The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [9]
CHAPTER XI
Now there's a dark Westminster of a time when a multitude of objects cannot be clear; they're too dense and there's an island rain. North Sea lightlessness, the vein of the Thames. That darkness in which resolutions have to be made--it isn't merely local; it's the same darkness that exists in the fiercest clearnesses of torrid Messina. And what about the coldness of the rain? That doesn't deheat foolishness in its residence of the human face, nor take away deception nor change defects, but this rain is an emblem of the shared condition of all. It maybe means that what is needed to mitigate the foolishness or dissolve the deception is always superabundantly about and insistently offered to us--a black offer in Charing Cross; a gray in Place Pereires where you see so many kinds and varieties of beings go to and fro in the liquid and fog; a brown in the straight unity of Wabash Avenue. With the dark, the solvent is in this way offered until the time when one thing is determined and the offers, mercies, and opportunities are finished. The house where I was living on the South Side was a student house within range of the university chimes and chapel bell when the evenings were still, and it had a crowded medieval fullness, besides, of hosts inside the narrow walls, faces in every window, every inch occupied. I had some student book customers and even several friends here. In fact I really knew everybody through the circumstance that Owens, the old Welshman who operated the place, had me answering telephone calls and distributing the mail in the little varnished hole called the lobby. This I did in exchange for my rent. And as I sorted the letters I unavoidably read return addresses and postcards, and, signaling by bell to call people to the telephone, I had to hear their conversations since there was no booth. Owens too listened in, he and his spinster sister who was housekeeper; the door of their stale parlor was always open--the smell of the kitchen governed over all the other smells of the house--where I at my post in the wicker rocker two hours every evening could see their after-supper state, their square pillars of walnut, the madnesses of starched lace, the insects'-eye inspiration of cut-glass, the screwy detail of fern both fiddle-necked and expanded, the paintings of fruit, which were full of hardness against liberty, plus the wheels of blue dishes around the wainscoting. With such equipment making an arsenal of their views--I mustn't forget the big fixtures of buffalo glass hanging on three chains--they demonstrated how they were there to stay and endure. Their tenants were transient, hence the Owenses probably needed something like this to establish home for themselves, and it was made very heavy. Clem Tambow took to visiting me. His father the old politician had died, and Clem and his brother, now a tap dancer on the Loew's circuit, had divided an insurance policy. Clem wouldn't say how much he had inherited, out of a queer personal niceness or privacy, or maybe from superstition. But he had registered at the university, in the psychology department, and was living in the neighborhood. "What do you think of the old man leaving me money?" he said, laughing, shy of his big mouth and carious teeth--he still had the big clear whites of his eyes and his head furry at the back as when a boy; and he went on confessing the trouble of his ugliness to me, being somber about the grief of his nose, but interrupting his complaints with enormous laughs, suddenly and swiftly moving his hand to save his cigar from falling. Now that he had money he wore a row of Perfecto Queens in his coat. "I didn't appreciate my old man enough. I was all-out for my mother. I mean out. I would be still, but now she's just plain too old. Can't kid myself about it any more, especially since I've read a few psychology books." Speaking of psychology, he always laughed. He said, "I'm only on campus because of the pussy." And then, a little melancholy, "I have some dough now, so I may as well harvest. I wouldn't get anywhere otherwise, with this fish mouth and my nose. Educated girls, you can appeal to their minds, and they don't expect you to spend too much on them." He couldn't consider himself a student; he was a sort of fee-paying visitor; he played poker in the law-school basement and pool at tlie Reynold's Club and went to a handbook on Fifty-third Street to bet on horses. If he attended a class he was apt to "haw-hawhaw" in the big lecture hall at Kent, the amphitheater, at any standard joke of the science, or from private fun, unpreventably. "But," he would explain, "that dumbbell was trying to put over some behaviorist junk, that all thinking is in words and so it must take place partly in the throat, in the vocal cords--what he said was 'inhibited sub-vocalization.' So they got curious as to what happened with mutes, and got some and put dinguses on their necks and read them syllogisms. But all the stuff was escaping through the fingers, because of course they talk with their hands. Then they poured plaster casts on their hands. Well, when the guy got this far I started laughing _haw-haw! And he asked me to leave." Clem said this with one of his convulsions of embarrassment and shyness which then was wiped out by further laughter. Haw-haw-haw! Then a big flush of delight. Then gloom again, as he recalled his troubles, his having been shortweighed as to gifts by nature. I tried to tell him that he was wrong and that he didn't need to make up for anything. It was his ramming time, and his appearance was strongly virile in spite of exaggerations, such as his mustache, the gambler's stripe of the $22.50 suits he bought on time--he had the money but he preferred to pay installments. He said, "Don't be nice to me, Augie. You don't have to." Sometimes he took the air toward me of an uncle with a nephew of nearly the same age. He sought middie-agedness. He had decided that he could appeal to women whose taste was for experience; a little worn, somewhat bitter, debauched uncle. And that was how he tried to play it. "Well, what about you, Augie, what's the matter with you?" he said. "What are you slopping around here for? You've got more possibilities than you know what to do with. The trouble with you is that you're looking for a manager. Now you're in cahoots with this Mexican. What are you postponing everything for?" "What's everything?" "I don't know. But you lie here in a wicker chair, taking it easy, holding a book on your chest, and letting time go by when there are a thousand things you could do." Clem had a vast idea of what things there were to be had, which was quite natural when you consider how it wounded and stung him to believe that they were out of his reach. He meant, I know, money, admiration, women made absolutely helpless before you by love. The goods of fortune. He was disturbed by these thousand things, and, rometimes, so was I. He insisted that I should be going somewhere, east ^at I should be practicing how to go, that I should concentrate on how to be necessary, and not be backward but energetic, absolute, an so forth. And of course I had some restlessness to be taken up 203 into something greater than myself. I could not shine the star of great individuality that, by absorbed stoking, became a sun of the world over a throng to whom it glitters--whom it doesn't necessarily warm but only showers down a Plutarch radiance. Being necessary, yes, that would be fine and wonderful; but being Phoebus's boy? I couldn't even dream of it. I never tried to exceed my constitution. In any case, when someone like Clem urged me and praised me, I didn't listen closely. I had my own counseling system. It wasn't infallible, but it made mistakes such as I could bear. Clem wasn't fooling with me on this great topic, but it wasn't his main purpose to talk to me when he came to the house. He wasn't there to hop me up or tell me news about Jimmy Klein, who was already married, and the father of a child, and working in a department store; or about his brother's trying to get on Broadway big-time. He came because he was after a girl named Mimi Villars who lived in the house. Mimi wasn't a student; she waited on tables in a student hash-house on Ellis Avenue. I had noted her with appreciation, maybe the more fit to judge because I had no thought of making her myself. She was very fair and ruddy, of a push-faced tough beauty, long brows continued in very thin pencil slightly upward, like the lash of the euglena, away from their natural line toward tight blond ears that had to be looked for amid her curls, and a large mouth, speaking for a soul of wild appetite, nothing barred; she'd say anything, and had no idea of what could hinder her. Her hips were long and narrow, her bust was large, and she wore close-fitting skirts and sweaters and high heels that gave a tight arch of impatience to the muscles of her calves; her step was small and pretty and her laughter violent, total, and critical. She didn't much remind me of Willa from the Symington, also a waitress. Willa, whom I preferred personally, this country girl--I think I could have been perfectly happy with Willa and lived all