In the last months of his life Ravelstein did the things he had a ways done. He met his classes, he organized conferences. When it was beyond his strength to give lectures, he invited his friends to give them: Foundation money was always available. His bald head at the center of the front row dominated these events. When a lecture ended, he was invariably the first to ask a question.
This became protocol. Everyone waited for him to kick off the discussion. At the beginning of the fall term he was still quite active, though when I escorted him to the campus from the apartment he had to stop at every other corner to catch his breath.
I recall that flocks of parrots had descended on a clump of trees that grew edible red berries. These parrots, thought to be the descendants of a pair of caged birds that had escaped, built their long, sac-like nests in the lake-front park and later colonized the alleys. In these bird tenements that hung from utility poles, hundreds of green parrots lived.
"What are we looking at?" said Ravelstein, turning his outsized round eyes on me.
"We're looking at parrots."
"Sure we are, but I never thought I'd see the likes of this. What a noise they make."
"Well, there used to be only rats, mice, and gray squirrels-now there are raccoons in the alleys and even possums-a new garbage-based ecology in the big cities…"
"You mean the urban jungle is no longer a metaphor," he said. "It really jangles me to listen to these noisy green birds from the tropics. Doesn't the snow get them down?"
"It doesn't seem to."
Nothing got them down. The noisy green birds threshing and bickering in the leaves, scattering snow, gorging on berries held Ravelstein's attention longer than I had expected. He had little interest in natural life. Human beings absorbed him entirely. To lose yourself in grasses, leaves, winds, birds, or beasts was an evasion of higher duties. And I think the birds held his attention unusually long because they were not merely feeding, but gorging, and he was a voracious eater himself. Or had been one. His meals were now mainly social, conversational occasions. He was dining out nightly. Nikki couldn't cook for all the people who were flying in to see Ravelstein.
Abe was taking the common drug prescribed for his condition but he didn't want it to be known. I remember how much it shocked him when his nurse walked in-the room was full of friends. She said, "It's time for your AZT."
He said to me the next day, "I could have killed the woman." He was still enraged. "Don't they give those people any training?"
"They're from the ghetto," said Nikki.
"Ghetto nothing!" Ravelstein said. "Ghetto Jews had highly developed feelings, civilized nerves-thousands of years of training. They had communities and laws. 'Ghetto' is an ignorant newspaper term. It's not a ghetto that they come from, it's a noisy, pointless, nihilistic turmoil."
One day he said to me, "Chick, I need a check drawn. It's not a lot. Five hundred bucks."
"Why can't you write it yourself?"
"I want to avoid trouble with Nikki. He'd see it on the check stub."
"All right. How do you want it drawn?"
"Make it out to cash."
There was no need to ask Ravelstein to elaborate. "I've written the address out," he said, and handed me a slip of paper.
"Consider it done."
"I'll cut you a check."
"Don't give it a thought," I said.
I wondered whether some visitor hadn't pinched a cigarette lighter or some other _bibelot__, and Ravelstein was paying ransom. But I decided it wasn't worth pursuing. He had already told me about his sharp increase in sexual feeling. He'd say, "I feel hot, and what am I supposed to do with it? And some of these kids have a singular sympathy with you. They've got the complete picture. I would never have expected death to be such a weird aphrodisiac. I don't know why I'm unloading this on you. Maybe I think this is in formation you should have."
I have a life-time habit of putting things off. Of course I knew Ravelstein was in the end zone, that he didn't have long to live. But when Nikki told me that Morris Herbst was coming to town I felt I was on notice to pull myself together.
Ravelstein and Morris Herbst were on the phone every day. With Ravelstein's assistance, Morris, a widower, had managed to bring up two children. Ravelstein was, somehow, in love with their late mother, and spoke of her with singular respect and admiration. He described to me her "dramatic white face, black eyes, a beautiful and sexually open but not promiscuous nature." Nothing in the sexual line is prohibited anymore, but the challenge is to hold your own against the general sexual anarchy. Ravelstein admired Herbst's late wife, loved her. She was the one woman whose photograph he carried in his wallet. So it was entirely natural that he should be a second father to her children. He dug up scholarships and found campus jobs for them, vetted their friends, and made certain that they read the essential classics.
It was Nikki who told me about the photo of Nehamah. "It's there with the credit and Blue Cross cards," he said. "You know that he goes for people who have basic passions-who make the tears come to his eyes. With Abe that counts more than anything."
If Ravelstein didn't often talk about Nehamah Herbst the reason was that in the last months of her life, he and Morris had built a cult of sorts around her. Abe had spent much time with her in the final weeks, and she had spoken freely about secret and intimate matters. Though he couldn't be trusted to respect confidences, he never told me what he and Nehamah had talked about.
Nehamah's mother came over from Mea Sha'arim and begged her daughter to have an orthodox ceremony performed.
"What, on my deathbed?"
"Yes. For the sake of your children you must. I am here to save them."
But one almost never gets the real thing, Ravelstein sometimes said. What truly matters has to be revealed, never performed. But only a handful of human beings have the imagination and the qualities of character to live by the true Eros. Nehamah not only refused to see the orthodox rabbi her mother had brought to her deathbed, but never spoke to her again, and without her daughter's goodbye the old woman flew back to Mea Sha'arim. "Nehamah was pure and she was immovable," Ravelstein said in the low voice of infinite respect.
I am trying as well as I can to transmit the singular connection between Ravelstein and Morris Herbst. For thirty or forty years they were in daily contact. "Now that there is moolah for every purpose, I have the satisfaction of being in touch, of talking to Morris without a thought of the expense," Ravelstein told me. Anyway, he never opened the telephone bills, Nikki said. Those were paid by Legg Mason, the vast investment firm in the East that managed his money. Abe told Nikki, who opened the mail, "I don't like the electronic printouts, I'm certainly not about to study them. Don't bring anything up, don't hand me a statement unless the principal falls below ten million." Here, Nikki's oriental reserve was blown away. He couldn't stop laughing. "Not a penny less than ten big ones," he said. He was open with me because I never pressed him-we never spoke of money. He would have been-let's see, now, what would he have been? "Affronted" is the suitable word. He had his own kind of princely Asiatic mildness, but if you were to offend him Nikki would tear your head off.
Morris Herbst, to get back to him, was at the top of Ravelstein's guest list for every conference he organized. He was the first to be invited and the first to accept. He read a paper at each and every one of Ravelstein's events. He had a reflective, settled, stable air and spoke deliberately without hurry or nervousness. With his square white beard-no mustache-he had the look of a Michigan farmer I had known fifty years ago. Herbst too had studied with Professor Davarr, but without Greek he could never call himself a genuine Davarr product. He taught Goethe, he had written a book about _Elective Affinities__, but the curious fact was-and there were always curious facts-he had a weakness too for cards and dice and was often in Las Vegas. Ravelstein had an extra-high regard for reckless plungers. And I too had a good opinion of Herbst. I couldn't say why. He gambled, he lost his head when he played Twenty-one, and though he mourned his wife he also chased women, but he never made any false claims about himself.