by Saul Bellow
“But isn’t my mother here any more? Where’s my mother?”
“The blind lady? She’s downstairs by the neighbors.”
The Kreindls had put her in Kotzie’s room, which had only a small window with bars on the passage where people ducked through the brick subterranean vault on a shortcut through the alley or stopped to take a leak. Since she could only just distinguish light from dark and didn’t need a view, you couldn’t say on that score it was an unkindness to have been put there. The deep kitchen cuts in her palms had never softened out, and I felt them when she took my hands and said in her cracky voice, queerer than ever just then, “Did you hear about Grandma?”
“No, what?”
“She died.”
“Oh no!”
That was a shaft! It went straight and cold into my bowels, and I couldn’t bring up my back or otherwise move, but sat bent over. Dead! Horrible, to imagine the old woman dead, in a casket, underground, with the face covered and weight thrown on her, silent. My heart shrunk before the idea of this violence. Because it would have had to be violent. She, who always tore off interferences as she did that dentist’s hand, would have had to be smothered. For all her frailty she was a hard fighter. But she fought when clothed and standing up, alive. And now it was necessary to picture her captured and pulled down into the grave, and lying still. That was too much for me.
My grates couldn’t hold it. I shed tears with my sleeve over my eyes.
“What did she die of, Ma, and when?”
She didn’t know. A few days ago, before she had moved down, Kreindl had told her, and she had been in mourning ever since. According to her notions of how she should mourn.
All that she had in this vault of a room was a bed and chair. Well, I tried to find out from Mrs. Kreindl why Simon had done this. As it was suppertime, Mrs. Kreindl was at home. Usually she was away, afternoons, playing poker with other housewives; they played in earnest, for blood. How she had the repose of a big sheep, don’t ask me, since she was always in a secret fever from gambling and from warring with her husband.
She couldn’t tell me anything about Simon. Was it to get married that he had sold everything? He had been desperate, before I left, about marrying Cissy. But the furniture was old stuff, and how much would the Pole have paid for it? What would anyone give for that cripple kitchen stove? Or for the beds, even older; and the leatherette furniture we used to slide and rock on when we were kids? This stuff went back to the time of Rameses’ Americana set, to the last century. Maybe my father had bought the furniture. All pain-causing reflections. Simon must have been in a terrible way for money to have sold off all of that veteran metal and leather and left Mama in this cell with the Kreindls.
I was empty with hunger as I questioned Mrs. Kreindl but couldn’t apply to her for a meal, remembering her to be not very free about food. “Do you have any money, Mama?” I said. But all she had in her purse was a fifty-cent piece. “Well, it’s a good idea for you to have some change,” I told her, “in case you happen to want something, like gum drops or a Hershey bar.” I’d have taken a buck from her if Simon had left her something, but I could make out a little longer without her last fifty-cent piece. To ask for it, I thought, would scare her, and that would be barbarous. Especially on top of Grandma’s death. And she already was frightened, although, as when sick, she was upright in her posture and like waiting for the grief to come to a stop; as if this stop would be called by a conductor. She wouldn’t discuss with me what Simon had done but clung rather to her own idea of it. To which she didn’t wish me to add anything. I knew her.
I stayed a little longer because I sensed she wanted it, but then I had to leave, and when I scraped back my chair she said, “You going? Where do you go?” This was a question about my absence when the flat was sold up. I couldn’t answer it.
“Why, I have that room on the South Side still that I told you about.”
“Are you working? You have a job?”
“I always have something. Don’t you know me? Don’t worry, everything is going to be all right.”
Answering, I shunned her face a little, though there was no reason to, and felt my own face bitten as though it were a key, notched and filed out, some dishonorable, ill-purpose key.
I headed for Einhorn’s, and on the boulevard, where the trees had begun to bud in the favorite purple of Chicago April evening, instilled with carbon and with the smells of crocodile beds of guck from the cleaned sewers, by the lamps of the synagogue, people were coming out in new coats and business hats, with square velvet envelopes for their prayer things. It was the first night of Passover, of the Angel of Death going through all doors not marked with blood to take away the life of the Egyptian first-born, and then the Jews trooping into the desert. I wasn’t permitted to pass by; I was stopped by Coblin and Five Properties, who had seen me as I got into the street to walk around the crowd. They were on the curb, and Five Properties snatched me by the sleeve. “Look!” he said. “Who is in shul tonight!” Both were grinning, bathed-looking, in their best cleanliness and virile good condition.
“Hey, guess what?” said Coblin.
“What?”
“Doesn’t he know?” said Five Properties.
“I don’t know anything. I’ve been out of town and just got back.”
“Five Properties’s getting married,” said Coblin. “At last. To a beauty. You ought to see the ring he’s giving. Well, we’re through with whores now, aren’t we? Ah, boy, somebody’s in for it!”
