by Saul Bellow
“You had no right to raise your hand to the child,” said Dolly.
“Why doesn’t he tell you what he was doing in your room?” said Etta.
I could see Iva sit up in her chair rigidly.
“What?” said Dolly.
“He was in your room.”
“I went there with Amos. Ask him,” I said.
“Daddy wasn’t there when I saw you. You were looking in Mama’s dressing table.”
“You little spy!” I shouted, glaring at her. “You hear?” I said to the others. “She accuses me of being a thief.”
“What were you doing?” Etta said.
“I was looking for something. You can go down and see if anything’s missing. There’s nothing missing. Or you can search me. I’ll let myself be searched.”
“Tell us, what was it? Nobody says you’re a thief.”
“It’s what you’re thinking. It’s clear enough to me.”
“Well, tell us,” Dolly insisted.
“It was only a pin. I needed one.”
In the darkened corner near the phonograph Iva lowered her head into her hands. “Hey! what are you acting up for back there?” I called out to her.
“A pin, is that all?” Dolly said. She allowed herself, despite the seriousness of the moment, to smile.
“Yes. And it happens to be true.” They did not answer. I said: “This, I suppose, makes my shame complete. I’m not only rash and stiff-necked, a beggar” (I bowed to Etta, who scornfully turned away her tear-smeared face) “and” (to Amos) “a jackass, but really an idiot.” Iva left the room without looking at me. “You, Amos,” I continued, “can begin living me down. You, too, Etta. Dolly is not a blood relative so she’s absolved, of course. Unless I bring disgrace on the whole family. Convicted of theft, or assault, or worse. …” Neither Dolly nor Amos undertook to reply.
I followed Iva downstairs.
She did not speak to me on the streetcar and, when we got off, she hurried home ahead of me. I reached the door of our room in time to see her drop to the edge of the bed and burst into tears.
“Dearest,” I shouted. “It’s so nice to know that you at least have faith in me!”
December 27
Amos called us up this morning; I sent Iva down to talk to him. She returned and wanted to know why I hadn’t spoken out, why I had wanted to give my brother’s family a wrong impression. I replied that as long as they were satisfied with the impression they had of themselves I didn’t care what impression they had of me. Iva rubbed mercuric oxide into her red lids before leaving for work. Her crying had continued for several hours.
I felt relieved on one score; I had been uneasy about the money, believing that Etta was not above taking it. But she went away without waiting to see what I was doing in Dolly’s dressing table. She did not know about the money. She might have stolen it to spite me.
But I have been wondering, now, what it can mean to Etta that she so closely resembles me. And why should I, furthermore, have assumed that our physical resemblance was the basis for an affinity of another kind? The search for an answer takes me far into my earlier history, a field I do not always find agreeable but which yields a great deal of essential information. And there I discover that the face, all faces, had a significance for me duplicated in no other object. A similarity of faces must mean a similarity of nature and presumably of fate.
We were a handsome family. I was brought up to think myself handsome, though not by any direct process that I can recall. It was conveyed to me by the atmosphere of the household.
Now I recall an incident from my fourth year, a quarrel between my mother and my aunt over the way in which she (my mother) dressed my hair. My aunt, Aunt Dina, claimed it was high tune my curls were cut; my mother refused to hear of it. Aunt Dina was a self-willed woman; she had arbitrary ways. She took me to the barber and had him cut my hair after the fashion of the time, in what was called a Buster Brown. She brought the curls back in an envelope and gave them to my mother, who thereupon began to cry. I bring this up not simply to recall how the importance of my appearance was magnified in my eyes, but also because during adolescence I was to remember this in another connection.
In a drawer of the parlor table where the family pictures were kept, there was one to which I was attracted from earliest childhood. It was a study of my grandfather, my mother’s father, made shortly before his death. It showed him supporting his head on a withered fist, his streaming beard yellow, sulphurous, his eyes staring and his clothing shroudlike. I had grown up with it. And then, one day, when I was about fourteen, I happened to take it out of the drawer together with the envelope in which my curls had been preserved. Then, studying the picture, it occurred to me that this skull of my grandfather’s would in time overtake me, curls, Buster Brown, and all. Still later I came to believe (and this was no longer an impression but a dogma) that the picture was a proof of my mortality. I was upright on my grandfather’s bones and the bones of those before him in a temporary loan. But he himself, not the further past, hung over me. Through the years he would reclaim me bit by bit, till my own fists withered and my eyes stared. This was a somber but not a frightening thought. And it had a corrective effect on my vanity.
