The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [4]
CHAPTER VI
What did I, out of all this, want for myself? I couldn't have told you. My brother Simon wasn't much my senior, and he and others at our age already had got the idea there was a life to lead and had chosen their directions, while I was circling yet. And Einhom, what services he needed of me he pretty well knew, but what I was to get from him wasn't at all clear. I know I longed very much, but I didn't understand for what. Before vice and shortcoming, admitted in the weariness of maturity, common enough and boring to make an extended showing of, there are, or are supposed to be, silken, unconscious, nature-painted times, like the pastoral of Sicilian shepherd lovers, or lions you can chase away with stones and golden snakes who scatter from their knots into the fissures of Eryx. Early scenes of life, I mean; for each separate person too, everyone beginning with Eden and passing through trammels, pains, distortions, and death into the darkness out of which, it is hinted, we may hope to enter permanently into the beginning again. There is horror of grayness, of the death-forerunning pinch, of scandalous mouth or of fear-eyes, and of whatever is caused by no recollection of happiness and no expectation of it either. But when there is no shepherd-Sicily, no free-hand nature-painting, but deep city vexation instead, and you are forced early into deep city aims, not sent in your ephod before Eli to start service in the temple, nor set on a horse by your weeping sisters to go and study Greek in Bogota, but land in a poolroom--what can that lead to of the highest? And what happiness or misery-antidote can it offer instead of pipes and sheep or musical, milk-drinking innocence, or even merely nature walks with a pasty instructor in goggles, or fiddle lessons? Friends, human pals, men and brethren, there is no brief, digest, or shorthand way to say where it leads. Crusoe, alone with nature, under heaven, had a busy, com84 ;: plicated time of it with the unhuman itself, and I am in a crowd that yields results with much more difficulty and reluctance and am part of it myself. Dingbat, too, for a short while, had his effect on me, speaking of deep city aims. He thought there was a lot he could teach me thai even his brother couldn't. I learned about Dingbat that he was full of the thought of justifying himself before the Commissioner and Einhom and aimed to produce a success, one that was characteristic of him. He swore he would, that it was in him to make a fortune and a reputation, and he wanted to glitter as a promoter, announced on the radio among the personalities that pass through the ring before the main event, his specs like diamonds. Now and then he got a fighter to manage, somebody mesmerizable. And at this time he became the manager of a heavyweight. At last, he said, he had a good one. Nails Nagel. Dingbat had had middles and welters, but a good heavyweight fighter was the biggest dough of all, provided he was championship material, which, Dingbat declared--cried out in his sincerest ready-for-battle assertion--Nails was. Nails sometimes allowed himself to think so too; at heart probably not, or he would have thrown himself full time into it and stopped going back to his job in the auto-wrecking yard. He was both slow and spasmodic in the way he used-the grime-crowned hands that ended his rugged white arms, lashed with extra reinforcements of sinew at the joints. His dull and black jaw was similarly reinforced, and it backed stiffly down on his shaven throat to shelter from punches; the top of his head was surrounded by a cap and the visor stuck forward over lair-hidden eyes. Hurt, decent manhood, meaning no wrong or harm, a horsehair coil or ragged ball of slob virility, that was what he made you feel. He was very strong and an angel about taking punishment; also his big white flanky body moved fast enough, for a heavy's. What he didn't have was ring wit. He depended on Dingbat to tell him what to do, suffered himself to be run, and he couldn't differ effectively because his tongue, among missing teeth, was very slow, and the poolroom wisecrackers said, "Change to light oil; she won't turn over in this weather." He was miscast as a fighter, the chicken-woman's son. His mother had worked for years in a poultryshop back, plucking hens and geese, a burlap-dressed woman who couldn't close her mouth over her teeth. She made good dough, and Nails still took more from her than he ever earned. He was in a racket he only had a strong apparent capacity for. However, he was cuckoo about being admired as a fighter, and he was unbelievably happy one time when Dingbat brought him along to stand by while he, Dingbat, gave a talk to a boys' club in a basement on Division Street, invited by a poolroom buddy who was sponsor. It went something like this; both Dingbat and Nails in their best clothes, black suede shoes and wearing spotless, eye-cramming fedoras and key chains. "Boys, the first thing you got to understand is how important it is to live clean, train hard, get plenty of milk and vegetables, and sleep with open windows. Take a fighter like my boy here"-- happily grinning Nails, toughly sending them his blessings--"on the road, makes no difference where, Nagel works up a full sweat at least once a day. Then, hot shower, cold shower, and a fast rub. He gets the body poisons out of his pores, and the only time he gets to smoke is when I give him a cigar after a vict'ry. I was reading where Tex Rickard wrote the other day in the Post, that before the Willard fight, when it was a hundred in the shade out there in Ohio, Dempsey was trained so fine that when he took a nap before the event, in his underwear, they were crisp and there wasn't a drop of sweat on him. Boys, I want to tell you, that's wonderful! That's one of the worth-while ways to be. So take my advice and don't play with your dummy. I can't tell you how important that is. Leave it alone. Not just if you want to be an athlete, and there's few things that's finer, but even if you got other ambitions, that's the first way to go wrong. So hands off; it'll make your brains fuzzy. And don't play gidgy with your little girl friends. It don't do you or them any good. Take it from me, I'm giving it to you straight because I don't believe in shady stuff and hanky-panky. The hot little punks I see around the street--just pass them by. If you got to have a girl friend, and I don't see why not, there's plenty of honest kids to choose from, the kind who'd never grab you by the fly or let you stick around till one a. m. mushing with them on the steps"--and on and on, with his glare of sincerity to the membership on camp chairs. Being a manager was perfect for Dingbat. And it was just what he needed, to make speeches (his brother was a lodge and banquet orator), and to drag Nails out of his room in the morning for road work in the park, and to coax, coach, neigh, and brandish around and dispute the use of equipment in Trafton's gym, always angrily on his rights over tapes and punching bags in the liniment-groggy, flicketyrope-time, tin-locker-clashing, Loop-darkened rooms and -the Polish, Italian, Negro