The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [5]
CHAPTER VII
I'm thinking of the old tale of Croesus, with Einhorn in the unhappy part. First the proud rich man, huffy at Solon, who, right or wrong in their argument over happiness, must have been the visiting Parisian of his day, and condescending to a rich island provincial. I try to think why didn't the warmth of wisdom make Solon softer than I believe he was to the gold- and jewel-owning semibarbarian. But anyway he was right. And Croesus, who was wrong, taught his lesson with tears to Cyrus, who spared him from the pyre. This old man, through misfortune, became a thinker and mystic and advice-giver. Then Cyrus lost his head to the revengeful queen who ducked it in a skinful of blood and cried, "You wanted blood? Here, drink!" And his crazy son Cambyses inherited Croesus and tried to kill him in Egypt as he had put his own brother to death and wounded the poor bull-calf Apis and made the head-and-body-shaved priests grim. The Crash was Einhorn's Cyrus and the bank failures his pyre, the poolroom his exile from Lydia and the hoodlums Cambyses, whose menace he managed, somehow, to get round. The Commissioner died before the general bust, and wasn't very long in his grave when the suicides by skyscraper leaps began to take place in La Salle Street and downtown New York. Einhom was among the first to be wiped out, partly because of the golden trust system of the Commissioner and partly because of his own mismanagement. Thousands of his dough were lost in Insull's watered and pyramided utilities --Coblin too dropped lots of money on-them--and he lost his legacy, and Dingbat's and Arthur's inheritance as well, by throwing it into buildings that in the end he couldn't hold. And at the finish he had nothing but vacant lots in the barren Clearing and around the airport, and of these several went for taxes; and when I sometimes took him for a ride he'd say, "We used to have that block of stores, over there," K; or, of a space full of weeds between two shanties, "Dad got that in a trade eight years ago and wanted to build a garage on it. Just as well be never did." So it was a melancholy thing to drive him, although he didn't make a heavy grouse; his observations were casual and dry. Even the building in which he lived, constructed by the Commissioner with a cash outlay of a hundred thousand dollars, was finally lost as the shops closed and the tenants in the flats upstairs stopped paying rent. "No rent, no heat," he said in the winter, resolving to be tough. "A landlord ought to act like one or give up his property. I'll stick by economic laws, good times, bad times, and be consistent." This was how he defended his action. He was taken to court, however, and lost, legal costs and all. He then rented the empty stores as flats, one to a Negro family and another to a gypsy fortuneteller, who hung a painted hand and giant, labeled brain in the window. There were fights in the building and thefts of pipes and toilet fixtures. By now the tenants were his enemies, led by the red-headed Polish barber Betzhevski, who had given mandolin concerts on the sidewalk in affable days, and now glared with raw winter eyes when he passed in front of Einhom's plate glass. Einhom started eviction proceedings against him and several others, and for this he was picketed by a Communist organization. "As if I didn't know more about communism than they do," he said with bitter humor. "What do they know about it, those ignorant bastards? What does even Sylvester know about revolution?" Sylvester was now a busy member of the Communist party. So Einhom sat at the Commissioner's front desk where the pickets could see him, to await action by the sheriff's office. He had his windows smeared with candle wax, and a paper sack of excrement was flung into the kitchen. Whereupon Dingbat organized a flying squad from the poolroom to guard the building; Dingbat was in a killing rage against Betzhevski and wanted to raid his shop and smash his mirrors. It wasn't much of a shop Betzhevski had moved into at this point of the Depression, a single chair in a basement, where he also kept canaries in a sad Flemish gloom. Clem Tambow still went to him to be shaved, saying that the redheaded barber was the only one who understood his beard. Dingbat was annoyed with him for it. But Betzhevski was evicted, and his wife stood on the sidewalk and cursed Einhorn for a stinking Jew cripple. There was nothing Dingbat could do to her. Anyhow, Einhom had eommanded, "No rough stuff unless I say so." He didn't rule it out, but he was going to control it, and Dingbat was obedient, even though Einhom had lost him every cent of his legacy. "It didn't hit only just -, 107 us," Dingbat said, "it hit everybody. If Hoover and J. P. Morgan didn't know it was coming, how should Willie? But he'll bring us back. I leave it to him." The reason for the evictions was that Einhorn had had an offer from a raincoat manufacturer for the space upstairs. Walls were torn out in several apartments before City Hall came down on him for violating fire and zoning ordinances and trying to get industrial current into a residential block. By that time some of the machinery had already been installed, and the manufacturer--a shoestring operator himself--was after him to foot the bill for removal. There was another suit about this when Einhorn tried to claim, throwing away all principle, that the machinery was bolted to the floor, hence real property