by Saul Bellow
Sometimes he’d tell something of himself in the form of a short remark, as when we passed under a North Shore viaduct once and he said, “I helped build that. I wasn’t any older than you then, and helped pass cement to the mixer. Must have been the year the Panama Canal was opened. Thought the job would knock me out in the stomach muscles. Buck and a quarter was pretty good dough in those days.”
This was how he borrowed me for company. It probably gave him some amusement, how I took to this sort of life.
There was a spell in which I mainly wished to own dinner clothes and be invited to formal parties and thought considerably about how to get into the Junior Chamber of Commerce. Not that I had any business ideas. I was better than fair in the shop, but I had no wider inventiveness about money. It was social enthusiasm that moved in me, smartness, clotheshorseyness. The way a pair of tight Argyle socks showed in the crossing of legs, a match to the bow tie settled on a Princeton collar, took me in the heart with enormous power and hunger. I was given over to it.
Briefly I ran with a waitress from the Symington, Willa Steiner. I took her dancing at the Merry Garden and went to the beach with her at night. She kindly let me get by most of the time with putting on the dog and pompousness, being a warm girl. She was nowise shy herself, making no bones about what we were together for. She had a hometown lover too, whom she talked about marrying—I’m certain without any hinder-thought of making me jealous. For she had a number of things against me about which she was probably in the right, my dandy gab and conceit and my care about clothes. Soon informed, Mrs. Renling came down hard on me for getting mixed up with her. Einhorn didn’t know more of what went on around him than she did about everything in her territory. “Augie, I’m astonished at you,” she said. “She’s not even a pretty girl. She has a nose like a little Indian”—I had especially petted Willa Steiner with this pretty nose for my theme; it wasn’t courageous of me not to defend it—“and she’s covered with freckles. I have freckles too, but mine are different, and anyhow, it’s only as an older person that I’m talking to you. Besides, the girl is a little prostitute, and not an honest prostitute, because an honest prostitute, all she wants is your money. And if you have to do this, if you come to me and tell me you have to—and don’t be ashamed of that—I’ll give you money to go somewhere on Sheridan Road near Wilson, where such places are.” Another instance of people offering to contribute money to keep me out of trouble; as Einhorn had, when he lectured me about the robbery. “Augie, don’t you see this little tramp wants you to get her in trouble so that you’ll have to marry her? That’s all you need now, to have a baby with her right at the start of your career. I would think that you would know what this is about.”
Sometimes I thought it was clever and free of her to talk as she did, and again that it was terribly stupid. I had an impression that, glancing out from the partitions where she observed, with her dotty, smarting, all-interfering face, she was bent on pulling whom she wanted to her, to infuse and instill. It was the kind of talk gilded dumb young men have heard from protectresses, generals’ and statesmen’s wives, in all the duchies, villas, and capital cities of the world.
“But you don’t really know anything about Willa, Mrs. Renling,” I said clumsily. “She doesn’t—” I didn’t go on, because of all the scorn in her face. “My dear boy, you talk like a nitwit. Go on with her if you want. I’m not your mother. But you’ll see,” she said in her impersonator’s voice, “when she has you roped. D’you think all she wants out of life is to wait on tables and work to feed herself just to keep in shape for you, so you’ll have nothing to do but enjoy her? You know nothing about girls; girls want to marry. And it’s not in the modest old times when they sat on it till somebody would have mercy.” She spoke disgustedly; she had disgust to burn.
It didn’t occur to me, when Mrs. Renling had me drive her to Benton Harbor where she took mineral baths for her arthritis, that she was getting me away from Willa. She said she couldn’t think of going out to Michigan alone, and that I would drive and keep her company in the hotel. Afterward I understood.
Benton Harbor was plenty different for me from what it had been last time, when I had hitch-hiked back from Muskegon with Nails and Dingbat, with sweat shirt tied on my neck by the sleeves and my feet road-sore. Actually we stayed in St. Joe, next to Lake Michigan, at the Merritt Hotel, right in front of the water and the deep, fresh smell of sea volume in the glossy pink walls of the rooms. The hotel was vast, and it was brick construction, but went after the tone of old Saratoga Springs establishments, greenery and wickerwork, braid cord on the portieres, menus in French, white hall runners and deep fat of money, limousines in the washed gravel, lavish culture of flowers bigger than life, and triple-decker turf on which the grass lived rich. Everywhere else, in the blaze of July, it was scanty.
I had the long bath hours to myself to see what the territory round about was like. It was mostly fruit country, farmed by Germans, the men like farmers anywhere, but the older women in bonnets, going barefoot in long dresses under the giant oaks of their yards. The peach branches shone with seams of gum, leaves milky from the spray of insecticides. Also, on the roads, on bicycles and in Ford trucks, were the bearded and long-haired House of David Israelites, a meat-renouncing sect of peaceful, businesslike, pious people, who had a big estate or principality of their own, and farmhouse palaces. They spoke of Shiloh and Armageddon as familiarly as of eggs and harnesses, and were a millionaire concern many times over, owning farms and springs and a vast amusement park in a big Bavarian dell, with a miniature railway, a baseball team, and a jazz band that sent music up clear to the road from the nightly dances in the pavilion. Two bands, in fact, one of each sex.