thump-muscled, sweat-glittering training-labor, where the smart crowd of owners and percentage-figurers was. When he had gotten Nails into condition he took him on the road, out West by bus, with money borrowed from Einhorn, but wired from Salt Lake City where they landed broke, and they came back hungry and white. Nails had won two fights in six, and it was hard going among the gibes in the poolroom. But Dingbat was out of the fight racket for a while; it was at the time of the great jailbreak at Joiiet, and he was a corporal in the National Guard called in by the governor. He was around at once in his khakis and corded campaign hat, not hiding the worry that he might be in the patrol that cornered Tommy O'Connor or Larry the Aviator or Bugsy Gonzalez whom he admired. "Fall in a ditch, stupid, and stay there," Einhorn said to him. "But the state troopers will have them rounded up before you're on the train, and the worst you'll have is a crowded ride and beans to eat." - The Commissioner, whose health hadn't been good lately, called from bed, "Let's see you, Cholly Chaplin, before you leave," and when Dingbat, looking wronged, and leg-bound in the deforming breeches, stood up to him, he said, colossally amused, "Ee-dyot!"--Dingbat drawn up in a consumption of misunderstood feelings. Mrs. Einhorn was frightened by the uniform and wept, hanging on Lollie Fewter's neck. Dingbat was bivouacked around Joiiet in rainy weather for a few days and came back leaner, blacker, ground into tiredness, with provoked eyes squinty from fatigue. But he took up with Nails immediately. He had gotten him a match in Muskegon, Michigan. Einhorn sent me along to get the lowdown on what happened to Dingbat and Nagel in the sticks. He said, "Augie, I owe you a holiday. If your friend Klein, whom I don't trust too much, will pinch-hit for you here a couple of afternoons, you can go and have an excursion. Maybe it'll give Nagel confidence to have somebody in his corner. Dingbat cracks the whip over him too much and gets him down. Maybe a cheerful third party--sursum corda. How good's your Latin, kid?" Einhorn was happy as the devil with his idea; when what he wanted coincided with a good deed, it made his emotions warm. He called his father and said, "Dad, give Augie here ten bucks. He's going on a trip for me"--thus to show that his generosity had an obstacle to pass. The Commissioner gladly gave, being openhanded and bland about any amount; in parting with dough he was exemplary. Dingbat was glad I was coming, and he made a speech to all, with that animal effrontery of his whenever he was in charge. "All right, fellas; we've got to click this time..." Poor Nails, he didn't look good in the Wasps AC mulberry jacket bagging over his muscles, and his togs in the bag hung down to his bowed giant gams as heavy as plumber's tools. An immense face like raked garden soil in need of water. And in this porous dryness, a pair of whity eyes fearing the worst, and a punch-formed nose. The worst, for that day, had already happened to somebody else; one of the Aiello brothers had been found shot to death in his roadster. There was a big spread on it in the Examiner; we read it in the pier bound trolley, and Nails thought he had played softball once against this Aiello. He was downcast. But it was still very early,. right after dawn, when the slum distances of the morning streets were hollow, with only a white drop of sun on the brinks of buildings. When we walked down the pier to the City of Saugatuck and came out of the shed, suddenly the town gloom ended in a flaming blue teeter of fresh water, from the black shore-ends down into the golden whiteness eastward. The white-leaded decks had just been washed down and were sparkling with colors of water in a Gulf of Mexico warmth, and the gulls let the air currents carry them around. Dingbat was finally happy. He got Nails to do his road work around the ship before the decks became too crowded. Eight hours on the water without exercise and he'd be too stiff to fight that night. So Nails threw himself into a trot, smiling; he was a changed man in this swift-water sunshine and the gulls dropping almost from a standstill to the surface for pieces of bread. He unpacked a few jabs from the top of his chest, ginger, technical, and dangerous, and Dingbat, in stripes like a locust's leg, advised him to put more shoulder into them. They were pretty convinced they were sailing to a victory. The two of them went into the rosy carpeting of the lounge for coffee. I stayed on deck in joy of the sun, the colors, up in the hay odors from the hatch where there were the horses of a yokel-circuit circus; it sent my blood happy to sit there in the blue and warm, with the slow air coming up against me from my feet in pretty much frazzled gym shoes, large-sized, lettered in india ink, up my jeans, and my head with plenty of hair to cushion it against the bulkhead. When we were well out on the warm, unsalty water Dingbat walked out of the salon with two young women, friends of Isabel or Janice, whom he had' met there, both in tennis whites and ribboned-up hair, starting on vacation, to run and straight-arm high-bounders on the tennis lawn of a Saugatuck resort and canoe their nice busts on the idle shore water. He pointed out the departing sights with his hat, his outstanding hair getting a chance to live in the sun and evaporate its perfumes--what was there better for a rising young fight manager than to stroll in his white shoes and with yachtsman's furl to his pants on a sweet morning indulgent to human hopes and be the cavalier to Be- OF AUGIB MARCH oirls? Nails stayed in the salon, trying to win a prize on a machine called the Claw, a little derrick in a glass case filled with cameras, fountain pens, and flashlights embedded in a hill of chickenfeed candy. For a nickel you could maneuver it by two gadgets, one that aimed and another that gripped the claw. He had nothing to show for fifty cents except a handful of waxy candy. He wanted a camera for his mother. So he shared the candy with me, on deck, and then declared that he had strained his eyes at the machine and felt dizzy, but it was the motion and the water bursting smoothly at the bow that got him, and when we were in close to the Michigan shore and its groundswell he turned death-nosed, white as a polyp, even in his deepest wrinkles. While he vomited. Dingbat supported him fiercely from the back--his boy, he'd see him through hell--and pleaded with an unhidable bitterness of disappointment, "Oh, man, hold up, for Chrissakes!" But Nails went on heaving and tearing air into his chest, his hair lapping down over his cold face and land-longing eyes. When we touched Saugatuck we didn't dare tell him that we were hours yet from Muskegon. Dingbat took him below to lie down. Nails could feel secure only in a few streets of all the world. At Muskegon we led him off, yellow and flabby, down the planks of the pier where there wasn't enough motion over the sand of the bottom to camouflage the perch from the afternoon anglers. We went to the YMCA and washed him, got a meal of roast beef, and then went to the gym. Though he complained of a headache and wanted to lie down, Dingbat forced him