The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [13]
CHAPTER XIV
I was hurrying to fulfill the prophecy Thea Fenchel had made on that swing in St. Joe. And while it was no minor thing to me that I was beat up and chased like this, I couldn't feel the importance of the cause much, or that it would benefit anyone for me to fight on in it. If I had felt this as such a matter of conscience I might have been out in front of Republic Steel at the hour of the Decoration Day Massacre, as Grammick was. He was clubbed on the head. But I was with Thea. It wasn't even in my power to be elsewhere, once we had started. No, I just didn't have the calling to be a union man or in politics, or any notion of my particle of will coming before the ranks of a mass that was about to march forward from misery. How would this will of mine have got there to lead the way? I couldn't just order myself to become one of those people who do go out before the rest, who stand and intercept the big social ray, or collect and concentrate it like burning glass, who glow and dazzle and make bursts of fire. It wasn't what I was meant to be. As I ran into Thea's apartment house from the cab and rang the ball three times, fast, I didn't especially observe where I had come. It was a showy, heavily furnished lobby, no one in it, and as I was trying to find out which of the elegant doors belonged to the elevator, a square of light appeared in one of them. Thea had come down for me. The door opened. There was a velvet bench and we sank down on it, pressing and kissing as the smooth elevator rose. Not noticing the blood-stiffened shirt, she passed her hand over my chest and up to my shoulders. I opened her housecoat on her breasts. I was not in control of my head. I was unaware, nearly blind. If anyone else had been near neither of us would have known it. I can't for certain say I don't remember a face, maybe that of a maid when the door opened, and we went on embracing in the corridor and then in the apartment, by the door, on the carpet. With Thea it wasn't at all as it had been with other women, those who gave you their permission, so to speak, to undo one thing at a time and admire it, the next thing guarded again, and the last thing most guarded of all. She didn't delay, or seem to hurry either. As if studying deeply from a surrendered mind, and with the lips, the hands and hair, the rising bosom and legs, without the use of any force, presently it seemed as if an exchange or transfer had happened of us both into still another person who hadn't existed before. There was a powerful feeling of love. And so finally, as if I had been on my bent knees in what's supposed to be an entirely opposite spirit, praying, with my fingers pressed together, I think it would have been no different from what I felt come over me with the fingers not together but touching her on the breasts instead. My bursting face with the swatted eye lay between, and her arms were around my neck. Now the sun began to heat us by the door, on the rug where we were lying. It had the same filmy whiteness as it had in the linen room. It had shone dirtier on the Loop sidewalk where I jumped from the streetcar. Here it glowed white once more. Presently I wanted to pull the curtain because of the glare on my eye, and when I stood up she observed for the first time how I looked. "Who did that to you?" she cried. I explained the whole business to her, and she kept saying, "Is that why you didn't come? Is that what you were doing all that time?" The time lost was the most important thing of all to her. Although it gave her a tremor to look straight at my bruise, the specific reason for my being beaten didn't interest her and she wasn't very curious about it. Yes, she had heard of the big union drive, but that I was in it was sort of irrelevant. For while I was not with her, where I was intended to be, it didn't make much difference where I was. All intervening things and interferences were of the same unreal kind and belongedout there. Gauze-winders, hotel workers on strike, errors like my illusion about her sister, that farce of being taken for Mrs. Renling's gigolo, all that Thea had herself done meanwhile, these were entirely "out there." The reality was now, and in here; she had followed it by instinct since St. Joe. So this was the reason for the cry of all that time lost and it made me feel what her fear was like of never succeeding in finding her way from the "out there" but blundering forever. Of course I didn't grasp this right away. It came out during the next few days, during which we stayed in the apartment. We slept and woke, and we didn't really discuss my doings or hers. Suitcases were standing around the bed, but I didn't ask about them. It was just as change from the delivery men and also checks and so forth in the refrigerator. The money was mixed up with rotting salad leaves and lying with saucers of bacon grease, which she didn't like to throw away. Anyway, the fives and tenners were there, and I was to pick up what I needed on the way out, as a man takes a handkerchief from his drawer on slight thought. I had a conversation with Grammick to ask him to step into my place at the Northumberland. He already had done what he could. There was no wildcat strike. He