my life in a country town if the chance had ever presented itself. Or, anyhow, I sometimes tell myself that. Mimi came from Los Angeles. Her father had been an actor in the silent movies. She'd speak of him when she wanted to say how she hated Englishmen. Originally she came to Chicago to study, but she was expelled from the university for going past the bounds of necking at Greene Hall, in the lounge. She was a natural for being bounced. You wouldn't doubt that she was capable of the offense, if it was one, and as for the penalty, it was a favorite subject of her ferocious humor. I knew that Clem didn't stand a chance with her. The cause of her strong color was not sheer health or self-excitement: love also con204 tributed to it. By a coincidence her lover was one of the customers Padilla had passed on to me, a man named Hooker Frazer who was a graduate assistant in Political Science. He was hard to deal with, for he ordered rare and out-of-print books. Two volumes of Nietzsche's Will to Power I had a hell of a time swiping, for they were in a closed case at the Economy Book Store; I also got him Hegel's Philosophy of Right, as well as the last volumes of Capital from the Communist bookshop on Division Street, Herzen's Autobiography, and some de Tocqueville. He bargained keenly, just as he spoke keenly, with unusual concision, and he was a man the university ought to have been pleased about, with his tall, free look of intelligence early crow-footed from the practice of consideration, a young Calhoun or statesman already, with clear blue spaces indicative of rigorous consistency and an untimely wrinkle, like the writing of a seismograph. He was not one of those tall men of whom you think that they must come in sections of different mechanical principle, but was not awkward although his posture was loose. The fact that he lived in Burton Court, so much like a new Christ Church or Magdalen, and in a don's state, that learned bachelorhood, itself fetched me. It didn't Padilla, with his stiff nose of Gizeh's mummy and livid eye-patches, his narrow vault of shoulders and back, and his hard, sharp step on the getting-to-bevenerable stones. Manny came from a high mountain slum and had a cultureless disposition. He didn't go in for the Old World much. But Hooker Frazer was Mimi Villars' man, and, seeing them together on the stairs of Owens' house, I admired them, both made so well, she hard and spirited, editing her words for no one, and he so distinct-looking he might have been lineally direct from Cro-Magnon man--but of course with present-day differences, including the disorders. He had a temper that didn't go with the rest of him, with his composure and even toploftiness. His teeth were often set hard, and his straight nose ended in a nervous fancifulness that must have originated in character rather than inheritance. But even Padilla, who didn't like him much, said he was muy hombre, a considerable man. Padilla was, however, down on him for his condescension to us; to me more than to him, for Frazer was aware that Padilla was a genius at mathematical physics. But he called us both "mister," as though he were a West Pointer, and treated us like amusing thieves. As if he wasn't a receiver of stolen goods himself. He'd say, "Mr. March, will you take a trip downtown and expropriate from the expropriators a good copy of the c.sprh des Lois? The other day I noticed one at the Argus " I'd laugh io\1^ at his mixture of pompousness and revolutionist's jargon and his amended Tennessee accent. At first he seemed to consider me an agreeable nitwit and joshed me about my color. "Anybody would say that you spent your days in the cow pasture, Mr. March, from your rosiness, instead of breathing the air of bookshops." Later he was more grave with me and offered me old copies of Communist and Trotskyist papers and magazines--he had them in stacks, sheaves, and bundles in his room, in various languages; he received all kinds of journals and bulletins. He even invited me once to hear him lecture, but that may have been because I was his cheap source of supply; I extended him credit, and he wanted to stay on good terms with me. Padilla threw fits when he heard that I gave him books on the cuff; I thought he would haul off and punch me with his skinny, longfingered fist; he screamed at me, "Bobo!" and "you gringo dummy!" And I said I'd stop Frazer's credit at twenty-five dollars. It was a lie to calm him; he was already into me for nearer to forty. "Shit! I wouldn't give him a penny. This is just the way he shows he's better than you," Manny said. But I wasn't affected. Probably I too much enjoyed delivering a few books to Frazer for the chance of spending half an hour in the atmosphere of his rooms and hearing him talk. Often I stole two copies of what he ordered, from curiosity, to read one myself, and thus had some dull and difficult afternoons. I never blamed myself for throwing aside such things as didn't let themselves be read with fervor, for they left nothing with me anyhow, and I took my cue from Padilla not to vex myself about what didn't come easy. After all, I wasn't yet in any special business, but merely trying various things on. But I had to tell Clem that he wouldn't get anywhere with Mimi Villars. "Why," he said, "because I'm so homely? I figure her for the kind that doesn't care about looks. She's a hot girl." "Your looks have nothing to do with it. She has a man already." "What, and you think she'll never have another one? That's how much you know." So he backed his belief about her stubbornly, and came to sit with me, washed and fresh-shaved, long black shoes gleaming, and acted with his depressed gallantry, practicing it even on me, lacking only laces and swords to be a follower of decayed Stuarts in exile--his heavy drama of boredom. Only his unlicked electric fur of boyish back-hair and the soft glossiness of his eye whites and his haw-haw! told a different story about him. I was glad of his company. But of course I couldn't tell him all I knew about Mimi. It wasn't only that I read nostcards and couldn't help listening to telephone conversations; it "as that Mirnii didn't care about secrecy. She led a proclaimed life, and once she got talking she held back nothing. Frazer would occasionally send her a card breaking a date, and she would go into a temper, flinging it away, and say to me furiously, tearing open the clasp of her purse, "Sell me a slug"; and to him on the phone she'd saw "You yellow bastard, can't you call me and tell me why you won't come? Don't give me any of that old crap about working on your thesis! What were you doing on Fifty-seventh Street the other night with those fat goofs when you were supposed to be working on it? Who are they? One of them was an English fairy, I could spot him a mile away. Don't tell me I don't understand. I'm tired of your bullshit, you preacher!" In her breathers, I could hear his voice going on measuredly as I sprawled and listened in the rocker. And then Owens' beefy wrist would come out to fetch the door and slam it. He didn't care what tenants did in their rooms, but he didn't like her swearing to reach his parlor--he was sitting in there on his leather, crunching like dry snow; his main sounds were, at close range, breathing, and, at a distance, turning his weight. "You'll never live to hear me beg for anything," were Mimi's last words to Frazer, and when she slammed phone and hook together with cruelty it was as a musician might shut the piano after he had finished storming chords of mightiest difficulty without a single flinch or error. To rip off a piece of lover's temper was pleasure in her deepest vein of enjoyment. She said to me then, "If that bastard calls back, tell him I ran out of the house swearing." However, she would be waiting for his next call. What made me sure, though, that she would have no interest in Clem, at least for the time being, was that lately Frazer had been phoning with regularity, and she took her time about descending when I buzzed her. He, knowing it was I that answered the phone, said, 'Can't you get her to make it a little faster, Mr. March?" To which I said, "I can try, but I'm not King Canute, you know," and let the big club of the receiver hang from the cord. What do you want?" were her first words when she laid her burning cigarette on the instrument box. "I can't talk to you. I'm stymied. If you want to find out how I am you can come over in person and ask." And then in her joyful, reckless way of welcoming her anger, "All right, you don't care, I don't care either. No, I haven't come around yet, ut don't worry, you won't have to marry me. I wouldn't marry a man and his amended Tennessee accent. At first he seemed to consider me an agreeable nitwit and joshed me about my color. "Anybody would say that you spent your days in the cow pasture, Mr. March, from your rosiness, instead of breathing the air of bookshops." Later he was more grave with me and offered me old copies of Communist and Trotskyist papers and magazines--he had them in stacks, sheaves, and bundles in his room, in various languages; he received all kinds of journals and bulletins. He even invited me once to hear him lecture, but that may have been because I was