VI-X

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 Einhom, 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 Bogota, 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, com84 ;: plicated 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 thai even his brother couldn't. I learned about Dingbat that he was full of the thought of justifying himself before the Commissioner and Einhom 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, announced 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 because his tongue, among missing teeth, was very slow, and the poolroom wisecrackers 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 poultryshop 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 unbelievably happy one time when Dingbat brought him along to stand by while he, Dingbat, 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 Dingbat 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 understand 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, flicketyrope-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 Joiiet, 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 misunderstood feelings. Mrs.

Einhorn was frightened by the uniform and wept, hanging on Lollie Fewter's neck. Dingbat was bivouacked around Joiiet 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 immediately. 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 white-leaded 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 colors, 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 Be- OF AUGIB MARCH oirls? 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, looki) ing 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 sulphur and coal, and flames seen by their heat, not light, in the space of noon air among the black, huge Pasiphae 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 spawning-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 oilspotted 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 Einhom'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. Einhom 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 Einhom 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-windmg 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, Einhom 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," Einhom 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 satisfied. I heard from Clem that Einhom 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, complain- '"g 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 I 91 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 re-covered. 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 livingroom 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, "Belch 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 belch 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 soft-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 rock-depth 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 shockproof.

Simon said, "She's on her last legs," and we accepted her decline and ^yrog. But that was because we were already out in the world, "ereas 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 tarn, 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 intelligent views. Mama was confounded, aghast at the thing, and not even she was so simpleminded 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 "^ 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 tomatoburst 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 collariess necks crazy with the assaults of Kansas 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 1 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 prosper- rty than ever. A few times a day Einhom had himself wheeled to his father's bedside to ask advice and get information, now everything ^s 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 ffice became the dangerous hints of the desert. Now you could see d* 97 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 Einhom 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 / wouldn't have failed to see. And his worldgypping 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 faineants 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 Einhom'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, impossible 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 remarkable 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 difficult question by saying it's not up to us to declare what a man should renounce 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, ]ealous, autocratic, carp-mouth, and hypocritical. However, in the SBd, 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 Beiisarius, 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 ^ S 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, Marlboroughs, goldwatch-consuiting 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 herself.

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. Spittoons 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 a done for. It wasn't a habit he could check, joking, having joked all j 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 orthodoxy; 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 firstclass stoicism. Kinsman the undertaker, the Einhorns' tenant, was very disturbed that be could not visit and stopped me in the street to ask after e 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 / 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 Einhom 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 Commissionerwas 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 anyone. But he did recognize the bricky, open spongeball cheeks of the old watcher 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 say- Mgs, for favorable comparisons. Things that didn't always fit. Not that this old lover the Commissioner doesn't deserve citation for having no slarm and dying undisgusted, without last minute revision of lifetime habits.

He was laid out that night in a colossal coffin, at Kinsman's. When 101 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 whiskers 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 receptions 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 presenting 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 hampered 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 sixcylinder 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 Einhom'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-theirheads 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 Einhom, 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 twolegged scrolls. It was dark, and a small group, the shaggy evening regulars, various old faces and voices, gruff, whispered, wheezy, heartgrumbled, noisily swarm-toned, singing off the Hebrew of the evening prayers. Dingbat and Einhorn had to be prompted when it came their turn to recite the orphans' Kaddish.

We went back in Karas's Packard, with Kreindl. Einhom 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.

Einhom 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 neighborhood 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 Strelitzes 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 ancient 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 tor 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 awav. 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 twofaced 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 Einhom was dissatisfied with the state of things. Most of his father's debtors were indicated as Margolis had been--"Fany 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. Einhom 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, anyway; 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. Einhom 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,"

K; 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 be 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 red-headed 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 Einhom's plate glass. Einhom 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 Einhom 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 poolroom 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 stinking Jew cripple.

There was nothing Dingbat could do to her. Anyhow, Einhom had eommanded, "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 Einhom had lost him every cent of his legacy. "It didn't hit only just -, 107 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. Einhom's huge, chainhung 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 reorganizing 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 Einhom. 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 whd 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 exceedingly 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 advsed 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 Grand- tna s successor, they were gone. The bank had closed in the first run, snd the pillared building was now a fish store--Einhom had a view of 109 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-inhands and bow ties, what was correct and incorrect in tucking a hand110 kerchief 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 portiered 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 afternoons, 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 confidence 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 f 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 i buy a suit that didn't fit. But he sat in Zechman's shop, calm, smoking sponged cigarettes, under the inciting proletarian posters, hearing I Latinistic, Germanic, exotic conversation, with large young side of jaw at rest on his collar in the yellow smoke of cold air, mentally blackballing 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 Einhoms. 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 bourgeoisie 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.

1 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 downtown 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 i open, and also canned milk and oysterettes. He was not a fast-thinking I man and didn't have many subjects. When I visited and saw him in } 112 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!" big-mouthed, 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 inquiries 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, decompression, 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 criminals. 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 "o 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 German 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 leathergoods 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 German'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 German 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 German 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 gummachine 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 stillness 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 ^y, were Bulba and German and dozens of others, but nothing was sver made of it--"though you're overgrown. But I won't have you doing "us, Augie. Even Dingbat, and he's no mental giant, knows better Kz 115 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 whoremaster.

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 German 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 highjinks 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 stranger 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 widowed 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 expect, 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 practically 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 snd 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 ^nt to be what he called determined. I never had accepted determinat^n and wouldn't become what other people wanted to make of me .1 had said "No" to Joe German too. To Grandma. To Jimmy. To lots of people. Einhorn had seen this in me. Because 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 j 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 various 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 rela- j tion 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 "US. 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 Einhom, behind the lunch counter. She served very good chili con, omelettes, navy bean soup, and learned to operate the bi 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 "etter 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 f----. 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 sinking 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 Einhoms 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 Tambows 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 curtained, 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. Einhom.

"Congratulations, son," said Einhom 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 Mc Vicker'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 Einhom 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. Einhom 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 inheritances 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 Einhom 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 Einhom 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 Einhom to me on Washington Boulevard. "Take 1! 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 t .121 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 perfectly 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 Einhom 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 Einhom paid with finesse and gave tips, and as I carried him through the parlor where my partner was with another man, smoking a cigarette- Einhom said to me for my private ear, "Don't look at anybody, understand?" Was he afraid to be recognized, 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



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

When I face back I can recognize myself as of this time in intimate tress, with my own and family traits of hands and feet, greenness ^sgrayness of the eyes and up-springing hair; but at myself fully feed and at my new social passes I have to look twice. I don't know tit all at once came to me to talk a lot, tell jokes, kick up, and sudf have views. When it was time to have them, there was no telling I picked them from the air. ie city college Simon and I attended wasn't a seminary in charge of Is who taught Aristotle and casuistry and prepared you for Euro61 games and vices and all the things, true or not true, actual or not it, nevertheless insisted on as true and actual. Considering how I'world there was to catch up with--Asurbanipal, Euclid, Alaric, tinich, Madison, Blackhawk--if you didn't devote your whole 0 it, how were you ever going to do it? And the students were fcen of immigrants from all parts, coming up from Hell's Kitchen, ISicily, the Black Belt, the mass of Polonia, the Jewish streets of oldt Park, put through the coarse sitters of curriculum, and also ag wisdom of their own. They filled the factory-length corridors ant classrooms with every human character and germ, to undergo Bdation and become, the idea was, American. In the mixture |tras beauty--a good proportion--and pimple-insolence, and par- tiaces, gum-chew innocence, labor fodder and secretarial forces, | stability. Dago inspiration, catarrh-hampered mathematical l|flere were waxed-eared shovelers' children, sex-promising busi JSfa daughters--an immense sampling of a tremendous host, the gfcs of holy writ, begotten by West-moving, factor-shoved parj S^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 citysponsored 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 Einhom's any longer, but in women's shoes, in the basement of the downtown clothing shop where Simon was upstairs in men's suits. His situation had gotten better, and he was excited by the change. It was a fashionable store where the management wanted you to be well dressed. But he went beyond anything demanded of a salesman and was not just natty but hot stuff, in a double-breasted striped suit, with a tape measure around his neck. I hardly knew him there, among mirrors, rugs, racks of clothes, eight stories above the Loop; he was big, fast and busy, heavy in his body, and his blood evident in him, in his face.

Below, I was in a bargain department under the sidewalk, seeing and hearing the shoppers pass over the green circles of glass set in concrete, skirts of heavy coats flying as shadows through these lenses, but the weight of bodies actual enough, the glass creaking and soles going every which way. This vault was for the poorer class of customers or for solitary-hornet shoppers, girls with outfits to match, hats and accessories; women with three or four little daughters to buy shoes for on the same day. The goods were heaped up on tables by sizes, and then there 126 be, cardboard-cell walls of boxes and fitting stools in a circle under I. honeycomb of the sidewalk.

|Afew weeks of apprenticeship here and the buyer had me up to the j Hn floor. Only to help out, in the beginning, and run stock for the tesmen or return boxes to the shelves. And then I became a shoe-dog yself, only having to be told by the buyer to cut my hair shorter. He (S a worried guy and his stomach was bad. From shaving twice a day S skin was tender, and, on a Saturday morning when he got the salesen together before opening to give them a speech, his mouth would eed a little at the corners. He hoped to be more severe than he could i, and I expect his trouble was that he was really not the man to direct {Snazzy operation. For the place was a salon, with Frenchy torches ltd by human-arm brackets out from the walls, furled drapes, and junese furniture--such corners as are softened, sheltered from the itside air, even from the air of the Rue de Rivoli, by oriental rugs ggt swallow sounds in their nap, and hangings that make whispers H protocol unavoidable. Differences of inside and outside hard to rec(pile; for up to the threshold of a salon like this there was a tremen- WAS high tension and antagonistic energy asked to lie still that couldn't |$, till; and trying to contain it caused worry and shivers, the kind of log that could erupt in raging, bloody Gordon or Chartist riots and pot up fire like the burning of a mountain of egg crates. This un||wn, superfluous free power streaming around a cold, wet, blackened icago day, from things laid out to be still, incapable, however, of ftg still.

Unancially Simon and I were doing first rate; he was getting fifteen |lars a week before commissions, and I was pulling down thirteen|.

Therefore it didn't matter that we were disqualified from Char|j Practically blind, Mama couldn't do the housework any longer.

|E>n hired a mulatto named Molly Simms, a strong lean woman, ! thirty-five, who slept in the kitchen--on George's old cot, in fact whispered or sang out to us when we came home late. We never ttten the habit of using the front entrance, forbidden to us in the lady's time. the means you, sport," Simon said. JSushwah, you're the one she looks at all the time." l New Year's Day she didn't show up, and I kept things running d the meals. Simon was away too. He had gone to a New Year's ty, leaving the house in his best: bowler hat, polka-dot muffler, > his two-tone shoes, pigskin gloves. And he didn't get back till Ifyening the next day, out of a rapid, sparkling snow. He was " 127 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 citysponsored 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 Einhom's any longer, but in women's shoes, in the basement of the downtown clothing shop where Simon was upstairs in men's suits. His situation had gotten better, and he was excited by the change. It was a fashionable store where the management wanted you to be well dressed. But he went beyond anything demanded of a salesman and was not just natty but hot stuff, in a double-breasted striped suit, with a tape measure around his neck. I hardly knew him there, among mirrors, rugs, racks of clothes, eight stories above the Loop; he was big, fast and busy, heavy in his body, and his blood evident in him, in his face.

Below, I was in a bargain department under the sidewalk, seeing and hearing the shoppers pass over the green circles of glass set in concrete, skirts of heavy coats flying as shadows through these lenses, but the weight of bodies actual enough, the glass creaking and soles going every which way. This vault was for the poorer class of customers or for solitary-hornet shoppers, girls with outfits to match, hats and accessories; women with three or four little daughters to buy shoes for on the same day. The goods were heaped up on tables by sizes, and then there were cardboard-cell walls of boxes and fitting stools in a circle under the honeycomb of the sidewalk.

A few weeks of apprenticeship here and the buyer had me up to the main floor. Only to help out, in the beginning, and run stock for the salesmen or return boxes to the shelves. And then I became a shoe-dog myself, only having to be told by the buyer to cut my hair shorter. He was a worried guy and his stomach was bad. From shaving twice a day his skin was tender, and, on a Saturday morning when he got the salesmen together before opening to give them a speech, his mouth would bleed a little at the corners. He hoped to be more severe than he could be, and I expect his trouble was that he was really not the man to direct a snazzy operation. For the place was a salon, with Frenchy torches held by human-arm brackets out from the walls, furled drapes, and Chinese furniture--such corners as are softened, sheltered from the outside air, even from the air of the Rue de Rivoli, by oriental rugs that swallow sounds in their nap, and hangings that make whispers and protocol unavoidable. Differences of inside and outside hard to reconcile; for up to the threshold of a salon like this there was a tremendous high tension and antagonistic energy asked to lie still that couldn't lie still; and trying to contain it caused worry and shivers, the kind of thing that could erupt in raging, bloody Gordon or Chartist riots and shoot up fire like the burning of a mountain of egg crates. This unknown, superfluous free power streaming around a cold, wet, blackened Chicago day, from things laid out to be still, incapable, however, of being still.

Financially Simon and I were doing first rate; he was getting fifteen dollars a week before commissions, and I was pulling down thirteenfifty.

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, ^ats 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 eatly in the morning. It was true he had fought with two micks; he was drunk, after the party; but she had given him the scratches. Furthermore, she hadn't let him go till good and dark, and then he blundered in the Black Belt streets, in the snow. Lifting the covers to climb into bed, he said to me that we would have to get rid of Molly Simms.

"Where do you get that 'we' stuff?"

"Or she'll think she's boss of the place, and the woman's a wildcat."

We were in our ancient little room, where the stiff wallpaper of many layers bulged out in bubbles and the comfortable snow raced dry on the window and mounted on the sill.

"She'll want to build it up to something. She told me already."

"What did she tell you?"

"That she loves me," he said, grinning but somber. "She's a crazy bitch."

"What? She's close on forty."

"What difference does that make? She's a woman. And I went to see her. I didn't ask her age before getting on her."

He sent her away that week. I noticed how she observed his scratched face at breakfast. She was a thin, gypsyish woman, and her face was very keen; she could put on a manner when she felt like it, but she didn't care a damn who saw her when she didn't, and she gave her sharp, greenish-eyed grin. He wasn't rattled by her; he had decided she was going to be a nuisance, and she caught on at once that he was bent on giving her the shove-ho. She was an experienced woman, rough from being so much on the losing side and from having knocked around from town to town, Washington to Brooklyn to Detroit, with what other stops you'd never know, getting gold teeth here and a slash in the cheek there. But she was an independent and never appealed for any sympathy; was never offered any either. Simon bounced her and hired Sablonka, an old Polish woman who disliked us, a slow-climbing, muttering, mob-faced, fat, mean, pious widow who was a bad cook besides.

But we were neither of us around much. Within a few weeks after she began I was not even living at home, but had dropped from school and was living and working in Evanston. And I was on a peculiar circuit, for a while, of the millionaire suburbs--Highland Park, Kenilworth, and Winnetka--selling things, a specialized salesman in luxury lines and dealing with aristocrats. It was the shoe buyer who put me onto this when asked by a business acquaintance in Evanston to recommend someone; he brought me forward, where Mr. Renting, 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, selfcommenting, 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- w^, I suppose, or girls brought to an old cocotte by their mothers for e* 129 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. Renting saw to it that I was appropriately dressed, in fact made a clotheshorse of me, advancing the money and picking out the tweeds and flannels, plaids, foulards, sport shoes, woven shoes Mexican style, and shirts and handkerchiefs--in the right taste for waiting on a smooth trade of mostly British inclination. When I had sounded the place out good I didn't go for it, but I was too stirred up at first, and enthusiastic, to see it well. I was dressed with splendor and working back of the most thrilling plate glass I had ever seen, on a leafy street, in a fashionable store three steps under a western timber from the main part of Renling's shop, which sold fishing, hunting, camping, golf and tennis equipment, canoes and outboard motors. You see now what I meant by saying that I have to marvel at my social passes, that I was suddenly sure and efficacious in this business, could talk firmly and knowingly to rich young girls, to country-club sports and university students, presenting things with one hand and carrying a cigarette in a long holder in the other. So that Renling had to grant that I had beat all the foreseen handicaps. I had to take riding lessons-- not too many, they were expensive. Renting didn't want me to become an accomplished horseman. "What for?" he said. "I sell these fancy guns and never shot an animal in my life."

