The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [21]
CHAPTER XXII
In my old room up at Owens' which I finally got back I went along with the changes of the times, industrial, military, scientific. Personally I experienced steep variations myself, bad news, wasted expenditures, wicked dreams, wizard happenings like the appearance of animals in the heat of evenings to desert Fathers, still I am thankful to say that as I view it I was not harmed. The police couldn't have had any complaint against me, regardless of what the moralists might have had. The worse offenses were in my imagination, where such belong, while like a big and busy enterprise that tries to cover all it can, I also brooded in my higher mind over my course of life. I came to certain conclusions too, which were -sometimes fragmentary--such as, The reason for solitude can only be reunion; or. Oh, it's very tiring to have your own opinions on everything--but other times were very full indeed, as will be shown in due course. I rambled around Chicago, my sociable self as always. But I was reverberating still from the plucks and pulls of Mexico. Thea didn't write, having disappeared for good to some blue shores of the ancient seas, probably on the trail of flamingos, with some new lover who would understand her no better than I did, and camping on a parapet with her guns and nooses, cameras, long-distance glasses. She'd pass into old age like this and never be any different. I wasn't getting any younger myself, and my friends would make pleasantries about my appearance, which wasn't at all prosperous. I smiled minus a couple of teeth of the lower line and was somewhat smeared, or knocked, kissed by the rocky face of clasping experience. My hair grew upward, copious, covering my old mountain hunter's scars. Undeniably I had a touch of the green of cousin Five Properties' eyes in my own, and I went along whiffing a cigar and lacking any air of steady application to tasks, forgetful, elliptical, gleeful sometimes, but ah, more larky formerly than now. While I mused I often picked Wp-i St up objects off the street because they looked to me like coins; slugs, metals from bottletops, and tinfoil scraps buried, thus obviously hoping for a lucky break. Also I wished somebody would die and leave me everything. This was bad, for who could benefit me by dying that I shouldn't love and want to keep on earth? And what good did finding coins do, even if each was a quarter, in the consummation and final form of my life? Why, no good, friends, not. the least bit. It also gave amusement that I was after a teaching certificate for grade school, for I hardly looked to be the type, I suppose. Yet this I was persistent about. I loved the practice teaching. It moved me while I did it; it was no problem to be my natural self with the kids-- as why, God help us, should it be with anyone? But let us not ask questions whose answers are among the world's well-kept secrets. In the classroom, or outside in the playground holleration, smelling pee in the hall, hearing the piano trimbles from the music room, among the busts, maps, and chalk-dust sunbeams, I was happy. I felt at home. I wanted to give the kids my best and tell them all I knew. At this same school, teaching Latin and algebra, was my onetime neighbor, Kayo Obermark. Bushy, sloppy, and fat, he used to lie on his bed at Owens' when he had the room next to mine in his underpants, his thighs curl-haired and feet smelly, and stare at the wall with determined thought as he put out cigarettes behind him without looking in the grease of an old skillet in which he fried salami. He kept a milk bottle by the bed to do duty in, disliking trips to the bathroom. Now the kids were springing like locusts around him while he walked in the schoolyard, sullen, like an emperor. His face was big, moody, white, unevenly scraped. Crumbled Kleenexes stuck to him; he smelled of a cold and sounded snotty. But he wasn't really sullen, this was just his dignity, and I was pleased that he was a teacher here. He said, "I saw you drive up here in your car." "It started this morning for a change." I did in fact own a ten-year- old Buick on which a very pleasant guy had gypped me like fury. It wouldn't start on cold mornings and was a trial to me. I put in two batteries on Padilla's advice but there was a fundamental defect in that the rods were bent. However, with a push it would go, and as it had a rumble seat and a long hood it looked powerful. "Are you married yet?" said Kayo. ' "No, I'm sorry to say." "I have a son," he said proudly. "You better get on the ball. Don't you have anybody? Women are easy to get. It's your duty to have sons. There was an old philosopher caught by his disciple behind the Stoa 448 ~ with a woman, and he said, 'Mock not! I plant a man.' But I've been hearing all kinds of things about you, that you went to Mexico with a circus or carnival and that you were nearly assassinated too." He was in quite a mood, and he walked me round the schoolyard several times, being extremely kind in his haughty way and quoting various poems in his tense tenor voice. Perish strife, both from among gods and men, And wrath which maketh even him that is considerate cruel, Which getteth up in the heart of a man like smoke, And the taste thereof is sweeter than drops of honey. Les vrais voyageurs sont ceux-la seuls qui portent Pour partir; caws legers, semblables aux ballons, De lew fatalite jamais Us ne s'ecartent, Et, sans savoir powquoi, disent toujours: Allans.' This last was probably aimed at me and accused me of being too light of heart and ignorantly saying good-by. I seemed to have critics everywhere. However, for a cold day this had a very bright sun, the trains were passing in blackness over an embankment of yellow concrete, the kids were screaming and whirling over the whole vast play yard, around the flagpole and in and out of the portables, and I felt especially stirred. "You should get married," said Kayo. "I'd like to. I think about it often. As a matter of fact I dreamed last night that I was, but it wasn't so pleasant. I was very disturbed. It started out all right. I came home from work and there were gorgeous little birds by the window, and I smelled barbecue. My wife was very handsome, but her beautiful eyes were filled with tears and twice as big as normal. 'Lu, what's the matter?' I said. She said, 'The children were born unexpectedly this afternoon and I'm so ashamed I've hidden them.' 'But why? What's there to be ashamed of?' 'One of them is a calf,' she said, 'and the other is a bug of some kind.' 'I can't believe it. Where are they?' 