said the union guy and his boys were really gunning for me, to lay low. When I told him I was quitting and leaving town he was surprised. However, I explained about Thea, that I absolutely had to go with her, and he appeared to take it better. He said it was a lousy deal anyway to be stuck in these dual-union situations, and the organization ought to put on a real drive in the hotel field or quit. Thea outfitted me before the trip. In which connection, for some reason, I get the picture something like the Duke of Wellington stepping out in the dress of the Salisbury Hunt, blue coat, black cap, and buckskins. Maybe this is because Thea had such very exact ideas as to what I should put on. We went from shop to shop in the station wagon to try on clothes. When she thought a thing was right she kissed me and cried, "Oh, baby, you make me happy!" u. nmindful of all the stiffness in the salespeople and the other customers. When I picked something she didn't like she'd give a laughing start and say, "Oh, you fool! Take it off. That's like what the old lady in Evanston thought was so smart." The clothes Simon had given me she disliked too. She wanted me to look like a sportsman, and she got me a heavy leather jacket at Von Lengerke and Antoine's that required you to want to kill game or you couldn't wear it. It was a knockout, with a dozen different kinds of pockets and slits for cartridges and handline, knife, waterproof matches, compass. . You could be thrown in the middle of Lake Huron in it and hope to live. Then for boots we crossed Wabash Avenue to Carson's, where I hadn't gone since Jimmy Klein trapped me that bad moment in the revolving doors. In these joints it was she who did the talking. Mostly silent, feeling full of blood, I came up smiling to try on the things and walk inside the triple mirror to let her turn me by the shoulder and see. I was glad over her least peculiarity--that she spoke high, that she didn't care that her slip showed a loop from her brilliant green dress, or that there were hairs on her neck that had escaped the gathering of the comb, hairs of Japanese blackness. Her dresses were expensive, but, as I had noticed her hat trembling when she had come up to my room, there never lacked one piece of disorder caused by excitement, and where arrangement failed. Going through this, being kissed in the stores and the purchases and gifts, my luck didn't make me hangdog, I'll say that for myself. If she had handed me titles and franchises like Elizabeth to Leicester it wouldn't have caused me awkwardness; nor would wearing feathers, instead of the deep Stetson that pleased her. So the checks, plaids, chamois, suedes, or high boots that made me come out on Wabash Avenue like a tall visitor or tourist were no embarrassment but made me laugh and even be somewhat vain, putting on like a stranger in my own home town. She was cuckoo about dime stores, where she bought cosmetics and pins and combs. After we locked the expensive purchases in the station wagon we went into Mc Crory's or Kresge's and were there by the hour, up and down the aisles with the multitude, mostly of women, and in the loud-played love music. Some things Thea liked to buy cheaply; they maybe gave her the best sense of the innermost relations of pennies and nickels and expressed the real depth of money. I don't know. But I didn't think myself too good to be wandering in the dime store with her .1 went where and as she said and did whatever she wanted because I was threaded to her as if through the skin. So that any trifling object she took pleasure in could become important to me at once; anything at all, a comb or hairpin or piece of line, a compass inside a tin ring that she bought with great satisfaction, or a green-billed baseball cap for the road, or the kitten she kept in the apartment--' she would never be anywhere without an animal. This little striped and spike-tailed torn, like a cat of the sea in the wide darkness of the floors of those rooms of the suite that Thea never used. She rented a big place and then settled in a space-economizing style, gathering and piling things around her. There were plenty of closets and dressers but she was still living out of the suitcases, boxes, cases, and you had to approach the bed at the center of this confusion through spaces between. She used sheets as towels and towels as shoe rags or mats or to wipe the kitten's messes, for it wasn't housebroken. She gave the maids bribes of perfume and stockings to clean up, wash the dishes, underclothes, and do other extras; or maybe she did it so that they wouldn't criticize her disorderiiness. She thought she was first-rate with clerks and servants. I, the ex-organizer, didn't say anything. It didn't matter. I let a lot of things go past. Those days, whatever touched me had me entirely, and whatever didn't was like dead, my : 315 heart not giving it a tumble. I was never before so taken up with a single human being. I followed her sense wherever it went. As I wasn't yet old enough to be tired of confinement to my own sense, I didn't appreciate this enough. What I did at times realize was how I was abandoning some miohtv old protections which now stood empty. Hadn't I been warned enough because of my mother, and on my own