“True?”
“So help me the Uppermost,” said Five Properties. “I invite you to my wedding, kid, a week from next Sunday at the Lion’s Club Hall, North Avenue, four o’clock. Bring a girl. I don’t want you should have anything against me.”
“What is there to have against you?”
“Well, you shouldn’t. We’re cousins, and I want you to come.”
“Happy days, man!” I said to him, doing my best, and thankful the murk was so deep they couldn’t see me well.
Coblin began to draw me by the arm. He wanted me to come to the Seder dinner. “Come along. Come home.”
While I stunk of jail and before I had begun to digest my misery? Before I found Simon? “No, some other time, thanks, Cob,” I said, going backwards.
“But why not?”
“Leave him, he’s got a date. Have you got a date?”
“As a matter of fact I do have to see somebody.”
“He’s starting his horny time of life. Bring your little pussy to the wedding.”
Cousin Hyman still smiled, but he thought probably of his daughter and so didn’t urge me more; he clammed up.
In Einhorn’s door I met Bavatsky as he descended to replace a fuse. Tillie had blown it with her curling iron, and, upstairs, one woman hobbled and the other just as slow from weight and uncertainty approached with candles and so recalled to me a second time it was the night of Exodus. But there was no dinner or ceremony here. Einhorn observed only one holy day, Yom Kippur, and only because Karas-Holloway, his wife’s cousin, insisted.
“What happened to that drunken wart Bavatsky?”
“He couldn’t get to the fuse box because the cellar was locked, so he went to fetch the key from the janitor’s wife,” said Mildred.
“If she has beer in the house we go to bed in the dark tonight.”
Suddenly Tillie Einhorn, with candle in a saucer, saw me by the flame.
“Look, it’s Augie,” she said.
“Augie? Where?” said Einhorn, quickly glancing between the uneven sizes of light. “Augie, where are you? I want to see you.”
I came forward and sat by him; he shifted his shoulder in token of wanting to shake hands.
“Tillie, go in the kitchen and make coffee. Mildred, you too.” He sent them back into the dark kitchen. “And take the plug out of the curler. I go nuts with their electric appliances.”
“It is out,” said Mildred, with a voice tired of, but always ready for, the duty of th
ese answers. Obedient in the smallest point, however, she shut the doors, and I was alone with him. In his night court. At least I thought he was grimacing with strictness at me. He had shaken hands only to give me a formal feel of his fingers and of the depth of his coldness. And the candles were now as genial to me as though they had been the ones stuck into loaves of bread by night and sailed on a black Indian lake to find the drowned body sunk to the bottom. Now the white middle way of his hair was down near the plate glass of his desk as he fixed to get and light a cigarette—as ever, the methodical struggle and pulling of the arms by the sleeves, that transport of flies by the ants. Then he began to blow smoke and prepared to speak. I decided I couldn’t allow myself to be chided like a kid of ten for the Joe Gorman deal, of which he by now certainly knew. I had to talk to him about Simon. But then it seemed he wasn’t going to lecture me at all. I must have looked too sick—low, gaunt, pushed to an extreme, burned. Last time we met I had had my Evanston fat on me; I had come to consult him about the adoption.
“Well, you haven’t been doing so well, it looks like.”
“No.”
“Gorman was caught. How did you get away?”
“By dumb luck.”
“Dumb? In a hot car, without even changing the plates! Talk about brainlessness! Well, they brought him back. The picture was in the Times. You want to see?”
No, I didn’t want to, for I knew what it would be like: between two hefty detectives and probably trying to tip his hat over his eyes as much as his held arms would allow, and spare his family direct eyes into the camera, or his plastered face. It was always like that.
“How come it took you so long to get back?” said Einhorn.
“I bummed, and I wasn’t very lucky.”
“But why did you have to bum? Your brother told me he was sending you the money to Buffalo.”
“Why, did he come and tell you?” I creased my brow with effort. “You mean he tried to borrow from you?”
“He got it from me. I made him another loan too.”
“What loan? I didn’t get anything from him.”
“That’s no good. I was stupid. I should have sent it to you myself. Beh?” He let out his tongue and his eyes went bright, looking surprised. “He took me—well, so he took. But he shouldn’t have let you down. Especially since I gave it to him over and above what I lent him personally. Even if he was in bad shape that’s too much.”
I was powerfully bitter and mad, but I felt an advance sway from a wave of something even worse, below the present depth.
“What do you mean—in bad shape? Why was he raising money? What did he want?”
“If he had told me for what I might have helped. I lent it to him because he is your brother; otherwise I hardly know the man. He went into a proposition with Nosey Mutchnik—the one I had that deal with in the lot. Remember? Now I could hold my own with him, but your brother is green. He took an interest in a betting pool, and the first game the White Sox played this season they told him he lost his share and if he wanted to stay in he’d have to bring another hundred bucks—I have the whole story now. They took that from him too, and he got a sock in the teeth when he became hotheaded. Mutchnik’s hooligans knocked him into the gutter. That’s what happened. I suppose you know why he wanted to make a fast buck?”
