The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [2]
CHAPTER III
Even at that time I couldn't imagine that I would marry into the Coblin family. And when Anna snatched Howard's saxophone, my thought was, "Go on, take it. What do I want it for! I'll do better than that." My mind was already dwelling on a good enough fate. While the old lady, following her own idea of what that fate would be, continued to find various jobs for me. Saying "various jobs," I give out the Rosetta stone, so to speak, to my entire life. These earliest jobs, though, that she chose for us, they weren't generally of the callousing kind. If hard, they were temporary and supposed to lead to something better. She didn't intend us to be common laborers. No, we were to wear suits, not overalls, and she was going to set us on the way to becoming gentlemen despite our being born to have no natural hope of it, unlike her own sons with the German governesses and tutors and gymnasium uniforms they had had. It was not her fault that they couldn't do better than to become small-town businessmen, for they had been brought up to give the world a harder shake. Not that she ever complained of them, and they behaved with decent respect toward her, two sizable broad men in belted overcoats and spats, Stiva driving a Studebaker and Alexander a Stanley Steamer. Both were inclined to be silent and bored. Addressed in Russian, they answered in English, and apparently they weren't so enormously grateful for all she had done. Perhaps she worked so hard over Simon and me to show them what she could do even with such handicaps as ours; and maybe she sermonized us both about love because of her sons. Although she had a quick way of capturing their heads when they bent down to give her the kiss of duty. Anyway, she had us under hard control. We had to brush our teeth with salt and wash our hair with Castile, bring home our report cards, and sleeping in skivvies was outlawed; we had to wear pajamas. What did Danton lose his head for, or why was there a Napoleon, if it wasn't to make a nobility of us all? And this universal eligibility to be noble, taught everywhere, was what gave Simon airs of honor, Iroquois posture and eagle bearing, the lithe step that didn't crack a twie the grace of Chevalier Bayard and the hand of Cincinnatus at the plow the industry of the Nassau Street match-boy who became the king of corporations. Without a special gift of vision, maybe you wouldn't have seen it in most of us, lining up in the schoolyard on a red fall momino, standing on the gravel in black sheepskins and twisted black stoekinos, mittens. Western gauntlets, and peeling shoes, while the drum and bugle corps blasted and pounded and the glassy tides of wind drove weeds, leaves, and smoke around, struck the flag stiff and clanked the buckle of the rope on the steel pole. But Simon must have stood out, at the head of the school police patrol, in starched linen Sam Browne belt ironed the night before and serge cap. He had a handsome, bold, blond face; even the short scar on his brow was handsome and assertive. In the school windows Thanksgiving cut-outs were hanging, black and orange Pilgrims and turkeys, strung cranberries, and the polished glass showed the blue and the red chill of the sky, the electric lights and the blackboards inside. A red and dark building; an abbey, a mill by the Fall River or the Susquehanna, a county jail--it resembled each somewhat. Simon had a distinguished record here. President of the Loyal League, he wore the shield on his sweater, and was valedictorian. I didn't have his singleness of purpose but was more diffuse, and anybody who offered entertainment could get me to skip and do the alleys for junk, or prowl the boathouse and climb in the ironwork under the lagoon bridge. My marks showed it, and the old lady would give me a going-over when I brought them in, calling me "cat-head" and, in her French, "meshant," threatening that I'd go to work at fourteen. 'I'll get you a certificate from the Board and you can go like a Polack and work in the stockyards," she'd say. Other times she'd take a different tone with me. "It isn't that you don't have a brain, you're just as smart as anybody else. If Kreindl's son can be a dentist you can be governor of Illinois. Only you're too easy to tickle. Promise you a joke, a laugh, a piece of candy, or a lick of ice- "earn, and you'll leave everything and run. In short, you're a fool," she said, taking her shawl of woolen knitted spider-circles in her hands and drawing it down as a man draws on his lapels. "You don't know \at\ earning if you think you can get by with laughing and eating peach pie." Coblin had given me a taste for pie; she scorned and despised it. "Paper and glue," she said with hatred and her Jehovah jealousy of outside influences. "What else did he teach you?" she menacingly asked. "Nothing." ';. -.: "Nothing is right!" And she would make me stand and endure a punitive silence, a comment on myself and my foolishness, overgrown and long-legged in my short pants, large-headed, with black mass of hair and cleft chin--a source of jokes. And also a healthy complexion. wasted on me evidently, for she would say, "Look, look, look