(1953)

Characters
Augie	A streetwise, introspective young man raised in poverty by a single mother on Chicago's Near Northwest Side.
Simon	Augie's handsome, fair-featured older brother. He is less romantic and more socially ambitious than Augie.
Georgie	Augie's developmentally disabled younger brother.
Mama	Augie's mother, Rebecca March. A simple woman with failing eyesight who was abandoned by her sons' father and left to provide for three children on her own.
Grandma Lausch	Not related by blood, but a boarder whom the Marches take in for income, and who subsequently advises and controls the family.
Winnie	A poodle kept by Grandma Lausch.
Stiva and Alexander Lausch	Grandma's grown children. Wealthy, successful businessmen who live in Racine and Duluth.
Kreindl	The Marches' Hungarian-born downstairs neighbor, who teaches Grandma how to play chess, and who keeps an interest in their welfare over the years.
Lubin	A social worker whose caseload includes the Marches.
Old Sylvester	The owner of a local theater, who gives Augie his first job handing out flyers promoting shows.
Sylvester	Old Sylvester's son, who studies engineering at Armour Tech, but befriends young Augie despite the age difference. He was married briefly to the sister of Mimi Villars. He becomes a communist and tries to recruit Simon; later moves to Mexico where Augie meets him as he's working as bodyguard to Leon Trotsky.
Anna Coblin	Rebecca March's better-off cousin, who lives on the North Side and takes in Augie one summer to help run the family business.
Hyman Coblin	Anna's husband, who makes a good living managing newspaper delivery routes and spends his afternoons idling about town.
"Five Properties"	Anna's brother (and Rebecca's cousin), who delivers dairy by day and has successfully invested in rental income property on the side. With his "five properties," he considers himself a suitable bachelor, and is known to be in the market for a wife.
Steve "The Sailor" Bulba	A tough kid at school who shares a locker with Augie. He later teams up with Joe Gorman and Augie to rob a leather goods shop.
Jimmy Klein	Augie's friend from school and from the neighborhood. Jimmy comes from a huge family that rents a garden apartment where Augie is always welcome.
Uncle Tambow	Jimmy Klein's uncle, a ward-heeler who sometimes employs Augie, Jimmy and Sylvester for odd tasks.
Clementi "Clem" Tambow	Jimmy Klein's cousin and another neighborhood friend of Augie's. Clem refuses to work for his father or, indeed, for anyone. He later enrolls at University of Chicago and pines for Augie's neighbor, Mimi Villars.
Donald	Clem's brother, an amateur singer, actor and showman.
Hilda Novinson	Augie's first crush, a shy girl from school whom he follows around but never asks out.
William Einhorn	A small-time businessman, landlord and sometimes swindler who runs a pool hall and many other operations. A handicapped man, Einhorn hires Augie as an errand-boy and becomes a mentor and role model.
"The Commissioner"	Einhorn's father, whose acumen built the family's small fortune.
"Dingbat"	Einhorn's half-brother, a flashy dresser who admires gangsters and fancies himself a boxing promoter.
Tillie	Einhorn's loving wife.
Arthur	Einhorn and Tillie's son, whom they send to college in Champaign and who later dates Mimi Villars.
Bavatsky	The Einhorns' handyman.
Lollie Fewter	Einhorn's maid, and an ongoing object of his lustful attentions.
The Karas-Holloways	Tillie Einhorn's cousin Karas, who married into the wealthy Holloway family and manages their businesses impeccably, and his snobbish wife.
Nails Nagel	A boxer whom Dingbat manages.
Kinsman	Einhorn's tenant, who runs a funeral parlor in the same building as the pool hall.
Joe Gorman	A thief and burglar acquainted with Augie from the pool hall. Augie allows himself to be recruited by Gorman for odd, illegal jobs, including a petty robbery and running immigrants over the border from Canada near Buffalo.
The Renlings	A wealthy Evanston retailer and his socialite wife, who first hire and groom Augie to work in their shop, then train in social manners and offer to adopt.
Willa Steiner	A waitress in Evanston with whom Augie has a fling.
Esther Fenchel	A beautiful heiress who stays in the same Benton Harbor resort hotel as Augie when he vacations with Mrs. Renling. Augie is smitten with her.
Thea Fenchel	Esther's equally beautiful older sister, who is smitten with Augie.
Clarence Ruber	An acquaintance of Augie's from Crane College who recruits him to sell rubber cement after Augie leaves the Renlings.
Stoney	A stocky young man who attaches himself to Augie while they are both riding the rails, after Augie escapes arrest in upstate New York.
Wolfy	Augie's other brief companion on the rails, whose real name we never learn and who gets arrested in Detroit.
Cissy Flexner	Simon's tall, beautiful girlfriend, with whom he is infatuated. She eventually marries Five Properties.
Mildred Stark	A handicapped woman who becomes infatuated with Einhorn through his newsletter writing, before becoming his assistant and secretary.
Guillaume	A French dog groomer and dog walker with whom Augie works for a time.
Manny Padilla	A friend of Augie's from Crane College who becomes a book thief to put himself through the University of Chicago. Originally from Chihuahua, Mexico, he is a genius in mathematical physics and eventually takes a job in a biophysics lab.
Charlotte Magnus	A large, pretty-faced, very wealthy heiress who falls in love with Simon and marries him.
Renee	Simon's longtime mistress who claims that she is pregnant with Simon's child and threatens to kill herself. Renee later tries to sue Simon; however, Charlotte intervenes and Renee disappears along with the lawsuit.
Owens	An old Welshman who runs a boarding house in Hyde Park where Augie lives and works in exchange for rent.
Mimi Villars	Augie's neighbor in the boarding house, and a waitress at the student hash house. Her boyfriend, Hooker Frazer, gets her pregnant, and she asks Augie for help. She is both acerbic and idealistic.
Hooker Frazer	Mimi Villars' lover, a graduate assistant in political science, and one of Augie's book customers. He gets Mimi pregnant and leaves her to go back to his wife.
Kayo Obermark	Shares the attic with Augie and Mimi at Owens' house. After his return from Mexico, Augie teaches with him at the same school for a short while.
Lucy Magnus	Charlotte's younger, slimmer and prettier cousin, who falls in love with Augie and even begins to refer to him as her "husband."
Grammick	Mimi's friend, a union organizer who hires Augie to work as his assistant, organizing strikes for the American Federation of Labor.
Happy Kellerman	Works at the coal yard for Simon and Augie as a weigh man.
Kelly Weintraub	Has known Augie and Simon for years and is related to the Magnuses. He catches Augie taking Mimi to the doctor for an abortion and then spreads rumors of their involvement, resulting in Augie and Lucy's breakup.
Caligula	The eagle that Thea and Augie take to Mexico; they plan to train him to hunt giant lizards. So named because Augie notices the resemblance of that to the Mexican word for eagle, "El aguila."
Bizcocho	The horse that Augie rides on during his and Thea's expeditions to catch lizards; Thea must shoot him after an accident because of his broken leg.
Jacinto	A house boy in Mexico who helps train Caligula.
Smitty	Thea's estranged husband. Thea goes to Mexico with Augie partly to get a divorce from him.
Stella	A woman Augie meets in Mexico and helps to escape questioning from the police who are looking for her boyfriend, Oliver. Later Augie goes to New York to be with Stella, followed by a move to Paris so she can pursue an acting career.
Oliver	Stella's boyfriend in Mexico, who is arrested for tax evasion.
Robey	an eccentric and stingy Chicago millionaire who employs Augie to be his assistant while he is writing a book on human happiness. Ultimately Robey only wants someone to listen to him talk.
Mintouchian	An Armenian divorce lawyer and Agnes Kuttner's lover, he befriends Augie and they discuss his thoughts on love and adultery. Mintouchian pays Augie to manage his black market dealings in Europe.
Agnes Kuttner	A friend of Stella's and Mintouchian's mistress. While in New York she fakes a mugging and claims a diamond ring is stolen to collect on the insurance.
Bateshaw	A native Chicagoan who survives the shipwreck of the Sam MacManus with Augie. He talks constantly about his obsession with learning the secrets of creating life. The two eventually fight and Augie contemplates throwing him overboard but decides not to in the end.
Jacqueline	Augie and Stella's housemaid in Paris, she travels to Burge with Augie at the end of the novel. Along the way Jacqueline reveals to Augie her dreams of traveling to Mexico, which makes Augie laugh.
Wiley Moulton	Long-haired big-bellied writer from New York that belongs to group of eccentrics Augie and Thea meet at "Hilario's Bar" in Acatla, Mexido.
Iggy Blaikie	Other writer from New York at Hilario's. A writer of "blood-curdlers," his seedy appearance is strongly misleading. Changed his name from Gurevitch.

CONTENTS


Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
Chapter XIX
Chapter XX
Chapter XXI
Chapter XXII
Chapter XXIII
Chapter XXIV
Chapter XXV
Chapter XXVI




Chapter I



I am an American, Chicago born--Chicago, that somber city--and go at things
as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way:
first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so
innocent. But a man's character is his fate, says Heraclitus, and in the end there
isn't any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door
or gloving the knuckles.

Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold
down one thing you hold down the adjoining.

My own parents were not much to me, though I cared for my mother. She was
simple-minded, and what I learned from her was not what she taught, but on the
order of object lessons. She didn't have much to teach, poor woman. My brothers
and I loved her. I speak for them both; for the elder it is safe enough; for
the younger one, Georgie, I have to answer--he was born an idiot--but I'm in
no need to guess, for he had a song he sang as he ran dragfooted with his stiff
idiot's trot, up and down along the curl-wired fence in the backyard:

　　　　　　　Georgie Mahchy, Augie, Simey
　　　　　　　Winnie Mahchy, evwy, evwy love Mama.

He was right about everyone save Winnie, Grandma Lausch's poodle, a pursy
old overfed dog. Mama was Winnie's servant, as she was Grandma Lausch's.
Loud-breathing and wind-breaking, she lay near the old lady's stool on a
cushionembroidered with a Berber aiming a rifle at a lion. She was personally
Grandma's, belonged to her suite; the rest of us were the governed, and
especially Mama. Mama passed the dog's dish to Grandma, and Winnie received
her food at the old lady's feet from the old lady's hands. These hands and feet
were small; she wore a shriveled sort of lisle on her legs and her slippers were
gray--ah, the gray of that felt, the gray despotic to souls--with pink ribbons.
Mama, however, had large feet, and around the house she wore men's shoes,
usually without strings, and a dusting or mobcap like somebody's fanciful cotton
effigy of the form of the brain. She was meek and long, round-eyed like Georgie
--gentle green round eyes and a gentle freshness of color in her long face. Her
hands were work-reddened, she had very few of her teeth left--to heed the
knocks as they come--and she and Simon wore the same ravelly coat-sweaters.
Besides having round eyes, Mama had circular glasses that I went with her to the
free dispensary on Harrison Street to get. Coached by Grandma Lausch, I went
to do the lying. Now I know it wasn't so necessary to lie, but then everyone
thought so, and Grandma Lausch especially, who was one of those Machiavellis
of small street and neighborhood that my young years were full of. So Grandma,
who had it all ready before we left the house and must have put in hours plotting
it out in thought and phrase, lying small in her chilly small room under the
featherbed, gave it to me at breakfast. The idea was that Mama wasn't keen
enough to do it right. That maybe one didn't need to be keen didn't occur to us;
it was a contest. The dispensary would want to know why the Charities didn't
pay for the glasses. So you must say nothing about the Charities, but that
sometimes money from my father came and sometimes it didn't, and that Mama
took boarders. This was, in a delicate and choosy way, by ignoring and omitting
certain large facts, true. It was true enough for them, and at the age of nine I
could appreciate this perfectly. Better than my brother Simon, who was too blunt
for this kind of maneuver and, anyway, from books, had gotten hold of some
English schoolboy notions of honor. Tom Brown's Schooldays for many years
had an influence we were not in a position to afford.

Simon was a blond boy with big cheekbones and wide gray eyes and had the
arms of a cricketer--I go by the illustrations; we never played anything but
softball. Opposed to his British style was his patriotic anger at George III. The
mayor was at that time ordering the schoolboard to get history books that dealt
more harshly with the king, and Simon was very hot at Cornwallis. I admired
this patriotic flash, his terrific personal wrath at the general, and his satis-
faction over his surrender at Yorktown, which would often come over him at lunch
while we ate our bologna sandwiches. Grandma had a piece of boiled chicken at
noon, and sometimes there was the gizzard for bristleheaded little Georgie, who
loved it and blew at the ridgy thing more to cherish than to cool it. But this
martial true-blood pride of Simon's disqualified him for the crafty task to be
done at the dispensary; he was too disdainful to lie and might denounce every-
body instead. I could be counted on to do the job, because I enjoyed it I loved
a piece of strategy. I had enthusiasms too; I had Simon's, though there was
never much meat in Cornwallis for me, and I had Grandma Lausch's as well. As
for the truth of these statements I was instructed to make--well, it was a fact
that we had a boarder. Grandma Lausch was our boarder, not a relation at all.
She was supported by two sons, one from Cincinnati and one from Racine,
Wisconsin. The daughters-in-law did not want her, and she, the widow of a
powerful Odessa businessman--a divinity over us, bald, whiskery, with a fat
nose, greatly armored in a cutaway, a double-breasted vest, powerfully buttoned
(his blue photo, enlarged and retouched by Mr. Lulov, hung in the parlor,
doubled back between the portico columns of the full-length mirror, the dome of
the stove beginning where his trunk ended)--she preferred to live with us,
because for so many years she was used to direct a house, to command, to
govern, to manage, scheme, devise, and intrigue in all her languages. She
boasted French and German besides Russian, Polish, and Yiddish; and who but
Mr. Lulov, the retouch artist from Division Street, could have tested her claim
to French? And he was a serene bogus too, that triple-backboned gallant teadrink-
er. Except that he had been a hackie in Paris, once, and if he told the truth
about that might have known French among other things, like playing tunes on
his teeth with a pencil or singing and keeping time with a handful of coins that
he rattled by jigging his thumb along the table, and how to play chess.

Grandma Lausch played like Timur, whether chess or klabyasch, with palatal
catty harshness and sharp gold in her eyes. Klabyasch she played with Mr.
Kreindl, a neighbor of ours who had taught her the game. A powerful stubhand-
ed man with a large belly, he swatted the table with those hard hands of his,
flinging down his cards and shouting "Shtoch! Yasch! Menél! Klabyasch!"
Grandma looked sardonically at him. She often said, after he left, "If you've
got a Hungarian friend you don't need an enemy." But there was nothing of the
enemy about Mr. Kreindl. He merely, sometimes, sounded menacing because of
his drill-sergeant's bark. He was an old-time Austro-Hungarian conscript, and
there was something soldierly about him: a neck that had strained with pushing
artillery wheels, a campaigner's red in the face, a powerful bite in his jaw and
gold-crowned teeth, green cockeyes and soft short hair, altogether Napoleonic.
His feet slanted out on the ideal of Frederick the Great, but he was about a
foot under the required height for guardsmen. He had a masterly look of
independence. He and his wife--a woman quiet and modest to the neighbors and
violently quarrelsome at home--and his son, a dental student, lived in what was
called the English basement at the front of the house. The son, Kotzie, worked
evenings in the corner drugstore and went to school in the neighborhood of
County Hospital, and it was he who told Grandma about the free dispensary. Or
rather, the old woman sent for him to find out what one could get from those
state and county places. She was always sending for people, the butcher, the
grocer, the fruit peddler, and received them in the kitchen to explain that the
Marches had to have discounts. Mama usually had to stand by. The old woman
would tell them, "You see how it is--do I have to say more? There's no man in
the house and children to bring up." This was her most frequent argument. When
Lubin, the caseworker, came around and sat in the kitchen, familiar, bald
headed, in his gold glasses, his weight comfortable, his mouth patient, she
shot it at him: "How do you expect children to be brought up?" While he listened,
trying to remain comfortable but gradually becoming like a man determined not
to let a grasshopper escape from his hand. "Well, my dear, Mrs. March could
raise your rent," he said. She must often have answered--for there were times
when she sent us all out to be alone with him--"Do you know what things
would be like without me? You ought to be grateful for the way I hold them
together." I'm sure she even said, "And when I die, Mr. Lubin, you'll see what
you've got on your hands." I'm one hundred per cent sure of it. To us nothing
was ever said that might weaken her rule by suggesting it would ever end.
Besides, it would have shocked us to hear it, and she, in her miraculous
knowledge of us, able to be extremely close to our thoughts--she was one
sovereign who knew exactly the proportions of love, respect, and fear of power
in her subjects--understood how we would have been shocked. But to Lubin, for
reasons of policy and also because she had to express feelings she certainly had,
she must have said it. He had a harassed patience with her of "deliver me from
such clients," though he tried to appear master of the situation. He held his derby
between his thighs (his suits, always too scanty in the pants, exposed white socks
and bulldog shoes, crinkled, black, and bulging with toes), and he looked into
the hat as though debating whether it was wise to release his grasshopper on the
lining for a while.

"I pay as much as I can afford," she would say.

She took her cigarette case out from under her shawl, she cut a Murad in half
with her sewing scissors and picked up the holder. This was still at a time when
women did not smoke. Save the intelligentsia--the term she applied to herself.
With the holder in her dark little gums between which all her guile, malice, and
command issued, she had her best inspirations of strategy. She was as wrinkled
as an old paper bag, an autocrat, hard-shelled and Jesuitical, a pouncy old hawk
of a Bolshevik, her small ribboned gray feet immobile on the shoekit and stool
Simon had made in the manual-training class, dingy old wool Winnie whose bad
smell filled the flat on the cushion beside her. If wit and discontent don't
necessarily go together, it wasn't from the old woman that I learned it. She was
impossible to satisfy. Kreindl, for example, on whom we could depend, Kreindl
who carried up the coal when Mama was sick and who instructed Kotzie to make
up our prescriptions for nothing, she called "that trashy Hungarian," or
"Hungarian pig." She called Kotzie "the baked apple"; she called Mrs. Kreindl
"the secret goose," Lubin "the shoemaker's son," the dentist "the butcher," the
butcher "the timid swindler." She detested the dentist, who had several times
unsuccessfully tried to fit her with false teeth. She accused him of burning her
gums when taking the impressions. But then she tried to pull his hands away
from her mouth. I saw that happen: the stolid, square-framed Dr. Wernick,
whose compact forearms could have held off a bear, painfully careful with her,
determined, concerned at her choked screams, and enduring her scratches. To
see her struggle like that was no easy thing for me, and Dr. Wernick was sorry to
see me there too, I know, but either Simon or I had to squire her wherever she
went. Here particularly she needed a witness to Wernick's cruelty and
clumsiness as well as a shoulder to lean on when she went weakly home.
Already at ten I was only a little shorter than she and big enough to hold her
small weight.

"You saw how he put his paws over my face so I couldn't breathe?" she said.
"God made him to be a butcher. Why did he become a dentist? His hands are too
heavy. The touch is everything to a dentist. If his hands aren't right he shouldn't
be let practice. But his wife worked hard to send him through school and make a
dentist of him. And I must go to him and be burned because of it."

The rest of us had to go to the dispensary--which was like the dream of a
multitude of dentists' chairs, hundreds of them in a space as enormous as an
armory, and green bowls with designs of glass grapes, drills lifted zigzag as
insects' legs, and gas flames on the porcelain swivel trays--a thundery gloom
inHarrison Street of limestone county buildings and cumbersome red streetcars
with metal grillwork on their windows and monarchical iron whiskers of cow-
catchers front and rear. They lumbered and clanged, and their brake tanks pant-
ed in the slushy brown of a winter afternoon or the bare stone brown of a sum-
mer's, salted with ash, smoke, and prairie dust, with long stops at the clinics
to let off clumpers, cripples, hunchbacks, brace-legs, crutch-wielders, tooth
and eye sufferers, and all the rest.

So before going with my mother for the glasses I was always instructed by the
old woman and had to sit and listen with profound care. My mother too had to be
present, for there must be no slip-up. She must be coached to say nothing.
"Remember, Rebecca," Grandma would re-repeat, "let him answer everything."
To which Mama was too obedient even to say yes, but only sat and kept her long
hands folded on the bottle-fly iridescence of the dress the old woman had picked
for her to wear. Very healthy and smooth, her color; none of us inherited this
high a color from her, or the form of her nose with nostrils turned back and
showing a little of the partition. "You keep out of it. If they ask you something,
you look at Augie like this." And she illustrated how Mama was to turn to me,
terribly exact, if she had only been able to drop her habitual grandeur. "Don't
tellanything. Only answer questions," she said to me. My mother was anxious that
I should be worthy and faithful. Simon and I were her miracles or accidents;
Georgie was her own true work in which she returned to her fate after blessed
and undeserved success. "Augie, listen to Grandma. Hear what she says," was all
she ever dared when the old woman unfolded her plan.

"When they ask you, 'Where is your father?' you say, 'I don't know where,
miss.' No matter how old she is, you shouldn't forget to say 'miss.' If she wants
to know where he was the last time you heard from him, you must tell her that
the last time he sent a money order was about two years ago from Buffalo, New
York. Never say a word about the Charity. The Charity you should never
mention, you hear that? Never. When she asks you how much the rent is, tell her
eighteen dollars. When she asks where the money comes from, say you have
boarders. How many? Two boarders. Now, say to me, how much rent?"

"Eighteen dollars."

"And how many boarders?"

"Two."

"And how much do they pay?"

"How much should I say?"

"Eight dollars each a week."

"Eight dollars."

"So you can't go to a private doctor, if you get sixty-four dollars a month.
The eyedrops alone cost me five when I went, and he scalded my eyes. And these
specs"--she tapped the case--"cost ten dollars the frames and fifteen the
glasses."

Never but at such times, by necessity, was my father mentioned. I claimed to
remember him; Simon denied that I did, and Simon was right I liked to imagine
it.

"He wore a uniform," I said. "Sure I remember. He was a soldier."

"Like hell he was. You don't know anything about it."

"Maybe a sailor."

"Like hell. He drove a truck for Hall Brothers laundry on Marsh-field, that's
what he did. I said he used to wear a uniform. Monkey sees, monkey does;
monkey hears, monkey says." Monkey was the basis of much thought with us.
On the sideboard, on the Turkestan runner, with their eyes, ears, and mouth
covered, we had see-no-evil, speak-no-evil, hear-no-evil, a lower trinity of
the house. The advantage of lesser gods is that you can take their names any
way you like. "Silence in the courthouse, monkey wants to speak; speak, monkey,
speak." "The monkey and the bamboo were playing in the grass…" Still the
monkeys could be potent, and awesome besides, and deep social critics when the
old woman, like a great lama--for she is Eastern to me, in the end--would point
to the squatting brown three, whose mouths and nostrils were drawn in sharp
blood-red, and with profound wit, her unkindness finally touching greatness, say,
"Nobody asks you to love the whole world, only to be honest, ehrlich. Don't have
a loud mouth. The more you love people the more they'll mix you up. Achild loves,
a person respects. Respect is better than love. And that's respect, themiddle
monkey." It never occurred to us that she sinned mischievously herselfagainst
that convulsed speak-no-evil who hugged his lips with his hands; but no criti-
cism of her came near our minds at any time, much less when the resonance
of a great principle filled the whole kitchen.

She used to read us lessons off poor Georgie's head. He would kiss the dog.
This bickering handmaiden of the old lady, at one time. Now a dozy, longsigh-
ing crank and proper object of respect for her years of right-minded but not
exactly lovable busyness. But Georgie loved her--and Grandma, whom he
would kiss on the sleeve, on the knee, taking knee or arm in both hands and
putting his underlip forward, chaste, lummoxy, caressing, gentle and diligent
when he bent his narrow back, blouse bagging all over it, whitish hair pointy
and close as a burr or sunflower when the seeds have been picked out of it.
The old lady let him embrace her and spoke to him in the following way: "Hey,
you, boy, clever junge, you like the old Grandma, my minister, my cavalyer?
That's-aboy. You know who's good to you, who gives you gizzards and necks? Who?
Who makes noodles for you? Yes. Noodles are slippery, hard to pick up with a
fork and hard to pick up with the fingers. You see how the little bird pulls the
worm? The little worm wants to stay in the ground. The little worm doesn't want
to come out. Enough, you're making my dress wet." And she'd sharply push his
forehead off with her old prim hand, having fired off for Simon and me, mindful
always of her duty to wise us up, one more animadversion on the trustful, loving,
and simple surrounded by the cunning-hearted and tough, a fighting nature of
birds and worms, and a desperate mankind without feelings. Illustrated by
Georgie. But the principal illustration was not Georgie but Mama, in her love-
originated servitude, simple-minded, abandoned with three children. This was
what old lady Lausch was driving at, now, in the later wisdom of her life, that
she had a second family to lead.

And what must Mama have thought when in any necessary connection my father
was brought into the conversation? She sat docile. I conceive that she thought
of some detail about him--a dish he liked, perhaps meat and potatoes, perhaps
cabbage or cranberry sauce; perhaps that he disliked a starched collar, or
a soft collar; that he brought home the Evening American or the Journal. She
thought this because her thoughts were always simple; but she felt abandonment,
and greater pains than conscious mental ones put a dark streak to her simplicity.
I don't know how she made out before, when we were alone after the desertion,
but Grandma came and put a regulating hand on the family life. Mama surren-
dered powers to her that maybe she had never known she had and took her
punishment in drudgery; occupied a place, I suppose, among women conquered
by a superior force of love, like those women whom Zeus got the better of in
animal form and who next had to take cover from his furious wife. Not that I
can see my big, gentle, dilapidated, scrubbing, and lugging mother as a fugi-
tive of immense beauty from such classy wrath, or our father as a marble-legged
Olympian. She had sewed buttonholes in a coat factory in a Wells Street loft
and he was a laundry driver--there wasn't even so much as a picture of him left
when he blew. But she does have a place among such women by the deeper right
of continual payment. And as for vengeance from a woman, Grandma Lausch
was there to administer the penalties under the standards of legitimacy,
representing the main body of married womankind.

Still the old lady had a heart. I don't mean to say she didn't. She was tyr-
annical and a snob about her Odessa luster and her servants and governesses,
but though she had been a success herself she knew what it was to fall through
susceptibility. I began to realize this when I afterward read some of the novels
she used to send me to the library for. She taught me the Russian alphabet so
that I could make out the titles. Once a year she read Anna Karenina and Eugene
Onegin. Occasionally I got into hot water by bringing a book she didn't want.
"How many times do I have to tell you if it doesn't say roman I don't want it?
You didn't look inside. Are your fingers too weak to open the book? Then they
should be too weak to play ball or pick your nose. For that you've got strength!
Bozhe moy! God in Heaven! You haven't got the brains of a cat, to walk two
miles and bring me a book about religion because it says Tolstoi on the cover."

The old grande dame, I don't want to be misrepresenting her. She was suspi-
cious of what could have been, given one wrong stitch of heredity, a family
vice by which we could have been exploited. She didn't want to read Tolstoi on
religion. She didn't trust him as a family man because the countess had had such
trouble with him. But although she never went to the synagogue, ate bread on
Passover, sent Mama to the pork butcher where meat was cheaper, loved canned
lobster and other forbidden food, she was not an atheist and free-thinker. Mr.
Anticol, the old junky she called (search me why) "Rameses"--after the city
named with Pithom in the Scriptures maybe; no telling what her inspirations
were--was that. A real rebel to God. Icy and canny, she would listen to what he
had to say and wouldn't declare herself. He was ruddy, and gloomy; his leathery
serge cap made him flat-headed, and his alley calls for rags, old iron--"recks
aline," he sung it--made him gravel-voiced and gruff. He had tough hair and
brows and despising brown eyes; he was a studious, shaggy, meaty old man.
Grandma bought a set of the Encyclopedia Americana--edition of 1892, I think
--from him and saw to it that Simon and I read it; and he too, whenever he met
us, asked, "How's the set?" believing, I reckon, that it taught irreverence to
religion. What had made him an atheist was a massacre of Jews in his town.
From the cellar where he was hidden he saw a laborer pissing on the body of his
wife's younger brother, just killed. "So don't talk to me about God," he said.
But it was he that talked about God, all the time. And while Mrs. Anticol stayed
pious, it was his idea of grand apostasy to drive to the reform synagogue on
the high holidays and park his pink-eye nag among the luxurious, whirl-wired
touring cars of the rich Jews who bared their heads inside as if they were
attending a theater, a kind of abjectness in them that gave him grim enter-
tainment to the end of his life. He caught a cold in the rain and died of
pneumonia.

Grandma, all the same, burned a candle on the anniversary of Mr. Lausch's
death, threw a lump of dough on the coals when she was baking, as a kind of
offering, had incantations over baby teeth and stunts against the evil eye. It
waskitchen religion and had nothing to do with the giant God of the Creation
whoturned back the waters and exploded Gomorrah, but it was on the side of rel-
igion at that. And while we're on that side I'll mention the Poles--we were just
ahandful of Jews among them in the neighborhood--and the swollen, bleeding
hearts on every kitchen wall, the pictures of saints, baskets of death flowers tied
at the door, communions, Easters, and Christmases. And sometimes we were
chased, stoned, bitten, and beat up for Christ-killers, all of us, even Georgie, arti-
cled, whether we liked it or not, to this mysterious trade. But I never had any
special grief from it, or brooded, being by and large too larky and boisterous to
take it to heart, and looked at it as needing no more special explanation than
the stone-and-bat wars of the street gangs or the swarming on a fall evening of
parish punks to rip up fences, screech and bawl at girls, and beat up strangers.
It wasn't in my nature to fatigue myself with worry over being born to this oc-
cult work, even though some of my friends and playmates would turn up in the
middle of these mobs to trap you between houses from both ends of a passageway.
Simon had less truck with them. School absorbed him more, and he had his sent-
iments anyway, a mixed extract from Natty Bumppo, Quentin Durward, Tom Brown,
Clark at Kaskaskia, the messenger who brought the good news from Ratisbon, and
so on, that kept him more to himself. I was just a slow understudy to this,
just as he never got me to put in hours on his Sandow muscle builder and the
gimmick for developing the sinews of the wrist. I was an easy touch for friend-
ships, and most of the time they were cut short by older loyalties. I was pals
longest with Stashu Kopecs, whose mother was a midwife graduated from the Aes-
culapian School of Midwifery on Milwaukee Avenue. Well to do, the Kopecses had
an electric player piano and linoleums in all the rooms, but Stashu was a thief,
and to run with him I stole too: coal off the cars, clothes from the lines, rub-
ber balls from the dime store, and pennies off the newsstands. Mostly for the
satisfaction of dexterity, though Stashu invented the game of stripping in the
cellar and putting on girls' things swiped from the clotheslines. Then he too
showed up in a gang that caught me one cold afternoon of very little snow while
I was sitting on a crate frozen into the mud, eating Nabisco wafers, my throat
full of the sweet dust. Foremost, there was a thug of a kid, about thirteen but
undersized, hard and grieved-looking. He came up to accuse me, and big Moonya
Staplanski, just out of the St Charles Reformatory and headed next for the one
at Pontiac, backed him up.

"You little Jew bastard, you hit my brother," Moonya said.

"I never did. I never even saw him before."

"You took away a nickel from him. How did you buy them biscuits else,
you?"

"I got them at home."

Then I caught sight of Stashu, hayheaded and jeering, pleased to sickness with
his deceit and his new-revealed brotherhood with the others, and I said, "Hey,
you lousy bed-wetter, Stashu, you know Moon ain't even got a brother."

Here the kid hit me and the gang jumped me, Stashu with the rest, tearing the
buckles from my sheepskin coat and bloodying my nose.

"Who is to blame?" said Grandma Lausch when I came home. "You know who? You
are, Augie, because that's all the brains you have to go with that piss-in-bed
accoucherka's son. Does Simon hang around with them? Not Simon. He has too much
sense." I thanked God she didn't know about the stealing. And in a way, because
that was her schooling temperament, I suspect she was pleased that I should see
where it led to give your affections too easily. But Mama, the prime example of
this weakness, was horrified. Against the old lady's authority she didn't dare
to introduce her feelings during the hearing, but when she took me into the kit-
chen to put a compress on me she nearsightedly pored over my scratches, whisper-
ing and sighing to me, while Georgie tottered around behind her, long and white,
and Winnie lapped water under the sink.




Chapter II




After the age of twelve we were farmed out in the summer by the old woman to
get a taste of life and the rudiments of earning. Even before, she had found
something for me to do. There was a morning class for feeble-minded children,
and when I had left Georgie in school I reported to Sylvester's Star Theatre to
distribute handbills. Grandma had arranged this with Sylvester's father, whom
she knew from the old people's arbor in the park.

