Ravelstein

"And they shouldn't bring love into disrepute," I said.

"Something like that," said Ravelstein. "You've heard the story. After one dance with Battle, whom she had never met before, she left her husband. She stepped into Battle's arms and that was that. In that same instant, both parties recognized that their respective marriages were ended…. He was strong on the tennis court and on the dance floor but he was no seducer, and she was not an unfaithful wife. He said he would be waiting for her at the airport…

"Where was that again?"

"In Brazil. And they've had a happy life."

"I remember now. Their plane was struck by lightning. They had to land in Uruguay. So for many years they were together-forty years without a letdown. The Battles count on me to summarize things, so I obliged and told them their own story. Among millions or hundreds of millions of people they alone lucked out. They had a great love affair and decades of effortless happiness. Each amused the other with his or her eccentricities. How could they bear to cheapen it with a suicide…? I could see that Mrs. Battle was hearing what she hoped to hear. She wanted me to make the case for continuing to live."

"But Battle was not completely satisfied-is that it?"

"That's right, Chick. He wanted a discussion about suicide and nihilism. I've often thought that suicide fantasies and murder fantasies balance each other in the mental economy of civilized people. Battle's not a professor through and through, but he feels a responsibility to square himself with nihilism. He doesn't know much about nihilism but it's in the air. He said something about successful people being prone to suicide-seeing through the illusions of success and doing away with themselves…"

"If you dislike existence then death is your release. You can call this nihilism, if you like."

"Yes. American-style-without the abyss," said Ravelstein. "But the Jews feel that the world was created for each and every one of us, and when you destroy a human life you destroy an entire world-the world as it existed for that person."

All at once Ravelstein was annoyed with me. At least he was speaking with an angry emphasis. Perhaps I was still smiling at the Battles and it might have seemed to him that I was dissociating myself from the view that you destroyed an entire world when you destroyed yourself. As if I would threaten to destroy a world-I who lived to see the phenomena, who believe that the heart of things is shown in the surface of those things. I always said-in answering Ravelstein's question "What do you imagine death will be like?" — "The pictures will stop." Meaning, again, that in the surface of things you saw the heart of things.

To the end, Ravelstein attracted lots of visitors. Few reached his bedroom-Nikki saw to that. But among those who mattered was Sam Pargiter, whose presence was oddly significant. He was one of my close friends. Through me he had read Abe's famous book and attended his public lectures and came also to some of our joint seminars. He highly valued Ravelstein's opinions and his jokes. With a large _No Smoking__ sign behind him, Ravelstein lit cigarettes with his Dunhill flame as he lectured, saying, "If you leave because you hate tobacco more than you love ideas, you won't be missed." He said this with such comic sharpness and good nature that Pargiter then and there fell in love with him and asked me to introduce him to this witty man. I told Ravelstein that my friend Sam Pargiter wanted to meet him.

"Well, we'll make you a double team of totally bald friends," said Ravelstein. Ravelstein did not reproach me for this but it was clear from his way of putting it that since time was now very short I shouldn't bring him new acquaintances.

"Did you say he was a Catholic priest?"

"Once, he was," I said. "He applied for a release. He's a Catholic still…. You have a Jesuit friend yourself-Trimble."

"Trimble and I shared a flat in Paris and we often went out together. But he was a Davarr student like me and we spoke the same language."

"Well, I haven't discussed this with Sam Pargiter but you can be sure that he comes here because he's read you and you can be sure also that he would never try to pull off a ninth-inning conversion."

I discover, looking back, that I was curiously concerned with the people who came to see Ravelstein in his last days and, along the walls of the room, form the largely silent group of witnesses. He no longer had the strength to accept or reject visitors. Of some of them I could say that he didn't at all want them to be there. One of his long-time rivals, Smith, appeared with a new wife who coached the professor at the bedside, "Say that you love him. Go on-say it." And the man lamely said, "I love you," when it was perfectly plain that he loathed him. They loathed each other. Ravelstein broke through this impossible moment with a golden smile but he was no longer capable of intervening. Clearly Smith was angry with his latest wife. Nobody had the authority to order the Smiths to leave the bedside. So it was just as well that Pargiter, whose presences, as I was dying, I would have welcomed, was sitting by the door. Pargiter came to comfort or witness-very simply, to sit along the walls and do a job, largely tacit, of being there.

Those of whom he had a genuine need came regularly. The Floods, for instance, husband and wife, a couple to whom Ravelstein and Nikki were greatly attached. Flood was part of the university administration-community relations were his special responsibility. He represented the University at City Hall and supervised the campus security system-the university police reported to him. Scandal management was one of his assignments. He was a complex, feeling, earnest, and good-hearted man. God knows how many unpleasant matters he had taken care of for the University community. Nor did you have to belong to that community to be taken up by him. There was a Greek restaurant proprietor whose daughter's life Flood saved by arranging surgery at the last possible dangerous moment. All over the city he had a quiet reputation as "a man you could turn to in a pinch." He had done favors for Ravelstein and for me. At home, the Floods' doors, like Ravelstein's own, were open. People came and went with a minimum of challenge or formality. Gilda Flood and her husband very simply loved each other. More than any other human connection this naive (but indispensable) one was valued by Ravelstein. One doesn't have to spell this out. I am simply noting the variety of visitors drawn to Ravelstein's bedside so that when he roused himself to look at them along the walls, he would be comforted to see people with whom he was familiar, with whom he had affinities-something like relatives-the nearest thing to family available.

Toward the end Ravelstein was often impatient with me. He had learned from Professor Davarr that modern people-and, in some ways, I was a modern person-made things too easy for themselves.

And it did them no harm to be called to account-to prune back the persistent overgrowth of delusion. So he could be direct without offense.

Often the dying become extremely severe. We will still be here when they're gone and it's not easy for them to forgive us. If I didn't deserve the ruler for opinion X, I clearly deserved a double rap on the knuckles for Y. The older you grow the worse the discoveries you make about yourself. He would have put to better use the years _I__ was allotted. To acknowledge the plain facts is the least one can do. He thought I was being flippant about the sin of suicide when I said he had given the Battles a very Jewish answer. But then he relented, saying, "Anyway, you can credit me with having saved two lives."

I have at any rate, with Rosamund's help, kept my promise to Ravelstein. He died six years ago, just as the High Holidays were beginning. When I said Kaddish for my parents, I had him in mind, too. And during the memorial service-Yizkor-I began even to give some thought to the memoir I had promised to write and wondered how I would go about it-how to deal with his freaks, quiddities, oddities, his eating, drinking, shaving, dressing, and playfully savaging his students. But that isn't much more than his natural history. Others saw him as bizarre, perverse-grinning, smoking, lecturing, overbearing, impatient, but to me he was brilliant and charming. Out to undermine the social sciences or other university specialties. He was doomed to die because of his irregular sexual ways. About these he was entirely frank with me, with all his close friends. He was considered, to use a term from the past, an invert. Not a "gay." He despised campy homosexuality and took a very low view of "gay pride." There were times when I simply didn't know what to make of his confidences. But then he had chosen me to do his portrait, and when he spoke to me he spoke intimately but also for the record. To lose your head was the great-souled thing to do. I suppose that even in this age people will understand the term "great-souled," though it is not the standing challenge it used to be. Ravelstein in any case counted confidently on my ability to describe him. "You can do it easy," he said to me. I agreed-more or less.