The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [10]
In spring he leased a yard, at the end of the coal season. It had no overhead track, only a long spur of siding, and the first rains made a marsh of the whole place. It had to be drained. The first coal was unloaded in the wet. The office itself was a shack; the scale needed exnensive repairs. His first few thousand dollars ran out and he had to ask for more; he had a credit to establish with the brokers, and it was important that he meet his bills on time. Uncle Charlie made that easier. Nevertheless, there was Uncle Charlie himself to satisfy. There was, besides, a substantial wage to pay his yard manager and weighmaster. Happy Kellerman, whom he had lured away from a large old'West Side company. He'd have hired me instead (at perhaps a little less) if I'd been able to handle the job, and he insisted on my coming to learn the ropes from Happy, so that presently I was spending a good amount of time at the office; for when he grabbed my wrist and told me, almost drunkenly, with the grime and chapping of the mouth that comes of long nervous talking, saying low, huskily, viciously, "There's got to be somebody here I can trust. Got to be!" I couldn't refuse. However, there was not much that Happy could be dishonest about. He was a beer saufer, droopy, small, a humorist, wry, drawn, weak, his tone nosy and quinchy, his pants in creases under his paunch; his nose curved up and presented offended and timorous nostrils, and he had round, disingenuous eyes in which he showed he was strongly defended. He was a tio listo, a carnival type, a whorehouse visitor. His style was that of a hoofer in the lowest circuit, doing a little cane-swinging and heel-and-toe routine, singing, "I went to school with Maggie Murphy," and telling smokehouse stories while the goofy audience waited for the naked star to come out and begin the grinds. He had a repertory of harmless little jokes, dog yipes, mock farts; his best prank was to come up behind and seize you by the leg with a Pekinese snarl. By Simon's wish I had to spend afternoons with him studying the business. Especially since I had heard him weeping in the can Simon wasn't easy for me to turn down. Often I relieved Happy at lunch. He hopped a car down to Halsted Street because he detested walking. Coming back at two, he would shuffle off at the stop by the driveway, carrying his coat and straw skimmer, vest stuffed with cigarettes, pencils, and cards--he had his own business card: "Happy Kellerman representing March's Coal and Coke": a rooster chasing a frantic hen, with the line beneath, "/ mean business." Walking in, he tested the beam of the scale, put the Times in the stove, walked around the yard, and then, these being the dog days, great heat, we would sit where the coolness rose from the concrete pit of the scale. The office had the appearance of a squatter's s ack or end house of a Western street. Over the way was a stockyards H* 225 siding, dusty animals bawling in the waiting cars, putting red muzzles to the slats; truck wheels sucked through the melting tar, the coal split and tarnished on the piles, the burdocks died on the stalk. There were rats in a corner of the yard who did not stir or go away for anyone, whole families, nursing, creeping, feeding there. I had never seen them so domestic, going whither they list, walking by your feet without fear. Simon bought a pistol--"We need one anyhow," he said--and shot at them, but they only scattered to come back. They didn't even bother to dig holes, only scooped out shallow nesting places. There were a few sales. Happy entered them on the big yellow sheets; an elegant penman, boastful of his hand, he sat up on the high stool in his flat straw, feathering out the wide and thin strokes. This oldfashioned bookkeeping desk of a scratched yellow brought the writer's face to a tiny square of window over the scale, and at times I saw Simon there, making out checks in the wide triple checkbook. Writing checks had fascinated him at first. He had wormed out of me that I owed Padilla two bucks for the satisfaction of paying one of my debts with his signature. There was no such satisfaction now, as the figures of the balance took fewer spaces, and he thought of his last audaciousness in money when he had tried to grab a fast buck in order to marry Cissy. This time he believed his whole life was staked. He had not merely been shooting his mouth off the day he had come to tell me he was getting married about how earnest he was over money; it was now proved by the mental wounds of his face, the death of its color, and the near-insanity of his behavior. The misery of his look at this black Sargasso of a yard in its summer stagnation and stifling would sometimes make my blood crawl in me with horror. If I took so much time from my own enterprises of theft and reading to walk around this yard with him, hands in pockets, it wouldn't be enough to say it was from solicitude, it was downright fright. The loose way he handled the pistol shooting at the rats was ominous to me. And that he complained of seething in his head, saying, "My brains are going to boil out of my ears," I