Psalm 8
I spent the last Saturday of April, the 27th, helplessly enduring a 12-hour power outtage in my apartment on Biliran Island. I had been warned more than a week in advance, so I was prepared for it. But how does one prepare for twelve hours in the middle of what is known hereabouts as "summer," when temperatures by day are in the nineties, without the relief of even an electric fan? I adapted years ago to living without air conditioning. It's pleasant to enter an air conditioned drugstore in town, or the Western Union office to wait for a money transfer from my brother, or the one fast food joint, and feel the coldness of the air, close to twenty degrees cooler than the air outside. But I learned how to live without it a long time ago.
In preparation for the power cut off early in the morning, I got out of bed an hour early, cooked rice in my electric cooker, filled a thermos with boiling water for coffee, and charged the batteries in my cellphone and my tablet. When the power shut down shortly after 6 AM, I opened all my windows, plugged my ears, and went back to sleep until after 8.
Despite my having hundreds of ebooks, my traveller's library, I always reserve the experience of reading an actual book for special occasions like power failures, which are practically a fact of life in the Philippines. So, since I have a small contingent of books, some hardcover some paperbacks, and since I spent the previous power outtage in the company of John Cheever (see "Oh What a Paradise It Seemed"), I opted for the contemporary of Cheever whom he regarded as the greatest writer of American fiction, Saul Bellow - the Penguin Collected Stories (2001). Having already read the first two stories, "By the St. Lawrence" and "The Silver Dish," I skipped "The Bellarosa Connection" and opened the paperback to "The Old System."
The story begins in the here and now where Dr. Samuel Braun wakes late on a December Saturday and, after his ablutions, goes to his kitchen, in which his remembrances of two older cousins, Isaac and Tina, occupy his otherwise lonely afternoon. They were the only two people he really loved - "For whatever use or meaning this fact might have within the peculiar system of light, movement, contact, and perishing in which he tried to find stability." The story he tells is banal - Tina on her deathbed abandoning an absurd family grudge against Isaac. But he finds himself amazed, as I too was amazed, at how deeply it moved him.
Dr. Braun remembers them, his uncle and mother, from their coming to America, and his older cousins. "A vision of mankind Braun was having as he sat over his coffee Saturday afternoon. . . . Silent, with silent eyes crossing and recrossing the red water tank bound by twisted cables, from which ragged icicles hung down and white vapor rose, Dr. Braun extracted a moment four decades gone . . ."
Dr. Braun has vivid memories of his cousins, and in particular a sexual encounter with Tina when he was a boy sick in bed with a fever. Tina, who was always obese (she once, without knowing it, sat on a kitten and smothered it to death), envelops the boy with her naked overabundance, which he recalls with mystified pleasure. (The story was first published in Playboy.) But shortly after the war, a quarrel arises between Isaac and Tina when Isaac needs three members of the family, with himself as the fourth, to contribute $25,000 each so that he could buy up a disused golf course and develop it as a shopping center. On the day the transaction was arranged to take place Tina and the others renege on their share, and Isaac has to come up with the $100,000 himself. He does it - the land is his, and Isaac gets rich.
But this is not the real cause of Isaac and Tina's estrangement - the reasons are far less explicable than either wants to admit. "The quarrel between Tina and Isaac lasted for years. She accused him of shaking off the family when the main chance came. He had refused to cut them in. He said that they had all deserted him at the zero hour. Eventually, the brothers made it up. Not Tina. She wanted nothing to do with Isaac." One begins to wonder what it is about these cousins that would inspire Dr. Braun to reflect so movingly on his love for them. Still, "Dr. Braun had given up his afternoon to the hopeless pleasure of thinking affectionately about his dead."
"For several years, at the same season, there was a scene between them. The pious thing before the Day of Atonement was to visit the dead an to forgive the living - forgive and ask forgiveness. Accordingly, Isaac went annually to the old home. . . . These annual visits to Tina continued until she became sick." Cancer. Terminal. Still, Tina refuses to see Isaac. This is a terrible breach of propriety, that Tina and Isaac should not be reconciled before she dies. "Cousin Tina had discovered that one need not be bound by the old rules." Finally, she relents, but only on condition that Isaac pays her $20,000.
"In Dr. Braun's opinion, his cousin Tina had seized upon the force of death to create a situation of opera, which at the same time was a situation of parody. As he stated it to himself, there was a feedback of mockery. Death the horrid bridegroom, waiting with a consummation life had never offered Life, accordingly, she devalued, filling up the clear light remaining (which should be reserved for beauty, miracle, nobility) with obese monstrosity, rancor, failure, self-torture."
Isaac goes to see his rabbi to confirm his resolution to do what he knows he must do. Then he gets the money from his bank and puts it in a briefcase. (The briefcase is a nice touch. $20,000 doesn't justify a briefcase.) He goes to the hospital, up to her room, hands the briefcase to his brother, Mutt, and waits. "Because he could not stand still, he moved down the corridor, hands clasped behind his back. . . . He was sixty years old. He knew the route he, too, must go, and soon. But only knew, did not yet feel it. Death still was at a distance."
As if remembering all of this in sequence, telling the story in the here and now inside his head, "And Dr. Braun, feeling with them this work of wit and despair, this last attempt to exchange significance, rose, stood, looking at the shafts of ice, the tatters of vapor in winter blue." Tina allows Isaac to enter. They are too overcome by sorrow and love to restrain themselves. They embrace. The story ends in tears. And Braun wonders about all of it in a paragraph of heartbreaking and astounding puzzlement.
"The Old System" closes with a return to equilibrium, to the here and now: "When Dr. Braun closed his eyes, he saw, red on black, something like molecular processes - the only true heraldry of being. As later, in the close black darkness when the short day ended, he went to the dark kitchen window to have a look at stars. These things cast outward by a great begetting spasm billions of years ago."
So I, sixty years old (sixty-one a week from Thursday), on a different Saturday, the hottest day of the year, deprived of any relief from the heat, reading a story set in "the short end of December", overwhelmed by the weight of that same heraldry of being, abstracted momentarily in exalted language. The question in the psalm quoted above (also quoted in the story) is a rhetorical one. It doesn't require an answer. But Bellow answers it.
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