If it got to our rear flat that the weather was excellent--warm and still, she
liked it--she would go to her room and put on her corset, relic of when she
was fuller, and her black dress. Mama would fix her a bottle of tea. Then in a
chapeau of flowers and a furpiece of tails locked on her shoulder with badger
claws she went to the park. With a book she never intended to read. There was
too much talk in the arbor for that. It was a place where marriages were made.
A year or so after the old atheist's death, Mrs. Anticol found herself a second
husband there. This widower traveled down from Iowa City for just the purpose
of marriage, and after they were married the news came back that he kept her
locked a prisoner in his house and made her sign away all rights of legacy.
Grandma did not pretend to be sorry; she said, "Poor Bertha," but she said it
with the humor she was a crackerjack at, as thin and full of play as fiddle wire,
and she took much credit for not going in for that kind of second marriage. I quit
thinking long ago that all old people came to rest from the things they were out
for in their younger years. But that was what she wanted us to believe--"an old
baba like me"--and accordingly we took her at her word to be old disinterested
wisdom who had put by her vanity. But if she never got a marriage offer, I'm not
prepared to say it made no difference to her. She couldn't have been so sold on
Anna Karenina for nothing, or another favorite of hers I ought to mention,
Manon Lescaut, and when she was feeling right she bragged about her waist and
hips, so, since she never gave up any glory or influence that I know of, I can see
it wasn't only from settled habit that she. went into her bedroom to lace on her
corset and wind up her hair but to take the eye of a septuagenarian Vronsky or
Des Grieux. I sometimes induced myself to see, beyond her spotty yellowness
and her wrinkles and dry bangs, a younger and resentful woman in her eyes.

But whatever she was after for herself, in the arbor, she wasn't forgetting us,
and she got me the handbill job through old Sylvester, called "the Baker"
because he wore white ducks and white golfer's cap. He had palsy, this the joke
of his making rolls, but he was clean, brief-spoken, serious in the aim of his
bloodshot eyes, reconciled, with an effort of nerve that was copied straight into
the curve of his white horseshoe of mustache, to the shortness of his days. I
suppose her pitch with him was as usual, about the family she was protecting,
and Sylvester took me to see his son, a young fellow whom money or family
anxiety always seemed to keep in a sweat. Something, his shadow business and
the emptiness of the seats at two o'clock, the violinist playing just for him
and the operator in the projection box, made it awful for him and misery to come
across with my two bits. It made him act tough. He said, "I've had kids who
shoved the bills down the sewer. Too bad if I ever find out about it, and I have
ways to check up." So I knew that he might follow me along a block of the
route, and I kept watch in the streets for his head with the weak hair of baldness
and his worry-wounded eyes, as brown as a bear's. "I've got a couple of tricks
myself for any punk who thinks he's going to pull a fast one," he warned me.
But when he believed I was trustworthy, and at first I was, following his
directions about rolling the bills and sticking them into the brass mouthpieces
over the bells, not fouling up the mailboxes and getting him in dutch with the
post office, he treated me to seltzer and Turkish Delight and said he was going to
make a ticket-taker of me when I grew a little taller, or put me in charge of the
popcorn machine he was thinking of getting; and one of these years he was going
to hire a manager while he went back to Armour Institute to finish his engineer-
ing degree. He had only a couple of years to go, and his wife was after him to
do it. He took me for my senior, I suppose, to tell me this, as the people at
the dispensary did, and as often happened. I didn't understand all that he told
me.

Anyway, he was just a little deceived in me, for when he said his other boys
had dumped bills down the sewer I felt I couldn't do less either and watched for
my chance. Or gave out wads to the kids in George's dummy-room when I came
at noon to fetch him at the penal-looking school built in the identical brick with
the icehouse and the casket factory which were its biggest neighbors. It had the
great gloom inside of clinks the world over, with ceilings the eye had to try for
and wood floors trailed with marching. Summers, one corner of it was kept open
for the feeble-minded, and, coming in, you traded the spray of the icehouse for
the snipping, cooing hubbub of paper-chain making and the commands of teachers.
I sat on the stairs and divided the remaining bills, and when class let out
Georgie helped me get rid of them. Then I took him by the hand and led him
home.

Much as he loved Winnie, he was scared of strange dogs, and as he carried her
scent he drew them. They were always sniffing his legs, and I carried stones to
pitch at them.

This was the last idle summer. The next, as soon as the term was over, Simon
was sent to work as a bellhop in a resort hotel in Michigan, and I went to the
Coblins' on the North Side to help Coblin with his newspaper route. I had to
move there, for the papers came into the shed at four in the morning and we
lived better than half an hour away on the streetcar. But it wasn't exactly
as though I were passing into strange hands, for Anna Coblin was my mother's
cousin and I was accordingly treated as a relative. Hyman Coblin came for me
in his Ford; George howled when I left the house; he had a way of demonstrating
the feelings Mama could not show under ban of the old woman. George had to
be shut up in the parlor. I sat him down by the stove and left. Cousin Anna
wept enough for everybody and plastered me with kisses at the door of her
house, seeing me dog-dumb with the heartbreak of leaving home--a very temporary
kind of emotion for me and almost, as it were, borrowed from Mama, who saw
her sons drafted untimely into hardships. But Anna Coblin, who had led the
negotiations for me, cried the most. Her feet were bare, her hair enormous,
and her black dress misbuttoned. "I'll treat you like my own boy," she prom-
ised, "my own Howard." She took my canvas laundry bag from me and put me in
Howard's room, between the kitchen and the toilet.

Howard had run away. Together with Joe Kinsman, the undertaker's son, he
had lied about his age and enlisted in the Marine Corps. Their families were
trying to get them out, but in the meantime they had been shipped to Nicaragua
and were fighting Sandino and the rebels. She grieved terribly, as if he were
dead already. And as she had great size and terrific energy of constitution she
produced all kinds of excesses. Even physical ones: moles, blebs, hairs, bumps
in her forehead, huge concentration in her neck; she had spiraling reddish hair
springing with no negligible beauty and definiteness from her scalp, tangling
as it widened up and out, cut duck-tail fashion in the back and scrawled out
high above her ears. Originally strong, her voice was crippled by weeping and
asthma, and the whites of her eyes coppery from the same causes, a burning,
morose face, piteous, and her spirit untamed by thoughts or the remote con-
siderations that can reconcile people to awfuler luck than she had. Because,
said Grandma Lausch, cutting her case down to scale with her usual satisfaction
in the essential, what did she want, a woman like that? Her brothers found her
a husband, bought him a business, she had two children in her own house and a
few pieces of real-estate besides. She might still be in the millinery factory
where she started out, over the Loop on Wabash Avenue. That was the observa-
tion we heard after Cousin Anna had come to talk to her--as one comes to a
wise woman--amassed herself into a suit, hat, shoes, and sat at the kitchen
table looking at herself in the mirror as she spoke, not casually, but steadily,
sternly, with wrathful comment; even at the bitterest, even when her mouth was
at the widest stretch of tears, she went on watching. Mama, her head wrapped
in a bandanna, was singeing a chicken at the gas plate.

"Daragaya, nothing will happen to your son; he'll come back," said the old
woman while Anna sobbed. "Other mothers have their sons there."

"I told him to stop going with the undertaker's. What kind of friend was that
for him? He dragged him into it."

She had the Kinsmans down for death-breeders, and I found out that she made
a detour of blocks when shopping to avoid Kinsman's parlors, though she had
always boasted before that Mrs. Kinsman, a big, fresh, leery-looking woman,
was a lodge sister and friend of hers--the rich Kinsmans. Coblin's uncle, a bank
officer, was buried out of Kinsman's, and Friedl Coblin and Kinsman's daughter
went to the same elocution teacher. She had the impediment of Moses whose hand
the watching angel guided to the coal, Friedl, and she carried her stuttering
into fluency later. Years after, at a football game where I was selling hot-dogs,
I heard her; she didn't recognize me in the white hat of the day, but I remember-
ed coaching her in "When the Frost Is on the Punkin'." And recalled also Cousin
Anna's oath that I should marry Friedl when I was grown. It was in her tears of
welcome when she pressed me, on the porch of the house that day. "Hear,
Owgie, you'll be my son, my daughter's husband, mein kind!" At this moment
she had once more given Howard up for dead.

She kept this project of marriage going all the time. When I cut my hand while
sharpening the lawn-mower she said, "It'll heal before your wedding day," and
then, "It's better to marry somebody you've known all your life, I swear.
Nothing worse than strangers. You hear me? Hear!" So she had the future
mapped because little Friedl so resembled her that she lived with foreknowledge
of her difficulty; she herself had had to be swept over it by the rude Providence
of her brother. No mother to help her. And probably she felt that if a husband
had not been found for her she would have been destroyed by the choked power
of her instincts, deprived of children. And the tears to shed for them would
have drowned her as sure as the water of Ophelia's brook. The sooner married
the better. Where Anna came from there was no encouragement of childhood
anyhow. Her own mother had been married at thirteen or fourteen, and Friedl
therefore had only four or five years to go. Anna herself had exceeded this age
limit by fifteen years at least, the last few, I imagine, of fearful grief, be-
fore Coblin married her. Accordingly she was already on campaign, every young
boy a prospect, for I assume I was not the only one but, for the time being,
the most available. And Friedl was being groomed with music and dancing lessons
as well as elocution and going into the best society in the neighborhood. No
reason but this would have made Anna belong to a lodge; she was too gloomy
and house-haunting a woman, and it needed a great purpose to send her out to
benefits and bazaars.

To anybody who snubbed her child she was a bad enemy and spread damaging
rumors. "The piano teacher told me herself. Every Saturday it was the same
story. When she went to give Minnie Carson her lesson, Mister tried to pull
her behind the door with him." Whether true or not, it soon became her
conviction. It made no difference who confronted her or whether the teacher
came to plead with her to stop. But the Carsons had not invited Friedl to a
birthday party and got themselves an enemy of Corsican rigor and pure
absorption.

And now that Howard had run away all her enemies were somehow implicated
as hell's agents and deputies, and she lay in bed, crying and cursing them:
"O God, Master of the Universe, may their hands and feet wither and their
heads dry out," and other grandiose things, everyday language to her. As she
lay in the summer light, tempered by the shades and the catalpa of the front
yard, flat on her back with compresses, towels, rags, she had a considerable
altitude of trunk, the soles of her feet shining from the sheets like graphite
rubbings, feet of war disasters in the ruined villages of Napoleon's Spanish
campaign; flies riding in echelon on the long string of the light switch. While
she panted and butchered on herself with pains and fears. She had the will of
a martyr to carry a mangled head in Paradise till doomsday, in the suffering
mothers' band led by Eve and Hannah. For Anna was terribly religious and had
her own ideas of time and place, so that Heaven and eternity were not too far;
she had things segmented, flattened down, and telescoped like the stages and
floors of the Leaning Tower, while Nicaragua was at a distance double the cir-
cumference of the world, where the bantam Sandino--and who he was to her is
outside my power to imagine--was killing her son.

The filth of the house, meantime, and particularly of the kitchen, was
stupendous. Nevertheless, swollen and fire-eyed, slow on her feet, shouting
incomprehensibly on the telephone, and her face as if lit by that gorgeous hair
which finally advanced her into royalty, she somehow kept up with her duties.
She had meals on time for the men, she saw to it that Friedl practiced and
rehearsed, that the money collected was checked, counted, sorted and the coins
rolled when Coblin wasn't on hand to do it himself, that the new orders were
attended to.

"Der… jener… Owgie, the telephone ringt. Hear! Don't forget to tell them
it's now extra the Saturday afternoon paper!"

And when I tried to blow on Howard's saxophone I learned how quickly she could
get out of bed and cover the house. She tore into the room and snatched it
from me, yelling, "Already they're taking his things away from him!" in a way
that made the skin gather down my head and the whole length of my neck. And I
saw where a son-in-law--granted, only a prospective one--ranked with respect
to her son. She did not forgive me that day, though she knew she had scared me.
But I guess I looked less wounded than I felt, and she assumed I had no sense of
penitence. What really is more like it is that I had no grudge-bearing power,
unlike Simon with his Old South honor and his codo-duello dangerous easiness
that was his specialty of the time. Besides, how could you keep a grudge against
anyone so terrific? And even while she pulled the saxophone out of my hands
she was hunting her reflection in the small mirror on top of the long chest of
drawers. I went down to the cellar where the storm windows and the tools were,
and there, after I decided I couldn't cut out for home just yet only to be sent
back by Grandma Lausch, I became interested in why the toilet trickled, took the
lid off the waterbox, and passed my time below there, tinkering while the floor
of the kitchen bowed and crunched.

That would be Five Properties shambling through the cottage, Anna's immense
brother, long armed and humped, his head grown off the thick band of muscle
as original as a bole on his back, hair tender and greenish brown, eyes
completely green, clear, estimating, primitive, and sardonic, an Eskimo smile
of primitive simplicity opening on Eskimo teeth buried in high gums, kidding,
gleeful, and unfrank; a big-footed contender for wealth. He drove a dairy truck,
one of those electric jobs where the driver stood up like a helmsman, the bottles
and wood-and-wire cases clashing like mad. He took me around his route a few
times and paid me half a buck for helping him hustle empties. When I tried to
handle a full case he felt me up, ribs, thighs, and arms--this was something he
loved to do--and said, "Not yet, you got to wait yet," lugging it off himself and
crashing it down beside the icebox. He was the life of the quiet little lard-smel-
ly Polish groceries that were his stops, punching it out or grappling in fun with
the owners, head to head, or swearing in Italian at the Italians, "Fungoo!" and
measuring off a chunk of stiff arm at them. He gave himself an awful lot of
delight. And he was very shrewd, his sister said. It wasn't so long ago he had
done a small part in the ruin of empires, driving wagons of Russian and German
corpses to burial on Polish farms; and now he had money in the bank, he had
stock in the dairy, and he had picked up in the Yiddish theater the fat swag--
ger of the suitor everybody hated: "Five prope'ties. Plente money."

Of a Sunday morning, when the balloon peddlers were tootling in the sweetness
and calm of the leafy street and blue sky, he came down to breakfast in a white
suit, picking his teeth finely, Scythian hair stroked down under a straw katie.
Nonetheless he had not cast off his weekday milk smell. But how fine he was this
morning, windburned and hearty-blooded, teeth, gums, and cheeks was this morning,
windburned and hearty-blooded, teeth, gums, and cheeks involved in a bursting
grin. He pinched his copper-eyed sister who was sullen with tears.

"Annitchka."

"Go, breakfast is ready."

"Five prope'ties, plente money."

A smile stole over her face which she morosely resisted. But she loved her
brother.

"Annitchka."

"Go! My child is missing. The world is chaos."

"Five prope'ties."

"Don't be a fool. You'll have a child yourself, and then you'll know what
wehtig is."

Five Properties cared absolutely nothing about the absent or the dead and
freely said so. Hell with them. He had worn their boots and caps while the stiffs
were bouncing in his wagon through shot and explosion. What he had to say was
usually on the Spartan or proconsular model, quick and hard. "You can't go to
war without smelling powder." "If granny had wheels she'd be a cart." "Sleep
with dogs and wake with fleas." "Don't shit where you eat." One simple moral
in all, amounting to, "You have no one to blame but yourself" or, Frenchy-wise
--for I have put in my time in the capital of the world--"Tu l'as voulu, Georges
Dandin."

Thus you see what views Five Properties must have had on his nephew's enlist-
ment. But he partly spared his sister.

"What do you want? He wrote you last week."

"Last week!" said Anna. "And what about meanwhile?"

"Meanwhile he's got a little Indian girl to tickle and squeeze him."

"Not my son," she said, turning her eyes to the kitchen mirror.

But in fact it appeared the boys had found someone to shack up with. Joe
Kinsman sent his dad a snapshot of two straight-haired native girls in short
skirts and hand in hand, without comment Kinsman had shown it to Coblin. The
fathers weren't exactly displeased; at least they didn't see fit to show dis-
pleasure to each other. On the contrary. But Cousin Anna didn't hear of the
picture.

Coblin had fatherly fears of his own, but not Anna's rage against Kinsman,
and he kept up the necessary liaison with him at his office, for of course the
undertaker couldn't enter the house. Generally speaking, Coblin's main lines
were outside anyway, and he led a life of movement, steady and square-paced.
By comparison with Anna and her brother he appeared small, but he was really a
good size himself, sturdy, and bald in a clean sweep of all his hair, his features
also big, rounded and flattened, puffy at the eyes which were given to blinking
just about to the point of caricature. If you took this tic of his with the stan-
dard interpretation of meekness--well, there are types and habits that develop
to beguile the experience of mankind. He was not beaten down by Anna or Five
Properties or other members of the family. He was something of a sport, he
had his own motives and he had established his own right of way with the
determination of a man who is liable to be dangerous when he makes a fight.
And Anna gave in. Therefore his shirts were always laid away in the drawer with
strips of whalebone in the collar, and the second breakfast he took when he came
back from morning deliveries had to include cornflakes and hard-boiled eggs.

The meals were of amazing character altogether and of huge quantity--Anna
was a strong believer in eating. Bowls of macaroni without salt or pepper or
butter or sauce, brain stews and lung stews, calves'-foot jelly with bits of
calves'hair and sliced egg, cold pickled fish, crumb-stuffed tripes, canned corn
chowder, and big bottles of orange pop. All this went well with Five Properties,
who spread the butter on his bread with his fingers. Coblin, who ate with better
manners, didn't complain either and seemed to consider it natural. But I know
that when he went downtown to a carriers' meeting he fed differently.

To begin with, he changed from the old check suit in which he did his route
with a bagful of papers, like Millet's "Sower," for a new check suit. In his
snap-brim detective's felt and large-toed shoes, carrying accounts and a copy
of the Tribune for the Gumps, the sports results, and the stock quotations--
he was speculating--and also for the gang-war news, keeping up with what
was happening around Colossimo and Capone in Cicero and the North Side
O'Bannions, that being about the time when O'Bannion was knocked off among
his flowers by somebody who kept his gun-hand in a friendly grip--with this,
Coblin got on the Ashland car. For lunch he went to a good restaurant, or to
Reicke's for Boston beans and brown bread. Then to the meeting, where the
circulation manager gave his talk. Afterward, pie à la mode and coffee at the
south end of the Loop, followed by a burlesque show at the Haymarket or Rialto,
or one of the cheaper places where farm or Negro girls did the grinds, the more
single-purposed, less playful houses.

Again, it's impossible to know what Anna's idea was of his downtown program.
She was, you might say, in a desert, pastoral condition of development and
not up to the fancy stage of Belshazzar's Feast of barbaric later days. For
that matter, Coblin wasn't really up to it either. He was a solid man of rel-
atively low current in his thoughts; he took the best care of his business and
wouldn't overstay downtown to an hour that would make it difficult for him to
get up at his regular time, four o'clock. He played the stock market, but that
was business. He played poker, but never for more than he carried in his change-
heavy pockets. He didn't have the long-distance burrowing vices of people who take
you in by mildness and then turn out to have been digging and tunneling all the
while--as skeptical judges are proud to point out when they see well-thought-of
heads breaking through the earth in dark places. He was by and large okay with
me, although he had his sullen times when he would badger me to get on faster
with filling in the Sunday supplement. That was usually Anna's effect, when she
obtained the widest influence on him and got him on war-footing with her in the
smoke of her trenches. But on his own he had an entirely different spirit of
private gayness, as exemplified by the time I walked in on him when he was in
the bathtub, lying in the manly state, erect, and dripping himself with the
sponge in the steamy, cramped steerage space of the small windowless bathroom.
It might have been more troublesome to ponder that the father of a Marine and
of a young daughter, and the husband of Cousin Anna, should be found in so lit-
tle dignity--much more troublesome, I see now, than it actually was. But my
thoughts on this topic were never of any great severity; I could not see a
debauchee where I had always seen Cousin Hyman, largely a considerate and
merciful man, generous to me.

In fact they were all generous. Cousin Anna was a saving woman, she sang poor
and did not spend much on herself, but she bought me a pair of winter hightops
with a jack-knife on the side. And Five Properties loved to bring treats,
cases of chocolate milk and flouncy giant boxes of candy, bricks of ice-cream
and layer cakes. Both Coblin and he were hipped on superabundance. Whether it
was striped silk shirts or sleeve garters or stockings with clocks, dixies in
the movies or crackerjacks in the park when they took Friedl and me rowing, they
seldom bought less than a dozen, Five Properties with bills, Cousin Hyman with
his heaps of coins, just as flush. There was always much money in sight, in cups,
glasses, and jars and spread on Coblin's desk. They seemed sure I wouldn't take
any, and probably because everything was so lavish I never did. I was easily
appealed to in this way, provided that I was given credit for understanding what
the setup was, as when Grandma sent me on a mission. I could put my heart into
a counterfeit too, just as easily. So don't think I'm trying to put over that,
if handled right, a Cato could have been made of me, or a young Lincoln who
tramped four miles in a frontier zero gale to refund three cents to a customer.
I don't want to pass for having such legendary presidential stuff. Only those
four miles wouldn't have been a hindrance if the right feelings were kindled.
It depended on which way I was drawn.

Home made a neat and polished contrast on my half-days off. At Anna's the
floors were washed on Friday afternoon, when she got down from bed and waded
barefoot after the strokes of the mop, going forward, and afterward spread
clean papers that soaked and dried and weren't taken up again till the week was
over. Here you smelled the daily cleaning wax, and everything was in place on a
studious plan--veneer shining, doilies spread, dime-store cut-glass, elkhorn,
clock set in place--as regular as a convent parlor or any place where the love
of God is made ready for on a base of domestic neatness and things kept well
separated from the sea-composition of brutal and noisy trouble that heaves over
every undefended wall. The bed that Simon and I slept in bulged up in full dress
with pieces of embroidery on the pillow; books (Simon's hero's library) stacked;
college pennants nailed in line; the women knitting by the clear, wall-browned
summer air of the kitchen window; Georgie among the sunflowers and green
wash-line poles of the yard, stumbling after slow Winnie, who went to smell
where sparrows had lighted.

I guess it troubled me to see how absent Simon and I could be from the house
and how smooth it went without us. Mama must have felt this and fussed over
me as much as was allowable; she'd bake a cake, and I was something of a
guest, with the table spread and jam dishes filled. That way my wage-earning
was recognized, and it gave me pride to dig the folded dollars out of my watch
pocket. Yet when any joke of the old woman's made me laugh harder than usual
a noise came out of me which was the echo of the whooping cough--I was only
that much ahead of childhood, and although I was already getting rangy and my
head was as big as it would ever grow, I was still kept in short pants and Eton
collar.

"Well, they must be teaching you great things over there," said Grandma.

"This is your chance to learn culture and refinement." She meant to boast that
she had already formed me and we had nothing to fear from common influences.
But a little ridicule was indicated, just in case there should be any danger.

"Is Anna still crying?"

"Yes."

"All day long. And what does he do?--he looks at her and blinks with his
eyes. And the kid stammers. It must be lively. And Five Properties, that Apollo
--still looking for an American girl to marry?"

That was her deft, scuttling way. With the small yellow bone of her hand, the
hand that had been truly married in Odessa to a man of real weight, she threw
the switch, the water rushed in and the clumsy sank--money, strength, fat, silks,
and candy boxes, and all--and left the witty and superb smiling to contemplate
the ripples. You had to know, to get this as I did, that on Armistice Day of 1922,
when Grandma turned her ankle coming down the stairs at eleven o'clock while
the factories brewed up their solemn celebrating noise and she should have been
standing still, Five Properties picked her up while she was spitting and wincing
and rushed her to the kitchen. But her memory specialized in misdemeanors and
offenses, which were as ineradicable from her brain as the patrician wrinkle was
between her eyes, and her dissatisfaction was an element and a part of nature.

Five Properties was keen on getting married. He took the question up with ever-
ybody and naturally had been to see Grandma Lausch about it, and she masked
herself up as usual and looked considerate and polite while in secret she
checked off and collected what she wanted for her file. But also she saw a
piece of change in it for her, a matchmaker's fee. She watched for business
opportunities. Once she had masterminded the smuggling of some immigrants
from Canada. And I happen to know that she had made an agreement with Kreindl
about a niece of his wife, that Kreindl was to act as go-between while the
old woman encouraged Five Properties from her side. The scheme fell through,
although Five Properties went into it eagerly at first, arriving to present
himself brushed and burnished, flaming from his shave up to the Eskimo angle
of his eyes, at Kreindl's basement where the meeting was to be. But the girl was
thin and pale and didn't satisfy him. He had in mind a bouncing, black-haired,
large-lipped, party-going peach. He was gentlemanly about his refusal and took
the thin girl out once or twice; she got a kewpie doll from him and one of those
cartwheel crimson Bunte candy boxes, and he was done. The old woman then
said she gave him up. However, I believe her arrangement with Kreindl stood for
some time after, and Kreindl didn't quit. He still went to the Coblins' on Sundays,
and he did a double errand, as he had Hebrew New Year's cards to sell on com-
mission for a printer. It was one of his regular lines, like buying job-lots and
auction goods and taking people from the neighborhood to the Halsted Street
furniture stores when he got wind of their needing a suite.

He worked on Five Properties craftily, and I would see them confabbing in the
shed, Kreindl with his rolled legs and his conscript's history pasted on his eager,
humiliated back, his beef-eater's face inflated to the height of his forehead with
the fine points of the young lady of that day: of good family, nourished from her
mother's hand with the purest and whitest food, brought up without rudeness or
collision, producing breasts on time, no evil thoughts as yet, giving nothing
but the clearest broth, you might say--and I can put myself in Five Properties'
thoughts as he listened, crossed his arms, grinned, and appeared to scoff. Was
she really so gentle, swell, and white? And if she overflowered into coarseness
and grossness, after a little marriage, and lay in the luxury of bed eating fig
newtons, corrupt and lazy, sending messages by window shade to sleek young
boys? Or if her father was a grafter, her brothers bums and cardsharks, her
mother loose or a spendthrift? Five Properties wanted to be awfully careful,
and he didn't lack warnings and cautions from his sister, who, by ten years of
seniority, could tip him off to American dangers and those of American women
for green, old-country boys especially. She was comical when she did it, but
grimly comical, for it was time taken from mourning.

"It'll be something different than with me, somebody that understands life. If
she wants a fur coat, like her swell friends, you'll have to buy a fur coat, and
she won't care if it takes your last drop of blood to do it, a fresh young thing."

"Not me," said Five Properties, in somewhat the way Anna had said, "Not my
son." He was rolling bread pills in his broad fingers and smoking a cigar, his
green eyes awake and cold.

Busy at his accounts in his BVDs--the afternoon was hot--Coblin blinked me an
extra smile, observing how I neglected my book to listen to this conversation.
He never had it in for me because I broke in on his privacy in the bathroom; just
the contrary.

As for the book, it was Simon's copy of the Iliad, and I had been reading how
the fair Briseis was dragged around from tent to tent and Achilles racked up his
spear and hung away his mail.

Early risers, the Coblins went to bed soon after supper, like a farm family.
Five Properties was the first up, at half-past three, and waked Coblin. Coblin
took me out with him to have breakfast at a joint on Belmont Avenue, a night-
crowd hangout of truckers, conductors, postal clerks, and scrubwomen from
Loop offices. Bismarcks and coffee for him, flapjacks and milk for me. He was
in a big mood of sociability here, with the other steady patrons and with the
Greek, Christopher, and the waitresses. He had no repartee but laughed at
everything. At the convict hour between four and five when even those with the
least to fear are darkened and sober, and back away from waking. It wasn't so
for him; in the summer, at least, he loved to get out of the house and have the
coffee before him and the bulldog edition under his arm.

We would go back to the shed to meet the paper trucks that came booming
down the alley, tearing off leaves, with punks on the tail gate (to be on
newspaper trucks was as sure a stage in their advancement to hoodlums as a
hitch in Bridewell or joy-riding in stolen cars), booting off bundles of Tri-
bunes or Examiners. Then the crew of delivery boys showed up with bicycles and
coasters, and the route was covered by eight o'clock, Coblin and his older hands
taking the steep back porches where you needed the knack of pitching the paper
up to the third floor over the beams and clotheslines. Meanwhile Cousin Anna
was awake and back at her specialties--as if the charge of them in the cottage
had run down overnight--tears, speeches, lamentations, and bothering the morn-
ing mirrors with her looks. But also second breakfast was on the table, and
Coblin ate before setting out on collections and the light banging of screen
doors, in polite panama hat, blinking rapid-fire. He had morning gossamers on
his trousers from being the first one through the yards, and he was ready for
any conversation with up-to-the-minute gang news of the bloody nights of the
beer barons and the last curb quotations--everybody was playing the stock
market, led by Insull.

And I was at home with Anna and the kid. Usually Anna went to Northern
Wisconsin to escape the pollen in August, but this year, because of Howard's
running away, Friedl was deprived of her vacation. Anna often signed off with
the complaint that Friedl was the only one of the better-class children to have
no holiday. To make up for it she fed her more than ever, and the child had the
color of too much nourishment in her face, a hectic, touchy, barbarous face. She
couldn't be got to close the door when she went to the can, as even Georgie had
been taught to do.

I hadn't forgotten that Friedl had been promised to me when I kept out of
sight at the football game that day--the players bucking and thudding on the
white lines of the frozen field. She was a young lady then, corrected of all
such habits, I'm sure, grown big like her mother, and with her uncle's wine-
sap complexion, and wearing a raccoon coat, eagerly laughing and flagging a
Michigan banner. She was studying to be a dietitian at Ann Arbor. This was
about ten years removed from the Saturdays when I was given the money by
Coblin to take her to the movies.

Anna did not object to our going, but she herself wouldn't touch money on
holy days. She observed them all, including the new moons, from a little Hebrew
calendar, covering her head, lighting candles, and whispering prayers, with her
eyes dilated and determined, going after religious terrors with the fear and nerve
of a Jonah driven to enter frightful Nineveh. She thought it was her duty while
I was in her house to give me some religious instruction, and it was a queer
account I got from her of the Creation and Fall, the building of Babel, the Flood,
the visit of the angels to Lot, the punishment of his wife and the lewd-ness of
his daughters, in a spout of Hebrew, Yiddish, and English, powered by piety and
anger, little flowers and bloody fires supplied from her own memory and fancy.
She didn't abridge much in stories like the one about Isaac sporting with
Rebecca in Abimelech's gardens, or the rape of Dinah by Shechem.

"He tortured her," she said.

"How?"

"Tortured!"

She didn't think more was necessary and she was right. I have to hand it to her
that she knew her listener. There wasn't going to be any fooling about it. She
was directing me out of her deep chest to the great eternal things.




Chapter III




Even at that time I couldn't imagine that I would marry into the Coblin family.
And when Anna snatched Howard's saxophone, my thought was, "Go on, take it.
What do I want it for! I'll do better than that." My mind was already dwelling
on a good enough fate.

While the old lady, following her own idea of what that fate would be,
continued to find various jobs for me.

Saying "various jobs," I give out the Rosetta stone, so to speak, to my entire
life.

These earliest jobs, though, that she chose for us, they weren't generally of the
callousing kind. If hard, they were temporary and supposed to lead to something
better. She didn't intend us to be common laborers. No, we were to wear suits,
not overalls, and she was going to set us on the way to becoming gentlemen
despite our being born to have no natural hope of it, unlike her own sons with
the German governesses and tutors and gymnasium uniforms they had had. It
was not her fault that they couldn't do better than to become small-town
businessmen, for they had been brought up to give the world a harder shake. Not
that she ever complained of them, and they behaved with decent respect toward
her, two sizable broad men in belted overcoats and spats, Stiva driving a
Studebaker and Alexander a Stanley Steamer. Both were inclined to be silent
and bored. Addressed in Russian, they answered in English, and apparently they
weren't so enormously grateful for all she had done. Perhaps she worked so hard
over Simon and me to show them what she could do even with such handicaps
as ours; and maybe she sermonized us both about love because of her sons.
Although she had a quick way of capturing their heads when they bent down to
give her the kiss of duty.

Anyway, she had us under hard control. We had to brush our teeth with salt
and wash our hair with Castile, bring home our report cards, and sleeping in
skivvies was outlawed; we had to wear pajamas.

What did Danton lose his head for, or why was there a Napoleon, if it wasn't
to make a nobility of us all? And this universal eligibility to be noble, taught
everywhere, was what gave Simon airs of honor, Iroquois posture and eagle bear-
ing, the lithe step that didn't crack a twig, the grace of Chevalier Bayard and
the hand of Cincinnatus at the plow, the industry of the Nassau Street match-boy
who became the king of corporations. Without a special gift of vision, maybe
you wouldn't have seen it in most of us, lining up in the schoolyard on a red fall
morning, standing on the gravel in black sheepskins and twisted black stockings,
mittens, Western gauntlets, and peeling shoes, while the drum and bugle corps
blasted and pounded and the glassy tides of wind drove weeds, leaves, and
smoke around, struck the flag stiff and clanked the buckle of the rope on the
steel pole. But Simon must have stood out, at the head of the school police
patrol, in starched linen Sam Browne belt ironed the night before and serge cap.
He had a handsome, bold, blond face; even the short scar on his brow was hand-
some and assertive. In the school windows Thanksgiving cut-outs were hanging,
black and orange Pilgrims and turkeys, strung cranberries, and the polished
glass showed the blue and the red chill of the sky, the electric lights and
the blackboards inside. A red and dark building; an abbey, a mill by the
Fall River or the Susquehanna, a county jail--it resembled each somewhat.
.
Simon had a distinguished record here. President of the Loyal League, he
wore the shield on his sweater, and was valedictorian. I didn't have his
singleness of purpose but was more diffuse, and anybody who offered
entertainment could get me to skip and do the alleys for junk, or prowl the
boathouse and climb in the ironwork under the lagoon bridge. My marks showed
it, and the old lady would give me a going-over when I brought them in, calling
me "cat-head" and, in her French, "meshant," threatening that I'd go to work at
fourteen. "I'll get you a certificate from the Board and you can go like a Polack
and work in the stockyards," she'd say.

