by Saul Bellow
Six months before such an answer would have been unthinkable. Also, there was money not accounted for to Grandma’s satisfaction.
“Don’t tell me all you made in tips was thirty dollars! I know that Reimann’s is a first-class resort, and they have people all the way from Cleveland and St. Louis. I expected you to spend something on yourself when you were away the whole summer, but—”
“Well, sure, and I did spend about fifteen dollars.”
“You always have been honest, Simon. Now Augie brought us home every cent.”
“Have been? I am!” he said, mounting up on his pride and tallest falsehood-spurning dignity. “I brought you my wages for twelve weeks, and thirty bucks besides.”
She let the matter drop with a silent, piercing glitter from the flat of her gold-wired goggles and a warning-off from a false course in her grayness and wrinkles and a quick suck of her cheek. She indicated she could strike a blow when the moment came. But for the first time I felt from Simon that he was thinking you didn’t have to worry about that. Not that he was ready to jump off into rebellion. But he had some ideas, and by and by we were saying to each other things that couldn’t be said before the women.
At first we often worked in the same places. We went to Coblin’s sometimes when he needed us for his crew, and down in Woolworth’s cellar we unpacked crockery from barrels so enormous that you could walk into them; we scooped out stale straw and threw it in the furnace. Or we loaded paper into the giant press and baled it. It was foul down there from the spoiled food and mustard cans, old candy, and the straw and paper. For lunch we went upstairs. Simon refused to take sandwiches from home; he said we needed a hot meal when we were working. For twenty-five cents we got two hotdogs, a mug of root beer, and pie, the dogs in cotton-quality rolls, dripping with the same mustard that made the air bad below. But it was the figure you cut as an employee, on an employee’s footing with the girls, in work clothes, and being of that tin-tough, creaking, jazzy bazaar of hardware, glassware, chocolate, chickenfeed, jewelry, drygoods, oilcloth, and song hits—that was the big thing; and even being the Atlases of it, under the floor, hearing how the floor bore up under the ambling weight of hundreds, with the fanning, breathing movie organ next door and the rumble descending from the trolleys on Chicago Avenue—the bloody-rinded Saturday gloom of wind-borne ash, and blackened forms of five-story buildings rising up to a blind Northern dimness from the Christmas blaze of shops.
Simon moved on soon to a better job with the Federal News Company, which had a concession of the stands in the railroad stations and the candy and paper sales on trains. The family had to lay out the deposit on a uniform, and he began to keep midnight hours, downtown and on the trains, smart and cadet-like in the spanty new uniform. Sunday mornings he rose late and came out in his bathrobe, sitting down to breakfast big and easy, emboldened by his new earning power. He was shorter than before with Mama and George, and occasionally he was difficult with me.
“Lay off that Tribune before I get to it. Christ, I bring it home at night, and in the morning it’s all in pieces before I can look at it!”
On the other hand he gave Mama some of his pay without Grandma’s knowledge, to spend on herself, and saw to it that I had pocket money and that even George got pennies for soldier-caramels. There was never anything mean about Simon where money was concerned. He had kind of an oriental, bestowing temperament; he had no peace or rest if he ever lacked dough and would sooner beat a check altogether than go out of a lunchwagon without leaving a good tip. He banged me on the head once for taking up one of the two dimes he put under our plates in a coffee shop. Ten cents seemed to me enough.
“Don’t let me catch you doing such piker things again,” he said to me, and I was afraid of him and didn’t dare talk back.
Those Sunday mornings in the kitchen, then, with his uniform seen inside the bedroom, hung with care from the foot of the bed, and comfortable tears of mist running on the windows, he felt the strength of his position as the one getting ready to take the control of the family into his own hands. For he sometimes spoke to me of Grandma as of a stranger.
“She’s really nothing to us, you know that, don’t you, Aug?”
