by Saul Bellow
We were in the Loop much more than we ought to have been and were continually running into Coblin standing in theater lines during school hours. He never told on me. He only said, like a sport, “What’s today, Augie? The mayor closed up the school?” Cheerful as usual, grinning and happy in the limy and red lights of the marquee, like the old king of the Scotch mists who had half a face of emerald and half of red jewel.
“What’s the feature?”
“Bardelys the Magnificent plus Dave Apollon and his Komarinsky dancers. Come along and keep me company.”
We had a reason, at that time, for keeping away from school. Steve the Sailor Bulba, my lockermate, brute-nosed and red, with the careful long-haired barbering and toutish sideburns that gave notice that he was dangerous; bearish, heavy-bottomed in his many-buttoned, ground-scuffing sailor pants and his menacing rat-peaked shoes: a housebreaker who stole plumbing fixtures and knocked open telephone coin boxes in recently vacated flats—this Bulba had taken my science notebook and turned it in as his own. Since there was nothing I could do with Bulba, Jimmy lent me his notes, and I carelessly erased his name and wrote my own over it. We were caught, and Simon had to be called in. Simon didn’t want Mama to be brought to school any more than I did. He was able to get around Wigler, the science teacher, eventually. But all the while Bulba, small-eyed and looking mild, his forehead peaceful and blind, wrinkled to the gentle winter light of the classroom, was trying to make his clasp-knife stand up on its blades, like a horny insect.
After this it wasn’t hard for Jimmy to induce me to go downtown with him, especially on science afternoons, to ride, if there was nothing better to do, in the City Hall elevator with his brother Tom, from the gilded lobby to the Municipal Courts. In the cage we rose and dropped, rubbing elbows with bigshots and operators, commissioners, grabbers, heelers, tipsters, hoodlums, wolves, fixers, plaintiffs, flatfeet, men in Western hats and women in lizard shoes and fur coats, hothouse and arctic drafts mixed up, brute things and airs of sex, evidence of heavy feeding and systematic shaving, of calculations, grief, not-caring, and hopes of tremendous millions in concrete to be poured or whole Mississippis of bootleg whisky and beer.
Tommy sent us to his bucket-shop stockbroker on Lake Street, back of the panels of a cigar-store front, later a handbook. Tommy was in a good position to get leads. But even in those money-minting days he never did more than break even. If you didn’t count the gains that went into his wardrobe and the gifts he gave his family. The Kleins were all gift-givers. Gift robes and wrappers, Venetian mirrors and chateaux-in-the-moonlight tapestries, teacarts, end tables, onyx-based lamps, percolators and electric toasters, and novels—boxes of things stacked up in the closets and under the beds, awaiting their time of usefulness. And yet, except on Sundays when they dolled up, the Kleins looked poor. Old Klein wore his vest over his long-sleeved undershirt and rolled his cigarettes in a little machine.
The one unmarried daughter, Eleanor, had a gypsy style and got herself up in flaming, bursting flowers and Japanese dyes. Fat and pale, with an intelligent Circassian bow to her eyes, very humane, overreconciled to a bad lot, taking it for granted that she was too fat to get a husband and forgiving her married sisters and mobile brothers their better luck, she had a genial cry, almost male and fraternal. She was especially kind to me, called me “lover” and “little brother” and “heart-breaker,” told my fortune in cards and knitted me a three-peaked skating cap in yellow and green so that I would look like a Norwegian champion on the pond. When she was well enough—she suffered from rheumatism and had female disorders—she worked in the wrapping department of a soap factory on the North Branch; and when she was at home sat with her mother in the kitchen, wrapped in a flamboyant floral material, heavy black hair slipping back loose and tuberous from a topknot, drinking coffee, knitting, reading, shaving her legs, playing operettas on the gramophone, painting her nails, and, doing these necessary or half-necessary or superfluous things, invisibly paid herself out farther and farther into the mood of a long-seated woman.
The Kleins respected and admired Grandma Lausch for the task she undertook with us. However, Grandma heard, from one of her Pinkerton sources, that Georgie was seen with the chicks between the buildings—they never reached full size, these animals, from lack of sunlight and good feed, but moulted and died scraggly and in a queer state of growth—and she called the Kleins some ugly names.
