The Collected Stories Of Saul Bellow

by Bellow, Saul

  He felt that his luck was better than usual today. When he had reported for work that morning he had expected to be shut up in the relief office at a clerk’s job, for he had been hired downtown as a clerk, and he was glad to have, instead, the freedom of the streets and welcomed, at least at first, the vigor of the cold and even the blowing of the hard wind. But on the other hand he was not getting on with the distribution of the checks. It was true that it was a city job; nobody expected you to push too hard at a city job. His supervisor, that young Mr. Raynor, had practically told him that. Still, he wanted to do well at it. For one thing, when he knew how quickly he could deliver a batch of checks, he would know also how much time he could expect to clip for himself. And then, too, the clients would be waiting for their money. That was not the most important consideration, though it certainly mattered to him. No, but he wanted to do well, simply for doing-well’s sake, to acquit himself decently of a job because he so rarely had a job to do that required just this sort of energy. Of this peculiar energy he now had a superabundance; once it had started to flow, it flowed all too heavily. And, for the time being anyway, he was balked. He could not find Mr. Green.

  So he stood in his big-skirted trench coat with a large envelope in his hand and papers showing from his pocket, wondering why people should be so hard to locate who were too feeble or sick to come to the station to collect their own checks. But Raynor had told him that tracking them down was not easy at first and had offered him some advice on how to proceed. “If you can see the postman, he’s your first man to ask, and your best bet. If you can’t connect with him, try the stores and tradespeople around. Then the janitor and the neighbors. But you’ll find the closer you come to your man the less people will tell you. They don’t want to tell you anything.”

  “Because I’m a stranger.”

  ‘ Because you’re white. We ought to have a Negro doing this, but we don’t at the moment, and of course you’ve got to eat, too, and this is public employment. Jobs have to be made. Oh, that holds for me too. Mind you, I’m not letting myself out. I’ve got three years of seniority on you, that’s all. And a law degree. Otherwise, you might be back of the desk and I might be going out into the field this cold day. The same dough pays us both and for the same, exact, identical reason. What’s my law degree got to do with it? But you have to pass out these checks, Mr. Grebe, and it’ll help if you’re stubborn, so I hope you are.”

  “Yes, I’m fairly stubborn.”

  Raynor sketched hard with an eraser in the old dirt of his desk, left-handed, and said, “Sure, what else can you answer to such a question. Anyhow, the trouble you’re going to have is that they don’t like to give information about anybody. They think you’re a plainclothes dick or an installment collector, or summons-server or something like that. Till you’ve been seen around the neighborhood for a few months and people know you’re only from the relief.”

  It was dark, ground-freezing, pre-Thanksgiving weather; the wind played hob with the smoke, rushing it down, and Grebe missed his gloves, which he had left in Raynor’s office. And no one would admit knowing Green. It was past three o’clock and the postman had made his last delivery. The nearest grocer, himself a Negro, had never heard the name Tulliver Green, or said he hadn’t. Grebe was inclined to think that it was true, that he had in the end convinced the man that he wanted only to deliver a check. But he wasn’t sure. He needed experience in interpreting looks and signs and, even more, the will not to be put off or denied and even the force to bully if need be. If the grocer did know, he had got rid of him easily. But since most of his trade was with reliefers, why should he prevent the delivery of a check? Maybe Green, or Mrs. Green, if there was a Mrs. Green, patronized another grocer. And was there a Mrs. Green? It was one of Grebe’s great handicaps that he hadn’t looked at any of the case records. Raynor should have let him read files for a few hours. But he apparently saw no need for that, probably considering the job unimportant. Why prepare systematically to deliver a few checks?

  But now it was time to look for the janitor. Grebe took in the building in the wind and gloom of the late November day—trampled, frost-hardened lots on one side; on the other, an automobile junk yard and then the infinite work of Elevated frames, weak-looking, gaping with rubbish fires; two sets of leaning brick porches three stories high and a flight of cement stairs to the cellar. Descending, he entered the underground passage, where he tried the doors until one opened and he found himself in the furnace room. There someone rose toward him and approached, scraping on the coal grit and bending under the canvas-jacketed pipes.

  “Are you the janitor?”

  “What do you want?”

  “I’m looking for a man who’s supposed to be living here. Green.”

  “What Green?”

  “Oh, you maybe have more than one Green?” said Grebe with new, pleasant hope. “This is Tulliver Green.”

  “I don’t think I c’n help you, mister. I don’t know any.”

  “A crippled man.”

  The janitor stood bent before him. Could it be that he was crippled? Oh, God! what if he was. Grebe’s gray eyes sought with excited difficulty to see. But no, he was only very short and stooped. A head awakened from meditation, a strong-haired beard, low, wide shoulders. A staleness of sweat and coal rose from his black shirr and the burlap sack he wore as an apron.

  “Crippled how?”

  Grebe thought and then answered with the light voice of unmixed candor, “I don’t know. I’ve never seen him.” This was damaging, but his only other choice was to make a lying guess, and he was not up to it. “I’m delivering checks for the relief to shut-in cases. If he weren’t crippled he’d come to collect himself. That’s why I said crippled. Bedridden, chair-ridden—is there anybody like that?”

