The Collected Stories Of Saul Bellow (85 page)

I couldn’t run after her, could I, and show myself naked to the people in the flat? She had banked on this. When we came in, she must have given the high sign to the man she worked with, and he had been waiting in the alley. When I ran to look out, my things had already been gathered up. All I saw was the back of somebody with a bundle under his arm hurrying in the walkway between two garages. I might have picked up my boots—those she had left me—and jumped from the first-floor window, but I couldn’t chase the man very far, and in a few minutes 1 would have wound up on Sheridan Road naked and freezing.

I had seen a drunk in his union suit, bleeding from the head after he had been rolled and beaten, staggering and yelling in the street. I didn’t even have a shirt and drawers. I was as naked as the woman herself had been in the doctor’s office, stripped of everything, including the five dollars I had collected for the flowers. And the sheepskin my mother had bought for me last year. Plus the book, the fragment of an untitled book, author unknown. This may have been the most serious loss of all.

Now I could think on my own about the world I really belonged to, whether it was this one or another.

I pulled down the window, and then I went to shut the door. The room didn’t seem lived in, but suppose it had a tenant, and what if he were to storm in now and rough me up? Luckily there was a bolt to the door. I pushed it into its loop and then I ran around the room to see what I could find to wear. In the lopsided clothespress, nothing but wire hangers, and in the bathroom, only a cotton hand towel. I tore the blanket off the bed; if I were to slit it I might pull it over my head like a serape, but it was too thin to do me much good in freezing weather. When I dragged the chair over to the clothespress and stood on it, I found a woman’s dress behind the molding, and a quilted bed jacket. In a brown paper bag there was a knitted brown tarn. I had to put these things on. I had no choice.

It was now, I reckoned, about five o’clock. Philip had no fixed schedule. He didn’t hang around the office on the off chance that somebody might turn up with a toothache. After his last appointment he locked up and left. He didnt necessarily set out for home; he was not too keen to return to the house. If I wanted to catch him I’d have to run. In boots, dress, tarn, and jacket, I made my way out of the apartment. Nobody took the slightest interest in me. More people (Philip would have called them transients) had crowded in—it was even likely that the man who had snatched up my clothes in the alley had returned, was among them. The heat in the staircase now was stifling, and the wallpaper smelled scorched, as if it were on the point of catching fire. In the street I was struck by a north wind straight from the Pole, and the dress and sateen jacket counted for nothing. I was running, though, and had no time to feel it.

Philip would say, “Who was this floozy? Where did she pick you up?” Philip was unexcitable, always mild, amused by me. Anna would badger him with the example of her ambitious brothers—they hustled, they read books. You coulant fault Philip for being pleased. I anticipated what he’d say—“Did you get in-Then at least you’re not going to catch the clap.” I depended on Philip now, roi I had nothing, not even seven cents for carfare. I could be certain, however, that he wouldn’t moralize at me, he’d set about dressing me, he’d scrounge a sweater among his neighborhood acquaintances or take me to the Salvation Army shop on Broadway if that was still open. He’d go about this in his slow-moving, thick-necked, deliberate way. Not even dancing would speed him up; he spaced out the music to suit him when he did the fox-trot and pressed his cheek to Anna’s. He wore a long, calm grin. My private term for this particular expression was Pussy-Veleerum. I saw Philip as fat but strong, strong but cozy, purring but inserting a joking comment. He gave a little suck at the corner of the mouth when he was about to take a swipe at you, and it was then that he was Pussy-Veleerum. A name it never occurred to me to speak aloud.

I sprinted past the windows of the fruit store, the delicatessen, the tailor’s shop. I could count on help from Philip. My father, however, was an intolerant, hasty man. Slighter than his sons, handsome, with muscles of white marble (so they seemed to me), laying down the law. It would put him in a rage to see me like this. And it was true that I had failed to consider: my mother dying, the ground frozen, a funeral coming, the dug grave, the packet of sand from the Holy Land to be scattered on the shroud. If I were to turn up in this filthy dress, the old man, breaking under his burdens, would come down on me in a blind, Old Testament rage. I never thought of this as cruelty but as archaic right everlasting. Even Albert, who was already a Loop lawyer, had to put up with the old man’s blows—outraged, his eyes swollen and maddened, but he took it. It never seemed to any of us that my father was cruel. We had gone over the limit, and we were punished.