through his paces. "If I let you, you'll only lie there and feel sorry for yourself, and you won't be able to fight worth a damn tonight. I know what you need. Augie'll go over and get-a pack of aspirins. You go on and start running off the meal." I got back with the pills, and Nails, white and crampy from his ten laps of the blind, airless room, sat and panted under the basketball standards, and Dingbat rubbed his chest and tried to pump him with confidence but only gave him more anguish, not knowing how to raise hopes without threats. "Man, where's your will power, where's your reserves!" It was no use. Already sunset, and the bout an hour away, we sat out in the square, but there was a fresh-water depth smell there, and Nails was queasy and sagged with a hinging head on the bench. "Well, come on," Dingbat said. "We'll do the best we can." The fight was in the Lions' Club. Nails was in the second event against a man named Prince Jaworski, a drill-operator from the Brunswick plant who got all the encouragement of the crowd, especially as Nails shambled and covered from him or held him in clinches, looki) ing frightened to death in the dry borax sparkle of the ring and gawping out into the ringside faces and the strident blood yells. Jaworski padded after him with wider swings. He had both height and reach on poor Nails, and, I estimate, was about five years younger. Dingbat was frantic with anger at the boos and shouted at Nails when he came to the corner, "If you don't hit him at least once this round I'm gonna walk out and leave you here alone." "I told you we shoulda taken the train," said Nails, "but you were going to save four bucks." He listened, however, to the noise against him, startled in the eyes, and plunged out with more spirit the second round, carrying the fight to Jaworski, reckless, with slum motions of deadliness in his giant white knots. But in the third round he was hit where he could least stand a blow, in the belly, and he went deadweight flat, counted out in a terror of roars and barks, accusations of dive-taking and fixed fight, with Dingbat mounted on the first rope and flapping his hat at the referee, who made a headstall of his hands and covered his ears. Nails came doubled out of the ring, dead-eyed in the white electric brilliance and with a wet moss of whiskers on the stony sponge of his cheeks. I helped him dress and took him back to the YMCA, where I got him into bed and locked him in the room, then waited in the street for Dingbat so that he wouldn't go and kick at his door. But he was too glum and droopy for that. He and I took a walk together and bought lard-fried potatoes at a street wagon, and then turned in. In the morning we had to cash in our return tickets to pay the hotel bill, for Dingbat had counted on a purse and was flat broke. We hitched rides toward Chicago and spent a night on the beach at Harbert, a little way out of St. Joe, Nails wrapped in his robe and Dingbat and I sharing a slicker. We went through Gary and Hammond that day, on a trailer from Flint, by docks and dumps of sulphur and coal, and flames seen by their heat, not light, in the space of noon air among the black, huge Pasiphae cows and other columnar animals, headless, rolling a rust of smoke and connected in an enormous statuary of hearths and mills--here and there an old boiler or a hill of cinders in the bulrush spawning-holes of frogs. If you've seen a winter London open thundering mouth in its awful last minutes of river light or have come with cold clanks from the Alps into Torino in December white steam then you've known like greatness of place. Thirty crowded miles on oilspotted road, where the furnace, gas, and machine volcanoes cooked the Empedocles fundamentals into pig iron, girders, and rails; another ten miles of loose city, five of tight--the tenements--and we got off the trailer not far from the Loop and went into Thompson's for a stew and spaghetti meal, near the Detective Bureau and in the midst of the movie-distributors' district of great posters. There was nobody much interested in our return. For there had been a fire at Einhom's meanwhile. It destroyed the living room--big reeking black holes in the mohair, the oriental rug ruined, and the mahogany library table and the set of Harvard Classics on it scorched and soaked by the extinguishers. Einhom had filed claim for two thousand dollars; the inspector didn't agree that the cause of the fire was a short-circuit but hinted it had been set, and there was opinion heard that he wanted to be paid off. Bavatsky wasn't around; I had to take on part of his duties for a while but had better sense than to ask about him, knowing he must be in hiding. The day the fire broke out Tillie Einhom had been visiting her cousin-in-law and Jimmy Klein had taken the sick Commissioner to the park. The Commissioner looked vexed about it. His bedroom was off the parlor, where the smell lasted for weeks, and he lay with silent frowns, condemning his son's way of doing business. Tillie had been asking for a new suite, so he had it in for her too-- furniture-insatiable women and their nest-windmg thoughts. "Wouldn't I give you the five, six hundred dollars you'll chisel out of the company," the Commissioner said to his son, "so I wouldn't have to smell this ipisch in my last days? Willie, you knew I was sick." This was certainly true. Beaky, white, and solemn, Einhom took the rebuke as deserved, filially, from the Commissioner risen out of bed, in his long underwear and his open, brocaded, heel-touching dressing gown, standing enfeebled in the kitchen and refusing the natural support of the back of a chair, independent. "Yes, Dad," Einhom answered, the sense of a bad piece of work settled about his neck in two or three loose rings; and without humor but strenuously and almost fiercely he looked at me. Now I had come to know definitely that he was the author of the fire, and probably it was in his thoughts that I was getting to learn all his secrets. They were safe with me, but it injured his pride that they should get out. I made myself inconspicuous and didn't remind him when he forgot my pay that week. Maybe that was too much delicacy, but I was at an exaggerating age. Summer passed, school reopened, and the insurance company still wasn't satisfied. I heard from Clem that Einhom was after Tambow Senior to get somebody in City Hall to approach a vice-president about the claim, and I know he got off quite a few letters himself, complain- '"g that one of the biggest brokers couldn't get a small fire settled. How did they expect him to convince clients that their losses would be covered promptly? As you'd expect, he had insured himself with the I 91 company that got most of his business. Holloway Enterprises alone paid premiums on a quarter of a million dollars' worth of property, so that there must have been pretty clear proof of arson, for I'm sure the company wanted to be obliging. The reeking, charred furniture, covered with canvas, remained until the Commissioner wouldn't have it around any more, and it was moved into the yard where the kids played King of the Hill on it and the junkmen came offering to take it away, sweating around the office humbly till