by Saul Bellow
On the whole we got on very well. He was lenient about my greenness, and I had some support from him and Jimmy when I took sick with love, with classic symptoms of choked appetite and utter absorption, hankering, great refinements of respect in looks, incompetent, and full of movie-born ideas and phrases of popular songs. The girl’s name was Hilda Novinson, and she was fairly tall but small-faced, with pallor and other signs of weakness of the chest, light-voiced, hasty-spoken, and shy. I never said a word to her, but came by with a miserable counterfeit of merely passing, secretly pumped with raptures and streaming painfully. I clumped by, looking unfeeling and as if I was thinking about other things. With her Russian facial angle and pale eyes, placed low and denying you a direct glance, she had the look of an older woman. She wore a green jacket, she smoked, she walked with a raft of schoolbooks held to the breast and in open galoshes, the clasps clinking. The spread of those open, high-heeled galoshes and their quick clink acted on my love-galled spirit like little fever-feeding darts and made me bristle with an idiot desire to fall before her. Later, when I wised up and was debeatified, I was more sensual. Those first times I was in the state of courtliness, craving pure feeling, and I was well stocked, probably by inheritance, in all the materials of love.
I had no idea that Hilda might be flattered by my following her and was astonished when Clem and Jimmy said it was so. I trailed her in the corridors and maneuvered myself behind her at basketball games, joined the Bonheur Club so that I might be in the same room with her one hour a week, after school, and, suffering badly, stood on the rear platform of her streetcar when she went home. She descended at the front end, and I jumped down from the rear into the high-piled sooty snow and gray, soaked boards of the West Side street. Her father was a tailor, and the family lived behind the shop. Hilda went through the curtain and—what did she do? Take off her gloves? The galoshes? Drink a cup of cocoa? Smoke? I didn’t smoke myself. Fiddle with her books? Complain of a headache? Confide to her mother that I was hunkering around in the glints of the dark street on a winter afternoon, heavy-stepping and in a sheepskin coat? I didn’t think she’d do that. And her tailor father didn’t seem to know of my being there, this lean, unshaved, back-bent man, and I could gaze at him as much as I liked while he pinned, sponged, and pressed, fatigued-looking and oblivious. Anyhow, once she had gone in Hilda didn’t come out again; she sunk into the house and seemed to have no business whatever out of doors.
“With all the babes there are to fall for!” said Clem Tambow, scornful and ugly-nosed. “Let me once take you to a whore, and you’ll forget all about her,” he said. Of course I didn’t answer. “Then I’ll write her a letter for you,” he offered, “and ask for a date. As soon as you’ve taken one single walk with her and kissed her you’ll be washed up. You’ll see how beanbrained she is, and she’s not pretty; she has lousy teeth.” I declined this too. “All right, I’ll talk to her then. I’ll tell her to grab you while you’re still blind. She’ll never get anybody handsomer, and she must know it. What gets you about her? That she smokes, I bet.” Finally Jimmy said, “Don’t bother him, he wants to carry the torch,” and they grabbed their genitals obscenely and threw themselves around on the furniture of the Kleins’ living room, which was our club. But I didn’t stop this sadhearted, worshipful blundering around or standing like painted wood across the street from the tailor shop in the bluey afternoon. Her scraggy father labored with his needle, bent over, and presumably thinking nothing of his appearance to the street in the lighted glass; her chicken-thin little sister in black gym bloomers cut paper with the big shears.
It took several weeks before the acute part of this passed, and meanwhile I was still in the doghouse at home. It didn’t improve things that during this love-struck time I brought in very little money. Simon now had strange hours for coming and going, and he couldn’t be questioned about them, since he was working. We no longer came home for lunch; consequently Mama had the chores we used to do at noon, lugging up the coal, airing Winnie, fetching George from school, and doing all the hard wringing of sheets by herself on washdays, growing leaner and more haggard from the extra work. Anyhow, there was a tone and air of anarchy and unruliness around, and of powers thickening with age and delays, planning the stroke that would make the palace ring as in old times and knock the courtiers’ noggins on the walls when they were least dreaming of it.
“Well, Augie? What? Are you through working?” Grandma said to me. “Finished work, eh? You want to live on the Charities all your life?”
I did have a sort of job at the time, in a flowershop. Only, on the afternoons when I was attending the meetings of the Bonheur Club or trailing Hilda Novinson in her heart-trap galoshes through the slush, I could easily say that Bluegren had no deliveries for me.