at his face! Look at it!" grinning and gripping the holder in her gums, smoke trickling up from her cigarette. She once caught me in the street, which was being paved, chewing tar from one of the seething tar-pots, with my friend Jimmy Klein whose family she didn't approve of anyhow, and I was in her bad books for a longer time than ever. These periods kept increasing, my misdemeanors growing worse. From taking my punishments very hard, consulting Mama as to how to be forgiven and asking her to approach the old lady for me, and shedding tears when I was pardoned, I got to the stage of feeling more resistant, through worldly comparisons that made me see my crimes more tolerantly. That isn't to say that I stopped connecting her with the highest and the best--taking her at her own word--with the courts of Europe, the Congress of Vienna, the splendor of family, and all kinds of profound and cultured things as hinted in her conduct and advertised in her speech--she'd call up connotations of the utmost importance, the imperial brown of Kaisers and rotogravures of capitals, the gloominess of deepest thought. And I wasn't unaffected by her nagging. I didn't want to go out at fourteen with a certificate and work in the packing plants, so occasionally, for a spell, I'd pick up; I'd do my homework and almost climb out of my seat, wagging my arm with zeal to answer questions. Then Grandma would swear that I'd not only go to high school but, if she lived and had strength, to college. "Just so you want! Heaven and earth will be moved." And she spoke of her cousin Dasha who had rolled on the floor nights to stay awake, studying for her medical exam. When Simon graduated and gave the commencement address I was skipped a grade, and the principal mentioned us in his speech, both March brothers. The whole family was present--Mama at the back where she had placed herself with George, in case he should act up. She wasn't going to leave him at home today, and they were in the last' row, where the floor and the bottom of the gallery came the closest. I was sitting up in front, in the feather-trailed air, with the old lady, who was dressed up in dark silk and multiply-wound gold chains with the heart of a locket that one of her teething children had dented; she was narrow-nosed with pride, and distinguished, in a kind of fury of silent trying, from the other immigrant relatives, her double spray of feathers busv hanging in two directions. This was what she had been attempting to et over to us, that if we did as she said we could expect plenty of results like this public homage. "Now I want to see you up there next year," she said to me. But she wasn't going to. It was already too late, notwithstanding that I had applied myself enough to skip; my past record was against me, and anyhow I didn't take permanent inspiration from this success. I wasn't cut out for it. And besides, Simon didn't keep it up himself. He remained more attentive to school than I, but he went through a change the summer he waited on tables in Benton Harbor, and came back with some different aims from his original ones and new ideas about conduct. A sign of his change, and of great importance for me, was that he returned in the fall brawnier and golden-colored but with an upperfront tooth broken, sharp and a little discolored among the whole and white ones, and his face, laughter and all, altered by it. He wouldn't say how it had happened. Was it in a fight that someone had cracked it? "Kissing a statue," he said to me. "No, I was biting a dime in a crap game." Six months before such an answer would have been unthinkable. Also, there was money not accounted for to Grandma's satisfaction. "Don't tell me all you made in tips was thirty dollars! I know that Reimann's is a first-class resort, and they have people all the way from Cleveland and St. Louis. I expected you to spend something on yourself when you were away the whole summer, but--" "Well, sure, and I did spend about fifteen dollars." "You always have been honest, Simon. Now Augie brought us home every cent." "Have been? I am!" he said, mounting up on his pride and tallest falsehood-spurning dignity. "I brought you my wages for twelve weeks, and thirty bucks besides." She let the matter drop with a silent, piercing glitter from the flat of her gold-wired goggles and a warning-off from a false course in her grayness and wrinkles and a quick suck of her cheek. She indicated she could strike a blow when the moment came. But for the first time relt fron-i Simon that he was thinking you didn't have to worry about that. Not that he was ready to jump off into rebellion. But he had some ideas, and by and by we were saying to each other things that couldn't be said before the women. At first we often worked in the same places. We went to Coblin's sometimes when he needed us for his crew, and down in Woolworth's cellar we unpacked crockery from barrels so enormous that you could walk into them; we scooped out stale straw and threw it in the furnace. Or we loaded paper into the giant press and baled it. It was foul down there from the spoiled food and mustard cans, old candy, and the straw and paper. For lunch we went upstairs. Simon refused