There were no lights in Philip’s D. D. S. office. When I jumped up the stairs, the door with its blank starred glass was locked. Frosted panes were still rare. What we had was this star-marred product for toilets and other private windows. Marchek—whom nowadays we could call a voyeur—was also, angrily, gone. I had screwed up his experiment. I tried the doors, thinking that I could spend the night on the leather examining table where the beautiful nude had lain. From the office I could also make telephone calls. I did have a few friends, although there were none who might help me. I wouldn’t have known how to explain my predicament to them. They’d think I was putting them on, that it was a practical joke—“This is Louie. A whore robbed me of my clothes and I’m stuck on the North Side without carfare. I’m wearing a dress. I lost my house keys. I can’t get home.”

I ran down to the drugstore to look for Philip there. He sometimes played five or six hands of poker in the druggist’s back room, trying his luck before getting on the streetcar. I knew Kiyar, the druggist, by sight. He had no recollection of me—why should he have? He said, “What can I do for you, young lady?”

Did he really take me for a girl, or a tramp off the srreet, or a Gypsy from one of the storefront fortune-teller camps? Those were now all over town. But not even a Gypsy would wear this blue sateen quilted boudoir jacket instead of a coat.

“I wonder, is Phil Haddis the dentist in the back?”

“What do you want with Dr. Haddis—have you got a toothache, or what?”

“I need to see him.”

The druggist was a compact little guy, and his full round bald head was painfully sensitive looking. In its sensitivity it could pick up any degree of disturbance, I thought. Yet there was a canny glitter coming through his specs, and Kiyar had the mark of a man whose mind never would change once he had made it up. Oddly enough, he had a small mouth, baby’s lips. He had been on the street—how long? Forty years? In forty years you’ve seen it all and nobody can tell you a single thing.

“Did Dr. Haddis have an appointment with you? Are you a patient?”

He knew this was a private connection. I was no patient. “No. But if I was out here he’d want to know it. Can I talk to him one minute?”

“He isn’t here.”

Kiyar had walked behind the grille of the prescription counter. I mustn’t lose him. If he went, what would I do next? I said, “This is important, Mr. Kiyar.” He waited for me to declare myself. I wasn’t about to embarrass Philip by setting off rumors. Kiyar said nothing. He may have been waiting for me to speak up. Declare myself. I assume he took pride in running a tight operation, giving nothing away. To cut through to the man I said, “I’m in a spot. I left Dr. Haddis a note before, but when I came back I missed him.”

At once I recognized my mistake. Druggists were always being appealed to. All those pills, remedy bottles, bright lights, medicine ads, drew wandering screwballs and moochers. They all said they were in bad trouble.

“You can go to the Foster Avenue station.”

“The police, you mean.”

I had thought of that too. I could always tell them my hard-luck story and they’d keep me until they checked it out and someone would come to fetch me. That would probably be Albert. Albert would love that. He’d say to me, “Well, aren’t you the horny little bastard.” He’d play up to the cops too, and amuse them.

“I’d freeze before I got to Foster Avenue” was my answer to Kiyar.

“There’s always the squad car.”

“Well, if Phil Haddis isn’t in the back maybe he’s still in the neighborhood. He doesn’t always go straight home.”

“Sometimes he goes over to the fights at Johnny Coulons. It’s a little early for that. You could try the speakeasy down the street, on Kenmore. It’s an English basement, side entrance. You’ll see a light by the fence. The guy at the slot is called Moose.”

He didn’t offer so much as a dime from his till. If I had said that I was in a scrape and that Phil was my sister’s husband he’d probably have given me carfare. But I hadn’t confessed, and there was a penalty for that.

Going out, I crossed my arms over the bed jacket and opened the door with my shoulder. I might as well have been wearing nothing at all. The wind cut at my legs, and I ran. Luckily I didn’t have far to go. The iron pipe with the bulb at the end of it was halfway down the block. I saw it as soon as I crossed the street. These illegal drinking parlors were easy to find; they were meant to be. The steps were cement, four or five of them bringing me down to the door. The slot came open even before I knocked, and instead of the doorkeeper’s eyes, I saw his teeth.

“You Moose?”

“Yah. Who?”

“Kiyar sent me.”

“Come on.”

