Saul Bellow - Collected Stories

Hattie had decided that she would have herself moved into India’s bed when it was time to die. Why should there be two deathbeds? A perilous look came into her eyes, her lips were pressed together forbiddingly. I follow, she said, speaking to India with an inner voice, so never mind. Presently—before long—she would have to leave the yellow house in her turn. And as she went into the parlor, thinking of the will, she sighed. Pretty soon she would have to attend to it. India’s lawyer, Claiborne, helped her with such things. She had phoned him in town, while she was staying with Marian, and talked matters over with him. He had promised to try to sell the house for her. Fifteen thousand was her bottom price, she said. If he couldn’t find a buyer, perhaps he could find a tenant. Two hundred dollars a month was the rental she set. Rolfe laughed. Hattie turned toward him one of those proud, dulled looks she always took on when he angered her. Haughtily she said, “For summer on Sego Lake? That’s reasonable.”

“You’re competing with Pace’s ranch.”

“Why, the food is stinking down there. And he cheats the dudes,” said Hat-tie. “He really cheats them at cards. You’ll never catch me playing blackjack with him again.”

And what would she do, thought Hattie, if Claiborne could neither rent nor sell the house? This question she shook off as regularly as it returned. I don’t have to be a burden on anybody, thought Hattie. It’s looked bad many a time before, but when push came to shove, I made it. Somehow I got by. But she argued with herself: How many times? How long, O God —an old thing, feeble, no use to anyone? Who said she had any right to own property?

She was sitting on her sofa, which was very old—India’s sofa—eight feet long, kidney-shaped, puffy, and bald. An underlying pink shone through the green; the upholstered tufts were like the pads of dogs’ paws; between them rose bunches of hair. Here Hattie slouched, resting, with knees wide apart and a cigarette in her mouth, eyes half shut but farseeing. The mountains seemed not fifteen miles but fifteen hundred feet away, the lake a blue band; the tealike odor of the roses, though they were still unopened, was already in the air, for Sam was watering them in the heat. Gratefully Hattie yelled, “Sam!”

Sam was very old, and all shanks. His feet looked big. His old railroad jacket was made tight across the back by his stoop. A crooked finger with its great broad nail over the mouth of the hose made the water spray and sparkle. Happy to see Hattie, he turned his long jaw, empty of teeth, and his long blue eyes, which seemed to bend back to penetrate into his temples (it was his face that turned, not his body), and he said, “Oh, there, Hattie. You’ve made it home today? Welcome, Hattie.”

“Have a beer, Sam. Come around the kitchen door and I’ll give you a beer.” She never had Sam in the house, owing to his skin disease. There were raw patches on his chin and behind his ears. Hattie feared infection from his touch, having decided that he had impetigo. She gave him the beer can, never a glass, and she put on gloves before she used the garden tools. Since he would take no money from her—Wanda Gingham charged a dollar a day—she got Marian to find old clothes for him in town and she left food for him at the door of the damp-wood-smelling boxcar where he lived. “How’s the old wing, Hat?” he said.

“It’s coming. I’ll be driving the car again before you know it,” she told him. “By the first of May I’ll be driving again.” Every week she moved the date forward. “By Decoration Day I expect to be on my own again,” she said.

In mid-June, however, she was still unable to drive. Helen Rolfe said to her, “Hattie, Jerry and I are due in Seattle the first week of July.”

“Why, you never told me that,” said Hattie.

“You don’t mean to tell me this is the first you heard of it,” said Helen. “You’ve known about it from the first—since Christmas.”

It wasn’t easy for Hattie to meet her eyes. She presently put her head down. Her face became very dry, especially the lips. “Well, don’t you worry about me. I’ll be all right here,” she said.

“Who’s going to look after you?” said Jerry. He evaded nothing himself and tolerated no evasion in others. Except that, as Hattie knew, he made every possible allowance for her. But who would help her? She couldn’t count on her friend Half Pint, she couldn’t really count on Marian either. She had had only the Rolfes to turn to. Helen, trying to be steady, gazed at her and made sad, involuntary movements with her head, sometimes nodding, sometimes seeming as if she disagreed. Hattie, with her inner voice, swore at her: Bitch-eyes. I can’t make it the way she does because I’m old. Is that fair? And yet she admired Helen’s eyes. Even the skin about them, slightly wrinkled, heavy underneath, was touching, beautiful. There was a heaviness in her bust that went, as if by attachment, with the heaviness of her eyes. Her head, her hands and feet should have taken a more slender body. Helen, said Hattie, was the nearest thing she had on earth to a sister. But there was no reason to go to Seattle—no genuine business. Why the hell Seattle? It was only idleness, only a holiday. The only reason was Hattie herself; this was their way of telling her that there was a limit to what she could expect them to do for her. Helen’s nervous head wavered, but her thoughts were steady. She knew what was passing through Hattie’s mind. Like Hattie, she was an idle woman. Why was her right to idleness better?

Because of money? thought Hattie. Because of age? Because she has a husband? Because she had a daughter in Swarthmore College? But an interesting thing occurred to her. Helen disliked being idle, whereas Hattie herself had never made any bones about it: an idle life was all she was good for. But for her it had been uphill all the way, because when Waggoner divorced her she didn’t have a cent. She even had to support Wicks for seven or eight years. Except with horses, Wicks had no sense. And then she had had to take tons of dirt from India. I am the one, Hattie asserted to herself. I would know what to do with Helen’s advantages. She only sujfers from them. And if she wants to stop being an idle woman why can’t she start with me, her neighbor? Hattie’s skin, for all its puffiness, burned with anger. She said to Rolfe and Helen, “Don’t worry. I’ll make out. But if I have to leave the lake you’ll be ten times more lonely than before. Nowl ‘m going back to my house.”

She lifted up her broad old face, and her lips were childlike with suffering. She would never take back what she had said.

But the trouble was no ordinary trouble. Hattie was herself aware that she rambled, forgot names, and answered when no one spoke.

“We can’t just take charge of her,” Rolfe said. “What’s more, she ought to be near a doctor. She keeps her shotgun loaded so she can fire it if anything happens to her in the house. But who knows what she’ll shoot? I don’t believe it was Jacamares who killed that Doberman of hers.”

Rolfe drove into the yard the day after she moved back to the yellow house and said, “I’m going into town. I can bring you some chow if you like.”

She couldn’t afford to refuse his offer, angry though she was, and she said, “Yes, bring me some stuff from the Mountain Street Market. Charge it.” She had only some frozen shrimp and a few cans of beer in the icebox. When Rolfe had gone she put out the package of shrimp to thaw.

People really used to stick by one another in the West. Hattie now saw herself as one of the pioneers. The modern breed had come later. After all, she had lived on the range like an old-timer. Wicks had had to shoot their Christmas dinner and she had cooked it—venison. He killed it on the reservation, and if the Indians had caught them, there would have been hell to pay.