to take sandwiches from home; he said we needed a hot meal when we were working. For twenty-five cents we got two hotdogs, a mug of root beer, and oie, the dogs in cotton-quality rolls, dripping with the same mustard that made the air bad below. But it was the figure you cut as an employee, on an employee's footing with the girls, in work clothes, and being of that tin-tough, creaking, jazzy bazaar of hardware, glassware, chocolate, chickenfeed, jewelry, drygoods, oilcloth, and song hits--that was the big thing; and even being the Atlases of it, under the floor, hearing how the floor bore up under the ambling weight of hundreds, with the fanning, breathing movie organ next door and the rumble descending from the trolleys on Chicago Avenue--the bloody-rinded Saturday gloom of wind-borne ash, and blackened forms of five-story buildings rising up to a blind Northern dimness from the Christmas blaze of shops. | Simon moved on soon to a better job with the Federal News Company, which had a concession of the stands in the railroad stations and 'the candy and paper sales on trains. The family had to lay out the deposit on a uniform, and he began to keep midnight hours, down- | town and on the trains, smart and cadet-like in the spanty new uniform. Sunday mornings he rose late and came out in his bathrobe, sitting down to breakfast big and easy, emboldened by his new earning power. He was shorter than before with Mama and George, and occasionally he was difficult with me. "Lay off that Tribune before I set to it. Christ, I bring it home at night, and in the morning it's all in pieces before I can look at iti" On the other hand he gave Mama some of his pay without Grandma's knowledge, to spend on herself, and saw to it that I had pocket money and that even George got pennies for soldier-caramels. There was never anything mean about Simon, where money was concerned. He had kind of an oriental, bestowing temperament; he had no peace or rest if he ever lacked dough and would sooner beat a check altogether than go out of a lunchwagon without leaving a good tip. He banged i') OF AUG1E MARCH p on the head once for taking up one of the two dimes he put under our plates in a coffee shop. Ten cents seemed to me enough. "Don't let me catch you doing such piker things again," he said to me and I was afraid of him and didn't dare talk back. Those Sunday mornings in the kitchen, then, with his uniform seen inside the bedroom, hung with care from the foot of the bed, and comfortable tears of mist running on the windows, he felt the strength of his position as the one getting ready to take the control of the family into his own hands. For he sometimes spoke to me of Grandma as of a stranger. "She's really nothing to us, you know that, don't you, Aug?" It wasn't so much rebellion as it was repudiation she had to fear, not being heeded, when he spread his paper over the entire table and read with his hand to his forehead and the darkening blond hair falling over it. Still, he didn't have any plan for deposing her and didn't interfere with her power over the rest of us-especially over Mama, who remained as much a slavey as before. And with her eyes deteriorating, so that the glasses fitted the year before were no longer strong enough. We went back to the dispensary for a new pair and cleared another inquisition; we only just cleared it. They had Simon's age on the record and asked whether he wasn't working. I thought I didn't need Grandma's rehearsing any more and could invent answers myself; and even Mama didn't obey as usual by being silent, but lifted up her odd clear voice and said, "My boys are still in school, and after school I need them to help me out." Then we were nearly caught by the clerk in the making out of the budget and were terrified, but we were favored by the crowd that day anrt got the slip to the optical department. We were not ready yet to do without the old woman's coaching. Simon's news became the chief interest of the house now, when he was shifted from the trains to a stand in the La Salle Street Station and men to the centra! stand that carried books and novelties, just where the most rushing and significant business was done, in the main path of travel. There he was able to see the celebrities in their furs or stetsons and alpacunas, going free in the midst of their toted luggage, always more proud or more melancholy or more affable or more lined than they were represented. They arrived from California or from Oregon on the Portland Rose in the snow whirled from the inhuman "eights of La Salle Street or cleaving hard in the speed lines of the trains; they took off for New York on the Twentieth Century, in their flower-garnished, dark polished parlor-like compartments upholstered b. - 33 in deep green, washing in silver sinks, sipping coffee out of china, smoking cigars. Simon reported, "I saw John Gilbert today in a big velour hat," or, "Senator Borah left me the change of a dime from his Daily News," or, "If you saw Rockefeller you'd believe that he has a rubber stomach, as they say," When he gave these accounts at the table he set off the hope that somehow greatness might gather him into its circle since it touched him already, that