by Bellow, Saul
“You don’t support your children,” said Mrs. Skoglund.
“That’s right,” said Hjordis.
“I haven’t got it. If I had it, wouldn’t I give it? There’s bread lines and soup lines all over town. Is it just me? What I have I divvy with. I give the kids. A bad father? You think my son would bring me if I was a bad father into your house? He loves his dad, he trusts his dad, he knows his dad is a good dad. Every time I start a little business going I get wiped out. This one is a good little business, if I could hold on to that little business. Three people work for me, I meet a payroll, and three people will be on the street, too, if I close down. Missus, I can sign a note and pay you in two months. I’m a common man, but I’m a hard worker and a fellow you can trust.”
Woody was startled when Pop used the word “trust.” It was as if from all four corners a Sousa band blew a blast to warn the entire world: “Crook! This is a crook!” But Mrs. Skoglund, on account of her religious preoccupations, was remote. She heard nothing. Although everybody in this part of the world, unless he was crazy, led a practical life, and you’d have nothing to say to anyone, your neighbors would have nothing to say to you, if communications were not of a practical sort, Mrs. Skoglund, with all her money, was unworldly—two-thirds out of this world.
“Give me a chance to show what’s in me,” said Pop, “and you’ll see what I do for my kids.”
So Mrs. Skoglund hesitated, and then she said she’d have to go upstairs, she’d have to go to her room and pray on it and ask for guidance—would they sit down and wait. There were two rocking chairs by the stove. Hjordis gave Pop a grim look (a dangerous person) and Woody a blaming one (he brought a dangerous stranger and disrupter to injure two kind Christian ladies). Then she went out with Mrs. Skoglund.
As soon as they left, Pop jumped up from the rocker and said in anger, “What’s this with the praying? She has to ask God to lend me fifty bucks?”
Woody said, “It’s not you, Pop, it’s the way these religious people do.”
“No,” said Pop. “She’ll come back and say that God wouldn’t let her.”
Woody didn’t like that; he thought Pop was being gross and he said, “No, she’s sincere. Pop, try to understand: she’s emotional, nervous, and sincere, and tries to do right by everybody.”
And Pop said, “That servant will talk her out of it. She’s a toughie. It’s all over her face that we’re a couple of chiselers.”
“What’s the use of us arguing,” said Woody. He drew the rocker closer to the stove. His shoes were wet through and would never dry. The blue flames fluttered like a school of fishes in the coal fire. But Pop went over to the Chinese-style cabinet or щtagшre and tried the handle, and then opened the blade of his penknife and in a second had forced the lock of the curved glass door. He took out a silver dish.
“Pop, what is this?” said Woody.
Pop, cool and level, knew exactly what this was. He relocked the щtagшre, crossed the carpet, listened. He stuffed the dish under his belt and pushed it down into his trousers. He put the side of his short thick finger to his mouth.
So Woody kept his voice down, but he was all shook up. He went to Pop and took him by the edge of his hand. As he looked into Pop’s face, he felt his eyes growing smaller and smaller, as if something were contracting all the skin on his head. They call it hyperventilation when everything feels tight and light and close and dizzy. Hardly breathing, he said, “Put it back, Pop.”
Pop said, “It’s solid silver; it’s worth dough.”
“Pop, you said you wouldn’t get me in Dutch.”
“It’s only insurance in case she comes back from praying and tells me no. If she says yes, I’ll put it back.”
“How?”
“It’ll get back. If I don’t put it back, you will.”
“You picked the lock. I couldn’t. I don’t know how.”
“There’s nothing to it.”
“We’re going to put it back now. Give it here.”
Woody, it’s under my fly, inside my underpants. Don’t make such a noise about nothing.”
‘Pop, I can’t believe this.”
For cry-ninety-nine, shut your mouth. If I didn’t trust you I wouldn’t have let you watch me do it. You don’t understand a thing. What’s with you?”
Before they come down, Pop, will you dig that dish out of your long Johns.”
Pop turned stiff on him. He became absolutely military. He said, “Look, I order you!”
