Сол Беллоу - Dangling Man

"Then only one question remains."

"What?"

"Whether you have a separate destiny. Oh, you're a shrewd wiggler," said Tu. st. ls Raison zlussi. "But I've been waiting for you to cross my corner. Well, what do you say?"

I think I must have grown pale.

"I'm not ready to answer. I have nothing to say to that now."

"How seriously you take this," cried To 4s Raison Aussi. "It's only a discussion. The boy's teeth are chattering. Do you have a chill?" He ran to get a blanket from the bed.

I said faintly, "I'm all right." He tucked the blanket round me and, in great concern, wiped my forehead and sat by me until nightfall.

March 17

WASHSD and shaved and rode downtown to meet Ira. I walked from Van Buren to Randolph Street on the park side of Michigan Boulevard, past the Art Institute lions and the types enjoying cigarettes in the watery sunlight and the shimmering exhaust gas, after a long winter in the interior. The leached grass is beginning to take on a weak yellow in some spots, and there are a few green stubs of iris showing, nearly provoking me into saying: "Go back, you don't know what you're getting into."

March 18

No MAIL in the box. Except for the paper that lies scrambled over the bed and the passing of an occasional soldier or military truck in the street, we are insulated here from the war. If we chose, we could pull the blinds and fling the paper into the hall for Marie to gather up, casting it out utterly.

NEVERTTREr. ESS, spring begins on

Sunday. I always experiencea rush of feeling on the twenty-first of March. "Thank heavens, I've made it again!"

March 22

I CARRIED Out my threat and walked in the park in my spring coat, and suffered for it. It was a slaty, windy day with specks of snow sliding through the trees.

I stopped at a tavern on the way back and treated myself to a glass of rye.

Because of Mrs. Kiefer, we could not listen to the Philharmonicin the afternoon, so, after lolling on the bed eating oranges and reading the magazines and the Sunday features, we set out at four o'clock for the movies.

As we stood buttoning our coats in the hall, in came Yanaker in his bowler and polka-dot muffler, carrying a bag in which bottles rattled.

"Sacre du Istin Temps," I smiled.

We had a late dinner and turned in at eleven.

Vanaker coughed boozily all through the night and awakened me near dawn, banging doors and making his customary splash.

March 23

Mrt. RI'RERTOLM moved out last week.

His room has been rented by a Chinese girl. Her trunk came from Internal70 tional House this morning. I read the tag-Miss Olive Ling.

March 24

A PICTURE postcard of Times Square from

Steidler on the hall table this morning, with the message: "I am thinking of stopping here indefinitely." Probably he has already run through his brother's money.

Mrs. Bartlett was beckoning to me as I was going upstairs; she asked if I would help her carry up a cot from the storeroom. She was going to sleep downstairs with Mrs. Kiefer henceforward.

I descended with her. She had already pulled the folding bed from the musty wood closet across half the length of the cellar. In the hot light of the furnace grating, her face, the face of an overgrown country girl, with large, slightly protruding front teeth that lent it a kind of innocence, was rather prepossessing. I was glad she had asked me to help her. "Take it from the bottom, that's it.

Now. Up. I'll go first." She puffed out her instructions. "Lord, they should make these contraptions of wood." We struggled up with it and carried it into the room where the old woman lay, her white hair arranged in a fringe that nearly met her brow.

Kitty wore hers that way. Mrs. Kiefer's cheeks were collapsed and her face was moist. It reminded me of a loaf, before the baker puts it in the oven, smeared with white of egg. I went into the hall quickly.

"Thanks," Mrs. Bartlett whispered loudly from the dark square inlet of the lower hall.

"Thanks loads." And her teeth shone up at me good-naturedly.

MormIN'C began dull and numb, then brightened miraculously. I tramped the neighborhood. It was warm in @eaancearnest at one o'clock, with a tide of summer odors from the stockyards and the sewers (odors so old in the city-bred memory they are no longer repugnant).

In the upper light there were small fair heads of cloud turning. The streets, in contrast, looked burnt out; the chimneys pointed heavenward in openmouthed exhaus. tion. The turf, intersected by sidewalk, was bedraggled with the whole winter's deposit of deadwood, match cards, cigarettes, dogmire, rubble. The grass behind the palings and wrought-iron frills was still yellow, although in many places the sun had already succeeded in shaking it into livelier green. And the houses, their doors and windows open, drawing in the freshness, were like old drunkards or Consumptives taking a cure.

Indeed, the atmosphere of the houses, the brick and plaster and wood, the asphalt, the pipes and gratings and hydrants outside, and the in-teriors-comcurtains and bedding, furniture, striped wall. paperand horny ceilings, the ravaged throats of entry halls and the smeary blind eyes of windows-comth atmosphere, I say, was one of an impossible hope, the hope of an ira. possible rejuvenation.

Nevertheless, a few large birds, robins and grackles, appeared in the trees, and some of the trees themselves were beginning to bud. The large rough cases cracked at the tip, showing sticky green within, and one tree was erupt. ing in crude red along its higher branches. I even saw in a ibrick passageway an untimely butterfly, out of place both in the season and the heart of the city, and somehow alien to the whole condition of the century.

And there were children, on skates and bicycles, or scouting along the curbs for salvage, playing ball or hop. ping after bits of glass in chalk squares. There was a showingof ice-cream cones, despite the inroads of rationing, and a sprinkling of spring articles, though infants still wore wool leggings and the elderly were fully buttoned and somberly hatted. Sound was magnified and vision en. larged, red was rough and bloody, yellow dear but thin, blue increasingly warm. All but the sun's own yellow that ripped up the middle of each street, making two of every. thing that stood-object and shadow.

The room, when I returned to it, was as full of this yellow as an egg is of yolk. In honor of the transformation in the weather, I decided to dean up for supper and, as I stood changing my shirt in the unaccustomed brilliance. of the mirror, I observed new folds near my mouth and, around my eyes and the root of my nose, marks that had not been there a year before. It is not pleasant to find such changes. But, tying my tie, I shrugged them off as, inevitable, the price of experience, an outlay that had better be made ungrudgingly, since it was bound in any case. to be collected.

March 26

W. ri. SD been short of funds for several days. Iva re. ceived her check on Thursday but, instead of cashing it, brought it home and left it in my bureau drawer with instructionsto take it to the bank. The reason she gave for not taking it to the currency exchange downtown, as usual, was that this week she was working evenings in the reference room and did not want to risk carrying such a sum home. She had heard rumors of holdups.

But I refused to go to the near-by bank with it.

I had had several experiences there with Ira's checks. I had been turned down twice last fall; once because I had insuticient identification and, again, when the vice president, looking from my cards to me and from me to my cards, once more said, "How do I know you're this person?"

I replied, "You can take my word for it."

He did not smile; I did not rate a smile. But the indications were that under different circumstanceswsay, if I had been clean-shaven and my shirt had not been frayed, or if bits of torn lining had not shown from my coat sleeve-my words would have evoked one. lie sat back seriously and considered the check. He was a plump man, about thirty years old. Mr. Frink stood in brass letters on the wooden block at his finger tips; his clean sandy hair was already fading back in two broad freckled arches. He would be bald within a few years, his bare head spotted with those blackish freckles.