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CHAPTER XII

When the cold weather came Simon started to make money and everything went well. His spirits rose. The wedding was a great affair in the main ballroom of a big hotel, the bridal party getting organized in the governor's suite where Simon and Charlotte also. spent the first night. I was an usher, Lucy Magnus the bridesmaid opposite me. Simon went along with me to rent a tuxedo, and then liked the fit of it so well he bought it outright. On the wedding day Mimi helped me with the studs of the boiled shirt and the tie. My neighbor Kayo Obermark sat in to observe, on my bed, fat feet bare, and laughed over Mimi's digs at marriage. "Now you look like the groom himself," said Mimi. "You probably aim to become one soon, don't you?" I snatched up my coat and ran, for I had to pick up Mama. I had the Pontiac for the purpose. She was my charge; I was supposed to see her through. Simon ordered me to have her wear dark glasses. The day was frosty, windy, clear, the waves piled up, from the slugging green water, white over the rocks of the Outer Drive. And then we came to the proud class of the hotel and its Jupiter's heaviness and restless marble detail, seeking to be more and more, introducing another pot too huge for flowers, another carved figure, another white work of iron; and inside luxuriously warm--even the subterranean garage where I parked had this silky warmth. And coming out of the white elevator, you were in an Alhambra of roses and cellular ceilings, gilt and ivory, Florida feathering of plants and muffling of carpets, immense distances, and everywhere the pure purpose of supporting and encompassing the human creature in conveniences. Of doing unto the body; holding it precious; bathing, drying, powdering, preparing satin rest, conveying, _eding. I've been at Schonbrunn and in the Bourbon establishment in Madrid and seen all that embellishment as the setting of power. But 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." I "It's the rule, Mr. March." 1 "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 ba 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.", ^ CHAPTER XII When the cold weather came Simon started to make money and everything went well. His spirits rose. The wedding was a great affair in the main ballroom of a big hotel, the bridal party getting organized in the governor's suite where Simon and Charlotte also, spent the first night. I was an usher, Lucy Magnus the bridesmaid opposite me. Simon went along with me to rent a tuxedo, and then liked the fit of it so well he bought it outright. On the wedding day Mimi helped me with the studs of the boiled shirt and the tie. My neighbor Kayo Obermark sat in to observe, on my bed, fat feet bare, and laughed over Mimi's digs at marriage. "Now you look like the groom himself," said Mimi. "You probably aim to become one soon, don't you?" I snatched up my coat and ran, for I had to pick up Mama. I had the Pontiac for the purpose. She was my charge; I was supposed to see her through. Simon ordered me to have her wear dark glasses. The day was frosty, windy, clear, the waves piled up, from the slugging green water, white over the rocks of the Outer Drive. And then we came to the proud class of the hotel and its Jupiter's heaviness and restless marble detail, seeking to be more and more, introducing another pot too huge for flowers, another carved figure, another white work of iron; and inside luxuriously warm--even the subterranean garage where I parked had this silky warmth. And coming out of the white elevator, you were in an Alhambra of roses and cellular ceilings, gilt and ivory, Florida feathering of plants and muffling of carpets, immense distances, and everywhere the pure purpose of supporting and encompassing the human creature in conveniences. Of doing unto the body; holding it precious; bathing, drying, powdering, preparing satin rest, conveying, ceding. I've been at Schonbrunn and in the Bourbon establishment in Madrid and seen all that embellishment as the setting of power. But luxury as the power itself is different--luxury without anything ulterior. Except insofar as all yearning, for no matter what, just so its scope is vast, is of one cluster of mysteries and always ulterior. And what will this power do to you? I know that I in, say, an ancient place like Venice I or in Rome, passing along the side of majestic walls where great men once sat, experienced what it was to be simply a dot, a speck that scans across the cornea, a corpuscle, almost white, almost nothing but air: I to these ottimati in their thought. And this spectacular ancient aggrandizement with its remains of art and many noble signs I could appreciate even if I didn't want to be just borne down by the grandeur of | it. But in this modern power of luxury, with its battalions of service workers and engineers, it's the things themselves, the products that are distinguished, and the individual man isn't nearly equal to their great sum. Finally they are what becomes great--the multitude of baths with never-failing hot water, the enormous air-conditioning units and the elaborate machinery. No opposing greatness is allowed, and the disturbing person is the one who won't serve by using or denies by not wishing to enjoy. I didn't yet know what view I had of all this. It still wasn't clear to me whether I would be for or against it. But then how does anybody form a decision to be against and persist against? When does he choose and when is he chosen instead? This one hears voices; that one is a saint, a chieftain, an orator, a Horatius, a kamikazi; one says Ich kann | Night anders--so help me God! And why is it / who cannot do otherwise? Is there a secret assignment from mankind to some unfortunate person who can't refuse? As if the great majority turned away from a thing it couldn't permanently forsake and so named some person to remain faithful to it? With great difficulty somebody becomes exem- I plary, anyhow. Conceivably Simon felt that I was this kind of influenceable person and looked liable to become an example. For God knows there are abandoned and hungry principles enough flowing free and looking for attachment. So he wanted to get to me first. Simon's idea was that I should marry Lucy Magnus, who had more money even than Charlotte. This was how he outlined the future to me. I could finish my pre-legal course and go to John Marshall law school at night while I worked for him. He'd pay my tuition and give me eighteen dollars a week. Eventually I could become his partner. Or if his business didn't suit me, we could go into real estate with our joint capital. Or perhaps into manufacturing. Or, if I chose to be a lawyer, I wouldn't need to be a mere ambulance chaser, shyster, or birdseed wiseguy and con- 'i Q niver in two-bit cases. Not with the money I'd have to play with as Lucy Magnus's husband. She was a juicy piece besides, even if he didn't care for the way her collarbones stood out when she wore a formal, and she was full of willingness. He would back me while I courted her. I didn't need to worry about the expenses; he'd give me the use of the Pontiac for taking her out, build me up with the family, remove the obstacles. All I had to do was play along, make myself desired, interpret, as I could do, the role of the son-in-law her parents wanted. It was a leadpipe cinch. We were alone in his room in the governor's suite, a room of white walls and gold paneling, heavy mirrors hung on silk hawsers, a Louis XIV bed. Having come out of the glass stall of the shower, dried in a thick Turkish mantle, put on black socks and a stiff shirt, he was now lying on the bed, smoking a cigar, while he explained this to me, practical and severe. He sprawled out with his big body, the mid-part of it nude. This comfort and luxury were not what he preached at me, but the thing to do: not to dissolve in bewilderment of choices but to make myself hard, like himself, and learn how to stay with the necessary, undistracted by the trimmings. This was what he thought, and to some extent I thought it too. Why shouldn't I marry a rich man's daughter? If I didn't want to do as Simon did in every respect, couldn't I arrange my life somewhat differently? Wasn't there any other way to ride this gorgeous train? Provided Lucy was different from her cousin, why shouldn't there be? I wasn't unwilling to look into this and profit by Simon's offers. I was already taking so many of his orders, putting in so much time, that I might as well accept wages too, go the whole way and make it official. And I may as well say that I had a desire to go along with him out of the love I felt for him and enthusiasm for his outlook. In which I didn't fundamentally believe. However, that I shouldn't be too good to do as he was doing was of enormous importance to him, and the obstinacy that had always made me hold out against him for unspoken or anyway insufficient reasons seemed at last over. I didn't oppose him, so he spoke to me with unusual affection. He rolled from the bed to finish dressing, saying, "Now we begin go- '"g places, you and me. I wondered when you'd start to show some sense, if ever, and worried you wouldn't be anything but a punk. Here, "xthis stud for me in back. My mother-in-law got this set for me. Christ! "ow'm I going to find my dress shoes? All this tissue paper. You can't "nd anything. Get rid of it. Leave it in the can for the governor," he sald> ^irited and nervous in his laugh. "The world hasn't set too tight 'e There's room, if you find the openings to it. If you study it out you can find them. Horner is a Jew too, after all, and probably didn't have a better start than we did, and is governor." "Are you thinking of giving politics a try?" "Maybe. Why not? It depends on how things shape up. Uncle Artie knows a guy who was made ambassador by contributing often enough to campaign drives. Twenty, thirty, even forty thousand bucks, and what's that to a man who has it?" This being an ambassador couldn't be envisioned as in the old days-- a Guicciardini arriving from Florence with his clever face, or a Russian coming to Venice, or an Adams--such grandeurs have sunk down as the imagination has been transferred from the bearer of his country's power walking on rugs to his blowing shellac through the waterpipes of Lima to stop the rust. Simon, when he put on his tails and walked from mirror to mirror, doubling back his fingers to tug down the white cuffs and pulling up his chin to make his strong neck freer in the band of the butterfly collar, had the vigor to make the place live up to him; more--the thought lay in the open--than the governors for whom it was reserved. And having gotten in without ever having been a candidate he could perhaps get far beyond them without running or going through the tiresome part of politics. He had come into a view of mutability, and I too could see that one is only ostensibly born to remain in specified limits. That's what you'll be told in the ranks. I don't say that I exactly shared his feelings, or spirits of the dauphin's horse, almost tearing down hangings and shouldering into mirrors with that bucking pride, but with him now I certainly felt less boxed than I ever before had, nothing that others did so inconceivable for me. However, people were waiting below and Simon was holding things up, taking his time. Charlotte came in herself, like a big bridal edifice in her veil and other lace, carrying long-stemmed flowers. With her there wasn't much hiding of the behind-the-scenes of life to keep a man in the bonds of love, as Lucretius advises when he tells you to make allowances for mortality. You only had to see her practical mouth to know everything about mortality was admitted in advance, though she did for form's sake all that other women do. Her frankness gave her a kind of nobility. But here when she came into the room was the visible means to governors' suites and ambassadorships, and the best that Simon could do brought him back to her. "Everybody else is ready. What are you doing?" She spoke to me, for she wouldn't blame him in any circumstances where she could blame me instead, his stand-in. "I've been dressing and shmoosing," said Simon. "There's plenty of ,._g_what's the big rush? Anyhow, you didn't have to come, you could have phoned. Now, honey, don't be nervous; you look beautiful and everything is going to be fine." "It will be if I see to it. Now will you go and talk to the guests?" she said in her bidding tone. She sat on the bed to call the caterer, the musicians, the florist, the management, the photographer, for she kept all under close control and had made every arrangement herself, relying on no one; and with her white shoes on a chair and a pad on her knees she made figures and dickered with the photographer, at the last moment still trying to beat down his price. "Listen, Schultz, if you try to hold me up you'll get no business out of any of the Magnuses ever again, and there're plenty of us." "Augie," said Simon when we went out, "you can have the car to take Lucy out. You'll probably need some dough, so here's ten bucks. I'll send Mama home in a cab. I want you at the office at eight though. Is she wearing those glasses I told you to get her?" Mama had obediently put on the glasses, but it displeased him to see that she carried her white cane. She was sitting with Anna Coblin in the lounge, the cane between her knees, and he tried to take it away from her, but she wouldn't yield it up. "Ma, give me that stick, for Chrissake! How will it look? They're going to take a picture." "No, Simon, people will bump into me." "They won't bump into you--you'll be with Cousin Anna." "Hear, let her keep it," said Anna. "Ma, give that cane to Augie and he'll check it for you." "I don't want to, Simon." "Mama, don't you want everything to look nice?" He tried to loosen her fingers. "Cut it out!" I said to him, and Cousin Anna with her burning morose face muttered something to him. "You shut up, you cow!" he said to her. He went, but left me instructions. "You get it away from her. What a turnout from our side!" I let her keep the cane, and had to pacify Cousin Anna and beg her to stay for Mama's sake. Money makes you meshuggah," she said, sitting heavy and tall in "er corset, glaring maddened into the luxurious lounge. approved of Mama's exhibition of will, wondering at the surprises the meek will pull. Anyway, Simon dropped the matter; he was too / to fight every fight through, a^ he was somewhere off the ba UDUS7, where the ceremony was s\- I went around looking roo. g the guests for some I knew, ^ ^ad invited the Einhoms, inam , ng Arthur. Arthur, who had gr^uated from the University of Illici" was m Chicago, where he was doing nothing in particular. Occano1 ally I saw him on the South Side ^d knew that he was friendly with m^1 s set and that he was ^PP^d to be translating poems from the " ^ch. Einhorn would always ba^ him in any intellectual pursuit. l_ fe were the Emhorns then, in t^ ballroom, the old man with a sort l"iditary cloak, gray, looking like ^e former possessor of a splendor of as good as this who, without sp^al rancor but understanding how 1^,1 comes about, watches it chan^ hands. He said to me, "You look fit fine in y^tuxedo> ^g10-" ^Ilie kissed me, taking my face in her w K hands, Arthur smiling. He co^ behave with exceptional charm, w this was absent-mindedly conferred on you bu^ went on to welcome Happy Keiierman and his wife, a thin blond ,le of a woman who bore out he,. belly and was wound high and low K1 (i beads and pearls. Next I saw l^e Properties and Cissy. Simon had ^ ^d them from motives not hard to understand, partly to show Cissy y he had gone on to d0 and ALSO to ^b)01 Five Properties to a cruel w. ipanson. Cissy defeated all, t^ugh, with that sly provoking dec ^cy about her female gifts, brea^ touching breast in the low opening c tier dress. She showed her ton^g softly in the few words that she ^m o ike. Five Properties had come for a reconciliation of cousins. She Ji st J taught him to comb his Scythe ^air differently; it now came lower t^ the rugged forehead without modifying the skeptical grinning of his | 0 ^s; that savage green would a^ays express everything that Five ^perties thought. He too was dr^sed in a tuxedo, wore it on his enor V t, us trunk to be equal to the opuig^ce Simon had invited him to see. %d so he grinned all around with his gum-buried teeth and green eyes. r was evident that Cissy steered (^ ^g^ him civilized behavior--^. fi who had loaded and driven t^e wagon of jolting corpses the Rus* .