by Saul Bellow
Let it be hot—for I’m reporting on summers, during vacations, when I spent full time with him—and he was wearing his vest in the office. The morning, this early, was often gentle prairie weather, long before the rugged grind—like the naïveté you get to expect in the hardest and toughest-used when you’ve been with them long enough—I refer to business and heat of a Chicago summer afternoon. But it was breathing time. The Commissioner wasn’t finished dressing yet; he went into the mild sun of the street in his slippers, his galluses hung down, and the smoke of his Claro passed up and back above his white hair, while his hand was sunk comfortable and deep below his waistband. And Einhorn, away back, the length of the office, slit open his letters, made notes for replies, dipped into his files or passed things on for me to check on—me, the often stumped aide, trying to get straight what he was up to in his numerous small swindles. In this respect there was hardly anything he didn’t get into, like ordering things on approval he didn’t intend to pay for—stamps, little tubes of lilac perfume, packages of linen sachet, Japanese paper roses that opened in water, and all the sort of items advertised in the back pages of the Sunday supplement. He had me write for them in my hand and give fictitious names, and he threw away the dunning letters, of course, and said all of these people calculated losses into what they charged. He sent away for everything that was free: samples of food, soaps, medicine, the literature of all causes, reports of the Bureau of American Ethnology and publications of the Smithsonian Institution, the Bishop Museum in Hawaii, the Congressional Record, laws, pamphlets, prospectuses, college catalogues, quack hygiene books, advice on bust-development, on getting rid of pimples, on longevity and Couéism, pamphlets on Fletcherism, Yoga, spirit-rapping, antivivisection; he was on the mailing list of the Henry George Institute and the Rudolf Steiner Foundation in London, the local bar association, the American Legion. He had to be in touch with everything. And all this material he kept; the overflow went down to the basement. Bavatsky or I or Lollie Fewter, who came in three days a week to do the ironing, carried it below. Some of it, when it went out of print, he sold to bookstores or libraries, and some he remailed to his clients with the Einhorn stamp on it, for good will. He had much to do also with contests and entered every competition he got wind of, suggesting names for new products, slogans; he made up bright sayings and most embarrassing moments, most delightful dreams, omens he should have heeded, telepathic experiences, and jingles:
When radio first appeared, I did rave,
And all my pennies I did save,
Even neglected to shave.
I’ll take my dear Dynamic to the grave.
He won the Evening American’s first prize of five dollars with this, and one of my jobs was to see that what was sent out to contests, anagrams on the names of presidents or on the capitals of states, or elephants composed of tiny numbers (making what sum?), that these entries were neat, mounted right, inside ruled borders, accompanied by the necessary coupons, boxtops, and labels. Furthermore, I had to do reference work for him in his study or at the library downtown, one of his projects being to put out an edition of Shakespeare indexed as the Gideon Bible was: Slack Business, Bad Weather, Difficult Customers, Stuck with Big Inventory of Last Year’s Models, Woman, Marriage, Partners. One thousand and one catchpenny deals, no order too big, no sum too small. And, all the time, talkative, clowning, classical, philosophical, homiletic, corny, passing around French poses and imitation turds from the Clark Street novelty stores, pornographic Katzenjammers and Somebody’s Stenog; teasing with young Lollie Fewter who was fresh up from the coal fields, that girl with her green eyes from which she didn’t try to keep the hotness, and her freckled bust presented to the gathering of men she came among with her waxing rags and the soft shake of her gait. Yea, Einhorn, careful of his perch, with dead legs, and yet denying in your teeth he was different from other men. He never minded talking about his paralysis; on the contrary, sometimes he would boast of it as a thing he had overcome, in the manner of a successful businessman who tells you of the farm poverty of his boyhood. Nor did he overlook any chance to exploit it. To a mailing list he got together from houses that sold wheel chairs, braces, and appliances, he sent out a mimeographed paper called “The Shut-in.” Two pages of notices and essays, sentimental bits cribbed from Elbert Hubbard’s Scrapbook, tags from “Thanatopsis.” “Not like the slave scourged to his quarry” but like a noble, stoical Greek; or from Whittier: “Prince thou art, the grown up man/Only is Republican,” and other such sources. “Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul!” The third page was reserved for readers’ letters. This thing—I put it out on the mimeograph and stapled and carried it to the post office—gave me the creeps once in a while, uneasy flesh around the neck. But he spoke of it as a service to shut-ins. It was a help to him as well; it brought in considerable insurance business, for he signed himself, “William Einhorn, a neighborhood broker,” and various companies paid the costs. Like Grandma Lausch again, he knew how to use large institutions. He had an important bearing with their representatives—clabber-faced, with his intelligent bit of mustache and shrewd action of his dark eyes, chicken-winged arms at rest. He wore sleeve garters—another piece of feminine apparel. He tried to maneuver various insurance companies into competitive bidding to increase his commissions.
