The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [20]
CHAPTER XXI
On the way back from Mexico to Chicago I took a side trip or pilgrimage out of East St. Louis and went toward Pinckneyville to see my brother George after many years. He was already a grown man, a large hulk insecure in his steps. Darkenings of brown in his fair skin under the eyes showed how after his own fashion he too made the struggle that we make if we consent to live. Just as though, the time for it coming round, we left what company we were in and went privately to take a few falls with our own select antagonist in his secret room, like inside a mountain or down in a huge root-cellar. This was how it was with George too. Nevertheless he was a man of fine appearance, as he had been a beautiful child. Now as then his shirt still bagged out in that senseless style over his back, and his hair grew like chestnut burr the same as formerly, brown, and gold, close bristles. I was kind of proud of him that he took his fate with dignity. They had made a shoemaker of him. He couldn't run one of those machines you see thumping under their fender in a repair shop with the screaming disks and circular brushes, and he wasn't equal to making shoes by hand, but he was good at heeling and soling. Down in the basement, under the veranda, was where he worked. It was a wide veranda, for the place was far enough downstate to be reckoned Southern, and the buildings were big, white, of wood. Vines gave green color to his dusty half-window below. I saw him bent over the last, taking nails out of his mouth and sending them through the leather. "George!" I said, looking at the man he had grown to be. He knew me right away, and he stood up, happy, and exactly as in the old days said, "Hi, Aug! Hi, Aug!" in his nasal voice. This repetition of two words if it went on long enough led usually to howling. So I went up to him, as he didn't move toward me. "Well, how is it, old man?" I said to him. I pulled him to me with one arm and put my head on his shoulder. He wore a blue work shirt; he was big, white, and clean, except his hands. Eyes, nose, and small mouth of his undeveloped face were as they had always been, simple. I was moved that he couldn't know how much of a complaint be had against me for neglect, and no sooner saw me than was happy. He hadn't had a visitor in three or four years, so they let me see him by special permission for the whole day. "What do you remember, Georgie?" I asked him. "Grandma, and Mama, Simon, Winnie?" With his small smile he said these names after me, as in the song he used to sing when he trotted with the dog along the curl-wired fence, singing how everybody loved Mama. Within his moist mouth his teeth were white and good, though his eye-teeth were very sharp. I took him by the hand, which now was bigger than mine, and we went walking in the grounds. It was the beginning of May and the oak leaves were shot out full, dark and healthy; worked through just as richly were the big dandelion blades and warm bottom-land-smelling air surrounded us. We walked along the wall, which at first was simply a wall to me. But then suddenly I was disturbed to think that he was a prisoner and never got outside, poor George. So without asking permission I took him off the grounds. He looked at his feet in the unfamiliar road to watch where they were going, for he was frightened. In a crossroads store I bought him a package of chocolate marshmaliow cookies. He took them but wouldn't eat them, putting the package in his pocket. His eyes were now turning very uneasily, and I said, "Okay, George, we're going back right away." That calmed him. When he heard the dinner bell go--which was like the clink of the church bell of mouse-town in a children's zoo--trained to answer right away, he went to the rambly green cafeteria. He left me here. I had to follow him. He picked up his tray, and with those disconnected others who scraped their tinware and fed, wagging their weak noggins, without talk or observation, we sat down and ate. It must be as simple as the blue and white of pillow-ticking to lay plans to take care of creatures so, clothe them, feed them, put them in their dormitory. There is probably just nothing to it. The rest of the trip I kept thinking that something should be done for Georgie, not to let him spend his entire life like that; also I thought how quick we were to latch on to the excuse to deal practically with any element, like jailbirds, orphans, cripples, the weak-brained or the old. And I decided that after I had visited Mama I'd go and talk to Simon about Geprgie. I didn't have anything specific to propose. But I said to myself that Simon had money, therefore he ought to know what money could do. And anyway, as I was coming back to Chicago I thought of Simon. I wanted to see him. I went from the one institution straight to the other in Chicago. But the two places were very different. Mama wasn't any longer right off the kitchen but established in almost an apartment with a Gulistan on the floor and drapes on the window. I had phoned that I was coming, and she waited for me down in front and rested on her white cane. While still at a distance I spoke to her, so she wouldn't be startled. She weaved her head to locate me and with her crying-out voice of painful joy called my name. From the top rims of her goggles, which were dull dark, the brows of her pink long face lifted as if she were trying to use her eyes too. She then kissed me and whispered to me. She felt my face and said, "You're skinny. Augie, why you're so skinny?" And then, a long figure herself, nearly as tall as I, she led me up to her room by the back entrance. An odor of boiling fish spouted up the stairs; that passed into my home-coming mood and made me feel the kitchen heat of old days, sitting with my mother. On the dresser all my postcards from Mexico were set out, and there were photos of Simon and Charlotte also. To show the seeing people who came. But besides the supervisor and his wife, who hated Simon, who did come? Only once in a while Anna Coblin. Or Simon himself. He'd come in, see how fixed up she was in her bourgeois parlor, and be satisfied. She too realized that she was being treated in a satisfactory way. On her wrist was a silver bracelet, she wore high heels, she had a radio with a big chromium zigzag across the speaker. In fact when Grandma Lausch had put on her black Od&ssa best in the Nelson Home she was laying claim feebly to the style Mama here was living in. That was how the Lausch brothers had let the old lady down, failing to appreciate legitimacy and without any sense of standards. Yet it wasn't a light duty for Mama that she had to live up to what Simon and Charlotte were doing for her. Simon was if anything even more difficult than Charlotte, I gathered. He was very fussy. He opened her closet and inspected all her clothes to see if they were cleaned or if any were missing from the rack. I knew how Simon could be when he was doing something for your good and welfare; he could make things hot. But maybe that spicy, sumptuous fish-gravy odor that belonged to the past made me too much of a critic of the present moment, exaggerating Mama's difficulties and imagining that the Gulistan and the drapes were the softenings of a cage. A blind woman, growing elderly, she had to live in a room, some room, and therefore why not a comfortable room? Moreover, it was perhaps my fault that I saw both Georgie and Mama as prisoners, and was unhappy that I was tooting freely around while they were confined. "Augie, go see him," she said. "Don't be mad on Simon. I told him he shouldn't be." "I will, Ma, as soon as I find a room and begin to settle down." "What are you going to do?" she said. "Oh--something. I hope something interesting." "What? Do you make a living, Augie?" "Well, here I am. What do you mean, Ma? I am living." "Why are you so skinny? But the clothes are good--I felt the material." They ought to have been good. Thea had paid a fancy price for them. "Augie, don't wait too long to call Simon. He wants you to. He told me I should tell you. He talks about you all the time." Simon did want to see me. As soon as he heard my voice over the phone he said, "Augie! Where are you? Stay put. I'll come and pick you up right away." I was calling from a booth near my new place, which wasn't far from the old, on the South Side. He lived in the vicinity and was there within a few minutes in his black Cadillac, this beautiful enamel shell coming so softly to the curb, inside like jewelry. He beckoned and I got in. "I have to go right