belonging to him. He lost this case too, and the manufacturer found it handier to break out windows and lower his equipment by pulley than to disassemble it, and he got a court order to do so. Einhom's huge, chainhung sign was damaged. Only this didn't matter any more because he lost the building, his last large property, and was out of business. The office was shut down and most of the furniture sold. Desks were piled on desks in the dining room and files by his bed, so that it could be approached only from one side. Against better times, he wanted to keep as much furniture as he could. There were swivel chairs in the living room, where the burned furniture (the insurance company was kaput and had never paid his claim), cheaply reupholstered and smelling of fire, was brought back. He still owned the poolroom, and personally took over the management of it; he had a sort of office installed in the front corner, around the cash register, and still, after a fashion, did business. Dropped down into this inferior place, he was slow to get over it. But in time he became chief here too, and had reorganizing ideas for which he began to accumulate money. First, a lunch counter. The pool tables were shifted to make room. Then a Twenty-Six green diceboard. He had remained a notary public and insurance agent, and he got himself accredited by the gas, electric, and telephone companies to take payment of bills. All this slowly, for things had low action these mortified times, and even his ingenuity was numb from the speed and depth of the fall, and much of his thought went into tracing back the steps he should have taken to save at least Arthur's money--and Dingbat's. Besides, there was the environment, narrowed down to a single street and place now that he had lost all other property, the thickened and caked machine-halted silence from everywhere lying over this particular sparseness and desolation, plus the abasement from dollars to nickels. And he, a crippled and aging man, scaled down from large plans to mere connivances. In his own eyes, the general disaster didn't excuse him sufficiently--it was that momentum he had which often blurred out others--and -it appeared that as soon as he inherited the Commissioner's fortune it darted and wriggled away like a collection of little gold animals that had obeyed only the old man's voice. "Of course," he explained sometimes, "it isn't personally so terrible to me. I was a cripple before and am now. Prosperity didn't make me walk, and if anybody knew what a person is liable to have happen to him, it's William Einhom. You can believe that." Well, yes, I both could and couldn't. I knew this assurance was a growth of weak light, more pale than green, and what a time of creeping days he had had when he lost the big building and the remaining few thousands of Arthur's legacy in the final spurt to save it, inspired by pride instead of business sense. He officially let me go then, saying weakly, "You're a luxury to me, Augie. I'll have to cut you out." Dingbat and Mrs. Einhorn took care of him during that bad period when he kept to his study, hard hit, overcome, in his black thought, many days unshaved--and he a man whd depended for the whole tone of life on regularity in habit--before he left the drab, bookish room and declared he was taking over in the pool hall. An Adams, beaten for the presidency, going back to the capital as a humble congressman. Unless he took Arthur out of the university and sent him to work--provided Arthur would have agreed--he had to do something, for there was nothing to fall back on; he had even turned his insurance policies in to raise cash for the building. And Arthur had no profession; he had been--unlike Kreindl's son Kotzie, the dentist, who now supported his family--given a liberal education in literature, languages, and philosophy. Suddenly what the sons had been up to became exceedingly important. Howard Coblin earned money with his saxophone. And Kreindl didn't any longer scoff to me about his son's unnatural coolness with women. Instead he advsed me to ask him for a job in the pharmacy below his office. Kotzie got me a relief spot behind the counter as apprentice soda jerk. I was thankful, for Simon had graduated from high school and was cut off from Charity. Also, he had lost some of his days at the La Salle Street Station. Borg was putting in his own jobless brothers-in-law and giving others the shove, left and right. As for the savings, the family money Simon had handled as Grand- tna s successor, they were gone. The bank had closed in the first run, snd the pillared building was now a fish store--Einhom had a view of 109 it from his poolroom corner. Still, Simon graduated pretty well--I can't understand how he managed--and was elected class treasurer, in charge of buying rings and school pins. It was his rigorous-looking honesty, I suppose. He had to account to the principal for the money, but that didn't keep him from fixing a deal with the jeweler and making a clear fifty dollars for himself. He was up to much; so was I. We kept it from each other. But I, because I watched him by long habit, knew somewhat what he was up to, whereas he didn't pause to look back over my doings. He signed up at the municipal college, with the idea that everyone had then of preparing for one of the Civil-Service examinations. There was a rush on for Weather Bureau, Geological Survey, and post-office jobs, from the heavy-print announcements in layers of paper on the school