alone again, I asked if there was anything more he wanted to say. He said no. I ended with “We always had an honest relationship, and I don’t see any reason to change it now.” He nodded in agreement. As I left to have lunch, the attendant was giving Janis, who had returned, a report. I concluded that she had been instructed to
listen at the door and interrupt if I brought up the problems between us.

I returned an hour later with a different concern, that I’d never see Saul alive again. I tried to find a way to say goodbye without using the word
death
. I was standing at his bedside and Saul put his hand on my heart. I told him that I loved him as I always had. I kissed him and walked out of his room. Saying “Goodbye, Pop” under my breath, I wished him a peaceful end.

Saul’s statement that he wished me no harm went a long way toward healing my wound. For fifty years I had been protected from the kind of pain Saul could cause when he let people down: as a child by his love, and as an adult by physical distance and layers of emotional insulation. This time I had let my guard down out of my love for Juliet, and I had paid the price. Looking back, I realize that I had successfully avoided the full force of his coldness. The disappointment I had experienced was just a full dose of the selfishness everyone else had been enduring for years.

Although his memory had been failing for several years, Saul had insisted on teaching a course on Joseph Conrad at Boston University, but his problems were severe enough that James Wood was enlisted to coteach. Will, who attended, told me that my father could still make magnificent observations about fiction, but could no longer follow the thread of the discussions. During my final visits to him in Boston, Saul reminded me of Beebee. Both walked aimlessly around homes that appeared both familiar and unfamiliar. But I did not realize how bad Saul’s memory was until he forgot about a dinner guest I’d invited after clearing it with him and Janis the day before. When the young man arrived, Saul raked me over the coals
for inviting a stranger into the house. He backed off after a head shake from Janis, which indicated he was relying on her when his memory failed.

The extent of Janis’s control over his literary affairs became clear after I mentioned a growing desire to gain access to Saul’s archive in the Regenstein Library. “So,” Saul said with pleasure, “you’re getting interested in your past.” His signature was necessary for me to gain access, and Will began to make the necessary arrangements. After an unduly long delay, Will called to tell me that my access to the archive had been denied. Diplomatically, he added that matters were out of his hands and in those of the Wylie Agency. Though I made it clear to Saul’s new literary agent that Saul approved of my request, I received a curt refusal from the same young man who had sweetly quoted romantic poetry to Saul in Vermont. By then I saw that my father did not even have the power to give me access to his own archive.

The final blow was determining Saul’s final resting place. By the late 1980s, my aunt Jane and Saul were the only survivors from the generation of Bellows that had lived in Lachine. Though Morrie was buried in Georgia and Sam in Israel, Saul retained a deep faith that he’d see members of his family after his death. For a decade that faith took on a very concrete form: a preoccupation with being buried next to his parents. But Jane’s husband, Charlie, and their sons Larry and Bob were in a plot next to my grandparents. The one remaining spot was reserved for her. Saul was irritated that his sister, once again, took precedence, but a solution became available.

An adjacent gravesite, sufficient to hold Saul, Lesha, and her husband, was for sale. Lesha made the initial arrangements but
needed her uncle’s go-ahead. Burial next to his parents would confirm the sentimental connection between Saul and his family of origin in perpetuity. But when Lesha pressed Saul for a decision, she was met with obfuscation and delay. Finally, with my father present but silent, it was Janis who told Lesha that the two of them would be buried together in Vermont. With one sentence, Janis finally eliminated any possibility of interference by Saul’s family during the rest of his life and even in death.

During his final year, Saul was very weak and rarely left his bed. Every time I asked about his welfare on the phone, his answer, “Hunky-dory,” made me realize my father was too far gone to realize how frail he was. I tracked Saul’s health through Will’s phone reports. Eventually, it turned so dire that I took a red-eye from San Francisco to Boston, arriving at 6:00 A.M. The winter temperature was 2 degrees. I snoozed at the airport until the temperature went up to 4 and got a chuckle out of Saul when I reported that a 100 percent improvement was sufficient for me to leave the comfort of the terminal.

Apparently it had been a long time since Saul had ventured downstairs, but that day he pulled himself together and met me on the first floor. Janis, who was in and out of the house all day, was delighted to see him dressed and sitting upright. Maria, the kind woman now charged with his physical care, reported that Saul called me his “little boy” and spoke of me often. My father’s mental state had indeed worsened. The seas of silence had expanded and the islands of clarity were smaller. He often became lost midthought but seemed to understand when I brought him up to speed about my family, and even inquired whether I was close to retirement.

