Dr. Gruner had private nurses around the clock. Sammler entered and found the uniformed woman sitting by the bed. The patient was sleeping. Sammler in a careful whisper introduced himself. "His uncle—oh, yes, he said you'd probably come," said the nurse. She didn't make it sound like a pleasant prediction. Under her starched cap the dyed dry hair was puffed out. The face itself, middle-aged, was fleshy, healthy, bossy. The eyes had an expression of sovereignty. Patients would be brought along the way that they must go: recovery or death.

 

"Is he asleep for the night, or is he taking a nap?" said Sammler.

 

"He may be waking up soon, but that's a guess. Miss Gruner is in the visitors' room."

 

"I’ll stand a bit," said Sammler, not invited to sit. There were many flowers, baskets of fruit, candy boxes, best sellers. The television set was running, soundlessly. The nurse listened with an earpiece. Reflected light flickered on the wall behind the bed. Elya's hands were turned downward at his sides, as though he had arranged himself symmetrically before dropping off. The hairy hands were clean, strong, venous, with polished nails. The nails had the same shine as the shot glass from which Gruner had sipped his mineral oil. The Nujol bottle was there, too, and beside it the Wall Street Journal. Bald dignity. The cord of the electric razor was plugged in above. He always was clean-shaven. The priests of Apis the Bull, as described by Herodotus, with shaven heads and bodies. And with the sleeping mouth bulged out on one side as if Elya, who liked to say that he had grown up in Greenpoint among hoodlums, might have been dreaming about racketeers and gunfire. Under his chin the bandage was like a military collar. Sammler thought of him as a man who badly, even desperately, needed confirmation, support, and touch. Gruner was a toucher. His habit, even in passing through a room, was to touch, to take people's arms, even perhaps getting medical information about their muscles, glands, weight, or the growth of their hair. He also implanted his opinions, his hopes in their breasts, and then if he said, "Well, isn't it so?", it was indeed so. Like a modern General of the Army, an Eisenhower, he made his logistical preparations. This shrewdness was very childish. But easy to pardon. Especially at such a time. At such a time, how could he sleep?

 

Sammler backed through the door softly and went to the visitors' room. There Angela sat smoking but not in her usual sensual and elegant style. She had been crying, and her face was white and hot. Her figure was heavy, breasts a burden, knees bulging pale against the taut silk of the stockings. Was it only because of her father that she was weeping? Sammler sensed a combined cause for those tears. He sat opposite her and laid the Augustus John hat, mole-gray, on his lap.

 

"Sleeping still?"

 

"Yes," said Sammler.

 

Angela's large lips, as though to cool herself, were open; she breathed through her mouth. Hot, the slope face with close-textured skin seemed very tight. The heat rose also into the whites of the eyes. "Does he really understand the situation?"

 

"I wonder. But he is a doctor, and I think he does."

 

Angela cried again, and Sammmler was even more convinced of a second cause for her tears. "And there's nothing else wrong with him," said Angela. "He's perfectly well except for that thing—that one tiny damned thing. And you think he knows, Uncle?"

 

"Yes, probably."

 

"But acting so normal. Talking about the family. He was so glad to see you and hoped you'd come back tonight. And he still keeps worrying about Wallace."

 

"One can see why."

 

"Wallace has been such a headache. At six, seven, he was such a beautiful gifted little boy. He put together mathematical things. We thought we had another Einstein. Daddy sent him to MIT. But next thing we knew he was a bartender in Cambridge, and he beat some drunk almost to death."

 

"I've heard."

 

"And now he's bugging Daddy to get him a plane. At such a time! A flying saucer would be more like it. Of course I share some of the blame for Wallace." Sammler knew that the conversation would take a tiresome psychiatric-pediatric turn, and that he would have to endure a certain amount of explanation.

 

"Of course I was resentful when they brought the kid home from the hospital. I asked Mother to put his crib in the garage. I'm sure he felt rejection, from the first. I never liked him. He was too gloomy. He just wasn't like a child. He had terrible fits of rage."

 

"Well, everybody has a history," said Sammler.