account? With terrible warnings? Look out! Oh, you chump and weak fool, you are one of a humanity that can't be numbered and not more than the dust of metals scattered in a magnetic field and clinging to the lines of force, determined by laws, eating, sleeping, employed, conveyed, obedient, and subject. So why hunt for still more ways to lose liberty? Why go toward, and not instead run from, the huge drag that threatens to wear out your ribs, rub away your face, splinter your teeth? No, stay away! Be the wiser person who crawls, rides, runs, walks to his solitary ends used to solitary effort, who procures for himself and heeds the fears that are the kings of this world. Ah, they don't give you much of a break, these kings! Many a dead or dying face lies or drifts under them. Here Thea appeared with her money, her decided mind set on love and great circumstances, her car, her guns and Leicas and boots, her talk about Mexico, her ideas. One of the chiefest of these ideas being that there must be something better than what people call reality. Oh, well and good. Very good and bravo! Let's have this better, nobler reality. Still, when such an assertion as this is backed by one person and maintained for a long time, obstinacy finally gets the upper hand. The beauty of it is harmed by what it suffers on the way to proof. I know that. However, Thea had one superiority in her ideas. She was one of those people who are so certain of their convictions that they can fight for them in the body. If the threat to them goes against their very flesh and blood, as with people who are examined naked by police or with martyrs, you soon know which beliefs have strength and which do not. So that you don't speak air. For what you don't suffer in your person is mostly dreaminess, or like shots of light, sky-sprinkling fireworks and creamy wheels that scatter to a sad earth. Thea was prepared for the extremest test of her thoughts. Not that she herself was always on her own highest standard. I had to accept her version of everything, this being the obstinacy of assertion I spoke of. Also it was evident that she was used to having what she wanted, including me. Her behavior was sometimes curious and crude. When certain long-distance calls came through she'd just about order me out of the room, and then I could hear her yelling and be startled, astonished that she could have a voice like that. I couldn't catch the words and could only speculate as to the reasons. Then how I'd criticize her if I v/eren't her lover would come to me. She assumed she understood everything about me, and it was astonishing how much she did know; the remainder she made up with confidence and trusted to closed eyes and fast strokes. She therefore said some harsh and jealous things and her look occasionally was more brilliant than friendly. She was aware of her weakness in having come after me--in her confident moments she thought of it instead as strength and was proud of it. "Did you like that Greek girl?" "Yes, sure I did." "Was it just the same with her as with me?" "No." ': "I can tell you're just lying, Augie. Of course it was the same for you." "Don't you find it different with me? Am I like your husband?" "Like him? Never!" "Well, can it be so different for you and not also for me? You think I can put it on and not love you?" "Oh, but I came to look for you, not you for me. I had no pride"-- she was forgetting that I scarcely knew her in St. Joe. "You were getting tired of this little Greek chambermaid, and I happened to show up, and it flattered you so much you couldn't resist. You like to get bou1 quets like that." And now, to say this, made her breathe with labor; [ she was suffering. "You want people to pour love on you, and you soak it up and swallow it. You can't get enough. And when another woman runs after you, you'll go with her. You're so happy when somebody begs you to oblige. You can't stand up under flattery!" Maybe so. But what I couldn't stand up under at the moment was this glare, when she went so hot and white in the face with its strong nerve and metaphysical reckless assertion. Although she painted her mouth with carnation lipstick she didn't make it sensual, nor did she have a sensual face, but any excitement, no matter what it was, took up her person, her entire being. It was the same whether she was angry or when she was loving and had her breasts against me, clasping hands, touching feet. So even if this jealousy made no sense, still it wasn't play-acting jealousy.. "If I'd been wise enough I'd have come for you," I said. "I just didn't have enough sense, so I'm grateful that you did. And you don't have to be afraid." No, no, what did I want with the upper hand or pride contests? None of that stuff. When she heard me speak like this there was a tremor in her features of the strain passing off; she shrugged and smiled at herself and a more normal color began to appear. Not only was she accustomed to independence struggles and to resistance, to going counter to the open direction of everyone else, which made her judgments severe, but she was in many ways suspicious. Her experience was, socially, much wider than mine, and so she suspected many things which at the time were out of my range. She must have remembered that when we