Saul Bellow - The Victim

He gazed down at the dented deck brass. For the present he preferred to be cautious about Elena and assume that her nerves were overworked. She gave way without control to what any parent with a sick child was liable to feel. But when he allowed himself to go further, to think of more than overworked nerves and Italian emotions, he saw the parallel between her and his mother and, for that matter, between himself and Max and the two children. The last was not so important. But it gave him a clearer view of each of the women to consider that they were perhaps alike. At least you could say of them that they were both extraordinary when they were disturbed (he had not forgotten his mother’s screaming) — whatever the right word for it was.

The winches began to rattle, a gate dropped resoundingly in the green wooden cove of the slip. The water turned yellow and white under the bows like stale city snow. The boat started back and then, with shut engines, glided in, bumping the weedy timbers. On the long hill beyond the arches of the sheds, the house fronts were suddenly present, and Leventhal, moving ashore in the crowd, heard the busses throbbing before the station.

Philip again let him in. Recognizing his uncle he stood aside for him.

“Where’s Elena. Is she here?” Leventhal said, striding into the dining-room. “How’s the boy?”

“He’s sleeping. Ma’s downstairs using Villani’s telephone. She said she’d be up right away.” He turned to the kitchen, explaining from the doorway, “I was eating supper.”

“Go ahead, finish,” said Leventhal. He walked restlessly round the room. Mickey was asleep; the second alarm seemed to be like the first. Touching the hall door, he debated whether to go into the child’s room alone. No, it would be wiser not to; there was no telling how Elena would take it.

It was shortly before sundown, and there were lights in the flats giving on the airshaft where the walls, for a short distance below the black cornice, were reddened by the sky. Leventhal went into the kitchen where Philip sat beside the table on a high stepstool. He had a bowl of dry cereal before him and he poured milk over it, digging up the flap of the milk carton with his thumbnail; he peeled and sliced a banana, sprinkled sugar over it, and flipped the skin into the sink with its pans and dishes. The paper frills along the shelves of the cupboard crackled in the current of the fan. It ran on the cabinet, sooty, with insectlike swiftness and a thrumming of its soft rubber blades; it suggested a fly hovering below the tarnish and heat of the ceiling and beside the scaling, many-jointed, curved pipes on which Elena hung rags to dry. The boy’s knees were level with the tabletop, and he bent almost double as he ate, spreading his legs. Leventhal reflected that he had taken the stool instead of a chair because he felt the need to do something extreme in his presence. “I used to do stunts, too, when there was a visitor,” he reminded himself. “And that is what I am here, a visitor.”

“Is this your whole supper?” he asked.

“When it’s hot like this, I never eat a lot.” The boy had a rather precise way of speaking.

“You ought to have bread and butter, and so on, and greens,” said Leventhal.

Philip interrupted his eating to look at his uncle briefly. “We don’t cook much during the heat wave,” he said. He set his feet on a higher rung and bent even lower. His hair had been newly cut, roughly clipped on top and shaved high up the back of his neck to a line above his large but delicately white ears.

“What kind of a barber do you have?”

Philip looked up again. “Oh, Jack McCaul on the block. We all go to him; Dad too, when he’s home. I told him to cut it this way. I asked for a summer haircut.”

“They ought to take away the man’s license for giving you one like that.” He said this too forcefully and overshot his intended joke, and he paused and made an effort to find the right tone.

“Oh, McCaul’s all right,” said Philip. “He takes care of us. I was waiting for the kid to get better so’s we could go together. But Ma said I should go and have a trim before she had to buy me a fiddle to go with my hair. This haircut is all right for the weather. Last summer I got a baldie — all off.”

“Well, it’s really okay.” Leventhal watched him eat, penetrated with sympathy for him. “An independent little boy,” he thought. “But how they treat him.”

He sat down by the window, unbuttoning his creased jacket, and glanced at the sky through the airshaft’s black square. In one of the other flats, a girl in a parlor chair was brushing a dog that yawned and tried to lick her hand. She pushed its muzzle down. A woman in a chemise passed through the room, back and forth from kitchen to hall. Mickey’s window gave on the shaft; it was on the corner, and if he were awake now he might be able to see his brother and his uncle.

“The doctor’s going to be here any minute.” Leventhal was suddenly impatient. “I thought Elena was in such a hurry for him to come. What’s keeping her?”

“I’ll go and see.” Philip sprang from the stool.

“Don’t leave your supper. Tell me where she is and I’ll find her.” But Philip was already in the corridor. Leventhal, however, instead of footsteps, heard voices through the open doors. Had he met Elena coming up the stairs? The light went on in the dining-room, under the green glass panes of the shade, and Leventhal had a glimpse of a woman in a black dress moving beside the table.

“Boy?” he called out. “Say, Phil?”

“Here. Come on in.”

“Who is it?” he inquired in a low voice. He tried to see beyond the lamp to the other end of the room.

“My grandmother.”

“The old woman?” said Leventhal in surprise. He had heard something about her from Max but had never seen her. He started from the doorway and, looking confused, went toward her around the dining-room table, changing his direction when she turned and sat down in the mohair armchair.

“This is Dad’s brother,” Philip said to her. Leventhal was conscious of prolonging his nod almost into a bow; he wanted to be prepossessing. The old lady gave him only a brief sharp glance. Taller than Elena, she was gaunt and straight-backed, and the carriage of her head was tense. She wore large gold earrings. The hair came out short and white at her temples; toward the back of her head it was black and tightly knotted. Her dress also was black, a black silk, and despite the heat she wore a shawl on her shoulders.

Since she remained silent, Leventhal stood undecided; it seemed inadvisable to say more; to sit down without being answered would embarrass him. But, also, it might be impolite to return to the kitchen. Maybe he misunderstood her taciturnity. However, she seemed to avert her head from him, and he had to struggle with an angry urge to compel her to face him. Nevertheless she had not spoken, and he could not be sure. It was possible that he was mistaken.

“I thought you were going to fetch your mother,” he said to Philip somewhat impatiently. And when Philip started to leave, he said hastily, “I’ll go with you.” He had decided that the grandmother’s look was unfriendly, though in the dusty green-tinged light that came through the lampshade it was difficult to get a definite impression. But he felt her antagonism. In a shambling gait — the heat made him heavy — he followed Philip down several turns of the stairs to the neighbor’s flat. Philip knocked, and in a few seconds Elena came hurrying out to them, eager and fearful.

“Oh, Asa, you,” she said. “And the specialist? Did you bring him?”

“He said between seven and eight. He ought to be here soon.”

The neighbor, Mr Villani, smoking a twisted stogie, appeared in the hallway and cried out to her, “You let us know right away what he says about the boy up there.” He looked at Leventhal, perfectly unconstrained in his curiosity. “How do?” he said to him.