by Bellow, Saul
” ‘De dextram misero._
_” ─leajacta est. ‘ “__
” ‘Excelsior._
Raynor shouted with laughter, and other workers came to look at him over the partition. Grebe also laughed, feeling pleased and easy. The luxury of fun on a nervous morning.
When they were done and no one was watching or listening, Raynor said rather seriously, “What made you study Latin in the first place? Was it for the priesthood?”
“No.”
“Just for the hell of it? For the culture? Oh, the things people think they can pull!” He made his cry hilarious and tragic. “I ran my pants off so I could study for the bar, and I’ve passed the bar, so I get twelve dollars a week more than you as a bonus for having seen life straight and whole. I’ll tell you, as a man of culture, that even though nothing looks to be real, and everything stands for something else, and that thing for another thing, and that thing for a still further one—there ain’t any comparison between twenty-five and thirty-seven dollars a week, regardless of the last reality. Don’t you think that was clear to your Greeks? They were a thoughtful people, but they didn’t part with their slaves.”
This was a great deal more than Grebe had looked for in his first interview with his supervisor. He was too shy to show all the astonishment he felt. He laughed a little, aroused, and brushed at the sunbeam that covered his head with its dust. “Do you think my mistake was so terrible?”
‘Damn right it was terrible, and you know it now that you’ve had the whip of hard times laid on your back. You should have been preparing yourself for trouble. Your people must have been well-off to send you to the university. Stop me, if I’m stepping on your toes. Did your mother pamper you? Did your father give in to you? Were you brought up tenderly, with permission to go and find out what were the last things that everything else stands for while everybody else labored in the fallen world of appearances?”
“Well, no, it wasn’t exactly like that.” Grebe smiled. The fallen world of appearances! no_ less. But now it was his turn to deliver a surprise. “We weren’t rich. My father was the last genuine English butler in Chicago—”
“Are you kidding?”
“Why should I be?”
“In a livery?”
“In livery Up on the Gold Coast.”
“And he wanted you to be educated like a gentleman?”
“He did not. He sent me to the Armour Institute to study chemical engineering. But when he died I changed schools.”
He stopped himself, and considered how quickly Raynor had reached him. In no time he had your valise on the table and all your stuff unpacked. And afterward, in the streets, he was still reviewing how far he might have gone, and how much he might have been led to tell if they had not been interrupted by Mrs. Staika’s great noise.
But just then a young woman, one of Raynor’s workers, ran into the cubicle exclaiming, “Haven’t you heard all the fuss?”
“We haven’t heard anything.”
“It’s Staika, giving out with all her might. The reporters are coming. She said she phoned the papers, and you know she did.”
“But what is she up to?” said Raynor.
“She brought her wash and she’s ironing it here, with our current, because the relief won’t pay her electric bill. She has her ironing board set up by the admitting desk, and her kids are with her, all six. They never are in school more than once a week. She’s always dragging them around with her because of her reputation.”
“I don’t want to miss any of this,” said Raynor, jumping up. Grebe, as he followed with the secretary, said, “Who is this Staika?”
“They call her the ‘Blood Mother of Federal Street.’ She’s a professional donor at the hospitals. I think they pay ten dollars a pint. Of course it’s no joke, but she makes a very big thing out of it and she and the kids are in the papers all the time.”
A small crowd, staff and clients divided by a plywood barrier, stood in the narrow space of the entrance, and Staika was shouting in a gruff, mannish voice, plunging the iron on the board and slamming it on the metal rest.
“My father and mother came in a steerage, and I was born in our house, Robey by Huron. I’m no dirty immigrant. I’m a U. S. citizen. My husband is a gassed veteran from France with lungs weaker’n paper, that hardly can he go to the toilet by himself. These six children of mine, I have to buy the shoes for their feet with my own blood. Even a lousy little white Communion necktie, that’s a couple of drops of blood; a little piece of mosquito veil for my Vadja so she won’t be ashamed in church for the other girls, they take my blood for it by Goldblatt. That’s how I keep goin’. A fine thing if I had to depend on the relief. And there’s plenty of people on the rolls—fakes! There’s nothin’ they_ can’t get, that can go and wrap bacon at Swift and Armour anytime. They’re lookin’ for them by the Yards. They never have to be out of work. Only they rather lay in their lousy beds and eat the public’s money.” She was not afraid, in a predominantly Negro station, to shout this way about Negroes.