But Mrs. Renting 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. Renting was pushing fifty-five, light-haired, only a little gray, small, her throat whiter than her face. She had tiny, dry red freckles and eyes of light color, but not gentle. Her accent was foreign; she came from Luxembourg, and it was a great pride of hers that she was connected with names in the Almanach de Gotha for that part of the world. Once in a while she assured me, "It is all nonsense; I am a democrat; I am a citizen of this country. I voted for Cox, I voted for Al Smith, and I voted for Roosevelt. I do not care for aristocrats. They hunted on my father's estate. Queen Carlotta used to go to chapel near us, and she never forgave the French, because of Napoleon the Third.

I was going to school in Brussels when she died." She corresponded with ladies of the nobility in different places. She exchanged recipes with a German woman who lived in Doom and had something to do with the Kaiser's household. "I was in Europe a few years ago and I saw this baroness. I knew her long. Of course they can never really accept you. I told her, 'I am really an American.' I brought some of my pickled watermelon. There is nothing like that over there, Augie. She taught me how to make veal kidneys with cognac. One of the rare dishes of the world. There's a restaurant now in New York that makes them. People have to make reservations, even now, in Depression time.

She sold the recipe to a caterer for five hundred dollars. I would never do that. I go and cook it for my friends, but I would consider it beneath me to sell an old family secret."

She could cook all right, she had all the cooking arcana. She was known all over for the dinners she threw. Or for those she cooked at other places, because she might decide to make one anywhere, for friends. Her social set were the hotel manager's wife at the Symington, the jewelers, Vietold, 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. Renting--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 "lore force than anybody else around; with her light eyes and the pale, tox stain of her freckles lying in the dust of powder or on the back of faer 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 soirees 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 cuf E and that many looked to you to know what tone to take. The real touchstone was Mrs. Renting, who couldn't be denied leadership. Mr. Renting didn't seem to care and played his cards or ivories, truly detached and passionless. He didn't speak much, and Mrs. Ren Sing said what she was going to say without hearing other opinion. This other opinion, what was said about servants, or about unemployment or the government, was monstrous, no two ways about it. Renting 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 I 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 lifegame where they sign on to lose and then anyhow put up a kind of | underneath battle. He was a fight fan and took me to the matches now: and then, at a ring near the Montrose Cemetery. Saying, at about ten o'clock, in a gathering, "Augie and I have a pair of duckets it would be a shame to waste altogether. We can still make the main event if we leave now." Since there were things men found it necessary to do, Mrs. Renling said, "Well, by all means."

During the bouts Renling didn't holler or carry on, but he ate them up. Anything that took stamina got him--six-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 ear and gas and oil statistics. We'd stop for barbecue chicken in some piny place, on warm sand, like a couple of earth-visiting Plutonians, and sip beer in the perfect clothes we wore, of sporting hound's-tooth or brown Harris tweed, carrying field glasses in cases from the shop: a gloomy, rich gentleman and his gilded nephew or young snob cousin, we must have looked. I was too much engaged with feeling this raiment on me, the closeness of good cloth to my body, or with thoughts of the cock-green Tyrolean brush in my hat and splendor of British shoes, to be able to see Renling as I did see him later. He was an obstacle-eater.

He rushed over roads. He loved feats and worshiped endurance, and he took between his teeth all objections, difficulties, hindrances, and chewed and swallowed them down.

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 ^id, "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 social 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. Renting came down hard on me for getting mixed up with her.

Einhom 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 bum.

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 "secticides. Also, on the roads, on bicycles and in Ford trucks, were the bearded and long-haired House of David Israelites, a meat135 renouncing sect of peaceful, businesslike, pious people, who had a big estate or principality of their own, and farmhouse palaces. They spoke of Shilo 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 lazyblooded.

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 conversation 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 wrathruled 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 moming in the face of these damnation chats. I had to struggle when she called out her whole force of frights, apocalypse death riders, churchporch 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, ^ch 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 whitehaired 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 sate, 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 Renting made popular ttiat season in Evanston--,-1 couldn't witness this, I say, without a push of love and worship in my bowels at the curve of her hips. and triumph ant 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 mine ralwater business. It wasn't easy, because he was a millionaire. He drove a Packard, the same model and color as the Renlings';! 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 twentyfive 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, blackeyed--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, spur-tangled and needing block and tackle to be raised, that it was time, seeing my inattention 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 military 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 weiaht 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 peche flambee, 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' flambee, 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 Einhom'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. Renling because we heard her say once to Mrs. Zeeland that you were her husband's protege. 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 together! 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 person, maybe was an unallowable presumption, too pure,, too special, and a misunderstanding of the real condition of things.; When I walked in to have breakfast with Mrs. Renling next moming 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 I 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, con^cessionaires, 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, moneyman?"

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 longjohns, 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 selftasting 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 powerfully 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 slaying 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 sids 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, i 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 naming 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 hap-) pened 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 I 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.







CHAPTER IX



Just when Mrs. Renling's construction around me was nearly complete J shoved off. The leading and precipitating reason was that sle proposed to adopt me. I was supposed to become Augie Renlirig, live with them, and inherit all their dough. To see what there was behind this more light is needed than probably I can turn on. But first of all there was something adoptional about me. No doubt this had something to do with the fact that we were in a fashion adopted by Grandma Lausch in our earliest days; to please and reward whom I had been pliable and grateful-seeming, an adoptee. If not really so docile and pliable, this was the hidden ball and surprise about me. Why lad the Einhoms, protecting their son Arthur, had to underscore it that they didn't intend to take me into their family? Because something about me suggested adoption. And then there were some people who were. especially adoption-minded. Some maybe wishing to complete their earthly work. Thus Mrs. Renling in her strenuous and hacked-up way, and the whiteness that came from her compression into her intense purposes. She too had her mission on earth.

There's one thing you couldn't easily find out from Mrs. Renling; I never knew what was her most deep desire, owing to her cranky manners and swift conversation. But she wanted to try being a nother.

However, I was in a state of removal from all her intentions for me.

Why should I turn into one of these people who didn't know wlo they themselves were? And the unvarnished truth is that it wasn't a fate good enough for me, because that was what came out clearly when it lecame a question of my joining up. As son. Otherwise I had nothing against them; just the opposite, I had a lot to thank them for. But all the same I Was not going to be built into Mrs. Renling's world, to consolidate what she affirmed she was. And it isn't only she but a class of people who trust they will be justified, that their thoughts will be as substantial as the seven hills to build on, and by spreading their power they will have an eternal city for vindication on the day when other founders have gone down, bricks and planks, whose thoughts were not real and who built on soft swamp. What this means is not a single Tower of Babel plotted in common, but hundreds of thousands of separate beginnings, the length and breadth of America. Energetic people who build against pains and uncertainties, as weaker ones merely hope against them. And, even literally, Mrs. Renling was very strong, and as she didn't do any visible work it must have come, the development in her muscles, from her covert labor.

Mr. Renling also was willing to adopt me and said he would be happy to be my father. I knew it was more than he would say to anyone else. From his standpoint, for me, reared by poor women, it was a big break to be rescued from the rat race and saved by affection.

God may save all, but human rescue is only for a few.

When I told Mrs. Renling that Simon was going to get married and that Cissie was the daughter of a busted drygoods man, she began to work it out and do the sociology of it for me. She showed me the small flat and the diapers hanging in the kitchen, the installment troubles about furniture and clothes and my brother an old man at thirty from anxiety and cut-off spirit, the captive of the girl and babies.

"While you at thirty, Augie, will just start thinking about getting married. You'll have money and culture and your pick of women. " Even a girl like Thea Fenchel. An educated man with a business is a lord. Renling is very clever and has come far, but with science, | literature, and history he would have been a real prince and not just average prosperous--", She pressed in the right place when she mentioned the Fenchels. | It opened up a temptation. But it was only one temptation and that was not enough. I didn't believe Esther Fenchel ever would have me. j And, moreover, though I was still in love with her, my attitude toward 1 her wasn't what it had been. I more and more believed what her sister had said. And then, when I told myself absolutely the truth, I conceded that I didn't have a chance.

Anyway, Mrs. Renling put tender weights on me. She called me "son," and she would introduce me to people as "our youngster," and she petted me on the head and so forth. And I was robust and in possession of my sex; I mean by that that it wasn't stroking a boy of eight on his new glossy hair, and there was something more to be assumed than that I was a child. | ;, That I didn't want to be adopted never spontaneously occurred to ^.:, 152: ' her, and she assumed, as if it were normal but not to be mentioned, something else: that, like everyone, I was self-seeking. So that if I had any objections in reserve, they'd be minor ones, and I'd keep them covered. Or if I had thoughts of helping my brothers or Mama, those thoughts would be bound up and kept in the back. She had never seen Mama and didn't intend to; and when I told her in St. Joe that Simon was coming she didn't ask to meet him. There was a little in it of Moses and the Pharaoh's daughter; only I wasn't a bulrush-hidden infant by any means. I had family enough to suit me and history to be loyal to, not as though I had been gotten off of a stockpile.

So I drew back; I turned down the hints, and when they became open offers I declined them. I said to Mr. Renling, "I appreciate your kindness, and you two are swell. I'll be grateful to you as long as I live.

But I have folks, and I just have a feeling--"

"You fool!" said Mrs. Renling. "What folks? What folks?"

"Why, my mother, my brothers."

"What have they got to do with it? Baloney! Where's your father-- tell me!"

I couldn't say.

"You don't know even who he is. Now, Augie, don't be a fool. A real family is somebody, and offers you something. Renling and I will be your parents because we will give you, and all the rest is bunk."

"Well, let him think about it," said Renling.

I think that Renling was out of sorts that day; he had a cowlick at the back of his hair and the loops of his suspenders showed from his vest. Which indicated that he suffered some, with a despair of his own, nothing to do with me, for as a usual thing he presented himself perfect.

"Oh, what's to think!" Mrs. Renling cried. "You see how he thinks!

He has to learn how to think first, if he wants to be a dumbbell and work for other people all his life. If I let him, he'd be married already to the waitress next door, that Indian with the squashed nose, and waiting for a baby, so in two years he'd be ready to take gas. Offer him gold and he says, no, he chooses shit!"

She went on like that and worked ugly terror on me. Renling was disturbed. Not terribly disturbed, but in the manner a nightbird, that knows all about daylight, will beat through it if he must, a crude, big, brown-barred shape, but only if he must, and then he will fly toward the thick of the woods and get back to the darkness.

And I--I always heard from women that I didn't have the profounder knowledge of life, that I didn't know its damage or its sufferi / ing or its stupendous ecstasies and glories. Being not weak, nor with breasts where its dreads could hit me. Looking not so strong as to be capable of a superior match with it. Other people showed me their achievements, claims and patents, paradise and hell-evidence, their prospectors' samples--often in their faces, in lumps--and, especially women, told me of my ignorance. Here Mrs. Renling was menacing me, crying out that I was the child of fools, dead sure that I would be crushed in the gate, stamped out in the life struggle. For, listen to her, and I was made for easy conditions, and to rise from' a good bed to the comfort of a plentiful breakfast, to dip my roll in yolk and smoke a cigar with coffee, in sunshine and comfort, free from melancholy or stains. Such the kind faction of the world wanted for me, and if I refused my chance there was oblivion waiting for me instead; the wicked would get hold of me. I tried not to reject the truth in what I was told, and I had a lot of regard for the power of women to know it.

But I asked for time to think the matter over, and I could have thought very successfully, for the weather favored it--the first and best of autumn, football weather, cold yellow asters in the fine air, and the full sounds of punting and horses stamping on the bridle path.

I took an afternoon off to consult Einhom.

Einhom's luck had begun to turn again and he had opened a new office, moving from the poolroom to a flat across the street where he could continue to keep an eye on it. The change made him somewhat egotistical, as also the fact that there was a woman in love with him.

It gave him a big boost. He had been putting out his paper for shut-ins again, on the mimeograph machine, and one of his readers, a crippled girl named Mildred Stark, had fallen for him. She wasn't in first youth any more; she was aged about thirty and heavy, but she had a vital if somewhat struggle-weakened head, hair and brows strong and black.

She wrote answers m verse to his inspirational poems and at last she had her sister bring her to the office, where she made a scene and wouldn't go away until Einhom had promised to let her work for him.

She didn't ask for any salary, only that he should rescue her from homeboredom.

Mildred's trouble was with her feet, and she wore orthopedic shoes. They made slow going, and, as I later had the chance to learn, Mildred was somebody for whom impulses came fast and in force, and these impulses ran onto non-conductors and were turned back, stored up until she got dark in the face. In her person, as I say, she was heavy, and her eyes were black, her skin was not well lit. To de154 velop from crippled girl into crippled woman, in the family, in the house such staleness and hardship--that's what it makes for, darkness, saturn'inity, oversat grievance. Being without what's needed to put a satisfied, not dissatisfied, face at the window.

But Mildred wouldn't accept lying down and dying, though she never recovered from looking near middle-aged and dark and sore, as a woman forced to sit, or someone who has missed out on children, or whom men have swindled. It could not be rubbed out, though it was arrested by her love for Einhorn, who permitted her to love him. In the beginning she came only two or three times a week to type some letters for him, and ended by becoming his full-time secretary, as well as other things--his servant and confidante. Someone who could literally say, biblically, "Thy handmaiden." Pushing his rolling chair for him, she needed its support in her limping and foot-dragging. He sat, well satisfied, well served. He looked severe and even impatient, but the truth was otherwise. The spirit I found him in was the Chanticleer spirit, by which I refer to male piercingness, sharpness, knotted hard muscle and blood in the comb, jerky, flaunty, haughty and bright, with luxurious slither of feathers.

Ah, but there are other facts that have to be satisfied too, after this comparison. It's too bad but it is so. Humankind does not have that sort of simplicity--not the single line that a stick draws on the ground but a vast harrow of countless disks. His spirit was piercing, but there has to be mentioned his poor color, age-impoverished and gray; plus the new flat's ugliness; dullness of certain hours, dry ness of days, drear Lness and shabbiness-mentioned that the street was bare, dim and low in life, bad; and that there were business thoughts and malformed growths of purpose, terrible, menacing, salt-patched with noises and news, and pimpled and dotted around with lies, both practical and gratuitous.

To Tillie Einhorn, as far as anybody could tell, Mildred was acceptable.

The force of Einhorn on Tillie was such that to judge him wrong was too much of an operation for her. Besides, you have to think of a condition of people that gets into them like a cobbler's stretcher into a shoe; this stretcher for Tillie was Einhorn's special need as a cripple.

She was used to making allowances.

Well, this was how Einhorn was situated when I came to ask him tor advice; I found him too busy to give me his attention. He kept ookmg to the street as I talked, then asked me to push him to the oilet, which I did, on the gaggling casters that could, as always, stand an oiling. All he replied was, "Well, it's pretty unusual. It's quite an offer. You were born lucky." He gave it less than half his mind, thinking I was telling him the news that the Renlings wanted to adopt me, not that I considered refusing. Naturally he was wrapped up in his own affairs. And I could look at Mildred Stark if I wanted an example of how someone became attached to, and then absorbed into, a family.