Many repeated pressures with the same effect as one strong blow, that was his method, he said, and it was his special pride that he knew how to use the means contributed by the age to connive as ably as anyone else; when in a not-so-advanced time he’d have been mummy-handled in a hut or somebody might have had to help him be a beggar in front of a church, the next thing to a memento mori or, more awful, a reminder of what difficulties there were before you could even become dead. Whereas now—well, it was probably no accident that it was the cripple Hephaestus who made ingenious machines; a normal man didn’t have to hoist or jack himself over hindrances by means of cranks, chains, and metal parts. Then it was in the line of human advance that Einhorn could do so much; especially since the whole race was so hepped-up about appliances, he was not a hell of a lot more dependent than others who couldn’t make do without this or that commodity, engine, gizmo, sliding door, public service, and this being relieved of small toils made mind the chief center of trial. Find Einhorn in a serious mood when his fatty, beaky, noble Bourbon face was thoughtful, and he’d give you the lowdown on the mechanical age, and on strength and frailty, and piece it out with little digressions on the history of cripples—the dumbness of the Spartans, the fact that Oedipus was lame, that gods were often maimed, that Moses had faltering speech and Dmitri the Sorcerer a withered arm, Caesar and Mahomet epilepsy, Lord Nelson a pinned sleeve—but especially on the machine age and the kind of advantage that had to be taken of it; with me like a man-at-arms receiving a lecture from the learned signor who felt like passing out discourse.
I was a listener by upbringing. And Einhorn with his graces, learning, oratory, and register of effects was not out to influence me practically. He was not like Grandma, with her educational seventy-fives trained on us. He wanted to flow along, be admirable and eloquent. Not fatherly. I wasn’t ever to get it into my head that I was part of the family. There was small chance that I would, the way Arthur, the only son, figured in their references, and I was sent out when any big family deal began to throb around. To make absolutely sure I wouldn’t get any such notions, Einhorn would now and then ask me some question about my people, as if he hadn’t informed himself through Coblin, Kreindl, Clem, and Jimmy. Pretty clever, he was, to place me this way. If Grandma had ideas about a wealthy man who might take a fancy to us and make our fortune, Simon’s and mine, Einhorn had the reverse. I wasn’t to think because we were intimately connected and because he liked me that I was going to get into the will. The things that had to be done for him were such that anybody who worked for him was necessarily intimate with him. It sometimes got my goat, he and Mrs. Einhorn made so sure I knew my place. But maybe they were right; the old
woman had implanted the thought, though I never entertained it in earnest. However, there was such a thought, and it bulged somewhat into my indignation. Einhorn and his wife were selfish. They weren’t mean, I admitted in fairness, and generally I could be fair about it; merely selfish, like two people enjoying their lunch on the grass and not asking you to join them. If you weren’t dying for a sandwich yourself it could even make a pleasant picture, smacking on the mustard, cutting cake, peeling eggs and cucumbers. Selfish Einhorn was, nevertheless; his nose in constant action smelled, and smelled out everything, sometimes austerely, or again without manners, covert, half an eye out for observers but not to be deterred if there were any, either.
I don’t think I would have considered myself even remotely as a legatee of the Commissioner if they hadn’t, for one thing, underlined my remoteness from inheritance, and, for another, discussed inheritances all the time.