had to keep him from clouting Happy once when he misjudged the moment to grab Simon's leg with his yiping-dog prank. It was a near thing. And just a while ago he had been laughing with Happy at his stories of being a shill during the Florida land boom; and about his love affair with a Turkish woman who wouldn't let him out of the house; and his account of his first dose, when he said, "It was like getting into a can of hot angleworms." This change from great laughter to savagery made Happy ready to quit, his big, skillful, poachy eyes morose, warn226 o filling up, as I tried to iron things out. For it was up to me to bring hack. the peace. "I never took no shit in bigger concerns," said Happy from the corner of his mouth to me, but that Simon should hear. I knew that Simon had a strongly beating heart by the way his head hune downward, his mouth open on that still unmended front tooth, and that his craving which he would of necessity fight off was to take Happy by the seat of the pants and throw him into the street. At last Simon said, "Okay, I want to say I'm sorry. I'm kind of nervous today. You ought to realize. Happy..." Thought of the Magnuses had overcome him, and a horror of so far forgetting that he was a young man in business and Happy merely a drip as to get himself towering about this nonsense. Simon's patience and swallowing were worse to me than his wrath or flamboyance--that shabby compulsory physical patience. Another such hard thing was his speaking low and with an air of difficult endurance to Charlotte on the telephone and answering her questions with subdued repetitiousness, near the surrender point. "Well," he said to Happy and me, "why don't you two take the car and go see some of the dealers? Try to drum up some trade. Here's five bucks for beer money. I'll stay here with Coxie and try to get that back fence in shape. They'll steal us blind of we don't do something about it." Cox was the handyman, an old wino in a slap-happy painter's cap that looked like an Italian officer's lid. He sent him scouting along the fence of the Westinghouse plant for old planks. Coxie worked for hamburgers and a bottle of California K. Arakelian's sherry or of yocky-dock. He was watchman too, and slept on rags back of the green lattice before the seldom used front door. Off he limped--he carried a bullet, he claimed, from San Juan Hill--by the mile-long big meshed fence of the corporation in which such needs as fences were met by sub-officers' inviting contractors' bids and a tight steel net permitted all to look in at the vast remote shimmer, the brick steeples, the long power-buildings and the Vesuvian soft coal under the scarcely smeared summer sky and gaudiness. I went with Happy, who drove. His fear in the Bohunk streets was that he would run over a kid and a crowd would tear him to pieces in its rage. "If it's their kids anything happens to, then look out, even if it s not your fault, the way they chase around." So he was always somewhat m this terror and wouldn't let me have the wheel, who didn't read this enough to be vigilant. We took the coal-and-ice dealers into averns a Dd drank beer and swapped talk, in those sleepy and dark w ^eat Joints where the very flies crept rather than flew, seeming doped by the urinal camphors and malt sourness, and from the heated emptiness and woodblock-knocking of the baseball broadcast that gave only more constriction to the unlocatable, uhdiagnosed wrong. If you thought toward something outside, it might be Padilla theorizing on the size of the universe; his scientific interest kept the subject from being grim. But in such places the slow hairy fly-crawl from drop to drop and star to star, you could pray the non-human universe was not entered from here, and this was no sack-end of it that happened to touch Cook County and Northern Illinois. Such a consideration never would trouble Simon. Whatever the place was, he would make it pay off, the only relation with it that concerned him; it had dollars, as the rock water, as the waste-looking mountain is made to spit its oil or iron, where otherwise human beings would have no wish to go, the barrens, the Newfoundlands, the scaly earths and the Antarctic snow blackened with the smoke of fuel tapped in Texas or Persia. Hrapek, Drodz, Matuczynski these dealers were called; we found them in their sheds, by the church, by the funeral home, or on a moving job. They sold coal by the ton and by the bag; they had stake trucks or dump trucks; they had to be convinced and sold, entertained, offered special deals, flattered, bantered, told secrets about the veins of the mines, made up with specious technical information about BTU's and ash percentages. Happy was crafty with them, an excellent dealer's man with talents comparable to those of a ship's chandler; he drank as much piva as they did, glass for glass, and he got results. Enticed by undercut prices and the pick of the coal, they began to come in. Also, Simon ran some sales, just to get things moving. He had me pass out handbills in Chinatown, advertising coke which the laundry Chinese favored above other fuel, and slowly he accumulated customers. He also covered the