Grebe and Raynor worked themselves forward to get a closer view of the woman. She was flaming with anger and with pleasure at herself, broad and huge, a golden-headed woman who wore a cotton cap laced with pink ribbon. She was barelegged and had on black gym shoes, her Hoover apron was open and her great breasts, not much restrained by a man’s undershirt, hampered her arms as she worked at the kid’s dress on the ironing board. And the children, silent and white, with a kind of locked obstinacy, in sheepskins and lumber-jackets, stood behind her. She had captured the station, and the pleasure this gave her was enormous. Yet her grievances were true grievances. She was telling the truth. But she behaved like a liar. The look of her small eyes was hidden, and while she raged she also seemed to be spinning and planning.
“They send me out college caseworkers in silk pants to talk me out of what I got comin’. Are they better’n me? Who told them? Fire them. Let ‘em go and get married, and then you won’t have to cut electric from people’s budget.”
The chief supervisor, Mr. Ewing, couldn’t silence her and he stood with folded arms at the head of his staff, bald-bald-headed, saying to his subordinates like the ex—school principal he was, “Pretty soon she’ll be tired and go.”
“No she won’t,” said Raynor to Grebe. “She’ll get what she wants. She knows more about the relief even than Ewing. She’s been on the rolls for years, and she always gets what she wants because she puts on a noisy show. Ewing knows it. He’ll give in soon. He’s only saving face. If he gets bad publicity, the commissioner’ll have him on the carpet, downtown. She’s got him submerged; she’ll submerge everybody in time, and that includes nations and governments.”
Grebe replied with his characteristic smile, disagreeing completely. Who would take Staika’s orders, and what changes could her yelling ever bring about?
No, what Grebe saw in her, the power that made people listen, was that her cry expressed the war of flesh and blood, perhaps turned a little crazy and certainly ugly, on this place and this condition. And at first, when he went out, the spirit of Staika somehow presided over the whole district for him, and it took color from her; he saw her color, in the spotty curb fires, and the fires under the El, the straight alley of flamey gloom. Later, too, when he went into a tavern for a shot of rye, the sweat of beer, association with West Side Polish streets, made him think of her again.
He wiped the corners of his mouth with his muffler, his handkerchief being inconvenient to reach for, and went out again to get on with the delivery of his checks. The air bit cold and hard and a few flakes of snow formed near him. A train struck by and left a quiver in the frames and a bristling icy hiss over the rails.
Crossing the street, he descended a flight of board steps into a basement grocery, setting off a little bell. It was a dark, long store and it caught you with its stinks of smoked meat, soap, dried peaches, and fish. There was a fire wrinkling and flapping in the little stove, and the proprietor was waiting, an It
alian with a long, hollow face and stubborn bristles. He kept his hands warm under his apron.
No, he didn’t know Green. You knew people but not names. The same man might not have the same name twice. The police didn’t know, either, and mostly didn’t care. When somebody was shot or knifed they took the body away and didn’t look for the murderer. In the first place, nobody would tell them anything. So they made up a name for the coroner and called it quits. And in the second place, they didn’t give a goddamn anyhow. But they couldn’t get to the bottom of a thing even if they wanted to. Nobody would get to know even a tenth of what went on among these people. They stabbed and stole, they did every crime and abomination you ever heard of, men and men, women and women, parents and children, worse than the animals. They carried on their own way, and the horrors passed off like a smoke. There was never anything like it in the history of the whole world.
It was a long speech, deepening with every word in its fantasy and passion and becoming increasingly senseless and terrible: a swarm amassed by suggestion and invention, a huge, hugging, despairing knot, a human wheel of heads, legs, bellies, arms, rolling through his shop.
Grebe felt that he must interrupt him. He said sharply, “What are you talking about! All I asked was whether you knew this man.”
“That isn’t even the half of it. I been here six years. You probably don’t want to believe this. But suppose it’s true?”
“All the same,” said Grebe, “there must be a way to find a person.”