 

"I think I decided in adolescence that my brother was going to be a queer. I thought it was my fault, that I was so slutty that he became frightened of girls."

 

"Is that so? Well, I remember your confirmation," said Sammler. "You were quite studious. I was impressed that you were studying Hebrew."

 

"Just a front, Uncle. I was a dirty little bitch, really."

 

"I wonder. In retrospect, people exaggerate so."

 

"Neither Father nor I ever liked Wallace. We pushed him off on Mother, and that was like condemning him for life. Then it was one thing after another, his obese stage, his alcoholic stage. Well, now have you heard? He thinks there's money hidden in the house."

"Do you think so, too?"

 

"I'm not sure. There have been hints from Daddy about it. Mother too before she died. She seemed to believe that now and then Daddy would—he'd step out of line, as she used to say."

"To help out famous families from Dutchess County, as Wallace tells me?"

"Is that what he says? No, Uncle, what I heard was that Daddy did favors for the Mafia characters he grew up with. Top people in the Syndicate. very well. You probably never heard of Luciano."

"Just vaguely."

"Luciano came out to New Rochelle now and then. And if Daddy did those things and they paid him in cash, it must have been embarrassing. He probably didn't know what to do with that money. But that's not what's weighing on my mind."

"No. Speaking of New Rochelle, you haven't seen Shula, have you, Angela?"

"I haven't. What is she up to?"

"She brought me a very interesting book. However, it wasn't hers to bring."

"I assume she's hiding from Eisen. She thinks he's come to claim her."

"A flattering fear. If only he were capable of coming on such a mission. If he didn't beat her, it would answer many needs. It would be a mercy. No, I don't think he wants her at all. He doesn't like it that she poses as a Catholic. That was his pretext. Although he did say he got along well with Pope Pius at Castel Gandolfo. And now Eisen is not the friend of Popes, he is an artist. I don't think he has much genius, though he's crazy enough to want great glory." But Angela didn't want to hear this now. Apparently she thought Sammler was trying to turn the subject in a theoretical direction—to discuss the creative psychotic.

"Well, he's been here."

"You saw Eisen? He's been annoying Elya? Did he go in?"

"He wanted to make drawings—to sketch him, you know."

"I don't like it. I wish he wouldn't bother Elya. What the devil does he want? Keep him away."

"Well, maybe I shouldn't have let him in. I thought he might entertain Daddy."

Sammler was about to answer, but several beats of comprehension passed through his head and made him see matters differently. Of course. Ah, yes. Angela was having her own troubles with Dr. Gruner. Angela was not one of your great weepers, not like Margotte with her high annual tearfall. If Angela was looking so wan that even the frosted hair, usually so glossy and powerful, seemed to bristle dryly and Sammler thought he saw the dark follicular spots on her scalp, it was because she had been wrangling with her father. Under stress, Sammler believed, the whole faltered, and parts (follicles, for instance) became conspicuous. Such at least was his observation. Elya must be furious with her, and she was trying to divert his attention. Visitors. Obviously this was why she had taken Eisen straight in. But Eisen was not diverting. He was one of those smiling gloomy maniacs. Very gloomy, really. A depressing fellow . The smart silk suit he had worn ten years ago in Haifa when he and his father-in-law had gone out in the street, to a café, to discuss Shula, might have made a satisfactory coffin lining. Eisen certainly deserved to be cared for, and that was one of the uses of Israel, to gather in these cripples. But now Eisen had broken out, had heard the jolly frantic music of America and wanted to get into the act. He made a beeline for the rich cousin. The rich cousin was in the hospital with some kind of fiddle-peg in his neck. Odd what an instinct they all had for molesting a dying man.

"Did Edya find Eisen amusing? I doubt it."

Angela wore a playful cap, matching the black and white shoes. Now that her head was lowered Sammler saw the large button of kid leather set in the radial creases.

"A while he did, I think," she said. "Eisen made sketches of Daddy. But then he tried to sell them to him. Daddy would hardly glance at them."