It wasn’t so much rebellion as it was repudiation she had to fear, not being heeded, when he spread his paper over the entire table and read with his hand to his forehead and the darkening blond hair falling over it. Still, he didn’t have any plan for deposing her and didn’t interfere with her power over the rest of us—especially over Mama, who remained as much a slavey as before. And with her eyes deteriorating, so that the glasses fitted the year before were no longer strong enough. We went back to the dispensary for a new pair and cleared another inquisition; we only just cleared it. They had Simon’s age on the record and asked whether he wasn’t working. I thought I didn’t need Grandma’s rehearsing any more and could invent answers myself; and even Mama didn’t obey as usual by being silent, but lifted up her odd clear voice and said, “My boys are still in school, and after school I need them to help me out.”
Then we were nearly caught by the clerk in the making out of the budget and were terrified, but we were favored by the crowd that day and got the slip to the optical department. We were not ready yet to do without the old woman’s coaching.
Simon’s news became the chief interest of the house now, when he was shifted from the trains to a stand in the La Salle Street Station and then to the central stand that carried books and novelties, just where the most rushing and significant business was done, in the main path of travel. There he was able to see the celebrities in their furs or stetsons and alpacunas, going free in the midst of their toted luggage, always more proud or more melancholy or more affable or more lined than they were represented. They arrived from California or from Oregon on the Portland Rose in the snow whirled from the inhuman heights of La Salle Street or cleaving hard in the speed lines of the trains; they took off for New York on the Twentieth Century, in their flower-garnished, dark polished parlor-like compartments upholstered in deep green, washing in silver sinks, sipping coffee out of china, smoking cigars.
Simon reported, “I saw John Gilbert today in a big velour hat,” or, “Senator Borah left me the change of a dime from his Daily News,” or, “If you saw Rockefeller you’d believe that he has a rubber stomach, as they say.”
When he gave these accounts at the table he set off the hope that somehow greatness might gather him into its circle since it touched him already, that he might appeal to somebody, that Insull’s eye might be taken by him and he would give him his card and tell him to report at his office next morning. I have a feeling that soon Grandma began to blame Simon in her secret thought for not making the grade. Maybe he didn’t care enough to seem distinguished, maybe his manner wasn’t right, impudent, perhaps. Because Grandma believed in the stroke or inspiration that brought you to the notice of eminent men. She collected stories about this, and she had a scheme for writing to Julius Rosenwald whenever she read that he was making a new endowment. It was always to Negroes, never to Jews, that he gave his money, she said, and it angered her enormously, and she cried, “That German Yehuda!” At a cry like that the age-crippled old white dog would stand up and try to trot to her.
“That Deutsch!”
Still, she admired Julius Rosenwald; he belonged to the inside ring of her equals; where they sat, with a different understanding from ours, and owned and supervised everything.
Simon, meanwhile, was trying to find a Saturday place for me in the La Salle Street Station and rescue me from the dime-store cellar, where Jimmy Klein had taken his place. Grandma and even Mama were after him to do something.
“Simon, you must pull Augie in.”
“Well, I ask Borg every time I see him. Holy Jesus, folks, everybody has relatives there!”
“What’s the matter, won’t he take a bribe?” said Grandma. “Believe me, he’s waiting for you to offer him one. Ask him for dinner and I’ll show you. A couple of dollar bil
ls in a napkin.”
She’d show us how to practice in the world. Short of brushing the throat of a rival or hindrance with a poison feather at the dinner table, of course, as Nero had done. Simon said he couldn’t invite Borg. He didn’t know him well since he was only an extra, and he didn’t want to look like a toady and be despised.
“Well, my dear Graf Potocki,” Grandma said, narrowing down her look, cold and dry, while he in his impatience was already out of breath. “So you’d rather leave your brother working at Woolworth’s with that foolish Klein boy in the basement!”
After months of this Simon at last got me on downtown, proving that her power over him wasn’t ended yet.
He brought me in to Borg one morning. “Remember now,” he warned me on the streetcar, “no funny stuff. You’ll be working for old foxy grandpa himself, and he isn’t going to put up with any fooling. On this job you handle a lot of dough and it comes at you fast. Anything you’re short at the end of the day Borg will take out of your little envelope. You’re on probation. I’ve seen some dopes go out on their ear.”