'I didn't want the neighbors to see, so I put them behind the piano.' I felt terrible. But still they were our children and it wasn't right that they should be behind the piano, so I went to look. But there on a chair behind the upright, who should be sitting but my mother--who, as you know, is blind. I said, 'Mama, what are you sitting here for? Where are the children?' And she looked at me with sort of pity and said, 'Oh, my son, what are you doing? You must do right.' Then I l> - 449 started to sob. I felt full of tragedy, and I said, 'Isn't that what I want to do?'" "Ah, you poor guy," said Kayo, sorry for me. "You're no worse than anybody else, don't you know that?" "I really should simplify my existence. How much trouble is a person required to have? I mean, is it an assignment I have to carry out? It can't be, because the only good I ever knew of was done by people when they were happy. But to tell you the truth. Kayo, since you are the kind of guy who will understand it, my pride has always been hurt by my not being able to give an account of myself and always being manipulated. Reality comes from giving an account of yourself, and that's the worst of being helpless. Oh, I don't mean like the swimmer on the sea or the child on the grass, which is the innocent being in the great hand of Creation, but you can't lie down so innocent on objects made by man," I said to him. "In the world of nature you can trust, but in the world of artifacts you must beware. There you must know, and you can't keep so many things on your mind and be happy. 'Look on my works ye mighty and despair!' Well, never mind about Ozymandias now being just trunkless legs; in his day the humble had to live in his shadow, and so do we live under shadow, with acts of faith in functioning of inventions, as up in the stratosphere, down in the subway, crossing bridges, going through tunnels, rising and falling in elevators where our safety is given in keeping. Things done by man which overshadow us. And this is true also of meat on the table, heat in the pipes, print on the paper, sounds in the air, so that all matters are alike, of the same weight, of the same rank, the caldron of God's wrath on page one and Wieboldt's sale on page two. It is all external and the same. Well, then what makes your existence necessary, as it should be? These technical achievements which try to make you exist in their way?" Kayo said, not much surprised by this, "What you are talking about is moha--a Navajo word, and also Sanskrit, meaning opposition of the finite. It is the Bronx cheer of the conditioning forces. Love is the only answer to moha, being infinite. I mean all the forms of love, eros, agape, libido, philia, and ecstasy. They are always the same but sometimes one quality dominates and sometimes another. Look, I'm glad we've had this chance to meet again. You seem to have become a much more serious fellow. Why don't you come and meet my wife? My mother-inlaw lives with us and she's kind of a dull old woman who fusses about everything, but we can ignore her. She's a big help with the kid incidentally. But she's always giving me an earful about how my brotherin-law is doing so well for himself. He's a radio-repair man and a real fool. But come to dinner and we can have some conversation. I want to show you my kid too." So I did go home with him; that was kind of Kayo. But his wife was unfriendly, highly suspicious. The child was very nice, for his age, of course, which was young. While I was there the brother-in-law came over; he was interested in the Buick, which fortunately was running well that night. He asked me questions, attracted by the rumble seat, and then drove it around and offered to buy it. I set a moderate price, taking some loss but never mentioning the bent rods, I am ashamed to say. Well, he wanted to buy it right off, so we went to his house where he gave me a check for one hundred and eighty dollars on the Continental Illinois. But then he wouldn't let me get out of the house. Jokingly he said I should let him win back some of his money at poker. His wife played too. Obviously they were going to try to strip me. Kayo had to sit in on the game as well, so it would look friendly. It was really an attempted swindle. We sat at the circular table by the stove with a pot of coffee and condensed milk and played far into the night. The workbench with its busted radios was right there in the large kitchen. The husband got angry at the wife because she lost. If she had won they'd have won double, but since she lost he swore at her and she screamed at him. Kayo lost too. I was the only winner and would rather not have been. In fact I refunded Kayo's money on the way home. But then the brother-in-law stopped the check two days later, and I had to come and fetch the car, for it wouldn't run. There was an angry scene. And Kayo was very put out and wouldn't talk much to me at school for a time, though he eventually thawed out. I guess I really shouldn't have sold the car without telling of the bent rods. Sophie Geratis, my friend of hotel-organizer days, was married now but wanted to divorce her husband and marry me. She told me he had a vice with other men and didn't pay attention to her at all. He gave her charge accounts and a car but he wanted her only as window dressing. His business was to sell a product to greenhouses, and this certain product was a monopoly, so his life was easy and he was chauffeured every day in his homburg hat and gloves around the hothouse belt of the city. Therefore Sophie spent a lot of time with me, fixing up my room at Owens' as it had never been fixed up before. She wondered that I would sleep on a pillow without a pillowcase, and she brought over several. "You're stingy," she told me. "You're not just sloppy, you appreciate good things." She was right. Sophie was very intelligent, never mind that she had been a chambermaid. About some things I was tight. When I went into a good bar or club I would feel my pocket and worry about the check. Naturally she knew this. "But also I know that you give your dough away if somebody touches you the right way. That's not good either. And there's that car of yours, but that's just plain dumbness. You were a knucklehead to buy it." With her floating wide gaze, brown and slow, Sophie was very pretty. In addition to which, as I've said, she had gifts of the mind, though she was inclined to use them in a scornful way. She wouldn't use the fancy charge accounts her husband gave her. Wearing a hat of Polish flowers she had bought at Goldblatt's she would wash her things in my sink. She was in her slip and smoked a cigarette. The paradoxical part is that she was a very tender person, she was good to me, and not just because she needed me but somehow just the reverse, because I needed her. However, I wasn't prepared to marry. "We'd get along fine if I fitted in more with your ambitions," she said. "I'm