met I seemed an old woman's hanger-on who sponged on her and maybe worse than that. Of course she knew better. What she knew of me by now, really knew, was plenty, from information I gave freely. Because involuntarily. But so was her habitual shrewdness involuntary, the shrewd suspiciousness of a rich girl. And then, once you've irrevocably made up your mind, does that mean you don't sweat and fear you can be wrong? Even Thea with her convictions and confidence wasn't immune to occasional fits of doubt. "What makes you say these things about me, Thea?" They bothered me. Certainly there was some truth in them; I felt it in my lining, somewhere, like an object that had slipped down out of the pocket. "Aren't they right? Especially about your being so obliging?" "Well, partly. I used to be much more so. But not so much now." I tried to tell her that I had looked all my life for the right thing to do, for a fate good enough, that I had opposed people in what they wanted to make of me, but now that I was in love with her I understood much better what I myself wanted. But what she had to answer was this: "What makes me say these things is that I see how much you care about the way people look at you. It matters too much to you. And there are people who take advantage of that. They haven't got anything of their own and they'll leave you nothing for yourself. They want to put themselves in your thoughts and in your mind, and that you should care for them. It's a sickness. But they don't want you to care for them as they really are. No. That's the whole stunt. You have to be conscious of them, but not as they are, only as they love to be seen. They live through observation by the ones around them, and they want you to live like that too. Augie, darling, don't do it. They will make you suffer from what they are. And you don't really matter to them. You only matter when someone loves you. You matter to me. Otherwise you don't matter, you're only dealt with. So you shouldn't care how you seem to them. But you do, you care too much." She went on like this. It was bitter sometimes, for usually her wisdom was against me. As if she foresaw that I'd do her wrong and was warning me. But then, too, I was eager to hear what she said and I understood it, I understood only too well. These conversations we had more often on the road when we set out for Mexico. She had several times tried to tell me what we would do in Mexico besides obtaining her divorce, and she seemed to assume that I knew intuitively what her plans were. I frequently was confused. I couldn't tell whether she owned or rented a house in the town of Acatia, and what she described of the country didn't make me altogether happy. It sounded like a risky place when she talked of the mountains, hunting, diseases, robbery, and the dangerous population. I wasn't clear for a long time about the hunting. I thought she intended to hunt eagles, and that seemed peculiar to me, but what I understood wasn't so peculiar as what she really meant. She wanted to hunt with an eagle trained in falconry, and as she had owned hawks she was eager to imitate a British captain' and an American couple who had taught or "manned" golden and American eagles, some of the few since the Middle Ages. She had gotten the idea for this hunt from reading articles by Clan and Julie Mannix, who actually had gone to Taxco some years before with a trained bald eagle and used the bird to catch iguanas. Near Texarkana there was a man who had eaglets to sell. He had offered one to George H. Somebody-or-other, an old friend of Thea's father, who kept a private zoo. This friend of her father, who by the accounts she gave seemed to me loony, like the mad King Ludwig of Bavaria, had built himself a copy of the Trianon in Indiana, only with cages inside, and had made Hagenbeck voyages everywhere to fill them with beasts of his own capture. He was in retirement now, too old to travel; but he had asked Thea to bring him some giant iguanas--or challenged her to--these huge furious lizards, mesozoic holdouts in the mountains south of Mexico City. As this information came out, which I didn't know how seriously to take, I thought this was like me and my life--I could not find myself in love without it should have some peculiarity. I'm not going to say that she was more than I had bargained for, because it has to be absolutely understood that I didn't bargain. What::^. ' ' 319 I will say is that she was singular, unforeseen, and contradictory in her flightiness, steadiness, nervousness, or courage. When she tripped on the stairs in the dark she cried out, but she traveled with snake-catching equipment and she showed me snapshots of the outings of a rattlercollectors' club she had belonged to. I saw her holding a diamondback behind the head and milking the poison from him with a slice of rubber. She told me how she had crawled into a cave after him. In Renling's shop I had sold sports equipment, but the only hunting I had ever watched was in the movies, apart from having seen my brother Simon shooting at the rats in his yard with his pistol. My special memory was of one large one with humped back like a small boar but terrible, swiftclawed feet racing for the fence. I was, however, ready even to become a