by Saul Bellow
In the morning we had to cash in our return tickets to pay the hotel bill, for Dingbat had counted on a purse and was flat broke. We hitched rides toward Chicago and spent a night on the beach at Harbert, a little way out of St. Joe, Nails wrapped in his robe and Dingbat and I sharing a slicker. We went through Gary and Hammond that day, on a trailer from Flint, by docks and dumps of sulphur and coal, and flames seen by their heat, not light, in the space of noon air among the black, huge Pasiphaë cows and other columnar animals, headless, rolling a rust of smoke and connected in an enormous statuary of hearths and mills—here and there an old boiler or a hill of cinders in the bulrush spawning-holes of frogs. If you’ve seen a winter London open thundering mouth in its awful last minutes of river light or have come with cold clanks from the Alps into Torino in December white steam then you’ve known like greatness of place. Thirty crowded miles on oil-spotted road, where the furnace, gas, and machine volcanoes cooked the Empedocles fundamentals into pig iron, girders, and rails; another ten miles of loose city, five of tight—the tenements—and we got off the trailer not far from the Loop and went into Thompson’s for a stew and spaghetti meal, near the Detective Bureau and in the midst of the movie-distributors’ district of great posters.
There was nobody much interested in our return. For there had been a fire at Einhorn’s meanwhile. It destroyed the living room—big reeking black holes in the mohair, the oriental rug ruined, and the mahogany library table and the set of Harvard Classics on it scorched and soaked by the extinguishers. Einhorn had filed claim for two thousand dollars; the inspector didn’t agree that the cause of the fire was a short-circuit but hinted it had been set, and there was opinion heard that he wanted to be paid off. Bavatsky wasn’t around; I had to take on part of his duties for a while but had better sense than to ask about him, knowing he must be in hiding. The day the fire broke out Tillie Einhorn had been visiting her cousin-in-law and Jimmy Klein had taken the sick Commissioner to the park. The Commissioner looked vexed about it. His bedroom was off the parlor, where the smell lasted for weeks, and he lay with silent frowns, condemning his son’s way of doing business. Tillie had been asking for a new suite, so he had it in for her too—furniture-insatiable women and their nest-winding thoughts.
“Wouldn’t I give you the five, six hundred dollars you’ll chisel out of the company,” the Commissioner said to his son, “so I wouldn’t have to smell this ipisch in my last days? Willie, you knew I was sick.” This was certainly true. Beaky, white, and solemn, Einhorn took the rebuke as deserved, filially, from the Commissioner risen out of bed, in his long underwear and his open, brocaded, heel-touching dressing gown, standing enfeebled in the kitchen and refusing the natural support of the back of a chair, independent. “Yes, Dad,” Einhorn answered, the sense of a bad piece of work settled about his neck in two or three loose rings; and without humor but strenuously and almost fiercely he looked at me. Now I had come to know definitely that he was the author of the fire, and probably it was in his thoughts that I was getting to learn all his secrets. They were safe with me, but it injured his pride that they should get out. I made myself inconspicuous and didn’t remind him when he forgot my pay that week. Maybe that was too much delicacy, but I was at an exaggerating age.
Summer passed, school reopened, and the insurance company still wasn’t satisfied. I heard from Clem that Einhorn was after Tambow Senior to get somebody in City Hall to approach a vice-president about the claim, and I know he got off quite a few letters himself, complaining that one of the biggest brokers couldn’t get a small fire settled. How did they expect him to convince clients that their losses would be covered promptly? As you’d expect, he had insured himself with the company that got most of his business. Holloway Enterprises alone paid premiums on a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of property, so that there must have been pretty clear proof of arson, for I’m sure the company wanted to be obliging. The reeking, charred furniture, covered with canvas, remained until the Commissioner wouldn’t have it around any more, and it was moved into the yard where the kids played King of the Hill on it and the junkmen came offering to take it away, sweating around the office humbly till Einhorn would see them and say, no, he was thinking of donating it to the Salvation Army when the claim was settled.