"Not surprising. I wonder where Eisen got the money to come to America."

"I don't know, maybe he saved up. He's put out with you, Uncle."

"I'm sure of that."

"For not coming to see him in Israel. You were there for the war. He says you cut him."

"That doesn't concern me much. I wasn't there to pay my respects to a son-in-law or to make social visits."

"He complained to Daddy about you."

"Horrible!" said Sammler. "Everybody hitting away with these stupidities. At this time!"

"But Daddy takes an interest in all kinds of things. If everything suddenly stopped, it would be abnormal. Of course it's bad to aggravate him. For instance, he's angry with me."

"I suppose there is really no good way for Elya to do this thing."

"I'd say that he should stop talking to Widick. You know his fat lawyer, Widick?"

"Of course, I've met the man."

"Four or five times a day on the telephone. And Daddy asks me to leave the room. They're still buying and selling, trading on the stock market. Also I assume they discuss his will, or he wouldn't send me outside."

"Evidently, Angela, in spite of the case you make against Mr. Widick, you've crossed your father yourself, in some way. And you seem to want me to ask about it?"

"I think I should tell you."

"It doesn't sound good."

"It isn't. It was when Wharton Horricker and I went to Mexico."

"I believe Elya likes Horricker. He wouldn't have objected to that."

"No, he hoped that Wharton and I would get married."

"Won't you?"

Angela held a lighted cigarette in forked fingers before her face. Actions normally graceful, now distressingly heavy. She shook her head, her eyes filling, reddening. Ah, trouble with Horricker. Sammler had guessed something of the sort. It was a little hard for him to understand why she should always have so much trouble. Perhaps he put it to himself that she enjoyed so many privileges, what more did she want? She had the income from half a million to live on: tax-exempt Municipals, as Elya would repeat. She had this flesh, these sex attractions and talents—volupté she had. She brought back the French sex vocabulary Sammler had learned at the University of Cracow reading Emile Zola. That book about the fruit market. Le Ventre de Paris. Les Halles. And that appetizing woman there who was also something good to eat, a regular orchard. Volupté, seins, épaules, hanches. Sur un lit de feuilles. Cette tiédeur satinée de femme. Excellent, Emile! And—all right!—orchards suffering when there were earth tremors could drop all their pears; this too Sammler could sympathetically understand. But Angela was always unusually involved in difficulty and suffering, tripping on invisible obstructions, bringing forth complications of painful mischief which made him wonder whether this volupté was not one of the sorest strangest burdens that could be laid on a woman's soul. Saw the woman (by her own erotic account), as if in the actual bedroom. By invitation he was there, a perplexed bystander. Evidently she believed it necessary that he should know what went on in America. He did not need quite so much information. But better a surplus than ignorance. Both the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. were, for Sammler, utopian projects. There, in the East, the emphasis was on low-level goods, on shoes, caps, toilet-plungers, and tin basins for peasants and laborers. Here it fell upon certain privileges and joys. Here wading naked into the waters of paradise, et cetera. But always a certain despair underlining pleasure, death seated inside the health-capsule, steering it, and darkness winking at you from the golden utopian sun.

"So you've had a quarrel with Wharton Horricker?"

"He's angry with me."

"Aren't you angry with him?"

"Not exactly. I seem to be in the wrong."

"Where is he now?"

"He's supposed to be in Washington. He's doing something statistical on antiballistic missiles. For the Senate bloc against the ABM. I don't understand the thing."

"It's a pity to have such trouble now, to have a double difficulty."

"I’m afraid Daddy has found out about this."

In Angela's expression as in Wallace's there was something soft, a hint of infancy or of baby reverie. The parents must have longed overmuch for babies and so inhibited something in their children's cycle of development. Angela's last glance, before she began to sob, astonished Sammler. Open lips, wrinkled forehead, the skin expressing utter surrender, traits of the original person. An infant! But the eyes did not give up their look of erotic experience.

"Found out about what?"

"A thing that happened at Acapulco. I didn't think it was so very serious. Neither did Wharton. At the time, it was just a kick. I mean it was funny. We had a party with another couple."