hunter. Thea took me out into the country before we left Chicago, and I practiced shooting at crows. This was while we held over in Chicago a few days longer; she was waiting for a letter from Smitty's--her husband's--lawyer and used the time to give me lessons with the guns in the woods off toward the Wisconsin line. When we came home and she took off her breeches and sat in her out-of-doors shirt with bare legs, she might take up a piece of costume jewelry to fix the clasp and sit like a girl of ten, in a rapt way, her neck bent and knees up, her fingers kind of clumsy. Then we'd ride on the Lincoln Park bridle path, and there was nothing clumsy about her there. I hadn't forgotten how to manage a horse since my Evanston days. But that was what it was, managing rather than riding. I followed her speed as fast as I could, red in the face and hitting the saddle hard, using my weight against the animal. I managed to stay on, but how I did it amused her. I was amused, too, when I caught my breath and climbed down from the saddle, but asked myself just how many new adaptations I was going to have to try to make. Along with the snapshots of the Rattlesnake Club I saw others; she had a leather case full of them. Some were of that very summer in St. Joe when I met her, of her uncle and aunt, her sister Esther and sports in white pants with tennis rackets and paddling canoes. When she showed me Esther's picture it didn't touch me except through her resemblance to Thea. There were photos also of her parents. Her mother had been a lover of the Pueblos, so there she was, sitting in a touring car in a hat and furs, looking at the cliffs. One picture in particular took my attention. It was of her father in a rikshaw. He wore a white drill suit and a helmet with a nipple, his eyes also whitish, the influence of the sun whose spottiness made the wheels seem like tea-soaked lemon. He looked over the shaved head of 3;0 the Chinese human horse who stood with thick wide calves between the shafts. Then there were more pictures of hunting. Some of Thea with different falcons on her gloved arm. Several of Smitty, her husband. In ridin" pants. At play, wrangling with a dog. Or again with Thea in a night club--she laughed with eyes closed in the flash of the bulb and he covered his bald head with slender fingers while an entertainer flung arms out over the table. Many of these things troubled me. For instance, in her laughter at the night club I saw the bosom, shoulder, chin, with kind of a happy recognition, but the hands of ridicule and squawk of limelight laughter--no, those were foreign. There was no place for me, there, by the table. Nor by her father in the rikshaw. Nor by the mother in the touring car with the fur about her neck. And then the hunting troubled me. I didn't know how earnestly I was to take it. Banging at crows, fine, that was okay. But when she bought me a gauntlet so I could handle the eagle, and I put it on, a strange sense came over me as if I were a fielder in a demons' game and would have to gallop here and there and catch burning stone in the air. So I was very uncertain. Not as to whether I should go with her, which was no decision since I had to, but as to what to expect, what I'd have to go through or put up as my share, where we were headed. To explain it sensibly to anyone was more than I was capable of. I tried. Mimi, who should have been the one best able to sympathize, was just the friend with whom I had most awkwardness about it. She didn't like it a bit and said, "Now what are you trying to tell me?'* unwilling to believe I was, as I said, in love, and the skin of her fore[ head thickened and drew along her upshot brows. As I explained in more detail she laughed in my face. "What, what, what! You have an eagle to pick up in Arkansas? An eagle? Don't you mean a buzzard?" From loyalty to Thea I didn't laugh; Mimi couldn't get me to, even if the queerness of the expedition worried me plenty. "Where did you find a babe like this?" "Mimi, I love her." This made her take another, nearer look at me, which showed me to be in earnest. And Mimi thought so much of the seriousness of love she doubted there were many who could get it right, and, soberer, she said, Watch out you don't get in trouble. And why are you quitting your job? Grammick told me you had a future as an organizer." "I don't want any more of that. Arthur can have it." As if she thought I spoke of Arthur with disrespect she said, "Don't "e silly. He has to finish those translations, and he's working very hard; l .32; he's in the middle of an essay on the poet and death," and she began to tell me how poets must be allowed to run funerals. Arthur was installed in my room, and he had discovered the fire-ruined set of Dr. Eliot's classics in the old box under the bed and asked to be allowed to take care of it for me. Since the books were stamped "W. Einhorn," it would have been hard to refuse even if I had wanted to. Meanwhile he was in a cure for his clap, and Mimi watched over him and could have only side concerns about anybody else. It was easy to explain my going off to Mama. Of course I didn't have to tell her much, only that I was engaged to a young lady who had to go to Mexico, and that I was going too. Though Mama no longer did