and library bulletin boards. Simon had forefront ability. Maybe his reading was related to it, and the governor's clear-eyed gaze he had developed. Of John Sevier. Or of Jackson in the moment when the duelist's bullet glanced off the large button of his cloak and he made ready to fire--a lifted look of unforgiving, cosmological captaincy; that look where honesty had the strength of a prejudice, and foresight appeared as the noble cramp of impersonal worry in the forehead. My opinion is that at one time it was genuine in Simon. And if it was once genuine, how could you say definitely that the genuineness was ever all gone. But he used these things. He employed them, I know damned well. And when they're used consciously, do they turn spurious? Well, in a fight, who can lay off his advantages? Maybe Grandma Lausch had gotten her original dream scheme of Rosenwald or Carnegie favors from appreciation of this gift of Simon's. Standing at a corner brawl, he would be asked by a cop, from among a dozen volunteer witnesses, what had happened. Or when the coach came out of the gym-supply room with a new basketball, tens of arms waving around, beseeching, it would be Simon, appearing passive, that he flung it to. He expected it and was never surprised. And now he was on soggy ground and forced to cut down the speed he had been making toward the mark he secretly aimed at. I didn't know at the time which mark or exactly understand why there needed to be a mark; it was over my head. But he was getting in, all the time, a big variety of information and arts, like dancing, conversation with women, courtship, gift-giving, romantic letter-writing, the ins and outs of restaurants and night clubs, dance halls, the knotting of four-inhands and bow ties, what was correct and incorrect in tucking a hand110 kerchief in the breast pocket, how to choose clothes, how to take care of himself in a tough crowd. Or in a respectable household. This last was a poser for me, who had not assimilated the old woman's conduct lessons. But Simon, without apparently paying attention, had got the essential of it. I name these things, negligible to many people, because we were totally unfamiliar with them. I watched him study the skill of how to put on a hat, smoke a cigarette, fold a pair of gloves and put them in an inner pocket, and I admired and wondered where it came from, and learned some of it myself. But I never got the sense of luxury he had in doing it. In passing through the lobbies of swank places, the Palmer Houses and portiered dining rooms, tassels, tapers, string ensembles, making the staid bouncety tram-tram of Vienna waltzes, Simon had absorbed this. It made his nostrils open. He was cynical of it but it got him. I ought to have known, therefore, how ugly it was for him to be in the flatness of the neighborhood, spiritless winter afternoons, passing time in his long coat and two days unshaven, in a drugstore, or with the Communist Sylvester in Zechman's pamphlet shop; sometimes even in the poolroom. He was working only Saturdays at the station, and that, he said, because Borg liked him. We had a little time for palaver, in the slowness of the undeveloping winter, sitting at the lunch counter of the poolroom by the window that showed out on horse-dropped, coal-dropped, soot-sponged snow and brown circulation of mist in the four o'clock lamplight. When we had done the necessary at home for Mama, set up the stoves, got in groceries, taken out the garbage and ashes, we didn't stay there with her-- I less than Simon, who sometimes did his college assignments on the kitchen table, and she kept a percolator going for him on the stove. I didn't pass on to him the question that Jimmy Klein and Clem asked of me, namely, whether Sylvester was converting him to his politics. I had confidence in the answer I gave, which was that Simon was hard up for ways to kill time, and that he went to meetings, bull sessions and forums, socials and rent parties, from boredom, and in order to meet girls, not because he took Sylvester for one of the children of morning, but he went for the big babes in leather jackets, low heels, berets, and chambray workshirts. The literature he brought home with him kept coffee rings off the table the morning after, or he tore the mimeographed pages with his large blond hands to start the stove. I read more f it than he did, with puzzled curiosity. No, I knew Simon and his idea of the right of things. He had Mama and me for extra weight, he believed, and wasn't going to pick up the whole of a class besides, and he wouldn't have Sylvester's moral sentiments any more than he would i buy a suit that didn't fit. But he sat in Zechman's shop, calm, smoking sponged cigarettes, under the inciting proletarian posters, hearing I Latinistic, Germanic, exotic conversation, with large young side of jaw at rest on his collar in the yellow smoke of cold air, mentally blackballing it all. That he showed up in the poolroom was a surprise to me too, in view of what he had formerly said about my tie-in with the Einhoms. But the explanation was the same--because it was a dull time, because he was broke; he soon kept company with bear-eyes Sylvester in his pamphlet-armed war with the bourgeoisie and took lessons in pool from Dingbat. He became good enough at it to win some in rotation at a nickel a ball, staying away from the deadeyes who made their career in the parlor. Occasionally he played craps in the back room, and his luck at this was pretty fair, too. He kept clear of the hoodlums, torpedoes, and thieves on their professional side. In that regard he was smarter than I, for I somehow got to be party to a robbery. 