Authors: Saul Bellow
flat. He looked for one whenever he had time to spare. "Why doesn't he come back to New York where he's got a flat?" said Leventhal. "Oh, he makes good money down there; he works fifty, sixty hours a week. He sends me plenty." She did not appear to feel abandoned or even greatly concerned about Max's absence. Hurriedly drinking down his beer, Leventhal rose, saying that he might still go back to the office for an hour to clear up some things. Elena gave him a neighbor's phone number; he copied it into his book and told her to ring in a day or two if Mickey did not get better. At the door, he called Philip and gave him a quarter for a soda. The boy took it, muttering "Thanks," but with a look that refused obligation. Probably a quarter did not mean much to Philip. Elena's pocket was full of change; she must be free with it. Leventhal drew his finger along the boy's cheek. Philip dropped his head, and, somewhat disappointed and dissatisfied with himself, Leventhal left the house. He had to wait long for a bus, and it was dusk when he reached Manhattan. Too late to be useful at the office, he nevertheless debated at South Ferry, in the tenebrous brown heat, whether to return. "Ah, they'll get along without me today," he finally decided. Beard would interpret his coming in now as an admission that he was in the wrong. Moreover, it might seem that he was trying to establish himself as one of the "brethren" who was different. No, not even a hint of that, thought Leventhal. He would have an early dinner and go home. He felt dry, rather than hungry, but he must eat. He made an abrupt start and walked toward the train.
2
LEVENTHAL'S figure was burly, his head large; his nose, too, was large. He had black hair, coarse waves of it, and his eyes under their intergrown brows were intensely black and of a size unusual in adult faces. But though childishly large they were not childlike in expression. They seemed to disclose an intelligence not greatly interested in its own powers, as if preferring not to be bothered by them, indifferent; and this indifference appeared to be extended to others. He did not look sullen but rather unaccommodating, impassive. Tonight, because of the heat, he was disheveled, and he was even ordinarily not neat. His tie was pulled to the side and did not close with the collar; his shirt cuffs came out beyond his coat-sleeves and covered his thick brown wrists; his trousers sagged loose at the knees. Leventhal came originally from Hartford. He had gone through high school there and after that had left home. His father, who had owned a small drygoods store, was a turbulent man, harsh and selfish toward his sons. Their mother had died in an insane asylum when Leventhal was eight and his brother six. At the time of her disappearance from the house, the elder Leventhal had answered their questions about her with an embittered "gone away," suggestive of desertion. They were nearly full grown before they learned what had happened to her. Max did not finish high school; he left in his second year. Leventhal graduated and then went to New York, where for a time he worked for an auctioneer named Harkavy, a friend of his Uncle Schacter. Harkavy took Leventhal under his protection; he encouraged him to go to college at night and even lent him money. Leventhal took a prelegal course, but he did not do well. Perhaps the consciousness that he was attempting to do something difficult overweighed him. And the school itself--its atmosphere, especially on blue winter nights, the grimness of some of the students, many of them over fifty, world-beaten but persistent--that disturbed him. He could not study; he had never learned how, in the room behind his father's store. He finished the course, but without distinguishing himself, and he was not encouraged to go on to law school. He would have been satisfied to remain Harkavy's assistant, but the old man caught pneumonia and died. His son Daniel, then a junior at Cornell, left school to take over the business. Leventhal still remembered how he had come into the shop after the funeral in a bearskin coat, tall, blond, serious, saying emotionally to each of the clerks, "Let's dig in and hold the line!" Leventhal, virtually the old man's ward, was too dispirited by his death and trusted himself far too little to be of much use to Daniel. The shop was soon shut down. Going back to Hartford was out of the question (his father had remarried), and Leventhal, beginning to drift, was in a short time, a few months after Harkavy's death, living in a dirty hall bedroom on the East Side, starved and thin. For a while he sold shoes on Saturdays in the basement of a department store. Later he found steady work as a fur dyer, and after that, for about a year, he clerked in a hotel for transients on lower Broadway. Then his turn came on a civil-service list and he put himself down for "assignment anywhere in the United States." He was sent to the Baltimore customhouse. The life he led in Baltimore was