Einhorn would see them and say, no, he was thinking of donating it to the Salvation Army when the claim was settled. Really, he had already promised to sell it to Kreindl, who was going to have it re-covered. Especially because of the inconvenience, Einhorn was set on getting full value out of it. And because of the scorn of the Commissioner. But on the whole he thought he had been right; that this was the way you answered your wife's request for a new livingroom suite. He made me a present of the Harvard Classics with the covers ruined by the carbonic spray. I kept the volumes in a crate under my bed and started on Plutarch, Luther's letters to the German nobility, and The Voyage of the Beagle, in which I got as far as the crabs who stole the eggs of stupid shorebirds. I couldn't read more because I didn't have much studious peace at night. The old lady had become loose in the wires and very troublesome, with the great weaknesses of old age. Although she had always claimed she hadn't taught Mama anything if not to be a great cook, she now wanted to cook for herself and set aside pots and pans for her own use, and groceries and little jars in the icebox covered with paper and bound with elastic, forgot them till mold set in, and then was scratching mad when they were thrown out, accused Mama of stealing. She said two women could not share a kitchen--forgetting how long it had been shared-especially if one was dishonest and dirty. Both trembled, Mama from the scare more than from the injustice; she tried to locate the old woman with her eyes, which were deteriorating very fast. To Simon and me Grandma scarcely ever spoke any more, and when the puppy her son Stiva gave her--she couldn't really accept a successor to Winnie but anyway demanded a dog--when it ran to us she cried, "Belch du! Beich!" But the tawny little bitch wanted to play and wouldn't lie at her feet as the old dog had done. She wasn't even named or housebroken properly, such was the condition the women were in now. Simon and I agreed to take turns cleaning; Mama couldn't any longer keep up with it. But Simon worked downtown, so there was no way to make a fair division. And there wasn't any longer enough character in the house even to give a name to and domesticate this pup. I couldn't go on crawling under Grandma Lausch's bed, one of the dirtiest places, while she, glaring into a book, refused to say a single word, blind and dumb toward me unless her belch yipped around my cuffs, when she would shriek. This was where much of my time was going. And, furthermore, since Mama couldn't go alone to visit Georgie, because of her eyesight, we had to take her to the far West Side. George was bigger than I now, and sometimes a little surly and offended with us, though still with the same mind-crippled handsomeness, a giant moving with slow-pants, mature heaviness in the dragfoot gait of his undeveloped legs. He wore my hand-me-downs and Simon's, and it was singular to see the clothes worn so differently. At the school they had taught him broom-making and weaving and showed us the thistle- flower neckties he made with wool on a frame. But he was growing too old for this boys' Home; in a year or so he'd have to move on to Manteno or one of the other downstate institutions. Mama took this very badly. "There maybe once or twice a year we'll be able to visit him," she said. Going to see this soft-faced man of a George wasn't easy on me either. So, afterward, on these trips, as I had money in my pockets these days, I'd take Mama into a fancy Greek place on Crawford Avenue for ice-cream and cakes, to try to raise her out of her rock-depth of heavy trouble, where, I guess, the greater part of human beings have always spent most of their silent time. She let me divert her somewhat, even if rattled by the fancy prices, and protesting in high tones of a person unaware of what a sound she is making. To which I'd say calmingly, "It's okay, Ma. Don't worry." Because Simon and I were still at school we were still on charity, and with both of us working and George in the institution, we had more dough than we'd ever had. Only it was Simon who took care of the surplus, and no longer Grandma, as in the old administration. Sometimes I had glimpses of Grandma in the parlor, at the light end of the dark hallway, in her disconnection from us, waiting by herself beside the Crystal-Palace turret of the stove, in dipping bloomers and starched dress with hem as stiff as a line of Euclid. She had too many wrongs against us now to forgive us, and they couldn't be discussed. From weakness of mind of the very old. She that we always had thought so powerful and shockproof. Simon said, "She's on her last legs," and we accepted her decline and ^yrog. But that was because we were already out in the world, "ereas Mama didn't have any such perspective. Grandma had laid most of her strength on Mama as boss-woman, governing hand, queen mother, empress, and even her banishment of George and near-senile kitchen scandals couldn't shake the respect and liege feeling so long established. Mama wept to Simon and me about Grandma's strange alteration but couldn't answer her according to her new folly. But Simon said, "It's too much for Ma. Why should the Lausches get away with sloughing the old woman off on us? Ma's been her servant long enough. She's getting older herself and her eyes are bad; she can't even see the pooch when it's under her feet." "Well, this is something we ought to leave up to Ma herself." "For Chrissake, Augie," said Simon, blunt--his broken tooth showed to much effect when he was scornful--"don't be a mushhead all your life, will you! Honest to God, you make me think I was the only one of us born with a full set of brains. What good is it to let Mama decide?" I usually didn't find much to offer when it was a question of theory or reality with regard to Mama. We treated her alike but thought about her differently. All I had to say was that Mama wasn't used to being alone and, as a fact, my feelings took a bad drop when I imagined it. She was already nearly blind. What would she do but sit by herself? She had no friends, and had always shambled around on her errands in her man's shoes and her black tarn, thick glasses on her rosy, lean face, as a kind of curiosity in the neighborhood, some queer woman, not all there. "What kind of company is Grandma though?" said Simon. "Oh, maybe she'll come around a little. And they still talk sometimes, I guess." "When did she ever? Bawls her out, you mean, and makes her cry. The only thing you're saying is that we should let things ride. That's only laziness, even though you probably tell yourself you're just an easygoing guy and don't want to be ungrateful to the old dame for what she's done. We did things for her too, don't forget. She's been riding Ma for years and put on the ritz at our expense. Well, Ma can't do it any more. If the Lausches want to hire a housekeeper, that's a fair way to settle it, but if they don't they're going to have to take her out of here." He wrote a letter to her son in Racine. I don't know what things were like with these two Quaker-favored men in their respective towns. I've never gone through a place like Racine without