He was particularly severe with me that morning. It was stiff cold weather, the ground hard, the weeds standing broken in the frost, the river giving off vapor and the trains leghorn shots of steam into the broad blue Wisconsin-humored sky, the brass handgrip of the straw seats finger-polished, the crusty straw golden, the olive and brown of coats in their folds gold too, and the hairs of Simon’s sizable wrists a greater brightness of the same; also the down of his face, now shaved more often than before. He had a new tough manner of pulling down breath and hawking into the street. And whatever the changes were that he had undergone and was undergoing, still he hadn’t lost his fine-framed independent look that he controlled me with. I was afraid of him, though I was nearly his size. Except for the face, we had the same bones.
I wasn’t fated to do well at the station. Maybe Simon’s threats had something to do with this, and his disgust with me when I had to be docked the first day. But I was a flop, and nearly as much as a dollar short each time, even by the third week. Since I was allowed only two bits above my carfare—forty cents to the penny—I couldn’t cover my shortages, and Simon, grim and brief, told me on the way to the car one night that Borg had given me the boot.
“I couldn’t run after people who short-changed me,” I kept defending myself. “They throw the money down and grab a paper; you can’t leave the stand to shag them.”
At last he answered me coldly, with a cold lick of fire in his eyes, on the stationary wintriness of the black steel harness of the bridge over the dragging unnamable mixture of the river flowing backwards with its waste. “You couldn’t get that money out of somebody else’s change, could you!”
“What?”
“You heard me, you dumbhead!”
“Why didn’t you tell me before?” I cried back.
“Tell you?” he said, pushing angrily by me. “Tell you to keep your barn buttoned, as if you didn’t have any more brains than George!”
And he let the old woman yell at me, saying nothing in my defense. Before this he had always stood up for me when it was any serious matter. Now he kept aside in the low lights of the kitchen, his fist on his hip and his coat slung over his shoulder, once in a while lifting the lid on the stove where our supper stood warming, and prodding the coals. I took it hard that he was disloyal to me, but also I knew I had let him down with Borg, whom he sold a bright brother that turned out stupid. But I had been at a small stand under a pillar, where I seemed to get merely stragglers, and Borg gave me only the coat of a uniform, gone in the lining, with ragged cuffs and the braid shot. Alone, I had nobody to point out celebrities to me if any came that way, and I passed the time mooning and waiting for lunch relief and the three o’clock break, when I would watch Simon at the main stand and admire the business there—where the receipts were something to see—the pour of money and the black molecular circulation of travelers knowing what they wanted in gum, fruit, cigarettes, the thick bulwarks of papers and magazines, the power of the space and the span of the main chandelier. I thought that if Borg had started me here instead of in my marble corner, off on the edge where I heard only echoes and couldn’t even see the trains, I would have made out better.
So I had the ignominy of being canned and was read the riot act in the kitchen. Seemingly the old lady had been waiting for just this to happen and had it ready to tell me that there were faults I couldn’t afford to have, situated where I was in life, a child of an abandoned family with no father to keep me out of trouble, nobody but two women, feeble-handed, who couldn’t forever hold a cover over us from hunger, misery, crime, and the wrath of the world. Maybe if we had been sent to an orphanage, as Mama at one time thought of doing, it would have been better. For me, at least, in lessons of hardness, since I had the kind of character that looked for ease and places where I could lie down. She shook the crabbed unit of her hand at me with the fierceness of the words, till now spoken only to herself, bitterly, and with them there came out an oceanic lightning of prophecy that had gathered in her skull by the stove-side through days not otherwise very lighted.
“Remember when I am in my grave, Augie, when I will be dead!”
And the falling hand landed on my arm; it was accidental, but the effect was frightful, for I yelled as if this tap had tenfold hit my soul. Maybe I was yelling about my character, made to feel the worst of it, that I’d go to the grave myself with never the hope of another and better; no power to relieve me of it, purify and redeem me from it; and she was putting herself already beyond life to make her verdict on me binding beyond recall.