kitchen work, the knife marks in her hands had stayed, and there probably always would be those dark lines; so, also, her color still was gentle, but her eyes increasingly cloudy and her lower lip expressed continually less sense. I suppose what I said was pretty well indifferent to her, as long as the tone of it didn't distress her. That was what she listened to. And why should it distress her, since I was riding high and in the best silks and colors? Say if the main bonds of attachment were death ropes, crazy, in the end, at least I felt them now as connections of joy, and if that was a deception it would never appear more substantial or marvelous. But I denied it would be a deception, unless nothing so vivid can be substantial. No, I wouldn't admit that. "Is she a rich girl, like Simon's wife?" I thought perhaps she believed Thea was Lucy Magnus. "This isn't any of Charlotte's family, Ma." "Well, then don't let her make you unhappy, Augie," she said. And what lay behind this, I believe, was that if Simon hadn't helped me to choose, if I had picked for myself, my mother thought me to be sufficiently like her to get myself in a bad fix. I said nothing of the hunting to her, but it did occur to me how it was inevitable for the son of a Hagar to go chase wild animals at one time or another. I asked about Simon. The only recent news I had of him was from Clem Tambow, who had seen him in a fistfight with a Negro on Drexel Boulevard. "He bought a new Cadillac car," said Mama, "and he came to give me a ride. Oh, it's wonderful! He's going to be a very rich fellow." ]h It didn't hurt me to hear of him in prosperity, and even if he was Duke of Burgundy, let him go ahead and be it. But I have to admit that I couldn't keep down the satisfaction of the thought that Thea was an heiress too. I don't want to pretend that I could. I looked up Padilla too before I left, and found him in front of his institute. He was in a blood-spotted lab coat, although he was hired to do calculations, as far as I knew, not experiments, and he smoked one of his stinking dark-tobacco cigarettes while in his swift way he debated about two curves with a character who held open a big looseleaf notebook. Padilla wasn't so terribly pleased that I was bound for Mexico, and he warned me not to go near Chihuahua, his province. He said that in Mexico City, where he himself had never been, he had a cousin, whose address I took. "If he'll rob you or help I can't predict, but look him up if you want somebody to look up," he said. "He was piss-poor fifteen years ago when he went away. He sent me a postcard last year when I got my M. A. Which maybe means that he wants me to send for him. Fat chance! Well, enjoy your trip, if they let you, but don't tell me afterward I didn't warn you to stay home." Suddenly he smiled in the sunshine and creased his short curved nose and forehead which sloped backward into his handsome Mexican hair. "Go easy with that wild native tail." I couldn't even grin at him to be sociable, it was such inaporopriate advice to a man in love. Nobody, then, gave the, happy bon voyage I'd have liked. Everybody warned me, in some way, and I even thought of Eleanor Klein and what Jimmy had told me of her being rooked there in Mexico, and her mishaps. I argued back to myself that it was just the Rio Grande I had to cross, not the Acheron, but anyway it oppressed me from somewhere. Really, it was the strangeness of the state I was in and not so much that of the destination I was aware of. The great astonishment of this state was that the unit of humanity should maybe be not one but two. Not even the eagle falconry distressed me as much as that what happened to her had to happen to me too, necessarily. This was scary. This trouble of course wasn't clear to me then. I put it all on Mexico and the hunting. And finally I said to Thea, on an evening while she was playing the guitar--with a rounded-back thumb on the hind string; she treated the instrument easily and it supplied its own strength--I said, "Do we have to go to Mexico?" "Do we have to?" she said and shut off the strings with her hand. "You can get a quick divorce in Reno and in other places." "But why shouldn't we go to Mexico? I've been there several times, many times. What's wrong with it?" "But what's wrong with other places?" "There's a house down in Acatia, and we're going there to catch some of those lizards and other animals. Besides, I've arranged with Smitty's lawyer to be divorced there. And there's still another reason why it's better for us to be there." "What's that?" "I won't have much money after the divorce." I shut my eyes and put my palm on my forehead as if trying to help the sudden astonishment go through. "Well, Thea, excuse me if I don't follow you. I thought you and Esther had lots of money. What about the stuff in the icebox?" "Augie, our part of the family never did have very much. It's my uncle, my father's brother, who's rich, and Esther and I are the only kin, and we always had allowances and were brought up in the money, but we were supposed to make good. Esther did; she married a rich man." "And so did you." "But it's over, and I may as well tell you there was a scandal about it. It isn't anything you should mind, it was just foolishness, but I