  This sort of frankness was one of Grebe’s oldest talents, going back to childhood. But it gained him nothing here.

  “No suh. I’ve got four buildin’s same as this that I take care of. I don’ know all the tenants, leave alone the tenants’ tenants. The rooms turn over so fast, people movin’ in and out every day. I can’t tell you.”

  The janitor opened his grimy lips, but Grebe did not hear him in the piping of the valves and the consuming pull of air to flame in the body of the furnace. He knew, however, what he had said.

  “Well, all the same, thanks. Sorry I bothered you. I’ll prowl around upstairs again and see if I can turn up someone who knows him.”

  Once more in the cold air and early darkness he made the short circle from the cellarway to the entrance crowded between the brickwork pillars and began to climb to the third floor. Pieces of plaster ground under his feet; strips of brass tape from which the carpeting had been torn away marked old boundaries at the sides. In the passage, the cold reached him worse than in the street; it touched him to the bone. The hall toilets ran like springs. He thought grimly as he heard the wind burning around the building with a sound like that of the furnace, that this was a great piece of constructed shelter. Then he struck a match in the gloom and searched for names and numbers among the writings and scribbles on the walls. He saw WHOODY-DOODY GO TO JESUS, and zigzags, caricatures, sexual scrawls, and curses. So the sealed rooms of pyramids were also decorated, and the caves of human dawn.

  The information on his card was, TUIXIVER GREEN—APT 3D. There were no names, however, and no numbers. His shoulders drawn up, tears of cold in his eyes, breathing vapor, he went the length of the corridor and told himself that if he had been lucky enough to have the temperament for it he would bang on one of the doors and bawl out “Tulliver Green!” until he got results. But it wasn’t in him to make an uproar and he continued to burn matches, passing the light over the walls. At the rear, in a corner off the hall, he discovered a door he had not seen before and he thought it best to investigate. It sounded empty when he knocked, but a young Negress answered, hardly more than a girl. She opened only a bit, to guard the warmth of the room.

  “Yes suh?”

&nb
sp; “I’m from the district relief station on Prairie Avenue. I’m looking for a man named Tulliver Green to give him his check. Do you know him?”

  No, she didn’t; but he thought she had not understood anything of what he had said. She had a dream-bound, dream-blind face, very soft and black, shut off. She wore a man’s jacket and pulled the ends together at her throat. Her hair was parted in three directions, at the sides and transversely, standing up at the front in a dull puff.

  “Is there somebody around here who might know?”

  “I jus’ taken this room las’ week.”

  He observed that she shivered, but even her shiver was somnambulistic and there was no sharp consciousness of cold in the big smooth eyes of her handsome face.

  “All right, miss, thank you. Thanks,” he said, and went to try another place. Here he was admitted. He was grateful, for the room was warm. It was full of people, and they were silent as he entered—ten people, or a dozen, perhaps more, sitting on benches like a parliament. There was no light, properly speaking, but a tempered darkness that the window gave, and everyone seemed to him enormous, the men padded out in heavy work clothes and winter coats, and the women huge, too, in their sweaters, hats, and old furs. And, besides, bed and bedding, a black cooking range, a piano piled towering to the ceiling with papers, a dining-room table of the old style of prosperous Chicago. Among these people Grebe, with his cold-heightened fresh color and his smaller stature, entered like a schoolboy. Even though he was met with smiles and goodwill, he knew, before a single word was spoken, that all the currents ran against him and that he would make no headway. Nevertheless he began. “Does anybody here know how I can deliver a check to Mr. Tulliver Green?”

  “Green?” It was the man that had let him in who answered. He was in short sleeves, in a checkered shirt, and had a queer, high head, profusely overgrown and long as a shako; the veins entered it strongly from his forehead. “I never heard mention of him. Is this where he live?”

  “This is the address they gave me at the station. He’s a sick man, and he’ll need his check. Can’t anybody tell me where to find him?”

  He stood his ground and waited for a reply, his crimson wool scarf wound about his neck and drooping outside his trench coat, pockets weighted with the block of checks and official forms. They must have realized that he was not a college boy employed afternoons by a bill collector, trying foxily to pass for a relief clerk, recognized that he was an older man who knew himself what need was, who had had more than an average seasoning in hardship. It was evident enough if you looked at the marks under his eyes and at the sides of his mouth. “Anybody know this sick man?”

  “No suh.” On all sides he saw heads shaken and smiles of denial. No one knew. And maybe it was true, he considered, standing silent in the earthen, musky human gloom of the place as the rumble continued. But he could never really be sure.

  “What’s the matter with this man?” said shako-head.

  “I’ve never seen him. Ail I can tell you is that he can’t come in person for his money. It’s my first day in this district.”

  “Maybe they given you the wrong number?”