Other times she'd take a different tone with me. "It isn't that you don't have a
brain, you're just as smart as anybody else. If Kreindl's son can be a dentist you
can be governor of Illinois. Only you're too easy to tickle. Promise you a joke, a
laugh, a piece of candy, or a lick of ice-cream, and you'll leave everything and
run. In short, you're a fool," she said, taking her shawl of woolen knitted spi-
dercircles in her hands and drawing it down as a man draws on his lapels. "You
don't know what's coming if you think you can get by with laughing and eating
peach pie." Coblin had given me a taste for pie; she scorned and despised it.
"Paper and glue," she said with hatred and her Jehovah jealousy of outside
influences. "What else did he teach you?" she menacingly asked.

"Nothing."

"Nothing is right!" And she would make me stand and endure & punitive
silence, a comment on myself and my foolishness, overgrown and long-legged in
my short pants, large-headed, with black mass of hair and cleft chin--a source
of jokes. And also a healthy complexion wasted on me evidently, for she would
say, "Look, look, look at his face! Look at it!" grinning and gripping the holder
in her gums, smoke trickling up from her cigarette.

She once caught me in the street, which was being paved, chewing tar from
one of the seething tar-pots, with my friend Jimmy Klein whose family she
didn't approve of anyhow, and I was in her bad books for a longer time than
ever. These periods kept increasing, my misdemeanors growing worse. From
taking my punishments very hard, consulting Mama as to how to be forgiven and
asking her to approach the old lady for me, and shedding tears when I was
pardoned, I got to the stage of feeling more resistant, through worldly
comparisons that made me see my crimes more tolerantly. That isn't to say that
I stopped connecting her with the highest and the best--taking her at her own
word--with the courts of Europe, the Congress of Vienna, the splendor of
family, and all kinds of profound and cultured things as hinted in her conduct
and advertised in her speech--she'd call up connotations of the utmost
importance, the imperial brown of Kaisers and rotogravures of capitals, the
gloominess of deepest thought. And I wasn't unaffected by her nagging. I didn't
want to go out at fourteen with a certificate and work in the packing plants, so
occasionally, for a spell, I'd pick up; I'd do my homework and almost climb out
of my seat, wagging my arm with zeal to answer questions. Then Grandma
would swear that I'd not only go to high school but, if she lived and had
strength, to college. "Just so you want! Heaven and earth will be moved." And
she spoke of her cousin Dasha who had rolled on the floor nights to stay awake,
studying for her medical exam.

When Simon graduated and gave the commencement address I was skipped a
grade, and the principal mentioned us in his speech, both March brothers. The
whole family was present--Mama at the back where she had placed herself with
George, in case he should act up. She wasn't going to leave him at home today,
and they were in the last row, where the floor and the bottom of the gallery came
the closest. I was sitting up in front, in the feather-trailed air, with the old
lady, who was dressed up in dark silk and multiply-wound gold chains with the heart
of a locket that one of her teething children had dented; she was narrow-nosed
with pride, and distinguished, in a kind of fury of silent trying, from the other
immigrant relatives, her double spray of feathers busy hanging in two directions.
This was what she had been attempting to get over to us, that if we did as she
said we could expect plenty of results like this public homage.

"Now I want to see you up there next year," she said to me.

But she wasn't going to. It was already too late, notwithstanding that I had
applied myself enough to skip; my past record was against me, and anyhow I
didn't take permanent inspiration from this success. I wasn't cut out for it.
And besides, Simon didn't keep it up himself. He remained more attentive to
school than I, but he went through a change the summer he waited on tables in
Benton Harbor, and came back with some different aims from his original ones
and new ideas about conduct.

A sign of his change, and of great importance for me, was that he returned in
the fall brawnier and golden-colored but with an upper-front tooth broken, sharp
and a little discolored among the whole and white ones, and his face, laughter
and all, altered by it. He wouldn't say how it had happened. Was it in a fight
that someone had cracked it?

"Kissing a statue," he said to me. "No, I was biting a dime in a crap game."
Six months before such an answer would have been unthinkable. Also, there
was money not accounted for to Grandma's satisfaction.

"Don't tell me all you made in tips was thirty dollars! I know that Reimann's
is a first-class resort, and they have people all the way from Cleveland and St.
Louis. I expected you to spend something on yourself when you were away the
whole summer, but--"

"Well, sure, and I did spend about fifteen dollars."

"You always have been honest, Simon. Now Augie brought us home every cent."

"Have been? I am!" he said, mounting up on his pride and tallest falsehood
spurning dignity. "I brought you my wages for twelve weeks, and thirty bucks
besides."

She let the matter drop with a silent, piercing glitter from the flat of her
goldwired goggles and a warning-off from a false course in her grayness and
wrinkles and a quick suck of her cheek. She indicated she could strike a blow
when the moment came. But for the first time I felt from Simon that he was
thinking you didn't have to worry about that. Not that he was ready to jump
off into rebellion. But he had some ideas, and by and by we were saying to
each other things that couldn't be said before the women.

At first we often worked in the same places. We went to Coblin's sometimes
when he needed us for his crew, and down in Woolworth's cellar we unpacked
crockery from barrels so enormous that you could walk into them; we scooped
out stale straw and threw it in the furnace. Or we loaded paper into the giant
press and baled it. It was foul down there from the spoiled food and mustard
cans, old candy, and the straw and paper. For lunch we went upstairs. Simon
refused to take sandwiches from home; he said we needed a hot meal when we
were working. For twenty-five cents we got two hotdogs, a mug of root beer,
and pie, the dogs in cotton-quality rolls, dripping with the same mustard that
made the air bad below. But it was the figure you cut as an employee, on an
employee's footing with the girls, in work clothes, and being of that tin-tough,
creaking, jazzy bazaar of hardware, glassware, chocolate, chickenfeed, jewelry,
drygoods, oilcloth, and song hits--that was the big thing; and even being the
Atlases of it, under the floor, hearing how the floor bore up under the ambling
weight of hundreds, with the fanning, breathing movie organ next door and the
rumble descending from the trolleys on Chicago Avenue--the bloody-rinded
Saturday gloom of wind-borne ash, and blackened forms of five-story buildings
rising up to a blind Northern dimness from the Christmas blaze of shops.

Simon moved on soon to a better job with the Federal News Company, which
had a concession of the stands in the railroad stations and the candy and paper
sales on trains. The family had to lay out the deposit on a uniform, and he began
to keep midnight hours, downtown and on the trains, smart and cadet-like in the
spanty new uniform. Sunday mornings he rose late and came out in his bathrobe,
sitting down to breakfast big and easy, emboldened by his new earning power.
He was shorter than before with Mama and George, and occasionally he was
difficult with me.

"Lay off that Tribune before I get to it. Christ, I bring it home at night, and in
the morning it's all in pieces before I can look at it!"

On the other hand he gave Mama some of his pay without Grandma's knowledge,
to spend on herself, and saw to it that I had pocket money and that even
George got pennies for soldier-caramels. There was never anything mean
about Simon where money was concerned. He had kind of an oriental, bestowing
temperament; he had no peace or rest if he ever lacked dough and would sooner
beat a check altogether than go out of a lunchwagon without leaving a good
tip. He banged me on the head once for taking up one of the two dimes he put
under our plates in a coffee shop. Ten cents seemed to me enough.

"Don't let me catch you doing such piker things again," he said to me, and I
was afraid of him and didn't dare talk back.

Those Sunday mornings in the kitchen, then, with his uniform seen inside the
bedroom, hung with care from the foot of the bed, and comfortable tears of mist
running on the windows, he felt the strength of his position as the one getting
ready to take the control of the family into his own hands. For he sometimes
spoke to me of Grandma as of a stranger.

"She's really nothing to us, you know that, don't you, Aug?"

It wasn't so much rebellion as it was repudiation she had to fear, not being
heeded, when he spread his paper over the entire table and read with his hand to
his forehead and the darkening blond hair falling over it. Still, he didn't have
any plan for deposing her and didn't interfere with her power over the rest of
us--especially over Mama, who remained as much a slavey as before. And with her
eyes deteriorating, so that the glasses fitted the year before were no longer
strong enough. We went back to the dispensary for a new pair and cleared another
inquisition; we only just cleared it. They had Simon's age on the record and
asked whether he wasn't working. I thought I didn't need Grandma's rehearsing
any more and could invent answers myself; and even Mama didn't obey as usual
by being silent, but lifted up her odd clear voice and said, "My boys are still
in school, and after school I need them to help me out."

Then we were nearly caught by the clerk in the making out of the budget and
were terrified, but we were favored by the crowd that day and got the slip to
the optical department. We were not ready yet to do without the old woman's
coaching.

Simon's news became the chief interest of the house now, when he was shifted
from the trains to a stand in the La Salle Street Station and then to the
central stand that carried books and novelties, just where the most rushing and
significant business was done, in the main path of travel. There he was able to
see the celebrities in their furs or stetsons and alpacunas, going free in the
midst of their toted luggage, always more proud or more melancholy or more affable
or more lined than they were represented. They arrived from California or from
Oregon on the Portland Rose in the snow whirled from the inhuman heights of
La Salle Street or cleaving hard in the speed lines of the trains; they took off
for New York on the Twentieth Century, in their flower-garnished, dark polished
parlor-like compartments upholstered in deep green, washing in silver sinks,
sipping coffee out of china, smoking cigars.

Simon reported, "I saw John Gilbert today in a big velour hat," or, "Senator
Borah left me the change of a dime from his Daily News," or, "If you saw
Rockefeller you'd believe that he has a rubber stomach, as they say."

When he gave these accounts at the table he set off the hope that somehow
greatness might gather him into its circle since it touched him already, that he
might appeal to somebody, that Insull's eye might be taken by him and he would
give him his card and tell him to report at his office next morning. I have a
feeling that soon Grandma began to blame Simon in her secret thought for not
making the grade. Maybe he didn't care enough to seem distinguished, maybe
his manner wasn't right, impudent, perhaps. Because Grandma believed in the
stroke or inspiration that brought you to the notice of eminent men. She collect-
ed stories about this, and she had a scheme for writing to Julius Rosenwald
whenever she read that he was making a new endowment. It was always to
Negroes, never to Jews, that he gave his money, she said, and it angered her
enormously, and she cried, "That German Yehuda!" At a cry like that the age
crippled old white dog would stand up and try to trot to her.

"That Deutsch!"

Still, she admired Julius Rosenwald; he belonged to the inside ring of her
equals; where they sat, with a different understanding from ours, and owned and
supervised everything.

Simon, meanwhile, was trying to find a Saturday place for me in the La Salle
Street Station and rescue me from the dime-store cellar, where Jimmy Klein had
taken his place. Grandma and even Mama were after him to do something.

"Simon, you must pull Augie in."

"Well, I ask Borg every time I see him. Holy Jesus, folks, everybody has
relatives there!"

"What's the matter, won't he take a bribe?" said Grandma. "Believe me, he's
waiting for you to offer him one. Ask him for dinner and I'll show you. A
couple of dollar bills in a napkin."

She'd show us how to practice in the world. Short of brushing the throat of a
rival or hindrance with a poison feather at the dinner table, of course, as Nero
had done. Simon said he couldn't invite Borg. He didn't know him well since he
was only an extra, and he didn't want to look like a toady and be despised.
"Well, my dear Graf Potocki," Grandma said, narrowing down her look, cold
and dry, while he in his impatience was already out of breath. "So you'd rather
leave your brother working at Woolworth's with that foolish Klein boy in the
basement!"

After months of this Simon at last got me on downtown, proving that her power
over him wasn't ended yet.

He brought me in to Borg one morning. "Remember now," he warned me on the
streetcar, "no funny stuff. You'll be working for old foxy grandpa himself,
and he isn't going to put up with any fooling. On this job you handle a lot of
dough and it comes at you fast. Anything you're short at the end of the day Borg
will take out of your little envelope. You're on probation. I've seen some dopes
go out on their ear."

He was particularly severe with me that morning. It was stiff cold weather, the
ground hard, the weeds standing broken in the frost, the river giving off vapor
and the trains leghorn shots of steam into the broad blue Wisconsin-humored
sky, the brass handgrip of the straw seats finger-polished, the crusty straw
golden, the olive and brown of coats in their folds gold too, and the hairs of
Simon's sizable wrists a greater brightness of the same; also the down of his
face, now shaved more often than before. He had a new tough manner of pulling
down breath and hawking into the street. And whatever the changes were that he
had undergone and was undergoing, still he hadn't lost his fine-framed inde-
pendent look that he controlled me with. I was afraid of him, though I was
nearly his size. Except for the face, we had the same bones.

I wasn't fated to do well at the station. Maybe Simon's threats had something
to do with this, and his disgust with me when I had to be docked the first day.
But I was a flop, and nearly as much as a dollar short each time, even by the
third week. Since I was allowed only two bits above my carfare--forty cents to
the penny--I couldn't cover my shortages, and Simon, grim and brief, told me
on the way to the car one night that Borg had given me the boot.

"I couldn't run after people who short-changed me," I kept defending myself.
"They throw the money down and grab a paper; you can't leave the stand to shag
them."

At last he answered me coldly, with a cold lick of fire in his eyes, on the
stationary wintriness of the black steel harness of the bridge over the dragging
unnamable mixture of the river flowing backwards with its waste. "You couldn't
get that money out of somebody else's change, could you!"

"What?"

"You heard me, you dumbhead!"

"Why didn't you tell me before?" I cried back.

"Tell you?" he said, pushing angrily by me. "Tell you to keep your barn
buttoned, as if you didn't have any more brains than George!"

And he let the old woman yell at me, saying nothing in my defense. Before
this he had always stood up for me when it was any serious matter. Now he kept
aside in the low lights of the kitchen, his fist on his hip and his coat slung over
his shoulder, once in a while lifting the lid on the stove where our supper stood
warming, and prodding the coals. I took it hard that he was disloyal to me, but
also I knew I had let him down with Borg, whom he sold a bright brother that
turned out stupid. But I had been at a small stand under a pillar, where I seemed
to get merely stragglers, and Borg gave me only the coat of a uniform, gone in
the lining, with ragged cuffs and the braid shot. Alone, I had nobody to point out
celebrities to me if any came that way, and I passed the time mooning and
waiting for lunch relief and the three o'clock break, when I would watch Simon
at the main stand and admire the business there--where the receipts were
something to see--the pour of money and the black molecular circulation of
travelers knowing what they wanted in gum, fruit, cigarettes, the thick bulwarks
of papers and magazines, the power of the space and the span of the main
chandelier. I thought that if Borg had started me here instead of in my marble
corner, off on the edge where I heard only echoes and couldn't even see the
trains, I would have made out better.

So I had the ignominy of being canned and was read the riot act in the kitchen.
Seemingly the old lady had been waiting for just this to happen and had it ready
to tell me that there were faults I couldn't afford to have, situated where I was
in life, a child of an abandoned family with no father to keep me out of trouble,
nobody but two women, feeble-handed, who couldn't forever hold a cover over
us from hunger, misery, crime, and the wrath of the world. Maybe if we had
been sent to an orphanage, as Mama at one time thought of doing, it would have
been better. For me, at least, in lessons of hardness, since I had the kind of
character that looked for ease and places where I could lie down. She shook the
crabbed unit of her hand at me with the fierceness of the words, till now spoken
only to herself, bitterly, and with them there came out an oceanic lightning of
prophecy that had gathered in her skull by the stove-side through days not
otherwise very lighted.

"Remember when I am in my grave, Augie, when I will be dead!"

And the falling hand landed on my arm; it was accidental, but the effect was
frightful, for I yelled as if this tap had tenfold hit my soul. Maybe I was yelling
about my character, made to feel the worst of it, that I'd go to the grave myself
with never the hope of another and better; no power to relieve me of it, purify
and redeem me from it; and she was putting herself already beyond life to make
her verdict on me binding beyond recall.

"Gedenk, Augie, wenn ich bin todt!"

But she couldn't stand to dwell long on her death. Heretofore she hadn't ever
mentioned her mortality to us, so it was a sort of lapse; and even now she was
like a Pharaoh or Caesar promising to pass into a God--except that she would
have no pyramids or monuments to make good the promise and was that much
inferior to them. However, her painful, dreadful, toothless, gape-gummed crying
the cry of judgment in the lock of death worked hard on me. She had the power
to make a threat like this more than the threat of ordinary people, but she also
had to pay the price of her own terror at it.

Now she switched back to our fatherlessness. It was a bad moment, and I had
brought it on Mama. Simon kept silent by the nickel and bitumen black of the
stove, fiddling with the poker-handled steel coil of the lid lever. In the other
corner sat Mama, sober and guilty, the easy mark of whoever was our father.
The old lady was out to burn me to small ash that night, and everyone was going
to get scorched.

I couldn't go back to my old Woolworth job. And so Jimmy Klein and I went
together to look for work, despite Grandma's warnings against him. He was
highly sociable and spirited, slight and dark-faced, narrow-eyed, witty-looking,
largely willing to be honest but not over-strapped by conscience--the old lady
was right about that. He couldn't come to the house; she wouldn't encourage me
to keep bad company, she said. But I was welcome at the Kleins', and even
Georgie was. Afternoons, when I had to take him out, I could leave him there
playing with the little chicks they raised, or tried to raise, in the dark, clay
areaway between buildings, and Mrs. Klein could keep an eye on him from the
cellar kitchen, where she sat at the table, handy to the range, paring, peeling,
slicing, cutting meat for stew, and molding meatballs.

Weighing more than two hundred pounds, and with one leg shorter than the
other, she couldn't keep long on her feet. Unworried and regular-looking, brow
bent to brow, nose curving and short, she dyed her hair black with a liquid
ordered by mail from Altoona; she applied it with old toothbrushes she kept in
a glass on the bathroom window; this gave her braids a peculiar Indian luster.
They fell along her cheeks down to the multiform work of her chins. Her black
eyes were small but merciful to confusion; she was popelike and liberal with
pardons and indulgences. Jimmy had four brothers and three sisters, some of
them occupied mysteriously, but all were genial and glad-handing, even the
married elder daughters and the middle-aged sons. Two of her children were
divorced and one daughter was a widow, so that Mrs. Klein had grandchildren in
her kitchen at all times, some coming from school for lunch and after school
for cocoa, others creeping on the floor or lying in buggies. Everyone in those
prosperous days was earning money, and yet all had trouble. Gilbert had to pay
alimony; the divorced sister, Velma, was not getting hers regularly. Her husband
had knocked out one of her teeth in a brawl, and now he often came to beg her
mother to plead with her to come back. I saw him lay his red head on the table
and cry while his sons and daughters were playing in the seats of his taxi. He
made good dough, still he wouldn't give Velma enough, figuring she'd come
back to him if he kept her needy. She borrowed, however, from her family. I've
never seen such people for borrowing and lending; there was dough changing
hands in all directions, and nobody grudged anyone.

But the Kleins seemed to need a great many things and bought them all on the
installment plan. Jimmy was sent out--and I with him--the money put inside
the earflaps of his cap, to make payments. On the phonograph, on the Singer
machine, on the mohair suite with pellet-filled ashtrays that couldn't be
overturned, on buggies and bicycles, linoleums, on dental and obstetrical work,
on the funeral of Mr. Klein's father, on back-supporting corsets and special
shoes for Mrs. Klein, on family photos taken for a wedding anniversary. We
covered the city on these errands. Mrs. Klein didn't mind our going to shows, as
we often did, to hear Sophie Tucker whack herself on the behind and sing "Red
Hot Mama," or see Rose La Rose swagger and strip in the indolent rhythm that
made Coblin her admirer. "That girl is not just a beautiful girl," he said. "There
are a lot of beautiful girls, but this girl feels men's hearts. She doesn't drop
off her dress the way others do, she pulls it over her head. That's why she's the
top of her profession today."

We were in the Loop much more than we ought to have been and were continually
running into Coblin standing in theater lines during school hours. He never
told on me. He only said, like a sport, "What's today, Augie? The mayor closed
up the school?" Cheerful as usual, grinning and happy in the limy and red lights
of the marquee, like the old king of the Scotch mists who had half a face of
emerald and half of red jewel.

"What's the feature?"

"Bardelys the Magnificent plus Dave Apollon and his Komarinsky dancers.
Come along and keep me company."

We had a reason, at that time, for keeping away from school. Steve the Sailor
Bulba, my lockermate, brute-nosed and red, with the careful long-haired
barbering and toutish sideburns that gave notice that he was dangerous; bearish,
heavy-bottomed in his many-buttoned, ground-scuffing sailor pants and his
menacing rat-peaked shoes; a house-breaker who stole plumbing fixtures and
knocked open telephone coin boxes in recently vacated flats--this Bulba had
taken my science notebook and turned it in as his own. Since there was nothing I
could do with Bulba, Jimmy lent me his notes, and I carelessly erased his name
and wrote my own over it. We were caught, and Simon had to be called in.
Simon didn't want Mama to be brought to school any more than I did. He was
able to get around Wigler, the science teacher, eventually. But all the while
Bulba, small-eyed and looking mild, his forehead peaceful and blind, wrinkled to
the gentle winter light of the classroom, was trying to make his clasp-knife stand
up on its blades, like a horny insect.

After this it wasn't hard for Jimmy to induce me to go downtown with him, espe-
cially on science afternoons, to ride, if there was nothing better to do, in the
City Hall elevator with his brother Tom, from the gilded lobby to the Municipal
Courts. In the cage we rose and dropped, rubbing elbows with bigshots and
operators, commissioners, grabbers, heelers, tipsters, hoodlums, wolves, fixers,
plaintiffs, flatfeet, men in Western hats and women in lizard shoes and fur coats,
hothouse and arctic drafts mixed up, brute things and airs of sex, evidence of
heavy feeding and systematic shaving, of calculations, grief, not-caring, and
hopes of tremendous millions in concrete to be poured or whole Mississippis of
bootleg whisky and beer.

Tommy sent us to his bucket-shop stockbroker on Lake Street, back of the pan-
els of a cigar-store front, later a handbook. Tommy was in a good position to
get leads. But even in those money-minting days he never did more than break
even. If you didn't count the gains that went into his wardrobe and the gifts
he gave his family. The Kleins were all gift-givers. Gift robes and wrappers,
Venetian mirrors and chateaux-in-the-moonlight tapestries, teacarts, end tables,
onyx-based lamps, percolators and electric toasters, and novels--boxes of things
stacked up in the closets and under the beds, awaiting their time of usefulness.
And yet, except on Sundays when they dolled up, the Kleins looked poor. Old Klein
wore his vest over his long-sleeved undershirt and rolled his cigarettes in a
little machine.

The one unmarried daughter, Eleanor, had a gypsy style and got herself up in
flaming, bursting flowers and Japanese dyes. Fat and pale, with an intelligent
Circassian bow to her eyes, very humane, overreconciled to a bad lot, taking it
for granted that she was too fat to get a husband and forgiving her married sisters
and mobile brothers their better luck, she had a genial cry, almost male and
fraternal. She was especially kind to me, called me "lover" and "little brother"
and "heart-breaker," told my fortune in cards and knitted me a three-peaked
skating cap in yellow and green so that I would look like a Norwegian champion
on the pond. When she was well enough--she suffered from rheumatism and
had female disorders--she worked in the wrapping department of a soap factory
on the North Branch; and when she was at home sat with her mother in the
kitchen, wrapped in a flamboyant floral material, heavy black hair slipping back
loose and tuberous from a topknot, drinking coffee, knitting, reading, shaving
her legs, playing operettas on the gramophone, painting her nails, and, doing
these necessary or half-necessary or superfluous things, invisibly paid herself
out farther and farther into the mood of a long-seated woman.

The Kleins respected and admired Grandma Lausch for the task she undertook
with us. However, Grandma heard, from one of her Pinkerton sources, that
Georgie was seen with the chicks between the buildings--they never reached
full size, these animals, from lack of sunlight and good feed, but moulted and
died scraggly and in a queer state of growth--and she called the Kleins some
ugly names.

She didn't come down to give them a piece of her mind because it was no use
fighting; they were sometimes able to get me some small job or other, through
the influence of Jimmy's uncle Tambow, who delivered the vote of his relatives
in the ward and was a pretty big wheel in Republican ward politics. We had a
very good month before elections, passing out campaign literature. Tambow
often had use for us when someone put a piece of business in his way, like lost
articles in the post office or distressed goods in a bankruptcy. It had to be
something worth while to pull him away from his card game, but when he had
made his buy of razors, leather straps, or doll dishes, toy xylophones, glass
cutters, hotel soap, or first-aid kits, being exempt from licenses, he'd set up
a stand on Milwaukee Avenue and hire us to run it. His own sons refused to
work for him.

He was divorced and lived in a single room. He had a huge nose, and a
countenance loose in the skin, with the eye-bags of a fishing bird, seamy,
greenish, and gray. Patient, diligent-looking, and gross, on his chair like a
vaquero deep sunk in the saddle, he whistled when he breathed from his burden
of weight and the bite on his cigar; hair grew from his nose and about the var-
ious rings on his knuckles. All times of the year were alike to him. May or
November, he had his eleven o'clock breakfast of tea with milk and lump sugar
and sweet rolls, dinner of steak and baked potatoes, he smoked ten or twelve
Ben Beys, wore the same pants of aldermanic stripe, a hat of dark convention
drawing the sphere of social power over his original potent face while he
considered what to meld and when to play jack or ace, or whether he could give
his son Clementi the two bucks he often came in to ask for. Clementi was the
younger son who lived with his mother and stepfather back of their infants'-wear
store. "Mine boy, with pleasure," or, "Tomorrow, with pleasure," Tambow said.
Tambow didn't say no to sons who had a stepfather. And, a good five rinds
inside his old Adam, in the grease, tea, and onion blaze of his restaurant
headquarters, crumbling ashes on his lap and picking up his cards with one hand,
he wasn't, with his other sins, worried over money; he was grand-ducal with it,
like the Kleins. And Clem was an easy spender too, and stood treat. But he
wouldn't work, not for his father or for anyone else. So old Tambow set us up in
the Milwaukee Avenue throng with, usually, Sylvester in charge, put in a fix
with the cops so we wouldn't be bothered, and went back to his card game.

It was a bad time for Sylvester. He had lost the lease on his movie, which had
been failing anyway--it was now a wallpaper and paint shop--and he was living
with his father, for his wife had left him and, he told us himself, threw stones
at him when he tried to come through the backyard to see her. He had given her up
for crazy and sent a letter agreeing to an annulment. To raise the money for his
fees at Armour Tech, where he was trying to finish his work for an engineer's
degree, he had sold his furniture and movie equipment, and now he said that he
had been away from school too long to sit in a classroom. Eyes tearing in the
November wind as he stood with us on Milwaukee Avenue, thick hands in his
overcoat pocket, neck sunk, foot knocking foot, he made depressed jokes. The
difference in our ages was no consideration with him. He told all his thoughts.
When he finished his degree he was off to see the total globe. Foreign
governments were crying for American engineers, and he could write his own
ticket. He'd go to Kimberley, where he understood it was true that the natives
tried to hide the diamonds in their guts. Or to Soviet Russia--now giving us the
whole story, that he sympathized with the Reds and admired Lenin, and
especially Trotsky, who had won the civil war, traveling in a tank and reading
French novels, while czar, priests, barons, generals, and landlords were being
smoked out of the palaces.

Meantime, Jimmy and I were sitting on Tambow's two big suitcases, and we
called, "Get ya blades here!" and tended to business. Sylvester collected the
money.




Chapter IV




All the influences were lined up waiting for me. I was born, and there they
were to form me, which is why I tell you more of them than of myself.

At this time, and later too, I had a very weak sense of consequences, and the
old lady never succeeded in opening much of a way into my imagination with
her warnings and predictions of what was preparing for me--work certificates,
stockyards, shovel labor, penitentiary rock-piles, bread and water, and lifelong
ignorance and degradation. She invoked all these, hotter and hotter, especially
from the time I began to go with Jimmy Klein, and she tried to tighten house
discipline, inspected my nails and shirt collar before school, governed my table
conduct more sharply, and threatened to lock me out nights if I stayed in the
streets after ten. "You can go to the Kleins, if they'll take you in. Listen
to me, Augie, I'm trying to make something of you. But I can't send Mama out to
follow you and see what you do. I want you to be a mensch. You have less time
to change than you think. The Klein boy is going to get you into trouble. He
has thievish eyes. The truth now--is he a crook or not? Aha! He doesn't answer.
True," she said, pushing sharply. "Say!"

I answered emptily, "No," and wondered what she knew and who had told her.
For Jimmy, like Stashu Kopecs, did take what he wanted in stores and from
stands. And at this very time we were engaged in a swindle in Deever's
neighborhood department store, where we were Christmas extras in the toy
department, Santa Claus's helpers, in elves' costumes, with painted faces.

High-school sophomores, we were getting too big for this sort of thing, but
Santa Claus himself was enormous, a Swedish stoker and handyman, from the
alley side of the store, a former iron-boat fireman from Duluth, with
trellis-winding muscles and Neanderthal eye-sockets, hootch-shining lumps in
his forehead and his beard-hidden lip packed with Copenhagen Seal snuff. Over
an undershirt full of holes, he strapped pillows for girth, wadded up his pants,
for his legs were long and thin, and we helped pull on his coat. Painted and
rouged with theater greasepaint and dusted with mica snow, Jimmy and I marched
around the store with tambourines and curl-tongued noisemakers, turning somer-
saults in our billiard-felt jester's suits, and we gathered a gang of kids to
lead to the third floor where the Swede Santa Claus sat in his sleigh, with
reindeer artfully hung from the ceiling, the toy trains snicking and money
baskets mousing swift and mechanical on the cables to the cashier's cage. Here
we were in charge of a surprise-package barrel done up in red and green paper,
hollies and diamond powder and coils of silver bristles. These Christmas
packages sold for two bits, and Jimmy decided that no inventory of them was
possible and began to pocket every tenth quarter. For several days he didn't tell
me this, only stood me to lunch. Then he let me into his secret as the volume of
business got heavier. We were supposed to carry the money to the cashier when
we had accumulated ten dollars. "She dumps it straight in the sack with the rest
of the change," he said. "She doesn't mark down where it comes from because
she's too busy raking it in, so why shouldn't we take a cut?" We had many dis-
cussions about it and raised the percentage to two quarters in every ten. There
was a great thriving noise and glitter; all minds were dispersed into this Christ-
mas tinkling, whirring, carols, and signal chimes, and what we were doing
in secret with our hands wasn't observable. We stole considerable money.
Jimmy was ahead of me. Not only had he started earlier, but I was out several
days from the effect of butterscotch cream pie and other rich stuff we treated
ourselves to. Or perhaps from a heightening of nerves through the brilliance
and success of the wrong we were doing and the problem of how to spend the
money. Jimmy spent a lot on presents--elegant slippers and string-feathered
mules for everyone, smoking jackets, jazzy ties, rag rugs, and Wearever alum-
inum. From me, Mama got a bathrobe, the old woman a cameo pin, Georgie plaid
stockings, and Simon a shirt. I gave presents to Mrs. Klein and Eleanor too,
and to some girls at school.

Days when we weren't working I stayed by preference at the Kleins', where
the window sills were level with the sidewalk, and got a taste of what it
was to be sitting on parlor furniture while outside something was shaping up
from our misdeeds, as for a Roger Touhy, Tommy O'Connor, Basil Banghart, or
Dillinger, who had had surgery on their faces, acid on their fingertips, who
played solitaire, followed the sports results, sent out for hamburgers and
milkshakes, and were trapped at last going to the movies or on a roof.
Sometimes we lettered on Jimmy's genealogical chart, it being a belief of the
Kleins that they went back to a Spanish family called Avila, in the thirteenth
century. They had a cousin in Mexico City who manufactured leather jackets,
and he was the author of this theory. Me, I was perfectly willing to believe in
such lucky breaks of descent. I worked with Jimmy on the sheet of mechanical-
drawing paper, lettering out his family tree in red and india inks. I was uneasy.

At the end of the Christmas holiday Deever's caught up with us. The department
manager came and had a talk with Grandma. There had been an inventory of the
packages. We didn't attempt to deny the theft, and I at any rate didn't argue
the figure of seventy dollars that the manager gave, though the amount we took
was actually less. The old lady at first refused to see me through. Icy, she
told Simon he had better call in Lubin, the caseworker, for she didn't have the
strength to give and had only undertaken to help bring up children, not to han-
dle criminals. Simon brought her around because, he said, the Charities would
want to know how long we had been working and why they weren't told. Of course
the old lady never had the slightest intention of letting me be sent to reform
school, as was threatened. But the threat was made, and I was prepared to go to
Juvenile Court and pass on to the house of correction with a practically Chinese
acquiescence in their right to punish that foretold what I'd let be done with
me. It partly showed I felt people were right because they were angry. On the
other hand, I lacked the true sense of being a criminal, the sense that I was
on the wrong side of the universal wide line with the worse or weaker part of
humankind, carrying brow marks or mutilated thumbs and slit ears and noses.

