The Collected Stories Of Saul Bellow (39 page)

“That’s true,” said Grebe, rising. His glance met the old man’s.

“I know you got to go,” he said. “Well, God bless you, boy, you ain’t been sly with me. I can tell it in a minute.”

He went back through the buried yard. Someone nursed a candle in a shed, where a man unloaded kindling wood from a sprawl-wheeled baby buggy and two voices carried on a high conversation. As he came up the sheltered passage he heard the hard boost of the wind in the branches and against the house fronts, and then, reaching the sidewalk, he saw the needle-eye red of cable towers in the open icy height hundreds of feet above the river and the factories—those keen points. From here, his view was obstructed all the way to the South Branch and its timber banks, and the cranes beside the water. Rebuilt after the Great Fire, this part of the city was, not fifty years later, in ruins again, factories boarded up, buildings deserted or fallen, gaps of prairie between. But it wasn’t desolation that this made you feel, but rather a faltering of organization that set free a huge energy, an escaped, unattached, unregulated power from the giant raw place. Not only must people feel it but, it seemed to Grebe, they were compelled to match it. In their very bodies. He no less than others, he realized. Say that his parents had been servants in their time, whereas he was supposed not to be one. He thought that they had never done any service like this, which no one visible asked for, and probably flesh and blood could not even perform. Nor could anyone show why it should be performed; or see where the performance would lead. That did not mean that he wanted to be released from it, he realized with a grimly pensive face. On the contrary. He had something to do. To be compelled to feel this energy and yet have no task to do—that was horrible; that was suffering; he knew what that was. It was now quitting time. Six o’clock. He could go home if he liked, to his room, that is, to wash in hot water, to pour a drink, lie down on his quilt, read the paper, eat some liver paste on crackers before going out to dinner. But to think of this actually made him feel a little sick, as though he had swallowed hard air. He had six checks left, and he was determined to deliver at least one of these: Mr. Green’s check.

So he started again. He had four or five dark blocks to go, past open lots, condemned houses, old foundations, closed schools, black churches, mounds, and he reflected that there must be many people alive who had once seen the neighborhood rebuilt and new. Now there was a second layer of ruins; centuries of history accomplished through human massing. Numbers had given the place forced growth; enormous numbers had also broken it down. Objects once so new, so concrete that it could never have occurred to anyone they stood for other things, had crumbled. Therefore, reflected Grebe, the secret of them was out. It was that they stood for themselves by agreement, and were natural and not unnatural by agreement, and when the things themselves collapsed the agreement became visible. What was it, otherwise, that kept cities from looking peculiar? Rome, that was almost permanent, did not give rise to thoughts like these. And was it abidingly real? But in Chicago, where the cycles were so fast and the familiar died out, and again rose changed, and died again in thirty years, you saw the common agreement or covenant, and you were forced to think about appearances and realities. (He remembered Raynor and he smiled. Ray-nor was a clever boy.) Once you had grasped this, a great many things became intelligible. For instance, why Mr. Field should conceive such a scheme. Of course, if people were to agree to create a millionaire, a real millionaire would come into existence. And if you wanted to know how Mr. Field was inspired to think of this, why, he had within sight of his kitchen window the chart, the very bones of a successful scheme—the El with its blue and green confetti of signals. People consented to pay dimes and ride the crash-box cars, and so it was a success. Yet how absurd it looked; how little reality there was to start with. And yet Yerkes, the great financier who built it, had known that he could get people to agree to do it. Viewed as itself, what a scheme of a scheme it seemed, how close to an appearance. Then why wonder at Mr. Field’s idea? He had grasped a principle. And then Grebe remembered, too, that Mr. Yerkes had established the Yerkes Observatory and endowed it with millions. Now how did the notion come to him in his New York museum of a palace or his Aegean-bound yacht to give money to astronomers? Was he awed by the success of his bizarre enterprise and therefore ready to spend money to find out where in the universe being and seeming were identical? Yes, he wanted to know what abides; and whether flesh is Bible grass; and he offered money to be burned in the fire of suns. Okay, then, Grebe thought further, these things exist because people consent to exist with them—we have got so far—and also there is a reality which doesn’t depend on consent but within which consent is a game. But what about need, the need that keeps so many vast thousands in position? You tell me that, you
private
_ little gentleman and
decent
_ soul—he used these words against himself scornfully. Why is the consent given to misery? And why so painfully ugly? Because there is
something
_ that is dismal and permanently ugly? Here he sighed and gave it up, and thought it was enough for the present moment that he had a real check in his pocket for a Mr. Green who must be real beyond question. If only his neighbors didn’t think they had to conceal him.

