by Saul Bellow
“Any odds he’s going to the station to swear out a warrant?” said Happy.
Simon, who had put down the gun, listened to him, and with a heavy breath he said, “Get me Nuzzo on the phone.” He spoke to me, and it was in a fashion I had made up my mind to get used to and generally obeyed. He no longer looked up a number himself or did the dialing but took the instrument only when his party was already waiting. This time, however, I didn’t stir. My arms were crossed and I held my place by the scale. He marked me down for this, grimly. Happy got the number for him.
“Nuzzo!” said Simon. “This is March. How y’doin’? What? No, it’s cold enough, I can’t kick. Now listen, Nuzzo, we just had a little trouble down here from a squarehead dealer who hit one of my men with a shovel. What? No, he was drunk as a lord, dumped his load on my scale and tied me up for an hour. Look, he’s probably on his way to make a complaint because I roughed him up. Take care of him for me, will you? Keep him in the clink till he cools off. Sure I will, I got witnesses. You tell him if he’s thinking of laying for me after, you’ll fix his clock good. What? He does bushel business down by that church on Twenty-eighth. Do that for me, will you?”
He did, and Guzynski was in the lockup several days. Next time I saw him he wasn’t plotting any revenge. His scars were crusty yet when he came back still a customer, quiet, and I know that Simon was watching his eyes and would have acted on the least hint. But there was no trouble to hint. Nuzzo, or Nuzzo’s people, had put a deep fright in him in their cellar below cellar, and gave him a Saturn’s bite in the shoulder to show him how he could be picked up whole and eaten. He must even come back a customer. And Simon, too, knew how to put home the clincher, and at Christmas gave Guzynski a bottle of Gordon’s Dry Gin and his wife a box of New Orleans pecan pralines in the form of a cotton bale. She said to him that it had done Guzynski good.
“Of course,” said Simon. “He’s satisfied now. Because he knows where he stands. When he swung that shovel he didn’t know and was trying to find out. Now he knows.”
For Simon wanted to show me how justly he handled such crises, and how badly, by contrast—because of chicken-heartedness—I did. I should have quelled Guzynski’s riot as soon as it broke. But I wasn’t prompt, wasn’t brave, didn’t understand that Guzynski had to be pistol-whipped and thrown in jail if he wasn’t to become a Steelkilt mutineer to buffalo all captains. The inference was clear that if I didn’t make time with Lucy Magnus it was from these same shortcomings. If I became her husband in two-armed fact, the rest was merely a formality. But I didn’t mount the step of power. I could have done so from love, but not to get to the objective.
Thus things became more tough for me at the yard; Simon increased my hardships both for my good and because it didn’t displease him to do it. At this time he couldn’t say how many high things were suitable for him and was trying on guises. His last thoughts at breakfast sometimes were the next new policy, and this might be to devote himself absolutely to the bottom-most detail or fistful in a business that reckoned by tons; or, again, to skim in the big space of principle only and leave the details to subordinates—as he could do if they, and mainly I, were trustworthy; or to be a Jesuit of money; or to be self-made: that was one of his weakest ideas but it was also persistent. I said, “Oh, but you’re not a Henry Ford. After all, you married a rich girl.” “The question is,” he said, “what you have to suffer to get money, how much effort there is in it. Not that you start with a nickel, like the Alger story”—I here remembered what a reader Simon had been—“and run it into a fortune. But if you get a stake, what you do with it, whether you plunge or not.” But this was the discussion of theory, which became rarer between us. Mostly I had to see in his disgusted eyes what his theory was and how disadvantageously I fitted into it, where I trailed, lagged, and missed the mark.
So those were evil days for me, in that particular field of feeling that had the shape of the yard, the forms of the fence, coal heaps, machinery, the window of the scale, and that long, brass, black-graduated beam where I weighed. These things: and also the guys that worked, the guys that bought, the cops that came for theirs, the mechanics and the railroad agents, the salesmen, got into me. My head was fall of things to remember; I must not quote a wrong price and stumble in arithmetic or any dealing. Mimi Villars heard me talking in my sleep one night about prices and came in and asked me questions, as though in a telephone conversation. She quoted the prices back to me in the morning, all correctly. “Brother! things must be bad for you,” she said, “if that’s all you can dream.” I might have confessed even worse, if I’d cared to, since Simon had decided on the roughest treatment for me and sent me on errands not exactly for Hesperides apples. I had to fight with janitors about clinkers, soothe and bribe them, sweeten dealers with beer, wrangle with claims agents about shrinkage, make complicated deposits in the pushing, barking crowd at the bank, everybody in a hurry and temper; I had furthermore to hunt up shovelers in flop-houses and court them in the Madison Street gutter when we were suddenly shorthanded. I had to go to the morgue to identify one found shot with our pay envelope empty in his shirt pocket. They lifted the bristling, creased wrap from him and I recognized him, his black body rigid, as if he died in a fit of royal temper, making fists, feet out of shape, and crying something from the roof of his mouth, which I saw.