city and hit his new relatives for orders; Charlie Magnus threw business his way, and little by little things began to stir. Simon was wised up as to how to do things politically--to be in a position to bid on municipal business--and he saw wardheelers and was kissing-cousins with the police; he took up with lieutenants and captains, with lawyers, with realestate men, with gamblers and bookies, the important ones who owned legitimate businesses on the side and had property. During the chauffeurs' and hikers' strike he had squad cars to protect his two trucks from strikers who were dumping coal in the streets. I had to wait for his calls in the police station to tell the cops when a load was setting out from the yard, my first lawful sittin" in such a place, moving from dark to lighter inside the great social protoplasm. But the dark of this West Side station! It was very dark It was spoiled, diseased, sore and running. And as the mis-minted ard wrench-struck figures and faces stooped, shambled, strode, gazed, dreaded, surrendered, didn't care--unfailing, the surplus and superabundance of human material--you wondered that all was stuff that was born human and shaped human, and over the indiscriminateness and lack of choice. And don't forget the dirt-hardness, the dough fats and raw meats, of those on the official side. And this wasn't even the bio Newgate of headquarters downtown but merely a neighborhood tributary. As a son-in-law of the Magnuses, and also because he wanted to be, Simon was on very good terms with Lieutenant Nuzzo, than whom few were more smooth and regular-looking. I am not sure how the lieutenant managed. A cop, who even in the friendliness of a joke must take you by the shoulder as if in an arrest, with hands whose only practice is to be iron. In some manner Lieutenant Nuzzo had stayed a Valentine, even though his flesh was heavy and his face kept imprints long, like sleep creasings and the marks of fingers. We had dates to go to the Chez Paree with him--a party of five until I began to take Lucy Magnus, making it six--and had spaghetti and chicken livers with sparkling burgundy or champagne; the lieutenant, he looked around like a master of ceremonies on a visit from a much better night club. His wife seemed like a woman on probation; as everybody is, after a fashion, with a police lieutenant. Even a wife. He was an Italian, he brought the style of ancient kingdoms with him. A lot of them do. Authority must have death behind it. To cut off Masaniello's head; to hang great admirals themselves, as Lord Nelson did in Naples harbor. This I believe was how to read the lieutenant's smooth face while he sat in the enjoyable noise of the Chez Paree, viewing Veioz and Yolanda or the near-naked chicks who didn't altogether know what they were doing but suggested the motions of busy people bringing their private pleasures to a head. Anyway, while this night club remained tops, Simon and Charlotte were great ones for it, as much, shrewdly, for the lowdown to be gotten there and contacts and public life and business, as to have their pictures taken by flashbulbs, laughing and in shenanigan embraces with paper caps and streamers, an important race at their table, a singer in strapless gown appealing with her lifted ^m and fine teeth, or the chairman of a board finishing a drink. Simon grasped very soon the importance for business of such close Fontact. Didn't the Chief Executive pass sleepless nights at Yalta be229 cause Stalin for the first two days did not smile? He couldn't deal with a man who wouldn't yield to charm or trade on the basis of love. There had to be sport and amiability to temper decisions that could not all be pleasant, and at least the flash of personality helped. This was something Simon well understood, how to be liked, and how to reach an accord on the basis of secret thoughts with people similarly placed. But I'm still in the middle of the summer with him, at the worst of his trouble when he was envenomed with the fear that he'd go bankrupt, and he had to confess to himself, I'm sure, that he was really afraid of the Magnuses, and terrified by what he had taken on himself. So I spent most of these months with him. I won't say we were never closer--he kept his ultimate thoughts stubbornly to himself--but we were never more together. From the fresh of morning to the grime and horn color of late afternoon I rode in the car with him and made all his stops--downtown, the union hall, the bank, the South Water market office Charlotte was managing for her Uncle Robby, the kitchen at Magnuses' where we stopped to get sandwiches from the black cook, or the back room where they had put the marriage bed--the marriage still the secret of the immediate family. Here the door opened on what supported the weight of this heaped-up life. The room had been refurnished for him and Charlotte with silk-shaded reading lamps, bedside fleeces, drapes against the alley view and its barbarity--as in a palazzo against the smell of the canals--a satin cover on the bed, and auxiliary pillows on the roll of the bolster. To save steps to the dresser Simon walked on the bed. He changed clothes, letting things