Really, he had already promised to sell it to Kreindl, who was going to have it re-covered. Especially because of the inconvenience, Einhorn was set on getting full value out of it. And because of the scorn of the Commissioner. But on the whole he thought he had been right; that this was the way you answered your wife’s request for a new living-room suite. He made me a present of the Harvard Classics with the covers ruined by the carbonic spray. I kept the volumes in a crate under my bed and started on Plutarch, Luther’s letters to the German nobility, and The Voyage of the Beagle, in which I got as far as the crabs who stole the eggs of stupid shorebirds.
I couldn’t read more because I didn’t have much studious peace at night. The old lady had become loose in the wires and very troublesome, with the great weaknesses of old age. Although she had always claimed she hadn’t taught Mama anything if not to be a great cook, she now wanted to cook for herself and set aside pots and pans for her own use, and groceries and little jars in the icebox covered with paper and bound with elastic, forgot them till mold set in, and then was scratching mad when they were thrown out, accused Mama of stealing. She said two women could not share a kitchen—forgetting how long it had been shared—especially if one was dishonest and dirty. Both trembled, Mama from the scare more than from the injustice; she tried to locate the old woman with her eyes, which were deteriorating very fast. To Simon and me Grandma scarcely ever spoke any more, and when the puppy her son Stiva gave her—she couldn’t really accept a successor to Winnie but anyway demanded a dog—when it ran to us she cried, “Beich du! Beich!” But the tawny little bitch wanted to play and wouldn’t lie at her feet as the old dog had done. She wasn’t even named or housebroken properly, such was the condition the women were in now. Simon and I agreed to take turns cleaning; Mama couldn’t any longer keep up with it. But Simon worked downtown, so there was no way to make a fair division. And there wasn’t any longer enough character in the house even to give a name to and domesticate this pup. I couldn’t go on crawling under Grandma Lausch’s bed, one of the dirtiest places, while she, glaring into a book, refused to say a single word, blind and dumb toward me unless her beich yipped around my cuffs, when she would shriek. This was where much of my time was going.
And, furthermore, since Mama couldn’t go alone to visit Georgie, because of her eyesight, we had to take her to the far West Side. George was bigger than I now, and sometimes a little surly and offended with us, though still with the same mind-crippled handsomeness, a giant moving with slow-pants, mature heaviness in the dragfoot gait of his undeveloped legs. He wore my hand-me-downs and Simon’s, and it was singular to see the clothes worn so differently. At the school they had taught him broom-making and weaving and showed us the thistle-flower neckties he made with wool on a frame. But he was growing too old for this boys’ Home; in a year or so he’d have to move on to Manteno or one of the other downstate institutions. Mama took this very badly. “There maybe once or twice a year we’ll be able to visit him,” she said. Going to see this soft-faced man of a George wasn’t easy on me either. So, afterward, on these trips, as I had money in my pockets these days, I’d take Mama into a fancy Greek place on Crawford Avenue for ice-cream and cakes, to try to raise her out of her rock-depth of heavy trouble, where, I guess, the greater part of human beings have always spent most of their silent time. She let me divert her somewhat, even if rattled by the fancy prices, and protesting in high tones of a person unaware of what a sound she is making. To which I’d say calmingly, “It’s okay, Ma. Don’t worry.” Because Simon and I were still at school we were still on charity, and with both of us working and George in the institution, we had more dough than we’d ever had. Only it was Simon who took care of the surplus, and no
longer Grandma, as in the old administration.
Sometimes I had glimpses of Grandma in the parlor, at the light end of the dark hallway, in her disconnection from us, waiting by herself beside the Crystal-Palace turret of the stove, in dipping bloomers and starched dress with hem as stiff as a line of Euclid. She had too many wrongs against us now to forgive us, and they couldn’t be discussed. From weakness of mind of the very old. She that we always had thought so powerful and shock-proof.