^ns and Germans had made of one another in the Polish mud. She yched him. All the same she CQu^n't prevent him by her smile and , t, w murmured word from feelii^ her on the back and fondling her. "',$0 what's wrong, babe?" he saiq Well, the wedding music bega^ t went to see that Mama was taken ^ a plush bench, her place inside ^e flower cage beside the altar--the ^bims were with her--and then ^to rehearsed position in the proces^n, with Lucy Magnus, along the white carpet down which the princi,1s came: Charlotte and her fa^er with rose-scattering children be' fore Mrs. Magnus and Uncle Charlie, and then Simon with Lucy's brother Sam, first-string guard on the Michigan team, a hulky walker. Throufhout the ceremony Lucy looked at me in her unambiguously declarative way, and when the ring was on and Simon swung Charlotte back before all to kiss her, and all clapped and cried out, Lucy came and took my arm. We went in to the banquet; ten dollars a plate, it was _for that day a staggering price. But I couldn't sit through the meal in peace. An usher came to tell me I was wanted and rushed me to the back of the hall. Five Properties, angry, was walking out because he and Cissy had been put at a little table apart behind a pillar. Whether it was Charlotte who was responsible for this, or Simon himself, I never found out. One was as capable of it as the other. Whoever had done it, Five Properties was powerfully offended. " 'S okay, Augie. Against you I got nothing. He asked me? I came. I wish him all. But what way is it to treat a cousin? Okay. Eat I can where I want. I don't. God forbid, need his meal. Babe, come on." I went to get her fur, knowing it was useless to argue, and I saw them to the garage elevator with some dawning thought about rudeness as the measure of achievement and the systems of storing up injury. As Cissy passed into the elevator she said, "Tell your brother congratulations. His wife is awfully pretty." But this was one game in which I wasn't going to play intermediary, and when Simon asked me eagerly about their leaving I said casually, "Oh, they just didn't have the time to stay. They came only for the ceremony." I gave no satisfaction. But as for that other more important game into which he had gotten me, I played it to the full, going to night clubs, sorority dances, and shows and night-football games at which Lucy and I pitched and necked. She was, up to the last thing of all, unrestrained and exploratory; and where she stopped I stopped. You never know what forms self-respect will take, especially with people whose rules of life are few. But I enjoyed all that was allowed and to that extent I remained myself. But I wasn't much myself in other ways, and it was very disturbing, and sometimes pressed on my head with very heavy weight, and I realized I was in the end zone of my adaptability. It was my pride to make it seem easy though. So that if you took me at Uncle Charlie's house on a Sunday afternoon, after dinner, by the fire, among the fam"y, with Mrs. Magnus knitting a shawl that rose out of a tapestry oarpetbag; with Sam, Lucy's brother, standing by, his chin picked up o make way for the foulard beneath it and his dressing gown swelling over his behind while every now and then he treated his plastered hair busy to fight every fight through, and he was somewhere off the ballroom where the ceremony was shaping up. I went around looking among the guests for some I knew. He had invited the Einhoms, including Arthur. Arthur, who had graduated from the University of Illinois, was in Chicago, where he was doing nothing in particular. Occasionally I saw him on the South Side and knew that he was friendly with Frazer's set and that he was supposed to be translating poems from the French. Einhorn would always back him in any intellectual pursuit. There were the Einhorns then, in the ballroom, the old man with a sort of military cloak, gray, looking like the former possessor of a splendor just as good as this who, without special rancor but understanding how it all comes about, watches it change hands. He said to me, "You look very fine in your tuxedo, Augie." Tillie kissed me, taking my face in her dark hands, Arthur smiling. He could behave with exceptional charm, but this was absent-mindedly conferred on you. I went on to welcome Happy Kellerman and his wife, a thin blond rattle of a woman who bore out her belly and was wound high and low with beads and pearls. Next I saw Five Properties and Cissy. Simon had asked them from motives not hard to understand, partly to show Cissy what he had gone on to do and also to subject Five Properties to a cruel comparison. Cissy defeated all, though, with that sly provoking decency about her female gifts, breast touching breast in the low opening of her dress. She showed her tongue softly in the few words that she spoke. Five Properties had come for a reconciliation of cousins. She had taught him to comb his Scythian hair differently; it now came lower on the rugged forehead without modifying the skeptical grinning of his eyes; that savage green would always express everything that Five Properties thought. He too was dressed in a tuxedo, wore it on his enormous trunk to be equal to the opulence Simon had invited him to see. And so he grinned all around with his gum-buried teeth and green eyes. It was evident that Cissy steered him, taught him civilized behavior-- him who had loaded and driven the wagon of jolting corpses the Russians and Germans had made of one another in the Polish mud. She coached him. All the same she couldn't prevent him by her smile and slow murmured word from feeling her on the back and fondling her. "So what's wrong, babe?" he said. Well, the wedding music began. I went to see that Mama was taken to a plush bench, her place inside the flower cage beside the altar--the Coblins were with her--and then into rehearsed position in the procession, with Lucy Magnus, along the white carpet down which the principals came: Charlotte and her father with rose-scattering children be242 fore Mrs. Magnus and Uncle Charlie, and then Simon with Lucy's brother Sam, first-string guard on the Michigan team, a bulky walker. Throughout the ceremony Lucy looked at me in her unambiguously declarative way, and when the ring was on and Simon swung Charlotte back before all to kiss her, and all clapped and cried out, Lucy came and took my arm. We went in to the banquet; ten dollars a plate, it was _for that day a staggering price. But I couldn't sit through the meal in peace. An usher came to tell me I was wanted and rushed me to the back of the hall. Five Properties, angry, was walking out because he and Cissy had been put at a little table apart behind a pillar. Whether it:; was Charlotte who was responsible for this, or Simon himself, I never found out. One was as capable of it as the other. Whoever had done it, Five Properties was powerfully offended. " 'S okay, Augie. Against you I got nothing. He asked me? I came. I wish him all. But what way is it to treat a cousin? Okay. Eat I can where I want. I don't, God forbid, need his meal. Babe, come on." I went to get her fur, knowing it was useless to argue, and I saw them to the garage elevator with some dawning thought about rudeness as the measure of achievement and the systems of storing up injury. As Cissy passed into the elevator she said, "Tell your brother congratulations. His wife is awfully pretty." But this was one game in which I wasn't going to play intermediary, and when Simon asked me eagerly about their leaving I said casually, "Oh, they just didn't have the time to stay. They came only for the ceremony." I gave no satisfaction. But as for that other more important game into which he had gotten me, I played it to the full, going to night clubs, sorority dances, and shows and night-football games at which Lucy and I pitched and necked. She was, up to the last thing of all, unrestrained and exploratory; and where she stopped I stopped. You never know what forms self-respect will take, especially with people whose rules of life are few. But I enjoyed all that was allowed and to that extent I remained myself. But I wasn't much myself in other ways, and it was very disturbing, and sometimes pressed on my head with very heavy weight, and I realized I was in the end zone of my adaptability. It was my pride to make it seem easy though. So that if you took me at Uncle Charlie's house on a Sunday afternoon, after dinner, by the fire, among the fam"y> with Mrs. Magnus knitting a shawl that rose out of a tapestry Garpetbag; with Sam, Lucy's brother, standing by, his chin picked up to malre way for the foulard beneath it and his dressing gown swelling over nis behind while every now and then he treated his plastered hair with affection; with Uncle Charlie listening to Father Coughlin who hadn't yet begun to shag out the money-changers but had that boring fervor of the high-powered and misleading who won't let you be but have to make you feel all the trembling vacancy of winter space between Detroit and Chicago--if you took me there, by the firelight, facing Uncle Charlie who had one leg thrown forward and his fingers inside the crevice of his shirt drawing at the mat of his chest, I wasn't the success envy might have believed me to be. My own envy went out with, I don't doubt, sick eyes through the clear gray panes where the kids were warring and shooting snowballs that spiatted on the black trunks and soared in the elegant scheme of twigs. Not that Lucy, in dark wool dress that just covered the tops of stockings she had helped me loosen the night before so that I could stroke her skin, didn't make up for much. In some way, not the deepest nor yet trivially, I was gone on her and as far as I was allowed gave her a real embrace that she returned, licking my ear and praising and promising me; she already called me husband. The deep consideration women give, as seen privately in their thoughtful eye, to demands for the most part outlawed out of fear for everything that has been done to make a reasonable, continuous life, the burden that made Phedra cry she wanted to throw off her harmful clothes, you could find that in Lucy too. It took her as far as to choose me. It was evident I was less desirable than Simon from her family's standpoint. Their main investigation was conducted on my willingness to be as they were in everything. They never were too sure, and were forever asking to have another look at my credentials, and, so to speak, would come in without knocking, as if I were at West Point, to see whether all was dusted and the hospital corners satisfied regulations. Lucy stood up for me; it was her only disobedience so far as I, a wayward but close student of the situation, could see. When I suggested that we run away and get married at Crown Point she refused flat, and I could see the difference between her and Charlotte. I probably shouldn't forget the difference between Simon and me; he had been able to talk Charlotte into eloping. And if Lucy already called me "husband," Mimi Villars would have said, no compliment intended, that she was a wife, wanting the whole wifely racket. In other words, minor sensuality and no trouble. Unless she was flirting with trouble by having detected a source of it in me. But I was, as at the Renlings', under an influence and not the carrier of it. I had to get around; I had a figure to cut, the car to drive, the money to spend, the clothes to wear, and served before I had it clear ' .244 whether I wanted or liked the doing of it at all. Even if her father stole in on us at two in the morning as we were loving-up, he stole through a mansion, and it was hard to think him wrong when the lights went on and he prowled peevish toward us. I suppose I saw nothing very wrong anywhere, and it took me longer than it should have taken to discover that he didn't like me, because everything flashed so, all was rich, was heavy, velvet, lepidopterous. The circuit I was in, at the Glass Derby and Chez Paree and the dances at Medinah Club, kept me very busy. Here what had to be established was whether I was qualified in pocket to mix with the sons of established fathers. I had to mind my step, for Simon kept me on a minimum budget; he somehow thought that I could do what he had done on just a little less. It was true that I could make money go farther, but Lucy thought less about economics than Charlotte. And I had to notice cover charges, tips, the cost of a parking lot, and slip out to the store for Camels instead of buying them from the cigarette girl. I got through examination by Lucy's set, not hearing what I didn't want to hear, or forcing others to give ground, and even if it did strengthen the hypocrite's muscle in my face and harden my stomach I thought it did me credit to bluff it through. These weren't our only company. We went to visit Simon and Charlotte in their flat--they had, for a beginning, only three rooms--and to eat off the trousseau linen and the wedding china. The Magnuses went to exceptional lengths to procure anything for one of their own, and these plates and cups had been baked in an English kiln, as the rug was really from Bokhara and the silver by Tiffany. If we stayed after dinner we. played bridge or rummy, and at ten o'clock Charlotte phoned the drugstore to send peppermint ice-cream and hot fudge. So we licked spoons and I was in general sociable, helpful, debonair, and thought of the two colors of my silk suspenders and the fit of my shirt, Simon's gifts. Obedient to him. Charlotte treated Lucy and me like an engaged pair, but with wariness and reserve camouflaged from him. With the instinct of her family she knew that I didn't have Simon's qualities, that I really didn't intend to follow in his steps, his difficulties perhaps too much for me to undertake. This he was becoming aware of too. He was pleased at first by my willingness and fluency and spoon-lickery and obliging and niceness that continued while I moved before the regard of the Magnuses and made the most that could be made of the appeal of their seductions-- all that opulence, the strength of cars in the great rout of cars in the cold-lit darkness of the North Side Drive, and that mobile heraldry on soft tires rushing toward the floating balls and moons of the Drake Hotel and the towers around it; the thick meat, solid eating, excitement of dancing. Following the lake shore, you left the dry wood and grayed brick of the thick-built, jammed, labor-and-poverty Chicago standing | apart, speedily