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

with you in the Model T,” said Rexler, “and you parked in front of a clapboard house across the tracks. Then you went in. Was that a whorehouse?”
    “Why do you ask?”
    “Because you were there for such a long time and I played with the pedals and the steering wheel.”
    Albert smiled forgivingly. It was himself that he forgave. “There were a couple of houses.”
    “On this one there was a veranda.”
    “I wouldn’t have paid much attention….”
    “And on the way home there was an accident on the Grand Trunk tracks. A man was killed.”
    “Was he?”
    Albert had no memory of it.
    “Minutes before we crossed. His liver was in the roadbed.”
    “The things kids will remember.”
    Rexler was about to describe his surprise at seeing a man’s organs on the ties and stones on the roadbed but he caught himself in time luckily. Albert’s skin cancer had metastasized and he hadn’t far to go. His still-shrewd eyes communicated this to Rexler, who backed off, thinking that for Albert that afternoon, when he and the girl had lain chest to chest, his heart and lungs pressing upon hers, had added up to a different sum. Rexler had come to say good-bye to his cousin, whom he wouldn’t be seeing again. Albert was wasted; his legs forked under the covers like winter branches, and his courtroom voice was as dim as a child’s toy xylophone. He sent for me, Rexler reminded himself, not to talk about my memories, and I think I look alien to him, that seeing me is a disappointment.
    In the upside-down intravenous flask a pellucid drop was about to pass into his spoiled blood. If other things could be as clear as that fluid. Probably Albert had asked one of his daughters to telephone me because he remembered how things once were. The uncritical affectionate child. He hoped I might bring back something. But all he got from me was a cripple at his bedside. Yet Rexler had tried to offer him something. Let’s see if we can ratchet up some ofthat old-time feeling. Perhaps Albert had _ got something out of it. But Albert had taken no conscious notice of the man hit by the train. There never was a conversation about that and now Albert too was buried with the rest of the family—“my dead,” as Ezra spoke of them. Rexler, who didn’t even know where the cemetery was and would never go to visit it, walked lopsided in the sunny grass of Monkey Park beside the canal locks. Deep-voiced, either humming or groaning, he turned his mind again to the lungs in the roadbed as pink as a rubber eraser and the other organs, the baldness of them, the foolish oddity of the shapes, almost clownish, almost a denial or a refutation of the high-ranking desires and subtleties. How finite they looked.
    His deformity, the shelf of his back and the curved bracket of his left shoulder, gave added protection to his hoarded organs. A contorted coop or bony armor must have been formed by his will on the hint given that afternoon at the scene of the accident. Don’t tell me, Rexler thought, that everything depends on these random-looking parts—and that to preserve them I was turned into some kind of human bivalve?
    The Mercedes limo had come to the canal for him and he got in, turning his thoughts to the afternoon lecture he didn’t particularly want to give.
     

A SILVER DISH
     
    WHAT DO YOU DO about death—in this case, the death of an old father? If you’re a modern person, sixty years of age, and a man who’s been around, like Woody Selbst, what do you do? Take this matter of mourning, and take it against a contemporary background. How, against a contemporary background, do you mourn an octogenarian father, nearly blind, his heart enlarged, his lungs filling with fluid, who creeps, stumbles, gives off the odors, the moldiness or gassiness, of old men. I mean! _ As Woody put it, be realistic. Think what times these are. The papers daily give it to you—the Lufthansa pilot in Aden is described by the hostages as being on his knees, begging the