by Saul Bellow
“Well, she thinks she’s boss now.”
“Let her think,” he said. He cleared the passages of his head with the loud, short pull that had got to be the mark of his soberest moments and tripped the light switch with his foot. He began to read.
So there wasn’t much I could do after that. I couldn’t any longer acknowledge Grandma to be the head of the family, and it was to Simon that some of the old authority became attached. I stayed in the room with him rather than go out and face Mama, who, when the dishes were done and the crumbs shaken off the cloth, would be more lying than sitting in her chair with the Prussian-spiked bulb emitting its glossy villain light through the head on the squashlike wens and bubbles and hard-grained paint of the walls. When she had a grief she didn’t play it with any arts; she took straight off from her spirit. She made no fuss or noise nor was seen weeping, but in an extreme and terrible way seemed to be watching out the kitchen window, until you came close and saw the tear-strengthened color of her green eyes and of her pink face, her gap-toothed mouth; she laid her head on the wing of the chair sideways, never direct. When sick she was that way also. She climbed into bed in her gown, twisted her hair into braids to keep it from tangling, and had nothing to do with anyone until she felt able to stay on her feet. It was useless for us to come with the thermometer, for she refused to have it; she lay herself dumbly on the outcome of forces, without any work of mind, of which she was incapable. She had some original view on doom or recovery.
Well, it was now decided about George, and, not reproaching anyone, she did her work while Grandma Lausch made speed to carry out her project. The old lady went down to the drugstore herself to phone Lubin, the caseworker. That in itself was significant, because she scarcely ever set foot in the street when snow had fallen after that icy Armistice Day when she had twisted her ankle. Old people often suffered out their days with broken bones that couldn’t mend, she observed. Besides, even if it were only for a block, she couldn’t go in a housedress. It wasn’t right. She had to get herself up and change from worsted stockings—actually golf hose held with snarled elastics—to silk, to black dress, put up her triple-circle coif and, looking mean, powder her face. Not caring how ungentle she looked to us, she mounted her air-sweeping feathers with hat pins and, got up in the condition of ceremony, she went out with an aged quickness of anger, but as she walked down she still had to set both feet on each tread of the stairs.
It was an election day, and crossed flags were hung over the polling places, burly party men were in the snow, breathing steam and flapping long sample ballots. School was closed, and I was available to accompany her, but she wouldn’t have me. And half an hour later when I went out with the ash drawer of the stove I saw her on one knee in the snowy passageway. Fallen. It was hurtful to see her. She never before had gone out without protection. I flung away the tin drawer and ran to her, and she fastened on my thin-shirted arm with the snow-wet gloves. Once on her feet, though, she wanted no support from me, either because of a big, swollen consciousness of sacrifice or maybe a superstitious thought of retribution. She got up the stairs alone and limped straight through the house to her room, where she further laid out precedent by locking the door. Till then I had never even known there was a key; she must have kept it hidden from the earliest days, with her jewels and family papers. Mama and I stood outside, astonished, and asked if she was hurt, until we got the answer of firm rage to go away and let her alone, and I was enough shaken up by having seen her snow-spitten face to tremble now at the cat-intensity of her voice. And there was a change in the main established order: that a door less to be thought of locked than the door of a church, and always accessible, should have a key, and that that key should be used! The significance of this election-day fall was all the deeper since usually all her cuts and kitchen burns were treated with great seriousness and much business, with downright melancholy and the haunting of the ultimate threat. After applying the iodine or oil and bandages she would take a cigarette for her nerves. But the Murads were in her sewing basket in the kitchen and she didn’t come out of her room.