I finished the afternoon downtown, and while I was eating a liver sandwich at Elfman's and watching the unemployed musicians on the Dearborn corner, I saw a guy named Clarence Ruber passing and knocked on the plate glass with my ring till he noticed me and came in to talk. I knew this Ruber from Crane College, where he had run a baseball pool at the Enark Cafe; he was quiet and dirty-spoken, smooth in the face, fat behind, with a slow, shiny Assyrian fringe on his head and a soft-bosomed fashion of clothes, silky shirts, yellow silk tie, and gray flannel suit. Looking me over, he saw that I was doing well too, in contrast to the Depression musicians and the other eaters, and we traded information. He had opened a small shop on the South Shore, in partnership with a cousin's widow who had a little money. They dealt in lamps, pictures, vases, piano scarves, ashtrays and such bric-a-brac, and since the cousin and his wife had been, before the Bust, interior decorators with big hotels for clients, they did a good trade. "There's dough in this. It's one of these rackets where people pay for being handled a particular way. Dazzle business. Because, if they knew it, they could buy a lot of this crap at the dime store, but they can't trust their judgment. It's a woman's line," he said, "and you have to understand how to tickle their bellies." I asked him what he was doing here among the musicians. "Musicians, my ass," he said. He had been seeing a man in the Bumham Building who had invented a rubberized paint for bathrooms, a waterproof product that, with the widow-cousin's contacts in hotels, ought to make him a fortune. It kept walls from rotting; the water didn't harm the plaster.

The inventor was just beginning to go into production. Ruber himself was going to go out and sell it, for there was a lot of money in it.

Therefore, he said, they would need a man to replace him in the shop. And since I had experience with rich customers, a ritzy clientele, I was just the man for the substitution. "I don't want any more f---- relatives around; they get in my hair. So if you're interested come out and have a look at the setup. If you like it we can talk terms."

Seeing that I could not stay with the Renlings unless I became their adopted son, which by now I knew would suffocate me, no other arrangement possible after I had turned them down, I closed a deal with Ruber. I made up a story to tell Renling about a marvelous busi156 ness opportunity of a lifetime with a school chum, and I pulled out nf Evanston in a cold air--Mrs. Renling iron with anger toward me, and Renling himself on the cool side of well-wishing, but saying any- way that I was to come to him if ever I needed help.

I took a room on the South Side, in a house on Blackstone Avenue, four flights up, three of mingy red carpet and one of thready wood, up in the clumsy dust, next door to the can. Here I wasn't far from the Nelson Home, and as it was a Sunday morning when I set myself up, and I had time, I went to visit Grandma Lausch. By now she was almost like everyone else in the joint, to my eyes, having lost her distinguishing independence, weakened, mole-ish, needing to look around for her old-time qualities when she greeted me, as if she had laid them down, forgetting where. She didn't seem to recall what grievances she had against me either, and when we sat down together on a bench in the parlor, between some silent old people, asked me, "And how is--is jener, the idiot?" She had forgotten Georgie's name, and it horrified me; yes, it sent me for a loop until I remembered to think how small a part of her life compared with the whole span she had spent with us, and how many bayous and deadwaters there must be to the sides of an old varicose channel. And as there is a strength or stubbornness about people that doesn't want the first fact about them spoken, also there is a time when that fact or truth can't any more be helpful--what can it do for the ruin of an old woman?-- but it appears as a blot in the eyes over old expressions. What good can this fact be so near death? Except as a benefit to its witnesses, since we human creatures have many reasons to believe there's advantage and profit for someone in everything, even in the worst muds, wastes, and poison by-products; and a charm of chemical medicine or industry is how there are endless uses in cinders, slag, bone, and manure. But in reality we're a long way from being able to profit from everything. Yes, and besides even a truth can get cold from solitude and solitary confinement, and doesn't live long outside the Bastille; if the rescuing republican crowd is the power of death it doesn't live at all. This was how it was with Grandma Lausch, who had only a few months left of life. Whose Odessa black dress was greasy and whitening; who gave me an old cat's gape; who maybe didn't too well place me; who had this blob of original fact, of what had primarily counted with her, like a cast in the eye; weakly, even infant and lunatic. Her we always thought so powerful and shockproof! It really threw me. Yet I also thought she did remember who I was and that old consciousness was not lost but in a phase of a turntable that turned too slowly. I even thought that she appreciated the visit and said I was her neighbor now and would come again. But I couldn't make it, and the same winter she died of pneumonia.

In my new job I had a downgrade from the start. Ruber's cousin's widow was a dissatisfied woman; she didn't trust me very much. This lady--she wore her fur coat in the style of a cloak in the store, with a hat of the same creature like a prickly crown, and a face always aware of its imperfections and suffering from them, wretched skin and meager lips--she had stomach troubles and a stiff clamp on bad temper. She cramped my style, the style learned with what I thought was anyway a better class of customers, and she wouldn't let me come near the important ones. And in the office she locked drawers; she didn't want me to know costs. What she wanted was to confine me to the work in the back, packing, wrapping, matting, framing, and winding cellophane on lampshades. So that, with being kept in the rear or out on errands to various little factories and potteries in lofts around Wabash Avenue, I quick caught on that she was pushing me toward the door.

And as soon as the rubberized paint went into production I became a salesman for it, as I think Ruber too had all the time intended. He said that the shop didn't actually need me since I seemed satisfied to be errand boy and didn't take enough interest in the business. "I thought you'd have some ideas, not be just a salary man, but that ain't the way it's been," he told me.

"Well," I said, "Mrs. Ruber has ideas about me."

"Of course," said Ruber, "I seen she's been trying to make you suck hind titty. But the thing is why you let her."

Now he took me off salary and put me on a commission basis. There was nothing I saw to do but accept, and went around on the streetcars and El with a can of the paint, to hotels, hospitals, and such, trying to get orders. It was a flop. I couldn't land anything, money was so tight, and I was. dealing with a peculiar sort of people. I had leads from Mrs. Ruber, into hotels, where she claimed to be better known than she actually was (or managers would not acknowledge her till they knew my business); and, moreover, these were not easy people to lay hold of, in the backstairs and workshops of the cream, noble marble, footmanned, razmataz, furnished-for-pontiffs lakeside joints.

Also, many hotels had painting contractors or graft arrangements; controlled by receivers, appointed by the courts, the original corporations in bankruptcy; the receivers were themselves interested in the insurance, plumbing, catering, decorating, bars, concessions, and the rest of the interlocking system. To be sent by the manager to the nainting contractor was to be given a runaround. They didn't want to see my rubber paint. I waited on enough of them in outside offices, which I don't say breeds the best thoughts, and soon this was clear.

It was now full winter, and barbarous how raw; so going around the city on the spidery cars, rides lasting hours, made you stupid as a stoveside cat because of the closeness inside; and there was something fuddlino besides in the mass piled up of uniform things, the likeness of small parts, the type of newspaper columns and the bricks of buildings.

To sit and be trundled, while you see: there's a danger in that of being a bobbin for endless thread or bolt for yard goods; if there's not much purpose anyway in the ride. And if there's some amount of sun in the dusty weep marks of the window, it can be even worse for the brain than those iron-deep clouds, just plain brutal and not mitigated.

There haven't been civilizations without cities. But what about cities without civilizations? An inhuman thing, if possible, to have so many people together who beget nothing on one another. No, but it is not possible, and the dreary begets its own fire, and so this never happens.

I did make a few sales. Karas, Einhorn's cousin-in-law, in the Holloway Enterprises, gave me a break and bought a few gallons to try in a little Van Buren Street gray-bedding hotel, almost a bum's flop, near the railroad station, and he said he would never use it in any of his better establishments because it made a loud smell of rubber in the heat and moisture of the shower room. There was also a doctor at State and Lake, a buddy of Ruber's, an abortionist; he was doing over his suite and I got an order from him; and here Ruber tried to chisel from the commission; he didn't need me, he said, to make this sale. I would have quit him flat then and there if I hadn't gotten pretty familiar by then with the situations-wanted columns of the Tribune. I wasn't earning enough to give anything toward Mama's support any more, but at least I was making expenses and Simon didn't have to support me. Of course he beefed because I had quit Renling. How was he going to marry if he had to keep Mama by himself? I said, "You and Cissy can move in with her." But this made him look black, and I understood that Cissy wasn't having any of that, the old flat and Mama to take care of. "Well, Simon, you know I don't want to stick you,"

I said, "and that I'll try my best." We were having coffee in Raklios's, and my pot of paint was on the table and my gloves on top of that. pen at the seams, the gloves showed how I had lost my grip on prosperity.

And I was getting dirty, for a salesman, for whose appearance ere are laws which are supposed to guarantee a certain firmness of personality. I had fallen below the standard, unable to afford cleaning and repairing, nor was able to spare much feeling for it.

The way I was living was becoming crude, and I was learning some squatter lessons. Up in my room the heat didn't reach, and I wore my coat and socks at night. In the morning I went down to the drugstore to warm up on a cup of coffee and lay out my route for the day.

I carried my razor in my pocket and shaved downtown with the free hot water, liquid soap, and paper towels of public toilets, and I ate in YMCA cafeterias or one-arm joints and beat checks as often as I could. Vigorous at nine, my hope ran out by noon, and then one of my hardships was that I had no place of rest. I could try to pass the afternoon in Einhorn's new office; he was accustomed to people on his bench, outside the railing, who had no special tasks. But I who had worked for him had to be doing something, and he would send me on his business. So that I might as well have been on my own, once I was already on the streetcar. Besides I had an obligation to Simon that would not let me loaf, although simply to move around was in itself of no advantage. It was not only for me that being moored wasn't permitted; there was general motion, as of people driven from angles and corners into the open, by places being valueless and inhospitable to them. In the example of the Son of Man having no place to lay His head; or belonging to the world in general; except that the illuminated understanding of this was absent, nobody much guessing what was up on the face of the earth. I, with my can of paint, no more than others. And once I was under way, streetcars weren't sufficient, nor Chicago large enough to hold me.

Coming out of an El station one day, when the snow was running off, at the tail end of winter, I ran into Joe German whom I hadn't seen since after the robbery. He was in a good blue coat of narrow style, and a freshly blocked fedora, dented like a soft bread by the fingers. He was buying magazines, out of the wall of them that hung by the stand. His nose was raised up and he looked ruddy and well, benefited by a good breakfast and the cold morning--although it would have been more like his habit of life to have come from an all-night poker game. Sizing me up, with my sample paint can, it was plain to him that I was having it bad. I had the face of someone pretty much beat.

"What's this racket you're in?" he asked me, and when I explained it he said, but not in a triumphing way, "Sucker!" He was certainly right, and I didn't put much force into defending myself. "It's a way of meeting people," I answered, "and something may open up one of these days.".

"Yes " he said, "a deep hole. What if you do meet people--you think somebody is going to do something for you because you're a pretty boy? Give you a big break? These days they take care of their relatives first. And what have you got in the way of relatives?"

I didn't have much. Five Properties was still driving his milk truck, but I didn't mean to ask him for a job. Coblin had lost everythin except his paper route in the crash. Anyway, I hadn't seen much of either of them since the Commissioner's funeral.

"Come and have some cheese and pie on me," he said, and we went into a restaurant.

"What's up with you?" I said, for I didn't want to ask explicitly; it was bad manners. "Do you ever see Sailor Bulba?"

"Not that dumbhead, he's no good to me. He's in an organization now, slugger for a union, and it's all he's good for. Besides, what I'm in now, I have no use for anybody like that. But I could do something for you if you wanted to earn a fast buck."

"Is it risky?"

"Nothing like what worried you last time. I don't go in for that any more myself. It's not legitimate, what I'm doing, but it's a lot easier and safer. And what do you think makes the buck so fast?"

"Well. what is it?"

"Running immigrants over the border from Canada, from around Rouse's Point over to Massena Springs, New York."

"No," I said, not having forgotten my conversation with Einhorn.

"I can't do that."

"There's nothing to it."

"And if you're caught?"

"And if I'm caught? And if I'm not caught?" he said with savage humor, poking fun at me. "You want me to go around and peddle paint? I'd rather sit still, like the pilot light inside the gas; and I can't sit around or I'd go bats."

"Thi;> is federal."

"You don't have to tell me what it is. I only asked you because you look as if you needed a break. I make this trip two and three times a month, and I'm getting tired of doing all the driving. So if you want to come along and be my relief on the road as far as Massena Springs I'll give you fifty bucks and all expenses. Then if you decide to come the rest of the way I'll up it to a hundred. There'll still be time to think it over on the way, and we'll be back in three days."

I took him up on this and considered it a break. Fifty dollars, clear, would go a long way toward easing my mind about Simon. I was fed i* 161 up with trying to peddle the rubberized paint, and my reckoning was that with a little dough to tide me over I could spend a week or two looking for something else, perhaps dope out a way to get back to college, for I had not altogether given up on that. All this was how I | decided, in my outer mind, to go; with the other, the inner, I wanted a change of pressure, and to get out of the city. As for the immigrants, my thought about them was. Hell, why shouldn't they be here with the rest of us if they want to be? There's enough to go around of everything including hard luck.

I gave the paint to Tillie Einhorn, to decorate her bathroom, and early in the morning Joe German picked me up in a black Buick; it was souped up, I could tell the first instant, from the hell-energy that gives you no time to consider. I wasn't even well settled, with spare shirt wrapped in a newspaper in the back seat and my coat straightened under me, before we were on the far South Side, passing the yards of Carnegie Steel; then the dunes, piled up like sulphur; in and out of Gary in two twists and on the road for Toledo, where the speed increased, and the mouth of the motor opened out like murder, not panting, but liberated to do what it was made for.

Slender, pressing down nervous on the wheel, with his long nose of | broken form and the color running fast up his face and making a narrow crossing on his forehead, German was like a jockey in his feeling toward the car. You could see what pleasure he got out of finding what j he needed to wrap his nerves in. Outside Toledo I took the wheel, | and occasionally found him looking sardonically sidewise from his < narrow face, a long dark eye making a new measure of me from its splotch of discoloration by fatigue or by the trouble of a busy will; and he said--they seemed his first words to me, though they weren't literally--"Step it up!"

So I apologized that I didn't have the feel of the car yet and obeyed. But he didn't like my driving, particularly that I hesitated to pass trucks on the hills, and took the wheel from me before we had covered much i of the ground to Cleveland. I It was beginning April, and the afternoon was short, so that it was getting dark when we approached Lackawanna. Some way beyond it we stopped for gas, and Gorman gave me a bill to buy some hamburgers at a joint next door. There I went to the can first, and from the window saw a state trooper by the pump, examining the car, and no sign of German. I slipped into the filthy side hall and glanced into the kitchen, where an old Negro was washing dishes, and passed behind him without being noticed, over a bushel in the doorway, into the intervening yard, or lot, and I saw Gorman beating it along the wall of the garage, swiftly, towa'rd the border of trees and bushes where the fields began. I ran parallel, having a start of ten yards or so and met him back of these trees, and there was almost a disaster before he recognized me, for he had a pistol in his hand--the gun Einhom had warned me he carried. I clapped my hand to the barrel and pushed it away.

"What've you got that out for?"

"Take your hands off, or I'll clobber you with it!"

"What's got into you? What're you running from the cops for? It's only for speeding."

"The car's hot. Speeding hell!"

"I thought it was your car!"

"No, it's stolen."

We started to run again, hearing the motorcycle in the lot, and threw ourselves down in plowed field. It was open country, but dusk.

The trooper came as far as the trees and looked but did not come through. Luck was with us that he didn't, since Gorman had him covered with the gun on a sod for a rest, and was cowboy enough to shoot, so that I tasted puke in my throat from terror. But the trooper turned off, splitting the beams of his lamp on the evergreens, and we beat it over the plowland to a country road well back from the highway.

This place, for sure, had a demon; it was blue, lump-earthed, oil-rank, and machinery was cooking in the dark, not far back of us, into heaven, from the Lackawanna chimneys.

"You weren't going to shoot, were you?" I said. He was reaching inside his sleeve with a lifted shoulder, almost like a woman pulling up an inside strap. He put away his gun. Each of us, I suppose, was thinking in his own fashion that we didn't make a pair--I of the vanity of being so leaping dangerous, and he, despisingly, that I must have shit in my blood, or such poolroom contempt.

"What did you run for?" he said.

"Because I saw you running."

"Because you were scared."

"That too."

"Did the guy in the garage notice two of us?"

"He must have. And if he didn't somebody in the hamburger joint must be wondering where I went."

'"^en we'd better split up. We're not far outside of Buffalo, and pick you up there tomorrow in front of the main post office at nine oclock." r "Pick me up?"

"In a car. By then I'll have one. You've got the tenner I gave you for the chow--that'll take care of you. There must be a bus into town.

