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 Fa-
thers, 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 re-
union; 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 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 cigar-
ettes 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 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 partent
　　　　　Pour partir; cœurs légers, semblables aux ballons,
　　　　　De leur fatalité jamais ils ne s'écartent,
　　　　　Et, sans savoir pourquoi, disent toujours: Allons!

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 port-
ables, 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 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 some-
times 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-in-law 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 brother-in-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 ques-
tions, 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 want-
ed 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 Marsh-field. 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 Bruyère 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 de-
gree in the winter he aimed to get an office in one of the older skyscrapers
on Dearborn near Jackson and set up as a vocational-guidance 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 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. Modern 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, usefulness, 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 touched
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 inter-
pret? 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 Tom-
my 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
hindlegs 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 went 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, wheel-
chair 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 mys-
terious tremor, dust, vapor, emanation of stupendous effort traveled with the
air, over me on top of the great establishment, so full 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 Einhorn 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 Elimelek, 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 under-
stand 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 the 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 tra-
veled on the Cadillac chassis and high cushions like a pair of carnival Ro-
mans cruising the Corso, this high-breasted 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 laugh-
ed, 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 Renée 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. "Renée, 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 au 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 soufflé, pastry-fish, and
other surprises. This was what Renée 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?

Renée 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 Renée 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 con-
sideration 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 Renée 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 Renée 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 Renée 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 salesman-prince, 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 Hen-
rici'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?"

"Renée 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."

"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 Renée.
"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 pew-
ter dishes said, "Here you are, Mr. March." Renée 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 cer-
tainly 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 blind-
ness 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, figur-
ing 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. Renée 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 Renée 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 biceps--it 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 Renée, 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.
Renée was told Charlotte wouldn't be there, but then Charlotte showed up.
Renée cursed her. Charlotte slapped her. Simon slapped Renée 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 Renée 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.



Chapter XXIII



If the great Andromeda galaxy had to depend on you to hold it up, where would
it be now but fallen way to hell? Why, March, let the prophetic soul of the
wide world dreaming on things to come (S. T. Coleridge) summon its giants and
mobilizers, Caesars and Atlases. But you! you pitiful recruit, where do you
come in? Go on, marry a loving wife and settle at March's farm and academy, and
don't get in the way when the nations are furiously raging together. My friend,
I said, speaking to myself, relax and knock off effort. The time is in the hands
of mighty men to whom you are like the single item in the mind of the chief of
a great Sears, Roebuck Company, and here come you, wishing to do right and not
lead a disappointed life (sic!).

However, my conscience had already decided. I was committed and couldn't stay,
and at last the hour struck. There was a windy, flattening rain that beat the
smoke down, the whole city sodden and black, the pillars of La Salle Street
Station weeping. Clem said to me, "Don't push your luck. Don't take a risk with
the clap. Don't tell your secrets to anybody to satisfy their curiosity. Don't
get married without a six-month engagement. If you get in dutch I can always
spare you a few bucks."

I put in for the Purser's and Pharmacist's Mate's School, and they took my
application. For a while I had a wrangle with a psychiatrist fellow. Why had I
indicated with an X that I was a bed-wetter? I insisted my bed was always dry.
"But here's the X opposite the question in the Yes column." Didn't he realize, I
said, that in filling out twenty questionnaires and taking five examinations after
thirty hours without sleep on the train a man might make a single slip? "But why
this slip, not another?" he said cunningly. I began to hate him very much, sit-
ting there on his cool white fanny while his lazy eyes arrived at unpleasant
conclusions about me. I said, "Do you want me to confess that I do wet the bed
even though it's not so? Or do you mean that I'd like to wet the bed?" He told
me I had an aggressive character.

Anyway, before I could start at the school, they sent us away on a training
cruise in Chesapeake Bay. We sailed up and down through flickering heat. The
ship was a many-decked old contraption from McKinley's time. White, an iron,
floury, adrift bakery, it wallowed wide and aimless all week. The white ferries
with Dixie pillars passed us by, very elegant. Or the flattop whales that had
planes like kids' jacks on the deck, and monstrous hair-stuffing smoke came
from their sides. We did fire-fighting and abandon-ship drills eight or ten times a
day. The boats crashed down from the davits; the trainees poured into them from
manlines and cargo nets, rambunctious, mauling and horsing around, prodding
with boat hooks, goosing and carrying on, screaming about female genitals.
Then rowed. Hours and hours of rowing. The water curled like a huge bed of
endive.

Between times you could bask on the fantail of this painted old vertical
bakery, and crates, spoiled lettuces, oranges, turds, and little crabs follow-
ed on the stream or departed. The sky enamel, the sun with gold spindles. It
makes me think of the picture of the fools with fish and cake and the boaters
with soup-ladle oars in the painting of the old master Hieronymus B.--this
idle craft with the excursion strummers, roast chicken trussed in a tree;
death's head in the little twigs above. Other scenes too: eggs spitted on
knives trotting with tiny feet; men inside oyster shells carried to a can-
nibal banquet. Herring, meat, and other belly-goods. But, all the same, hu-
man eyes were looking out. Up to no good, maybe, but how do you know? Or
the rich kings at Bethlehem. Joseph by a fire of sticks. But off in the
meadow, what goes on? A wolf bleeding at a knife wound eating the swine-
herd who struck him, and someone else dashing like mad for the goofy tow-
ers of the city, the potato-masher castles and the pots, double-boilers,
and smokehouses of habitations.

We ate plenty: flapjacks, chops, ham, spuds, steak, chili con and rice, ice
cream, pie. Everybody talked about the chow, discussed the menus, and remem-
bered home recipes.

Saturday we put in at Baltimore where the tramps of the port were waiting on
Clap Hill, and the denominations with printed verses. There was mail call.
Simon had been turned down for service because of a bad ear. "A way out I
could've used," he said. Clem wasn't doing well at his new business. There
were two letters from Sophie Geratis, now with her husband at Camp Blanding.
She said farewell but kept saying it in different letters. From Einhorn there
was a mimeographed message to his friends in the service, full of corny sen-
timent and comedy. In a personal note he added that Dingbat was a soldier in
New Guinea, driving a jeep, and that he himself was ailing.

And so, more weeks of captivity on this cruise, back and forth over the bay;
the same endive waves and blare of public-address system, horseplay in the
head, boat drills, brine, heavy meals, sun, hell-raising, and this continual
whanging away on a few elements so as to deafen you.

At last we were returned to Sheepshead, and I started to study book-keeping
and ship's doctoring. The science part consoled me. As long as I could keep
improving my mind, I figured, I was doing okay.

Sylvester was in New York. Also Stella Chesney, the girl I had helped escape
in Mexico. Of course I went to see her first. On my first liberty I phoned her,
and she said to come right over. So I bought a bottle of wine and the delica-
cies of the season and went; and of course I told myself I could use the dough
she owed me and what not, but I ought to have known myself better than that.
What use was war without also love?

The place where she lived seemed to be among dress factories, silent on Sat-
urday. As I climbed the stairs I was very excited. But I warned myself not to
think we could take up where we had stopped at Cuernavaca. Oliver being in
jail, chances were that there was someone else.

But there was the object of these wicked thoughts with a warm healthy face,
looking innocent and happy to see me. What a beauty! My heart whanged without
pity for me. I already saw myself humbled in the dust of love, the god Eros
holding me down with his foot and forcing all kinds of impossible stuff on
me.

She made the same impression on me that she had made the first time when I
saw her on the little porch above the Carta Blanca beer shield with bulge-eyed
Oliver and the two friends. Then I thought of her in the lace dress she wore
in court the time Oliver socked Louie Fu. Then in the mountains under the
tarpaulin when her dress and petticoat went up so fast. And there were those
same legs above me. They were bare, I saw, by the white of the skylight and
the reflection of the green carpet.

"Well, if it isn't a pleasure," she said and put out her hand. I was all dressed
up in my brand-new government goods, and as I walked I felt upon me the skivvies
and socks, new shoes and tight jumper and pants. To say nothing of the white
cap and the embroidery of anchors on the sailor collar. "You didn't tell me
you were drafted. What a surprise!"

"When I look, I'm surprised myself," I said.

But what I really thought of was whether to kiss her. It suddenly came back to
me, to my cheek itself, what the sensation of her lips had been like in the hot
market place. My face heated now. Finally I decided I'd better speak my mind,
and I told her, "I can't decide whether it would be right to kiss you."

"Please! Don't create a problem." She laughed, meaning that I should. I put
my lips on the side of her face, exactly as she had done to me, and I flush-
ed instantaneous as electricity. She colored too, pleased that I had done it.
Was she not so simple and free of ulterior motives as she looked? Well,
neither was I.

We sat down to talk. She wanted to know about me. "What do you do?" she
asked. When not a rich young beauty's friend, nor an eagle-tamer nor poker
player, was what she meant.

"I've had a hard time deciding just what I should do. But now I think I was cut
out to be a teacher. I want to get a place of my own and have a family. I'm tired
of knocking around."

"Oh, you like children? You'd make a good father."

I thought it was very nice of her to say so. I wanted to offer her everything
I had, suddenly. Glorious constructions began to rise in my mind, golden and
complicated. Maybe she would give up whatever life she was leading for my
sake. If she had another man maybe she'd quit him. Maybe he'd be killed in an
automobile accident. Maybe he'd go back to his wife and children. You perhaps
know yourself what such vain imaginings can be. O ye charitable gods, don't
hold it against me! My heart was beginning to bake. I couldn't see her straight;
she dazed me.

She wore velvet houseshoes, with ties; her dark hair was piled three ways; she
had on an orange skirt. Her eyes looked soft and gentle. I wondered if she could
look so fresh without having a lover and bothered myself about it.

I should hope!--about the father part, I mean. And what did she do? Well, it
was hard to get a clear account. She mentioned various things unfamiliar to me.
Women's colleges, musical career, stage career, painting. From college there
were books; from music, piano, etcetera; from the theater inscribed photos, also
a sewing machine of spidery cast-iron, circa 1910, which I connected with
costumes; her pictures were on the walls--flowers, oranges, bedsteads, nudes
in the bath. She talked about getting on the radio and mentioned the USO and
Stage-Door Canteen. I did my best to follow.

"You like my house?" she said.

It wasn't a house but a room, a parlor, high, long, and old-fashioned, with
archduke moldings of musical instruments and pears. Plants, piano, a big
decorative bed, fishes, a cat and dog. The dog was a heavy breather--he was
getting on in years. The cat played around her ankles and scratched them; I
quickly walloped him with a newspaper, but she didn't like that. He sat on her
shoulder, and when she said, "Kiss, Ginger--kiss, kiss," he licked her face.

Over the way were dress factories. Scraps of material floated and waved from
the wire window guards. Planes with powerful rotary noise cut the blue air clear
from Britain to California. She served the wine I brought. I drank and my head
gave a throb in its injured place. Then I became very heated and filled with
amorous anxiety. But I thought, There's her pride to consider. I wanted to get
away from her in Cuernavaca. Why should she believe I'm falling for her now?
And maybe I shouldn't fall. What if she's the Cressida type, as Einhorn used to
call Cissy F.?

"I still intend to pay you the money you were so kind as to lend me," she said.
"No, please, I didn't come for that."

"But you probably need it now."

"Why, I haven't even touched my last month's pay."

"My father sends me an allowance from Jamaica. That's where he is. Of course
I can't live on it. I haven't done any too well recently." This was not a
complaint but sounded as though soon she'd do better. "Oliver set me back. I
depended on him. I thought I was in love with him. Did you love that girl you
were with?"

"Yes," I said. I'm glad I didn't lie, I may say.

"She must have hated me like poison."

"She married a captain out in the Pacific."

"I'm sorry."

"Oh no, don't be. It's been over for quite a while."

"I felt in the wrong afterward. But you were the only person who would have
helped me. And I never thought--"

"I'm glad I was able to help. As far as that goes, I came out way ahead."

"It's nice of you to say so. But you know--now that it's finished you won't
care if I say it--I thought we were in the same boat. Everybody said how she--"

"Went hunting without me. I know." I hoped she wouldn't mention Talavera.

"You got into trouble without knowing it, the way I did. Maybe you deserved
it though--like me. It served me right. I was on my way to Hollywood with him.
Mexico was just a side trip; he was going to make a star of me. Wasn't that
ridiculous?"

"No, it wasn't. You'd make a first-rate star. But how could Oliver do that to
you when he knew he was going to jail?"

"He put it over easily because for a while I was in love."

It went to my head when she spoke that word.