1 ran with Jimmy Klein and Clem Tambow much of the time. Toward the last high-school terms I hadn't been seeing a lot of them either. Jimmy's family was hard hit by the unemployment--Tommy lost his job at City Hall when the Republicans were pushed out by Cermak--and Jimmy was working a great deal; he was also studying bookkeeping at night, or trying to, for he was no good at figures or at any head work for that matter. Only he had much determination to get ahead for the sake of his family. His sister Eleanor had gone to Mexico, by bus the entire journey, to see whether she could make a go of it with the cousin there, the one that had started Jimmy's interest in genealogy. As for Clem Tambow, his contempt of school was extreme, and he passed as much time as he could get away with in bed, reading screen news, going over scratch sheets. He was developing into a superior bum. Through his mother, he carried on a long-term argument with her second husband, who didn't have a job either, about his habits. A neighbor's son was working as a pin boy in a downtown alley for thirty cents an hour; why, therefore, did he refuse to look for work? They were all four living in the back rooms of the infants'-wear shop that the ex-Mrs. Tambow ran by herself. Bald, with harsh back-hair, Clem's stepfather, in his undershirt, read the Jewish Courier by the stove and prepared lunch of sardines, crackers, and tea for them all. There were always two or three King Oscar cans on the table, rolled i open, and also canned milk and oysterettes. He was not a fast-thinking I man and didn't have many subjects. When I visited and saw him in } 112 the cirrus-cloud weave of his wool undershirt, the subject was always what was I earning. "Do stoop labor?" said Clem to his mother when she took it up with him. "If I can't find anything better I'll swallow cyanide." And the thought of swallowing cyanide made him laugh enormously, with a great "haw, haw, haw!" big-mouthed, and shake his quills of hair. "Anyhow," he said, "I'd rather stay in bed and play with myself. Ma" ._his mother in her skirts and with feet of a dancer of Spanish numbers--"you're not too old to know what I mean. You're in the room next to mine, remember, you and your husband." He made her gasp, unable to answer because of me, but staring at him with furious repudiation. "Put on with me, that's okay--what should I suppose you got married for?" "You oughtn't talk to your old lady like that," I said privately to him. He laughed at me. "You should spend a couple of days and nights around here--you'd say I was going easy on her. Her pince-nez takes you in, and you don't know what a letch she's got. Let's face the facts." And of course he told me these facts, and it seemed even I figured in them, that she had made sly inquiries about me and said how strong I looked. In the afternoon Clem took a walk; he carried a cane and had British swagger. He read the autobiographies of lords from the library and guffawed over them and played the Piccadilly gentleman with Polack storekeepers, and he was almost always ready to burst out haw-hawing with happy violence, decompression, big thermal wrinkles of ugly happiness in his red face. When he could cadge a few bucks from his father he bet on the horses; if he won he'd stand me to a steak dinner and cigars. I was around people of other kinds too. In one direction, a few who read whopping books in German or French and knew their physics and botany manuals backwards, readers of Nietzsche and Spengler. In another direction, the criminals. Except that I never thought of them as such, but as the boys I knew in the poolroom and saw also at school, dancing the double-toddle in the gym at lunch hour, or in the hot-dog parlors. I touched all sides, and nobody knew where I belonged. I had "o good idea of that myself. Whether I'd have been around the poolroom if I hadn't known and worked for Einhorn I can't say. I wasn't a grind certainly, or a memorizing eccentric; I wasn't against the grinds and eccentrics either. But it was easier for the gangsters to take me for one of them. And a thief named Joe German began to talk to me about a robbery. I didn't say no to him. Gorman was very bright, handsome and slim, clever at basketball. His father, who owned a tire shop, was well off, and there was no apparent reason for him to steal. But he had a considerable record as a car thief and was in St. Charles twice. Now he intended to rob a leathergoods shop on Lincoln Avenue, not very far from the Coblins', and there were three of us for the job. The third was Sailor Bulba, my old lockermate who had stolen my science notebook. He knew I wasn't a squealer. Gorman would get his father's car for the getaway. We'd break into the shop by the cellar window at the rear and clean out the handbags. Bulba would hide them, and there was a fence in the poolroom named Jonas who would sell them for us. On one o'clock of an April night we drove to the North Side, parked beside an alley, and one by one slipped into the backyard. Sailor had cased the place; the half-size basement window had no bars. Gorman tried to open it, first with a jimmy and then with bicycle tape, a technique he had heard of in the poolroom but never tried. It didn't work. Then Sailor rolled a brick in his cap and pounded out the pane. After the noise