by Saul Bellow
This was not at Einhorn’s any longer, but in women’s shoes, in the basement of the downtown clothing shop where Simon was upstairs in men’s suits. His situation had gotten better, and he was excited by the change. It was a fashionable store where the management wanted you to be well dressed. But he went beyond anything demanded of a salesman and was not just natty but hot stuff, in a double-breasted striped suit, with a tape measure around his neck. I hardly knew him there, among mirrors, rugs, racks of clothes, eight stories above the Loop; he was big, fast and busy, heavy in his body, and his blood evident in him, in his face.
Below, I was in a bargain department under the sidewalk, seeing and hearing the shoppers pass over the green circles of glass set in concrete, skirts of heavy coats flying as shadows through these lenses, but the weight of bodies actual enough, the glass creaking and soles going every which way. This vault was for the poorer class of customers or for solitary-hornet shoppers, girls with outfits to match, hats and accessories; women with three or four little daughters to buy shoes for on the same day. The goods were heaped up on tables by sizes, and then there were cardboard-cell walls of boxes and fitting stools in a circle under the honeycomb of the sidewalk.
A few weeks of apprenticeship here and the buyer had me up to the main floor. Only to help out, in the beginning, and run stock for the salesmen or return boxes to the shelves. And then I became a shoe-dog myself, only having to be told by the buyer to cut my hair shorter. He was a worried guy and his stomach was bad. From shaving twice a day his skin was tender, and, on a Saturday morning when he got the salesmen together before opening to give them a speech, his mouth would bleed a little at the corners. He hoped to be more severe than he could be, and I expect his trouble was that he was really not the man to direct a snazzy operation. For the place was a salon, with Frenchy torches held by human-arm brackets out from the walls, furled drapes, and Chinese furniture—such corners as are softened, sheltered from the outside air, even from the air of the Rue de Rivoli, by oriental rugs that swallow sounds in their nap, and hangings that make whispers and protocol unavoidable. Differences of inside and outside hard to reconcile; for up to the threshold of a salon like this there was a tremendous high tension and antagonistic energy asked to lie still that couldn’t lie still; and trying to contain it caused worry and shivers, the kind of thing that could erupt in raging, bloody Gordon or Chartist riots and shoot up fire like the burning of a mountain of egg crates. This unknown, superfluous free power streaming around a cold, wet, blackened Chicago day, from things laid out to be still, incapable, however, of being still.
Financially Simon and I were doing first rate; he was getting fifteen dollars a week before commissions, and I was pulling down thirteen-fifty. Therefore it didn’t matter that we were disqualified from Charity. Practically blind, Mama couldn’t do the housework any longer. Simon hired a mulatto named Molly Simms, a strong lean woman, about thirty-five, who slept in the kitchen—on George’s old cot, in fact—and whispered or sang out to us when we came home late. We never had gotten the habit of using the front entrance, forbidden to us in the old lady’s time.
“She means you, sport,” Simon said.
“Bushwah, you’re the one she looks at all the time.”
On New Year’s Day she didn’t show up, and I kept things running and fixed the meals. Simon was away too. He had gone to a New Year’s Eve party, leaving the house in his best: bowler hat, polka-dot muffler, spats on his two-tone shoes, pigskin gloves. And he didn’t get back till early evening the next day, out of a rapid, sparkling snow. He was filthy, scowling, with blood in his eyes and scratches through his blond stubble. A first good look at his violent and lavish nature, it was, to see him heaving in from the quiet snowfall of the back porch, kicking his shoes clean on the bricks and bristling over them with broom, next showing his face, streaky, as if he had been shagged through brambles, and putting his hard hat, with a puncture in it, on the chair. It was lucky Mama couldn’t see him; at that she knew something was wrong and asked in her high cry.
“Why, there’s nothing the matter, Ma,” we said to her.
Slangily, so that she wouldn’t understand, he told me a cock-and-bull story about a scrap on a Wells Street El platform with a couple of drunk jokers, ferocious Irishmen, of one catching his arms in his coat by yanking down the collar while the other pushed his face into those guard wires on the banister and threw him down the stairs. None of that convinced me. It didn’t explain where he had been a day and a night.