There wasn't just threatening and scolding this time but absolute abasement.
After the first giant crash, in full brass, Grandma put me on cold treatment.
Simon was distant to me. I couldn't throw it up to him that he had given me
advice about short-change; he'd only say curtly that I was a chump and act as
though he didn't know what I was talking about. Mama must have felt she was in
one of her star-crossed hours, and that the result of her unlucky capitulation
to our father was beginning to show its final retributive shape. Even she said a
few sharp things to me. I suffered like a beaver. However, they couldn't get me
to beg and entreat--though I wasn't unmoved by the thought of a jail sentence,
beg and entreat--though I wasn't unmoved by the thought of a jail sentence,
head shaven, fed on slumgullion, mustered in the mud, buffaloed and bossed. If
they decided I had it coming, why, I didn't see how I could argue it.

But I was never in real danger of the house of correction. The robe, cameo,
and other things were given back. Enough money was saved out of my wages at
Coblin's to pay up. Jimmy's family got him off too. He was clobbered by his
father, his mother cried, and the whole thing was done with long before my
disgrace was lifted a single degree. We had it much austerer at our house. Nor
did the Kleins remain angry with me; in their eyes it wasn't a great subject
for anger nor thought of as a disfigurement of my soul. In a few days I was as
welcome as ever, and Eleanor was calling me "lover" and knitting a muffler for
me to replace one I had to return.

When Jimmy came out of his scare, having carried himself unmoved and
cynical all along and taken his father's sharp, erratic wallops, given by his
undershirted arm, without shrinking, he was indignant that Deever's had made a
profit on us. They had, too. He had some ideas about revenge and went as far as
speaking of setting a fire, but I had had as much trouble as I wanted with
Deever's, and, really, so had he, but it took some of the sting out of it for
him to plot at least.

Clem Tambow, Jimmy's cousin, had a healthy laugh on us for the debate on
burning down the store and the other desperado proposals. He suggested that
if we wanted to make up some of the money we had lost we could get into the
Charleston contest at the Webber and try to earn an honest dollar. He wasn't
kidding. He wanted to be an actor and had already tried amateur night, imitating
a Britisher who tried to tell a long story about an incident in the Khyber Pass.
The Poles and Swedes booed him, and the master of ceremonies sent out the
hook. His brother Donald had actually won five dollars, singing "Marquita" and
doing a tap dance. Donald was the handsome one, black and curly--the mother's
son. She too was handsome and dignified, and wore black dresses and pince nez
in her shop. Her special subject was her brother the industrialist, who had died
in Warsaw of typhus during the war. Clem had his father's looks, high color, bony
head and beak, low-grown point of hair, large lips, everything but the weight; his
legs were nervous and long. He would have had a chance to win the city half-mile
if he hadn't hurt his wind with cigars and--he bragged about it--what the
health manuals called self-abuse and depletion of manhood. He jeered at his
wickedness and at all the things that make the admonitory world groan. He
strutted on the track, his thighs as skinny as his calves and covered with straight
black hairs, nifty and supercilious toward his competitors, the squares who were
prancing and bracing. But he was all the same a little dubious and haunted, his
black eyes in the long joke-austerity of his head often very melancholy. He could
be as melancholy as dirt. He said there was nothing I couldn't do better than he,
if I wanted to try. "Oh yes," he said, "you could make broads who wouldn't even
look at me." It was this, mainly, that he gave me credit for. "With teeth like
yours. They're perfect. My mother let me ruin mine. If I ever do get into big
time I'll have to wear a plate." I laughed at nearly everything he said, and he
often told me I was dim-witted. "Poor March, anything can make him laugh."

On the whole we got on very well. He was lenient about my greenness, and I
had some support from him and Jimmy when I took sick with love, with classic
symptoms of choked appetite and utter absorption, hankering, great refinements
of respect in looks, incompetent, and full of movie-born ideas and phrases of
popular songs. The girl's name was Hilda Novinson, and she was fairly tall but
small-faced, with pallor and other signs of weakness of the chest, light-voiced,
hasty-spoken, and shy. I never said a word to her, but came by with a miserable
counterfeit of merely passing, secretly pumped with raptures and streaming
painfully. I clumped by, looking unfeeling and as if I was thinking about other
things. With her Russian facial angle and pale eyes, placed low and denying you
a direct glance, she had the look of an older woman. She wore a green jacket,
she smoked, she walked with a raft of schoolbooks held to the breast and in open
galoshes, the clasps clinking. The spread of those open, high-heeled galoshes
and their quick clink acted on my love-galled spirit like little fever-feeding
darts and made me bristle with an idiot desire to fall before her. Later, when
I wised up and was debeatified, I was more sensual. Those first times I was in
the state of courtliness, craving pure feeling, and I was well stocked, probably
by inheritance, in all the materials of love.

I had no idea that Hilda might be flattered by my following her and was
astonished when Clem and Jimmy said it was so. I trailed her in the corridors
and maneuvered myself behind her at basketball games, joined the Bonheur Club
so that I might be in the same room with her one hour a week, after school, and,
suffering badly, stood on the rear platform of her streetcar when she went home.
She descended at the front end, and I jumped down from the rear into the high
piled sooty snow and gray, soaked boards of the West Side street. Her father was
a tailor, and the family lived behind the shop. Hilda went through the curtain
and--what did she do? Take off her gloves? The galoshes? Drink a cup of cocoa?
Smoke? I didn't smoke myself. Fiddle with her books? Complain of a headache?
Confide to her mother that I was hunkering around in the glints of the dark street
on a winter afternoon, heavy-stepping and in a sheepskin coat? I didn't think
she'd do that. And her tailor father didn't seem to know of my being there, this
lean, unshaved, back-bent man, and I could gaze at him as much as I liked while
he pinned, sponged, and pressed, fatigued-looking and oblivious. Anyhow, once
she had gone in Hilda didn't come out again; she sunk into the house and
seemed to have no business whatever out of doors.

"With all the babes there are to fall for!" said Clem Tambow, scornful and
ugly-nosed. "Let me once take you to a whore, and you'll forget all about her,"
he said. Of course I didn't answer. "Then I'll write her a letter for you," he
offered, "and ask for a date. As soon as you've taken one single walk with her
and kissed her you'll be washed up. You'll see how beanbrained she is, and
she's not pretty; she has lousy teeth." I declined this too. "All right, I'll
talk to her then. I'll tell her to grab you while you're still blind. She'll never
get anybody handsomer, and she must know it. What gets you about her? That
she smokes, I bet." Finally Jimmy said, "Don't bother him, he wants to carry the
torch," and they grabbed their genitals obscenely and threw themselves around
on the furniture of the Kleins' living room, which was our club. But I didn't
stop this sadhearted, worshipful blundering around or standing like painted wood
across the street from the tailor shop in the bluey afternoon. Her scraggy fa-
ther labored with his needle, bent over, and presumably thinking nothing of his
appearance to the street in the lighted glass; her chicken-thin little sister
in black gym bloomers cut paper with the big shears.

It took several weeks before the acute part of this passed, and meanwhile I
was still in the doghouse at home. It didn't improve things that during this
lovestruck time I brought in very little money. Simon now had strange hours
for coming and going, and he couldn't be questioned about them, since he was
working. We no longer came home for lunch; consequently Mama had the chores
we used to do at noon, lugging up the coal, airing Winnie, fetching George
from school, and doing all the hard wringing of sheets by herself on wash-
days, growing leaner and more haggard from the extra work. Anyhow, there was
a tone and air of anarchy and unruliness around, and of powers thickening
with age and delays, planning the stroke that would make the palace ring as
in old times and knock the courtiers' noggins on the walls when they were
least dreaming of it.

"Well, Augie? What? Are you through working?" Grandma said to me. "Finished
work, eh? You want to live on the Charities all your life?"

I did have a sort of job at the time, in a flowershop. Only, on the after-
noons when I was attending the meetings of the Bonheur Club or trailing Hilda
Novinson in her heart-trap galoshes through the slush, I could easily say that
Bluegren had no deliveries for me.

Bluegren gave me what he felt like giving on any particular afternoon; and
that, usually, was more for helping him shake down and wire the straw cores of
wreaths (he had a big gangster clientele) than for deliveries, when he reckoned I
would get tips, which by and large turned out pretty fair. I didn't like traveling
on streetcars with large wreaths or floral doorpieces for funerals, because early
in the evening I struck the home-going traffic and had to fight for space and hold
a corner against conductors and winter-moody passengers, covering the flowers
with my body, and was pretty harassed. And then if it was an undertaker's I was
bound for, swinging my package overhead like a bass fiddler and making slow
way through the beeping, grinding, and the throng, there hardly ever was anyone
in the quilted, silent plush and rose glow of mahogany in the parlor to give me
a tip, but only some flunky received me in my pointed skating cap and with my
runny nose kept just decent by an occasional touch of my wool glove. Once in a
while I'd strike on a wake where there was a jar of bootleg red-eye passing
around, in one of those offside green bungalows approached by a boardwalk over
the long marsh of the yard, a room of friends and mourners. When you came into
one of those whisky-smelling mourning rooms with your flowers, why, nobody was
so absorbed that you were ignored, as in other sorts of grieving that I've seen,
and you were sure to come out with a buck or so in change weighing down your
cap. But anyway I preferred to be in the shop--in that Elysian Fields' drift
of flowers piled around the loam boxes of the back room or stacked behind the
thick panes of the icebox, the roses, carnations, and chrysanthemums. Especial-
ly as I was in love.

Bluegren was an imposing man too, fair, smooth, and big, with considerable
healthy flesh--a friend of gangsters and rum-runners, very thick with people
like Jake the Barber and, in his time, the chief of the North Siders, Dion
O'Bannion, who was a florist himself after a fashion and was knocked off in his
own shop by three men said to have been sent by Johnny Torrio and who got away
in a blue Jewett sedan. Bluegren used gloves to protect himself from thorns when
he whipped out a rose to treat it to the shears. He had blue, cold eyes, pre-
pared for any kind of findings, and a big fleshy nose, a little sick of things.
I suppose the confusion will happen of having sharp thoughts and a broad face,
or broad thoughts and a sharp face. Bluegren's was the first kind, from, I reck-
on, the connection he had with gangsters, and the effects of fear or temporari-
ness. This was what made him that way. He could be rude and bitter, very shrewish
sometimes, especially after an important murder of a Genna or Aiello. And a lot
of guys were shot that winter.

It was a bad winter for everyone--not just for notables but for people
oblivious of anything except their own ups and downs and busy with the limited
traffic of their hearts and minds. Kreindl, say, or Eleanor Klein, or my mother.
These days Kreindl had operatic nerves and made bitching scenes in his English
basement flat; he threw dishes on the floor and stamped his feet. And Eleanor
was in a slump of spirits and often wept in her room over the general drift of her
life. There was plenty of such impulse, enough to reach and move all, just in the
tone of days. I might have felt this more myself if it hadn't been for Hilda
Novinson.

Mama also was very nervous; it was something you had to know how to detect
since she didn't give any of the usual signs. I noticed it from the grimness
that showed through her docility, and the longer rest of her weak green eyes
on things around her, and sometimes the high-breasted breathing that didn't
arise from any exertion at her work. She had a dizzy watchfulness from the
buzzing of some omen or other.

Presently we all knew what was up; the old woman was ready to deliver her
stroke. She waited for an evening when we were all at supper. I came in from
delivering death-flowers; Simon was off from the station. The old woman hit out
in her abrupt way and declared it was time we did something about Georgie,
who was growing up. There was beef stew on the table, and everybody, the kid
included, continued to eat meat and wipe up gravy. But I never assumed, like the
old woman, that he was an unwitting topic; not even the poodle was entirely that
but knew even when she became deaf before her death that she was spoken of.
And sometimes Georgie had the Gioconda's own look and smile when he was
being discussed, I declare he did, a subtle look that passed down his white lashes
and cheeks, a sort of reflex from wisdom kept prisoner by incapacity, something
full of comment on the life of all of us. This wasn't the first time Grandma had
spoken of Georgie's future, but now it was not just another observation but
getting down to cases. I assume Mama already knew about it, from the look of
waiting that came on her face. Sooner or later something had to be done about
him, said the old woman. He was hard to manage, now he was growing so tall
and beginning to look like a man. What would we do if he got it in his head to
take hold of some girl, she said, and we had to deal with the police? This was
her rebuke in full for all our difficulty, disobedience, waywardness, and
unmindfulness of our actual condition, and I was the main cause of it, as I
realized very well. She said Georgie should go to an institution. It was common
sense anyhow that he couldn't stay with us all his life, and we hadn't shown
much ability to carry burdens so far. Besides, Georgie had to learn to do
something and be trained in basketry or brush-making or what it was they could
teach the feeble-minded, some trade that would help pay his keep. She finished
strong, with the threat that neighbors with little daughters already were angry,
seeing him roam around the yards, ready to put on long pants. Not making her
distaste any too fine, she said he had reached his development of a man. As
something lewd that had, however, to be faced. She got this across, in her granny
grimace of repugnance, and left us with her horror.

Ah, it was great for her to make us take a long swig of her mixture of reality
and to watch the effect come up sober in our eyes. Finishing her speech, she had
a terrific look of shrewd pleasure. Her brows were standing up. I maintain that
Georgie had an idea of the topic, while he went on and wiped up the beef gravy.
I don't want to make out that her position was all wicked evil while his was
nothing but sublimity. That couldn't be true. She had a difficult practical bur-
den, that of suggesting this shocking thing by which supposedly we would benef
it. We wouldn't have had the strength or wisdom to propose it. Like so many
loving, humane people who, however, have to live, just like everyone else, and
count on tougher souls to carry them along. But I am allowing Grandma her best
excuse. Because there still remains the satisfaction this gave her. She breathed
that tense "Aha!" to herself with which she closed a trap in chess. It was always
this same thing; we refused to see where our mistakes were leading, and then the
terrible consequences came on. Similar to Elisha's bear that rushed on the
children who were taunting him; or the divine blow that cracked down that Jew
so thoughtless as to put out a hand to keep the ark of the covenant from falling
off the wagon. It was punishment for mistakes there would be no time now to
correct, that was what it was. She was happy when she could act in behalf of this
inexorability she was all the time warning us about.

George sat there with one foot stepping on the other and ate the gravy in that
unconscious, mind-crippled seraph's way of his by contrast to this worldly
reasoning. Mama in her hurt, high voice tried to answer but only spoke
confusion. She was anyway incapable of saying much that was clear, and when
she was excited or in pain you couldn't understand her at all. Then Georgie
stopped eating and began to moan.

"You! Quiet!" said the old woman.

I spoke up on his side and Mama's. I said that George hadn't done wrong yet
and that we wanted to keep him with us.

She had counted on this from me and was prepared. "Kopfmensch meiner,"
she said with powerful irony. "Genius! Do you want to wait until he gets in
trouble? Are you here to take care of him when you're needed? You're in the
streets and alleys with Klein, that hoodlum, learning to steal and every kind of
dirt. Maybe you'd enjoy being an uncle to a bastard by your brother from a
Polish girl with white hair, and explain to her stockyards father that he would be
a fine son-in-law to him? He'd murder you with a sledgehammer, like an ox, and
burn down the house."

"Well," Simon said, "if Augie really wants to take charge of him--"

"Even if Augie were better than he is," she answered quickly, "what would be
the good of it? When Augie works once in a while, there's more trouble than
money. But if he didn't work at all, imagine how fine it would be! He'd leave
the boy at the Kleins' anyhow, and bum with his friend. Oh, I know your bro-
ther, my dear boy; he has a big heart if it costs him no trouble, pure gold, and
he can promise you anything when his heart is touched. But how reliable he is I
don't have to tell you. But even if he were as good as his word, could you afford
for him to stop bringing in the little he makes? What? Did you inherit a fortune?
Can you have servants, gouvernantkes, tutors, such as Lausch laid down his life
to give our sons? I have done as much as I could to give you a little education
and an honest upbringing, even tried to make gentlemen of you. But you must
know who you are, what you are, and not get unreal ideas. So I tell you that you
better do for yourself, first, what the world will do anyway for you without
kindness. I've seen a little more than you; I know how mistakes are corrected,
and how many ways there are to die just from foolishness alone, not to say other
things. I tried to explain something about this to your brother, but his thoughts
are about as steady as the way a drunkard pees."

Thus she went on with this ominous crying and prophecy. She didn't have to
win Simon over; in this one matter of Georgie he was with her. He wasn't
openly going to join her because of his feeling for Mama, but when we were
alone in the bedroom he let me make all my accusations and arguments, waiting
me out with a superior face, taking it easy full-length on the sheets--sewed
together of Ceresota sacks--and when he thought I was ready to hear him he
said, "Tell it to the Marines, kid. Whyn't you use your brains once in a while
before they turn to powder and blow away? The old woman is right and you know
it. And don't think you're the only one that cares about George either, but
something has got to be done with him. How do you know what he might pick up
and do? He's not just a sprout any more, and we can't be watching him all his
life."

Simon had been rough on me since I had lost the job at the station and during
my trials with Wigler and Sailor Bulba and my crookedness at Deever's. Nor did
he think much of Clem and Jimmy, and I had made the mistake of telling him
how I felt about Hilda and laid myself open to ridicule. "Why," he said, "Friedl
Coblin'll be better looking than that when she grows up. She'll probably have
tits anyhow." Of course Simon knew I wasn't a real grudge-bearing character
but the type that comes down as fast as he boils up. And he considered that he
had the right to treat me like this, because he was making progress while I was
making a fool of myself, and he intended to carry me along with him, when it
was time, the way Napoleon did his brothers. During my worst difficulties with
the old lady he'd be stiff and keep a distance, but then he'd also tell me that
I could expect him to help me out of real trouble as long as I was reasonably
deserving. He didn't like to see my bubble-headed friends get me in dutch. Yes,
he had a sense of duty toward me, and toward George too. I couldn't say he was
being hypocritical about George.

"I was sore as hell there for a while when you just let Mama talk and didn't
say anything," I told him. "You know damn well I can't do much about the kid
unless I quit school and take care of him. But if Mama wants him home you
should leave that up to her. And you shouldn't have sat there and let her make
a holy show of herself."

"Ma might as well get it all at once as in installments." Simon lay on the dark
iron bedstead, brawny and blond. He spoke out strongly. Then he paused and
took a calm touch of his broken tooth with his tongue. He seemed to have
expected that I would light into him harder than I did, and when I had said my
sharpest words he went on to let me hear what I pretty well knew without being
told. "She got you dead to rights, Augie. You know you've been pretty damn
sloppy. But anyway we wouldn't have had the kid with us more than another
year. Even if you were in there pitching, which you're not."

"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 tearstrength-
ened 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 therm-
ometer, 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 snowspit-
ten 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 some-
thing 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 im-
patient 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 feather-
bed in her apron, shawl, and pointing 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 organ-
ization?

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, dog-proof 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 allow-
ed 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, suckcheeked
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 V




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 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 fun-
eral 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 galliard, with white Buffalo Bill vandyke, and he swanked
around, still healthy and fleshy, in white suits, looking things over with big
sexamused 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-act-
ioned, brilliant-colored crowd; waterside structures and towers, and sky-
scrapers beyond in a vast right angle to the evading bend of the shore.

Einhorn was the Commissioner's son by his first wife. By the second or third
he had another son who was called Shep or, by his poolroom friends, Dingbat,
for John Dingbat O'Berta, the candy kid of city politics and friend of Polack
Sam Zincowicz. Since he didn't either know or resemble O'Berta and wasn't
connected with Thirteenth Ward politics or any other, I couldn't exactly say how
he came by the name. But without being a hoodlum himself he was taken up
with gang events and crime, a kind of amateur of the lore and done up in the
gangster taste so you might take him for somebody tied in with the dangerous
Druccis or Big Hayes Hubacek: sharp financial hat, body-clasping suit, the shirt
Andalusian style buttoned up to the collar and worn without a necktie, trick
shoes, pointed and pimpy, polished like a tango dancer's; he clumped hard on
the leather heels. Dingbat's hair was violent, brilliant, black, treated,
ripple-marked. Bantam, thin-muscled, swift, almost frail, he had an absolutely
unreasonable face. To be distinguished from brutal--it wasn't that, there was all
kind of sentiment in it. But wild, down-twisting, squint-eyed, unchangeably firm
and wrong in thoughts, with the prickles coming black through his unmethodical
after-shave talcum: the puss of an executioner's subject, provided we understand
the prototype not as a murderer (he attacked with his fists and had a killer's
swing but not the real intention) but as somebody intractable. As far as that goes,
he was beaten all the time and wore a mishealed scar where his cheek had been
caught between his teeth by a ring, but he went on springing and boxing, rushing
out from the poolroom on a fresh challenge to spin around on his tango shoes
and throw his tense, weightless punches. The beatings didn't squelch him. I was
by one Sunday when he picked a fight with that huge Five Properties and thrust
him on the chest with his hands, failing to move him; Five Properties picked him
up and threw him down on the floor. When Dingbat came back punching, Five
Properties grinned but was frightened and shied back against the cue rack.
Somebody in the crowd began to shout that Five Properties was yellow, and it
was thought the right thing to hold Dingbat back, by the arms, struggling with a
blinded, drawn face of rage. A pal of his said what a shame that a veteran of
Château Thierry should be shoved around by a greenhorn. Five Properties took it
to heart and thereafter stayed away from the poolroom.

Dingbat had had charge of the poolroom at one time, but he was unreliable
and the Commissioner had replaced him with a manager. Now he was around as
the owner's son--racked up balls, once in a while changed color like a coal
when a green table felt was ripped--and in the capacity of key-man and bravo,
referee, bet-holder, sports expert, and gang-war historian, on the watch for a
small deal, a fighter to manage, or a game of rotation at ten cents a ball. Be-
tween times he was his father's chauffeur. The Commissioner couldn't drive
the big red Blackhawk-Stutz he owned--the Einhorns never could see anything
in a small car--and Dingbat took him to the beach when it was too hot to walk.
After all, the old man was pushing seventy-five and couldn't be allowed to risk
a stroke. I'd ride with him in the back seat while Dingbat sat with mauled, crazy
neck and a short grip on the wheel, ukelele and bathing suit on the cushion
beside him; he was particularly sex-goaded when he drove, shouting, whistling,
and honking after quiff, to the entertainment of his father. Sometimes we had the
company of Clem or Jimmy, or of Sylvester, the movie bankrupt, who was now
flunking out of his engineer's course at Armour Tech and talking about moving
away to New York altogether. On the beach Dingbat, athletically braced up with
belt and wristbands, a bandanna to keep the sand out of his hair when he stood
on his head, streaked down with suntan oil, was with a crowd of girls and other
beach athletes, dancing and striking into his ukelele with:

　　　　　　　　Ani-ka, hula wicki-wicki
　　　　　　　　Sweet brown maiden said to me,
　　　　　　　　And she taught me hula-hula
　　　　　　　　On the beach at Waikiki…

Kindled enough, he made it suggestive, his black voice cracking, and his little
roosterish flame licked up clear, queer, and crabbed. His old sire, gruff and
mocking, deeply tickled, lay like the Buffalo Bill of the Etruscans in the beach
chair and bath towel drawn up burnoose-wise to keep the dazzle from his eyes--
additionally shaded by his soft, flesh-heavy arm--his bushy mouth open with
laughter.

"Ee-dyot!" he said to his son.

If the party began after the main heat of the day William Einhorn might come
down too, wheel chair brought on the baggage rack of the Stutz, and his wife
carrying an umbrella to shade them both. He was taken pick-a-back by his bro-
ther, or by me, from the office into the car, from the car to the right site on
the lakeshore; all as distinguished, observing, white, untouched and nobiliary
as a margrave. Quickeyes. Originally a big man, of the Commissioner's stature,
well-formed, well-favored, he had more delicacy of spirit than the Commis-
sioner, and of course Dingbat wasn't a patch on him. Einhorn was very pale,
a little flabby in the face; considerable curvature of the nose, small lips,
and graying hair let grow thickly so that it touched on the ears; and continually
watchful, his look going forward uninterruptedly to fasten on subject matters.
His heavy, attractive wife sat by him with the parasol, languorous, partly in
smiles, with her free, soft, brown fist on her lap and strong hair bobbed with
that declivity that you see in pictures of the Egyptian coif, the flat base
forming a black brush about the back of the neck. Entertained by the summer
breeziness and the little boats on the waves and the cavorting and minstrelsy.

If you want to know what she thought, it was that back home was locked.
There were two pounds of hotdogs on the shelf of the gas range, two pounds of
cold potatoes for salad, mustard, a rye bread already sliced. If she ran out, she
could send me for more. Mrs. Einhorn liked to feel that things were ready. The
old man would want tea. He needed to be pleased, and she was willing, asking
only in return that he stop spitting on the floor, and that not of him directly,
being too shy, but through her husband, to him it was merely a joking matter.
The rest of us would have Coca-Cola, Einhorn's favorite drink. One of my daily
chores was to fetch him Cokes, in bottles from the poolroom or glasses from the
drugstore, depending on which he judged to have the better mixture that day.

My brother Simon, seeing me carry a glass on a tray through the gathering on
the sidewalk--there was always an overflow of businessmen in front of
Einhorn's, mixing with the mourners from Kinsman's chapel and the poolroom
characters--gave a big laugh of surprise and said, "So this is your job! You're
the butler."

But it was only one function of hundreds, some even more menial, more per-
sonal, others calling for cleverness and training--secretary, deputy, agent,
companion. He was a man who needed someone beside him continually; the
things that had to be done for him made him autocratic. At Versailles or in Paris
the Sun King had one nobleman to hand him his stockings, another his shirt, in
his morning levee. Einhorn had to be lifted up in bed and dressed. Now and then
it was I who had to do it. The room was dark and unfresh, for he and his wife
slept with the windows shut. So it was sleep rank from nights of both bodies. I
see I had no sense of criticism about such things; I got used to it quickly.
Einhorn slept in his underwear because changing to pajamas was a task, and he
and his wife kept late hours. Thus, the light switched on, there was Einhorn in
his BVDs, wasted arms freckled, grizzled hair afly from his face that was
inclined to flatness, the shrewd curved nose and clipped mustache. If peevish,
and sometimes he was, my cue was to be quiet until he got back his spirits. It
was against policy to be out of temper in the morning. He preferred to be jocular.
Birdy, teasing, often corny or lewd, he guyed his wife about the noise and bother
she made getting breakfast. In dressing him, my experience with George came in
handy, but there was more style about Einhorn than I was used to. His socks
were of grand silk, trousers with a banker's stripe; he had several pairs of shoes,
fine Walkovers that of course never wrinkled below the instep, much less wore
out, a belt with a gothic monogram. Dressed to the waist, he was lifted into his
black leather chair and pulled on quaky wheels to the bathroom. At times the
first settling in the chair drew a frown from him, sometimes a more oblique look
of empoisoned acceptance; but mostly it was a stoical operation. I eased him
down and took him, traveling backwards, to the toilet, a sunny room with an east
window to the yard. The Commissioner and Einhorn, both rather careless in their
habits, made this a difficult place to keep clean. But for people of some nobility
allowances have always been made in this regard. I understand that British aris-
tocrats are still legally entitled to piss, if they should care to, on the hind
wheels of carriages.

There wasn't anything Mrs. Einhorn could do about the wet floor. Once in a while
when Bavatsky the handyman was gone too long in Polack Town or drunk in the
cellar, she asked me to clean up. She said she didn't like to impose on me be-
cause I was a student. Nevertheless I was getting paid. For unspecified work of
a mixed character. I accepted it as such; the mixed character of it was one of
the things I liked. I was just as varietistic and unfit for discipline and regu-
larity as my friend Clem Tambow; only I differed from Clem in being a beaver, once
my heart was attached to a work or a cause. Naturally, when Einhorn found this
out, and he quickly did, he kept me going steadily; it suited him perfectly
because of the great number of things he had to be done. Should he run out, my
standing by made him invent more. So I didn't often get the toilet detail; he had
too many important tasks for me. And when I did get it, why, what I had had
under Grandma Lausch made an inconsiderable thing of it to be porter for an
hour.

But now in the toilet with Einhorn: he kept me by him to read the morning
headlines from the Examiner, the financial news, closing quotations from Wall
Street and La Salle Street. Local news next, something about Big Bill Thomp-
son, that he had hired the Cort Theatre, for instance, and presented himself
on the stage with two caged giant rats from the stockyards whom he addressed
by the names of Republican renegades--I came to know what items Einhorn
would want first. "Yes, it's just as Thompson says. He's a big gasbag, but this
time it's true. He rushed back from Honolulu to save what's-his-name from
the penitentiary." He was long and well-nigh perfect of memory, a close and
detailed reader of the news, and kept a file on matters of interest to him,
for he was highly systematic, and one of my jobs was to keep his files in or-
der in the long steel and wood cases he surrounded himself with, being mast-
erful, often fussy for reasons hard to understand when I placed something be-
fore him, proposing to throw it away. The stuff had to be where he could lay
his hands on it at once, his clippings and pieces of paper, in folders label-
ed Commerce, Invention, Major Local Transactions, Crime and Gang, Democrats,
Republicans, Archaeology, Literature, League of Nations. Search me, why the
League of Nations, but he lived by Baconian ideas of what makes the man this
and that, and had a weakness for complete information. Everything was going to
be properly done, with Einhorn, and was thoroughly organized on his desk and
around it--Shakespeare, Bible, Plutarch, dictionary and thesaurus, Commercial
Law for Laymen, real-estate and insurance guides, almanacs and directories; then
typewriter in black hood, dictaphone, telephones on bracket arms, and a little
screwdriver to hand for touching off the part of the telephone mechanism that
registered the drop of the nickel--for even at his most prosperous Einhorn was
not going to pay for every call he made; the company was raking in a fortune
from the coinboxes used by the other businessmen who came to the office--wire
trays labeled Incoming and Outgoing, molten Aetna weights, notary's seal on a
chain, staplers, flap-moistening sponges, keys to money, confidential papers,
notes, condoms, personal correspondence and poems and essays. When all this
was arranged and in place, all proper, he could begin to operate, back of his
polished barrier approached by two office gates, where he was one of the chiefs
of life, a white-faced executive, much aware of himself and even of the freakish,
willful shrewdness that sometimes spoiled his dignity and proud, plaquelike
good looks.

He had his father to keep up with, whose business ideas were perhaps less imag-
inative but broader, based on his connections with his rich old-time cronies.
The old Commissioner had made the Einhorn money and still kept the greater part
of the titles in his name, not because he didn't trust his son, but only for
the reason that to the business community he was the Einhorn, the one who was
approached first with offers. William was the heir and was also to be trustee
of the shares of his son Arthur, who was a sophomore at the University of Il-
linois, and of Dingbat. Sometimes Einhorn was unhappy about the Commissioner's
habit of making private loans, some of them sizable, from the bankroll he carried
pinned inside the pocket of his Mark Twain suit: More often he bragged about
him as a pioneer builder on the Northwest Side and had dynastic ideas about the
Einhorns--the organizer coming after the conqueror, the poet and philosopher
succeeding the organizer, and the whole development typically American, the
work of intelligence and strength in an open field, a world of possibilities. But
really, with all respect for the Commissioner, Einhorn, while still fresh and
palmy, had his father's overriding powers plus something else, statesmanship,
fineness of line, Parsee sense, deep-dug intrigue, the scorn of Pope Alexander VI
for custom. One morning while I was reading from a column on the misconduct
of an American heiress with an Italian prince at Cannes, he stopped me to quote,
"‘Dear Kate, you and I cannot be confined within the weak list of a country's
fashion. We are the makers of manners, Kate, and the liberty that follows our
places stops the mouth of all find-faults.…' That's Henry Fifth for you. Meaning
that there's one way for people at large and another for those that have some-
thing special to do. Which those at large have to have in front of them. It
braces them up that there's a privilege they can't enjoy, as long as they know
it's there. Besides, there's law, and then there's Nature. There's opinion, and
then there's Nature. Somebody has to get outside of law and opinion and speak for
Nature. It's even a public duty, so customs won't have us all by the windpipe."
Einhorn had a teaching turn similar to Grandma Lausch's, both believing they
could show what could be done with the world, where it gave or resisted, where
you could be confident and run or where you could only feel your way and were
forced to blunder. And with his son at the university I was the only student he
had at hand.

He put on a judicious head, and things, no matter how they ran, had to be col-
lared and brought to a standstill when he was ready to give out. He raised his
unusable arms to the desk by a neat trick that went through several stages,
tugging the sleeve of the right with the fingers of the left, helping on the
left with the right. There wasn't any appeal to feelings as he accomplished
this; it was only an operation. But it had immense importance. As a robust,
full-blooded man might mount up to a pulpit and then confess his weakness
before God, Einhorn, with his feebleness demonstrated for a preliminary, got
himself situated to speak of strength, with strength. It was plenty queer to
hear him on this note, especially in view of the daily drift of life here.

But let's take it back to the toilet, where Einhorn got himself ready in the
morning. At one time he used to have the barber in to shave him. But this
reminded him too much of the hospital, he said, where he had put in a total of
two and one-half years. Besides he preferred to do things for himself as much as
possible; he had to rely on too many people as it was. So now he used a safety
razor stropped in a gadget a Czech inventor had personally sold him; he swore
by it. To shave took better than half an hour, chin on the edge of the sink and
hands in the water, working round his face. He fished out the washrag, muffled
himself in it; I could hear him breathe through its papillae. He soaped, he rubb-
ed and played, scraped, explored with fingers for patches of bristle, and I sat
on the cover of the pot and read. The vapor woke up old smells, and there was
something astringent in the shaving cream he used that cut into my breath. Then
he pomaded his wet hair and slipped on a little cap made of an end of woman's
hose. Dried and powdered, he had to be helped into his shirt, his tie put on,
the knot inspected many times by his fingers and warped exactly into place with
some nervousness about the top button. The jacket next, finished off with the
dry noise of the whiskbroom. Fly re-examined, shoes wiped of water drops, we
were all set and I got the nod to draw him into the kitchen for breakfast.

