by Saul Bellow
I went along with this rush, really needing some such thing now because of my blowout with Simon. After office hours I was out on the streetcars, traveling to see cooks and dishwashers or hotel clerks on night duty—those leafy nights of the beginning green in streets of the lower North Side where the car seemed to blunder as if without tracks, off Fullerton or Belmont, when the white catalpa bells were opening and even the dust could have a sweet odor. Many clerks especially asked you to come at night, when they could speak freely. The conspiratorial part of it was fine; and with the radical ideas then going, these people who were placed in a position to be thoughtful, since they were up all night, wanted the chance to say those self-rehearsed things that sometimes had been on their hearts too long. True and false light was distributed just about as usual, is my opinion. But it wasn’t my place to judge that, but only to advance the work. Some of these guys just plain meant business. I suspect they wanted me to be more dangerous than I appeared to be. I know I seemed too fresh and well in color, not enough smoked and yellowed to appreciate what they were up against. My manner was both slipshod and peppy. They were looking for some fire-fed secret personality that would prepare the moment when they could stand up yelling rebellion. And here instead I would breeze in—I knew sometimes that my color and the height of my hair, my relaxed way, would give offense. But there wasn’t any help for that.
Occasionally they’d even ask for my credentials.
“Did they send you from headquarters?”
“You Eddie Dawson?”
“That’s right.”
“I’m March. You talked to me on the telephone.”
“You?” said Dawson. And I knew he had expected to see some sandy, suck-cheeked devil, veteran of coal fields or oil or New Jersey textile strikes. Yes, that at least—someone on whom it was evident that his first strength had been drawn out of him in the Paterson jail.
“You don’t have to worry. I’m reliable.”
Then he resigned himself; he had been taken in by my telephone voice. I could be at least a messenger to the higher-ups who’d be busy Guy-Fawkesing the Drake Hotel or the Palmer House—because it was that to Eddie Dawson, hauling up gunpowder in the tunnels.
He would tell me, then, what he wanted my superiors to know and give me directives.
“I want you to arrange a meeting with your top man down there—”
“Mr. Ackey, you mean?”
“You tell him I can get the employees together, but before we go out on strike we want to talk to him, all of us. That’s to give my people confidence.”
“Why are you sure you’ll have to go out? Maybe you’ll get your demands.”
“Do you know who runs this bedbug palace?”
“What, some bank? Is it a receivership? Most of these small joints—”
“It’s an outfit called Holloway Enterprises.”
“Karas?”
“You know him?”
“Yes, I do, it so happens. I used to work for the insurance man Einhorn who is his cousin-in-law.”
“He writes the policies for this place. You know what kind of a joint this is, don’t you? For quickies.”
“Is that so?” I said, observing that the big forehead, flushed and deeply vein-fed in the light cloud of fair hair, was covered with a sweat and that he wiped his hands the nails of which were manicured nails on his pink-striped shirt with an unconscious clutch. “If that’s a problem it’s a police problem. You don’t want the CIO to start a union of them, do you?”
“Don’t talk foolish. I mean I get the brunt of the trouble because I’m night clerk. Anyhow, if you know Karas you can tell me how easy it’ll be to get our demands.”
“He’s a pretty tough character.”
“Now when I have the shop ready to go, you ask Mr. Ackey for a few minutes so we can talk to him.”
“We can arrange it,” I said, who didn’t know Ackey well enough to say good day when passing in and out of the toilet. But I represented him.
The situation was different in the hash-houses. I was more trusted and highly regarded. In the kitchens were old men—flophouse, County Hospital, and mission attendance inscribed all over them big and bold, and there was nothing like the resentment of a fellow like Dawson in that striped shirt, who was close enough to Karas’s condition to figure how he made profit, to hate and envy, and also to wish to be nifty at the track, to wear hound’s-tooth checks, to have a case and binoculars and be seen with a proud-cheeked fine big broad.
But take one of these old guys from a Van Buren Street greasy-spoon—I’d be requested by him to come around by the alley, the large paving stones breathing fumes of piss, and signal him through the window. Whereupon he’d go tight with caution and make me an oblique response with his head that might be taken by other eyes as a random motion. At last, by the door, we’d have a shushing conversation that we could have had just as well after hours. Except that he would want me to have a look at his place of work probably. The angry skin of his dish-plunging arms and his twist horse-gauntness, long teeth and spread liquidness of eyes in the starry alley evening; also that terrible state of food when you suspect it of approaching garbage that he brought out in his clothes and on all his person, his breath and the hair of his head just below me. Under the fragile shell of his skull he leakily was reasoning. And did it matter to him as it did to Dawson whether I looked like the organizer of his dreams? He wanted to make his dim contribution to the righting of wrongs, so that it was enough for him that he could locate me in an office or that I would come down this reeking alley to talk to him and accept the lists he slipped me of other stiffs who wanted to belong to the union. I was supposed to hunt them up in their moldy rooms. Where I had been on altogether different errands while I worked for Simon, recruiting coal hikers. No use assuming that I had reversed all and was now entering these flophouse doors from the side of light, formerly from that of darkness. Those times that I thought clearly of my duties I decided that I couldn’t consider persons so much but rather the one degree of advancement in which everybody could be included.
