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CHAPTER IV

All the influences were lined up waiting for me. I was born, and there they were to form me, which is why I tell you more of them than of myself. At this time, and later too, I had a very weak sense of consequences, and the old lady never succeeded in opening much of a way into my imagination with her warnings and predictions of what was preparing for me--work certificates, stockyards, shovel labor, penitentiary rockpiles, bread and water, and lifelong ignorance and degradation. She invoked all these, hotter and hotter, especially from the time I began to go with Jimmy Klein, and she tried to tighten house discipline, inspected my nails and shirt collar before school, governed my table conduct more sharply, and threatened to lock me out nights if I stayed in the streets after ten. "You can go to the Kleins, if they'll take you in. Listen to me, Augie, I'm trying to make something of you. But I can't send Mama out to follow you and see what you do. I want you to be a mensch. You have less time to change than you think. The Klein boy is going to get you into trouble. He has thievish eyes. The truth now--is he a crook or not? Aha! He doesn't answer. True," she said, pushing sharply. "Say!" I answered emptily, "No," and wondered what she knew and who had told her. For Jimmy, like Stashu Kopecs, did take what he wanted in stores and from stands. And at this very time we were engaged in a swindle in Deever's neighborhood department store, where we were Christmas extras in the toy department, Santa Claus's helpers, in elves' costumes, with painted faces. - High-school sophomores, we were getting too big for this sort of '"g, but Santa Claus himself was enormous, a Swedish stoker and dayman, from the alley side of the store, a former iron-boat fireman roin Duluth, with trellis-winding muscles and Neanderthal eye-sockets, ootch-shming lumps in his forehead and his beard-hidden lip packed " 43 with Copenhagen Seal snuff. Over an undershirt full of holes, he strapped pillows for girth, wadded up his pants, for his legs were long and thin, and we helped pull on his coat. Painted and rouged with theater greasepaint and dusted with mica snow. Jimmy and I marched around the store with tambourines and curl-tongued noisemakers, turning somersaults in our billiard-felt jester's suits, and we gathered a gang of kids to lead to the third floor where the Swede Santa Claus sat in his sleigh, with reindeer artfully hung from the ceiling, the toy trains snicking and money baskets mousing swift and mechanical on the cables to the cashier's cage. Here we were in charge of a surprisepackage barrel done up in red and green paper, hollies and diamond powder and coils of silver bristles. These Christmas packages sold for two bits, and Jimmy decided that no inventory of them was possible and began to pocket every tenth quarter. For several days he didn't tell me this, only stood me to lunch. Then he let me into his secret as the volume of business got heavier. We were supposed to carry the money to the cashier when we had accumulated ten dollars. "She dumps it straight in the sack with the rest of the change," he said. "She doesn't mark down where it comes from because she's too busy raking it in, so why shouldn't we take a cut?" We had many discussions about it and raised the percentage to two quarters in every ten. There was a great thriving noise and glitter; all minds were dispersed into this Christmas tinkling, whirring, carols, and signal chimes, and what we were doing in secret with our hands wasn't observable. We stole considerable money. Jimmy was ahead of me. Not only had he started earlier, but I was out several days from the effect of butterscotch cream pie and other rich stuff we treated ourselves to. Or perhaps from a heightening of nerves through the brilliance and success of the wrong we were doing and the problem of how to spend the money. Jimmy spent a lot on presents--elegant slippers and string-feathered mules for everyone, smoking jackets, jazzy ties, rag rugs, and Wearever aluminum. From me. Mama got a bathrobe, the old woman a cameo pin, Georgie plaid stockings, and Simon a shirt. I gave presents to Mrs. Klein and Eleanor too, and to some girls at school. Days when we weren't working I stayed by preference at the Kleins', where the window sills were level with the sidewalk, and got a taste of what it was to be sitting on parlor furniture while outside something was shaping up from our misdeeds, as for a Roger Touhy, Tommy O'Connor, Basil Banghart, or Dillinger, who had had surgery on their faces, acid on their fingertips, who played solitaire, followed the sports results, sent out for hamburgers and milkshakes, and were trapped at 1 . She finished strong, with the threat that neighbors with ers already were angry, seeing him roam around the yards, i on long pants. Not making her distaste any too fine, she I reached his development of a man. As something lewd that er, to be faced. She got this across, in her granny grimace ice, and left us with her horror. is great for her to make us take a long swig of her mixture id to watch the effect come up sober in our eyes. Finishing, she had a terrific look of shrewd pleasure. Her brows were p. I maintain that Georgie had an idea of the topic, while Jib R and wiped up the beef gravy. I don't want to make out Iposition was all wicked evil while his was nothing but sublimity. IHto't be true. She had a difficult practical burden, that of sug- (his shocking thing by which supposedly we would benefit. We Ifchave had the strength or wisdom to propose it. Like so many bamane people who, however, have to live, just like everyone 9 count on tougher souls to carry them along. But I am allows Udma her best excuse. Because there still remains the satisfact^ve her. She breathed that tense "Aha!" to herself with which (fed a trap in chess. It was always this same thing; we refused Iftere our mistakes were leading, and then the terrible conse Kcame on. Similar to Elisha's bear that rushed on the children K taunting him; or the divine blow that cracked down that Itotightless as to put out a hand to keep the ark of the covenant (Bag off the wagon. It was punishment for mistakes there would We, now to correct, that was what it was. She was happy when P tet in behalf of this inexorability she was all the time warning t|e sat there with one foot stepping on the other and ate the t'fliat unconscious, mind-crippled seraph's way of his by con- Qtis worldly reasoning. Mama in her hurt, high voice tried to Iwt only spoke confusion. She was anyway incapable of saying At was clear, and when she was excited or in pain you couldn't Md her at all. Then Georgie stopped eating and began to moan. "You! Quiet!" said the old woman. I spoke up on his side and Mama's. I said that George hadn't done wrong yet and that we wanted to keep him with us. She had counted on this from me and was prepared. "Kopfmensch meiner," she said with powerful irony. "Genius! Do you want to wait until he gets in trouble? Are you here to take care of him when you're needed? You're in the streets and alleys with Klein, that hoodlum, learning to steal and every kind of dirt. Maybe you'd enjoy being an uncle to a bastard by your brother from a Polish girl with white hair, and explain to her stockyards father that he would be a fine son-in-law to him? He'd murder you with a sledgehammer, like an ox, and bum down the house." "Well," Simon said, "if Augie really wants to take charge of him--" "Even if Augie were better than he is," she answered quickly, "what would be the good of it? When Augie works once in a while, there's more trouble than money. But if he didn't work at all, imagine how fine it would be! He'd leave the boy at the Kleins' anyhow, and bum with his friend. Oh, I know your brother, my dear boy; he has a big heart if it costs him no trouble, pure gold, and he can promise you anything when his heart is touched. But how reliable he is I don't have to tell you. But even if he were as good as his word, could you afford for him to stop bringing in the little he makes? What? Did you inherit a fortune? Can you have servants, gouvernantkes, tutors, such as Lausch laid down his life to give our sons? I have done as much as I could to give you a little education and an honest upbringing, even tried to make gentlemen of you. But you must know who you are, what you are, and not get unreal ideas. So I tell you that you better do for yourself, first, what the world will do anyway for you without kindness. I've seen a little more than you; I know how mistakes are corrected, and how many ways there are to die just from foolishness alone, not to say other things. I tried to explain something about this to your brother, but his thoughts are about as steady as the way a drunkard pees." Thus she went on with this ominous crying and prophecy. She didn't have to win Simon over; in this one matter of Georgie he was with her. He wasn't openly going to join her because of his feeling for Mama, but when we were alone in the bedroom he let me make all my accusations and arguments, waiting me out with a superior face, taking it easy full-length on the sheets--sewed together of Ceresota sacks--and when he thought I was ready to hear him he said, "Tell it to the Marines, kid. Whyn't you use your brains once in a while before they turn to powder and blow away? The old woman is right and you know it. And i Uunk you're the only one. that cares about George either, but J^ng has got to be done with him. How do you know what he Ipick up and do? He's not just a sprout any more, and we can't Idling him all his life." (on had been rough on me since I had lost the job at the station luring my trials with Wigler and Sailor Bulba and my crookedtt Deever's. Nor did he think much of Clem and Jimmy, and I lade the mistake of telling him how I felt about Hilda and laid feopen to ridicule. "Why," he said, "Friedl Coblin'll be better jig than that when she grows up. She'll probably have tits any|0f course Simon knew I wasn't a real grudge-bearing character B type that comes down as fast as he boils up. And he considered 6 had the right to treat me like this, because he was making ss while I was making a fool of myself, and be intended to carry ittg with him, when it was time, the way Napoleon did his brothuring my worst difficulties with the old lady he'd be stiff and tdistance, but then he'd also tell me that I could expect him to ie out of real trouble as long as I was reasonably deserving. He liike to see my bubble-headed friends get me in dutch. Yes, he Eof duty toward me, and toward George too. I couldn't say ig hypocritical about George. are as hell there for a while when you just let Mama talk Sdn't say anything," I told him. "You know damn well I can't fch about the kid unless I quit school and take care of him. But ffla wants him home you should leave that up to her. And you Ih't have sat there and let her make a holy show of herself." ' |k might as well get it all at once as in installments." Simon lay i dark iron bedstead, brawny and blond. He spoke out strongly. 