he might appeal to somebody, that Insull's eye might be taken by him and he would give him his card and tell him to report at his office next morning. I have a feeling that soon Grandma began to blame Simon in her secret thought for not making the grade. Maybe he didn't care enough to seem distinguished, maybe his manner wasn't right, impudent, perhaps. Because Grandma believed in the stroke or inspiration that brought you to the notice of eminent men. She collected stories about this, and she had a scheme for writing to Julius Rosenwald whenever she read that he was making a new endowment. It was always to Negroes, never to Jews, that he gave his money, she said, and it angered her enormously, and she cried, "That German Yehuda!" At a cry like that the age-crippled old white dog would stand up and try to trot to her. "That Deutsch!" Still, she admired Julius Rosenwald; he belonged to the inside ring of her equals; where they sat, with a different understanding from ours, and owned and supervised everything. Simon, meanwhile, was trying to find a Saturday place for me in the La Salle Street Station and rescue me from the dime-store cellar, where Jimmy Klein had taken his place. Grandma and even Mama were after him to do something. "Simon, you must pull Augie in." "Well, I ask Borg every time I see him. Holy Jesus, folks, everybody has relatives there!" "What's the matter, won't he take a bribe?" said Grandma. "Believe me, he's waiting for you to offer him one. Ask him for dinner and I'll show you. A couple of dollar bills in a napkin." She'd show us how to practice in the world. Short of brushing the throat of a rival or hindrance with a poison feather at the dinner table, of course, as Nero had done. Simon said he couldn't invite Borg. He didn't know him well since he was only an extra, and he didn't want to look like a toady and be despised. "Well, my dear Graf Potocki," Grandma said, narrowing down her look cold and dry, while he in his impatience was already out of breath. "So you'd rather leave your brother working at Woolworth's with that foolish Klein boy in the basement!" After months of this Simon at last got me on downtown, proving that her power over him wasn't ended yet. He brought me in to Borg one morning. "Remember now," he warned me on the streetcar, "no funny stuff. You'll be working for old foxy grandpa himself, and he isn't going to put up with any fooling. On this job you handle a lot of dough and it comes at you fast. Anything you're short at the end of the day Borg will take out of your little envelope. You're on probation. I've seen some dopes go out on their ear." He was particularly severe with me that morning. It was stiff cold weather, the ground hard, the weeds standing broken in the frost, the river giving off vapor and the trains leghorn shots of steam into the broad blue Wisconsin-humored sky, the brass handgrip of the straw seats finger-polished, the crusty straw golden, the olive and brown of coats in their folds gold too, and the hairs of Simon's sizable wrists a greater brightness of the same; also the down of his face, now shaved more often than before. He had a new tough manner of pulling down breath and hawking into the street. And whatever the changes were that he had undergone and was undergoing, still he hadn't lost his fineframed independent look that he controlled me with. I was afraid of him, though I was nearly his size. Except for the face, we had the same bones. I wasn't fated to do well at the station. Maybe Simon's threats had something to do with this, and his disgust with me when I had to be docked the first day. But I was a flop, and nearly as much as a dollar short each time, even by the third week. Since I was allowed only two bits above my carfare--forty cents to the penny--! couldn't cover my shortages, and Simon, grim and brief, told me on the way to the car one night that Borg had given me the boot. "I couldn't run after people who short-changed me," I kept defending myself. "They throw the money down and grab a paper; you can't leave the stand to shag them." At last he answered me coldly, with a cold lick of fire in his eyes, on the stationary wintriness of the black steel harness of the bridge over the dragging unnamable mixture of the river flowing backwards with its waste. "You couldn't get that money out of somebody else's change, could you!" What?" "You heard me, you dumbhead!" "Why didn't you tell me before?" I cried back. "Tell you?" he said, pushing angrily by me. "Tell you to keep your barn buttoned, as if you didn't have any more brains than George!" And he let the old woman yell at me, saying nothing in my defense. Before this he had always stood up for me when it was any serious matter. Now he kept aside in the low lights of the kitchen, his fist on his hip and his coat slung over his shoulder, once in a while lifting the lid on the stove where our supper stood warming, and prodding the coals. I took it hard that he was disloyal to me, but also I knew I had let him down with Borg, whom he sold a bright brother that turned out stupid. But I had been at a small stand under a pillar, where I seemed to get merely stragglers, and Borg gave me only the coat of a uniform, gone