I was constructing higher and higher, up to the top spheres, and simultan-
eously committing a dozen crimes to achieve my end. The cat scratched my hand
as it swung by the chair. I thought I was going to have a nosebleed also,
from passion. One minute I felt gross and swollen, and the next my soul was
up there concertizing among her brilliant sister souls.

"Or worse than ridiculous," said she, pointedly.

Worse? Oh, how she paid her way, did she mean? She didn't have to say that.
It pained me that she should feel such explanations necessary. I certainly
was lucky to be seated; my legs wouldn't have kept me up.

"Why, what's the matter?" she said in her warmhearted voice.

I begged her not to make fun, please. I said, "When I was covered with ban-
dages and playing poker at the Chinaman's, how could you think we were in
the same boat?"

"I'm sure you remember how we looked at each other that day in the bar
where they had that monkey thing."

"The kinkajou."

Crossing her hands in her lap and bringing her knees together around them--
which I admired and wished she would, however, not do--she said, "Nobody
should pretend to be always one hundred per cent honest. I wish I knew how
to be seventy, sixty per cent."

I swore she must be one hundred and ten, two hundred. Then I said something
I didn't expect myself. I said, "Nobody should be a mystery intentionally.
Unintentionally is mysterious enough."

"I'll try not to be. With you, anyway."

She was sincere. I knew it. I saw how her throat suddenly grew full. My body,
which is maybe all I am, this effortful creature, felt subject to currents
and helpless. I wanted to go and hug her by the legs, but I thought I'd bet-
ter wait. For why should I assume it would be right? Because I felt like?

I said, "I suppose you see how I'm getting to feel about you. If I'm making a
mistake, you'd better tell me."

"A mistake? Why do you say that?"

"Well, in the first place," I said, "I haven't been here long. You'll think
I'm in too much of a hurry."

"And the second place? What makes you speak so slowly?"

Was I speaking in an unusual way? I didn't even know it. "In the second, I
feel I did wrong in Cuernavaca by going back."

"Maybe you can do right this time," she said.

Then I dropped to the ground and hugged her legs. She bent to kiss me. I
would have hurried, but her idea was to be slower. She said, "We'd better shut
the animals in the kitchen." She collared the dog, I lifted up the cat from
underneath, and we put them there. The kitchen door was fastened with a bent
nail, having no knob or hook. Then she took the cover from the bed and we
helped each other to undress.

"What are you saying to yourself?" she whispered when we lay down. I wasn't
aware that I was saying anything. I was afraid she would bump her head against
the wall and tried to cover it with my hands, which she then understood, and
helped me. I was hungry and kissed her wherever my mouth could reach, till
she kept my lip in her teeth and drew on me, drew on me. Nothing could be put
over by effort any more, and there was nothing to try.

Was she a vain person, or injurious or cynical, it couldn't make any difference
now. Or was I a foolish, uncorrected, blundering, provisional, unreliable man,
this was taken away as of no account and couldn't have any sense or meaning.
The real truth about one or the other was simpler than any such description.
I told her I loved her. It was true. I felt I had come to the end of my trouble
and hankering, and it was conclusive. As we lay in bed kissing, whispering,
and loving all weekend long, the air was strong and blue outside, the sun was
splendid and sailed around handsome and haughty. We got up only to take the
dog, Harry, to the roof. The cat walked on the covers over the bed and kneaded
us with its paws. The only people we saw were two old guys playing pinochle on
a cutting table of the dress factory over the way.

However, Monday morning I had to be back at the base. She woke me in the
middle of the night and got me dressed and went down with me to the subway.
I kept asking, Would she marry me? She said, "You want all your troubles to
be over all of a sudden and you're so anxious for it you may be making a
mistake."

This was just before dawn, by the descent-into-hell stairs of the subway, just
under the Eastern vault of wired glass, and the blackout light like a dumb posy
on its thick iron. So by this blue illumination we were kissing with loving
faces until it began to drizzle and her slippers got wet.

"Darling, go home," I said.

"Will you phone me?"

"Every chance I get. Do you love me?"

"Of course I love you."

Every time she said this I was so moved that happy gratitude poured over me
down to my very feet while my back-hair prickled. Like when you're swimming
in the pleasure of the sea and feel some contact come up behind. All the deep
breathes like silent concertinas and the shore is gay with stripes and bunting.

Finally I had to go down into the tunnel and take a train. I couldn't see her
for five days. And meantime I didn't dare fall behind in the Purser's School
or tangle with a master-at-arms and lose my next liberty. Every evening I went
down by the sea where the phone booths were; and she was often out, having a
busy life. I had a terrible fear that she had spent the weekend with me out of
friendliness alone, or so that I would understand better what should have
happened in the mountains that night. If this was so, I was sunk, for by now
I was more in love than I could stand, as if some mineral had got into my
veins and arteries and I ached, flesh and bones, the way you will on the verge
of the grippe.

All week the freighters groaned in from the sea, while Coney Island was wrap-
ped in gray or lilac fog and I sat with a suffering spirit of love in the phone
booth after evening chow trying to do my lessons and waiting for her to answer.
I was afraid I was too much of a latecomer and had nothing to expect. In which
case I was ruined, because everything now depended on her.

On Saturday, in a fever, I got off the base as soon as the usual parade shen-
anigans were over. What a state I was in! When I rode over the bridge from
Brooklyn suspended on those heaven-hung struts over the brick valleys, then the
fiery flux of harbor water, the speedy gulls, the battleships open like vast radio
sets in the yards, beast-horns of Hengist and Horsa, and then the tunnel again,
I felt that if I had to continue to ride and ride I would certainly not last but
would give out.

But there was no need to be scared, for Stella was waiting. She had been sick
all week because I wasn't there, running a temperature, wondering did I love
her. She cried when we were in bed, with her hands pressed on my back and her
breasts against me. She said that when she saw me in front of the cathedral from
the balcony of the bar where the Carta Blanca shield was hung she fell in love
with me. She didn't even need the money she borrowed from me at Cuernavaca
but took it as a means of keeping in touch. As for Oliver--

"What's it to me what happened with Oliver? It's none of my business," I
said. "I want to get married."

Clem had urged me to be engaged for six months, in view of my personality and
make-up. But this advice was good for people who were merely shopping, not for
someone who had lived all his life with one great object.

"Of course," she said, "I want to get married if you love me."

I deeply assured her.

"If you still love me after lunch," she said, "ask me again."

She brought the lunch to me in bed, which was a bed she had bought at an auc-
tion, ivory colored and painted with wreaths and Arcadia roses. It came from
Bavaria. Well, she served me here, and wouldn't even let me butter my own
bread. As if I was the Elector, I got waited on hand and foot, and in turn I
gave the animal staff ham trimmings and leftovers.

She felt obliged to tell me all she could about herself.

"I buy a ticket in the Irish Sweepstakes every year," she said.

I could see nothing objectionable in this.

"Also I'm a mystic, a Gurdjieff follower."

This was a new one on me. She showed me a picture of this old boy, a shaved
head, deep eyes, and mustachios of the old school of Crimean fighter. I saw no
special harm in him.

What else? She spent lots of money on clothes. This I could see; her closets
were stuffed with dresses. But I didn't bother my head about it. Since she
went along with me in my scheme for the foster-home and academy, and she
enthusiastically did, what difference could her wardrobe make? In fact, I
was proud that she was so elegant. Also she owed money, she said.

"Why, darling, don't worry, we'll pay everybody. C'est la moindre des choses,
as they say on the other side." When I was loved and sitting in a fine bed
like this, I was just like royalty and disposed of all matters with a word.

We decided to get married as soon as I graduated from Sheepshead.



Chapter XXIV



I see before me next a fellow named Mintouchian, who is an Armenian, of course.
We are sitting together in a Turkish bath having a conversation, except that
Mintouchian is doing most of the talking, explaining various facts of exist-
ence to me, by allegory mostly. The time is a week before Stella and I were
married and I shipped out.

This Mintouchian was a monument of a person, with his head very abrupt at
the back, as Armenian heads tend sometimes to be, but lionlike in front, with
red cheekbones. He had legs on him like that statue of Clemenceau on the Champs
Elysées where Clemenceau is striding against a wind and is thinking of bread
and war, and the misery and grandeur, going on with last strength in his
longjohns and gaiters.

Sitting together in this little white-tile room, Mintouchian and I were quite
pals in spite of differences of age and income--Mintouchian was supposed to be
loaded. He looked overpowering, and he had tones in his voice like the dumping
of coal. This must have done him good in court, as he was a lawyer. He was a
friend of a friend of Stella whose name was Agnes Kuttner. Agnes lived in big
style in an apartment off Fifth Avenue near one of the Latin-American embassies,
furnished in Empire, with tremendous mirrors and chandeliers, Chinese screens,
alabaster birds of night, thick drapes, and all luxuries like that. She went
around to auction rooms and bought up treasures of the Romanoffs and Hapsburgs;
she herself came from Vienna. Mintouchian had set up a trust fund for her, so
she wasn't at all in the business of antiques, and her apartment was his home
away from home, as hotels sometimes falsely speak of themselves. His other
home was also in New York, but his wife was an invalid. Every evening he
went and had dinner with her, served by her nurse in the bedroom. But before
this he had visited Agnes. Usually his chauffeur was driving him across Central
Park at 7:45 for the meal with his wife.

The reason why I was with him in the bath this particular afternoon was that
Stella had gone shopping with Agnes for the wedding. These two, Agnes and
Mintouchian, were the only people we ever saw when I got liberty from the base
on weekends. He enjoyed taking us to Toots Shor's or the Diamond Horseshoe, I
think, and other scarlet-and-gold-door places. The one time I tried to pick up
the tab he pushed me away. I would have had to borrow from Stella to pay it.
But Mintouchian was very openhanded, a grand good-time Charlie. Almost always
in evening clothes of Rembrandt blackness, with his red-edged eyes and craggy
head and ears, and as if smelling the sands and savannahs with his flat nose, but
a smile of spin-on-the-music, spend-the-money; his teeth were long, and he was
ever so slightly feline-whiskered to go with his corrupt, intelligent wrinkles
and expanding mouth. Amid the ladies he didn't let go with this smile, but now
when he sat like a village headman of the south of Asia in his carnival-colors
towel, he did; and while conversing more man to man he was pinching himself under
the eyes to make the bags disappear--his yellow toenails were lacquered with clear
polish, except the small toes grievously buried in the lifeworn foot with its
skinful of vessels. I wondered if he was really one of those hot-to-the-touch
and perilous guys like Zaharoff or Juan March, or the Swedish Match King or
Jake the Barber or Three-Finger Brown. Stella said he had money he hadn't even
folded yet. He certainly was laying out plenty for Agnes, whom he had met in
Cuba; he paid her husband a remittance to stay there. However, even though I
found out that Mintouchian wasn't strictly honest, he was never a rogue's-gal-
ery character. To get his legal education, as a matter of fact, he had played
the organ in silent movies. But he was a crack lawyer now and had global busi-
ness interests, and, moreover, he was a lettered person and reader. It was one
of his curiosities to figure out historical happenings like the building of
the Berlin-Baghdad Railway or the Battle of Tannenberg, and he furthermore
knew a lot about the lives of Martyrs. He was another of those persons who
persistently arise before me with life counsels and illumination throughout
my entire earthly pilgrimage.

I couldn't figure out what he saw in Agnes, who was obviously the boss over
him. Her eyes were deep brown, of an aristocratic favorite of cafés and carri-
ages of Imperial days, although she must have been only a child in those times.
And what's more, she had a slight depression on either side of her turned-up
nose which made her look not exactly of an open nature. Nevertheless she was
Stella's friend, and Mintouchian loved her. This made me think of the deep
wishes of elderly people, or desires unslayable short of total demolition by
death.

"Death!" Mintouchian said it himself. He was describing how he was sub-
ject to strokes. He said, "I don't want to make you gloomy, so close to your
wedding."

"Oh no, sir, you couldn't make me gloomy. I love Stella too much to consider
it."

"Well, I won't say that I was as happy as you, but I was also very feeling
when I got married. Maybe it came from playing the mood music, which I was
then doing. For sea adventures I'd play 'Fingal's Cave.' For Rudolph Valentino,
'Orientale,' César Cui, Tchaikovsky's 'Sehnsucht.' Also 'Poet and Peasant.' You
try to fight this stuff, when Milton Sills sees Conway Tearle didn't go down on
the Titanic, or something. I was playing it all from my book on torts, boning
up for the bar exam. But all the same, those were times of emotion. Or maybe
you think this is guff?"

"No, why?"

"You think I'm a bandit, only you wouldn't say it on a bet. You fight your
malice too much."

