by Saul Bellow
“What are you doing here?” said the nurse with angry looks. I had no right to be there.
I found my way back, and when I saw Mimi resting, much cooler, I cleared out of the hospital by the stairs Castleman had shown me and went to the car, new snow floating at my feet over the gray plating of ice.
I didn’t exactly know where I was when I started. I went slowly in the increasing snow, through side streets, hoping to come out on a main drag, and at last I did hit Diversey Boulevard in a deserted factory part, not far from the North Branch of the river. And here, as the thought of soon sacking in began to seem agreeable, I had a flat, at the rear. The tire sunk, and I dragged to the curb on the wheel rim and killed the motor. I had to thaw the lock of the trunk with matches, and when I got out the tools I didn’t understand the working of the bumper jack. It was new that year, and I was used to the axle type that Einhorn had had. For a while I tried, though the boiled shirt cut me and the cold gripped my feet and fingers, and then I flung the pieces back, locked up, and started to look for a place where I could get warm. But everything was shut, and now that I had my bearings I knew that I was not far from the Coblins’. Knowing Coblin’s hours, I didn’t hesitate to go there and wake him.
When the yellow lamp flashed in the black cottage hall and he discovered who was ringing he blinked his eyes, astonished.
“The car broke down on Diversey and I thought I could come by because you get up around this time for the route.”
“No, not today. It’s New Year’s; no presses working. But I wasn’t sleeping. I just before heard Howard and Friedl when they got in from a party. Come inside, for God’s sake, and stay. I’ll give you a blanket on the couch.”
I went in gratefully, took off the tormenting shirt, and covered my feet with cushions.
Coblin was delighted. “What a surprise they’ll have in the morning when they see Cousin Augie! Boy, that’s great! Anna will be in seventh heaven.”
Because of the brightness of the morning and also the kitchen noise, I was up early. Cousin Anna, no less slovenly than in other days, had pancakes and coffee going and a big spread on the table. Her hair was becoming white, her face with its blebs and hairs darker; her eyes were gloomy. But this gloom was the form of her emotion and not any radical pessimism. Weeping and catching me in her arms, she said, “Happy New Year, my dearest boy. You should know only happiness, as you deserve. I always loved you.” I kissed her and shook hands with Coblin, and we sat down to breakfast.
“Whose car broke down, Augie?”
“Simon’s.”
“Your bigshot brother.”
“It didn’t break down. It’s a flat, and I was too cold to change it.”
“Howard will help you when he gets up.”
“Don’t have to bother—” I thought I might mail Simon the keys and let him come after his damned car himself. This angry idea was momentary, however. I drank coffee and looked out into the brilliant first morning of the year. There was a Greek church in the next street of which the onion dome stood in the snow-polished and purified blue, cross and crown together, the united powers of earth and heaven, snow in all the clefts, a snow like the sand of sugar. I passed over the church too and rested only on the great profound blue. The days have not changed, though the times have. The sailors who first saw America, that sweet sight, where the belly of the ocean had brought them, didn’t see more beautiful color than this.
“Augie, it was too bad Friedl couldn’t come down from Ann Arbor for your brother’s wedding; she had exams. You haven’t seen her since a child, and you should. She’s so beautiful. I don’t say because she is my child—God is my witness. You’ll see her soon for herself. But here, look, this is a picture from the school. And this one was in the paper when she was chairlady of the junior benefit. And not only beautiful, Augie—”
“I know she’s very pretty, Cousin Anna.”
“And why do you want to get mixed up with your brother’s new relatives, those coarse people? Look how developed she is on this picture. She was your little sweetheart when you were kids. You used to say you were engaged.”
I almost corrected her, “No, you used to say it.” Instead I laughed, and she thought I was laughing over those pleasant memories and joined in, clasping her hands and closing her eyes. Slowly I realized that she was shedding tears as well as laughing.
“I ask one thing only, that before I die I should see my child happy with a husband.”
“And children.”
“And children—”
“For the love of mike, let’s have pancakes. There’s nothing on the plate,” said Coblin.
She hurried to the stove, leaving the pictures spread before me, album and clippings; at which I stared. Only to turn my eyes at last again to the weather.
Chapter 13
I WAS NO CHILD NOW, neither in age nor in protectedness, and I was thrown for fair on the free spinning of the world. If you think, and some do, that continual intimacy, familiarity, and love can result in falsehood, this being thrown on the world may be a very desirable even if sad thing. What Christ meant when he called his mother “Woman.” That after all she was like any woman. That in any true life you must go and be exposed outside the small circle that encompasses two or three heads in the same history of love. Try and stay, though, inside. See how long you can.
