The Collected Stories Of Saul Bellow

by Bellow, Saul

  Persistent fragments, inspired epigrams, or spontaneous expressions of ill will come and go. Clemenceau saying about Poincarщ that he was a hydrocщphalie in patent-leather boots. Or Churchill answering a question about the queen of Tonga as she passes in a barouche during the coronation of Elizabeth II: “Is that small gentleman in the admiral’s uniform the queen’s consort?”

  “I believe he is her lunch.”

  Disraeli on his deathbed, informed that Queen Victoria has come to see him and is in the anteroom, says to his manservant, “Her Majesty only wants me to carry a message to dear Albert.”

  Such items might be delicious if they were not so persistent and accompanied by a despairing sense that I am no longer in control.

  “You look pale and exhausted, Professor X.”

  “I’ve been exchanging ideas with Professor Y, and I feel absolutely drained.”

  Worse than this is the nervous word game I am unable to stop playing.

  “She is the woman who put the ‘dish’ into ‘fiendish.’ “

  “He is the man who put the ‘rat’ into ‘rational.’ “

  “The ‘fruit’ in ‘fruitless.’ “

  “The ‘con’ in ‘icon.’ “

  Recreations of a crumbling mind, Miss Rose. Symptoms perhaps of high blood pressure, or minor tokens of private resistance to the giant public hand of the law (that hand will be withdrawn only when I am dead).

  No wonder, therefore, that I spend so much time with old Mrs. Gracewell. In her ticktock Meissen parlor with its uncomfortable chairs I am at home. Forty years a widow and holding curious views, she is happy in my company. Few visitors want to hear about the Divine Spirit, but I am seriously prepared to ponder the mysterious and intriguing descriptions she gives. The Divine Spirit, she tells me, has withdrawn in our time from the outer, visible world. You can see what it once wrought, you are surrounded by its created forms. But although natural processes continue, Divinity has absented itself. The wrought work is brightly divine but Divinity is not now active within it. The world’s grandeur is fading. And this is our human setting, devoid of God, she says with great earnestness. But in this deserted beauty man himself still lives as a God-pervaded being. It will be up to him—to us—to bring back the light that has gone from these molded likenesses, if we are not prevented by the forces of darkness. Intellect, worshipped by all, brings us as far as natural science, and this science, although very great, is incomplete. Redemption from mere_ nature is the work of feeling and of the awakened eye of the Spirit. The body, she says, is subject to the forces of gravity. But the soul is ruled by levity, pure.

  I listen to this and have no mischievous impulses. I shall miss the old girl. After much monkey business, dear Miss Rose, I am ready to listen to words of ultimate seriousness. There isn’t much time left. The federal marshal, any day now, will be setting out from Seattle.

  SOMETHING TO REMEMBER ME BY

  WHEN THERE IS too much going on, more than you can bear, you may choose to assume that nothing in particular is happening, that your life is going round and round like a turntable. Then one day you are aware that what you took to be a turntable, smooth, flat, and even, was in fact a whirlpool, a vortex. My first knowledge of the hidden work of uneventful days goes back to February 1933. The exact date won’t matter much to you. I like to think, however, that you, my only child, will want to hear about this hidden work as it relates to me. When you were a small boy you were keen on family history. You will quickly understand that I couldn’t tell a child what I am about to tell you now. You don’t talk about deaths and vortices to a kid, not nowadays. In my time my parents didnt hesitate to speak of death and the dying. What they seldom mentioned was sex. We’ve got it the other way around.

  My mother died when I was an adolescent. I’ve often told you that. What I didn’t tell you was that I knew she was dying and didn’t allow myself to think about it—there’s your turntable.

  The month was February, as I’ve said, adding that the exact date wouldnt matter to you. I should confess that I myself avoided fixing it.

  Chicago in winter, armored in gray ice, the sky low, the going heavy.

  I was a high school senior, an indifferent student, generally unpopular, a background figure in the school. It was only as a high jumper that I performed in public. I had no form at all; a curious last-minute spring or convulsion pur me over the bar. But this was what the school turned out to see.