all right for bed, but not to marry. When that other girl came to fetch you, you dropped me in a second. You probably would be ashamed of me. You have the most use for me when you're feeling weak or low. I know you. Nothing is ever good enough for you to stick to. Your old man must have been some aristocrat bastard." "I doubt it. My brother says he drove a truck for a laundry on Marshfield. I never thought that he was a hotshot. Besides, he found my mother working in a Wells Street loft." "You don't really want me, do you?" Well, she meant why wasn't I going to set my feet on a path of life and stop looking over the field. Why, there was nothing that I longed for more than that. Let it come! Let there be consummation, and superfluity be finished from the next drop of the pendulum onward! Let the necessity for the mystical great things of life, which, not satisfied, lives in us as the father of secret miseries, be fulfilled and have a chance to show it's not the devil himself. Did Sophie think I didn't want to have a wife, and sons and daughters, or be busy at my appropriate daily work? I stood up then and there and told her how entirely wrong she was about me. "What are we waiting for?" she said, glad. "Let's start! I'll be a good -wife to you, you know I will. I need to begin too." Then I got red and embarrassed, and my tongue wouldn't move. "See?" she said with sad frankness and wide, shadowed, rouged mouth while the electric light shone down on her clear bare shoulders. "I ain't good enough. Well, who is?" I wasn't marrying just yet, that was what I said. But what Sophie had to tell me was what my Cossack pal also had meant, that time he hurt my pride. What he had really meant to say to me, as I sensed infallibly and right off, was that I couldn't be hurt enough by the fate of other people. He should have known, as he himself was wandering from here to there, and what should he be kicking around for, from Moscow to Turkestan, to Arabia, to Paris, Singapore? Nobody gets out of these pains like a pilgrim, looking at temples and docks and smoking cigarettes past the bone heaps of history and over many times digested soil, there where people stayed at home and caught it in the neck. So Sophie's face, which was maturer now than the pretty face in the union office that I had first seen, was hurt. But she didn't quit me this time as when, after Thea knocked at the door, she suddenly had covered the backs of her thighs. By now she knew, I reckon, how much disappointment is in the taste of existence. But I didn't wish to marry her. She would have scolded me for my own good too much, I thought. So this one more soul I would fly by, that wanted something from me. "You're waiting for that girl," she said with envy, wrongly. I said, "No, I'll never see her again." Nevertheless I was getting somewhere, you mustn't go entirely by appearances. I was coming to some particularly important conclusions. In fact I was lying on my couch in the state of grand summary one afternoon, still in my bathrobe and having called off all duties in the inspiration of the day, when Clem Tambow arrived, full of an idea of his own. I don't believe Clem had many of the vices that lead to damnation, but such as they were they were very evident on this occasion--late rising, puffiness, double-breasted slovenliness of the kind that old gentleman La Bruyere thought so sordid, tobacco stink, lint, and cat hairs on him, kept up by dime-store purchase and cheap accommodation, as in aftershave lotion, Sta-comb, artificial silk socks, and so forth, besides his lordly self-abuse look. Be that as it might, he had been lying in bed too this solemn brown Chicago day and working also on a scheme. He was going out into professional life. As soon as he got his psychology degree in the winter he aimed to get an office in one of the older skyscrapers on Dearborn near Jackson and set up as a vocationalguidance counselor. "You?" I said. "You never did a day's work in your life!" "That's what makes me so ideal," he answered, ready for me. "I'm relaxed. No bunk, Augie. You remember Benny Fry from the poolroom? He's cleaning up. He does marriage counseling too, and gives rabbit tests." "If it's the same guy I'm thinking of, the one who wore the elevator shoes, didn't they have him in court last month for a phony?" "Yes, but we can do the same thing legitimately." "I don't want to throw cold water," I said, still full of my own experience. "But how will you get clients?" "Oh, that's no problem. Do people seem to you to know what they want? They beg you to tell them. So we'll be the experts they come to." "Oh no, Clem. Not 'we.' " "Augie, I want you to come into this with me. I don't like to go into things by myself. I'll give the aptitude tests and you do the interviews. With the new Rogers nondirective technique you let them do the talking anyway. There's nothing to it. Listen here, you can't go on from one screwball job to another." "I know, but Clem, something has just happened to me today." "You're just being stubborn again," he said. "We can clean up in this mm,! i racket." "No, Clem. What could I do for these guys or women? I'd be ashamed to take their dough in this kind of an employment bureau." "Oh, bushwah! You don't send guys out on jobs, you tell them what they're good for. This is modern activity. Modem activity is entirely different." "Stop arguing," I said severely. "Can't you see something has happened to me too today?" Then he saw that I really was moved. I made a lengthy declaration, which I remember went somewhat as follows: "I have a feeling," I said, "about the axial lines of life, with respect to which you must be straight or else your existence is merely clownery, hiding tragedy. I must have had a feeling since I was a kid about these axial lines which made me want to have my existence on them, and so I have said 'no' like a stubborn fellow to all my persuaders, just on the obstinacy of my memory of these lines, never entirely clear. But lately I have felt these thrilling lines again. When striving stops, there they are as a gift. I was lying on the couch here before and they suddenly went quivering right straight through me. Truth, love, peace, bounty, use'!