I brought Mrs. Renling here a few times to dance and drink spring water; the mosquitoes, though, were too active for her. Afterward I sometimes went alone; she didn’t see why I should want to. Nor did she see what I strayed into town for in the morning, or why I took pleasure in sitting in the still green bake of the Civil War courthouse square after my thick breakfast of griddle cakes and eggs and coffee. But I did, and warmed my belly and shins while the little locust trolley clinked and crept to the harbor and over the trestles of the bog-spanning bridge where the green beasts and bulrush-rocking birds kept up their hot, small-time uproar. I brought along a book, but there was too much brown stain on the pages from the sun. The benches were white iron, roomy enough for three or four old gaffers to snooze on in the swamp-tasting sweet warmth that made the redwing blackbirds fierce and quick, and the flowers frill, but other living things slow and lazy-blooded. I soaked in the heavy nourishing air and this befriending atmosphere like rich life-cake, the kind that encourages love and brings on a mild pain of emotions. A state that lets you rest in your own specific gravity, and where you are not subject matter but sit in your own nature, tasting original tastes as good as the first man, and are outside of the busy human tamper, left free even of your own habits. Which only lie on you illusory in the sunshine, in the usual relation of your feet or fingers or the knot of your shoestrings and are without power. No more than the comb or shadow of your hair has power on your brain.
Mrs. Renling did not like to be alone at meals, not even at breakfast. I had to eat with her in her room. Each morning she took sugarless tea, with milk, and a few pieces of zwieback. I had the works, the bottom half of the menu, from grapefruit to rice pudding, and ate at a little table by the open window, in the lake airs that lapped the dotted Swiss curtains. In bed, and talking all the while, Mrs. Renling took off the gauze chin band she slept in and began to treat her face with lotions and creams, plucked her eyebrows. Her usual subject of conversation was the other guests. She got them down and polished them off, but good. In the leisure of the early hour, when she bravely rode fence on her face. She would die a well-tended lady who had kept up fiercely all civilized duties, as developed before Phidias and through Botticelli—all that great masters and women of illustrious courts had prescribed and followed for p
erfection, the kind of intelligence to wear in the eyes and the molds of sweetness and authority. But she had a wrath-ruled mind. Giving herself these feminine cares in the brightness of her suite in the soft-blown-open summer beauty, she was not satisfied without social digging and the toil of grievances and antipathies.
“Did you notice the old couple on my left, last night at the Bunco party, the Zeelands? Marvelous old Dutch family. Isn’t he a beautiful old man? Why, he was one of the greatest corporation lawyers in Chicago, and he’s a trustee for the Robinson Foundation, the glass people. The university gave him an honorary degree, and when he has a birthday the newspapers write editorials. And still his wife is stupid as her own feet, and she drinks, and the daughter is a drunkard too. If I knew she was going to be here I would have gone to Saratoga instead. I wish there was some way to get an advance guest list from these hotels. There ought to be a service like that. They have a suite for six hundred dollars a month in Chicago. And as soon as the chauffeur comes for the old man in the morning—this is something I know!—the bellhop goes out and buys them a bottle of bourbon and bets on a horse for them. Then they drink and wait for the results. But that daughter—she keeps herself a little old-fashioned. If you didn’t notice her last night, look for a heavy-built woman who wears feathers. She threw a child out of the window and killed it. They used all their influence and got her free. A poor woman would have gotten the chair, like Ruth Snyder, with the matrons standing all around and picking up their skirts so the photographers couldn’t get a picture of it. I wonder if she dresses like this now so as to feel nothing in common with that young flapper who did that thing.”
You needed a strong constitution to stick to your splendor of morning in the face of these damnation chats. I had to struggle when she called out her whole force of frights, apocalypse death riders, church-porch devils who grabbed naked sinners from behind to lug them down to punishment, her infanticides, plagues, and incests.
I managed. But the situation was that I was enjoying what a rich young man enjoys and arranged my feelings accordingly, filling in and plastering over objections. Except that there were rotten moments, such as when she spoke of the Snyder execution and evoked this terrible protection of a woman’s modesty who was writhing in thousands of volts. And though I was avoiding everything that didn’t agree with what I wanted, the consistent painting of doomedness and evil she specialized in did get under my skin. What if it really was as she said? If, for instance, the woman had thrown her baby out of the window? It wasn’t Medea, a good, safe long time ago, chasing her pitiful kids, but a woman I saw in the dining room, wearing feathers, sitting down with her white-haired father and mother.