his cheap source of supply; I extended him credit, and he wanted to stay on good terms with me. Padilla threw fits when he heard that I gave him books on the cuff; I thought he would haul off and punch me with his skinny, longfingered fist; he screamed at me, "Bobo!" and "you gringo dummy!" And I said I'd stop Frazer's credit at twenty-five dollars. It was a lie to calm him; he was already into me for nearer to forty. "Shit! I wouldn't give him a penny. This is just the way he shows he's better than you," Manny said. But I wasn't affected. Probably I too much enjoyed delivering a few books to Frazer for the chance of spending half an hour in the atmosphere of his rooms and hearing him talk. Often I stole two copies of what he ordered, from curiosity, to read one myself, and thus had some dull and difficult afternoons. I never blamed myself for throwing aside such things as didn't let themselves be read with fervor, for they left nothing with me anyhow, and I took my cue from Padilla not to vex myself about what didn't come easy. After all, I wasn't yet in any special business, but merely trying various things on. But I had to tell Clem that he wouldn't get anywhere with Mimi Villars. "Why," he said, "because I'm so homely? I figure her for the kind that doesn't care about looks. She's a hot girl." "Your looks have nothing to do with it. She has a man already." "What, and you think she'll never have another one? That's how much you know." So he backed his belief about her stubbornly, and came to sit with me, washed and fresh-shaved, long black shoes gleaming, and acted with his depressed gallantry, practicing it even on me, lacking only laces and swords to be a follower of decayed Stuarts in exile--his heavy drama of boredom. Only his unlicked electric fur of boyish back-hair and the soft glossiness of his eye whites and his haw-haw! told a different story about him. I was glad of his company. But of course I couldn't tell him all I knew about Mimi. It wasn't only that I read nostcards and couldn't help listening to telephone conversations; it "as that Mimi. didn't care about secrecy. She led a proclaimed life, and once she got talking she held back nothing. Frazer would occasionally send her a card breaking a date, and she would go into a temper, flinging it away, and say to me furiously, tearing open the clasp of her purse, "Sell me a slug"; and to him on the phone she'd say "You yellow bastard, can't you call me and tell me why you won't come? Don't give me any of that old crap about working on your thesis! What were you doing on Fifty-seventh Street the other night with those fat goofs when you were supposed to be working on it? Who are they? One of them was an English fairy, I could spot him a mile away. Don't tell me I don't understand. I'm tired of your bullshit, you preacher!" In her breathers, I could hear his voice going on measuredly as I sprawled and listened in the rocker. And then Owens' beefy wrist would come out to fetch the door and slam it. He didn't care what tenants did in their rooms, but he didn't like her swearing to reach his parlor--he was sitting in there on his leather, crunching like dry snow; his main sounds were, at close range, breathing, and, at a distance, turning his weight. "You'll never live to hear me beg for anything," were Mimi's last words to Frazer, and when she slammed phone and hook together with cruelty it was as a musician might shut the piano after he had finished storming chords of mightiest difficulty without a single flinch or error. To rip off a piece of lover's temper was pleasure in her deepest vein of enjoyment. She said to me then, "If that bastard calls back, tell him I ran out of the house swearing." However, she would be waiting for his next call. What made me sure, though, that she would have no interest in Clem, at least for the time being, was that lately Frazer had been phoning with regularity, and she took her time about descending when I buzzed her. He, knowing it was I that answered the phone, said, ' 'Can't you get her to make it a little faster, Mr. March?" To which I said, "I can try, but I'm not King Canute, you know," and let the big club of the receiver hang from the cord. What do you want?" were her first words when she laid her burning cigarette on the instrument box. "I can't talk to you. I'm stymied. If you want to find out how I am you can come over in person and ask." And then in her joyful, reckless way of welcoming her anger, "All right, you don't care, I don't care either. No, I haven't come around yet, "t don't worry, you won't have to marry me. I wouldn't marry a man who doesn't know what love is. You don't want a wife, you want a looking glass. What! What do you mean, money! You still owe me forty-seven dollars. That's okay. I don't care what it was spent for. If I'm up the stump I'll take care of it myself. Sure you owe everybody. Don't give me that kind of stuff. Tell it to your wife. She seems to swallow everything." Frazer was not yet divorced from his first wife, from whom Mimi, in her version of it, had rescued him. "Do you remember a picture called The Island of Dr. Moreau? This mad scientist made men and women out of animals? And they called the laboratory 'The House of Pain'? Well, with his wife he was living like one of those animals," she once told me, speaking of how she had first found him. "This girl had a flat--you wouldn't believe a man like Hooker could live in it; no matter what I think of his personality, he's intelligent, he has ideas; when he was a Communist he was chosen to go study at the Lenin Institute, where they train national leaders like Cachin and Mao; he didn't make it because he was expelled over the German question. Well, in this flat there were chenille rugs in the toilet so you felt you were doing wrong, going in your shoes. A man can't do anything while putting up with that. Women really are no good, Augie," she declared with her characteristic and favorite humorous rage. "They're no f-- good. They want a man in the house. Just there, in the house. Sitting in his chair. They pretend to take what he thinks and says seriously. Is it about government? Is it about astronomy? So they play along and make believe they care about parties and stars. They baby men, and they don't care what game they play, just so there's i im a man in the house. If the husband is a Socialist, she's a Socialist, I! hotter than he, and if he changes into a Technocrat she beats him to it --she makes him think so. All she really cares about is to have a man in the house and doesn't give a hoot in hell what she says she is. And m it isn't even hypocritical, it's deeper than that. It's having the man." a With things like this--and it was one of many--Mimi tried to pierce you through. Sufficiently said, I suppose, the thing was true for her. | She believed in words, in speaking, and if she convinced you, then she ^ herself could believe what her inspiration told her. And when it came | to speaking, she had borrowed some from Frazer--that private forensic method that didn't always seem quite right in personal conversation: he with his long knees spread and elbows resting on them, hands clasped, perfect earnestness of eyes, and, as a further warrant of plain talk, the straight white middle part of his sandy hair. Mimi followed his manner as much as she might, and she had more knottedness in her and passion, and the speed you can get from narrow gauge and high compression. She was, as Einhorn had rightly said that I was, in opposition; only she named names and wrongs, and was an attacker where I had other ways, temperamentally, and she didn't persuade me. I didn't believe she was right because emphatic. "Well," she said, "if you don't agree with me, why are you quiet? Why don't you say what you think instead of turning down what I say by grinning? You try to look more simple than you are, and it isn't honest. But if you know better, come on and speak up." "No," I said, "I don't know. But I don't like low opinions, and when you speak them out it commits you and you become a slave of them. Talk will lead people on until they convince their minds of things they can't feel true." She took this as a harder criticism of her than I had meant it to be, and answered me nastily with a kind of cat's electric friction and meanness of her face. "Why, you're a lousy bohehead! If you don't even know how to be indignant--why, 'Christ, even a cow gets indignant! And what do you mean, low! You want to have high opinions of garbage? What do you want to become, a sewage plant? Hell, I say no! If a thing is bad it's bad, and if you don't hate it you kiss it on the sly." She shot it off in my face that I wasn't mad enough about abominations or aware enough of them, didn't know how many graves were underneath my feet, was lacking in disgust, wasn't hard enough against horrors or wrathful about swindles. The worst of which swindles was in getting terrible payment for what should be a loving exchange of bodies and the foundation of all the true things of life. The women to blame for this were far worse than whores. And I guess that she exploded against me in this conversation because I wasn't enough of an enemy of such things but smiled at such ruining wives^ too