back," he said. "I left without a shirt; I just put on this coat and hat. Well, let's look at you." He said this, but actually didn't much look, despite his rush to get down. Of course he was driving, but just the touch of manicured hands on the valuable stones on the wheel--something like jade--did the trick. The thing pretty well ran itself. I thought he was sorry about the fight we had had over Lucy and Mimi. I wasn't angry any more but was looking ahead. Simon was heftier than before. The light raglan with its chestnut buttons came open on his hard bare belly. Also his face was larger, and rude, autocratic. The fat of it was not clear, as it is in some faces. Mrs. Klein, Jimmy's mother, had had a fat face, almost oriental, but there the fat illuminated something. However, I found out that I couldn't be critical of Simon when I saw him after a long interval. No matter what he had done or what he was up to now, the instant I saw him I loved him again. I couldn't help it. It came over me. I wanted to be brothers again. And why did he come running for me if he didn't want the same? Well, now he wanted to know how rugged things had been for me, and I didn't have any intention of telling him. What was I up to in Mexico? "I was in love with a girl." "You were, uh? And what else?" I didn't say anything about the bird or my failures and lessons. Maybe I should have. He criticized me anyway in his mind for my randomness and sentiment. So what did I stand to lose by telling him the facts? However, something haughty kept me. That was how brief the first warmth of love turned out to be. So he was judging me--what of it? Let him. Wasn't I busted down, creased, head-damaged, missing teeth, disappointed, and so forth? And couldn't I have said, "Well, all right, Simon, here I am." No, what I told him was that I had gone down to Mexico to work out something important. Then he started to talk about himself. He had built up his business and sold it at a whopping profit. Since he didn't want to have to do with the Magnuses he had gone into other kinds of business and he was very lucky. He said, "I certainly do have the gold touch. After all, I did start in the Depression when everything was supposed to be over and done with." Then he described how he had bought an old hospital building at auction and turned it into a tenement. Inside of six months he had cleared fifty thousand bucks on this, and then had organized a management company and run the place for the new owners. He had a large interest in a Spanish cobalt mine now. They sold the stuff in Turkey, or some place in the Middle East. He also had a potato-chip concession in several railroad stations. In fact, Einhom himself couldn't have dreamed up such deals, much less have made them pay oil. "How much do you think I'm worth now?" "A hundred grand?" He smiled. "Let yourself go a little," he said. "If I'm not a millionaire soon there's a hitch in my arithmetic." It impressed me; who wouldn't be impressed? He couldn't help seeing this. Nevertheless, with his autocratic blue eyes darkening, he looked at me and asked, "Augie, you don't think you're superior to me because you have no money, do you?" The question made me laugh, and maybe I laughed more than I should have. I said, "That's a strange thing to be asking. How can I? And if I can, why should you care?" Then I said, "I guess it's true that people fix it to come out better than those near to them. Why, sure I'd like to have money too." I didn't say that I had to have a fate good enough, and that this came first. My answer satisfied him. "You're wasting a lot of time," he said. "I know it." "You ought to quit stalling. You're not a boy. Even George is something, he's a shoemaker." You know, I did admire Georgie for the way he took his fate. I wished I had one that was more evident, and that I could quit this pilgrimage of mine. I didn't fee! I was better than Simon, not at all. If there had been real ease in me, he might have envied me. As it was, what was there to envy? Bodily overbearing, his fashionable pointed shoe on the rubber pad of the accelerator, he drove over the streets. This proud car, it had heraldry, it was royal, and wasn't my brother like a prince of Detroit, full of force and darkness? Why, what was the matter with that, to be a power of the world of machinery? Wasn't it good enough? And to what should you go rather? I wasn't proud of myself, believe me, and my stubbornness about a "higher," independent fate .1 was no wizard, for sure, nor gazetted as anything illustrious, nor billed to stand up to Apollyon with his horrible scales and bear's feet, nor slated to find the answer to all my shames like Jean-Jacques on the way to Vincennes sinking down with emotion of the conception that evil society is to blame for all that happened to warm, impulsive, loving me. There was no such first-rate thing that I could boast, and who was I, not to make up my mind and be so obstinate? The one thing I could say was that though I wanted this independent fate it wasn't merely for my own sake I wanted it. Oh, but why get too earnest? Seriousness is only for a few, a gift or grace, and though all have it rough only the favorites can speak of it plain and sober. "So when are you going to start what you're going to do?" "I wish I knew. But it seems to be one of those things you can't rush." "Well, people don't trust you if they don't know what you do, and you can't blame them." He pulled up before his apartment, and he left the Cadillac tripleparked in the street for the doorman to worry about. Rising up swift and soundless in the elevator, we came to the ivory white door of his flat. As he opened it he was already yelling for the maid to cook some ham and eggs right away. He took on like a king, a Francis back from the hunt; he swelled, hollered, turned things round, not so much showing me the great rooms as dominating them typically. Well, there were vast rugs and table lamps as tall as life-sized dolls or female idols, walls that were all mahogany, drawers full of underwear and shirts, sliding doors that opened on racks of shoes, on rows of coats, cases of gloves, of socks, bottles of eau^de cologne, little caskets, lights lining the corners, water hissing criss-cross in the showerstall. He took a shower. I went alone into the parlor; a huge China vase was there, and in secret I got up on a chair to lift the lid and look down, where I saw the reverse white bulge of the dragons and birds. The candy dishes were full of candy--I had some coconut balls and apricot marshmallows walking around while Simon took his shower. Then we went to eat, on a handsome marble-topped round table. The chairs were red leather. The metal circle that held up the marble was worked all around with peacocks and children's faces. The maid came from the blazing white of the kitchen with the ham and eggs and coffee. Simon's hand with its rings went out to test the heat of the cup. He behaved like some Italian Lord Moltocurante, jealous over the quality and exacting all he had coming. I knew we had gone way up in the elevator but hadn't noticed to what floor. Now, after breakfast, when I strayed into one of the enormous carpeted rooms, dark as a Pullman when it sits with drawn blinds in the station, I drew a drape aside and saw we were on the twentieth story at least. I hadn't had a look at Chicago yet since my return. Well, here it was again, westward from this window, the gray snarled city with the hard black straps of rails, enormous industry cooking and its vapor shuddering to the air, the climb and fall of its stages in construction or demolition like mesas, and on these the different powers and sub-powers crouched and watched like sphinxes. Terrible dumbness covered it, like a judgment that would never find its word. Simon came looking for me. He cried, "Hey, what the hell are you doing in a dark room, for Chrissake? Come on, you're going around with me today." He wanted me to know what his life was like. And maybe he thought I'd run into something that would appeal to me, for my future's sake. "Wait a minute though," he said. "What kind of clown's suit are you wearing there? You can't go among people dressed like that." "Listen, a friend of mine picked this out for me. Anyway, just feel the material. There's nothing wrong with this suit." But his face was impatient, and he pulled the jacket from me and said, "Strip!" He dressed me in a double-breasted flannel, very elegant soft gray. It certainly was my fortune to be poor in style. From the skin out he reclothed me in swell linen and silk socks, new shoes, and called