The Collected Stories Of Saul Bellow by Saul Bellow Read Free Book Online Page A

live with Stalinism this lightness was essential. Hence the joys of the knife, as in “Mackie Messer,” so many years on the hit parade. All that pre-Hitler Weimar stuff. It was Stalin, whom Brecht had backed, who should have won in 1932. But Rexler did not intend to go public with such views. He was too ill, too old to make enemies. If he turned polemical the intelligentsia would be sure to say that he was a bitter aging hunchback. No, for him it was private life from now on.
    He didn’t want to think about the books and articles that had made his Lachine cousins so proud of him. “Just look how Robbie overcame the polio and made something of himself,” Cousin Ezra would tell his growing children.
    Nobody could say exactly how extensive Cousin Ezra’s realestate holdings were.
    But toward the end, dying of leukemia, Ezra greeted Rexler by throwing his arms wide. He sat up in his hospital bed and exclaimed, “A maloch _ has walked into my room.” His color was his father’s exactly—very dark and with pleasant folds, and he had become the Old Testament patriarch through and through—an Abraham bargaining with the Lord God to spare Sodom and Gomorrah or buying the cave of Machpelah to bury his wife.
    “Angel,” Ezra said with delicacy because of the mound on Rexler ‘s back: not exactly a pair of folded wings. The truth at that time was that Rexler looked like one of the cast of a Brecht—Kurt Weill production: hands sunk in his trousers’ pockets and his skeptical head—it was too heavy, it listed—needing cleverly poised feet to support it. His hair was gray, something like the color of drying Oregano. What did his dying cousin make of him, of his reputation as a scholar and a figure in New York theatrical circles? Rexler had gone against the mainstream in the arts, and his radical side was the side that had won.
    All those years of error, as it now seemed to Rexler. Hands clasped behind his back he tramped, limped, along the Lachine Canal, thinking that his dying cousin Ezra gave him high marks for his struggle against paralysis.
    Here in Lachine, Rexler had had a second family. After Uncle Mikhel and Aunt Rozzy died and Ezra had assumed the role of patriarch, Albert had refused to acknowledge him as such, “ recognized, was willing.” In this matter Rexler saw that he had relied on the mainstream. It was an inconsistency.
    Strictly speaking, the child with normal spine and arms and legs was transformed into the deformed man in the loden coat, the theatrical hat pulled down over the thick sideburns.
    It had been better on balance to be a revolutionary than a cripple. “Have I ever told you, Robbie, that we are descended from the tribe of Naphtali?” said Ezra.
    “How do we know that?”
    “Oh, these things are known. It was passed on to me and I pass it on to you.”
    In a month’s time Ezra was dead. Years ago he had exhumed Reba’s body and she was buried beside her parents. They were all to be together. Twenty years later Matty joined them. Only Albert remained. At eighty he was still an _homme р femmes.__ But they wouldn’t stay put when they found out what was expected of them. Now he was no longer a seducer, he was a petitioner or suppliant. The meanness, however, hadn’t gone out of him. Only he was weakened, he couldn’t enforce anything, and he played humble. The last of his wives had left him within a year. Back to Baltimore.
    Albert sent for Rexler. He was by now the last of the Rexlers. “Only the two of us left,” said Albert. “I’m so glad you came. The family doted on you.”
    “When I got polio my childish charm was shot down.”
    “Of course it was very hard. But you fought back. You became a distinguished man. I used to give copies of your books to my literate clients.”
    Evidence of wasted years, Rexler thought, if anyone wished to make a case against him. However, you don’t waste the time of a dying man with disclosures, confessions, repudiations. “One day I went