in the lining, with ragged cuffs and the braid shot. Alone, I had nobody to point out celebrities to me if any came that way, and I passed the time mooning and waiting for lunch relief and the three o'clock break, when I would watch Simon at the main stand and admire the business there--where the receipts were something to see-- the pour of money and the black molecular circulation of travelers knowing what they wanted in gum, fruit, cigarettes, the thick bulwarks of papers and magazines, the power of the space and the span of the main chandelier. I thought that if Borg had started me here instead of in my marble corner, off on the edge where I heard only echoes and couldn't even see the trains, I would have made out better. So I had the ignominy of being canned and was read the riot act in the kitchen. Seemingly the old lady had been waiting for just this to happen and had it ready to tell me that there were faults I couldn't afford to have, situated where I was in life, a child of an abandoned family with no father to keep me out of trouble, nobody but two women, feeble-handed, who couldn't forever hold a cover over us from hunger, misery, crime, and the wrath of the world. Maybe if we had been sent to an orphanage, as Mama at one time thought of doing, it would have been better. For me, at least, in lessons of hardness, since I had the kind of character that looked for ease and places where I could lie down. She shook the crabbed unit of her hand at me with the fierceness of the words, till now spoken only to herself, bitterly, and with them there came out an oceanic lightning of prophecy that had gathered in her skull by the stove-side through days not otherwise very lighted. "Remember when I am in my grave, Augie, when I will be dead!" And the falling hand landed on my arm; it was accidental, but the ffect was frightful, for I yelled as if this tap had tenfold hit my soul. Maybe I wasyelling about my character, made to feel the worst of it, that I'd go to the grave myself with never the hope of another and better- no power to relieve me of it, purify and redeem me from it; and she was putting herself already beyond life to make her verdict on me binding beyond recall. "Gedenk, Augie, wenn ich bin todt!" But she couldn't stand to dwell long on her death. Heretofore she hadn't ever mentioned her mortality to us, so it was a sort of lapse; and even now she was like a Pharaoh or Caesar promising to pass into g qq(j_except that she would have no pyramids or monuments to make ood the promise and was that much inferior to them. However, her painful, dreadful, toothless, gape-gummed crying the cry of judgment in the lock of death worked hard on me. She had the power to make a threat like this more than the threat of ordinary people, but she also had to pay the price of her own terror at it. Now she switched back to our fatherlessness. It was a bad moment, and I had brought it on Mama. Simon kept silent by the nickel and bitumen black of the stove, fiddling with the poker-handled steel coil of the lid lever. In the other corner sat Mama, sober and guilty, the easy mark of whoever was our father. The old lady was out to bum me to small ash that night, and everyone was going to get scorched. I couldn't go back to my old Woolworth job. And so Jimmy Klein and I went together to look for work, despite Grandma's warnings against him. He was highly sociable and spirited, slight and dark-faced, narrow-eyed, witty-looking, largely willing to be honest but not overstrapped by conscience--the old lady was right about that. He couldn't come to the house; she wouldn't encourage me to keep bad company, she said. But I was welcome at the Kleins', and even Georgie was. Afternoons, when I had to take him out, I could leave him there playing with the little chicks they raised, or tried to raise, in the dark, clay areaway between buildings, and Mrs. Klein could keep an eye on him from the cellar kitchen, where she sat at the table, handy to the range, paring, peeling, slicing, cutting meat for stew, and molding meatballs. Weighing more than two hundred pounds, and with one leg shorter than the other, she couldn't keep long on her feet. Unworried and ^gular-looking, brow bent to brow, nose curving and short, she dyed her hair black with a liquid ordered by mail from Altoona; she applied it with old toothbrushes she kept in a glass on the bathroom window; this gave her braids a peculiar Indian luster. They fell along her cheeks down to the multiform work of her chins. Her black eyes were small but merciful to confusion; she was popelike and liberal with pardons and indulgences. Jimmy had four brothers and three sisters, some of them occupied mysteriously, but all were genial and glad-handing, even the married elder daughters and the middle-aged sons. Two of her children were divorced and one daughter was a widow, so that Mrs. Klein had grandchildren in her kitchen at all times, some coming from school for lunch and after school for cocoa, others creeping on the floor or lying in buggies. Everyone in those prosperous days was earning money, and yet all had trouble. Gilbert had to pay alimony; the divorced sister, Velma, was not getting hers regularly. Her