the maid to have my old suit cleaned and sent to me--it was sort of shiny on the elbows. The other stuff he ordered her to throw down the incinerator. So it plunged down into the fire. I wiped my face with the monogrammed handkerchief, now mine, and felt around with my toes in the narrow shoes, trying to accustom myself to them. To top it off he gave me fifty bucks. I made efforts to refuse this, but my tongue got in its own way. "Go! Stop mumbling," he said. "You have to have a little something in your pocket to live up to this outfit." He had a big gold money-clip and all the bills were new. "Now let's go. I have things to do at my office and Charlotte wants to be picked up at five. She's at the accountant's, going over some of the books." He called down for the Cadillac, and we drove away, stopping for scarcely anything in this lustrous hard shell with radio playing. In his office Simon wore his hat like a Member of Parliament, and while he phoned his alligator-skin shoes knocked things off the desk. He was in on a deal to buy some macaroni in Brazil and sell it in Helsinki. Then he was interested in some mining machinery from Slidbury, Ontario, that was wanted by an Indo-Chinese company. The nephew of a Cabinet member came in with a proposition about waterproof material. And after him some sharp character interested Simon in distressed yard-goods from Muncie, Indiana. He bought it. Then he sold it as lining to a manufacturer of leather jackets. All this while he carried on over the phone and cursed and bullied, but that was just style, not anger, for he laughed often. Then we drove to his club for lunch, arriving late. There was no service in the dining room. Simon went into the kitchen to bawl out the headwaiter. Seeing some pot roast on a platter he broke off a piece of bread and sopped the gravy, covering the meat with crumbs. The waiter hollered and Simon yelled back, furiously laughing in his face too, "Why don't you wait on people then, you jerk!" Finally they fed us, and then Simon seemed to find the afternoon dragging. We went into the cardroom where he forced his way into a poker game. I could tell he was hated, but no one could stand up to him. He said to some bald-headed guy, "Push over. Curly!" and sat in. "This is my brother," he said as if bidding them to look at me in the opulent gray flannel and button-down collar. I 'lounged just behind him in a leather chair. Then he would turn and describe various people to me, pretending to lower his voice. "You see that guy in the blue, the one with the cigar, Augie? He's a lawyer but doesn't practice, only he keeps an office so he can say he's at the bar. He makes a living at cards. If nobody played with him he'd be on relief next week. Same with his wife. She plays in all the fancy hotels. And this other one, over there, that's Goonie. His father owns a sausage factory and he's a Harvard man. If I had a son like that I'd just as soon pour champagne on my dick as send him to college. The sonofabitch. I'd make him stuff wurst. He's a bachelor. He'll never have sons of his own, but he likes little boys, and last year he tried to pick up a sailor at the State and Lake and the kid gave him a shiner. Over there is Ruby Ruskin--he's a good fellow. He visits his old dad down in Joliet Penitentiary at least once a month. The old man took the rap for them both in an arson case." Those players who weren't glaring or grinning appeared to be holding their breath, and I thought sure Simon would end by being clouted. Then he said, "Listen, you cruds, I want you to take a good look at my brother. He's a radical and he just got back from Mexico. Augie, tell them how soon the revolution's coming when they'll get sash weights tied on their necks and be thrown in the drainage canal." He took a big pot--he must have won because the rest were too rattled to play their cards--and left the table with a swagger. "They could drown you in a teaspoonful of water," I said. "Why do you want to make them hate you so?" "Because I hate them. I want them to know it. What do I care if those jag-offs hate me? Why, they're all lice! I despise them!" "Then why do you belong to their club?" "Why not? I enjoy being a member of a club." He played the Twenty-Six girl at a bar for smokes at the green baize board, socking down the leather dice cup, and won again. Putting some Havanas in my breast pocket, he said, "Let's visit a barbershop, You need it and I like it. God, I love barbershops!" We stopped at the Palmer House where they had those grand episcopal chairs. By the time we were finished with all the cutting, shaving, toweling, steaming, polishing, it was five o'clock, and on the run we got into the car and sped through illegal alley shortcuts out of the Loop. Charlotte was waiting in the street in her fur-trimmed suit, grimly handsome and immense. She was terribly put out at having had to wait, and right away she started, "Simon, where have you been? Do you know how late you are?" "Shut up!" he said. "Here's my kid brother. You haven't seen him for two years and can't even say hello but have to start yacking first." "How are you, Augie?" she said, more vigorous than friendly, turning her head upon her furs toward the back seat. "How did you like Mexico?" "Oh, very much." She looked to be at the peak of fashion, and with the straight rulings of brow and mouth would have seemed attractive if it wasn''t so evident how tried in flesh and patience she was. Her devices for hiding impatience were in bad repair. Of course she observed that I was already dressed in a suit of Simon's. Not that she'd object to a thing like that, only she didn't miss it. When she talked to you she had a nagging, bidding way and was tough, a hard judge, and you a defendant. You had to watch what you said. But she anyhow arrived at the opinion that she wanted. In her fur-trimmed suit, large and handsome, she was like an officer of the court all right, even though her lips were painted and eyes mascaraed. And me, I was like some foxy pirate, larron de mer, only I wasn't really such a bold answerer. One thing that disturbed her was that without having a cent I seemed perfectly at home with many of the satisfactions that the rich enjoy. Free of charge and trouble. It wasn't true, of course, but only another one of those appearances. However, she was particularly concerned that I didn't at least look more anxious. At dinner I wanted to talk about Georgie with Simon, but he said, "Don't make any new problems. Don't make any new problems. He's fine. What do you want?" "Why worry about your brother George when you haven't decided what to do with your own life?" said Charlotte. "It's very easy to turn into a bum." Simon said, "Be quiet! Better a bum than your cousin Lucy's husband and your uncle's son-in-law. Let Augie alone. A bum is just what he doesn't want to be. What if it takes him a little longer to settle down?" "You lost a tooth or two, didn't you?" said Charlotte. "How did it happen? You look like hell--" She might have gone on but the bell rang and somebody who was admitted by the maid went down the passage into the living room. Charlotte became silent. Later I glanced in, and I saw a giant feminine figure sitting in the dark. I went to see who this Brobdingnag woman could be. Why, it was Charlotte's mother, Mrs. Magnus, sitting beside the China jug which didn't make her seem smaller, giant as it was. Even in the dark Mrs. Magnus's color, beautiful and healthful, and her braided hair and calm saddle nose and her size, touched my feeling. "Why do you sit in the dark, Mrs. Magnus?" I said. "I have to," she told me simply. "But why do you have to?" "Because my son-in-law doesn't want to see me." "But what's the matter?" I asked Charlotte and Simon. Charlotte said, "Simon bawled her out about the cheap clothes she wears." "Because," said Simon, angry, "she comes here wearing nineteenfifty dresses. A woman with half a million dollars! She looks like the ragman's horse." Owing to me, Charlotte brought her mother in to sit at the table. We were eating cherries and drinking coffee. Charlotte laid off me, but Simon worked himself into a rage at Mrs. Magnus in her brown dress. He tried to read the paper and cut her--he hadn't said a word when she came in--but finally he said, and I could see the devil in him now, "Well, you lousy old miser, I see you still buy your clothes off the janitor's wife." "Let her alone," said Charlotte sharply. But suddenly Simon threw himself across the table, spilling the cherries and overturning coffee cups. He grabbed his mother-in-law's dress at the collar, thrust in