'the paused and took a calm touch of his broken tooth with his |. He seemed to have expected that I would light into him harder I did, and when I had said my sharpest words he went on to let sbt what I pretty well knew without being told. "She got you dead Site, Augie. You know you've been pretty damn sloppy. But any- The wouldn't have had the kid with us more than another year. It you were in there pitching, which you're not." SB, she thinks she's boss now." ft her think," he said. He cleared the passages of his head with Bid, short pull that had got to be the mark of his soberest moments Ipped the light switch with his foot. He began to read. |here wasn't much I could do after that. I couldn't any longer Hrledge Grandma to be the head of the family, and it was to t 53 Simon that some of the old authority became attached. I stayed in the room with him rather than go out and face Mama, who, when the dishes were done and the crumbs shaken off the cloth, would be more lying than sitting in her chair with the Prussian-spiked bulb emitting its glossy villain light through the head on the squashlike wens and bubbles and hard-grained paint of the walls. When she had a grief she didn't play it with any arts; she took straight off from her spirit. She made no fuss or noise nor was seen weeping, but in an extreme and terrible way seemed to be watching out the kitchen window, until you came close and saw the tear-strengthened color of her green eyes and of her pink face, her gap-toothed mouth; she laid her head on the wing of the chair sideways, never direct. When sick she was that way also. She climbed into bed in her gown, twisted her hair into braids to keep it from tangling, and had nothing to do with anyone until she felt able to stay on her feet. It was useless for us to come with the thermometer, for she refused to have it; she lay herself dumbly on the outcome of forces, without any work of mind, of which she was incapable. She had some original view on doom or recovery. Well, it was now decided about George, and, not reproaching anyone, she did her work while Grandma Lausch made speed to carry out her project. The old lady went down to the drugstore herself to phone Lubin, the caseworker. That in itself was significant, because she scarcely ever set foot in the street when snow had fallen after that icy Armistice Day when she had twisted her ankle.'Old people often suffered out their days with broken bones that couldn't mend, she observed. Besides, even if it were only for a block, she couldn't go in a housedress. It wasn't right. She had to get herself up and change from worsted stockings--actually golf hose held with snarled elastics--to silk, to black dress, put up her triple-circle coif and, looking mean, powder her face. Not caring how ungentle she looked to, us, she mounted her air-sweeping feathers with hat pins and, got up in the condition of ceremony, she went out with an aged quickness of anger, but as she walked down she still had to set both feet on each tread of the stairs. It was an election day, and crossed flags were hung over the polling places, burly party men were in the snow, breathing steam and flapping long sample ballots. School was closed, and I was available to accompany her, but she wouldn't have me. And half an hour later when I went out with the ash drawer of the stove I saw her on one knee in the snowy passageway. Fallen. It was hurtful to see her. She never before had gone out without protection. I flung away the tin drawer and ran id she fastened on my thin-shirted arm with the snow-wet see on her feet, though, she. wanted no support from me, use of a big, swollen consciousness of sacrifice or maybe tious thought of retribution. She got up the stairs alone and taight through the house to her room, where she further aecedent by locking the door. Till then I had never even ere was a key; she must have kept it hidden from the earliest I her jewels and family papers. Mama and I stood outside, I, and asked if she was hurt, until we got the answer of firm away and let her alone, and I was enough shaken up by ya her snow-spitten face to tremble now at the cat-intensity Ece. And there was a change in the main established order: if less to be thought of locked than the door of a church, and ccssible, should have a key, and that that key should be used! icance of this election-day fall was all the deeper since usually if and kitchen burns were treated with great seriousness and jaess, with downright melancholy and the haunting of the treat. After applying the iodine or oil and bandages she would (arette for her nerves. But the Murads were in her sewing Die kitchen and she didn't come out of her room. bae passed, and it was well on in the afternoon before she (She was wearing a thick bandage on her leg. She came along fths of the house, the parrot colors of the rug worn down to liime skirting the parlor stove and entering the short hall |pn the kitchen, where the trail changed to brown in the It-good part of this the work of her own feet and flint-colored |ng steadily along this fox run for the better part of ten j-Wore her everyday clothes and shawl again, so that every|tp be presumed back to normal or almost so; whereas it |ly nerve-silent, and her face, attempting to be steady and |blenched as if she really had lost blood, or else her long|e composure at the sight of blood. She had to have been |yed and scared to lock her door, but apparently she had It she had to come back and, moony-pale as she was, turn ence. But there was something missing. Even the frazzled, latch whose white wool had gone brown around her eyes, if walk with clickety claws, as if she sensed that new days % out the last of an old regime, the time when counselors gcs see the finish of their glory, and Switzers and Praetorian gutless. ibm to spend full time with Georgie, in the last month, pull- t\ 55 ing him around on the sled, walking him in the park, and taking him to the Garfield Park conservatory to see the lemons bloom. The administrative wheels were already going; eleventh-hour efforts did no good. Lubin, who had always said that Georgie would be better off in an institution, brought the commitment papers, and Mama, without Simon's support against the old lady (and probably even that would not have stopped her, since Grandma was in a decisive action and was carried along with the impulse of a doom), had to sign. No, Grandma Lausch couldn't have been withstood, I'm convinced. Not now, not in this. Everything considered, it was, no matter how sad, wiser to commit the kid. As Simon said, we would later have had to do it ourselves. But the old lady made of it something it didn't necessarily have to be, a test of strength, tactless, a piece of sultanism; it originated in things we little understood: disappointment, angry giddiness from self-imposed, prideful struggle, weak nearness to death that impaired her judgment, maybe a sharp utterance of stubborn animal spirit, or bubble from human enterprise, sinking and discharging blindly from a depth. Do I know? But sending Georgie away could have been done differently. At last notice arrived that there was place for him in the Home. I had to go and buy him a valise at the Army-Navy store--a tan, bulldog gladstone, the best I could get. The thing would be his for life, and I wanted it to be right. I taught him how to work the clasps and the key. Where he was going there would always be people of course to help him, but my idea was that he should be master of a little of his own, when he went from place to place. We also bought him a hat in the drygoods store. It was sunless but snow-melting weather at the late start of spring, and the trees and roofs dripped. In that grown man's hat and the coat he didn't wear intelligently--not appearing to feel the need to settle it right on his shoulders--he looked grown up and like a traveler. In fact, beautiful, and the picture of a far traveler, with his pale, mind-crippled, impotent handsomeness. It was enough to make you break down and cry, to see him. But nobody did cry; neither of us, I mean, for by then there were only my mother and I--Simon had given him a kiss on the head when leaving in the morning and said, "Good-by, old socks, I'll; come and see you." As for Grandma Lausch, she stayed in her room.: Mama said, "Go and tell Gramma we're ready to go."; "It's Augie," I said at Grandma's door. "Everything is set." [, "Well? Go, then." This she said in her onetime deci Idtpatient way, but without the brightness or what you might tea ring of real command. The door was locked, and I suppose |nng on the featherbed in her apron, shawl, and pointing slip It the bric-a-brac of her Odessa existence on her vanity table, pp, and on the walls. jk Mama wants you to say good-by." t is there to say good-by? I'll come and visit him later on." idn't have the strength to go and look at the results she had ^hard to get and then still keep on trying to hold power in her |Bd how was i supposed to interpret this refusal if not as feebleta cracking of organization? I showed at last the trembling anger of weak people that it Bch to bring on. She seemed determined that Georgie should teatment of a child from the old woman. But in a few minutes H-ned alone from the bedroom and said with harshness not tfor me, "Pick up the satchel, Augie." I took hold of Georgie's Ingh the wide sleeve and we left by the door of the front room, Vinnie was snoozing under the ferns. Georgie softly chewed 'ses of his mouth as we went. It was a slow trip on the cars; we ithree times, and the last stretch on the West Side took us by Hoson's shop. te about an hour getting to the Home--wired windows, dogclone fence, asphalt yard, great gloom. In the tiny below-stairs itooody-looking matron took the papers and signed him into it. We were allowed to go up to the dormitory with him, where fe stood around under the radiator high on the wall and watched m took off George's coat and the manly hat, and in his shirt of ittons, with whitish head and big white, chill fingers--it was I that they were so man-sized--he kept by me beside the bed igain showed him the simple little stunt of the satchel lock. But |& distract him from the terror of the place and of boys like around--he had never met such before. And now he realized would leave him and he began to do with his soul, that is, to Is moan, worse for us than tears, though many grades below 8 of weeping. Then Mama slumped down and gave in utterly. hen she had the bristles of his special head between her hands H'tissing him that she began to cry. When I started after a |(faaw her away he tried to follow. I cried also. I took him (Be bed and said, "Sit here." So he sat and moaned. We went ^C .57 down to the car stop and stood waiting by the black, humming pole for the trolley to come back from city limits. After that we had a diminished family life, as though it were care of Georgie that had been the main basis of household union and now everything was disturbed. We looked in different directions, and the old woman had outsmarted herself. Well, we were a disappointment to her too. Maybe she had started out by dreaming she might have a prodigy in one of us to manage to fame. Perhaps. The force that directs these things in us higher beings and brings together lovers to bear the genius that will lead the world a step or two of the slow march toward its perfection, or find the note that will reach the ear of the banded multitude and encourage it to take that step, had come across with a Georgie instead, and with us. We were far from having the stuff in us that she must have wanted. Our parentage needn't have mattered so much, and it wasn't just a question of high or even legal birth. Fouche got as far as Talleyrand. What counted was natural endowment, and on that score she formed the opinion bitterly that we were not born with talents. Nonetheless we could be trained to be decent and gentlemanly, to wear white collars and have clean nails, brushed teeth, table manners, be brought up to fairly good pattern no matter what office we worked in, store we clerked in, teller's cage we reliably counted in-- courteous in an elevator, prefatory in asking directions, courtly to ladies, grim and unanswering to streetwalkers, considerate in conveyances, and walking in the paths of a grayer, dimmer Castiglione. Instead we were getting to be more common and rude, deepervoiced, hairy. In our underpants, mornings while getting dressed, we punched and grappled in play, banging to the springs, to the floor, knocking over chairs. Passing then into the hall to wash, there, often, we saw the old woman's small figure and her eyes whitely contemptuous, with a terrible little naked yawn of her gums, suck-cheeked with unspoken comment. But power-robbed. Done for. Simon would say sometimes, "Wha'che know, Gram?"