|j fulness, harmony! And all noise and grates, distortion, chatter, distraction, effort, superfluity, passed off like something unreal. And I believe that any man at any time can come back to these axial lines, even if an unfortunate bastard, if he will be quiet and wait it out. The ambition of something special and outstanding I have always had is only a boast that distorts this knowledge from its origin, which is the oldest knowledge, older than the Euphrates, older than the Ganges. At any time life can come together again and man be regenerated, and doesn't have to be a god or public servant like Osiris who gets torn apart annually for the sake of the common prosperity, but the man himself, finite and taped as he is, can still come where the axial lines are. He will be brought into focus. He will live with true joy. Even his pains will be joy if they are true, even his helplessness will not take away his power, even wandering will not take him away from himself, even the big social jokes and hoaxes need not make him ridiculous, even disappointment after disappointment need not take away his love. Death will not be terrible to him if life is not. The embrace of other true people will take away his dread of fast change and short life. And this is not imaginary stuff, Clem, because I bring my entire life to the test." "You really are a persistent and obstinate type of a guy," said Clem. "I thought if I knew more my problem would be simplified, and maybe I should complete my formal education. But since I've been working for Robey I have reached the conclusion that I couldn't utilize even ten per cent of what I already knew, I'll give you an example. I read about King Arthur's Round Table when I was a kid, but what am I ever going to do about it? My heart was torched by sacrifice and pure attempts, so what should I do? Or take the Gospels. How are you supposed to put them to use? Why, they're not utilizable! And then you go and pile on top of that more advice and information. Anything that just adds information that you can't use is plain dangerous. Anyway, there's too much of everything of this kind, that's come home to me, too much history and culture to keep track of, too many details, too much news, too much example, too much influence, too many guys who tell you to be as they are, and all this hugeness, abundance, turbulence, Niagara Falls torrent. Which who is supposed to interpret? Me? I haven't got that much head to master it all. I get carried away. It doesn't give my feelings enough of a chance if I have to store up and become like an encyclopedia. Why, just as a question of time spent in getting prepared for life, look! a man could spend forty, fifty, sixty years like that inside the walls of his own being. And all great experience would only take place within the walls of his being. And all high conversation would take place within those walls. And all achievement would stay within those walls. And all glamour too. And even hate, monstrousness, enviousness, murder, would be inside them. This would be only a terrible, hideous dream about existing. It's better to dig ditches and hit other guys with your shovel than die in the walls." "Well, come on, what are you trying to prove?" "I don't want to prove a single thing, not a thing. Do you think I have this kind of ambition to stand out and prove something? Almost everybody I ever knew wanted to show in some way how he held the world together. This only comes from feeling the strain of holding yourself together, and it gets exaggerated into the whole world from the hard labor you put into it. But it doesn't take hard labor. Or at least shouldn't. You don't do that. The world is held for you. So I don't want to be representative or exemplary or head of my generation or any model of manhood. All I want is something of my own, and bethink myself. This is why I'm sounding off now and am so excited. I want a place of my own. If it was on Greenland's icy mountain, I'd take and go to Greenland, and I'd never loan myself again to any other guy's scheme." "So tell me before I die from impatience, what's this deal of yours?" "I aim'to get myself a piece of property and settle down on it. Right here in Illinois would suit me fine, though I wouldn't object to Indiana or Wisconsin. Don't worry, I'm not thinking about becoming a farmer, though I might do a little farming, but what I'd like most, is to get married and set up a kind of home and teach school. I'll marry--of course my wife would have to agree with me about this--and then I'd get my mother out of the blind-home and my brother George up from the South. I think Simon might give me some dough to get a start. Oh, I don't expect to set up the Happy Isles. I don't consider myself any Prospero. I haven't got the build. I have no daughter. I never was a king, for instance. No, no, I'm not looking for any Pindar Hyperborean dwelling with the gods in ease a tearless life, never aging--" "This is the most fantastic thing I ever heard come out of you yet. It's a scheme worthy of your mind. It makes me proud of you, kind of, though I'm also appalled when I think of the things you must think about when you look so calm and restful. But where are you going to get the kids for your school?" "I thought maybe I could get accredited with the state or county, or whoever does it, as a foster-parent, and get kids from institutions. This way the board and keep would be taken care of, and we'd have these kids." "Plus children of your own?" "Of course. I'd love to have my own little children. I long for little children. And these kids from institutions who have had it rough--" "And who might turn out to be little John Dillingers or Basil Bangharts or Tommy O'Connors. But I know what you're hoping. You think you'll love them so they'll turn into little'Michelangelos and Tolstois, and you'll give them their chance in life and rescue them, so you'll be their saint and holy father. But if you make them so good, how will they get along in the world? They'll have to pass their whole life all alone." "No, really, I could live with them. I'd be very happy. I'd fix up a shop for woodwork. Maybe I'd even learn how to repair my own car. My brother George could be the shoemaking instructor. Maybe I'd study languages so I could teach them. My mother could sit on the porch and the animals would come around her, by her shoes, the roosters and the cats. Maybe we could start a tree nursery." "You do too want to be a king," said Clem. "You sonofabitch, you want to be the kind goddam king over these women and children and your half-wit brother. Your father ditched the family, and you did your share of ditching too, so now you want to make up for it." "You can always find bad motives," I said. "There are always bad motives. So all I can say is I don't want to have them. I don't know , about my unfortunate father--he seems to have done as most others, get in and then take off. Seemingly for liberty. Most likely for other trouble or suffering. But why should I want to cheat on a thing like this, when I'm looking for something lasting and durable and trying to get where those axial lines are? I realize this may not sound like such a great scheme to many people. But I know I can't have much of a chance to beat life at its greatest complication and meshuggah power, so I want to