for their female softnesses. I was too indulgent about them, about the beds that would be first stale and then poisonous because their manageresses' thoughts were on the conquering power of chenille and dimity and the suffocation of light by curtains, and the bourgeois ambering of adventuring man in parlor upholstery. These things not appearing so threatening to me as they ought to appear, I was, on this topic any"ow, a fool to her, one who also could be stuck, leg-bent, in that white spiders' secretion and paralyzed inside women's edifices of safety. She had torn Frazer out of that. He was worth saving. And here I could see what a value she set on the intelligence of men. If they didn't breathe the most difficult air of effort and nobility, then she wished for them the commonplace death in the gas cloud of settled existence, office bondage, quiet-store-festering, unrecognized despair of marriage without hope, or the commonness of resentment that grows unknown boils in one's heart or bulbs of snarling flowers. She had a high, absolute standard, and she preferred people to miss it from suffering, vice, being criminal or perverted, or of loony impulse. I learned about her when I knew her better that she was a thief too; she stole her clothes from department stores, stole a good deal, since she liked to dress well, and had even been arrested but got off on suspended sentence. Her method was to put on layers of dresses in the fitting booths, also underpants and slips; and the way she had gotten out of the rap was to convince the court psychiatrist that she had money and could pay but was afflicted with kleptomania. She was proud of this and urged me to do the same should I be caught--she knew of course that I was lifting books. There was another thing of which she was not so proud. About a year before, late one night as she was passing an alley on Kimbark Avenue, a stickup man had tried to take her pocketbook, and she had kicked him in the groin, snatched the gun when he dropped it, and shot him through the thigh. It made her wretched to remember this, and when she talked about it her hands became nervous and worked inward at her waist--which was small: she drew notice to its smallness by wearing broad belts--and her color got rough enough to be a symptom of scarlatina. She tried to get into Bridewell Hospital to see him, and wasn't allowed. "The poor guy," she said, and this was remorse over her savage speed and rashness as well as pity for this boy, haunting the mouth of an alley with that toy of swift decisions For the robbery money can shrink mighty small; and you can soon handle the satisfaction out of it, but having someone do precisely what you say is a thing of a different order. And a woman too. She didn't interpret this as cowardice of the assailant but as special mark of crude love appeal, that a citytutored rough child struggled for his instinct and was less cared about, providentially speaking, than the animal in the woods who was at least in the keeping of nature. Well, she had to go to court and testify, to explain why she had shot him. She didn't, however, want to bring charges, and she tried to speak a piece to the judge and was prevented. So the boy was given five years for armed robbery, and now she sent him packages and letters. Not because she feared harm from him when he got out, but out of remorse. This time she wasn't up the stump, as she spoke of it. Eventually he was able to give Frazer better news. But she made him wait for it. She wanted him to worry, or to give him practice in learning to worry about her and not about himself. She was not easy toward him. She knew it was unequal, that she loved him more than he could her or anyone. But neither was love his calling, as it was hers. And she was very severe and exalted about this. She too could have lived in desert wilderness for the sake of it, and have eaten locusts. The thing I began to learn from her was of the utmost importance; namely, that everyone sees to it his fate is shared. Or tries to see to it. You may say that I should have known this before. I should have, and in a way I did, or else Grandma Lausch or Einhom or the Renlings would have had more success with me. But it was never so clear in anyone as in Mimi Villars, whose actual body was her recruiting place and who more conspicuously issued her own warrant, license, diploma, asserting what she was, and she had no usual place of legitimate activity, like a store, office, or family, or membership anywhere, but banked all on her clinching will, her hard reason, and her obstinate voice. I think she must have recognized--and how could it fail to give her sharp pain?--the contradiction of harsh persuasion to such a love belief as hers. But the thick rind of world-organized resistance made that inevitable. Well, that too was a fate to be shared and another underlying bitterness. By the end of summer we were already close friends and under suspicion by Tambow of being more. But there was nothing to that except his envious although not grudging imagination, backed by such slight apparent proof as that she came into my room in her petticoat. This was only because we lived on the same floor. She went into Kayo Obennark's the same way--we had the attic between the three of us; it just was proximity; even if provocation was never far away it came simply from unremitting practice, like that of the fiddler who has a rubber ball in the pocket of his great alpacuna as he rides the train to a concert and is never far from, for him, the greatest thing, along the accidentals and slides of landscape and steel rail. No, she came to borrow a cigarette or to use the closet where she kept the overflow of her dresses. Or to talk. We now had something more to talk about, for by and by we found we had another connection. It was through that swarthy Sylvester for whom I used to pass out movie handbills and who had tried to make a Communist of Simon. He had never finished his degree at Armour ec Iie said it was from lack of dough and hinted also his political assignment elsewhere, but it was everybody's thought that he had washed out. Be that as it might, he was living in New York and working for the subway at a technical job. Under Forty-second Street. He seemed bound to have occupations in the darkness, and by now this had laid a peculiar coloring on him, his face darkened sallow and slack-cheeked and his eyes, injured by worry, now more Turkish from a thickening of the skin by the continual effort and wrinkling his eyes, probably, at the ruby and green cut buttons of his burrow office-- there where he sat at a drawing board and copied blueprints and read pamphlets in his leisure time. He had been expelled, like Frazer,. from the Communist party. On charges of Infantile Leftism and Trotskyist Deviationism--the terms were queer to me, and just as queer was his assuming that I understood them. He belonged to another party now, the Trotskyites, and was still a Bolshevik, and disclosed that he was never free from duty, never unassigned, never went anywhere without permission from party chiefs. Even returning to Chicago, ostensibly to visit his father, the old man called by Grandma "the Baker," he had a mission, which was to contact Frazer. So I inferred that Frazer was being recruited to the new party. I happened to walk behind them on Fifty-seventh Street one day. Sylvester was toting a fat briefcase and looking up at Frazer and talking with special slowness in a kind of political accent while Frazer was looking past and over him with aloof gravity and had his hands clasped at his back. I also saw Sylvester on the stairs of the rooming house, with Mimi. He was, or had been, Mimi's brother-in-law, married in New York to her sister Annie, who had now left him and was getting a divorce. I recalled how his first wife threw stones at him when he tried to come through her father's backyard to talk to her, and I even remembered the surroundings in which I had heard about this from him, the grim air of cold Milwaukee Avenue when We peddled razorblades and glasscutters with Jimmy Klein. Sylvester wanted Mimi to plead with her sister for him. "Hell," Mimi told me, as much for my private ear as any of her opinions were, "if I had known him before they were married I would have told Annie not to do it. He leaks misery all over. I wonder how she could stand two full years of him. Young girls do the goddamnedest things. Can you imagine being in bed with him, and that mud face and those lips? Why, he looks like the frog prince. I hope now she'll get under the sheets with a young strong stevedore." If somebody fell against Mimi's lines she had no mercy, and as she listened to Sylvester she kept in mind her sister bolt upright in a huskier man's clasp and struggling her arms with pleasure, and it made me for a minute dislike her for her cruelty that she held her eyes open for Sylvester so that he might look in and see this. What was to make it an acceptable joke was the supposition that he couldn't see. No, he probably couldn't. It needs to be explained that in Mimi's hard view all that you inherited from the mixing peoples of the past and the chance of parents' encountering like Texas cattle was your earthy material, which it