passed to the side. Ah no! but the two halves of the prophecy were there together, the Chaldee beauties and the wild beasts and doleful creatures shared the same houses together. Being in the yard daily, the beginning of this winter, I was not in a position to forget even if my evenings and Sundays were in another sphere. And my Sundays themselves were divided. Simon had me open the gates Sunday morning to catch what trade there was in the very cold weather. He drove me hard, bound to discipline me. Some mornings he checked on the time I arrived. If once in a while I overslept it wasn't to be wondered at, since, after taking Lucy home and leaving his car in the garage, I had to ride home on the trolley and so rarely got into the sack before one in the morning. He wouldn't, however, take any excuses from me. He said, "Well, why don't you make your time with her a little faster? Marry her and you'll get more rest." This, at first, was half a joke, but later, when he began more to doubt me, he was surly and before long fierce toward me. He grudged me the extra money, thinking it was merely thrown away. "What the hell are you waiting for, goddam you, Augie! She ought to be a pushover. If it was me I'd show you how, but fast." He was more violent as the resistance of her family began to shape up, though this I didn't understand for a while. But should I come in at eight-fifteen instead of eight I might find him at the scale, glaring at me. "What's the matter, did that Mimi keep you?" He was convinced that I had carried on and continued still with Mimi. We had other difficulties too. As I was assistant bookkeeper as well as weighmaster, he expected me to take from the pay-envelopes of the Negro hikers installments on the cast-off clothing he had sold them, and on a few occasions there was bad feeling between us. As in December, once, a lushed-up dealer named Guzynski tore onto the scale out of the slushy yard with white steam gushing from his busted radiator. He was buying a ton of coal and was overweight by several hundred pounds; when I told him he was heavy he cursed me, and he came down from the truck to force his way into the office and break my arm for cheating. I met him at the door and threw him out, and when he picked himself up from the snow, instead of pushing me again, he dumped his coal on the scale. There was now a jam of trucks and wagons in the street as well as in the yard. I told a hiker to clear the scale, but Guzynski was standing over his coal with a shovel and swung on him when he came near. Happy Kellerman was phoning for a squad car when Simon arrived. Simon went for the gun at once, and as he was running from the office with it I caught him by the arm and swung him back, and in his rage he drove a punch at me and hit me in the chest. I yelled at him as he eot away, "Don't be an idiot! Don't shoot!" and then saw him stagger for his balance in the coaly slush as he turned the corner. Guzynski was not too drunk to see the gun and he threw himself, burly in his short filthy coat and seaman's watch cap, to the side of his truck, trying to get to the cab. Here, in the narrow space between the truck and the office wall, Simon caught him, had him by the throat, and hit him in the face with the side of the gun. This happened right below Happy and me; we were standing at the scale window, and we saw Guzynski, trapped, square teeth and hideous eyes, foul blue, and his hands hooked, not daring to snatch the gun with which Simon hit him again. He laid open Guzynski's cheek. My heart went back on me when the cuts were torn, and I thought. Does it make him think he knows what he's doing if the guy bleeds? Now he let him go and with the pistol signed to the hikers to clear the scale platform, and their shovels began to scrape or gouge the dirty silence of Guzynski looking with loathing at his blood. He sprang into his truck, and I feared he would crash it into the gates, but he skidded into the snow mash of the street and the tracks caught his wheels and straightened him out in the traffic that took him up with it toward the sunless, faint direction. "Any odds he's going to the station to swear out a warrant?" said. Happy. I Simon, who had put down the gun, listened to him, and with a heavy breath he said, "Get me Nuzzo on the phone." He spoke to me, and it was in a fashion I had made up my mind to get used to and generally obeyed. He no longer looked up a number himself or did the dialing but took the instrument only when his party was already waiting. This time, however, I didn't stir. My arms were crossed and I held my place by the scale. He marked me down for this, grimly. Happy got the number for him. "Nuzzo!" said Simon. "This is March. How y'doin'? What? No, it's cold enough, I can't kick. Now listen, Nuzzo, we just had a little trouble "own here from a squarehead dealer who hit one of my men with a shovel. What? No, he was drunk as a lord, dumped his load on my scale and tied me up for an hour. Look, he's probably on his way to make a romplaint because I roughed him up. Take care of him for me, will you? Keep him in the clink till he cools off. Sure I will, I got witnesses. You tell him if he's thinking of laying for me after, you'll fix his clock good. What? He does bushel business down by that church on Twentyeighth. Do that for me, will you?" He did, and Guzynski was in the lockup several days. Next time I saw him he wasn't plotting any revenge. His scars were crusty yet when he came back still a customer, quiet, and I know that Simon was watching his eyes and would have acted on the least hint. But there was no trouble to hint. Nuzzo, or Nuzzo's people, had put a deep fright in him in their cellar below cellar, and gave him a Saturn's bite in the shoulder to show him how he could be picked up whole and eaten. He must even come back a customer. And Simon, too, knew how to put home the clincher, and at Christmas gave Guzynski a bottle of Gordon's Dry Gin and his wife a box of New Orleans pecan pralines in the form of a cotton bale. She said to him that it had done Guzynski good. "Of course," said Simon. "He's satisfied now. Because he knows where he stands. When he swung that shovel he didn't know and was trying to find out. Now he knows." For Simon wanted to show me how justly he handled such crises, and how badly, by contrast--because of chicken-heartedness--I did. I should have quelled Guzynski's riot as soon as it broke. But I wasn't prompt, wasn't brave, didn't understand that Guzynski had to be pistolwhipped and thrown in jail if he wasn't to become a Steelkilt mutineer to buffalo all captains. The inference was clear that if I didn't make time with Lucy Magnus it was from these same shortcomings. If I became her husband in two-armed fact, the rest was merely a formality. But I didn't mount the step of power. I could have done so from love, but not to get to the objective. Thus things became more tough for me at the yard; Simon increased my hardships both for my good and because it didn't displease him to do it. At this time he couldn't say how many high things were suitable for him and was trying on guises. His last thoughts at breakfast sometimes were the next new policy, and this might be to devote himself absolutely to the bottom-most detail or fistful in a business that reckoned by tons; or, again, to skim in the big space of principle only and leave the details to subordinates--as he could do if they, and mainly I, were trustworthy; or to be a Jesuit of money; or to be self-made: that was one of his weakest ideas but it was also persistent. I said, "Oh, but you're not a Henry Ford. After all, you married a rich girl." "The question is," he said, "what you have to suffer to get money, how much effort there is in it. Not that you start with a nickel, like the Alger story"--I 248., I here remembered what a reader Simon had been--"and run it into a fortune. But if you get a stake, what you do with it, whether you plunge or not." But this was the discussion of theory, which became rarer between us. Mostly I had to see in his disgusted eyes what his theory was and how disadvantageously I fitted into it, where I trailed, lagged, and missed the mark. So those were evil days for me, in that particular field of feeling that had the shape of the yard, the forms of the fence, coal heaps, machinery, the window of the scale, and that long, brass, black-graduated beam where I weighed. These things: and also the guys that worked, the guys that bought, the cops that came for theirs, the mechanics and the railroad agents, the salesmen, got into me. My head was full of things to remember; I must not quote a wrong price and stumble in arithmetic or any dealing. Mimi Villars heard me talking in my sleep one night about prices and came in and asked me questions, as though in a telephone conversation. She quoted the prices back to me in the morning, all correctly. "Brother! things must be bad for you," she said, "if that's all you can dream." I might have confessed even worse, if I'd cared to, since Simon had decided on the roughest treatment for me and sent me on errands not exactly for Hesperides apples. I had to fight with janitors about clinkers, soothe and bribe them, sweeten dealers. with beer, wrangle with claims agents about shrinkage, make complicated deposits in the pushing, barking crowd at the bank, everybody in a hurry and temper; I had furthermore to hunt up shovelers in flop. houses and court them in the Madison Street gutter when we were suddenly shorthanded. I had to go to the morgue to identify one found shot with our pay envelope empty in his shirt pocket. They lifted the bristling, creased wrap from him and I recognized him, his black body rigid, as if he died in a fit of royal temper, making fists, feet out of shape, and crying something from the roof of his mouth, which I saw. "You know him?" "That's Ulace Padgett. He worked for us. What happened to him?" "Girl friend shot him, they say." He pointed out the wound in his breast. "Have they caught her?" 'Naw, they won't even look for her. They never do." S>imon had given me this mission because, he said, I was driving the car anyway, to take Lucy out, and might as well attend to it on the way "ome. I had to hurry and change, and I didn't have the time to wash any but the exposed dirt of face, neck, and ears. All over the rest of me was grit from the yard, up my heels and legs. Even in the corners of the eyes there were shadowed places I didn't get into. They widened out my look by darkness. I had no time to eat, even if I had enjoyed an appetite, for the morgue had taken long and Lucy was waiting. I drove faster than I had any business to, and had a near thing at Western Avenue and Diversey, a long, downhill skid that turned the Pontiac round so that I finished backwards, against a streetcar. The motorman had had a good forty yards to see me and was standing on a grade, under the railroad bridge. So I didn't hit hard. I smashed the rear lights but couldn't see much other damage, and was congratulated by that sudden gathering that always collects on such an occasion. I was told how lucky I was and laughed it all off, hopped back of the wheel again and continued. I got to the Magnuses' in marvelous spirits, in the black night of the drive and the snow head of the portico, confident and whistling, the keys melodious in the coat I tossed down on the bench in the hall. However, when Lucy's brother Sam gave me a drink I went back, infinitely quicker than the speed at which I had come, to the morgue--the smell of the whisky on an empty stomach did that for me--and to the accident, which now made my work-filthy legs too weak to hold me. I sank down in a chair. Lucy said, "Why are you so white?" And Sam came near, like the host of a B movie, concerned after all lest his sister, huggable, press-bosom dolly, get herself engaged to a weakling. With more of this interest than mercy he bent to me, the stripes of his dressing gown stretched tight over his can. H "Am I white?" I struggled to say and picked up my head. "Maybe because I haven't eaten." "Oh, how silly. Since when? Why, it's after nine." She sent Sam to the kitchen to get a sandwich and a glass of milk from the cook. "I also had an accident--almost," I said to her when he had gone, and described what had happened. I'm not sure which most came through, her concern, or the sudden thought at the rear of her mind that I was a Jonah--I, the happy lover of the present moment. Trained fine in foresight, when, as now, she wanted to make use of it, she must have been seeing a drift of hard luck if not downright misery in the horizon. "Did you damage the car badly?" she said. "It's banged up a little." < She didn't like my vagueness about it. "The trunk?" j "I don't know exactly. I broke the tail lights, that I know. About the rest it's hard to tell in the dark, but it probably isn't much." "We'll go in my car tonight," she said, "and I'll drive. You must be shaky from the accident." So we went out in her roadster, a new one her father had recently given her, to our party on the North Shore, and afterward parked in one of the big sectors of shadow around the Bahai temple to stroke, struggle and shiver at the base of that cold religious knoll and its broken-up moonlight. Things seemed as usual but were not, either for her or for me. When we got back she wanted to have another look at the damage, afraid for me. I wouldn't go bend over the back of the car with her and put my finger in the dents. I turned off her headlights, under which the examination was taking place. And in the front hall afterward, when I was in coat and hat, fondling her and being assured she loved me, I knew there was an obstruction of sympathy. She foresaw that Simon would raise hell about the damage--as he did--and what's more, no point of view but his seemed possible to her, and she was somewhat frightened at me, feeling that I had one. And I might smell her shoulder and lift up her breast, but it wasn't the same intimacy any more in that riches-cluttered hall partly inventoried by the moon, the old man snuffing upstairs, vigilant whether asleep or not. I was therefore worn out in advance of the dripping yellow morning and its sick cold and the close filthy heat of the oil-squirting stove indoors. There is a way, I don't doubt, to carry all such things like little sticks in the bulge of the flood water, if you determine your energy to flow that way, and the weight of morgues and cars depends on the hydraulic lifting power you dispose of. Napoleon when he escaped in the old box of a sledge from wintry Russia, the troops of his dead lying like so many flocks covered in snow, talked three days to Caulaincourt who probably couldn't hear very well because his ears were bandaged --his master couldn't practice his old trick of pulling them--but he must have seen in his boss's swollen face the depth that kept floating a whole Europe of details. Yes, these business people have great energy. There's a question as to what's burned to produce it and what things we can and can't burn. There's the burning of an atom. Wild northern forests go like so many punk sticks. Where's the competitor-fire kindling, and what will its strength be? And another thing is that while for the sake of another vigor is lack- ^g, for the sake of the taste 01 egg in one's mouth there's all-out effort, and that's how love is lavished. I couldn't hold up all of these different elements. Simon came in and awled me out over the car and I was too broken-down to give any back talk or even feel