“Yes, to get married.”
“To get on top of Joe Flexner’s daughter, who made him wild. He never will now.”
“But why not? They’re engaged.”
“I begin to feel sorry for your brother, though he isn’t very smart, and if I did drop seventy-eight bucks …” As I saw the anguishing thing of Simon knocked over and bloodied in the gutter, I only listened and didn’t speak of Grandma’s death, or the furniture, and Mama put out of the house. “Now she won’t marry him,” said Einhorn.
“She won’t? Tell me!”
“Kreindl is the one I heard it from. He made a match for her with a relative of yours.”
“Not Five Properties—with him?” I shouted.
“Your greenhorn cousin. It’s going to be his hand that sets apart those fine legs.”
“Oh hell! No! They couldn’t do that to Simon!”
“They did.”
“And by now I guess he knows.”
“Does he! He went to Flexner’s and started a riot, breaking chairs. The girl went and locked herself in the toilet, and then the old man had to send for the police. The squad car came and got him.”
Arrested too! I suffered to myself for Simon. It was crazy, how. It crushed me to hear and picture.
“Cynical quiff, ah?” Einhorn said. He wanted to bring it all home to me with his queer stare of severity. “Cressida going over to the Greek camp—”
“And where’s Simon, in jail still?”
“No, old Flexner let the charge drop when he promised no more trouble. Flexner is a decent old man. He went broke owing nobody. He wouldn’t have the heart. He’s a sport too. They kept your brother one night and let him out this morning.”
“He spent last night in jail?”
“One night, that’s all,” said Einhorn. “Now he’s out.”
“Where is he though? Do you know?”
“No. But I can tell you you won’t find him at home.” Kreindl had told him about Mama, and he was preparing to let me hear all; but I said I had already been home. I sat before him stripped; I knew of nowhere to turn and had no force to leave.
Till now, as a family, we had some privacy, even if it was known that we were deserted as kids and on Charity. In Grandma’s time nobody, not even the caseworker Lubin, was informed exactly about us. At the free dispensary I’d go and do my guile not just on account of the money but so we should have some power of guidance over ourselves. Now there were no secrets, so anybody interested could look. This maybe was the consideration which made me not say to Einhorn what was the crudest thing of all, that Grandma was dead.
“I’m sorry for you; especially for your mother,” Einhorn started out, trying to raise me up. “Your brother got ahead of himself. Too inspired by tail. What got him so hot?”
In part I thought this question came from envy that anyone should be subject to such inspirations and heat. But also, on this side, Einhorn couldn’t be altogether unsympathetic.
Gradually, talking, he lost view of his first aim, which was to comfort me, and he got so bitter he tried to curl his fists inward and breasted the desk. “Why should you care if your brother gets a rupe up the behind!” he said. “He deserves it. He left you in a hole, he sold the flat, he got the money out of me because of you and you didn’t smell a dime of it. If you were honest with yourself you’d be glad. You’d do yourself some good by saying so, and I’d respect you more for it.”
“Say what? That it’s all his fault and I’m glad of that? That falling in love made him not care what happened to Mama? Or just that he’s miserable? What am I supposed to be glad about, Einhorn?”
“Don’t you realize the advantage you have from now on? You’d better not be easy on him. He’s got to make it right to you. The advantage has passed to you, and you’ve got him by the balls. Don’t you understand that? And if there’s only one thing you can get out of this right now it’s to admit at least that you’re happy he caught it in the neck. Jesus! if anybody did this to me I’d certainly have satisfaction knowing he was good and burned himself. If I didn’t, I’d worry I wasn’t clear in my head. Good for him! Good, good!”
I’m not sure why Einhorn worked over me with such savagery approaching waked-up despair. He even forgot to raise hell about Joe Gorman. I guess, back of it, that he thought of Dingbat’s inheritance which he had run into the ground. Maybe he didn’t want me to be despised as he somewhat despised Dingbat for not being angry. No, there was even more to the view he was driving so strongly, though sprawl-handed, against the desk. He intended that, as there were no more effective prescriptions in old ways, as we were in dreamed-out or finished visions, that therefore, in the naked form of the human jelly
, one should choose or seize with force; one should make strength from disadvantages and make progress by having enemies, being wrathful or terrible; should hammer on the state of being a brother, not be oppressed by it; should have the strength of voice to make other voices fall silent—the same principle for persons as for peoples, parties, states. This, and not a man-chick, plucked and pinched, with scraggle behind and anxious face full of sorrow-wrinkles, human fowl chased by brooms.