took off from a party with a naval cadet. He looked just like you. It didn't amount to anything. I was thinking of you all the time, but you weren't there." "A substitute!" "Well, that Greek girl wasn't even that for you." "I never said I spent all the time since we were in St. Joseph thinking about you." "Nor about Esther?" "No." "Do you want to argue, or do you want to hear? I'm only trying to explain what happened. My aunt was visiting us--you remember the old lady--and the party was at our house, at Smitty's house. And she saw how this kid and I were petting. Augie, you really don't have to mind that. It was thousands of miles away and I didn't realize that I was going to come to Chicago to look for you. But I couldn't take Smitty any more. I had to have somebody else.' Even if it was only just another boy, like that Navy boy. After that my old aunt went home, and my uncle talked to me long-distance and told me I was on probation with him. And that's one more reason why I have to go to Mexico, to make some money." "With the eagle?" I cried out. Many kinds of things were disturbing me. "How do you expect to make anything with an eagle! Even if he catches those blasted lizards or whatever you mean. Holy smokes!" "It isn't just the lizards. We're also going to make movies of hunt324 ing, I have to capitalize on the things I know how to do. We can sell articles about it to the National Geographic." "How do you know we can? And who can write them?" "We'll have the material and find somebody to help us. There's always such a person wherever you go." "But. darling, you can't count on that. What do you think! It's not so easy." "It's not so terribly hard, I don't believe. I know lots of people everywhere who are crazy to do me a favor. I don't suppose it is going to be very easy to man that bird. But I'm thrilled to try. Besides, we can live cheaper in Mexico." "But what about the money you're spending now? In this suite?" "Smitty pays all the expenses until the divorce is final. That doesn't matter to you, does it?" "No, but you ought to take it easier, not put out all this gold." "Why?" she said, and genuinely didn't understand. Any more than I could understand some of her notions about spending. She would pay thirty dollars for a pair of French sewing scissors in a silver shop on Michigan Boulevard--one big dead sizzle of trousseau silver--and those scissors would never cut a thread or snip a button, but disappear into the flow of articles in the bags and boxes, in the rear of the station wagon, and perhaps never show up again. Yet she could talk about being thrifty in Mexico.; "You don't mind spending Smitty's money, do you?" "No," I said, and truthfully I scarcely cared. "But suppose I wasn't going to Mexico with you--would you have gone on alone? With the bird, and so on?" "Of course. Don't you want to come with me, though?" She knew, however, that I could no more stay here and let her go than I could put out my eyes. Even if it was African vultures, condors, rocs, or phoenixes. She had the initiative and carried me; if I had had a different, independent idea I might have tried to take the lead instead. But I had none. So she asked me whether I didn't want to stay behind, and then seeing it all over my face how I loved her she took back her question and was silent; the only sound was the strike of the guitar as it was set down. Then she said, "If the bird worries you, just forget about it till you see it. I'll show you what to do. Only don't think about it beforehand. Or think what a kick there may be in it when you get the animal trained, and how beautiful it is." I tried to take her advice, but all the same my bottom skepticism of West-Side Chicago nagged after me and asked, "Nah, what is this!" And since we were only a short distance from the zoo I took a walk to see their eagle, who perched on a trunk inside a cage forty feet high and conical like the cage of a parlor parrot, in its smoke and gun colors dipped somewhat with green, and its biped stance and Turkish or Janissary pants of feathers--the pressed-down head, the killing eye, the deep life of its feathers. Oy! In the old-country park green of lawns and verdigris-covered ironwork, ordinary tree shade and garden sunlight, there seemed nothing a bird like this might want. I thought, How could anybody ever tame him? And also, We'd better make speed for Texarkana and start with this thing before it grows too big. The letter from Smith's lawyer had arrived. The day we received it we loaded up the wagon and left the city, heading toward St. Louis. As we started late we didn't quite make it that far. We camped, sleeping on the ground under a shelter-half. I figured we weren't too far from the Mississippi, which I was eager to see. I was terribly excited. We lay beside a huge tree. Such a centuries' old trunk still had such small-change of foliage--it was difficult to think this enormous thing should live merely by these tiny leaves. And soon you distinguished the sound of the leaves, moved by the air, from the insects' sound. First near and loud; then farther and mountainous. And then you realized that wherever it was dark there was this sound of insects, continental and hemispheric, again and again, like surf, and continuous and dense as stars.