was your own job to make into admirable flesh. In other words, applied to Sylvester, he was in large measure to blame for how he looked; his spirit was a bad kiln. And also it was his fault that he couldn't keep his wives and girls. "I hear his first one was a dizzy bitch. And Annie has something of a slut about her too. What makes them go for him at the start? That really interests me," said Mimi. And she supposed that they must take his little gloom for real devilishness and expect him to visit their places with prickles and fire, like a genuine demon; when he failed to, turning out to be mere uncompleted mud, they threw stones at him, real or figurative. She was savage-minded, Mimi, and prized her savagery as proof that there was no monkey business about her; she punished and took blows as the real thing. That humiliated, bandy-legged, weak-haired, and injured-in-theeyes Sylvester, however, the subterranean draftsman and comedy commissar of a Soviet-America-to-be, teaching himself the manner and even the winner's smile and confidence, why, he was going to blast off the old travertine and let the gold and marble shine for a fresh humanity. He tried to impress me with the command he had over Marxian coal and cotton, plenary dates, factional history, texts of Lenin and Plekhanov; what he had really was the long-distance dreams ing gaze of the eyes into the future and the pick of phrase, which he smiled and smelled like a perfume, heavy-lidded. He condescended to me and dutch-uncled me because he knew that I liked him and wasn't aware how much I knew about him. Which I was bound to spare him. Anyway, his defects weren't as serious to me as they were to Mimi. With me he could be fully confident, and some of his charm couldn't live except in the presence of confidence. "How's tricks, kid?" he said with a rejoicing smile--but darkness and bitterness could never wholly leave it any more--and while he gentled his palms on his doublebreasted joint belly and chest. "What are you up to? Getting by? What are you here, a student? No. A macher? A proletarian?" This word, even jesting, he pronounced with veneration. "Well, a sort of student." "Our boys," he replied, more deeply smiling. "Anything but honest labor. And how's your brother Simon? What's he doing? I thought I could recruit him once. He'd have made a good revolutionary. Where are they going to come from if not from your kind of background? But I guess I couldn't make him see it. He's very intelligent though. One day he'll see it himself." In the peculiar fate of people that makes them fat and rich, when this happens very swiftly there is the menace of the dreamy state that plunders their reality. Let's say that anyway old age and death would come, so why shouldn't the passage be comfortable? But this proposal doesn't make a firm mind, in the strange area where things swim too fast. Against this trouble thought may be a remedy; force of person is another one, and money and big-scale lavishness, unpierceable concreteness, organizational deeds. So there are these various remedies and many more, older ones, but you don't actually have full choice among all the varieties, especially those older ones of the invisible world. Most people make do with what they have, and labor in their given visible world, and this has its own stubborn merit. Not only did Simon make what he had do, but he went the limit. It astonished me how he took his objectives and did exactly what he had projected. It was well-nigh unfair to have called the turns so accurately and to do to people what he planned while he was still a stranger to them. Charlotte was in love with him. Not only that, but they were already married, and it wasn't only he who had hastened and pushed the thing, but she too was in a hurry. Partly because he was too broke to court her long. He told her that, and she and her parents agreed they shouldn't waste time. Only, the ceremony was performed out of town to keep the news out of the papers, and for the rest of the family there had to be an engagement and a wedding. So Charlotte and her mother had worked it out, and while Simon paid rent in a good bachelor's club downtown he was actually living with the Magnuses in their huge old West Side flat. He came to see me after the one-day honeymoon which was all the secrecy of the marriage gave them time for. They had been in Wisconsin. Already he had more new attributes than I could keep track of, draped in comfortable flannel, owning a new lighter, and effects in his pockets he didn't yet have the hang of. He said, "The Magnuses have been wonderful to me." There was a new gray Pontiac at the curb--he showed it to me from the window; and he was learning the coal business at one of the Magnuses' yards.. "And what about your own yard? Didn't you say--" "Certainly, I said. They've promised me that as soon as I can run place myself. It won't take long. No, it hasn't been so hard," he aid further, understanding my unasked question. "They'd rather have a poor young man. A poor young man gets up more steam and pressure They were like that themselves, and they know." Already he didn't look like such a poor young man in the high qualitv eray flannel, and shoes with new stitching; his shirt smelled of the store; it hadn't been to the laundry yet. "Get dressed, I'm taking you to dinner there," he said. When we were outside, walking down the path to the car, he took a stiff shot of breath and hawked, exactly as on the day I went with him to the La Salle Street Station where apparently I was too dumb to sell papers. Except that this time he had gloomy big rings round his eyes; and we sat down in the car, which had that sour spice of new rubber and car upholstery. It was the first time I had seen him drive. He swung it round like a veteran, even somewhat recklessly. So I was taken into that hot interior of lamps and rugs, to the Magnuses'. Everything was ungainly there, roomy and oversized. The very parrots painted on the lampshades were as big as Rhode Island Reds. The Magnuses too were big; they had a Netherlandish breadth of bone. My sister-in-law was of that size also, and was aware or shy of it as indelicacy, giving me the touch of her hand as though it were a smaller one. She needn't have. It's difficult when outsized people worry about their presentation, and women especially, who have secret dismay of grossness. She had remarkably handsome eyes, soft, with occasional lights of distaste though, shrewd, and expressing immense power of management; "but also they were warm. So was her bosom', which was abundant, and she had large hips. She was on her guard with me, as if afraid of my criticism, of what I would say to Simon the first time we were alone. She must have convinced herself that he had done her a great favor by marrying her, he was so obviously smart and good-looking, and at the same time she was swept with resentment lest she shouldn't be thought good enough or the money be too much remembered. The issue most alive was whether he would have married her without money. It was much too troubling not to be spoken fi so it was spoken of in a kind of fun and terrible persiflage. Simon ^d it with the kind of coarseness that has to be laughed at because to take it seriously would be murder--his saying, for instance, when lae three of us were left alone in the parlor to become acquainted, Nobody's ever been laid better at any price." It was so ambiguous and insids-out as to who had paid the price that it had to be taken as "sing, and she hurried and came down from a romantic, senti215 mental position and denied it all by pretending that this randy talk was the joke of sincerity and deep underlying agreement, a more realistic sort of love. But leaning above him like a kind of flounced Pisan tower construction--she dressed with luxury and daring--keeping a hand on his hair, she had instants of great difficulty before me. She had difficulty only for a while, until she absorbed from Simon the attitude that I was a featherhead, affectionate but not long on good sense. She soon enough learned to deal with me. But it was painful until she found confidence, and I suppose that at the time she hadn't recovered from the honeymoon, which, Simon had been frank to tell me, was awful. He didn't specify in which way, but he expressed enough to make it profoundly believable; he had some notes in the end of the scale that I would rather not have heard played for the consents to death that rang in them, but I was forced to listen to all he had, struck right on the key and sounded from top to bottom. I could be sure these said-in-jest things were the weirdest of their kind ever to be laughed at and spoken in that carpeted peace and brown-gravy velour. It was all supposed to pass for fun and bridegroom's lustiness, energy, and play-wickedness, and it came through to me that he was being tortured by thought of suicide, stronger than a mere hint, but simultaneously he could dive to clasp his compensations, such as his pride in audaciousness and strength of nerve and body or the luxury he was coming into, and furthermore, a certain recklessness in demands: the sense of what he could do and what he could exact without caring what anybody thought was much to him. Then