She didn’t come down to give them a piece of her mind because it was no use fighting; they were sometimes able to get me some small job or other, through the influence of Jimmy’s uncle Tambow, who delivered the vote of his relatives in the ward and was a pretty big wheel in Republican ward politics. We had a very good month before elections, passing out campaign literature. Tambow often had use for us when someone put a piece of business in his way, like lost articles in the post office or distressed goods in a bankruptcy. It had to be something worth while to pull him away from his card game, but when he had made his buy of razors, leather straps, or doll dishes, toy xylophones, glass-cutters, hotel soap, or first-aid kits, being exempt from licenses, he’d set up a stand on Milwaukee Avenue and hire us to run it. His own sons refused to work for him.
He was divorced and lived in a single room. He had a huge nose, and a countenance loose in the skin, with the eye-bags of a fishing bird, seamy, greenish, and gray. Patient, diligent-looking, and gross, on his chair like a vaquero deep sunk in the saddle, he whistled when he breathed from his burden of weight and the bite on his cigar; hair grew from his nose and about the various rings on his knuckles. All times of the year were alike to him. May or November, he had his eleven o’clock breakfast of tea with milk and lump sugar and sweet rolls, dinner of steak and baked potatoes, he smoked ten or twelve Ben Beys, wore the same pants of aldermanic stripe, a hat of dark convention drawing the sphere of social power over his original potent face while he considered what to meld and when to play jack or ace, or whether he could give his son Clementi the two bucks he often came in to ask for. Clementi was the younger son who lived with his mother and stepfather back of their infants’-wear store. “Mine boy, with pleasure,” or, “Tomorrow, with pleasure,” Tambow said. Tambow didn’t say no to sons who had a stepfather. And, a good five rinds inside his old Adam, in the grease, tea, and onion blaze of his restaurant headquarters, crumbling ashes on his lap and picking up his cards with one hand, he wasn’t, with his other sins, worried over money; he was grand-ducal with it, like the Kleins. And Clem was an easy spender too, and stood treat. But he wouldn’t work, not for his father or for anyone else. So old Tambow set us up in the Milwaukee Avenue throng with, usually, Sylvester in charge, put in a fix with the cops so we wouldn’t be bothered, and went back to his card game.
It was a bad time for Sylvester. He had lost the lease on his movie, which had been failing anyway—it was now a wallpaper and paint shop—and he was living with his father, for his wife had left him and, he told us himself, threw stones at him when he tried to come through the backyard to see her. He had given her up for crazy and sent a letter agreeing to an annulment. To raise the money for his fees at Armour Tech, where he was trying to finish his work for an engineer’s degree, he had sold his furniture and movie equipment, and now he said that he had been away from school too long to sit in a classroom. Eyes tearing in the November wind as he stood with us on Milwaukee Avenue, thick hands in his overcoat pocket, neck sunk, foot knocking foot, he made depressed jokes. The difference in our ages was no consideration with him. He told all his thoughts. When he finished his degree he was off to see the total globe. Foreign governments were crying for American engineers, and he could write his own ticket. He’d go to Kimberley, where he understood it was true that the natives tried to hide the diamonds in their guts. Or to Soviet Russia—now giving us the whole story, that he sympathized with the Reds and admired Lenin, and especially Trotsky, who had won the civil war, traveling in a tank and reading French novels, while czar, priests, barons, generals, and landlords were b
eing smoked out of the palaces.
Meantime, Jimmy and I were sitting on Tambow’s two big suitcases, and we called, “Get ya blades here!” and tended to business. Sylvester collected the money.
Chapter 4
ALL THE INFLUENCES were lined up waiting for me. I was born, and there they were to form me, which is why I tell you more of them than of myself.
At this time, and later too, I had a very weak sense of consequences, and the old lady never succeeded in opening much of a way into my imagination with her warnings and predictions of what was preparing for me—work certificates, stockyards, shovel labor, penitentiary rockpiles, bread and water, and lifelong ignorance and degradation. She invoked all these, hotter and hotter, especially from the time I began to go with Jimmy Klein, and she tried to tighten house discipline, inspected my nails and shirt collar before school, governed my table conduct more sharply, and threatened to lock me out nights if I stayed in the streets after ten. “You can go to the Kleins, if they’ll take you in. Listen to me, Augie, I’m trying to make something of you. But I can’t send Mama out to follow you and see what you do. I want you to be a mensch. You have less time to change than you think. The Klein boy is going to get you into trouble. He has thievish eyes. The truth now—is he a crook or not? Aha! He doesn’t answer. True,” she said, pushing sharply. “Say!”