“Gedenk, Augie, wenn ich bin todt!”
But she couldn’t stand to dwell long on her death. Heretofore she hadn’t ever mentioned her mortality to us, so it was a sort of lapse; and even now she was like a Pharaoh or Caesar promising to pass into a God—except that she would have no pyramids or monuments to make good the promise and was that much inferior to them. However, her painful, dreadful, toothless, gape-gummed crying the cry of judgment in the lock of death worked hard on me. She had the power to make a threat like this more than the threat of ordinary people, but she also had to pay the price of her own terror at it.
Now she switched back to our fatherlessness. It was a bad moment, and I had brought it on Mama. Simon kept silent by the nickel and bitumen black of the stove, fiddling with the poker-handled steel coil of the lid lever. In the other corner sat Mama, sober and guilty, the easy mark of whoever was our father. The old lady was out to burn me to small ash that night, and everyone was going to get scorched.
I couldn’t go back to my old Woolworth job. And so Jimmy Klein and I went together to look for work, despite Grandma’s warnings against him. He was highly sociable and spirited, slight and dark-faced, narrow-eyed, witty-looking, largely willing to be honest but not overstrapped by conscience—the old lady was right about that. He couldn’t come to the house; she wouldn’t encourage me to keep bad company, she said. But I was welcome at the Kleins’, and even Georgie was. Afternoons, when I had to take him out, I could leave him there playing with the little chicks they raised, or tried to raise, in the dark, clay areaway between buildings, and Mrs. Klein could keep an eye on him from the cellar kitchen, where she sat at the table, handy to the range, paring, peeling, slicing, cutting meat for stew, and molding meatballs.
Weighing more than two hundred pounds, and with one leg shorter than the other, she couldn’t keep long on her feet. Unworried and regular-looking, brow bent to brow, nose curving and short, she dyed her hair black with a liquid ordered by mail from Altoona; she applied it with old toothbrushes she kept in a glass on the bathroom window; this gave her braids a peculiar Indian luster. They fell along her cheeks down to the multiform work of her chins. Her black eyes were small but merciful to confusion; she was popelike and liberal with pardons and indulgences. Jimmy had four brothers and three sisters, some of them occupied mysteriously, but all were genial and glad-handing, even the
married elder daughters and the middle-aged sons. Two of her children were divorced and one daughter was a widow, so that Mrs. Klein had grandchildren in her kitchen at all times, some coming from school for lunch and after school for cocoa, others creeping on the floor or lying in buggies. Everyone in those prosperous days was earning money, and yet all had trouble. Gilbert had to pay alimony; the divorced sister, Velma, was not getting hers regularly. Her husband had knocked out one of her teeth in a brawl, and now he often came to beg her mother to plead with her to come back. I saw him lay his red head on the table and cry while his sons and daughters were playing in the seats of his taxi. He made good dough, still he wouldn’t give Velma enough, figuring she’d come back to him if he kept her needy. She borrowed, however, from her family. I’ve never seen such people for borrowing and lending; there was dough changing hands in all directions, and nobody grudged anyone.
But the Kleins seemed to need a great many things and bought them all on the installment plan. Jimmy was sent out—and I with him—the money put inside the earflaps of his cap, to make payments. On the phonograph, on the Singer machine, on the mohair suite with pellet-filled ashtrays that couldn’t be overturned, on buggies and bicycles, linoleums, on dental and obstetrical work, on the funeral of Mr. Klein’s father, on back-supporting corsets and special shoes for Mrs. Klein, on family photos taken for a wedding anniversary. We covered the city on these errands. Mrs. Klein didn’t mind our going to shows, as we often did, to hear Sophie Tucker whack herself on the behind and sing “Red Hot Mama,” or see Rose La Rose swagger and strip in the indolent rhythm that made Coblin her admirer. “That girl is not just a beautiful girl,” he said. “There are a lot of beautiful girls, but this girl feels men’s hearts. She doesn’t drop off her dress the way others do, she pulls it over her head. That’s why she’s the top of her profession today.”