the family came in, wondering what type- of person I might be. I wondered at them no less. They were so big you thought what could prevent them from handling even Simon and me like children, though we were by no means midgety--Simon was nearly six feet tall and I only an inch shorter than he. It was their width that made the difference, and even now that he was getting stout Simon didn't begin to approach them. They were substantial in their lives as in girth; they made their old people respected--there was a grandmother there that evening--and they bought the best of everything, clothes, furniture, or machinery. Also they were grateful for entertainment and admired speed of wit, which they didn't have themselves, and dramatic selfpresentation, which Simon gave them. He more than pleased them and more than made a big hit. He went both deep and far into the place of star and sovereign. They had patriarchs and matriarchs but they had no prince before him. To make this of himself, the prince, he went through a metamorphosis. That was the next of my astonishments. Elsewhere I've said that he had always, even when silent, been noticeable But he wasn't silent any more, and his old reserve was gone to nieces; he was boisterous, capacious, haughty, critical, arbitrary, mimicking and deviling, and he crowed, croaked, made faces and had the table all but spinning in this dining room of stable and upright wealth. I saw Grandma's satire in him, across the plaited white bread and the sprigged fish and candles--yes, the old woman's hardness of invention and travestying savagery, even certain Russian screams. I didn't know Simon had gotten so much from her. I could draw my mind back over some six or seven hundred Friday nights and see his uncommenting eyes follow a performance of the old woman's. And how deep that had sunk in, without even appearing to. At the shrieks he caused I nearly heard her comment of disdain, a disdain of which Simon was not all innocent either. He both borrowed from her and burlesqued her. His appearance was new in more than one way; more was new than the shirt, or the jewel on his finger and minor gems in his cuffs, or even the fat, and the haggardness from unwanted thought that lit on him in instants between the turns of his performance. The task of doing bold things with an unhappy gut, that was it. In a way he made them meet the expense of this too, as when he imitated his good queen mother-in-law's accent. But it was just the opposite of offensive to her and to them all; it was grand and uproarious. However, he wasn't just their entertainer; when he turned grave and stopped the vaudeville with a pair of somber eyes he got earnest silence for the speech he was going to make, and a full weight of respect. He spoke to me, but of course his words were in large part for them. "Augie," he said, putting his arm around Charlotte--she laid her painted nails on his hand--"you can see how unlucky we were not to have this kind of close and loyal family. There isn't anything these people won't do for one another. We don't even understand what that is because we never experienced it, we missed it all our lives. We had no luck. Now they've taken me in and made me one of them, as if I were their own child. I never understood what a real family was till now, and you ought to know how grateful I am. They may seem a little slowwitted to you"--Mr. and Mrs. Magnus didn't quite get this, Simon's tone being enough for them and the fine satisfaction they took in him, but Charlotte was seized with a laugh in the throat at this mischief interrupting his seriousness--"but they have something you'll have to learn to appreciate, and that's their kindness and the way they stick by their own." when he scrawled this on me, I had a fit of hate for the fat person " .217 mental position and denied it all by pretending that this randy talk was the joke of sincerity and deep underlying agreement, a more realistic sort of love. But leaning above him like a kind of flounced Pisan tower construction--she dressed with luxury and daring--keeping a hand on his hair, she had instants of great difficulty before me. She had difficulty only for a while, until she absorbed from Simon the attitude that I was a featherhead, affectionate but not long on good sense. She soon enough learned to deal with me. But it was painful until she found confidence, and I suppose that at the time she hadn't' recovered from the honeymoon, which, Simon had been frank to tell me, was awful. He didn't specify in which way, but he expressed enough to make it profoundly believable; he had some notes in the end of the scale that I would rather not have heard played for the consents to death that rang in them, but I was forced to listen to all he had, struck right on the key and sounded from top to bottom. I could be sure these said-in-jest things were the weirdest of their kind ever to be laughed at and spoken in that carpeted peace and brown-gravy velour. It was all supposed to pass for fun and bridegroom's lustiness, energy, and play-wickedness, and it came through to me that he was being tortured by thought of suicide, stronger than a mere hint, but simultaneously he could dive to clasp his compensations, such as his pride in audaciousness and strength of nerve and body or the luxury he was coming into, and furthermore, a certain recklessness in demands: the sense of what he could do and what he could exact without caring what anybody thought was much to him. Then the family came in, wondering what type- of person I might be. I wondered at them no less. They were so big you thought what could prevent them from handling even Simon and me like children, though we were by no means midgety--Simon was nearly six feet tall and I only an inch shorter than he. It was their width that made the difference, and even now that he was getting stout Simon didn't begin to approach them. They were substantial in their lives as in girth; they made their old people respected--there was a grandmother there that evening--and they bought the best of everything, clothes, furniture, or machinery. Also they were grateful for entertainment and admired speed of wit, which they didn't have themselves, and dramatic selfpresentation, which Simon gave them. He more than pleased them and more than made a big hit. He went both deep and far into the place of star and sovereign. They had patriarchs and matriarchs but they had no prince before him. To make this of himself, the prince, be went through a metamorphosis. That was the next of my astonishments. Elsewhere I've said that he had always, even when silent, been noticeable But he wasn't silent any more, and his old reserve was gone to nieces; he was boisterous, capricious, haughty, critical, arbitrary, mimicking and deviling, and he crowed, croaked, made faces and had the table all but spinning in this dining room of stable and upright wealth. I saw Grandma's satire in him, across the plaited white bread and the sprigged fish and candles--yes, the old woman's hardness of invention and travestying savagery, even certain Russian screams. I didn't know Simon had gotten so much from her. I could draw my mind back over some six or seven hundred Friday nights and see his uncommenting eyes follow a performance of the old woman's. And how deep that had sunk in, without even appearing to. At the shrieks he caused I nearly heard her comment of disdain, a disdain of which Simon was not all innocent either. He both borrowed from her and burlesqued her. His appearance was new in more than one way; more was new than the shirt, or the jewel on his finger and minor gems in his cuffs, or even the fat, and the haggardness from unwanted thought that lit on him in instants between the turns of his performance. The task of doing bold things with an unhappy gut, that was it. In a way he made them meet the expense of this too, as when he imitated his good queen mother-in-law's accent. But it was just the opposite of offensive to her and to them all; it was grand and uproarious. However, he wasn't just their entertainer; when he turned grave and stopped the vaudeville with a pair of somber eyes he got earnest silence for the speech he was going to make, and a full weight of respect. He spoke to me, but of course his words were in large part for them. "Augie," he said, putting his arm around Charlotte--she laid her painted nails on his hand--"you can see how unlucky we were not to have this kind of close and loyal family. There isn't anything these people won't do for one another. We don't even understand what that is because we never experienced it, we missed it all our lives. We had no luck. Now they've taken me in and made me one of them, as if I were their own child. I never understood what a real family was till now, and you ought to know how grateful I am. They may seem a little slowwitted to you"--Mr. and Mrs. Magnus didn't quite get this, Simon's tone being enough for them and the fine satisfaction they took in him, but Charlotte was seized with a laugh in the throat at this mischief interrupting his seriousness--"but they have something you'll have to learn to appreciate, and that's their kindness and the way they stick by their own." when he scrawled this on me, I