When Herbst arrived I made myself scarce. Friends for nearly half a century, Abe and Morris would have a world of things to say to each other. Ravelstein was calling from his bed, "Bring him here." The Pratesi sheets had been pulled out at the corners and the mink coverlet, beautifully cured and soft, had fallen to the floor. On the walls, the paintings somehow were never hanging straight. All the good antique pieces in the room were piled with clothing and with manuscripts and letters. The letters always made me think of the controversies he was involved in-the powerful unforgiving enemies he had made in the academic world. He didn't care a damn about any of them.
Herbst stooped at the bedside and hugged Ravelstein.
"Chick, pull up a seat for Morris, won't you.'
I brought forward the round-backed leather Italian chair. You tended to forget that Herbst was kept alive by his transplant. He looked well enough to attend to normal needs. I half suspected for a moment that Ravelstein preferred him, his oldest friend, to be an invalid. But that thought was very brief. It was unlike Ravelstein to play around like that. He was dying, of course, but there wasn't going to be any sickroom business. He needed-he wanted-to talk.
I got out, leaving the friends together in what Ravelstein had furnished as a kind of bedroom fit for a man of his stature. Almost immediately I heard the two of them laughing loudly-they were telling each other the best (the crudest, the raunchiest) jokes they had heard lately. The solemn "last days of Socrates" atmosphere was not Ravelstein's style. This was not the time to be somebody else-not even Socrates. You wanted more than ever to be what you had always been. He wasn't about to fool away his declining hours being somebody else.
When they settled down for their private talk I went home and reported the day's events to Rosamund. She had been on the phone with the woman who was typing her dissertation. She'd be giving her doctoral lecture in a few weeks. She had studied for five years with Ravelstein, so that if I needed to know what Machiavelli owed to Livy I had only to ask this slender, handsome young woman with the long blue eyes. I cared little these days about Machiavelli's debts. What was more important and tremendously comforting to me was that there was nothing I could say to this woman that she wouldn't understand.
"Did Herbst arrive? They must have so much to say to each other."
"I don't doubt that they do, but they had a few dirty jokes to tell each other first. It's an odd occasion from any angle. There's Herbst with another man's heart beating away in his chest and Ravelstein has already said goodbye to him. In a way jokes are more suitable than a conversation on the soul and immortality. To find out what happens after you stop breathing you have to buy a ticket."
"To die?"
"Well, is there any other way to get the information?"
"Did Nikki tell you that Dr. Schley is sending Ravelstein back to the hospital?"
"I'm surprised," I said. "He's just learned to walk again. You thought he'd at least have a year more."
"Didn't you?" said Rosamund.
"Sure, but he wouldn't want it to just drag on. In the hospital he'll have more protection from friends and well-wishers."
"He's far more sociable than you, Chick. He enjoys company."
It was not merely a matter of company. People brought their problems to him as well, as if from his deathbed you could expect something approaching divine information.
The door to Ravelstein's bedroom stood open and I could see our friend Battle's long back-hair resting on his mountainous shoulders, and his natty, ankle-high boots. I didn't have his face fully before me but his wife was evidently crying. She was bent forward. Those couldn't have been anything but tears. I had great respect for Mrs. Battle and was very fond of her husband.
The Battles were Ravelstein fans. They never attended his public lectures and I doubt they read his books, but they took him very seriously. When Battle retired some years ago, he and his wife moved across the state line into the Wisconsin woods, living very simply, а la Thoreau. When they were in town Ravelstein liked to dine with them at our Serbian-French club.
I had made the discovery that if you put people in a comic light they became more likable-if you spoke of someone as a gross, belching, wall-eyed human pike you got along much better with him, thereafter partly because you were aware that you were the sadist who took away his human attributes. Also, having done him some metaphorical violence, you owed him special consideration.
After they had gone Ravelstein said to me (he was coiled up with some internal amusement) that the purpose of their visit was to get his advice.
"About what?"
"They came to talk to me about their suicide plans. They apologized for troubling me. At such a time…"
"I should think so," I said.
"Don't be too hard on them, Chick. With older people suicide fantasies are common enough. I think they were serious."
"They thought they were being serious."
"Because I'm dying I had the same thought, naturally. This is a hell of a time for people to be bringing me their problems. They put it in the 'just suppose' form. Did I think that in the abstract, at their time of life, and all the rest of it, they would be well advised…?"
"A suicide pact?"
"Battle made the argument and she filled it out and added the sensible comment. They said I was the only person they trusted enough and who wouldn't be satirical with them."
"So you come to a man who would rather not die and you put your case for suicide to him."
"Battle has been hinting at it for weeks. He's a very intelligent per son, but he has too much character to overcome. His character makes him inarticulate. She's the more sensible one, and she came wearing a plain blue suit with rows of buttons down the front. She's a little thing. Or is it the supersized husband that makes her look tiny? Anyway, she has a pretty, upward-looking small Brit face. I think that when kids look at her they must see a lovely, sympathetic face…."
"So what's their complaint?"
"The complaint is that they're getting old. All educated people make the same mistake-they think that nature and solitude are good for them. Nature and solitude are poison," said Ravelstein. "Poor Battle and his wife are depressed by the woods. That's the first observation to be made."
"What did you tell them?"
"I said they had done right to take it up with me. More people should get advice when they're suicidal. They feel that way because there's no community, no one to talk to."
"Maybe it's their idea of a tribute-as if they were saying that life without their friend Ravelstein would lose its value," I said.
"Well, they're dear people," said Ravelstein. "They dreamed up this occult way of letting me know that I didn't have to go it alone."
"Obviously they talk about you all the time, and you may have become their absent referee."
"So that if I died they might as well be dead, too," said Ravelstein, but this was his way of making light of the subject. He loved gossip but the interest he took in people would be hard to describe. He had a curious intuitive ability but with him it wasn't so much analysis as it was divination that you sensed when he talked about personalities, or groped them out.
"What I said was that it was a mistake to make suicide a matter of argument or debate. To reason for or against life is kid stuff."
"You have great authority with both of the Battles, and if you said don't do it, they wouldn't do it."
"That's not my style, Chick, to lay down the law."
This was certainly untrue.
"They wanted to be taken seriously," he said. "But of course they weren't. They wanted to amuse me with their double-suicide routine."
That was more like it.
"I told them they had had a great love affair. A classic."