At every opportunity, on any reasonable pretext, Ravelstein zipped across the Atlantic to Paris. But that didn't mean he was un happy with the urban Midwest. He was attached to the University, where he had taken his degree under the great Davarr. He was an American through and through.
I had grown up in the city, but Ravelstein's people hadn't arrived from Ohio until the end of the thirties. I never met the father, whom Ravelstein described to me as a toy ogre, a huffy little man, and a neurotic disciplinarian. One of those small-time tyrants who control their children with demented screams, in some crazy nonstop family opera.
The University accepted high school kids who could pass its en trance exams. Ravelstein was admitted when he was fifteen years old and then was free from his father and from a sister he disliked almost as much. As I have said, he was fond of his mother. But at the University he was rid of all the Ravelsteins. "My real mental life began here. For me there was nothing better than the student rooming houses where I bunked. I never could see what was so disgraceful about 'stiffening in a rented house,' as Eliot wrote. Do you croak better on your own property?"
Still, without being envious (I never knew Ravelstein to envy anybody), he had a deep weakness for pleasant surroundings and liked to think of living in one of the tony flat buildings formerly occupied by the exclusively WASP faculty. When he returned to the University as a full professor after two decades on lesser campuses, he wangled a four-room apartment in the most desirable building of all. Most of his windows looked into the dark courtyard, but be yond he could see the campus to the west with its gothic, Indiana limestone spires, labs, dormitories, office buildings. He could stare at the tower of the chapel-a kind of truncated Bismarck Colossus with bells that boomed over and beyond the University compound. When Ravelstein became a national figure (an international one as well-his Japanese royalties alone were, he said with wild pleasure and no modesty, "ferocious"), he moved into one of the best apartments in the place. Now he had views in all directions. The late Madame Glyph, who put him down for drinking from a Coke bottle at her T. S. Eliot luncheon, had not been better situated.
Curiously enough, there was a monastic-retreat tone to his place. You entered under low vaulted ceilings. The lobby was paneled in mahogany. The elevators were like confession boxes. Each apartment had a small flagstone entry hall, and a gothic light fixture overhead. On Ravelstein's landing there was often a piece of furniture on its way out, displaced by some new purchase or other-a chest of drawers, a small armoire, an umbrella stand, a Paris painting about which he was beginning to have doubts. Ravelstein could not compete with the Glyphs' collection of Matisses and Chagalls, begun in the twenties. But in the kitchen he went far beyond them. From a restaurant supply company he had bought an espresso ma chine. It was installed in the kitchen, it dominated the sink, and it steamed and fizzed explosively. I refused to drink his coffee because it was made with chlorinated tap water. The huge commercial ma chine made the sink unusable. But Ravelstein had no use for sinks-it was only the coffee that mattered.
He and Nikki slept on Pratesi linens and under beautifully cured angora skins. He was perfectly aware that all this luxury was funny. Under charges of absurdity he was perfectly steady. He was not going to have a long life. I'm inclined to think he had Homeric ideas about being cut down early. He didn't have to accept confinement in a few dead-end decades, not with his appetite for existence and his exceptional gift for great overviews. It wasn't the money alone-his great best-seller windfall-that made it possible; it was his ability proven in the mental wars-the positions he held, the fights he provoked, his disputes with Oxford don classicists and historians. He was sure of himself, as de Gaulle had said about the Jews. He loved polemics.
Rosamund and I lived just up the street in a building that reminded you of the Maginot Line. Our rooms weren't as splendid as Ravelstein's monastic-luxurious apartment. They were boxy, but I had been looking for shelter just then. I was bombed out-evicted after twelve years of marriage from what had been my uptown home, and I was lucky to find sanctuary in one of the concrete pill boxes down the way from Ravelstein, about fifty yards from his wrought-iron midwestern gothic gate and his uniformed door man.-We had no doorman.
What I had were some fifty years of walking these sun-striped pavements, past buildings once occupied by friends. Now here, where a Japanese theologian was the tenant today, a Miss Abercrombie had lived forty years ago. She was a painter who had married a pleasant hippie burglar whose specialty was to entertain company by re-enacting second-story break-ins. On every one of the surrounding streets there were front rooms where friends had lived-and at the sides, the windows of bedrooms where they died. There were more of those than I cared to think about.
At my age, you don't want to be too tender-minded. It's different if you lead an active life. And I am active, on the whole. But there are gaps, and these gaps tend to fill up with your dead.
Ravelstein credited me with a kind of simpleminded seriousness about the truth. He said, "You don't lie to yourself, Chick. You may put off acknowledgment for a very long time but in the end you do own up. It's not a common virtue."
I am by no means a professor, although I've been around the University community for so many decades that some of the faculty think of me as a longtime colleague. And when I walked out on one of those sun-printed days shortly after I had returned to the University neighborhood, the weather dry, cold, clear, and high, I met an acquaintance named Battle. He was a prof, an Englishman who strode about the freezing streets in an old thin topcoat. A man in his sixties, he was big, ruddy, fleshy, his huge chilled face as thick as sweet red pepper. His hair was dense and long, and he sometimes reminded me of the Quaker on the oatmeal box. He had energy enough to keep two men warm. Only his raised shoulders acknowledged that the temperature was well below freezing-the shoulders up, and the hands thrust down into his coat pockets-all but the thumbs. His feet were set close together. He was not what we used to call "a sport" but he always wore classy shoes.
Battle was said to be a man of immense knowledge. (I had to take people's word for this-how would I know about his command of Sanskrit and Arabic?) He was not an Oxbridge type. He was a product of one of England's redbrick universities.
In a case like his you couldn't simply mention that you had run into a prof named Battle whose long hair made hats superfluous. In World War II, Battle had been a paratrooper, and a pilot as well. He had ferried de Gaulle across the Mediterranean once. Besides which, he had been a notable tennis player in civilian life. He had also taught ballroom dancing in Indochina. He was very quick on his feet, an astonishing runner who had chased and caught a mugger. He punched the mugger so hard in the guts that the cops had to send for an ambulance.
Battle, one of Ravelstein's favorites, was fond of good old Abe. But to say how he, Battle, saw Ravelstein was well-nigh impossible. There were no clues as to what went on behind that powerful fore head. Full of force it came down to the bristling overhang of a superorbital ridge intersecting the straight line of his nose and matching the tight parallels of his lips-the mouth of a Celtic king.
He might have been trained as an Olympic-class weightlifter. This was a very strong man-but to what end was he strong? Battle brushed aside his natural gifts. Subtlety was what he aimed at-hidden, complex, bold, secret Machiavellian moves. His purpose might be to frustrate a departmental chairman by influencing an in different dean to pass a word to the provost, et cetera. No one would ever suspect such conspiracies existed, much less care to discover who was behind them. Ravelstein, who explained all this to me, in coherent with laughter and crying "thee-ah, thee-ah," said, "He comes to discuss all kinds of personal, highly personal thee-ah things with me but never mentions those other operations."