start in lower down, and simpler." "I wish you luck," he said. "But I don't think it ever can happen." Well, now I had this sterling idea, my project. I was at the turning point. For a while I thought seriously that I might marry Sophie but that was in my hurry to make a start. When all of a sudden--wham! the .; war broke out on that terrible Sunday afternoon, and then there was < nothing but war that you could think about. I got carried away immediately. Overnight I had no personal notions at all. Where had they gone to? They were on the bottom somewhere. It was just the war I cared about and I was on fire. How much are you required to care when such an event comes? Me, I cared like anything. At first I went off my rocker, I hated the enemy, I couldn't wait to go and fight. I was a madman in the movies and yelled and clapped in the newsreel. Well, what you terribly need you take when you get the chance, I reckon. After a while, if I thought of my great idea, I told myself that after the war I'd get a real start, but I couldn't do it while the whole earth was busy in this hell-making project, or man-eating Saturns were picking guys up left and right around me. I went around and made a speech to my pals, much to the amazement of people, about the universal ant heap the enemy would establish if they won, a fate nobody could escape then, mankind under one star of government, a human desert rolling up to monster pyramids of power. A few centuries after, and on this same earth's surface, under the same sun and moon, where there once had been men like gods there would be nothing but this bug-humanity that would make itself as weird as the threatening universe outside and would imitate it by creating human mechanical regularity as invariable as physical laws. Obedience would be God, and freedom the Devil. There wouldn't any new Moses arise to lead an exodus, because amidst the new pyramids there wouldn't any new Moses be bred. Oh yes, I got up on my hindiegs like an orator and sounded off to everyone. Then I went to volunteer, but it turned out that Bizcocho had ruptured me. The Army and Navy doctors had me cough for them and agreed that I had inguinal hernia. They recommended that I be operated on, which was free of charge. So I weni to County Hospital to have this done. I didn't mention it to Mama, never telling her of such things. Sophie said, "You're absolutely nuts, going under the knife while well and having an out from the draft." She took it personally. Her husband was being inducted, which was all the more reason for me to stick around, and if I was going to the hospital that meant I didn't want her. However, she saw me through. Clem also dropped around to see me in the ward, and so did Simon, but Sophie was there every visiting hour. The operation was rough on me, and when it was done I couldn't stand straight for a long time and went slightly bent over. The hospital was mobbed and was like Lent and Carnival battling. This was Harrison Street, where Mama and I used to come for her specs, and not far from where I had to go once to identify that dead coal heaver, the thundery gloom, bare stone brown, while the red cars lumbered and clanged. Every bed, window, "separate frame of accommodation, every corner was filled, like the walls of Troy or the streets of Clermont when Peter the Hermit was preaching. Shruggers, hobblers, truss and harness wearers, crutch-dancers, wall inspectors, wheelchair people in bandage helmets, wound smells and drug flowers blossoming from gauze, from colorful horrors and out of the deep sinks. Not far the booby-hatch voices would scream, sing, and chirp and sound like the tropical bird collection of Lincoln Park. On warm days I went up to the roof and had a look at the city. Around was Chicago. In its repetition it exhausted your imagination of details and units, more units than the cells of the brain and bricks of Babel. The Ezekiel caldron of wrath, stoked with bones. In time the caldron too would melt. A mysterious tremor, dust, vapor, emanation of stupendous effort traveled with the air, over me on top of the great establishment, so full OF AXJGIE MARCH as it was, and over the clinics, clinks, factories, flophouses, morgue, skid row. As before the work of Egypt and Assyria, as before a sea, you're nothing here. Nothing. Simon came to see me and threw a bag of oranges on the bed. He bawled me out that I hadn't gone to a private hospital. His temper was bad and nothing and nobody was spared in his glare. But they were letting me out, so why fuss? I was still stooped, as if stitched in the wrong places, but they said it was just temporary. Well and good, I got back to the South Side and found that Padilla had a girl staying in my room, his guest, and he moved me into his own place. This was just a formality that the young lady occupied my room, and sheer etiquette, because he did too. He was never at home. Over at the university he was working in the uranium project. Where he lived was a little stale-air flat in a tenement. The plaster stuck on the laths mostly by the force of the paint. The neighbors were relief families, night owls who walked to the window at 4 p.m. in their skivvies curiously to greet the day, chicks, Filipinos neat and sharp, drunk old women and gloomy guys. After a descent of many flights you came out of this structure and crossed an entry of unusual architectural fantasy, horizontally long, a Chinese hothouse where nothing grew beneath the vermilion frames but sundry sticks, old Tribunes of the cats and dogs, trash. In the street, by cylinders of garbage cans, you were just a step from a place of worship for Buddhists that was formerly a church. Then a chop-suey joint. Then a handbook behind, as usual, a dummy cigar store where the shoppers were with racing forms, and the retired, or precinct leaders, and heavy on their feet cigar chewers, and cops. I wasn't feeling very keen while in this tenement. It took me many long months to get better, and I was doing very poorly. And about this time I got a letter from Thea, APO San Francisco, telling me that she had married an Air Force captain. She felt she should tell me, but she maybe shouldn't have, because the grief of it laid me up. My eyes sunk even deeper than before, and my hands and feet were cold, and I lay in Padilla's dirty bed, feeling sick and broken up. Naturally I couldn't be comforted by Sophie. It wasn't even the right thing to do, to accept comfort from her and not tell her the trouble. It was Clem I told how broken up I was. "I know how it is. I had an affair with a copper's daughter and she did the same to me last year," he said. "She married some gambler and went to Florida. Anyway, you told me long ago it was over." "It was," I said. "But I see you Marches are a romantic