Bluegren gave me what he felt like giving on any particular afternoon; and that, usually, was more for helping him shake down and wire the straw cores of wreaths (he had a big gangster clientele) than for deliveries, when he reckoned I would get tips, which by and large turned out pretty fair. I didn’t like traveling on streetcars with large wreaths or floral doorpieces for funerals, because early in the evening I struck the home-going traffic and had to fight for space and hold a corner against conductors and winter-moody passengers, covering the flowers with my body, and was pretty harassed. And then if it was an undertaker’s I was bound for, swinging my package overhead like a bass fiddler and making slow way through the beeping, grinding, and the throng, there hardly ever was anyone in the quilted, silent plush and rose glow of mahogany in the parlor to give me a tip, but only some flunky received me in my pointed skating cap and with my runny nose kept just decent by an occasional touch of my wool glove. Once in a while I’d strike on a wake where there was a jar of bootleg red-eye passing around, in one of those offside green bungalows approached by a boardwalk over the long marsh of the yard, a room of friends and mourners. When you came into one of those whisky-smelling mourning rooms with your flowers, why, nobody was so absorbed that you were ignored, as in other sorts of grieving that I’ve seen, and you were sure to come out with a buck or so in change weighing down your cap. But anyway I preferred to be in the shop—in that Elysian Fields’ drift of flowers piled around the loam boxes of the back room or stacked behind the thick panes of the icebox, the roses, carnations, and chrysanthemums. Especially as I was in love.
Bluegren was an imposing man too, fair, smooth, and big, with considerable healthy flesh—a friend of gangsters and rum-runners, very thick with people like Jake the Barber and, in his time, the chief of the North Siders, Dion O’Bannion, who was a florist himself after a fashion and was knocked off in his own shop by three men said to have been sent by Johnny Torrio and who got away in a blue Jewett sedan. Bluegren used gloves to protect himself from thorns when he whipped out a rose to treat it to the shears. He had blue, cold eyes, prepared for any kind of findings, and a big fleshy nose, a little sick of things. I suppose the confusion will happen of having sharp thoughts and a broad face, or broad thoughts and a sharp face. Bluegren’s was the first kind, from, I reckon, the connection he had with gangsters, and the effects of fear or temporariness. This was what made him that way. He could be rude and bitter, very shrewish sometimes, especially after an important murder of a Genna or Aiello. And a lot of guys were shot that winter.
It was a bad winter for everyone—not just for notables but for people oblivious of anything except their own ups and downs and busy with the limited traffic of their hearts and minds. Kreindl, say, or Eleanor Klein, or my mother. These days Kreindl had operatic nerves and made bitching scenes in his English-basement flat; he threw dishes on the floor and stamped his feet. And Eleanor was in a slump of spirits and often wept in her room over the general drift of her life. There was plenty of such impulse, enough to reach and move all, just in the tone of days. I might have felt this more myself if it hadn’t been for Hilda Novinson.
Mama also was very nervous; it was something you had to know how to detect since s
he didn’t give any of the usual signs. I noticed it from the grimness that showed through her docility, and the longer rest of her weak green eyes on things around her, and sometimes the high-breasted breathing that didn’t arise from any exertion at her work. She had a dizzy watchfulness from the buzzing of some omen or other.
Presently we all knew what was up; the old woman was ready to deliver her stroke. She waited for an evening when we were all at supper. I came in from delivering death-flowers; Simon was off from the station. The old woman hit out in her abrupt way and declared it was time we did something about Georgie, who was growing up. There was beef stew on the table, and everybody, the kid included, continued to eat meat and wipe up gravy. But I never assumed, like the old woman, that he was an unwitting topic; not even the poodle was entirely that but knew even when she became deaf before her death that she was spoken of. And sometimes Georgie had the Gioconda’s own look and smile when he was being discussed, I declare he did, a subtle look that passed down his white lashes and cheeks, a sort of reflex from wisdom kept prisoner by incapacity, something full of comment on the life of all of us. This wasn’t the first time Grandma had spoken of Georgie’s future, but now it was not just another observation but getting down to cases. I assume Mama already knew about it, from the look of waiting that came on her face. Sooner or later something had to be done about him, said the old woman. He was hard to manage, now he was growing so tall and beginning to look like a man. What would we do if he got it in his head to take hold of some girl, she said, and we had to deal with the police? This was her rebuke in full for all our difficulty, disobedience, waywardness, and unmindfulness of our actual condition, and I was the main cause of it, as I realized very well. She said Georgie should go to an institution. It was common sense anyhow that he couldn’t stay with us all his life, and we hadn’t shown much ability to carry burdens so far. Besides, Georgie had to learn to do something and be trained in basketry or brush-making or what it was they could teach the feeble-minded, some trade that would help pay his keep. She finished strong, with the threat that neighbors with little daughters already were angry, seeing him roam around the yards, ready to put on long pants. Not making her distaste any too fine, she said he had reached his development of a man. As something lewd that had, however, to be faced. She got this across, in her granny grimace of repugnance, and left us with her horror.
Ah, it was great for her to make us take a long swig of her mixture of reality and to watch the effect come up sober in our eyes. Finishing her speech, she had a terrific look of shrewd pleasure. Her brows were standing up. I maintain that Georgie had an idea of the topic, while he went on and wiped up the beef gravy. I don’t want to make out that her position was all wicked evil while his was nothing but sublimity. That couldn’t be true. She had a difficult practical burden, that of suggesting this shocking thing by which supposedly we would benefit. We wouldn’t have had the strength or wisdom to propose it. Like so many loving, humane people who, however, have to live, just like everyone else, and count on tougher souls to carry them along. But I am allowing Grandma her best excuse. Because there still remains the satisfaction this gave her. She breathed that tense “Aha!” to herself with which she closed a trap in chess. It was always this same thing; we refused to see where our mistakes were leading, and then the terrible consequences came on. Similar to Elisha’s bear that rushed on the children who were taunting him; or the divine blow that cracked down that Jew so thoughtless as to put out a hand to keep the ark of the covenant from falling off the wagon. It was punishment for mistakes there would be no time now to correct, that was what it was. She was happy when she could act in behalf of this inexorability she was all the time warning us about.