considerably different; it was not so solitary. It came to him slowly that in New York he had taken being alone so much for granted that he was scarcely aware how miserable it made him. During his first winter in the customhouse he was invited to join a party that went to the opera in Washington on Saturdays. He sat through five or six performances with a kind of alien, skeptical interest. But he began to go out regularly. He learned to like seafood. He bought himself two suits and a topcoat--he who from October to April had sweated in a heavy camel"s-hair coat old Harkavy had given him. At a picnic on the Chesapeake shore one Fourth of July, he fell in love with a sister of one of his friends. She was a tall, heavy-moving, handsome girl. With his eyes, he followed her in the steady, fiery sparkle of the bay when she climbed to the dock from the excursion boat and started arm in arm with her brother toward the grove and the spicy smoke of the barbecue clouding in the trees. Later he saw her running in the women's race, her arms close to her sides. She was among the stragglers and stopped and walked off the field, laughing and wiping her face and throat with a handkerchief of the same material as her silk summer dress. Leventhal was standing near her brother. She came up to them and said, "Well, I used to be able to run when I was smaller." That she was still not accustomed to thinking of herself as a woman, and a beautiful woman, made Leventhal feel very tender toward her. She was in his mind when he watched the contestants in the three-legged race hobbling over the meadow. He noticed one in particular, a man with red hair who struggled forward, angry with his partner, as though the race were a pain and a humiliation which he could wipe out only by winning. "What a difference," Leventhal said to himself. "What a difference in people." He ran in the egg race, he swam, he felt his spirits thawed out that day. He was with Mary most of the afternoon. They took their sandwiches to the beach, walking half-shoe over in the white sand to find a place to themselves. From sundown, when they started back, till they came into the heat of the sluggish harbor among the heels of tankers, and through the yellow film spread over the water and in the air by the mills and piers, they sat together on the fantail of the little steamer. Her brother was waiting for her in the crowd at the gangplank, and they said good night in the noise of the steam plunging loosely skyward. By autumn they were engaged, and Leventhal's success amazed him. He felt that the harshness of his life had disfigured him, and that this disfigurement would be apparent to a girl like Mary and would repel her. He was not entirely sure of her, and, in fact, something terrible did happen a month after the engagement. Mary confessed that she found herself unable to break off an old attachment to another man, a married man. In the pain of the moment, Leventhal almost lost his power to speak. He looked at her--they were in a restaurant. Then he asked if she had gone on seeing this man during the engagement. She said that she had and only at that moment seemed to realize how serious the matter was. He started to leave, and when she tried to hold him back, he pushed her, and she lost her footing in the booth and fell. He helped her rise; her mouth had gone white, and she averted her eyes from him. They left the restaurant together--she even waited while he paid the check--but outside they instantly separated without speaking. About two years later she sent him a friendly letter. He did not know how to reply. It stood on his dresser for more than a month, confronting him nightly and overriding all his other concerns. He was still deliberating when he received a second letter from her. In it she asked him directly to consider how harassed she had been; she admitted that she had tried to end her infatuation by becoming engaged to him but that that was not the only reason; she had not chosen him indiscriminately. Leventhal found this letter easier to answer. They began to correspond. At Christmas he went down to visit her, and they were married by a justice of the peace in Wilmington. He had meanwhile moved back to New York, having left Baltimore a few weeks after the engagement was broken. Daniel Harkavy had somehow landed on a trade paper. Leventhal, who had been editing a book of departmental regulations, thought that he, too, could handle that kind of job. He got in touch with Harkavy, and Harkavy wrote back that he was sure he could place him on a paper if he wanted to come to New York. Harkavy had many connections. Leventhal packed his trunk one week end and sent it to Harkavy's rooming house. He could not bear to stay in Baltimore; he was too wretched. He could not think of it later without flushing and wincing. A man brought up on hardships should have known better than to cut himself adrift. Even then he had realized that it was foolhardy to throw up his job and worse than that to put faith in Harkavy, and