thinking which house with the rubber-tire swing for kids and piano-practicing inside was like Stiva Lausch's, who had two daughters brought up with every refinement, including piano lessons, and how such little-speaking Odessa-bred sons had gotten on a track like this through the multiverse. What did they go for, that they were so regular and unexcitable of appearance? Well, there was at least a hint of what in the note that Stiva sent, pretty calmly saying that he and his brother didn't feel a housekeeper was the solution and that they were making arrangements for their mother to live in the Nelson Home for the Aged and Infirm, and would consider it a great service if we would move her there. Which, considering our long association with their mother (a dig at our ingratitude), they didn't hesitate to request. "This is it then," said Simon, and even he looked as if we had gone too far. But the thing was done, and there were only last details to attend to. Grandma had received a letter in Russian at the same time, and took it with considerable coolness, as you expect from somebody with that degree of pride, boasting even, "Ha! How well Stiva writes Russian! In the gymnasium, when you learned, you learned something." We heard from Mama also what Grandma said about the Home, that it was a very fine old place, just about a palace, built by a millionaire, and had a greenhouse and garden, was near the university and therefore most of the people retired professors. Going to a better place. And she was glad of rescue from us by her sons; where she would be among equals and exchange intelligent views. Mama was confounded, aghast at the thing, and not even she was so simpleminded as to believe that Grandma, so many years bound to us, would have thought it up herself, as she now apparently claimed. The packing went on for two weeks. Pictures came off the walls, the monkeys with scarlet nose holes, the runner from Tashkent, egg cups, salves and medicines, her eiderdown from the closet shelf. I brought up her wood trunk from the shed, a yellow old pioneer piece with labels from Yalta, Hamburg Line, American Express, old Russian journals in its papered interior of blue forest flowers, smelly from the cellar. She wrapped with caution each of her things of great value, the crushable and breakable on top, and covered all with the harsh snow of mothflakes. On the final day she watched the trunk wag down the front stairs, on the back of the mover, with an amazing, terrible look of presidency, and supervised everything, every last box, in this fashion, gruesomely and violently white so that her mouth's corner hairs were minutely apparent, but in rigid-backed aristocracy, full face to the important transfer to something better, from this (now that she turned from it) disgracefully shabby flat of a deserted woman and "^ sons whom she had preserved while a temporary guest. Ah, regardless how decrepit of superstructure, she was splendid. You forgot how loony she'd become, and her cantankerousness of the past year. What was a year like that when now her shakiness of mind dropped off in this moment of emergency and she put on the strictness and power of her most grande-dame days? My heart went soft for her, and I felt admiration that she didn't want from me. Yes, she made retirement out of banishment, and the newly created republicans, the wax not cool yet on their constitution, had the last pang of loyalty to the deposed, when mobs, silent, see off the limousine, and the prince and princely family have the last word in the history of wrongs. "Be well, Rebecca," said the old woman. She didn't exactly decline Mama's weeping kiss on the side of the face, but was objective-bound primarily. We helped her into the panting car, borrowed from Einhorn. Tensely, with impatience, she said good-by, and we started--me managing around with the big, awkward apparatus of the 'hostile tomatoburst red machine and its fire-marshal's brass. Dingbat had just taught me how to drive. Not a word passed between us. I don't count what she said in the Michigan Boulevard crush, because that was just a comment about the traffic. Out of Washington Park we turned east on Sixtieth Street, and, sure enough, there was the university, looking strange but restful in its Indian summer rustle of ivy. I located Greenwood Avenue and the Home. In front was a fence of four-by-fours, sharp angles up, surrounding two plots of earth and flower beds growing asters that leaned on supports of sticks and rags; on the path to the sidewalk black benches made of planks; and on the benches on the limestone porch, on chairs in the vestibule for those who found the sun too strong, in the parlor on more benches, old men and women watched Grandma back down from the car. We came up the walk, between the slow, thought-brewing, beat-up old heads, liver-spotted, of choked old blood salts and wastes, hard and bone-bare domes, or swollen, the elevens of sinews up on collariess necks crazy with the assaults of Kansas heats and Wyoming freezes, and with the strains of kitchen toil, Far West digging, Cincinnati retailing, Omaha slaughtering, peddling, harvesting, laborious or pegging enterprise from whale-sized to infusorial that collect into the labor of the nation. And even somebody here, in old slippers and suspenders or in corset and cottons, might have been a cellar of the hidden salt which preserves the world, but it would take the talent of Origen himself to find it among the terrible appearances of white hair and rashy, vessel-busted hands holding canes, fans, newspapers in all languages and alphabets, faces gone in the under-surface flues and in the eyes, of these people sitting in the sunshine and leaf burning outside or in the mealy moldiness and gravy acids in the house. Which wasn't a millionaire-built residence at all, only a onetime apartment house, and no lovely garden in the back but corn and sunflowers. The truck arrived with the rest of Grandma's luggage; she wasn't allowed to have the trunk in her bedroom, for she shared it with three others. She had to go down to the basement where she picked out what she would need--too many things, in the opinion of the stout brown lady superintendent. But I carried the stuff up and helped her to stow and hang it, I then went to the back of the Stutz to search, on her orders, for anything that might have been forgotten. She didn't discuss the place with me, and of course she would have praised it if she had found anything to praise to show what an advantageous change she had made. But neither did she let me see her looking downcast. She ignored the matron's suggestion that she get into a housedress and sat down in the rocker with a view of the corn, sunflower, cabbage lot in the back, in her Odessa black dress. I asked her if she would care for a cigarette, but she wasn't having anything from anyone and especially not from me--the way she felt Simon and I were repaying her years of effort. I knew she needed to be angry and dry if she was to avoid weeping. She must have cried as soon as I left, for she wasn't so rattlebrained by old age that she didn't realize what her sons had done to her. 