His appetite was sharp and he crowded his food. A stranger with a head on
him, unaware that Einhorn was paralyzed, would have guessed he was not a well
man from seeing him suck a pierced egg, for it was something humanly foxy,
paw-handled, hungry above average need. Then he had this cap of a woman's
stocking, like a trophy from another field of appetites, if you'll excuse a
sporting reference, or martial one, on his head. He was conscious of this him-
self, for pretty much everything was thought of, and his mind in its way per-
formed admirable work with many of the things he did; or did not care to stop
himself from doing; or was not able to stop; or thought it only creaturely hu-
man nature to do; or enjoyed, indulged; was proud his disease had not killed
his capacity for but rather left him with more capacity than many normal men.
Much that's nameless to many people through disgust or shame he didn't mind
naming to himself or to a full confidant (or pretty nearly so) like me, and
caught, used, and worked all feelings freely. There was plenty to be in on;
he was a very busy man.

There was a short executive period, after coffee, when Einhorn threw his
weight around about household matters. Wrinkled, gloomy Tiny Bavatsky,
string-muscled, was fetched up from the basement and told what he must do,
warned to lay off the bottle till night. He went away, hitch-gaited, talking to
himself in words of menace, to start his tasks. Mrs. Einhorn was not really a
good housekeeper even though she complained about the floor of the toilet and
the old man's spitting. But Einhorn was a thoughtful proprietor and saw to it that
everything was kept humming, running, flushing, and constantly improved--rats
killed, cement laid in the backyard, machines cleaned and oiled, porches re-tim-
bered, tenants sanitary, garbage cans covered, screens patched, flies sprayed.
He was able to tell you how fast pests multiplied, how much putty to buy for a
piece of glazing, the right prices of nails or clothesline or fuses and many
such things; as much as any ancient Roman senator knew of husbandry before
such concerns came to be thought wrong. Then, when everything was under con-
trol, he had himself taken into his office on the specially constructed chair with
cackly casters. I had to dust the desk and get him a Coke to drink with his second
cigarette, and he was already on his mail when I got back with it. His mail was
large--he had to have it so, and from many kinds of correspondents in all parts
of the country.

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 after-
noon. 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, prospect-
uses, 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 mater-
ial 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, tel-
epathic 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. Further-
more, I had to do reference work for him in his study or at the library down-
town, 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 in-
heritance, 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 bank-
ruptcies, 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 Po-
lish 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 ordinar-
ily, 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, Ein-
horn, 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, con-
gregated 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, cindercrawed,
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.

But Einhorn wasn't exactly buried in front of his pleasures. He carried on with
one woman or another, and in particular he had a great need of girls like Lollie
Fewter. His explanation was that he took after his father. The Commissioner, in
a kindly, sleepy, warm-aired, fascinated way, petted and admired all women and
put his hands wherever he liked. I imagine women weren't very angry when he
saluted them in this style because he picked out whatever each of them herself
prized most--color, breasts, hair, hips, and all the little secrets and conni-
vances with which she emphasized her own good things. You couldn't rightly say
it was a common letch he had; it was a sort of Solomonic regard of an old chief
or aged sea lion. With his spotty big old male hands, he felt up the married
and the unmarried ones, and even the little girls for what they promised, and
nobody ever was offended by it or by the names he invented, names like "the
Tangerines," or "the Little Sled," "Madame Yesteryear," "the Six-Foot Dove."
The grand old gentleman. Satisfied and gratified. You could feel from the net
pleasantness he carried what there had been between him and women now old or
dead, whom he recognized, probably, and greeted in this nose or that bosom.

His sons didn't share this quality. Of course you don't expect younger men
to have this kind of evening-Mississippi serenity, but there wasn't much
disinterestedness or contemplation in either of them. There was more romantic
feeling in Dingbat than in his brother. There scarcely was a time when Dingbat
wasn't engaged to a nice girl. He scrubbed himself and dressed himself to go to
see her in a desperate, cracked rage of earnest respect. Sometimes he would look
ready to cry from devotion, and in his preparations he ran out of the perfumed
bathroom, clean starched shirt open on his skinny hairiness, to remind me to
fetch the corsage from Bluegren's. He could never do enough for these girls and
never thought himself good enough for them. And the more he respected them
the more he ran with tramps between times, whom he picked up at Guyon's
Paradise and took to the Forest Preserves in the Stutz, or to a little Wilson
Avenue hotel that Karas-Holloway owned. But Friday evenings, at family din-
ner, there was often a fiancée, now a piano teacher, now a dress designer or
bookkeeper, or simply a home girl, wearing an engagement ring and other pre-
sents; and Dingbat with a necktie, tense and daffy, homagefully calling her
"Honey," "Isabel, hon," "Janice dear," in his hoarse, thin black voice.

Einhorn, however, didn't have such sentiments at all, whatever sentiments he
entertained on other scores. He took the joking liberties his father did, but his
jokes didn't have the same ring; which isn't to say that they weren't funny but
that he cast himself forward on them toward a goal--seduction. What the laugh
was about was his disability; he was after a fashion laughing about it, and he was
not so secretly saying to women that if they'd look further they'd find to their
surprise that there was the real thing, not disabled. He promised. So that when he
worked his wicked, lustful charm, apparently so safe, like a worldly priest or
elderly gentleman from whom it's safe to accept a little complimentary badinage
or tickle, he was really singlemindedly and grimly fixed on the one thing,
ultimately the thing, for which men and women came together. And he was the
same with them all; not, of course, foreseeing any great success, but hoping all
the same that one of them--beautiful, forward, intrigued with him, wishing to
play a secret game, maybe a trifle perverse (he suggested), would see, would
grasp, would crave, would burn for him. He looked and hoped for this in every
woman.

He wouldn't stay a cripple, Einhorn; he couldn't hold his soul in crippledom.
Sometimes it was dreadful, this; he'd lose everything he'd thought through un-
countable times to reconcile himself to it, and be like the wolf in the pit in
the zoo who keeps putting his muzzle to the corners of the walls, back and forth,
back and forth. It didn't happen often; probably not oftener than ordinary people
get a shove of the demon. But it happened. Touch him when he was off his feed,
or had a cold and a little fever, or when there was a rift in the organization, or
his position didn't feel so eminent and he wasn't getting the volume of homage
and mail he needed--or when it was the turn of a feared truth to come up unseen
through the multitude of elements out of which he composed his life, and then
he'd say, "I used to think I'd either walk again or else swallow iodine. I'd have
massages and exercises and drills, when I'd concentrate on a single muscle and
think I was building it up by my will. And it was all the bunk, Augie, the Coué
theory, etcetera. For the birds. And It Can Be Done and the sort of stuff that
bigshot Teddy Roosevelt wrote in his books. Nobody'll ever know all the things
I tried before I finally decided it was no go. I couldn't take it, and I took it.
And I can't take it, yet I do take it. But how! You can get along twenty-nine
days with your trouble, but there's always that thirtieth day when goddammit you
can't, when you feel like the stinking fly in the first cold snap, when you look
about and think you're the Old Man of the Sea on Sinbad's neck; and why should
anybody carry an envious piece of human junk? If society had any sense they'd
give me euthanasia. They'd leave me the way the Eskimos do their old folks in
an igloo with food for two days. Don't you look so miserable. Go on away. See
if Tillie wants you for something."

But this was on the thirtieth day, or more seldom, because in general he en-
joyed good health and looked on himself as a useful citizen and even an extra-
ordinary one, and he bragged that there was hardly anything he couldn't bring
off if he put his mind to it. And he certainly did some bang-up things. He'd
clear us all out of the way to be alone with Lollie Fewter; he'd arrange for the
whole lot of us to drive out to Niles Center and show the Commissioner a piece
of property. Ostensibly getting ready to occupy himself with a piece of work
while we were away--the files and information were laid out for him--he was
unhurried, engaging, and smooth-tempered in his tortoise-shell specs, answering
every last question in full and even detaining the excursion to have some last
words with his father about frontages or improvements. "Wait till I show you on
the map just where the feeder-bus comes through. Bring the map, Augie." He'd
have me fetch it and kept the Commissioner till he became impatient, with Ding-
bat grinding the klaxon and Mrs. Einhorn already settled with bags of fruit
in the back seat, calling, "Come, it's hot. I'm fainting here." And Lollie in
the passage between the flat and the offices sauntered up and down with the
dustmop in the polished dimness, big and soft, comfortable for the heat in a thin
blouse and straw sandals, like an overgrown girl walking a doll and keeping a
smile to herself about this maternal, matrimonial game, lazy and careless and,
you could say, saving force for the game to follow. Clem Tambow had tried to
tell me what the score was but hadn't convinced me, not just because of the
oddness of the idea, and that I had a boyish respect for Einhorn, but also be-
cause I had made a start with Lollie myself. I found excuses to be with her in
the kitchen while she was ironing. She told me of her family in the Franklin
County coal fields, and then about the men there, and what they tried and did.
She rolled me in feelings. From suggestion alone, I didn't have the strength to
keep my feet. We soon were kissing and feeling; she now held off my hands and
now led them inside her dress, alleging instruction, boisterous that I was still
cherry, and at last, from kindness, she one day said that if I'd come back in the
evening I could take her home. She left me so horny I was scarcely able to walk.
I hid out in the poolroom, dreading that Einhorn would send for me. But Clem came
with a message from her that she had changed her mind. I was bitter about that but
I reckon I felt freed, too, from a crisis. "Didn't I tell you?" said Clem. "You
both work for the same boss, and she's his little nooky. His and a couple of other
guys'. But not for you. You don't know anything and you don't have any
money."

"Why, damn her soul!"

"Well, Einhorn would give her anything. He's nuts about her."

I couldn't conceive that. It wouldn't be like Einhorn to settle his important
feelings on a tramp. But that exactly was what he had done. He was mad for her.
Einhorn knew, too, that he shared her with a few hoodlums from the poolroom.
Of course he knew. It wasn't in his life to be without information; he had the
stowage of an anthill for it, with weaving black lines of provisioners creeping
into the crest from every direction. They told him what would be the next turn
in the Lingle case, or what the public-auction schedule would be, or about
Appellate Court decisions before they were in print, or where there were hot
goods, from furs to school supplies; so he had a line on Lollie from the
beginning to the end.

Eleanor Klein asked me sentimental questions. Did I have a sweetheart yet? It
was a thing I appeared ripe for. Our old neighbor, Kreindl, asked me too, but
in a different way, on the q.t. He judged I was no longer a kid and he could
reveal himself, his cockeyes turning fierce and gay. "Schmeist du schon, Augie?
You've got friends? Not my son. He comes home from the store and reads the
paper. S'interesiert ihm nisht. You're not too young, are you? I was younger
than you and gefährlich. I couldn't get enough. Kotzie doesn't take after me."
He much needed to pronounce himself the better, and in fact the only, man in his
house; and he did look very sturdy when he massed up his teeth and creased his
out-of-doors, rugged face to smile. He saw a lot of weather, for he went through
the entire West Side on foot with his satchel of samples. Because he had to count
every nickel. And he had the patience and hardness of steady pavement going,
passing the same lead-whited windows of a factory twenty times a month and
knowing to the last weed every empty lot between him and his destination. Ar-
riving, he could hang around hours for a six-bit commission or a piece of in-
formation. "Kotzie takes after my missis. He is kaltblutig." Sure I knew it was
he himself that did all the trumpeting, screaming, and stamping down in his
flat, throwing things on the floor.

"And how is your brother?" he said intriguingly. "I understand the little
maidelech wet their pants for him. What is he doing?"

As a matter of fact I didn't know what Simon was up to these days. He didn't
tell me, nor did he seem curious as to what was happening to me, having decided
in his mind that I was nothing but a handyman at Einhorn's.

Once I went with Dingbat to a party one of his fiancées was giving, and I met
my brother with a Polish girl in a fur-trimmed orange dress; he wore a big,
smooth, check suit and looked handsome and sufficient to himself. He didn't
stay long, and I had a feeling that he didn't want to spend his evenings where I
did. Or maybe it was the kind of evening Dingbat made of it that didn't please
him, Dingbat's recitations and hoarse parodies, his turkey girding and obscene
cackles that made the girls scream. For several months Dingbat and I were very
thick. At parties I horsed around with him, goofy, his straight man; or I hug-
ged girls on porches and in backyards, exactly as he did. He took me under his
protection in the poolroom, and we did some friendly boxing, at which I was
never much good, and played snooker--a little better--and hung about there
with the hoods and loudmouths. So that Grandma Lausch would have thought that
the very worst she had ever said about me let me off too lightly, seeing me
in the shoeshine seat above the green tables, in a hat with diamond airholes cut
in it and decorated with brass kiss-me pins and Al Smith buttons, in sneakers and
Mohawk sweatshirt, there in the frying jazz and the buzz of baseball broadcasts,
the click of markers, butt thumping of cues, spat-out pollyseed shells and blue
chalk crushed underfoot and dust of hand-slickening talcum hanging in the air.
Along with the blood-smelling swaggeroos, recruits for mobs, automobile thieves,
stick-up men, sluggers and bouncers, punks with ambition to become torpedoes,
neighborhood cowboys with Jack Holt sideburns down to the jawbone, collegiates,
tinhorns and small-time racketeers and pugs, exservicemen, home-evading hus-
bands, hackies, truckers, and bush-league athletes. Whenever someone had a
notion to work out on me--and there were plenty of touchy characters here
to catch your eye in a misconstrued way--Dingbat flew around to protect me.

"This kid is a buddy of mine and he works for my bro. Monkey with him and
you'll get something broke on your head. What's the matter, you tough or
hungry!"

He was never anything but through and through earnest when the subject was
loyalty or honor; his bony dukes were ready and his Cuban heels dug down
sharply; his furrowed chin was already seeking its fighting position on the
shoulder of his starched shirt. Then he was prepared to go into his stamping
dance and start slugging.

But there weren't any fights over me. If there was one doctrine of Grandma
Lausch's that went home, it was the one of the soft answer, though with her this
was of tactical not merciful origin, the dust-off for heathen, stupes, and brute-
heads. So I don't claim it was a trained spirit turning aside wrath, or integer
vitae (how could I?) making the wolves respect me; but I didn't have any taste
for the perpetual danger-sign, eye-narrowing, tricky Tybalt all coiled up to stab,
for that code, and was without curiosity for what it was like to hit or to be hit,
and so I refused all the bids to outface or be outfaced.

On this I had Einhorn's views also, whose favorite example was his sitting in
the driver's seat of the Stutz--as he sometimes did, having been moved over to
watch tennis matches or sandlot games--and a coal heaver running up with a tire
tool because he had honked once or twice for the Stutz to move and Dingbat
wasn't there to move it. "What could I do," said Einhorn, "if he asked me no
questions but started to swing or punch me in the face? With my hands on the
wheel, he'd think I was the driver. I'd have to talk fast. Could I talk fast e-
nough? What could make an impression on an animal like that? Would I pretend to
faint or play dead? Oh my God! Even before I was sick, and I was a pretty husky
young fellow, I'd do anything possible before I started to trade punches with any
sonofabitch, muscle-minded ape or bad character looking for trouble. This city
is one place where a person who goes out for a peaceful walk is liable to come
home with a shiner or bloody nose, and he's almost as likely to get it from a
cop's nightstick as from a couple of squareheads who haven't got the few dimes
to chase pussy on the high rides in Riverview and so hang around the alley and
plot to jump someone. Because you know it's not the city salary the cops live on
now, not with all the syndicate money there is to pick up. There isn't a single
bootleg alky truck that goes a mile without being convoyed by a squad car. So
they don't care what they do. I've heard of them almost killing guys who didn't
know enough English to answer questions."

And now, with eager shrewdness of nose and baggy eyes, he began to increase
his range; sometimes, with what white hair bunched over his ears and his head
lifted back, he looked grand, suffering more for than from something, relaxing
his self-protective tension. "But there is some kind of advantage in the roughness
of a place like Chicago, of not having any illusions either. Whereas in all the
great capitals of the world there's some reason to think humanity is very dif-
ferent. All that ancient culture and those beautiful works of art right out in
public, by Michelangelo and Christopher Wren, and those ceremonies, like
trooping the color at the Horse Guards' parade or burying a great man in the
Pantheon over in Paris. You see those marvelous things and you think that
everything savage belongs to the past. So you think. And then you have another
think, and you see that after they rescued women from the coal mines, or pulled
down the Bastille and got rid of Star Chambers and lettres de cachet, ran out
the Jesuits, increased education, and built hospitals and spread courtesy and
politeness, they have five or six years of war and revolutions and kill off twenty
million people. And do they think there's less danger to life than here? That's a
riot. Let them say rather that they blast better specimens, but not try to put it
over that the only human beings who live by blood are away down on the Orinoco
where they hunt heads, or out in Cicero with Al Capone. But the best specimens
always have been maltreated or killed. I've seen a picture of Aristotle mounted
and ridden like a horse by some nasty whore. There was Pythagoras who got
killed over a diagram; there was Seneca who had to cut his wrists; there were the
teachers and the saints who became martyrs.

"But I sometimes think," he said, "what if a guy came in here with a gun and
saw me at this desk? If he said ‘Stick 'em up!' do you think he'd wait until I
explained that my arms were paralyzed? He'd let me have it. He'd think I was
reaching in a drawer or pushing a signal button, and that would be the finish of
Einhorn. Just have a look at the holdup statistics and then tell me I'm dreaming
up trouble. What I ought to do is have a sign up above my head saying ‘Cripple.'
But I wouldn't like to be seeing that on the wall all the time. I just hope the
Brink's Express and Pinkerton Protective labels all over the place will keep them
away."

He often abandoned himself to ideas of death, and notwithstanding that he
was advanced in so many ways, his Death was still the old one in shriveled
mummy longjohns; the same Death that beautiful maidens failed to see in their
mirrors because the mirrors were filled with their white breasts, with the blue
light of old German rivers, with cities beyond the window checkered like their
own floors. This Death was a cheating old rascal with bones showing in
buckskin fringes, not a gentle Sir Cedric Hardwicke greeting young boys from
the branches of an apple tree in a play I once saw. Einhorn had no kind familiar
thoughts of him, but superstitions about this frightful snatcher, and he only
played the Thanatopsis stoic but always maneuvered to beat this other--Death!
--who had already gained so much on him.

Who maybe was the only real god he had.

Often I thought that in his heart Einhorn had completely surrendered to this
fear. But when you believed you had tracked Einhorn through his acts and
doings and were about to capture him, you found yourself not in the center of a
labyrinth but on a wide boulevard; and here he came from a new direction--a
governor in a limousine, with state troopers around him, dominant and
necessary, everybody's lover, whose death was only one element, and a remote
one, of his privacy.



Chapter VI



What did I, out of all this, want for myself? I couldn't have told you. My brother
Simon wasn't much my senior, and he and others at our age already had got the
idea there was a life to lead and had chosen their directions, while I was circling
yet. And Einhorn, what services he needed of me he pretty well knew, but what I
was to get from him wasn't at all clear. I know I longed very much, but I didn't
understand for what.

Before vice and shortcoming, admitted in the weariness of maturity, common
enough and boring to make an extended showing of, there are, or are supposed
to be, silken, unconscious, nature-painted times, like the pastoral of Sicilian
shepherd lovers, or lions you can chase away with stones and golden snakes who
scatter from their knots into the fissures of Eryx. Early scenes of life, I mean;
for each separate person too, everyone beginning with Eden and passing through
trammels, pains, distortions, and death into the darkness out of which, it is
hinted, we may hope to enter permanently into the beginning again. There is
horror of grayness, of the death-forerunning pinch, of scandalous mouth or of
fear-eyes, and of whatever is caused by no recollection of happiness and no
expectation of it either. But when there is no shepherd-Sicily, no free-hand
nature-painting, but deep city vexation instead, and you are forced early into
deep city aims, not sent in your ephod before Eli to start service in the temple,
nor set on a horse by your weeping sisters to go and study Greek in Bogotá, but
land in a poolroom--what can that lead to of the highest? And what happiness or
misery-antidote can it offer instead of pipes and sheep or musical, milk-drinking
innocence, or even merely nature walks with a pasty instructor in goggles, or
fiddle lessons? Friends, human pals, men and brethren, there is no brief, digest,
or shorthand way to say where it leads. Crusoe, alone with nature, under heaven,
had a busy, complicated time of it with the unhuman itself, and I am in a crowd
that yields results with much more difficulty and reluctance and am part of it
myself.


Dingbat, too, for a short while, had his effect on me, speaking of deep city
aims. He thought there was a lot he could teach me that even his brother
couldn't. I learned about Dingbat that he was full of the thought of justify-
ing himself before the Commissioner and Einhorn and aimed to produce a success,
one that was characteristic of him. He swore he would, that it was in him to
make a fortune and a reputation, and he wanted to glitter as a promoter, an-
nounced on the radio among the personalities that pass through the ring before
the main event, his specs like diamonds. Now and then he got a fighter to
manage, somebody mesmerizable. And at this time he became the manager of a
heavyweight. At last, he said, he had a good one. Nails Nagel. Dingbat had had
middles and welters, but a good heavyweight fighter was the biggest dough of
all, provided he was championship material, which, Dingbat declared--cried out
in his sincerest ready-for-battle assertion--Nails was. Nails sometimes allowed
himself to think so too; at heart probably not, or he would have thrown himself
full time into it and stopped going back to his job in the auto-wrecking yard.
He was both slow and spasmodic in the way he used the grime-crowned hands
that ended his rugged white arms, lashed with extra reinforcements of sinew at
the joints. His dull and black jaw was similarly reinforced, and it backed stiffly
down on his shaven throat to shelter from punches; the top of his head was
surrounded by a cap and the visor stuck forward over lair-hidden eyes. Hurt,
decent manhood, meaning no wrong or harm, a horsehair coil or ragged ball of
slob virility, that was what he made you feel. He was very strong and an angel
about taking punishment; also his big white flanky body moved fast enough, for
a heavy's. What he didn't have was ring wit. He depended on Dingbat to tell him
what to do, suffered himself to be run, and he couldn't differ effectively be-
cause his tongue, among missing teeth, was very slow, and the poolroom wise-
crackers said, "Change to light oil; she won't turn over in this weather." He
was miscast as a fighter, the chicken-woman's son. His mother had worked for
years in a poultry-shop back, plucking hens and geese, a burlap-dressed woman
who couldn't close her mouth over her teeth. She made good dough, and Nails
still took more from her than he ever earned. He was in a racket he only had
a strong apparent capacity for.

However, he was cuckoo about being admired as a fighter, and he was unbeliev-
ably happy one time when Dingbat brought him along to stand by while he, Ding-
bat, gave a talk to a boys' club in a basement on Division Street, invited
by a poolroom buddy who was sponsor. It went something like this: both Ding-
bat and Nails in their best clothes, black suede shoes and wearing spotless,
eye-cramming fedoras and key chains. "Boys, the first thing you got to under-
stand is how important it is to live clean, train hard, get plenty of milk and
vegetables, and sleep with open windows. Take a fighter like my boy here"--
happily grinning Nails, toughly sending them his blessings--"on the road, makes
no difference where, Nagel works up a full sweat at least once a day. Then, hot
shower, cold shower, and a fast rub. He gets the body poisons out of his pores,
and the only time he gets to smoke is when I give him a cigar after a vict'ry. I
was reading where Tex Rickard wrote the other day in the Post, that before the
Willard fight, when it was a hundred in the shade out there in Ohio, Dempsey
was trained so fine that when he took a nap before the event, in his underwear,
they were crisp and there wasn't a drop of sweat on him. Boys, I want to tell
you, that's wonderful! That's one of the worth-while ways to be. So take my
advice and don't play with your dummy. I can't tell you how important that is.
Leave it alone. Not just if you want to be an athlete, and there's few things
that's finer, but even if you got other ambitions, that's the first way to go
wrong. So hands off; it'll make your brains fuzzy. And don't play gidgy with
your little girl friends. It don't do you or them any good. Take it from me, I'm
giving it to you straight because I don't believe in shady stuff and hanky-panky.
The hot little punks I see around the street--just pass them by. If you got to
have a girl friend, and I don't see why not, there's plenty of honest kids to
choose from, the kind who'd never grab you by the fly or let you stick around
till one a.m. mushing with them on the steps"--and on and on, with his glare of
sincerity to the membership on camp chairs.

Being a manager was perfect for Dingbat. And it was just what he needed, to
make speeches (his brother was a lodge and banquet orator), and to drag Nails
out of his room in the morning for road work in the park, and to coax, coach,
neigh, and brandish around and dispute the use of equipment in Trafton's gym,
always angrily on his rights over tapes and punching bags in the liniment
groggy, flickety-rope-time, tin-locker-clashing, Loop-darkened rooms and the
Polish, Italian, Negro thump-muscled, sweat-glittering training-labor, where the
smart crowd of owners and percentage-figurers was. When he had gotten Nails
into condition he took him on the road, out West by bus, with money borrowed
from Einhorn, but wired from Salt Lake City where they landed broke, and they
came back hungry and white. Nails had won two fights in six, and it was hard
going among the gibes in the poolroom.

But Dingbat was out of the fight racket for a while; it was at the time of the
great jailbreak at Joliet, and he was a corporal in the National Guard called
in by the governor. He was around at once in his khakis and corded campaign
hat, not hiding the worry that he might be in the patrol that cornered Tommy
O'Connor or Larry the Aviator or Bugsy Gonzalez whom he admired.

"Fall in a ditch, stupid, and stay there," Einhorn said to him. "But the state
troopers will have them rounded up before you're on the train, and the worst
you'll have is a crowded ride and beans to eat."

The Commissioner, whose health hadn't been good lately, called from bed,
"Let's see you, Cholly Chaplin, before you leave," and when Dingbat, looking
wronged, and leg-bound in the deforming breeches, stood up to him, he said,
colossally amused, "Ee-dyot!"--Dingbat drawn up in a consumption of misun-
derstood feelings. Mrs. Einhorn was frightened by the uniform and wept,
hanging on Lollie Fewter's neck. Dingbat was bivouacked around Joliet in rainy
weather for a few days and came back leaner, blacker, ground into tiredness,
with provoked eyes squinty from fatigue. But he took up with Nails immedi-
ately. He had gotten him a match in Muskegon, Michigan. Einhorn sent me along
to get the lowdown on what happened to Dingbat and Nagel in the sticks. He
said, "Augie, I owe you a holiday. If your friend Klein, whom I don't trust
too much, will pinch-hit for you here a couple of afternoons, you can go
and have an excursion. Maybe it'll give Nagel confidence to have somebody
in his corner. Dingbat cracks the whip over him too much and gets him down.
Maybe a cheerful third party--sursum corda. How good's your Latin, kid?"
Einhorn was happy as the devil with his idea; when what he wanted coincided
with a good deed, it made his emotions warm. He called his father and said,
"Dad, give Augie here ten bucks. He's going on a trip for me"--thus to show
that his generosity had an obstacle to pass. The Commissioner gladly gave,
being openhanded and bland about any amount; in parting with dough he was
exemplary.

Dingbat was glad I was coming, and he made a speech to all, with that animal
effrontery of his whenever he was in charge. "All right, fellas; we've got to
click this time …" Poor Nails, he didn't look good in the Wasps AC mulberry
jacket bagging over his muscles, and his togs in the bag hung down to his bowed
giant gams as heavy as plumber's tools. An immense face like raked garden soil
in need of water. And in this porous dryness, a pair of whity eyes fearing the
worst, and a punch-formed nose.

The worst, for that day, had already happened to somebody else; one of the
Aiello brothers had been found shot to death in his roadster. There was a big
spread on it in the Examiner; we read it in the pier-bound trolley, and Nails
thought he had played softball once against this Aiello. He was downcast. But it
was still very early, right after dawn, when the slum distances of the morning
streets were hollow, with only a white drop of sun on the brinks of buildings.
When we walked down the pier to the City of Saugatuck and came out of the shed,
suddenly the town gloom ended in a flaming blue teeter of fresh water, from the
black shore-ends down into the golden whiteness eastward. The whiteleaded decks
had just been washed down and were sparkling with colors of water in a Gulf of
Mexico warmth, and the gulls let the air currents carry them around. Dingbat was
finally happy. He got Nails to do his road work around the ship before the decks
became too crowded. Eight hours on the water without exercise and he'd be too
stiff to fight that night. So Nails threw himself into a trot, smiling; he was
a changed man in this swift-water sunshine and the gulls dropping almost from
a standstill to the surface for pieces of bread. He unpacked a few jabs from the
top of his chest, ginger, technical, and dangerous, and Dingbat, in stripes like
a locust's leg, advised him to put more shoulder into them. They were pretty
convinced they were sailing to a victory. The two of them went into the rosy
carpeting of the lounge for coffee. I stayed on deck in joy of the sun, the col-
ors, up in the hay odors from the hatch where there were the horses of a yokel-
circuit circus; it sent my blood happy to sit there in the blue and warm, with
the slow air coming up against me from my feet in pretty much frazzled gym shoes,
large-sized, lettered in india ink, up my jeans, and my head with plenty of hair
to cushion it against the bulkhead.

When we were well out on the warm, unsalty water Dingbat walked out of the salon
with two young women, friends of Isabel or Janice, whom he had met there, both
in tennis whites and ribboned-up hair, starting on vacation, to run and straight-
arm high-bounders on the tennis lawn of a Saugatuck resort and canoe their nice
busts on the idle shore water. He pointed out the departing sights with his hat,
his outstanding hair getting a chance to live in the sun and evaporate its
perfumes--what was there better for a rising young fight manager than to stroll
in his white shoes and with yachtsman's furl to his pants on a sweet morning
indulgent to human hopes and be the cavalier to girls? Nails stayed in the salon,
trying to win a prize on a machine called the Claw, a little derrick in a glass
case filled with cameras, fountain pens, and flashlights embedded in a hill of
chickenfeed candy. For a nickel you could maneuver it by two gadgets, one that
aimed and another that gripped the claw. He had nothing to show for fifty cents
except a handful of waxy candy. He wanted a camera for his mother.

So he shared the candy with me, on deck, and then declared that he had
strained his eyes at the machine and felt dizzy, but it was the motion and the
water bursting smoothly at the bow that got him, and when we were in close to
the Michigan shore and its groundswell he turned death-nosed, white as a polyp,
even in his deepest wrinkles. While he vomited, Dingbat supported him fiercely
from the back--his boy, he'd see him through hell--and pleaded with an
unhidable bitterness of disappointment, "Oh, man, hold up, for Chrissakes!" But
Nails went on heaving and tearing air into his chest, his hair lapping down over
his cold face and land-longing eyes. When we touched Saugatuck we didn't dare
tell him that we were hours yet from Muskegon. Dingbat took him below to lie
down. Nails could feel secure only in a few streets of all the world.

At Muskegon we led him off, yellow and flabby, down the planks of the pier
where there wasn't enough motion over the sand of the bottom to camouflage
the perch from the afternoon anglers. We went to the YMCA and washed him,
got a meal of roast beef, and then went to the gym. Though he complained of a
headache and wanted to lie down, Dingbat forced him through his paces. "If I let
you, you'll only lie there and feel sorry for yourself, and you won't be able to
fight worth a damn tonight. I know what you need. Augie'll go over and get a
pack of aspirins. You go on and start running off the meal." I got back with the
pills, and Nails, white and crampy from his ten laps of the blind, airless room,
sat and panted under the basketball standards, and Dingbat rubbed his chest
and tried to pump him with confidence but only gave him more anguish, not
knowing how to raise hopes without threats. "Man, where's your will power,
where's your reserves!"

It was no use. Already sunset, and the bout an hour away, we sat out in the
square, but there was a fresh-water depth smell there, and Nails was queasy and
sagged with a hinging head on the bench. "Well, come on," Dingbat said. "We'll
do the best we can."

The fight was in the Lions' Club. Nails was in the second event against a man
named Prince Jaworski, a drill-operator from the Brunswick plant who got all
the encouragement of the crowd, especially as Nails shambled and covered from
him or held him in clinches, looking frightened to death in the dry borax sparkle
of the ring and gawping out into the ringside faces and the strident blood yells.
Jaworski padded after him with wider swings. He had both height and reach on
poor Nails, and, I estimate, was about five years younger. Dingbat was frantic
with anger at the boos and shouted at Nails when he came to the corner, "If you
don't hit him at least once this round I'm gonna walk out and leave you here
alone." "I told you we shoulda taken the train," said Nails, "but you were going
to save four bucks." He listened, however, to the noise against him, startled in
the eyes, and plunged out with more spirit the second round, carrying the fight to
Jaworski, reckless, with slum motions of deadliness in his giant white knots. But
in the third round he was hit where he could least stand a blow, in the belly, and
he went deadweight flat, counted out in a terror of roars and barks, accusations
of dive-taking and fixed fight, with Dingbat mounted on the first rope and
flapping his hat at the referee, who made a headstall of his hands and covered his
ears. Nails came doubled out of the ring, dead-eyed in the white electric
brilliance and with a wet moss of whiskers on the stony sponge of his cheeks. I
helped him dress and took him back to the YMCA, where I got him into bed and
locked him in the room, then waited in the street for Dingbat so that he wouldn't
go and kick at his door. But he was too glum and droopy for that. He and I took
a walk together and bought lard-fried potatoes at a street wagon, and then turned
in.