husband had knocked out one of her teeth in a brawl, and now he often came to beg her mother to plead with her to come back. I saw him lay his red head on the table and cry while his sons and daughters were playing in the seats of his taxi. He made good dough, still he wouldn't give Velma enough, figuring she'd come back to him if he kept her needy. She borrowed, however, from her family. I've never seen such people for borrowing and lending; there was dough changing hands in all directions, and nobody grudged anyone. But the Kleins seemed to need a great many things and bought them all on the installment plan. Jimmy was sent out--and I with him--the money put inside the earflaps of his cap, to make payments. On the phonograph, on the Singer machine, on the mohair suite with pelletfilled ashtrays that couldn't be overturned, on buggies and bicycles, linoleums, on dental and obstetrical work, on the funeral of Mr. Klein's father, on back-supporting corsets and special shoes for Mrs. Klein, on family photos taken for a wedding anniversary. We covered the city on these errands. Mrs. Klein didn't mind our going to shows, as we often did, to hear Sophie Tucker whack herself on the behind and sing "Red Hot Mama," or see Rose La Rose swagger and strip in the indolent rhythm that made Coblin her admirer. "That girl is not just a beautiful girl," he said. "There are a lot of beautiful girls, but this girl feels men's hearts. She doesn't drop off her dress the way others do, she pulls it over her head. That's why she's the top of her profession today." We were in the Loop much more than we ought to have been and were continually running into Coblin standing in theater lines during school hours. He never told on me. He only said, like a sport, "What's today, Augie? The mayor closed up the school?" Cheerful as usual, grinning and happy in the limy and red lights of the marquee, like the old kin" of the Scotch mists who had half a face of emerald and half of red jewel. "What's the feature?" "Bardelys the Magnificent plus Dave Apollon and his Komarinsky dancers. Come along and keep me company." We had a reason, at that time, for keeping away from school. Steve the Sailor Bulba, my lockermate, brute-nosed and red, with the careful long-haired bartering and toutish sideburns that gave notice that he was dangerous; bearish, heavy-bottomed in his many-buttoned, groundscuffing sailor pants and his menacing rat-peaked shoes; a housebreaker who stole plumbing fixtures and knocked open telephone coin boxes in recently vacated flats--this Bulba had taken my science notebook and turned it in as his own. Since there was nothing I could do with Bulba, Jimmy lent me his notes, and I carelessly erased his name and wrote my own over it. We were caught, and Simon had to be called in. Simon didn't want Mama to be brought to school any more than I did. He was able to get around Wigler, the science teacher, eventually. But all the while Bulba, small-eyed and looking mild, his forehead peaceful and blind, wrinkled to the gentle winter light of the classroom, was trying to make his clasp-knife stand up on its blades, like a horny insect. After this it wasn't hard for Jimmy to induce me to go downtown with him, especially on science afternoons, to ride, if there was nothing better to do, in the City Hall elevator with his brother Tom, from the gilded lobby to the Municipal Courts. In the cage we rose and dropped, rubbing elbows with bigshots and operators, commissioners, grabbers, heelers, tipsters, hoodlums, wolves, fixers, plaintiffs, flatfeet, men in Western hats and women in lizard shoes and fur coats, hothouse and arctic drafts mixed up, brute things and airs of sex, evidence of heavy feeding and systematic shaving, of calculations, grief, not-caring, and hopes of tremendous millions in concrete to be poured or whole Mississippis of bootleg whisky and beer. Tommy sent us to his bucket-shop stockbroker on Lake Street, back of the panels of a cigar-store front, later a handbook. Tommy was in a good position to get leads. But even in those money-minting days he never did more than break even. If you didn't count the gains that went into his wardrobe and the gifts he gave his family. The Kleins were all gift-givers. Gift robes and wrappers, Venetian mirrors and chateaux- ro-the-moonlight tapestries, teacarts, end tables, onyx-based lamps, percolators and electric toasters, and novels--boxes of things stacked "P in the closets and under the beds, awaiting their time of usefulness. And yet, except on Sundays when they dolled up, the Kleins looked poor. Old Klein wore his vest over his long-sleeved undershirt and rolled his cigarettes in a little machine. The one unmarried daughter, Eleanor, had a gypsy style and got herself up in flaming, bursting flowers and Japanese dyes. Fat and pale, with an intelligent Circassian bow to her eyes, very humane, overreconciled to a bad lot, taking it for granted that she was too fat to get a husband and forgiving her married sisters and mobile brothers their better luck, she had a genial cry, almost male and fraternal. She was especially kind to me, called me "lover" and "little brother" and "heartbreaker," told my fortune in cards and knitted