--even, occasionally, "Mrs. Lausch." I never repudiated her that much or tried to strike the old influence, such as it had become, out of her hands. Presently Simon too took a less disrespectful tone. By now, however, it didn't matter much. She had seen what we were and what we were capable of. The house was changed also for us; dinkier, darker, smaller; once shiny and venerated things losing their attraction and richness and importance. Tin showed, cracks, black spots where enamel was hit ; r, design scuffed out of the center of the rug, all the er, massiveness, florescence, wiped out. The old-paste 5 in her last days apparently wasn't noticed by the housesa; it was by us, coming in fresh from outdoors. I in May of that year, and.1 laid her in a shoe box and hb the yard. down to the car stop and stood waiting by the black, humming pole for the trolley to come back from city limits. After that we had a diminished family life, as though it were care of Georgie that had been the main basis of household union and now everything was disturbed. We looked in different directions, and the old woman had outsmarted herself. Well, we were a disappointment to her too. Maybe she had started out by dreaming she might have a prodigy in one of us to manage to fame. Perhaps. The force that directs these things in us higher beings and brings together lovers to bear the genius that will lead the world a step or two of the slow march toward its perfection, or find the note that will reach the ear of the banded multitude and encourage it to take that step, had come across with a Georgie instead, and with us. We were far from having the stuff in us that she must have wanted. Our parentage needn't have mattered so much, and it wasn't just a question of high or even legal birth. Fouche got as far as Talleyrand. What counted was natural endowment, and on that score she formed the opinion bitterly that we were not born with talents. Nonetheless we could be trained to be decent and gentlemanly, to wear white collars and have clean nails, brushed teeth, table manners, be brought up to fairly good pattern no matter what office we worked in, store we clerked in, teller's cage we reliably counted in-- courteous in an elevator, prefatory in asking directions, courtly to ladies, grim and unanswering to streetwalkers, considerate in conveyances, and walking in the paths of a grayer, dimmer Castiglione. Instead we were getting to be more common and rude, deepervoiced, hairy. In our underpants, mornings while getting dressed, we punched and grappled in play, banging to the springs, to the floor, knocking over chairs. Passing then into the hall to wash, there, often, we saw the old woman's small figure and her eyes whitely contemptuous, with a terrible little naked yawn of her gums, suck-cheeked with unspoken comment. But power-robbed. Done for. Simon would say sometimes, "Wha'che know, Gram?"--even, occasionally, "Mrs. Lausch." I never repudiated her that much or tried to strike the old influence, such as it had become, out of her hands. Presently Simon too took a less disrespectful tone. By now, however, it didn't matter much. She had seen what we were and what we were capable of. The house was changed also for us; dinkier, darker, smaller; once shiny and venerated things losing their attraction and richness and importance. Tin showed, cracks, black spots where enamel was hit off threadbarer, design scuffed out of the center of the rug, all the lamour, lacquer, massiveness, florescence, wiped out. The old-paste odor of Winnie in her last days apparently wasn't noticed by the housedwelline women; it was by us, coming in fresh from outdoors. Winnie died in May of that year, and I laid her in a shoe box and buried her in the yard. ikk, fcr e^.-:...-,, CHAPTER V William Einhom was the first superior man I knew. He had a brain and many enterprises, real directing power, philosophical capacity, and if I were methodical enough to take thought before an important and practical decision and also (N. B.) if I were really his disciple and not what I am, I'd ask myself, "What would Caesar suffer in this case? What would Machiavelli advise or Ulysses do? What would Einhorn think?" I'm not kidding when I enter Einhom in this eminent list. It was him that I knew, and what I understand of them in him. Unless you want to say that we're at the dwarf end of all times and mere children whose only share in grandeur is like a boy's share in fairy-tale kings, beings of a different kind from times better and stronger than ours. But if we're comparing men and men, not men and children or men and demigods, which is just what would please Caesar among us teeming democrats, and if we don't have any special wish to abdicate into some different, lower form of existence out of shame for our defects before the golden faces of these and other old-time men, then I have the right to praise Einhorn and not care about smiles of derogation from those who think the race no longer has in any important decree the traits we honor in these fabulous names. But I don't want to be pushed into exaggeration by such opinion, which is the opinion of students who, at all ages, feel their boyishness when they confront the past. 1 went to work for Einhom while I was a high-school junior, not long before the great crash, during the Hoover administration, when Einhorn was still a wealthy man, though I don't believe he was ever so rich as he later claimed, and I stayed on with him after he had lost most of his property. Then, actually, was when I became essential to him, not just metaphorical right hand but virtually arms and legs. Einhorn v/as a cripple who didn't have the use of either, not even partial; only his hands still functioned, and they weren't strong enough to drive heel chair. He had to be rolled and drawn around the house by his a. fe brother, relations, or one of the people he usually had on call, ther employed by or connected with him. Whether they worked for him or were merely around his house or office, he had a talent for makio supernumeraries of them, and there were always plenty of people heroin0 to become rich, or more rich if already well-to-do, through the Einhorns. They were the most important realestate brokers in the district and owned and controlled much property, including the enormous forty-flat building where they lived. The poolroom in the corner store of it was ov/ned outright by them and called Einhorn's Billiards. There were six other stores--hardware, fruit, a tin shop, a restaurant, barbershop, and a funeral parlor belonging to Kinsman, whose son it was that ran away with my cousin Howard Cobiin to join the Marines aoainst Sandino. The restaurant was the one in which Tambow, the Republican vote-getter, played cards. The Einhoms were his ex-wife's relatives; they, however, had never taken sides in the divorce. It wouldn't have become Einhorn Senior, the old Commissioner, who had had four wives himself, two getting alimony still, to be strict with somebody on that' account. The Commissioner had never held office, that was just people's fun. He was still an old galliard, with white Buffalo Bill vandyke, and he swanked around, still healthy of flesh, in white suits, looking things over with big sex-amused eyes. He had a lot of respect from everyone for his shrewdness, and when he opened his grand old mouth to say something about a chattel mortgage or the location of a lot, in his laconic, single-syllabled way, the whole hefty, serious crowd of businessmen in the office stopped their talk. He gave out considerable advice, and Coblin and Five Properties got him to invest some of their money. Kreindl, who did a job for him once in a while, thought he was as wise as a god. "The son is smart," he said, "but the Commissioner--that's really a man you have to give way to on earth." I disagreed then and do still, though when the Commissioner was up to something he stole the show. One of my responsibilities in summer was to go with him to the beach, where he swam daily until the second week in September. I was supposed to see that he didn't go out too far, and also I handed him lighted cigarettes while he floated near the pier in the pillow striping of his suit with large belly, large old man's sex, and yellow, bald knees; his white back-hair spread on the water, yellowish, like polar bear's pelt, his vigorous foreskull, tanned and red, turned up; while his big lips uttered and his nose drove out smoke, clever and pleasurable in the warm, heavy blue of Micliigan; while wood-bracketed trawlers, tarred on the sides, chuffed and va^ 61 pored outside the water reserved for the bawling, splashing, manyactioned, brilliant-colored crowd; waterside structures and towers, and skyscrapers beyond in a vast right angle to the evading bend of the shore. Einhom was the Commissioner's son by his first wife. By the second or third he had another son who was called Shep or, by his poolroom friends. Dingbat, for John Dingbat O'Berta, the candy kid of city politics and friend of Polack Sam Zincowicz. Since he didn't either know or resemble O'Berta and wasn't connected with Thirteenth Ward politics or any other, I couldn't exactly say how he came by the name. But without being a hoodlum himself he was taken up with gang events and crime, a kind of amateur of the lore and done up in the gangster taste so you might take him for somebody tied in with the dangerous Druccis or Big Hayes Hubacek: sharp financial hat, body-clasping suit, the shirt Andalusian style buttoned up to the collar and worn without a necktie, trick shoes, pointed and pimpy, polished like a tango dancer's; he clumped hard on the leather heels. Dingbat's hair was violent, brilliant, black, treated, ripple-marked. Bantam, thin-muscled, swift, almost frail, he had an absolutely unreasonable face. To be distinguished from brutal--it wasn't that, there was all kind of sentiment in it. But wild, down-twisting, squint-eyed, unchangeably firm and wrong in thoughts, with the prickles coming black through his unmethodical after-shave talcum: the puss of an executioner's subject, provided we understand the prototype not as a murderer (he attacked with his fists and had a killer's swing but not the real intention) but as somebody intractable. As far as that goes, he was beaten all the time and wore a mishealed scar where his cheek had been caught between his teeth by a ring, but he went on springing and boxing, rushing out from the poolroom on a fresh challenge to spin around on his tango shoes and throw his tense, weightless punches. The heatings didn't squelch him. I was by one Sunday when he picked a fight