"Everybody says so. It's as if you were supposed to have low opinions. I'd
never say I was angelic, but I respect as much as I can."

Mintouchian said, "In one day of practice I see more than you could imagine
if it was a project. The Balzac Comédie Humaine is child's play in compari-
son. I wake up in the morning and have to ask myself, 'Now in the case of
Shiml versus Shiml, who is screwing who? Who is going to be in worse shape in
the end? The man who takes the child away from the living-in-sin mother? The
lover who makes her give up the kid to avoid the publicity so it won't harm
his business? The mother who does anything for the lover?' Ribono shel Olam!"

I was surprised by this phrase, which he explained as follows: "My father was
janitor of a synagogue, and I hung around the cellar. I had an uncle who was a
colonel in the Boer War. Who is what? So if history casts a strange or even
ridiculous light on us, we are still all serious, aren't we? We die anyway." He
went back to the subject of his strokes. "Here several years ago I was sitting
on the toilet figuring a big deal mentally when suddenly the Angel of Death pluck-
ed me by the nose. My mind turned black. I fell on my face. I think if my belly
hadn't been in the way to break the force I might have been killed. As it was,
the blood from my nose sprayed the door like seltzer. Which, in my vanity, I had
shut. Then by and by the spark of life came back to me. My mind filled again
with the typical thought and light of Mintouchian. Now, I reflected, you're
Mintouchian again. As if I had an option. Do I have to come back Mintouchian,
including the distressing parts? Yes, because to live is to be Mintouchian, my
dear man. I went over all my secrets and found they were still in place. I still
didn't know who was screwing whom, and I crept into my bed and shivered from
the touch of death.

"But I was saying"--he gave me a genial smile with heart-felt squint and
then he yawned and enjoyed the golden light--"how a guy struggles with ma-
lice. How life goes beyond the conscience of nice well-reared people. A good
upbringing stops them from knowing what they think even. Because we all
think the same, more or less. You love Stella--all right, don't you?"

"Like I never loved anyone before."

"That's swell. That's what I call answering like a man. When is your
birthday?"

"In January."

"I'd have sworn to it. So is mine. I believe the highest types are born in
January. It's barometric--you can look it up in Ellsworth Huntington. The
parents make love in spring when the organism is healthiest and then the best
specimens are conceived. If you want children you should plan to knock up your
dear one in that season. Ancient wisdom is right. Now science comes lately and
finds it out. But what I wanted to say about your bride, even she, is that she's
no different from the rest of us except more gifted and beautiful. It is absolu-
tely certain that she has thought of the future both with and without you.

　　　　　　　　I should worry, I should care,
　　　　　　　　I should marry a millionaire,
　　　　　　　　He should die and I should cry,
　　　　　　　　I should marry another guy.

But this has taken place in inner consciousness, which is outlaw and accepts
no　check. What of it? Life is possible anyhow. Except that even legitimate and
reasonable things have to come through this Mongolia, or clear-light desert
minus trees. What do we respect more than commerce and industry? But when
Mr. Cecil Rhodes of the British Empire weeps many tears because he can't do
business with the blazing stars, this is not decadence but inner consciousness
speaking over all the highest works of presumptuous man."

I was deeply wounded when he spoke of Stella in this way. Where did he get
off, this rude bastard, having her bump me off in her inner consciousness? I
burned with resentment. "First you talk about ancient wisdom," I said, angry,
"and then you take a crack at love."

"Well, I'm a sonofabitch!" he said, getting up in the Turkish heat and
rewrapping the towel. "I didn't mean to hurt any feelings. Damn! If I did in this
idle conversation to while away time, please forgive me. I see you really are,
really, in love. God bless you for such noble feelings! You're going to ship out
soon too, and the danger as well as separation from the loved one has stirred up
natural emotions. But this little song of little girls also is ancient wisdom.
This is not a reason for cynicism, but pride in the conquest of nature. The human
mind has bounded the exploding oceans of universal space; the head has swallowed
up the empyrean. But you shouldn't overlook also how much secret thought and
conniving goes on.

"Listen, since we're talking, let me give you a few examples from my practice
of what goes on in other parts of the soul. A few years ago a client's wife re-
ports she has lost a valuable bracelet. Perfectly trustworthy woman, and mother
of three, a wealthy husband who has given her a hundred thousand dollars' worth
of property, only keeping the power of attorney for himself. The bracelet is lost?
Very well. It's just a routine matter for the company. They investigate, come
back to the husband, and tell him, 'Your wife did not lose this bracelet, she
gave it to her lover who was broke.' You, indignation! 'My wife, a lover? My
respected spouse, mother of children, who shows me constant affection and proofs
of loyalty? My dear wife, my beloved of years?' Nevertheless her can has been
over a barrel, she has spread, or equivalent. This poor man. Heart-shattered!
How could it be! Imagine his pain and bewilderment that she should have such a
secret from him. What a failure of life when he worked so hard that there should
be a certain, guaranteed reason that life might last longer than from Thursday
to Saturday. If anything deserves tears this does. However, he mustn't take the
word of the insurance investigator, so he comes to me and I get him a private
eye. He comes back with the same facts, that this lover is a bum with a prison
record for pimping and dealing in hot goods. They show the poor husband a photo,
even, so he can describe this character. Thick nose, long sideburns. You know
the type. Well, the poor fellow is going crazy. And now he finds that in the
whole suburb where he lives he's the only one who didn't know about it. They're
seen in the car, parked all over the vicinity. The woods, the bushes. It comes
down on him like a busted house. 'Who is left among you that saw this house in
her first glory? and how do ye see it now?'"

Oh, the poor guy. My heart broke for him.

"People start to tell him, 'Throw her out, man! Don't be a damn chump. This
other guy has been ramming her and been her fancy-man at your expense.' So not
able to stand it any more, he accuses her. Why, she denies everything. Every
single thing. He brings out names, dates, places, therefore, and there's nothing
she can say. All is true. Then she says, 'I won't leave this house and the chil-
dren, they're mine.' He comes to me and asks advice. All the law is on his side.
He can throw her in the street if he wants. But does he want? No!"

Like the wife of Hosea who fooled around, I thought: "Thou shalt abide for
me many days."

"And I'll tell you something else. She loved her husband too. That's how
clouded the situation can be. She gave up the fancy pimp. And then the neigh-
bors saw her and the husband in the movies holding hands and kissing like
young lovers."

I was glad it had turned out like that, and they forgave each other. My heart
gave a happy bound that they had made it.

I said, "You have to pity the wife also."

"You have to pity her more," said Mintouchian, "because she had to do the ly-
ing and lead the two lives. This secrecy is what the real burden is. You come
home still panting or dripping or dizzy from an encounter. And what's here?
Another world, another life; you are another self. You also know exactly what
you are doing. Exactly as a druggist when he goes from one prescription to an-
other. Just the right amount of atropine or arsenic. There'd better be. There'd
better!" Mintouchian said with kind of personal barbarism or force of heart. He
couldn't stop it up. "You come home. 'Hello, husband or wife.' 'What was in the
office today?' 'Just the usual.' 'I see you changed the sheets.' 'I also sent out
the insurance premium.' 'That's good.' So you are another person. Where are the
words you spoke an hour before? Gone! Where is Central? Oh my dear friend, Cen-
tral is listening in from Mongolia. Do you say a double life? It's secret over
secret, mystery and then infinity sign stuck on to that. So who knows the ulti-
mate, and where is the hour of truth?

"Of course," he said, "this has got nothing to do with you." He grinned and
tried to get brighter, but there was some sort of darkness at this time in the
superilluminated little sweat room. He went on after this effort, as follows:
"But just for the interest of it I give you another case. There was a rich couple
I had before the war. Husband handsome, wife gorgeous. Connecticut, Yale, and so
forth background. The husband goes to Italy on a business trip, meets an Italian
lady and has an affaire de cœur, and then he indiscreetly corresponds with the
lady after he comes back. The wife catches a letter of love he kept in his back
pocket. Not only did he keep it, March, but where the words of the dear hand
were faded by his perspiration he restored them with his own pen. Then the wife
comes to me with blood in her eye. Now I know for a fact that while he was
gone she had herself a ball with someone, a man friend. But now she wants the
husband punished. Because she caught him! She wants to go to Italy with the
husband, confront the Italian lady, and have the husband deny before them both
he ever loved her. Otherwise, divorce. Naturally I can't tell the husband what
to do, and he goes. Seven-thousand-mile trip to perform this necessary act.
They then come home, and what do you think? You're an intelligent man, you
know what then."

"He finds out about her. Listen," I said, now smelling a rat, "how are these
stories supposed to apply, just now, before my marriage? Are you saying that
I should put the shoe on to see if it fits?" The thought made me boil.

"Hup! Now don't take it personally. I never said these stories applied to you.
They probably apply only in general. Would I say anything against Miss Ches-
ney? Not only is she Agnes's friend, but I wouldn't be a killjoy and interfere
with genuine love, which I see all over you.

"You may be as interested as I was, though, in what a clever fellow once said
to me about the connection of love and adultery. On any certain day, when you're
happy, you know it can't last, but the weather will change, the health will be
sickness, the year will end, and also life will end. In another place another day
there'll be a different lover. The face you're kissing will change to some other
face, and so will your face be replaced. It can't be helped, this guy said. Of
course he was a lousy bastard himself and a counterfeit no-good mooch, and he
was in and out of Bellevue, and women supported him all his life; he deserted
his kid and nobody could depend on him. But love is adultery, he said, and ex-
presses change. You make your peace with change. Another city, another woman,
a different bed, but you're the same and so you must be flexible. You kiss the
woman and you show how you love your fate, and you worship and adore the chang-
es of life. You obey this law. Whether or not this bum was right, may God hate
his soul! don't think you don't have to obey the laws of life."

My strange teacher, for he certainly was teaching, said further, "Erratic is
nothing. Only system taps the will of the universe."

"I want to obey those laws," I said. "I'm not trying to get out from under. I
never did try."

By now the sweat was running very fast down both our faces, and his carnival
towel, which had fallen from his fat chest and armpits down to the everglades
moss of his belly, was like the robe of a sage. I would never agree that love
had to be adultery. Never! Why, imagine! Even if I had to admit that many lov-
ers were adulterers, such as Paolo and Francesca or Anna Karenina, Grandma
Lausch's favorite. Which led my mind toward suffering that got mixed with
love. As eating the damaged fruit so as not to offend the gods, for whom pure
joy is reserved.

He looked as if he were grinning, with great, bland, pouring-faced kindness,
like a sage, prophet, or guru, a prince of experience with his jewel toes. I
wanted him to give me wisdom.

"Why do you have to think that the thing that kills you is the thing that you
stand for? Because you are the author of your death. What is the weapon? The
nails and hammer of your character. What is the cross? Your own bones on which
you gradually weaken. And the husband or the wife gets the other to do the deed.
'Kind spouse, you will make me my fate,' they might as well say, and tell them
and show them how. The fish wills water, and the bird wills air, and you and
me our dominant idea."

"Can you say what is your dominant idea, Mr. Mintouchian?"

He answered readily, "Secrets. Society makes us have some, of course. The bro-
therhood of man wants to let us out of them by the power of confession. But I
must beget secrets. I will be known by secrets at my death, like St. Blas who
was killed by wool combs and was made the patron saint of woolcombers.

"Complications, lies, lies, and lies!" he said. "Disguises, vaudevilles, multi-
ple personalities, diseases, conversations. Even in a few minutes' conversation,
do you realize how many times what you feel is converted before it comes out as
what you say? Somebody tells you A. Your response is B. B you can't say, so
you transform it, you put it through the coils of your breast. From DC to AC,
increased four hundred volts, filtered. So instead of B there comes out gamma
sub one. The longer the train of transformation, the worse the stink of gamma
sub one. Mind you, I'm a great admirer of our species. I stand in awe of the
genius of the race. But a large part of this genius is devoted to lying and
seeming what you are not. We love when this man Ulysses comes back in disguise
for his revenge. But suppose he forgot what he came back for and just sat around
day in, day out in the disguise. This happens to many a frail spirit who forgets
what the disguises are for, doesn't understand complexity, or how to return to
simplicity. From telling different things to everyone, forgets what the case is
originally and what he wants himself. How rare is simple thought and pureheart-
edness! Even a moment of pureheartedness I bow to, down to the ground. That's
why I think well of you when you tell me you're in love. I appreciate this dur-
ability, and I'm a lover myself."

God bless Mintouchian! What a good man! He really paid attention, and I re-
turned him love for love.