lie where they were dropped or flung, kicking his shoes into the corner and drying the sweat from his naked body with an undershirt. There were days when he changed three times, or four, and others when he might sit listless and indifferent, and get up from his office chair heavy after hours of silence, saying, "Let's get out of here." Instead of going home to change, sometimes he'd drive to the lake. We'd go swimming at the North Avenue point the late Commissioner had loved. In whose mouth, as he floated by, I used to place cigarettes. The loose spread of Simon's legs as he plunged and the embracing awkwardness of his arms to the water gave me the worry that he threw himself in with a thought of never coming back to the surface alive, as if he went to take a blind taste of the benefits of staying down. He came up haggard and with a slack gasp of his mouth and rough blood in his face. I knew it made a strong appeal to him to go down and not come up again. Even if he didn't make a display of this half-a-desire and swam up and down, sullen, with flattened coarse hair, making master passes at the water; the water turned around on the shore and its crowd and carried black spools in its horizon, the cool paving of one of the imaginary series of worlds, clear into the naming ether. My brother down there, as if Alexander in the harmful Cydnus whose cold made him sick when he leaped in after battle, I stood in striped trunks with toes bent over the wood of a pile, ready to jump after if need be. I didn't go in when he did. He came up the ladder shivering, the big flies bit nastily, the hullabaloo waterside carnival turned your head. I'd help him dry; he'd lie down on the stone like a sick man. But when he'd warm and get his comfort back, he'd start to make bullish approaches to women and girls, his eyes big and red, and as if someone who bent over to choose a plum from her lunch bag was making the offer of a Pasiphae. And then he'd start to blare like brass and he'd hit me on the arm and say to me, "Look at the spread on that broad!" forgetting that he was not only married but also engaged-- the engagement had taken place before the eyes of the world, in a reception at a hotel. He didn't think of that. Instead he thought of the powerful possibility in a new Pontiac standing near Lincoln Park, and the money he had; also the things to be done in one street, building, room that need have no bearing on what came later in the day elsewhere. So he got violent and lustful, with step and sidle, and protrusion of his head that made a kind of wall of his neck, charged and hard like that of a fighter who has been hit but not damaged, only roused. There wasn't anything in his new class or of his speed at the North Avenue beach (called a beach, it was merely a stone slab waterfront); the place was rough and hard, the young fellows were tough and the girls battlesome, factory hands, salesgirls, with some dark Street sluts and dance-hall chicks. Therefore Simon said and proposed without sorting or choosing words. "You look good to me. You interested?" Direct, without game, not even nickel phrases of circumlocution. That very fact maybe made it no indecency; instead it created awe and fear, that brute charge that gave the veins too much to bear and seemed to endanger his underjaw by crowding, his eyeballs darkening with currents of heat violet and darker, to near black. The girls were not always frightened of him; he had a smell of power, he was handsome, and I don't know what floors his bare feet left in shade-drawn hot rooms. Unly a year ago he would not have given a second glance at such bims. Now, where he went, he had information unavailable to me, but e had to have advantages and prerogatives, I reckon, in exchange for scrifiees. Yes, principals like that practice an anger not everyone is 231 ' allowed. They come playing the god like bloody Commodus before the Senate, or run with jockeys and wrestlers like Caracalla, while knowing that somewhere the instrument of their downfall is beginning to gather thought to thought about them, like loops on the knitting needle. That was how it was with Simon, as I had had the chance to see before, when he put on a lady's hat at the Chez Paree and pranced around, or when he had brought me along to a bachelor's stag where two naked acrobatic girls did stunts with false tools. From circus games to private dissoluteness, then, and only doing as many others did--except that from the force of his personality he was prominent and played a leading part. "And you? Do you?" said Simon to me. "What a question! Who's that babe who lives on your floor? Is that why you don't want to move? Mimi, isn't that her name? She looks like an easy broad." I denied it, and he didn't believe me. On her side Mimi was interested in Simon. "What's eating him?" she asked me. "It was him I heard crying in the can, wasn't it? What's he want to be such a sharp dresser for? What's the matter? He has a woman on his neck, huh?" She was prepared to approve of him despite the satire, noting something extravagant and outlaw about him that she approved of. He wasn't all brashness, however, and headlong despair, Simon. No, he >vas also making a prize showing. It was summer, and slow, and naturally he was losing money. Charlotte, an excellent businesswoman, and highly important as backer, counselor, consultant, gave him just what united them closer than common conjugality. Though he fought with her and even from the very first roared and cursed her, saying astonishing things, she held on steady, A close watcher could see her recoil and then come back to the great, the all-important thing, which was that he was one of those anointed to be rich and mighty. His very outrageousness when he yelled "You goofy cow!" was proof. She took it with a nervous laugh that recalled him to his better judgment and reminded him that such things were supposed to 'come out as comedy. Whereat he almost never tailed to add the laughter drop of the entertainer, even while the glare of his eyes might remain savage. And he was made to do that even when feelings on both sides had burst out so close to injury that it was too much to try to kid them back into something that could pass for affectionate roughness. But Charlotte's first aim and the reason for her striving was to make the union serious by constructing a fortune on it. She said to me, "Simon has real business ability. This stuff now"--he was already, at the time she spoke, making money_"is just nothing." When she said this, sometimes, it was in the territory of seriousness where distinctions of sex do not exist; the power invoked is too great for that. It is of neither man nor woman. As when Macbeth's wife made that prayer, "Unsex me here!" A call so hard, to what is so hard, that it makes the soul neuter. Neither her ladies' trimming and gewgawing, the detail of her tailored oerson, nor the decorating of the flat when they furnished one, nor his way of carrying on was of real consequence. But in what related to the bank, the stock, the taxes, head approached to head discussing these, the great clear and critical calculations and confidences made in the kev to which real dominion was set, that was what wedlock really rested on. Even though she was continually singing and whistling songs to herself like "My Blue Heaven" and "A Faded Summer's Love," doing her nails, revising her hair, she didn't live in these vanities. Which indeed were hopeless. She gave them all their due, and more. High heels, sheer hose, beautiful suits, hats, earrings, feathers, and the colors of pancake maquillage, plus electrolysis, sweet-sweats, and the hidden pinnings where adoration could come to roost. She neglected nothing in this respect, she had a lot of dignity, she could be monumentally handsome. But her ultimate disbelief in this was unmistakable in the real mouth, unconforming to the painted one, impatient, discounting less important things. She wouldn't have chosen a young man to marry from the pictures on the sheet music of her piano any more than she'd have chosen a schoolboy; she bore her ambition tight and was prepared to see, without being moved in her purpose, any limits of coarseness, rashness, harshness, scandal. She knew this in advance by consulting with herself, and she didn't have to wait to see a great part in actuality; it first arose in her mind and there was where she dealt with it. Simon, in the odd way of these things, was all for her. He said, "She's got more brain and ability than six women. She's a hundred per cent straight, no faking. She's as goodhearted as they come"--there was a considerable element of truth in this--"and she likes you too, Augie." He said this with a view to my beginning to court Lucy Magnus, as I presently agreed to do. "She keeps sending Mama stuff. She wants to board her with a private family. Her idea. Mama never has complained about the Home. The company there is good for her. What do you think?". While driving around the city we sometimes stopped to see Mama. lost often we simply passed the building. But you never knew with imon what your destination was. Saying, "Hop in," he'd perhaps himnot know where he was off to, answering a need he didn't under stand yet. Perhaps it was food he was after, perhaps a fight, perhaps disaster, perhaps a woman beckoning from behind, or a business order, a game of billiards, a lawyer's office, a steam bath at the athletic club. So then among these possible stops was the Home on Arthington Street. It was of gray stone, the porch just a widening before the doorway on which there were two benches. There were benches inside too. It was furnished like a meeting hall or public forum, all the common space of it bare; only the bad state of the windows kept the outsider from looking in; the panes were full of glassy gnarls and dirty, probably from the hands of people who had touched them to discover that this i was not wall but window. Everything that could have made a hazard I in the old house had been taken away; thus there were a bar of plaster, where the mantelpiece had been and a cork grade at the doorsills. But the blind did not go around very much. They sat, and didn't seem to have any conversation, and soon you were aware of leisure gone bad. I had learned something of this during Einhorn's days of dirty mental weather. Or of the soul, not the mind, the sick evil of not even knowing why anything should all you since you're resigned to accept all conditions. The director and his wife boasted that they fed their people well; it was a fact that you knew the next menu in advance by the smell of the kitchen. In general I considered it a blessing that Mama was simple. I thought that if there were any characters here that were intriguing or quarrelsome--and how would there fail to be?