Before he knew it, Woody had jumped his father and begun to wrestle with him. It was outrageous to clutch your own father, to put a heel behind him, to force him to the wall. Pop was taken by surprise and said loudly, “You want Halina killed? Kill her! Go on, you be responsible.” He began to resist, angry, and they turned about several times, when Woody, with a trick he had learned in a Western movie and used once on the playground, tripped him and they fell to the ground. Woody, who already outweighed the old man by twenty pounds, was on top. They landed on the floor beside the stove, which stood on a tray of decorated tin to protect the carpet. In this position, pressing Pop’s hard belly, Woody recognized that to have wrestled him to the floor counted for nothing. It was impossible to thrust his hand under Pop’s belt to recover the dish. And now Pop had turned furious, as a father has every right to be when his son is violent with him, and he freed his hand and hit Woody in the face. He hit him three or four times in midface. Then Woody dug his head into Pop’s shoulder and held tight only to keep from being struck and began to say in his ear, “Jesus, Pop, for Christ’s sake remember where you are. Those women will be back!” But Pop brought up his short knee and fought and butted him with his chin and rattled Woodys teeth. Woody thought the old man was about to bite him. And because he was a seminarian, he thought: Like an unclean spirit. And held tight. Gradually Pop stopped thrashing and struggling. His eyes stuck out and his mouth was open, sullen. Like a stout fish. Woody released him and gave him a hand up. He was then overcome with many many bad feelings of a sort he knew the old man never suffered. Never, never. Pop never had these groveling emotions. There was his whole superiority. Pop had no such feelings. He was like a horseman from Central Asia, a bandit from China. It was Mother, from Liverpool, who had the refinement, the English manners. It was the preaching Reverend Doctor in his black suit. You have refinements, and all they do is oppress you? The hell with that.
The long door opened and Mrs. Skoglund stepped in, saying, “Did I imagine, or did something shake the house?”
“I was lifting the scuttle to put coal on the fire and it fell out of my hand. I’m sorry I was so clumsy,” said Woody.
Pop was too huffy to speak. With his eyes big and sore and the thin hair down over his forehead, you could see by the tightness of his belly how angrily he was fetching his breath, though his mouth was shut.
“I prayed,” said Mrs. Skoglund.
“I hope it came out well,” said Woody.
“Well, I don’t do anything without guidance, but the answer was yes, and I feel right about it now. So if you’ll wait, I’ll go to my office and write a check. I asked Hjordis to bring you a cup of coffee. Coming in such a storm.”
And Pop, consistently a terrible little man, as soon as she shut the door, said, “A check? Hell with a check. Get me the greenbacks.”
“They don’t keep money in the house. You can cash it in her bank tomorrow. But if they miss that dish, Pop, they’ll stop the check, and then where are you?”
As Pop was reaching below the belt, Hjordis brought in the tray. She was very sharp with him. She said, “Is this a place to adjust clothing, Mister? A men’s washroom?”
“Well, which way is the toilet, then?” said Pop.
She had served the coffee in the seamiest mugs in the pantry, and she bumped down the tray and led Pop along the corridor, standing guard at the bathroom door so that he shouldn’t wander about the house.
Mrs. Skoglund called Woody to her office and after she had given him the
folded check said that they should pray together for Morris. So once more he was on his knees, under rows and rows of musty marbled-cardboard files, by the glass lamp by the edge of the desk, the shade with flounced edges, like the candy dish. Mrs. Skoglund, in her Scandinavian accent—an emotional contralto—raising her voice to Jesus-uh Christ-uh, as the wind lashed the trees, kicked the side of the house, and drove the snow seething on the windowpanes, to send light-uh, give guidance-uh, put a new heart-uh in Pop’s bosom. Woody asked God only to make Pop put the dish back. He kept Mrs. Skoglund on her knees as long as possible. Then he thanked her, shining with candor (as much as he knew how), for her Christian generosity and he said, “I know that Hjordis has a cousin who works at the Evanston YMCA. Could she please phone him and try to get us a room tonight so that we don’t have to fight the blizzard all the way back? We’re almost as close to the Y as to the car line. Maybe the cars have even stopped running.”
Suspicious Hjordis, coming when Mrs. Skoglund called to her, was burning now. First they barged in, made themselves at home, asked for money, had to have coffee, probably left gonorrhea on the toilet seat. Hjordis, Woody remembered, was a woman who wiped the doorknobs with rubbing alcohol after guests had left. Nevertheless, she telephoned the Y and got them a room with two cots for six bits.
