by Saul Bellow
Ah, but there are other facts that have to be satisfied too, after this comparison. It’s too bad but it is so. Humankind does not have that sort of simplicity—not the single line that a stick draws on the ground but a vast harrow of countless disks. His spirit was piercing, but there has to be mentioned his poor color, age-impoverished and gray; plus the new flat’s ugliness; dullness of certain hours, dryness of days, dreariness and shabbiness—mentioned that the street was bare, dim and low in life, bad; and that there were business thoughts and malformed growths of purpose, terrible, menacing, salt-patched with noises and news, and pimpled and dotted around with lies, both practical and gratuitous.
To Tillie Einhorn, as far as anybody could tell, Mildred was acceptable. The force of Einhorn on Tillie was such that to judge him wrong was too much of an operation for her. Besides, you have to think of a condition of people that gets into them like a cobbler’s stretcher into a shoe; this stretcher for Tillie was Einhorn’s special need as a cripple. She was used to making allowances.
Well, this was how Einhorn was situated when I came to ask him for advice; I found him too busy to give me his attention. He kept looking to the street as I talked, then asked me to push him to the toilet, which I did, on the gaggling casters that could, as always, stand an oiling. All he replied was, “Well, it’s pretty unusual. It’s quite an offer. You were born lucky.” He gave it less than half his mind, thinking I was telling him the news that the Renlings wanted to adopt me, not that I considered refusing. Naturally he was wrapped up in his own affairs. And I could look at Mildred Stark if I wanted an example of how someone became attached to, and then absorbed into, a family.
I finished the afternoon downtown, and while I was eating a liver sandwich at Elfman’s and watching the unemployed musicians on the Dearborn corner, I saw a guy named Clarence Ruber passing and knocked on the plate glass with my ring till he noticed me and came in to talk. I knew this Ruber from Crane College, where he had run a baseball pool at the Enark Café; he was quiet and dirty-spoken, smooth in the face, fat behind, with a slow, shiny Assyrian fringe on his head and a soft-bosomed fashion of clothes, silky shirts, yellow silk tie, and gray flannel suit. Looking me over, he saw that I was doing well too, in contrast to the Depression musicians and the other eaters, and we traded information. He had opened a small shop on the South Shore, in partnership with a cousin’s widow who had a little money. They dealt in lamps, pictures, vases, piano scarves, ashtrays and such bric-à-brac, and since the cousin and his wife had been, before the Bust, interior decorators with big hotels for clients, they did a good trade. “There’s dough in this. It’s one of these rackets where people pay for being handled a particular way. Dazzle business. Because, if they knew it, they could buy a lot of this crap at the dime store, but they can’t trust their judgment. It’s a woman’s line,” he said, “and you have to understand how to tickle their bellies.” I asked him what he was doing here among the musicians. “Musicians, my ass,” he said. He had been seeing a man in the Burnham Building who had invented a rubberized paint for bathrooms, a waterproof product that, with the widow-cousin’s contacts in hotels, ought to make him a fortune. It kept walls from rotting; the water didn’t harm the plaster. The inventor was just beginning to go into production. Ruber himself was going to go out and sell it, for there was a lot of money in it. Therefore, he said, they would need a man to replace him in the shop. And since I had experience with rich customers, a ritzy clientele, I was just the man for the substitution. “I don’t want any more fucking relatives around; they get in my hair. So if you’re interested come out and have a look at the setup. If you like it we can talk terms.”
Seeing that I could not stay with the Renlings unless I became their adopted son, which by now I knew would suffocate me, no other arrangement possible after I had turned them down, I closed a deal with Ruber. I made up a story to tell Renling about a marvelous business opportunity of a lifetime with a school chum, and I pulled out of Evanston in a cold air—Mrs. Renling iron with anger toward me, and Renling himself on the cool side of well-wishing, but saying anyway that I was to come to him if ever I needed help.
