by Saul Bellow
“Well, they must be teaching you great things over there,” said Grandma. “This is your chance to learn culture and refinement.” She meant to boast that she had already formed me and we had nothing to fear from common influences. But a little ridicule was indicated, just in case there should be any danger.
“Is Anna still crying?”
“Yes.”
“All day long. And what does he do?—he looks at her and blinks with his eyes. And the kid stammers. It must be lively. And Five Properties, that Apollo—still looking for an American girl to marry?”
That was her deft, scuttling way. With the small yellow bone of her hand, the hand that had been truly married in Odessa to a man of real weight, she threw the switch, the water rushed in and the clumsy sank—money, strength, fat, silks, and candy boxes, and all—and left the witty and superb smiling to contemplate the ripples. You had to know, to get this as I did, that on Armistice Day of 1922, when Grandma turned her ankle coming down the stairs at eleven o’clock while the factories brewed up their solemn celebrating noise and she should have been standing still, Five Properties picked her up while she was spitting and wincing and rushed her to the kitchen. But her memory specialized in misdemeanors and offenses, which were as ineradicable from her brain as the patrician wrinkle was between her eyes, and her dissatisfaction was an element and a part of nature.
Five Properties was keen on getting married. He took the question up with everybody and naturally had been to see Grandma Lausch about it, and she masked herself up as usual and looked considerate and polite while in secret she checked off and collected what she wanted for her file. But also she saw a piece of change in it for her, a matchmaker’s fee. She watched for business opportunities. Once she had masterminded the smuggling of some immigrants from Canada. And I happen to know that she had made an agreement with Kreindl about a niece of his wife, that Kreindl was to act as go-between while the old woman encouraged Five Properties from her side. The scheme fell through, although Five Properties went into it eagerly at first, arriving to present himself brushed and burnished, flaming from his shave up to the Eskimo angle of his eyes, at Kreindl’s basement where the meeting was to be. But the girl was thin and pale and didn’t satisfy him. He had in mind a bouncing, black-haired, large-lipped, party-going peach. He was gentlemanly about his refusal and took the thin girl out once or twice; she got a kewpie doll from him and one of those cartwheel crimson Bunte candy boxes, and he was done. The old woman then said she gave him up. However, I believe her arrangement with Kreindl stood for some time after, and Kreindl didn’t quit. He still went to the Coblins’ on Sundays, and he did a double errand, as he had Hebrew New Year’s cards to sell on commission for a printer. It was one of his regular lines, like buying job-lots and auction goods and taking people from the neighborhood to the Halsted Street furniture stores when he got wind of their needing a suite.
He worked on Five Properties craftily, and I would see them confabbing in the shed, Kreindl with his rolled legs and his conscript’s history pasted on his eager, humiliated back, his beef-eater’s face inflated to the height of his forehead with the fine points of the young lady of that day: of good family, nourished from her mother’s hand with the purest and whitest food, brought up without rudeness or collision, producing breasts on time, no evil thoughts as yet, giving nothing but the clearest broth, you might say—and I can put myself in Five Properties’ thoughts as he listened, crossed his arms, grinned, and appeared to scoff. Was she really so gentle, swell, and white? And if she over-flowered into coarseness and grossness, after a little marriage, and lay in the luxury of bed eating fig newtons, corrupt and lazy, sending messages by window shade to sleek young boys? Or if her father was a grafter, her brothers bums and cardsharks, her mother loose or a spendthrift? Five Properties wanted to be awfully careful, and he didn’t lack warnings and cautions from his sister, who, by ten years of seniority, could tip him off to American dangers and those of American women for green, old-country boys especially. She was comical when she did it, but grimly comical, for it was time taken from mourning.
“It’ll be something different than with me, somebody that understands life. If she wants a fur coat, like her swell friends, you’ll have to buy a fur coat, and she won’t care if it takes your last drop of blood to do it, a fresh young thing.”