Simon said, “She’s on her last legs,” and we accepted her decline and dying. But that was because we were already out in the world, whereas Mama didn’t have any such perspective. Grandma had laid most of her strength on Mama as boss-woman, governing hand, queen mother, empress, and even her banishment of George and near-senile kitchen scandals couldn’t shake the respect and liege feeling so long established. Mama wept to Simon and me about Grandma’s strange alteration but couldn’t answer her according to her new folly.
But Simon said, “It’s too much for Ma. Why should the Lausches get away with sloughing the old woman off on us? Ma’s been her servant long enough. She’s getting older herself and her eyes are bad; she can’t even see the pooch when it’s under her feet.”
“Well, this is something we ought to leave up to Ma herself.”
“For Chrissake, Augie,” said Simon, blunt—his broken tooth showed to much effect when he was scornful—“don’t be a mushhead all your life, will you! Honest to God, you make me think I was the only one of us born with a full set of brains. What good is it to let Mama decide?” I usually didn’t find much to offer when it was a question of theory or reality with regard to Mama. We treated her alike but thought about her differently. All I had to say was that Mama wasn’t used to being alone and, as a fact, my feelings took a bad drop when I imagined it. She was already nearly blind. What would she do but sit by herself? She had no friends, and had always shambled around on her errands in her man’s shoes and her black tarn, thick glasses on her rosy, lean face, as a kind of curiosity in the neighborhood, some queer woman, not all there.
“What kind of company is Grandma though?” said Simon.
“Oh, maybe she’ll come around a little. And they still talk sometimes, I guess.”
“When did she ever? Bawls her out, you mean, and makes her cry. The only thing you’re saying is that we should let things ride. That’s only laziness, even though you probably tell yourself you’re just an easygoing guy and don’t want to be ungrateful to the old dame for what she’s done. We did things for her too, don’t forget. She’s been riding Ma for years and put on the ritz at our expense. Well, Ma can’t do it any more. If the Lausches want to hire a housekeeper, that’s a fair way to settle it, but if they don’t they’re going to have to take her out of here.”
He wrote a letter to her son in Racine. I don’t know what things were like with these two Quaker-favored men in their respective towns. I’ve never gone through a place like Racine without thinking which house with the rubber-tire swing for kids and piano-practicing inside was like Stiva Lausch’s, who had two daughters brought up with every refinement, including piano lessons, and how such little-speaking Odessa-bred sons had gotten on a track like this through the multiverse. What did they go for, that they were so regular and unexcitable of appearance? Well, there was at least a hint of what in the note that Stiva sent, pretty calmly saying that he and his brother didn’t feel a housekeeper was the solution and that they were making arrangements for their mother to live in the Nelson Home for the Aged and Infirm, and would consider it a great service if we would move her there. Which, considering our long association with their mother (a dig at our ingratitude), they didn’t hesitate to request.
“This is it then,” said Simon, and even he looked as if we had gone too far. But the thing was done, and there were only last details to attend to. Grandma had received a letter in Russian at the same time, and took it with considerable coolness, as you expect from somebody with that degree of pride, boasting even, “Ha! How well Stiva writes Russian! In the gymnasium, when you learned, you learned something.” We heard from Mama also what Grandma said about the Home, that it was a very fine old place, just about a palace, built by a millionaire, and had a greenhouse and garden, was near the university and therefore most of the people retired professors. Going to a better place. And she was glad of rescue from us by her sons; where she would be among equals and exchange intelligent views. Mama was confounded, aghast at the thing, and not even she was so simple-minded as to believe that Grandma, so many years bound to us, would have thought it up herself, as she now apparently claimed.