Well, they were steeped and soaked necessarily in insurance and property, lawsuits and legal miscarriages, sour partnerships and welshings and contested wills. This was what you heard when the connoisseurs’ club of weighty cronies met, who all showed by established marks—rings, cigars, quality of socks, newness of panamas—where they were situated; they were classified, too, in grades of luck and wisdom, darkness by birth or vexations, power over or subjection to wives, women, sons and daughters, grades of disfigurement; or by the roles they played in comedies, tragedies, sex farces; whether they screwed or were screwed, whether they themselves did the manipulating or were roughly handled, tugged, and bobbled by their fates; their frauds, their smart bankruptcies, the fires they had set; what were their prospects of life, how far death stood from them. Also their merits: which heavy character of fifty was a good boy, a donor, a friend, a compassionate man, a man of balls, a lucid percentage calculator, a fellow willing to make a loan of charity though he couldn’t sign his name, a giver of scrolls to the synagogue, a protector of Polish relatives. It was known; Einhorn had it all noted. And apparently everybody knew everything. There was a good circulation of frankness and a lot of respect going back and forth. Also a lot of despicable things. Be this as it might, the topic inside the railed space of benches or at the pinochle game in the side-office annex was mostly business—receiverships, amortizations, wills, and practically nothing else. As rigor is the theme of Labrador, breathing of the summits of the Andes, space to the Cornish miner who lies in a seam under the sea. And, on the walls, insurance posters of people in the despair of firetraps and the undermining of rats in the beams, housewives bringing down the pantry shelves in their fall. Which all goes to show how you couldn’t avoid the question of inheritance. Was the old Commissioner fond of me? While Mrs. Einhorn was a kindly woman ordinarily, now and again she gave me a glance that suggested Sarah and the son of Hagar. Notwithstanding that there was nothing to worry about. Nothing. I wasn’t of the blood, and the old man had dynastic ideas too. And I wasn’t trying to worm my way into any legacy and get any part of what was coming to her elegant and cultivated son Arthur. Sure the Commissioner was fond of me, stroked my shoulder, gave me tips; and he thought of me no further.
But he and Einhorn were an enigma to Tillie. Her pharaoh-bobbed hair grew out of a head mostly physically endowed; she couldn’t ever tell what they might take it into their minds to do. And especially her husband, he was so supple, fertile, and changeable. She worshipfully obeyed him and did his biddings and errands just as the rest of us did. He’d send her to City Hall with requests for information from the Recorder’s Office or the License Bureau; he wrote notes, because she could never explain what he wanted, and she brought back the information written out by a clerk. To get her out of the way when he was up to something he sent her to visit her cousin on the South Side, an all-day junket on the streetcars. To be sure she’d be good and gone; and what’s more, she knew it.
But now suppose we’re at lunchtime, in Einhorn’s specimen day. Mrs. Einhorn didn’t like to bother in the kitchen and favored ready-made or easy meals, delicatessen, canned salmon with onion and vinegar, or hamburger and fried potatoes. And these hamburgers weren’t the flat lunch-wagon jobs, eked out with cornmeal, but big pieces of meat souped up with plenty of garlic and fried to blackness. Covered with horseradish and chili sauce, they didn’t go down so hard. This was the food of the house, in the system of its normalcy like its odors and furnishings, and if you were the visiting albatross come to light, you’d eat the food you ne’er had eat and offer no gripe. The Commissioner, Einhorn, and Dingbat asked no questions about it but ate a great deal, with tea or Coca-Cola as usual. Then Einhorn took a white spoonful of Bisodol and a glass of Waukesha water for his gas. He made a joke of it, but he never forgot to take them and heeded all his processes with much seriousness, careful that his tongue was not too coated and his machinery smooth. Very grave he was sometimes, when he acted as his own physician. He liked to say that he was fatal to doctors, especially to those who had never given him much hope. “I buried two of them,” he said. “Each one told me I’d be gone in a year, and before the year was out he croaked.” It made him feel good to tell other doctors of this. Still, he was zealous about taking care of himself; and with this zeal he had a brat’s self-mockery about the object of his cares, bottomless self-ribbing; he let his tongue droop over his lip, comic and stupid, and made dizzy crosses with his eyes. Nevertheless he was always thinking about his health and took his powders and iron and liver pills. You might almost say he followed assimilation with his thoughts; all through his body that death had already moved in on, to the Washington of his brain, to his sex and to his studying eyes. Ah, sure, he was still a going concern, very much so, but he had to take thought more than others did about himself, since if he went wrong he was a total loss, nowise justified, a dead account, a basket case, an encumbrance, zero. I knew this because he expressed everything, and though he wouldn’t talk openly about the money he had in the bank or the property he owned, he was absolutely outspoken about vital things, and he’d open his mind to me, especially when we were together in his study and busy with one of his projects that got more fanciful and muddled the more notions he had about being systematic, so that in the end there’d be a super-monstrous apparatus you couldn’t set in motion either by push or crank.