with that huge Five Properties and thrust him on the chest with his hands, failing to move him; Five Properties picked him up and threw him down on the floor. When Dingbat came back punching, Five Properties grinned but was frightened and shied back against the cue rack. Somebody in the crowd began to shout that Five Properties was yellow, and it was thought the right thing to hold Dingbat back, by the arms, struggling with a blinded, drawn face of rage, A pal of his said what a shame that a veteran of Chateau Thierry should be shoved around by a greenhorn. Five Properties took it to heart and thereafter stayed away from the poolroom .62 Dingbat had had charge of the poolroom at one time, but he was nreliable and the Commissioner had replaced him with a manager. ^ow he was around as the owner's son--racked up balls, once in a 'hile chanced color like a coal when a green table felt was ripped--ind in the capacity of key-man and bravo, referee, bet-holder, sports expert and gang-war historian, on the watch for a small deal, a fighter to manage, or a game of rotation at ten cents a ball. Between times he was his father's chauffeur. The Commissioner couldn't drive the big red Blackhawk-Stutz he owned--the Einhoms never could see anything in a small car--and Dingbat took him to the beach when it was too hot to walk. After all, the old man was pushing seventy-five and couldn't be allowed to risk a stroke. I'd ride with him in the back seat while Dingbat sat with mauled, crazy neck and a short grip on the wheel, ukelele and bathing suit on the cushion beside him; he was particularly sex-goaded when he drove, shouting, whistling, and honking after quiff, to the entertainment of his father. Sometimes we had the company of Clem or Jimmy, or of Sylvester, the movie bankrupt, who was now flunking out of his engineer's course at Armour Tech and talking about moving away to New York altogether. On the beach Dingbat, athletically braced up with belt and wristbands, a bandanna to keep the sand out of his hair when he stood on his head, streaked down with suntan oil, was with a crowd of girls and other beach athletes, dancing and striking into his ukelele with: Ani-ka, hula wicki-wicki *i Sweet brown maiden said to me, i- And she taught me hula-hula " On the beach at Waikiki... Kindled enough, he made it suggestive, his black voice cracking, and his little roosterish flame licked up clear, queer, and crabbed. His old sire, gruff and mocking, deeply tickled, lay like the Buffalo Bill of the? Etruscans in the beach chair and bath towel drawn up burnoose-wise4 to keep the dazzle from his eyes--additionally shaded by his soft, flesh-heavy arm--his bushy mouth open with laughter. "Ee-rfyo?/" he said to his son. If the party began after the main heat of the day William Einhom flight come down too, wheel chair brought on the baggage rack of the ^utz, and his wife carrying an umbrella to shade them both. He was taken pick-a-back by his brother, or by me, from the office into the car, tom the car to the right site on the lakeshore; all as distinguished, oh- ^rving, white, untouched and nobiliare as a margrave. Quickeyes. Originally a big man, of the Commissioner's stature, well formed, well favored, he had more delicacy of spirit than the Commissioner, and of course Dingbat wasn't a patch on him. Einhom was very pale, a little flabby in the face; considerable curvature of the nose, small lips, and graying hair let grow thickly so that it touched on the ears; and continually watchful, his look going forward uninterruptedly to fasten on subject matters. His heavy, attractive wife sat by him with the parasol, languorous, partly in smiles, with her free, soft brown fist on her lap and strong hair bobbed with that declivity that you see in pictures of the Egyptian coif, the flat base forming a black brush about the back of -the neck. Entertained by the summer breeziness and the little boats on the waves and the cavorting and minstrelsy. If you want to know what she thought, it was that back home was locked. There were two pounds of hotdogs on the shelf of the gas range, two pounds of cold potatoes for salad, mustard, a rye bread already sliced. If she ran out, she could send me for more. Mrs. Einhom liked to feel that things were ready. The old man would want tea. He needed to be pleased, and she was willing, asking only in return that he stop spitting on the floor, and that not of him directly, being too shy, but through her husband, to him it was merely a joking matter. The rest of us would have Coca-Cola, Einhorn's favorite drink. One of my daily chores was to fetch him Cokes, in bottles from the poolroom or glasses from the drugstore, depending on which he judged to have the better mixture that day. My brother Simon, seeing me carry a glass on a tray through the gathering on the sidewalk--there was always an overflow of businessmen in front of Einhorn's, mixing with the mourners from Kinsman's chapel and the poolroom characters--gave a big laugh of surprise and said, "So this is your job! You're the butler." But it was only one function of hundreds, some even more menial, more personal, others calling for cleverness and training--secretary, deputy, agent, companion. He was a man who needed someone beside him continually; the things that had to be done for him made him autocratic. At Versailles or in Paris the Sun King had one nobleman to hand him his stockings, another his shirt, in his morning levee. Einhom had to be lifted up in bed and dressed. Now and then it was I who had to do it. The room was dark and unfresh, for he and his wife slept with the windows shut. So it was sleep rank from nights of both bodies. I see I had no sense of criticism about such things; I got used to it quickly. Einhom slept in his underwear because changing to pajamas was a task, and he and his wife kept late hours. Thus, the light switched on, there was Einhorn in his BVDs, wasted arms freckled, grizzled hair afly from his face that was inclined to flatness, the shrewd curved nose and clipped mustache. If peevish, and sometimes he was, my cue was to be nuiet until he got back his spirits. It was against policy to be out of temper in the morning. He preferred to be jocular. Birdy, teasing, often corny or lewd, he guyed his wife about the noise and bother she made petting breakfast. In dressing him, my experience with George came in handy, but there was more style about Einhom than I was used to. His socks were of grand silk, trousers with a banker's stripe; he had several pairs of shoes, fine Walkovers that of course never wrinkled below the instep, much less wore out, a belt with a gothic monogram. Dressed to the waist, he was lifted into his black leather chair and pulled on quaky wheels to the bathroom. At times the first settling in the chair drew a frown from him, sometimes a more oblique look of empoisoned acceptance; but mostly it was a stoical operation. I eased him down and took him, traveling backwards, to the toilet, a sunny room with an east window to the yard. The Commissioner and Einhorn, both rather careless in their habits, made this a difficult place to keep clean. But for people of some nobility allowances have always been made in this regard. I understand that British aristocrats are still legally entitled to piss, if they should care to, on the hind wheels of carriages. ':'; There wasn't anything Mrs. Einhom could do about the wet floor. Once in a while when Bavatsky the handyman was gone too long in Polack Town or drunk in the cellar, she asked me to clean up. She said she didn't like to impose on me because I was a student. Nevertheless I was getting paid. For unspecified work of a mixed character. I accepted it as such; the mixed character of it was one of the things I liked. I was just as varietistic and unfit for discipline and regularity as my friend Clem Tambow; only I differed from Clem in being a beaver, once my heart was attached to a work or a cause. Naturally, when Einhorn found this out, and he quickly did, he kept me going steadily; it suited him perfectly because of the great number of things he had to be done. Should he run out, my standing by made him invent more. So I didn't often get the toilet detail; he had too many important tasks for me. And when I did get it, why, what I had had under Grandma Lausch made an inconsiderable thing of it to be porter for an hour. But now in the toilet with Einhom: he kept me by him to read the rooming headlines from the Examiner, the financial news, closing quotations from Wall Street and La Salle Street. Local news next, some- wing about Big Bill Thompson, that he had hired the Cort Theatre, or "stance, and presented himself on the stage with two caged giant c 65 rats from the stockyards whom he addressed by the names of Republican renegades--I came to know what items Einhorn would want first. "Yes, it's just as Thompson says. He's a big gasbag, but this time it's true. He rushed back from Honolulu to save what's-his-name from the penitentiary." He was long and well-nigh perfect of memory, a close and detailed reader of the news, and kept a file on matters of interest to him, for he was highly systematic, and one of my jobs was to keep his files in order in the long steel and wood cases he surrounded himself with, being masterful, often fussy for reasons hard to understand when I placed something before him, proposing to throw it away. The stuff had to be where he could lay his hands on it at once, his clippings and pieces of paper, in folders labeled Commerce, Invention, Major Local Transactions, Crime and Gang, Democrats, Republicans, Archaeology, Literature, League of Nations. Search me, why the League cf Nations, but he lived by Baconian ideas of what makes the man this and that, and had a weakness for complete information. Everything was going to be properly done, with Einhom, and was thoroughly organized on his desk and around it--Shakespeare, Bible, Plutarch, dictionary and thesaurus. Commercial Law for Laymen, realestate and insurance guides, almanacs and directories; then typewriter in black hood, dictaphone, telephones on bracket arms and a little screwdriver to hand for touching off the part of the telephone mechanism that registered the drop of the nickel--for even at his most prosperous Einhorn was not going to pay for every call he made; the company was raking in a fortune from the coinboxes used by the other businessmen who came to the office--wire trays labeled Incoming and Outgoing, molten Aetna weights, notary's seal on a chain, staplers, flap-moistening sponges, keys to money, confidential papers, notes, condoms, personal correspondence and poems and essays. When all this was arranged and in place, all proper, he could begin to operate, back of his polished barrier approached by two office gates, where he was one of the chiefs of life, a white-faced executive, much aware of himself and even of the freakish, willful shrewdness that sometimes spoiled his dignity and proud, plaque-like good looks. He had his father to keep up with, whose business ideas were perhaps less imaginative but broader, based on his connections with his rich old-time cronies. The old Commissioner had made the Einhom money and still kept the greater part of the titles in his name, not because he didn't trust his son, but only for the reason that to the business community he was the Einhom, the one who was approached first with offers. William was the heir and was also to be trustee of the shares of his son Arthur, who was a sophomore at the University of