he was doing me wrong. All I did reply was, "What are you fussing about? It wasn't much of an accident, and you're insured." This was just where the error was; it was that I had to feel bad about the back shell of the car and those crustacean eyes that were draggino by the wires, and it wasn't so much the accident as my failure to care as I should that he minded. That was why he burned me with his eyes and showed his brokenedged tooth while his head settled downward with menace. I was too despondent to stand up to him. Nothing visible backed me, as it did him, to see and trust, but all was vague on my side and yet it was also very stubborn. I stayed in that evening to read. According to our agreement I was to start at the university in the spring, when business would let up a little and Simon could spare me. I still had the craving that I had given in to all summer long when I had lived on books, to have the reach to grasp both ends of the frame and turn the big image-taking glass to any scene of the world. By now Padilla had sold most of my books for me--he himself had given up stealing lately since he had taken a parttime job calculating the speed of nerve impulses in a biophysics lab-- and I had only a few things left. However, there was Einhorn's firedamaged set of classics in a box under the bed, and I picked out Schiller's Thirty Years' War and was lying in my socks reading when Mimi Villars came in. Often she came and went without talking to me, only for her things in the closet. But she had something to say tonight, and didn't spar, but told me, "Frazer knocked me up." "Gosh, are you sure?" "Of course I'm sure. Come out with me. I want to talk to you and I don't want Kayo to be in on it. He listens through the wall." It was black weather, not too cold but very windy, and the street light was hacked and banged like a cymbal. "But where's Frazer?" I said, having been out of touch with the house lately. "He had to leave. He has to read a damn paper at a convention in Louisiana, Christmas, and so he went to see his folks first, because he can't be with them for the holiday. But what difference is it where he is--what's the good of him?" "Well, honestly now, Mimi, wouldn't you like it if you could get married?" She gave me enough silence in which to take it back, looking at me252 | "You must think I lose my head easily," she said when I didn't retract. We hadn't gone down into the wind yet; we were on the porch. She had one foot pointed to the side and her hand coming from her deep sleeve held the back of her neck while her round face of tough happiness was turned close under mine. Tough happiness? Yes, or hard amusement, or something spiritual and gymnastic, with pain done to the brows to make them point finely. "If I wouldn't marry him before, why should I now because of an accident? I see you've been under pood influences. Let's go get a cup of coffee." She took my arm, and we got as far as the corner, where we stopped again and were talking when a little dog came up, followed by his mistress in a Persian lamb coat and astrakhan hat, and an astonishing thing happened of the sort that made me see how believable it was that Mimi should have grabbed the gun from a stickup man and shot him; for the dog, somehow misoriented, perhaps because of the strong weather, wet on Mimi's ankle, and she shouted at the woman, who seemed incapable of looking to see what was happening, "Take away your dog!" And then she tore off the woman's high fur hat to dry herself with it and left her like that, her hairdress beginning to be destroyed by the wind as she cried out, "My hat!" The hat was on the street where Mimi had flung it. That lack of respect in occurrences for the difficulties that there already are! But then proofs always flocked to Mimi to help her make her case. Anyway, in the drugstore, when she had stripped off and rolled her stocking and put it in her bag, it only made her laugh. A real and pure chance for temper tickled her heart. But what she wanted to discuss over coffee was a new method of abortion she had heard about. She had already tried drugs like ergoapiol, with walking, climbing stairs, and hot baths, and now one of the waitresses at the co-op told her of a doctor near Logan Square who brought on miscarriages by injection. "I never heard of such a thing before, but it's worth a try, and I'm going to try." "What is it that he uses?" "How should I know? I'm not a scientist." 'And if it has a bad effect you'll have to go to the hospital, and then what?" ' 6 v Oh, they have to take you in if you're in danger of your life. Only they'd never get out of me'how it happened." '^It sounds risky. Maybe you'd better not try at all." "And have a baby? Me? Can you see me with a kid? You don't care how the world gets populated, do you! Maybe you're thinking about your mother"--I thus knew that either Sylvester or Clem Tambow had talked to her about me--"and that you wouldn't be here if your mother had ideas like mine. Nor your brothers either. But even if I could be sure I'd have a son like you," she said, with her usual comment of laughter, "not that I don't think the world of you, pal, even with all your faults--why should I get into this routine? So the souls of these things shouldn't get after me when I die and accuse me of not letting them be born? I'd tell them, 'Listen, stop haunting me. What do you think you ever were? Why, a kind of little scallop, that's all. You don't know how lucky you are. What makes you think you would have liked it? Take it from me, you're indignant because you don't know.' " We were sitting near the counter, and all the help stopped and listened to this speech. Among them was a man who said, "What a crazy broad!" She heard him, he caught her eye, and she laughed at him and said, "Here's a guy who'll live and die trying to look like Cesar Romero." "First thing, she comes in, she has to take off her stockings and show her gams..." This argument had to run its course, and then we couldn't stay; we _ finished our conversation in the street. li "No," I said, "I can't complain about having been born." | | "Yes, sure, you'd even feel grateful if you knew to whom, and for what was only an accident." "It couldn't have been all an accident. On my mother's side at least I can be sure there was love in it." "Is it love that saves it from being an accident?" "I mean the desire that there should be more life; from gratitude." "Show me where that is! Why don't you go down to the Fulton egg market and think it over there. Find me the gratitude--" "I can't argue with you that way. But if you ask me whether obliviousness would have been better for me, then I'd be a liar if I answered 'yes' or even 'maybe,' because the facts are against it. I couldn't even swear that I knew what obliviousness was, but I could tell you a lot about how pleasant my life has been." "That's hunky-dory for you; maybe you like the way you are, but most people suffer from it. They suffer from what they are, such as they are; this woman because she's getting wrinkled and her husband won't love her; and that one because she wants her sister to die and leave her her Buick; and still another who is willing to devote her whole life to keep her fanny in the right shape; or getting money out of somebody; or thinking about getting a better man than her husband. Do you want me to give you a list on men too"? I could go on as long as you like. They'll never change, one beautiful morning. They can't change. So maybe you're lucky. But others are stuck; they have what they have; and if that's their truth, where are we?" Me, I couldn't think all was so poured in concrete and that there weren't occasions for happiness that weren't illusions of people still permitted to be forgetful of permanent disappointment, more or less permanent pain, death of children, lovers, friends, ends of causes, old age, loathsome breath, fallen faces, white hair, retreated breasts, dropped teeth; and maybe most intolerable the hardening of detestable character, like bone, similar to a second skeleton and creaking loudest before the end. But she, who had to make up her mind practically, couldn't be expected to make it up by my feelings. She let you know, but quick, that you, a man, could talk, but she was the one for whom it was the flesh and blood trouble, and she even had a pride about it that made her cheeks shine, that in her was something ultimate. I didn't keep up these arguments with her. And although not convinced by her, I wasn't utterly horrified for the unborn either. To be completely consistent in that kind of economy of souls you would have to have great uneasiness and remorse that wombs should ever be unoccupied; likewise, that hospitals, prisons, and madhouses and graves should ever be full. That wide a spread is too much. The decision was really up to her, whether to have a child by Frazer who wasn't free to' marry her now, even if she wanted to marry him. And, by the way, I | didn't take at face value all that she said about him. However, I wasn't any too sure about the injection. I wanted to ask Padilla about it, who was my scientific authority, and I tried to get him at his laboratory. If he didn't know the answer himself he could ask one of his biological buddies in that semi-skyscraper of a building where there were always dogs barking with abnormal strain, which made me flinch a little when I heard it. Padilla didn't seem to mind this; he only went there to do calculations in that slip-slop queer swift way, standing on an eccentric point, a hand in his pocket and an untouched cigarette burning with forked smoke. But I couldn't find him before Mimi's appointment with the doctor. To which I took her. Inis doctor was a man made dolorous, or anyhow heavy of mood, y the bad times, and he looked very unprofessional. There was a careess office of old equipment, and he sat in rolled sleeves and smoked 'gars at a desk where my book-accustomed eyes spotted a Spinoza a Hegel and other things odd for a doctor, and especially one in his line. Under him there was a music shop. My memory gives me back the name: Stracciatella. In the window there was the entire family, playing guitars to a microphone--the young girls and bareleooed boys whose feet didn't yet touch the floor, and the sounds covering the street, cold that night, after a snowfall, with a noise of wires stronger even than the competition of the streetcars, old on that line and passing with a ruckus. The doctor didn't misrepresent what he had to offer--he was too careless even for that. He wasn't hardhearted maybe, but he appeared to ask, "What could I accomplish by caring?" Perhaps there was a disdain about him for the double powerlessness of creatures, first to oppose love and then to be free of the consequences. Naturally he took me for the lover. I suppose Mimi wanted him to; as for me, that wasn't what I cared about. Therefore, this was how we were, in the office, the stout doctor explaining his injection for our lay understanding, fatfaced, dry, unarduous, heavy of breath, his arms hairy, the office stinking of cigars and of his sedentary career in old black leather. He was not actually unkind, in his goggles, and partly a man of thought--just as far as the difficulties that purify, and no farther. Then the guitars breaking their step, a wiry woe and clatter. And Mimi with fair face and hair, red cheeks, a cloth rose laying down its folds front and center of her hat, assisted by white and less serious flowers .0 that red! of summer walls and yet of fabric and the counters of stores. Also her demonish or ciliary eyebrows, so hard-set and yet she was also so confused. But the time was one of the highest opportunity, if I understood her spirit, having to do with that same powerlessness the doctor ohserved--the powerlessness of women waiting for what will be done to them, and that way and none other to buy glory. "This injection causes contractions," said the doctor, "and it may expel your trouble. Nobody can promise that it will, and sometimes even if it works you still need a dilation and curettage. The thing actresses in Hollywood describe in the paper as appendicitis." "I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't make any jokes. I'm only interested in your medical services," Mimi told him right off, and he saw he wasn't dealing with a timid little knocked-up factory girl who was grateful, he'd think, for his wit and signal back to him dimly with a smile over the vast separating distances of real grief and danger. Some poor body in trouble from tenderness. But Mimi--her tenderness didn't have an easy visibility. You wondered what it would be, and after what terrific manifestations it would appear. "Let's just keep everything professional," she said. He said, with offended dark nose holes, "Okay, do you want the injection or not?" "Well, what the hell do you think I came all this way for, a cold night!" "He got up and put an enamel pot on the gas ring--a grizzly-claw collar of fires giving hot scratches. His handling of the pot was suggestive of the laziness and sloppiness of his morning egg in the kitchen; he dropped the hypo in, fished it up again with tongs, and was ready. "And suppose I need other help, if this only works halfway, will I get it from you?" He shrugged. Her voice began to ring. "Well, you're one hell of a doctor! Don't discuss it before you start? Or don't you give a damn what happens to people after they take your injection? You think they're so desperate you don't have to give a damn and they're only fooling with their lives, is that the way it is?" "If I had to, I might be able to do something for you."; I said, "You mean you do if you get paid. How much do you soak for it?": ^ "A hundred bucks.".,:? "You wouldn't settle for fifty?" she said.. "You might find somebody who would." He meant to show--and I thought it was genuine--that he didn't care. Non curo! That was what came easiest to him. He would just as soon have put away the hypo and gone back to picking his nose and to his ideas. I counseled her not to talk money with him. I said to her, "That part of it isn't important." "You want to go ahead with it? Look, to me it's just the same." "Mimi, you can still change your mind," I said for her own ear. ^i; "And where will I be if I change it? On the same spot still." I helped her off with her fur-collared coat, and she took me by the hand as if it were I that had to be led to the needle. At the moment of my putting my arm around her--feeling her need and wanting greatly to do all I could to meet it--she broke into sobs. The thing affected me too; I caught it from her. So we held together like what we were not, a pair of lovers. However, the doctor would not let us forget he was waiting. Sorrow^1 or tiresome, was this for him? Something between the two, and he watched how I would comfort her. Whatever there was to envy before, taking me as her lover, this was not enviable to him now. Well, he Qidn'tknow. But Mimi had decided, and she wasn't wavering; these tears didn't mean that. She gave him her arm, and he sank the needle in it; the hardlooking fluid went down. He told her she would have pains like birth pangs and had better go to bed. The bite for this was fifteen bucks, which she was able to pay; she didn't want any money from me at the moment. Not that I had a lot of it. Going with Lucy kept me broke. Frazer owed me something, but if he had been able to pay he would also have been able to send money to Mimi. She didn't want him to be bothered about it. He was still raising money