“You know him?”
“That’s Ulace Padgett. He worked for us. What happened to him?”
“Girl friend shot him, they say.” He pointed out the wound in his breast.
“Have they caught her?”
“Naw, they won’t even look for her. They never do.”
Simon had given me this mission because, he said, I was driving the car anyway, to take Lucy out, and might as well attend to it on the way home. I had to hurry and change, and I didn’t have the time to wash off any but the exposed dirt of face, neck, and ears. All over the rest of me was grit from the yeard, up my heels and legs. Even in the corners of the eyes there were shadowed places I didn’t get into. They widened out my look by darkness. I had no time to eat, even if I had enjoyed an appetite, for the morgue had taken long and Lucy was waiting. I drove faster than I had any business to, and had a near thing at Western Avenue and Diversey, a long, downhill skid that turned the Pontiac round so that I finished backwards, against a streetcar. The motorman had had a good forty yards to see me and was standing on a grade, under the railroad bridge. So I didn’t hit hard. I smashed the rear lights but couldn’t see much other damage, and was congratulated by that sudden gathering that always collects on such an occasion. I was told how lucky I was and laughed it all off, hopped back of the wheel again and continued. I got to the Magnuses’ in marvelous spirits, in the black night of the drive and the snow head of the portico, confident and whistling, the keys melodious in the coat I tossed down on the bench in the hall. However, when Lucy’s brother Sam gave me a drink I went back, infinitely quicker than the speed at which I had come, to the morgue—the smell of the whisky on an empty stomach did that for me—and to the accident, which now made my work-filthy legs too weak to hold me. I sank down in a chair. Lucy said, “Why are you so white?” And Sam came near, like the host of a B movie, concerned after all lest his sister, huggable, press-bosom dolly, get herself engaged to a weakling. With more of this interest than mercy he bent to me, the stripes of his dressing gown stretched tight over his can.
“Am I white?” I struggled to say and picked up my head. “Maybe because I haven’t eaten.”
“Oh, how silly. Since when? Why, it’s after nine.” She sent Sam to the kitchen to get a sandwich and a glass of milk from the cook.
“I also had an accident—almost,” I said to her when he had gone, and described what had happened.
I’m not sure which most came through, her concern, or the sudden thought at the rear of her mind that I was a Jonah—I, the happy lover of the present moment. Trained fine in foresight, when, as now, she wanted to make use of it, she must have been see
ing a drift of hard luck if not downright misery in the horizon. “Did you damage the car badly?” she said.
“It’s banged up a little.”
She didn’t like my vagueness about it.
“The trunk?”
“I don’t know exactly. I broke the tail lights, that I know. About the rest it’s hard to tell in the dark, but it probably isn’t much.”
“We’ll go in my car tonight,” she said, “and I’ll drive. You must be shaky from the accident.”
So we went out in her roadster, a new one her father had recently given her, to our party on the North Shore, and afterward parked in one of the big sectors of shadow around the Bahai temple to stroke, struggle, and shiver at the base of that cold religious knoll and its broken-up moonlight. Things seemed as usual but were not, either for her or for me. When we got back she wanted to have another look at the damage, afraid for me. I wouldn’t go bend over the back of the car with her and put my finger in the dents. I turned off her headlights, under which the examination was taking place. And in the front hall afterward, when I was in coat and hat, fondling her and being assured she loved me, I knew there was an obstruction of sympathy. She foresaw that Simon would raise hell about the damage—as he did—and what’s more, no point of view but his seemed possible to her, and she was somewhat frightened at me, feeling that I had one. And I might smell her shoulder and lift up her breast, but it wasn’t the same intimacy any more in that riches-cluttered hall partly inventoried by the moon, the old man snuffing upstairs, vigilant whether asleep or not.
I was therefore worn out in advance of the dripping yellow morning and its sick cold and the close filthy heat of the oil-squirting stove indoors. There is a way, I don’t doubt, to carry all such things like little sticks in the bulge of the flood water, if you determine your energy to flow that way, and the weight of morgues and cars depends on the hydraulic lifting power you dispose of. Napoleon when he escaped in the old box of a sledge from wintry Russia, the troops of his dead lying like so many flocks covered in snow, talked three days to Caulaincourt who probably couldn’t hear very well because his ears were bandaged—his master couldn’t practice his old trick of pulling them—but he must have seen in his boss’s swollen face the depth that kept floating a whole Europe of details.
Yes, these business people have great energy. There’s question as to what’s burned to produce it and what things we can and can’t burn. There’s the burning of an atom. Wild northern forests go like so many punk sticks. Where’s the competitor-fire kindling, and what will its strength be?
And another thing is that while for the sake of another vigor is lacking, for the sake of the taste of egg in one’s mouth there’s all-out effort, and that’s how love is lavished.