his hand, and tore the cloth down to the waist. She screamed. There were her giant soft breasts wrapped in the pink band. What a great astonishment it was, all of a sudden to see them! She panted and covered the top nudity with her hands and turned away. However, her cries were also cries of laughter. How she loved Simon! He knew it too. "Hide, hide!" he said, laughing. "You crazy fool," cried Charlotte. She ran away on her high heels to bring her mother a coat and came back laughing also. They were' downright proud, I guess. Simon wrote out a check and gave it to Mrs. Magnus. "Here," he said, "buy yourself something and don't come here looking like the scrubwoman." He went and kissed her on the braids, and she took his head and gave his kisses back two for one and with tremendous humor. I went to see Einhorn, who was kind of white- and peaky. Things were not too good with him. He had gone to the hospital and had a prostate operation while I was away. All the same he still had a fine presence, much as in the insurance literature and in the clippings and photos all over the place. In the midst of all these hung the portrait of the Commissioner--there was a man! What a fine, great head--with the famous obituary under it! Tillie was away on a holiday with the grandchild, and Mildred who was more than ever Einhorn's friend was in charge. In her stout orthopedic shoes she stood up at the office barrier, which was cut down from the old office across the way. She had a way about the eyes of making you go to war with her. Not me, thanks. Her hair was beginning to be gray. Einhorn's was snowy, which made his eyes blacker. He saw the double-breasted suit Simon had given me and said, "You certainly are doing fine, Augie." The house stunk. The books were falling off the shelves. The busts of great men were lost up near the ceiling. The black leather chairs on casters were aging well, but aging. Einhom made a powerful complaint against Mimi Villars, who was ruining his son. Mimi was even more unkind when she spoke of him and what he had done to Arthur. "I'll tell you about that old man," she said. "He's a damned impresario for himself. Every time he goes to the toilet he wants to publish an article about it. I know everybody is vain, and that that's what makes the world go round. Maybe it isn't even vanity. Maybe it's like, with a bullet in your brain, you go on thinking of your nice hat. You go on thinking about the party you were invited to on Saturday, and so forth. But there ought to be a limit somewhere. If you can't help it, at least you should know that it isn't a good thing. All that old man wants is that Arthur should be a credit to him and bring him glory, but as for helping him worth a damn, no, he won't come across with a nickel. And parents who have money and won't give any to their children ought to have it all taken away. They ought to go and beg. I'd take and put the old man on the corner of State and Lake with a tin cup, that's what I'd do. And you know the grandfather left it all to Arthur. He knew better than to trust his son. Arthur has been trying to finish a book, which is a great book. I believe in it. You know he can't be expected to work while doing that." Einhorn did have some money though she exaggerated his wealth. However, I didn't argue with her. I was down on Einhorn myself. Since the time when I came back from Buffalo and found the family wiped out, when he urged me to be hard on Simon, I didn't feel the old friendliness toward him. And, if you want to know, because he and Tillie had warned me in the old days not to expect anything, repeating how Arthur would come into all, I couldn't help feeling no one had been good enough for them and now they were not good enough for one another. Now maybe was my chance to pass them by. "Of course," Mimi said with some of her old-time bitterness, "I have a pretty good job now, but last winter I was down with the flu and couldn't work. Not only that but Owens kicked us out because I couldn't pay the rent and a friend of ours on Dorchester took us in. But all Arthur and I had to sleep on was the sofa. Both of us on the sofa, and I had the flu. By morning he was so tired that when my friend went to work he got into her bed. So," she said with her universal-comedy laugh, "finally I said he should try to get a job. He said he'd try, and he got up one morning at eight and was back at ten. He said he had a job in the toy department at Wieboldt's and he was going to learn the details the next day. He left at nine that morning and was back at eleven. They had showed him, but before he started he wanted to clean up an important chapter about Kierkegaardwhat do I know about it? 'So then he went away next day at half-past eight and was back at noon, fired, because the floorwalker told him to pick up a piece of paper and he said, 'Pick it up yourself, you dog. Your back isn't broken.' "Then Arthur came down with the flu and I had to get up and give him the sofa. But," she said, "I love him. It's never dull with him. The worse our life gets, the more good I feel in love. And you?" she said, looking closely at me, how I had been browned by Mexico, aged by hard going and experience, finally thrown on those rocks by Bizcocho and eating cinders and ashes over Thea. Why, the way I came back I must have had something in common with a survivor of Crassus's army in the eastern desert, barely making it back from the massacre in tattered armor scales. Well, people had warned me in the first place. Padilla, for instance, said, "Holy Christ, March, what did you have to go there for, with a broad like that and this bird! A girl who catches snakes, and God knows what else! What do you expect? No wonder you look like this. I hate like hell to be rubbing it in, but it seems to me you had it coming." "Manny, what was I supposed to do? I fell in love with her." "Is love supposed to ruin you? It seems to me you shouldn't destroy yourself out of life for purposes of loveor what good is it?" "That's right, but I didn't love her as I ought to have. You see, I missed out. I should have been more pure, and stayed with it. There was something wrong with me." "Old pal, let me tell you something," said Padilla. "You take too much blame on yourself, and the real reason is not such a good one. It's because you're too ambitious. You want too much, and therefore if you miss out you blame yourself too hard. But this is all a dream. The big investigation today is into how bad a guy can be, not how good he can be. You don't keep up with the times. You're going against history. Or at least you should admit how bad things are, which you don't do either. You should cut out this junketing around and go back to the university." "I think I might do that. Only I'm still collecting my thoughts." "Collect them meanwhile, in the evening. Can't you do two things at a time?" And then Clem Tambow told me practically the same thing. He was getting his degree soon, and he looked very mature now with his heavy mustache and the cigar. He dressed like a poor man's press agent and his clothes smelled of cleaning fluid and the masculine odor. "Well, big boy, I see you're the same as when you left," he said. Now Clem and I liked each other very much, a splendid and goodhearted fellow, salt of the earth, ready with sympathy and appreciative of the general human plight. But I went on a toot with a rich woman, as he saw it, and if I was roughed up I had it coming to me. That was what he meant, for I wasn't at all the same as when I left. "How is your campaign after a worth-while fate, Augie?" asked Clem, for he knew a lot about me, you see. Alas, why should he kid me so! I was only trying to do right, and I had broken my dome, lost teeth, got burned in my progress, a mighty slipshod campaigner. Lord, what a runner after good things, servant of love, embarker on schemes, recruit of sublime ideas, and good-time Charlie! Why, it was a crying matter, no fooling, to anyone who might know which side was up, that here was I trying to refuse to lead a disappointed life. A hell of a cause of sympathetic tears but also, as Clem saw, of haw-haws, as great jokes often are. So I looked desolated, and Clem laughed like anything. I couldn't feel sore at him. You know why I struck people funny? I think it was because of the division of labor. Specialization was leaving the likes of me behind. I didn't know spot-welding, I didn't know traffic management, I couldn't remove an appendix, or anything like that. I discussed it with Clem, who was of like opinion. Clem was no slouch. He now said he was pushing ahead in the