"What sort of party was it?"

Well, it was a sex thing for the four of us."

"With other people? Who were they?"

"They were perfectly all right. We met them on the beach. The wife suggested it."

"An exchange?"

"Well, yes. Oh, it is done now, Uncle."

"I hear it is."

"You are disgusted with me, Uncle."

"I? Not really. I knew all this long ago. I regret it when things become so stupid, that's true. It seems to me that things poor professionals once had to do for a living, performing for bachelor parties, or tourist sex-circuses on the Place Pigalle, ordinary people, housewives, filing-clerks, students, now do just to be sociable. And I can't really say what it's all about. Is it maybe some united effort to conquer disgust? Or to show that all the repulsive things in history are not so repulsive? I don't know. Is it an effort to liberalize' human existence and show that nothing that happens between people is really loathsome? Affirming the Brotherhood of Man? Ah, well—" Sammler steadied and restrained himself. He did not want to know the details of this incident in Acapulco, didn't want to hear that the man in the case was a municipal judge from Chicago, or a chiropractor or CPA or a dope-pusher or that he made perfume or formaldehyde.

 

"Wharton went along, he did his share, but afterward he turned sullen. Then on the plane, flying back, he told me how angry he was about it."

"Well, he's a fastidious young man. You can see from his shirts. I assume he was well brought up."

"He acted no better than the rest of us."

"If you expected to marry Wharton, it was certainly poor judgment to do this."

Sammler badly wanted to get this conversation over. Elya had told him not to worry about the future, a hint that he was provided for; but there were also practical considerations to bear in mind. What if he and Shula had to depend on Angela? Angela had always been generous—she spent easily. When they went to a gallery or to lunch, she, naturally, paid for cabs, paid the check, left the tip, everything. But it would not do to go too deeply with Angela into this life of hers. The facts were too bad, too bald, abominable, pitiful. To a degree such behavior was based on theory, on generational ideology, part of a liberal education , and was therefore to an extent impersonal. But Angela would later regret these confessions—regret, and resent his disapproval. On the whole he received her confidences in a disinterested way. He was not unsympathetic, unfeeling; he was (she had said it herself) objective, nonjudging. As they faced Elya's death, he decided that under no circumstances and on no account would he become involved in a perverse relationship with Angela in which he had to listen for his supper. His disinterestedness would never become one of her comforts, part of the furniture of her life. Not even his anxiety over Shula's future could force him into such a position. A receiver of sordid goods? His whole heart rose against this.

"Daddy is asking very pointed questions about Wharton."

"He has heard about this episode?"

"That's right, Uncle."

"Who would tell him such things? It seems unusually cruel."

"I don't know whether you understand about that fat Widick, the lawyer. He and Wharton are related somewhere along the line. He's a bastard."

"That's not my impression at all. Normally fraudulent, perhaps, but that is simply business."

"He's a shit. Daddy thinks the world of Widick. He won the big case for him against the insurance company. I told you they talk four or five times a day on the phone. And Widick hates me."

"How do you know that?"

"I feel it. I get the spoiled-daughter look from him. There have always been people around who thought that Daddy had a bad thing about me, made me financially too independent. You know—pampered me and let me hang too loose."

"Hasn't he been exceptionally indulgent?"

"Not just for my sake, Uncle Sammler. You don't just act for yourself, and he's also lived through me. You can believe it."