The Italian’s close-spaced eyes had been queerly concentrated, as were his muscles, while he leaned across the counter trying to convince Grebe. Now he gave up the effort and sat down on his stool. “Oh—I suppose. Once in a while. But I been telling you, even the cops don’t get anywhere.”
“They’re always after somebody. It’s not the same thing.”
“Well, keep trying if you want. I can’t help you.”
But he didn’t keep trying. He had no more time to spend on Green. He slipped Green’s check to the back of the block. The next name on the list was F1KLD, WINSTON.
He found the backyard bungalow without the least trouble; it shared a lot with another house, a few feet of yard between. Grebe knew these two-shack arrangements. They had been built in vast numbers in the days before the swamps were filled and the streets raised, and they were all the same—a boardwalk along the fence, well under street level, three or four ball-headed posts for clotheslines, greening wood, dead shingles, and a long, long flight of stairs to the rear door.
A twelve-year-old boy let him into the kitchen, and there the old man was, sitting by the table in a wheelchair.
“Oh, it’s d’ Government man,” he said to the boy when Grebe drew out his checks. “Go bring me my box of papers.” He cleared a space on the table.
“Oh, you don’t have to go to all that trouble,” said Grebe. But Field laid out his papers: Social Security card, relief certification, letters from the state hospital in Manteno, and a naval discharge dated San Diego, 1920.
“That’s plenty,” Grebe said. “Just sign.”
“You got to know who I am,” the old man said. “You’re from the Government. It’s not your check, it’s a Government check and you got no business to hand it over till everything is proved.”
He loved the ceremony of it, and Grebe made no more objections. Field emptied his box and finished out the circle of cards and letters.
“There’s everything I done and been. Just the death certificate and they can close book on me.” He said this with a certain happy pride and magnificence. Still he did not sign; he merely held the little pen upright on the golden-green corduroy of his thigh. Grebe did not hurry him. He felt the old man’s hunger for conversation.
“I got to get better coal,” he said. “I send my little gran’son to the yard with my order and they fill his wagon with screening. The stove ain’t made for it. It fall through the grate. The order says Franklin County egg-size coal.”
“I’ll report it and see what can be done.”
“Nothing can be done, I expect. You know and I know. There ain’t no little ways to make things better, and the only big thing is money. That’s the only sunbeams, money. Nothing is black where it shines, and the only place you see black is where it ain’t shining. What we colored have to have is our own rich. There ain’t no other way.”
Grebe sat, his reddened forehead bridged levelly by his close-cut hair and his cheeks lowered in the wings of his collar—the caked fire shone hard within the isinglass-and-iron frames but the room was not comfortable—sat and listened while the old man unfolded his scheme. This was to create one Negro millionaire a month by subscription. One clever, good-hearted young fellow elected every month would sign a contract to use the money to start a business employing Negroes. This would be advertised by chain letters and word of mouth, and every Negro wage earner would contribute a dollar a month. Within five years there would be sixty millionaires.
‘That’ll fetch respect,” he said with a throat-stopped sound that came out like a foreign syllable. “You got to take and organize all the money that gets thrown away on the policy wheel and horse race. As long as they can take it away from you, they got no respect for you. Money, that’s d’ sun of humankind!” Field was a Negro of mixed blood, perhaps Cherokee, or Natchez; his skin was reddish. And he sounded, speaking about a golden sun in this dark room, and looked—shaggy and slab-headed—with the mingled blood of his face and broad lips, and with the little pen still upright in his hand, like one of the underground kings of mythology, old judge Minos himself.
And now he accepted the check and signed. Not to soil the slip, he held it down with his knuckles. The table budged and creaked, the center of the gloomy, heathen midden of the kitchen covered with bread, meat, and cans, and the scramble of papers.
“Don’t you think my scheme’d work?”
“It’s worth thinking about. Something ought to be done, I agree.”
“It’ll work if people will do it. That’s all. That’s the only thing, anytime. When they understand it in the same way, all of them.”
“That’s true,” said Grebe, rising. His glance met the old man’s.
“I know you got to go,” he said. “Well, God bless you, boy, you ain’t been sly with me. I can tell it in a minute.”