“Augie, you know another man in my position might be out of life for good. There’s a view of man anyhow that he’s only a sack of craving guts; you find it in Hamlet, as much as you want of it. What a piece of work is a man, and the firmament frotted with gold—but the whole gescheft bores him. Look at me, I’m not even express and admirable in action. You could say a man like me ought to be expected to lie down and quit the picture. Instead, I’m running a big business today”—that was not the pure truth; it was the Commissioner who was still the main wheel, but it wasn’t uninteresting all the same—“while nobody would blame me for rotting in the back room under a blanket or for crabbing and blabbing my bitter heart out, with fresh and healthy people going around me, so as not to look. A kid like you, for instance, strong as a bronco and rosy as an apple. An Alcibiades beloved-of-man, by Jesus. I don’t know what brain power you’ve got; you’re too frisky yet, and even if you turn out to be smart you’ll never be in the class of my son Arthur. You shouldn’t be angry for hearing the truth, if you’re lucky enough to find somebody to hear it from. Anyhow, you’re not bad off, being an Alcibiades. That’s already way and above your fellow creatures. And don’t think they didn’t hate the original either. All but Socrates himself, ugly as an old dog, they tell us. Nor just because that the young fellow knocked the dongs of the holy figures off, either, before he shipped for Sicily. But to get back to the subject, it’s one thing to be buried with all your pleasures, like Sardanapalus; it’s another to be buried right plunk in front of them, where you can see them. Ain’t it so? You need a genius to raise you above it …”
Quiet, quiet, quiet afternoon in the back-room study, with an oilcloth on the library table, busts on the wall, invisible cars snoring and
trembling toward the park, the sun shining into the yard outside the window barred against house-breakers, billiard balls kissing and bounding on the felt and sponge rubber, and the undertaker’s back door still and stiller, cats sitting on the paths in the Lutheran gardens over the alley that were swept and garnished and scarcely ever trod by the chintied Danish deaconesses who’d come out on the cradle-ribbed and always fresh-painted porches of their home.
Somewhat it stung me, the way in which he compared me with his son. But I didn’t mind being Alcibiades, and let him be in the same bracket with Socrates in the bargain, since that was what he was driving at. We had title just as good as the chain-mail English kings had to Brutus. If you want to pick your own ideal creature in the mirror coastal air and sharp leaves of ancient perfections and be at home where a great mankind was at home, I’ve never seen any reason why not. Though unable to go along one hundred per cent with a man like the Reverend Beecher telling his congregation, “Ye are Gods, you are crystalline, your faces are radiant!” I’m not an optimist of that degree, from the actual faces, congregated or separate, that I’ve seen; always admitting that the true vision of things is a gift, particularly in times of special disfigurement and world-wide Babylonishness, when plug-ugly macadam and volcanic peperino look commoner than crystal—to eyes with an ordinary amount of grace, anyhow—and when it appears like a good sensible policy to settle for medium-grade quartz. I wonder where in the creation there would be much of a double-take at the cry “Homo sum!” But I was and have always been ready to venture as far as possible; even though I was never as much imposed on by Einhorn as he wanted me to be in his big moments, with his banker’s trousers and chancellor’s cravat, and his unemployable squiggle feet on the barber-chairlike mount of his wheeled contraption made to his specifications. And I never could decide whether he meant that he was a genius or had one, and I suppose he wanted there should be some doubt about the meaning. He wasn’t the man to come out and declare that he wasn’t a genius while there was the chance he might be one, a thing like that coming about nolens volens. To some, like his half-brother Dingbat, he was one. Dingbat swore up and down, “Willie is a wizard. Give him two bits’ worth of telephone slugs and he’ll parlay it into big dough.” His wife agreed too, without reservations, that Einhorn was a wizard. Anything he did—and that covers a lot of territory—was all right with her. There wasn’t any higher authority, not even her cousin Karas, who ran the Holloway Enterprises and Management Co. and was a demon money-maker himself. Karas, that bad, rank character, cinder-crawed, wise to all angles, dressed to kill, with a kitty-cornered little smile and extortionist’s eyes, she was in awe of him also, but he wasn’t presumed to be in Einhorn’s class.