Illinois, and nf Dingbat. Sometimes Einhorn was unhappy about the Commissioner's habit of making private loans, some of them sizable, from the bankroll he carried pinned inside the pocket of his Mark Twain s. uit. More often he bragged about him as a pioneer builder on the Northwest Side and had dynastic ideas about the Einhoms--the organizer coming after the conqueror, the poet and philosopher succeeding the organizer, and the whole development typically American, the work of intelligence and strength in an open field, a world of possibilities. But really, with all respect for the Commissioner, Einhorn, while still fresh and palmy, had his fathers overriding powers plus something else, statesmanship, fineness of line, Parsee sense, deep-dug intrigue, the scorn of Pope Alexander VI for custom. One morning while I was reading from a column on the misconduct of an American heiress with an Italian prince at Cannes, he stopped me to quote, " 'Dear Kate, you and I cannot be confined within the weak list of a country's fashion. We are the makers of manners, Kate, and the liberty that follows our places stops the mouth of all find-faults....' That's Henry Fifth for you. Meaning that there's one way for people at large and another for those that have something special to do. Which those at large have to have in front of them. It braces them up that there's a privilege they can't enjoy, as long as they know it's there. Besides, there's law, and then there's Nature. There's opinion, and then there's Nature. Somebody has to get outside of law and opinion and speak for Nature. It's even a public duty, so customs won't have us all by the windpipe." Einhorn had a teaching turn similar to Grandma Lausch's, both believing they could show what could be done with the world, where it gave or resisted, where you could be confident and run or where you could only feel your way and were forced to blunder. And with his son at the university I was the only student he had to hand. He put on a judicious head, and things, no matter how they ran, had to be collared and brought to a standstill when he was ready to give out. He raised his unusable arms to the desk by a neat trick that went through several stages, tugging the sleeve of the right with the fingers of the left, helping on the left with the right. There wasn't any appeal to feelings as he accomplished this; it was only an operation. But it had immense importance. As a robust, full-blooded man might mount up to a pulpit and then confess his weakness before God, Einhorn, with his feebleness demonstrated for a preliminary, got himself situated to speak of strength, with strength. It was plenty queer to hear him on this note, especially in view of the daily drift of life here. But let's take it back to the toilet, where Einhom got himself ready in the morning. At one time he used to have the barber in to shave him. But this reminded him too much of the hospital, he said, where he had put in a total of two and one-half years. Besides he preferred to do things for himself as much as possible; he had to rely on too many people as it was. So now he used a safety razor stropped in a gadget a Czech inventor had personally sold him; he swore by it. To shave took better than half an hour, chin on the edge of the sink and hands in the water, working round his face. He fished out the washrag, muffled himself in it; I could hear him breathe through its papillae. He soaped, he rubbed and played, scraped, explored with fingers for patches of bristle, and I sat on the cover of the pot and read. The vapor woke up old smells, and there was something astringent in the shaving cream he used that cut into my breath. Then he pomaded his wet hair and slipped on a little cap made of an end of woman's hose. Dried and powdered, he had to be helped into his shirt, his tie put on, the knot inspected many times by his fingers and warped exactly into place with some nervousness about the top button. The jacket next, finished off with the dry noise of the whiskbroom. Fly re-examined, shoes wiped of water drops, we were all set and I got the nod to draw him into the kitchen for breakfast. His appetite was sharp and he crowded his food. A stranger with a head on him, unaware that Einhom was paralyzed, would have guessed he was not a well man from seeing him suck a pierced egg, for it was something humanly foxy, paw-handled, hungry above average need. Then he had this cap of a woman's stocking, like a trophy from another field of appetites, if you'll excuse a sporting reference, or martial one, on his head. He was conscious of this himself, for pretty much everything was thought of, and his mind in its way performed admirable work with many of the things he did; or did not care to stop himself from doing; or was not able to stop; or thought it only creaturely human nature to do; or enjoyed, indulged; was proud his disease had not killed his capacity for but rather left him with more capacity than many normal men. Much that's nameless to many people through disgust or shame he didn't mind naming to himself or to a full confidant (or pretty nearly so) like me, and caught, used, and worked all feelings freely. There was plenty to be in on; he was a very busy man. There was a short executive period, after coffee, when Einhom threw his weight around about household matters. Wrinkled, gloomy Tiny Bavatsky, string-muscled, was fetched up from the basement and told what he must do, warned to lay off the bottle till night. He went away, hitch-gaited, talking to himself in words of menace, to start his tasks. Mrs. Einhom was not really a good housekeeper even though she complained about the floor of the toilet and the old man's spitting. But Einhom was a thoughtful proprietor and saw to it that everything was kept humming, running, flushing, and constantly improved--rats killed, cement laid in the backyard, machines cleaned and oiled, porches retimbered, tenants sanitary, garbage cans covered, screens patched, flies sprayed. He was able to tell you how fast pests multiplied, how much puttv to buy for a piece of glazing, the right prices of nails or clothesline or fuses and many such things; as much as any ancient senator knew of husbandry before such concerns came to be thought wrong. Then, when everything was under control, he had himself taken into his office on the specially constructed chair with cackly casters. I had to dust the desk and get him a Coke to drink with his second cigarette, and he was already on his mail when I got back with it. His mail was large--he had to have it so, and from many kinds of correspondents in all parts of the country. Let it be hot--for I'm reporting on summers, during vacations, when I spent full time with him--and he was wearing his vest in the office. The morning, this early, was often gentle prairie weather, long before the rugged grind--like the nai'vete you get to expect in the hardest and toughest-used when you've been with them long enough--I refer to business and heat of a Chicago summer afternoon. But it was breathing time. The Commissioner wasn't finished dressing yet; he went into the mild sun of the street in his slippers, his galluses hung down, and the smoke of his Claro passed up and back above his white hair, while his hand was sunk comfortable and deep below his waistband. And Einhorn, away back, the length of the office, slit open his letters, made notes for replies, dipped into his files or passed things on for me to check on--me, the often stumped aide, trying to get straight what he was up to in his numerous small swindles. In this respect there was hardly anything he didn't get into, like ordering things on approval he didn't intend to pay for--stamps, little tubes of lilac perfume, packages of linen sachet, Japanese paper roses that opened in water, and all the sort of items advertised in the back pages of the Sunday supplement. He had me write for them in my hand and give fictitious names, and he threw away the dunning letters, of course, and said all of these people calculated losses into what they charged. He sent away for everything that was free: samples of food, soaps, medicine, the literature of all causes, reports of the Bureau of American Ethnology and publications 0! the Smithsonian Institution, the Bishop Museum in Hawaii, the Congressional Record, laws, pamphlets, prospectuses, college catalogues, quack hygiene books, advice on bust-development, on getting rid of pimples, on longevity and Coueism, pamphlets on Fletcherism, Yoga, spirit-rapping, anti-vivisection; he was on the mailing list of the Henry George Institute and the Rudolf Steiner Foundation in London, the local bar association, the American Legion. He had to be in touch with everything. And all this material he kept; the overflow went down to the basement. Bavatsky or I or Lollie Fewter, who came in three days a week to do the ironing, carried it below. Some of it, when it went out of print, he sold to bookstores or libraries, and some he remailed to his clients with the Einhorn stamp on it, for good will. He had much to do also with contests and entered every competition he got wind of, suggesting names for new products, slogans; he made up bright sayings and most embarrassing moments, most delightful dreams, omens he should have heeded, telepathic experiences, and jingles: When radio first appeared, I did rave, And all my pennies I did save, Even neglected to shave. I'll take my dear Dynamic to the grave. He won the Evening American's first prize of five dollars with this, and one of my jobs was to see that what was sent out to contests, anagrams on the names of presidents or on the capitals of states, or elephants composed of tiny numbers (making what sum?), that these entries were neat, mounted right, inside ruled borders, accompanied by the necessary coupons, boxtops, and labels. Furthermore, I had to do reference work for him in his study or at the library downtown, one of his projects being to put out an edition of Shakespeare indexed as the Gideon Bible was: Slack Business, Bad Weather, Difficult Customers, Stuck with Big Inventory of Last Year's Models, Woman, Marriage, Partners. One thousand and one catchpenny deals, no order too big, no sum too small. And, all the time, talkative, clowning, classical, philosophical, homiletic, corny, passing around French poses and imitation turds from the dark Street novelty stores, pornographic Katzenjammers and Somebody's Stenog; teasing with young Lollie Fewter who was fresh up from the coal fields, that girl with her green eyes from which she didn't try to keep the hotness, and her freckled bust presented to the gathering of men she came among with her waxing rags and the soft shake of her gait. Yea, Einhom, careful of his perch, with dead legs, and yet denying in your teeth he was different from other men. He never minded talking about his paralysis; on the contrary, sometimes he would boast of it as thing he had overcome, in the manner of a successful businessman who tells you of the farm poverty of his boyhood. Nor did he overlook any chance to exploit it. To a mailing list he got together from houses that sold wheel chairs, braces, and appliances, he sent out a mimeographed paper called "The Shut-in." Two pages of notices and essays, sentimental bits cribbed from Elbert Hubbard's Scrapbook, tags from "Thanatopsis." "Not like the slave scourged to his quarry" but like a noble, stoical Greek; or from Whittier: "Prince thou art, the grown up man/Only is Republican," and other such sources. "Build