me a three-peaked skating cap in yellow and green so that 1 would look like a Norwegian champion on the pond. When she was well enough--she suffered from rheumatism and had female disorders--she worked in the wrapping department of a soap factory on the North Branch; and when she was at home sat with her mother in the kitchen, wrapped in a flamboyant floral material, heavy black hair slipping back loose and tuberous from a topknot, drinking coffee, knitting, reading, shaving her legs, playing operettas on the gramophone, painting her nails, and, doing these necessary or half-necessary or superfluous things, invisibly paid herself out farther and farther into the mood of a long-seated woman. The Kleins respected and admired Grandma Lausch for the task she undertook with us. However, Grandma heard, from one of her Pinkerton sources, that Georgie was seen with the chicks between the buildings--they never reached full size, these animals, from lack of sunlight and good feed, but moulted and died scraggly and in a queer state of growth--and she called the Kleins some ugly names. She didn't come down to give them a piece of her mind because it was no use fighting; they were sometimes able to get me some small job or other, through the influence of Jimmy's uncle Tambow, who delivered the vote of his relatives in the ward and was a pretty big wheel in Republican ward politics. We had a very good month before elections, passing out campaign literature. Tambow often had use for us when someone put a piece of business in his way, like lost articles in the post office or distressed goods in a bankruptcy. It had to be something worth while to pull him away from his card game, but when he had made his buy of razors, leather straps, or doll dishes, toy xylophones, glass-cutters, hotel soap, or first-aid kits, being exempt from licenses, he'd set up a stand on Milwaukee Avenue and hire us to run it. His own sons refused to work for him. He was divorced and lived in a single room. He had a huge nose, d a countenance loose in the skin, with the eye-bags of a fishing hird seamy, greenish, and gray. Patient, diligent-looking, and gross, ^'is chair like a vaquero deep sunk in the saddle, he whistled when he breathed from his burden of weight and the bite on his cigar; hair crrew from his nose and about the various rings on his knuckles. All? imes of the year were alike to him. May or November, he had his eleven o'clock breakfast of tea with milk and lump sugar and sweet rolls dinner of steak and baked potatoes, he smoked ten or twelve Ben Beys, wore the same pants of aldermanic stripe, a hat of dark convention drawing the sphere of social power over his original potent face while he considered what to meld and when to play jack or ace, or whether he could give his son Clementi the two bucks he often came in to ask for. Clementi was the younger son who lived with his mother and stepfather back of their infants'-wear store. "Mine boy, with pleasure," or, "Tomorrow, with pleasure," Tambow said. Tambow didn't say no to sons who had a stepfather. And, a good five rinds inside his old Adam, in the grease, tea, and onion blaze of his restaurant headquarters, crumbling ashes on his lap and picking up his cards with one hand, he wasn't, with his other sins, worried over money; he was grand-ducal with it, like the Kleins. And Clem was an easy spender too, and stood treat. But he wouldn't work, not for his father or for anyone else. So old Tambow set us up in the Milwaukee Avenue throng with, usually, Sylvester in charge, put in a fix with the cops so we wouldn't be bothered, and went back to his card game. It was a bad time for Sylvester. He had lost the lease on his movie, which had been failing anyway--it was now a wallpaper and paint shop--and he was living with his father, for his wife had left him and, he told us himself, threw stones at him when he tried to come through the backyard to see her. He had given her up for crazy and sent a letter agreeing to an annulment. To raise the money for his fees at Armour Tcch, where he was trying to finish his work for an engineer's degree, he had sold his furniture and movie equipment, and now he said that he had been away from school too long to sit in a classroom. Eyes tearing in the November wind as he stood with us on Milwaukee Avenue, thick hands in his overcoat pocket, neck sunk, foot knocking "oot, he made depressed jokes. The difference in our ages was no consideration with him. He told all his thoughts. When he finished his degree he was off to see the total globe. Foreign governments were crying for American engineers, and he could write his own ticket. He'd go 10 Kimberley, where he understood it was true that the natives tried to hide the diamonds in their guts. Or to Soviet Russia--now giving us 41" the whole story, that he sympathized with the Reds and admired Lenin, and especially Trotsky, who had won the civil war, traveling in a tank and reading French novels, while czar, priests, barons, generals, and landlords were being smoked out of the palaces. Meantime, Jimmy and I were sitting on Tambow's two big suitcases, and we called, "Get ya blades here!" and tended to business. Sylvester collected the money.