"You will understand, Mr. Mintouchian, if I tell you that I have always tried
to become what I am. But it's a frightening thing. Because what if what I am by
nature isn't good enough?" I was close to tears as I said it to him. "I suppose
I better, anyway, give in and be it. I will never force the hand of fate to cre-
ate a better Augie March, nor change the time to an age of gold."

"That's exactly right. You must take your chance on what you are. And you can't
sit still. I know this double poser, that if you make a move you may lose but
if you sit still you will decay. But what will you lose? You will not invent
better than God or nature or turn yourself into the man who lacks no gift or
development before you make the move. This is not given to us."


"That's right, and I'm grateful to you," I said. "I owe you much for this
explanation."

This took place on the fifty-eighth story of a building in midtown Manhattan,
behind sliding glass doors. No use being so blasé as not to mention it.

"It is better to die what you are than to live a stranger forever," he said.

After this he concentrated in silence for a while, as though he were counting
drops from an invisible dropper. What were the drops of, of pure essence, or
of gall?

"I think you will be interested in a matter that's bothered me the last few
months." Gall. I saw that now. His large eyes grew heavy and sad.

"The reason why I told of a bracelet before," he said, "is that I have jewelry
on my mind on account of a diamond ring that Mrs. Kuttner, Agnes, lost several
months ago. She said she was mugged in Central Park while walking the dog in
the evening. It happens of course that people are mugged."

"But why wear a diamond ring while walking a dog?"

"That is explained by the fact that we had a date. On her throat fingermarks.
Good enough evidence, huh? Also, she was found lying on a path between the
Met and the children's playground. The cops took her home. Pretty convincing,
isn't it?"

"It sounds absolutely--"

"She collected the insurance of five thousand dollars. And now I tell you in
strict confidence that she did it all herself."

"What?"

"Choked herself unconscious. The marks on her throat she made with her own
fingers."

"How could she!"

"She could."

The vision of the Vienna beauty choking herself in the night park stupefied
me. "How do you know?"

"Because one of her friends is keeping the ring for her."

"But what is she trying to put over?"

"That's the whole thing. I give her all the money she needs. Plus sending a
check to her husband in Cuba. So what does she want this extra swindle for?"

"Maybe it's just social-security money, like? Have you provided for her?"

"She is very managing about property. That's my best hope. Provided? Of
course. I gave her a house on the Island. But what if it isn't that? You
get the pitch? She has secrets from me; she's double-lifing me."

"It might turn out to be something very ordinary, like a brother in trouble
she doesn't want to tell you about. Or she's tired of just being handed mon-
ey and wants to make money."

He was aware that I was trying to comfort him.

"There must be easier ways. No, what if it's to pay off somebody? Ah, law
practice makes me very suspicious. But don't you see where I'm at?"

Mintouchian asked me. "With my outlook?"

Sometimes on short acquaintance you can get very closely knitted to someone.
And Mintouchian and I now were.

On this particular Saturday, Stella and Agnes not showing up because of a
misunderstanding about the arrangements, Mintouchian became very nervous as
we waited in his office for them. Dinner hour with his wife was approaching,
that was why. Finally he sent word by his chauffeur to Stella's apartment that
we'd join them at half-past nine, and then took me home with him in a cab,
across the park.

So I met Mrs. Mintouchian. I couldn't figure out her complaint. She was dress-
ed in a quilted blue robe and her hair was gray. She was dignified, if not
haughty; I felt her conduct like a kind of touching athletic prowess.

She gave me a very upstage reception.

"Harold, the martinis have to be mixed in the kitchen," she said to Min-
touchian. So he went out, and as soon as he left she said, almost with
violence, "Who are you, young man?"

"Me? I'm a client of Mr. Mintouchian. You see, I'm just about to get married."

"I don't expect you to tell me anything," she said. "I know that Harold has his
secrets. I mean, he thinks he has. I really know all about him, because I think
about him all the time. It isn't so hard if you spend all your time thinking
about somebody. I don't have to leave this room."

I was astonished. I felt my eyes get wide.

I said, "I haven't known Mr. Mintouchian long, ma'am, but in my opinion
he's a great man."

"Oh, you realize that? He is great, even if he's all too human."

It awed me that when this lion, Mintouchian, sobbed in the brakes of, he
thought, most solitude, this invalid was standing listening behind him.

But then he came carrying the glasses and the conversation was finished.



Chapter XXV



As drugged with love as I was, why, nothing could deter me from marriage. I'm
not sure whether Mintouchian was trying to do that, but if he was he didn't
stand a chance, because I wasn't hospitable to suspicions. However, he acted
the part of a good friend. He arranged with the catering service for the wedd-
ing lunch and bought roses and gardenias for everybody. By City Hall the air
was blue, and there seemed to be trembles of music. When we came down in the
elevator I remembered how more than a year before I was standing on top of County
Hospital, Chicago, and reflecting how of all our family, including old Grandma,
Simon was the only one who had managed to stay out of an institution. But now
I didn't have any more reason to envy him. Envy? Why, I thought I had it all
over him, seeing I was married to a woman I loved and therefore I was advanc-
ing on the only true course of life. I told myself my brother was the kind
of man who could only leave the world as he found it and hand on the fate he
inherited to any children he might now have--I didn't for sure know whether he
had any. Yes, this was how such people were subject to all the laws in the book,
like the mountain peaks leaning toward their respective magnetic poles, or like
crabs in the weeds or crystals in the caves. Whereas I, with the help of love,
had gotten in on a much better thing and was giving this account of myself that
reality comes from and was not just at the mercy. And here was the bride with
me, her face was burning with happy excitement; she wanted what I wanted. In
her time she had made mistakes, but all mistakes were now wiped out.

We came out on the steps. The doves were walking around, and Mintouchian
had arranged for a photographer to be there and make a picture of the wedding
party. He was very thoughtful and acted kind to everyone.

I had graduated from Sheepshead the day before and had my new rating in my
pocket. My smile was changed, because they had given me some lower teeth gra-
tis to replace the ones I lost in Mexico. I have to confess that in addition to
passionate love and the pride of the day I had a bubble in me like the air bubble
of the carpenter's level. But I was shaved and combed like a movie actor and
dressed in the new high-pressure uniform, which lacked only service ribbons and
stars. I would have liked some, and to have married a beauty as a hero of the
service of his country. I promised myself that I would have been modest. How-
ever, you wouldn't have been able to tell how nervous I was, I think. It wasn't
just because I had to ship out soon after the wedding that I was nervous, but
also because Stella was bound the week after for Alaska and the Aleutians with
a USO show. I didn't want her to go.

Of course I wouldn't say anything to spoil the occasion. We had pictures tak-
en of the wedding party, which included also Agnes and Sylvester. I looked
with changed eyes on Agnes since hearing of her self-strangulation. She was
wearing a fine gray suit that showed off her hips, and a collar sweeping up-
ward as if to keep you from seeing her throat.

Anyway, turkey, ham, champagne, cognac, fruit, and cake were set up on the
buffet in Stella's apartment. It was very grand. Robey and Frazer had showed
up in town together, and I invited them, so I was well represented. Frazer wore
a major's uniform. Robey's beard was fuller and he had put on weight down in
Washington. He sat by himself in a corner, clasping his knee in two hands and
never saying anything. There was enough conversation without him.

After a few glasses of champagne Sylvester broke out in grins. He was a funny,
melancholy guy, Sylvester He wanted to be taken serious and straight, but gave
himself away in his dark-lined grins, and the un-thoughtful part of him fought
its way out. In his double-breasted pinstriped business suit he sat by me. I
held Stella around the waist and stroked her satin wedding dress.

"What a dish!" said Sylvester to me. "What you've fallen into! And when I
think you used to work for me!"

This was when he had owned the Star Theatre on California Avenue, below
that dentist who tormented Grandma. Sylvester was no kid; he was getting on.
He said he was off politics now. I wanted to ask him about Mexico, but the
wedding day was no time for that, so I passed the question over.

The man of the hour at this party was not myself so much as Frazer, in a way.

Frazer had just come back from the Orient. He was in the Intelligence and
attached to a mission to Chungking.

He was talking to Agnes and Mintouchian about the East. I still admired
Frazer a whole lot and looked up to him. He was a mighty attractive and ideal
man. There was a lanky American elegance about him, in the case of his long
legs and his cropped-on-the-sides head which from chin to top showed the male
molding on the strong side of haggardness; his gray eyes on the cool side of
frankness. All the markings of his face were strong, with creases beginning to
deepen from world pressure. And there was something else about him--as if he
were in the barber's chair at the conclusion of shaving, the witch hazel drying,
the fine Western shoes stuck out. He knew so much too. Suppose that you said
something about D'Alembert or Isidore of Seville, Frazer would have been ready
to discuss them. You couldn't find a subject that stumped him. He was going to
become an important person. You could see how he was flying at the highest,
from one peak of life to the next. And yet he looked relaxed. But the more ease
and leisure he achieved the more distance and flashing there were; he talked
about Thucydides or Marx and showed pictures of history-like visions. You got
shivers on the back and thrills clear into the teeth. I was real proud to have
such a friend come. He gave tone to the wedding and was a great success.
But as you listened to this brilliant educational discussion it was somewhat
scary too; like catching hold of high voltage.

Declarations, resolutions, treaties, theories, congresses, bones of kings,
Cromwells, Loyolas, Lenins and czars, hordes of India and China, famines,
huddles, massacres, sacrifices, he mentioned. Great crowds of Benares and
London, Rome, he made me see; Jerusalem against Titus, Hell when Ulysses
visited, Paris when they butchered horses in the street. Dead Ur and Memphis.
Atoms of near silence, the dead acts, that formed a collective roar. Macedonian
sentinels. Subway moles. Mr. Kreindl shoving a cannon wheel with his buddies.
Grandma and legendary Lausch in his armor cutaway having an argument in the
Odessa railroad station the day the Japanese war broke out. My parents taking
a walk by the Humboldt Park lagoon the day I was conceived. Flowery springtime.

And I thought there was altogether too much of this to live with. Better forget
it, in part. The Ganges is there with its demons and lords; but you have a right
also, and merely, to wash your feet and do your personal laundry in it. Or even
if you had a good car it would take more than a lifetime to do a tour of all the
Calvaries.

Whether I was all I might be troubled me as Frazer held forth, but much less
than it would have done before my conversations with Clem about the axial lines
and with Mintouchian in the Turkish bath. It gave me great comfort that Minto-
uchian was here. And in the end it was marriage-day tribute--all that happened.
The champagne being at an end, the white meat eaten, the two pinochle players
of the cutting table opposite putting on their jackets to depart, our company
bowed out too. Farewell all, and many thanks.

"Isn't my friend Frazer smart?" I said.

"Yes, but you're my darling," said Stella and kissed me. So we went to the
bridal bed.


Two days of honeymoon were all we had.

I had to ship from Boston. Stella went up on the train with me the night
before. And separating of course was tough. I sent her back in the morning.

"Go, sweetheart."

"Augie, darling, good-by," she said from the platform of the train. Some
people can't bear a train departure at any time, and how crushing these
departures were in the stations during the war, as the cars moved away and left
throngs behind, and the oil-spotted empty tracks and the mounting, multiplying
ties. "Please," she said, "be careful about everything."

"Oh, I will," I promised her. "Don't worry about that. I love you too much to
go and get sunk, on my first trip out. You take care too, out there in Alaska."
She made it sound as though it were somehow up to me, as though I could
make my own safe way over the Atlantic waters of wartime. But I knew what
she was trying to say.

"Radar has licked the submarines," I told her. "It says so in the papers."

This piece of news was improvised; it did a lot of good, however, and I went
on talking, so extremely salty you'd have taken me for an old sailor.

The conductor came to close the door, and I said, "Go on inside, honey, go
on."

Till the last moment I saw her big eyes at the window. As she bent forward
from the hips in her seat, the prettiness and grace of it was a killing thing
to have to miss during months on the water.

So the train went and I was left in the crowd and felt low and bleak.

To add to it, the weather was gray and windy and the ship, the Sam Mac-
Manus, was old. Black machinery beside it, at the wharf, grim gimmicks on
it, grease, darkness, blues, the day itself housed in iron. The ocean was waiting
with grand and bitter provocations, as if it invited you to think how deep it was,
how much colder than your blood or saltier, or to outguess it, to tell which were
its feints or passes and which its real intentions, meaning business. It wasn't any
apostle-crossed or Aeneas-stirred Mediterranean, the clement, silky, marvelous
beauty-sparkle bath in which all the ancientest races were children. As we left
the harbor, the North Atlantic, brute gray, heckled the ship with its strength,
clanging, pushing, muttering; a hungry sizzle salted the bulkheads.