  Unwilling to study, I was bookish nevertheless. I was secretive about my family life. The truth is that I didn’t want to talk about my mother. Besides, had no language as yet for the oddity of my peculiar interests.

  But let me get on with that significant day in the early part of February.

  It began like any other winter school day in Chicago—grimly ordinary. The temperature a few degrees above zero, botanical frost shapes on the windowpane, the snow swept up in heaps, the ice gritty and the streets, block after block, bound together by the iron of the sky. A breakfast of porridge, toast, and tea. Late as usual, I stopped for a moment to look into my mother’s sickroom. I bent near and said, “It’s Louie, going to school.” She seemed to nod. Her eyelids were brown; the color of her face was much lighter. I hurried off with my books on a strap over my shoulder.

  When I came to the boulevard on the edge of the park, two small men rushed out of a doorway with rifles, wheeled around aiming upward, and fired at pigeons near the rooftop. Several birds fell straight down, and the men scooped up the soft bodies and ran indoors, dark little guys in fluttering white shirts. Depression hunters and their city game. Moments before, the police car had loafed by at ten miles an hour. The men had waited it out.

  This had nothing to do with me. I mention it merely because it happened. I stepped around the blood spots and crossed into the park.

  To the right of the path, behind the wintry lilac twigs, the crust of the snow was broken. In the dead black night Stephanie and I had necked there, petted, my hands under her raccoon coat, under her sweater, under her skirt, adolescents kissing without restraint. Her coonskin cap had slipped to the back of her head. She opened the musky coat to me to have me closer.

  Approaching the school building, I had to run to reach the doors before the last bell. I was on notice from the family—no trouble with teachers, no summons from the principal at a time like this. And I did observe the rules, although I despised classwork. But I spent all the money I could lay hands on at Hammersmark’s Bookstore. I read Manhattan Transfer, The Enormous Room,_ and A Portrait of the Artist._ I belonged to the Cercle Franчais and the Senior Discussion Club. The club’s topic for this afternoon was Von Hindenburg’s choice of Hitler to form a new government. But I couldn’t go to meetings now; I had an after-school job. My father had insisted that I find one.

  After classes, on my way to work, I stopped at home to cut myself a slice of bread and a wedge of Wisconsin cheese, and to see whether my mother might be awake. During her last days she was heavily sedated and rarely said anything. The tall, square-shouldered bottle at her bedside was filled with clear red Nem-butal. The color of this fluid was always the same, as if it could tolerate no shadow. Now that she could no longer sit up to have it washed, my mother’s hair was cut short. This made her face more slender, and her lips were sober. Her breathing was dry and hard, obstructed. The window shade was halfway up. It was scalloped at the bottom and had white fringes. The street ice was dark gray. Snow was piled against the trees. Their trunks had a mineral-black look. Waiting out the winter in their alligator armor, they gathered coal soot.

  Even when she was awake, my mother couldn’t find the breath to speak. She sometimes made signs. Except for the nurse, there was nobody in the house. My father was at business, my sister had a downtown job, my brothers hustled. The eldest, Albert, clerked for a lawyer in the Loop. My brother Len had put me onto a job on the Northwestern commuter trains, and for a while I was a candy butcher, selling chocolate bars and evening papers. When my mother put a stop to thi
s because it kept me too late, I had found other work. Just now I was delivering flowers for a shop on North Avenue and riding the streetcars carrying wreaths and bouquets to all parts of the city. Behrens the florist paid me fifty-cents for an afternoon; with tips I could earn as much as a dollar. That gave me time to prepare my trigonometry lesson and, very late at night, after I had seen Stephanie, to read my books. I sat in the kitchen when everyone was sleeping, in deep silence, snowdrifts under the windows, and below, the janitor’s shovel rasping on the cement and clanging on the furnace door. I read banned books circulated by my classmates, political pamphlets, read “Prufrock” and “Mauberley.” I also studied arcane books, too far out to discuss with anyone.