family. I keep running into your brother with a blond doll. Even Einhom has seen them. He was being carried piggyback from the Oriental Theatre, from Lou Holtz over to see Juno and the Paycock--he doesn't go out often, and when he does, as you know, he likes a full day. And while he was riding in his black cape on Louie Elimeiek, the ex-welter, whom should he bump into but Simon and this broad. By his description the same broad. A zaftige piece too, in a mink stole." "Poor Charlotte," I said, thinking at once of my sister-in-law. "What's the matter with Charlotte? You mean that Charlotte doesn't understand about leading a double life? A woman with money and not know that? Double if not more? When it's practically the law of the land?" So I had something more to think about during my convalescence, when I wanted to be gone from Chicago anyhow, to where world events were thick. One day I was on the West Side. I had gone to take Mama for a walk in Douglas Park. It was good for us both, as I still dragged somewhat. Douglas Park in a cold sunlight, mossy, benches not well kept up in wartime, with elderly folks on them, newspapers, furs, stucco walls--paper sailing wild over (he lagoon. Mama was beginning to have the aging stiffness and was somewhat bowlegged; she enjoyed the cold air though, and still had her calm smooth color of health. I was taking her back to the Home when Simon's car drew up beside us. A woman, not Charlotte, was with him. I saw the fur stole and golden hair. Right away Simon, with smiles, wigwagged that Mama wasn't to be aware of her. Then he came out on the sidewalk and it seemed just plain not good enough for him, this West Side concrete so powerfully cracked and with grocers' and butchers' sawdust. He looked very good. From the shell cordovans to the ruby points of his cufflinks, the shirt white on white, most likely a Sulka tie, a Strook coat, everything handstitched and not intended just for cover like a Crusoe goatskin. I have to confess that, arriving like this, he was enviable to see. Was he here to visit Mama? Or to point her out to the girl? To identify me for her he said, with pleasure, "Well, my brother! Isn't this a swell surprise! Why don't I ever see you? And, Mama, how are you?" An arm around each of us, he turned us to face the car, where the girl acknowledged us, friendly. "It's great the family's together," he said. I wondered whether Mama felt him acting toward someone; maybe she did. But how would she in her innocence have known what to think about these two specially treated or gardened, enveloped in finery, pampered bodies that traveled on the Cadillac chassis and high cushions like a pair of carnival Romans cruising the Corso, this highbreasted girl and Simon? He was making real dough now. A company he had invested in was manufacturing a gimmick for the Army. When he told me how the money poured in he always laughed, as if astonished himself, and said he hoped to catch up with my millionaire, Robey, and write a book himself. Then I'd be his helper. A crack I didn't like. Robey, by the way, was getting ready to go to Washington. He didn't seem able to explain why but just had to go. Simon said, "I just stopped to find out if you were all right, Ma. I can't stay. And I'm taking Augie with me." "Go, boys," she said. She wanted us to have business together. We took her up the stone stairs and let her into the Home. When we were alone Simon said, and meant every word of it, "Before you start to think any different, I love this girl." "You do? Since when?" "Quite a while now." "But who is she? Where does she come from?" Smiling, he told me, "She left her husband the same night we met. It was at a night club in Detroit. I was there just two days on business. I danced with her and she said she'd never stay another day with this guy. I said, 'Come'along,' and she's been with me ever since." "Here, in Chicago?" "Of course here--where do you think! Augie, I want you to know ,, her. It's time you knew each other. She's alone a lot because--you can ^understand why. She knows all about you. Don't worry, I told her' nothing but good things. All right!" he said, standing up straight over me with his advantage in height of an inch or two; the red was in his cheeks like a polish, or the color of effrontery. He answered my thought about Charlotte by saying, "I didn't think it would be so hard for you to understand how this is." "No, it's not so hard." "This has nothing to do with Charlotte. I don't tell Charlotte what to do. Let her go and do the same." "Would she? Can she?" "That's her problem if she can't. My problem--my problem is Renee here. And myself." For a second, as he said "myself," he looked grim and somehow in thought followed his soul past lots of dangers, downward. I couldn't see what there could be of such danger. I didn't yet understand. However, I was fascinated by him, by them both. "Renee, this is Augie," he said, turning me down the steps. It was a hard thing for me to get through my head, after I came to know her, that she could be so important to him. Though slight, she certainly was stacked. You could see how her breasts went on with great richness under her clothes--du monde an balcon is the way they say it in the capital of sex--and her endowments went down into, and were visible through, her silk stockings. Extremely young, her face was made up to some thickness of gold tone, lips drawn to a forward point by thick rouge; her lashes and brows seemed to have gold dust sprinkled and rubbed into them; her hair, golden, appeared added to, like the hair of Versailles; her combs were gold, her glasses gold-trimmed, and she wore golden jewelry. I was about to say that she looked immature, but maybe that means that she didn't bear this gold freight with the fullest confidence; perhaps only some big woman could have done that. Not necessarily a physical giantess but a person whose capacity for adornment was really very great. One of that old sister-society whose pins and barrettes and little jars and combs from Assyria or Crete lie so curious with the wavy prongs and stained gold and green-gnawed bronze in museum cases--those sacred girls laid in the bed by the priests to wait for the secret night visit of Attis or whoever, the maidens who took part in the hot annual battles of gardens, amorous ditty singers, Syrians, Amorites, Moabites, and so on. The line continuing through femmes galantes, courts of love, Aquitaines, infantas, Medicis, courtesans, wild ladies, down to modern night clubs or first-class salons of luxury liners and the glamorous passengers for whom chefs plot their biggest souffle, pastry-fish, and other surprises. This was what Renee was supposed to be, and in my opinion she wasn't entirely. You may think that for this