'I have to bring back the car. Grandma," I said at last, "so I'll have to go now, if there isn't anything else you want done." "What else? Nothing." I started to leave. She said, "There's my shoebag 1 forgot to take. The chintz one inside the clothescloset door." "I'll bring it out soon." "Mama can keep it. And for your trouble, Augie, here's something." She opened her purse of dull large silver antennae and with short gesture she gave me an angry quarter--the payoff--which I couldn't refuse, couldn't pocket, could scarcely close my hand on. Things were in a queer way at Einhorns' too, where the Commissioner was dying in the big back room, while up front, in the office, deeds were changing hands with more thousands and greater prosper- rty than ever. A few times a day Einhom had himself wheeled to his father's bedside to ask advice and get information, now everything ^s in his hands, grave and brow-drawn as he began to feel the unruliness of what he had to manage, and all the social chirping of the ffice became the dangerous hints of the desert. Now you could see d* 97 how much he had been protected by the Commissioner. After all, he became a cripple at a young age. Whether before or after marriage I never did find out--Einhorn said after marriage, but I heard it told here and there that the Commissioner had paid off Mrs. Einhorn's cousin Karas (Holloway) and bought his paralytic son a bride. That she loved Einhom wasn't any evidence against this, for it'd be constitutional with her to adore her husband. Anyhow, regardless of what he bragged, he was a son who had lived under his father's protection. That's something that / wouldn't have failed to see. And his worldgypping letters and operations, and all his poetical schemes, even if he had a son at the university himself, were doings of a boy. And, indulged so long, into middle age, how was he going to get over it? He thought, by being fierce and serious. He stopped his old projects; "The Shut-in" wasn't published any more and the on-approval packages no longer opened--I toted them down to the storeroom with the pamphlets and the rest of the daily prizes of the mail; and he got himself consumed by business and closed and opened the deals on the Commissioner's calendar, began or dissolved partnerships in lots or groceries in the suburbs, and, on his own--the kind of thing he loved-- cheaply bought up second mortgages from people who needed ready money. He insisted on kickbacks from plumbing, heating, or painting contractors with whom the Commissioner had always been cronies, and so made enemies. That didn't bother him, to whom the first thing was that the faineants shouldn't be coming after Charlemagne--as long as people understood that. And furthermore, the more difficulty and tortuousness there were, the more he felt safe. So there were quarrels about broken agreements; he'd never pay bills till the last day of grace; and most people who put up with this did it for the Commissioner's sake. He grabbed command very toughly. "I can argue all day the runner didn't touch base," he said, "even if I know damn well he did. The idea shouldn't get started that you can be made to back down." This was the way the lessons and theories of power were taught to me in the intervals of quiet that became fewer and fewer; and these lessons were self-addressed mostly, explanations of what he was doing, that it was right.. At this time all his needs were very keen, and he wanted things in the house he hadn't cared much about before--a special kind of coffee that only one place in town carried, and he ordered several bottles of bootleg rum from Kreindl, which was one of Kreindl's sidelines; he brought them in a straw satchel from the South Side, where he was in second- or third-hand touch with all kinds of demon, dangerous elements. But Kreindl had an instinct to get people what they had a craving for--of a steward or batman or fag or a Leporello or pimp. He hadn't quit on Five Properties. And now that the Commissioner was dying, and Dingbat, who would inherit a lot of money, was still unmarried, Kreindl hung out at Einhom's, keeping the Commissioner company in the bedroom, talking to Dingbat, and having long conversations privately with Einhorn, who made use of him in various ways. One of their subjects was Lollie Fewter, who had quit in September and was working downtown. Einhorn suffered over her no longer being in the house, impossible as it would have been during his father's sickness and his increased work to put the blocks to her as in the leisurely summer. There were always people in the flat and office. But it was now that he wanted her and kept sending her notes and messages and harping about it. And at such a time! It hurt him too. Nevertheless he kept thinking how, in spite of the time, he could carry it off., and didn't merely brood, but discussed, obstinately, how it could be done. I heard him with Kreindl. And still he was the family leader, the chief, the man of administration and thought, responsible custodian, remarkable son of a remarkable father. Awfully damn remarkable. Even the rising of his brows toward his whitening hair was that. And what if, together with this, he had his inner and personal growths of vice, passion, even prurience, unbecoming obscenity? Was it unbecoming because he was a cripple? And then if you satisfy that difficult question by saying it's not up to us to declare what a man should renounce because he is crippled or otherwise cursed, there's still the fact that Einhorn could be ugly and malicious. You can know a man by his devils and the way he gives hurts. But I believe he has to run a chance of injuring himself too. In this way you can judge, if he does it safely for himself, that he is wrong. Or if he has no spur gear to something not himself. And Einhorn? Jesus, he could be winsome-- the world's charm-boy. And that was distracting. You can grumble at it; you can say it's a ruse or feint of gifted people to sidetrack you from the viper's tangle and ugly knottedness of their desires, but if the art of it is deep enough and carried far enough into great play, it gets above its origin. Providing it's festive, which sometimes it was with Einhorn, when he was not merely after something but was gay. He could be simple-hearted. Nevertheless I was down on him occasionally, and I said to myself he was nothing--nothing. Selfish, ]ealous, autocratic, carp-mouth, and hypocritical. However, in the SBd, I every time had high regard for him. For one thing, there was always the fight he had made on his sickness to consider. No doubt smiting the sledded Polack on the ice was more, or being a Beiisarius, and Grail-seeking was higher, but weighing it all up, the field he was put into and the weapons he was handed, he had made an imposing showing and, through mind, he connected with the spur gear that I, mentioned. He knew what retributions your devils are liable to bring ^ S for the way you treat wife and women or behave while your father is on his deathbed, what you ought to think of your pleasure, of acting like a cockroach; he had the intelligence for the comparison. He had the intelligence to be sublime. But sublimity can't exist only as a special gift of a few, due to an accident of origin, like being born an