field of psychology and a lot was clear to him that was a mystery before. Oh, he still knocked himself. He said, "I bought all my fine notions at a fire sale," but he was growing more confident of his point of view. He made a big thing of my coming back, declaring that we were among the few true friends around. That was no lie. I had the. warmest feelings toward him. Well, then, he came around and said we must go to the Oriental Theatre and have supper. Till his last penny, Clem had to treat, and then he didn't mind if you stood him to something. He liked to look well, though his face was often raging, wrinkled, or his laugh was enormous while his teeth were snaggly, his head huge, and the suit he wore was prosperous, solid, middle-aged, a banker's suit, but his shanks were long, 432.. his shoes were wrecked, his socks old Argyles, he wore a turtleneck sweater and stunk of cigars. So we went to the Oriental. The stars crept in the blue heavens there, like Arabian nights. We heard Milton Berie singing "River, Stay Away from My Door," then floppy dancers, as couch-dolls in velvet, followed by an act of little dogs zipping across the stage in automobiles, and then a troupe of girls playing bagpipes. First they performed "Annie Laurie" and then went into classical numbers. They did the "Liebestod" and "Vaise Triste," and then came the feature, which was so lousy we walked out and went to a restaurant. Dignified again after his windy haw-haws in the wild gallery, Clem ordered a big Chinese dinner--sweet and sour pork, bamboo shoots, chicken chow mein with pineapple, egg too yung, and tea, rice, sherbet, almond cakes. We cleaned up on this and meanwhile had a conversation. "Now just suppose," he said, "we were on our way up the Nile to the first cataract, sailing in a dahabiyeh. The green fields and boys shying rocks at the heavy birds, and the splashing flowers, while we eat dates with aphrodisiacs in them and beautiful. Coptic girls come rowing up to the music of the lateen sails and so on. Going to Kamak to copy inscriptions. How would that be?" "Well, I just came back from one exotic place." "Yes, but you jumped the gun. You weren't ready to go yet. You won't take things step by step. That's why your trip wasn't a success. Now if you were ah Egyptologist you could go on this trip up the' Nile." "Good, then I'll become one. All I need is about ten-years' preparation." "Look at you, you look so bright and happy after supper and your face is so pleasant, why, you might be the owner of this building. Haw, haw! Oh, brother, you're swell!" "The only thing is," said I, flattered and smiling, "why the Nile?" "For you? Something exceptional," said Clem. "When I think of you I have to think in terms of something exceptional. On the level of achievement." He had picked up this vocabulary at the university. One of his favorite words was "reinforced," which meant to give food to a rat who has solved a problem, to encourage him. Meantime, with big red lips, scowling laughter, and territorial face, the great nose with its passages, he looked like a king. "Are you like one of the lousy crowd cheering the Coptics who row out to the boat? You are not. You are a distinguished personality. You are a man of feeling. Among us poor drips at the human masquerade you come like an angel." I tried to tut-tut him, but he said, "Oh, keep your shirt on, I'm not finished yet. You may not like it so much before I finish." "Well, don't build me up so, and you won't have to tear me down." "We aren't in the same universe of discourse. This is not yet what St. Thomas calls my level of first intention. I didn't say I thought you were an angel; only us common-clay, step-by-step, unfortunate ordinary personnel see you arrive as for a ball, smiling and beaming. You have ambitions. But you're ambitious in general. You're not concrete enough. You have to be concrete. Now Napoleon was. Goethe was. You take this Professor Sayce who actually had this Nile deal. He knew everything along the banks for a thousand miles. Specific! Names and addresses. Dates. The whole mystery of life is in the specific data." "What makes you so keen about Egypt suddenly?" I said. "And besides I know there's plenty that's wrong with me. Don't you worry." "Why, of course, even though you're beaming you're full of anxiety. Don't I know it! I can see you pissing against the wind. What you need is some of Dr. Freud's medicine. It could do you a whole lot of good." "As a matter of fact," I said, now somewhat disturbed, "I've been having plenty of peculiar dreams lately. Just listen. Last night I dreamed that I was in my own house, somewhere--it was enough of a surprise to have a house of my own, much less dream what I dreamed. I was standing in my beautiful front room, entertaining a guest. And what do you think? I had two pianos. There were two grand pianos, as if ready for a concert. Then my guest, who had wonderful manners-- and me too, regular society--he said, 'Isn't it unusual for somebody to own three grand pianos?' Three! I turned around, and God! if there wasn't another piano. And I had been trying to figure out how come I had two in my house, as I can't play any more than a bull can sew cushions. This seemed downright sinister. But even though I was thrown by it I didn't let on or show anything. I told this guy, 'Sure, of course there are three of them'; as if who could do with less? So I felt like a terrible faker." "Oh, what a case! You'd be a regular conservatory for a scientific mind. You'd be the greatest collection of unknowns ever to lie on a couch. What I guess about you is that you have a nobility syndrome. You can't adjust to the reality situation. I can see it all over you. You want there should be Man, with capital M, with great stature. As we've been pals since boyhood, I know you and what you think. Remember how you used to come to the house every day? But I know what you want .0 paidea! 0 King David! 0 Plutarch and Seneca! 0 chivalry, 0 Abbot Suger! 0 Strozzi Palace, 0 Weimar! 0 Don Giovanni, 0 lineaments of gratified desire! 0 godlike man! Tell me, pal, am I getting warm or not?" "You are, yes you are," said I. We were in this woodwork bower, you see, of the Chinese restaurant, and all seemed right, good-tempered, friendly. When important thought doesn't have to be soliloquy, I know how valuable an occasion that is. Because to whom can you speak your full mind as to yourself? "Go on, Clem, go on," I told him. "I went to the Mottley School in the fourth grade. Mrs. Minsick was the teacher. She'd call you up to the front of the class and hand you a piece of chalk. 'Now, Dorabella, what flower are you going to smell?' Haw, haw! It was a riot. This little Dorabella Feingold would smell up until her pants showed and turn her eyes with ecstasy. She'd say, 'Sweetpea.' It was a regular drill. Inhale and exhale. Stephanie Kriezcki, she'd say, 'Violet, rose, nasturtium.' " He held the cigar by the stem and smelled with his inflated nose. "Just catch the picture of this lousy classroom, and all these poor punks full of sauerkraut and bread with pig's-feet, with immigrant blood and washday smells and kielbasa and home-brew beer. Where did they get off with this flora elegance? Why, hell! And then old lady Minsick would give a goid star to reinforce the good ones. She, with that kisser of hers with sharp teeth and tits that hung down to her belly, she'd hawk into the wastepaper basket. Well, the wild kids would say, 'Skunk cabbage, teach,' ' or, 'Wild schmooflowers,' or 'Dreck.' For this she'd grab you by the neck and rush you down to the principal. But these tough kids were right. Whoever saw any sweetpeas? Why, I'd fish through the sewer lid with a diaper pin because my wiseguy brother told me I'd catch goldfish." "This is a sad story. But don't you see both kinds of kids were right? Some stood up for what they knew and some longed for what they didn't. What do you mean, that there are some kids or people for whom there can't be flowers? That couldn't be true." "I knew you'd go for this chalk-smelling. You have a strong superego. You want to accept. But how do you know what you're accepting? You have to be nuts to take it come one come all. Nobody is going to thank you for trying. And you know you're going to ruin yourself ignoring the reality principle and trying to cheer up the dirty scene. You should accept the data of experience. Why don't you read some psychology? It did me a lot of good." "Well, I'll borrow some of your books, since you think it's so important, Only you've got the whole thing wrong already. I'll put it to you as I see