by Saul Bellow
“Daragaya, nothing will happen to your son; he’ll come back,” said the old woman while Anna sobbed. “Other mothers have their sons there.”
“I told him to stop going with the undertaker’s. What kind of friend was that for him? He dragged him into it.”
She had the Kinsmans down for death-breeders, and I found out that she made a detour of blocks when shopping to avoid Kinsman’s parlors, though she had always boasted before that Mrs. Kinsman, a big, fresh, leery-looking woman, was a lodge sister and friend of hers—the rich Kinsmans. Coblin’s uncle, a bank officer, was buried out of Kinsman’s, and Friedl Coblin and Kinsman’s daughter went to the same elocution teacher. She had the impediment of Moses whose hand the watching angel guided to the coal, Friedl, and she carried her stuttering into fluency later. Years after, at a football game where I was selling hotdogs, I heard her; she didn’t recognize me in the white hat of the day, but I remembered coaching her in “When the Frost Is on the Punkin’.” And recalled also Cousin Anna’s oath that I should marry Friedl when I was grown. It was in her tears of welcome when she pressed me, on the porch of the house that day. “Hear, Owgie, you’ll be my son, my daughter’s husband, mein kind!” At this moment she had once more given Howard up for dead.
She kept this project of marriage going all the time. When I cut my hand while sharpening the lawn-mower she said, “It’ll heal before your wedding day,” and then, “It’s better to marry somebody you’ve known all your life, I swear. Nothing worse than strangers. You hear me? Hear!” So she had the future mapped because little Friedl so resembled her that she lived with foreknowledge of her difficulty; she herself had had to be swept over it by the rude Providence of her brother. No mother to help her. And probably she felt that if a husband had not been found for her she would have been destroyed by the choked power of her instincts, deprived of children. And the tears to shed for them would have drowned her as sure as the water of Ophelia’s brook. The sooner married the better. Where Anna came from there was no encouragement of childhood anyhow. Her own mother had been married at thirteen or fourteen, and Friedl therefore had only four or five years to go. Anna herself had exceeded this age limit by fifteen years at least, the last few, I imagine, of fearful grief, before Coblin married her. Accordingly she was already on campaign, every young boy a prospect, for I assume I was not the only one but, for the time being, the most available. And Friedl was being groomed with music and dancing lessons as well as elocution and going into the best society in the neighborhood. No reason but this would have made Anna belong to a lodge; she was too gloomy and house-haunting a woman, and it needed a great purpose to send her out to benefits and bazaars.
To anybody who snubbed her child she was a bad enemy and spread damaging rumors. “The piano teacher told me herself. Every Saturday it was the same story. When she went to give Minnie Carson her lesson, Mister tried to pull her behind the door with him.” Whether true or not, it soon became her conviction. It made no difference who confronted her or whether the teacher came to plead with her to stop. But the Carsons had not invited Friedl to a birthday party and got themselves an enemy of Corsican rigor and pure absorption.
And now that Howard had run away all her enemies were somehow implicated as hell’s agents and deputies, and she lay in bed, crying and cursing them: “O God, Master of the Universe, may their hands and feet wither and their heads dry out,” and other grandiose things, everyday language to her. As she lay in the summer light, tempered by the shades and the catalpa of the front yard, flat on her back with compresses, towels, rags, she had a considerable altitude of trunk, the soles of her feet shining from the sheets like graphite rubbings, feet of war disasters in the ruined villages of Napoleon’s Spanish campaign; flies riding in echelon on the long string of the light switch. While she panted and butchered on herself with pains and fears. She had the will of a martyr to carry a mangled head in Paradise till doomsday, in the suffering mothers’ band led by Eve and Hannah. For Anna was terribly religious and had her own ideas of time and place, so that Heaven and eternity were not too far; she had things segmented, flattened down, and telescoped like the stages and floors of the Leaning Tower, while Nicaragua was at a distance double the circumference of the world, where the bantam Sandino—and who he was to her is outside my power to imagine—was killing her son.
