Saul Bellow - Collected Stories

The effect of this question was to make me tight in the face, dim in the ears. The whole cellar grew small and distant, toylike but not for play.

“How’s your old man to deal with—tough?”

“Hard,” I said.

“Slaps the kids around? This time you’ve got it coming. What’s under the dress, a pair of bloomers?”

I shook my head.

“Your behind is bare? Now you know how it feels to go around like a woman.”

The Greek’s great muscles were dough-colored. You wouldn’t have wanted him to take a headlock on you. That’s the kind of man the Organization hired. The Capone people were now in charge. The customers would be like celluloid Kewpie dolls to the Greek. He looked like one of those boxing kangaroos in the movies, and he could do a standing jump over the bar. Yet he enjoyed playing zany. He could curve his long mouth up at the corners like the happy face in a cartoon.

“What were you doing on the North Side?”

“Delivering flowers.”

“Hustling after school but with ramming on your brain. You got a lot to learn, buddy boy. Well, enough of that. Now, Moosey, take this flashlight and see if you can scrounge up a sweater or something in the back basement for this down-on-his-luck kid. I’d be surprised if the old janitor hasn’t picked the stuff over pretty good. If mice have nested in it, shake out the turds. It’ll help on the trip home.”

I followed Moose into the hotter half of the cellar. His flashlight picked out the laundry tubs with the hand-operated wringers mounted on them, the padlocked wooden storage bins. “Turn over some of these cardboard boxes. Mostly rags, is my guess. Dump ‘em out, that’s the easiest.”

I emptied a couple of big cartons. Moose passed the light back and forth over the heaps. “Nothing much, like I said.”

“Here’s a flannel shirt,” I said. I wanted to get out. The smell of heated burlap was hard to take. This was the only wearable article. I could have used a pullover or a pair of pants. We returned to the bar. As I was putting on the shirt, which revolted me (I come of finicky people whose fetish is cleanliness), the barman said, “I tell you what, you take this drunk home—this is about time for him, isn’t it, Moosey? He gets plastered here every night. See he gets home and it’ll be worth half a buck to you.”

“I’ll do it,” I said. “It all depends on how far away he lives. If it’s far, 111 be frozen before I get there.”

“It isn’t far. Winona, west of Sheridan, isn’t far. I’ll give you the directions. This guy is a City Hall payroller. He has no special job, he works direct for the ward committeeman. He’s a lush with two little girls to bring up. If he’s sober enough he cooks their dinner. Probably they take more care of him than he does of them.”

“First I’ll take charge of his money,” said the barman. “I don’t want my buddy here to be rolled. I don’t say you would do it, but I owe this to a customer.”

Bristle-faced Moose began to empty the man’s pockets—his wallet, some keys, crushed cigarettes, a red bandanna that looked foul, matchbooks, greenbacks, and change. All these were laid out on the bar.

When I look back at past moments, I carry with me an apperceptive mass that ripens and perhaps distorts, mixing what is memorable with what may not be worth mentioning. Thus I see the barman with one big hand gathering in the valuables as if they were his winnings, the pot in a poker game. And then I think that if the kangaroo giant had taken this drunk on his back he might have bounded home with him in less time than it would have taken me to support him as far as the corner. But what the barman actually said was, “I got a nice escort for you, Jim.”

Moose led the man back and forth to make sure his feet were operating. His swollen eyes now opened and then closed again. “McKern,” Moose said, briefing me. “Southwest corner of Winona and Sheridan, the second building on the south side of the street, and it’s the second floor.”

“You’ll be paid when you get back,” said the barman.

The freeze was now so hard that the snow underfoot sounded like metal foil. Though McKern may have sobered up in the frigid street, he couldn’t move very fast. Since I had to hold on to him, I borrowed his gloves. He had a coat with pockets to put his hands in. I tried to keep behind him and get some shelter from the wind. That didn’t work. He wasn’t up to walking. I had to hold him. Instead of a desirable woman, I had a drunkard in my arms. This disgrace, you see, while my mother was surrendering to death. At about this hour, upstairs neighbors came down and relatives arrived and filled the kitchen and the dining room—a deathwatch. I should have been there, not on the far North Side. When I had earned the carfare, I’d still be an hour from home on a streetcar making four stops to the mile.

Toward the last, I was dragging McKern. I kept the street door open with my back while I pulled him into the dim lobby by the arms.

The little girls had been waiting and came down at once. They held the inner door for me while I brought their daddy upstairs with a fireman’s-carry and laid him on his bed. The children had had plenty of practice at this. They undressed him down to the long Johns and then stood silent on either side of the room.

This, for them, was how things were. They took deep oddities calmly, as children generally will. I had spread his winter coat over him.

I had little sympathy for McKern, in the circumstances. I believe I can tell you why: He had surely passed out many times, and he would pass out again, dozens of times before he died. Drunkenness was common and familiar, and therefore accepted, and drunks could count on acceptance and support and relied on it. Whereas if your troubles were uncommon, unfamiliar, you could count on nothing. There was a convention about drunkenness, established in part by drunkards. The founding proposition was that consciousness is terrible. Its lower, impoverished forms are perhaps the worst. Flesh and blood are poor and weak, susceptible to human shock. Here my descendant will hear the voice of Grandfather Louie giving one of his sermons on higher consciousness and interrupting the story he promised to tell. You will hold him to his word, as you have every right to do.

The older girl now spoke to me. She said, “The fellow phoned and said a man was bringing Daddy home, and you’d help with supper if Daddy couldn’t cook it.”

“Yes. Well…?”

“Only you’re not a man—you’ve got a dress on.”

“It looks like it, doesn’t it. Don’t you worry; I’ll come to the kitchen with you.”

“Are you a lady?”

“What do you mean—what does it look like? All right, I’m a lady.”

“You can eat with us.”

“Then show me where the kitchen is.”

I followed them down a corridor narrowed by clutter—boxes of canned groceries, soda biscuits, sardines, pop bottles. When I passed the bathroom, I slipped in for quick relief. The door had neither a hook nor a bolt; the string of the ceiling fixture had snapped off. A tiny night-light was plugged into the baseboard. I thanked God it was so dim. I put up the board while raising my skirt, and when I had begun I heard one of the children behind me. Over my shoulder I saw that it was the younger one, and as I turned my back {everything was happening today) I said, “Don’t come in here.” But she squeezed past and sat on the edge of the tub. She grinned at me. She was expecting her second teeth. Today all females were making sexual fun of me, and even the infants were looking lewd. I stopped, letting the dress fall, and said to her, “What are you laughing about?”

“If you were a girl, you’d of sat down.”

The kid wanted me to understand that she knew what she had seen. She pressed her fingers over her mouth, and I turned and went to the kitchen.