My hair had been as white as Saul’s for decades, and on that visit I sported a large beard, also white. As the afternoon drew to a close and my departure grew near, Saul said he was glad to see “sonny boy.” By mimicking Al Jolson’s intonation, Saul was bringing to mind the times I sat on his lap as a boy and he made believe my stomach was a cello, drawing his arm back and forth as he sang, “Climb upon my knee, sonny boy.”

“Yes, Pop,” I answered, “even under all this snow [Bellowese for my white hair and beard], I’ll always be your sonny boy.” After decades of being nearly buried, “young Saul” and little Herschele reemerged in our last moment together. I left as Janis prepared a beautiful Sabbath table to celebrate Saul’s coming downstairs on a Friday night. I believe it was the last time he did so under his own power.

Saul and I had a few brief telephone calls in the ensuing weeks. I remember shouting into the phone, “I love you, sweetheart,” the last thing I ever said to my father.

Chapter Eleven
Expanding the Franchise

Will warned me that Saul was failing. His breathing was so labored that trying to speak to him on the phone was useless. I spent the day he died on tenterhooks, anticipating the call from Boston that never came. My father’s lawyer, Walter Pozen, called the media and word of Saul Bellow’s death was circulated almost immediately. Juliet heard of her grandfather’s death via the media. My noble daughter tried to spare me from the coldness she had already suffered, frantically calling every place I might be, without success. I sat in stunned silence after turning on my car radio and hearing the news.

I was already angered by Walter’s apparent lack of concern. A few days after Saul died my brother Dan wryly noted that even after a horrific traffic accident, the state police show more decency toward the family than Walter showed Saul’s children. He went out of his way to make a statement that Saul’s mental state was “sharp to end,” which was completely at variance with my observations of my father’s decline. Since Walter’s public version of events was so different from the shrinking islands of lucidity in the expanding sea of dark silences, along with Saul’s
frequent memory lapses and confusion, I eventually considered Walter’s gratuitous assertion of mental clarity to be a preemptive attempt to mythologize Saul Bellow, the famous author, at the expense of my father, the man.

As Jewish tradition requires burial before the Sabbath, JoAnn and I flew across the country overnight. The stark simplicity of Orthodox ritual we followed in Brattleboro’s Jewish cemetery made Saul’s death all too palpable. Pins with black ribbons were affixed to the mourners and were roughly torn to represent our loss and grief. Saul’s thin wooden casket was so light I had to remind myself that we were carrying my father, who had often seemed larger-than-life. At the gravesite, the black cloth with a white Star of David was removed from the casket and Saul was lowered into the ground. Next to the rectangular hole stood a pile of sand with a shovel placed back side up to represent the unusual task to which it was about to be put. Janis carefully balanced a bit of sand on the shovel’s back and threw it onto the casket, where it landed with a hollow sound. Next came my turn. I picked up a handful of sand, kissed it, said, “Rest easy, Pop,” and threw it into the hole. Adam and Dan followed with their shovels of sand before the other mourners took their turns at the required task of filling the grave level to the earth.

When our cousin Shael took a turn, I blurted out, “Put one in for Grandpa,” and so he did. He labeled several more: one for Jane, one for his father Sam, and two for Morrie, whom we all agreed required an extra because he took a double share of everything. I took another turn and labeled one shovelful for each first cousin—Larry, Bobby, and Lynn—who were all deceased. After the grave was filled, the rabbi outlined a six-foot rectangle
above the casket. Janis placed a temporary metal marker on the grave and lovingly smoothed the sand around it. The rabbi led all assembled in the Jewish prayer for the dead. The family walked away between two rows of mourners.

About a hundred family members and friends assembled in a nearby building, ate and drank a bit, and listened to short speeches, one by Ruth Wisse about Saul’s Jewishness and another by Martin Amis about his literary legacy. The rabbi ended with a tribute to the unique love between Janis and Saul that solidified my view of how she romanticized their relationship.

My family joined Lesha’s at Dan and Heather’s home, where we shared family stories over dinner. A few days later, JoAnn and I took the train to New York City, passing the old house in Tivoli. We went to the newly remodeled MoMA, where looking at the pictures was like visiting old friends I had shared with Saul on dozens of custodial visits. As we passed through galleries, I found myself humming an aria from Mozart’s
Marriage of Figaro
, which had filled our house every morning as he finished
Augie March
.