it. It can never be right to offer to die, and if that's what the data of experience tell you, then you must get along without them. I also understand what you're driving at about my not being concrete. It's as follows: In the world of today your individual man has to be willing to illustrate a more and more narrow and restricted point of existence. And I am not a specialist." "Well, you tell me you can train birds." Yes, so far that had been my only field of specialization. And it's perfectly true, you have to be one of these spirits that get as if jumped into and driven far and powerfully by a social purpose. If somebody is needed to go and lie under the street, you be it. Or in a mine. Or work out joyrides in the carnival. Or invent names of new candy. Or electroplate babies'. shoes. Or^go around and put cardboard pictures of bims in barbershops or saloons. Or go die in one subdivided role or another, with one or two thoughts, these narrow, persistent ideas of your function. I always believed that for what I wanted there wasn't much hope if you had to be a specialist, like a doctor or other expert. If so, as an expert, you'd be dealing with other experts. You wouldn't care for amateurs, for experts are like that about amateurs. And besides specialization means difficulty, or what's there to be a specialist about? I had Padilla's slogan of "Easy or not at all." Mimi got a big laugh out of my Mexican experiences. "What a ball you've been having," she said. She made me feel unpleasant about Thea; and about Stella she said, "Guys like you make life easy for some women." There hadn't been anything easy for anyone, but you couldn't tell Mimi that. Having gotten the story as she wanted it, she didn't listen to more, but with her push-faced vigor, her broad red mouth stretching and giving out with her helicon or hunting-hom voice, she let me have it almost the same as Clem. I'd better be cured of my attitudes. The reason why I didn't see things as they were was that I didn't want to; because I couldn't love them as they were. But the challenge was not to better them in your mind but to put every human weakness into the picture--the bad, the criminal, sick, envious, scavenging, wolfish, the living-on-the-dying. Start with that. Take the fact that people generally were full of loathing and it cost them an effort to look at one another. Mostly they wanted to. be let alone. And they dug for unreality more than for treasure, unreality being their last great hope because then they could doubt that what they knew about themselves was true. Maybe she exaggerated her rake-the-heavens wrath and went beyond how she truly felt. However, there were blue marks of worry beneath her eyes these days. When Arthur came around she talked about money and jobs. Four times out of five she changed the subject to that as soon as he showed up. There was a certain job she kept after him to take. But he said, "Why, it's a farce!" And gently began to laugh in his dark way, crowfooted. "The money's no farce." "Oh, please, Mimi. Don't be absurd.",/ "There'd be practically no work connected with it." However, he made it seem absolutely impossible. I began to think it was a job I might put in for myself, if qualified. I met Arthur out walking and I asked him why he didn't want it. It was a cool afternoon, and he was wearing cap and coat. He had lost much weight and was very bony, his shoulders up sharp, so that I was impressed with his resemblance to his uncle Dingbat and how he had subdued the same inheritance by a different life. He was of that same sharp skinny-chested build, with long face and a quick walk of inward-pointed toes". His shoes were tapered, as elegant as chivalry in' the stirrups or the end of a lizard entering a crevice. But Arthur's health was poorer than Dingbat's and he had a swarthier color; his breath was strong with coffee and tobacco. He owned up to inferior teeth with his smile. Nevertheless he had all the charm of the Einhorns when he wanted to turn it on. There was great style in his thinking. Sometimes I believed he was ready to say or consider anything. My personal preference was for useful thoughts. I mean thoughts that answered questions that moved you. Arthur said this was wrong; truth was truer when it had less to do with your needs. What personal need, for instance, is there in the investigation of the creep of light from the outermost stars which even at that unimaginable speed decays and breaks down because it grows so ancient in its travel? It fascinated me, this question. However, about the job: there was a millionaire engaged in writing a book and he was looking for a research assistant. ' "Do you think I'd fill the bill?" "Of course you would, Augie. Are you interested?" "Well, I need a job. Something that'll leave me the free time I want." "I like the way you arrange your life. What do you intend to do with this free time?" "I intend to use it." I didn't like the implication of this. Why should he need his lime free and I be questioned? "I'm just curious. Some people always appear to know what they're going to do, and others never. Of course I'm a poet, and relatively lucky. I've often thought. If I weren't a poet, what would I be? A politician? But just see how Lenin's life work turned out. A professor? That's much too tame. A painter? But nobody knows what painting's about any more. Whenever I write a dramatic poem I can't understand why the characters should ever want to be anything but poets themselves." Well, this is how it was in Chicago when I came back. I stayed on the South Side. I got my case of books back from Arthur and I read in my room. The heat of June grew until the shady yards gave up the smell of the damp soil, of underground, and the city-Pluto kingdom of sewers and drains, and the mortar and roaring tar pots of roofers, the geraniums, lilies-of-the-valley, climbing roses, and sometimes the fiery devastation of the stockyards stink when the wind was strong. I read my books and almost each day wrote to Thea in care of Wells Fargo, but no answer came. One letter was forwarded from Mexico, and that one was from Stella. She was in New York. I never expected her to write such a good letter; I decided that I had underrated her. She said she couldn't pay me yet; she had to square herself with her union. But as soon as she landed a job she'd settle her debt. Simon had given me some money so that I could take summer courses at the university. Now I thought I might like to be a schoolteacher and I was registered in several Education courses. I found it hard to sit in classes and read the textbooks. Simon was always ready to stand by me if I wanted to, though he himself didn't have much use for universities. I was still after the job Arthur refused to take with the millionaire who wanted to write a book. This millionaire's name was Robey. He had studied with Frazer when Frazer was an instructor, and that was why Mimi knew him. He was tall and bent, he had a bad stammer, he wore a beard, he had been married four or five times--Mimi told me these facts. Arthur said the book was to be a survey or history of human happiness from the standpoint of the rich. I wasn't so sure that I wanted to do this but I didn't want Simon to keep on suppor11"^ me. I tried to fish a loan from Einhom but he held it against me taat I was an old friend of Mimi. He said, "I can't lend you anything. ^ou realize that I have to support my grandchild. The extra burdert is tough. And what if Arthur decides to bless my last years with another" He was p. o. So reluctantly I went to Arthur to ask him to phone Robey for roe. "This is a very strange fellow, Augie, he ought to amuse you." "Oh hell, I don't want him to amuse me. I just want a job." "Well, you'll have to try to understand him. He's very peculiar. He partly gets it from his mother. She thought she was the quee0 ^ Rockford, Illinois. She wore a crown. She had a throne. She enpected everyone in town to bow to her." "Does he live in Rockford now?" "No, he has a mansion here on the South Side. When he ^s a student a chauffeur used to drive him to campus. For a long tlme he was mad on Great Books and he used to buy space in the wan1 a(^ and put in quotations from Plato or Locke, Like, "The unexani1"^ life is not worth living.' He has a sister who's wacky too--Car O^i"- She think she's a Spaniard. But you have a gift of getting along wltn these temperaments. You were a jewel with my dad." "I was kind of in love with him." "Maybe you'll love Robey too." "He sounds to me like another crank. I can't always be connsc1^ with ridiculous people. It's wrong." But