“Not me,” said Five Properties, in somewhat the way Anna had said, “Not my son.” He was rolling bread pills in his broad fingers and smoking a cigar, his green eyes awake and cold.
Busy at his accounts in his BVDs—the afternoon was hot—Coblin blinked me an extra smile, observing how I neglected my book to listen to this conversation. He never had it in for me because I broke in on his privacy in the bathroom; just the contrary.
As for the book, it was Simon’s copy of the Iliad, and I had been reading how the fair Briseis was dragged around from tent to tent and Achilles racked up his spear and hung away his mail.
Early risers, the Coblins went to bed soon after supper, like a farm family. Five Properties was the first up, at half-past three, and waked Coblin. Coblin took me out with him to have breakfast at a joint on Belmont Avenue, a night-crowd hangout of truckers, conductors, postal clerks, and scrubwomen from Loop offices. Bismarcks and coffee for him, flapjacks and milk for me. He was in a big mood of sociability here, with the other steady patrons and with the Greek, Christopher, and the waitresses. He had no repartee but laughed at everything. At the convict hour between four and five when even those with the least to fear are darkened and sober, and back away from waking. It wasn’t so for him; in the summer, at least, he loved to get out of the house and have the coffee before him and the bulldog edition under his arm.
We would go back to the shed to meet the paper trucks that came booming down the alley, tearing off leaves, with punks on the tail gate (to be on newspaper trucks was as sure a stage in their advancement to hoodlums as a hitch in Bridewell or joy-riding in stolen cars), booting off bundles of Tribunes or Examiners. Then the crew of delivery boys showed up with bicycles and coasters, and the route was covered by eight o’clock, Coblin and his older hands taking the steep back porches where you needed the knack of pitching the paper up to the third floor over the beams and clotheslines. Meanwhile Cousin Anna was awake and back at her specialties—as if the charge of them in the cottage had run down overnight—tears, speeches, lamentations, and bothering the morning mirrors with her looks. But also second breakfast was on the table, and Coblin ate before setting out on collections and the light banging of screen doors, in polite panama hat, blinking rapid-fire. He had morning gossamers on his trousers from being the first one through the yards, and he was ready for any conversation with up-to-the-minute gang news of the bloody nights of the beer barons and the last curb quotations—everybody was playing the stock market, led by Insull.
And I was at home with Anna and the kid. Usually Anna went to Northern Wisconsin to escape the pollen in August, but this year, because of Howard’s running away, Friedl was deprived of her vacation. Anna often signed off with the complaint that Friedl was the only one of the better-class children to have no holiday. To make up for it she fed her more than ever, and the child had the color of too much nourishment in her face, a hectic, touchy, barbarous face. She couldn’t be got to close the door when she went to the can, as even Georgie had been taught to do.
I hadn’t forgotten that Friedl had been promised to me when I kept out of sight at the football game that day—the players bucking and thudding on the white lines of the frozen field. She was a young lady then, corrected of all such habits, I’m sure, grown big like her mother, and with her uncle’s winesap complexion, and wearing a raccoon coat, eagerly laughing and flagging a Michigan banner. She was studying to be a dietitian at Ann Arbor. This was about ten years removed from the Saturdays when I was given the money by Coblin to take her to the movies.
Anna did not object to our going, but she herself wouldn’t touch money on holy days. She observed them all, in
cluding the new moons, from a little Hebrew calendar, covering her head, lighting candles, and whispering prayers, with her eyes dilated and determined, going after religious terrors with the fear and nerve of a Jonah driven to enter frightful Nineveh. She thought it was her duty while I was in her house to give me some religious instruction, and it was a queer account I got from her of the Creation and Fall, the building of Babel, the Flood, the visit of the angels to Lot, the punishment of his wife and the lewdness of his daughters, in a spout of Hebrew, Yiddish, and English, powered by piety and anger, little flowers and bloody fires supplied from her own memory and fancy. She didn’t abridge much in stories like the one about Isaac sporting with Rebecca in Abimelech’s gardens, or the rape of Dinah by Shechem.