Men, thought Sammler, often sin alone; women are seldom companionless in sin. But although Angela might be trying to force this interpretation on her father's kindness , it was possible that Elya too had his own lustful tendencies. Who was Sammler to say no? Things in general were desperate. The arterial bulge in Elya's brain must have cast its shadow earlier—spatters before the cloudburst. Sammler believed in premonitions, and death was a powerful instigator of erotic ideas. Sammler's own sex impulses (perhaps even now not altogether gone) had been very different. But he knew how to respect differences. He didn't measure others by himself. Now Shula had no volupté. She had something else. Of course she was not a rich man's daughter, and money, the dollar, was certainly a terrific sexual additive. But even Shula, though a scavenger or magpie, had never actually stolen before. Then suddenly she too was like the Negro pickpocket. From the black side, strong currents were sweeping over everyone . Child, black, redskin—the unspoiled Seminole against the horrible Whiteman. Millions of civilized people wanted oceanic, boundless, primitive, neckfree nobility, experienced a strange release of galloping impulses, and acquired the peculiar aim of sexual niggerhood for everyone. Humankind had lost its old patience. It demanded accelerated exaltation, accepted no instant without pregnant meanings as in epic, tragedy, comedy, or films. He had an idea even that the very special development of the significance of prisons since the eighteenth century had some relation to this shrinking ability to endure restraint. Punishment must be fitted, closely tailored to the state of the spirit, adapted to the need of the soul. Where liberty had been promised most, they had the biggest, worst prisons. Then another question: Had Elya performed abortions to oblige old Mafia friends? As to that, Sammler had no opinion. He simply couldn't say. Elya had never wanted to be a physician. He disliked the practice of medicine. But he had done his duty. And even doctors nowadays made sexual gestures to their patients. Put women's hands on their parts. Sammler had heard of this. Physicians who rejected the Oath, who joined the Age. Also Shula, Shula stealing, was contemporary—lawless. She was experiencing the Age. In so doing, she drew her father along with her. And possibly Elya, with the screw in his throat, had not wished to be left behind either, and had delegated Angela to experience the Age for him.

Be all that as it might—life once had nearly ended. Someone ahead, carrying the light, stumbled, faltered, and Mr. Sammler had thought it was over. However, he was still alive. He had not come through, for the connotation of coming through was that of an accomplishment and little had been accomplished. He had been steered from Cracow to London, from London to the Zamosht Forest, and eventually into New York City. One result of such a history was that he had formed a habit of condensation. He was a specialist in short views. And in the short view, Angela had offended her dying father. He was angry, and she wanted Sammler to intercede for her. Maybe Elya would cut her out of his will, give his money to charity. He had made large contributions to the Weizmann Institute. That Think-tank, they called it, at Rehovoth. Or perhaps she was afraid that he himself, Sammler, who was so close to Elya, would become his heir.

"Will you talk to Daddy, Uncle?"

"About this . . . thing of yours? That would be up to him. I wouldn't introduce the subject. I don't think he's just become aware of your style of life. I can't say what he's gotten out of it vicariously, as you suggest. But he's not stupid, and giving a young woman like you a capital of half a million dollars to live in New York City, he would have to be very dumb to think you were not amusing yourself."

Great cities are whores. Doesn't everyone know? Babylon was a whore. ? La Reine aux fesses cascadantes. Penicillin keeps New York looking cleaner. No faces gnawed by syphilis, with gaping noseholes as in ancient times.

"Daddy has such respect for you."

"What use should I make of that respect?"

"All the oldest, deepest, worst sexual prejudices are mobilized against me."

 

"Lord only knows what's in his mind," said Sammler. "Perhaps it's only one pain among many."

 

"He's said cruel things to me."

 

"This Mexican event is not the first," said Sammler. "Surely your father has always known. He hoped you would marry Horricker and stop this sexual nonsense."

 

"I’ll see if he's awake," said Angela, and rose. Her soft and heavy self was dressed in one of its costumes. Her legs, exposed to the last quarter of the thigh, were really very strong, almost clumsy. Her face was at this moment baby-pale, and soft under the little leather cap. As she detached herself from the plastic seat, and the evening was quite warm, an odor was released. Both low comic and high serious. Goddess and majorette. The Great Sinnerl What a vexation for poor Elya. What overvaluation. What an atrocious mixture of feelings. Angela was displeased with Sammler. She walked away.

 

As she was going, he remembered where he had last seen a cap like hers. It was in Israel—the Six-Day War he had seen.

 

He had seen.

 

It was almost as if he had attended—among other spectators. Arriving in fast cars at a point before Mount Hermon , where a tank battle was taking place, he was one of a press group watching a fight, below. Down in the flat va............