The Collected Stories Of Saul Bellow (36 page)

“What should I stay for?”

“I only wondered. If you wanted a different experience of America, you might find it in Washington, D. C.”

“What would I be doing there?”

“Serious work. And don’t be put off by ‘serious’; it wouldn’t be dull. I did some of it myself in Cortina d’Ampezzo years ago and had one of the greatest summers of my life. This friend of mine in Washington, the one I did it for, may possibly be a dark horse in the history of the American mind. I think perhaps he’s the one with the gifts to put it all in perspective. Everything. If you met him, you’d agree that he was a fascinating man….” Here Clara stopped herself. Without warning, she had sped into a complex intersection, a cloverleaf without a single sign. A pause was imposed on her, and she considered in a silence of many levels where her enthusiasm for this Austrian girl—a pretty girl and a sound one, basically (maybe)—was leading. Did she want to give Ithiel to her? She wanted to reward Gina. All right. And she wanted to find a suitable woman for Ithiel. It was a scandal, the wives he chose. (Or my husbands; not much better.) Again, all right. But what about Frederic? What had she done that she had to veto all discussion of the Haitian connection? And why was this conversation with Clara cramped into twenty minutes? Why was she not invited to the farewell cocktail party? Who would be there?

Now came any number of skeptical scenarios: Gina’s parents had come to America to take her home. They had paid Frederic off, and an incidental part of the deal was that he should surrender the ring. Clara could readily imagine such a package. The girl had plenty of reasons to keep Clara away from her friends—possibly her parents. Brash Clara with her hick candor might have put the case point-blank to the rich parents with all their Mitteleuropa culture (bullshit culture, Ithiel might have said). Oh, let them have their party undisturbed. But she wasn’t about to send Gina to Washington all done up in gift wrapping—only the present with ribbons would have been Ithiel, handed over to this young woman. No way! Clara decided. Let me be as crude as she accused me of being. I am sure not going to make a marriage to rankle me for life. She stopped the matchmaking pitch she had begun, in her softheaded goodness. Yes, Gina was an unusual girl—that conviction was unchanged—but if Teddy Regler was the man in prospect, no.

“I haven’t met him, have I?” Gina said. “No.”

Nor will you ever.

“You’d like to do something for me, wouldn’t you?” Gina spoke in earnest. “Yes, if there were something feasible,” said Clara.

“You’re a generous woman—exceptionally so. I’m not in a position to go to Washington. Otherwise I might be glad to. And I have to leave you soon, I’m sorry to say. I really am sorry. There’s no time to talk about it, but you have meant a lot to me.”

That’s one thing, Clara was thinking. The people you mean a lot to just haven’t got the time to speak to you about it. “Let me tell you quickly,” said Clara, “since it has to be quick, what I’ve been thinking of the stages a woman like me has gone through in her life. Stage one: Everybody is kindly, basically good; you treat ‘em right, they’ll treat you right—that’s baby time. Stage two: Everybody is a brute, butcher, barbarian, rapist, crook, liar, killer, and monster. Stage three: Cynicism
also
_ is unacceptable, and you begin to put together an improved judgment based on minimal leads or certain selected instances. I don’t know what, if anything, you can make of that…. Now, before you leave you’re going to satisfy my curiosity at least on one point: how you got the ring back. If it cost you money, I want to pay every cent of it. I insist. Tell me how much, and to whom. And how did you get into the apartment? Nobody saw you. Not with a key?”

“Don’t talk about costs; there’s no money owing,” said Gina. “The one thing I have to tell you is how the ring got to your bedside. I went to Lucy’s school and gave it to her.”

“You gave an emerald to Lucy! To a young child?”

“I made sure to arrive before her new sitter came for her, and I explained to Lucy what had to be done: Here’s your mother’s ring, it has to be put on her night table, and here’s a nice Madeira handkerchief to put it on.”

“What else did you say?”

“There wasn’t much else that needed saying. She knew the ring was lost. Well, it was found now. I folded the handkerchief around the ring and put it in her schoolbag. “

“And she understood?”

“She’s a lot like you.”

“How’s that?
Tell
_ me!”

“The same type as you. You mentioned that to me several times. Did I think so? And presently I did begin to think so.”

