Saul Bellow - Collected Stories

“She can’t. Her arm hasn’t healed.”

Amy didn’t say that she was sorry to hear it. In the place of those words came a silence which might have meant that. Then she said, “I might go over there a few hours a day, but she would have to pay me.”

“Now, Amy, you must know as well as I do that Hattie has no money—not much more than her pension. Just the house.”

At once Amy said, no pause coming between his words and hers, “I would take care of her if she’d agree to leave the house to me.”

“Leave it in your hands, you mean?” said Rolfe. “To manage?”

“In her will. To belong to me.”

“Why, Amy, what would you do with Hattie’s house?” he said.

“It would be my property, that’s all. I’d have it.”

“Maybe you would leave Fort Walters to her in your will,” he said.

“Oh, no,” she said. “Why should I? I’m not asking Hattie for her help. I don’t need it. Hattie is a city woman.”

Rolfe could not carry this proposal back to Hattie. He was too wise ever to mention her will to her.

But Pace was not so careful of her feelings. By mid-June Hattie had begun to visit his bar regularly. She had so many things to think about she couldn’t stay at home. When Pace came in from the yard one day—he had been packing the wheels of his horse trailer and was wiping grease from his fingers—he said with his usual bluntness, “How would you like it if I paid you fifty bucks a month for the rest of your life, Hat?”

Hattie was holding her second old-fashioned of the day. At the bar she made it appear that she observed the limit; but she had started drinking at home. One before lunch, one during, one after lunch. She began to grin, expecting Pace to make one of his jokes. But he was wearing his scoop-shaped Western hat as level as a Quaker, and he had drawn down his chin, a sign that he was not fooling. She said, “That would be nice, but what’s the catch?”

“No catch,” he said. “This is what we’d do. I’d give you five hundred dollars cash, and fifty bucks a month for life, and you let me sleep some dudes in the yellow house, and you’d leave the house to me in your will.”

“What kind of a deal is that?” said Hattie, her look changing. “I thought we were friends.”

“It’s the best deal you’ll ever get,” he said.

The weather was sultry, but Hattie till now had thought that it was nice. She had been dreamy but comfortable, about to begin to enjoy the cool of the day; but now she felt that such cruelty and injustice had been waiting to attack her, that it would have been better to die in the hospital than be so disillusioned.

She cried, “Everybody wants to push me out. You’re a cheater, Pace. God! I know you. Pick on somebody else. Why do you have to pick on me? Just because I happen to be around?”

Why, no, Hattie,” he said, trying now to be careful. “It was just a business offer.”

“Why don’t you give me some blood for the bank if you’re such a friend of mine?”

“Well, Hattie, you drink too much and you oughtn’t to have been driving anyway.”

“I sneezed, and you know it. The whole thing happened because I sneezed. Everybody knows that. I wouldn’t sell you my house. I’d give it away to the lepers first. You’d let me go away and never send me a cent. You never pay anybody. You can’t even buy wholesale in town anymore because nobody trusts you. I’m stuck, that’s all, just stuck. I keep on saying that this is my only home in all the world, this is where my friends are, and the weather is always perfect and the lake is beautiful. But I wish the whole damn empty old place were in hell. It’s not human and neither are you. But I’ll be here the day the sheriff takes away your horses—you never mind! I’ll be clapping and applauding!”

He told her then that she was drunk again, and so she was, but she was more than that, and though her head was spinning she decided to go back to the house at once and take care of some things she had been putting off. This very day she was going to write to the lawyer, Claiborne, and make sure that Pace never got her property. She wouldn’t put it past him to swear in court that India had promised him the yellow house.

She sat at the table with pen and paper, trying to think how to put it.

“I want this on record,” she wrote. “I could kick myself in the head when I think of how he’s led me on. I have been his patsy ten thousand times. As when that drunk crashed his Cub plane on the lake shore. At the coroner’s jury he let me take the whole blame. He said he had instructed me when I was working for him never to take in any drunks. And this flier was drunk. He had nothing on but a T-shirt and Bermuda shorts and he was flying from Sacramento to Salt Lake City. At the inquest Pace said I had disobeyed his instructions. The same was true when the cook went haywire. She was a tramp. He never hires decent help. He cheated her on the bar bill and blamed me and she went after me with a meat cleaver. She disliked me because I criticized her for drinking at the bar in her one-piece white bathing suit with the dude guests. But he turned her loose on me. He hints that he did certain services for India. She would never have let him touch one single finger. He was too common for her. It can never be said about India that she was not a lady in every way. He thinks he is the greatest sack-artist in the world. He only loves horses, as a fact. He has no claims at all, oral or written, on this yellow house. I want you to have this over my signature. He was cruel to Pickle-Tits who was his first wife, and he’s no better to the charming woman who is his present one. I don’t know why she takes it. It must be despair.” Hattie said to herself, I don’t suppose I’d better send that.

She was still angry. Her heart was knocking within; the deep pulses, as after a hot bath, beat at the back of her thighs. The air outside was dotted with transparent particles. The mountains were as red as furnace clinkers. The iris leaves were fan sticks—they stuck out like Jiggs’s hair.

She always ended by looking out of the window at the desert and lake. They drew you from yourself. But after they had drawn you, what did they do with you? It was too late to find out. I’ll never know. I wasn’t meant to. I’m not the type, Hattie reflected. Maybe something too cruel for women, young or old.

So she stood up and, rising, she had the sensation that she had gradually become a container for herself. You get old, your heart, your liver, your lungs seem to expand in size, and the walls of the body give way outward, swelling, she thought, and you take the shape of an old jug, wider and wider toward the top. You swell up with tears and fat. She no longer even smelled to herself like a woman. Her face with its much-slept-upon skin was only faintly like her own—like a cloud that has changed. It was a face. It became a ball of yarn. It had drifted open. It had scattered.

I was never one single thing anyway, she thought. Never my own. I was only loaned to myself.

But the thing wasn’t over yet. And in fact she didn’t know for certain that it was ever going to be over. You only had other people’s word for it that death was such-and-such. How do I know? she asked herself challengingly. Her anger had sobered her for a little while. Now she was again drunk.… It was strange. It is strange. It may continue being strange. She further thought, I used to wish for death more than I do now. Because I didn’t have anything at all. I changed when I got a roof of my own over me. And now? Do I have to go? I thought Marian loved me, but she already has a sister. And I thought Helen and Jerry would never desert me, but they’ve beat it. And now Pace has insulted me. They think I’m not going to make it.