I answered emptily, “No,” and wondered what she knew and who had told her. For Jimmy, like Stashu Kopecs, did take what he wanted in stores and from stands. And at this very time we were engaged in a swindle in Deever’s neighborhood department store, where we were Christmas extras in the toy department, Santa Claus’s helpers, in elves’ costumes, with painted faces.
High-school sophomores, we were getting too big for this sort of thing, but Santa Claus himself was enormous, a Swedish stoker and handyman, from the alley side of the store, a former iron-boat fireman from Duluth, with trellis-winding muscles and Neanderthal eye-sockets, hootch-shining lumps in his forehead and his beard-hidden lip packed with Copenhagen Seal snuff. Over an undershirt full of holes, he strapped pillows for girth, wadded up his pants, for his legs were long and thin, and we helped pull on his coat. Painted and rouged with theater greasepaint and dusted with mica snow, Jimmy and I marched around the store with tambourines and curl-tongued noisemakers, turning somersaults in our billiard-felt jester’s suits, and we gathered a gang of kids to lead to the third floor where the Swede Santa Claus sat in his sleigh, with reindeer artfully hung from the ceiling, the toy trains snicking and money baskets mousing swift and mechanical on the cables to the cashier’s cage. Here we were in charge of a surprise-package barrel done up in red and green paper, hollies and diamond powder and coils of silver bristles. These Christmas packages sold for two bits, and Jimmy decided that no inventory of them was possible and began to pocket every tenth quarter. For several days he didn’t tell me this, only stood me to lunch. Then he let me into his secret as the volume of business got heavier. We were supposed to carry the money to the cashier when we had accumulated ten dollars. “She dumps it straight in the sack with the rest of the change,” he said. “She doesn’t mark down where it comes from because she’s too busy raking it in, so why shouldn’t we take a cut?” We had many discussions about it and raised the percentage to two quarters in every ten. There was a great thriving noise and glitter; all minds were dispersed into this Christmas tinkling, whirring, carols, and signal chimes, and what we were doing in secret with our hands wasn’t observable. We stole considerable money. Jimmy was ahead of me. Not only had he started earlier, but I was out several days from the effect of butterscotch cream pie and other rich stuff we treated ourselves to. Or perhaps from a heightening of nerves through the brilliance and success of the wrong we were doing and the problem of how to spend the money. Jimmy spent a lot on presents—elegant slippers and string-feathered mules for everyone, smoking jackets, jazzy ties, rag rugs, and Wearever aluminum. From me, Mama got a bathrobe, the old woman a cameo pin, Georgie plaid stockings, and Simon a shirt. I gave presents to Mrs. Klein and Eleanor too, and to some girls at school.
Days when we weren’t working I stayed by preference at the Kleins’, where the window sills were level with the sidewalk, and got a taste of what it was to be sitting on parlor furniture while outside something was shaping up from our misdeeds, as for a Roger Touhy, Tommy O’Connor, Basil Banghart, or Dillinger, who had had surgery on their faces, acid on their fingertips, who played solitaire, followed the sports results, sent out for hamburgers and milkshakes, and were trapped at last going to the movies or on a roof. Sometimes we lettered on Jimmy’s genealogical chart, it being a belief of the Kleins that they went back to a Spanish family called Avila, in the thirteenth century. They had a cousin in Mexico City who manufactured leather jackets, and he was the author of this theory. Me, I was perfectly willing to believe in such lucky breaks of descent. I worked with Jimmy on the sheet of mechanical-drawing paper, lettering out his family tree in red and india inks. I was uneasy.