This time he stopped at the second floor. He struck a match and found a door. Presently a man answered his knock and Grebe had the check ready and showed it even before he began. “Does Tulliver Green live here? I’m from the relief.”

The man narrowed the opening and spoke to someone at his back. “Does he live here?”

“Uh-uh. No.”

“Or anywhere in this building? He’s a sick man and he can’t come for his dough.” He exhibited the check in the light, which was smoky—the air smelled of charred lard—and the man held off the brim of his cap to study it. “Uh-uh. Never seen the name.”

“There’s nobody around here that uses crutches?”

He seemed to think, but it was Grebe’s impression that he was simply waiting for a decent interval to pass. “No, suh. Nobody I ever see.”

“I’ve been looking for this man all afternoon”—Grebe spoke out with sudden force—“and I’m going to have to carry this check back to the station. It seems strange not to be able to find a person to
give
_ him something when you’re looking for him for a good reason. I suppose if I had bad news for him I’d find him quick enough.”

There was a responsive motion in the other man’s face. “That’s right, I reckon.”

“It almost doesn’t do any good to have a name if you can’t be found by it. It doesn’t stand for anything. He might as well not have any,” he went on, smiling. It was as much of a concession as he could make to his desire to laugh.

“Well, now, there’s a little old knot-back man I see once in a while. He might be the one you lookin’ for. Downstairs.”

“Where? Right side or left? Which door?”

“I don’t know which. Thin-face little knot-back with a stick.” But no one answered at any of the doors on the first floor. He went to the end of the corridor, searching by matchlight, and found only a stairless exit to the yard, a drop of about six feet. But there was a bungalow near the alley, an old house like Mr. Field’s. To jump was unsafe. He ran from the front door, through the underground passage and into the yard. The place was occupied. There was a light through the curtains, upstairs. The name on the ticket under the broken, scoop-shaped mailbox was Green! He exultantly rang the bell and pressed against the locked door. Then the lock clicked faintly and a long staircase opened before him. Someone was slowly coming down—a woman. He had the impression in the weak light that she was shaping her hair as she came, making herself presentable, for he saw her arms raised. But it was for support that they were raised; she was feeling her way downward, down the wall, stumbling. Next he wondered about the pressure of her feet on the treads; she did not seem to be wearing shoes. And it was a freezing stairway. His ring had got her out of bed, perhaps, and she had forgotten to put them on. And then he saw that she was not only shoeless but naked; she was entirely naked, climbing down while she talked to herself, a heavy woman, naked and drunk. She blundered into him. The contact of her breasts, though they touched only his coat, made him go back against the door with a blind shock. See what he had tracked down, in his hunting game!

The woman was saying to herself, furious with insult, “So I cain’t fuck, huh? I’ll show that son of a bitch kin I, cain’t I.”

What should he do now? Grebe asked himself. Why, he should go. He should turn away and go. He couldn’t talk to this woman. He couldn’t keep her standing naked in the cold. But when he tried he found himself unable to turn away.

He said, “Is this where Mr. Green lives?”

But she was still talking to herself and did not hear him.

“Is this Mr. Green’s house?”

At last she turned her furious drunken glance on him. “What do you want?”

Again her eyes wandered from him; there was a dot of blood in their enraged brilliance. He wondered why she didn’t feel the cold.

“I’m from the relief.”

“Awright, what?”

“I’ve got a check for Tulliver Green.”

This time she heard him and put out her hand.

“No, no, for
Mr.
_ Green. He’s got to sign,” he said. How was he going to get Green’s signature tonight!

“I’ll take it. He cain’t.”

He desperately shook his head, thinking of Mr. Field’s precautions about identification. “I can’t let you have it. It’s for him. Are you Mrs. Green?”