But next morning, in the sun and warmth, we were steaming south with all our
might. I came on deck from an all-night bout of seasickness--the Mothersills
pills, even, hadn't helped--and being torn by longing and worry about Alaska.

The middle-aged ship was busting through the water so as to make you feel
great depth and the air was sweet, radiant. It was pellucid. Even the sooty
MacManus in the flush, like a kitchen insect escaping into the garden at dawn.
The bluey deck rattled underfoot with the chainlike drag of the rudder engine. A
few confused resemblances: clouds or distant coast, birds or corpuscles, fled
across my eyes.

I went to investigate my office and duties. Nothing much, in fact. Druggist
and bookkeeper setup, as I've already said. Green old filing cases. Lockers of
same color. A swivel chair and fair light to read by. I squared myself away for
the voyage.

So there were several days of mechanical progress over the water, the horizon
sea rising to grip after a cloud like a crab after a butterfly, with armored totter,
then falling and travailing. Plus the sun's heat and the patriarch wake, spitting
and lacy.

In my privacy I read books and wrote an endless letter chronicle to Stella
which I hoped to send from Dakar, our first port, out to Alaska. Of course there
were guns and a radar ring to remind you of danger, but the time was very
pleasant.

Before long the word got around that I was a listener to hard-luck stories,
personal histories, gripes, and that I gave advice, and by and by I had a daily
clientele, almost like a fortuneteller. By golly, I could have taken fees! Clem
knew what he was talking about when he urged me to come into the advice
business. Here I was doing it free of charge, and in dangerous conditions.
Although all seemed tranquil enough. Of an early evening, say, red and gold,
with the deep blue tense surface, the full-up ocean, and some guy came
darkening between me and the light, as if to a session of spiritual guidance. I
can't claim it annoyed me. It gave me a chance to learn secrets, and also to
sound off on the problems of life. I was on fine terms practically with everyone.
Even the union delegate, when he saw I didn't intend to be hard-nosed and
difficult about the company's interests. And the Old Man--he did correspond-
ence courses in philosophy at a bunch of universities, it was his hobby, and
was forever writing out assignments--he took to me too, though he didn't
approve of my leniency.

Anyway, I became ship's confidant. Though not all the confidences gave hope
to the soul.

More than one guy dropped in to sound me out on a black-market proposition
or fast buck on foreign soil.

One planned to become a hairdresser after the war, he told me, because then
he'd have his hands on the head of every broad in Kenosha.

One who had washed out of paratroop school and still wore his Fort Benning
boots told me frankly when the matter of his beneficiary came up that he had
three legal wives in different parts of Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
Some wanted diagnosis, as if I were a professional head-feeler and not the
humble understudy's understudy of the cult of Asclepius the Maritime
Commission had made me.

"You think I maybe have an inferiority complex, do you think?" one of them
asked me.

Indeed I saw many ravages, but I never said.

Beside-itself humanity, hurrying, hurrying, with liquid eyes.

"Suppose you was the guy in a fix like this…"

"There was this certain friend of mine…"

"He said, 'You support the old man for a while and see how you like it.'"

"He ran away for a Carnie."

"Now this girl, who was a cripple in one leg, she worked in the paint lab of
the stove factory."

"He was a Rumania-box type of swindler, where you put in a buck and it
comes out a fiver."

"If he floated down the river with a hard-on he expected them to raise the
bridges for him, that's how he was an egotist."

"I said, 'You listen here to me, fart-blossom, you chiseler…'"

"Though I knew she was so sweet and we had the kids, the time just came
when I couldn't keep the multiplication table out of my head, and then I knew,
'Bitches is all you deserve and should be with. Let them rob you and kick you
around. That's okay!'"

Lasciar le donne? Pazzo! Lasciar le donne!

"I was trying to have one night with this girl before I shipped out. We both
worked in the shipping department. But I couldn't swing it. So for weeks I was
carrying a safety in my pocket and couldn't get to use it. One time it was all
set and then my wife's grandmother died. I had to go fetch grandfather to the
funeral. He couldn't understand what it was all about. We sat in the chapel
where the organ played. He said, 'Why, that's the music the old dog died to,'
and made one joke after another. Then he recognized her in the coffin, and he
said, excited, 'Why, there's Mother! I saw her yesterday in the A and P. What's
she doing here? Mother, why, Mother!' And then he understood and bust into
tears. Oh, he cried. Me too. All of us. Me with the safety still in my pocket.
What do you think? Everybody is some kind of tricker. Even me.

"Then my wife and kid took me to the station. I still hadn't made it with that
girl and probably she forgot all about it and started with another guy. My little
daughter said, 'Daddy, I got to take a pisst.' She'd heard the boys talk. We had
to laugh. But then, good-by. My heart weighed a ton. So long, honey. She was
cryin' away by the train window, and I felt the same. And meantime that safety
was in my vest pocket. I didn't throw it away."

This man's face was flat, slender, rosy, bony-nosed, gray-eyed, and his mouth
was small.

I passed out advice in moderate amounts; nobody is perfect. I advocated love,
especially.

Some terribly strange personalities came forward.

Griswold, for instance, one of the stewards. A former undertaker and also
zoot-suiter and cat. A light Negro, extremely handsome and grand, short beard
full of graceful glitters, hair rich and oiled; a burn on his cheek gleamed with
Unguentine. His pants flowed voluminous and stripy down to a two-strap shoe.
He smoked tea for his quiet recreation and studied grammar in a number of
languages for kicks. Griswold handed me the following poem of his own
writing:

　　　　　How much, you ask me, do I suffer.
　　　　　Now, baby, listen, I am not a good bluffer.
　　　　　My ambitions and aspirations don't leave
　　　　　　　　　　me no rest;
　　　　　I am born with a high mind and aim for
　　　　　　　　　　the best.

His knee went up and down rapidly while I read this, and his eyes were dark and
anxious.

If I dwell on these individual members of the crew it's in the nature of a
memorial. For on the fifteenth day out, when we were off the Canaries, the Sam
MacManus was sent down by a torpedo.

It happened while I was hearing one of these unofficial confiteors, in fact.
It was night, and we must have been making twelve knots, when suddenly there
came a crushing great blow on the side; we were flung down. There were buck-
lings and crashes and then the inside stun of an explosion. We rushed for the
outer deck, fast. Already hairs of fire came up through the busted plates, and
the superstructure was lighted clear by the flames. Patches of water also burn-
ed close by, and the bright water approached. Hungry yells and steam blasts,
plunges; the huge rafts swooped over the side, released, and the boats crashed
from the davits. We scrambled up to the boats, this guy and I, and started to
wind one out. It hung caught and crooked. I shouted to him to jump in and see
what was fouling. He didn't seem to get this, his eyes looking wildly at me. "Get
in there!" I yelled, weirdly hoarse with the terror. Then I hopped in myself to
free the boat, whereupon, the winch letting go, unbraked, the boat slammed fast
and hard on the water, knocking me overboard. My thought when I went under
was that the ship would suck me with it as it sank. The fear squeezed and milked
the strength out of my arms and legs, but I tried to fight, hearing grunts and
Orpheus pulls of string from the deep bottom, and then all the consciousness
there was to me seemed a hairlash in the crushing water universe.

I came up wanting to howl but unable to; my jaws tore open only to breathe.
And where was the lifeboat? Well, there were boats and rafts here and there in
the water-fires. I was spitting, vomiting up sea, weeping, and straining to get
distance from the flaming ship from which, in the white of the fire, men were
still jumping.

I made for a boat that floated a hundred yards or so off. I labored after it in
terror lest it pull away. However, I saw no oars out. I couldn't have hollered
after; my voice seemed to have gone. But it only drifted, and I made it. I grabbed
the painter and called to whoever might be lying inside, for I was too beat to get
in. But the boat was vacant. Then the MacManus went down. The sudden quench
of the white light was how I knew it. Fire still burned all over the surface, but the
current was carrying fast. I saw a loaded raft in the torn light of flames. Then
I had another go at climbing into the boat. I worked my way to the middle, where
the gunwale was lower. From that position I saw a guy who held on to the stern,
poor bastard. I yelled to him, thrilled, glad, but his head hung back. I frantic-
ally swam behind him to see what was wrong.

"You hurt?" I asked.

"No, bushed," he muttered.

"Come, I'll boost you over and then you give me a hand. We've got to see if
we can pick up any other guys."

We had to wait until he had the strength to try. Finally I gave him a hand-stir-
rup, and he made it.

I waited for his assistance but it didn't come. He let me trail for I don't
know how long. I hollered and cried, cursed, rocked the boat. No soap. At last
I threw a leg over the side and toiled and dragged myself astride the gunwale.
He was sitting on a thwart, there, hands between his knees. Furious, I drove
my fist down on his sodden back. He lurched but otherwise didn't move, only
turned up a pair of animal-in-the-headlights eyes. "Le' me drown, you sonofa-
bitch? I'll bash your brains out!" I yelled. He didn't answer, only covered me
with his cold eyes and his face twitched.

"Grab an oar and let's go pick up survivors," I said.

But there was only one oar to grab. The rest were gone.

There was nothing to do but sit and drift. I gazed and called over the water
in case there should be someone carried out this way. But there wasn't anybody.
The fires were receding and going out. I half expected the sub to surface and
take stock, and I half wanted it to. It was around, all right, beating it down
in the sea. What did I think--that I'd get a chance to holler and give them a
piece of my mind? No, they went away, no doubt, continuing their supper perhaps,
or playing cards. And by the time night fell completely there wasn't the light
of boat or raft to be seen anywhere.

I sat and waited for daylight, when I hoped there'd something show on the
horizon.

Nothing showed. At dawn we were in a haze like the swelter of an old-fashioned
laundry Monday, with the sun a burning copper-bottom, and through this air dis-
tortion and diffused color you couldn't see fifty yards. We sighted some wreck-
age but no boats. The sea was empty. I was awed by the death of those guys and
the disappearance of the survivors, swept away. Down in the engine room they
couldn't have had much of a chance.

Glum and bitter, I started to take stock. There were smudgepots and flares for
signaling, and there was no food or water problem for the time being, since
there were only two of us. But who was it that fate had billeted on me? This
guy sitting on the thwart whom I had beaten last night, as far as my strength
permitted, what trouble would I have with him? He was the ship's carpenter and
handyman, and from one point of view I was in luck, having no manual skill or
ingenuity myself. He rigged up a kind of sail by stepping up the oar; and he
claimed we couldn't be more than two hundred miles west of the Canaries, and
that if we had any luck at all we'd sail right into them. He told me that every
day he'd gone and looked at the charts, and so he knew exactly where we were and
what the currents were doing. He figured it out with great satisfaction and self-
confidence, and he seemed absolutely untroubled. About my beating and cursing
him, not a single word.

He was of broad, stocky build, carrying a judicious big ball of a head, cut close.
Many of his bristles were white, but not with age; he had a dark mustache that
followed the corners of his mouth calmly downward. His eyes were blue and
he wore specs. A pair of bleached-at-the-knees overalls dried slowly on his wide
calves.

I took a flier of imagination at his past and saw him at age ten reading Popular
Mechanics.

Even as I sized him up, he did me, of course.

"You're Mr. March, the purser," he said at last. He commanded, when he wanted
to, a very cultured deep voice.

"That's right," said I, surprised by the sudden viola tone.

"Basteshaw, ship's carpenter. By the way, aren't you a Chicagoan too?"

Basteshaw, after all, was a name I had heard before. "Wasn't your dad in the
real-estate business? Around Einhorn's, back in the twenties, there was a man
named Basteshaw."

"He dabbled in real estate. He was in the produce business. Basteshaw the
Soupngreens King."

"That's not what Commissioner Einhorn called him."

"What was that?"

It was too late now to back out, and so I said, "He nicknamed him Butcher-Paper."
Basteshaw laughed. He had broad teeth. "That's great!" he said.

Imagine! Over this trouble, solitude, danger, heartbreak of the disaster, there
blows suddenly home-town familiarity, and even a faux pas about the nickname.

He didn't respect his old father. I didn't approve of that.

Respect? Why, it came out how he downright hated him. He was glad he was dead.
I'm willing to believe old Basteshaw was a tyrant, a miser, a terrible man. Never-
theless he was the fellow's father.

In beauty or doom colors, according to what was in your heart, the sea and
skies made their cycles of day and night, the jeweled water gadding universally,
the night-glittering fury setting in. The days were sultry. We sat under the crust
of the canvas, in the patch of shade. There was scarcely any wind for the first
few days, which was lucky.