I took a room on the South Side, in a house on Blackstone Avenue, four flights up, three of mingy red carpet and one of thready wood, up in the clumsy dust, next door to the can. Here I wasn’t far from the Nelson Home, and as it was a Sunday morning when I set myself up, and I had time, I went to visit Grandma Lausch. By now she was almost like everyone else in the joint, to my eyes, having lost her distinguishing independence, weakened, mole-ish, needing to look around for her old-time qualities when she greeted me, as if she had laid them down, forgetting where. She didn’t seem to recall what grievances she had against me either, and when we sat down together on a bench in the parlor, between some silent old people, asked me, “And how is—is jener, the idiot?” She had forgotten Georgie’s name, and it horrified me; yes, it sent me for a loop until I remembered to think how small a part of her life compared with the whole span she had spent with us, and how many bayous and deadwaters there must be to the sides of an old varicose channel. And as there is a strength or stubbornness about people that doesn’t want the first fact about them spoken, also there is a time when that fact or truth can’t any more be helpful—what can it do for the ruin of an old woman?—but it appears as a blot in the eyes over old expressions. What good can this fact be so near death? Except as a benefit to its witnesses, since we human creatures have many reasons to believe there’s advantage and profit for someone in everything, even in the worst muds, wastes, and poison by-products; and a charm of chemical medicine or industry is how there are endless uses in cinders, slag, bone, and manure. But in reality we’re a long way from being able to profit from everything. Yes, and besides even a truth can get cold from solitude and solitary confinement, and doesn’t live long outside the Bastille; if the rescuing republican crowd is the power of death it doesn’t live at all. This was how it was with Grandma Lausch, who had only a few months left of life. Whose Odessa black dress was greasy and whitening; who gave me an old cat’s gape; who maybe didn’t too well place me; who had this blob of original fact, of what had primarily counted with her, like a cast in the eye; weakly, even infant and lunatic. Her we always thought so powerful and shockproof! It really threw me. Yet I also thought she did remember who I was and that old consciousness was not lost but in a phase of a turntable that turned too slowly. I even thought that she appreciated the visit and said I was her neighbor now and would come again. But I couldn’t make it, and the same winter she died of pneumonia.
In my new job I had a downgrade from the start. Ruber’s cousin’s widow was a dissatisfied woman; she didn’t trust me very much. This lady—she wore her fur coat in the style of a cloak in the store, with a hat of the same creature like a prickly crown, and a face always aware of its imperfections and suffering from them, wretched skin and meager lips—she had stomach troubles and a stiff clamp on bad temper. She cramped my style, the style learned with what I thought was anyway a better class of customers, and she wouldn’t let me come near the important ones. And in the office she locked drawers; she didn’t want me to know costs. What she wanted was to confine me to the work in the back, packing, wrapping, matting, framing, and winding cellophane on lampshades. So that, with being kept in the rear or out on errands to various little factories and potteries in lofts around Wabash Avenue, I quick caught on that she was pushing me toward the door. And as soon as the rubberized paint went into production I became a salesman for it, as I think Ruber too had all the time intended. He said that the shop didn’t actually need me since I seemed satisfied to be errand boy and didn’t take enough interest in the business. “I thought you’d have some ideas, not be just a salary man, but that ain’t the way it’s been,” he told me.
“Well,” I said, “Mrs. Ruber has ideas about me.”
“Of course,” said Ruber, “I seen she’s been trying to make you suck hind titty. But the thing is why you let her.”
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br /> Now he took me off salary and put me on a commission basis. There was nothing I saw to do but accept, and went around on the streetcars and El with a can of the paint, to hotels, hospitals, and such, trying to get orders. It was a flop. I couldn’t land anything, money was so tight, and I was dealing with a peculiar sort of people. I had leads from Mrs. Ruber, into hotels, where she claimed to be better known than she actually was (or managers would not acknowledge her till they knew my business); and, moreover, these were not easy people to lay hold of, in the backstairs and workshops of the cream, noble marble, footmanned, razmataz, furnished-for-pontiffs lakeside joints. Also, many hotels had painting contractors or graft arrangements; controlled by receivers, appointed by the courts, the original corporations in bankruptcy; the receivers were themselves interested in the insurance, plumbing, catering, decorating, bars, concessions, and the rest of the interlocking system. To be sent by the manager to the painting contractor was to be given a runaround. They didn’t want to see my rubber paint. I waited on enough of them in outside offices, which I don’t say breeds the best thoughts, and soon this was clear.