Having a call in the old neighborhood one morning, I dropped in on Einhorn and found him in his sunny parlor office, in that peculiar, familiar staleness of coffee and bed, papers, his own shaving lotions and the powders of the two women. Mildred with her orthopedic shoes—she was polite but didn’t like me—was already at her machine, heated and lit on the back of the neck, which had just been shaved up to the border where her potent hair began. Over the way, empty, were the windows of the old place of great days and grands circonstances. I didn’t find Einhorn in a good state though I wasn’t supposed to know it from his weighty face. For a while I thought he wanted to sit me out silently, until I went away. He breathed and felt of himself, looked out in the morning, smoked, nibbled, croaked off some shallow gas. He appeared melancholy and even savage.
“How’s the pay at this new job of yours?” he asked me, deciding to speak. “Fair?”
“It’s liberal.”
“Then there’s good coming out of it,” he said with his dry decisiveness.
I laughed at him. “Is that all you think?”
“At least that anyway. Kid, I don’t want to take away your zeal if you think you’re doing something. And remember, I’m no conservative. Just because I sit here in a chair. This is no rich guys’ club. In fact I have less to lose than other men, so I don’t shrink from thinking to the extreme. I do a little business with Karas, but it doesn’t follow that my ideas have to be where my interests are. What interests! Some interests! He’s a knacker; Karas, he just bought a big new place in San Antonio.”
I was now convinced that something was wrong. “Then you think it’s a waste of time, what I’m doing?”
“Oh, it seems to me on both sides the ideas are the same. What’s the use of the same old ideas? On both sides. To take some from one side and give it to the other, the same old economics.”
He hadn’t wanted to talk to me in the first place, but since
I didn’t go away he drove himself into the subject at first by irritation and then summoning up what he really thought. I wasn’t zealous, not as he implied, but I did feel called on to say, “Well, people get up every morning to go to work; it isn’t right that it should be an illusion, or that they should be so grateful for being allowed to continue in their habit that they shouldn’t ask for anything more.”
“You think that with a closed shop you’re going to make men out of slobs? If they have a steward to gripe for them? Fooey!”
“So,” I said, “is it better to leave it to Karas or a gorilla of a business agent who takes graft from him?”
“Look here, because they were born you think they have to turn out to be men? That’s just an old-fashioned idea. And who tells them that? A big organization. One more big organization. A big organization makes dough or it doesn’t last. If it makes dough it’s for dough.”
“If there can’t be much sense in these big organizations that’s all the more reason why they should stand for a variety of things,” said I. “There ought to be all kinds.”
Meanwhile, ignoring, Mildred went on typing out statements. Einhorn didn’t reply; I thought it was the appearance of Arthur from the kitchen half of the house that stopped him, for Arthur’s brainy authority made his dad occasionally hesitate to sound off. But this time it wasn’t that. He came forward only briefly, but it was evident that all the nervousness and difficulty were because of him. In a black sweater, narrow-shouldered, his hands in his back pockets, he sauntered, an elderly wrinkle on him that surprised me, and his eyes retreated with gradations of dark into a very somber color of trouble. He put his head to the side, his bushy hair touched the doorframe, and the smoke of his cigarette escaped to the sun where it became silky. Though he wasn’t quite sure who I was at first, his smile was all the same suave, but also sick or fatigued. I was aware that Einhorn, to the very cloth of his coat, was stiff to him and prepared to be curt, within a degree of telling him to beat it, and I realized also that this was why Mildred had been so cold to me and hitting her machine as though it were a way to get me to leave.
Then a little kid came running from the kitchen, and Arthur held it with the clasp of a father, unmistakably, the kid swaying from his fingers. Behind, Tillie stood but didn’t come forward. If I’m not mistaken they hadn’t yet decided whether they could keep this a secret, for I realized it was recent news to the Einhorns too, and it was touch and go about acknowledging the baby, a little boy. He, while Arthur turned back into the kitchen, came running to Mildred and secured himself on her knee. She picked him up eagerly, and his booties catching in her skirt, it rode up on her thighs with their little dark hairs. About which she was calm. Thither I followed Einhorn’s look. She kissed the boy with almost adult kisses and sought the hem to straighten her dress.
“What do you say to our news!” Einhorn spoke harshly and turned to me with a stiff curve in the back of his neck, partly with intention to bully but also greatly bowed by trouble, and that great representative of him, his face, twitched with an impulse that darted in from a little-explored place.
“That Arthur is married?” I didn’t know what to say.
“Already divorced. It went through last week, and we didn’t know anything about it. The girl was from Champaign.”
“So you have a grandson. Congratulations!”