Lunchtime passed, and it was well on in the afternoon before she came out. She was wearing a thick bandage on her leg. She came along the old paths of the house, the parrot colors of the rug worn down to fiber on a line skirting the parlor stove and entering the short hall that gave on the kitchen, where the trail changed to brown in the linoleum, a good part of this the work of her own feet and flint-colored slippers going steadily along this fox run for the better part of ten years. She wore her everyday clothes and shawl again, so that everything was to be presumed back to normal or almost so; whereas it was actually nerve-silent, and her face, attempting to be steady and calm, was blenched as if she really had lost blood, or else her longtime female composure at the sight of blood. She had to have been horribly moved and scared to lock her door, but apparently she had decided that she had to come back and, moony-pale as she was, turn on her influence. But there was something missing. Even the frazzled, pursy old bitch whose white wool had gone brown around her eyes, took a slow walk with clickety claws, as if she sensed that new days were pushing out the last of an old regime, the time when counselors and ministers see the finish of their glory, and Switzers and Praetorian Guards get restless.
I now began to spend full time with Georgie, in the last month, pulling him around on the sled, walking him in the park, and taking him to the Garfield Park conservatory to see the lemons bloom. The administrative wheels were already going; eleventh-hour efforts did no good. Lubin, who had always said that Georgie would be better off in an institution, brought the commitment papers, and Mama, without Simon’s support against the old lady (and probably even that would not have stopped her, since Grandma was in a decisive action and was carried along with the impulse of a doom), had to sign. No, Grandma Lausch couldn’t have been withstood, I’m convinced. Not now, not in this. Everything considered, it was, no matter how sad, wiser to commit the kid. As Simon said, we would later have had to do it ourselves. But the old lady made of it something it didn’t necessarily have to be, a test of strength, tactless, a piece of sultanism; it originated in things we little understood: disappointment, angry giddiness from self-imposed, prideful struggle, weak nearness to death that impaired her judgment, maybe a sharp utterance of stubborn animal spirit, or bubble from human enterprise, sinking and discharging blindly from a depth.
Do I know? But sending Georgie away could have been done differently.
At last notice arrived that there was place for him in the Home. I had to go and buy him a valise at the Army-Navy store—a tan, bulldog gladstone, the best I could get. The thing would be his for life, and I wanted it to be right. I taught him how to work the clasps and the key. Where he was going there would always be people of course to help him, but my idea was that he should be master of a little of his own, when he went from place to place. We also bought him a hat in the drygoods store.
It was sunless but snow-melting weather at the late start of spring, and the trees and roofs dripped. In that grown man’s hat and the coat he didn’t wear intelligently—not appearing to feel the need to settle it right on his shoulders—he looked grown up and like a traveler. In fact, beautiful, and the picture of a far traveler, with his pale, mind-crippled, impotent handsomeness. It was enough to make you break down and cry, to see him. But nobody did cry; neither of us, I mean, for by then there were only my mother and I—Simon had given him a kiss on the head when leaving in the morning and said, “Good-by, old socks, I’ll come and see you.” As for Grandma Lausch, she stayed in her room.
Mama said, “Go and tell Gramma we’re ready to go.”
“It’s Augie,” I said at Grandma’s door. “Everything is set.”
She answered, “Well? Go, then.” This she said in her onetime decisive and impatient way, but without the brightness or what you might call the sea ring of real command. The door was locked, and I suppose she was lying on the featherbed in her apron, shawl, and po
inting slippers, with the bric-à-brac of her Odessa existence on her vanity table, dresser top, and on the walls.
“I think Mama wants you to say good-by.”
“What is there to say good-by? I’ll come and visit him later on.”
She didn’t have the strength to go and look at the results she had worked hard to get and then still keep on trying to hold power in her hands. And how was I supposed to interpret this refusal if not as feebleness and a cracking of organization?
Mama showed at last the trembling anger of weak people that it takes much to bring on. She seemed determined that Georgie should get the treatment of a child from the old woman. But in a few minutes she returned alone from the bedroom and said with harshness not intended for me, “Pick up the satchel, Augie.” I took hold of Georgie’s arm through the wide sleeve and we left by the door of the front room, where Winnie was snoozing under the ferns. Georgie softly chewed at a corner of his mouth as we went. It was a slow trip on the cars; we changed three times, and the last stretch on the West Side took us by Mr. Novinson’s shop.