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 sul-
phur 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 spawn-
ing-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 sat-
isfied. 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
recovered. 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
softfaced man of a George wasn't easy on me either. So, afterward, on these
trips, as 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 rockdepth 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 tam, 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 intel-
ligent 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 Kan-
sas 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.

"I have to bring back the car, Grandma," I said at last, "so I'll have to go now,
if there isn't anything else you want done."

"What else? Nothing."

I started to leave.

She said, "There's my shoebag I forgot to take. The chintz one inside the
clothescloset door."

"I'll bring it out soon."

"Mama can keep it. And for your trouble, Augie, here's something." She
opened her purse of dull large silver antennae and with short gesture she gave
me an angry quarter--the payoff--which I couldn't refuse, couldn't pocket,
could scarcely close my hand on.

Things were in a queer way at Einhorns' too, where the Commissioner was
dying in the big back room, while up front, in the office, deeds were changing
hands with more thousands and greater prosperity than ever. A few times a day
Einhorn had himself wheeled to his father's bedside to ask advice and get
information, now everything was in his hands, grave and brow-drawn as he
began to feel the unruliness of what he had to manage, and all the social chirping
of the office became the dangerous hints of the desert. Now you could see how
much he had been protected by the Commissioner. After all, he became a cripple
at a young age. Whether before or after marriage I never did find out--Einhorn
said after marriage, but I heard it told here and there that the Commissioner had
paid off Mrs. Einhorn's cousin Karas (Holloway) and bought his paralytic son a
bride. That she loved Einhorn wasn't any evidence against this, for it'd be
constitutional with her to adore her husband. Anyhow, regardless of what he
bragged, he was a son who had lived under his father's protection. That's
something that I wouldn't have failed to see. And his world-gypping letters and
operations, and all his poetical schemes, even if he had a son at the university
himself, were doings of a boy. And, indulged so long, into middle age, how was
he going to get over it? He thought, by being fierce and serious. He stopped his
old projects; "The Shut-In" wasn't published any more and the on-approval
packages no longer opened--I toted them down to the storeroom with the
pamphlets and the rest of the daily prizes of the mail; and he got himself
consumed by business and closed and opened the deals on the Commissioner's
calendar, began or dissolved partnerships in lots or groceries in the suburbs,
and, on his own--the kind of thing he loved--cheaply bought up second mortgages
from people who needed ready money. He insisted on kickbacks from plumbing,
heating, or painting contractors with whom the Commissioner had always been
cronies, and so made enemies. That didn't bother him, to whom the first thing
was that the fainéants shouldn't be coming after Charlemagne--as long as
people understood that. And furthermore, the more difficulty and tortuousness
there were, the more he felt safe. So there were quarrels about broken
agreements; he'd never pay bills till the last day of grace; and most people who
put up with this did it for the Commissioner's sake. He grabbed command very
toughly. "I can argue all day the runner didn't touch base," he said, "even if I
know damn well he did. The idea shouldn't get started that you can be made to
back down."

This was the way the lessons and theories of power were taught to me in the
intervals of quiet that became fewer and fewer; and these lessons were self-
addressed mostly, explanations of what he was doing, that it was right.

At this time all his needs were very keen, and he wanted things in the house
he hadn't cared much about before--a special kind of coffee that only one place
in town carried, and he ordered several bottles of bootleg rum from Kreindl,
which was one of Kreindl's sidelines; he brought them in a straw satchel from
the South Side, where he was in second-or third-hand touch with all kinds of
demon, dangerous elements. But Kreindl had an instinct to get people what they
had a craving for--of a steward or batman or fag or a Leporello or pimp. He
hadn't quit on Five Properties. And now that the Commissioner was dying, and
Dingbat, who would inherit a lot of money, was still unmarried, Kreindl hung
out at Einhorn's, keeping the Commissioner company in the bedroom, talking to
Dingbat, and having long conversations privately with Einhorn, who made use
of him in various ways.

One of their subjects was Lollie Fewter, who had quit in September and was
working downtown. Einhorn suffered over her no longer being in the house, im-
possible as it would have been during his father's sickness and his increased
work to put the blocks to her as in the leisurely summer. There were always
people in the flat and office. But it was now that he wanted her and kept sending
her notes and messages and harping about it. And at such a time! It hurt him too.
Nevertheless he kept thinking how, in spite of the time, he could carry it off,
and didn't merely brood, but discussed, obstinately, how it could be done. I
heard him with Kreindl. And still he was the family leader, the chief, the man
of administration and thought, responsible custodian, remarkable son of a re-
markable father. Awfully damn remarkable. Even the rising of his brows toward
his whitening hair was that. And what if, together with this, he had his inner
and personal growths of vice, passion, even prurience, unbecoming obscenity?
Was it unbecoming because he was a cripple? And then if you satisfy that dif-
ficult question by saying it's not up to us to declare what a man should re-
nounce because he is crippled or otherwise cursed, there's still the fact that
Einhorn could be ugly and malicious. You can know a man by his devils and the
way he gives hurts. But I believe he has to run a chance of injuring himself too.
In this way you can judge, if he does it safely for himself, that he is wrong. Or
if he has no spur gear to something not himself. And Einhorn? Jesus, he could be
winsome--the world's charm-boy. And that was distracting. You can grumble at
it; you can say it's a ruse or feint of gifted people to sidetrack you from the
viper's tangle and ugly knottedness of their desires, but if the art of it is deep
enough and carried far enough into great play, it gets above its origin. Providing
it's festive, which sometimes it was with Einhorn, when he was not merely after
something but was gay. He could be simple-hearted. Nevertheless I was down on
him occasionally, and I said to myself he was nothing--nothing. Selfish, jealous,
autocratic, carp-mouth, and hypocritical. However, in the end, I every time had
high regard for him. For one thing, there was always the fight he had made on
his sickness to consider. No doubt smiting the sledded Polack on the ice was
more, or being a Belisarius, and Grail-seeking was higher, but weighing it all
up, the field he was put into and the weapons he was handed, he had made an
imposing showing and, through mind, he connected with the spur gear that I
mentioned. He knew what retributions your devils are liable to bring for the way
you treat wife and women or behave while your father is on his deathbed, what
you ought to think of your pleasure, of acting like a cockroach; he had the
intelligence for the comparison. He had the intelligence to be sublime. But
sublimity can't exist only as a special gift of a few, due to an accident of
origin, like being born an albino. If it were, what interest could we have in
it? No, it has to survive the worst and find itself a dry corner of retreat
from the mad, bloody wet, and mud-splashing of spike-brains, marshals, Marl-
boroughs, gold-watch-consulting Plugsons, child-ruiners, human barbecuers,
as well as from the world-wide livery service of the horsemen of St. John.
So why be down on poor Einhorn, afflicted with mummy legs and his cripple-
irritated longings?

Anyway, I stood by him, and he said to me, "Oh, that bitch! That lousy
freckle-faced common coal-mine whore!" And he sent messages by Kreindl to
her, downtown, with lunatic offers. But also he said, "I know I'm no goddam
good to have pussy on the brain at a time like this. It'll be my downfall."
Lollie answered his notes but didn't come back. She had other ideas for her-
self.

And meantime the Commissioner was passing out of the picture. At first he
had lots of friends coming to see him in the onetime sumptuous bedroom,
furnished by his third wife, who had left him ten years ago, with an Empire
four-poster bed and gilded mirrors, Cupid with his head inside a bow. Spit-
toons on the floor, cigars on the dresser, check stubs and pinochle decks,
it had become an old businessman's room. He seemed to enjoy himself, when
old-country and synagogue buddies and former partners were there, telling
them he was done for. It wasn't a habit he could check, joking, having joked
all his life. Coblin came often, on Sunday afternoons, and Five Properties
in the milk truck during the week--for a young man, he had considerable or-
thodoxy; respectful form, anyhow. I can't say I believe he cared a whole
lot, but his presence was not a bad thing and showed he knew at least where
the right place for the heart was. And probably he approved of the way the
Commissioner was making his death, his first-class stoicism. Kinsman the
undertaker, the Einhorns' tenant, was very disturbed that he could not vi-
sit and stopped me in the street to ask after the Commissioner, begging me
not to mention it. "Those are my worst times," he said. "When a friend is
passing I'm about as welcome as old Granum who works for me." Old Granum
was the deathbed watcher and Psalm reciter, feeble and ruination-faced, in
Chinatown black alpaca and minute, slippered feet. "If I come," said Kinsman,
"you know what people think."

As the old man made deeper progress toward death fewer visitors were
allowed, and the klatch ruled by his deep wisecracking tones ended. Now
Dingbat was with him most, and he didn't need to be urged by Einhorn to come
out of the poolroom to tend his father but was much affected; he had been the
last to accept the doctor's forecast and said confidently, "That's the way all
croakers talk when an old fellow is sick. Why, the Commissioner is really built,
he's powerful!" But now he hastened in and out of the room on his noisy and
clumping tango-master's heels, fed the Commissioner and rubbed him down and
shagged away the kids who played on the furniture in the backyard. "Beat it, you
little jag-offs, there's a sick person here. Damn snots, where's your upbringing!"
He kept the sickroom dark and camped on a hassock, reading Captain Fury, Doc
Savage, and other pulp sports stories by the vigil light. I saw the Commissioner
afoot only once, at this stage, when Einhorn sent me to his study to fetch some
papers, and in the darkness of the living room the Commissioner was rambling
slowly in his underclothes, looking for Mrs. Einhorn, to demand an explanation
for missing buttons, annoyed that from neck to bottom there were only two and
he was exposed and naked between. "That's no way!" he said. "Lig a naketter."
He was angry still about the fire.

At last Dingbat surrendered his place in the bedroom to Kinsman's Granum,
when the Commissioner seldom roused and, awake, didn't easily recognize any-
one. But he did recognize the bricky, open sponge-ball cheeks of the old watch-
er in the towel-looped twelve-watt light, and said, "Du? Then I slept longer
than I thought." Which Einhorn repeated scores of times, mentioning Cato and
Brutus and others noted for the calm of their last moments; he was a collector
of facts like these, and shook down all he read, Sunday supplements, Monday
reports of sermons, Haldeman-Julius blue books, all collections of sayings, for
favorable comparisons. Things that didn't always fit. Not that this old lover
the Commissioner doesn't deserve citation for having no alarm and dying undis-
gusted, without last minute revision of lifetime habits.

He was laid out that night in a colossal coffin, at Kinsman's. When I came in
the morning the office was shut, with the shades in green and black wrinkles
against the cold sunshine and dry fall weather, and I went round the back.
The mirrors had been covered by Mrs. Einhorn, in whom superstition was very
strong, and a candle burned down in a pale white ecclesiastical glass in the
dark dining room by a photo of the Commissioner taken when his Bill Cody whis-
kers were still full and glossy. Arthur Einhorn had come from Champaign for his
grandfather's funeral and sat at the table in detached college elegance, hand in
his woolly intellectual hair, taking it easy in the expected family folly of such
an occasion; he was engaging and witty, though not youthful in appearance--
he had lines in his cheeks already--despite his raccoon coat that was lying on
the buffet with a beret dropped on it. Einhorn and Dingbat had razor slits in
their vests, symbolizing rent clothes. The ex-Mrs. Tambow was there, in duenna
hairdress and arched pince-nez, along with her son Donald, who sang at recep-
tions and weddings; and, also on family duty, Karas-Holloway and his wife, she
with poodle tuft on the front of her head and her usual concentrated unrest or
dislike. She had a lot of flesh, and her face was red, resentful, criticizing.
I was aware that she was always after her cousin-in-law to protect herself from
the Einhorns. She didn't trust them. She didn't trust her husband either, who
gave her everything, a large super-decorated flat on the South Side, Haviland
china, venetian blinds, Persian rugs, French tapestry, Majestic radio with
twelve tubes. That was Karas, in a sharkskin, double-breasted suit and present-
ing a look of difficulties in shaving and combing terrifically outwitted, the
knars of his face gotten-around and his hair flattened. His smoothness was a
huge satisfaction to him, as, also, his extraordinary English that hadn't hamp-
ered him in making a fortune, plus his insignificance in the old country--people
gave way before his supple wrinkles and small eyes and, comparably, the onslaught
of his six-cylinder car, a yellow Packard.

Long afterward I had a queer ten minutes with Mrs. Karas, in a bakery near
Jackson Park where I came in with a Greek girl she assumed to be my wife
because we were arm in arm, in summer flannels, intimate early in the morning.
She recognized me on the spot, with a coloring of extreme pleasure, but with
errors of memory there was no stopping or correcting, they were so singular. She
told the girl I had been practically a relative to her, she had loved me as much
as Arthur, and received me in her own house like kin--all joy and happy reunion,
she was, embracing me by the shoulders to say how fine and handsome I had
become, but then my complexion had always been the envy of girls (as if I had
been Achilles among the maidens, in the office and poolroom). I must say I was
stumped by such major will to do over the past with affection and goodness.
People have been adoptive toward me, as if I were really an orphan, but she had
never been like that, but only morose with her riches, and mad at her mystifying,
dapper husband, and critical of the Einhorns. I had been in her flat only as
Einhorn's chauffeur and sat in another room while they visited. Tillie Einhorn,
not the hostess, brought me sandwiches and coffee from the table. And now Mrs.
Karas, who had come out to buy rolls for breakfast, fell into a lucky chance to
adorn the past with imaginary flowers grown in worried secret. I didn't deny
anything; I said it was all true, and allowed her her enthusiasm. She even chided
me for not coming to visit her. But I remembered her off-with-their-heads stony-
facedness and the breakfast before the funeral when I helped out in the kitchen.
Bavatsky made the coffee.

Einhorn, weary but not crushed, had his black homburg on the back of his
head as he smoked--no word to spare for me but an occasional one of command.
Dingbat insisted with dry, roughened voice that he was going to wheel his
brother into Kinsman's parlors. After that it was I who carried Einhorn, not
Arthur, who walked alongside with his mother. On my back, I took him in and
out of the limousine, in the autumn park of the cemetery, low-grown with
shrubs and slabs; back again to the cold-cuts dinner for the mourners, and
afterward, at nightfall, to the synagogue in his black duds, his feet riding
stirrupless and weak by sides and his cheek on my back.

Einhorn wasn't religious, but to go to the synagogue was due form and,
regardless of what he thought, he knew how to conduct himself. The Coblins
belonged to this congregation too, and I had strung along with Cousin Anna in
the oriental, modified purdah of the gallery while she wept for Howard amid the
coorooing and smelling salts of the women in finery, sobbing at who would be
doomed the coming year by fire or water--as the English text translated it.
This was different, however, from the times of crowds praying below in shawls
and business hats, and the jinking of the bells on the velvet dresses-of the
two-legged scrolls. It was dark, and a small group, the shaggy evening regulars,
various old faces and voices, gruff, whispered, wheezy, heart-grumbled, noisily
swarm-toned, singing off the Hebrew of the evening prayers. Dingbat and Ein-
horn had to be prompted when it came their turn to recite the orphans' Kaddish.

We went back in Karas's Packard, with Kreindl, Einhorn whispered to me to
tell Kreindl to go home. Dingbat turned in. Karas was off to the South Side.
Arthur had gone to visit friends; he was leaving for Champaign in the morning.
I got Einhorn into more comfortable clothes and slippers. There was a cold wind
pouring and moonlight in the backyard.

Einhorn kept me with him that evening; he didn't want to be alone. While I sat
by he wrote his father's obituary in the form of an editorial for the neighbor-
hood paper. "The return of the hearse from the newly covered grave leaves a man
to pass through the last changes of nature who found Chicago a swamp and left
it a great city. He came after the Great Fire, said to be caused by Mrs. O'Leary's
cow, in flight from the conscription of the Hapsburg tyrant, and in his life as a
builder proved that great places do not have to be founded on the bones of slaves,
like the pyramids of Pharaohs or the capital of Peter the Great on the banks of
the Neva, where thousands were trampled in the Russian marshes. The lesson of an
American life like my father's, in contrast to that of the murderer of the Stre-
litzes and of his own son, is that achievements are compatible with decency. My
father was not familiar with the observation of Plato that philosophy is the
study of death, but he died nevertheless like a philosopher, saying to the an-
cient man who watched by his bedside in the last moments …" This was the vein
of it, and he composed it energetically in half an hour, printing on sheets of
paper at his desk, the tip of his tongue forward, scrunched up in his bathrobe
and wearing his stocking cap.

We then went to his father's room with an empty cardboard file, locked the
doors and turned on the lights, and began to go through the Commissioner's
papers. He handed me things with instructions. "Tear this. This is for the fire,
I don't want anyone to see it. Be sure you remember where you put this note--I'll
ask for it tomorrow. Open the drawers and turn them over. Where are the keys?
Shake his pants out. Put his clothes on the bed and go through the pockets. So
this was the deal he had with Fineberg? What a shrewd old bastard, my dad, a
real phenomenon. Let's keep things in order now--that's the main thing. Clear
the table so we can sort stuff out. Lots of these clothes can be sold, what I won't
be able to wear myself, except it's pretty old-fashioned. Don't throw any little
scraps of paper away. He used to write important things down that way. The old
guy, he thought he'd live forever, that was one of his secrets. I suppose all
powerful old people do. I guess I really do myself, even on the day of his death.
We never learn anything, never in the world, and in spite of all the history books
written. They're just the way we plead or argue with ourselves about it, but it's
only light from the outside that we're supposed to take inside. If we can. There's
a regular warehouse of fine suggestions, and if we're not better it isn't because
there aren't plenty of marvelous and true ideas to draw on, but because our
vanity weighs more than all of them put together," said Einhorn. "Here's a thing
about Margolis, who lied yesterday when he said he didn't owe Dad anything.
'Crooked Feet, two hundred dollars!' He'll pay me or I'll eat his liver, that
two-faced sonofabitch confidence man!"

At midnight we had a pile of torn papers, like the ballots of the cardinals
whose smoke announces a new pontiff. But Einhorn was dissatisfied with the
state of things. Most of his father's debtors were indicated as Margolis had
been -- "Farty Teeth," "Rusty Head," "Crawler," "Constant Laughter," "Alderman
Sam," "Achtung," "The King of Bashan," "Soup Ladle." He had made loans to
these men and had no notes, only these memoranda of debts amounting to
several thousand dollars. Einhorn knew who they were, but those who didn't
want to pay didn't actually have to. It was the opening indication that the
Commissioner had not left him as strong as he believed, but subject to the honor
of lots of men he hadn't always treated well. He became worried and thoughtful.

"Is Arthur in yet?" he nervously said. "He's got an early train to make." In
the demolition of the once gorgeous room where the old man had been camped
ruggedly in female luxury, he reflected with the round eyes of a bird about his
son, and then, more easily, he observed, "Well, this stuff isn't for him, an
yway; he's with poets and intelligent people, having conversation." He always
spoke this way of Arthur, and it gave him first-rate solace.




Chapter VII




I'm thinking of the old tale of Croesus, with Einhorn in the unhappy part. First
the proud rich man, huffy at Solon, who, right or wrong in their argument over
happiness, must have been the visiting Parisian of his day, and condescending to
a rich island provincial. I try to think why didn't the warmth of wisdom make
Solon softer than I believe he was to the gold-and jewel-owning semibarbarian.
But anyway he was right. And Croesus, who was wrong, taught his lesson with
tears to Cyrus, who spared him from the pyre. This old man, through misfortune,
became a thinker and mystic and advice-giver. Then Cyrus lost his head to the
revengeful queen who ducked it in a skinful of blood and cried, "You wanted
blood? Here, drink!" And his crazy son Cambyses inherited Croesus and tried to
kill him in Egypt as he had put his own brother to death and wounded the poor
bull-calf Apis and made the head-and-body-shaved priests grim. The Crash was
Einhorn's Cyrus and the bank failures his pyre, the poolroom his exile from
Lydia and the hoodlums Cambyses, whose menace he managed, somehow, to
get round.

The Commissioner died before the general bust, and wasn't very long in his
grave when the suicides by skyscraper leaps began to take place in La Salle
Street and downtown New York. Einhorn was among the first to be wiped out,
partly because of the golden trust system of the Commissioner and partly
because of his own mismanagement. Thousands of his dough were lost in
Insull's watered and pyramided utilities--Coblin too dropped lots of money on
them--and he lost his legacy, and Dingbat's and Arthur's inheritance as well, by
throwing it into buildings that in the end he couldn't hold. And at the finish he
had nothing but vacant lots in the barren Clearing and around the airport, and of
these several went for taxes; and when I sometimes took him for a ride he'd say,
"We used to have that block of stores, over there," or, of a space full of weeds
between two shanties, "Dad got that in a trade eight years ago and wanted to
build a garage on it. Just as well he never did." So it was a melancholy thing to
drive him, although he didn't make a heavy grouse; his observations were casual
and dry.

Even the building in which he lived, constructed by the Commissioner with a
cash outlay of a hundred thousand dollars, was finally lost as the shops closed
and the tenants in the flats upstairs stopped paying rent.

"No rent, no heat," he said in the winter, resolving to be tough. "A landlord
ought to act like one or give up his property. I'll stick by economic laws, good
times, bad times, and be consistent." This was how he defended his action. He
was taken to court, however, and lost, legal costs and all. He then rented the
empty stores as flats, one to a Negro family and another to a gypsy fortuneteller,
who hung a painted hand and giant, labeled brain in the window. There were
fights in the building and thefts of pipes and toilet fixtures. By now the tenants
were his enemies, led by the redheaded Polish barber Betzhevski, who had given
mandolin concerts on the sidewalk in affable days, and now glared with raw
winter eyes when he passed in front of Einhorn's plate glass. Einhorn started
eviction proceedings against him and several others, and for this he was picketed
by a Communist organization.

"As if I didn't know more about communism than they do," he said with bitter
humor. "What do they know about it, those ignorant bastards? What does even
Sylvester know about revolution?" Sylvester was now a busy member of the
Communist party. So Einhorn sat at the Commissioner's front desk where the
pickets could see him, to await action by the sheriff's office. He had his
windows smeared with candle wax, and a paper sack of excrement was flung
into the kitchen. Whereupon Dingbat organized a flying squad from the pool-
room to guard the building; Dingbat was in a killing rage against Betzhevski
and wanted to raid his shop and smash his mirrors. It wasn't much of a shop
Betzhevski had moved into at this point of the Depression, a single chair in a
basement, where he also kept canaries in a sad Flemish gloom. Clem Tambow still
went to him to be shaved, saying that the redheaded barber was the only one
who understood his beard. Dingbat was annoyed with him for it. But Betzhevski
was evicted, and his wife stood on the sidewalk and cursed Einhorn for a stink-
ing Jew cripple. There was nothing Dingbat could do to her. Anyhow, Einhorn
had commanded, "No rough stuff unless I say so." He didn't rule it out, but
he was going to control it, and Dingbat was obedient, even though Einhorn had
lost him every cent of his legacy. "It didn't hit only just us," Dingbat said,
"it hit everybody. If Hoover and J. P. Morgan didn't know it was coming, how
should Willie? But he'll bring us back. I leave it to him."

The reason for the evictions was that Einhorn had had an offer from a raincoat
manufacturer for the space upstairs. Walls were torn out in several apartments
before City Hall came down on him for violating fire and zoning ordinances and
trying to get industrial current into a residential block. By that time some of
the machinery had already been installed, and the manufacturer--a shoestring
operator himself--was after him to foot the bill for removal. There was another
suit about this when Einhorn tried to claim, throwing away all principle, that the
machinery was bolted to the floor, hence real property belonging to him. He lost
this case too, and the manufacturer found it handier to break out windows and
lower his equipment by pulley than to disassemble it, and he got a court order
to do so. Einhorn's huge, chain-hung sign was damaged. Only this didn't matter
any more because he lost the building, his last large property, and was out of
business. The office was shut down and most of the furniture sold. Desks were
piled on desks in the dining room and files by his bed, so that it could be
approached only from one side. Against better times, he wanted to keep as much
furniture as he could. There were swivel chairs in the living room, where the
burned furniture (the insurance company was kaput and had never paid his
claim), cheaply reupholstered and smelling of fire, was brought back.

He still owned the poolroom, and personally took over the management of it;
he had a sort of office installed in the front corner, around the cash register,
and still, after a fashion, did business. Dropped down into this inferior place,
he was slow to get over it. But in time he became chief here too, and had reor-
ganizing ideas for which he began to accumulate money. First, a lunch counter.
The pool tables were shifted to make room. Then a Twenty-Six green diceboard. He
had remained a notary public and insurance agent, and he got himself accredited
by the gas, electric, and telephone companies to take payment of bills. All this
slowly, for things had low action these mortified times, and even his ingenuity
was numb from the speed and depth of the fall, and much of his thought went
into tracing back the steps he should have taken to save at least Arthur's money
--and Dingbat's. Besides, there was the environment, narrowed down to a single
street and place now that he had lost all other property, the thickened and caked
machine-halted silence from everywhere lying over this particular sparseness
and desolation, plus the abasement from dollars to nickels. And he, a crippled
and aging man, scaled down from large plans to mere connivances. In his own
eyes, the general disaster didn't excuse him sufficiently--it was that momentum
he had which often blurred out others--and it appeared that as soon as he
inherited the Commissioner's fortune it darted and wriggled away like a
collection of little gold animals that had obeyed only the old man's voice.

"Of course," he explained sometimes, "it isn't personally so terrible to me.
I was a cripple before and am now. Prosperity didn't make me walk, and if
anybody knew what a person is liable to have happen to him, it's William
Einhorn. You can believe that."

Well, yes, I both could and couldn't. I knew this assurance was a growth of
weak light, more pale than green, and what a time of creeping days he had had
when he lost the big building and the remaining few thousands of Arthur's legacy
in the final spurt to save it, inspired by pride instead of business sense. He
officially let me go then, saying weakly, "You're a luxury to me, Augie. I'll
have to cut you out." Dingbat and Mrs. Einhorn took care of him during that bad
period when he kept to his study, hard hit, overcome, in his black thought,
many days unshaved--and he a man who depended for the whole tone of life on
regularity in habit--before he left the drab, bookish room and declared he was
taking over in the pool hall. An Adams, beaten for the presidency, going back to
the capital as a humble congressman. Unless he took Arthur out of the university
and sent him to work--provided Arthur would have agreed--he had to do
something, for there was nothing to fall back on; he had even turned his
insurance policies in to raise cash for the building.

And Arthur had no profession; he had been--unlike Kreindl's son Kotzie, the
dentist, who now supported his family--given a liberal education in literature,
languages, and philosophy. Suddenly what the sons had been up to became exceed-
ingly important. Howard Coblin earned money with his saxophone. And Kreindl
didn't any longer scoff to me about his son's unnatural coolness with women.
Instead he advised me to ask him for a job in the pharmacy below his office.
Kotzie got me a relief spot behind the counter as apprentice soda jerk. I
was thankful, for Simon had graduated from high school and was cut off from
Charity. Also, he had lost some of his days at the La Salle Street Station.
Borg was putting in his own jobless brothers-in-law and giving others the
shove, left and right.

As for the savings, the family money Simon had handled as Grandma's successor,
they were gone. The bank had closed in the first run, and the pillared build-
ing was now a fish store--Einhorn had a view of it from his poolroom corner.
Still, Simon graduated pretty well--I can't understand how he managed --and was
elected class treasurer, in charge of buying rings and school pins. It was his
rigorous-looking honesty, I suppose. He had to account to the principal for the
money, but that didn't keep him from fixing a deal with the jeweler and making
a clear fifty dollars for himself.

He was up to much; so was I. We kept it from each other. But I, because I
watched him by long habit, knew somewhat what he was up to, whereas he didn't
pause to look back over my doings. He signed up at the municipal college,
with the idea that everyone had then of preparing for one of the Civil-Service
examinations. There was a rush on for Weather Bureau, Geological Survey, and
post-office jobs, from the heavy-print announcements in layers of paper on the
school and library bulletin boards.

Simon had forefront ability. Maybe his reading was related to it, and the
governor's clear-eyed gaze he had developed. Of John Sevier. Or of Jackson in
the moment when the duelist's bullet glanced off the large button of his cloak
and he made ready to fire--a lifted look of unforgiving, cosmological captaincy;
that look where honesty had the strength of a prejudice, and foresight appeared
as the noble cramp of impersonal worry in the forehead. My opinion is that at
one time it was genuine in Simon. And if it was once genuine, how could you
say definitely that the genuineness was ever all gone. But he used these things.
He employed them, I know damned well. And when they're used consciously,
do they turn spurious? Well, in a fight, who can lay off his advantages?

Maybe Grandma Lausch had gotten her original dream scheme of Rosenwald or
Carnegie favors from appreciation of this gift of Simon's. Standing at a corner
brawl, he would be asked by a cop, from among a dozen volunteer witnesses,
what had happened. Or when the coach came out of the gym-supply room with a
new basketball, tens of arms waving around, beseeching, it would be Simon,
appearing passive, that he flung it to. He expected it and was never surprised.

And now he was on soggy ground and forced to cut down the speed he had
been making toward the mark he secretly aimed at. I didn't know at the time
which mark or exactly understand why there needed to be a mark; it was over
my head. But he was getting in, all the time, a big variety of information and
arts, like dancing, conversation with women, courtship, gift-giving, romantic
letter-writing, the ins and outs of restaurants and night clubs, dance halls, the
knotting of four-in-hands and bow ties, what was correct and incorrect in tucking
a handkerchief in the breast pocket, how to choose clothes, how to take care of
himself in a tough crowd. Or in a respectable household. This last was a poser
for me, who had not assimilated the old woman's conduct lessons. But Simon,
without apparently paying attention, had got the essential of it. I name these
things, negligible to many people, because we were totally unfamiliar with them.
I watched him study the skill of how to put on a hat, smoke a cigarette, fold a
pair of gloves and put them in an inner pocket, and I admired and wondered
where it came from, and learned some of it myself. But I never got the sense of
luxury he had in doing it.

In passing through the lobbies of swank places, the Palmer Houses and portier-
ed dining rooms, tassels, tapers, string ensembles, making the staid bouncety
tram-tram of Vienna waltzes, Simon had absorbed this. It made his nostrils open.
He was cynical of it but it got him. I ought to have known, therefore, how ugly
it was for him to be in the flatness of the neighborhood, spiritless winter af-
ternoons, passing time in his long coat and two days unshaven, in a drugstore,
or with the Communist Sylvester in Zechman's pamphlet shop; sometimes even in
the poolroom. He was working only Saturdays at the station, and that, he said,
because Borg liked him.

We had a little time for palaver, in the slowness of the undeveloping winter,
sitting at the lunch counter of the poolroom by the window that showed out on
horse-dropped, coal-dropped, soot-sponged snow and brown circulation of mist
in the four o'clock lamplight. When we had done the necessary at home for
Mama, set up the stoves, got in groceries, taken out the garbage and ashes, we
didn't stay there with her--I less than Simon, who sometimes did his college
assignments on the kitchen table, and she kept a percolator going for him on the
stove. I didn't pass on to him the question that Jimmy Klein and Clem asked of
me, namely, whether Sylvester was converting him to his politics. I had con-
fidence in the answer I gave, which was that Simon was hard up for ways to kill
time, and that he went to meetings, bull sessions and forums, socials and rent
parties, from boredom, and in order to meet girls, not because he took Sylvester
for one of the children of morning, but he went for the big babes in leather
jackets, low heels, berets, and chambray workshirts. The literature he brought
home with him kept coffee rings off the table the morning after, or he tore the
mimeographed pages with his large blond hands to start the stove. I read more of
it than he did, with puzzled curiosity. No, I knew Simon and his idea of the right
of things. He had Mama and me for extra weight, he believed, and wasn't going
to pick up the whole of a class besides, and he wouldn't have Sylvester's moral
sentiments any more than he would buy a suit that didn't fit. But he sat in
Zechman's shop, calm, smoking sponged cigarettes, under the inciting proletarian
posters, hearing Latinistic, Germanic, exotic conversation, with large young side
of jaw at rest on his collar in the yellow smoke of cold air, mentally black-
balling it all.

That he showed up in the poolroom was a surprise to me too, in view of what
he had formerly said about my tie-in with the Einhorns. But the explanation
was the same--because it was a dull time, because he was broke; he soon kept
company with bear-eyes Sylvester in his pamphlet-armed war with the bourg-
eoisie and took lessons in pool from Dingbat. He became good enough at it
to win some in rotation at a nickel a ball, staying away from the deadeyes who
made their career in the parlor. Occasionally he played craps in the back room,
and his luck at this was pretty fair, too. He kept clear of the hoodlums,
torpedoes, and thieves on their professional side. In that regard he was
smarter than I, for I somehow got to be party to a robbery.