Only by this time it was not so simple as that, it was not merely vanity. By this time my face was to me the whole embodiment of my meaning. It was a register of my ancestors, a part of the world and, simultaneously, the way I received the world, clutched at it, and the way, moreover, in which I announced myself to it. All of this was private and never spoken of.
But, still more, while I was conscious of being handsome I was not a little suspicious of it. Mortality, I’ve explained, played its part, making inroads on my vanity. Suspicion undermined it further. For I kept thinking, “There’s something wrong.” I meant that there was a falseness about it. And then this incident occurred:
In high school I became friendly with a boy named Will Harscha, a German. I used to visit him at home and I knew his sister and his younger brother, as well as his mother. But I had never met his father, who kept a store in a distant neighborhood. However, when I came to call one Sunday morning, the father happened to be at home, and Will took me in to meet him. He was a fat man, black-haired and swart, but kindly-looking.
“So this is Joseph,” he said as he shook hands with me. “Well. Er ist schön,” he said to his wife.
“Mephisto war ouch schön,” Mrs. Harscha answered.
Mephisto! Mephistopheles? I understood what she had said. I stood frozen there. Mr. Harscha, observing me, must have grasped that I knew what she had referred to, for he began glaring at his wife, who, with her lips pressed together, continued to look at me.
I never saw them again. I avoided Will at school. And I spent sleepless hours thinking of what Mrs. Harscha had said. She had seen through me—by some instinct, I thought then—and, where others saw nothing wrong, she had discovered evil. For a long time I believed there was a diabolic part to me. Later, I gave that up. It was “poor devil,” if any devil. Not me, specifically, just the general, poor, human devil. But meanwhile I had the confirmation of people like Mrs. Harscha for my suspicion that I was not like others but (and I now know that it is an old belief and at the heart of what we call “Romantic”) that I concealed something rotten. And perhaps it is world-wide, such a conviction, and arises because we know ourselves too well to accept the good but, rather, embrace the bad opinions others have of us. Mrs. Harscha may have disliked me because I was too “well-behaved,” or because of a way of mine in boyhood of making, or attempting to make, a compact with the adult relatives of my friends, particularly mothers, over the heads of their sons. She may have thought I had no business being unboyish. Many people resented that.
I have long ago freed myself from this morbidity. It is because of Etta that I undertook to trace it back. But there is no reason to believe that there is any parallel between us. It may be that grandfather’s head hangs over both of us, but if and when it devou
rs us it will be devouring two people who have nothing else in common.
I have also been considering Dolly. Of course, I knew that she was no saint; but now, reviewing her part in last night’s affair, I find her farther on the hellward side than ever. Here I have additional proof of my inability to read people properly, to recognize the likelihood of baseness in them—as natural in some as a blink, a nod, a flip of the hand. I make theoretical, that is, unreal, allowances for it. I shall have to begin schooling myself in shrewdness.
December 28
What would Goethe say to the view from this window, the wintry, ill-lit street, he with his recurring pleasures, fruits, and flowers?
December 29
Slept until one o’clock. Out at four for a walk, I lasted ten minutes and then retreated.
December31
I shaved in honor of the holiday. But we are not going out Iva has some sewing to do.
January 2, 1943
Mr. Vanaker observed the birth of the new year with large quantities of whisky, with coughing, pelting the yard with bottles, with frequent, noisy trips to the lavatory, and ended his revels with a fire. At about ten o’clock I heard his growls, unusually thick, and repeated thumps in the corridor and looked out to see him shambling through the smoke, feeling his way along the wall. Iva ran to summon Captain Briggs while I thrust open Vanaker’s door. The armchair was burning. He hurried in with a cup of water, which he poured over it. He was wearing sleeveless pajamas, and his bare arms were marked with sooty fingerprints. His large, fleshy, somewhat concave face, with its high forehead overarched with gray curls in a manner that suggested a bonnet, was red and distressed. He did not speak; he ran to fetch another cupful.