thee more stately mansions, 0 my soul!" The third page was reserved for readers' letters. This thing--I put it out on the mimeograph and stapled and carried it to the post office--gave me the creeps once in a while, uneasy flesh around the neck. But he spoke of it as a service to shut-ins. It was a help to him as well; it brought in considerable insurance business, for he signed himself, "William Einhom, a neighborhood broker," and various companies paid the costs. Like Grandma Lausch again, he knew how to use large institutions. He had an important bearing with their representatives--clabber-faced, with his intelligent bit of mustache and shrewd action of his dark eyes, chicken-winged arms at rest. He wore sleeve garters--another piece of feminine apparel. He tried to maneuver various insurance companies into competitive bidding to increase his commissions. Many repeated pressures with the same effect as one strong blow, that was his method, he said, and it was his special pride that he knew how to use the means contributed by the age to connive as ably as anyone else; when in a not so advanced time he'd have been mummyhandled in a hut or somebody might have had to help him be a beggar in front of a church, the next thing to a memento mori or, more awful, a reminder of what difficulties there were before you could even become dead. Whereas now--well, it was probably no accident that it ' '.'as the cripple Hephaestus who made ingenious machines; a normal man didn't have to hoist or jack himself over hindrances by means of cranks, chains, and metal parts. Then it was in the line of human advance that Einhom could do so much; especially since the whole race was so hepped-up about appliances, he was not a hell of a lot more dependent than others who couldn't make do without this or that commodity, engine, gizmo, sliding door, public service, and this being relieved of small toils made mind the chief center of trial. Find Einhom in a serious mood when his fatty, beaky, noble Bourbon face was thoughtful, and he'd give you the lowdown on the mechanical age, and n strength and frailty, and piece it out with little digressions on the history of cripples--the dumbness of the Spartans, the fact that Oedipus was lame, that gods were often maimed, that Moses had faltering speech and Dmitri the Sorcerer a withered arm, Caesar and Mahomet epilepsy. Lord Nelson a pinned sleeve--but especially on the machine age and the kind of advantage that had to be taken of it; with me like a man-at-arms receiving a lecture from the learned signor who felt like passing out discourse. I was a listener by upbringing. And Einhorn with his graces, learning, oratory, and register of effects was not out to influence me practically. He was not like Grandma, with her educational seventy-fives trained on us. He wanted to flow along, be admirable and eloquent. Not fatherly. I wasn't ever to get it into my head that I was part of the family. There was small chance that I would, the way Arthur, the only son, figured in their references, and I was sent out when any big family deal began to throb around. To make absolutely sure I wouldn't get any such notions, Einhom would now and then ask me some question about my people, as if he hadn't informed himself through Coblin, Kreindl, Clem, and Jimmy. Pretty clever, he was, to place me this way. If Grandma had ideas about a wealthy man who might take a fancy to us and make our fortune, Simon's and mine, Einhorn had the reverse. I wasn't to think because we were intimately connected and because he liked me that I was going to get into the will. The things that had to be done for him were such that anybody who worked for him was necessarily intimate with him. It sometimes got my goat, he and Mrs. Einhorn made so sure I knew my place. But maybe they were right; the old woman had implanted the thought, though I never entertained it in earnest. However, there was such a thought, and it bulged somewhat into my indignation. Einhom and his wife were selfish. They weren't mean, I admitted in fairness, and generally I could be fair about it; merely selfish, like two people enjoying their lunch on the grass and not asking you to join them. If you weren't dying for a sandwich yourself it could even make a pleasant picture, smacking on the mustard, cutting cake, peeling eggs and cucumbers. Selfish, Einhorn was, nevertheless; his nose in constant action smelted, and smelled out everything, sometimes austerely, or again without manners, covert, half an eye out for observers but not to be deterred if there were any, either. I don't think I would have considered myself even remotely as a legatee of the Commissioner if they hadn't, for one thing, underlined my remoteness from inheritance, and, for another, discussed inheritances all the time. Well, they were steeped and soaked necessarily in insurance and nroperty, lawsuits and legal miscarriages, sour partnerships and welsh- ngs and contested wills. This was what you heard when the connoisseurs' club of weighty cronies met, who all showed by established marks --rings, cigars, quality of socks, newness of panamas--where they were situated; they were classified, too, in grades of luck and wisdom, darkness by birth or vexations, power over or subjection to wives, women, sons and daughters, grades of disfigurement; or by the roles they played in comedies, tragedies, sex farces; whether they screwed or were screwed, whether they themselves did the manipulating or were roughly handled, tugged, and bobbled by their fates; their frauds, their smart bankruptcies, the fires they had set; what were their prospects of life, how far death stood from them. Also their merits: which heavy character of fifty was a good boy, a donor, a friend, a compassionate man, a man of balls, a lucid percentage calculator, a fellow willing to make a loan of charity though he couldn't sign his name, a giver of scrolls to the synagogue, a protector of Polish relatives. It was known; Einhom had it all noted. And apparently everybody knew everything. There was a good circulation of frankness and a lot of respect going back and forth. Also a lot of despicable things. Be this as it might, the topic inside the railed space of benches or at the pinochle game in the side-office annex was mostly business--receiverships, amortizations, wills, and practically nothing else. As rigor is the theme of Labrador, breathing of the summits of the Andes, space to the Cornish miner who lies in a seam under the sea. And, on the walls, insurance posters of people in the despair of firetraps and the undermining of rats in the beams, housewives bringing down the pantry shelves in their fall. Which all goes' to show how you couldn't avoid the question of inheritance. Was the old Commissioner fond of me? While Mrs. Einhom was a kindly woman ordinarily, now and again she gave me a glance that suggested Sarah and the son of Hagar. Notwithstanding that there was nothing to worry about. Nothing. I wasn't of the blood, and the old man had dynastic ideas too. And I wasn't trying to worm my way into any legacy and get any part of what was coming to her elegant and cultivated son Arthur. Sure the Commissioner was fond of me, stroked my shoulder, gave me tips; and he thought of me no further. But he and Einhom were an enigma to Tillie. Her pharaoh-bobbed hair grew out of a head mostly physically endowed; she couldn't ever |tell what they might take it into their minds to do. And especially her husband, he was so supple, fertile, and changeable. She worshipfully obeyed him and did his biddings and errands just as the rest of us did. "ed send her to City Hall with requests for information from the Recorder's Office of the License Bureau; he wrote notes, because she could never explain what he wanted, and she brought back the information written out by a clerk. To get her out of the way when he was up to something he sent her to visit her cousin on the South Side, an allday junket on the streetcars. To be sure she'd be good and gone; and what's more, she knew it. But now suppose we're at lunchtime, in Einhom's specimen day. Mrs. Einhom didn't like to bother in the kitchen and favored readymade or easy meals, delicatessen, canned salmon with onion and vinegar, or hamburger and fried potatoes. And these hamburgers weren't the flat lunch-wagon jobs, eked out with cornmeal, but big pieces of meat souped up with plenty of garlic and fried to blackness. Covered with horseradish and chili sauce, they didn't go down so hard. This was the food of the house, in the system of its normalcy like its odors and furnishings, and if you were the visiting albatross come to light, you'd eat the food you ne'er had eat and offer no gripe. The Commissioner, Einhorn, and Dingbat asked no questions about it but ate a great deal, with tea or Coca-Cola as usual. Then Einhorn took a white spoonful of Bisodol and a glass of Waukesha water for his gas. He made a joke of it, but he never forgot to take them and heeded all his processes with much seriousness, careful that his tongue was not too coated and his machinery smooth. Very grave, he. was sometimes, when he acted as his own physician. He liked to say that he was fatal to doctors, especially to those who had never given him much hope. "I buried two of them," he said. "Each one told me I'd be gone in a year, and before the year was out he croaked." It made him feel good to tell other doctors of this. Still, he was zealous about taking care of himself; and with this zeal he had a brat's self-mockery about the object of his cares, bottomless self-ribbing; he let his tongue droop over his lip, comic and stupid, and made dizzy crosses with his eyes. Nevertheless he was always thinking about his health and took his powders and iron and liver pills. You might almost say he followed assimilation with his thoughts; all through his body that death had already moved in on, to the Washington of his brain, to his sex and to his studying eyes. Ah, sure, he was stilt a going concern, very much so, but he had to take thought more than others did about himself, since if he went wrong he was a total loss, nowise justified, a dead account, a basket case, an encumbrance, zero. I knew this because he expressed everything, and though he wouldn't talk openly about the money he had in the bank or the property he owned, he was absolutely outspoken about vital things, and he'd open his mind to me, especially when we were together in his -tudv and busy with one of his projects that got more fanciful and muddled the more notions he had about being systematic, so that in the end there'd be a super-monstrous apparatus you couldn't set in motion either by push or crank. "Auie, you know another man in my position might be out of life for food. There's a view of man anyhow that he's only a sack of craving guts; you find it in Hamlet, as much as you want of it. What a piece of work is a man, and the firmament frotted with gold--but the whole eescheft bores him. Look at me, I'm not even express and admirable in action. You could say a man like me ought to be expected to lie down and quit the picture. Instead, I'm running a big business today"-- that was not the pure truth; it was the Commissioner who was still the main wheel, but it wasn't uninteresting all the same--"while nobody would blame me for rotting in the back room under a blanket or for crabbing and blabbing my bitter heart out, with fresh and healthy people going around me, so as not to look. A kid like you, for instance, strong as a bronco and rosy