I remember I was in a fishmarket square in Naples (and the Neapolitans are people who don’t give up easily on consanguinity)—this fishmarket where the mussels were done up in bouquets with colored string and slices of lemon, squids rotting out their sunk speckles from their flabbiness, steely fish bleeding and others with peculiar coins of scales—and I saw an old beggar with his eyes closed sitting in the shells who had had written on his chest in mercurochrome: Profit by my imminent death to send a greeting to your loved ones in Purgatory: 50 lire.
Dying or not, this witty old man was sassing everybody about the circle of love that protects you. His skinny chest went up and down with the respiration of the deep-sea stink of the hot shore and its smell of explosions and fires. The war had gone north not so long before. The Neapolitan passersby grinned and smarted, longing and ironical as they read this ingenious challenge.
You do all you can to humanize and familiarize the world, and suddenly it becomes more strange than ever. The living are not what they were, the dead die again and again, and at last for good.
I see this now. At that time not.
Well, I went back to books, to reading not stealing them, while I lived on the money Mimi repaid, and on what she loaned me when she was on her feet and working once more. Through with Frazer, Mimi had met Arthur Einhorn and had taken up with him. She was still waiting on tables. I got my meals at the joint where she worked. And I lay down and finished the Five-Foot Shelf Einhorn had given me, the fire- and water-spotted books I had kept in the original cardboard box. They had a somewhat choky smell. So if Ulysses went down to hell or there were conflagrations in Rome or London or men and women lusted as they did in St. Paul, I could breathe an odor that supplemented the reading. Kayo Obermark lent me volumes of poets and took me to lectures now and then. This improved his attendance. He didn’t like to go alone.
I can’t be sure it isn’t sour grapes that the university didn’t move me much—I say that because according to the agreement I had made with Simon I was to have gone back in the spring—but it didn’t. I wasn’t convinced about the stony solemnity, that you couldn’t get into the higher branches of thought without it or had to sit down inside these old-world-imitated walls. I felt they were too idolatrous and monumental. After all, when the breeze turned south and west and blew from the stockyards with dust from the fertilizer plants through the handsome ivy some of the stages from the brute creation to the sublime mind seemed to have been bypassed, and it was too much of a detour.
That winter I had a spell of the WPA. Mimi urged me to go and be certified. She said it would be simple, which it certainly was. I had the two requirements, being
indigent and a citizen.
The trouble was that I didn’t care to be put on one of the street details I’d see picking up bricks and laying them down, and with that shame of purposelessness you smelled as the gang moved a little, just enough to satisfy the minimum demand of the job. However, she said I could always quit if too proud to be assigned to this; she thought it wasn’t a good sign in me that I had to have a clerical job; I’d be in better shape in the open air among simpler people. It wasn’t the people that I complained of, but the clinking on a brick and that melancholy percussion of fifty hammers at a time. But I went to apply because she felt obliged to take care of me, making me her responsibility, giving me money, and as we weren’t lovers this would be unfair.
Anyhow, I was certified and got a strolling kind of job that was about as good as I could expect. I was with a housing survey, checking on rooms and plumbing back-of-the-yards. I could fix up my own time card and soldier considerably, as everyone expected me to do; in bitter weather I could pass the time in the back booth of a coffeepot until the check-out hour. Also, the going into houses satisfied my curiosity. It was finding ten people to a room and the toilets in excavations under the street, or the rat-bitten kids. That was what I didn’t like too much. The stockyard reek clung to me worse than the smell of the dogs at Guillaume’s. And even to me, as accustomed to slums as Indians are to elephants, it was terra incognita. The different smells of flesh in all degrees from desire to sickness followed me. And all the imagination, passion, or even murder you could conceive were wrapped up in apparent simplicity or staleness, with elementary coarseness of a housewife feeling cabbages in a Polack store, or a guy who lifted a glass of beer to his white, flat-appearing face, or a merchant hanging ladies’ bloomers and elastics in the drygoods window.
I stayed with this deal until the end of winter, and then Mimi, who was always up on these things, had an idea that there might be something for me in the CIO drive that had just started. This was soon after the first sitdown strikes. Mimi was an early member of the restaurant workers’ union CIO. Not that she had any special grievance where she worked, but she believed in unions and she was on fine terms with her organizer, a man named Grammick. She brought us together.
This Grammick was no rough-and-tumble type but had points of similarity with Frazer and also Sylvester. He was a college man, soft-spoken, somewhat of a settlement-house minister doing his best, meek with the punks but used to them, and causing you a sense of regret. He had a long chest but his legs were relatively short; he walked quickly, toes in, slovenly in his double-breasted long jacket, a densely hairy, mild, even delicate person. But he wasn’t an easy man for opponents to deal with. He couldn’t be caught off balance, he clung hard, he was clever, and he knew a thing or two about deceit himself, Grammick did.
I produced a pretty favorable impression, and he agreed I might make an organizer. In fact his behavior toward me was very sweet. I had an idea that my good impression wasn’t all my doing, but that he was trying to make time with Mimi.
