Henderson the Rain King - Saul Bellow [1]
II
Because her father had committed suicide in that same way, with a pistol. One of the bonds between Lily and me is that we both suffer with our teeth. She is twenty years my junior but we wear bridges, each of us. Mine are at the sides, hers are in front. She has lost the four upper incisors. It happened while she was still in high school, out playing golf with her father, whom she adored. The poor old guy was a lush and far too drunk to be out on a golf course that day. Without looking or giving warning, he drove from the first tee and on the backswing struck his daughter. It always kills me to think of that cursed hot July golf course, and this drunk from the plumbing supply business, and the girl of fifteen bleeding. Damn these weak drunks! Damn these unsteady men! I can't stand these clowns who go out in public as soon as they get swacked to show how broken-hearted they are. But Lily would never hear a single word against him and wept for him sooner than for herself. She carries his photo in her wallet. Personally I never knew the old guy. When we met he had already been dead for ten or twelve years. Soon after he died she married a man from Baltimore, of pretty good standing, I have been told--though come to think of it it was Lily herself who told me. However, they could not become adjusted and during the war she got her divorce (I was then fighting in Italy). Anyway, when we met she was at home again, living with her mother. The family is from Danbury, the hatters' capital. It happened that Frances and I went to a party in Danbury one winter night, and Frances was only half willing because she was in correspondence with some intellectual or other over in Europe. Frances is a very deep reader and an intense letter writer and a heavy smoker, and when she got on one of her kicks of philosophy or something I would see very little of her. I'd know she was up in her room smoking Sobranie cigarettes and coughing and making notes, working things out. Well, she was in one of these mental crises when we went to that party, and in the middle of it she recalled something she had to do at once and so she took the car and left, forgetting all about me. That night I had gotten mixed up too, and was the only man there in black tie. Midnight blue. I must have been the first fellow in that part of the state with a blue tuxedo. It felt as though I were wearing a whole acre of this blue cloth, while Lily, to whom I had been introduced about ten minutes before, had on a red and green Christmas-striped dress and we were talking. When she saw what had happened, Lily offered me a ride, and I said, "Okay." We trod the snow out to her car. It was a sparkling night and the snow was ringing. She was parked on a hill about three hundred yards long and smooth as iron. As soon as she drove away from the curb the car went into a skid and she lost her head and screamed, "Eugene!" She threw her arms about me. There was no other soul on that hill or on the shoveled walks, nor, so far as I could see, in the entire neighborhood. The car turned completely around. Her bare arms came out of the short fur sleeves and held my head while her large eyes watched through the windshield and the car went over the ice and hoarfrost. It was not even in gear and I reached the key and switched off the ignition. We slid into a snowdrift, but not far, and I took the wheel from her. The moonlight was very keen. "How did you know my name?" I said, and she said, "Why, everybody knows you are Eugene Henderson." After we had spoken some more she said to me, "You ought to divorce your wife." I said to her, "What are you talking about? Is that a thing to say? Besides, I'm old enough to be your father." We didn't meet again until the summer. This time she was shopping and was wearing a hat and a white pique dress, with white shoes. It looked like rain and she didn't want to be caught in those clothes (which I noticed were soiled already) and she asked me for a lift. I had been in Danbury buying some lumber for the barn and the station wagon was loaded with it. Lily started to direct me to her house and lost the way in her nervousness; she was very beautiful, but wildly nervous. It was sultry and then it began to rain. She told me to take a right turn and that brought us to a gray cyclone fence around the quarry filled with water--a dead-end street. The air had grown so dark that the mesh of the fence looked white. Lily began to cry out, "Oh, turn around, please! Oh, quick, turn around! I can't remember the streets and I have to go home." Finally we got there, a small house filled with the odor of closed rooms in hot weather, just as the storm was beginning. "My mother is playing bridge," said Lily. "I have to phone her and tell her not to come home. There is a phone in my bedroom." So we went up. There was nothing loose or promiscuous about Lily, I assure you. When she took off her clothes she started to speak out in a trembling voice, "I love you! I love you!" And I said to myself as we embraced, "Oh, how can she love you--you--you!" There was a huge knot of thunder, and then a burst of rain on the streets, trees, roofs, screens, and lightning as well. Everything got filled and blinded. But a warm odor like fresh baking arose from her as we lay in her sheets which were darkened by the warm darkness of the storm. From start to finish she had not stopped saying "I love you!" Thus we lay quietly, and the early hours of the evening began without the sun's returning. Her mother was waiting in the living room. I didn't care too much for that. Lily had phoned her and said, "Don't come home for a while," and therefore her mother had immediately left the