We were about an hour getting to the Home—wired windows, dogproof cyclone fence, asphalt yard, great gloom. In the tiny below-stairs office a moody-looking matron took the papers and signed him into the ledger. We were allowed to go up to the dormitory with him, where other kids stood around under the radiator high on the wall and watched us. Mama took off George’s coat and the manly hat, and in his shirt of large buttons, with whitish head and big white, chill fingers—it was troubling that they were so man-sized—he kept by me beside the bed while I again showed him the simple little stunt of the satchel lock. But I failed to distract him from the terror of the place and of boys like himself around—he had never met such before. And now he realized that we would leave him and he began to do with his soul, that is, to let out his moan, worse for us than tears, though many grades below the pitch of weeping. Then Mama slumped down and gave in utterly. It was when she had the bristles of his special head between her hands and was kissing him that she began to cry. When I started after a while to draw her away he tried to follow. I cried also. I took him back to the bed and said, “Sit here.” So he sat and moaned. We went down to the car stop and stood waiting by the black, humming pole for the trolley to come back from city limits.
After that we had a diminished family life, as though it were care of Georgie that had been the main basis of household union and now everything was disturbed. We looked in different directions, and the old woman had outsmarted herself. Well, we were a disappointment to her too. Maybe she had started out by dreaming she might have a prodigy in one of us to manage to fame. Perhaps. The force that directs these things in us higher beings and brings together lovers to bear the genius that will lead the world a step or two of the slow march toward its perfection, or find the note that will reach the ear of the banded multitude and encourage it to take that step, had come across with a Georgie instead, and with us. We were far from having the stuff in us that she must have wanted. Our parentage needn’t have mattered so much, and it wasn’t just a question of high or even legal birth. Fouché got as far as Talleyrand. What counted was natural endowment, and on that score she formed the opinion bitterly that we were not born with talents. Nonetheless we could be trained to be decent and gentlemanly, to wear white collars and have clean nails, brushed teeth, table manners, be brought up to fairly good pattern no matter what office we worked in, store we clerked in, teller’s cage we reliably counted in—courteous in an elevator, prefatory in asking directions, courtly to ladies, grim and unanswering to streetwalkers, considerate in conveyances, and walking in the paths of a grayer, dimmer Castiglione.
Instead we were getting to be more common and rude, deeper-voiced, hairy. In our underpants, mornings while getting dressed, we punched and grappled in play, banging to the springs, to the floor, knocking over chairs. Passing then into the hall to wash, there, often, we saw the old woman’s small figure and her eyes whitely contemptuous, with a terrible little naked yawn of her gums, suck-cheeked with unspoken comment. But power-robbed. Done for. Simon would say sometimes, “Wha’che know, Gram?”—even, occasionally, “Mrs. Lausch.” I never repudiated her that much or tried to strike the old influence, such as it had become, out of her hands. Presently Simon too took a less disrespectful tone. By now, however, it didn’t matter much. She had seen what we were and what we were capable of.
The house was changed also for us; dinkier, darker, smaller; once shiny and venerated things losing their attraction and richness and importance. Tin showed, cracks, black spots where enamel was hit off, threadbarer, design scuffed out of the center of the rug, all the glamour, lacquer, massiveness, florescence, wiped out. The old-paste odor of Winnie in her last days apparently wasn’t noticed by the house-dwelling women; it was by us, coming in fresh from outdoors.
Winnie died in May of that year, and I laid her in a shoe box and buried her in the yard.
