Yes, he had kept the family, just as he promised Nehamah, but the children knew all the details of his womanizing, his love affairs. There was always some lady or other camping in the house after Nehamah died, and women telephoned him from all parts of the country. He had a calm manner-a four-square way of sitting tight. His white hair was both curly and wavy and his color high. He looked well but he owed his life to cardiac surgery. And when you put a question to him, you had to wait while he organized his answer. He might sit tight, considering his reply (several times I clocked him) for as long as five minutes. He was a sober and circumspect conversationalist. German-born, he specialized in Ger man thinkers. He was never as keen on them as he was on women but since the death of his wife he had had one durable love affair with a woman whose none-too-patient husband had to put up with their long nightly telephone calls. Without the telephone, what would Morris's spiritual life have been? Ravelstein preferred the French expression. He said "I wouldn't call Morris a chaser. He's a real _homme а femmes__. If it's not a vocation, it's nothing."
Five years ago, the surgeons had told Herbst his heart was used up. He was wait-listed for a transplant with a very high priority. He had no more than a week to go when a motorcyclist from Missouri was killed in a crash. The boy's organs were harvested. Technically these transplants are an immense achievement. The human side of the thing is that Morris carries another man's heart in his chest. One might accept a skin graft from a compatible stranger. But the heart, we would be inclined to agree, is a different matter. The heart is a mystery. If you've seen your own heart on a video screen, as millions by now have done, convulsing and opening rhythmically, you may have wondered why this persistent muscle is so faithful in its function from the uterus to the last breath. This rhythmic gripping and relaxing blindly goes on. Why? How? And who was it now that prolonged Morris Herbst's life-a harum-scarum adolescent speed demon from Cape Girardeau, Missouri, about whom Herbst knew nothing. Nothing fits here except the old industrial slogan: "The parts are interchangeable." This brings modern reality home to us.
During the war, it often came home to me that the Russian troops driving Hitler's army back through Poland did it all on canned pork from Chicago.
Why pork? Well, it is appropriate in this case. Morris was a believing Jew-not fully orthodox but more or less observant. And this freestyle Jew owes his existence to the heart from the bosom of a young man who lost control of his bike-I don t know the actual circumstances of his death. All I really know is that surgical technicians took out the boy's heart and it now replaced the faltering heart in Herbst's breast. Herbst would tell me that it brought foreign impulses and sensations into his life.
I asked him what that meant.
Seated and circumspect, his hands on his knees, his pale look gone with the leaky heart that had been killing him, the white hair curled around his now ruddy face, he said about himself that just then he felt like the Santa Claus in the department store asking kid dies what they wanted for Christmas. Because at the center of his "physical plant" (his own term for it) his borrowed heart had taken over, and he felt that a different temperament had come with it-boyish, heedless, not just willing but glad to take a risk. "I feel a little like that fellow who calls himself Evel Knievel and jumps his Honda bike over sixteen beer barrels."
I understood this, oddly enough, because at the time I was being treated by a physical therapist who told me that the main organs of the body were surrounded by charged energies and that she, the therapist, was then and there in touch with my gall bladder. I said, "But I no longer have a gall bladder. It's been taken out."
"Sure, but those energies remain-and they'll be there as long as you live," she told me.
I bring this up, with a touch of agnosticism, because I was asked to believe that it was not the young man's heart alone that had changed bodies. The organs are also repositories of the shadows or the assertive impulses-anxious or happy as the case may be, and these had come into Herbst's body with the new heart. They now would need to come to terms with the forces of their new setting.
If this were a kidney or a pancreatic transplant it would be different. But the heart carries so many connotations; it's the center of man's emotions-his higher life.
At any rate, Morris, a German Jew, was saved by this Missouri boy. And I had to restrain myself from questioning him about a heart originally Christian or Gentile, with its shadow energies and its rhythms-how did it adapt itself to Jewish needs or peculiarities, pains and ideas? At this point I could not discuss the subject with Ravelstein. He was in no condition to turn his thoughts in that direction.
The most I dared to do was to ask Morris in the most tentative way about the transplant. He said that in all states when you were issued a driver's license you were asked to check a box agreeing or declining to be an organ donor. "In half a second the kid made an X-what the hell, why not! So the heart was flown east and the surgery was done at Mass General."
"And you don't know anything else about the kid?"
"Very little. I wrote a thank-you letter to his parents."
"What did you tell them, if you don't mind saying?"
"I told them, honestly, how grateful I was, and I came on as a straightforward American so they wouldn't have to worry that their boy's heart was keeping some foreign creep alive…
"It must give you second thoughts, on the road, when you're suddenly surrounded by a gang of young guys on bikes, with scarves, caps, and goggles."
"I'm always braced for that."
"Did the boy's family answer?"
"Not so much as a postcard. But they must be glad his heart is living on." He turned his face downward with a tentative look. His fingers spread on the temple propped up his head-as if he were looking for answers in the motif of Ravelstein's Persian carpet, or doping out a singular message there about the miraculous extension he was given. I had no hope invested in the carpet. I fell back on the language of big-city politics-a strange fix had been put in. And so life-that is, what one incessantly saw, the pictures produced by life-continued. This was related to something I had said to Ravelstein.
When he asked me what view I took of death, how I imagined it, I said that the pictures would stop. Evidently I saw as pictures what Americans refer to as Experience. I wasn't at the moment thinking of the pictures newly available, recently offered by technology-the kind of tour one now might take of one's digestive tract, or of the heart. The heart-only a group of muscles after all. But how tenacious they are, starting to beat in the womb, and going in rhythm for as long as a century. In Herbst's case it had petered out in his fifties, and the transplant would keep him going into his eighties.
He signed himself into the hospital once a year for tests. But by and large his life went on as before. He looked kindly, tolerant, open-minded. His benevolent, silent clock of a face with its clean, curly white border of beard was calm and healthy. He looked women over very closely, checked out their figures, their breasts, legs, their hairstyles. He was one of those men who appreciate, who can do justice to, the qualities of women. His appraisals didn't seem to make anyone uneasy. He took a disinterested pleasure in sizing women up. But his manner was quiet, he didn't make a production of it, and few were annoyed by his interest.