But I got to value Grammick for various reasons. Though he was so inconspicuous that he could come and go, not specially noticed around hotel lobbies and service passages, still when a matter came to a head he could act with authority and not be frightened by a situation he had created. I appreciated his consciousness in advance of rights and wrongs that hadn’t risen to view yet.
“Yes, they’re hiring organizers. They want experienced people, but where are they going to find them? The problems are piling up too fast.”
“Augie is the kind of person you ought to have,” said Mimi, “somebody who can speak the workers’ language.”
“Oh, really, does he?” said Grammick, looking at me. It made me laugh to hear this advertised of me, and I said I didn’t know whose language I spoke.
It couldn’t have made less difference I soon learned when I began to work at the job. People were rushing to join up, and it was a haste that practically belonged to nature, like a change of hives, and, bent on their ends, they had that touchiness from being immersed in the sense of their own motion that causes striking and stinging. It must have resembled a migration, land race, or Klondike. Except that this time the idea was about justice. The big strikes had set it off, those people sitting down by their machines and holding parties, but grim parties. That was in the automobile and rubber industries, and of this I saw the far-reaching result, down to the most negligible pearldiver on skid row.
I started out at a table of the union hall—which wasn’t the kind of rugged place you might picture but as solid as a bank building, on Ashland Avenue; it even had a restaurant of its own as well as a pool parlor—just a toy, for the members’ recreation, nothing like Einhorn’s—in the basement. I was supposed to be Grammick’s inside man and take care of the telephone and office part of things. It was anticipated I wouldn’t be busy above what was average and could gradually pick up what I needed to know. Instead there was a rush on me of people having to have immediate action; some hand-hacked old kitchen stiff as thickened with grease as a miner or sandhog would be with clay, wanting me to go and see his boss, subito; or an Indian would bring his grievances written in a poem on a paper bag soaked with doughnut oil. There wasn’t an empty chair in my room, which was a room well apart from the main offices reserved for workers in the big industries. It made no difference how hidden I was. I’d have been found had I been in a steel vault by the feeblest signal of possible redress, or as faint a trace as makes the night moth scamper ten miles through clueless fields.
There were Greek and Negro chambermaids from all the hotels, porters, doormen, checkroom attendants, waitresses, specialists like the director of the garde-manger from flossy Gold Coast joints, places where I had gone with the dog-wagon and so understood a little. All kinds were coming. The humanity of the under-galleries of pipes, storage, and coal made an appearance, maintenance men, short-order grovelers; or a ducal Frenchman, in homburg, like a singer, calling himself “the beauty cook,” who wrote down on his card without taking off his gloves. And then old snowbirds and white hound-looking faces, guys with Wobbly cards from an earlier time, old Bohunk women with letters explaining what was wanted, and all varieties of assaulted kissers, infirmity, drunkenness, dazedness, innocence, limping, crawling, insanity, prejudice, and from downright leprosy the whole way again to the most vigorous straight-backed beauty. So if this collection of people has nothing in common with what would have brought up the back of a Xerxes’ army or a Constantine’s, new things have been formed; but what struck me in them was a feeling of antiquity and thick crust. But I expect happiness and gladness have always been the same, so how much variation should there be in their opposite?
Dealing with them, signing them into the organization and explaining what to expect, wasn’t all generous kindness. In large part it was rough, when I wanted to get out of the way. The demand was that fierce, the idea having gotten around that it was a judgment hour, that they wanted to pull you from your clerical side of the desk to go with them. Instead I had to promise to investigate.
“When?”
“Soon. As soon as possible. We have a big backlog. But soon.”
“Sonsofbitches! Those guys! We’re just waiting there to give it to them. You should see that kitchen!”
“There’ll be an organizer out to contact you.”
“When?”
“Well, I’ll tell you the truth, we’re shorthanded because there’s such a rush; we haven’t got enough men. But what you must do meanwhile is get ready, have your people sign the cards, and prepare your demands and grievances.”
“Yeah, yeah. But, mister, when is the man going to come? The boss is gonna call in the AFL and sign a contract with them, that’s some outfit.”
I tried to discuss this danger with my higher-ups. Just then hotels and restaurants were a sideline with them, however; they lacked time to deal with them, busy with retail clerks who were out on a big strike and with runaway dress shops in Chicago Heights and so fo
rth, but they couldn’t bring themselves to turn down new memberships and aimed to keep them until they were prepared to devote the necessary time and money. In short, Grammick and I were intended to hold the line. I learned to do somewhat as he did. He would work sixteen hours daily for ten or twelve days at a stretch and then for two whole days he couldn’t be found by anyone. He spent that time in his mother’s flat, sleeping and eating steaks and ice-cream, taking the old lady to the movies or reading. Once in a while he slipped away to a lecture. He was studying law too. Grammick wasn’t going to be sucked away from all private existence.