as an apple. An Alcibiades beloved-of-man, by Jesus. I don't know what brain power you've got; you're too frisky yet, and even if you turn out to be smart you'll never be in the class of my son Arthur. You shouldn't be angry for hearing the truth, if you're lucky enough to find somebody to hear it from. Anyhow, you're not bad off, being an Alcibiades. That's already way and above your fellow creatures. And don't think they didn't hate the original either. All but Socrates himself, ugly as an old dog, they tell us. Nor just because that the young fellow knocked the dongs of the holy figures off, either, before he shipped for Sicily. But to get back to the subject, it's one thing to be buried with all your pleasures, like Sardanapalus; it's another to be buried right plunk in front of them, where you can see them. Ain't it so? You need a genius to raise you above it..." Quiet, quiet, quiet afternoon in the back-room study, with an oilcloth on the library table, busts on the wall, invisible cars snoring and trembling toward the park, the sun shining into the yard outside the window barred against house-breakers, billiard balls kissing and bound- trig on the felt and sponge rubber, and the undertaker's back door still and stiller, cats sitting on the paths in the Lutheran gardens over the alley that were swept and garnished and scarcely ever trod by the chintied Danish deaconesses who'd come out on the cradle-ribbed and always fresh-painted porches of their home. Somewhat it stung me, the way in which he compared me with his son. But I didn't mind being Alcibiades, and let him be in the same "racket with Socrates in the bargain, since that was what he was driving at. We had title just as good as the chain-mail English kings had to Brutus. If you want to pick your own ideal creature in the mirror coastal air and sharp leaves of ancient perfections and be at home where a great mankind was at home, I've never seen any reason why not. Though unable to go along one hundred per cent with a man like the Reverend Beecher telling his congregation, "Ye are Gods, you are crystalline, your faces are radiant!" I'm not an optimist of that degree, from the actual faces, congregated or separate, that I've seen; always admitting that the true vision of things is a gift, particularly in times of special disfigurement and world-wide Babylonishness, when plug-ugly macadam and volcanic peperino look commoner than crystal--to eyes with an ordinary amount of grace, anyhow--and when it appears like a good sensible policy to settle for medium-grade quartz. I wonder where in the creation there would be much of a double-take at the cry "Homo sum!" But I was and have always been ready to venture as far as possible; even though I was never as much imposed on by Einhorn as he wanted me to be in his, big moments, with his banker's trousers and chancellor's cravat, and his unemployable squiggle feet on the barber-chairlike mount of his wheeled contraption made to his specifications. And I never could decide whether he meant that he was a genius or had one, and I suppose he wanted there should be some doubt about the meaning. He wasn't the man to come out and declare that he wasn't a genius while there was the chance he might be one, a thing like that coming about nolens volens. To some, like his halfbrother Dingbat, he was one. Dingbat swore up and down, "Willie is a wizard. Give him two bits' worth of telephone slugs and he'll parlay it into big dough." His wife agreed too, without reservations, that Einhorn was a wizard. Anything he did--and that covers a lot of territory--was all right with her. There wasn't any higher authority, not even her cousin Karas, who ran the Holloway Enterprises and Management Co. and was a demon moneymaker himself. Karas, that bad, rank character, cinder-crawed, wise to all angles, dressed to kill, with a kitty-comered little smile and extortionist's eyes, she was in awe of him also, but he wasn't presumed to be in Einhom's class. But Einhorn wasn't exactly buried in front of his pleasures. He carried on with one woman or another, and in particular he had a great need of girls like Lollie Fewter. His explanation was that he took after his father. The Commissioner, in a kindly, sleepy, warm-aired, fascinated way, petted and admired all women and put his hands wherever he liked. I imagine women weren't very angry when he saluted them in this style because he picked out whatever each of them herself prized _ost-_color, breasts, hair, hips, and all the little secrets and connivances with which she emphasized her own good things. You couldn't riehtly say it was a common letch he had; it was a sort of Solomonic reeard of an old chief or aged sea lion. With his spotty big old male hands, he felt up the married and the unmarried ones, and even the little girls for what they promised, and nobody ever was offended by it or by the names he invented, names like "the Tangerines," or "the Little Sled " "Madame Yesteryear," "the Six-Foot Dove." The grand old gentleman. Satisfied and gratified. You could feel from the net pleasantness he carried what there had been between him and women now old or dead, whom he recognized, probably, and greeted in this nose or that bosom. His sons didn't share this quality. Of course you don't expect younger men to have this kind of evening-Mississippi serenity, but there wasn't much disinterestedness or contemplation in either of them. There was; i: perhaps more of it in Dingbat than in his brother. There scarcely was 1 a time when Dingbat wasn't engaged to a nice girl. He scrubbed himself; and dressed himself to go to see her in a desperate, cracked rage of H earnest respect. Sometimes he would look ready to cry from devotion, and in his preparations he ran out of the perfumed bathroom, clean starched shirt open on his skinny hairiness, to remind me to fetch the corsage from Bluegren's. He could never do enough for these girls and never thought himself good enough for them. And the more he respected them the more he ran with tramps between times, whom he picked up at Guyon's Paradise and took to the Forest Preserves in the Stutz, or to a little Wilson Avenue hotel that Karas-Holloway owned. But Friday evenings, at family dinner, there was often a fiancee, now a piano teacher, now a dress designer or bookkeeper, or simply a home girl, wearing an engagement ring and other presents; and Dingbat with a necktie, tense and daffy, homagefully calling her "Honey," "Isabel, hon," "Janice dear," in his hoarse, thin black voice. Einhom, however, didn't have such sentiments at all, whatever sentiments he entertained on other scores. He took the joking liberties his father did, but his jokes didn't have the same ring; which isn't to say that they weren't funny but that he cast himself forward on them toward a goal--seduction. Whai the laugh was about was his disability; he was ^ter a fashion laughing about it, and he was not so secretly saying to women that if they'd look further they'd find to their surprise that there ^s the real thing, not disabled. He promised. So that when he worked his wicked, lustful charm, apparently so safe, like a worldly priest or elderly gentleman from v/hom it's safe to accept a little complimentary badinage or tickle, he was really singlemindediy and grimly fixed on the one thing, ultimately the thing, for which men and women came together. And he was the same with them all; not, of course, foreseeino any great success, but hoping all the same that one of them--beautiful, forward, intrigued with him, wishing to play a secret game, maybe a trifle perverse (he suggested), would see, would grasp, would crave, burn for him. He looked and hoped for this in every woman. He wouldn't stay a cripple, Einhom; he couldn't hold his soul in it. Sometimes it was dreadful, this; he'd lose everything he'd thought through uncountable times to reconcile himself to it, and be like the wolf in the pit in the zoo who keeps putting his muzzle to the corners of the walls, back and forth, in his exhibition jail. It didn't happen often; probably not oftener than ordinary people get a shove of the demon. But it happened. Touch him when he was off his feed, or had a cold and a little fever, or when there was a rift in the organization, or his position didn't feel so eminent and he wasn't getting the volume of homage and mail he needed--or when it was the turn of a feared truth to come up unseen through the multitude of elements out of which he composed his life, and then he'd say, "I used to think I'd either walk or swallow iodine, and I'd have massages and exercises, and drills when I'd concentrate on a single muscle and think I was building it up by my will, and it was all the bunk, Augie, the Coue theory, etcetera. For the birds. And It Can Be Done and the sort of stuff that bigshot Teddy Roosevelt wrote in his books. Nobody'11 ever know all the things I tried before I finally decided it was no go. I couldn't take it, and I took it. And I can't take it, yet I do take it. But how! You can get along twenty-nine days with your trouble, but there's always that thirtieth day when goddammit you can't, when you feel like the stinking fly in the first cold snap, when you look about and think you're the Old Man of the Sea locked around Sinbad's neck; and why should anybody carry an envious piece of human junk? If society had any sense they'd give me euthanasia or leave me the way the Eskimos do their old folks in an igloo with food for two days. Don't you look so miserable. Go on away. See if Tillie wants you for something." But this was on the thirtieth day, or more seldom, because in general he enjoyed good health and looked on himself as a useful citizen and even an extraordinary one, and he bragged that there was hardly anything he couldn't bring off if he put his mind to it. And he certainly did some bang-up things. He'd clear us all out of the way to be alone with Lollie Fewter; he'd arrange for the whole lot of us to drive out to Niles Center and show the Commissioner a piece of property. Ostensibly get78 tine ready to occupy himself with a piece of work while we were away--the files and information were laid out for him--he was unhurried, engagine. and smooth-tempered in his tortoiseshells, answering every last question in full and even detaining the excursion to have some last words with his father about frontages or improvements. "Wait till I show you on the map just where the feeder-bus comes through. Bring the map, Augie." He'd have me fetch it and kept the Commissioner till he became impatient, with Dingbat grinding the klaxon and Mrs. Einhorn already settled with bags of fruit in the back seat, calling, "Come, it's hot. I'm fainting here," And Lollie in the passage between the flat and the offices sauntered up and down with the dustmop in the polished dimness, big and soft, comfortable for the heat in a thin blouse and straw sandals, like an overgrown girl walking a doll and keeping a smile to herself about this maternal, matrimonial game, lazy and careless and, you could say, saving force for the game to follow. Clem Tambow had tried to tell me what the score was but hadn't convinced me, not just because of the oddness of the idea, and that I had a boyish respect for Einhom, but also because I had made a start with Lollie myself. I found excuses to be with her in the kitchen while she was ironing. She told me of her family in the Franklin County coal fields, and then about the men there, and what they tried and did. She rolled me in feelings. From suggestion