Saul Bellow - Collected Stories

“Don’t talk about costs; there’s no money owing,” said Gina. “The one thing I have to tell you is how the ring got to your bedside. I went to Lucy’s school and gave it to her.”

“You gave an emerald to Lucy! To a young child?”

“I made sure to arrive before her new sitter came for her, and I explained to Lucy what had to be done: Here’s your mother’s ring, it has to be put on her night table, and here’s a nice Madeira handkerchief to put it on.”

“What else did you say?”

“There wasn’t much else that needed saying. She knew the ring was lost. Well, it was found now. I folded the handkerchief around the ring and put it in her schoolbag.”

“And she understood?”

“She’s a lot like you.”

“How’s that? Tell me!”

“The same type as you. You mentioned that to me several times. Did I think so? And presently I did begin to think so.”

“You could trust her to carry it out, and not to say, not to tell. Why, I was beside myself when the ring turned up on the handkerchief. Where did it drop from! Who could have done it! I even wondered if a burglar had been hired to come in and put it there. Not a word from the kid. She looked straight ahead like a Roman sentry. You asked her not to say?”

“Well, yes. It was better that way. It never occurred to you to ask her about it?”

“How would that ever come up?” said Clara. Not once. My own kid, capable ofthat.

“I told her to come down to the street again and report to me afterward,” said Gina. “I walked behind them from school—Lucy and the new girl, who doesn’t know me. And in about fifteen minutes Lucy came to me at the corner and said she had put it where I told her…. You’re pleased, aren’t you?”

“I’m mystified. I’m moved. Frankly, Gina, I don’t believe you and I will ever meet again….” The girl didn’t disagree, and Clara said, “So I’m going to speak my mind. You weren’t going to describe or discuss your experiences in New York—in Harlem: I suppose you were being firm according to your private lights. Your intimacies are your business, but the word I used to describe your attitude was ‘vainglory’—the pride of a European girl in New York who gets into a mess and takes credit for getting herself out. But it’s far beyond that.” Tears fell from Clara’s eyes as she took Gina’s hand. “I see how you brought it all together through my own child. You gave her something significant to do, and she was equal to it. Most amazing to me is the fact that she didn’t talk, she only watched. That level of observation and control in a girl of ten… how do you suppose it feels to discover that?”

Gina had been getting ready to stand up, but she briefly sat down again. She said, “I think you found the right word—right for both of us. When I came to be interviewed, the vainglory was all around—you were waving it over me. I wondered whether the lady of the house was like that in America. But you’re not an American lady of the house. You have a manner, Mrs. Velde. As if you were directing traffic. ‘Turn left, go right—do this, do that.’ You have definite ideas.”

“Pernickety, maybe?” said Clara. “Did I hurt your feelings?”

“If that means bossy, no. My feelings weren’t hurt when I knew you better. You were firm, according to your lights. I decided that you were a complete person, and the orders you gave you gave for that reason.”

“Oh, wait a minute, I don’t see any complete persons. In luckier times I’m sure complete persons did exist. But now? Now that’s just the problem. You look around for something to take hold of, and where is it?”

“I see it in you,” said Gina. She stood up and took her purse. “You may be reluctant to believe it, because of the disappointment and confusion. Which people are the lost people? This is the hardest thing of all to decide, even about oneself. The day of the fashion show we had lunch, and you made a remark like ‘Nobody is anybody’ You were just muttering, talking about your psychiatrist. But when you started to talk about the man in Washington just now, there was no nobody-anybody problem. And when the ring was stolen, it wasn’t the lost property that upset you. Lost people lose ‘valuables.’ You only lost this particular ring.” She set her finger on the stone.

How abnormal for two people, one of them young, to have such a mental conversation. Maybe life in New York had forced a girl like Gina to be mental. Clara wondered about that. “Goodbye, Gina.”

“Goodbye, Mrs. Velde.” Clara was rising, and Gina put her arm about her. They embraced. “With all the disorder, I can’t see how you keep track. You do, though. I believe you pretty well know who you are.” Gina quickly left the lounge.

Minutes ago (which might have been hours), Clara had entertained mean feelings toward the girl. She intended, even, to give her a hard time, to stroll back with her to her destination, fish for an invitation to the cocktail farewell, talk to her parents, embarrass her with her friends. That was before she understood what Gina had done, how the ring had been returned. But now, when Clara came out of the revolving door, and as soon as she had the pavement under her feet, she started to cry passionately. She hurried, crying, down Madison Avenue, not like a person who belonged there but like one of the homeless, doing grotesque things in public, one of those street people turned loose from an institution. The main source of tears came open. She found a handkerchief and held it to her face in her ringed hand, striding in an awkward hurry. She might have been treading water in New York harbor—it felt that way, more a sea than a pavement, and for all the effort and the motions that she made she wasn’t getting anywhere, she was still in the same place. When he described me to myself in Washington, I should have taken Ithiel’s word for it, she was thinking. He knows what the big picture is—the big, big picture; he doesn’t flatter, he’s realistic and he’s truthful. I do seem to have an idea who it is that’s at the middle of me. There may not be more than one in a zillion, mores the pity, that do have. And my own child possibly one of those.

HARD WORK? No, it wasn’t really so hard. He wasn’t used to walking and stair-climbing, but the physical difficulty of his new job was not what George Grebe felt most. He was delivering relief checks in the Negro district, and although he was a native Chicagoan this was not a part of the city he knew much about—it needed a depression to introduce him to it. No, it wasn’t literally hard work, not as reckoned in foot-pounds, but yet he was beginning to feel the strain of it, to grow aware of its peculiar difficulty. He could find the streets and numbers, but the clients were not where they were supposed to be, and he felt like a hunter inexperienced in the camouflage of his game. It was an unfavorable day, too—fall, and cold, dark weather, windy. But, anyway, instead of shells in his deep trench-coat pocket he had the cardboard of checks, punctured for the spindles of the file, the holes reminding him of the holes in player-piano paper. And he didn’t look much like a hunter, either; his was a city figure entirely, belted up in this Irish conspirator’s coat. He was slender without being tall, stiff in the back, his legs looking shabby in a pair of old tweed pants gone through and fringy at the cuffs. With this stiffness, he kept his head forward, so that his face was red from the sharpness of the weather; and it was an indoors sort of face with gray eyes that persisted in some kind of thought and yet seemed to avoid definiteness or conclusion. He wore sideburns that surprised you somewhat by the tough curl of the blond hair and the effect of assertion in their length. He was not so mild as he looked, nor so youthful; and nevertheless there was no effort on his part to seem what he was not. He was an educated man; he was a bachelor; he was in some ways simple; without lushing, he liked a drink; his luck had not been good. Nothing was deliberately hidden.