It was now full winter, and barbarous how raw; so going around the city on the spidery cars, rides lasting hours, made you stupid as a stoveside cat because of the closeness inside; and there was something fuddling besides in the mass piled up of uniform things, the likeness of small parts, the type of newspaper columns and the bricks of buildings. To sit and be trundled, while you see: there’s a danger in that of being a bobbin for endless thread or bolt for yard goods; if there’s not much purpose anyway in the ride. And if there’s some amount of sun in the dusty weep marks of the window, it can be even worse for the brain than those iron-deep clouds, just plain brutal and not mitigated. There haven’t been civilizations without cities. But what about cities without civilizations? An inhuman thing, if possible, to have so many people together who beget nothing on one another. No, but it is not possible, and the dreary begets its own fire, and so this never happens.
I did make a few sales. Karas, Einhorn’s cousin-in-law, in the Holloway Enterprises, gave me a break and bought a few gallons to try in a little Van Buren Street gray-bedding hotel, almost a bum’s flop, near the railroad station, and he said he would never use it in any of his better establishments because it made a loud smell of rubber in the heat and moisture of the shower room. There was also a doctor at State and Lake, a buddy of Ruber’s, an abortionist; he was doing over his suite and I got an order from him; and here Ruber tried to chisel from the commission; he didn’t need me, he said, to make this sale. I would have quit him flat then and there if I hadn’t gotten pretty familiar by then with the situations-wanted columns of the Tribune. I wasn’t earning enough to give anything toward Mama’s support any more, but at least I was making expenses and Simon didn’t have to support me. Of course he beefed because I had quit Renling. How was he going to marry if he had to keep Mama by himself? I said, “You and Cissy can move in with her.” But this made him look black, and I understood that Cissy wasn’t having any of that, the old flat and Mama to take care of. “Well, Simon, you know I don’t want to stick you,” I said, “and that I’ll try my best.” We were having coffee in Raklios’s, and my pot of paint was on the table and my gloves on top of that. Open at the seams, the gloves showed how I had lost my grip on prosperity. And I was getting dirty, for a salesman, for whose appearance there are laws which are supposed to guarantee a certain firmness of personality. I had fallen below the standard, unable to afford cleaning and repairing, nor was able to spare much feeling for it.
The way I was living was becoming crude, and I was learning some squatter lessons. Up in my room the heat didn’t reach, and I wore my coat and socks at night. In the morning I went down to the drugstore to warm up on a cup of coffee and lay out my route for the day. I carried my razor in my pocket and shaved downtown with the free hot water, liquid soap, and paper towels of public toilets, and I ate in YMCA cafeterias or one-arm joints and beat checks as often as I could. Vigorous at nine, my hope ran out by noon, and then one of my hardships was that I had no place of rest. I could try to pass the afternoon in Einhorn’s new office; he was accustomed to people on his bench, outside the railing, who had no special tasks. But I who had worked for him had to be doing something, and he would send me on his business. So that I might as well have been on my own, once I was already on the streetcar. Besides I had an obligation to Simon that would not let me loaf, although simply to move around was in itself of no advantage. It was not only for me that being moored wasn’t permitted; there was general motion, as of people driven from angles and corners into the open, by places being valueless and inhospitable to them. In the example of the Son of Man having no place to lay His head; or belonging to the world in general; except that the illuminated understanding of this was absent, nobody much guessing what was up on the face of the earth. I, with my can of paint, no more than others. And once I was under way, streetcars weren’t sufficient, nor Chicago large enough to hold me.