“He tortured her,” she said.
“How?”
“Tortured!”
She didn’t think more was necessary and she was right. I have to hand it to her that she knew her listener. There wasn’t going to be any fooling about it. She was directing me out of her deep chest to the great eternal things.
Chapter 3
EVEN AT THAT TIME I couldn’t imagine that I would marry into the Coblin family. And when Anna snatched Howard’s saxophone, my thought was, “Go on, take it. What do I want it for! I’ll do better than that.” My mind was already dwelling on a good enough fate.
While the old lady, following her own idea of what that fate would be, continued to find various jobs for me.
Saying “various jobs,” I give out the Rosetta stone, so to speak, to my entire life.
These earliest jobs, though, that she chose for us, they weren’t generally of the callousing kind. If hard, they were temporary and supposed to lead to something better. She didn’t intend us to be common laborers. No, we were to wear suits, not overalls, and she was going to set us on the way to becoming gentlemen despite our being born to have no natural hope of it, unlike her own sons with the German governesses and tutors and gymnasium uniforms they had had. It was not her fault that they couldn’t do better than to become small-town businessmen, for they had been brought up to give the world a harder shake. Not that she ever complained of them, and they behaved with decent respect toward her, two sizable broad men in belted overcoats and spats, Stiva driving a Studebaker and Alexander a Stanley Steamer. Both were inclined to be silent and bored. Addressed in Russian, they answered in English, and apparently they weren’t so enormously grateful for all she had done. Perhaps she worked so hard over Simon and me to show them what she could do even with such handicaps as ours; and maybe she sermonized us both about love because of her sons. Although she had a quick way of capturing their heads when they bent down to give her the kiss of duty.
Anyway, she had us under hard control. We had to brush our teeth with salt and wash our hair with Castile, bring home our report cards, and sleeping in skivvies was outlawed; we had to wear pajamas.
What did Danton lose his head for, or why was there a Napoleon, if it wasn’t to make a nobility of us all? And this universal eligibility to be noble, taught everywhere, was what gave Simon airs of honor, Iroquois posture and eagle bearing, the lithe step that didn’t crack a twig, the grace of Chevalier Bayard and the hand of Cincinnatus at the plow, the industry of the Nassau Street match-boy who became the king of corporations. Without a special gift of vision, maybe you wouldn’t have seen it in most of us, lining up in the schoolyard on a red fall morning, standing on the gravel in black sheepskins and twisted black stockings, mittens, Western gauntlets, and peeling shoes, while the drum and bugle corps blasted and pounded and the glassy tides of wind drove weeds, leaves, and smoke around, struck the flag stiff and clanked the buckle of the rope on the steel pole. But Simon must have stood out, at the head of the school police patrol, in starched linen Sam Browne belt ironed the night before and serge cap. He had a handsome, bold, blond face; even the short scar on his brow was handsome and assertive. In the school windows Thanksgiving cutouts were hanging, black and orange Pilgrims and turkeys, strung cranberries, and the polished glass showed the blue and the red chill of the sky, the electric lights and the blackboards inside. A red and dark building; an abbey, a mill by the Fall River or the Susquehanna, a country jail—it resembled each somewhat.
Simon had a distinguished record here. President of the Loyal League, he wore the shield on his sweater, and was valedictorian. I didn’t have his singleness of purpose but was more diffuse, and anybody who offered entertainment could get me to skip and do the alleys for junk, or prowl the boathouse and climb in the ironwork under the lagoon bridge. My marks showed it, and the old lady would give me a going-over when I brought them in, calling me “cat-head” and, in her French, “meshant,” threatening that I’d go to work at fourteen. “I’ll get you a certificate from the Board and you can go like a Polack and work in the stockyards,” she’d say.