Pop had plenty of time, therefore, to reopen the щtagшre, lined with reflecting glass or German silver (something exquisitely delicate and tricky), and as soon as the two Selbsts had said thank you and good-bye and were in midstreet again up to the knees in snow, Woody said, “Well, I covered for you. Is that thing back?”
“Of course it is,” said Pop.
They fought their way to the small Y building, shut up in wire grille and resembling a police station—about the same dimensions. It was locked, but they made a racket on the grille, and a small black man let them in and shuffled them upstairs to a cement corridor with low doors. It was like the small-mammal house in Lincoln Park. He said there was nothing to eat, so they took off their wet pants, wrapped themselves tightly in the khaki army blankets, and passed out on their cots.
First thing in the morning, they went to the Evanston National Bank and got the fifty dollars. Not without difficulties. The teller went to call Mrs. Skoglund and was absent a long time from the wicket. “Where the hell has he gone?” said Pop.
But when the fellow came back, he said, “How do you want it?”
Pop said, “Singles.” He told Woody, “Bujak stashes it in one-dollar bills.”
But by now Woody no longer believed Halina had stolen the old man’s money.
Then they went into the street, where the snow-removal crews were at work. The sun shone broad, broad, out of the morning blue, and all Chicago would be releasing itself from the temporary beauty of those vast drifts.
“You shouldn’t have jumped me last night, Sonny.”
“I know, Pop, but you promised you wouldn’t get me in Dutch.”
“Well, it’s okay. We can forget it, seeing you stood by me.”
Only, Pop had taken the silver dish. Of course he had, and in a few days Mrs. Skoglund and Hjordis knew it, and later in the week they were all waiting for Woody in Kovner’s office at the settlement house. The group included the Reverend Doctor Crabbie, head of the seminary, and Woody, who had been flying along, level and smooth, was shot down in flames. He told them he was innocent. Even as he was falling, he warned that they were wronging him. He denied that he or Pop had touched Mrs. Skoglund’s property. The missing object—he didn’t even know what it was—had probably been misplaced, and they would be very sorry on the day it turned up. After the others were done with him, Dr. Crabbie said that until he was able to tell the truth he would be suspended from the seminary, where his work had been unsatisfactory anyway. Aunt Rebecca took him aside and said to him, “You are a little crook, like your father. The door is closed to you here.”
To this Pop’s comment was “So what, kid?”
“Pop, you shouldn’t have done it.”
“No? Well, I don’t give a care, if you want to know. You can have the dish if you want to go back and square yourself with all those hypocrites.”
“I didn’t like doing Mrs. Skoglund in the eye, she was so kind to us.”
“Kind?”
“Kind.”
“Kind has a price tag.”
Well, there was no winning such arguments with Pop. But they debated it in various moods and from various elevations and perspectives for forty years and more, as their intimacy changed, developed, matured.
“Why did you do it, Pop? For the money? What did you do with the fifty bucks?” Woody, decades later, asked him that.
“I settled with the bookie, and the rest I put in the business.”
“You tried a few more horses.”
“I maybe did. But it was a double, Woody. I didn’t hurt myself, and at the same time did you a favor.”
“It was for me?”
“It was too strange of a life. That life wasn’t you,_ Woody. All those women… Kovner was no man, he was an in-between. Suppose they made you a minister? Some Christian minister! First of all, you wouldn’t have been able to stand it, and second, they would have thrown you out sooner or later.”
“Maybe so.”
“And you wouldn’t have converted the Jews, which was the main thing they wanted.”
“And what a time to bother the Jews,” Woody said. “At least / didn’t bug them.”
Pop had carried him back to his side of the line, blood of his blood, the same thick body walls, the same coarse grain. Not cut out for a spiritual life. Simply not up to it.
Pop was no worse than Woody, and Woody was no better than Pop. Pop wanted no relation to theory, and yet he was always pointing Woody toward a position—a jolly, hearty, natural, likable, unprincipled position. If Woody had a weakness, it was to be unselfish. This worked to Pop’s advantage, but he criticized Woody for it, nevertheless. “You take too much on yourself,” Pop was always saying. And it’s true that Woody gave Pop his heart because Pop was so selfish. It’s usually the selfish people who are loved the most. They do what you deny yourself, and you love them for it. You give them your heart.