You go up the road and take it; I'll go down. Let a couple of buses go by so we won't be getting on the same one."

So we split up, and I felt safer without him.

Narrow, tall, sharp in the way his shoulders, hat, and features broke, he seemed, as he watched me get started up the road, like a city specialist on this unfamiliar interurban ground. Then he turned swiftly too, going low on his legs downhill, fast, scraping on the stones.

I tramped a considerable distance to take the first crossroad back to the highway. Headlights on a barn approached around a curve and made me drop down. It was a state police car, and what would it be doing on a side lane like this if not looking to pick us up? Probably German hadn't even bothered to change the license plates of the car.

I got off the lane into the fields then, and made up my mind to take the shortest way back to Lackawanna and not to meet him in Buffalo. He was too inspired for me, and his kind of outlawry wasn't any idea of mine; therefore why should I be sprawling in the mud waiting for him to commit a hothead crime and get me in as accessory for a stiff sentence?

When I had left him to go up the road I had already begun to think of this and was actually on my way back to Chicago.

I began to run cross-country because I was tired of picking my way, and I came out to the highway near town, where the edge of Lake Erie approaches. And there I saw a crowd, forming up in old cars, with banners and signs, blocking the traffic. I think it was an organization of the unemployed, many veterans, wearing Legion caps; I was too hard pushed in the crude hard air of darkness to get it straight. But they were gathering for a march on Albany or Washington to ask for a relief increase and starting out to meet the Buffalo contingent. I came up slowly and saw that there were more troopers around, who were trying to keep traffic open, and also town cops, and I figured it to be safer to mingle than to try to go into town. By the lamps I was able to see how much mud had stuck to me, too wet to get off. There was such yelling and sheaving of old engines jockeying to form a line that I got to the tail gate of a jalopy, and, giving a man a hand putting in planks for benches and laying a tarpaulin over the top, I made myself a part of his outfit in the dusk. And now, though no distance at all from Lackawanna, I was about to start for Buffalo anyhow. I might have returned to the fields and gone around into town, but I calculated that, looking as I did, I might be picked up.

As I was tying down canvas behind the cab the crowd was slowly , j ^k, and from the beam that was painting back and forth on , oeoole, yellow and red, I knew that a squad car was forcing a path nd saw tbfe eye of it swiveling and rolling smoothly from the top. I twisted backward from the running board to look, and it was as fear had inspired me to suspect, Joe German was sitting in the back seat between two troopers, with blood lines over his chin showing that he had probably tried to fight with them and they had opened up his lip, doing their cops' work. This was what he had come a long way to get, and got it, and looked not dazed but bright awake--which may have been an appearance, as the red of the blood appeared black. I felt powerfully heartsick to see him.

The squad car passed, and we started off in the truck at a slow sway, something like twenty men stowed in shank to shank behind the black open roar of the engine. There was nasty weather; rain, first thing, and the wet blowing in, which made a human steam like the steam of rinsing in a dairy, and while we were squelching and rocking over the swells of the road I was thinking of the misery of Joe German's being picked up, how they must have nabbed him, and if he had had a chance to pull his gun. Behind the canvas I didn't get to see the gas station and whether the car we had left was still there, or anything else. Until the truck got into the city I couldn't see a thing.

I dropped off the tail gate in the middle of town and found myself a hotel where I was dumb enough not to ask the price; but I was more concerned that the clerk shouldn't see the dirt on me and carried the coat on rny arm. Besides, I was so sick over Joe German I didn't think.

Then, when they had beaten me out of two bucks in the morning, or about twice what a fleabag like that should have cost, and after I had paid for a big breakfast, which I had to have, there wasn't enough money for a bus ticket back to Chicago. I telegraphed Simon to wire me some money, and then I went to see the main drag, and I took the excursion to Niagara Falls where nobody seemed to have any business that day, only a few strays beside the crush of the water, like early sparrows in the cathedral square before Notre Dame has opened its doors; and then in the brute sad fog you know that at one time this sulphur coldness didn't paralyze everything, and there's the cathedral to prove it.

So I calked around the rails by the dripping black crags until it began to drizzle again, and I returned to see whether Simon's reply had come in yet. Till late afternoon I kept asking, and at last the girl in the cage looked tired of seeing me, and I recognized that I had the option of another night in Buffalo or hitting the road. And I was dim with the troubles I had got into, all this speeding and scattering, Gorman in the squad car pressing through the crowd, then the terrific emptying of Niagara waters, and also hobbling on the Buffalo cars, eating peanuts and hard rolls, my bowels like a screw of rubber, and the town unfriendly and wet--because if I hadn't been in such a dim state I'd have realized sooner that Simon wasn't going to send any money. But all of a sudden I realized that that was so. He might not even have it to spare, just after the first of the month when there was the rent to pay.

Thinking this, I told the telegraph girl to forget about the wire, I was leaving town.

Not to be picked up on the road in northern New York, I took a ticket to Erie at the Greyhound Station, and I was in the Pennsylvania corner that evening. To get off in Erie gave me no feeling that I had arrived somewhere, in a place that was a place in and for itself, but rather that it was one which waited on other places to give it life by occurring between them; the breath of it was thin, just materialized, waiting.

The flop I found was in a tall clapboard hotel, a kind of bone of a building, with more laths than plaster, with burns in the blanket, splits in the sheet opening on the mattress and its many stains. But I didn't care too much where I was; it would have been a nuisance to care; and I dropped off my shoes and climbed in. It sounded like a gale on the lake that night.

Nevertheless it was a serene warm morning when I went out on the road to start thumbing. I wasn't alone; people in great numbers were on the highways. Sometimes they traveled in pairs, but more usually alone, because it was easier to get rides alone. There was the CCC, draining swamps and planting trees in the distance, and on the road was this wanderer population without any special Jerusalem or Kiev in mind, or relics to kiss, or any idea of putting off sins, but only the hope their chances might be better in the next town. In this competition it was hard to get lifts. Appearances were against me too, for the Renling clothes were both smart and filthy. And then in my hurry to put distance between me and the stretch of road near Lackawanna where Joe German had been picked up, I didn't have the patience to stand and flag for long but walked.

The traffic dived and quivered past me, and when I reached a place near Ashtabula, Ohio, where the Nickel Plate line approaches the highway, I saw a freight going toward Cleveland with men sitting on 166 the boxcars, and in the flats, and in under-angles of gondolas, and eight or ten guys shagging after and flipping themselves up on the rungs. I ran too, down from the unlucky highway, up the rocky grade where I felt the thinness of my shoes, and took hold of a ladder. I wasn't agile, so ran with the red car, unable to swing from the ground until I was helped by a boost from behind. I never saw who it was that gave it-- someone among the runners who didn't want me tearing my arms from their sockets or breaking the bones of my feet.

So I climbed to the roof. It was a high-backed cattle car topped with broad red planks. Ahead the slow bell was turning over and over, and I was in plenty of company, the rough-looking crowd of non-paying passengers the Nickel Plate was carrying. I felt the movement of the stock against the boards and sat in the beast smell. Until Cleveland, with the great yards and overbuilt hills and fume, chaff and grit flying at your face.

There was a hotshot or nonstop express to Toledo making up in the yards, the word came, which would be ready in a couple of hours.

Meanwhile I went up to the city to get some food. Going back to the yards, I climbed down a steep path, like a cliff of Pisgah, below the foundations of-factories, and emerged on rusty tracks by the Sherwin Williams paint factory--the vast field of rails and hummocky ground to the sides covered with weed stalks where people were waiting: catching a nap, reading old papers, mending.

This was both a boring and a tense afternoon, soon dark with oncoming rain, while we squatted in the weeds, waiting; brackish and yet nerve-touching. Therefore I rushed up when I saw by the rising and motion along the darkening line that the train was coming. In the sudden shift toward the open and the tracks it seemed that hundreds had risen, the most distant already closing in upon the train. The locomotive came slowly, like a bison, the iron shell of the boiler black.

The train crashed its boxes and went backwards a moment. It was picking up its last cars. In that moment I got under a gondola carrying coal, into the angle of it between the slope end and the wheels. When we rolled forward the wheels creaked and bit out sparks like grindstones, and the couplings played free and hooked tight in a mechanical game into which your observation and brain were forced. Having to recognize whose kingdom you were in, with tons of coal at the back and ndmg in the tiny blind gallery with the dashing dark rain at the sides. There were four of us sitting in this space; a lean, wolfy man, who stretched his legs clear over the wheels, on the bar, while the rest of us fetched ours up short. I saw his face when he lit a butt, grinning and somewhat sick, blues under his eyes like chain links. He held his fingers in his crotch. On the other side was a young boy. The fourth man, as I didn't know till we were chased off the train at Lorain, was a Negro.

All I saw of him as we were running was his yellow raincoat, but when I caught up by a trackside shack he was leaning on the boards, his big eyes shut, a stumpy, heavy man getting his breath with much trouble and his beard sparkling about his mouth with sweat or drizzle.

The hotshot stopped at Lorain; it wasn't a hotshot at all. Or perhaps they stopped it because it carried too many free riders. These made a ragged line, like a section gang that draws aside at night back of the flares as a train comes through, only much more numerous. There were flashlights swinging from car to car as the cops emptied them, and then the train went off, cleared of riders, down into the semaphore lights and the oily blues of the track.

This stocky young boy Stoney was his nameattached himself to me and we went into the town. The harbor with its artificial peaks and cones of sand and coal was visible from the muddy main stem. In the featureless electric faces of bulbs hung on the dredges, cranes, cables, the rain looked like nothing either and was nullified. I laid out some of my money for bread and peanut butter and a couple of bottles of milk and we had supper.

It was after ten and streaming rain. I wasn't going to chase another freight that night, I was too bushed. I said, "Let's find a place to flop," and he agreed.

On the sidings we found some boxcars retired from service, of great age, rotten and swollen, filled with old paper and straw, a cheesy old hogshead stink of cast-off things such as draws rats, a marly or fungus white on the walis. There we bedded down in the refuse. I buttoned up, for security as well as the cold, and stretched out. There was plenty of room at first. But till far into the night men kept arriving, roiling back the door, and passing back and forth over us, discussing where to sleep.

I heard them coming, grating with the feet along the rows of cars, until our boxcar was so full that newcomers would look in and then pass on.

It was no time to be awake, or half awake, with the groaning and sick coughing, the grumbles and gases of bad food, the rustling in paper and straw like sighs or the breath of dissatisfaction. And when I fell asleep I didn't sleep long, for the man next to me began to press up, and I thought it was only his unconscious habit of the night, that he was used to a bedmate, and I just drew away, but he drew after. Then he must have worked long in secret to open his pants and first to touch my hand as if by accident and then to guide my fingers. I had trouble getting free because he finally held my wrist with both hands, and I knocked his head against the. boards. That couldn't have hurt much, the wood was so rotten it was almost soft, but he let me go and said almost with laughter, "Don't raise a fuss." He rolled back from me a space. I sat up and I reasoned that if I didn't move he might think he wasn't unwelcome to me. As a matter of fact he was waiting and he began to talk, with a hard tremble, both cynical and hopeful, about the filth of women, and when I heard that I went away, helping myself up in back against the wall and stepping over bodies to where I had seen Stoney lie down. A bad nightthe rain rattling hard first on one side and then on the other like someone nailing down a case, or a coop of birds, and my feelings were big, sad, comfortless, of a thinking animal, my heart acting like an orb filled too big for my chest, not from revulsion, which I have to say I didn't feel, but over-all general misery.

And I lay down by Stoney, who roused a little, recognized me, and fell asleep. Only it was cold; toward morning, deathly cold; and now and then we'd find we were pressed close, rubbing faces and bristles, and we would separate. Until-it was too freezing to take account of being strangerswe were trembling too hardand had to clasp close. I took off my coat and spread it over the both of us to keep in the warmth a little, and even so we lay shivering.

There was a rooster some brakeman's family nearby owned, and he had the instinct or the temerariousness to crow in the wet and ashes of the backyard. This morning signal was good enough for us, and we got out of the car. Was it really day? The sky was dripping, and cloud was running as light as smoke; there was pink in it, but whether that was the reflection of the sun or of railroad fire how could you tell?

We entered the station where there was a stove of which the bottom skirt was hot to transparency, and we steamed ourselves by it. The heat pushed into your face.

"Stand me a cup of coffee," said Stoney.

It took five such days of travel to get back to Chicago, for I got a tram to Detroit by error. A brakeman told us there was a train for Toledo coming soon, and I went to catch it. Stoney came along. Our luck seemed good. Because of the hour this freight was practically empty. We had a car to ourselves. Furniture must have been hauled in it the last trip, for there was clean excelsior on the floor, and we made beds in this paper fleece and lay there sleeping.

I woke when the angle of the sun was very narrow in the door and guessed it must be noon. If it was that late we must already have gone through Toledo and be crossing Indiana. But these oak woods and the deep-lying farms and scarce cattle were not what I had seen in Indiana crossing it with Joe German. We were going very fast, flying, the locomotive and the empty cars. Then I saw a Michigan license on a truck at a crossing.

"We must be bound for Detroit; we missed Toledo," I said.

As the sun went south it was back of us and not on the left hand; we were going north. There was no getting off either. I sat down, legs hanging at the open door, back-broken and dry, hungry furthermore, and my eyes followed the spin of the fields newly laid out for sowing, the oak woods with hard bronze survivor leaves, and a world of great size beyond, or fair clouds and then of abstraction, a tremendous Canada of light.

The short afternoon soon darkened; between the trees and stumps it turned blue. The towns became industrial, factories riding up and tank cars and reefers sitting on the spurs. Queer that I didn't worry more about being taken these hundreds of miles out of my way when there were only a few quarters and some thinner stuff in my pocket, about a buck in all. Riding in this dusk and semiwinter, it was the way paltry and immense were so mixed, perhaps, the jointed spine of train racing and swerving, the steels, rusts, bloodlike paints extended space after space in the sky, and then other existence, space after space.

Factory smoke was standing away with the wind, and we were in an industrial sub-town--battlefield, cemetery, garbage crater, violet welding scald, mountains of tires sagging, and ashes spuming like crests in front of a steamer, Hooverville crate camps, plague and war fires like the boiling pinnacle of all sackings and Napoleonic Moscow burnings.

The freight stopped with a banging and concussion, and we jumped out and were getting over the tracks when someone got us by the shoulders from behind and gave us each a boot in the ass. It was a road dick. He wore a Stetson and a pistol hung on the front of his vest; his whisky face was red as a winter apple and a crazy saliva patch shone on his chin. He yelled, "Next time I'll shoot the shit out of you!"

So we ran, and he threw rocks past us. I wished that I could lay for him till he came off duty and tear his windpipe out.

However, we were legging it over the rails on the lookout for anything swift that might come down on us out of the steel coldly laid out in the dark and the shrivels of steam and cyclops headlamps, a looserolling car. Also the coal rumbled in the hoppers and bounded grim to the ground. We ran, and I didn't feel angry any more.

A highway marker told us we were twenty miles from Detroit. As we stood there the fellow came up who had ridden out of Cleveland under the gondola with us, the wolf-looking one. Though it was dark, t spotted him coming in the road. He didn't seem to have anything special in mind, only to hang around.

I said to this stocky boy Stoney, "I have a buck to take me back to Chicago, so let's get some chow."

"Hang on to it, we'll mooch something," he said. He tried a few stores along the highway and by and by turned up some stale jelly bismarcks.

A truck carrying sheet-metal took all three of us into town. We lay under the tarpaulin, for it was cold now. The truck dragged up the hills in low gear, and it took hours, with all the stops. Stoney slept.

Looking capable of harm, Wolfy didn't seem to mean us any; he had only tied in with us to be carried along as we were. As we started again in the late night for the city he began to tell me what a rough town it was, that he had heard the cops were mean and everything rugged; he said he had never been here before himself.

While we penetrated more, by a series of funnels of light, into the city, he made me feel dejected, describing it as he did. Then the truck stopped and the driver let us off. I couldn't see where; it was empty and silent, past midnight. There was a small restaurant; all else was closed doors. So we went into this joint to ask where we were. It was narrow as a corridor, laid out with oilcloth. The short-order guy told us we were off the center of town, about a mile, if we followed the car line from the next intersection.