he told his chief that he was resigning to take another position. He was ashamed to tell him the truth. He found Harkavy looking a little different. He was losing his hair and he had grown a red mustache. There was a certain swagger about him; he had taken to wearing large bow ties and black suede shoes. But he was essentially the same. He had written about his connections, but he could think of only one man to call on. This was a middle-aged Kentuckian by the name of Williston, short and ruddy, with a broad head across which his brown hair was brushed with a sort of backwoodsman's Sunday care. He was one of those people who keep their regional traits after twenty years in New York. It was a cold fall day, and he had an electric heater beside his desk. He sat back in his swivel chair, occasionally raising a foot to warm it over the coils. No, he said, there was no vacancy in his office. An experienced man might find something even now, in bad times. An inexperienced one didn't have a chance. Unless by a freak -his shoe shone over the burnished heater--unless he knew someone very influential. "We don't," Harkavy said. "We have no pull. And how will he get experience?" He wouldn't suggest, said Williston, that Leventhal try to get a job running copy with a pack of boys at six bucks a week. Even such jobs were scarce. He would suggest that he stick to his trade. Leventhal's face grew dark, more with self-condemnation than with resentment. He might have asked for a transfer instead of quitting the civil service outright and waited it out, no matter how long it took. He imagined that Williston partly divined what had happened. It stupefied him, what he had done. But, Harkavy was saying, speaking of himself, he had gotten his job by luck, without experience. Oh, no, Williston answered, his father's name counted for something in the antiques field--Harkavy worked on a paper for auctioneers and antique dealers. "Leventhal was with my father and me for a long time," Harkavy told him. And Willis-ton lifted his shoulders and gazed into the face of the heater as if to say, "In that case, nothing's too good for him." He seemed to regret this when he saw Leventhal's pained, lowering look. Of course he would do what he could, he said, but he didn't want them to believe that much could be done. He would phone some people, and meanwhile Leventhal could begin making the rounds. He began in a spirit of utter hopelessness. The smaller trade papers simply turned him away. The larger gave him applications to fill out; occasionally he spent a few minutes with a personnel manager and had the opportunity to shake someone's hand. Gradually he became peculiarly aggressive and, avoiding the receptionists, he would make his way into an inner office, stop anyone who appeared to have authority, and introduce himself. He was met with astonishment, with coldness, and with anger. He often grew angry himself. They were frightened, he observed to Harkavy, when you got out of line, out of the proper channel. But the channel led out of the door. How could they expect you to stay in it? He discussed it reasonably enough with Harkavy, but the provocations and near-quarrels continued, and in the heat of these provocations he frequently lost sight of his real object. He might remind himself while shaving or when he entered the bank to draw on his savings that he was after all defeating his own purpose, that anyone who, on an outside chance, had a job to give would not give it to him. But he did not change. This queer condition lasted for about two months. Then, since Harkavy was becoming increasingly difficult to live with (several nights a week he entertained a woman friend and Leventhal, turned out of the room, went to a movie or sat in a cafeteria), and since his money was running low, Leventhal decided to take any job at all, the next that came his way--he was thinking of trying his old hotel on lower Broadway -when he received a note from Williston asking him to come in. One of his men was sick and had to go to Arizona for the winter, and Leventhal could fill his place till he came back. So it was through Williston that Leventhal got his start in the profession. He was grateful and worked hard for him, and he discovered he had a knack for the job. From June until the end of summer he was idle again--that, too, was a difficult period. But now he had a season's experience and he found a place at last with Burke-Beard and Company. Apart from his occasional trouble with Beard, he was satisfied. He was really better off than in the civil service. He said occasionally to Mary, revealing his deepest feelings, "I was lucky. I got away with it." He meant that his bad start, his mistakes, the things that might have wrecked him, had somehow combined to establish him. He had almost fallen in with that part of humanity of which he was frequently mindful (he never forgot the hotel on lower Broadway), the part that did not get away with it--the lost, the outcast, the overcome, the effaced, the ruined.