Humboldt's Gift Read Online Free PDF Page B

girder shadows came at us through the shuddering windshield. In the back seat were books, bottles, beer cans, and paper bags—Tristan Corbière, I remember, Les Amours Jaunes in a yellow jacket, The Police Gazette , pink, with pictures of vulgar cops and sinful kittycats.
      Humboldt’s house was in the Jersey back country, near the Pennsylvania line. This marginal land was good for nothing but chicken farms. The approaches were unpaved and we drove in dust. Briars lashed the Roadmaster as we swayed on huge springs through rubbishy fields where white boulders sat. The busted muffler was so loud that though the car filled the lane there was no need to honk. You could hear us coming. Humboldt yelled, “Here’s our place!” and swerved. We rolled over a hummock or earth-wave. The front of the Buick rose and then dived into the weeds. He squeezed the horn, fearing for his cats, but the cats lit out and found safety on the roof of the woodshed which had collapsed under the snow last winter.
      Kathleen was waiting in the yard, large, fair-skinned, and beautiful. Her face, in the feminine vocabulary of praise, had “wonderful bones.” But she was pale, and she had no country color at all. Humboldt said she seldom went outside. She sat in the house reading books. It was exactly like Bedford Street, here, except that the surrounding slum was rural. Kathleen was glad to see me, and gave my hand a kind touch. She said, “Welcome, Charlie.” She said, “Thank you for coming. But where’s Demmie, couldn’t she come? I’m very sorry.”
      Then in my head a white flare went off. There was an illumination of curious clarity. I saw the position into which Humboldt had placed Kathleen and I put it into words: Lie there. Hold still. Don’t wiggle. My happiness may be peculiar, but once happy I will make you happy, happier than you ever dreamed. When I am satisfied the blessings of fulfillment will flow to all mankind. Wasn’t this, I thought, the message of modern power? This was the voice of the crazy tyrant speaking, with peculiar lusts to consummate, for which everyone must hold still. I grasped it at once. Then I thought that Kathleen must have secret feminine reasons for going along. I too was supposed to go along, and in another fashion I too was to hold still. Humboldt had plans also for me, beyond Princeton. When he wasn’t a poet he was a fanatical schemer. And I was peculiarly susceptible to his influence. Why that was I have only recently begun to understand. But he thrilled me continually. Whatever he did was delicious. Kathleen seemed aware of this and smiled to herself as I came out of the car. I stood on the down-beaten grass.
      “Breathe the air,” Humboldt said. “Different from Bedford Street, hey?” He then quoted, “This castle hath a pleasant seat. Also, The heaven’s breath smells wooingly here.”
      We then started to play football. He and Kathleen played all the time. This was why the grass was trampled. Kathleen spent most of the day reading. To understand what her husband was talking about she had to catch up, she said, on James, Proust, Edith Wharton, Karl Marx, Freud, and so on. “I have to make a scene to get her out of the house for a little football,” said Humboldt. She threw a very good pass—a hard, accurate spiral. Her voice trailed as she ran barelegged and made the catch on her breast. The ball in flight wagged like a duck’s tail. It flew under the maples, over the clothesline. After confinement in the car, and in my interview clothes, I was glad to play. Humboldt was a heavy choppy runner. In their sweaters he and Kathleen looked like two rookies, big, fair, padded out. Humboldt said, “Look at Charlie, jumping like Nijinsky.”
      I was as much Nijinsky as his house was Macbeth’s castle. The crossroads had eaten into the small bluff the cottage sat on, and it was beginning to tip. By and by they’d have to prop it up. Or sue the county, said Humboldt. He’d