for his divorce. Besides, it was part of Frazer's style not to know about such things. There was always something superior to what was happening in the immediate view, more eminent. This was a part of him that Mimi's satire was always aimed at, and yet she encouraged it as something precious as well as foolish. It wasn't that he was specially ungenerous but that he put things off to give his generosity a longer and more significant route. Anyway, Mimi went to bed, cursing the doctor, for the action had already set in. However, it was "dry," she said, and the cramps weren't going to effect anything. She shuddered and sweated, her bare shoulders thin and square above the quilt, and the childish form of her forehead painfully determined with lines, eyes greatly widened, strongly lighted blue. "Oh, that dirty, bloody gypper!";'. "Mimi, but he said nothing might happen. Wait--" rsti "What in the name of hell can I do now but wait when I'm shot full of this terrible poison? I must be caught strong, for it's squeezing my guts out. That lousy clumsy cow doctor! Oh!" Intermittently the spasms passed off and she found the spirit for a relieving joke. "It's sitting tight, won't budge; stubborn thing. While some women have to stay on their backs nine months to keep theirs. Listen to the radio. But"--increasing in seriousness--"I can't let it alone now and be born, with all the stuff I've taken. It might be hurt. Groggy. If not, it might be dangerous because it's so obstinate, and be a criminal. I think if he'd be wild enough and kick the world around I might let him come. Why do I say 'he' though? It might be a girl, and what would I do to a daughter, poor child? Still women--women. They do themselves more credit, there's more reality in women. They live closer to their nature. They have to. It's more with them. They have the breasts. They see their blood, and it does them good, while men are let to be vainer. Oh! give me your hand, will you, Augie, for Chrissake?" It was the return of the gripes, making her sit stiffly and squeeze and bear down on my hand. With shut eyes she let the spasm pass throuoh and then lay back, and I helped her cover up. Little by little the effect of the drug ended and left her tired in the muscles and belly, furious with the doctor and angry also with me. "But you know he didn't make any promises." "Don't be stupid," she said, ugly. "How do you know he gave me a bie enough dose? Or if he didn't want me to come back and have it done the other way, so he'd get more? And that's what it will have to be. Only I'm not going to him." Seeing how she was, fiery and sullen, though weakened, and wanting nobody near, I let her be and went to my room. Kayo Obermark had the room between us, and of course he was on to what was happening; in spite of Mimi's efforts to keep him out, how could he miss? He was young, about my own age of twenty-two, but ponderous already, a big, important, impatient face, irritable, smoky with thought that went out far. He was gloomy and rough. His life was rugged in there, that room; he didn't like classes, his notion being that he could do all his own learning; the room was foul from the moldering of old things and smelled of bottles he used for urine, because he didn't like to make trips to the toilet when he was working. He lived halfnaked in his bed, which all the rest of the room approached, heaped up with commodities and dirt. He was melancholy and brilliant. He thought the greatest purity was outside human relations, that those only begot lies and cabbage-familiarity, and he told me, "I prefer stones any time. I could be a geologist. I'm not even disappointed in humankind, I just don't care about it, and if there's one thing that's sure, it's that this world is certainly not enough, and if there isn't any more they can have it all back." Kayo wanted to know about Mimi although she always baited him. "What's the matter, she having it rough? She has hard luck." "Yes, it's bad." "But nah! it's not all luck," he said--one of the things he couldn't stand was that you should agree with him. "You notice people have the same kind of thing happen to them, over and over and over." His attitude to her had something in common with the doctor's; it was woman's trouble she had, and neither of them could place it very high. Kayo, however was a much more intelligent man than the doctor, and though as he stood in my room on bare weight-flattened feet in undershirt, the hair in tufts on his shoulders, and that large face from which everyone was reproached for letting him down and coming short tlle "wk--though, in other words, he was the hard figure of prej259 udice, there was still in him an extra effort of justice, a channel kept open. "Well--you understand. Everyone has bitterness in his chosen thine. Bitterness in his chosen thing. That's what Christ was for, that even God had to have bitterness in his chosen thing if he was really going to be man's God, a god who was human. She also goes in for it." He gave a heave of terrible impatience. "That was Christ. Other gods poured on the success, knocked you down with their splendor. Those that didn't give a damn. Real success, you see, is terrifying. Can't face that. Rather ruin everything first. Everything would have to be changed. You can't find a pure desire except the one that everything should be mixed. We run away from what can be conceived pure, and everyone acts out this disappointment in his own way as if to prove that the mixed and impure will and must win." I was always impressed by him and his big horse's eyes startled by wisdom or the shadow of it, as a horse may shy at a ridiculous thing the same as at an important one. I felt what he was saying. I knew there was truth in it, and had respect for him as the source of illumination; even while himself he was in dark colors, some of smudge, and green and blue by the eyes, but some of radiance; and, hands on his fat hips, he looked at me with a face in which some original beauty was turned down as a false lead. That this fact that all had to give in was acted out I could see, and the accompanying warning that to hope too much was a killing disease. Yes, pestilential hope that passes under the evils and leaves them standing. I had enough of a dose of it to recognize it. So I was both drawn to Kayo's view and resistant to it. No painted sky of the human theater for him, but always on the outside toward the diamond-drop true sky by means of the long, star-crawling clear fog of the medulla and brain, a copy of the Milky Way. But I had the idea also that you don't take so wide a stand that it makes a human life impossible, nor try to bring together irreconcilables that destroy you, but try out what of human you can live with first. And if the highest should come in that empty overheated tavern with its flies and the hot radio buzzing between the plays and plugged beer from Sox Park, what are you supposed to do but take the mixture and say imperfection is always the condition as found; all great beauty too, my scratched eyeballs will always see scratched. And there may gods turn up anywhere..; "If you go into reasons," I said to Kayo, "there may be reasons for these mixed things too." "Not real," he answered. "You wouldn't try to live on a movie screen. When you understand that, you'll be on your way to something. You can be too, if I'm not wrong about your character. You wouldn't be afraid to believe in something. What I don't get is why you want to make a dude of yourself. It won't keep up though." Mimi heard that we were talking and she called me. I went back to her. "What does he want?" she said. "Kayo?" "Yes, Kayo." "We were just talking." "You were talking about me. If you tell him anything I'll murder you. All he ever looks for is proof he's right, and he'd walk on my chest with his big feet if he could." "It's you yourself that don't keep your own secrets," I said, trying to be easy about it, however. It wasn't the time to talk back in any fashion, and she stared at me, harsh, from the bent-metal bed with its so many cast-iron nuclei and iron ribbon bows. "What I say, I say, but I can tell you not to." "Just take it easy, Mimi, I won't." Nevertheless I had to ask Kayo to keep an eye on her next day, not knowing what might come up and worrying through it at the office and at the supper meeting of the Magnus Cousins Club that took place once a month in an oak room downtown. I tried phoning the house and couldn't get anyone but Owens himself, who when peeved, and he was with Mimi, put on a Welsh accent I couldn't penetrate, so that it was- just wasting nickels to continue phoning. Lucy wanted to go dancing I after the meeting; I got out of that by alleging tiredness, which I didn't have to counterfeit, and cut out for home. Mimi was there, and she had happy news. Dressed in a black and white suit, a black ribbon in her hair, she was sitting in my room. "I used my head today," she said. "I started by saying to myself, 'Are there any ways to get this done legally?' Well, there are a few. One is if you go to an alienist and get him to say you're nuts. They don't want madwomen to be having kids. I once got off a rap that way so it's on a court record. But I don't feel like doing it now. You can go too far. So I decided, to hell with that stuff of putting on a wacky act. The other thing is that if your heart is weak or your life in danger they'll do it for you. So I went to the clinic today and said I thought I was pregnant but "of normally, and kept having trouble. There was a guy who examined "ie and thought he was pretty sure I had a tube pregnancy. So I have to e examined again, and if they still think so they might have to operate." This was what overjoyed her. She already was banking on it. I said to her, "What did you do, bone up in a book on what a tube pregnancy was like and then go down and describe the symptoms to them?" "Baby, what an idea! Do you think I'm such a daredevil? And do you think you can walk in there, tell them any old thing, and take them in?" "They can be fooled about some things at a clinic. That I 'can tell you. But watch what you're getting into, Mimi. Don't try to put it over on them." "It isn't all my idea; they think so too, and I have some of the symptoms. But I won't go back, I'll go to that veterinarian." I couldn't keep watch over her the next few days, having a full calendar of suppers and gatherings, and the times I looked in on her, late at night or at half-past six in the morning when I had to turn out, she was too sleepy to talk to me. When I went to wake her she seemed to know at once whose hand was on her shoulder and what the question was, and answered as though out of sleep, "No, nothing, no soap." Winter was pouring on, late December, smoky and dark. Clobbering down the steps in my galoshes these mornings of mist and smoke, usually running late, I made for the car line in the seeping-back of night from the bad filters of low sky. Nine o'clock, after the first rush of business, I could catch up with breakfast at Marie's greasy-spoon, walled with decorative tin panels, one-arm chairs by the walls, no great amount of light because of the height of the fixtures. On a Saturday afternoon I was taking a break at Marie's. She had the opera on the radio, tuned in from New York, and that eloquence turned loose didn't reach me but went on in my ears. There you have a service formerly paid for, as when a Burgundian duke in prison in Bruges sent for a painter to alleviate the dark shutters with gold faces and devotional decoration. This kind of aid to people in trouble now diffused practically free, as in magazines or on the air. However, I didn't hear it well, except as powerful and formal voices. Sent by Happy Kellerman, a shoveler came to say that I was wanted on the phone by a lady. It was a nurse from a South Side hospital, calling with a message from Mimi. "Hospital? What's the matter? Since when has she been there?" "Since yesterday," the woman said, "and perfectly all right, but says she wants to see you." I told Simon, who listened to me with suspicion, irony, reprimand, already hard and waiting to spurn my explanation that I had to get off early to see a friend in the hospital. "Which friend? You mean that broad of yours, the roughneck blonde? Pal, you have too many irons in the fire. How are you mixed up with her? I think you're going a little too fast, aren't you, trying to keep up with two dames? That's why you look so dug-up lately. If one of them didn't haul your ashes you might make faster time with the other. Or is it more than an ash-haul job? Ah, that would be just like you, to fall in love too! You can't hold your load of love, can you! What do you have to give for a piece of tail? You can't climb in bed with a girl without feeling that you have to take care of her for life?" "You don't have to say all this, Simon, it doesn't have any bearing. Mimi's sick and wants me to come see her." "As long as the boy is getting laid, I don't see what's such a rush to marry," said Happy. "If this gets around to them," said Simon, out of Happy's hearing; and, strangely, his look got hung up on something that resembled satisfaction and pleasure more than anything else, and I saw that he had already handled the consequences of this to himself; he'd repudiate me, and it would do him no harm. As for his notions, the wedding night, of what we two would be able to combine and achieve, he had no doubt changed them, deciding that all should be the work of a single mind and authority. But I was not thinking of this much, but rather of Mimi in the hospital. I was sure she had gone through with her plan to trick the doctors. Late afternoon I saw her, in a ward; I was in the door, and she was snapping her fingers from the distance and trying to sit up in bed. "You went through with it?" "Oh, sure! Didn't you know I would?" "Well? At least, is it over?" "Augie, I've had an operation for nothing. It's all normal. I still have the thing to go through with." I didn't get it at first; I felt block-headed and stupid. She said with devilish towering humor and plunging bitterness, Augie, they all come in to congratulate me that I'm going to have a normal baby. It's not a fallopian pregnancy. The doctor, the internes, the nurses, they think I should be wild with happiness, and I can't even yell at them. I've been crying. I'm so crossed up." But why did you go through with it? Didn't you know? You invented the symptoms." ' 263 "No, I wasn't sure. I didn't invent everything, I had some. Maybe it was that injection. And when they thought it might be in the tube I was afraid not to have the operation. Then I thought when they had me on the operating table they'd do it for me. But they didn't." "Of course they didn't, they're not allowed to. That's what it was all about in the first place." "I realize. I realize. I thought I could crash the gate, I suppose. One of my bright schemes." She wasn't crying now, though in her eyes there were the crimson threads that tear salts bring out, and her nose was stung with them too, but she was not less but more, as was clear on her push-faced beauty, an aristocrat in her idea of the energy you should devote to love. "How long are you supposed to stay in bed, Mimi?" "I'm not going to stay as long as they think. I can't." "But you have to." "Oh no. It's getting late. A little more and I won't be able to. You call that man and get an appointment for me for late next week. By that time I'll be able to take it." This touched me very wrong, and I couldn't help it, I showed