we scattered into the alley, but crept back when no one came. I was sick with the thing by now, but there was no getting out of it. Sailor and Gorman went in and left me as lookout. Which didn't make much sense, for the window was the only way of escape, and if I had been caught by a squad car in the alley they'd never have gotten away either. Nevertheless, Gorman was the experienced one, and we took his orders. There was nothing to hear but rats or paper scuttling. Finally there was a noise from the cellar, and German's sharp, pale face came up below; he started handing out the bags to me, soft things in tissue paper, which I stuffed into a duffel bag I had carried under my trench coat. Bulba and I ran through backyards into the next street with the stuff, while German drove the car around. We dropped Bulba at the rear of his house; he tossed the bag over the fence and vaulted after, swinging up with a wide flutter of his sailor pants and landing in cans and gravel. I walked home by a short cut, over lots, got the key out of the tin mailbox, and went into the sleeping house. Simon knew I had come in very late and said that at midnight Mama had come in to ask where I was. He didn't appear to care what I had been up to, or notice that I was, behind my casualness, miserable. I had stayed awake hours trying to figure out how I was to explain the twenty or thirty dollars my cut probably would amount to. I thought to ask Clem to say that we had won together on a horse, but that didn't appear feasible. And it really wasn't a difficulty at all, since I could give it to my mother bit by bit over a period of weeks, and besides, nobody, as in Grandma's days, watched closely what I was doing. It was a while before I could think straight about it, having the shakes. But I wasn't afflicted long. From reasons of temperament. I went to school, missing only one period; I showed up for glee-club rehearsal, and at four o'clock went to the poolroom, and Sailor Bulba was sitting up in a shoeshine chair in his bell-bottomed pants, observing a snooker game. It was all right. Everything was already arranged with Jonas, the fence, who would take the stuff that night. I put the whole thing out of mind, and in this had the help of perfect spring, when the trees were beginning to bud. Einhorn said to me, "They're having bicycle races over in the park. Let's take them in," and I willingly carried him out to the car and we went. I had decided there wasn't going to be any more robbery for me, now that I knew what it was like, and I told Joe German that he wasn't to count on me for future jobs. I was prepared to be called yellow. But he didn't take on and wasn't scornful. He said quietly, "Well, if you think it isn't your dish." "That's just the way it is--it isn't my dish." And he said thoughtfully, "Okay. Bulba is a jerk, but I could get along swell with you." "No use doing it if it isn't in me." "What the hell for then? Sure." He was very mild and independent. He combed his hair in the gummachine mirror, fixed up his streaming tie, and went away. Thereafter he didn't have much to say to me. I took Clem out, and we blew in the money together. But I wasn't done with this matter by a long shot. Einhorn found out about it through Kreindl, who was approached by the fence to peddle some of the bags. Probably Kreindl and Einhorn decided that I should get a going-over for it. So Einhorn called me to sit by him, one afternoon in the poolroom. I saw from his stillness that he was getting up an angry blow against me, and of course I knew why. "I'm not going to sit by and let you turn into jailbait," he said. "I partly consider myself responsible that you're in this environment. You're not even of age to be here, you're still a minor"--so, by the ^y, were Bulba and German and dozens of others, but nothing was sver made of it--"though you're overgrown. But I won't have you doing "us, Augie. Even Dingbat, and he's no mental giant, knows better Kz 115 than to get into robbery. I have to put up with all kinds of elements around here, unfortunately. I know who's a thief or gunman or whoremaster. I can't help it. It's a poolroom. But, Augie, you know what better is; you've been with me in other times, and if I hear of you on another job I'm going to have you thrown out of here. You'll never see the inside of this place or Tillie and me again. If your brother knew about this, by Jesus Christ! he'd beat you. I know he would." I admitted that it was so. Einhorn must have seen the horror and fear in me as through a narrow opening. My hand lay where he could reach it; he put his fingers on it. "This is where a young fellow starts to decay and stink, and his health and beauty go. By the first things he does when he's not a boy any longer, but does what a man does. A boy steals apples, watermelons. If he's a wildcat in college he writes a bad check or two. But to go out as an armed bandit--" "We weren't." "I'll open this drawer," he said with intensity, "and give you fifty bucks if you'll swear Joe German didn't have a gun. I tell you he had one." I was hot in the face but faint. It could be true; it was plausible. "And if the cops had come he'd have tried to shoot his way out. That was what you let yourself in for. Yes, that's right, Augie, a dead cop or two. You know what cop-killers get, from the station onward-- their faces beaten off, their hands smashed, and worse; and that would be your start in life. You can't tell me there's nothing but boyish highjinks spirits