I ran with Jimmy Klein and Clem Tambow much of the time. Toward the last
high-school terms I hadn't been seeing a lot of them either. Jimmy's family
was hard hit by the unemployment--Tommy lost his job at City Hall when the
Republicans were pushed out by Cermak--and Jimmy was working a great deal;
he was also studying bookkeeping at night, or trying to, for he was no good at
figures or at any head work for that matter. Only he had much determination to
get ahead for the sake of his family. His sister Eleanor had gone to Mexico, by
bus the entire journey, to see whether she could make a go of it with the cousin
there, the one that had started Jimmy's interest in genealogy.

As for Clem Tambow, his contempt of school was extreme, and he passed as
much time as he could get away with in bed, reading screen news, going over
scratch sheets. He was developing into a superior bum. Through his mother, he
carried on a long-term argument with her second husband, who didn't have a job
either, about his habits. A neighbor's son was working as a pin boy in a down-
town alley for thirty cents an hour; why, therefore, did he refuse to look for
work? They were all four living in the back rooms of the infants'-wear shop
that the ex-Mrs. Tambow ran by herself. Bald, with harsh back-hair, Clem's
stepfather, in his undershirt, read the Jewish Courier by the stove and prepared
lunch of sardines, crackers, and tea for them all. There were always two or three
King Oscar cans on the table, rolled open, and also canned milk and oysterettes.
He was not a fast-thinking man and didn't have many subjects. When I visited
and saw him in the cirrus-cloud weave of his wool undershirt, the subject was
always what was I earning.

"Do stoop labor?" said Clem to his mother when she took it up with him. "If I
can't find anything better I'll swallow cyanide." And the thought of swallowing
cyanide made him laugh enormously, with a great "haw, haw, haw!" bigmouthed,
and shake his quills of hair. "Anyhow," he said, "I'd rather stay in bed and play
with myself. Ma"--his mother in her skirts and with feet of a dancer of Spanish
numbers--"you're not too old to know what I mean. You're in the room next to
mine, remember, you and your husband." He made her gasp, unable to answer
because of me, but staring at him with furious repudiation. "Put on with me,
that's okay--what should I suppose you got married for?"

"You oughtn't talk to your old lady like that," I said privately to him.

He laughed at me. "You should spend a couple of days and nights around here
--you'd say I was going easy on her. Her pince-nez takes you in, and you don't
know what a letch she's got. Let's face the facts." And of course he told me
these facts, and it seemed even I figured in them, that she had made sly in-
quiries about me and said how strong I looked.

In the afternoon Clem took a walk; he carried a cane and had British swagger.
He read the autobiographies of lords from the library and guffawed over them
and played the Piccadilly gentleman with Polack storekeepers, and he was
almost always ready to burst out haw-hawing with happy violence, decompres-
sion, big thermal wrinkles of ugly happiness in his red face. When he could
cadge a few bucks from his father he bet on the horses; if he won he'd
stand me to a steak dinner and cigars.

I was around people of other kinds too. In one direction, a few who read
whopping books in German or French and knew their physics and botany manuals
backwards, readers of Nietzsche and Spengler. In another direction, the crim-
inals. Except that I never thought of them as such, but as the boys I knew in
the poolroom and saw also at school, dancing the double-toddle in the gym at
lunch hour, or in the hot-dog parlors. I touched all sides, and nobody knew
where I belonged. I had no good idea of that myself. Whether I'd have been
around the poolroom if I hadn't known and worked for Einhorn I can't say. I
wasn't a grind certainly, or a memorizing eccentric; I wasn't against the grinds
and eccentrics either. But it was easier for the gangsters to take me for one
of them. And a thief named Joe Gorman began to talk to me about a robbery.
I didn't say no to him.

Gorman was very bright, handsome and slim, clever at basketball. His father,
who owned a tire shop, was well off, and there was no apparent reason for him
to steal. But he had a considerable record as a car thief and was in St. Charles
twice. Now he intended to rob a leather-goods shop on Lincoln Avenue, not very
far from the Coblins', and there were three of us for the job. The third was
Sailor Bulba, my old lockermate who had stolen my science notebook. He knew I
wasn't a squealer.

Gorman would get his father's car for the getaway. We'd break into the shop
by the cellar window at the rear and clean out the handbags. Bulba would hide
them, and there was a fence in the poolroom named Jonas who would sell them
for us.

On one o'clock of an April night we drove to the North Side, parked beside an
alley, and one by one slipped into the backyard. Sailor had cased the place; the
half-size basement window had no bars. Gorman tried to open it, first with a
jimmy and then with bicycle tape, a technique he had heard of in the poolroom
but never tried. It didn't work. Then Sailor rolled a brick in his cap and pounded
out the pane. After the noise we scattered into the alley, but crept back when no
one came. I was sick with the thing by now, but there was no getting out of it.
Sailor and Gorman went in and left me as lookout. Which didn't make much
sense, for the window was the only way of escape, and if I had been caught by a
squad car in the alley they'd never have gotten away either. Nevertheless,
Gorman was the experienced one, and we took his orders. There was nothing to
hear but rats or paper scuttling. Finally there was a noise from the cellar, and
Gorman's sharp, pale face came up below; he started handing out the bags to me,
soft things in tissue paper, which I stuffed into a duffel bag I had carried under
my trench coat. Bulba and I ran through backyards into the next street with the
stuff, while Gorman drove the car around. We dropped Bulba at the rear of his
house; he tossed the bag over the fence and vaulted after, swinging up with a
wide flutter of his sailor pants and landing in cans and gravel. I walked home by
a short cut, over lots, got the key out of the tin mailbox, and went into the
sleeping house.

Simon knew I had come in very late and said that at midnight Mama had
come in to ask where I was. He didn't appear to care what I had been up to, or
notice that I was, behind my casualness, miserable. I had stayed awake hours
trying to figure out how I was to explain the twenty or thirty dollars my cut
probably would amount to. I thought to ask Clem to say that we had won
together on a horse, but that didn't appear feasible. And it really wasn't a
difficulty at all, since I could give it to my mother bit by bit over a period of
weeks, and besides, nobody, as in Grandma's days, watched closely what I was
doing. It was a while before I could think straight about it, having the shakes.

But I wasn't afflicted long. From reasons of temperament. I went to school,
missing only one period; I showed up for glee-club rehearsal, and at four o'clock
went to the poolroom, and Sailor Bulba was sitting up in a shoeshine chair in his
bell-bottomed pants, observing a snooker game. It was all right. Everything was
already arranged with Jonas, the fence, who would take the stuff that night. I put
the whole thing out of mind, and in this had the help of perfect spring, when the
trees were beginning to bud. Einhorn said to me, "They're having bicycle races
over in the park. Let's take them in," and I willingly carried him out to the car
and we went.

I had decided there wasn't going to be any more robbery for me, now that I
knew what it was like, and I told Joe Gorman that he wasn't to count on me for
future jobs. I was prepared to be called yellow. But he didn't take on and wasn't
scornful. He said quietly, "Well, if you think it isn't your dish."

"That's just the way it is--it isn't my dish."

And he said thoughtfully, "Okay. Bulba is a jerk, but I could get along swell
with you."

"No use doing it if it isn't in me."

"What the hell for then? Sure."

He was very mild and independent. He combed his hair in the gum-machine
mirror, fixed up his streaming tie, and went away. Thereafter he didn't have
much to say to me.

I took Clem out, and we blew in the money together. But I wasn't done with
this matter by a long shot. Einhorn found out about it through Kreindl, who
was approached by the fence to peddle some of the bags. Probably Kreindl and
Einhorn decided that I should get a going-over for it. So Einhorn called me
to sit by him, one afternoon in the poolroom. I saw from his stiffness that
he was getting up an angry blow against me, and of course I knew why.

"I'm not going to sit by and let you turn into jailbait," he said. "I partly
consider myself responsible that you're in this environment You're not even
of age to be here, you're still a minor"--so, by the way, were Bulba and Gor-
man and dozens of others, but nothing was ever made of it--"though you're
overgrown. But I won't have you doing this, Augie. Even Dingbat, and he's no
mental giant, knows better than to get into robbery. I have to put up with all
kinds of elements around here, unfortunately. I know who's a thief or gunman or
whore-master. I can't help it. It's a poolroom. But, Augie, you know what better
is; you've been with me in other times, and if I hear of you on another job I'm
going to have you thrown out of here. You'll never see the inside of this place or
Tillie and me again. If your brother knew about this, by Jesus Christ! he'd beat
you. I know he would."

I admitted that it was so. Einhorn must have seen the horror and fear in me as
through a narrow opening. My hand lay where he could reach it; he put his
fingers on it. "This is where a young fellow starts to decay and stink, and his
health and beauty go. By the first things he does when he's not a boy any longer,
but does what a man does. A boy steals apples, watermelons. If he's a wildcat in
college he writes a bad check or two. But to go out as an armed bandit--"

"We weren't."

"I'll open this drawer," he said with intensity, "and give you fifty bucks if
you'll swear Joe Gorman didn't have a gun. I tell you he had one."

I was hot in the face but faint. It could be true; it was plausible.

"And if the cops had come he'd have tried to shoot his way out. That was what
you let yourself in for. Yes, that's right, Augie, a dead cop or two. You know
what cop-killers get, from the station onward--their faces beaten off, their
hands smashed, and worse; and that would be your start in life. You can't tell
me there's nothing but boyish high-jinks spirits in that. What did you do it for?"

I didn't know.

"Are you a real crook? Have you got the calling? I don't think I ever saw a strang-
er case of deceiving appearances then. I had you in my house and left stuff
in the open. Were you tempted to steal, ever?"

"Hey, Mr. Einhorn!" I said, violent and excited.

"You don't have to tell me. I know you didn't. I only asked if you have the
real impulses from the bottom, and I don't believe you do. Now, for God's sake,
Augie, stay away from those thieves. I'd give you twenty bucks for your widow-
ed mother if you asked me. Did you need it so badly?"

"No."

It was kindness itself of him to call Mama a widow when he knew she really
wasn't.

"Or were you looking for a thrill? Is this a time to be looking for a thrill, when
everybody else is covering up? You could take it out on the roller coasters, the
bobs, the chute-the-chutes. Go to Riverview Park. But wait. All of a sudden I
catch on to something about you. You've got opposition in you. You don't slide
through everything. You just make it look so."

This was the first time that anyone had told me anything like the truth about
myself. I felt it powerfully. That, as he said, I did have opposition in me, and
great desire to offer resistance and to say "No!" which was as clear as could be,
as definite a feeling as a pang of hunger.

The discoverer of this, who had taken pains to think of me--to think of me--I
was full of love of him for it. But I was also wearing the discovered attribute,
my opposition. I was clothed in it. So I couldn't make any sign of argument or
indicate how I felt.

"Don't be a sap, Augie, and fall into the first trap life digs for you. Young
fellows brought up in bad luck, like you, are naturals to keep the jails filled--
the reformatories, all the institutions. What the state orders bread and beans
long in advance for. It knows there's an element that can be depended on to come
behind bars to eat it. Or it knows how much broken rock for macadam it can ex-
pect, and whom it can count on to break it, and whom it can expect for chancre
treatments at the Public Health Institute. From around here and similar parts
of the city, and the same in other places throughout the country. It's pract-
ically determined. And if you're going to let it be determined for you too,
you're a sucker. Just what's predicted. Those sad and tragic things are waiting
to take you in--the clinks and clinics and soup lines know who's the natural to
be beat up and squashed, made old, pooped, farted away, no-purposed away. If it
should happen to you, who'd be surprised? You're a setup for it."

Then he added, "But I think I'd be surprised." And also, "I don't ask you to
take me for your model either," too well realizing the contradiction, that I knew
about his multifarious swindles.

Einhorn had his experts who tinkered with the gas meters; he got around the
electric company by splicing into the main cables; he fixed tickets and taxes; and
his cleverness was unlimited in these respects. His mind was continually full of
schemes. "But I'm not a lowlife when I think, and really think," he said. "In the
end you can't save your soul and life by thought. But if you think, the least of
the consolation prizes is the world."

He continued, but my thoughts took their own direction. No, I didn't want to
be what he called determined. I never had accepted determination and wouldn't
become what other people wanted to make of me. I had said "No" to Joe Gorman
too. To Grandma. To Jimmy. To lots of people. Einhorn had seen this in me. Be-
cause he too wanted to exert influence.


To keep me out of trouble and also because he was accustomed to have a
delegate, messenger, or trusted hand, he hired me again for less money. "Don't
forget, old man, I've got my eye on you." Didn't he always have his eye on as
many things and people as he could get in range? Conversely, however, I had my
eye on him. I took closer interest in his swindles than when I had been not much
more than houseboy and the Einhorn business was too vast for me to understand.
One of the first things I helped with was a very dangerous piece of work--
taking in a gangster, Nosey Mutchnik. A few years before, Nosey Mutchnik,
nothing but a punk, had worked for the North Side gang, throwing acid on
clothes in dry-cleaning shops that wouldn't buy protection and doing similar
things. Now he had reached a higher stage, when he had money and was looking
for investments, particularly in real estate. For, he said seriously to Einhorn,
on a summer evening, "I know what happens to guys who stay in the rackets. In
the end they get blasted. I seen it happen enough."

Einhorn told him he knew of a fine vacant lot that they could buy as partners.
"If I'm going into it with you myself, you don't have to worry that it's not on the
up and up. I stand to lose if you do," he said with sincere heart to Mutchnik. The
asking price for the property was six hundred dollars. He could get it down to
five. This was a perfectly just assurance, because Einhorn himself owned the lot,
having acquired it from a buddy of his father's for seventy-five dollars; and he
now became its half-owner at a further profit. All this was done by means of var-
ious tricks, and very coolly. It ended well, with Mutchnik finding a buyer for
it, delighted to make a hundred dollars in a piece of legitimate business. But
if he had found out he would have shot Einhorn or had him shot. Nothing simpler
to do, or more natural in his eyes, in defense of his pride. I was in terror that
Mutchnik might have taken a notion to investigate in the Recorder's Office and
find out that a relation of Mrs. Einhorn had nominally owned the lot. But
Einhorn said, "What are you bothering your head about, Augie? I've got this
man figured out. He's terribly stupid. I keep suggesting angles to him for his
protection."

Thus, without risking a cent, Einhorn made more than four hundred dollars in
this particular deal. He was proud, gleeful with me; this was what he really dug.
It was a specimen triumph of the kind--only bigger and bigger--he wanted his
whole history to consist of. While he sat still at his Twenty-Six baize board, the
leather dice cup there, and the green reflected up to his face, his white skin and
underpainted eyes. He kept the valuable ivory cue balls by him in a box, inside
the nickel-candy case, and his attention to what went on in the establishment was
keen and close. He ran it his own way entirely.

I never knew another poolroom where there was a woman permanently, like
Tillie Einhorn, behind the lunch counter. She served very good chili con,
omelettes, navy bean soup, and learned to operate the big coffee urn, even the
exact moment to throw in salt and raw egg to make the coffee clear. She took to
this change in her life energetically, and physically she appeared to become
broader and stronger. She flourished, and the male crowd made her tranquil.
There was a lot said or shouted that she didn't know the meaning of, which was
to the good. She didn't soften things in the poolroom, or put a limit, like a
British barmaid or bistro proprietress; here things were too harsh and ornery to
be influenced; the clamor and fights and the obscene yelling and banging
weren't going to stop, and didn't stop. Only she somehow became part of the
place. By limiting herself to the chili, wieners and beans, coffee and pie.

The Depression had altered Einhorn too. Retrospectively, he was rather green
in the Commissioner's lifetime, and some ways, for his years, unformed. Now he
was no longer second-to-last, but the last and end-term of his family; there was
nobody expected to die before he did, and, you could say, troubles came directly
to his face, and he showed the test of them. No more willowiness; he had to get
thicker and harder, and so he did. But toward women he didn't change at all. He
saw fewer of them, naturally, than in past days. What women entered a poolroom?
Lollie Fewter didn't come back to him. And for him--well, I suppose that souls
not in the very best state have to have organizing acts, devices that brace them,
must shave or must dress. To Einhorn, the enjoyment of a woman not his wife was
such an organizing act. And Lollie must have been important to him, for he kept
track of her to the last, for better than ten years, that is, when she was shot
by a teamster-lover, the father of several children, whom she got involved in
black marketing. He was caught, and there was prison coming to him, and no rap
for her. Therefore he killed her, he said, "So another guy wouldn't live rich
with her off my troubles." Einhorn saved the clippings from the papers. "You
see what he says--'live rich'? Living rich was what it was with her. I can tell
you." He wanted me to know he could. He could tell me indeed, and there were
few people better placed than I to hear it from him.

"Poor Lollie!"

"Ah, poor, poor kid!" he said. "But I think she was bound to die like that,
Augie. She had a Frankie-and-Johnny mentality. And when I knew her she was
beautiful. Yes, she was rich." All white-headed, and shrunken some from his
former size, he told me about her with fervor. "They say she was getting sloppy
toward the end, and greedy about money. That was bad. There's trouble enough
from fucking. She was made to have a violent thing happen to her. The world
doesn't let hot blood off easy."

Wrapped and planted in this was an appeal to me to remember his hot blood.
My services to him had put me in some striking positions--he wanted to know
what thought I had of them, maybe; or, humanly enough, whether I would
celebrate them with him. Oh, the places where pride won't make a stand!

What I was particularly bidden to recall in this talk was the night of my
graduation from high school. The Einhorns had been extremely kind to me. A
wallet with ten dollars in it was my present from the three of them, and Mrs.
Einhorn came to the graduation exercises with Mama and the Kleins and Tam-
bows that February night. Afterward there was a party at the Kleins', where
I was expected. I drove Mama home from the assembly--I didn't have my name
in the evening program, like Simon, but Mama was pleased and smoothed my
hand as I was leading her upstairs.

Tillie Einhorn waited below in the car. "You go to your party," she said as I
was taking her back to the poolroom. My having finished high school was of
immense importance in her eyes, and she honored me extraordinarily, in the tone
she took. She was a warm woman, in most matters very simple, she wanted to
give me some sort of blessing, and my "education" had, I think, suddenly made
her timid of me. So we drove in the black and wet cold to the poolroom, and she
said several times over, "Willie says you got a good head. You'll be a teacher
yourself." And then she crushed up against me in her sealskin coat, belonging to
the good days, to kiss me on the cheek, and had the happy tears of terribly deep
feeling to wipe from her face before we went into the poolroom. Behind this,
probably, was my "orphancy," and the occasion woke it up. We were dressed in
our best; Mrs. Einhorn even gave off a perfume, in the car, from her silk scarf
and dress established with silver buttons on her breast. We crossed the wide
sidewalk to the poolroom. Below, the windows, as required by law, were curtain-
ed, and above, the rods of the signs writhed in their colors in the wet. The
crowd in the poolroom was small tonight because of graduation. So you could hear
the kissing of the balls from the farthest cavelike lights and soft roaring of
green tables, and the fat of wieners on the grill. Dingbat came from the back,
holding the wooden triangular ball rack, to shake hands.

"Augie is going to a party by Klein," said Mrs. Einhorn.

"Congratulations, son," said Einhorn with state manners. "He's going, Tillie,
but not right away. I have a treat for him first. I'm taking him to a show."

"Willie," she said, disturbed, "let him go. Tonight it's his night."

"Not just a neighborhood movie, but to McVicker's, a stage show with little
girls, trained animals, and a Frenchman from the Bal Tabarin who stands on his
head on a pop bottle. How does that sound to you, Augie? Like a good thing? I
planned it out a week ago."

"Sure, that's all right. Jimmy said the party would run late, and I can go after
midnight."

"But Dingbat can take you, Willie. Augie wants to be with young people
tonight, not with you."

"If I'm going out Dingbat is needed here and will stay here," said Einhorn and
shook off her arguments.

I wasn't so intoxicated with its being my night that I couldn't see a reason for
Einhorn's insistence, a small darkness of a reason no bigger than a field mouse
yet and very swift.

Mrs. Einhorn dropped her hands to her sides. "Willie, when he wants--" she
apologized to me. But I was practically one of the family, now that no inher-
itances were in the way. I tied on his cloak and carried him to the car. My
face was red in the night air, and I was annoyed. For it was a chore to take
Einhorn to the theater, and there were many steps and negotiations necessary.
First to park the car, and then to find the manager and explain that two seats
had to be found near the exit; next to arrange to have the steel firedoors opened,
to drive down the alley, tote Einhorn into the theater, back out of the alley,
and find another parking space. And at that, once in the theater, you sat at a
bad angle to the stage. He had to be right next to the emergency exit. "Imagine
me in the middle of a stampede in case of fire," he said. Hence we saw things to
the side of the main confrontation of the big dramatic shell, powder and paint
on the faces, and voices muffled, then loud, or glenny silver, and frequently
didn't know what made the audience laugh.

"Don't speed," said Einhorn to me on Washington Boulevard. "Take it slow
here." I suddenly observed that he had an address in his hand.

"It's near Sacramento. You didn't think I really was going to drag you to
McVicker's tonight, did you, Augie? No, we're not going downtown. This place
I'm taking you to, I've never been in before. It's a back entrance, I under-
stand, and on the third floor."

I stopped the car and went out to scout, came back when I had found the joint,
and got him on my back. He used to talk about himself as the Old Man of the
Sea riding Sinbad. But there was Aeneas too, who carried his old dad Anchises
in the burning of Troy, and that old man had been picked by Venus to be her
lover; which strikes me as the better comparison. Except that there was no fire
or war cry around us, but dead-of-night silence on the boulevard, and ice. I
went down the narrow cement walk, below sleeping windows, with Einhorn telling
me, clear and loud, to watch my step. Luckily I had cleared out my locker that
day and was wearing the rubbers that had lain at the bottom of it the better part
of a year, and so my feet didn't slip. But it was difficult work all the same, up
the wooden stairs and under the short clotheslines on the porches. "This better
be it," he said when I rang the bell on the third floor, "or they'll be asking
me what the hell I'm doing." It always was he who was principally present in a
place.

But we hadn't rung the wrong bell. A woman opened the door, and I said,
"Where?" out of wind. "Go on, go on," said Einhorn. "This is only the kitchen."
Which it was; a beery place. I walked with him carefully into the parlor and put
him down before the astonished people there, on the couch. Seated, he felt equal
to them all and looked at all the women. I stood beside him and looked too, in
great eagerness and excitement. I always felt, in taking him somewhere, a great
sense of responsibility; and here, far more than ever, I sensed how heavy his
dependence on me was. And I didn't want to have to worry about it now. Though
he didn't look at a disadvantage, only imperious and imperturbable, with no un-
easy flinch of disgrace at being a man of importance seen helpless before ter-
rible needs. "I heard the girls were nice here," he said, "and they are nice.
Pick one out."

"Me?"

"Of course you. Which one of you girls is going to entertain this handsome
boy who graduated from high school tonight? Look around, kid, and keep your
head," he said to me.

The madam came to the parlor from one of the rooms. Her peculiarity was in
the paint of her face, the insect dust or lamp-black of colors and moth's wing
red of the cheek pigment.

"Mister," she began to say.

But it was all right. Einhorn had a card from someone, and it had been pre-
arranged, as she recalled. Only she hadn't been told, I could see, that Ein-
horn would be carried in. He wouldn't have trusted himself here without an
introduction.

Nevertheless there was embarrassment, and Einhorn sat shoe to shoe and in
the banker's trousers covering his immovable legs. When I think of it with a
collected mind, Einhorn, asking who would entertain me, might well have been
voicing anticipation of the aversion of the girl he chose. Even here, where he
was paying. But perhaps it wasn't so. My head was a long way from being clear
in this lionish place, the paltry, ritzy den of a parlor, and he maybe was not
as bold and easy as he sounded.

At last Einhorn said to the girl he had called over to chat with, "Which is your
room, kid?" and with perfect calm, ignoring the effect of it, had me carry him
there. A pink coverlet was on the bed (this was a better-class place as I was later
to know by contrast), and she skimmed it off. I laid him down. As the girl, in a
corner of the room, began to take off her clothes, he beckoned me to bend to him
again and whispered, "Take my wallet," and I took out the heavy leather article
and put it in my pocket. "Hang on to it," he said. The look of his eye was bold,
full, even resentful. Resentful of this posture, I think, not of me. There was a
pressure in his face, and his hair spread on the pillow. He began to talk to the
woman in a tone of instruction. "Take off my shoes," he said. She did. He watch-
ed in that active way; along the line of his entire body his glance went, to the
woman in her wrapper who bent over his feet, this woman of strong neck and red
fingernails, standing in a pair of felt slippers by the bed. "Just a thing or two
more I have to tell you," he said. "There's my back; I have to go easy till I'm
set right, miss, and take everything step by step."

"Haven't you gone yet?" He saw me by the door. "Go on, do you have to be
told what to do? I'll send them for you after."

I didn't have to be told, but as long as he didn't send me from him I'd have
delayed.

I went back to the parlor, where there was someone waiting for me; the rest
had gone, so the choice had been made for me. As always with strangers, I
behaved as if I knew exactly what I was doing and from an idea that at a critical
time it was best and most decent to have my own momentum. She did not take
this away from me. She whose business or burden it was to be calm in the primal
thing, where no one else is, and have an advantage of the strong. She wasn't
young--the women had made the right choice for me--and she had sort of a
crude face; but she encouraged me to treat her loverlike. Undressing, she had
playful frills or point edges on her underthings--these gewgaws that go with the
imposing female fact, the brilliant, profound thing. My clothes were off and I
waited. She approached and took me round the body. She even set me on the
bed. As if, it being her bed, she'd show me how to use it. And she pressed up her
breasts against me, she curved her shoulders back, she closed her eyes and held
me by the sides. So that I didn't lack kindness of person and wasn't pushed off
when done. I knew later I had been lucky with her, that she had tried not to be
dry with me, or satirical, and done it mercifully.

Yet when the thrill went off, like lightning smashed and dispersed into the
ground, I knew it was basically only a transaction. But that didn't matter so
much. Nor did the bed; nor did the room; nor the thought that the woman would
have been amused--with as much amusement as could make headway against other
considerations--at Einhorn and me, the great sensationalist riding into the
place on my back with bloodshot eyes and voracious in heart but looking perfect-
ly calm and superior. Paying didn't matter. Nor using what other people used.
That's what city life is. And so it didn't have the luster it should have had,
and there wasn't any epithalamium of gentle lovers. …

I had to wait for Einhorn in the kitchen, and to think of him, close by, having
this violence done to him for his pleasure. The madam didn't look pleased about
it. Other men were coming in, and she was mixing drinks in the kitchen, and I
came in for peevish glances until Einhorn's girl came in dressed again to have
me fetch him. The madam went along with me for the money, and Einhorn paid
with finesse and gave tips, and as I carried him through the parlor where my
partner was with another man, smoking a cigarette. Einhorn said to me for my
private ear, "Don't look at anybody, understand?" Was he afraid to be recog-
nized, or was this order simply about the best composure for passing through
the parlor again with him clinging to my back in his dark garments?

"You'll have to be careful as hell about the way you go down," he said on the
porch. "It was stupid not to bring a flashlight. All we need now is a spill."
And he laughed; with irony, but laughed. The house was thoughtful though, and a
whore came out, in a coat like any ordinary woman, to light our way down to the
yard, where we thanked her and all politely said good night.

I brought him home and took him into the house, though the poolroom was still
open, and he said, "Never mind putting me to bed. Go on to your party. You
can take the car, but don't go getting drunk and joy-riding, that's all I ask."




Chapter VIII




From here a new course was set--by us, for us: I'm not going to try to unravel
all the causes.

When I face back I can recognize myself as of this time in intimate undress,
with my own and family traits of hands and feet, greenness and grayness of the
eyes and up-springing hair; but at myself fully clothed and at my new social
passes I have to look twice. I don't know how it all at once came to me to talk
a lot, tell jokes, kick up, and suddenly have views. When it was time to have
them, there was no telling how I picked them from the air.

The city college Simon and I attended wasn't a seminary in charge of priests
who taught Aristotle and casuistry and prepared you for European games and
vices and all the things, true or not true, actual or not actual, nevertheless
insisted on as true and actual. Considering how much world there was to catch
up with--Asurbanipal, Euclid, Alaric, Metternich, Madison, Blackhawk--if you
didn't devote your whole life to it, how were you ever going to do it? And the
students were children of immigrants from all parts, coming up from Hell's Kit-
chen, Little Sicily, the Black Belt, the mass of Polonia, the Jewish streets of
Humboldt Park, put through the coarse sifters of curriculum, and also bringing
wisdom of their own. They filled the factory-length corridors and giant class-
rooms with every human character and germ, to undergo consolidation and
become, the idea was, American. In the mixture there was beauty--a good
proportion--and pimple-insolence, and parricide faces, gum-chew innocence,
labor fodder and secretarial forces, Danish stability, Dago inspiration,
catarrh-hampered mathematical genius; there were waxed-eared shovelers'
children, sex-promising businessmen's daughters--an immense sampling of a
tremendous host, the multitudes of holy writ, begotten by West-moving, fact-
or-shoved parents. Or me, the by-blow of a traveling man.

Normally Simon and I would have gone to work after high school, but jobs
weren't to be had anyway, and the public college was full of students in our
condition, because of the unemployment, getting a city-sponsored introduction
to higher notions and an accidental break into Shakespeare and other great
masters along with the science and math leveled at the Civil-Service exams. In
the nature of the case it couldn't be avoided; and if you were going to prepare
impoverished young folks for difficult functions, or if merely you were going
to keep them out of trouble by having them read books, there were going to be
some remarkable results begotten out of the mass. I knew a skinny, sickly
Mexican too poor for socks and spotted and stained all over, body and clothes,
who could crack any equation on the board; and also Bohunk wizards at the
Greeks, demon-brained physicists, historians bred under pushcarts, and many
hard-grain poor boys who were going to starve and work themselves bitterly
eight years or so to become doctors, engineers, scholars, and experts. I had no
special eagerness of this kind and never had been led to think I should have, nor
gave myself anxious cares about being revealed a profession. I didn't feel moved
to take it seriously. Nevertheless I turned in a fairly good performance in French
and History. In things like Botany, my drawings were cockeyed and smudgy and
I was behind the class. Though I had been Einhorn's office clerk I hadn't learned
much of neatness. And besides I was working five afternoons a week and all day
on Saturday.

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 hea-
vy 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 morn-
ing 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 hu-
man-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 Well 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 for-
ward, 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 makes 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 work-
ing 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 accomplish-
ed 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
Doorn 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 unemploy-
ment 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 any-
how 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-day 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 earthvisit-
ing 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.

Sometimes he'd tell something of himself in the form of a short remark, as
when we passed under a North Shore viaduct once and he said, "I helped build
that. I wasn't any older than you then, and helped pass cement to the mixer.
Must have been the year the Panama Canal was opened. Thought the job would
knock me out in the stomach muscles. Buck and a quarter was pretty good dough
in those days."

This was how he borrowed me for company. It probably gave him some amusement,
how I took to this sort of life.

There was a spell in which I mainly wished to own dinner clothes and be
invited to formal parties and thought considerably about how to get into the
Junior Chamber of Commerce. Not that I had any business ideas. I was better
than fair in the shop, but I had no wider inventiveness about money. It was so-
cial enthusiasm that moved in me, smartness, clotheshorseyness. The way a pair of
tight Argyle socks showed in the crossing of legs, a match to the bow tie settled
on a Princeton collar, took me in the heart with enormous power and hunger. I
was given over to it.

Briefly I ran with a waitress from the Symington, Willa Steiner. I took her
dancing at the Merry Garden and went to the beach with her at night. She kindly
let me get by most of the time with putting on the dog and pompousness, being
a warm girl. She was nowise shy herself, making no bones about what we were
together for. She had a home-town lover too, whom she talked about marrying--
I'm certain without any hinder-thought of making me jealous. For she had a
number of things against me about which she was probably in the right, my
dandy gab and conceit and my care about clothes. Soon informed, Mrs. Renling
came down hard on me for getting mixed up with her. Einhorn didn't know more
of what went on around him than she did about everything in her territory.
"Augie, I'm astonished at you," she said. "She's not even a pretty girl. She has
a nose like a little Indian"--I had especially petted Willa Steiner with this
pretty nose for my theme; it wasn't courageous of me not to defend it--"and she's
covered with freckles. I have freckles too, but mine are different, and anyhow,
it's only as an older person that I'm talking to you. Besides, the girl is a little
prostitute, and not an honest prostitute, because an honest prostitute, all she
wants is your money. And if you have to do this, if you come to me and tell me
you have to--and don't be ashamed of that--I'll give you money to go somewhere
on Sheridan Road near Wilson, where such places are." Another instance of people
offering to contribute money to keep me out of trouble; as Einhorn had, when he
lectured me about the robbery. "Augie, don't you see this little tramp wants you
to get her in trouble so that you'll have to marry her? That's all you need now,
to have a baby with her right at the start of your career. I would think that
you would know what this is about."

Sometimes I thought it was clever and free of her to talk as she did, and again
that it was terribly stupid. I had an impression that, glancing out from the
partitions where she observed, with her dotty, smarting, all-interfering face, she
was bent on pulling whom she wanted to her, to infuse and instill. It was the kind
of talk gilded dumb young men have heard from protectresses, generals' and
statesmen's wives, in all the duchies, villas, and capital cities of the world.