“You could trust her to carry it out, and not to say, not to tell. Why, I was beside myself when the ring turned up on the handkerchief. Where did it drop from! Who could have done it! I even wondered if a burglar had been hired to come in and put it there. Not a word from the kid. She looked straight ahead like a Roman sentry. You asked her not to say?”

“Well, yes. It was better that way. It never occurred to you to ask her about it?”

“How would that ever come up?” said Clara. Not once. My own kid, capable ofthat.

“I told her to come down to the street again and report to me afterward,” said Gina. “I walked behind them from school—Lucy and the new girl, who doesn’t know me. And in about fifteen minutes Lucy came to me at the corner and said she had put it where I told her…. You’re pleased, aren’t you?”

“I’m mystified. I’m moved. Frankly, Gina, I don’t believe you and I will ever meet again….” The girl didn’t disagree, and Clara said, “So I’m going to speak my mind. You weren’t going to describe or discuss your experiences in New York—in Harlem: I suppose you were being firm according to your private lights. Your intimacies are your business, but the word I used to describe your attitude was ‘vainglory’—the pride of a European girl in New York who gets into a mess and takes credit for getting herself out. But it’s far beyond that.” Tears fell from Clara’s eyes as she took Gina’s hand. “I see how you brought it all together through my own child. You gave her something significant to do, and she was equal to it. Most amazing to me is the fact that she didn’t talk, she only watched. That level of observation and control in a girl of ten… how do you suppose it feels to discover that?”

Gina had been getting ready to stand up, but she briefly sat down again. She said, “I think you found the right word—right for both of us. When I came to be interviewed, the vainglory was all around—you were waving it over me. I wondered whether the lady of the house was like that in America. But you’re not an American lady of the house. You have a manner, Mrs. Velde. As if you were directing traffic. ‘Turn left, go right—do this, do that.’ You have definite ideas.”

“Pernickety, maybe?” said Clara. “Did I hurt your feelings?”

“If that means bossy, no. My feelings weren’t hurt when I knew you better. You were firm, according to
your
_ lights. I decided that you were a complete person, and the orders you gave you gave for that reason.”

“Oh, wait a minute, I don’t see any complete persons. In luckier times I’m sure complete persons did exist. But now? Now that’s just the problem. You look around for something to take hold of, and where is it?”

“I see it in you,” said Gina. She stood up and took her purse. “You may be reluctant to believe it, because of the disappointment and confusion. Which people are the lost people? This is the hardest thing of all to decide, even about oneself. The day of the fashion show we had lunch, and you made a remark like ‘Nobody is anybody’ You were just muttering, talking about your psychiatrist. But when you started to talk about the man in Washington just now, there was no nobody-anybody problem. And when the ring was stolen, it wasn’t the lost property that upset you. Lost people lose ‘valuables.’ You only lost this particular ring.” She set her finger on the stone.

How abnormal for two people, one of them young, to have such a mental conversation. Maybe life in New York had forced a girl like Gina to be mental. Clara wondered about that. “Goodbye, Gina.”

“Goodbye, Mrs. Velde.” Clara was rising, and Gina put her arm about her. They embraced. “With all the disorder, I can’t see how you keep track. You do, though. I believe you pretty well know who you are.” Gina quickly left the lounge.

Minutes ago (which might have been hours), Clara had entertained mean feelings toward the girl. She intended, even, to give her a hard time, to stroll back with her to her destination, fish for an invitation to the cocktail farewell, talk to her parents, embarrass her with her friends. That was before she understood what Gina had done, how the ring had been returned. But now, when Clara came out of the revolving door, and as soon as she had the pavement under her feet, she started to cry passionately. She hurried, crying, down Madison Avenue, not like a person who belonged there but like one of the homeless, doing grotesque things in public, one of those street people turned loose from an institution. The main source of tears came open. She found a handkerchief and held it to her face in her ringed hand, striding in an awkward hurry. She might have been treading water in New York harbor—it felt that way, more a sea than a pavement, and for all the effort and the motions that she made she wasn’t getting anywhere, she was still in the same place. When he described me to myself in Washington, I should have taken Ithiel’s word for it, she was thinking. He knows what the big picture is—the big,
big
_ picture; he doesn’t flatter, he’s realistic and he’s truthful. I do seem to have an idea who it is that’s at the middle of me. There may not be more than one in a zillion, mores the pity, that do have. And my own child possibly one of those.