  I read on the streetcars (called trolleys elsewhere). Reading shut out the sights. In fact there were_ no sights—more of the same and then more of the same. Shop fronts, garages, warehouses, narrow brick bungalows.

  The city was laid out on a colossal grid, eight blocks to the mile, every fourth street a car line. The days short, the streetlights weak, the soiled snowbanks toward evening became a source of light. I carried my carfare in my mitten, where the coins mixed with lint worn away from the lining. Today 1 was delivering lilies to an uptown address. They were wrapped and pinned in heavy paper. Behrens, spelling out my errand for me, was pale, a narrow-faced man who wore nose glasses. Amid the flowers, he alone had no color—something like the price he paid for being human. He wasted no words: “This delivery will take an hour each way in this traffic, so it’ll be your only one. I carry these people on the books, but make sure you get a signature on the bill.”

  I couldn’t say why it was such a relief to get out of the shop, the damp, warm-earth smell, the dense mosses, the prickling cactuses, the glass iceboxes with orchids, gardenias, and sickbed roses. I preferred the brick boredom of the street, the paving stones and steel rails. I drew down the three peaks of my racing-skater’s cap and hauled the clumsy package to Robey Street. When the car came panting up there was room for me on the long seat next to the door. Passengers didn’t undo their buttons. They were chilled, guarded, muffled, miserable. I had reading matter with me—the remains of a book, the cover gone, the pages held together by binder’s thread and flakes of glue. I carried these fifty or sixty pages in the pocket of my short sheepskin. With the one hand I had free I couldnt manage this mutilated book. And on the Broadway-Clark car, reading was out of the question .1 had to protect my lilies from the balancing straphangers and people pushing toward the front.

  I got down at Ainslie Street holding high the package, which had the shape of a padded kite. The apartment house I was looking for had a courtyard with iron palings. The usual lobby: a floor sinking in the middle, kernels of tile, gaps stuffed with dirt, and a panel of brass mailboxes with earpiece-mouthpieces. No voice came down when I pushed the button; instead, the lock buzzed, jarred, rattled, and I went from the cold of the outer lobby to the overheated mustiness of the inner one. On the second floor one of the two doors on the landing was open, and overshoes and galoshes and rubbers were heaped along the wall. At once I found myself in a crowd of drinkers. All the lights in the house were on, although it was a good hour before dark. Coats were piled on chairs and sofas. All whiskey in those days was bootleg, of course. Holding the flowers high, I parted the mourners. I was quasi-official. The message went out: “Let the kid through. Go right on, buddy.”

  The long passageway was full too, but the dining room was entirely empty. There, a dead girl lay in her coffin. Over her a cut-glass luster was hanging from a taped, deformed artery of wire pulled through the broken plaster. I hadn’t expected to find myself looking down into a coffin.

  You saw her as she was, without undertaker’s makeup, a girl older than Stephanie, not so plump, thin, fair, her straight hair arranged on her dead shoulders. All buoyancy gone, a weight that counted totally on support, not so much lying as sunk in this gray rectangle. I saw what I took to be the pressure mark of fingers on her cheek. Whether she had been pretty or not was no consideration.

  A stout woman (certainly the mother), wearing black, opened the swing door from the kitchen and saw me standing over the corpse. I thought she was displeased when she made a fist signal to come forward. As I passed her she drew both fists against her bosom. She said to put the flowers on the sink, and then she pulled the pins and crackled the paper. Big arms, thick calves, a bun of hair, her short nose thin and red. It was Behrens’s practice to tie the lily stalks to slender green sticks. There was never any damage.

  On the drainboard of the sink was a baked ham with sliced bread around the platter, a jar of French’s mustard and wooden tongue depressors to spread it. I saw and I saw and I saw.

  I was on my most discreet and polite behavior with the woman. I looked at the floor to spare her my commiserating face. But why should she care at all about my discreetness; how did I come into this except as a messenger and menial? If she wouldn’t observe my behavior, whom was 1 behaving for? All she wanted was to settle the bill and send me on my way. She picked up her purse, holding it to her body as she had held her fists. “What do I owe Behrens?” she asked me.