George sat there with one foot stepping on the other and ate the gravy in that unconscious, mind-crippled seraph’s way of his by contrast to this worldly reasoning. Mama in her hurt, high voice tried to answer but only spoke confusion. She was anyway incapable of saying much that was clear, and when she was excited or in pain you couldn’t understand her at all. Then Georgie stopped eating and began to moan.
“You! Quiet!” said the old woman.
I spoke up on his side and Mama’s. I said that George hadn’t done wrong yet and that we wanted to keep him with us.
She had counted on this from me and was prepared. “Kopfmensch meiner,” she said with powerful irony. “Genius! Do you want to wait until he gets in trouble? Are you here to take care of him when you’re needed? You’re in the streets and alleys with Klein, that hoodlum, learning to steal and every kind of dirt. Maybe you’d enjoy being an uncle to a bastard by your brother from a Polish girl with white hair, and explain to her stockyards father that he would be a fine son-in-law to him? He’d murder you with a sledgehammer, like an ox, and burn down the house.”
“Well,” Simon said, “if Augie really wants to take charge of him—”
“Even if Augie were better than he is,” she answered quickly, “what would be the good of it? When Augie works once in a while, there’s more trouble than money. But if he didn’t work at all, imagine how fine it would be! He’d leave the boy at the Kleins’ anyhow, and bum with his friend. Oh, I know your brother, my dear boy; he has a big heart if it costs him no trouble, pure gold, and he can promise you anything when his heart is touched. But how reliable he is I don’t have to tell you. But even if he were as good as his word, could you afford for him to stop bringing in the little he makes? What? Did you inherit a fortune? Can you have servants, gouvernantkes, tutors, such as Lausch laid down his life to give our sons? I have done as much as I could to give you a little education and an honest upbringing, even tried to make gentlemen of you. But you must know who you are, what you are, and not get unreal ideas. So I tell you that you better do for yourself, first, what the world will do anyway for you without kindness. I’ve seen a little more than you; I know how mistakes are corrected, and how many ways there are to die just from foolishness alone, not to say other things. I tried to explain something about this to your brother, but his thoughts are about as steady as the way a drunkard pees.”
Thus she went on with this ominous crying and prophecy. She didn’t have to win Simon over; in this one matter of Georgie he was with her. He wasn’t openly going to join her because of his feeling for Mama, but when we were alone in the bedroom he let me make all my accusations and arguments, waiting me out with a superior face, taking it easy full-length on the sheets—sewed together of Ceresota sacks—and when he thought I was ready to hear him he said, “Tell it to the Marines, kid. Whyn’t you use your brains once in a while before they turn to powder and blow away? The old woman is right and you know it. And don’t think you’re the only one that cares about George either, but something has got to be done with him. How do you know what he might pick up and do? He’s not just a sprout any more, and we can’t be watching him all his life.”
Simon had been rough on me since I had lost the job at the station and during my trials with Wigler and Sailor Bulba and my crookedness at Deever’s. Nor did he think much of Clem and Jimmy, and I had made the mistake of telling him how I felt about Hilda and laid myself open to ridicule. “Why,” he said, “Friedl Coblin’ll be better looking than that when she grows up. She’ll probably have tits anyhow.” Of course Simon knew I wasn’t a real grudge-bearing character but the type that comes down as fast as he boils up. And he considered that he had the right to treat me like this, because he was making progress while I was making a fool of myself, and he intended to carry me along with him, when it was time, the way Napoleon did his brothers. During my worst difficulties with the old lady he’d be stiff and keep a distance, but then he’d also tell me that I could expect him to help me out of real trouble as long as I was reasonably deserving. He didn’t like to see my bubble-headed friends get me in dutch. Yes, he had a sense of duty toward me, and toward George too. I couldn’t say he was being hypocritical about George.
“I was sore as hell there for a while when you just let Mama
talk and didn’t say anything,” I told him. “You know damn well I can’t do much about the kid unless I quit school and take care of him. But if Mama wants him home you should leave that up to her. And you shouldn’t have sat there and let her make a holy show of herself.”
“Ma might as well get it all at once as in installments.” Simon lay on the dark iron bedstead, brawny and blond. He spoke out strongly. Then he paused and took a calm touch of his broken tooth with his tongue. He seemed to have expected that I would light into him harder than I did, and when I had said my sharpest words he went on to let me hear what I pretty well knew without being told. “She got you dead to rights, Augie. You know you’ve been pretty damn sloppy. But anyway we wouldn’t have had the kid with us more than another year. Even if you were in there pitching, which you’re not.”