all you have to do is surrender to instinct. As if that were so easy! For start that and how do you know which instincts are going to come out on top? Renee seemed like a very suspicious girl to me. Along her nose, like a light, there was sort of a suspicion and uncertainness. As soon as Simon had to step out of the car for a few minutes her first remark was, "I love your brother. The first minute I saw him I fell in love, and I'll love him till I die." She gave me her hand, in the glove, to take. "Believe me, Augie."' As this may have been true it was kind of a pity that she had to throw suspicion on it by extra effort. Games and games. Games within games. Even though, despite the games, somehow there remain things meant in earnest. "I want us to know each other," she went on. "Maybe you don't realize it but Simon watches over you; you mean the world and all to him. You should hear how he talks about you! He says as soon as you really settle down to something you'll become a great man. And I only want you to consider me as a person who loves Simon and not judge me harshly." "Why should I do that? Because of my sister-in-law?" It made her stiffen, when I mentioned Charlotte. But then she saw I meant no harm. Simon would speak of Charlotte all the time. It surprised me. He said to his girl friend, "I want no trouble out of you about her. I respect her. I'll never leave her under any circumstances. In her way she's as close to me as anybody in the world." He was romantic about Charlotte too. And Renee had to bear it and know she could never have any exclusive claim on him. It didn't fail to occur to me that I had once done the same thing after my own style with Thea and Stella, covered myself from one by putting one in the way of the other, so I wouldn't be at the mercy of either. So neither one could do harm. Oh, I caught wise to this. You bet I knew it. It wasn't as Simon said. It wasn't even the common-sense consideration that he and Charlotte owned property jointly. I tried to explain this and warn him, but I only astonished him. However, before I tried I waited till I knew the situation well. And how he and Renee did was as follows: Nearly every morning he picked her up at her apartment; she was waiting outside or in a restaurant nearby. She then drove him to his office, which she didn't enter though most of his employees knew her. Afterward she went off by herself to shop or to do his errands; or she read a magazine and waited till he'd be free. All day long she was with him or not far off, and then in the evening she drove him almost to his door and she went back home in a taxi. And during the day, every hour nearly, there were crises when they shouted and screamed at each other--she enlarged her eyes and arched and hardened her neck and he lost his head and sometimes tried to swat her while his skin wrinkled and teeth set with fury. He never had done anything about that broken front tooth, by which I saw in him still, this blond Germanic-looking ruddy businessman and investor, the schoolboy Grandma Lausch had sent to wait on tables in the resort hotel. The things he and Renee fought about were usually such as clothes, some gloves, a bottle of Chanel perfume, or the servant. She didn't need a servant was what he said, since she was never at home and could make the bed herself. What was the good of a woman sitting there? But Renee had to have whatever Charlotte had. She was completely posted on Charlotte, better than a sister, and often turned up at the same night club or had tickets to the same musical. Thus she knew how she looked and what she wore, and studied her. She demanded the same at least, and as long as it was for items like bags, dresses, lizard shoes, harlequin glasses, Ronson lighter, the demands could be pretty well satisfied. But the worst fight took place when she wanted a car of her own, like Charlotte's. "Why, you beggar!" he said. "Charlotte has her own money, don't you realize that?" "But not what you want. I've got that." He roared, "Not you only! Don't fool yourself. Lots of women have it." And this was one of the few times when he minded my seeing him. Usually he didn't seem to care. And she, after her speech about wanting us to know each other better, assumed she had covered the ground by so saying and hardly ever spoke to me. "You see how your brother is?" she cried. No, I didn't see how he was. Mainly what I saw was that he was all the time in a rage, open or disguised. He'd break out and yell, "Why didn't you go to the doctor yesterday? How long are you going to neglect that cough? How do you know what you've got in your chest?" (Which made me glance toward that chest, approximately--like any living creature's, under the furs and the silk, under the brassiere, under the breasts, it was there.) "No, sir, you did not go. I checked on you. I phoned there, you liar! I bet you thought I feel too important to phone him about you or am afraid of it getting back to Charlotte." (She went to Charlotte's doctor; but he was the best doctor.) "Well, I did it. You never showed up there. You can't tell the truth. Never! I doubt if even in bed you ever do. Even when you say you love me you're conniving." Well, this is an example of his rage in the form of solicitude. I couldn't wait to recover from the hernia and go to the war. Let me get going! I thought. But I wasn't fit yet, and meantime I had a stopgap position with a business-machine company. This was a fancy, select job. I could only get into it on account of the manpower shortage. If I had stayed with the company I might have turned into a salesmanprince, traveling parlor car to St. Paul twice a month, seven good cigars to the trip and a dignified descent at the station, breathing winter steam and holding a portfolio. But no, I had to get into the service. "Well, you horse's foot," said Simon, "I expected you to live to see middle age, but I guess you're too dumb to make it and want to get yourself wiped out. If you have to go and get shot up, and be in a cast and vomit blood, and lie in mud and eat potato peel, go! If you get on the casualty list it will do my business good. What a hell of a deal for Ma it is to have only one normal son! And me? It leaves me alone in the world. The idea of making a buck is my intelligent companion, my brother not." But I went ahead anyway. Only I still wasn't acceptable to the Army or the Navy and so I signed with the Merchant Marine and was scheduled to leave for Sheepshead Bay to go into training there. Next time I saw Simon I ran into him on Randolph Street and he didn't behave as usual. "Let's go in and have a bite," he said, for we were in front of Henrici's and they had a vat of out-of-season strawberries in the window. The waiters knew him but he hardly even answered