my horror at such nerve to practice on one's own body. "Oh, you think a woman should be more fragile than that," she said. "I keep forgetting you're just about engaged to be married." "But shouldn't you wait at least until they let you out?" "They say ten days, and it'll only weaken me to stay in bed that long. Anyhow, I can't stand the ward. And the nurses' being so pleased about the blessed event. I can't put up with it. And I'm beginning to be nervous. Do you have any dough?" "Not much. Do you?" "Not even half of what I need, and can't raise much. He won't touch me for a buck under the price, I know. Frazer hasn't got anything either." "If I could get into his room I could take some of his books and sell them. There are things there worth good money." "He wouldn't like that. Anyhow, you can't get in." She broke her preoccupation to give me a look for my own sake, straight, and said with a laugh that didn't last, "You take my side, don't you?" I saw no necessity to answer. "You can see the point of love, I mean." She kissed me feelingly, and with some pride in me'. All the rest, the women, wan, visiting or gazing around. "Well," I said, "we can raise this money. How much short of the hundred are you?" "I'll need at least fifty more." "We'll get it." The easiest way I knew to raise'extra dough--so easy I was rather proud of it--was to steal books. I needed to ask no one, and Simon least of all. I headed downtown right away. It was still early in the evening, glittering with electric, with ice; and trembling in the factories, those nearly all windows, over the prairies that had returned over demolitions with winter grass pricking the snow and thrashed and frozen together into beards by the wind. The cold simmer of the lake also, blue; the steady skating of rails too, down to the dark. I went to Carson's on Wabash Avenue, the book section on the ground floor, warm and busy with a late crowd of shoppers under the Christmas bells and silvery ivies. I didn't as a rule loiter long, thus drawing attention. I knew what books I was after, a rare Plotinus, an English edition of The Enneads worth a whole lot of money, more than it was priced. I took the volumes down, leafed them, looked over the bindings, put them under my arm, and with fair ease made my way to the Wabash Avenue door. It was spinning slowly. I got into the quadrant that opened up for me and was half through when the door stuck and caught me, inches from the street. I turned to see whether the cause of the jamming was the worst that could be, having in my mind already police, court, and prison, up to a terrible year in Bridewell. But behind me was Jimmy Klein, practically a stranger to me since the old days, but not a stranger nevertheless. It was he who had me caught in the- brass barrel that the doors turned within, and he signaled me that he I would release me, that I was to wait in the street. There was a good deal of practice in his regard, under the felt brim, and the hook of the forefinger downward, meaning precisely, "Stop outside." By these signs I knew him to have become a store dick. Hadn't Clem Tambow told me that he was working at Carson's? I wasn't going to make a break. The first thing was to get free of the trap, and I surrendered the books to him in the street. He said quickly, "By the stoplight on the corner. I'll be there right away." I saw his hasty back and hat as he ran in the circle of the door. His behavior was not angry, but he appeared to deal with what he had foreseen and been ready for. By the stoplight, in the crowd, I sweated in the cold air, weak and grateful after the passed danger. Grandma's warning against Jimmy, that he was a crook, came back to me. He "salt, anyway, with lawbreaking. "Okay," he said, returning. "You dropped the books and beat it THB ADVENTURES when I hollered. I didn't see your face, but I'm out looking if I can spot you, you understand? Now you just go to Thompson's on Monroe. I'll be right behind." I set off, drying my face with my silk muffler. In the cafeteria I carried my cup from the counter to a table. Presently he came too, and sat down. He considered me for a while; he had gotten to be wrinkled at the eyes, sallow, shrewd, stillish, a commentator. Yet on both sides, as much as the circumstances let it be, there was happiness at meeting again. "Was you scared in the door?" he finally said. "Jesus, yes--what do you think?" I said, smiling. "Same jerk as you always were. A train could hit you and you'd think it was just swell and get up with smiles, like knee-deep in June. What's all the happy joy this time?" "Well, I'm glad it was you, not a real dick." "I am a real dick, only not for you, you fool. I had to chase you. I was standing with the buyer and you came right smack in our sights, two yards' range. So what could I do but go for you? But what are you swiping books for? I thought they beat it out of us both at the same time when we worked that Santa Claus deal. My old man almost killed me. He almost killed me."?;?;' "And he made a detective of you?" "He? Shit! I go where they put me and do what they tell me." I knew his mother was dead; that, limping and corpulent, she had sunk into coffin and gone down to grave. But what had happened to the others? "What about your dad now?" "Putzin' on. He got married again after Ma died. It turned out he had a romance from the old country lasting about forty years. Isn't that something? While he had eight kids by Ma and the woman had four by her husband, both eating their hearts out with love. She became a widow, so they went and got married. What's the matter, you surprised?" "Why, yes. I remember your father always being at home." "Well, he had to go to the West Side sometimes, and when he did he had a transfer good for the Sixteenth-Street Kenton streetcar, so he used it." "Don't be so rough on him, Jimmy." "I'm not against him. I'd be happy if it did him good, but he stayed the same. He's the same now." "And how's Eleanor? She went to Mexico, I heard." "Oh, you're out of date. That was a long time ago. She's been back a good while. You should visit her. You was her favorite in the old davs, and she still talks about you. Eleanor has a big heart. I wish she was better." "She sick?" "She was. She's working again, at Zarropick's on Chicago Avenue where they make the suckers they sell in the stores next-door to schools. She shouldn't be working though. She got sick in Mexico." "I thought she was going there to marry." "Oh, you remember?" "Your Spanish relative." He smiled downward. "Yeah. Well, he runs a sweatshop of leather poods, and he had Eleanor working in it for about a year while they were supposed to be engaged. But he was laying the other broads workins, there too, and he wasn't really thinking of getting married. Finally she got sick and came home. She's not heartbroken; it was great to see another country." "I'm sorry for Eleanor." "Yeah, she hoped to be in love. She banked a lot on it." He was contemptuous beyond measure, not toward Eleanor for whom he happened to care a lot. No, perhaps for her sake, toward love, as to something that had undermined and debilitated her. "You're kind of hard on it." "I don't think anything of it." "But you're married, Clem told me."' This innocence of mine pleased him. "That's right, and have a son. He's a winner." "And your wife?" "Oh, she's a good kid. She has sort of a hard life. We live with her folks, we have to. And there's another married sister and brother-inlaw. Well, what do you think it's like, with fights about who's going to use the toilet or take down the wash, or cook, or yell at the kid? There's still another sister who's a tramp and spreads on the stairs, so you can step on her in the dark coming home from the show, so there's brawls all the time. What I get out of it is space in a double bed. Don't you know how it is by now? It's all that you want from life comes to you as one single thing--f----; so you and some nice kid get together, and after a while you have more misery than before, only now it smore permanent. You're married and have a kid." "Is that how it happened to you?" "I fooled around with her, I got her in the family way, and I married her." The path of wretchedness as Mrs. Renling had drawn it for me when she predicted what would happen if Simon married Cissy. "You're set up like the July fourth rocket," said Jimmy. "Just charge enough to explode you. Up. Then the stick falls down after the flash. You live to bring up the kid and oblige your wife." "Is that what you do?" "Well, it's not much to me; I give up on that. I don't think I give her much of a bang. But what are we talking about me for? You're the wonder boy. And what the hell are you doing, or think you're doing? I died when I saw you glom onto those books. That's a fine way to meet again. Augie, a crook!" It was not all dismay; in part he seemed glad of it. "Not a full-time crook, Jim." "But even part-time it doesn't go with what I've heard about you and Simon, that you're so successful." "He's doing fine--married and in business."; "That's what I heard from Kreindl. And you was going to the university. Is that why you were copping books? We catch a lot of students. Most of them don't make a good impression." I explained to him my need for money, letting him assume that I was Mimi's lover, for otherwise it would have been difficult to make him understand; and though it was curious to meet Jimmy as the cop that caught me, and I felt light with relief and one foot on paradox and all the spirited melancholy that came of that, I had to get on with my money-raising and the other things there were to attend to. However, Jimmy was aroused by what I told him, and his eyes and all the skin of his face expanded with concern and with the immediate determination he took. "How far gone is she?" "Over two months." "Listen, Augie, I'll help you as much as I can." "No, Jimmy," said I, surprised, "I couldn't tap you. I know you have it hard." "Don't be a dummy. Compare a few bucks to a life of grief. Say it's for my own sake--me not wanting to see it happen to anybody I used to be buddies with. How much do you need?" "About fifty bucks." "Easy. Between me and Eleanor it won't be anything. She has some dough put aside. I won't tell her what it's for. She wouldn't ask, but anyway why should she know? You don't have to te! l me why you don't nut the bee on your brother. You wouldn't be stealing it if he'd be willing to give it to you." "If push came to shove I might ask him, but there're special reasons why I can't. Well, Jim--thanks. It's great of you. Thanks, Jimmy!" The extent of my gratitude made him laugh at me. "Don't exaggerate. I'll see you here Monday, this same time, and give you the fifty bucks." Jimmy had no confidence that he could keep company with kind motives; he was abashed by them. And I understood well that he wanted to defeat a mechanism as much as he wanted to help a onetime friend. However that was, he gave me the money, and I made the appointment with the doctor for the end of Christmas week. Things were difficult to arrange. I had a date with Lucy that same night and couldn't break it with Simon's knowledge because I needed the car. Therefore, when I had left Mimi with the doctor I went down in great nervousness and phoned Lucy from a drugstore. "Honey, I'll have to be very late tonight," I told her. "Something's come up. It'll be ten o'clock before I can get to your place." She, however, had not much thought of me tonight. She whispered on the phone, "Darling, I ran into a fence and bent my fender. I haven't told Daddy. He's downstairs, so I'm stymied." "Oh, he won't be so angry." "But, Augie, I've had the car less than a month. He said he'd sell it I if I didn't take good care of it. I had to promise there wouldn't be any trouble for six months." "Maybe we can have it fixed without his knov/ing." "Do you think I could?" "Oh, probably. I'll dope out something. I'll be around late." "Not too late.". "Well, then, if I'm not there by ten, don't expect me." "In that case maybe I ought to get some sleep before New Year's Eve. You'll be on time tomorrow, won't you? And don't forget it's formal." "Tomorrow at nine, in my tuxedo, and maybe even this evening. Gut I promised to help out a friend who's having a little trouble. Don't worry about the car." "I do though. You don't know Daddy." Empty, I left the booth; feeling stiff, and the soldier of my fears, and a- tn'lt I didn't know had power over me. Stracciatella was closed, and in the gaunt glass curled saxophones and guitars shrunk in their sides. Deeper, cracks of goblin light out of the spaghetti-feasting kitchen where the family sat. I waited upstairs in the corridor by the door, which, in time, I heard unlocked. Mimi passed through it alone, handed out, and it shut before I could see the doctor to question him. I couldn't now, having to support Mimi, who tottered. She was only two days out of the hospital, and the variety of decisions she had made alone, not counting pain and blood loss, was enough to have taken away her strength. She was faint to such a degree that for the first time I saw her without expression, like a kid asleep on the excursion train, fatigued at night from picnicking. Except thai when her head rolled on my shoulder and approached my neck, she drew on the skin of it with her lips, weakly, a reflex of sensuality. For the moment perhaps I was Frazer and she was confirming that no matter what complication, injury, foulness, she didn't back down from her belief that all rested on the gentleness in privacy of man and woman--they did in willing desire what in the rock and water universe, the green universe, the bestial universe, was done from ignorant necessity. As we stood at the head of the stairs, her lips at my neck while I clasped her and whispered, "Easy now, let's start down easy," a man came up from the street and I nervously thought I saw something familiar about him. Mimi too was aware that someone was approaching and took several steps. So it happened that we were in the shadow, not in the main light of the corridor, when he came up. Nevertheless we recognized each other. It was Kelly Weintraub, the Magnuses' cousin by marriage who came from my neighborhood, the one who had threatened me about Georgie. By the slow increase of his smile when he saw me, and what there was in the flesh of his mouth more jubilant than mere smiling, also by the setting of his eyes, more clear to me than the eyes themselves in this obscurity, I realized that he had me. He knew. "Why, Mr. March, what a hell of a surprise this is! You been to see my cousin?" "Who's your cousin?" "The doctor is." "That makes sense." "What does?" "That you're his cousin." I could never run so far or plunge so deep that this man, this Weintraub, wouldn't have enough erotic line to pay out after me, so he was telling me with his full, handsome teameo's look, fleshy and brow-bent, while he swaggered a little at the knees. "I have other cousins also," he said. I felt like hitting him, since I probably would never be seeing him after he had blabbed, but I couldn't do it because I was supporting Mimi. It may have been the dilation of the senses by rage that made me think I smelled blood, raw, but the result in horror is what counted. I said to him, "Get out of the way!" To take Mimi home and get her into bed was all I cared about now. "He's not my boy friend," said Mimi to Kelly. "He's only going out of his way to help me out of trouble." "That makes sense too," he answered. "Oh, you dirty bastard!" she said. She