THE EINHORNS
625
I understand that British aristocrats are still legally entitled to pi$,
if they should care to, on the hind wheels of carriages.
There wasn't anything Mrs. Einhorn could do about the wet
floor. Once in a while when Bavatsky the handyman was gone too
long in Polack Town or
drunk
in the cellar, she asked me to clean up.
She said she didn't like to impose on me because I was a student.
Nevertheless I was getting paid. For unspecified work of a mixed
character. I accepted it as such; the mixed character of it was one
of the things I liked. I was just as varietistic and unfit for discipline
and regularity as my friend Clem Tambow; only I differed from
Clem in being a beaver, once my heart was attached to a work or a
cause. Naturally, when Einhorn found this out, and he quickly did,
he kept me going steadily; it suited him perfectly because of the
great number of things he had to be done. Should he run out, my
standing by made him invent more. So I didn't often get the
toilet detail; he had too many important tasks for me. And when I
did get it, why, what I had had under Grandma Lausch made an
inconsiderable thing of
it
to be porter for an hour.
But now in the toilet with Einhorn: he kept me by him to
read the morning headlines from the
Examiner,
the financial news,
closing quotations from Wall Street and La Salle Street. Local news,
next, something about Big Bill Thompson, that he had hired the Cort
Theater, for instance, and presented himself on the stage with two
caged giant rats from the stockyards whom he addressed by the
names of Republican renegades-I came to know what items Einhorn
would want first. "Yes, it's just as Thompson says. He's a big gas–
bag, but this time it's true. He rushed back from Honolulu to save
what's-his-name from the penitentiary." He was long and well-nigh
perfect of memory, a close and detailed reader of the news and kept
a file on matters of interest to him, for he was highly systematic, and
one of my jobs was to see that his files were in order in the long
steel and wood cases he surrounded himself with. That wasn't always
easy as he was masterful, and often fussy for reasons hard to under–
stand when I placed something before him, proposing to throw it
away. The stuff had to be where he could lay his hands on it at
once, his clippings and pieces of paper, in folders labeled Com–
merce, Invention, Major Local Transactions, Crime and Gang,
Democrats, Republicans, Archaeology, Literature, League of Nations.