I tried to master my anxious mind, which kept asking whether I'd ever see
Stella again, or my mother, my brothers, Einhorn, Clem. I kept the smudgepot
and flares by me, dry. Our chances of being picked up were not bad in these
parts. It wasn't as though we had gone down in the extreme south where there
wasn't much shipping then.

As the heat fanned over you, you sometimes heard the actual salt in the water,
like rustling, or like a brittle snow when it starts to melt.

Basteshaw was forever watching me through those goggles. Even during a nap
he seemed to watch, his head backed off, studious, vigilant. Cousin Anna Coblin
didn't look more persistently into mirrors. There he sat, with his thick chest
interposed, ponderous. He was built like a horse, this Basteshaw. As if hoofs, not
hands, were on his knees. If he had hit back at me that first night there'd have
been real trouble. But then we were both too weak to fight. And now he seemed
to have forgotten all about it. His poise was that of a human fortress, and you
could never catch him off balance. He often laughed. But while the sounds of his
laughter went out into the spaces of the sea his eyes, blue and small, never lost
sight of me through the goggles.

"One thing I'm glad of," he said, "is that I didn't meet my end by drowning.
Not yet, anyway. I'd rather die of hunger, exposure, anything else. My dad, you
see, drowned in the lake."

"Did he?" Ah, then, farewell Butcher-Paper. This was when I learned of his
death.

"At Montrose Beach during his vacation. Busy men often die on their holiday,
as if they had no time for it during the business week. Relaxation kills them.
He had a heart attack."

"But I thought he drowned?"

"He fell in the water and was drowned. Early in the morning. He was sitting
on the pier, reading the Trib. He always got up before dawn, from years in the
market. The coronary was slight and wouldn't have been fatal. It was the water
in his lungs."

Basteshaw, I discovered, loved medical and all scientific conversation of any
sort.

"The guards found him when they came on duty. The afternoon papers carried a
story of foul play. There was a wad of money in his pocket, big thick rings on
his fingers. That infuriated me. I went down to Brisbane Street to give them
a piece of my mind. I thought it was scandalous. Trading on people's emotions
like that. There was poor Ma, horrified. Murder? I forced them to print a
retraction."

I know those small paragraphs of retraction on page thirty, in tiny print.

However, Basteshaw announced it with real pride. He put on his old man's best
Borsalino hat, he told me, and he took the Cadillac out of the garage and
smashed it up. He drove it into a wall on purpose. For the old man never would
let him have it and kept it like a Swiss watch. The late Butcher-Paper had had
a thing about breakage. When he had a violent fit and was about to smash
something, Mrs. Basteshaw would cry, "Aaron, Aaron, the drawer!" Old pie tins
were kept in a kitchen drawer for him that he could fling and stamp on. No
matter how enraged, he always used these pie tins, not good china.

Basteshaw laughed as he told this, but I was sad for the old man.

"The car couldn't be used in the funeral because it was in smithereens. That
made it a Viking funeral, after a fashion. After he was planted my next move"--
I flinched in advance--"was to break off with my cousin Lee. The old man made
me get engaged to her on the ground that I trifled with her affections. After
he mixed in I never intended to marry her."

"Trifle? What did he mean?"

"That I was in the sack with her. But I swore I'd never give the old man the
satisfaction."

"You might have been in love with her, old man or no old man."

He gave me a sharp glance. I didn't know what sort of person I was dealing
with.

"She had pulmonary phthisis, and people like that are frequently highly
stimulated. Increased temperatures often act on the erogenous zones
spectacularly," said he in his lecturer's tone.

"But was she in love with you?"

"Birds with their higher temperature also lead a more intense emotional
life. I see from the way you speak of love that you don't know a thing about
psychology or biology. She needed me and therefore loved me. If another guy
had been around she would have loved him. Suppose I had never been born, does
that mean she wouldn't have loved anyone? If the old man hadn't interfered
I might have married her, but he was pro so I was contra. Besides, she was
dying. So I told her I couldn't possibly marry her. Why string her along?"

Brute!

Pig!

Snake!

Murderer!

He had hastened her death. I couldn't bear the look of him for a while.

"Within a year she died. Toward the end her face was absolutely mealy, poor
girl. She was quite pretty originally."

"Why don't you shut up!"

He was surprised at me. "Why, what's eating you?" he said.

"Listen, drop dead!"

He would have let me drown too, or be eaten by sharks.

Nevertheless the conversation was resumed by and by. Under the
circumstances, what else?

So now Basteshaw told me about another relative, an aunt. She slept for
fifteen years. And then one day suddenly arose and went about the house as
if nothing had happened. "She dropped off when I was ten years old. She woke
up when I was twenty-five, and she knew me right as soon as she saw me. She
wasn't even surprised."

I'll bet.

"One day my uncle Mort was coming home from work--this was out in Ravens-
wood. You know how they build the bungalows there? He was going around to
the back, between two houses, and as he passed the bedroom he saw her hand
reach out to pull the window blind. He recognized the hand by the wedding
band, and he came close to filling his pants. He stumbled in, and sure
enough, she had cooked supper and it was on the table. She said, 'Go wash!'"

"Incredible! Could it really happen? Why, it's a regular sleeping-beauty
story. Was it sleeping sickness?"

"If she had been a beauty she wouldn't have slept so long. My own diagnosis
is some form of narcolepsy. Etiology purely mental. It may account for Lazarus.
For Miss Usher of the House of Usher and many others. Only my aunt's case is
extremely illuminating. Deep secrets of life. Deeper than this ocean. To hold
tight is the wish of every neurotic character. While she slept she ruled. In some
part of her mind she knew what was going on, as evidenced by the fact that she
could resume life after fifteen years with accuracy. She knew where things were,
and she was not surprised by the changes. She had the power achieved by those
who lie still."

I had to think of Einhorn in his wheel chair, lecturing me about strength.

"While battles rage, planes fly, machinery produces, money changes hands,
Eskimos hunt, kidnapers sweep the roads--that person is safe who by lying in
bed can make the world come to him, or to her. My Aunt Ettl's whole life was
a preparation for this miracle."

"It's something, all right," I said.

"You bet your sweet life. It's of the utmost significance too. Do you rem-
ember how the great Sherlock Holmes doped things out in his room on Baker
Street? But compared to his brother Mycroft he was no place. That Mycroft!
There was a brain, March! He never budged from his club, and he was a real
mastermind and knew everything. So when Sherlock was stumped he came to
Mycroft, who gave him the answer. You know the reason? Because Mycroft
sat tighter than Sherlock. Sitting tight is power. The king sits on his prat,
and the common folks are on their feet. Pascal says people get in trouble
because they can't stay in their rooms. The next poet laureate of England--I
figure--prays God to teach us to sit still. You know that famous painting of
the gypsy Arab traveler sleeping with his mandolin and the lion gazing on
him? That doesn't mean the lion respects his repose. No, it means the Arab's
immobility controls the lion. This is magic. Passivity plus power. Listen
to me, March, that old Rip van Winkle conked out on purpose."

"Who took care of your aunt all that time?"

"A Polack woman--Wadjka. And let me say that after the miracle was over
my uncle was in a hell of a spot. Because he had arranged his life around my
sleeping aunt. She slept, and he had his card parties and his honeybunch.
After she woke we all pitied him."

"As far as compassion goes," I said, "what about some for your aunt? She put
in all that time, a chunk of her life like that. Like a long prison term prac-
tically."

A smile began to draw Basteshaw's mustache.

"I once was bugs on the history of art," he said. "Instead of being on the hu-
stle in the summer, as my old man wanted, I'd slip away to the Newberry library
where I'd be the only lad among eight or ten nuns at a reading table. I picked
up a book by Ghiberti once, anyhow, and it made a great impression on me. He
told about a German goldsmith of the Duke of Anjou who was the equal of the
great sculptors of Greece. At the end of his life he had to stand by and watch
his masterpieces melted down for bullion. His labor all in vain. He prayed on
his knees, 'O Lord, creator of all, let me not follow after false gods.' Then
he went into a monastery, this holy man, where he cashed in his chips and check-
ed out for good."

O blight! That the firm world should give out at the end of life. Blasted! But
he had God to fall back on. And what if there had been no God for him? What if
the truth should be even more terrible and furious?

"So what was Aunt Ettl's sickness but a work of art? And just like this poor
German fellow, she had to be prepared for failure. That's what they mean by
the ruins of time--

　　　　　Or go to Rome, which is the sepulcher.

I suppose you know Shelley--

　　　　　Go thou to Rome--at once the Paradise,
　　　　　The grave, the city, and the wilderness.

So works of art aren't eternal. So beauty is perishable. Didn't this saintly
German wake up many mornings inspired, with joy in his heart? What more can
you ask? He couldn't be both happy and sure of being right for eternity. You
have to take your chance that being happy is also being right."

I was with him there; I nodded with answering intelligence. I had a better
opinion of him. There was something to him, after all. He had some nobility of
heart and was a good guy in some mysterious respects. Though what a mixture!

Meanwhile the boat sauntered through glassy stabs of light and wheewhocked
on the steep drink.

And then I had to bring to mind how many times, thinking myself right, I had
been wrong.

And wrong again.

And again.

And how long would I be right now?

But I had great confidence in my love of Stella and her love of me.

And then again, perhaps all matters of right and wrong would finish soon, as
we might not survive.

Points and crosses of diamond dazzled from the slopey blue ever-full waters.
Fish and monsters did their business within. Some of our drowned were near,
maybe, and passed beneath us.

Now he talked of his aunt Ettl as an artist and sounded pompous. Here it
wasn't so many days ago that he was scarcely able to fiddle his legs, and shrunk
down to nothing with fright, and now look at him, astride his mental powers,
sweating and round-headed, sitting there so sturdy.

"Why does an educated fellow like you ship out as carpenter?" I said, asking
the question that had puzzled me for some time.

And then it came out that he was a biologist or biochemist; or psycho-bio-
physicist, which he liked best of all. Six universities had canned him for his
strange ideas and refused to look at his experimental results. With all this
scientific training he wasn't going to be an infantry man. So he shipped, and
this was his fifth voyage. At sea he could keep up his scientific work.

Why did I always have to fall among theoreticians!

He started in to tell me of this work of his, beginning with a survey of his
life.

"You know how there are things every child wants to be. For instance, when I
was twelve I was very fast on the ice and could have become a skating champ-
ion. But I lost interest. Then I became a stamp expert. I lost interest in that
too. Next a socialist, and that didn't last. I took up the bassoon and I quit.
So I went through a large number of interests and nothing suited me. Then when
I was in college I caught an extreme desire to be--or to have been--a Renais-
sance cardinal. That was the one thing I'd have loved. A wicked one, smoking
with life, neighing and plunging. Yeah, boy! I'd put my mother in a nunnery.
I'd keep my father in a gunny sack. I'd commission Michelangelo to go beyond
the Farnese and the Strozzi. Spontaneous, I'd have been. Vigorous. Without
embarrassment. Happy as a god. Ah, well, what can you do, impose your ideas
on life? Everybody wants to be the most desirable kind of man.

"And how does it start? Well, go back to when I was a kid in the municipal
swimming pool. A thousand naked little bastards screaming, punching, pushing,
kicking. The lifeguards whistle and holler and punish you, the cops on duty
squash you in the ribs with their thumbs and call you snot-nose. Shivery lit-
tle rat. Lips blue, blood thin, scared, your little balk tight, your little
thing shriveled. Skinny you. The shoving multitude bears down, and you're no-
thing, a meaningless name, and not just obscure in eternity but right now. The
fate of the meanest your fate. Death! But no, there must be some distinction.
The soul cries out against this namelessness. And then it exaggerates. It tells
you, 'You were meant to astonish the world. You, Hymie Basteshaw, Stupor mundi!
My boy, brace up. You have been called, and you will be chosen. So start look-
ing the part. The generations of man will venerate you as long as calendars e-
xist!' This is neurotic, I know--excuse the jargon--but to be not neurotic is
to adjust to what they call the reality situation. But the reality situation
is what I have described. A billion souls boiling with anger at a doom of in-
significance. Reality is also these private hopes the imagination invents.
Hopes, the indispensable evils of Pandora's Box. Assurance of a fate worth
suffering for. In other words, desiring to be cast in the mold of true man-
hood. But who is cast in this mold? Nobody knows.

"I did my best to be as much of a Renaissance cardinal as one can under
modern conditions.