in that. What did you do it for?" I didn't know. "Are you a real crook? Have you got the calling? I don't think I ever saw a stranger case of deceiving appearances then. I had you in my house and left stuff in the open. Were you tempted to steal, ever?" "Hey, Mr. Einhorn!" I said, violent and excited. "You don't have to tell me. I know you didn't. I only asked if you have the real impulses from the bottom, and I don't believe you do. Now, for God's sake, Augie, stay away from those thieves. I'd give you twenty bucks for your widowed mother if you asked me. Did you need it so badly?" "No." It was kindness itself of him to call Mama a widow when he knew she really wasn't. "Or were you looking for a thrill? Is this a time to be looking for a thrill, when everybody else is covering up? You could take it out on the roller coasters, the bobs, the chute-the-chutes. Go to Riverview park. But wait. All of a sudden I catch on to something about you. You've got opposition in you. You don't slide through everything. You just make it look so." This was the first time that anyone had told me anything like the truth about myself. I felt it powerfully. That, as he said, I did have opposition in me, and great desire to offer resistance and to say "No!" which was as clear as could be, as definite a feeling as a pang of hunger. The discoverer of this, who had taken pains to think of me--to think of me--I was full of love of him for it. But I was also wearing the discovered attribute, my opposition. I was clothed in it. So I couldn't make any sign of argument or indicate how I felt. "Don't be a sap, Augie, and fall into the first trap life digs for you. Young fellows brought up in bad luck, like you, are naturals to keep the jails filled--the reformatories, all the institutions. What the state orders bread and beans long in advance for. It knows there's an element that can be depended on to come behind bars to eat it. Or it knows how much broken rock for macadam it can expect, and whom it can count on to break it, and whom it can expect for chancre treatments at the Public Health Institute. From around here and similar parts of the city, and the same in other places throughout the country. It's practically determined. And if you're going to let it be determined for you too, you're a sucker. Just what's predicted. Those sad and tragic things are waiting to take you in--the clinks and clinics and soup lines know who's the natural to be beat up and squashed, made old, pooped, farted away, no-purposed away. If it should happen to you, who'd be surprised? You're a setup for it." Then he added, "But I think I'd be surprised." And also, "I don't ask you to take me for your model either," too well realizing the contradiction, that I knew about his multifarious swindles. Einhorn had his experts who tinkered with the gas meters; he got around the electric company by splicing into the main cables; he fixed tickets and taxes; and his cleverness was unlimited in these respects. His mind was continually full of schemes. "But I'm not a lowlife when I think, and really think," he said. "In the end you can't save your soul snd life by thought. But if you think, the least of the consolation prizes is the world." He continued, but my thoughts took their own direction. No, I didn't ^nt to be what he called determined. I never had accepted determinat^n and wouldn't become what other people wanted to make of me .1 had said "No" to Joe German too. To Grandma. To Jimmy. To lots of people. Einhorn had seen this in me. Because he too wanted to exert influence. To keep me out of trouble and also because he was accustomed to have a delegate, messenger, or trusted hand, he hired me again for less money. "Don't forget, old man, I've got my eye on you." Didn't he always have his eye on as many things and people as he could get in range? Conversely, however, I had my eye on him. I took closer interest in his swindles than when I had been not much more than houseboy and the Einhorn business was too vast for me to understand. One of the first things I helped with was a very dangerous piece of work--taking in a gangster, Nosey Mutchnik. A few years before, Nosey Mutchnik, nothing but a punk, had worked for the North Side gang, throwing acid on clothes in dry-cleaning shops that wouldn't buy protection and doing similar things. Now he had reached a higher stage, when he had money and was looking for investments, particularly in real estate. For, he said seriously to Einhorn, on a summer evening, "I know what happens to guys who stay in the rackets. In the end they get blasted. I seen it happen enough." Einhorn told him he knew of a fine vacant lot that they could buy as partners. "If I'm going into it with you myself, you don't have to | worry that it's not on the up and up. I stand to lose if you do," he said with sincere heart to Mutchnik. The asking price for the property was six hundred dollars. He could get it down to five. This was a perfectly j just assurance, because Einhorn himself owned the lot, having acquired | it from a buddy of his father's for seventy-five dollars; and he now " became its half-owner at a further profit. All this was done by means of various tricks, and very coolly. It ended well, with Mutchnik finding a buyer for it, delighted to make a hundred dollars in a piece of legitimate business. But if he had found out he would have shot Einhorn or had him shot. Nothing simpler to do, or more natural in his eyes, in defense of his pride. I was in