I said, “You know, Molly Simms didn’t show up, and she said she was going to.”
He didn’t try to deny he had been with her, but sat heavy in his wet, foul best, brute-exhausted. He had me heat the boiler for his bath, and when he stripped his shirt revealed more skin torn from his back. He didn’t trouble himself as to what I thought. And, neither boasting nor complaining, he told me that he had gone to Molly Simms’ room early in the morning. It was true he had fought with two micks; he was drunk, after the party; but she had given him the scratches. Furthermore, she hadn’t let him go till good and dark, and then he blundered in the Black Belt streets, in the snow. Lifting the covers to climb into bed, he said to me that we would have to get rid of Molly Simms.
“Where do you get that ‘we’ stuff?”
“Or she’ll think she’s boss of the place, and the woman’s a wildcat.”
We were in our ancient little room, where the stiff wallpaper of many layers bulged out in bubbles and the comfortable snow raced dry on the window and mounted on the sill.
“She’ll want to build it up to something. She told me already.”
“What did she tell you?”
“That she loves me,” he said, grinning but somber. “She’s a crazy bitch.”
“What? She’s close on forty.”
“What difference does that make? She’s a woman. And I went to see her. I didn’t ask her age before getting on her.”
He sent her away that week. I noticed how she observed his scratched face at breakfast. She was a thin, gypsyish woman, and her face was very keen; she could put on a manner when she felt like it, but she didn’t care a damn who saw her when she didn’t, and she gave her sharp, greenish-eyed grin. He wasn’t rattled by her; he had decided she was going to be a nuisance, and she caught on at once that he was bent on giving her the shove-ho. She was an experienced woman, rough from being so much on the losing side and from having knocked around from town to town, Washington to Brooklyn to Detroit, with what other stops you’d never know, getting gold teeth here and a slash in the cheek there. But she was an independent and never appealed for any sympathy; was never offered any either. Simon bounced her and hired Sablonka, an old Polish woman who disliked us, a slow-climbing, muttering, mob-faced, fat, mean, pious widow who was a bad cook besides. But we were neither of us around much. Within a few weeks after she began I was not even living at home, but had dropped from school and was living and working in Evanston. And I was on a peculiar circuit, for a while, of the millionaire suburbs—Highland Park, Kenilworth, and Winnetka—selling things, a specialized salesman in luxury lines and dealing with aristocrats. It was the shoe buyer who put me onto this when asked by a business acquaintance in Evanston to recommend someone; he brought me forward, where Mr. Renling, this Evanstonian sporting-goods man, could get a load of me as I crossed the floor.
“Where does he come from?” he asked, this frosty, dry, self-commenting, neutral-eyed man, long-legged and stylish. He looked like a Scotsman.
“From the Northwest Side,” said the buyer. “His brother works upstairs. They’re clever boys, both of them.”
“Jehudim?” said Mr. Renling, still looking neutrally at the buyer.
“Jew?” the buyer said to me. He well knew the answer; he merely passed the question on.
“Yes. I guess.”
“Ah,” said Renling, this time to me. “Well, out there on the North Shore they don’t like Jews. But,” he said, brimming frostily with a smile, “who m
akes them happy? They like hardly anybody. Anyway, they’ll probably never know.” And to the buyer again he said, “Well, do you think this is a kid who can be glamorized?”
“He’s done all right here.”
“It’s a little more high-pressure on the North Shore.”
Prospective house slaves from the shacks got the same kind of going-over, I suppose, or girls brought to an old cocotte by their mothers for training. He had me strip my jacket so he could see my shoulders and my fanny, so that I was just about to tell him what he could do with his job when he said I was built right for his purpose, and my vanity was more influential than my self-respect. He then said to me, “I want to put you in my saddle shop—riding habits, boots, dude-ranch stuff, fancy articles. I’ll pay twenty bucks a week while you’re learning, and when you’re broken in I’ll pay you twenty-five plus commission.”
Naturally I took the job. I’d be earning more money than Simon.