At the end of the Christmas holiday Deever’s caught up with us. The department manager came and had a talk with Grandma. There had been an inventory of the packages. We didn’t attempt to deny the theft, and I at any rate didn’t argue the figure of seventy dollars that the manager gave, though the amount we took was actually less. The old lady at first refused to see me through. Icy, she told Simon he had better call in Lubin, the caseworker, for she didn’t have the strength to give and had only undertaken to help bring up children, not to handle criminals. Simon brought her around because, he said, the Charities would want to know how long we had been working and why they weren’t told. Of course the old lady never had the slightest intention of letting me be sent to reform school, as was threatened. But the threat was made, and I was prepared to go to Juvenile Court and pass on to the house of correction with a practically Chinese acquiescence in their right to punish that foretold what I’d let be done with me. It partly showed I felt people were right because they were angry. On the other hand, I lacked the true sense of being a criminal, the sense that I was on the wrong side of the universal wide line with the worse or weaker part of humankind, carrying brow marks or mutilated thumbs and slit ears and noses.
There wasn’t just threatening and scolding this time but absolute abasement. After the first giant crash, in full brass, Grandma put me on cold treatment. Simon was distant to me. I couldn’t throw it up to him that he had given me advice about short-change; he’d only say curtly that I was a chump and act as though he didn’t know what I was talking about. Mama must have felt she was in one of her star-crossed hours, and that the result of her unlucky capitulation to our father was beginning to show its final retributive shape. Even she said a few sharp things to me. I suffered like a beaver. However, they couldn’t get me to beg and entreat—though I wasn’t unmoved by the thought of a jail sentence, head shaven, fed on slumgullion, mustered in the mud, buffaloed and bossed. If they decided I had it coming, why, I didn’t see how I could argue it.
But I was never in real danger of the house of correction. The robe, cameo, and other things were given back. Enough money was saved out of my wages at Coblin’s to pay up. Jimmy’s family got him off too. He was clobbered by his father, his mother cried, and the whole thing was done with long before my disgrace was lifted a single degree. We had it much austerer at our house. Nor did the Kleins remain angry with me; in their eyes it wasn’t a great subject for anger nor thought of as a disfigurement of my soul. In a few days I was as welcome as ever, and Eleanor was calling me “lover” and knitting a muffler for me to replace one I had to return.
When Jimmy came out of his scare, having carried himself unmoved and cynical all along and taken his father’s sharp, erratic wallops, given by his undershirted arm, without shrinking, he was indignant that Deever’s had made a profit on us. They had, too. He had some ideas about revenge and went as far as speaking of setting a fire, but I had had as much trouble as I wanted with Deever’s, and, really, so had he, but i
t took some of the sting out of it for him to plot at least.
Clem Tambow, Jimmy’s cousin, had a healthy laugh on us for the debate on burning down the store and the other desperado proposals. He suggested that if we wanted to make up some of the money we had lost we could get into the Charleston contest at the Webber and try to earn an honest dollar. He wasn’t kidding. He wanted to be an actor and had already tried amateur night, imitating a Britisher who tried to tell a long story about an incident in the Khyber Pass. The Poles and Swedes booed him, and the master of ceremonies sent out the hook. His brother Donald had actually won five dollars, singing “Marquita” and doing a tap dance. Donald was the handsome one, black and curly—the mother’s son. She too was handsome and dignified, and wore black dresses and pince nez in her shop. Her special subject was her brother the industrialist, who had died in Warsaw of typhus during the war. Clem had his father’s looks, high color, bony head and beak, low-grown point of hair, large lips, everything but the weight; his legs were nervous and long. He would have had a chance to win the city half-mile if he hadn’t hurt his wind with cigars and—he bragged about it—what the health manuals called self-abuse and depletion of manhood. He jeered at his wickedness and at all the things that make the admonitory world groan. He strutted on the track, his thighs as skinny as his calves and covered with straight black hairs, nifty and supercilious toward his competitors, the squares who were prancing and bracing. But he was all the same a little dubious and haunted, his black eyes in the long joke-austerity of his head often very melancholy. He could be as melancholy as dirt. He said there was nothing I couldn’t do better than he, if I wanted to try. “Oh yes,” he said, “you could make broads who wouldn’t even look at me.” It was this, mainly, that he gave me credit for. “With teeth like yours. They’re perfect. My mother let me ruin mine. If I ever do get into big-time I’ll have to wear a plate.” I laughed at nearly everything he said, and he often told me I was dim-witted. “Poor March, anything can make him laugh.”