Chapter 5
WILLIAM EINHORN was the first superior man I knew. He had a brain and many enterprises, real directing power, philosophical capacity, and if I were methodical enough to take thought before an important and practical decision and also (N.B.)* if I were really his disciple and not what I am, I’d ask myself, “What would Caesar suffer in this case? What would Machiavelli advise or Ulysses do? What would Einhorn think?” I’m not kidding when I enter Einhorn in this eminent list. It was him that I knew, and what I understand of them in him. Unless you want to say that we’re at the dwarf end of all times and mere children whose only share in grandeur is like a boy’s share in fairy-tale kings, beings of a different kind from times better and stronger than ours. But if we’re comparing men and men, not men and children or men and demigods, which is just what would please Caesar among us teeming democrats, and if we don’t have any special wish to abdicate into some different, lower form of existence out of shame for our defects before the golden faces of these and other old-time men, then I have the right to praise Einhorn and not care about smiles of derogation from those who think the race no longer has in any important degree the traits we honor in these fabulous names. But I don’t want to be pushed into exaggeration by such opinion, which is the opinion of students who, at all ages, feel their boyishness when they confront the past.
I went to work for Einhorn while I was a high-school junior, not long before the great crash, during the Hoover administration, when Einhorn was still a wealthy man, though I don’t believe he was ever so rich as he later claimed, and I stayed on with him after he had lost most of his property. Then, actually, I became essential to him, not just metaphorical right hand but virtually arms and legs. Einhorn was a cripple who didn’t have the use of either, not even partial; only his hands still functioned, and they weren’t strong enough to drive a wheel chair. He had to be rolled and drawn around the house by his wife, brother, relations, or one of the people he usually had on call, either employed by or connected with him. Whether they worked for him or were merely around his house or office, he had a talent for making supernumeraries of them, and there were always plenty of people hoping to become rich, or more rich if already well-to-do, through the Einhorns. They were the most important real-estate brokers in the district and owned and controlled much property, including the enormous forty-flat building where they lived. The poolroom in the corner store of it was owned outright by them and called Einhorn’s Billiards. There were six other stores—hardware, fruit, a tin shop, a restaurant, barbershop, and a funeral parlor belonging to Kinsman, whose son it was that ran away with my cousin Howard Coblin to join the Marines against Sandino. The restaurant was the one in which Tambow, the Republican vote-getter, played cards. The Einhorns were his ex-wife’s relatives; they, however, had never taken sides in the divorce. It wouldn’t have become Einhorn Senior, the old Commissioner, who had had four wives himself, two getting alimony still, to be strict with somebody on that account. The Commissioner had never held office, that was just people’s fun. He was still an old gall
iard, with white Buffalo Bill vandyke, and he swanked around, still healthy and fleshy, in white suits, looking things over with big sex-amused eyes. He had a lot of respect from everyone for his shrewdness, and when he opened his grand old mouth to say something about a chattel mortgage or the location of a lot, in his laconic, single-syllabled way, the whole hefty, serious crowd of businessmen in the office stopped their talk. He gave out considerable advice, and Coblin and Five Properties got him to invest some of their money. Kreindl, who did a job for him once in a while, thought he was as wise as a god. “The son is smart,” he said, “but the Commissioner—that’s really a man you have to give way to on earth.” I disagreed then and do still, though when the Commissioner was up to something he stole the show. One of my responsibilities in summer was to go with him to the beach, where he swam daily until the second week in September. I was supposed to see that he didn’t go out too far, and also to hand him lighted cigarettes while he floated near the pier in the pillow striping of his suit with large belly, large old man’s sex, and yellow, bald knees; his white back-hair spread on the water, yellowish, like polar bear’s pelt, his vigorous foreskull, tanned and red, turned up; while his big lips uttered and his nose drove out smoke, clever and pleasurable in the warm, heavy blue of Michigan; while wood-bracketed trawlers, tarred on the sides, chuffed and vapored outside the water reserved for the bawling, splashing, many-actioned, brilliant-colored crowd; waterside structures and towers, and skyscrapers beyond in a vast right angle to the evading bend of the shore.