He went back through the buried yard. Someone nursed a candle in a shed, where a man unloaded kindling wood from a sprawl-wheeled baby buggy and two voices carried on a high conversation. As he came up the sheltered passage he heard the hard boost of the wind in the branches and against the house fronts, and then, reaching the sidewalk, he saw the needle-eye red of cable towers in the open icy height hundreds of feet above the river and the factories—those keen points. From here, his view was obstructed all the way to the South Branch and its timber banks, and the cranes beside the water. Rebuilt after the Great Fire, this part of the city was, not fifty years later, in ruins again, factories boarded up, buildings deserted or fallen, gaps of prairie between. But it wasn’t desolation that this made you feel, but rather a faltering of organization that set free a huge energy, an escaped, unattached, unregulated power from the giant raw place. Not only must people feel it but, it seemed to Grebe, they were compelled to match it. In their very bodies. He no less than others, he realized. Say that his parents had been servants in their time, whereas he was supposed not to be one. He thought that they had never done any service like this, which no one visible asked for, and probably flesh and blood could not even perform. Nor could anyone show why it should be performed; or see where the performance would lead. That did not mean that he wanted to be released from it, he realized with a grimly pensive face. On the contrary. He had something to do. To be compelled to feel this energy and yet have no task to do—that was horrible; that was suffering; he knew what that was. It was now quitting time. Six o’clock. He could go home if he liked, to his room, that is, to wash in hot water, to pour a drink, lie down on his quilt, read the paper, eat
some liver paste on crackers before going out to dinner. But to think of this actually made him feel a little sick, as though he had swallowed hard air. He had six checks left, and he was determined to deliver at least one of these: Mr. Green’s check.
So he started again. He had four or five dark blocks to go, past open lots, condemned houses, old foundations, closed schools, black churches, mounds, and he reflected that there must be many people alive who had once seen the neighborhood rebuilt and new. Now there was a second layer of ruins; centuries of history accomplished through human massing. Numbers had given the place forced growth; enormous numbers had also broken it down. Objects once so new, so concrete that it could never have occurred to anyone they stood for other things, had crumbled. Therefore, reflected Grebe, the secret of them was out. It was that they stood for themselves by agreement, and were natural and not unnatural by agreement, and when the things themselves collapsed the agreement became visible. What was it, otherwise, that kept cities from looking peculiar? Rome, that was almost permanent, did not give rise to thoughts like these. And was it abidingly real? But in Chicago, where the cycles were so fast and the familiar died out, and again rose changed, and died again in thirty years, you saw the common agreement or covenant, and you were forced to think about appearances and realities. (He remembered Raynor and he smiled. Ray-nor was a clever boy.) Once you had grasped this, a great many things became intelligible. For instance, why Mr. Field should conceive such a scheme. Of course, if people were to agree to create a millionaire, a real millionaire would come into existence. And if you wanted to know how Mr. Field was inspired to think of this, why, he had within sight of his kitchen window the chart, the very bones of a successful scheme—the El with its blue and green confetti of signals. People consented to pay dimes and ride the crash-box cars, and so it was a success. Yet how absurd it looked; how little reality there was to start with. And yet Yerkes, the great financier who built it, had known that he could get people to agree to do it. Viewed as itself, what a scheme of a scheme it seemed, how close to an appearance. Then why wonder at Mr. Field’s idea? He had grasped a principle. And then Grebe remembered, too, that Mr. Yerkes had established the Yerkes Observatory and endowed it with millions. Now how did the notion come to him in his New York museum of a palace or his Aegean-bound yacht to give money to astronomers? Was he awed by the success of his bizarre enterprise and therefore ready to spend money to find out where in the universe being and seeming were identical? Yes, he wanted to know what abides; and whether flesh is Bible grass; and he offered money to be burned in the fire of suns. Okay, then, Grebe thought further, these things exist because people consent to exist with them—we have got so far—and also there is a reality which doesn’t depend on consent but within which consent is a game. But what about need, the need that keeps so many vast thousands in position? You tell me that, you private_ little gentleman and decent_ soul—he used these words against himself scornfully. Why is the consent given to misery? And why so painfully ugly? Because there is something_ that is dismal and permanently ugly? Here he sighed and gave it up, and thought it was enough for the present moment that he had a real check in his pocket for a Mr. Green who must be real beyond question. If only his neighbors didn’t think they had to conceal him.