Coming out of an El station one day, when the snow was running off, at the tail end of winter, I ran into Joe Gorman whom I hadn’t seen since after the robbery. He was in a good blue coat of narrow style, and a freshly blocked fedora, dented like a soft bread by the fingers. He was buying magazines, out of the wall of them that hung by the stand. His nose was raised up and he looked ruddy and well, benefited by a good breakfast and the cold morning—although it would have been more like his habit of life to have come from an all-night poker game. Sizing me up, with my sample paint can, it was plain to him that I was having it bad. I had the face of someone pretty much beat.
“What’s this racket you’re in?” he asked me, and when I explained it he said, but not in a triumphing way, “Sucker!” He was certainly right, and I didn’t put much force into defending myself. “It’s a way of meeting people,” I answered, “and something may open up one of these days.”
“Yes,” he said, “a deep hole. What if you do meet people—you think somebody is going to do something for you because you’re a pretty boy? Give you a big break? These days they take care of their relatives first. And what have you got in the way of relatives?”
I didn’t have much. Five Properties was still driving his milk truck, but I didn’t mean to ask him for a job. Coblin had lost everything except his paper route in the crash. Anyway, I hadn’t seen much of either of them since the Commissioner’s funeral.
“Come and have some cheese and pie on me,” he said, and we went into a restaurant.
“What’s up with you?” I said, for I didn’t want to ask explicitly; it was bad manners. “Do you ever see Sailor Bulba?”
“Not that dumbhead, he’s no good to me. He’s in an organization now, slugger for a union, and it’s all he’s good for. Besides, what I’m in now, I have no use for anybody like that. But I could do something for you if you wanted to earn a fast buck.”
“Is it risky?”
“Nothing like what worried you last time. I don’t go in for that any more myself. It’s not legitimate, what I’m doing, but it’s a lot easier and safer. And what do you think makes the buck so fast?”
“Well, what is it?”
“Running immigrants over the border from Canada, from around Rouse’s Point over to Massena Springs, New York.”
“No,” I said, not having forgotten my conversation with Einhorn. “I can’t do that.”
“There’s nothing to it.”
“And if you’re caught?”
“And if I’m caught? And if I’m not caught?” he said with savage humor, poking fun at me. “You want me to go around and peddle paint? I’d rather sit still, like the pilot light inside the gas; and I can’t sit around or I’d go bats.”
“This is federal.”
“You don’t have to tell me what it is. I only asked you because you look as if you needed a break. I make this trip two and three times a month, and I’m getting tired of doing all the driving. So if you want to come along and b
e my relief on the road as far as Massena Springs I’ll give you fifty bucks and all expenses. Then if you decide to come the rest of the way I’ll up it to a hundred. There’ll still be time to think it over on the way, and we’ll be back in three days.”
I took him up on this and considered it a break. Fifty dollars, clear, would go a long way toward easing my mind about Simon. I was fed up with trying to peddle the rubberized paint, and my reckoning was that with a little dough to tide me over I could spend a week or two looking for something else, perhaps dope out a way to get back to college, for I had not altogether given up on that. All this was how I decided, in my outer mind, to go; with the other, the inner, I wanted a change of pressure, and to get out of the city. As for the immigrants, my thought about them was, Hell, why shouldn’t they be here with the rest of us if they want to be? There’s enough to go around of everything including hard luck.
I gave the paint to Tillie Einhorn, to decorate her bathroom, and early in the morning Joe Gorman picked me up in a black Buick; it was souped up, I could tell the first instant, from the hell-energy that gives you no time to consider. I wasn’t even well settled, with spare shirt wrapped in a newspaper in the back seat and my coat straightened under me, before we were on the far South Side, passing the yards of Carnegie Steel; then the dunes, piled up like sulphur; in and out of Gary in two twists and on the road for Toledo, where the speed increased, and the mouth of the motor opened out like murder, not panting, but liberated to do what it was made for.