I felt as though I were falling into a big, warm, paved cellar. There was little to see, almost nothing. A sort of bar was set up, a few hanging fixtures, some tables from an ice cream parlor, wire-backed chairs. If you looked through the window of an English basement your eyes were at ground level. Here the glass was tarred over. There would have been nothing to see anyway: a yard, a wooden porch, a clothesline, wires, a back alley with ash heaps.

“Where did you come from, sister?” said Moose.

But Moose was a nobody here. The bartender, the one who counted, called me over and said, “What is it, sweetheart? You got a message for somebody?”

“Not exactly.”

“Oh? You needed a drink so bad that you jumped out of bed and ran straight over—you couldn’t stop to dress?”

“No, sir. I’m looking for somebody—Phil Haddis? The dentist?”

“There’s only one customer. Is that him?”

It wasn’t. My heart sank into river mud.

“It’s not a drunk you’re looking for?”

“No.”

The drunk was on a high stool, thin legs hanging down, arms forward, and his head lying sidewise on the bar. Bottles, glasses, a beer barrel. Behind the barkeeper was a sideboard pried from the wall of an apartment. It had a long mirror—an oval laid on its side. Paper streamers curled down from the pipes.

“Do you know the dentist I’m talking about?”

“I might. Might not,” said the barkeeper. He was a sloppy, long-faced giant—something of a kangaroo look about him. That was the long face in combination with the belly. He told me, “This is not a busy time. It’s dinner, you know, and we’re just a neighborhood speak.”

It was no more than a cellar, just as the barman was no more than a Greek, huge and bored. Just as I myself, Louie, was no more than a naked male in a woman’s dress. When you had named objects in this elementary way, hardly anything remained in them. The barman, on whom everything now depended, held his bare arms out at full reach and braced on his spread hands. The place smelled of yeast sprinkled with booze. He said, “You live around here?”

“No, about an hour on the streetcar.”

“Say more.”

“Humboldt Park is my neighborhood.”

“Then you got to be a Uke, a Polack, a Scandihoof, or a Jew.”

“Jew.”

“I know my Chicago. And you didn’t set out dressed like that. You’da frozen to death inside of ten minutes. It’s for the boudoir, not winter wear. You don’t have the shape of a woman, neither. The hips aren’t there. Are you covering a pair of knockers? I bet not. So what’s the story, are you a morphodite? Let me tell you, you got to give this Depression credit. Without it you’d never find out what kind of funny stuff is going on. But one thing I’ll never believe is that you’re a young girl and still got her cherry.”

“You’re right as far as that goes, but the rest of it is that I haven’t got a cent, and I need carfare.”

“Who took you, a woman?”

“Up in her room when I undressed, she grabbed my things and threw them out the window.”

“Left you naked so you couldn’t chase her… I would have grabbed her and threw her on the bed. I bet you didn’t even get in.”

Not even, I repeated to myself. Why didn’t I push her down while she was still in her coat, as soon as we entered the room—pull up her clothes, as he would have done? Because he was born to that. While I was not. I wasn’t intended for it.

“So that’s what happened. You got taken by a team of pros. She set you up. You were the mark. Jewish fellows aren’t supposed to keep company with those bad cunts. But when you get out of your house, into the world, you want action like anybody else. So. And where did you dig up this dress with the fancy big roses? I guess you were standing with your sticker sticking out and were lucky to find anything to put on. Was she a good-looker?”

Her breasts, as she lay there, had kept their shape. They didn’t slip sideward. The inward lines of her legs, thigh swelling toward thigh. The black crumpled hairs. Yes, a beauty, I would say.

Like the druggist, the barman saw the fun of the thing—an adolescent in a fix, a soiled dress, the rayon or sateen bed jacket. It was a lucky thing for me that business was at a standstill. If he had had customers, the barman wouldn’t have given me the time of day. “In short, you got mixed up with a whore and she gave you the works.”

For that matter, I had no sympathy for myself. I confessed that I had this coming, a high-minded Jewish schoolboy, too high-and-mighty to be Orthodox and with his eye on a special destiny. At home, inside the house, an archaic rule; outside, the facts of life. The facts of life were having their turn. Their first effect was ridicule. To throw my duds into the alley was the woman’s joke on me. The druggist with his pain-sensitive head was all irony. And now the barman was going to get his fun out of my trouble before he, maybe, gave me the seven cents for carfare. Then I could have a full hour of shame on the streetcar. My mother, with whom I might never speak again, used to say that I had a line of pride straight down the bridge of my nose, a foolish stripe that she could see.