alone, I didn't have the strength to keep my feet. We soon were kissing and feeling; she now held off my hands and now led them inside her dress, alleging instruction, boisterous that I was still cherry, and at last, from kindness, she one day said that if I'd come back in the evening I could take her home. She left me so horny I was scarcely able to walk. I hid out in the poolroom, dreading that Einhom would send for me. But Clem came with a message from her that she had changed her mind. I was bitter about that but I reckon I felt freed, too, from a crisis. "Didn't I tell you?" said Clem, "You both work for the same boss, and she's his little nooky. His and a couple of other guys'. But not for you. You don't know anything and you don't have any money." "Why, damn her soul!" "Well, Einhorn would give her anything. He's nuts about her." I couldn't conceive that. It wouldn't be like Einhorn to settle his important feelings on a tramp. But that exactly was what he had done. He was mad for her. Einhorn knew, too, that he shared her with a few hoodlums from the poolroom. Of course he knew. It wasn't in his life to be without information; he had the stowage of an anthill for it, with Waving black lines of approvisioners creeping into the crest from every direction. They told him what would be the next turn in the Lingle case, or what the public-auction schedule would be, or about Appellate Court decisions before they were in print, or where there was hot goods, from furs to school supplies; so he had a line on Lollie from the beginning to the end. Eleanor Klein asked me sentimental questions. Did I have a sweetheart yet? It was a thing I appeared ripe for. Our old neighbor, Kreindl, asked me too, but in a different way, on the q. t. He judged I was no longer a kid and he could reveal himself, his cockeyes -turning fierce and gay. "Schmeist du schon, Augie? You've got friends? Not my son. He comes home from the store and reads the paper. S'interesiert ihm nisht. You're not too young, are you? I was younger than you and gefarlich. I couldn't get enough. Kotzie doesn't take after me." He much needed to pronounce himself the better, and in fact the only, man in his house; and he did look very sturdy when he massed up his teeth and creased his out-of-doors, rugged face to smile. He saw a lot of weather, for he went through the entire West Side on foot with his satchel of samples. Because he had to count every nickel. And he had the patience and hardness of steady pavement going, passing the same lead-whited windows of a factory twenty times a month and knowing to the last dent every empty lot between him and a destination. Arriving, he could hang around hours for a' six-bit commission or a piece of information. "Kotzie takes after my missis. He is kaltblutig." Sure I knew it was he himself that did all the trumpeting, screaming, and stamping down in his flat, throwing things on the floor. "And how is your brother?" he said intriguingly. "I understand the little maidelech wet their pants for him. What is he doing?" As a matter of fact I didn't know what Simon was up to these days. He didn't tell me, nor did he seem curious as to what was happening to me, having decided in his mind that I was nothing but a handyman at Einhorn's. Once I went with Dingbat to a party one of his fiancees was giving, and I met my brother with a Polish girl in a fur-trimmed orange dress; he wore a big, smooth, check suit and looked handsome and sufficient to himself. He didn't stay long, and I had a feeling that he didn't want to spend his evenings where I did. Or maybe it was the kind of evening Dingbat made of it that didn't please him, Dingbat's recitations and hoarse parodies, his turkey girding and obscene cackles that made the girls scream. There were several months when Dingbat and I were very thick. At parties I horsed around with him, goofy, his straight man; Or I hugged and pitched on the porches and in the backyards with girls, exactly as he did. He took me under his protection in the poolroom, and we did some friendly boxing, at which I was never much good, and played snooker--a little better--and hung about there with the hoods and loudmouths. So that Grandma Lausch would have thought that the very worst she had ever said about me let me off too light, seeing me in the shoeshine seat above the green tables, in a hat with diamond airholes cut in it and decorated with brass kiss-me pins and Al Smith buttons, in sneakers and Mohawk sweatshirt, there in the frying jazz and the buzz of baseball broadcasts, the click of markers, butt thumping of cues, spat-down pollyseed shells and blue chalk crushed underfoot and dust of hand-slickening talcum hanging in the air. Along with the blood-smelling swaggeroos, recruits for mobs, automobile thieves, stick-up men, sluggers and bouncers, punks with ambition to become torpedoes, neighborhood cowboys with Jack Holt sideburns down to the jawbone, collegiates, tinhorns and small-time racketeers and pugs, ex-servicemen, home-evading husbands, hackies, truckers and bushleague athletes. Whenever-someone had a notion to work out on me-- and there were plenty of touchy characters here to catch your eye in a misconstrued way--Dingbat flew around to protect me. "This kid is a buddy of mine and he works for my bro. Monkey with him and you'll get something broke on your head. What's the matter, you tough or hungry!" He was never anything but through and through earnest when the subject was loyalty or honor; his bony dukes were ready and his Cuban heels dug down sharply; his furrowed chin was already feeling toward its fighting position on the shoulder of his starched shirt, prepared to go into his stamping dance and start slugging. But there weren't any fights over me. If there was one doctrine of Grandma Lausch's that went home, it was the one of the soft answer, though with her this was of tactical not merciful origin, the dust-off for heathen, stupes, and bruteheads. So I don't claim it was a trained spirit turning aside wrath, or integer vitae (how could I?) making the wolves respect me; but I didn't have any taste for the perpetual danger-sign, sye-narrowing, tricky Tybalt all coiled up to stab, for that code, and was without curiosity for what it was like to hit and so I refused all the bids to outface or be outfaced. On this I had Einhom's views also, whose favorite example was his sitting in the driver's seat of the Stutz--as he sometimes did, having been moved over to watch tennis matches or sandlot games--and a coal heaver running up with a tire tool because he had honked once or twice 101 the Stutz to move and Dingbat wasn't there to move it. "What could. I do," said Einhorn, "if he asked me no questions but started to swing or punch me in the face? With my hands on the wheel, he'd think I was the driver. I'd have to talk fast. Could I talk fast enough? What could make an impression on an animal like that? Would I pretend to faint or play dead? Oh my God! Even before I was sick, and I was a pretty husky young fellow, I'd do anything possible before I started to trade punches with any sonofabitch, muscle-minded ape or bad character looking for trouble. This city is one place where a person who goes out for a peaceful walk is liable to come home with a shiner or bloody nose, and he's almost as likely to get it from a cop's nightstick as from a couple of squareheads who haven't got the few dimes to chase pussy on the high rides in Riverview and so hang around the alley and plot to jump someone. Because you know it's not the city salary the cops live on now, not with all the syndicate money there is to pick up. There isn't a single bootleg alky truck that goes a mile without being convoyed by a squad car. So they don't care what they do. I've heard of them almost killing guys who didn't know enough English to answer their questions." And now, with eager shrewdness of nose and baggy eyes, he began to increase his range; sometimes, with that white hair bunched over his ears and his head lifted back, he looked grand, suffering more for than from something, relaxing his tense care of himself. "But there is some kind of advantage in the roughness of a place like Chicago, of not having any illusions either. Whereas in all the great capitals of the world there's some reason to think humanity is very different. All that ancient culture and those beautiful works of art right out in public, by Michelangelo and Christopher Wren, and those ceremonies, like trooping the color at the Horse Guards' parade or burying a great man in the Pantheon over in Paris. You see those marvelous things and you think that everything savage belongs to the past. So you think. And then you have another think, and you see that after they rescued women from the coal mines, or pulled down the Bastille and got rid of Star Chambers and lettres de cachet, ran out the Jesuits, increased education, and built hospitals and spread courtesy and politeness, they have five or six years of war and revolutions and kill off twenty million people. And do they think there's less danger to life than here? That's a riot. Let them say rather that they blast better specimens, but not try to put it over that the only human beings who live by blood are away down on the Orinoco where they hunt heads, or out in Cicero. But the best specimens always have been maltreated or killed. I've seen a picture of Aristotle mounted and ridden like a horse by some nasty whore. There was Pythagoras who got killed over a diagram; there was Seneca .82 yho ha3 to cut his wrists; there were the teachers and the saints who became martyrs. "But I sometimes think," he said, "what if a guy came in here with a gun and saw me at this desk? If he said 'Stick 'em up!' do you think he'd wait until I explained to him that my arms were paralyzed? He'd let me have it. He'd think I was reaching in a drawer or pushing a signal button, and that would be the finish of Einhorn. Just have a look at the hold-up statistics and then tell me I'm dreaming up trouble. What I ought to do is have a sign put up above my head saying 'Cripple.' But I wouldn't like to be seeing that on the wall all the time. I just hope the Brink's Express and Pinkerton Protective labels all over the place will keep them away." He often abandoned himself to ideas of death, and notwithstanding that he was advanced in so many ways, his Death was still the old one in shriveling mummy longjohns; the same Death that beautiful maidens failed to see in their mirrors because the mirrors were filled with their white breasts, with the blue light of old German rivers, with cities beyond the window checkered like their own floors. A cheating old rascal with bones showing in his buckskin fringes, not a gentle Sir Cedric greeting young boys from the branches of an apple tree. Einhorn had no kind familiar thoughts of him, but superstitions about this frightful snatcher, and he only played the Thanatopsis stoic but maneuvered to beat this other, who had already gained so much on him. Who maybe was the only real god he had. Often I thought that in his heart Einhorn had completely surrendered to this fear. But when you believed you had tracked Einhom through his acts and doings and were about to capture him, you found yourself not in the center of a labyrinth but on a wide boulevard; and here he came from a new direction--a governor in a limousine, with state troopers around him, dominant and necessary, everybody's lover, whose death was only one element, and a remote one, of his privacy. y ^ -:.