The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [61]
telling them he was a done for. It wasn't a habit he could check, joking, having joked all j his life. Coblin came often, on Sunday afternoons, and Five Properties in the milk truck during the week--for a young man, he had considerable orthodoxy; respectful form, anyhow. I can't say I believe he cared a whole lot, but his presence was not a bad thing and showed he knew at least where the right place for the heart was. And probably he approved of the way the Commissioner was making his death, his firstclass stoicism. Kinsman the undertaker, the Einhorns' tenant, was very disturbed that be could not visit and stopped me in the street to ask after e Commissioner, begging me not to mention it. "Those are my worst times," he said. "When a friend is passing I'm about as welcome as old Granum who works for me." Old Granum was the deathbed watcher and Psalm reciter, feeble and ruination-faced, in Chinatown black alpaca and minute, slippered feet. "If / come," said Kinsman, "you know what people think." As the old man made deeper progress toward death fewer visitors were allowed, and the klatch ruled by his deep wisecracking tones ended. Now Dingbat was with him most, and he didn't need to be urged by Einhom to come out of the poolroom to tend his father but was much affected; he had been the last to accept the doctor's forecast and said confidently, "That's the way all croakers talk when an old fellow is sick. Why, the Commissioner is really built, he's powerful!" But now he hastened in and out of the room on his noisy and clumping tango-master's heels, fed the Commissioner and rubbed him down and shagged away the kids who played on the furniture in the backyard. "Beat it, you little jag-offs, there's a sick person here. Damn snots, where's your upbringing!" He kept the sickroom dark and camped on a hassock, reading Captain Fury, Doc Savage, and other pulp sports stories by the vigil light. I saw the Commissioner afoot only once, at this stage, when Einhorn sent me to his study to fetch some papers, and in the darkness of the living room the Commissionerwas rambling slowly in his underclothes, looking for Mrs. Einhorn, to demand an explanation for missing buttons, annoyed that from neck to bottom there were only two and he was exposed and naked between. "That's no way!" he said. "Lig a naketter." He was angry still about the fire. At last Dingbat surrendered his place in the bedroom to Kinsman's Granum, when the Commissioner seldom roused and, awake, didn't easily recognize anyone. But he did recognize the bricky, open spongeball cheeks of the old watcher in the towel-looped twelve-watt light, and said, "Du? Then I slept longer than I thought." Which Einhorn repeated scores of times, mentioning Cato and Brutus and others noted for the calm of their last moments; he was a collector of facts like these, and shook down all he read, Sunday supplements, Monday reports of sermons, Haldeman-Julius blue books, all collections of say- Mgs, for favorable comparisons. Things that didn't always fit. Not that this old lover the Commissioner doesn't deserve citation for having no slarm and dying undisgusted, without last minute revision of lifetime habits. He was laid out that night in a colossal coffin, at Kinsman's. When 101 I came in the morning the office was shut, with the shades in green and black wrinkles against the cold sunshine and dry fall weather, and I went round the back. The mirrors had been covered by Mrs. Einhorn, in whom superstition was very strong, and a candle burned down in a pale white ecclesiastical glass in the dark dining room by a photo of the Commissioner taken when his Bill Cody whiskers were still full and glossy. Arthur Einhorn had come from Champaign for his grandfather's funeral and sat at the table in detached college elegance, hand in his woolly intellectual hair, taking it easy in the expected family folly of such an occasion; he was engaging and witty, though not youthful in appearance--he had lines in his cheeks already-- despite his raccoon coat that was lying on the buffet with a beret dropped on it. Einhorn