LOOKING FOR MR. GREEN

Whatsoever thy handfindeth to do, do it with thy might….
_

HARD WORK? No, it wasn’t really so hard. He wasn’t used to walking and stair-climbing, but the physical difficulty of his new job was not what George Grebe felt most. He was delivering relief checks in the Negro district, and although he was a native Chicagoan this was not a part of the city he knew much about—it needed a depression to introduce him to it. No, it wasn’t literally hard work, not as reckoned in foot-pounds, but yet he was beginning to feel the strain of it, to grow aware of its peculiar difficulty. He could find the streets and numbers, but the clients were not where they were supposed to be, and he felt like a hunter inexperienced in the camouflage of his game. It was an unfavorable day, too—fall, and cold, dark weather, windy. But, anyway, instead of shells in his deep trench-coat pocket he had the cardboard of checks, punctured for the spindles of the file, the holes reminding him of the holes in player-piano paper. And he didn t look much like a hunter, either; his was a city figure entirely, belted up in this Irish conspirator’s coat. He was slender without being tall, stiff in the back, his legs looking shabby in a pair of old tweed pants gone through and fringy at the cuffs. With this stiffness, he kept his head forward, so that his face was red from the sharpness of the weather; and it was an indoors sort of face with gray eyes that persisted in some kind of thought and yet seemed to avoid definiteness or conclusion. He wore sideburns that surprised you somewhat by the tough curl of the blond hair and the effect of assertion in their length. He was not so mild as he looked, nor so youthful; and nevertheless there was no effort on his part to seem what he was not. He was an educated man; he was a bachelor; he was in some ways simple; without lushing, he liked a drink; his luck had not been good. Nothing was deliberately hidden.

He felt that his luck was better than usual today. When he had reported for work that morning he had expected to be shut up in the relief office at a clerk’s job, for he had been hired downtown as a clerk, and he was glad to have, instead, the freedom of the streets and welcomed, at least at first, the vigor of the cold and even the blowing of the hard wind. But on the other hand he was not getting on with the distribution of the checks. It was true that it was a city job; nobody expected you to push too hard at a city job. His supervisor, that young Mr. Raynor, had practically told him that. Still, he wanted to do well at it. For one thing, when he knew how quickly he could deliver a batch of checks, he would know also how much time he could expect to clip for himself. And then, too, the clients would be waiting for their money. That was not the most important consideration, though it certainly mattered to him. No, but he wanted to do well, simply for doing-well’s sake, to acquit himself decently of a job because he so rarely had a job to do that required just this sort of energy. Of this peculiar energy he now had a superabundance; once it had started to flow, it flowed all too heavily. And, for the time being anyway, he was balked. He could not find Mr. Green.

So he stood in his big-skirted trench coat with a large envelope in his hand and papers showing from his pocket, wondering why people should be so hard to locate who were too feeble or sick to come to the station to collect their own checks. But Raynor had told him that tracking them down was not easy at first and had offered him some advice on how to proceed. “If you can see the postman, he’s your first man to ask, and your best bet. If you can’t connect with him, try the stores and tradespeople around. Then the janitor and the neighbors. But you’ll find the closer you come to your man the less people will tell you. They don’t want to tell you anything.”

“Because I’m a stranger.”

‘ Because you’re white. We ought to have a Negro doing this, but we don’t at the moment, and of course you’ve got to eat, too, and this is public employment. Jobs have to be made. Oh, that holds for me too. Mind you, I’m not letting myself out. I’ve got three years of seniority on you, that’s all. And a law degree. Otherwise, you might be back of the desk and I might be going out into the field this cold day. The same dough pays us both and for the same, exact, identical reason. What’s my law degree got to do with it? But you have to pass out these checks, Mr. Grebe, and it’ll help if you’re stubborn, so I hope you are.”

“Yes, I’m fairly stubborn.”

Raynor sketched hard with an eraser in the old dirt of his desk, left-handed, and said, “Sure, what else can you answer to such a question. Anyhow, the trouble you’re going to have is that they don’t like to give information about anybody. They think you’re a plainclothes dick or an installment collector, or summons-server or something like that. Till you’ve been seen around the neighborhood for a few months and people know you’re only from the relief.”