not long afterward, on a drizzly afternoon, I found riiyself' face to face with this man Robey in his house on the lakefront. And what a face it was--what an appearance! Big, inflamed, reticent e^s, a reddish beard, red sullen lips, and across his nose a blotch; the night before, when he was drunk or sleepy, he had walked into the door of a taxi. His stutter was bad; when it really caught him he niade a great effort, fixed his soul, and twisted his head while his eyes tok on this discipline and almost hatred. At first I was astonished, an^ I was sorry for his sake when his teeth clicked or a snarl escaped- But I soon found out how fluent he could be in spite of it. With those reticent, blood-flickered eyes of his he looked at r^s like someone who had to explain he was born to difficulty and hard l1"^, and he opened his lips before starting to speak, as if to separ^s ^s upper and lower hairs of the beard. He said, "What about 11lunch?" We had a rotten lunch--thin clam chowder, a smoked ham which he sliced himself, boiled potatoes, wax beans, and twice-heated coffee. It made me kind of sore that a millionaire should invite you to lunch and put on such a lousy feed. He did the talking. Background first, he said. As his collaborator I'd have to have some personal knowledge of him. He started to tell me of his five marriages, taking his share of the blame for each divorce. But the marriages formed part of his education; therefore he had to evaluate them. I was disgusted. I took a sip of the coffee and let it flow back into the cup through my teeth, and made a face. But he didn't notice. He was on his third wife, terribly boring. The fourth gave him real insight into his character. I think he still carried the torch for her. As he was vibrating his neck over a troublesome word I interrupted. I was about to say, "What about some fresh coffee at least?" but I didn't have the heart. Instead I asked, "But can you give me an idea as to what my work will be?" He became more tongue-free then. "I need advice," he said. "Help. I need to clear up some of my concepts, m-my thinking, nn-need cl-clarity. This is s-something, this book." "But what's it about?" "It's not j-just a book--it's a guide, a p-p-program. I originated the idea b-but now it's too much for me. I need help." As he spoke of help he sounded frightened. "I discovered much too m-much. It was just an accident that it happened to be me, and now I'm stu-stuck with the responsibility.": We went into the salon to continue the conversation. His walk was belly-heavy, dragging, as if he had to remind himself not to step on his own dong. It kept on drizzling; the lake looked like milk. Indoors, moony lamps glowed on the plush and Far East crimson and mahogany. There were Persian screens and Invalides horsehair helmets, busts of Pericles and Cicero and Athena, and who-else-not. And there was a portrait of his mother. Sure enough, she looked demented and wore a crown, a scepter in one hand and a rose in the other. The fog-cradled ore-boats from Duluth to Gary were moaning. Robey sat under a light, which showed the acne-exploded follicles under his beard. He mightn't be very bright, Robey humbly started, but what could he do? he couldn't escape ideas. None of us could escape ideas, and everybody was up against the same thing, namely, that there were hundreds of things to think about and to know. He had a duty to do his best at it. This was how he covered up his zeal, which I felt, however, powerfully trembling in the back. This book, he went on, he wanted to call The Needle's Eye. Because there never had been a spiritual life for the rich if they didn't give up everything. But it wasn't any longer merely the rich who were headed for trouble. In the near future technology was going to create abundance and everyone would have enough of everything. There'd be inequality but not starvation or great need. People would eat. Well, when they ate, what then? The Eden of liberty, plenty, and love, the dream of the French Revolution coming to pass. But the French had been too optimistic and thought that when the decrepit old civilizations were busted nothing could stop us from entering the earthly paradise. But it wasn't so simple. We were facing the greatest crisis in history. And'he didn't mean the war, then coming on. No, we'd find out if there was going to be this earthly paradise or not. "B-bread's almost free now in America. What'll hap-happen when the struggle for bread is o-o.... Will goods free man or enslave him?" You almost forgot to think about his goofy looks and about the lavish collection of screens, antiques, irons, Russian sleighs, hanks and tails of helmets, and mother-of-pearl boxes. All the same, even when he was in the top spheres he looked miserable, ready to weep tears. In the meantime the moldy ham taste kept coming up on me. "M-machinery'll make an ocean of commodities. Dictators can't stop it. Man will accept death. Live without God. That's a b-brave project. End of an illusion. But with what values instead?" "That's quite a deal," I said. "But," he said, "that's toward the end of the b-book. I think weshould start with Aristotle discussing how much of worldly goods you need before you can practice virtue." "I haven't read much Aristotle." "Well, that's one of the th-things you have to do. You'll be paid for it, never you worry. But I want this to be a solid piece of work and real scholarly. We're going to cover the Greeks and Romans, Middle Ages, Renaissance Italy, and I'm p-planning a chart, the Min Minoans way high, Calvin down low. Sir Walter Raleigh, up; Carlyle, stinks; modern science, stand-still. Not even interested." In the next half-hour he made sense only now and then; he seemed to tire, and he rambled, he blinked his fire-streaked eyes and coughed in his fist. "N-now-now you tell me about yourself," he said. I didn't know where to begin and I damned him for asking me. But he wasn't lisr tening. By the way he looked at his wristwatch I could tell he was wondering how soon he could be by himself again. So I asked to be shown the can, and he pointed it out. When I came back he appeared to have recovered his interest in the book and wanted to discuss it some more. He said he was sure I was the man to help him. And he started to outline the whole thing for me. Part one, general statement. Part two, pagans. Three, Christians and so forth. Four, practical examples of the highest happiness. His excitement again rose. He took off a house slipper and laid it on a book or album that Illlllll II f was on ^ ^ffs table and every now and then he put it on again. '. llllllilll " He was saying that Christianity originally was aimed at the lowly and slaves, and that was why crucifixion and nailing and all such punitive grandeur of martyrdom were necessary. But at the pole opposite, the happy pole, there ought to be an equal thickness. Joy without sin, love without darkness, gay prosperity. Not to be always spoiling things. 0 great age of generous love and time of a new man! Not the poor, dark, disfigured creature cramped by his falsehood, a liar from the cradle, flogged by poverty, smelling bad from cowardice, deeper than a latrine in jealousy, dead as a cabbage to feeling, a maggot to beauty, a shrimp to duty, spinning the same thread of cocoon preoccupation from his mouth. Without tears to weep or enough expendable breath to laugh; cruel, frigging, parasitic, sneaking, grousing, anxious, and sluggardly. Drilled like a Prussian by the coarse hollering of sergeant fears. Robey poured it on me; he let it come down. I thought, Oh, what a crazy bastard! What kind of screwloose millionaire have they sent me to? All the same my heart responded to this and these things went home. My bottommost thought was, God have mercy on us poor human saps! And this bottommost thought budded out with another: Even if God did have mercy, this was what He'd have mercy on. Then Robey switched on me. He was a quick changer of mood. The damn bourgeoisie, he said, should have been leaders and offered practical examples of happiness. But they were a historic failure. They fumbled it. A weak dominant class, because all they had known how to do was to imitate the flow of money around the world, fill in all the opportunities for profit, like water seeking its own level, and to imitate the machine. Robey didn't sound like himself now, not, that is, as earnest as before, but bookish. He scratched his foot and went on like a lecturer, and with his beard, which looked straw-stuck, he was just one more oddity of this room. But I was still enough of an Einhorn worshiper