--there must be some awful events in the innermost privacy of the house. But Mama had put in many years of appeasing tempestuousness or staying out of its way, and she very likely had more trouble as a result of one of Simon's visits than she ever did with her companions. For he came to check on how she was treated, and he had a harsh way of inquiring. He was tough with the director, who hoped to get mattresses wholesale from Arthur Magnus through him. Simon had promised him this favor. But he threw his weight around, full of menace, pleased with nothing. He objected to Mama's having roommates, and when he obtained a private room for her it was next to the kitchen and all its noise and smell, and that was nothing to thank him for. And then, one summer afternoon, we found her sitting on her bed at the task of fitting pins into Roosevelt campaign buttons; she was getting ten. cents a hundred and earning a few dollars a week by the goodheartedness of the precinct captain. Seeg her with her unskillful hands of rough housework at the brass pins, ; eling the two objects together in her lap, Simon went into a rage that ing her' feeling the two of made her flinch, and knowing that I was with him she turned her face and tried to find me and get me to intercede; she was frightened, too, to discover that she had been doing wrong unawares. "Stop roaring," I said, "for God's sake!" But he couldn't be stopped. "What do they mean! Look what they've got her doing! Where's that sonofabitch?" It was the director's wife who came, in her house dress. She meant to remain respectful but not be servile; she was white, and she already had a fighting face and quivered, but spoke up, practical and proud. "Are you responsible for this?" he shouted at her. She said, "Mrs. March wasn't made to do anything she didn't want. She was asked and she wanted to. It's good for her to have something to keep her occupied." "Asked? I know how people are asked so they're afraid to say no. I'll have you know that my mother isn't going to do any piecework for ten, twenty, thirty cents, or a dollar an hour. She gets all the money she needs from me." "You don't have to yell like this. These are all very sensitive people and easy disturbed." In the passage I saw many of the blind stop and a group gathered, while in the kitchen the big sloven-haired cook turned with her knife from the meatblock. "Simon, / wanted, / asked," said Mama. She was unable to put weight in her tones; she had never been able; she lacked experience. "Calm down," I said to him with some eifect at last. It appeared that he could no longer take out the first intention of his heart without touching the inflamed place of self-distinction. Wrongly blessing and cursing like Balaam, but without any outside power to reverse him, only his own arbitrariness doubling back on him. So he could not speak for Mama without commanding how he himself was to be looked upon. Next he went to the closet to see whether the things were there that Charlotte had given her, the shoes, handbag, dresses, and he missed at once a light coat, handed down by a more robust person, that didn't fit her anyway. ^'Where is itwhat have they done with that coat?" I sent it to the cleaners. She spilled coffee on it," the director's wife explained. I did," said Mama in her clear, tuneless voice. And the woman, "I'll take it in for her when it comes back, it's too "_ the siroylders." Simon wore a look of anger and detestation, silent, still regarding the closet. "She can afford a good tailor if she needs alterations. I want her to look right." He left her money each time, single dollars so that she could not be cheated in the changing. Not that he really distrusted the director and his wife; he wanted them, however, to realize that he did not have to depend on their honesty. "I want her to go for a walk every day." | "It's the rule, Mr. March." '> "I know rules. You keep them when you want to." I spoke to him in a low tone, and he said, "That's all right. Be quiet. I want her to go to the hairdresser at least once a week." "My husband takes all the ladies in the car together. He can't bs taking one at a time." "Then hire a girl. Isn't there a high-school girl you can get to go with her once a week? I'll pay for it. I want her to be taken care of. I'm getting married soon." "We'll try to accommodate you, sir," she said, and he, not missing her derision though all she looked was steadfast and unintimidated, stared, spoke to himself, and took up his hat. "Good-by, Ma." "Good-by, good-by, boys." "And take away this junk," said Simon, scattering the pins with a tug of the bedcover. He left, and the woman tartly said to me, "I hope at least FDR is good enough for him personally."