But there were people at the table near theirs that soon were of more interest to me—two young girls, of beauty to put a stop to such thoughts or drive them to the dwindling point. There was a moment when I could have fallen for either one of them, and then everything bent to one side, toward the slenderer, slighter, younger one. I fell in love with her, and not in the way I had loved Hilda Novinson either, going like a satellite on the back of the streetcar or sticking around her father’s tailor shop. This time I had a different kind of maniac energy and knew what sexual sting was. My expectations were greater; more corrupt too, maybe, owing to the influence of Mrs. Renling and her speaking always of lusts, no holds barred. So that I allowed suggestions in all veins to come to me. I never have learned to reproach myself for such things; and then my experience in curtailing them was limited. Why, I had accepted of Grandma Lausch’s warning only the part about the danger of our blood and that, through Mama, we were susceptible to love; not the stigmatizing part that made us out the carriers of the germ of ruination. So I was dragged, entrained, over a barrel. And I had a special handicap, because of the way I presented myself—due to Mrs. Renling—as if God had not left out a single one of His gifts, and I was advertising His liberality with me: good looks, excellent wardrobe, mighty fine manners, social ease, wittiness, handsome-devil smiles, neat dancing and address with women—all in the freshest gold-leaf. And the trouble was that I had what you might call forged credentials. It was my worry that Esther Fenchel would find this out.
I worked, heart-choked, for the grandest success in these limits, as an impostor. I spent hours getting myself up to be a living petition. By dumb concentration and notice-wooing struggle. The only way I could conceive, in my blood-loaded, picturesque amorousness. But, the way a hint of plague is given in the mild wind of flags and beauty of a harbor—a scene of safe, busy peace—I could perhaps, for all of my sane look of easy, normal circumstances, have passed the note of my thoughts in the air—on the beach, on the flower-cultured lawn, in the big open of the white and gold dining room—and these thoughts were that I could submit to being hung in the girl’s hair—of that order. I had heavy dreams about her lips, hands, breasts, legs, between legs. She could not stoop for a ball on the tennis court—I standing stiff in a foulard with brown horses on a green background that was ingeniously slipped through a handcarved wooden ring which Renling made popular that season in Evanston—I couldn’t witness this, I say, without a push of love and worship in my bowels at the curve of her lips, and triumphant maiden shape behind, and soft, protected secret. Where, to be allowed with love, would be the endorsement of the world, that it was not the barren confusion distant dry fears hinted and whispered, but was necessary, justified, the justification proved by joy. That if she would have, approve, kiss, use her hands on me, allow me the clay dust of the court from her legs, the mild sweat, her intimate dirt and sweat, deliver me from suffering falsehood—show that there wasn’t anything false, injurious, or empty-hearted that couldn’t be corrected!
But in the evening, when nothing had come of my effort, a scoreless day, I lay on the floor of my room, all dressed up to go to dinner, with doomed patience, eaten with hankering and thinking futilely what brilliant thing to do—some floral, comet, star action, casting off stupidity and clumsiness. But I had marked carefully all that I could about Esther, in order to study what could induce her to see herself with me, in my light. That is, up there in sublimity. Asking only that she join me, let me, ride and row in love with me, with her fresh, great female wonders and beauties which would increase by my joy that she was exactly as she was, with her elbows, her nipples at her sweater. I watched how she chased a little awkwardly on the tennis court and made to protect her breasts and closed in her knees when a fast ball came over the net. My study of her didn’t much support my hopes; which was why I lay on the floor with a desiring, sunburned face and lips open in thought. I realized that she knew she had great value, and that she was not subject to urgent-heartedness. In short, that Esther Fenchel was not of my persuasion and wouldn’t much care to hear about her perspiration and little personal dirts.
Nevertheless the world never had better color, to say it exactly as it strikes me, or finer and more reasonable articulation. Nor ever gave me better trouble. I felt I was in the real and the true as far as nature and pleasure went in forming the native place of human and all other existence.
And I behaved ingeniously too. I got into conversations with old Fenchel, not the girls’ father but their uncle, who was in the mineral-water business. It wasn’t easy, because he was a millionaire. He drove a Packard, the same model and color as the Renlings’; I parked behind him on the drive so that he had to look twice to see which was his, and then I had him. Inter pares. For how could he tell that I earned twenty-five dollars a week and didn’t own the car? We talked. I offered him a Perfecto Queen. He smiled it away; he had his own tailor-made Havanas in a case big enough for a pistol, and he was so ponderously huge it didn’t even bulge in his pocket. His face was fat and seamed, black-eyed—eyes black as the meat of Chinese litchi nuts—with gray, heinie hair, clipped to the fat of the scalp, back and sides. It was a little discouraging that the girls were his heiresses, as he right away told me, probably guessing that I wasn’t bringing out the flower of my charm for his old cartilage-heav
y Rembrandt of a squash nose with its white hairs and gunpowder speckles. To be sure not. And he wanted me to know in what league I was playing. I didn’t give an inch. I’ve never backed down from male relatives, either calf or bull, or let father and guardians discomfit me.
Getting to Esther’s aunt was harder, since she was sickly, timid, and silent, with the mood of rich people whose health lets them down. Her clothes and jewelry were fine, but the poor lady’s face was full of private effort; she was a little deaf from it. I didn’t have to put on friendly interest; I really (God knows from where) had it. And by instinct I knew that what would fetch her—as infirm, loaded with dough, and beaten a long way out of known channels by the banked spoon-oars of special silver as she was—was the charm of ordinary health. So I talked away to her and was pretty acceptable.