to be taken with him. And I set aside some of my criticisms and said, "You were talking about the salary before. Could you be more definite?" This made an unpleasant impression. "How m-much do you expect? Till I tell how you pan out, I c-can start you at a reasonable figure." "What's reasonable?" "Fifteen a week?" "You must be making a mistake in your figure. Fifteen? I can get that much on relief and never lift a finger." It made me indignant. "Eighteen then," he followed up fast. "You try to get a plumber to fix your washbasin for less than half a buck an hour. Are you trying to hoax me or something? I don't think you're being serious." "You ought to th-think of the eded-ucation you'll be getting. And it isn't just a job but a cau-cau-cause." He was very disturbed. "Well, twenty bu-bucks and you can live upstairs rent free." So he could lay hold of me and chew my ear whenever he felt like it, night and day? Not on his life. "No," I said, "thirty a week for thirty hours." It hurt him to put out dough. I could see what a labor it was for his soul just to think about it. Finally he said, "Okay, when you work out. Twenty-five to start." "No, thirty, I told you." He cried, "Why do you put me through this t-temble haggle? It's really t-terrible. What the devil! It defeats the whole purpose." His look was positively full of hatred. But he hired me anyway. From day to day he changed his plan. First he wanted to do the historical section and assigned me to read Max Weber, Tawney, and Marx. Next I had to drop all this to start research on a pamphlet on philanthropy. He hated all philanthropist millionaires and wanted to hit all the puritanical rich who looked so bad and felt so unhappy. He named some of his cousins among them, so I could see it was all a family affair. Even the big brazen Wall Street louse with his suckers full of blood did more good in the form of a devil than these rich men who were worried, he said, like everybody else. Simply worried. And he'd rave against them by the hour. I was used to enthusiastic projects that would never leave the inventor's hangar. Like Einhom's indexed Shakespeare back in the old days. And I really understood that Robey wanted from me what Ein- horn had wanted, the very same thing, namely, a listener. He was on the telephone continually or sending the car for me or hunting for me in the library or waiting outside classrooms for me all the time. The first few months he heaped readings on me. I never could have gotten through all those Greeks and Fathers and histories of Rome and the Eastern Empire and whatnot in years. I don't even know that anybody should want to wade through so much stuff. But it suited me fine to sit in the library amid a heap of books. Twice a week we had official conferences. I'd come with my notebooks ready to answer his questions with quotations and paraphrases. It was all right when he was businesslike, but he had peculiar moods, when his voice straggled, he was in woe, his hair in spikes and his color bloodshot, tears or anger in his voice, and much too vexed and bothered to talk to me about Aristotle and theories of happiness and so forth. He sometimes gave me some real jolts and astonishments. As when, looking for him through the mansion one day, I found him standing on a kitchen chair, wrapped in his bathrobe, pumping Flit into a cupboard while hundreds of roaches rushed out practically clutching their heads and falling from the walls. What a moment that was! He wildly raised hell as he worked the spray gun, full of lust, and breathed as loudly as the spray itself while the animals landed as thick as beans or beat it, crazy, like an Oklahoma land rush, in every direction. Caught by me like this, Robey tried to swallow down his emotions and to act as though he didn't hate the cockroaches or kill them with thrilling satisfaction. It was kind of too bad he couldn't admit it. Moreover, I knew I had barged in at the wrong moment and that he'd hold it against me. He wouldn't be able to help it. He gave a bad twitch, as if I had touched him in the small of the back, and came down from the chair. "It's just too much. They're r-r-running away with the hou-hou--the house. I put a slice of bread in the toaster and a roach po-popped up toasted with the bread, so I couldn't t-take it any more." All his rage, like an ember eating a hole through straw, suddenly was out, and he led me to the salon where in the sunlight was seen much busted-out stuffing and tears in buttonless royal green velvet and dust. He wiped the oily killer juice off on his gown, saying, "Did you work up that Italian Renaissance stuff for me about the p-princes and the h-humanists? How they suffered without God!" he said, looking off. "But they were godlike themse-selves. What courage! And terrible, t-t-too. But it had to happen, that m-man would dare." In the autumn he lost his grip on himself. He went on giving me assignments and I collected my thirty bucks with a free conscience, but he didn't do any work. I had often wondered what sort of women he went around with when unmarried, whether spiny whores or ladies of his own set, or Back-of-the-Yards pickups, or nice little university girls, or what. I was surprised. He went for ordinary strippers from the Near North Side, from dark Street, Broadway, Rush, and those parts, who were rough on him in their dealings. And as if it were a just punishment he took it from them and even smiled. He tried to sell me on these girls, but I had taken up once more with Sophie Geratis. He mostly seemed to want me-to come with him. Which I did a few times to North Side joints. One stripper insulted him about the beard; he bowed to this. Only his red eyes, which he didn't take off her--she was dressed now, Wearing a gray* tailored suit--were something scandalous. But he merely said pedantically, "In the old days of Elizabeth the barbers had lutes and guitars in the shop so the gentlemen waiting could sing and play. It was because the beards and the lovelocks took so long to fix." On the same evening as he made this mild observation he went on a rampage and tore the meter off in a taxi. I was supposed to get out at Fifty-fifth Street but I worried lest the driver sock him for this and so took him home first. But he gave me a rough time just the same. He was very sensitive and wanted my good opinion; however, he was extremely variable, humble one minute and making sure of his money's worth the next, and yelling or being sullen, sticking out his big red mouth in unhappiness or anger. I remember one day in particular. There were snow and sunshine all around, and it was fresh and beautiful, but he was in a nasty mood, prodding his hands knuckle to knuckle in the pigskin gloves. He hitched at me and kept on and on. So I said, "You don't want me to work for you. You want somebody who'll take this lousy nervousness from you." And I wrapped my old coat around me, which was a camel's hair going bald in places, and set off across the yard. He came after me to take it all back. In the thick powder of snow I had on overshoes, but he came on in his fine tan shoes which were slipperlike, saying, "Augie, let's not have a fight. For the love of God. Listen, I'm sorry." But I went on, good and mad. And that evening he phoned me and asked me to come and get him downtown. I could hear that things weren't right. He said he'd be at the Pump Room, than which few places were considered niftier in the city. When I got there and ;' asked for him, two knickered footmen brought him out. He was drunk, mute, numb, and could scarcely budge a feature of his face or work his tongue. Little by little he had come to depend on me. Somewhat like Einhom in the old days, he had found I wouldn't take advantage of him and that I was dependable. And with his peculiarity and confusion, downright Guiana jungle manifestations or freaks that the power of life will squeeze into sometimes, there nevertheless was something in him that drew me. Just that power, no doubt, tormenting his humanity and tormented in return. And while he was a bachelor and shared that mansion with his sister Caroline--well, she didn't do him much good. She was screwy. And when she found I had been in Mexico she took a shine to me, believing herself Spanish. She wrote me notes, such as, "Eres muy Guapo." And now and then a telegram arrived, like, "Amiga, que te vaya con toda suerte, Carolina." She was terribly scrambled, poor woman. After all, I had taken care of my brother George. That ability or quality was with me yet, and sometimes people sensed it. Sometimes I wished I could become a shoemaker too.