"After much effort to live up to a glorious standard there came fatigue, wan
hope, and boredom. I experienced extreme boredom. I saw others experiencing
it too, many denying, by the way, that any such thing existed. And finally I
decided that I would make boredom my subject matter. That I'd study it. That
I'd become the world's leading authority on it. March, that was a red-letter
day for humanity. What a field! What a domain! Titanic! Promethean! I trembled
before it. I was inspired. I couldn't sleep. Ideas came in the night and I
wrote them down, volumes of them. Strange that no one had gone after this
systematically. Oh, melancholy, yes, but not modern boredom.

"I did a fair amount of research in literature and among modern thinkers. The
first conclusions were obvious. Boredom starts with useless effort. You have
shortcomings and aren't what you should be? Boredom is the conviction that you
can't change. You begin to worry about loss of variety in your character and
the uncomplimentary comparison with others in your secret mind, and this makes
you feel your own tiresomeness. On your social side boredom is a manifestation
of the power of society. The stronger society is, the more it expects you to
hold yourself in readiness to perform your social duties, the greater your a-
vailability, the smaller your significance. On Monday you are justifying your-
self by your work. But on Sunday, how are you justified? Hideous Sunday, enemy
of humanity. Sunday you're on your own--free. Free for what? Free to discover
what's in your heart, what you feel toward your wife, children, friends, and
pastimes. The spirit of man, enslaved, sobs in the silence of boredom, the bitter
antagonist. Boredom therefore can arise from the cessation of habitual functions,
even though these may be boring too. It is also the shriek of unused capacities,
the doom of serving no great end or design, or contributing to no master force.
The obedience that is not willingly given because nobody knows how to request
it. The harmony that is not accomplished. This lies behind boredom. But you see
the endless vistas."

Did I! I was stupefied. I watched him climb around like an alpinist of the
mountains of his own brain, sturdy, and with his calm goggles and his blue
glances of certitude.

"And I wanted to approach it scientifically," he went on. "So my first project
was to study the physiology of boredom. I looked into the muscular fatigue
experiments of Jacobson and others and that led me into biochemistry. I knocked
out my M.A. in record time, I may add, in cell chemistry. Keeping rat tissues
alive in vitro, after Harrison and the technique improved by Carrel. This drew
me on to von Wettstein, Leo Loeb, and so forth. How come the simple cells wish
for immortality whereas the complex organisms get bored? The cells have the
will to persist in their essence…"

There ensued certain descriptions which I don't command the physical chemistry
to repeat, the kinesis of enzymes and so forth. But the upshot of this was,
that as he investigated the irritability of protoplasm he discovered some of
the secrets of life. "I'm sure you'll find it hard to believe what happened
next. Nobody else has believed it."

"You didn't create life!"

"In all humility, that's exactly what I did. Six universities have thrown me out
for claiming it."

"Why, it's crazy! Are you sure that's what you did?"

He said stiffly, "I'm a serious person. My whole existence has been intensely
serious. I don't intend to jeopardize my own sanity by making wild claims. I get
the same results time after time--protoplasm."

"You must be a genius."

He didn't offer to deny this.

He'd better be one. If he wasn't a genius I was in this boat with a maniac.

"I stumbled on this," he said. "I am not God."

"But couldn't they see you had done it?"

"I couldn't get them to. And then the first cells I made lacked two essential
powers, the regenerative and the reproductive, and were sterile and fragile forms.
But in the last two years I've made a special study of biological organizers. I've
been in embryology, and I've made some further discoveries."

He had to take a swig of water, for he had talked himself onto dry spittle.
Huge-headed, huge-chested, stalwart, calm, he was like an enormous case of
the finest capacities. Like one of those Egyptian mummy cases that follow the
outlines of the bodies they enclose. And also his resemblance to a horse
continued very strong.

"But still you haven't explained what a man of your ability was doing as
ship's carpenter on the MacManus."

"Continuing my experiments."

"You mean there was some of that protoplasm aboard?"

"As a matter of fact, there was."

"And it's floating in the ocean now?"

"I'm sure it is."

"And what's going to happen?"

"I don't know. It's one of my later forms, a great advance over that earlier,
perishable form."

"What if a new chain of evolution begins?"

"Exactly. What if?"

"Something terrible maybe. Damn you guys, you don't care how you fiddle with
nature!" I said, feeling extremely angry. "Somebody is going to burn up the
atmosphere one day or kill us all with a gas."

He conceded that it was not impossible.

"Why should one man have the power to damage all nature or pollute the
entire world?" I asked him.

"I don't think there's much chance of that," he said. And then he wouldn't
continue the conversation but fell into fascinated thought.

Often Basteshaw seemed to be thinking over my head, and he would be in a
strange humor in which you could see him make an observation, both grim and
amusing to himself. It made me wonder what he was up to. And for long spells,
though he patrolled me still from the side of his eyes and knew my every move,
he sometimes sat as heavy as a piece of foundry brass. I became very uneasy.
A couple of days went by and not a single remark was spoken. This was a strange
thing, first to be overwhelmed with talk and then to be utterly isolated. Speak
of boredom! Why, I began to feel as stiff as the boat itself. But I took some
of the blame for this. I said to myself, "You have only this one person, one
soul to deal with here--what's the matter, can't you do better? It's enough like
yours, this soul, as one lion is pretty nearly all the lions, and there are just
the two here, and some of the last things of all could be said. You're not doing
so good, if you want to know the truth."

I had a very strange dream on the boat's bottom that night, which was this,
that a flatfooted, in gym shoes, pug-nosed old woman panhandled me. I laughed
at her. "Why, you old guzzler, I can hear the beer cans clinking in your shop-
ping bag!" "No, them ain't beer cans," she said, "it's my window-washer stuff,
my squeegee and Bon Ami and such, and for the love of God, must I wash my forty-
fifty windows every day of my life? Give us something, won't you?" "Okay, okay,"
I said, me the bighearted, grinning. Among other things it made me feel good
to see the West Side of Chicago again. I put my hand in my pocket, and I meant
to give her only chickenfeed. Being not downright stingy, but a little close
on some days, to tell the truth. But to my own surprise, instead of giving her
the price of a beer I gave her one coin of each kind--half a buck, a quarter, a
dime, a jitney, and a penny. All these were lined up in my palm, ninety-one cents,
and I dropped them in her hand. The same instant I was sorry, for it was far too
much. But then I began to feel clean proud of myself. And Ugly Face, she thanked
me; she was almost like a dwarf, with a wide behind. "Well, there's a few windows
free," I said. "I haven't got one I can call my own." "Come," said she warmly,
"and let me treat you to a beer." "No, thanks, mother, I've got to go. Thanks all
the same." I felt kindness in the depth of my breast. In kindness, I touched her on
the crown of her old head and a great thrill passed through me from it. "Why, old
woman," I said, "you've got the hair of an angel!" "Why shouldn't I have," she
said gently, "like other daughters of men?"

My bosom was full of stormy surprises and dark bursts of happiness.

"God send you truth," said the window-washer dwarf. She went toward the shadow
and the cool of the beer cavern.

I gave a long sigh and unwillingly woke. The stars were restless and fevery.
Basteshaw was asleep in a sitting position, transversely. I regretted he wasn't
awake so I could immediately start to talk to him.

But instead of bosom fraternity, what took place next day was a battle.

Basteshaw claimed we must be close to land; he said he had seen land birds and
also seaweed and floating branches. I didn't believe him. Also, the color of
the water was changing, he said, and was a yellower green. It didn't seem so to
me. He pulled his scientific authority on me. Because, he said, after all, he
was a scientist; he had seen the charts and studied the currents and made the
calculations and watched all the signs, so there couldn't be any two ways about
it. But the reason I resisted believing him was that I was afraid to encourage
my joy and increase the heaviness of the opposite if he should be wrong.

However, the trouble didn't start until I thought I saw a ship on the west hor-
izon. I began to shout and leap and wave my shirt. I was frantic. And then I
rushed to put a smudgepot into the water. I had taken good care of the signal-
ing equipment and had read the instructions for using it fifty times if I'd read
them once. So now with sweaty hands and anxiety-crippled fingers I started to
get the pot ready.

Then Basteshaw, with that calm of voice that was his specialty and made me
doubt I heard right, said, "What do you want to make signals for?"

Damn! The guy didn't want to be saved! He wanted to pass up a chance of res-
cue!

I turned my back on him and lowered the pot on the water. The black smoke
began to rise against the pure color of the air. I went on flagging my shirt.
I could almost feel Stella's arms slip round my waist and her face touch my
shoulder. And meantime my heart filled with black murder at this lunatic
Basteshaw, who sat in the stern with crossed arms. It was maddening to see
him.

But now there wasn't anything on the horizon, and I had to think my imagina-
tion had pulled a stunt on me. I was deeply graveled and felt my fatigue
and weakness for the first time; with just that clong of hope departing that
I had been afraid of, and sunken darkness.

"I'm sorry to tell you you were hallucinated," he said, while I was covered
with weak sweat.

"Why, you blind bastard, there is a ship out there, just over the horizon!"

"My vision is corrected to twenty-twenty," he said. It was just that kind of
pedantry that made me hate him wildly.

"You damn four-eyed fool, what makes you want to croak out here? Do you
think you have a built-in compass? Maybe you believe you can navigate, but
don't expect me to have the same sublime confidence. I'm not passing up any
chances."

"Now take it easy. Nobody's going to croak. I had a careful look at the course
a few hours before we went down and I know we're close to land. We must be,
we've been going due east. We're going to land on Spanish territory and be
interned. Don't you be a damn fool. Haven't you had enough war yet? But for
dumb luck you'd have been burned alive or become shark food. Now," he said,
getting severe, "listen attentively. I don't like to chew my cabbage twice.
I've been figuring this, and I believe luck is on our side. I'm going to land
in the Canaries and be interned. For the rest of the war I'll just stay there
and do my research. Which they wouldn't exempt me for at home though I went
to Washington with an appeal. Now. I have plenty of money in the States; my
old man left me close to a hundred grand and we can work here. I'll teach you.
You're a pretty smart fellow, though you have all kinds of cockeyed ideas about
yourself. In a year you'll know more than a Ph.D. in biochemistry. Think of the
opportunity you've fallen into. To understand the birth of life and be in on the
profoundest secrets. Wiser than the Sphinx. You'll gaze on the riddle of the
universe with comprehension!"

He went on with his oratory. I was frightened and awed. Not just by the storm-
ing of his mind, great as that was, but by the appearance once more of the
sign of the recruit under which I had been born.

"I say to you this is a great chance for you, not simply to rise to eminence,
not just to give your intellectual powers the very highest development, but to
assist in making a historic contribution to the happiness of mankind. These
experiments with cells, March, will give the clue to the origin of boredom in the
higher organisms. To what used to be called the sin of acedia. The old fellows
were right, for it is a sin. Blindness to life, secession, unreceptivity, a dull
wall of anxious, overprotected flesh, ignorant of the subtlety of God or Nature
and unfeeling toward its beauty. March, when liberated from this boredom, every
man will be a poet and every woman a saint. Love will fill the world. Injustice
will go, and slavery, bloodshed, cruelty. They will belong to the past, and,
seeing all these horrors of past times, all mankind will sit down and weep at
the memory of them, the memory of blood and the horrible life of monads, at
misunderstanding and murderous rages and carnage of innocents. The breasts
and bowels will melt at this vision of the past. And then a new brotherhood of
man will begin. The prisons and madhouses will be museums. Like the pyramids
and the ruins of Maya, they will commemorate an erroneous development of hu-
man genius. Real freedom will manifest itself, not based on politics and revolu-
tions, which never gave it anyhow, because it's not a gift but a possession
of the man who is not bored. March, this is what my experiments are leading
toward. I am going to create a serum--a serum like a new River Jordan. With
respect to which I will be a Moses. And you Joshua. To lead an Israel consisting
of the entire human race across it. And this is why I don't want to go back to
the States."

I was wrought up, choked. The very air that passed over me was as if from the
mouth of prophecy. Meantime the pot went on diffusing smoke. He was
watching it like an enemy.

"I'm not passing up any chance to be saved. I don't want to be interned. I've
just gotten married. So even if I was sure you knew what you were talking about
I'd still say no."

"You think I don't know what I'm talking about?"

I should have been more tactful. He saw that that was exactly what I thought.

"I'm offering you a great course of life," he said. "Worth taking a risk for."

"I already have a course of life."

"Indeed?" he said.

"Yes, and I'm dead against doing things to the entire human race. I don't want
any more done to me, and I don't want to tamper with anyone else. No one will
be a poet or saint because you fool with him. When you come right down to it,
I've had trouble enough becoming what I already am, by nature. I don't want to
go to the Canaries with you. I need my wife."