I couldn’t hold up all of these different elements. Simon came in and bawled me out over the car and I was too broken-down to give any back talk or even feel he was doing me wrong. All I did reply was, “What are you fussing about? It wasn’t much of an accident, and you’re insured.”
This was just where the error was; it was that I had to feel bad about the back shell of the car and those crustacean eyes that were dragging by the wires, and it wasn’t so much the accident as my failure to care as I should that he minded. That was why he burned me with his eyes and showed his broken-edged tooth while his head settled downward with menace. I was too despondent to stand up to him. Nothing visible backed me, as it did him, to see and trust, but all was vague on my side and yet it was also very stubborn.
I stayed in that evening to read. According to our agreement I was to start at the university in the spring, when business would let up a little and Simon could spare me. I still had the craving that I had given in to all summer long when I had lived on books, to have the reach to grasp both ends of the frame and turn the big image-taking glass to any scene of the world. By now Padilla had sold most of my books for me—he himself had given up stealing lately since he had taken a part-time job calculating the speed of nerve impulses in a biophysics lab—and I had only a few things left. However, there was Einhorn’s fire-damaged set of classics in a box under the bed, and I picked out Schiller’s Thirty Years’ War and was lying in my socks reading when Mimi Villars came in.
Often she came and went without talking to me, only for her things in the closet. But she had something to say tonight, and didn’t spar, but told me, “Frazer knocked me up.”
“Gosh, are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure. Come out with me. I want to talk to you and I don’t want Kayo to be in on it. He listens through the wall.”
It was black weather, not too cold but very windy, and the street light was hacked and banged like a cymbal.
“But where’s Frazer?” I said, having been out of touch with the house lately.
“He had to leave. He has to read a damn paper at a convention in Louisiana, Christmas, and so he went to see his folks first, because he can’t be with them for the holiday. But what difference is it where he is—what’s the good of him?”
“Well, honestly now, Mimi, wouldn’t you like it if you could get married?”
She gave me enough silence in which to take it back, looking at me. “You must think I lose my head easily,” she said when I didn’t retract. We hadn’t gone down into the wind yet; we were on the porch. She had one foot pointed to the side and her hand coming from her deep sleeve held the back of her neck while her round face of tough happiness was turned close under mine. Tough happiness? Yes, or hard amusement, or something spiritual and gymnastic, with pain done to the brows to make them point finely. “If I wouldn’t marry him before, why should I now because of an accident? I see you’ve been under good influences. Let’s go get a cup of coffee.”
She took my arm, and we got as far as the corner, where we stopped again and were talking when a little dog came up, followed by his mistress in a Persian lamb coat and astrakhan hat, and an astonishing thing happened of the sort that made me see how believable it was that Mimi should have grabbed the gun from a stickup man and shot him; for the dog, somehow misoriented, perhaps because of the strong weather, wet on Mimi’s ankle, and she shouted at the woman, who seemed incapable of looking to see what was happening, “Take away your dog!” And then she tore off the woman’s high fur hat to dry herself with it and left her like that, her hairdress beginning to be destroyed by the wind as she cried out, “My hat!” The hat was on the street where Mimi had flung it.
That lack of respect in occurrences for the difficulties that there already are! But then proofs always flocked to Mimi to help her make her case. Anyway, in the drugstore, when she had stripped off and rolled her stocking and put it in her bag, it only made her laugh. A real and pure chance for temper tickled her heart.
But what she wanted to discuss over coffee was a new method of abortion she had heard about. She had already tried drugs like ergoapiol, with walking, climbing stairs, and hot baths, and now one of the waitresses at the co-op told her of a doctor near Logan Square who brought on miscarriages by injection.
“I never heard of such a thing before, but it’s worth a try, and I’m going to try.”
“What is it that he uses?”
“How should I know? I’m not a scientist.”
“And if it has a bad effect you’ll have to go to the hospital, and then what?”
“Oh, they have to take you in if you’re in danger of your life. Only they’d never get out of me how it happened.”
“It sounds risky. Maybe you’d better not try at all.”
“And have a baby? Me? Can you see me with a kid? You don’t care how the world gets populated, do you! Maybe you’re thinking about your mother”—I thus knew that either Sylvester or Clem Tambow had talked to her about me—“and that you wouldn’t be here if your mother had ideas like mine. Nor your brothers either. But even if I could be sure I’d have a son like you,” she said, with her usual comment of laughter, “not that I don’t think the world of you, pal, even with all your faults—why s
hould I get into this routine? So the souls of these things shouldn’t get after me when I die and accuse me of not letting them be born? I’d tell them, ‘Listen, stop haunting me. What do you think you ever were? Why, a kind of little scallop, that’s all. You don’t know how lucky you are. What makes you think you would have liked it? Take it from me, you’re indignant because you don’t know.’”
We were sitting near the counter, and all the help stopped and listened to this speech. Among them was a man who said, “What a crazy broad!”