The filth of the house, meantime, and particularly of the kitchen, was stupendous. Nevertheless, swollen and fire-eyed, slow on her feet, shouting incomprehensibly on the telephone, and her face as if lit by that gorgeous hair which finally advanced her into royalty, she somehow kept up with her duties. She had meals on time for the men, she saw to it that Friedl practiced and rehearsed, that the money collected was checked, counted, sorted and the coins rolled when Coblin wasn’t on hand to do it himself, that the new orders were attended to.
“Der … jener … Owgie, the telephone ringt. Hear! Don’t forget to tell them it’s now extra the Saturday afternoon paper!”
And when I tried to blow on Howard’s saxophone I learned how quickly she could get out of bed and cover the house. She tore into the room and snatched it from me, yelling, “Already they’re taking his things away from him!” in a way that made the skin gather down my head and the whole length of my neck. And I saw where a son-in-law—granted, only a prospective one—ranked with respect to her son. She did not forgive me that day, though she knew she had scared me. But I guess I looked less wounded than I felt, and she assumed I had no sense of penitence. What really is more like it is that I had no grudge-bearing power, unlike Simon with his Old South honor and his cododuello dangerous easiness that was his specialty of the time. Besides, how could you keep a grudge against anyone so terrific? And even while she pulled the saxophone out of my hands she was hunting her reflection in the small mirror on top of the long chest of drawers. I went down to the cellar where the storm windows and the tools were, and there, after I decided I couldn’t cut out for home just yet only to be sent back by Grandma Lausch, I became interested in why the toilet trickled, took the lid off the waterbox, and passed my time below there, tinkering while the floor of the kitchen bowed and crunched.
That would be Five Properties shambling through the cottage, Anna’s immense brother, long armed and humped, his head grown off the thick band of muscle as original as a bole on his back, hair tender and greenish brown, eyes completely green, clear, estimating, primitive, and sardonic, an Eskimo smile of primitive simplicity opening on Eskimo teeth buried in high gums, kidding, gleeful, and unfrank; a big-footed contender for wealth. He drove a dairy truck, one of those electric jobs where the driver stood up like a helmsman, the bottles and wood-and-wire cases clashing like mad. He took me around his route a few times and paid me half a buck for helping him hustle empties. When I tried to handle a full case he felt me up, ribs, thighs, and arms—this was something he loved to do—and said, “Not yet, you got to wait yet,” lugging it off himself and crashing it down beside the icebox. He was the life of the quiet little lard-smelly Polish groceries that were his stops, punching it out or grappling in fun with the owners, head to head, or swearing in Italian at the Italians, “Fungoo!” and measuring off a chunk of stiff arm at them. He gave himself an awful lot of delight. And he was very shrewd, his sister said. It wasn’t so long ago he had done a small part in the ruin of empires, driving wagons of Russian and German corpses to burial on Polish farms; and now he had money in the bank, he had stock in the dairy, and he had picked up in the Yiddish theater the fat swagger of the suitor everybody hated: “Five prope’ties. Plente money.”
Of a Sunday morning, when the balloon peddlers were tootling in the sweetness and calm of the leafy street and blue sky, he came down to breakfast in a white suit, picking his teeth finely, Scythian hair stroked down under a straw katie. Nonetheless he had not cast off his weekday milk smell. But how fine he was this morning, windburned and hearty-blooded, teeth, gums, and cheeks involved in a bursting grin. He pinched his copper-eyed sister who was sullen wi
th tears.
“Annitchka.”
“Go, breakfast is ready.”
“Five prope’ties, plente money.”
A smile stole over her face which she moresely resisted. But she loved her brother.
“Annitchka.”
“Go! My child is missing. The world is chaos.”
“Five prope’ties.”
“Don’t be a fool. You’ll have a child yourself, and then you’ll know what wehtig is.”