albino. If it were, what interest could we have in it? No, it has to survive the worst and find itself a dry corner of retreat from the mad, bloody wet, and mud-splashing of spike-brains, marshals, Marlboroughs, goldwatch-consuiting Plugsons, child-ruiners, human barbecuers, as well as from the world-wide livery service of the horsemen of St. John. So why be down on poor Einhorn, afflicted with mummy legs and his cripple-irritated longings? | Anyway, I stood by him, and he said to me, "Oh, that bitch! That lousy freckle-faced common coal-mine whore!" And he sent messages by Kreindl to her, downtown, with lunatic offers. But also he said, "I know I'm no goddam good to have pussy on the brain at a time like this. It'll be my downfall." Lollie answered his notes but didn't come back. She had other ideas for herself. And meantime the Commissioner was passing out of the picture. At first he had lots of friends coming to see him in the onetime sumptuous bedroom, furnished by his third wife, who had left him ten years ago, with an Empire four-poster bed and gilded mirrors, Cupid with his head inside a bow. Spittoons on the floor, cigars on the dresser, check stubs and pinochle decks, it had become an old businessman's room. He seemed to enjoy himself, when old-country and synagogue buddies and former partners were there, telling them he was a done for. It wasn't a habit he could check, joking, having joked all j his life. Coblin came often, on Sunday afternoons, and Five Properties in the milk truck during the week--for a young man, he had considerable orthodoxy; respectful form, anyhow. I can't say I believe he cared a whole lot, but his presence was not a bad thing and showed he knew at least where the right place for the heart was. And probably he approved of the way the Commissioner was making his death, his firstclass stoicism. Kinsman the undertaker, the Einhorns' tenant, was very disturbed that be could not visit and stopped me in the street to ask after e Commissioner, begging me not to mention it. "Those are my worst times," he said. "When a friend is passing I'm about as welcome as old Granum who works for me." Old Granum was the deathbed watcher and Psalm reciter, feeble and ruination-faced, in Chinatown black alpaca and minute, slippered feet. "If / come," said Kinsman, "you know what people think." As the old man made deeper progress toward death fewer visitors were allowed, and the klatch ruled by his deep wisecracking tones ended. Now Dingbat was with him most, and he didn't need to be urged by Einhom to come out of the poolroom to tend his father but was much affected; he had been the last to accept the doctor's forecast and said confidently, "That's the way all croakers talk when an old fellow is sick. Why, the Commissioner is really built, he's powerful!" But now he hastened in and out of the room on his noisy and clumping tango-master's heels, fed the Commissioner and rubbed him down and shagged away the kids who played on the furniture in the backyard. "Beat it, you little jag-offs, there's a sick person here. Damn snots, where's your upbringing!" He kept the sickroom dark and camped on a hassock, reading Captain Fury, Doc Savage, and other pulp sports stories by the vigil light. I saw the Commissioner afoot only once, at this stage, when Einhorn sent me to his study to fetch some papers, and in the darkness of the living room the Commissionerwas rambling slowly in his underclothes, looking for Mrs. Einhorn, to demand an explanation for missing buttons, annoyed that from neck to bottom there were only two and he was exposed and naked between. "That's no way!" he said. "Lig a naketter." He was angry still about the fire. At last Dingbat surrendered his place in the bedroom to Kinsman's Granum, when the Commissioner seldom roused and, awake, didn't easily recognize anyone. But he did recognize the bricky, open spongeball cheeks of the old watcher in the towel-looped twelve-watt light, and said, "Du? Then I slept longer than I thought." Which Einhorn repeated scores of times, mentioning Cato and Brutus and others noted for the calm of their last moments; he was a collector of facts like these, and shook down all he read, Sunday supplements, Monday reports of sermons, Haldeman-Julius blue books, all collections of say- Mgs, for favorable comparisons. Things that didn't always fit. Not that this old lover the Commissioner doesn't deserve citation for having no slarm and dying undisgusted, without last minute revision of lifetime habits. He was laid out that night in a colossal coffin, at Kinsman's. When 101 I came in the morning the office was shut, with the shades in green and black wrinkles against the cold sunshine and dry fall weather, and I went round the back. The mirrors had been covered by Mrs. Einhorn, in whom superstition was very strong, and a candle burned down in a pale white ecclesiastical glass in the dark dining room by a photo of the Commissioner taken when his Bill Cody whiskers were still full and glossy. Arthur Einhorn had come from Champaign for his grandfather's funeral and sat at the table in detached college elegance, hand in his woolly intellectual hair, taking it easy in the expected family folly of such an occasion; he was engaging and witty, though not youthful in appearance--he had lines in his cheeks already-- despite his raccoon coat that was lying on the buffet with a beret dropped on it. Einhorn and Dingbat had razor slits in their vests, symbolizing rent clothes. The ex-Mrs. Tambow was there, in duenna hairdress and arched pince-nez, along with her son Donald, who sang at receptions and weddings; and, also on family duty, Karas Holloway and his wife, she with poodle tuft on the front of her head and her usual concentrated unrest or dislike. She had a lot of flesh, and her face was red, resentful, criticizing. I was aware that she was always after her cousin-in-law to protect herself from the Einhorns. She didn't trust them. She didn't trust her husband'either, who gave her everything, a large super-decorated flat on the South Side, Haviland china, Venetian blinds, Persian rugs, French tapestry. Majestic radio with twelve tubes. That was Karas, in a sharkskin, double-breasted suit and presenting a look of difficulties in shaving and combing terrifically outwitted, the knars of his face gotten-around and his hair flattened. His smoothness was a huge satisfaction to him, as, also, his extraordinary English that hadn't hampered him in making a fortune, plus his insignificance in the old country--people gave way before his supple wrinkles and small eyes and, comparably, the onslaught of his sixcylinder car, a yellow Packard. Long afterward I had a queer ten minutes with Mrs. Karas, in a bakery near Jackson Park where I came in with a Greek girl she assumed to be my wife because we were arm in arm, in summer flannels, intimate early in the morning. She recognized me on the spot, with a coloring of extreme pleasure, but with errors of memory there was no stopping or correcting, they were so singular. She told the girl I had been practically a relative to her, she had loved me as much as Arthur, and received me in her own house like kin--all joy and happy reunion, she was, embracing me