Other times she’d take a different tone with me. “It isn’t that you don’t have a brain, you’re just as smart as anybody else. If Kreindl’s son can be a dentist you can be governor of Illinois. Only you’re too easy to tickle. Promise you a joke, a laugh, a piece of candy, or a lick of ice-cream, and you’ll leave everything and run. In short, you’re a fool,” she said, taking her shawl of woolen knitted spider-circles in her hands and drawing it down as a man draws on his lapels. “You don’t know what’s coming if you think you can get by with laughing and eating peach pie.” Coblin had given me a taste for pie; she scorned and despised it. “Paper and glue,” she said with hatred and her Jehovah jealousy of outside influences. “What else did he teach you?” she menacingly asked.
“Nothing.”
“Nothing is right!” And she would make me stand and endure a punitive silence, a comment on myself and my foolishness, overgrown and long-legged in my short pants, large-headed, with black mass of hair and cleft chin—a source of jokes. And also a healthy complexion wasted on me evidently, for she would say, “Look, look, look at his face! Look at it!” grinning and gripping the holder in her gums, smoke trickling up from her cigarette.
She once caught me in the street, which was being paved, chewing tar from one of the seething tar-pots, with my friend Jimmy Klein whose family she didn’t approve of anyhow, and I was in her bad books for a longer time than ever. These periods kept increasing, my misdemeanors growing worse. From taking my punishments very hard, consulting Mama as to how to be forgiven and asking her to approach the old lady for me, and shedding tears when I was pardoned, I got to the stage of feeling more resistant, through worldly comparisons that made me see my crimes more tolerantly. That isn’t to say that I stopped connecting her with the highest and the best—taking her at her own word—with the courts of Europe, the Congress of Vienna, the splendor of family, and all kinds of profound and cultured things as hinted in her conduct and advertised in her speech—she’d call up connotations of the utmost importance, the imperial brown of Kaisers and rotogravures of capitals, the gloominess of deepest thought. And I wasn’t unaffected by her nagging. I didn’t want to go out at fourteen with a certificate and work in the packing plants, so occasionally, for a spell, I’d pick up; I’d do my homework and almost climb out of my seat, wagging my arm with zeal to answer questions. Then Grandma would swear that I’d not only go to high school but, if she lived and had strength, to college. “Just so you want! Heaven and earth will be moved.” And she spoke of her cousin Dasha who had rolled on the floor nights to stay awake, studying for her medical exam.
When Simon graduated and gave the commencement address I was skipped a grade, and the principal mentioned us in his speech, both March brothers. The whole family was present—Mama at the back where she had placed herself with George, in case he should act up. She wasn’t going to leave him at home today, and they were in the last row, where the floor and the bottom of the gallery came the closest. I was sitting up in front, in the feather-trailed air, with the old lady, who was dressed up in dark silk and multiply-wound gold chains with the heart of a locket that one of her teething children h
ad dented; she was narrow-nosed with pride, and distinguished, in a kind of fury of silent trying, from the other immigrant relatives, her double spray of feathers busy hanging in two directions. This was what she had been attempting to get over to us, that if we did as she said we could expect plenty of results like this public homage.
“Now I want to see you up there next year,” she said to me.
But she wasn’t going to. It was already too late, notwithstanding that I had applied myself enough to skip; my past record was against me, and anyhow I didn’t take permanent inspiration from this success. I wasn’t cut out for it.
And besides, Simon didn’t keep it up himself. He remained more attentive to school than I, but he went through a change the summer he waited on tables in Benton Harbor, and came back with some different aims from his original ones and new ideas about conduct.
A sign of his change, and of great importance for me, was that he returned in the fall brawnier and golden-colored but with an upper-front tooth broken, sharp and a little discolored among the whole and white ones, and his face, laughter and all, altered by it. He wouldn’t say how it had happened. Was it in a fight that someone had cracked it?
“Kissing a statue,” he said to me. “No, I was biting a dime in a crap game.”