When we came out, there was a squad car waiting with open doors and a cop blocking the way who said, "Get in."

Two plainclothesmen were inside, and I had to hold Wolfy on my lap while Stoney lay on the floor. This Stoney was only a young boy.

Nothing was said. They brought us into the stationconcrete, and small openings everywhere, the bars beginning at the end of a short flight of stairs not far from the sergeant's desk.

The cops kept us to one side, for there was another matter being heard, and four or five faces of peculiar night-wildness by the electric globe of the desk, and the sergeant with his large flesh and white fatty face presiding. There was a woman, and it was hard to take in the fact that she had been in the middle of a brawl, she was so modest-looking and dressmakerish, with a green trout knot to her hat. Alongside her there were two men, one with a bloody beehive of bandages, totterheaded, and the other shut up with defiance and meanwhile his hands pressing all his concern to his chest. He was supposed to be the offender.

1 say supposed because it was the cop who did the explaining, the three principals being deaf-mutes. This guy attacked the other with a hammer, was what he said; he said that the woman was a lousy bitch and didn't care for whom she spread, and the bastard was the biggest cause of trouble in the deaf-mute community even if she did look like a schoolteacher. I report what the cop told the sergeant.

"What's my idea," he said, "is that this poor jerk thought he was engaged to her and then he caught her with this other joker."

"What doin'?"

"I wouldn't know. It depends on how much of a sorehead he is. But with the pants off, I wouldn't be surprised."

"I wonder what makes 'em so randy. They fight more about love than the dagoes," said the sergeant. His face had a one-eye emphasis, and his cheek was so much rough wall. The arm he had up his sleeve was very thick; I wouldn't have liked to see it used. "Why do they have t'be all the time hittin'? Maybe because they talk with their hands."

Stoney and Wolfy grinned, wishing to be of the same humor as the cops.

"Well, is anything broke under them bandages?"

"They took a couple of stitches on his dome."

The bloody-haired topple-bandage was pushed into the light where the sergeant could see.

"Well," he said when he had looked, "take an' lock 'em up till we can see if we can get an interpreter tomorrow, and if we can't, then just kick 'em out in the morning. What would they do with this cocky in the workhouse? Anyway, a night in the clink will show them they aren't alone by themselves in the world and can't be carryin' on as if they was."

We were next, and I had meantime been worrying about a connection between Joe German's arrest and our being picked up, but there was no such connection. There was only that shirt in the back seat of the stolen Buick to trace me by. The laundry mark. That was farfetched, but I didn't know what else to think. I was relieved when I heard what they had us in for: theft of automobile parts from wrecking yards.

"We've never been in Detroit before," I said. "We just arrived in town."

"Yeah, where from?"

"Cleveland. We're hitchhiking."

"You're a sonofabiteh liar. You belong to the Foley gang and you been stealing car parts. But we caught up with you. We'll get all you guys." s* p^"

I said, "But we're not even from Detroit. I'm from Chicago."

"Where you goin'?"

"Home."

"That's a fine way to get to Chicago from Cleveland, by way of this town. Your story stinks." He started on Stoney. "Where're you gonna say you come from?"

"Pennsy."

"Where's that?"

"Near Wilkes Barre."

"And where you headin' for?"

"Nebraska, to study to be a vet'narian."

"And what's that?"

"About dogs and horses."

"About Fords and Chevvies, you mean, you little asswipe hoodlum!

And you, where's home for you, what's your story?" He started on Wolfy.

"I'm from Pennsylvania too."

"Whereabouts?"

"Around Scranton. It's a little town."

"How little is it?"

"About five hundred population or so."

"And what's the name of it?"

"It ain't much of a name."

"I bet. Well, tell me, what is it?"

He said, his eyes moving tensely, which was poison to his effort to smile easily. "The name of it is Drumtown."

"It must be a tough little hole to breed up rats like you. Okay, we'll see where it is on the map." He opened his drawer.

"It ain't on the map. It's too small."

"That's okay, if it has a name it'll be on my map. It's got them all."

"What I mean is it ain't really incorporated. It's just a little burg and hasn't got around to be incorporated yet."

"What do they do there?"

"Dig up a little coal. Nothin' much."

"Hard coal or soft coal?"

"Both," said Wolfy, sinking his head and still grinning a little; but his underiip was somewhat withdrawn from his teeth and his sinews were out.

"You belong to Foley's gang, friend," the sergeant said. ^No, I never been in this town before."

'Fetch me Jimmy," the sergeant instructed one of the cops.

Jimmy came, slow and old, from the narrow stairs of the lower cells; his flesh was like a stout old woman's; he was wearing cloth slippers and a front-buttoned sweater holding up his wide breasts; he seemed to die a little with every breath. But his eyes were as explicit as otherwise everything was vague about this gray, yellow, and white-haired head, bent with weakness. The eyes, however, trained so they were foreign to anything but their long-time function, they had no personal regard. This Jimmy gazed on Stoney and me and passed us and his look rested on Wolfy. To him he said, "You was in here three years ago.

You rolled a guy, and you got six months. It won't be three years yet till May. One month more."

This great classifying organ of a police brain!

"Well, Bumhead, Pennsylvania?" said the sergeant.

"That's right, I did six months. But I don't know Foley, that's the truth, and never stole car parts. I don't know anything about cars."

"Lock 'em all up."

We had to empty our pockets; they were after knives and matches and such objects of harm. But for me that wasn't what it was for, but to have the bigger existence taking charge of your small things, and making you learn forfeits as a sign that you aren't any more your own man, in the street, with the contents of your pockets your own business: that was the purpose of it. So we gave over our stuff and were taken down, past cells and zoo-rustling straw where some prisoner got off his- sack for a look through the bars. I saw the wounded deaf-mute like a magus holding his head, on a bunk. We were marched to the end of the row where the great memory-man sat sleeping, or perhaps he was only at dim rest all night, in a chair below a fish tail of ribbon tied into the grill of a ventilator. They stuck us in a large cell, a yell going up over us, "We got no room. We got no more room!" and obscene lip sounds and razzberries and flushing of the toilet, ape-wit and defiances.

It really was a crowded cell, but they pushed us in anyway, and we did as well as we could, squatting on the floor. The other mute was in here, sitting by the feet of a drunk, crouched up as if in a steerage. An enormous light was on at all hours. There was something heavy about it, like the stone rolled in front of the tomb.

Then by the wall, at day, a big dull rolling began, choking, the tubeclunk of trucks and heavy machine fuss, and also the needle-mouth speed of trolleys, fast as dragonflies.

I must say I didn't get any great shock from this of personal injustice.

I wanted to be out and on my way, and that was nearly all. I suffered over Joe German, caught and beat.

.174 However, as I felt on entering Erie, Pennsylvania, there is a darkness It is for everyone. You don't, as perhaps some imagine, try it, one foot into it like a barbershop "September Morn." Nor are lowered into it with visitor's curiosity, as the old Eastern monarch was let down into the weeds inside a glass ball to observe the fishes. Nor are lifted straight out after an unlucky tumble, like a Napoleon from the mud of the Arcole where he had been standing up to his thoughtful nose while the Hungarian bullets broke the clay off the bank. Only some Greeks and admirers of theirs, in their liquid noon, where the friendship of beauty to human things was perfect, thought they were clearly divided from this darkness. And these Greeks too were in it. But still they are the admiration of the rest of the mud-sprung, famine-knifed, streetpounding, war-rattled, difficult, painstaking, kicked in the belly, grief and cartilage mankind, the multitude, some under a coal-sucking Vesuvius of chaos smoke, some inside a heaving Calcutta midnight, who very well know where they are.

In the dinky grayness and smell of morning, after giving us coffee and bread, they let Stoney and me out; Wolfy was kept on suspicion.

The cops said to us, "Get out of town. We give you a flop last night, but next time you'll get a vagrancy hung on you." There was a dawn smokiness and scratchiness in the station as the patrolmen off the night beat were taking a load off themselves, unstrapping guns, lifting off hats, sitting down to write out reports. Was there a station next door to Tobit, the day the angel visited, it would have been no different.

We went along with the main traffic and ended in Campus Martius, which is not like the other Champs de Mars I know. Here all was brick, shaly with oil smoke and the shimmying gas of cars.

We started off to ride to city limits on the trolleys; and then it happened that the conductor shook my shoulder to warn me that we were at a transfer point, and I jumped out thinking that Stoney was back of me, but I saw him still asleep by the window as the car passed with air-shut doors, and pounding on the glass didn't wake him. Then I waited the better part of an hour before going on to the end of the line where the highway was. I stayed there till nearly noon. He maybe thought I had shaken him off, which wasn't so. I felt despondent that I had lost him.

At last I started to flag rides. First a truck took me to Jackson. I found a cheap flop there. Next afternoon a salesman for a film company picked me up. He was going to Chicago.







CHAPTER X



When evening came on we were tearing out of Gary and toward South Chicago, the fire and smudge mouth of the city gorping to us. As the flamy bay shivers for home-coming Neapolitans. You enter your native water like a fish. And there sits the great fish god or Dagon. You then bear your soul like a minnow before Dagon, in your familiar water.

I knew I wasn't coming back to peace and an easy time. In rising order of difficulty, there'd be the Polish housekeeper, always crabbing about money; next Mama, certain to feel my unreliability; and Simon who'd have been storing up something for me. I was ready to hear hard words from him; I felt I deserved some for going off on this trip. I also had a few to answer with, about the telegram. But I wasn't approaching the usual kind of family fight with its hot feelings and wrangled-out points; it was something different and much worse.

A new, strange Polish woman who spoke no English came to the door. I thought the old housekeeper had quit and this one had replaced her, but it was odd how the new woman had filled the kitchen with bleeding hearts, crucifixes, and saints. Of course, if she had to have them in her place of work, Mama couldn't see them anyhow. But there were also little children, and I wondered if Simon had taken in an entire family; and then, from the way the woman kept me standing, I began to grasp that this was no longer our flat, and an older girl wearing the dress of St. Helen's parochial school came to tell me that her father had bought the furniture and taken over the flat from the man who owned it. That was Simon.

"But isn't my mother here any more? Where's my mother?"

"The blind lady? She's downstairs by the neighbors."

The Kreindls had put her in Kotzie's room, which had only a small window with bars on the passage where people ducked through the brick subterranean vault on a shortcut through the alley or stopped to take a leak. Since she could only just distinguish light from dark and didn't need a view, you couldn't say on that score it was an unkindness to have been put there. The deep kitchen cuts in her palms had never softened out, and I felt them when she took my hands and said in her cracky voice, queerer than ever just then, "Did you hear about Grandma?"

"No, what?"

"She died."

"Oh no!"

That was a shaft! It went straight and cold into my bowels, and I couldn't bring up my back or otherwise move, but sat bent over. Dead!

Horrible, to imagine the old woman dead, in a casket, underground, with the face covered and weight thrown on her, silent. My heart shrunk before the idea of this violence. Because it would have had to be violent.

She, who always tore off interferences as she did that dentist's hand, would have had to be smothered. For all her frailty she was a hard fighter. But she fought when clothed and standing up, alive. And now it was necessary to picture her captured and pulled down into the grave, and lying still. That was too much for me.

My grates couldn't hold it. I shed tears with my sleeve over my eyes.

"What did she die of, Ma, and when?"

She didn't know. A few days ago, before she had moved down, Kreindl had told her, and she had been in mourning ever since. According to her notions of how she should mourn.

All that she had in this vault of a room was a bed and chair. Well, I tried to find out from Mrs. Kreindl why Simon had done this. As it was suppertime, Mrs. Kreindl was at home. Usually she was away, afternoons, playing poker with other housewives; they played in earnest, for blood. How she had the repose of a big sheep, don't ask me, since she was always in a secret fever from gambling and from warring with her husband.

She couldn't tell me anything about Simon. Was it to get married that he had sold everything? He had been desperate, before I left, about marrying Cissy. But the furniture was old stuff, and how much would the Pole have paid for it? What would anyone give for that cripple kitchen stove? Or for the beds, even older; and the leatherette furniture we used to slide and rock on when we were kids? This stuff went back to the time of Rameses' Americana set, to the last century. Maybe my father had bought the furniture. All pain-causing reflections. Simon must have been in a terrible way for money to. have sold off all of that veteran metal and leather and left Mama in this cell with the Kreindls.

I was empty with hunger as I questioned Mrs. Kreindl but couldn't apply to her for a meal, remembering her to be not very free about food. "Do you have any money, Mama?" I said. But all she had in her purse was a fifty-cent piece. "Well, it's a good idea for you to have some change," I told her, "in case you happen to want something, like gum drops or a Hershey bar." I'd have taken a buck from her if Simon had left her something, but I could make out a little longer without her last fifty-cent piece. To ask for it, I thought, would scare her, and that would be barbarous. Especially on top of Grandma's death. And she already was frightened, although, as when sick, she was upright in her posture and like waiting for the grief to come to a stop; as if this stop would be called by a conductor. She wouldn't discuss with me what Simon had done but clung rather to her own idea of it. To which she didn't wish me to add anything. I knew her.

I stayed a little longer because I sensed she wanted it, but then I had to leave, and when I scraped back my chair she said, "You going?

Where do you go?" This was a question about my absence when the flat was sold up. I couldn't answer it.

"Why, I have that room on the South Side still that I told you about."

"Are you working? You have a job?"

"I always have something. Don't you know me? Don't worry, everything is going to be all right."

Answering, I shunned her face a little, though there was no reason to, and felt my own face bitten as though it were a key, notched and filed out, some dishonorable, ill-purpose key.

I headed for Einhom's, and on the boulevard, where the trees had begun to bud in the favorite purple of Chicago April evening, instilled with carbon and with the smells of crocodile beds of guck from the cleaned sewers, by the lamps of the synagogue, people were coming out in new coats and business hats, with square velvet envelopes for their prayer things. It was the first night of Passover, of the Angel of Death going through all doors not marked with blood to take away the life of the Egyptian first-born, and then the Jews trooping into the desert. I wasn't permitted to pass by; I was stopped by Coblin and Five Properties, who had seen me as I got into the street to walk around the crowd. They were on the curb, and Five Properties snatched me by the sleeve. "Look!" he said. "Who is in shut tonight!" Both were grinning, bathed-looking, in their best cleanliness and virile good condition.

"Hey, guess what?" said Coblin.

"What?"

"Doesn't he know?" said Five Properties.

"I don't know anything. I've been out of town and just got back."

"Five Properties's getting married," said Coblin. "At last. Toi beauty. You ought to see the ring he's giving. Well, we're throuit with whores now, aren't we? Ah, boy, somebody's in for it!"

"True?"

"So help me the Uppermost," said Five Properties. "I invite you i my wedding, kid, a week from nex-t Sunday at the Lion's Club Hall.

North Avenue, four o'clock. Bring a girl. I don't want you should ha's anything against me."

"What is there to have against you?"

"Well, you shouldn't. We're cousins, and I want you to come."

"Happy days, man!" I said to him, doing my best, and thankful tte murk was so deep they couldn't see me well.

Coblin began to draw me by the arm. He wanted me to come to tilt Seder dinner. "Come along. Come home."

While I stunk of jail and before I had begun to digest my misei;'

Before I found Simon? "No, some other time, thanks. Cob," I sai A going backwards.

"But why not?"

"Leave him, he's got a date. Have you got a date?"

"As a matter of fact I do have to see somebody."

"He's starting his horny time of life. Bring your little pussy to tti6 wedding."

Cousin Hyman still smiled, but he thought probably of his daughttf and so didn't urge me more; he clammed up.

In Einhorn's door I met Bavatsky as he descended to replace a fuse Tillie had blown it with her curling iron, and, upstairs, one worn?1'1 hobbled and the other just as slow from weight and uncertainty aj" preached with candles and so recalled to me a second time it was til6 night of Exodus. But there was no dinner or ceremony here. Einhof11 observed only one holy day, Yom Kippur, and only because Kara?'

Holloway, his wife's cousin, insisted.

"What happened to that drunken- wart Bavatsky?"