bridge party through one of the worst summer storms in many years. No, I didn't like it. Not that the old lady scared me, but I read the signs. Lily had made sure she would be found out. I was the first down the stairs and saw a light beside the chesterfield. And when I got to the foot of the stairs, face to face with her, I said, "Henderson's the name." Her mother was a stout pretty woman, made up for the bridge party in a china-doll face. She wore a hat, and had a patent-leather pocketbook on her stout knees when she sat down. I realized that she was mentally listing accounts against Lily. "In my own house. With a married man." And so on. Indifferent, I sat in the living room, unshaved, my lumber in the station wagon outside. Lily's odor, that baking odor, must have been noticeable about me. And Lily, extremely beautiful, came down the stairs to show her mama what she had accomplished. Acting oblivious, I kept my big boots apart on the carpet and frisked my mustache once in a while. Between them I sensed the important presence of Simmons, Lily's papa, the plumbing supply wholesaler who had committed suicide. In fact he had killed himself in the bedroom adjoining Lily's, the master bedroom. Lily blamed her mother for her father's death. And what was I, the instrument of her anger? "Oh no, pal," I said to myself, "this is not for you. Be no party to this." It looked as though the mother had decided to behave well. She was going to be big about it and beat Lily at this game. Perhaps it was natural. Anyway, she was highly ladylike to me, but there came a moment when she couldn't check herself, and she said, "I have met your son." "Oh yes, a slender fellow? Edward? He drives a red MG. You see him around Danbury sometimes." Presently I left, saying to Lily, "You're a fine-looking big girl, but you oughtn't to have done that to your mother." The stout old lady was sitting there on the sofa with her hands clasped and her eyes making a continuous line under her brows from tears or vexation. "Good-by, Eugene," said Lily. "So long, Miss Simmons," I said. We didn't part friends exactly. Nevertheless we soon met again, but in New York City, for Lily had separated from her mother, quitted Danbury, and had a cold-water flat on Hudson Street where the drunks hid from the weather on the staircase. I came, a great weight, a huge shadow on those stairs, with my face full of country color and booze, and yellow pigskin gloves on my hands, and a ceaseless voice in my heart that said, _I__ _want, I want, I want, oh, I want--yes, go on,__ I said to myself, _Strike, strike, strike!__ And I kept going on the staircase in my thick padded coat, in pigskin gloves and pigskin shoes, a pigskin wallet in my pocket, seething with lust and seething with trouble, and realizing how my gaze glittered up to the top banister where Lily had opened the door and was waiting. Her face was round, white, and full, her eyes clear and narrowed. "Hell! How can you live In this stinking joint? It stinks here," I said. The building had hall toilets; the chain pulls had turned green and there were panes of plum-colored glass in the doors. She was a friend of the slum people, the old and the mothers in particular. She said she understood why they had television sets though on relief, and she let them keep their milk and butter in her refrigerator and filled out their social-security forms for them. I think she felt she did them good and showed these immigrants and Italians how nice an American could be. However, she genuinely tried to help them and ran around with her impulsive looks and said a lot of disconnected things. The odors of this building clutched at your face, and I was coming up the stairs and said, "Whew, I am out of condition!" We went into her apartment on the top floor. It was dirty, too, but there was light in it at least. We sat down to talk and Lily said to me, "Are you going to waste the rest of your life?" With Frances the case was hopeless. Only once after I came back from the Army did anything of a personal nature take place between us, and after that it was no soap, so I let her be, more or less. Except that one morning in the kitchen we had a conversation that set us apart for good and all. Just a few words. They went like this: "And what would you like to do now?" (I was then losing interest in the farm.) "I wonder," I said, "if it's too late for me to become a doctor--if I could enter medical school." Frances opened her mouth, usually so sober, not to say dismal and straight, and laughed at me; and as she laughed I saw nothing but her dark open mouth, and not even teeth, which is certainly strange, for she has teeth, white ones. What had happened to them? "Okay, okay, okay," I said. Thus I realized that Lily was perfectly right about Frances. Nevertheless the rest did not follow. "I need to have a child. I can't wait much longer," said Lily. "In a few years I'll be thirty." "Am I responsible?" I said. "What's the matter with you?" "You and I have got to be together," she said. "Who says so?" "We'll die if we're not," she said. A year or so went by, and she failed to convince me. I didn't believe the thing could be so simple. So she suddenly married a man from New Jersey, a fellow named Hazard, a broker. Come to think of it she had spoken of him a few times, but I thought it was only more of her blackmail. Because she was a blackmailer. Anyway, she married him. This was her second marriage. Then I took Frances and the two girls and went to Europe, to France, for a year. Several years of my boyhood were spent in the south of the country, near the town of Albi, where my old man was busy with his research. Fifty years ago I used to taunt a kid across the way, "Fran