was too weakened to put in all the power of savagery she felt. Shaking, I carried her to the car and drove off fast. "Kid, I'm sorry. I loused things up for you. Who is he?" "Just a guy--he doesn't amount to anything. Nobody ever listens to him. Never mind about that, Mimi. Was it all right?" "He was rough," she said. "First he took the money." "But it's over?" "It's all gone now, if that's what you mean." The drive was clear of snow, and I went fast over the endless varieties of black and smooth, along the tracks, through tunnels, lights streaming as if wind had gotten into a church and flown over the candles, sucking out breath, so much the speed fused things down. We arrived. I lifted her up the four flights, and while she was get'ting under the covers ran down to get an icebag from Miss Owens, who fussed with me about the ice. "What!" I yelled. "It's the middle of winter." "Go out and chop some then. Ours is made in the refrigerator and takes electricity." I stopped yelling, seeing that I had snagged a spinsterish trouble upsetting her by rushing in wildly, not thinking how I showed anguish. Calming down, I reasoned with her, turning on what charm I had on reserve. There can't have been much, the low charge in my trembling wires there was at this moment. I said, "Miss Villars has had a tooth pulled and it's very bad." A tooth! You young people get so excited." She gave me the ice tray and I scooted back with it. Ice, however, didn't help much. She bled very swift, and she tried to keep it secret, but presently she had to tell me, as she herself, aston271 ished, with open eyes, tried to keep track of it. She began to soak the bed. I was for taking her to the hospital at once, but she said, "It'll get better soon. I think it has to be like this at first." Going below, I phoned the doctor, who told me to watch and he'd tell me what to do if it didn't slacken. He'd stand by. There was fright in his tone. When I pulled off her sheets and made up her bed with my sheets her hands came up to oppose me, but I said, "Look, Mimi, this has to be done"; she shut her eyes and let me make the change, laying her cheek down to the hollow of her shoulder. There have great things been done to mitigate the worst human sights and teach you something different from revulsion at them. All the Golgothas have been painted with this aim. But since probably very few people are now helped by these things and lessons, each falls back on whatever he has. I flung the bloody bedclothes into the closet, and she noticed the energy of the swing and said, "Don't be panicky, Augie." I sat down by her, trying to be calmer. "Did you realize it might be like this?" "Or even tougher," she said; and as her eyes were yellowish and lacking in moisture and her mouth was pale, it occurred to me that possibly she couldn't grasp just how tough it already was. "But..." "But what?" I said. "You can't let your life be decided for you by any old thing that comes up." "A champion way to be independent," I said, intending the words for myself, but she heard me. "It makes a difference what you go down from, don't fool yourself. It does to me, now. Though," she said, face frowning and then growing smooth while she made the concession, "probably that is only if I come up again. If you're dead, does it make a difference for what?" I couldn't bear to talk now, and sat quiet, watching. And as she had thought it would, the hemorrhaging gradually let up; she was less braced and stiff-spread on the bed, and I was less benumbed in the muscles. My thoughts were crumbled, for I had been having fancies about how I was going to get her into a hospital, knowing how tough it was in such casss, and I imagined pleading and being refused, and official highhandedness and being driven mad. "Well," she said, "it looks as if even he couldn't croak me." "You beginning to feel better?" "I'd like a drink." "Shall I bring you something soft? I don't think you ought to drink whisky tonight." "I mean whisky. I think you could use some yourself." I took Simon's car to the garage and came back in a cab with a bottle. She took a good-sized slug, and I drank the rest, for now that I felt reassured about Mimi my own trouble came forward; as I was crawling naked into my sheetless bed in the dark it gave me an enormous squeeze, and I took a last swig at the bottle for the sake of stupefaction and sleep. But I woke in the small hours, earlier than my usual rising time. Kelly Weintraub would never let me get by but would nail me. And what I felt about this more definite than general darkness and fear, like the unlighted gathered cloud that hung outside, I didn't know. I dressed in my yard clothes. The whisky was still working in me; I was not used to drink. In the grimness and mess of her room Mimi seemed to be very hot but normally asleep. When I went to have coffee I arranged at the drugstore to have breakfast sent up to her. Watchfulness and care made me rocky that morning. The weather stayed black, undispersed soot sitting on the snow. Like the interior of something that should be closed. It was much more awful than sad, even to me, a native who didn't have much else. to know. Out of this middle-of-Asia darkness, as flat in humanity as the original is in space, to the yard, on business, came trucks and wagons, dying nags inquiring through the window with their grenadiers' decorations of velvet green or red, looking at us under the brilliant bulbs making out receipts and laying the dollars in the cash drawer. The dollar bills felt snotty and. smelled perfumed. Simon kept examining me, so that I wondered whether Kelly had already reached him. But no, he was only keeping me under his severity, stout and red in the eye. And I wasn't doing too well. It was, however, a short day, the last of the year. We were passing out little single-snort bottles of bourbon and gin and the joint got merry and jumping, peppered with these empties on the floor. Even Simon loosened up by and by. With the scrapping of the calendar and the old twelvemonth sagging off with his scythe and Diogenes lantern, Simon was after all on a new beginning. His summer troubles were well behind him. He said to me, "I understand you and Lucy are going formal tonight. Well, how can you put on a tux with a head of hair as wild as that? Go and see a barber. In fact, get some rest. You been balling it somewhere? Take the car and go on. Uncle Artie is coming for me. Who tired you out like that? It probably wasn't Lucy. It must be that other snatch. Well, go--Christ, I can't tell if you look more tired or more dumb." Simon could only vouch for himself alone as being safe from the touched mentality of our family; when he was irritated his suspicion fell on me. I lit out for home, wasting no time, and upstairs ran into Kayo Ober- mark coming out of the toilet with a wet towel for Mimi's head. He looked badly worried; his eyes, a big enough size in themselves, a few times enlarged by his specs, and his lip stuck out anxiously. His face was dark with bristle or dirt. "I think she's bad," he said. "Bleeding?" "I don't know--but she's burning up." To accept any help from Kayo she must, I thought, be in bad condition; and so she was, though talkative and of false alertness and sharpness--false because it didn't correspond to the expression of her eyes. The little room was overhot and gamy, everything about it felt stale and sickly, of swampy rottenness commencing to be dangerous. I got hold of Padilla, and he came over from his laboratory with pills for her fever, having consulted with some Physiology grad students. We wzited for results, which were slow to come, and wanting not to lose my head I agreed to play rummy. He, always alert in numbers, took every game. Until I couldn't any longer hold the cards. Toward night-- I go by the hour and not by darkness, which was the same that day at six as it had been at three, fuming and slow--her fever went down somewhat. Then Lucy phoned to ask me to come an hour earlier than arranged. I felt that there was trouble at that end too and said, "What's up?" "Nothing; only please try to be here at eight," she said, sounding a little stifled. It was already well past six and I was unshaved. I did the job quickly and started getting into my tuxedo, meanwhile consulting with Padilla and Kayo. "The big risk," said Padilla, "is if he gave her a septicemia. Suppose she has puerperal fever. That's too dangerous to keep her here with. You have to take her to the hospital." Without waiting to hear more, in the boiled shirt, I crossed the hall and said to her, "Mimi, we have to try to get you in a hospital." "They won't take me in anywhere." "We'll make them take you." "Call up and ask, you'll see." "We won't call," said Padilla. "We'll just go." "What's he doing?" she said to me. "How many people have to be in on this?" "Padilla is a good friend of mine, don't worry about this now." "You know what they'll do there, don't you? They'll try to get me to tell on the doctor. What do you think, will I keep my mouth shut?" This was a way of boasting that they could not make her squeal, even on him. Padilla muttered, "What do you waste time with her for? Get going." I dressed her in hat and coat, packed a little case with nightgown, toothbrush, and comb, and Padilla and I took her down to the car covered with a blanket. As I opened the gray car door Owens called from the porch, "Eh, March!" He had come out in his shirt and was giant and shrunkshouldered, knees together, in the cold of this bad death of the year. "Important, on the telephone." I ran up. It was Simon. "Augie!" "Talk fast. What's up? I'm in a hurry!" "It's you who'd better talk fast," he said, furious. "I just had a call from Charlotte, and Kelly Weintraub is spreading a story about you that you took a him to have an abortion." "So? What about it, Simon?" "That's the dame, isn't it, that one from your house? So you went and fixed yourself, you jazzed yourself right out into the cold. This is where I shake you, Augie, before you do worse to me. I can't carry you along any more. I'm going to have a tough time explaining this, how you were f----this girl all the time you were engaged to Lucy. I'll say you're no damned good, which is no lie since you're too dumb to live." "Aren't you even going to ask me if Kelly's story is true?" Contemptuous that I should be so simple as to think him foolish enough to believe what I would feed him, he said in an almost amused voice, "All right--what? You were doing another guy a favor, huh? You've never been between this doll's legs? You've been living next door to her without touching her? Listen, we're no more ten years old, kid. I've seen that tramp. She wouldn't let you alone even if you wanted to be let alone. And you didn't. Don't try to tell me you're not horny. We all are, in our family. What do you think started us out in the first place all three of us? Someone found he could come ring the bell whenever he wanted. Do you think I care if you were laying that girl? But you had to get tied up this way too--in dutch good and solid; that's wway it has to be to feel right. You must really be like Ma. Well, that's nothing to me if you have to do it that way. But I won't let you get me in trouble with the Magnuses." "There isn't any reason why you should be in trouble with the Magnuses. Listen, I'll tell you about this tomorrow." "No, you won't. Not after tomorrow either. You're not with me from here on. Just bring back the car." "I'll come by and tell you what this really is--" "Stay away, that's the last and only thing I'll ever ask you." "You sonofabitch!" I yelled with tears. "You shit! I hope to see you dead!" Padilla came running for me and called into the sitting room, "Hurry, cut out the gabbing." Bawling, I shoved and kicked past the wicker or paper furniture and plunged out. "What's the matter? What's the tears for? This too much for you?" I answered when able, "No, I had a scrap." "Let's go. You want me to drive?" "No, I can." We drove first to the hospital where she had had her operation. Soberer in the cold air, she said she would go in herself. We led her up to the emergency entrance and let her walk in, then sat in the car, hoping she would not come out. But presently, through the gilded, frosted drops of the windshield, I saw her appear in the door and I rushed to get her. "I said--" "Why didn't they take you in?" "There's this guy. When I told him he said, 'We got no room in a place like this for people like you. Why didn't you have the kid? Go home and wait for the undertaker.' " "Chinga su madre!" Padilla helped me lead her back to the car. "I think I know a guy in a hospital on the North Side working in a lab, if he's still there. I'll call him." I drove him to a cigar store and he went in to phone. "We should try it," he said when he returned. "We should say she did it to herself. Lots of women do. He told me who to ask for. If this other guy is on duty. He's supposed to be a good guy." In lower tones he said, "We may have to dump her there and beat it. She's just about passing out. What will they do? They can't put her in the street." "No, we won't dump her." "Why not? They see you and throw her right back at you because they don't want her on their hands. They pick what troubles they want to help. But let's use our heads. I'll go in first and case the doctor." However, we all eptered together. I couldn't wait in the car with her and was determined anyhow that they would take her in or I'd smash everything in sight. So we went through the near-empty first rooms; I made a one-handed grab at a guy in an orderly's gray coat who advanced in the way. He ducked and Padilla said to me, "What the Jesus are you doing! You're going to queer everything. Now take her over there and sit down till I find out if this buddy of mine is on duty." Mimi drooped on me, and I felt her heat in the cheek. She could no longer sit; I held her propped until a stretcher was brought for her.; Padilla had gone, and they had me, at first, as if in arrest. There was a cop on duty. Together with the orderly he came out of a side door with a cup of coffee, in blue shirt, even holding a club. "Now what's the story?" said a doctor. "Instead of asking, why don't you take care of her?" "Did you smack this guy?" said the cop. "Did, he swing on yon?" "He swung, but he didn't hit." Conceivably the-cop now observed that I wore a tuxedo, because he wasn't quite so deadly packed in the flesh of the neck and small-eyed when he spoke to me. I was in the clothes of a gentleman, and therefore why should he take chances? "What's the matter with this woman? What are you, the husband? She doesn't wear a wedding band. Are you related, or just friends?" "Mimi? Has she passed out?" "No, she's just not answering. She moves her eyes." Padilla returned, the doctor hurrying before him. "Just bring her here and we'll see what gives," said the doctor. Manny gave me a great look of success. We got rid of the whole ugly sniff-nosed crowd wanting to be in on trouble and went with the doctor. As we followed Manny gave him a story. "She did it to herself. She's a working girl and couldn't have a kid." "How did she do it?" "With something, I guess. Don't women make a study of these things all their life long?" 