Five Properties cared absolutely nothing about the absent or the dead and freely said so. Hell with them. He had worn their boots and caps while the stiffs were bouncing in his wagon through shot and explosion. What he had to say was usually on the Spartan or proconsular model, quick and hard. “You can’t go to war without smelling powder.” “If granny had wheels she’d be a cart.” “Sleep with dogs and wake with fleas.” “Don’t shit where you eat.” One simple moral in all, amounting to, “You have no one to blame but yourself” or, Frenchywise—for I have put in my time in the capital of the world—“Tu l’as voulu, Georges Dandin.”
Thus you see what views Five Properties must have had on his nephew’s enlistment. But he partly spared his sister.
“What do you want? He wrote you last week.”
“Last week!” said Anna. “And what about meanwhile?”
“Meanwhile he’s got a little Indian girl to tickle and squeeze him.”
“Not my son,” she said, turning her eyes to the kitchen mirror.
But in fact it appeared the boys had found someone to shack up with. Joe Kinsman sent his dad a snapshot of two straight-haired native girls in short skirts and hand in hand, without comment. Kinsman had shown it to Coblin. The fathers weren’t exactly displeased; at least they didn’t see fit to show displeasure to each other. On the contrary. But Cousin Anna didn’t hear of the picture.
Coblin had fatherly fears of his own, but not Anna’s rage against Kinsman, and he kept up the necessary liaison with him at his office, for of course the undertaker couldn’t enter the house. Generally speaking, Coblin’s main lines were outside anyway, and he led a life of movement, steady and square-paced. By comparison with Anna and her brother he appeared small, but he was really a good size himself, sturdy, and bald in a clean sweep of all his hair, his features also big, rounded and flattened, puffy at the eyes which were given to blinking just about to the point of caricature. If you took this tic of his with the standard interpretation of meekness—well, there are types and habits that develop to beguile the experience of mankind. He was not beaten down by Anna or Five Properties or other members of the family. He was something of a sport, he had his own motives and he had established his own right of way with the determination of a man who is liable to be dangerous when he makes a fight. And Anna gave in. Therefore his shirts were always laid away in the drawer with strips of whalebone in the collar, and the second breakfast he took when he came back from morning deliveries had to include cornflakes and hard-boiled eggs.
The meals were of amazing character altogether and of huge quantity—Anna was a strong believer in eating. Bowls of macaroni without salt or pepper or butter or sauce, brain stews and lung stews, calves’-foot jelly with bits of calves’ hair and sliced egg, cold pickled fish, crumb-stuffed tripes, canned corn chowder, and big bottles of orange pop. All this went well with Five Properties, who spread the butter on his bread with his fingers. Coblin, who ate with better manners, didn’t complain either and seemed to consider it natural. But I know that when he went downtown to a carriers’ meeting he fed differently.
To begin with, he changed from the old check suit in which he did his route with a bagful of papers, like Millet’s “Sower,” for a new check suit. In his snap-brim detective’s felt and large-toed shoes, carrying accounts and a copy of the Tribune for the Gumps, the sports results, and the stock quotations—he was speculating—and also for the gangwar news, keeping up with what was happening around Colossimo and Capone in Cicero and the North Side O’Bannions, that being about the time when O’Bannion was knocked off among his flowers by somebody who kept his gun-hand in a friendly grip—with this, Coblin got on the Ashland car. For lunch he went to a good restaurant, or to Reicke’s for Boston beans and brown bread. Then to the meeting, where the circulation manager gave his talk. Afterward, pie à la mode and coffee at the south end of the Loop, followed by a burlesque show at the Haymarket or Rialto, or one of the cheaper places where farm or Negro girls did the grinds, the more single-purposed, less playful houses.