had a fit of hate for the fat person ", .217 he was becoming, and I wanted to say, "This is crummy, to boost them and tear down your own. What's the matter with Mama or even Grandma?" But then what he said of the Magnuses had its truth, you couldn't miss it. I was a sucker for it too, family love. And though Simon did this thing in a bad gross way I doubt that he could have been absolutely insincere and putting on. Finding yourself amongst warm faces, why, there're many objections that recede, as when enemy women may kiss. Many common lies and hypocrisies are like that, just out of the harmony of the moment. And with Simon there was also a revulsion from his gnawing trouble and his need to get some breath on his Valley of Ezekiel slain. Therefore he was building up his causes for gratitude. And therefore, also, I answered nothing. As he had said this to me, however, they were watching and were suspicious because I didn't grab a piece of this love feast. I had consented to play his game, but I wasn't fast enough to do everything. I had a sea of feeling of my own which I was straining under. And then I think all their unresolved suspicions about Simon came to gather on me. They seemed to expect me to clear myself--all, in their ruddiness and size, including the granny who was dissolving from both, losing color and getting small, an old creature in black, wearing pious wig and amulets, who looked to have metaphysical judgmental powers. Well, they owned stores; maybe they smelled a thief in me. Anyway, they looked at me so acutely that I could perceive myself with their eyes, just about, my sizable head and uncommitted smile, my untrained and anti-disciplinary hair. Instead of asking, "Who are they?" about both Simon and me, they could demand of themselves, "Who is he?" Indeed, who was I to be sharing their gold soup of supper light and, putting their good spoons in my mouth? | Observing this difficulty, Simon quickly came up with a remedy, saying, "Augie is a good kid, he just doesn't know his own mind yet." They were glad to be reassured about me; all they asked was that I should be regular, that I should speak up more, make a few jokes, laugh when all laughed. I ought not to be so different from Simon. Of course there was an obstacle to being like him, which was that I hadn't k yet grasped him in his new character. But I soon caught on a little and made myself more acceptable, even welcome, by joining in the fun and dancing in the parlor after dinner. The only nearly serious hitch, with Mr. Magnus, was that I didn't know how to play pinochle. How was it that a decently brought-up young fellow didn't know how? Otherwise an indulgent easygoing character, Mr. Magnus was dissatisfied about this. Like Talleyrand making a tight mouth about the man who ri'dn't play whist. Simon could play pinochle. (Where had he learned? Well where, for that matter, had all his new accomplishments come from'9) "Oh, Augie is a sort of studious type and he doesn't go in for such things," he said. This wasn't good enough for Mr. Magnus, with the long gray threads of baldness on his robust head. "I don't like a voun" man should gamble either," he said. "But he should play a friendly game." I felt he wasn't unjustified. "I'll play if you teach me," I said which went a long way toward improving the situation and making me one of the house. I sat in a corner with some of the younger children to study pinochle. More relatives came; the vast apartment filled. It was family custom on Friday night, and, moreover, the word was out that Charlotte was engaged. People wanted to see Simon. He already knew most of them, the giant uncles and heavy-pelted aunts in their Siberian furs who came up from their Cadillacs and Packards: Uncle Charlie Magnus who owned the coal yards; Uncle Artie who owned a big mattress factory; Uncle Robby who was a commission merchant in South Water Street, ponderous, white, and caracul-haired--like Stiva Lausch--and with a hearing-aid plugged-in. There were sons in uniform, from military academy, and others with football letters, and daughters, and little children. Simon was ready for the uncles and aunts, very familiar and even already overbearing to some. He had a natural hang of their whole system of fellowship and contempt--how not to be caught under any circumstances in a position where to be looked down on was unavoidable, so that you could read in a back, bearishly turned, that you were a schmuck. I have to say that Simon's confidence was superb, and it was he who was getting them under, though he was deferential with a few of the women. Toward these, heartiness or brazening wasn't indicated, but what was necessary was to prove that in addition to everything he was also a lover. I must say also that he had no embarrassment because of "so; he assumed my complicity and was teaching and leading me. So I followed him around, because there was nobody else for me to stand close to comfortably. It lacked white stockings and fans to resemble the Ulrectorate--I'm thinking of commoners suddenly in the palaces of power. But the Magnuses seemed less to know what to do. However, in all the world there was no one who had more than they of anything ex- "pt money--a gap that could perhaps be closed. Over this tumultuousness and family heat, melding yells at the pnochle table, the racing of the kids, pitchers of cocoa and tea and 'asses of ^ffee cake carried in, political booming and the sharper neighing of women and all this grand vital discord, there was the supervision of Uncle Charlie standing, or rather rearing, beside his wigged mother in her black dress. If it strikes me as advisable to add "rearing" it is because of the tightness of his belly and the great weight supported by his feet, and possibly also because the old woman wore a collar of things in gold shaped like grizzly-teeth, and that reminds me of creatures. He was white, thick, and peevish, and had the kind of insolence that sometimes affects the eyes like snowblindness, making you think there's something arctic about having a million bucks. At least an immigrant who during the Depression was a millionaire had this dazzle. Not that Uncle Charlie was formidable in all respects; I'm taking him at a posed moment, during a family occasion, a niece to be married off and new kin to be added. Through Simon I had got to be a candidate too. If he worked out well then I might also be considered as a husband, for there wasn't any lack of daughters to marry, some of them pretty and all with money. So far Simon had had nothing but successes. For several weeks he had been working under Uncle Charlie's eye, first as weighmaster and cashier and then learning to buy, meeting brokers and salesmen and learning about freight rates and the different coal fields. Uncle Charlie certified that he was fehig, or apt, a naturally good businesshead, and all were very pleased. Simon was already looking for a yard of his own, hoping to find one with an overhead track that would reduce unloading costs. In short. Uncle Charlie was extremely indulgent with him as an up-and-comer, and he received all the marks of the old boy's favor, the simple cordial obscenities and hand on the shoulder; he wagged his head near Simon's face and opened up all bounties. His humor made everybody laugh with pleasure. Nobody thought to remonstrate about children and young girls when Uncle Charlie said, "Sonofabitch, you're fo-kay, my boy, fo-kay. You got the goods. I think you can put it down between the sheets too, eh?" because this was just his usual manner of speaking. "What do you think?" said Simon. "Leave it to me." "Yes, I think .1 leave it to you. You think I'm goin' to take it myself? Wouldn't be fun for Charlotte. Look how she's built. Nothing was left out. She has to have a young husk." Here I came in for my share of the notice. Kelly Weintraub, one of the distant cousins by marriage and a trucker who worked for Uncle Robby, said, "Look at his brother. The girls are popping their eyes out at him. Your daughter Lucy the worst. You got no shame, kid? In this family the girls can't hardly wait." There were shrieks about this. Through them Lucy Magnus continued to smile at me though her color deeply changed. She was slighter than most of her family; she wasn't shy to make a declaration of honest pnsuality under the scrutiny of the whole clan. None of the Magnuses took the trouble to conceal such things; it wasn't necessary. The young nnes could tell their parents exactly what they wanted, which I found admirable. I could look at Lucy with pleasure too. She was plain but had a healthy face, very clear skin, and pretty breasts that she swung where she pleased. Only her nose might have been finer; it was a little broad, as was her mouth, but her black eyes were strong and declarative and her hair black and delicate. It made me think of her maiden hair and there were suggestions I didn't try at all to evade. But these were lover's not husbandly thoughts. I had no special mind to get married. I saw Simon's difficulties too clearly for that. "Come here," said her father to me, and I had to stand close inspection. "What do you do?" he said, winking with the full snowblindness. Simon answered for me, "He's in the book business. Until