terror that Mutchnik might have taken a notion to investigate in the Recorder's Office and find out that a rela- j tion of Mrs. Einhorn had nominally owned the lot. But Einhorn said, "What are you bothering your head about, Augie? I've got this man figured out. He's terribly stupid. I keep suggesting angles to him for his protection." Thus, without risking a cent, Einhorn made more than four hundred dollars in this particular deal. He was proud, gleeful with me; this was what he really dug. It was a specimen triumph of the kind--only bigger and bigger--he wanted his whole history to consist of. While he sat still "US. at his Twenty-Six baize board, the leather dice cup there, and the green reflected up to his face, his white skin and underpainted eyes. He kept the valuable'ivory cue balls by him in a box, inside the nickel-candy case, and his attention to what went on in the establishment was keen and close. He ran it his own way entirely. I never knew another poolroom where there was a woman permanently, like Tillie Einhom, behind the lunch counter. She served very good chili con, omelettes, navy bean soup, and learned to operate the bi coffee urn, even the exact moment to throw in salt and raw egg to make the coffee clear. She took to this change in her life energetically, and physically she appeared to become broader and stronger. She flourished, and the male crowd made her tranquil. There was a lot said or shouted that she didn't know the meaning of, which was to the good. She didn't soften things in the poolroom, or put a limit, like a British barmaid or bistro proprietress; here things were too harsh and ornery to be influenced; the clamor and fights and the obscene yelling and banging weren't going to stop, and didn't stop. Only she somehow became part of the place. By limiting herself to the chili, wieners and beans, coffee and pie. The Depression had altered Einhorn too. Retrospectively, he was rather green in the Commissioner's lifetime, and some ways, for his years, unformed. Now he was no longer second-to-last, but the last and end-term of his family; there was nobody expected to die before he did, and, you could say, troubles came directly to his face, and he showed the test of them. No more willowiness; he had to get thicker and harder, and so he did. But toward women he didn't change at all. He saw fewer of them, naturally, than in past days. What women entered a poolroom? Lollie Fewter didn't come back to him. And for him--well, I suppose that souls not in the very best state have to have organizing acts, devices that brace them, must shave or must dress. To Einhorn, the enjoyment of a woman not his wife was such an organizing act. And Lollie must have been important to him, for he kept track of her to the last, for better than ten years, that is, when she was shot by a teamster-lover, the father of several children, whom she got involved in black marketing. He was caught, and there was prison coming to him, and no rap for her. Therefore he killed her, he said, "So another guy wouldn't live rich with her off my troubles." Einhorn saved the clippings from the papers. "You see what he says--'live rich'? Living rich was what it was with her. I can tell you." He wanted me to know he could. He could tell me indeed, and there were few people "etter placed than I to hear it from him. "Poor Lollie!" "Ah, poor, poor kid!" he said. "But I think she was bound to die like that, Augie. She had a Frankie-and-Johnny mentality. And when I knew her she was beautiful. Yes, she was rich." All white-headed, and shrunken some from his former size, he told me about her with fervor. "They say she was getting sloppy toward the end, and greedy about money. That was bad. There's trouble enough from f----. She was made to have a violent thing happen to her. The world doesn't let hot blood off easy." Wrapped and planted in this was an appeal to me to remember his hot blood. My services to him had put me in some sinking positions--he wanted to know what thought I had of them, maybe; or, humanly enough, whether I would celebrate them with him. Oh, the places where pride won't make a stand! What I was particularly bidden to recall in this talk was the night of my graduation from high school. The Einhoms had been extremely kind to me. A wallet with ten dollars in it was my present from the three of them, and Mrs. Einhorn came to the graduation exercises with Mama and the Kleins and Tambows that February night. Afterward there was a party at the Kleins', where I was expected. I drove Mama home from the assembly--I didn't have my name in the evening program, like Simon, but Mama was pleased and smoothed my hand as I was leading her upstairs. Tillie Einhorn waited below in the car. "You go to your party," she said as I was taking her back to the poolroom. My having finished high school was of immense importance in her eyes, and she honored me extraordinarily, in the tone she took. She was a warm woman, in most matters very simple, she wanted to give me some sort of blessing, and my "education" had, I think, suddenly made her timid of me. So we drove in the black and wet cold to the poolroom, and she said several times over, "Willie says you got a good head. You'll be a teacher yourself." And then she crushed up against me in her sealskin coat, belonging to the good days, to kiss me on the cheek, and had the happy tears of terribly deep feeling to wipe from her face before we went into the poolroom. Behind this, probably, was my "orphancy," and the occasion woke it up. We were dressed in our best; Mrs. Einhorn even gave off a perfume, in the car, from her silk scarf and dress established with silver buttons on her breast. We crossed the wide sidewalk to the poolroom. Below, the windows, as required by law, were curtained, and above, the rods of the signs writhed in their colors in the wet. The crowd in the poolroom was small tonight because of graduation. So you could hear the kissing of the balls from the farthest cavelike lights and soft roaring of green tables, and the fat of wieners on the grill. Dingbat came from the back, holding the wooden triangular ball rack, to shake hands. "Augie is going to a party by Klein," said Mrs. Einhom. "Congratulations, son," said Einhom with state manners. "He's going, Tillie, but not right away. I have a treat for him first. I'm taking him to a show." "Willie," she said, disturbed, "let him go. Tonight it's his night." "Not just a neighborhood movie, but to Mc Vicker's, a stage show with little girls, trained animals, and a Frenchman from the Bal Tabarin who stands on his head on a pop bottle. How does that sound to you, Augie? Like a good thing? I planned it out a week ago." "Sure, that's all right. Jimmy said the party would run late, and I can go after midnight." "But Dingbat can take you, Willie. Augie wants to be with young people tonight, not with you." "If I'm going out Dingbat is needed here and will stay here," said Einhom and shook off her arguments. I wasn't so intoxicated with its being my night that I couldn't see a reason for Einhorn's insistence, a small darkness of a reason no bigger than a field mouse yet and very swift. Mrs. Einhom dropped her hands to her sides. "Willie, when he -wants--" she apologized to me. But I was practically one of the family, now that no inheritances were in the way. I tied on his cloak and carried him to the car. My face was red in the night air, and I was annoyed. For it was a chore to take Einhom to the theater, and there were many steps and negotiations necessary. First to park the car, and then to find the manager and explain that two seats had to be found near the exit; next to arrange to have the steel firedoors opened, to drive down the alley, tote Einhom into the theater, back out of the alley, and find another parking space. And at that, once in the theater, you sat at a bad angle to the stage. He had to be right next to the emergency exit. "Imagine me in the middle of a stampede in case of fire," he said. Hence we saw things to the side of the main confrontation of the big dramatic shell, powder and paint on the faces, and voices muffled, then loud, or glenny silver, and frequently didn't know what made the audience laugh. "Don't speed," said Einhom to me on Washington Boulevard. "Take 1! slow here." I suddenly observed that he had an address in his hand. "It's near Sacramento. You didn't think I really was going to drag t .121 the imposing female fact, the brilliant, profound thing. My clothes were off and I waited. She approached and took me round the body. She even set me on the bed. As if, it being her bed, she'd show me how to use it. And she pressed up her breasts against me, she curved her shoulders back, she closed her eyes and held me by the sides. So that I didn't lack kindness of person and wasn't pushed off when done. I knew later I had been lucky with her, that she had tried not to be dry with me, or satirical, and done it mercifully. Yet when the thrill went off, like lightning smashed and dispersed into the ground, I knew it was basically only a transaction. But that didn't matter so much. Nor did the bed; nor did the room; nor the thought that the woman would have been amused--with as much amusement as could make headway against other considerations--at Einhorn and me, the great sensationalist riding into the place on my back with bloodshot eyes and voracious in heart but looking perfectly calm and superior. Paying didn't matter. Nor using what other people used. That's what city life is. And so it didn't have the luster it should have had, and there wasn't any epithalamium of gentle lovers.... I had to wait for Einhom in the kitchen, and to think of him, close by, having this violence done to him for his pleasure. The madam didn't look pleased about it. Other men were coming in, and she was mixing drinks in the kitchen, and I came in for peevish glances until Einhorn's girl came in dressed again to have me fetch him. The madam went along with me for the money, and Einhom paid with finesse and gave tips, and as I carried him through the parlor where my partner was with another man, smoking a cigarette- Einhom said to me for my private ear, "Don't look at anybody, understand?" Was he afraid to be recognized, or was this order simply about the best composure for passing through the parlor again with him clinging to my back in his dark garments? "You'll have to be careful as hell about the way you go down," he said on the porch. "It was stupid not to bring a flashlight. All we need now is a spill." And he laughed; with irony, but laughed. The house was thoughtful though, and a whore came out, in a coat like any ordinary woman, to light our way down to the yard, where we thanked her and all politely said good night. I brought him home and took him into the house, though the poolroom was still open, and he said, "Never mind putting me to bed. Go on to your party. You can take the car, but don't go getting drunk and joy-riding, that's all I ask."