Again, it’s impossible to know what Anna’s idea was of his downtown program. She was, you might say, in a desert, pastoral condition of development and not up to the fancy stage of Belshazzar’s Feast of barbaric later days. For that matter, Coblin wasn’t really up to it either. He was a solid man of relatively low current in his thoughts; he took the best care of his business and wouldn’t overstay downtown to an hour that would make it difficult for him to get up at his regular time, four o’clock. He played the stock market, but that was business. He played poker, but never for more than he carried in his change-heavy pockets. He didn’t have the long-distance burrowing vices of people who take you in by mildness and then turn out to have been digging and tunneling all the while—as skeptical judges are proud to point out when they see well-thought-of heads breaking through the earth in dark places. He was by and large okay with me, although he had his sullen times when he would badger me to get on faster with filling in the Sunday supplement. That was usually Anna’s effect, when she obtained the widest influence on him and got him on war-footing with her in the smoke of her trenches. But on his own he had an entirely different spirit of private gayness, as exemplified by the time I walked in on him when he was in the bathtub, lying in the manly state, erect, and dripping himself with the sponge in the steamy, cramped steerage space of the small windowless bathroom. It might have been more troublesome to ponder that the father of a Marine and of a young daughter, and the husband of Cousin Anna, should be found in so little dignity—much more troublesome, I see now, than it actually was. But my thoughts on this topic were never of any great severity; I could not see a debauchee where I had always seen Cousin Hyman, largely a considerate and merciful man, generous to me.
In fact they were all generous. Cousin Anna was a saving woman, she sang poor and did not spend much on herself, but she bought me a pair of winter hightops with a jack-knife on the side. And Five Properties loved to bring treats, cases of chocolate milk and flouncy giant boxes of candy, bricks of ice-cream and layer cakes. Both Coblin and he were hipped on superabundance. Whether it was striped silk shirts or sleeve garters or stockings with clocks, dixies in the movies or crackerjacks in the park when they took Friedl and me rowing, they seldom bought less than a dozen, Five Properties with bills, Cousin Hyman with his heaps of coins, just as flush. There was always much money in sight, in cups, glasses, and jars and spread on Coblin’s desk. They seemed sure I wouldn’t take any, and probably because everything was so lavish I never did. I was easily appealed to in this way, provided that I was given credit for understanding what the setup was, as when Grandma sent me on a mission. I could put my heart into a counterfeit too, just as easily. So don’t think I’m trying to put over that, if handled right, a Cato could have been made of me, or a young Lincoln who tramped four miles in a frontier zero gale to refund three cents to a customer. I don’t want to pass for having such legendary presidential stuff. Only those four miles wouldn’t have been a hindrance if the right feelings were kindled. It depended on which way I was drawn.
Home made a neat and polished contrast on my half-days off. At Anna’s the floors were washed on Friday afternoon, when she got down from bed and waded barefoot after the strokes of the mop, going forward, and afterward spread clean papers that soaked and dried and weren’t taken up again till the week was over. Here you smelled the daily cleaning wax, and everything was in place on a studious plan—veneer shining, doilies spread, dime-store cut-glass, elkhorn, clock set in place
—as regular as a convent parlor or any place where the love of God is made ready for on a base of domestic neatness and things kept well separated from the sea-composition of brutal and noisy trouble that heaves over every undefended wall. The bed that Simon and I slept in bulged up in full dress with pieces of embroidery on the pillow; books (Simon’s hero’s library) stacked; college pennants nailed in line; the women knitting by the clear, wall-browned summer air of the kitchen window; Georgie among the sunflowers and green washline poles of the yard, stumbling after slow Winnie, who went to smell where sparrows had lighted.
I guess it troubled me to see how absent Simon and I could be from the house and how smooth it went without us. Mama must have felt this and fussed over me as much as was allowable; she’d bake a cake, and I was something of a guest, with the table spread and jam dishes filled. That way my wage-earning was recognized, and it gave me pride to dig the folded dollars out of my watch pocket. Yet when any joke of the old woman’s made me laugh harder than usual a noise came out of me which was the echo of the whooping cough—I was only that much ahead of childhood, and although I was already getting rangy and my head was as big as it would ever grow, I was still kept in short pants and Eton collar.