'I've seen some dandies. But also I've heard pretty stinking stories made up. Well, if the women live we don't look for the abortionist, because what good does it do the profession?", __How does she look offhand?" "A lot of blood lost is all I can tell until I look it over. Who's this second fellow who's so worried?" "Her friend." "All he had to do was really smack that orderly and he'd have had New Year's fun in the calaboose with the drunks. Why is he in the monkey suit?" "Hey, what about your date?" said Padilla as he put his hand to his long face with shock. It was after eight by the smooth-pulled electric/c clock in the brilliant room we entered. "When I find out what's up with Mimi." "Go on. You better. I'll be here. I have no date toni'ght and was staying in anyway. The doctor doesn't think it's so bad. What do you have on?" "A ball at the Edgewater." I stood waiting until the doctor returned. "It's mostly blood loss and infection from the belly surgery, I think," he said. "Where did she get that done?" "She'll answer your questions herself if she wants to," I told him. "I don't know." "What do you know? Do you know, for instance, who can be billed?" " Padilla said, "There's money. Can't you see how good her clothes are?" And he said to me, for it worried him deeply, "Are you blowing or not? This guy's engaged to a millionaire's daughter and on New Year's Eve he keeps her waiting," "Write me a pass so I can get back tonight to see Mimi," I said to the doctor. He made a perplexed face to Padilla about me and I said further, "For Chrissake, Doc, don't fiddle around with me, but write the thing out. What's it to you if I come back? I'd tell you my whole hard luck story but don't have the time." "Ah, go on, it's no skin off your nose," said Padilla to him. "A pass from me wouldn't do you any good in front. I'm on now till morning, so just come and ask for me, Castleman." "I may be back before long," I said. For I was sure that Kelly Weintraub, since he was talking, had already gotten to Uncle Charlie Magnus. But I reckoned also that he and his wife had not told Lucy, not on New Year's Eve, when she was going to a dance. Later they'd throw me out on my prat. But why had she asked me to come an hour sooner? The dance didn't really begin until ten o'clock. I phoned her once more and asked, "Are you waiting?" "Of course I'm waiting. Where are you?" "Not far." "What are you-doing?" "I had to stop at a place. I'll hurry now." "Please!" About that last word of hers I thought as I drove that it was not like lovers' impatience, but neither soft nor hard. Turning too wide at the driveway, with a last-minute twist I put my wheels through mud and bushes and scraped back under the portico. Inside, on the turned-over heels of the yard shoes I hadn't remembered to change, I walked to the mirror to knot my black tie and saw backward, by the drape in the living room, the tense belly of Uncle Charlie, his sharp feet prepared, and sitting waiting in the oriental mix-up of brass, silk, wool, and all that gave the place so much power, Lucy, her mother, and Sam, observing roe. I felt there was a big machine set against me. But I had come in order not to disappoint Lucy, toward whom, given their chance, my feelings could have shone and warmed again. I expected poisoned looks, against which I was coated and immune; at least, my greater trouble made such looks seem negligible; and I wasn't willing to be tagged for lascivious crime and false pretenses or whatever the counts were that they thought they had against me. By no means nervous, therefore, I judged that I had to do only with Lucy, no fortune hunting now involved, for I could go any distance independent of brothers, relations, and all, provided that her impulse was a true one and she was, as she had always said, in love. This was the thing, for I saw that she had been worked on, though I didn't know how much she had been told. The iarge-mouthed smile she gave me, staying at her seateddistance instead of coming to kiss me, was curious--that pretty sketch ^_of charm, in lipstick, widening, the relative of the awful cleft, running ^|thc other way, of the schismatics in the sixth bulge of hell, hit open from the bottom and split through the face. Ah, dear face! treasured as the representative of all the body which, though, dies away from this top delegate when it becomes too gorged and valuable. She, now so unearnest with me through her worked-up countenance, I saw she had been gotten to by her parents and that decisions had been made. My only cue was to leave. But not a single word had been spoken yet in this oriental assembly, and I had no pretext. I was still the escort, dolled up, if you didn't scrutinize me too close, like a chorus boy, in a boiled shirt, and thinking of nothing but courtship and dances. "Why don't you sit down?" said Mrs. Magnus. 'I thought we were leaving right away." "Well, Lucy!" said her father. And on this signal she told me, "I'm not going with you, Augie." "Now or ever," he directed. "Never again.".. ' "You'll go to the dance with Sam." "But I came to take her, Mr. Magnus." "No, these things when you decide to break them, it's better to break at once," said Mrs. Magnus. "I'm sorry, Augie. I personally don't wish you any bad luck. But I advise you to control yourself. It's not too late, You're a handsome and intelligent young man. There's nothing against your family; I respect your brother. But you're not what we had in mind for Lucy." "What about what Lucy had in mind?" I said with a rising throatful of rage. The old man was impatient with Mrs. Magnus's effort toward queenly dignity and wisdom. "No dough if she marries you!" he said. "Well, Lucy, to whom does that make the difference, to you or to me?" Her smile spread wider and lost all other intentions in the single suggestion that it was she who had inflamed me and when hot I had discharged it all upon someone else but that it really didn't matter since she wasn't so little her father's child, though a girl, that all that ardor in the car and in the parlor and with the lips and tongues and fingertips and the rest could make her really lose her head and be unwise. I couldn't be sure just what the deal was. Something was said about the damage to her car. Now she confessed it. Her father said of course it would be fixed. As long as nothing else was broken, this being his delicacy about the hymen. But it was worth a laugh to him; this way a threat and groan also escaping in his fatherly joy that she had remained intact. There was nothing further to stay for. I was threatened by her brother Sam, whom I found near me when I picked up my coat in the hall, that he would break my back if I bothered his sister; but with all his thickset hairiness and spreading keister, he couldn't make it mean anything to me. I started the car, to which I also felt commitment ending, and drove to the hospital. Padilla had given Mimi blood, and he was lying down after the transfusion in the room where I had left him, sucking an orange; his skimpy arm with its one curious ball of muscle taped, and his eyes, below surface indifference, black and active toward what I couldn't readily see. "How is Mimi?" "They took her'upstairs. She's still off her head, but this Castleman says he gives her a good chance." "I'm going up to see her. How is it with you?" "Well, I don't think I'll be sticking around now. I'll be going home soon. Are you staying?" I gave him the cab fare, for I didn't want him to bang all that long way to Hyde Park in a streetcar on a crowded holiday night. "Thanks, Manny." He put the money in the pocket of his shirt, and suddenly he asked, surprised, "Say, what are you doing back from the dance already?" I didn't stand and answer but went out. Mimi was in one of the maternity wards. Castleman said that there had been no other place to put her, and I thought that she more or less belonged there. So I went up. It was a tall, big chamber, and in the middle on a table was a little Christmas fir with lit bulbs and under it a box with cotton wool and nativity dolls. Castleman told me, "You can stick around, but don't make yourself noticed or you'll be thrown out. I think she's going to pull out of it though she did everything she could not to except cut her wrists and take poison." There I sat by her bed, it being half-darkness. Nurses coming to bring infants for the breast now and then, there were whispers and crimped cries and sounds of turning in bed, and of coaxing and sucking. I was open to feelings that had no obstacle in coming to cover me, as I was, in darkness and to the side, scorched, bitter, foul, and violent; ' and these feelings receding by and by, I was aware of others full of great suggestion and of this place where I was cast up. I began to breathe by my own normal measure and grew much calmer. When the midnight noise exploded, the tooting, sirens, horns, all that jubilation, it came in rather faint, all the windows being shut, and the nursery squalling continued just the same. At about one o'clock, alert enough to hear me stirring, Mimi whispered, "What are you doing here?" "I don't have any place special to go." She knew where she was, hearing the infants cry. Her comment to roe was melancholy, about whether she had outwitted a fate or met it. That was perhaps according as she was weak or strong toward what she had chosen and done, and in the truth of her feeling at the present moment, hearing the suckling and crying, and the night-time business of mothering. "Anyhow, I think you're in good hands," I told her. " K 281 I went out to take a stroll, looking at the infant faces through the glass, and then, no one interfering, the nurses probably in a New Year's gathering of their own to snatch a moment's celebration, I passed through to another division where the labor rooms were, separate cubicles, and in them saw women struggling, outlandish pain and hugebellied distortion, one powerful face that bore down into its creases and issued a voice great and songlike in which she cursed her husband obscenely for his pleasure that had got her into this; and others, calling on saints and mothers, incontinent, dragging at the bars of their beds, weeping, or with faces of terror or narcotized eyes. It all stunned me. So that when a nurse hurried up to investigate who I was and what business I had to be there, she made me falter. And just then, in the elevator shaft nearby, there were screams. I stopped and waited for the rising light I saw coming steadily through the glass panels. The door opened; a woman sat before me in a wheel chair, and in her lap, just born in a cab or paddy wagon or in the lobby of the hospital, covered with blood and screaming so you could see sinews, square of chest and shoulders from the strain, this bald kid, red and covering her with the red. She too, with lost nerve, was sobbing, each hand squeezing up on itself, eyes wildly frightened; and she and the baby appeared like enemies forced to have each other, like figures of a war. They were pushed out, passing me close by so that the mother's arm grazed me. "What are you doing here?" said the nurse with angry looks. I had no right to be there. I found my way back, and when I saw Mimi resting, much cooler, I cleared out of the hospital by the stairs Castleman had shown me and went to the car, new snow floating at my feet over the gray plating of ice. I didn't exactly know where I was when I started. I went slowly in the increasing, snow, through side streets, hoping to come out on a main drag, and at last I did hit Diversey Boulevard in a deserted factory part, not far from the North Branch of the river. And here, as the thought of soon sacking in began to seem agreeable, I had a flat, at the rear. The tire sunk, and I dragged to the curb on the wheel rim and killed the motor. I had to thaw the lock of the trunk with matches, and when I got out the tools I didn't understand the working of the bumper jack. It was new that year, and I was used to the axle type that Einhorn had had. For a while I tried, though the boiled shirt cut me and the cold gripped my feet and fingers, and then I flung the pieces back, locked up, and started to look for a place where I could get warm. But everything was shut, and now that I had my bearings I knew that I was not far from the Coblins'. Knowing Coblin's hours, I didn't hesitate to go there and wake him. When the yellow lamp flashed in the black cottage hall and he discovered who was ringing he blinked his eyes, astonished. "The car broke down on Diversey and I thought I could come by because you get up around this time for the route." "No, not today. It's New Year's; no presses working. But I wasn't sleeping. I just before heard Howard and Friedl when they got in from a party. Come inside, for God's sake, and stay. I'll give you a blanket on the couch." I went in gratefully, took off the tormenting shirt, and covered my feet with cushions. Coblin was delighted. "What a surprise they'll have in the morning when they see Cousin Augie! Boy, that's great! Anna will be in seventh heaven." Because of the brightness of the morning and also the kitchen noise, I was up early. Cousin Anna, no less slovenly than in other days, had pancakes and coffee goim; and a big spread on the table. Her hair was becoming white, her face with its blebs and hairs darker; her eyes were gloomy. But this gloom was the form of her emotion and not any radical pessimism; Weeping and catching me in her arms, she said, "Happy New Year, my dearest boy. You should know only happiness, as you deserve. I always loved you." I kissed her and shook hands with Coblin, and we sat down to breakfast. "Whose car broke down, Augie?" "Simon's." | "Your bigshot brother." "It didn't break down. It's a flat, and I was too cold to change it." "Howard will help you when he gets up." "Don't have to bother--" I thought I might mail Simon the keys and let him come after his damned car himself. This angry idea was momentary, however. I drank coffee and looked out into the brilliant first morning of the year. There was a Greek church in the next street of which the onion dome stood in the snow-polished and purified blue, cross and crown together, the united powers of earth and heaven, snow in all the clefts, a snow like the sand of sugar. I passed over the church too and rested only on the great profound blue. The days have not changed, though the times have. The sailors who first saw America, that sweet sight, where the belly of the ocean had brought them, didn't see more beautiful color than this. Augie, it was too bad Friedl couldn't come down from Ann Arbor for your brother's wedding; she had exams. You haven't seen her since a child, and you should. She's so beautiful. I don't say because she is my child--God is my witness. You'll see her soon for herself. But here, look, this is a picture from the school. And this one was in the paper when she was chairlady of the junior benefit. And not only beautiful, Augie--" "I know she's very pretty. Cousin Anna." "And why do you want to get mixed up with your brother's new relatives, those coarse people? Look how developed she is on this picture. She was your little sweetheart when you were kids. You used to say you were engaged." I almost corrected her, "No, you used to say it." Instead I laughed, and she thought I was laughing over those pleasant memories and joined in, clasping her hands and closing her eyes. Slowly I realized that she was shedding tears as well as laughing. "I ask one thing only, that before I die I should see my child happy with a husband.", "And children." "And children--" "For the love of mike, let's have pancakes. There's nothing on the plate," said Coblin. She hurried to the stove, leaving the pictures spread before me, album and clippings; at which I stared. Only to turn my eyes at last again to the weather.