The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [64]
CHAPTER VII
I'm thinking of the old tale of Croesus, with Einhorn in the unhappy part. First the proud rich man, huffy at Solon, who, right or wrong in their argument over happiness, must have been the visiting Parisian of his day, and condescending to a rich island provincial. I try to think why didn't the warmth of wisdom make Solon softer than I believe he was to the gold- and jewel-owning semibarbarian. But anyway he was right. And Croesus, who was wrong, taught his lesson with tears to Cyrus, who spared him from the pyre. This old man, through misfortune, became a thinker and mystic and advice-giver. Then Cyrus lost his head to the revengeful queen who ducked it in a skinful of blood and cried, "You wanted blood? Here, drink!" And his crazy son Cambyses inherited Croesus and tried to kill him in Egypt as he had put his own brother to death and wounded the poor bull-calf Apis and made the head-and-body-shaved priests grim. The Crash was Einhorn's Cyrus and the bank failures his pyre, the poolroom his exile from Lydia and the hoodlums Cambyses, whose menace he managed, somehow, to get round. The Commissioner died before the general bust, and wasn't very long in his grave when the suicides by skyscraper leaps began to take place in La Salle Street and downtown New York. Einhom was among the first to be wiped out, partly because of the golden trust system of the Commissioner and partly because of his own mismanagement. Thousands of his dough were lost in Insull's watered and pyramided utilities --Coblin too dropped lots of money on-them--and he lost his legacy, and Dingbat's and Arthur's inheritance as well, by throwing it into buildings that in the end he couldn't hold. And at the finish he had nothing but vacant lots in the barren Clearing and around the airport, and of these several went for taxes; and when I sometimes took him for a ride he'd say, "We used to have that block of stores, over there," K; or, of a space full of weeds between two shanties, "Dad got that in a trade eight years ago and wanted to build a garage on it. Just as well be never did." So it was a melancholy thing to drive him, although he didn't make a heavy grouse; his observations were casual and dry. Even the building in which he lived, constructed by the Commissioner with a cash outlay of a hundred thousand dollars, was finally lost as the shops closed and the tenants in the flats upstairs stopped paying rent. "No rent, no heat," he said in the winter, resolving to be tough. "A landlord ought to act like one or give up his property. I'll stick by economic laws, good times, bad times, and be consistent." This was how he defended his action. He was taken to court, however, and lost, legal costs and all. He then rented the empty stores as flats, one to a Negro family and another to a gypsy fortuneteller, who hung a painted hand and giant, labeled brain in the window. There were fights in the building and thefts of pipes and toilet fixtures. By now the tenants were his enemies, led by the red-headed Polish barber Betzhevski, who had given mandolin concerts on the sidewalk in affable days, and now glared with raw winter eyes when he passed in front of Einhom's plate glass. Einhom started