"He couldn't get to the fuse box because the cellar was locked, sf he went to fetch the key from the janitor's wife," said Mildred.

"If she has beer in the house we go to bed in the dark tonight."

Suddenly Tillie Einhorn, with candle in a saucer, saw me by tt16 flame.

"Look, it's Augie," she said.

"Augie? Where?" said Einhom, quickly glancing between the ur' even sizes of light. "Augie, where are you? I want to see you." apply to her for a meal, remembering her to be not very free about food. "Do you have any money, Mama?" I said. But all she had in her purse was a fifty-cent piece. "Well, it's a good idea for you to have some change," I told her, "in case you happen to want something, like gum drops or a Hershey bar." I'd have taken a buck from her if Simon had left her something, but I could make out a little longer without her last fifty-cent piece. To ask for it, I thought, would scare her, and that would be barbarous. Especially on top of Grandma's death. And she already was frightened, although, as when sick, she was upright in her posture and like waiting for the grief to come to a stop; as if this stop would be called by a conductor. She wouldn't discuss with me what Simon had done but clung rather to her own idea of it. To which she didn't wish me to add anything. I knew her.

I stayed a little longer because I sensed she wanted it, but then I had to leave, and when I scraped back my chair she said, "You going?

Where do you go?" This was a question about my absence when the flat was sold up. I couldn't answer it.

"Why, I have that room on the South Side still that I told you about."

"Are you working? You have a job?"

"I always have something. Don't you know me? Don't worry, everything is going to be all right."

Answering, I shunned her face a little, though there was no reason to, and felt my own face bitten as though it were a key, notched and filed out, some dishonorable, ill-purpose key.

I headed for Einhom's, and on the boulevard, where the trees had begun to bud in the favorite purple of Chicago April evening, instilled with carbon and with the smells of crocodile beds of guck from the cleaned sewers, by the lamps of the synagogue, people were coming out in new coats and business hats, with square velvet envelopes for their prayer things. It was the first night of Passover, of the Angel of Death going through all doors not marked with blood to take away the life of the Egyptian first-born, and then the Jews trooping into the desert. I wasn't permitted to pass by; I was stopped by Coblin and Five Properties, who had seen me as I got into the street to walk around the crowd. They were on the curb, and Five Properties snatched me by the sleeve. "Look!" he said. "Who is in shut tonight!" Both were grinning, bathed-looking, in their best cleanliness and virile good condition.

"Hey, guess what?" said Coblin.

"What?"

"Doesn't he know?" said Five Properties. gs "I don't know anything. I've been out of town and just got back."

"Five Properties's getting married," said Coblin. "At last. To a beauty. You ought to see the ring he's giving. Well, we're through with whores now, aren't we? Ah, boy, somebody's in for it!"

"True?"

"So help me the Uppermost," said Five Properties. "I invite you to my wedding, kid, a week from next Sunday at the Lion's Club Hall, North Avenue, four o'clock, firing a girl. I don't want you should have anything against me."

"What is there to have against you?"

"Well, you shouldn't. We're cousins, and I want you to come."

"Happy days, man!" I said to him, doing my best, and thankful the murk was so deep they couldn't see me well.

Coblin began to draw me by the arm. He wanted me to come to the Seder dinner. "Come along. Come home."

While I stunk of jail and before I had begun to digest my misery?

Before I found Simon? "No, some other time, thanks, Cob," I said, going backwards.

"But why not?"

"Leave him, he's got a date. Have you got a date?"

"As a matter of fact I do have to see somebody."

"He's starting his horny time of life. Bring your little pussy to the wedding."

Cousin Hyman still smiled, but he thought probably of his daughter and so didn't urge me more; he clammed up.

In Einhorn's door I met Bavatsky as he descended to replace a fuse.

Tillie had blown it with her curling iron, and, upstairs, one woman hobbled and the other just as slow from weight and uncertainty approached with candles and so recalled to me a second time it was the night of Exodus. But there was no dinner or ceremony here. Einhom observed only one holy day, Yom Kippur, and only because Karas Holloway, his wife's cousin, insisted.

"What happened to that drunken wart Bavatsky?"

"He couldn't get to the fuse box because the cellar was locked, so he went to fetch the key from the janitor's wife," said Mildred.

"If she has beer in the house we go to bed in the dark tonight."

Suddenly Tillie Einhorn, with candle in a saucer, saw me by the flame.

"Look, it's Augie," she said.

"Augie? Where?" said Einhom, quickly glancing between the uneven sizes of light. "Augie, where are you? I want to see you."

I came forward and sat by him; he shifted his shoulder in token of wanting to shake hands.

"Tillie, go in the kitchen and make coffee. Mildred, you too." He sent them back into the dark kitchen. "And take the plug out of the curler. I go nuts with their electric appliances."

"It is out," said Mildred, with a voice tired of, but always ready for, the duty of these answers. Obedient in the smallest point, however, she shut the doors, and I was alone with him. In his night court. At least I thought he was grimacing with strictness at me. He had shaken hands only to give me a formal feel of his fingers and of the depth of his coldness. And the candles were now as genial to me as though they had been the ones stuck into loaves of bread by night and sailed on a black Indian lake to find the drowned body sunk to the bottom. Now the white middle way of his hair was down near the plate glass of his desk as he fixed to get and light a cigaretteas ever, the methodical struggle and pulling of the arms by the sleeves, that transport of flies by the ants.

Then he began to blow smoke and prepared to speak. I decided I couldn't allow myself to be chided like a kid of ten for the Joe German deal, of which he by now certainly knew. I had to talk to him about Simon. But then it seemed he wasn't going to lecture me at all. I must have looked too sicklow, gaunt, pushed to an extreme, burned. Last time we met I had had my Evanston fat on me; I had come to consult him about the adoption.

"Well, you haven't been doing so well, it looks like."

"No."

"German was caught. How did you get away?"

"By dumb luck."

"Dumb? In a hot car, without even changing the plates! Talk about brainlessness! Well, they brought him back. The picture was in the Times. You want to see?"

No, I didn't want to, for I knew what it would be like: between two hefty detectives and probably trying to tip his hat over his eyes as much as his held arms would allow, and spare his family direct eyes into the camera, or his plastered face. It was always like that.

"How come it took you so long to get back?" said Einhorn.

"I bummed, and I wasn't very lucky."

"But why did you have to bum? Your brother told me he was sending you the money to Buffalo."

"Why, did he come and tell you?" I creased my brow with effort.

"You mean he tried to borrow from you?"

"He got it from me. I made him another loan too."

"What loan? I didn't get anything from him."

"That's no good. I was stupid. I should have sent it to you myself.

Beh?" He let out his tongue and his eyes went bright, looking surprised.

"He took me--well, so he took. But he shouldn't have let you down.

Especially since I gave it to him over and above what I lent him personally.

Even if he was in bad shape that's too much."

I was powerfully bitter and mad, but I felt an advance sway from a wave of something even worse, below the present depth.

"What do you mean--in bad shape? Why was he raising money?

What did he want?"

"If he had told me for what I might have helped. I lent it to him because he is your brother; otherwise I hardly know the man. He went into a proposition with Nosey Mutchnik--the one I had that deal with in the lot. Remember? Now I could hold my own with him, but your brother is green. He took an interest in a betting pool, and the first game the White Sox played this season they told him he lost his share and if he wanted to stay in he'd have to bring another hundred bucks-- I have the whole story now. They took that from him too, and he got a sock in the teeth when he became hotheaded. Mutchnik's hooligans knocked him into the gutter. That's what happened. I suppose you know why he wanted to make a fast buck?"

"Yes, to get married."

"To get on top of Joe Flexner's daughter, who made him wild. He never will now.".

"But why not? They're engaged." s "I begin to feel sorry for your brother, though he isn't very smart, and if I did drop seventy-eight bucks..." As I saw the anguishing thing of Simon knocked over and bloodied in the gutter, I only listened and didn't speak of Grandma's death, or the furniture, and Mama put out of the house. "Now she won't marry him," said Einhorn.

"She won't? Tell me!"

"Kreindl is the one I heard it from. He made a match for her with a relative of yours."

"Not Five Properties--with him?" I shouted.

"Your greenhorn cousin. It's going to be his hand that sets apart those fine legs."

"Oh hell! No! They couldn't do that to Simon!"

"They did."

"And by now I guess he knows."

"Does he! He went to Flexner's and started a riot, breaking chairs. JTbe girl went and locked herself in the toilet, and then the old man had to send for the police. The squad car came and got him."

Arrested too! I suffered to myself for Simon. It was crazy, how. It crushed me to hear and picture.

"Cynical quiff, ah?" Einhorn said. He wanted to bring it all home to me with his queer stare of severity. "Cressida going over to the Greek camp--"

"And where's Simon, in jail still?"

"No, old Flexner let the charge drop when he promised no more trouble. Flexner is a decent old man. He went broke owing nobody. He wouldn't have the heart. He's a sport too. They kept your brother one night and let him out this morning."

"He spent last night in jail?"

"One night, that's all," said Einhorn. "Now he's out."

"Where is he though? Do you know?"

"No. But I can tell you you won't find him at home." Kreindl had told him about Mama, and he was preparing to let me hear all; but I said I had already been home. I sat before him stripped; I knew of nowhere to turn and had no force to leave.

Till now, as a family, we had had some privacy, even if it was known that we were deserted as kids and on Charity. In Grandma's time nobody, not even the caseworker Lubin, was informed exactly about us.

At the free dispensary I'd go and do my guile not just on account of the money but so we should have some power of guidance over ourselves.

Now there were no secrets, so anybody interested could look.

This maybe was the consideration which made me not say to Einhorn what was the cruelest thing of all, that Grandma was dead.

"I'm sorry for you; especially for your mother," Einhorn started out, trying to raise me up. "Your brother got ahead of himself. Too inspired by tail. What got him so hot?"

In part I thought this question came from envy that anyone should be subject to such inspirations and heat. . But also, on this side, Einhorn couldn't be altogether unsympathetic.

Gradually, talking, he lost view of his first aim, which was to comfort me, and he got so bitter he tried to curl his fists inward and breasted the desk. "Why should you care if your brother gets a rupe up the behind!" he said. "He deserves it. He left you in a hole, he sold the flat, he got the money out of me because of you and you didn't smell a dime of it. If you were honest with yourself you'd be glad. You'd do yourself some good by saying so, and I'd respect you more for it."

"Say what? That it's all his fault and I'm glad of that? That falling in love made him not care what happened to Mama? Or just that he's miserable? What am I supposed to be glad about, Einhom?

"Don't you realize the advantage you have from now on? You'd better not be easy on him. He's got to make it right to you. The advantage has passed to you, and you've got him by the balls. Don't you understand that? And if there's only one thing you can get out of this right now it's to admit at least that you're happy he caught it in the neck. Jesus! if anybody did this to me I'd certainly have satisfaction knowing he was good and burned himself. If I didn't, I'd worry I wasn't clear in my head. Good for him! Good, good!"

I'm not sure why Einhorn worked over me with such savagery approaching waked-up despair. He even forgot to raise hell about Joe German. I guess, back of it, that he thought of Dingbat's inheritance which he had run into the ground. Maybe he didn't want me to be despised as he somewhat despised Dingbat for not being angry. No, there was even more to the view he was driving so strongly, though sprawl-handed, against the desk. He intended that, as there were no more effective prescriptions in old ways, as we were in dreamed-out or finished visions, that therefore, in the naked form of the human jelly, one should choose or seize with force; one should make strength from disadvantages and make progress by having enemies, being wrathful or terrible; should hammer on the state of being a brother, not be oppressed by it; should have the strength of voice to make other voices fall silent--the same principle for persons as for peoples, parties, states.

This, and not a man-chick, plucked and pinched, with scraggle behind and anxious face full of sorrow-wrinkles, human fowl chased by brooms.

Now the lights began to twitter as Bavatsky fiddled in the fuse box, and it was discovered that instead of considering this as I should have been, I was bawling. I think Einhom was disappointed and maybe even shocked; shocked, I mean, by his misjudgment of my fitness to follow him in his shooting trajectory into what a soul should be. He gave me chilly gentleness such as he might have offered a girl. "Don't worry, we'll work something out for your mother," he said, for he seemed to think it was mainly that. He didn't know I was mourning Grandma too.

'Blow out these candles. Tillie's bringing coffee and sandwiches. You can sleep with Dingbat tonight, and tomorrow we'll start on something."

Next day I hunted for Simon and couldn't locate him; he hadn't been "ack to see Mama. I did find Kreindl at home, however, as he sat at a late breakfast of smoked fish and rolls. He said to me, "Sit down and catch a bite."

"I see you finally found a bride for my cousin," said I to the cockeyed old artilleryman, observing how the short, sufficient muscles of his forearms were operating in the skinning of the golden little fish and how the scabbards of his jaw were moving.

"A beauty. Such tsitskies! But don't blame me, Augie. I don't force anybody. Zwing keinem. Especially a pair of proud tsitskies like that.

Do you know anything about young ladies? I should hope! Well, when a girl has things like that nobody can tell her what to do. There's where your brother made his mistake, because he tried. I'm sorry for him."

He whispered, mounting his eyes to make sure his wife was at a distance, "This girl makes my little one stand up. At my age. And salute!

Anyways, she's too independent for a young fellow. She needs an older man, a cooler head who can say yes and do no. Otherwise she could ruin you. And maybe Simon is too young to marry. I've known you since you both was snot-noses. Pardon, but it's true. Now you're big, so you're hungry, and you think you're ready to marry, but what's the hurry? You got plenty of jig-jig ahead of you before you settle down. Take it! Take, take if they give you! Never refuse. To come together with a peepy little woman who sings in your ear. It's the life of the soul!"

He argued this to me with a squeeze of his awkward eyes, the old pimp and egger-on; he even made me smile, and I was in no mood for smiling.

"Besides," said he, "you can see what kind of a man your brother is, that when he gets it in his mind he can sell the goods of the house and put his mother out."

I expected him to mention this and pass from defense to the practical matter of Mama's support. In the past Kreindl had always been a kind enough neighbor, but we couldn't expect him to keep Mama. Especially as Simon now had him down as one of his chief enemies. Furthermore, I couldn't let her stay in that brick vault, and I told Kreindl I'd make other arrangements for her.

I went to appeal to Lubin, at the Charity, on gloomy Wells Street.

Lubin had always visited us as a sort of distant foster-uncle, formerly. In his office, to my maturer eyes, he came out differently. Something in his person argued what the community that contributed the money wanted us poor bastards to be: sober, dutiful, buttoned, clean, sad, moderate. The sadness and confusion of the field he was in made him sensible. Only a certain heaviness of breath that drew notice to the thickness of his nostrils gave you a sense of difficulty and, next, one of the labor of being patient. I made note in this broad man of the tame ape-nature promoted to pants and offices. This is the opposite of that disfigured image of God that fails away by its sin from Eden; or of the ame bad copy excited and inflamed by promise of grace to recover its sacredness and golden stature. Lubin's belief was that he didn't fall from Paradise but rose from the caves. But he was a good man, and this is no slander of, him, but merely his own view.

When I told him Simon and I had to find a home for Mama he doubtless thought we were getting rid of everyone--Georgie first, then Grandma, and now Mama. Therefore I said, "It's only temporary, till we set on our feet, and then we'll have another flat and housekeeper for her." But he took this very aridly, which wasn't to be wondered at, considering the tramp appearance I made, in the wrack of my good clothes, inflamed at the eyes, and looking garbage-nourished. However, he said he could get her into a Home for the blind on Arthington Street if we could pay part of the cost. It came to fifteen bucks a month.

That was as good as I could expect. Also he sent me with a note to an employment bureau, but there was nothing doing at the time. I went to my room on the South Side and took most of my clothes to hock, the tuxedo, sports clothes, and hound's-tooth coat. I pawned them and I got Mama established, and then started to hunt work. Being as they say up against it and au pied du mur, I took the first job that came, and I've never had one that was more curious.

Einhom got it for me through Karas-Holloway, who had a financial interest in the business. It was a luxury dog service on North dark Street, among the honkytonks and hock shops, antique stores and dreary beaneries.

