Saul Bellow - The Victim

Heartsick and tired, Leventhal started home at ten o’clock. He did not think of Allbee till he began to go up, and then quickened his step. Twisting the key, he threw the door back with a bang and turned on the lights. On the couch in the dining-room, sheets, bathrobe, and towel were twisted together. There was half a glass of milk on the floor.

He went back to the front room and stretched out on the bed, intending to rest awhile before taking off his clothes and shutting off the lights. He put his hand to his face with a groan. Almost at once he fell asleep.

During the night he heard a noise and sat up. The lights were still burning. Someone was in the flat. He went softly into the dark kitchen. The dining-room door was open, and by the window he saw Allbee undressing. He stood in his underpants, pulling his shirt over his head. The fear that Leventhal felt, though deep, lasted only a second, a single thrust. His indignation, too, was short lived. He returned to the front room and took off his clothes. Switching off the lights, he went toward his bed through the dark, mumbling, “Go, stay — it’s all the same to me.” He was in a state of indifference akin to numbness, and he lay down more conscious of the heat than of any emotion in himself.

MR MILLIKAN, who attended to make-up at the printer”s, was representing the firm at an all-industry conference, and Leventhal, at midday, had to go to the shop in Brooklyn Heights to replace him.

He waited on the subway platform in the dead brown air, feeling spent. He did not know how he was going to get through the day. The train rolled up and he sat down spiritlessly under the slow-wheeling fan that stirred the heat. Again and again he thought about the child’s death. So soon closed over, covered up. So soon. He repeated it involuntarily while his head rocked with the bucketing of the cars in the long pull under the river that ended below the St George Hotel. He left the train and rode up to the street level in the elevator.

Millikan had made up four pages, leaving him four more. The work went slowly; he became drowsy and made mistakes and tedious recounts. Toward four o’clock, he began to drop off. “It’s the machine,” he thought. The presses were upstairs and they ran without interruption all day. He took time out for a walk. It was curious that he should feel so dull and heavy, and yet at the same time so apprehensive.

He went into a restaurant for a cup of coffee. The chairs were standing on the tables and a boy with a red, bluff head and freckled, rolling shoulders was mopping the tiles. The waitress made a detour of the advancing line of dirty water to ask Leventhal to move out of the way. He drank his coffee at the counter, wiped his mouth on the oblong of a paper napkin he did not bother to unfold, loitered through the lobby of the St George, examining a few magazines, and returned to the shop. Contemplating the pages with their blank spaces, he sighed and picked up the scissors. The presses had stopped before he was done. At half-past six he pasted his last strip and rubbed his hands clean with a piece of wastepaper.

On his way to dinner, he stopped at his flat to look in the mailbox. There was a note from Mary saying that she was writing a long letter which she expected to mail in a day or two. Disappointed, he slipped the note into his shirt pocket. He did not go upstairs. Near the corner he met Nunez, in his dungarees and straw hat, carrying a webbed market bag full of groceries.

“Eh, eh, hey! How are you, Mr Leventhal? I see you got yourself some company while your wife is away.”

“How do you know?” said Leventhal.

“Us supers, we keep track of everything around a building. We’re supposed to be nosey. That’s not what it is, you find out even if you don’t care. You can’t help it. The tenants get surprised. Brujo , I see through the wall. They don’t know, eh?” He described a spiral with his fingers, enjoying himself greatly. “No. You go out in the morning and then I hear your radio play. This afternoon the dumb-waiter goes up to the fourth floor. Later on, what’s in it? — A empty soup can and rye bottle.”

“So that’s what he’s doing?” thought Leventhal. “Guzzling all day. That’s what I let him in for.” He said to Nunez, “I’ve got a friend staying with me.”

“Oh, I don’t care who you got.” Nunez gave a suggestive laugh and wrinkled his nose with pleasure, the veins on his forehead puffing out.

“Who do you think I’ve got?”

“That’s okay. The way the dumb-waiter went up, there was no lady pulling on the rope, I know that. Don’t worry.” He swung the bag with his big-jointed, muscular arm tattooed with a bleeding heart. Leventhal continued toward the restaurant. “No money for rent,” he said going down the stairs and bending under the awning. “But for hooch he has it. For hooch he can raise it. Where?” It occurred to him that Allbee had stolen some article from the house and pawned it. But what valuables were there? Mary’s sealskin coat was in storage. Spoons? The silver was not worth stealing. Clothing? But a pawnbroker would be running a great risk, seeing how Allbee was dressed, to deal with him. No, hockshops had to think of their licenses. Leventhal did not really fear for his clothes. He had a tweed suit sealed in a mothproof bag in his closet; the rest was not worth pawning. And the suit was a small enough price to pay for getting rid of Allbee. Allbee was certainly clever enough to realize that. Drunks, of course, when they were thirsty enough, desperate enough, turned reckless. “But it isn’t the few bucks he’s after,” Leventhal reasoned. For he had already offered him money. Allbee must have some of his own, since he could afford to buy whisky. Then what about his being evicted, was that an invention? But what of his appearance, that filthy suit of his, his shirt, his long hair? Leventhal tentatively concluded that he kept a little money for whisky by economizing on rent and other things. “But I better lock up the valuables, meanwhile,” he told himself.

He ate a small dinner of baked veal overseasoned with thyme, had a glass of iced tea with sandy, undissolved sugar, and lit a cigar. Max and the family had replaced Allbee in his mind. Should he phone? Not just now, not tonight — he busily supplied good excuses, flinching a little at the shadow of his own weakness which lay behind them. He knew it was there. But this was not really the time to call. Later, when things had settled down, Max would soon find out — assuming that Elena’s last look in the chapel signified what he thought it did — what he had on his hands. Though perhaps there was nothing so unusual in that look under the circumstances. Perhaps — Leventhal studied the seam in the long ash of his cigar — he had let his imagination run away with him. Grief, overloading of the heart… “Horror, you know,” he silently explained. People crying when their faces were twisted might appear to be laughing, and so on. “Well, I hope to God I’m wrong,” he said. “I hope I am. And if he can run the old woman out of the house, maybe they can come through.” The boy’s death ought to bring the family closer together, at least. The old woman’s influence on Elena was bad; and now especially she could work round her. For Philip’s sake, Max ought to show the old devil the door. With her cooking and housekeeping she might try, at a time like this, to make herself a power in the house. He must impress the danger of this on Max, who might be inclined to let her stay. “Throw her out, don’t give her a chance!” Leventhal exclaimed. If Max came to rely on her, why… And he might, if it freed him, go where he liked and leave Philip in her hands. No, she must be pitched out. He sat awhile at his gloomy corner table, his black eyes giving very little evidence of the gloomy anxiety that filled him.