he saves enough to go back to the university and finish his degree." "Shut up!" he said. "C--sucker! I asked him, not you, budinski! What do you do?" B I said, "I'm in the book business, as Simon told you." I thought the old man must be able to pierce by strength of suspicion my crockery, all the oddity of Owens' house and my friends there. What a book business could signify to him but starving Pentateuch peddlers with beards full of Polish lice and feet wrapped in sacking, I couldn't fathom. "Goddammit the schools. There's schoolboys now until gray hair. So what are you studying for, a lawyer? Fo-kay! I guess we got to have them, the crooks. My sons don't go to school. My daughters go, so long it keeps them out of trouble." "Augie was thinking of going to law school," Simon said to Lucy's mother. "Yes, that's right," I too said. "Fine, fine, fine, fine," said Uncle Charlie, my hearing done and his face of thick white hide turned in dismissal from us all; he threatened with his mtensest care his daughter Lucy, who answered him with one o1 her smiles. I saw that she promised him obedience and he promised "ack the satisfaction of all legitimate needs as long as she obeyed "irn. , e was another special glance on me, that of my sister-in-law arlotte, with her investigative, warm, and to some extent despairing yss. I don't doubt that she already knew some displeasing things about Simon, and perhaps she was trying to see them in me also. I presume she was thinking what risks her cousin Lucy ran with me. Meanwhile Kelly Weintraub was saying, "He has a pair of bedroom eyes, Augie." But I was the only one of the principals to hear and I took a good look at him to see how much harm he really meant me and to what extent he was kidding, the handsome teameo, slick-haired, with certainly horny eyes of his own and a suggestive pad of a chin. "I know you guys," he said to me. Then I recognized him, not greatly different, really, from what he had been in the schoolyard, in his sweaters. "You had a little brother, George." "We still have him. He's not little any more," I said. "He's big and he's living downstate." "Where, in Manteno?" "No, it's in another town, a little place down near Pinckneyville. You know that part of the state?" I didn't know it myself. Simon was the only one of us who had ever gone down there, the Renlings having been unable at that time to spare me. "No, I don't. But I remember George," he said. "I remember you too, skitching rides on the ice wagons." I shrugged, smiling. It was foolish of him to be suggesting a menace. He thought he could put a stick in Simon's spokes; Simon was way ahead of him. "Of course Charlotte knows," said Simon when I told him about Kelly Weintraub. "Why should we make a secret of it? She even wants to put George into a private institution. Don't worry, nobody pays any attention to this guy. He doesn't count around here. Anyhow, I recognized him first and got the jump on him. Leave it to me, I have them all eating out of my hand." He added, "You'll be doing the same if you'll listen to me. You made a good first impression." I quickly learned what power he really had with them. For he had absolutely meant it when he said he had plans for me, and he came for me several times a week to take me on his rounds. We had lunch with uncles and cousins in the rich businessmen's restaurants and clubs, fancy steakhouses. Simon was hard with them and didn't yield ground whether it was a joke or an argument that came up, while in an undertone he gave me the lowdown on them, contemptuously. I saw him developing some terrible abilities in quarrelsomeness; he differed with all their opinions no matter on what subject. It might be about tailors, or entertainers, or heavyweight fighters, or politics--things on which he informed himself as he went along. He was impatient even in his jokes; he made waiters fear him, sending dishes back to the kitchen, ,. ^gn he gave large tips also. He seemed to have no regard for money _Lg always carried a big bankroll now--but actually, by the way he handled wallet and the bills, he convinced me that he knew what he was doing. He said to me, "With these people you've got to spend. If they see you cautious with a buck, you lose your standing with them. And I have to stand in good. They know everybody, and I'm going out for myself soon and I need them. Just these bull-session lunches and going to the Chez Paree and the Glass Derby, proving I can keep up their speed, you see, that's the first thing. They're not going to deal with anybody that's not one of them. Now you understand why a slob like Kelly Weintraub doesn't count. He can't afford to eat lunch in joints like these, he can't take a check at the Chez Paree without everybody being uncomfortable and reckoning he can't afford it, because they know exactly what he's pulling down a week. You see, he's a negligible factor and nobody will listen to him. I'll remember him though," he said with dangerous promise. I knew he kept a file of accounts to settle. Did Cissy and Five Properties have a folder in it to themselves? I thought they must. "Ah!" he said. "Come downtown with me. Let's get our hair cut." We drove to the Palmer House and went below into the big radiance of the barbershop. Simon would have let his fine English coat fall to the ground if the Negro attendant hadn't run in time to gather it in his arms. We sat before the huge mirrors in those episcopal machines, the big chairs, and were groomed and shampooed. Simon had himself steamed and singed, manicured, had everything lavished on himself, and not simply urged me but forced me to do as he did. He wanted to try all they knew how to do. It was getting so that I had to undergo an examination of almost brass-hat severity when I appeared before him. My heels must not be turned over by so much as an eighth of an inch, my cuffs had to strike my shoes right, he supplied me with ties, taking mine away and leaving a dozen of his own choice on the rack. He yelled and bullied if he thought I didn't wear my clothes exactly as he thought I should. And these were things I had lost interest in since Evanston. I had to expect ridicule from Mimi for having polished nails. I let it be done. I didn't consider my fingers much. It was probably an asset to me as a book tlef- Looking at my hands and at my ties, who would suspect me? For hadn't, of course, stopped stealing. I didn't any longer have to support '" "a; Simon took care of that. But while he paid for me wherever e went, it was still expensive to go with him. Occasionally there were tips or drinks or cigars or corsages for Charlotte that slipped his mind, and I had larger cleaning and laundry bills than ever before. Once in a while I went, moreover, with Padilla for a Saturday night with our friends on Lake Park Avenue. And besides, I was trying to get together the university entrance fee. Shrewdly, Simon gave me little money; mostly he gave me things. He wanted me to learn to have expensive needs, and the desire for dough would come of itself. Then if I were to begin to ask him for more, he could hook me. From the barbershop we'd go to Field's to buy him a dozen or so shirts, imported Italian underclothes or slacks or shoes, all things of which he already had a surplus; he showed me drawers, closets, shelves full, and still kept buying. Some part of this was due to his having been on the wrong side of the counter, or the servile back on the shoefitting stool, and in part this was his way of tempting me. put also I knew that in the barbershop and on the shopping trips he was aiming to refresh himself; he slept badly and was looking flabby and ill, and one morning when he came to fetch me he locked himself in the toilet and cried. After that day he wouldn't come upstairs; he honked his horn for me in the street. He said, "I can't stand the joint you live in; they don't keep it clean. Are you sure they don't have bed animals? And the can is filthy. I don't see how you can go into it." Soon he took to saying this with the same inspection glare he had for my appearance. "When are you going to move out of this rat nest! Jesus, it's the sort of place plagues and epidemics start in!" Eventually he stopped calling J for me. He'd phone when he wanted me; sometimes he'd send wires. I At first, however, he wanted me with him constantly. So, then, we were in the gleaming lanes and warm indoor puffing of the department store, but after when he started back to the West Side, wearing one of his new ties and temporarily in a better state, suddenly he would lose it all, it seemed, and, pressing on the gas pedal, he must have seen himself * speeding across the last boundary of his strength. But just as the car, squealing around corners, righted itself, he too kept balance. However, it was evident that his feelings were suicidal from the way he drove and the way he leaped forward in arguments; hit him who would; he kept a tire tool under the driver's seat for his weapon in traffic arguments, and he cursed everybody in the street, running through lights and scattering pedestrians. The truth back of all this was that he had his pockets full of money as an advance on his promised ability to make a rich man of himself and now had to deliver.