In the morning I drove out in a station wagon along the Gold Coast to pick up the dogs, at the back doors of mansions or up the service elevators of lakeshore apartment hotels, and I brought the animals back to this club joint--it was called a club.

The chief was a Frenchman, a dog-coiffeur or groom or mattre de chiens; he was rank and rough, from Place Clichy near the foot of Montmartre, and from what he told me he had been a wrestler's shill in the carnivals there while studying this other profession. Some ways his face was short of humanity, by its energetic stiffness and abruptness of color, like an injection. His relation with the animals was a struggle.

He was trying to wrest something from them. I don't know what. Perhaps that their conception of a dog should be what his was. He was on the footing of Xenophon's Ten Thousand in Persia, here in Chicago; for he washed and ironed his own shirts, did his own marketing, and cooked his own meals in his beaverboard quarters in a corner of this doggish place--his lab, kitchen, and bedroom. I realize much etter now what it means to be a Frenchman abroad, how irregular G 185 everything must appear, and not simply abroad but on North dark Street.

We were located in no mere firetrap but had two stories of a fairlv new modern building just off the Gold Coast, not far from the scene of the St. Valentine's Day Massacre and, for that matter, from the Humane Society on Grand Avenue. It was the great feature of this outfit, I say, paid for by the subscribers, that it was a club for class that the pets were entertained as well as steamed, massaged, nianicured clipped, that they were supposed to be taught manners and tricks. The fee was twenty dollars a month, and no shortage of dogs; more in fact than Guillaume could handle, and he had to fight the front office continually, which wanted to go beyond capacity. The club w^s already as hell-deep as dogs' throats could scrape it; the Cerberus slaver-choke turmoil was at the full when I came in from the last pick-up and chansed from truck livery to rubber boots and ponchos; the racket made the skylight glass shiver. Organization was marvelous, however. Guillaume had real know-how; and let people go a little and they'll build you an Escuria). The enormous noise, as of Grand Central, was only the protest of chaos coming up against regulation--the trains got off on time" the dogs got their treatment. '

Though Guillaume used the hypo more than I thought he should.

He gave piqures for everything, and charged it extra. He'd say, "Cette chienne est galeuse--this is a mangy bitch!" and in with the needle.

Moreover, he'd give a drop of dope to the savage ones whenever organization was threatened, yelling, "Thees jag-off is goin' to get it!" Consequently I carried home some pretty wan dogs, and it wasn't easy to come up a flight of stairs with a sleeping boxer or shepherd and explain to the colored cook that he was only tuckered out from playing and pleasure. Dogs in heat Guillaume wouldn't tolerate either. "Grue!

En chasse!" Then he'd say to me anxiously, "Did anything 'appen in the back?" But since I had been driving, how was I to know? He was furious with the owners, especially if the animal was a chienne de race, and its aristocracy was not respected, and he wanted the office to slap an extra charge on them for letting them into the club in this State. Any pedigree made a courtier of him, and he could call on a very high manner, if he wanted to, and get his lips into a tight suppressive line of dislike to baseness--the opposite to breeding. He had the staff come over, two Negro boys and me, to show us the fine points of the aninial, and I will say for Guillaume that his idea was to run an atelier and to act like master in a guild, so that when he got a good poodle to trim it Was downtools for us while he demonstrated; there was then a spell of good feel186 "no and regard for him and for the lamb-docile, witty, small animal. Oh, it wasn't always vexation or the snapping and bickering of little dogs to which Marcus Aurelius compares the daily carryings on of men, though I once in a while see what he was getting at. But there's a dog harmony also, and to be studied by dog eyes, many of them, has its illumination too.

Only the work fatigued me, and I stunk of dog. People would move from me on the streetcar, as they do from the hoof-and-hides stockyards' man, or give me round-eye glares and draw down their mouths on the mobbed Cottage Grove line. Furthermore, there was something Pompeian that I minded about the job--the opulence for dogs, and then their ways that reflected civilized mentality, spoiled temperaments of favorites, mirrors of neuroticism. Plus the often needling thought that their membership fee in the club was more than I had to pay for Mama in the Home. All this together once in a while got me down.

From my neglected self-betterment I had additional pricks. I should be more ambitious. Often I looked for vocational hints in magazines, and I considered training at night school to become a court reporter, should I have the aptitude, and even going back to the university for something bigger. And then I not seldom had Esther Fenchel on my mind, since I moved around the dog-owning height of society. I never had a back-door glimpse of it without a twinge of the soul for her sake, and similar childishness. The sun of that childishness goes on shining even when the larger bodies of hotter stars have risen to smelt you and cover you with their influence. The recenter stars may be more critical, more in the eye, but that earlier sun still remains a long time.

I had some spells of adoring-sickness, and then I had deeper pangs of sex, later; from service with animals maybe. The street too was aphrodisiac, the honkytonks and titty photos, legs with sequins. Plus Guillaume's girl friend, who was a great work of ripple-assed luxury with an immense mozzarella bust, a middle-aged lady who'd go straight to bed and wait for him just as we started to close up shop in the evening, soughing in there like a white stout tree. But there wasn't much I could do about my needs. I was too strapped by money to chase. 'Though I risked running into the Renlings in that neighborhood, I went to Evanston to look for my friend Willa at the Symington, but she had quit to get married. As I returned on the El I was engrossed in thoughts of marriage bed, of Five Properties' behavior with Cissy, and of my brother's losing his head when he thought of their nuptials and honey Simon meanwhile stayed away from me and didn't answer the mes187 sages I left with Mama and elsewhere. I knew he must be in a bad way.

He wasn't giving any money to Mama, and folks who saw him told me how beat he looked. So his keeping to himself, in some hole of a room like mine, or worse, was understandable; he never before had had to approach me abashed, owing explanations and excuses, and wasn't going to do it now. With my last message to him I enclosed five bucks.

He took this fin all right, but I didn't hear from him till he was able to repay it, and that was some months later.

One possession of mine that was saved from the sale of the furniture was the damaged set of Dr. Eliot's Five-Foot Shelf that Einhorn gave me after his fire. I had it with me in my room and read at it when I could. And I was blasting out a paragraph of von Helmhoitz one day, on a corner downtown, between cars, when a onetime classmate of mine, at Crane College, a Mexican named Padilla, took it out of my hand to see what I was reading and gave it back saying, "What are you on this stuff for? It's been left way far behind." He started to tell me the latest, and I had to say I couldn't keep up with him. He asked me how things were then, and we had a long conversation.

In my math section Padilla had been the great equation cracker. He sat at the back of the room, rubbing his narrow front peak and working over smoothed-out pieces of paper others had stuffed into the desk, since he couldn't afford to buy a notebook. Called to the board whenever everyone else was stumped, he came with haste in his filthy whitish or creamed-hening suit, of cloth used in the cheapest summer caps, and naked feet in a pair of Salvation Army rummage shoes, also white, and would start hanging up the answer, covering his scrappy chalkings with his skinny body, infinity symbols like broken ants, and blittering Greek letters aimed downward to the last equal sign. As far as I was concerned, it was godlike that relations should be so clear to anyone.

Sometimes he'd get a hand for his performance when he went clacking back swiftly in his shoes, which were loose because he had no socks.

But his face, with small beak and the pricked skin of smallpox, didn't stock anything in gratification as we understand it. Anyway, he didn't deal much in expression. He often seemed chilly. And I'm not speaking of his character now, but it was cold winter, and sometimes I'd see him flying down Madison Street in his white suit, across the snow, running from home to warm himself in the school building. He never did look warm enough, but chill and sickly and with primitive prohibition of anyone's approaching him. Smoking Mexican cigarettes, he went through the halls by himself, often with a comb, running it through his hair, which was beautiful, black and high.

Well there had been some changes. He looked healthier, or at least didn't have that thistle-flower purple in his tinge, and he wore a better suit. Under his arm were heavy books.

"Are you at the university?" I said.

"I got a scholarship in math and physics. What about you?"

"I wash dogs. Can't you tell I spend my time with dogs?"

"No I don't notice anything. But what are you doing?"

"That is what I'm doing."

It greatly bothered him that I had such a flunky job, washing cages and sweeping up dogs' hair; and also that I was no longer a college man but trying to keep up on Helmholtz who was a dead number to him; in other words, that I should be of the unformed darkened-out mass. It was often that way with me, that people would feel the world owed me distinctness.

"What would I do at the university? I'm not like you, Manny, with a special talent."

"Don't tear yourself down," he said. "You should see the snots there are on campus. What special have they got, except the dough? You should go and find out what you can do, and then after four years if you aren't any good at any special thing, you at least have this degree, and it won't be just any sonofabitch who can kick you around."

My aching back! I thought. There'd still be black forces waiting to give me the boot, and if I had a degree the indignity would be all the greater, and I'd have heartburn from it.

"You shouldn't waste your time," he further said. "Don't you see that to do any little thing you have to take an examination, you have to pay a fee and get a card or a diploma? You better get wise to this. If people don't know what you qualify in they'll never know where to place you, and that can be dangerous. You have to get in there and do something for yourself. Even if you're just waiting, you have to know what you're waiting for, you have to specialize. And don't wait too long or you'll be passed by."

It wasn't so much what he said that affected me, though that was interesting and probably full of truth; it was his friendship that I responded to. I didn't want to let go of him, and I clung to him. I was moved that he thought of me.

'^How'm I supposed to go to school, Manny, if I'm broke?"

"How do you think I do it? The scholarship isn't enough, it's only V tuition scholarship. I get a little dough from the NYA and I'm in a racket swiping books."

"Books?"

"Like these. I stole them this afternoon. Technical books, texts. I take orders even. If I pick up twenty or thirty a month and get from two to five bucks apiece, I make out all right. Texts cost. What's the matter, are you honest?" he said, looking to see if he had queered himself with me.

"Not completely. I'm just surprised, Manny, because all I knew about you was that you were a wizard at math."

"Also I ate once a day and didn't own a coat. You know that. Well, I give myself a little more now. I want to have it a little better. I don't go stealing for the kicks. As soon as I can I'll quit."

"But what if you get nailed?"

He said, "I'll explain how I feel about it. You see, I don't have larceny in my heart; I'm not a real crook. I'm not interested in it, so nobody can make a fate of it for me. That's not my fate. I might get into a little trouble, but I never would let them make it my trouble, get it?"

I did get it, having been around Joe German, who looked at the same question another way.

But Padilla was a gifted crook all the same and took pride in his technique. We made a date for Saturday, and he gave me an exhibition.

When we walked out of a shop I couldn't tell whether or not he had taken anything, he was so good at maneuvering. Outside he'd show me a copy of Sinnott's Botany or Schlesinger's Chemistry. Valuable books only; he'd never take orders for cheaper ones. Handing me his list, he'd tell me to pick the next title and he'd swipe it even if it was kept back of the cash desk. He went in carrying an old book with which he covered the one he wanted. He never hid anything under his coat, so that if they were to stop him he could always plead he had set down his own book to look at something and then picked up his own and another, unawares. Since he delivered the books on the same day he stole them, there was nothing incriminating in his room. It was greatly in his favor that he didn't in the least look like a crook, but only a young Mexican, narrow-shouldered, quick in his movements, but somewhat beaten down and harmless, that entered the shop, put on specs, and got lost with crossed feet in thermodynamics or physical chemistry. That he was pure of all feeling of larceny contributed a lot to his success.

There's an old, singular, beautiful Netherlands picture I once saw in | an Italian gallery, of a wise old man walking in empty fields, pensive, j while a thief behind cuts the string of his purse. The old man, in black, j thinking probably of God's City, nevertheless has a foolish length of nose and is much too satisfied with his dream. But the peculiarity of the thief is that he is enclosed in a glass ball, and on the glass ball there . surmounting cross, and it looks like the emperor's symbol of rule.

Meaning that it is earthly power that steals while the ridiculous wise in a dream about this world and the next, and perhaps missing this one, they will have nothing, neither this nor the next, so there is a sharp pain of satire in this amusing thing, and even the painted field does not have too much charm; it is a flat place.

Well, Padilla in his thieving wasn't of this earthly-power class, and had no ideas such as involved the whole world. It wasn't his real calling.

But he enjoyed being good at it and liked the whole subject. He had all kinds of information about crooks, about dips, wires, and their various tricks; about Spanish pickpockets who were so clever they got to the priest's money through the soutane, or about the crooks' school in Rome of such high tuition that the students signed a contract to pay half their take for five years after graduation. He knew a lot about Chicago clipjoints and rackets. It was a hobby with him, as other people go in for batting averages. What fascinated him was the little individual who tries to have a charge counter to the central magnetic one and dance his own dance on the periphery. He knew about B girls and how the hip-chicks operated in the big hotels; a book he read often was the autobiography of Chicago May, who used to throw her escorts' clothes out of the window to her accomplice in the alley, and was a very remarkable woman.

Padilla himself when he went to have a good time didn't stint; he spent everything he had. I was his guest at a flat on Lake Park Avenue that a couple of'Negro girls kept together. First he shopped at Hillman's; he bought ham, chicken, beer, pickles, wine, coffee, and Dutch chocolate; then we went there and spent Saturday evening and Sunday in those two rooms, kitchen and bedroom. The only retiring space was the toilet, so everything was in common. This suited Padilla. Toward niorning he started to say that we should make an exchange so no exclusive feelings would develop. The girls were glad and voted that this made sense. They appreciated Padilla and his spirit of the thing, so let themselves into the fun. Nothing was very serious nor much held back but in the very best sympathy. I liked best the girl I had first, as she was willing to be more personal with me and wished our cheeks to touch. The second was taller and less given to it; she seemed to have more of a private life to defend against us. There was more style to her. Also she was an older girl.

Anyway, it was Padilla's show. If he got out of bed to eat or dance he ranted me to do likewise, and on and off during the night he was sitting "P on the pillows, talking of his life.

"I once was married," said Padilla when the subject came to that.

"In Chihuahua when I was fifteen. I had a kid before I was a man myself."

I didn't approve of his boasting that he had left a wife and kid behind in Mexico, but then the tall girl said she had a child too, and maybe the other did also and just didn't say, and so 1 let the subject pass, since if so many do the same wrong there maybe is something to it that's not right away apparent.

We were lying in the two beds, all four, with only as much shape as there was light to reveal it proceeding from the curtains in the slow opening of Sunday, originating white in the east but falling gray upon the upright staggers of walls. Such a sight as the old Negro walls in these streets had a peculiar grandness, if dread too, where this external evidence was of a big humanity which you now couldn't see. It was like the Baths of Caracalla. The vast hidden population slept away into the morning of Sunday. The little girl I liked lay with saddle nose and her sleepy cheeks and big, sensitive, thoughtless mouth, smiling a little at Padilla's speeches. We lay and warmed ourselves by the girls, like kings, till nearly evening, then we left, kissing and fondling while dressing and then to the door, promising we'd be back.

Broke, Padilla and I had supper at his house, a more empty house than the one we had just left; that at least had old carpets, old soft chairs, and doodad girls' ingenuities, whereas Padilla lived with some aged female relatives in a big railroad flat off Madison Street. It was almost empty; in one room was a table with a few chairs and in another nothing but mattresses laid on the floor. The old women sat in the kitchen and cooked, fanning a charcoal fire, fat-burdened, slow, stoneinexpressive old creatures to whom he didn't even speak. We ate soup with ground meat at the bottom of the bowl and tortillas which came wrapped in a napkin. Finishing quickly, Padilla left me at the table, and when I went to see what had become of him found him already in bed, an army blanket drawn up to his face, with sharp nose and hair fallen back.

He said, "I have to get some sleep. I have a quiz first thing in the morning."

"Are you ready for it, Manny?"

He said, "Either this stuff comes easy or it doesn't come at all."

And that stayed with me. Therefore I was thinking on the streetcar.

Of course! Easily or not at all. People were mad to be knocking themselves out over difficulties because they thought difficulty was a sign of the right thing. So I decided to try this out and, to begin with, to experiment with book stealing. If it went easily I'd leave the dog club.

And if I made as much at it as Padilla did, that would be double what Guillaume paid me, and I could start saving toward the tuition fee at the university. I didn't mean to settle down to a career of stealing even if it were to come easy, but only to give myself a start at something better.