  “He said you could sign for this.”

  However, she wasn’t going to deal in kindnesses. She said, “No.” She said, “I don’t want debts following me later on.” She gave me a five-dollar bill, she added a tip of fifty cents, and it was I who signed the receipt, as well as I could on the enameled grooves of the sink. I folded the bill small and felt under the sheepskin coat for my watch pocket, ashamed to take money from her within sight of her dead daughter. I wasn’t the object of the woman’s severity, but her face somewhat frightened me. She leveled the same look at the walls, the door. I didn’t figure here, however; this was no death of mine.

  As if to take another reading of the girl’s plain face, I looked again into the coffin on my way out. And then on the staircase I began to extract the pages from my sheepskin pocket, and in the lobby I hunted for the sentences I had read the night before. Yes, here they were: Nature cannot suffer the human form within her system of laws. When given to her charge, the human being before us is reduced to dust. Ours is the most perfect form to be found on earth. The visible world sustains us until life leaves, and then it must utterly destroy us. Where, then, is the world from which the human form comes?_

  If you swallowed some food and then died, that morsel of food that would have nourished you in life would hasten your disintegration in death.

  This meant that nature didn’t make life; it only housed it.

  In those days I read many such books. But the one I had read the previous night went deeper than the rest. You, my only child, are only too familiar with my lifelong absorption in or craze for further worlds. I used to bore you when I spoke of spirit, or pneuma, and of a continuum of spirit and nature. You were too well educated, respectably rational, to take stock in such terms. I might add, citing a famous scholar, that what is plausible can do without proof. I am not about to pursue this. Still, there would be a gap in what I have to tell if I were to leave out my significant book, and this after all is a narrative, not an argument.

  Anyway, I returned my pages to the pocket of my sheepskin, and then I didn’t know quite what to do. At four o’clock, with no more errands, I was somehow not ready to go home. So I walked through the snow to Argyle Street, where my brother-in-law practiced dentistry, thinking that we might travel home together. I prepared an explanation for turning up at his office. “I was on the North Side delivering flowers, saw a dead girl laid out, realized how close I was, and came here.” Why did I need to account for my innocent behavior when it was_ innocent? Perhaps because I was always contemplating illicit things. Because I was always being accused. Because I ran a little truck farm of deceits—but selt-examination, once so fascinating to me, has become tiresome.

  My brother-in-law’s office was a high, second-floor walk-up: PHILIP HAD-DIS, D.D.S. Three bay windows at the rounded corner of the building gave you a full view of
the street and of the lake, due east—the jagged flats of ice floating. The office door was open, and when I came through the tiny blind (window-less) waiting room and didn’t see Philip at the big, back-tilted dentist’s chair, 1 thought that he might have stepped into his lab. He was a good technician and did most of his own work, which was a big saving.

  Philip wasn’t tall, but he was very big, a burly man. The sleeves of his white coat fitted tightly on his bare, thick forearms. The strength of his arms counted when it came to pulling teeth. Lots of patients were referred to him for extractions.

  When he had nothing in particular to do he would sit in the chair himself, studying the Racing Form_ between the bent mantis leg of the drill, the gas flame, and the water spurting round and round in the green glass spit-sink. The cigar smell was always thick. Standing in the center of the dental cabinet was a clock under a glass bell. Four gilt weights rotated at its base. This was a gift from my mother. The view from the middle window was divided by a chain that couldn’t have been much smaller than the one that stopped the British fleet on the Hudson. This held the weight of the druggist’s sign—a mortar and pestle outlined in electric bulbs. There wasn’t much daylight left. At noon it was poured out; by four it had drained away. From one side the banked snow was growing blue, from the other the shops were shining warmth on it.

  The dentist’s lab was in a closet. Easygoing Philip peed in the sink sometimes. It was a long trek to the toilet at the far end of the building, and the hallway was nothing but two walls—a plaster tunnel and a carpet runner edged with brass tape. Philip hated going to the end of the hall.