I moved into a student loft in Evanston, where soon the most distinguished thing was my wardrobe. Maybe I ought to say my livery, since Mr. and Mrs. Renling saw to it that I was appropriately dressed, in fact made a clotheshorse of me, advancing the money and picking out the tweeds and flannels, plaids, foulards, sport shoes, woven shoes Mexican style, and shirts and handkerchiefs—in the right taste for waiting on a smooth trade of mostly British inclination. When I had sounded the place out good I didn’t go for it, but I was too stirred up at first, and enthusiastic, to see it well. I was dressed with splendor and working back of the most thrilling plate glass I had ever seen, on a leafy street, in a fashionable store three steps under a western timber from the main part of Renling’s shop, which sold fishing, hunting, camping, golf and tennis equipment, canoes and outboard motors. You see now what I meant by saying that I have to marvel at my social passes, that I was suddenly sure and efficacious in this business, could talk firmly and knowingly to rich young girls, to country-club sports and university students, presenting things with one hand and carrying a cigarette in a long holder in the other. So that Renling had to grant that I had beat all the foreseen handicaps. I had to take riding lessons—not too many, they were expensive. Renling didn’t want me to become an accomplished horseman. “What for?” he said. “I sell these fancy guns and never shot an animal in my life.”
But Mrs. Renling wanted me to become a rider and to refine and school me every way. She had me register for evening courses at Northwestern. Of the four men who worked in the store—I was the youngest—two were college graduates. “And you,” she said, “with your appearance, and your personality, if you have a college degree …” Why, she showed me the result, as if it already lay in my hands.
She played terribly on my vanity. “I’ll make you perfect,” she said, “completely perfect.”
Mrs. Renling was pushing fifty-five, light-haired, only a little gray, small, her throat whiter than her face. She had tiny, dry red freckles and eyes of light color, but not gentle. Her accent was foreign; she came from Luxembourg, and it was a great pride of hers that she was connected with names in the Almanach de Gotha for that part of the world. Once in a while she assured me, “It is all nonsense; I am a democrat; I am a citizen of this country. I voted for Cox, I voted for Al Smith, and I voted for Roosevelt. I do not care for aristocrats. They hunted on my father’s estate. Queen Carlotta used to go to chapel near us, and she never forgave the French, because of Napoleon the Third. I was going to school in Brussels when she died.” She corresponded with ladies of the nobility in different places. She exchanged recipes with a German woman who lived in Doom and had something to do with the Kaiser’s household. “I was in Europe a few years ago and I saw this baroness. I knew her long. Of course they can never really accept you. I told her, ‘I am really an American.’ I brought some of my pickled watermelon. There is nothing like that over there, Augie. She taught me how to make veal kidneys with cognac. One of the rare dishes of the world. There’s a restaurant now in New York that makes them. People have to make reservations, even now, in Depression time. She sold the recipe to a caterer for five hundred dollars. I would never do that. I go and cook it for my friends, but I would consider it beneath me to sell an old family secret.”
She could cook all right, she had all the cooking arcana. She was known all over for the dinners she threw. Or for those she cooked at other places, because she might decide to make one anywhere, for friends. Her social set were the hotel manager’s wife at the Symington, the jewelers, Vletold, who sold to the carriage trade—the heaviest, crested, cymbal-sized fruit dishes and Argonaut gravy boats. There also was the widow of a man involved in the Teapot Dome Scandal, who bred coach dogs. Any number of people like this. For new friends who didn’t know her veal kidneys she’d prepare everything at home and cook it in at their table. She was an ardent feeder of people, and often cooked for the salesmen; she hated to see us go to restaurants, where everything, she said, in her impersonator’s foreign voice that nothing could interrupt, was so cheap and sticky.
That was just it, with Mrs. Renling—she couldn’t be interrupted or stopped, in her pale-fire concentration. She would cook for you if she wanted to, feed you, coach you, instruct you, play mah-jongg with you, and there was scarcely anything you could do about it, she had so much more force than anybody else around; with her light eyes and the pale, fox stain of her freckles lying in the dust of powder or on the back of her hands, with long hard rays of the tendons. She told me I would study advertising in the School of Journalism at the university, and she paid my fees, and so I did. She also chose for me the other courses I needed for a degree, stressing that a cultured man could have anything he wanted in America for the asking, standing out, she said, like a candle in a coal mine.