“Maybe I is, and maybe I ain’t. Who want to know?”

“Is he upstairs?”

Awright. Take it up yourself, you goddamn fool.”

Sure, he was a goddamn fool. Of course he could not go up because Green would probably be drunk and naked, too. And perhaps he would appear on the landing soon. He looked eagerly upward. Under the light was a high narrow brown wall. Empty! It remained empty!

“Hell with you, then!” he heard her cry. To deliver a check for coal and clothes, he was keeping her in the cold. She did not feel it, but his face was burning with frost and self-ridicule. He backed away from her.

“I’ll come tomorrow, tell him.”

“Ah, hell with you. Don’t never come. What you doin’ here in the nighttime? Don’ come back.” She yelled so that he saw the breadth of her tongue. She stood astride in the long cold box of the hall and held on to the banister and the wall. The bungalow itself was shaped something like a box, a clumsy, high box pointing into the freezing air with its sharp, wintry lights.

“If you are Mrs. Green, I’ll give you the check,” he said, changing his mind.

“Give here, then.” She took it, took the pen offered with it in her left hand, and tried to sign the receipt on the wall. He looked around, almost as though to see whether his madness was being observed, and came near to believing that someone was standing on a mountain of used tires in the auto-junking shop next door.

“But are you Mrs. Green?” he now thought to ask. But she was already climbing the stairs with the check, and it was too late, if he had made an error, if he was now in trouble, to undo the thing. But he wasn’t going to worry about it. Though she might not be Mrs. Green, he was convinced that Mr. Green was upstairs. Whoever she was, the woman stood for Green, whom he was not to see this time. Well, you silly bastard, he said to himself, so you think you found him. So what? Maybe you really did find him—what of it? But it was important that there was a real Mr. Green whom they could not keep him from reaching because he seemed to come as an emissary from hostile appearances. And though the self-ridicule was slow to diminish, and his face still blazed with it, he had, nevertheless, a feeling of elation, too. “For after all,” he said, “he
could
_ be found!”

JUST BEFORE THE SENTENCING of Tanky Metzger in a case memorable mainly to his immediate family, I wrote a letter—I was induced, pressured, my arm was twisted—to Judge Eiler of the Federal Court. Tanky and I are cousins, and Tanky s sister Eunice Karger kept after me to intercede, having heard that I knew Eiler well. He and I became acquainted years ago when he was a law student and I was presiding over a television program on Channel Seven which debated curious questions in law. Later I was toastmaster at a banquet of the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, and a picture in the papers showed Eiler and me in dinner jackets shaking hands and beaming at each other.

So when Tanky’s appeal was turned down, as it should have been, Eunice got me on the telephone. First she had a cry so passionate that it shook me up in spite of myself. When her control returned she said that I must use my influence. “Lots of people say that you’re friends with the judge.”

“Judges aren’t that way….” I corrected myself: “Some judges may be, but Eiler isn’t.”

Eunice only pressed harder. “Please, Ijah, don’t brush me off. Tanky could get up to fifteen years. I’m not in a position to spell out the entire background. About his associates, I mean….” I knew quite well what she meant; she was speaking of his Mob connections. Tanky had to keep his mouth shut if he didn’t want the associates to order his execution.

I said, “I more or less get the point.”

“Don’t you feel for him?”

“How could I not.”

“You’ve led a very different life from the rest, Ijah, but I’ve always said how fond you were of the Metzgers.”

“It’s true.”

“And loved our father and our mother, in the old days.”

“I’ll never forget them.”

She lost control again, and why she sobbed so hard, no expert, not even the most discerning, could exactly specify. She didn’t do it from weakness. That I can say with certainty. Eunice is not one of your fragile vessels. She is forceful like her late mother, tenacious, determined. Her mother had been honorably direct, limited and primitive.

It was a mistake to say, “I’ll never forget them,” for Eunice sees herself as her mother’s representative here among the living, and it was partly on Shana’s account that she uttered such sobs. Sounds like this had never come over this quiet office telephone line of mine. What a disgrace to Shana that her son should be a convicted felon. How would the old woman have coped with such a wound! Still refusing to surrender her mother to death, Eunice (alone!) wept for what Shana would have suffered.