"But you don't really know anything about Willa, Mrs. Renling," I said
clumsily. "She doesn't--" I didn't go on, because of all the scorn in her face.
"My dear boy, you talk like a nitwit. Go on with her if you want. I'm not your
mother. But you'll see," she said in her impersonator's voice, "when she has you
roped. D'you think all she wants out of life is to wait on tables and work to feed
herself just to keep in shape for you, so you'll have nothing to do but enjoy her?
You know nothing about girls; girls want to marry. And it's not in the modest
old times when they sat on it till somebody would have mercy." She spoke
disgustedly; she had disgust to burn.

It didn't occur to me, when Mrs. Renling had me drive her to Benton Harbor
where she took mineral baths for her arthritis, that she was getting me away
from Willa. She said she couldn't think of going out to Michigan alone, and
that I would drive and keep her company in the hotel. Afterward I understood.


Benton Harbor was plenty different for me from what it had been last time,
when I had hitch-hiked back from Muskegon with Nails and Dingbat, with sweat
shirt tied on my neck by the sleeves and my feet road-sore. Actually we stayed in
St. Joe, next to Lake Michigan, at the Merritt Hotel, right in front of the water
and the deep, fresh smell of sea volume in the glossy pink walls of the rooms.
The hotel was vast, and it was brick construction, but went after the tone of old
Saratoga Springs establishments, greenery and wickerwork, braid cord on the
portieres, menus in French, white hall runners and deep fat of money, limousines
in the washed gravel, lavish culture of flowers bigger than life, and triple-decker
turf on which the grass lived rich. Everywhere else, in the blaze of July, it was
scanty.

I had the long bath hours to myself to see what the territory round about was
like. It was mostly fruit country, farmed by Germans, the men like farmers
anywhere, but the older women in bonnets, going barefoot in long dresses under
the giant oaks of their yards. The peach branches shone with seams of gum,
leaves milky from the spray of insecticides. Also, on the roads, on bicycles and
in Ford trucks, were the bearded and long-haired House of David Israelites, a
meat-renouncing sect of peaceful, businesslike, pious people, who had a big
estate or principality of their own, and farmhouse palaces. They spoke of Shiloh
and Armageddon as familiarly as of eggs and harnesses, and were a millionaire
concern many times over, owning farms and springs and a vast amusement park
in a big Bavarian dell, with a miniature railway, a baseball team, and a jazz band
that sent music up clear to the road from the nightly dances in the pavilion. Two
bands, in fact, one of each sex.

I brought Mrs. Renling here a few times to dance and drink spring water; the
mosquitoes, though, were too active for her. Afterward I sometimes went alone;
she didn't see why I should want to. Nor did she see what I strayed into town for
in the morning, or why I took pleasure in sitting in the still green bake of the
Civil War courthouse square after my thick breakfast of griddle cakes and eggs
and coffee. But I did, and warmed my belly and shins while the little locust
trolley clinked and crept to the harbor and over the trestles of the bog-spanning
bridge where the green beasts and bulrush-rocking birds kept up their hot, small-
time uproar. I brought along a book, but there was too much brown stain on the
pages from the sun. The benches were white iron, roomy enough for three or
four old gaffers to snooze on in the swamp-tasting sweet warmth that made the
redwing blackbirds fierce and quick, and the flowers frill, but other living things
slow and lazy-blooded. I soaked in the heavy nourishing air and this befriending
atmosphere like rich life-cake, the kind that encourages love and brings on a
mild pain of emotions. A state that lets you rest in your own specific gravity, and
where you are not a subject matter but sit in your own nature, tasting original
tastes as good as the first man, and are outside of the busy human tamper, left
free even of your own habits. Which only lie on you illusory in the sunshine, in
the usual relation of your feet or fingers or the knot of your shoestrings and are
without power. No more than the comb or shadow of your hair has power on
your brain.

Mrs. Renling did not like to be alone at meals, not even at breakfast. I had to
eat with her in her room. Each morning she took sugarless tea, with milk, and a
few pieces of zwieback. I had the works, the bottom half of the menu, from
grapefruit to rice pudding, and ate at a little table by the open window, in the
lake airs that lapped the dotted Swiss curtains. In bed, and talking all the while,
Mrs. Renling took off the gauze chin band she slept in and began to treat her
face with lotions and creams, plucked her eyebrows. Her usual subject of con-
versation was the other guests. She got them down and polished them off, but
good. In the leisure of the early hour, when she bravely rode fence on her face.
She would die a well-tended lady who had kept up fiercely all civilized duties,
as developed before Phidias and through Botticelli--all that great masters and
women of illustrious courts had prescribed and followed for perfection, the kind
of intelligence to wear in the eyes and the molds of sweetness and authority. But
she had a wrath-ruled mind. Giving herself these feminine cares in the brightness
of her suite in the soft-blown-open summer beauty, she was not satisfied without
social digging and the toil of grievances and antipathies.

"Did you notice the old couple on my left, last night at the Bunco party, the
Zeelands? Marvelous old Dutch family. Isn't he a beautiful old man? Why, he
was one of the greatest corporation lawyers in Chicago, and he's a trustee for
the Robinson Foundation, the glass people. The university gave him an honorary
degree, and when he has a birthday the newspapers write editorials. And still his
wife is stupid as her own feet, and she drinks, and the daughter is a drunkard too.
If I knew she was going to be here I would have gone to Saratoga instead. I wish
there was some way to get an advance guest list from these hotels. There ought
to be a service like that. They have a suite for six hundred dollars a month in
Chicago. And as soon as the chauffeur comes for the old man in the morning--
this is something I know!--the bellhop goes out and buys them a bottle of
bourbon and bets on a horse for them. Then they drink and wait for the results.
But that daughter--she keeps herself a little old-fashioned. If you didn't notice
her last night, look for a heavy-built woman who wears feathers. She threw a
child out of the window and killed it. They used all their influence and got her
free. A poor woman would have gotten the chair, like Ruth Snyder, with the
matrons standing all around and picking up their skirts so the photographers
couldn't get a picture of it. I wonder if she dresses like this now so as to feel
nothing in common with that young flapper who did that thing."

You needed a strong constitution to stick to your splendor of morning in the
face of these damnation chats. I had to struggle when she called out her whole
force of frights, apocalypse death riders, church-porch devils who grabbed naked
sinners from behind to lug them down to punishment, her infanticides, plagues,
and incests.

I managed. But the situation was that I was enjoying what a rich young man
enjoys and arranged my feelings accordingly, filling in and plastering over
objections. Except that there were rotten moments, such as when she spoke of
the Snyder execution and evoked this terrible protection of a woman's modesty
who was writhing in thousands of volts. And though I was avoiding everything
that didn't agree with what I wanted, the consistent painting of doomedness and
evil she specialized in did get under my skin. What if it really was as she said?
If, for instance, the woman had thrown her baby out of the window? It wasn't
Medea, a good, safe long time ago, chasing her pitiful kids, but a woman I saw
in the dining room, wearing feathers, sitting down with her white-haired father
and mother.

But there were people at the table near theirs that soon were of more interest
to me--two young girls, of beauty to put a stop to such thoughts or drive them to
the dwindling point. There was a moment when I could have fallen for either one
of them, and then everything bent to one side, toward the slenderer, slighter,
younger one. I fell in love with her, and not in the way I had loved Hilda
Novinson either, going like a satellite on the back of the streetcar or sticking
around her father's tailor shop. This time I had a different kind of maniac energy
and knew what sexual sting was. My expectations were greater; more corrupt
too, maybe, owing to the influence of Mrs. Renling and her speaking always of
lusts, no holds barred. So that I allowed suggestions in all veins to come to me.
I never have learned to reproach myself for such things; and then my experience
in curtailing them was limited. Why, I had accepted of Grandma Lausch's warning
only the part about the danger of our blood and that, through Mama, we were
susceptible to love; not the stigmatizing part that made us out the carriers
of the germ of ruination. So I was dragged, entrained, over a barrel. And I had
a special handicap, because of the way I presented myself--due to Mrs. Renling--
as if God had not left out a single one of His gifts, and I was advertising His
liberality with me: good looks, excellent wardrobe, mighty fine manners, social
ease, wittiness, handsome-devil smiles, neat dancing and address with women--
all in the freshest gold-leaf. And the trouble was that I had what you might call
forged credentials. It was my worry that Esther Fenchel would find this out.

I worked, heart-choked, for the grandest success in these limits, as an
impostor. I spent hours getting myself up to be a living petition. By dumb
concentration and notice-wooing struggle. The only way I could conceive, in my
blood-loaded, picturesque amorousness. But, the way a hint of plague is given in
the mild wind of flags and beauty of a harbor--a scene of safe, busy peace--I
could perhaps, for all of my sane look of easy, normal circumstances, have
passed the note of my thoughts in the air--on the beach, on the flower-cultured
lawn, in the big open of the white and gold dining room--and these thoughts
were that I could submit to being hung in the girl's hair--of that order. I had
heavy dreams about her lips, hands, breasts, legs, between legs. She could not
stoop for a ball on the tennis court--I standing stiff in a foulard with brown
horses on a green background that was ingeniously slipped through a handcarved
wooden ring which Renling made popular that season in Evanston--I couldn't
witness this, I say, without a push of love and worship in my bowels at the curve
of her hips, and triumphant maiden shape behind, and soft, protected secret.
Where, to be allowed with love, would be the endorsement of the world, that it
was not the barren confusion distant dry fears hinted and whispered, but was
necessary, justified, the justification proved by joy. That if she would have,
approve, kiss, use her hands on me, allow me the clay dust of the court from her
legs, the mild sweat, her intimate dirt and sweat, deliver me from suffering
falsehood--show that there wasn't anything false, injurious, or empty-hearted
that couldn't be corrected!

But in the evening, when nothing had come of my effort, a scoreless day, I lay
on the floor of my room, all dressed up to go to dinner, with doomed patience,
eaten with hankering and thinking futilely what brilliant thing to do--some
floral, comet, star action, casting off stupidity and clumsiness. But I had marked
carefully all that I could about Esther, in order to study what could induce her to
see herself with me, in my light. That is, up there in sublimity. Asking only that
she join me, let me, ride and row in love with me, with her fresh, great female
wonders and beauties which would increase by my joy that she was exactly as
she was, with her elbows, her nipples at her sweater. I watched how she chased a
little awkwardly on the tennis court and made to protect her breasts and closed in
her knees when a fast ball came over the net. My study of her didn't much
support my hopes; which was why I lay on the floor with a desiring, sunburned
face and lips open in thought. I realized that she knew she had great value, and
that she was not subject to urgent-heartedness. In short, that Esther Fenchel was
not of my persuasion and wouldn't much care to hear about her perspiration and
little personal dirts.

Nevertheless the world never had better color, to say it exactly as it strikes me,
or finer and more reasonable articulation. Nor ever gave me better trouble. I felt
I was in the real and the true as far as nature and pleasure went in forming the
native place of human and all other existence.

And I behaved ingeniously too. I got into conversations with old Fenchel, not
the girls' father but their uncle, who was in the mineral-water business. It
wasn't easy, because he was a millionaire. He drove a Packard, the same model and
color as the Renlings'; I parked behind him on the drive so that he had to look
twice to see which was his, and then I had him. Inter pares. For how could he
tell that I earned twenty-five dollars a week and didn't own the car? We talked.
I offered him a Perfecto Queen. He smiled it away; he had his own tailor-made
Havanas in a case big enough for a pistol, and he was so ponderously huge it
didn't even bulge in his pocket. His face was fat and seamed, black-eyed--eyes
black as the meat of Chinese litchi nuts--with gray, heinie hair, clipped to the fat
of the scalp, back and sides. It was a little discouraging that the girls were his
heiresses, as he right away told me, probably guessing that I wasn't bringing out
the flower of my charm for his old cartilage-heavy Rembrandt of a squash nose
with its white hairs and gunpowder speckles. To be sure not. And he wanted me
to know in what league I was playing. I didn't give an inch. I've never backed
down from male relatives, either calf or bull, or let father and guardians
discomfit me.

Getting to Esther's aunt was harder, since she was sickly, timid, and silent,
with the mood of rich people whose health lets them down. Her clothes and
jewelry were fine, but the poor lady's face was full of private effort; she was a
little deaf from it. I didn't have to put on friendly interest; I really (God knows
from where) had it. And by instinct I knew that what would fetch her--as infirm,
loaded with dough, and beaten a long way out of known channels by the banked
spoon-oars of special silver as she was--was the charm of ordinary health. So I
talked away to her and was pretty acceptable.

"My dear Augie, was that Mrs. Fenchel you were sitting with?" said Mrs.
Renling. "She hasn't done anything but watch the sprinkler all month, so I
thought she was screwloose. Did you speak to her first?"

"Well, I just happened to be sitting by her."

I got a good mark for this; she was pleased. But the next thing to be thought of
was my purpose, and this she immediately and roughly found out. "It's the girls,
isn't it! Well, they are very beautiful, aren't they? Especially the black-haired
one. Gorgeous. And mischievous, full of the devil she looks. But remember,
Augie, you're with me; I'm responsible for your behavior. And the girl is not a
waitress, and you better not think you-know-what. My dear boy, you're very
clever and good, and I want to see you get ahead. I'll see that you do. Naturally,
with this girl, you haven't got a chance. Of course, rich girls can sometimes be
little whores too, and have the same itch as common ones and sometimes even
worse. But not these girls. You don't know what German upbringing is."
So to speak, reserved for the brass, the Fenchel heiresses. But Mrs. Renling
wasn't infallible, and had already made one mistake, that of thinking it was Thea
rather than Esther Fenchel I was in love with. Also, she had no notion how much
in love I was, down to the poetic threat of death. I didn't want her to have any
notion either, though I would have been happy to tell someone. I did not like
what I foresaw Mrs. Renling would make of it, and so I was satisfied to let her
think it was Thea, the kinky-haired but also glorious-looking sister I carried the
torch for, and I used some deceit. It didn't take much, as it was pleasing to Mrs.
Renling's pride to think she had guessed, quick and infallible, what was bothering
me.

As a matter of fact Thea Fenchel was better than merely pleasant to me, and I
was fishing after her uncle, who was in a bad mood, surly and difficult, one
morning, when she asked me whether I played tennis. I had to say, and though it
was a bad moment for me, smiling, that riding was my sport; and I desperately
thought that I must get a racket and go at once to the public courts in Benton
Harbor to learn. Not that I had been born to the saddle either; but it covered my
origins somewhat to say that I was a horseman and had a pretty creditable clang.
"My partner hasn't come," said Thea, "and Esther's on the beach."

Within ten minutes I too was on the sand, notwithstanding that I had promised
to play cards with Mrs. Renling after her mineral bath, when, she said, she felt
too weakened to read. I lay hot and wandering-witted on my belly, watching
Esther, and my notions were many-branched, high-seasoned, erotic, a good half
painful, hoping for and afraid of notice as she bent down and rubbed sun-oil like
brightness on her legs, and her head turned toward me, who was loony and drunk
with assessing the weight of her breasts and the soft little heaviness of her belly,
so elegantly banded in by the sheath of her swim suit, or her hair which she
combed, it seemed to me, with great animal strength, taking off the close white
rubber helmet.

The sand swallows burst out of their scupper holes in the bluffs and out over
the transparent drown of the water, back again to the white, to the brown, to the
black, from moving to stock-still sand waves and water-worked woods and roots
that hugged and twisted in the sun.

Presently she went up; and so did I, a little later. Mrs. Renling gave me the icy
treatment for being late. And, I thought, lying on the floor of my room with my
heels upon the bedspread like an armored man fallen from his horse, spurtangled
and needing block and tackle to be raised, that it was time, seeing my inatten-
tion was making Mrs. Renling angry, to have some progress to show for it at least.
I got up and brushed myself without particular heart or interest, using two mili-
tary brushes she had given me. I went down in the slow, white elevator and, on
the ground floor, moseyed around in the lobby.

It was sundown, near dinnertime, with brilliant darkening water, napkins and
broad menus standing up in the dining room, and roses and ferns in long-necked
vases, the orchestra tuning back of its curtain. I was alone in the corridor,
troubled and rocky, and trod on slowly to the music room, where the phonograph
was playing Caruso, stifled and then clear cries of operatic mother-longing, that
ornate, at heart somber, son's appeal of the Italian taste. Resting her elbows on
the closed cabinet, in a white suit and round white hat, next thing to a bishop's
biretta, bead-embroidered, was Esther Fenchel; she stood with one foot set on its
point.

I said, "Miss Fenchel, I wonder if you would like to go with me some evening
to the House of David." Astonished, she looked up from the music. "They have
dancing every night."

I saw nothing but failure, from the first word out, and felt smitten, pounded
from all sides.

"With you? I should say not. I certainly won't."

The blood came down out of my head, neck, shoulders, and I fainted dead
away.

I came out of it without help. There wasn't anyone to offer any, Esther not
having spent an instant in seeing what had happened to me, evidently, because
the singing rolled in on me in the splendor of its wind-up, at first with the noise
of a seashell, then louder, with the climbing of the orchestra on the staircase of a
magnificent hall, to the clear heartbreak of the very top where the drums severed
and killed and gave a hammering burial to everything.

I don't know whether it was the refusal or the emotion of speaking and being
spoken to that knocked me down, and I wasn't in any condition to touch around
and feel for the trigger, where it was and why it was like a loose tooth. It was
enough I had found out how strong the charge was, and that it was the kick of a
false situation that went off. And meanwhile I was sucking breath and the air felt
chilly to me because of my damp face. I got my back against a sofa, where I felt
I had got trampled all over my body by a thing some way connected by weight
with my mother and my brother George, who perhaps this very minute was working
on a broom, or putting it down to shamble in to supper; or with Grandma Lausch
in the Nelson Home--somehow as though run over by the beast that kept them
steady company and that I thought I was safely away from.

Meantime Miss Zeeland was standing in the doorway, the daughter of the
famous corporation lawyer, looking at me, in her evening feathers, and her body
in the long drape of her dress making a single unbroken human roll. She had on
golden shoes and white gloves to the elbow, and looked visionary, oriental, with
her rich hair swept up in a kind of tower that was in equilibrium to her big bust.
Her face was clear and cold, like a kind of weather, though the long clean groove
of her upper lip was ready to go into motion, as if she were going to break her
silence with something momentous and long-matured; explain love to me, perhaps.
But no, her ideas remained closed to me, though she didn't leave until I got up
to turn off the phonograph, and then she glided or fanned away.

I went to the men's toilet to wash my face with a little warm water and then
went to dinner. I didn't do much with the food, not even the pêche flambée, as
didn't escape Mrs. Renling, and she said, "Augie, when is this love nonsense
going to stop? You'll hurt your system. Is it that important?" Then she used her
most fondling words on me, to get me around by kidding, and, as a woman, tried
to put a top on my imagination of women where she thought a top should be,
explaining what there was and was not to women, and praised the male in all
things as if she was working for Athena. It drove me a little crazy. I wasn't
right on my rocker anyway, and hearing her run down the body of womankind in her
metal, bristling way made me look at her with a streak of bad blood in the eye.
And I waited almost with the shakes of malaria for Esther to appear in the dining
room. The old Fenchels were already at their table. Then Thea came, but her
sister wasn't having supper apparently.

"And you know," said Mrs. Renling after a time, "the girl hasn't had her eyes
off you since she came in. Is there something between you already? Augie! Have
you done something? Is that why you're low? What have you done?"

"I haven't done anything," I said.

"You better not!" She was on me, sharp and shrewd, just like a police matron.
"You're too attractive to women for your own good, and you'll end up in
trouble. So will she; she's got hot pants, that little miss."

She gave Thea stare for stare. The waiter set light to the Fenchels' flambée,
and there were little fires here and there in the green of twilight.

I left the dining room without saying more. To walk around on the shore road
and get the shameful twists out of my guts and digest my trouble. It was awful,
the feelings I was having, the disgrace and anger over Esther and the desire to
conk Mrs. Renling on the head. I went along the edge of the water, and then
around the grounds, staying away from the porch where I knew Mrs. Renling
would be waiting to pay me off for my rudeness, and then to the back, to the
children's playground, and sat down on the slat seat of the garden swing.
Sitting here, I started to dream that Esther had thought it over and had come
out of her room to look for me, so that I had to groan over the grip my stupidity
had on me and was sloshed all over with corrupting feelings, worse than before.
Then I heard someone light coming near, a woman stepping under the tree into
the dusty rut worn beside the swing by the feet of kids. It was Esther's sister
Thea, come to talk to me, the one Mrs. Renling warned me of. In her white dress
and her shoes that came down like pointed shapes of birds in the vague
whiteness of the furrow by the swing, with lace on her arms and warm opening
and closing differences of the shade of leaves back of her head, she stood and
looked at me.

"Disappointed that it isn't Esther, aren't you, Mr. March? I guess you must be
having a terrible time. You looked pretty white in the dining room."

Wondering what she knew and what she was after, I didn't say anything.

"Have you recovered a little?"

"Recovered from what?"

"From fainting. Except Esther thought it might be an epileptic fit."

"Well, maybe it was one," I said, feeling heavy, sullen, and crumbling.

"I don't think so. You're just sore, and you don't want me to bother you."

That wasn't so; on the contrary, I wanted her to stay. So I said, "No," and
she sat down beside my feet, touching them with her thigh. I made a move, but
she touched my ankles and said, "Don't bother. You don't have to make yourself
uncomfortable because of me. What happened anyway?"

"I asked your sister for a date."

"And when she said 'No' you passed out."

I thought she was warm toward me and not merely curious.

"I'm all for you, Mr. March," she said, "so I'll tell you what Esther thinks.
She thinks that you service the lady you're with."

"What?" I cried out and jumped from the seat and gave myself a crack on the
head against the dowels of the swing.

"That you're her gigolo and lay her. Why don't you sit down? I thought I
should explain this to you."

As if I had been carrying something with special sacred devotedness and it
had spilled and scalded me, that was how I felt. And here I had all along thought
that the worst that could occur in the minds of young girls, heiresses even, was
innocent by the standards of Einhorn's poolroom.

"Who thought of that, you or your sister?"

"I don't want to throw all the blame on Esther. I thought it might be so too,
even though she brought it up first. We knew you weren't related to Mrs. Ren-
ling because we heard her say once to Mrs. Zeeland that you were her husband's
protégé. You never danced with anybody else, and you held hands with her, and
she is a sexy-looking woman for her age. You ought to see the two of you toge-
ther! And then she's a European, and they don't think it's so terrible for a
woman to have a much younger lover. I don't see what's so terrible about it
either. Just my deadhead of a sister does."

"But I'm not European. I come from Chicago. I work for her husband in
Evanston. I'm a clerk in his store, and that's the only occupation I have."

"Now don't be upset, Mr. March. Please don't be. We get around and see a
lot. Why do you think I came out here to talk to you? Not to trouble you more.
If you did, you did, and if you didn't, you didn't."

"You don't know what you're saying. It's a lousy thing to think of me, and of
Mrs. Renling too, who's been only kind to me." I was angry and sounded angry,
and she held her answers back; she also was heated and tight with excitement. I
felt as well as saw her eyes deeply studying me. Whereas till now she had smiled
occasionally there was no longer the least bit of humor in her face, which I saw
well in the whiteness and ground dust and orchard leaves. I began to understand
that I was with someone extraordinary, for it was a hot, prompt, investigative,
and nearly imploring face. It was delicate but also full of strong nerve, with the
recklessness that gives you as much concern as admiration, seeing it in a young
woman; as when you see birds battling, like two fierce spouts of blood; they
could easily die from small harms and don't seem to realize it. Of course that's
one of those innocent male ideas probably.

"You don't really believe I'm Mrs. Renling's gigolo, do you?"

"I've already told you I wouldn't care if you were."

"Sure, what difference should it make to you!"

"No, you don't get it. You've been in love with my sister and following her
around, so you haven't noticed that I've done exactly the same to you."

"You've what?"

"I've fallen in love with you. I love you."

"Go away. You don't. It's just an idea. If it's even an idea. What are you
trying to give me?"

"You couldn't love Esther if you knew her. You're like me. That's why you
fell in love. She couldn't. Augie! Why don't you change to me?"

She took my hand and drew it to her, leaning toward me from the hips, which
were graceful. Oh, Mrs. Renling over whom I thought I had triumphed because
her suspicions were so misplaced!

"I don't care about Mrs. Renling," she said. "Suppose you did, once."

"Never!"

"A young person can do all sorts of things because he has more in him than he
knows what to do with."

Did I say that the world had never had better color? I left something out of
account, a limping, crippled consideration which seems to lose ground as you
reach beauty and Orizaba flowers, but soon you find it has preceded you.

"Now, Miss Fenchel," I said, trying to keep her in her seat as I stood up.
"You're lovely, but what do you think we're doing? I can't help it, I love
Esther." And as she wouldn't stay put I had to escape from the swing and get
away in the orchard.

"Mr. March--Augie," she called. But I wasn't going to talk to her now. I went
into the hotel by the service entrance. When I was in the room, with the phone
off the hook so that Mrs. Renling couldn't reach me, I explained to myself, while
taking off my good duds and dropping them on the floor, that this was merely
something between sisters and I figured in it accidentally, not really personally.
But my other thought was that, if it weren't so, there was no luck in these things;
how everyone seemed to get drawn in the wrong direction. So for the same desires
to meet was a freak occurrence. And to feel them so specific, settled on one per-
son, maybe was an unallowable presumption, too pure, too special, and a misun-
derstanding of the real condition of things.

When I walked in to have breakfast with Mrs. Renling next morning I left the
door open.

"What, were you born in the coal scuttle?" she said. "Close it. I'm lying here."
And when I went, halfhearted, to do it, she observed how wrinkled I looked. "Go
down to the tailor after breakfast and get pressed. You must have slept in your
pants. I make allowance for you because you're in love, even the way you were
so courteous to me last night. But you don't have to be a tramp."

After breakfast she took off for her mineral bath and I went down to the lobby.
The Fenchels had checked out. There was a note at the desk for me from Thea.
"Esther told uncle about you, and we are going to Waukesha for a few days and
then East. You were foolish last night. Think about it. It's true I love you.
You'll see me again."

Then I had a few rough days and got stretched out in melancholy. I thought,
where did I get that way, putting in for the best there was in the departments
of beauty and joy as if I were a count of happy youth, and like born to elegance
and sweet love, with bones made of candy? And had to remember what very seldom
mattered with me, namely, where I came from, parentage, and other history,
things I had never much thought of as difficulties, being democratic in
temperament, available to everybody and assuming about others what I assumed
about myself.

And in the meantime, more and more, I had to carry what till now had carried
me. This place, for instance, the Merritt, cream and gold, was now on my neck--
the service, the dinner music, the dances; the hyperbolical flowers all of a
sudden like painted iron; the chichi a millstone; and, on top of it, Mrs. Renling
and her foundry-cast weight. I couldn't take her now when she was difficult.
There was bad luck even in the weather, which turned cool and rainy toward the
last; and rather than stay in where she could lay hands on me and carry on and
tyrannize, I stuck around the amusement park at Silver Beach, where the seats of
the Ferris wheel were covered, getting blackened, and I got soaked through my
raincoat (from the old times and not up to my recenter elegance). I sat in the
hot-dog stands among the carnies, concessionaires, and shell-game operators,
waiting for the course of baths to finish.

Near the end of the holiday Simon wrote that he was coming to St. Joe with a
girl friend, and he had luck with the weather. I was on the pier when the white
steamer tied up. All the blue and green was fresher from the rains, and the cold
of the wet days was down to a pin core. As for the people debarking, the hard
use of the city was on them; it had come off only a little during this four-hour
excursion on the water. Families, single men, working girls in pairs bringing
their beach and summer things, some not so visibly encumbered but heavily
loaded all the same. Tough or injured, according to their lot or nature. Off the
ship they tramped, over the motor-driven edge of water and into the peaceful
swale of brightness, and here and there the light picked out a specialized or
warily happy face; and also illuminated were silks, hairs, brows, straws, breasts
come to breathe out charges of nerves or let rise the driven-down simplicities,
bearers of things as old as the most ancient of cities and older; desires and
avoidances bred into bellies, shoulders, legs, as long ago as Eden and the Fall.

Taller than most, blond and brown, there was my Germanic-looking brother.
He was dolled up like a Fourth of July sport, and a little like a smart gypsy,
smiling, his chipped tooth foremost, his double-breasted plaid jacket open wide,
knuckles down on the handles of two grips. He gave off his fairness with a kind
of heat in the blue color of his eyes, terrifically; it was also in his cheeks,
down into his neck, rich and animal. He walked heavy in balance, in his pointed
shoes over the gangplank, arms drawn down by the weight of the valises, searching
for me in the shade of the pier. I never saw him looking better than there, in the
sun, rolling in with the crowd in his glad rags. When he clapped his arm around me
I was happy to feel and smell him, and we grinned, mugged, pushed faces, with
man's bristles under each other's fingers, and went through a rough, teasing grip.

"Well, you jerk?"

"And you, money-man?"

There wasn't any sting in this, though Simon had for a while been acting quiet
toward me because I was earning more than he and cruising in luxury.

"How's everybody--Mama?"

"Well, the eyes, you know. But she's okay."

And then he fetched up his girl--a big dark girl named Cissy Flexner. I had
known her at school; she was from the neighborhood. Her father, before he went
bust, had owned a drygoods store--overalls, laborers' canvas gloves and longj-
ohns, galoshes, things like that; and he was a fleshy, diffident, pale, inside
sort of man, back in his boxes. But she, although in a self-solicitous way, was
a beautiful piece of tall work, on colossal but careful legs, hips forward; her
mouth was big and would have been perfect if there hadn't been something self-
tasting in it, eyes with complicated lids but magnificent in their slow heaviness,
an erotic development. So that she had to cast down these eyes a little to be
decent with her endowment, that height of the bosom and form of hips and other
generic riches, smooth and soft, that may take the early person, the little girl,
by surprise in their ampleness when they come on. She accused me somewhat of
examining her too much, but could anybody help that? And it was excusable on
the further score that she might become my sister-in-law, for Simon was power-
fully in love. He already was husbandly toward her, and they hung on each
other with fondling and kissing and intimacy, strolling by the steep colors of
water and air, while I swam by myself in the lake a little distance away. Also on
the sand, when Simon, after he had rubbed his fine shield of chest hair, dried her
back, he kissed it, and it gave me a moment's ache in the roof of the mouth, as if
I had got the warm odor and touch of skin myself. She had so much, gave out so
much splendor. As stupendous quiff.

But personally I didn't care too much for her. Partly because I was gone on
Esther. But also because what came across as her own, that is, apart from female
brilliance, was slow. Maybe she herself was stupefied by what she had, her slay-
ing weight. It must have pressed down on her thoughts, like any great vitality
in nature. Like the aims that live in the blood of grizzly or tiger, bearing
down on the mind of such beasts with square weight, a manifestation of one
thing carried out completely, to the very stripes and claws. But what about the
privilege over that of being in the clasp of nature, and in on the mission of a
species? The ingredient of thought was weaker in Cissy's mixture than the other
elements. But she was a sly girl, soft though she seemed.

And as she lay stretched on the sand, and the hot oil of popcorn and sharpness
of mustard came in puffs, with crackling, from the stands of Silver Beach, she
kept answering Simon, whom I couldn't hear--he was on his side next to her in
his red trunks--"Oh, fooey, no. What bushwah! Love, shmuv!" But her pleasure
was high. "I'm so glad you brought me, dear. So clean. It's heavenly here."

I didn't like Simon's struggle with her--for that was what it was--to convince
her, sway her, work her around. Nearly everything he proposed she refused.
"Let's not and say we did," and similar denials. It led him into crudenesses I
hadn't ever seen him in before, the way he laid himself out, dug, campaigned,
swashed, flattered her, was gross. His tongue hung out with the heat of work and
infatuation; and there was a bottom ground where he was angry, his anger rising
straight into his face in two flaming centers, under his eyes, on either side of
his nose. I understood this, as we were covering the same field of difficulty and
struggle in front of the identical Troy. This that happened to us would have
given Grandma Lausch the satisfaction of a prophetess--the spirit, anyhow, of
her; the actual was covered up in the dust of the Home, in the band of finalists
for whom there was the little guessing game of which would next be taken out of
play. So I recorded this seeming success of prediction for her. And as for Simon,
all the places where he and I had once been joined while still young brothers,
before there were differences and distances between us--these places began to
act up, feeling attachment near again. The reattachment didn't actually take
place, but I loved him nevertheless. When he was on his feet with the flowered
cloth of her beach dress on his shoulders, it made something crass but brave, his
standing up raw and sunburned, by the pure streak of the water, as if he were
being playful about the wearing of this girl's favor.

I took them to the evening steamer, for she refused to stay overnight, and was
on deck with them through the long working out of sunset, down to the last blue,
devoid of other lights; fall weight and furrows in the clouds set cityward, let
go from the power of the sun to sink down on the moundings and pilings of the
water, gray and powerful.

"Well, sport, we may be married in the next few months," he said. "You envy
me? I bet you do."

And he covered her up with his hands and arms, his chin on her shoulder and
kissing her on the neck. The flamboyant way he had of making love to her was
curious to me--his leg advanced between her legs and his fingers spread on her
face. She didn't refuse anything he did, although in words never agreed; she
had no kindness in speaking. With her hands up the sleeves of her white coat,
hugging out the chill, she stood by a davit. He was still in his shirt, owing
to sunburn, but wore his panama, the breeze molding the brim around.




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