I had a busy life. In my new person of which, at the time, I was ungodly proud. With my class evenings, evenings in the library reading history and the cunning books for creating discontent in the consumer; attending Mrs. Renling’s bridge or mah-jongg soirées in her silk, penthouse parlor, something of a footman, something of a nephew, passing around candy dishes, opening ginger ale in the pantry, with my cigarette holder in my mouth, knowing, obliging, with hints of dalliance behind me, Sta-comb shining on my hair, flower blooming out of my lapel, smelling of heather lotion, snitching tips on what was what in behavior and protocol; till I found that much of this last was off the cuff and that many looked to you to know what tone to take. The real touchstone was Mrs. Renling, who couldn’t be denied leadership. Mr. Renling didn’t seem to care and played his cards or ivories, truly detached and passionless. He didn’t speak much, and Mrs. Renling said what she was going to say without hearing other opinion. This other opinion, what was said about servants, or about unemployment or the government, was monstrous, no two ways about it. Renling knew this but he didn’t care. These were his friends of the business community; a man in business had to have such, and he visited and entertained but neither touched nor was touched, ever.
He had a personality strictly relative to his business. Once in a while he’d take off to show his skill with a piece of rope in knot tying, or he’d sing:
“So this, so this, is Wenice
And where do we park the car?”
His upper lip had a pretty big perch on the other one, and he looked gloomy and patient. He was a wintry, slick guy, like many people who have to do service but save something for their own—like a headwaiter or chief of bellhops—individuals who are mixed up in a peculiar life-game where they sign on to lose and then anyhow put up a kind of underneath battle. He was a fight fan and took me to the matches now and then, at a ring near the Montrose Cemetery. Saying, at about ten o’clock, in a gathering, “Augie and I have a pair of duckets it would be a shame to waste altogether. We can still make the main event if we leave now.” Since there were things men found it necessary to do, Mrs. Renling said, “Well, by all means.”
During the bouts Renling didn’t holler or carry on, but he ate them up. Anything that took stamina got him—six-da
y bike races, dance marathons, walkathons, flagpole sitting, continuous and world flights, long fasts by Gandhi or striking prisoners, people camping underground, buried alive and fed and breathing through a shaft—any miracles of endurance and effort, as if out of competition with cylinder walls or other machine materials that withstand steam, gases, and all inhuman pressure. Such exhibitions he’d drive any distance in his powerful Packard to get a load of, and, driving, he raced. But he did not appear to be going fast. For there was his stability in the green leather seat, plus his unshaking, high-placed knees beside the jade onion of the gear knob, his hands trimmed with sandy hairs on the wheel, the hypersmoothness of the motor that made you feel deceived in the speedometer that stood at eighty. Until you noticed how a mile of trees cracked open like a shadow inch of tape, that the birds resembled flies and the sheep birds, and how swift the blue, yellow, and red little bloods of bugs spattered on the glass. He liked me to go with him. And what his idea of company was was perplexing, since, as we came and went like a twister, there was no warmth of conversation to counteract the scene-ignoring cold rush, the thin thresh of the radio antenna and yacking of broadcasts through the gold-mesh mouth in the panel. But what was mostly touched on, now and again, was the performance of the car and gas and oil statistics. We’d stop for barbecue chicken in some piny place, on warm sand, like a couple of earth-visiting Plutonians, and sip beer in the perfect clothes we wore, of sporting hound’s-tooth or brown Harris tweed, carrying field glasses in cases from the shop: a gloomy, rich gentleman and his gilded nephew or young snob cousin, we must have looked. I was too much engaged with feeling this raiment on me, the closeness of good cloth to my body, or with thoughts of the cock-green Tyrolean brush in my hat and splendor of British shoes, to be able to see Renling as I did see him later. He was an obstacle-eater. He rushed over roads. He loved feats and worshiped endurance, and he took between his teeth all objections, difficulties, hindrances, and chewed and swallowed them down.