The packing went on for two weeks. Pictures came off the walls, the monkeys with scarlet nose holes, the runner from Tashkent, egg cups, salves and medicines, her eiderdown from the closet shelf. I brought up her wood trunk from the shed, a yellow old pioneer piece with labels from Yalta, Hamburg Line, American Express, old Russian journals in its papered interior of blue forest flowers, smelly from the cellar. She wrapped with caution each of her things of great value, the crushable and breakable on top, and covered all with the harsh snow of mothflakes. On the final day she watched the trunk wag down the front stairs, on the back of the mover, with an amazing, terrible look of presidency, and supervised everything, every last box, in this fashion, gruesomely and violently white so that her mouth’s corner hairs were minutely apparent, but in rigid-backed aristocracy, full face to the important transfer to something better, from this (now that she turned from it) disgracefully shabby flat of a deserted woman and her sons whom she had preserved while a temporary guest. Ah, regardless how decrepit of superstructure, she was splendid. You forgot how loony she’d become, and her cantankerousness of the past year. What was a year like that when now her shakiness of mind dropped off in this moment of emergency and she put on the strictness and power of her most grande-dame days? My heart went soft for her, and I felt admiration that she didn’t want from me. Yes, she made retirement out of banishment, and the newly created republicans, the wax not cool yet on their constitution, had the last pang of loyalty to the deposed, when mobs, silent, see off the limousine, and the prince and princely family have the last word in the history of wrongs.
“Be well, Rebecca,” said the old woman. She didn’t exactly decline Mama’s weeping kiss on the side of the face, but was objective-bound primarily. We helped her into the panting car, borrowed from Einhorn. Tensely, with impatience, she said good-by, and we started—me managing around with the big, awkward apparatus of the hostile tomato-burst red machine and its fire-marshal’s brass. Dingbat had just taught me how to drive.
Not a word passed between us. I don’t count what she said in the Michigan Boulevard crush, because that was just a comment about the traffic. Out of Washington Park we turned east on Sixtieth Street, and, sure enough, there was the university, looking strange but restful in its Indian summer rustle of ivy. I located Greenwood Avenue and the Home. In front was a fence of four-by-fours, sharp angles up, surrounding two plots of earth and flower beds growing asters that leaned on supports of sticks and rags; on the path to the sidewalk black benches made of planks; and on the benches on the limestone porch, on chairs in the vestibule for those who found the sun too strong, in the parlor on more benches, old men and women watched Grandma back down from the car. We came up the walk, between the slow, thought-brewing, beat-up old heads, liver-spotted, of choked old blood salts and wastes, hard and bone-bare domes, or swollen, the elevens of sinews up on collarless necks crazy with the assaults of Kansas heats and Wyoming freezes, and with the strains of kitchen toil, Far West digging, Cincinnati retailing, Omaha slaughtering, peddling, harvesting, laborious or pegging enterprise from whale-sized to infusorial that collect into the labor of the nation. And even somebody here, in old slippers and suspenders or in corset and cottons, might have been a cellar of the hidden salt which preserves the world, but it would take the talent of Origen himself to find it among the terrible appearances of white hair and rashy, vessel-busted
hands holding canes, fans, newspapers in all languages and alphabets, faces gone in the under-surface flues and in the eyes, of these people sitting in the sunshine and leaf-burning outside or in the mealy moldiness and gravy acids in the house. Which wasn’t a millionaire-built residence at all, only a onetime apartment house, and no lovely garden in the back but corn and sunflowers.
The truck arrived with the rest of Grandma’s luggage; she wasn’t allowed to have the trunk in her bedroom, for she shared it with three others. She had to go down to the basement where she picked out what she would need—too many things, in the opinion of the stout brown lady superintendent. But I carried the stuff up and helped her to stow and hang it. I then went to the back of the Stutz to search, on her orders, for anything that might have been forgotten. She didn’t discuss the place with me, and of course she would have praised it if she had found anything to praise to show what an advantageous change she had made. But neither did she let me see her looking downcast. She ignored the matron’s suggestion that she get into a housedress and sat down in the rocker with a view of the corn, sunflower, cabbage lot in the back, in her Odessa black dress. I asked her if she would care for a cigarette, but she wasn’t having anything from anyone and especially not from me—the way she felt Simon and I were repaying her years of effort. I knew she needed to be angry and dry if she was to avoid weeping. She must have cried as soon as I left, for she wasn’t so rattlebrained by old age that she didn’t realize what her sons had done to her.