Remembering the pawn ticket for the silver dish, Woody startled himself with a laugh so sudden that it made him cough. Pop said to him after his expulsion from the seminary and banishment from the settlement house, “You want in again? Here’s the ticket. I hocked that thing. It wasn’t so valuable as I thought.”
“What did they give?”
“Twelve-fifty was all I could get. But if you want it you’ll have to raise the dough yourself, because I haven’t got it anymore.”
‘You must have been sweating in the bank when the teller went to call Mrs. Skoglund about the check.”
I was a little nervous,” said Pop. “But I didn’t think they could miss the thing so soon.”
That theft was part of Pop’s war with Mother. With Mother, and Aunt Rebecca, and the Reverend Doctor. Pop took his stand on realism. Mother represented the forces of religion and hypochondria. In four decades, the fighting never stopped. In the course of time, Mother and the girls turned into welfare personalities and lost their individual outlines. Ah, the poor things, they became dependents and cranks. In the meantime, Woody, the sinful man, was their dutiful and loving son and brother. He maintained the bungalow—this took in roofing, pointing, wiring, insulation, air-conditioning—and he paid for heat and light and food, and dressed them all out of Sears, Roebuck and Wieboldt’s, and bought them a TV, which they watched as devoutly as they prayed. Paula took courses to learn skills like macramщ-making and needlepoint, and sometimes got a little job as recreational worker in a nursing home. But she wasn’t steady enough to keep it. Wicked Pop spent most of his life removing stains from people’s clothing. He and Halina in the last years ran a Cleanomat in West Rogers Park—a so-so business resembling a Laundromat—which gave him leisure for billiards, the horses, rummy and pinochle. Every morning he
went behind the partition to check out the filters of the cleaning equipment. He found amusing things that had been thrown into the vats with the clothing—sometimes, when he got lucky, a locket chain or a brooch. And when he had fortified the cleaning fluid, pouring all that blue and pink stuff in from plastic jugs, he read the Forward over_ a second cup of coffee, and went out, leaving Halina in charge. When they needed help with the rent, Woody gave it.
After the new Disney World was opened in Florida, Woody treated all his dependents to a holiday. He sent them down in separate batches, of course. Halina enjoyed this more than anybody else. She couldn’t stop talking about the address given by an Abraham Lincoln automaton. “Wonderful, how he stood up and moved his hands, and his mouth. So real! And how beautiful he talked.” Of them all, Halina was the soundest, the most human, the most honest. Now that Pop was gone, Woody and Halina’s son, Mitosh, the organist at the Stadium, took care of her needs over and above Social Security, splitting expenses. In Pop’s opinion, insurance was a racket. He left Halina nothing but some out-of-date equipment.
Woody treated himself, too. Once a year, and sometimes oftener, he left his business to run itself, arranged with the trust department at the bank to take care of his gang, and went off. He did that in style, imaginatively, expensively. In Japan, he wasted little time on Tokyo. He spent three weeks in Kyoto and stayed at the Tawaraya Inn, dating from the seventeenth century or so. There he slept on the floor, the Japanese way, and bathed in scalding water. He saw the dirtiest strip show on earth, as well as the holy places and the temple gardens. He visited also Istanbul, Jerusalem, Delphi, and went to Burma and Uganda and Kenya on safari, on democratic terms with drivers, Bedouins, bazaar merchants. Open, lavish, familiar, fleshier and fleshier but still muscular (he jogged, he lifted weights)—in his naked person beginning to resemble a Renaissance courtier in full costume—becoming ruddier every year, an outdoor type with freckles on his back and spots across the flaming forehead and the honest nose. In Addis Ababa he took an Ethiopian beauty to his room from the street and washed her, getting into the shower with her to soap her with his broad, kindly hands. In Kenya he taught certain American obscenities to a black woman so that she could shout them out during the act. On the Nile, below Murchison Falls, those fever trees rose huge from the mud, and hippos on the sandbars belched at the passing launch, hostile. One of them danced on his spit of sand, springing from the ground and coming down heavy, on all fours. There, Woody saw the buffalo calf disappear, snatched by the crocodile.