Free Saul Bellow's Heart by Greg Bellow Page B

when we were stopped by Russian soldiers. Flashlights shone in my face and I was terrified, but Maja’s U.S. papers got us through, and I remember the performance of The Magic Flute we saw in Vienna.
    During a brutally hot summer, we spent a month in Rome living above a pasta shop where large sheets of dough were hung up to dry before being cut into spaghetti. The odor of latterias ,milk and cheese shops, carried for blocks. Bored stiff, Anita and I often went to Rome’s zoo, which featured a pink-skinned newborn baby elephant and a bicycle-riding chimp named Gregorio, my name in Italian. By then I had seen dozens of churches. When Saul tried to pique my flagging interest by telling me St. Peter’s was the biggest church in the world, I responded, “In that case we don’t need to see any more!”
    Our final Italian stop was Positano, a town on the Amalfi coast noted for its beauty. Every morning for six weeks, while Saul wrote, Anita and I descended a long staircase to the beach, where she taught me to swim. Our daily routine included a siesta after lunch and a late-afternoon walk to the main part of town, where we feasted on freshly made mozzarella Anita said tasted sweeter than ice cream. One afternoon my parents mis-communicated and I was left alone at the town’s only intersection. I remained perfectly calm and walked home as my parents panicked. On our drive back to Paris, it was my turn to panic. We stopped for ice cream, and when I finished before the others, I climbed into my father’s lap. Bronzed by daily swimming and without a haircut for weeks, I must have looked like an urchin trying to beg money from the rich Americans. A white-helmeted officer tried to shoo me away and, after failing to dislodge me from Saul’s lap, he threatened to arrest me. Saul said “He’s my son” in Italian, but the policeman thought my father was just trying to protect a beggar. Finally, the waiter confirmed that I had arrived with the adults and the officer went on his way.
    When we returned from Europe, we spent a month in Chicago. By now Anita and Saul were barely speaking, and both complainedopenly to family and friends as never before. They were dead broke, but Saul’s manuscript of Augie March was far enough along to attract the interest of Harold Guinzburg, publisher of the Viking Press, who helped us rent an apartment in Forest Hills, a neighborhood in Queens, New York.
    In September of 1950 I began at P.S. 175, where the school day for first graders ended at noon. If my mother was late, I often cried. One day, late because she had waited for Saul to finish writing, Anita brought him along to pick me up. I was already in tears. Recognizing my father’s ability to cheer me up, she said, “Look who came to pick you up from school.” But Anita had to earn a salary and got a job at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Far Rockaway that prevented her from picking me up at noon. Saul and Anita sought advice about a suitable school from Rachel and Paulo Milano, friends who lived nearby. Their son Andy attended a private school that offered a full academic day supplemented by what my mother called “after-school supervision.” In practice that meant simply letting the kids with working parents have the run of the school and its playground until they were picked up.
    The Queens School was populated by red-diaper babies, a term used to describe the children of communists. It was run along lines so egalitarian that we called adults by their first names and once locked our teacher out of the classroom after “going on strike.” The learning model was based on the progressive educational philosophy of John Dewey, which included studying a single theme in depth for a whole school year. I remember that we built a working model of the solar system; made a huge plywood copy of the New York City transit system and took a field trip to see how the subway works; andstudied all the American Indian tribes, even fabricating miniature