By this time other roomers were on the scene, for the smoke had spread through the house: Mrs. Bartlett, the middle-aged practical nurse from the large room in the rear; Mrs. Fessman, the pretty Austrian refugee; and Mr. Ringholm, who shares the third floor with Captain and Mrs. Briggs.
“Tell him to carry out that chair,” Mrs. Bartlett said to me.
“He’s trying to put the fire out,” I replied.
Hasty slapping sounds came from Vanaker’s room.
“With his hands.”
“He’d better take it out. This is a frame house. It’s dangerous.” Mrs. Bartlett came closer to me in the smoke, a tall figure in a kimono; her head was bound in a handkerchief, a black cotton sleeping mask hung around her neck. “Someone should tell him to. Take it out, mister.” But the smoke was too much for her. She retreated to the stairs. I, too, was coughing and rubbing my eyes. I stepped back into our room to recover. Throwing open the window, I cleared my head in the frigid air. Loud knocks began outside. Iva looked in.
“He locked himself inside. He must be afraid of the Captain,” she said.
I joined her in the hall. “Damn,” said the Captain, amused and vexed. “What’d he start running for? How’m I going to get at the fire?” He doubled the tempo of his knocks. “Open up, Mr. Vanaker. Come on, now.”
“It’s a wonder you don’t lose your temper, Sir,” said Mrs. Bartlett.
“Mr. Vanaker!”
“I’m awright,” Vanaker said.
“He’s ashamed, that’s what it is,” Mrs. Bartlett explained to us.
“Well, I want you to let me in,” the Captain said. “I have to see if the fire’s out.”
The key turned, and Vanaker, with streaming eyes, stood in the doorway; the Captain passed by him into the ragged smoke. Mr. Ringholm, touching his head, complained that this was doing his hang-over no good.
“We’re lucky not to be in ashes,” said Mrs. Bartlett.
And now the Captain, also coughing, reappeared, dragging the chair. He and Mr. Ringholm together carried it down. The carpet had caught fire in several places. I brought a double handful of snow from the window sill, and Mrs. Briggs joined me in stamping out the sparks and wetting down the burned spots. Vanaker had fled to the bathroom, where we heard him washing, splashing in the sink.
A little later we heard Vanaker explaining: “It was a cigarette, Captain. See? I put ah on the saucer. Then ah rolled off. …”
“You must be careful, old-timer,” the Captain said. “With cigarettes you must be careful. They’re dangerous; cigarettes are dangerous.”
“Awright, Captain.”
That was our only New Year’s Day diversion and a rather poor substitute for observing the holiday. It did give us a feeling of being set aside to let the entire day slip by. Children ran past in the morning blowing horns; in the afternoon, families in their Sunday clothes went promenading. The Captain and his wife drove off in their car early in the day and had just returned when the fire broke out.
But what such a life as this incurs is the derangement of days, the leveling of occasions. I can’t answer for Iva, but for me it is certainly true that days have lost their distinctiveness. There were formerly baking days, washing days, days that began events and days that ended them. But now they are undistinguished, all equal, and it is difficult to tell Tuesday from Saturday. When I neglect to look carefully at the newspaper I do not know what day it is. If I guess Friday and then learn that it is actually Thursday, I do not experience any great pleasure in having won twenty-four hours.
It is possible that that is one reason why I have been creating agitation. I am not sure. The circumstances at the Arrow and at Amos’s house were provoking enough, but I could have avoided making scenes if I had wished. It may be that I am tired of having to identify a day as “the day I asked for a second cup of coffee,” or “the day the waitress refused to take back the burned toast,” and so want to blaze it more sharply, regardless of the consequences. Perhaps, eager for consequences. Trouble, like physical pain, makes us actively aware that we are living, and when there is little in the life we lead to hold and draw and stir us, we seek and cherish it, preferring embarrassment or pain to indifference.