So I began; at first with more excitement than I could tolerate. I had nausea after, on the street, and sweated. It was a big Jowett's Plato that I took. But I was severe with myself to finish the experiment. I checked the book in a dime locker of the Illinois Central station as Padilla had told me to do and immediately went after another, and then I made good progress and became quite cool about it. The difficult moment wasn't that of walking out of the store; it came when I picked the books up and put them under my arm. But then I felt more casual, confident that if stopped I'd be able to explain myself, laugh it off as an error of thoughtlessness and charm my way out. In the store, Padilla told me, the dicks would never arrest you; it was when you stepped into the street that they nabbed you. However, in a department store, without glancing back, I'd drift into another sectionmen's shoes at Carson Pirie's, candy or rugs at Marshall Field's. It never entered my mind to branch out and steal other stuff as well.

Sooner than I had planned I quit the dog club, and it wasn't only confidence in my crook's competence that made me do it, but I was struck by the reading fever. I lay in my room and read, feeding on print and pages like a famished man. Sometimes I couldn't give a book up to a customer who had ordered it, and for a long time this was all that I could care about. The sense I had was of some live weight driven into tangles or nets of hungry feeling; I wanted to haul it in. Padilla was sore and fired up when he came to my room and saw stacks of books I should have gotten rid of long ago; it was dangerous to keep them.

If he had restricted me to books on mathematics, thermodynamics, mechanics, things probably would have been different, for I didn't carry the germ of a Clerk Maxwell or Max Planck in me. But as he had turned over to me his orders for books on theology, literature, history, and philosophy, and I copped Ranke's History of the Popes and Sarpi's Council of Trent for the seminary students, or Burckhardt or Merz's European Thought in the Nineteenth Century, I sat reading. Padilla raised hob with me about the Merz because it took so long. to finish and a man in the History department was after him for it. "You can use my card and get it out of the library," he said. But somehow that wasn l the ^me. As eating your own meal, I suppose, is different from a g. ^3 handout, even if calory for calory it's the same value; maybe the body even uses it differently.

Anyhow, I had found something out about an unknown privation, and I realized how a general love or craving, before it is explicit or before it sees its object, manifests itself as boredom or some other kind of suffering. And what did I think of myself in relation to the great occasions, the more sizable being of these books? Why, I saw them, first of all. So suppose I wasn't created to read a great declaration, or to boss a palatinate, or send off a message to Avignon, and so on, I could see, so there nevertheless was a share for me in all that had happened. How much of a share? Why, I knew there were things that would never, because they could never, come of my reading. But this knowledge was not so different from the remote but ever-present death that sits in the corner of the loving bedroom; though it doesn't budge from the corner, you wouldn't stop your loving. Then neither would I stop my reading. I sat and read. I had no eye, ear, or interest for anything else--that is, for usual, second-order, oatmeal, merephenomenal, snaried-shoelace-carfare-laundry-ticket plainness, unspecified dismalness, unknown captivities; the life of despair-harness, or the life of organization-habits which is meant to supplant accidents with calm abiding. Well, now, who can really expect the daily facts to go, toil or prisons to go, oatmeal and laundry tickets and all the rest, and insist that all moments be raised to the greatest importance, demand that everyone breathe the pointy, star-furnished air at its highest difficulty, abolish all brick, vaultlike rooms, all dreariness, and live like prophets or gods? Why, everybody knows this triumphant life can only be periodic. So there's a schism about it, some saying only this triumphant life is real and others that only the daily facts are. For me there was no debate, and I made speed into the former.

This was when I heard from Simon again. He said on the phone he was coming to repay the five bucks I had sent him. It meant that he felt ready to face me--otherwise he'd have mailed the money. Thus when he entered I sensed how he carried a load of lordly brass and effrontery; that's how he was ready; he was prepared to put me down, should I begin to holler and blame. But when he saw me surrounded by books, barefoot in an old gown, and noted, probably, the air puffs and yellow blisters of wallpaper and the poverty of light, he was more confident and easy. For he very likely felt that I was the same as before, that my wheels turned too freely, that I was hasty, too enthusiastic, or, in few words, something of a schlemiel. Suppose he touched on Grandma's death, I'd easy be led to cry, and then he'd have me. The question for him was always whether I was this way by character or choice. If by choice I could maybe be changed.

Me, on my side, I was glad he had come and eager to see him. I could never in the world have taken Einhom's advice to be hard with him and keep him down. It's true he ought to have sent me that money when I wired from Buffalo, but he'd been in dutch and I could forgive him that. Then the loan from Einhom wasn't too grievous either, since Einhorn himself had let lots of people down for far larger amounts; and he, Einhorn, was big enough and gentleman enough not to scream and moan about it. So far so good. But what about Mama and the flat?

I confess that had gone down hard, and that if I had seen Simon when I was rushing downstairs to Kreindl's to look for Mama I'd have broken his head for him. But later when I had thought it through I conceded to myself that we couldn't have kept the old home going much longer and set up a gentle kind of retirement there for Mama, neither of us having that filial tabby dormancy that natural bachelors have. Something in us both consented to the busting up of the house. All Simon had to do was speak of this; if he didn't it was because he felt his blame too much to have a clear head.

I expected to see him haggard; instead he was fatter. However, it wasn't comfortable-looking fat but as if it came from not eating right.

It took me a minute to get over my uneasiness about his creasing smile and the yellow and gold bristles on his chin--it wasn't like him not to shave; but then he was all right and sat down, big fingers knit on his chest.

It was summer, a late afternoon, and though I was on the top floor of this old frame house the shade tree was so huge it passed the roof, so all around it was green, as if in the woods, glossy; and underneath on the lawn this bird was, like a hammer tapping a waterpipe in the grass. It could have helped us to feel peaceful, but it didn't.

I believe people never knew how to observe one another so damagingly as they do now. Kin too, of course. I tried to avoid it with Simon, but we couldn't. So on each side, for a moment, the worst was thought.

Then he said, "What are you doing out on the South Side with all these books, becoming a student?"

"I wish I could afford to."

"So you must be in the book business. It can't be much of a business though, because I see you read them too. Leave it to you to find a business like this!" He said it scornfully, or meant to, but there was a dead Place where the scorn should have rung; and he said reasonably, "But suppose you could ask where my mastermind got me."

"I don't have to ask. I know. I can see."

"Are you sore, Augie?"

"No," I said, husky, and with one glance he could see how far from anger my feeling was. One glance was all he wanted, and he dropped his eyes. "I was sore when I found out. It came all together, including the news about Grandma."

"Yes, she's dead, isn't she? I guess she must have been very old.

Did you ever find out how old? I guess we'd never..." And so he passed over it with irony, sadness, even awe. We'd always smile and attribute extraordinary things to her.

Then Simon put off the brass he had come in, and he said, "I was a damn fool to get mixed up with that mob. They took away the dough and beat me up. I knew they were dangerous, but I thought I could hold my own with them. I didn't think, I mean, because I was in love.

Love! She let me go only so far. On the sun porch at night., I thought I'd bust out of my skin. I was dying for her, just to get a touch of it, and that's about all I got." He said it with coarse anger, despisingly. It gave me a shiver. "When I heard they were married I had dreams about them jazzing, like a woman with an ape. She wouldn't care. And you know what he's like. But it makes no difference, he can raise hell up there same as any other man. Besides he has dough. That's what she thinks is dough! All he owns is a few buildings. It's chickenfeed. It'll look like a lot to her until she gets to know better." Now his face was red, and with an emotion different from that despising anger. He said, "You know I hate to be like this and have such thoughts. I'm ashamed of it, I tell you honestly. Because she wasn't all that glorious and he's not all that bad. He wasn't bad to us when we were kids. You haven't forgotten that, have you? I don't want her to make me act like a damn Eskimo dog with his scruff up about a piece of fish. I used to have my sights set kind of high, as a kid. But after a while you find out what you've really got or haven't, and you wise up to the fact that first comes all the selfish and jealous stuff, that you don't care what happens to anybody else as long as you get yours; you start to think such things as how pleasant it would be if somebody close to you would die and leave you free. Then I thought it would be all the same to the somebodies if / died."

"What do you mean, died?"

"By suicide .1 came close to it in jail, 'there on North Avenue."

This reference to suicide was only factual. Simon didn't work me for pity; he never seemed to require it of me.

"I don't have much feeling against death, do you, Augie?" he said.

Tn the change of leaves about him he was calmer, heavy in his seated nosition, with the crown of his felt hat taking the side against variants, played by the green shadow and yellow of the leaves. "Well, say, do you?"

"I'm not so hot about dying."

This, after two or three thoughts had come in succession to his face, made him easier and more relaxed, softer with me. He laughed at last.

He said, "You'll die like everybody else. But I have to admit that's not what you make people think of when they look at you. You're a pretty pay numero, I'll say that for you. But you're not much good at taking care of yourself. Any other brother but you would have sweated the money out of me. If you had pulled what I pulled I'd have made things rough for you. Or anyway I'd be glad to see you land on your ass the way I've done. I'd say, 'It serves you right. Good for you!' Well, since you won't look out for your interests I see I'm going to have to do it for you."

"My interests?"

"Sure," he said, a little angered by the question. "Don't you believe I ever think about you? We've both been running too much with the losers, and I'm tired of it."

"Where're you living now?" I said.

"On the Near North Side," he said, brushing this off, that I wanted to know definite things about him. He wasn't going to say whether there was a sink in his room, or carpet or linoleum, or whether he was on a car line or facing a wall. It's normal for me to have such curiosity about details. But he wasn't going to satisfy this curiosity, since to dwell on such things implied it would be hard to get away from them; for him they were things to pass quickly. "I'm not going to stay there," he said.

"What have you been living on?" I asked. "What are you doing?"

"What do you mean, living on?" He threw difficulties in my way by repeating questions. He stood too much on his pride to say how things were and show what a bad rip he had gotten in his stuff. A kind of gallantry of presentation he had always had in the quality of older brother he wouldn't give up. He had been a fool and done wrong, he showed up sallow and with the smaller disgrace that he was fat, as if overeating were his reply to being crushedand with this all over him he wasn't going to tell me, he balked at telling, some small details. He ook my asking as a blow at him while he was trying to climb out of the nole of mortification, and he warded it off with a stiff arm, saying, "What ao you mean?" as if he'd remember later I had tried to hit him or at least goad him. Later he didn't mind telling me that he had washed floors in a beanery, but this was long afterward. But now he fought this off. Loaded on the hard black armchair--I put it that way because of his increased bulk--he passionately pulled together his perves and energies--I could see him concentrate and do it--and he started to deal with me. He did it more strongly than was necessary, with pasha force. "I haven't been wasting my time," he said. "I've been working on something. I think I'm getting married soon," he said, and didn't allow himself to smile with the announcement or temper it in some pleasant way.

"When? To whom?"

"To a woman with money."

"A woman? An older woman?" That was how I interpreted it.

"Well, what's the matter with you? Yes, I'd marry an older woman, Why not?"

"I bet you wouldn't." He was still able to amaze me, as though we had remained kids.

"We don't have to argue about it because she's not old. She's about twenty-two, I'm told."

"By whom? And you haven't even seen her?"

"No, I haven't seen her. You remember the buyer, my old boss?

He's fixing me up .1 have her picture. She's not bad. Heavy--but I'm getting heavy too. She's sort of pretty. Anyhow, even if she weren't pretty, and if the buyer isn't lying about the dough--her family is supposed to have a mountain of dough--I'd marry her."

"You've already made up your mind?"

"I'll say I have!"

"And suppose she doesn't want you?"

"I'll see that she does. Don't you think I can?"

"Maybe you can, but I don't like it. It's cold-blooded."

"Cold-blooded!" he said with sudden emotion. "What's cold-blooded about it? I'd be cold-blooded if I stayed as I am. I see around this marriage and beyond it. I'll never again go for all the nonsense about marriage. Everybody you lay eyes on, except perhaps a few like you and me, is born of marriage. Do you see anything so exceptional or wonderful about it that makes it such a big deal? Why be fooling around to make this perfect great marriage? What's it going to save you from? Has it saved anybody--the jerks, the fools, the morons, the schleppers, the jag-offs, the monkeys, rats, rabbits, or the decent unhappy people or what you call nice people? They're all married or are born of marriages, so how can you pretend to me that it makes a difference that Bob loves Mary who marries Jerry? That's for the movies. Don't you see people pondering how to marry for love and petting the blood gypped out of them? Because while they're looking for the best there is--and I figure that's what's wrong with you--everything else gets lost. It's sad, it's a pity, but it's that way."

I was all the same strongly against him; that he saw. Even if I couldn't just then consider myself on the active list of lovers and wasn't carrying a live torch any more for Esther Fenchel. I recognized his face as the face of a man in the wrong. I thought there was too much noise of life around him for a right decision to be made. Furthermore, the books I had been reading--I noticed that Simon was aware of their contribution to my opposition and his eye marked them as opponents, and there was a little bit of derision in his glance too. But I couldn't deny or be disloyal to, at the first hard blink of a challenger or because of derision, things I took seriously and consented to in my private soul as I sat reading.

"What do you want me to agree with you for? If you believe what you're saying, it shouldn't make any difference whether I agree or not."

"Oh hell!" he said, sitting forward and looking into me with widened eyes. "Don't flatter yourself, kid. If you really understood you'd agree. That would be nice, but I can certainly get along without if I have to. And besides, though this may not flatter either of us, we're the same and want the same. So you understand."

I wasn't of that opinion, and not from pride; only because of the facts. Seeing that he needed me to be similar, however, I kept quiet.

And if he was talking about the mysterious part of parentage, that our organs could receive waves or quanta of the same length, I didn't know enough about it to differ with him.

"Well, maybe it's as you say. But what makes you think this girl and her family are going to want you?"

"What are my assets? Well, first of all we're all handsome men in our family. Even George, if he were normal, would have been. The old lady knew that and thought we'd capitalize on it. But besides, I'm not marrying a rich girl in order to live on her dough and have a good time. They'll get full value out of me, those people. They'll see that I won't lie down and take it easy. I can't. I have to make money. I'm not one of those guys that give up what they want as soon as they realize they want it. I want money, and I mean want; and I can handle it. Those are my assets. So I couldn't be more on the level with them."

You couldn't blame me for listening to this with some amount of skepticism. But then things like this are done by people with the specific ambition to do them. I didn't like the way he talked; for instance, the boast that we were handsome men--it made us sound like studs. However, I couldn't hope that he'd have another failure; he wasn't that rich in heart that he could make good use of it.

"Let's see the girl's picture."

He had it in his pants pocket. She seemed young enough, a big girl, with a pretty good face. I thought she was rather handsome, though not of an open or easy nature.

"She's attractive, I told you. A little too heavy maybe."

Her name was Charlotte Magnus.

"Magnus? Wasn't it a Magnus truck that delivered coal to the Einhoras?"

"That's her uncle, in the coal business. Four or five big yards. And her father owns property by the acre. Hotels. Also a few five-and-dime stores. It'll be the coal business for me. That's where I think the most dough is. I'll ask for a yard as a wedding present."

"You have it all pretty well figured out"

"Sure. I have something figured out for you too."

"What, am I supposed to get married also?"; "In time, yes, we'll fix you up. Meanwhile you have to help me out. I'have to have some family. I've been told they're family-minded people. They wouldn't understand or like it, the way we are, and we have to make it look better. There'll be dinners and such things, and probably a big engagement party. You don't expect me to go downstate and fetch George here to show them, do you? No, I have to have you.

We need clothes. Do you have any?"

"They're in hock."

"Get them out."....

"And what am I going to use for money?"

"Don't you have any at all? I thought you were in some kind of book business here.";,'

"Mama gets all the money I have to spare."

He said tightly, "All right, don't be wise. I'll take care of all that soon. I'll raise the dough."

I wondered where his credit might still be good. Perhaps his buyer friend lent him some money. Anyway, I got a postal order from Simon a few days later, and when I redeemed the clothes he came to borrow one of my Evanston suits. Soon he said that he had met Charlotte Magnus. He believed she was already in love with him.