  “I don’t believe so. But where else can I ask about him?” He felt that this persistence amused them deeply, and in a way he shared their amusement that he should stand up so tenaciously to them. Though smaller, though slight, he was his own man, he retracted nothing about himself, and he looked back at them, gray-eyed, with amusement and also with a sort of courage. On the bench some man spoke in his throat, the words impossible to catch, and a woman answered with a wild, shrieking laugh, which was quickly cut off.

  “Well, so nobody will tell me?”

  “Ain’t nobody who knows.”

  “At least, if he lives here, he pays rent to someone. Who manages the building?”

  “Greatham Company. That’s on Thirty-ninth Street.”

  Grebe wrote it in his pad. But, in the street again, a sheet of wind-driven paper clinging to his leg while he deliberated what direction to take next, it seemed a feeble lead to follow. Probably this Green didn’t rent a flat, but a room. Sometimes there were as many as twenty people in an apartment; the realestate agent would know only the lessee. And not even the agent could tell you who the renters were. In some places the beds were even used in shifts, watchmen or jitney drivers or short-order cooks in night joints turning out after a day’s sleep and surrendering their beds to a sister, a nephew, or perhaps a stranger, just off the bus. There were large numbers of newcomers in this terrific, blight-bitten portion of the city between Cottage Grove and Ashland, wandering from house to house and room to room. When you saw them, how could you know them? They didn’t carry bundles on their backs or look picturesque. You only saw a man, a Negro, walking in the street or riding in the car, like everyone else, with his thumb closed on a transfer. And therefore how were you supposed to tell? Grebe thought the Greatham agent would only laugh at his question.

  But how much it would have simplified the job to be able to say that Green was old, or blind, or consumptive. An hour in the files, taking a few notes, and he needn’t have been at such a disadvantage. When Raynor gave him the block of checks Grebe asked, “How much should I know about these people?” Then Raynor had looked as though Grebe were preparing to accuse him of trying to make the job more important than it was. Grebe smiled, because by then they were on fine terms, but nevertheless he had been getting ready to say something like that when the confusion began in the station over Staika and her children.

  Grebe had waited a long time for this job. It came to him through the pull of an old schoolmate in the Corporation Counsel’s office, never a close friend, but suddenly sympathetic and interested—pleased to show, moreover, how well he had done, how strongly he was coming on even in these miserable times. Well, he was coming through strongly, along with the Democratic administration itself. Grebe had gone to see him in City Hall, and they had had a counter lunch or beers at least once a month for a year, and finally it had been possible to swing the job. He didn’t mind being assigned the lowest clerical grade, nor even being a messenger, though Raynor thought he did.

  This Raynor was an original sort of guy and Grebe had taken to him immediately. As was proper on the first day, Grebe had come early, but he waited long, for Raynor was late. At last he darted into his cubicle of an office as though he had just jumped from one of those hurtling huge red Indian Avenue cars. His thin, rough face was wind-stung and he was grinning and saying something breathlessly to himself. In his hat, a small fedora, and his coat, the velvet collar a neat fit about his neck, and his silk muffler that set off the nervous twist of his chin, he swayed and turned himself in his swivel chair, feet leaving the ground, so that he pranced a little as he sat. Meanwhile he took Grebe’s measure out of his eyes, eyes of an unusual vertical length and slightly sardonic. So the two men sat for a while, saying nothing, while the supervisor raised his hat from his miscombed hair and put it in his lap. His cold-darkened hands were not clean. A steel beam passed through the little makeshift room, from which machine belts once had hung. The building was an old factory.

  “I’m younger than you; I hope you won’t find it hard taking orders from me,” said Raynor. “But I don’t make them up, either. You’re how old, about?”

  “Thirty-five.”

  ‘And you thought you’d be inside doing paperwork. But it so happens I have to send you out.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “And it’s mostly a Negro load we have in this district.”

  “So I thought it would be.”

  “Fine. You’ll get along. C’est un bon boulot._ Do you know French?”

  “Some.”

  “I thought you’d be a university man.”

  “Have you been in France?” said Grebe.

  “No, that’s the French of the Berlitz School. I’ve been at it for more than a year, just as I’m sure people have been, all over the world, office boys in China and braves in Tanganyika. In fact, I
damn well know it. Such is the attractive power of civilization. It’s overrated, but what do you want? Que voulez-vous?_ I get Le Rire_ and all the spicy papers, just like in Tanganyika. It must be mystifying, out there. But my reason is that I’m aiming at the diplomatic service. I have a cousin who’s a courier, and the way he describes it is awfully attractive. He rides in the wagon-lits_ and reads books. While we—What did you do before?”

  “I sold.”

  “Where?”

  “Canned meat at Stop and Shop. In the basement.”

  “And before that?”

  “Window shades, at Goldblatt’s.”

  “Steady work?”

  “No, Thursdays and Saturdays. I also sold shoes.”

  “You’ve been a shoe-dog too. Well. And prior to that? Here it is in your folder.” He opened the record. “Saint Olafs College, instructor in classical languages. Fellow, University of Chicago, 1926-27. I’ve had Latin, too. Let’s trade quotations—_’Dum spiro spew.__