Saul Bellow - Collected Stories

“I don’t mind.”

“And it’s mostly a Negro load we have in this district.”

“So I thought it would be.”

“Fine. You’ll get along. C’est un bon boulot. Do you know French?”

“Some.”

“I thought you’d be a university man.”

“Have you been in France?” said Grebe.

“No, that’s the French of the Berlitz School. I’ve been at it for more than a year, just as I’m sure people have been, all over the world, office boys in China and braves in Tanganyika. In fact, I damn well know it. Such is the attractive power of civilization. It’s overrated, but what do you want? Que voulez-vous? I get Le Rire and all the spicy papers, just like in Tanganyika. It must be mystifying, out there. But my reason is that I’m aiming at the diplomatic service. I have a cousin who’s a courier, and the way he describes it is awfully attractive. He rides in the wagon-lits and reads books. While we—What did you do before?”

“I sold.”

“Where?”

“Canned meat at Stop and Shop. In the basement.”

“And before that?”

“Window shades, at Goldblatt’s.”

“Steady work?”

“No, Thursdays and Saturdays. I also sold shoes.”

“You’ve been a shoe-dog too. Well. And prior to that? Here it is in your folder.” He opened the record. “Saint Olafs College, instructor in classical languages. Fellow, University of Chicago, 1926-27. I’ve had Latin, too. Let’s trade quotations—‘ Dum spiro spew ’.’

”‘De dextram misero.’”

“‘─ leajacta est .’”

“‘Excelsior.’”

Raynor shouted with laughter, and other workers came to look at him over the partition. Grebe also laughed, feeling pleased and easy. The luxury of fun on a nervous morning.

When they were done and no one was watching or listening, Raynor said rather seriously, “What made you study Latin in the first place? Was it for the priesthood?”

“No.”

“Just for the hell of it? For the culture? Oh, the things people think they can pull!” He made his cry hilarious and tragic. “I ran my pants off so I could study for the bar, and I’ve passed the bar, so I get twelve dollars a week more than you as a bonus for having seen life straight and whole. I’ll tell you, as a man of culture, that even though nothing looks to be real, and everything stands for something else, and that thing for another thing, and that thing for a still further one—there ain’t any comparison between twenty-five and thirty-seven dollars a week, regardless of the last reality. Don’t you think that was clear to your Greeks? They were a thoughtful people, but they didn’t part with their slaves.”

This was a great deal more than Grebe had looked for in his first interview with his supervisor. He was too shy to show all the astonishment he felt. He laughed a little, aroused, and brushed at the sunbeam that covered his head with its dust. “Do you think my mistake was so terrible?”

‘Damn right it was terrible, and you know it now that you’ve had the whip of hard times laid on your back. You should have been preparing yourself for trouble. Your people must have been well-off to send you to the university. Stop me, if I’m stepping on your toes. Did your mother pamper you? Did your father give in to you? Were you brought up tenderly, with permission to go and find out what were the last things that everything else stands for while everybody else labored in the fallen world of appearances?”

“Well, no, it wasn’t exactly like that.” Grebe smiled. The fallen world of appearances! no less. But now it was his turn to deliver a surprise. “We weren’t rich. My father was the last genuine English butler in Chicago—”

“Are you kidding?”

“Why should I be?”

“In a livery?”

“In livery Up on the Gold Coast.”

“And he wanted you to be educated like a gentleman?”

“He did not. He sent me to the Armour Institute to study chemical engineering. But when he died I changed schools.”

He stopped himself, and considered how quickly Raynor had reached him. In no time he had your valise on the table and all your stuff unpacked. And afterward, in the streets, he was still reviewing how far he might have gone, and how much he might have been led to tell if they had not been interrupted by Mrs. Staika’s great noise.

But just then a young woman, one of Raynor’s workers, ran into the cubicle exclaiming, “Haven’t you heard all the fuss?”

“We haven’t heard anything.”

“It’s Staika, giving out with all her might. The reporters are coming. She said she phoned the papers, and you know she did.”

“But what is she up to?” said Raynor.

“She brought her wash and she’s ironing it here, with our current, because the relief won’t pay her electric bill. She has her ironing board set up by the admitting desk, and her kids are with her, all six. They never are in school more than once a week. She’s always dragging them around with her because of her reputation.”

“I don’t want to miss any of this,” said Raynor, jumping up. Grebe, as he followed with the secretary, said, “Who is this Staika?”

“They call her the ‘Blood Mother of Federal Street.’ She’s a professional donor at the hospitals. I think they pay ten dollars a pint. Of course it’s no joke, but she makes a very big thing out of it and she and the kids are in the papers all the time.”

A small crowd, staff and clients divided by a plywood barrier, stood in the narrow space of the entrance, and Staika was shouting in a gruff, mannish voice, plunging the iron on the board and slamming it on the metal rest.

“My father and mother came in a steerage, and I was born in our house, Robey by Huron. I’m no dirty immigrant. I’m a U. S. citizen. My husband is a gassed veteran from France with lungs weaker’n paper, that hardly can he go to the toilet by himself. These six children of mine, I have to buy the shoes for their feet with my own blood. Even a lousy little white Communion necktie, that’s a couple of drops of blood; a little piece of mosquito veil for my Vadja so she won’t be ashamed in church for the other girls, they take my blood for it by Goldblatt. That’s how I keep goin’. A fine thing if I had to depend on the relief. And there’s plenty of people on the rolls—fakes! There’s nothin’ they can’t get, that can go and wrap bacon at Swift and Armour anytime. They’re lookin’ for them by the Yards. They never have to be out of work. Only they rather lay in their lousy beds and eat the public’s money.” She was not afraid, in a predominantly Negro station, to shout this way about Negroes.

Grebe and Raynor worked themselves forward to get a closer view of the woman. She was flaming with anger and with pleasure at herself, broad and huge, a golden-headed woman who wore a cotton cap laced with pink ribbon. She was barelegged and had on black gym shoes, her Hoover apron was open and her great breasts, not much restrained by a man’s undershirt, hampered her arms as she worked at the kid’s dress on the ironing board. And the children, silent and white, with a kind of locked obstinacy, in sheepskins and lumber-jackets, stood behind her. She had captured the station, and the pleasure this gave her was enormous. Yet her grievances were true grievances. She was telling the truth. But she behaved like a liar. The look of her small eyes was hidden, and while she raged she also seemed to be spinning and planning.

“They send me out college caseworkers in silk pants to talk me out of what I got comin’. Are they better’n me? Who told them? Fire them. Let ‘em go and get married, and then you won’t have to cut electric from people’s budget.”