when they spoke to him, instead of being proud, as would have been normal. When we sat down and he lifted off his hat, the whiteness of his face gave me a start. I said, "What's the matter--what goes on?" "Renee tried to commit suicide last night," he said. "She took sleeping pills. I got there as she was passing out, I shook her and slapped her, I made her walk, threw her in a cold bath until the doctor got there-- and she's alive. She'll be all right." "Was it a real attempt? Did she mean business?" "The doctor said she wasn't really in danger. Maybe she didn't know how many pills to take." "That doesn't sound likely to me." l "Me neither. She must have been faking. She is a counterfeiter. It- wasn't the first time by a long shot." I got a glimpse of struggles that probably could never make sense. It afflicted me. "People will act themselves into something at last though," he went on. "They get carried away." And he said, "If it's for pleasure you pay a steep price, okay. But suppose it's a price for no_pleasure. Only trying to have it. Wanting pleasure. You pay for what you want, not always what you get. That's what a price means. Otherwise where's the price? The payment is in something you're liable to run short on." "I wish I knew of anything I could do." "You could shove me in front of a train," he said. He began to tell me what had happened. Charlotte had found out about Renee. "I think she knew for a long time," he said, "but I guess she wanted to wait." It would have been surprising if Charlotte hadn't known. Information and thoughts about Simon were streaming through her mind all the time. Everybody knew him in the downtown district. The waiter who brought the strawberries in the pewter dishes said, "Here you are, Mr. March." Renee was with Simon all the time too, and they were continually playing with the chance of discovery. Why did she drive him almost to the door? One day after she left I picked up a gold comb from the floor of the car, and he said, "Damn her, she's too careless," and put it in his pocket. Now it couldn't be that during two years Charlotte hadn't found anything--no gold hairs, no hankies, no matches in the glove compartment from salons she didn't go to; or that she couldn't read in Simon's husbandly home-coming with hat and evening paper, kiss of the cheek or married joke on the backside, that only five minutes before, in only the time it took to park the car and ride up in the elevator, he had been with another woman. She certainly must have. I figure that for a while she'd have said to herself, "What I don't see with my own eyes won't hurt me"--this not quite deliberate blindness but the tight grasp of people who devise very deeply. Somebody wrestling a bear for dear life, and with forehead lost against the grizzly pelt, figuring anyway what to do next Sunday, whom to invite to dinner and how to fix the table. But with Charlotte you never could tell. She perhaps understood that with a lot of noise she'd drive him to be rash, because of romantic honor, and she therefore was cautious with him. Once she explained to me, "Your brother needs money, a whole lot of money. If he didn't have it to spend, as much as he needed, he'd die." This astounded me when I heard it--on a hot morning it was, in the sunny, barbaric-carpeted skyscraper living room and its vases, hot breezes that blew the plants, and she herself a large figure in a white satin coat and with a cigarette holder in her rouged mouth but looking as severe as any Magnus, any of her uncles or cousins. She was as good as telling me that she was saving Simon's life. But he did need dough. Renee lived in the same style as Charlotte. He had a feeling that that was right; also he owed it to himself not to try to do things cheaply. When he and Charlotte went to Florida the girl came along a day or so later and stayed at as swanky a hotel. He didn't so much worry about the expenses. What poisoned his life by this time was the slavery of constant thought and arrangement-making. He went to defy his wife, and soon he found himself twice-married. Poor Simon! I pitied him. I pitied my brother. All along he had been telling me the affair would never be permanent. So? How short is temporary? Eventually his idea was Renee would marry some rich man. I was once present when they discussed it. "This guy Karham at the club," he said. "He asked me about you after we ran into him. He wants to go out with you." "I won't do it," she said. "You will. Don't be a sap. We have to set you up. He's got a lot of dough. A bachelor. In the paving business." "I don't care what he's got. He's an ugly old man. His mouth is full of bridges. What do you think I am! Leave me alone." She folded her arms, angry, holding her small bicepsit being warm summer she was in a sleeveless dress; she brought her knees together and looked fixedly through the windshield. You have to remember these conversations took place mostly in the car. I told Simon afterward, "It's you she aims to marry." "No, she only wants to stay with me. It suits her this way. She's got it better than a wife." "Some conceit you've got, Simon. You mean to say she can't think up anything better than to ride around with you every day and read movie magazines while you make your calls?" But what he was telling me at Henrici's now was that a few weeks before, Charlotte had come out and said the affair had gone far enough. It had to stop now. Fights broke out. But not because he disagreed with Charlotte. He knew he had to stop and told Renee, and what happened with her was even worse. She screamed, threatened to take him to court, and fainted. Next Simon's lawyer came into the picture. He called a meeting in his office to settle everything. Renee was told Charlotte wouldn't be there, but then Charlotte showed up. Renee cursed her. Charlotte slapped her. Simon slapped Renee too. Then they all cried, for which there seemed to be plenty of reason. "Why did you have to slap her?" "You should have heard what she was saying. You would have done the same," he said. "I got carried away." Finally Renee agreed to go away to California provided she was paid off. And she did go. But now she was back again and said on the phone that she was pregnant. "I don't care," Simon told her. "You're a crook. You took the dough and went to California when you knew you'd be coming right back." After a silence she hung up. This was when he thought she would kill herself. And, sure enough, when he got to the hotel it was just after she had swallowed the pills. She was in her fourth month of pregnancy. "What'll I do?" he said. "What's there to do? Nothing. There'll be a kid now. Who knows but that this is the way you and George and I happened to come into the world." I comforted him the best I knew how.