January 3
A Jefferson Forman is listed as having crashed in the Pacific. His home is given as St. Louis. The Jeff Forman I knew came from Kansas City, but his family may have moved in the last few years. The name is not common; it must be the same Forman. I had heard that he was in the merchant marine. Probably he had himself transferred when the war broke out. I heard a rumor that he had been arrested in Genoa about four years ago for shouting A basso in a public place. No name, simply A basso. According to Tad, the consulate had great difficulty in getting him released, though nobody claimed that he had added anything to his A basso. Jeff was in love with excitement. He was expelled from the University for some misdemeanor or other. I never learned the facts about it. It is surprising that he was not thrown out during his first year. One night he knocked George Colin down on the street; he never tried to explain why, merely apologized to Colin before the Dean. And his inspiration for waking me early one winter morning was to throw snowballs mixed with ashes into my bed.
His rank was given in the paper as ensign; his ship was a Catalina. I suppose the submarine danger was not enough for him. I always suspected of him that he had in some fashion discovered there were some ways in which to be human was to be unutterably dismal, and that all his life was given over to avoiding those ways.
January 4
With all the respect we seem to have for perishable stuff, we have easily accustomed ourselves to slaughter. We are all, after some fashion, the beneficiaries of that slaughter and yet we have small pity for the victims. This has not come with the war, we were ready before the war ever started; it only seems more apparent now. We do not flinch at seeing all these lives struck out; nor would those who were killed have suffered any more for us, if we, not they, had been the victims. I do not like to think what we are governed by. I do not like to think about it. It is not easy work, and it is not safe. Its kindest revelation is that our senses and our imaginations are somehow incompetent. The old Joseph who, in view of the temporariness of life, was opposed to hacking and tearing, said that he regretted that with the best will in the
world one must deal out his share of bruises. … Bruises! What a piece of innocence! Yes, he recognized that even those who meant to be gentle could not hope to escape whipping. And that was modest enough.
Yet we are, as a people, greatly concerned with perish-ability; an empire of iceboxes. And pet cats are flown hundreds of miles to be saved by rare serums; and country neighbors in Arkansas keep a month’s vigil night and day to save the life of a man stricken at ninety.
Jeff Forman dies; brother Amos lays up a store of shoes for the future. Amos is kind. Amos is no cannibal. He cannot bear to think that I should be unsuccessful, lack money, refuse to be concerned about my future. Jeff, under the water, is beyond virtue, value, glamor, money, or future. I say these things unable to see or think straight, and what I feel is less injustice or inhumanity than bewilderment.
Myself, I would rather die in the war than consume its benefits. When I am called I shall go and make no protest. And, of course, I hope to survive. But I would rather be a victim than a beneficiary. I support the war, though perhaps it is gratuitous to say so; we have the habit of making these things issues of personal morality and private will, which they are not at all. The equivalent would be to say, if God really existed, yes, God does exist. He would exist whether we recognized him or not. But as between their imperialism and ours, if a full choice were possible, I would take ours. Alternatives, and particularly desirable alternatives, grow only on imaginary trees.
Yes, I shall shoot, I shall take lives; I shall be shot at, and my life may be taken. Certain blood will be given for half-certain reasons, as in all wars. Somehow I cannot regard it as a wrong against myself.
January 5
This afternoon I emptied the closet of all its shoes and sat on the floor polishing them. Surrounded by rags, saddle soap, and brushes—the brown light of the street pressing in at the windows, and the sparrows bickering in the dead twigs—I felt tranquil for a while and, as I set Iva’s shoes out in a row, I grew deeply satisfied. It was a borrowed satisfaction; it was doing something I had done as a child. In Montreal, on such afternoons as this, I often asked permission to spread a paper on the sitting-room floor and shine all the shoes in the house, including Aunt Dina’s with their long tongues and scores of eyelets. When I thrust my arm into one of her shoes it reached well above the elbow and I could feel the brush against my arm through the soft leather. The brown fog lay in St. Dominique Street; in the sitting room, however, the stove shone on the davenport and on the oilcloth and on my forehead, drawing the skin pleasantly. I did not clean shoes because I was praised for it, but because of the work and the sensations of the room, closed off from the wet and fog of the street, with its locked shutters and the faint green of the metal pipes along the copings of its houses. Nothing could have tempted me out of the house.
