Saul Bellow - Collected Stories

“I don’t know which. Thin-face little knot-back with a stick.” But no one answered at any of the doors on the first floor. He went to the end of the corridor, searching by matchlight, and found only a stairless exit to the yard, a drop of about six feet. But there was a bungalow near the alley, an old house like Mr. Field’s. To jump was unsafe. He ran from the front door, through the underground passage and into the yard. The place was occupied. There was a light through the curtains, upstairs. The name on the ticket under the broken, scoop-shaped mailbox was Green! He exultantly rang the bell and pressed against the locked door. Then the lock clicked faintly and a long staircase opened before him. Someone was slowly coming down—a woman. He had the impression in the weak light that she was shaping her hair as she came, making herself presentable, for he saw her arms raised. But it was for support that they were raised; she was feeling her way downward, down the wall, stumbling. Next he wondered about the pressure of her feet on the treads; she did not seem to be wearing shoes. And it was a freezing stairway. His ring had got her out of bed, perhaps, and she had forgotten to put them on. And then he saw that she was not only shoeless but naked; she was entirely naked, climbing down while she talked to herself, a heavy woman, naked and drunk. She blundered into him. The contact of her breasts, though they touched only his coat, made him go back against the door with a blind shock. See what he had tracked down, in his hunting game!

The woman was saying to herself, furious with insult, “So I cain’t fuck, huh? I’ll show that son of a bitch kin I, cain’t I.”

What should he do now? Grebe asked himself. Why, he should go. He should turn away and go. He couldn’t talk to this woman. He couldn’t keep her standing naked in the cold. But when he tried he found himself unable to turn away.

He said, “Is this where Mr. Green lives?”

But she was still talking to herself and did not hear him.

“Is this Mr. Green’s house?”

At last she turned her furious drunken glance on him. “What do you want?”

Again her eyes wandered from him; there was a dot of blood in their enraged brilliance. He wondered why she didn’t feel the cold.

“I’m from the relief.”

“Awright, what?”

“I’ve got a check for Tulliver Green.”

This time she heard him and put out her hand.

“No, no, for Mr. Green. He’s got to sign,” he said. How was he going to get Green’s signature tonight!

“I’ll take it. He cain’t.”

He desperately shook his head, thinking of Mr. Field’s precautions about identification. “I can’t let you have it. It’s for him. Are you Mrs. Green?”

“Maybe I is, and maybe I ain’t. Who want to know?”

“Is he upstairs?”

Awright. Take it up yourself, you goddamn fool.”

Sure, he was a goddamn fool. Of course he could not go up because Green would probably be drunk and naked, too. And perhaps he would appear on the landing soon. He looked eagerly upward. Under the light was a high narrow brown wall. Empty! It remained empty!

“Hell with you, then!” he heard her cry. To deliver a check for coal and clothes, he was keeping her in the cold. She did not feel it, but his face was burning with frost and self-ridicule. He backed away from her.

“I’ll come tomorrow, tell him.”

“Ah, hell with you. Don’t never come. What you doin’ here in the nighttime? Don’ come back.” She yelled so that he saw the breadth of her tongue. She stood astride in the long cold box of the hall and held on to the banister and the wall. The bungalow itself was shaped something like a box, a clumsy, high box pointing into the freezing air with its sharp, wintry lights.

“If you are Mrs. Green, I’ll give you the check,” he said, changing his mind.

“Give here, then.” She took it, took the pen offered with it in her left hand, and tried to sign the receipt on the wall. He looked around, almost as though to see whether his madness was being observed, and came near to believing that someone was standing on a mountain of used tires in the auto-junking shop next door.

“But are you Mrs. Green?” he now thought to ask. But she was already climbing the stairs with the check, and it was too late, if he had made an error, if he was now in trouble, to undo the thing. But he wasn’t going to worry about it. Though she might not be Mrs. Green, he was convinced that Mr. Green was upstairs. Whoever she was, the woman stood for Green, whom he was not to see this time. Well, you silly bastard, he said to himself, so you think you found him. So what? Maybe you really did find him—what of it? But it was important that there was a real Mr. Green whom they could not keep him from reaching because he seemed to come as an emissary from hostile appearances. And though the self-ridicule was slow to diminish, and his face still blazed with it, he had, nevertheless, a feeling of elation, too. “For after all,” he said, “he could be found!”

JUST BEFORE THE SENTENCING of Tanky Metzger in a case memorable mainly to his immediate family, I wrote a letter—I was induced, pressured, my arm was twisted—to Judge Eiler of the Federal Court. Tanky and I are cousins, and Tanky’s sister Eunice Karger kept after me to intercede, having heard that I knew Eiler well. He and I became acquainted years ago when he was a law student and I was presiding over a television program on Channel Seven which debated curious questions in law. Later I was toastmaster at a banquet of the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, and a picture in the papers showed Eiler and me in dinner jackets shaking hands and beaming at each other.

So when Tanky’s appeal was turned down, as it should have been, Eunice got me on the telephone. First she had a cry so passionate that it shook me up in spite of myself. When her control returned she said that I must use my influence. “Lots of people say that you’re friends with the judge.”

“Judges aren’t that way….” I corrected myself: “Some judges may be, but Eiler isn’t.”

Eunice only pressed harder. “Please, Ijah, don’t brush me off. Tanky could get up to fifteen years. I’m not in a position to spell out the entire background. About his associates, I mean….” I knew quite well what she meant; she was speaking of his Mob connections. Tanky had to keep his mouth shut if he didn’t want the associates to order his execution.

I said, “I more or less get the point.”

“Don’t you feel for him?”

“How could I not.”

“You’ve led a very different life from the rest, Ijah, but I’ve always said how fond you were of the Metzgers.”

“It’s true.”

“And loved our father and our mother, in the old days.”

“I’ll never forget them.”

She lost control again, and why she sobbed so hard, no expert, not even the most discerning, could exactly specify. She didn’t do it from weakness. That I can say with certainty. Eunice is not one of your fragile vessels. She is forceful like her late mother, tenacious, determined. Her mother had been honorably direct, limited and primitive.

It was a mistake to say, “I’ll never forget them,” for Eunice sees herself as her mother’s representative here among the living, and it was partly on Shana’s account that she uttered such sobs. Sounds like this had never come over this quiet office telephone line of mine. What a disgrace to Shana that her son should be a convicted felon. How would the old woman have coped with such a wound! Still refusing to surrender her mother to death, Eunice (alone!) wept for what Shana would have suffered.

“Remember that my mother idolized you, Ijah. She said you were a genius.”