He looked strained, his eyes gemmy with the determination to sustain all, but his nosy face flat and with a light of pale unhappiness.
“And this is his first visit?” I said.
“Visit? She dumped him on us. She put him inside the door with a note and beat it, and then we had to wait for Arthur to come home and explain.”
“Oh, he’s dear and sweet,” Mildred said with great spirit, the child on her breast cruelly clasping her neck. “I’ll take him any time.”
At this from his second wife, which in effect she was, Einhorn had all his cares come around to his first source: himself; his sensuality. And he looked angrily struck by this thought for all his Bourbon pride of profile and reflected it to the very depth of his black eyes. Like the roof-crouched goblin of an old church, he looked, his hands covered with pale spots placed at the sides of his often purposeless-appearing pants. His hair had the wave of unstranded rope, and from the set of his head there was the sense of ruins forming up behind him. With no motion in his arms, he might have been a man in a cape or a bound prisoner. Poor Einhorn! At any hour of his decline he could formerly have taken out the gilt bond representing Arthur, and now the spite had come upon him that the value had gone, like that of Grandma’s picture-watered czarist money. The gleaming vault where he had kept this reserve wealth now let out the smell of squalor. Einhorn didn’t even look at the kid, which was a jolly little kid that trod in Mildred’s lap. Tillie stayed out of sight altogether.
I hesitated to show sympathy; he’d have thrown it back, though I was one of the few remaining people, I imagine, who’d give him full credit on his old-time greatness. I served a purpose that way for him, that I was prepared to testify that it was true noble and regal greatness. But he himself now started out weakly, saying, “It’s not a good situation. Augie—you have some idea what capacities Arthur has. And before he can begin to use them, he gets into this—”
“I don’t see what’s so wrong,” said Mildred. “You have a cute grandson.”
“Keep out of this, please, will you, Mildred? A child isn’t a toy.”
“Oh,” she said, “they grow up. Time does it more than fathers and mothers. The parents take too much credit.”
Einhorn said to me in a lower voice, wanting no conversation with her, “I think Arthur hangs around your part of the woods. And there’s a girl named Mimi he’s interested in. You know her?”
“She’s a good friend of mine.”
Quick his brows rose, and I interpreted the hope that she was my mistress and therefore Arthur couldn’t get into further trouble.
“Not that kind of friend.”
“You don’t lay her?” he said secretly.
“No.”
I disappointed him; there was also a very fine salt of condescension or mockery, only a glitter on the surface of his look, but I saw it.
“Don’t forget I was practically engaged until New Year’s Day,” I told him.
“Well, what kind of girl is this Mimi? He brought her around a couple of weeks ago, and Tillie and I thought she was pretty tough, and with somebody like Arthur whose thoughts always have an intellectual or poetic direction, she could give him a pretty rough time of it. But maybe she’s goodhearted. I don’t want to tear her down needlessly.”
“Why, is Arthur thinking of remarrying already? Well, I’m an admirer of Mimi.”
“Platonic?”
I laughed but felt sullen too, for it seemed to me that Einhorn didn’t want his son to succeed me as Mimi’s lover, or any girl’s. I said, “The best person to ask about Mimi is Mimi herself. But I was going to say that I don’t think she would be interested in a marriage proposal.”
“That’s good.”
I expressed no agreement.
“Augie,” he said with a rich preliminary of the face which I knew belonged to business, “it occurs to me that maybe my son could fit into your organization somewhere.”
“Is he looking for a job?”
“No, I am for him.”
“I could try.” It was a discouraging favor to be asked. I could see Arthur stooping his weight on a desk in the union hall, one finger between the covers of his Valéry, or whatever he was interested in. “Mimi could help him if she wanted to,” I said. “I got the job because she knew someone.”
“Who knew someone, your friend?” He hoped still, slyly, to trap me into confessing intimacy with Mimi, but he drew a blank. “Well,” he said, “you don’t mean to tell me you keep that bursting health without the cooperation of a dear friend?” He was so pleased to have said this that his own troubles for a moment slipped his mind. But then the kid crowed on
Mildred’s neck and he changed again from a sensual to a sad or austere face.
It was a true guess that I had a friend. She was a Greek girl whose name was Sophie Geratis and she was chambermaid in a luxury hotel. She spoke for a delegation that came to me to apply for membership. They were earning twenty cents an hour, and when they went to their local to ask one of the head guys to put in for a raise he was playing poker and wouldn’t be bothered. They knew he was in cahoots with the management. This small Greek girl was shapely every which way, in legs, mouth, and face; her lips went a little forward and their expression was sweetened a lot by the clear look of her eyes. She had a set of hard-worked hands and she lived with her beauty on rough terms. I couldn’t for even a minute pretend that I didn’t go for her. As soon as I saw her I thought that in the form of her eye-corners there was a personal hope of tenderness, and it got me. What I felt was tender too, rather than that heat that makes Nile mud of you, as like to crack as to be fertile.