by the shoulders to say how fine and handsome I had become, but then my complexion had always been the envy of girls (as if I had been Achilles among the maidens, in the office and poolroom). I must say I was stumped by such major will to do over the past with affection and goodness. People have been adoptive toward me, as if I were really an orphan, but she had never been like that, but only morose with her riches, and mad at her mystifying, dapper husband, and critical of the Einhorns. I had been in her flat only as Einhom's chauffeur and sat in another room while they visited. Tillie Einhorn, not the hostess, brought me sandwiches and coffee from the table. And now Mrs. Karas, who had come out to buy rolls for breakfast, fell into a lucky chance to adorn the past with imaginary flowers grown in worried secret. I didn't deny anything; I said it was all true, and allowed her her enthusiasm. She even chided me for not coming to visit her. But I remembered her off-with-theirheads stony-facedness and the breakfast before the funeral when I helped out in the kitchen. Bavatsky made the coffee. Einhorn, weary but not crushed, had his black homburg on the back of his head as he smoked--no word to spare for me but an occasional one of command. Dingbat insisted with dry, roughened voice that he was going to wheel his brother into Kinsman's parlors. After that it was I who carried Einhom, not Arthur, who walked alongside with his mother. On my back, I took him in and out of the limousine, in the autumn park of the cemetery, low-grown with shrubs and slabs; back again to the cold-cuts dinner for the mourners, and afterward, at nightfall, to the synagogue in his black duds, his feet riding stirrupless and weak by sides and his cheek on my back. Einhorn wasn't religious, but to go to the synagogue was due form and, regardless of what he thought, he knew how to conduct himself. The Coblins belonged to this congregation too, and I had strung along with Cousin Anna in the oriental, modified purdah of the gallery while she wept for Howard amid the coorooing and smelling salts of the women in finery, sobbing at who would be doomed the coming year by fire or water--as the English text translated it. This was different, however, from the times of crowds praying below in shawls and business hats, and the jinking of the bells on the velvet dresses of the twolegged scrolls. It was dark, and a small group, the shaggy evening regulars, various old faces and voices, gruff, whispered, wheezy, heartgrumbled, noisily swarm-toned, singing off the Hebrew of the evening prayers. Dingbat and Einhorn had to be prompted when it came their turn to recite the orphans' Kaddish. We went back in Karas's Packard, with Kreindl. Einhom whispered to me to tell Kreindl to go home. Dingbat turned in. Karas was off to the South Side. Arthur had gone to visit friends; he was leaving for Champaign in the morning. I got Einhorn into more comfortable clothes and slippers. There was a cold wind pouring and moonlight in the backyard. Einhom kept me with him that evening; he didn't want to be alone. While I sat by he wrote his father's obituary in the form of an editorial for the neighborhood paper. "The return of the hearse from the newly covered grave leaves a man to pass through the last changes of nature who found Chicago a swamp and left it a great city. He came after the Great Fire, said to be caused by Mrs. O'Leary's cow, in flight from the conscription of the Hapsburg tyrant, and in his life as a builder proved that great places do not have to be founded on the bones of slaves, like the pyramids of Pharaohs or the capital of Peter the Great on the banks of the Neva, where thousands were trampled in the Russian marshes. The lesson of an American life like my father's, in contrast to that of the murderer of the Strelitzes and of his own son, is that achievements are compatible with decency. My father was not familiar with the observation of Plato that philosophy is the study of death, but he died nevertheless like a philosopher, saying to the ancient man who watched by his bedside in the last moments..." This was the vein of it, and he composed it energetically in half an hour, printing on sheets of paper at his desk, the tip of his tongue forward, scrunched up in his bathrobe and wearing his stocking cap. We then went to his father's room with an empty cardboard file, locked the doors and turned on the lights, and began to go through the Commissioner's papers. He handed me things with instructions. "Tear this. This is for the fire, I don't want anyone to see it. Be sure you remember where you put this note--I'll ask tor it tomorrow. Open the drawers and turn them over. Where are the keys? Shake his pants out. Put his clothes on the bed and go through the pockets. So this was the deal he had with Fineberg? What a shrewd old bastard, my dad, a real phenomenon. Let's keep things in order now--that's the main thing. Clear the table so we can sort stuff out. Lots of these clothes can be sold, what I won't be able to wear myself, except it's pretty old-fashioned. Don't throw any little scraps of paper awav. He used to write important things down that way. The old guy, he thought he'd live forever, that was one of his secrets. I suppose all powerful old people do. I guess I really do myself, even on the day of his death. We never learn anything, never in the world, and in spite of all the history books written. They're just the way we plead or argue with ourselves about it, but it's only light from the outside that we're supposed to take inside. If we can. There's a regular warehouse of fine suggestions, and if we're not better it isn't because there aren't plenty of marvelous and true ideas to draw on, but because our vanity weighs more than all of them put together," said Einhorn. "Here's a thing about Margolis, who lied yesterday when he said he didn't owe Dad anything. 'Crooked Feet, two hundred dollars!' He'll pay me or I'll eat his liver, that twofaced sonofabitch confidence man!" At midnight we had a pile of torn papers, like the ballots of the cardinals whose smoke announces a new pontiff. But Einhom was dissatisfied with the state of things. Most of his father's debtors were indicated as Margolis had been--"Fany Teeth," "Rusty Head," "Crawler," "Constant Laughter," "Alderman Sam," "Achtung," "The King of Bashan," "Soup Ladle." He had made loans to these men and had no notes, only these memoranda of debts amounting to several thousand dollars. Einhom knew who they were, but those who didn't want to pay didn't actually have to. It was the opening indication that the Commissioner had not left him as strong as he believed, but subject to the honor of lots of men he hadn't always treated well. He became worried and thoughtful. "Is Arthur in yet?" he nervously said. "He's got an early train to make." In the demolition of the once gorgeous room where the old man had been camped ruggedly in female luxury, he reflected with the round eyes of a bird about his son, and then, more easily, he observed, "Well, this stuff isn't for him, anyway; he's with poets and intelligent people, having conversation." He always spoke this way of Arthur, and it gave him first-rate solace.