He sat with his big arms crossed and his face devoid of expression while the
smudgepot sent silky, oily curls into the sea freshness of morning. The early
red was still on the water from the east fringe of the sky. I kept glancing
toward the horizon.

"I assure you I don't think your answer is frivolous," he said. "I think it is
sincere, but it is minor. Life has a much greater scale. I'm sure you will agree
with me later on, after we have worked and discussed, in the islands. Which I
understand are charming."

"We may be passing a hundred miles to the north or the south and never see
those islands at all," I said. "You want to put it over on me that you're such
a great scientist you can steer by the power of your brain. Well, go ahead, but
I'm getting rescued if I can."

"It is my conviction that we may see land at any time," he said. "So why don't
you extinguish that smudge?"

"No, I won't!" I shouted. "No, and that's final!" The fellow was really out of
his mind. But even then, in anger, I thought, what if he really was a genius too,
and I was lacking in faith.

He said quietly, "Okay."

I turned to give my full attention to the horizon, when suddenly a heavy blow
descended on me and knocked me flat. He had clobbered me with the oar. He
was getting ready to hit me again, with the loom this time, having hit me with
the blade before. That Moses, Savior and Messiah! He raised up on his heavy
legs. More of a look of a task to be done than lust was on his face. I tried
to roll away from this blow and I yelled, "For Chrissake, don't kill me!"

Then I made a rush for him, and the minute I got my hands on him I felt I'd
kill him if I could, that much rage was in me. I wanted to strangle him. He
dropped the oar and gripped me round the ribs. The way he grabbed me I couldn't
use my arms. I butted and kicked while he put on more pressure, till I couldn't
breathe.

He was a maniac.

And a murderer.

Two demented land creatures struggling on the vast water, head to head, put-
ting out all the strength they had. I would certainly have killed him then if I'd
been able. But he was the stronger man. He threw his immense weight on me, he
was heavy as brass, and I fell over a thwart with my face on the cleats of the
bottom.

I made ready for the end.

The powers of the universe should take me back as they had sent me forth.

Death!

But he didn't mean to murder me. He was tearing my clothes off and binding
me with them. He twisted the shirt into bonds for my wrists. My pants he tied
my legs with. Then he tore off my skivvies to wipe the blood from my face and
the sweat from his. He yanked the painter off and reinforced my bonds.

Then he doused the smudgepot, and he stepped up the oar again with its piece
of canvas and sat looking eastward for the shore he was so sure of while I lay
naked and gasping, still on my side as he had left me.

Later he picked me up and set me down under the tarpaulin because the sun
was burning on me. When he laid hands on me I flinched and heaved. "Anything
busted?" he said, doctorlike, and felt my person, my ribs and shoulders. I
cursed him till my throat was raw.

When it came time to eat he fed me; and he said, "Better let me know when
you have to go to bathroom, otherwise there'll be a problem."

I said, "If you untie me, I give my word of honor I won't send any signals."

"I can't take chances with you," he said. "This is too important."

Once in a while he'd chafe the arms and legs to help my circulation. I beg-
ged him now. I said, "I'll get gangrene."

But no, he told me; I had made my choice. Besides, he said, we'd hit those
happy isles soon. Late in the afternoon he declared he could smell the land
breeze. He also said, "It's getting hotter," and took to shading his eyes. And
when evening came on he stretched out. He did it with heaviness, and, while I
watched and wished him the worst, stretched out those doughty big legs and that
bowl of tireless contemplations from which the instructions had come to lam me
and leave me tied for the night, and which might direct him to do worse yet.

The moon shone, a damp fell, and the boat crept; it scarcely budged on the wat-
er. I wore out my wrists trying to pull free, and then I thought that if I could
crawl that far I might find a corner of the metal locker on which I could saw
myself free. I turned on my back and began to work toward it, using my heels.
Basteshaw didn't wake. He lay like that great painted mummy case, his feet
cocked out and his head like stone.

He had made a big welt on my back, and this I scraped as I crawled, and I had
to stop and take it out on my lip with my teeth. It didn't seem any use. Terrible
deep sorrow came on me, and I wept to myself. So as not to wake him.

It took me half the night to reach the locker and work my hands loose. But final-
ly the shirt tore off and I flaked away at the painter, soaking it to make it
expand. At last it came off. I crouched there and licked my raw wrists. My back
was flaming from the beating it had taken, but there was one cool place in my
body, which was where I kept murder in my heart toward Basteshaw. I crept
over to him; I didn't stand up because he might wake and see me standing in the
moonlight. I had my choice now of pushing him in the water, of strangling him,
of beating him with the oar as he had done me, of breaking his bones and seeing
his blood.

I decided as the first step to tie him and take off his goggles. Then we'd see.
Well, as I stood poised over him on my toes, full of revenge, holding the paint-
er, I felt heat rising off him. I lightly touched his cheek. The guy was burning
up with fever. I listened to his heart. Some kind of gunnery seemed to be going
on there, hollow and terrible.

I was gypped of revenge. For as a matter of course I took care of him. I cut a
hole in a piece of canvas to make myself a poncho, my other clothes being rip-
ped to tatters, and I sat up with him all night.

Like Henry Ware of the Kentucky border and the great chief of the Ohio, Timmen-
diquas. He might have stabbed Timmendiquas but he let him go.

I felt sorrow and pity for him too. I realized how much he was barren of, or
trying to be barren of in order to become the man of his ideas. Didn't he, even
if mainly from his head rather than from his heart, want to bring about redemp-
tion and rescue the whole brotherhood of man from suffering?

He was off his rocker all the next day. It would have been the end of him if I
hadn't sighted and signaled a British tanker late that day. It would have been
the end of me too, for it turned out that we were way past the Canaries and
somewhere off the Rio de Oro. This scientist Basteshaw! Why, he was cuckoo!
Why, we'd both have rotted in that African sea, and the boat would have rotted,
and there would have been nothing but death and mad ideas to the last. Or he'd
have murdered and eaten me, still calm and utterly reasonable, and gone on
steering to his goal.

Anyway, they dragged us aboard, both in a bad way. Naples was the first port
this Limey ship made. There the authorities stuck us in a hospital. And it was
a few weeks before I was afoot again, and I met Basteshaw in the corridor in a
bathrobe, coming along slowly. He seemed himself again, confident and proud-
headed. But he was decidedly cool to me. I could see he was blaming me for
frustrating his great plan. Now he'd have to ship again. No Canaries. His
research, so essential to human survival itself--that was no small thing to
postpone.

"Do you realize," I said, driving it home, still indignant at what might have
happened, "that you missed, you great navigator? I might never have seen my
wife again if I had listened to you."

He heard me out and meanwhile took my measure. He said, "The power of an indi-
vidual to act through his intellect on the reason of mankind is smaller now
than ever."

"Go ahead! Save mankind!" I said. "But don't forget if you had your way you'd
be dead now."

He wouldn't talk to me after that, and I didn't care. We snubbed each other in
the corridor. All I thought about was Stella anyhow.

It was six months before I saw New York again, for they found one reason after
another to detain me at the hospital.

So it was a night in September when the taxi let me off at Stella's door, which
now also was mine, and she came running down the stairs to me.



Chapter XXVI



If I could have come back and started to lead a happy, peaceful life I think very
few people would have the right to complain that I wasn't ready yet or hadn't
paid the admission price that's set by whoever sets prices. Guys like the broken-
down Cossack of the Mexican mountains and other spokesmen would at least
have to agree that I had a breather coming. Nevertheless I have had almost none.
It probably is too much to ask.

I said when I started to make the record that I would be plain and heed the knocks
as they came, and also that a man's character was his fate. Well, then it is obvi-
ous that this fate, or what he settles for, is also his character. And since I
never have had any place of rest, it should follow that I have trouble being still,
and furthermore my hope is based upon getting to be still so that the axial lines
can be found. When striving stops, the truth comes as a gift--bounty, harmony,
love, and so forth. Maybe I can't take these very things I want.

Once I said to Mintouchian when we were discussing this, "Wherever I stay it
has always been on somebody's hospitality. First on old Grandma--it was really
her house. Then those people in Evanston, the Renlings, then this Casa
Descuitada in Mexico, and with Mr. Paslavitch the Yugoslavian."

"Some people, if they didn't make it hard for themselves, might fall asleep,"
said Mintouchian. "Even the Son of Man made it hard so He would have enough
in common with our race to be its God."

"I had this idea of an academy foster-home or something like that."

"It could never work. Excuse me, but it's a ridiculous idea. Of course some
ridiculous ideas do work, but yours wouldn't, having so many children to take
care of. You're not the type, and Stella even less."

"Oh, I know it was a goofy idea that I should educate children. Who am I to
educate anybody? It wasn't so much education as love. That was the idea. What
I wanted was to have somebody living with me for a change, instead of the other
way around."


I always denied that I was the only creature of my kind. But how seldom two
imaginations coincide! That's because they are ambitious imaginations, both.
If they meant to be satisfied, then they would coincide.

I saw one thing and Stella another when we thought about matters like this
academy and foster-home. What I had in my mind was this private green place
like one of those Walden or Innisfree wattle jobs under the kind sun, surround-
ed by velvet woods and bright gardens and Elysium lawns sown with Lincoln Park
grass seed. However, we are meant to be carried away by the complex and hear
the simple like the far horn of Roland when he and Oliver are being wiped out
by the Saracens. I told Stella I was keen about beekeeping. Hell, I thought, I
had got along with an eagle, why not get along with different winged creatures
and there be honey instead? So she bought me a book on beekeeping and I took
it out with me on my second voyage. But I already knew what she thought the
academy would look like: a beaten-up frame house of dead-drunk jerry-builders
under dusty laborious trees, laundry boiling in the yard, pinched chickens of
misfortune, rioting kids, my blind mother wearing my old shoes and George
cobblering, me with a crate of bees in the woods.

At first Stella said it was a lovely idea, but what else was she going to say
in the emotions of reunion when I told her how the ship went down, and the rest.
She cried, holding on to me, and her tears fell on my chest, almost spurted. "Oh,
Augie," she said, "the things that happen to you! Poor Augie!" We were in bed.
I saw her round smooth back by the Italian mirror, a big circular one that hung
over the mantel. "Well, to hell with this war and falling in the water and all of
that," I said. "I want to get this place where we can have a settled life."

"Oh yes," she said. But at that time what else could she say?

However, I didn't have the least idea of how to go about it. And of course it
was only one of those bubble-headed dreams of people who haven't yet realized
what they're like nor what they're intended for.

Pretty soon I understood that I would mostly do as she wanted because it was
I who loved her most. What it was that she wanted wasn't clear for a time. You
see, there was all the immenso giubbilo of homecoming and being saved from
the sea and this Basteshaw, a romantic survivor and escapee; it was appropriate
there should be cries of Thanksgiving as if written down by Franz Joseph Haydn
and sung by the Schola Cantorum, and so on. And after all Stella did love me,
and we had a honeymoon still to catch up on. So if sometimes I saw she was
preoccupied I considered that probably her preoccupations were with me. That
was the intelligent thing to consider. Yet it wasn't really I who absorbed her
most. What do you think it is, to drag people from their preoccupations, where
they do their habitual toil! At first you wouldn't think anything in such a con-
nection with a woman who looks as she does, with those endowments, not light
but solid, her body rising toward a delicate head with feathery dark bangs.
Around some people the space is their space, and when you want to approach
them it has to be across their territory so that how you are to behave to them
is mainly under their control, and then it is always astonishing to learn that
they suffer, and perhaps worse than others, from their predominant ideas. Now
my foster-home and academy dream was not a preoccupation but one of those fea-
therhead millenarian notions or summer butterflies. You should never try to cook
such butterflies in lard. So to speak. Other preoccupations are my fate, or what
fills life and thought. Among them, preoccupation with Stella, so that what
happens to her happens, by necessity, to me too.

Guys may very likely think, Why hell! What's this talk about fates? and will
feel it all comes to me from another day, and a mistaken day, when there were
fewer people in the world and there was more room between them so that they
grew not like wild grass but like trees in a park, well set apart and developing
year by year in the rosy light. Now instead of such comparison you think, Let's
see it instead not even as the grass but as a band of particles, a universal shawl
of them, and these particles may have functions but certainly lack fates. And
there's even an attitude of mind which finds it almost disgusting to be a person
and not a function. Nevertheless I stand by my idea of a fate. For which a func-
tion is a substitution of a deeper despair.

Not long ago I was in Florence, Italy. Stella and I are in Europe now and have
been since the end of the war. She wanted to come for professional reasons, and
I'm in a kind of business I'll soon tell about. Anyway, I was in Florence; I travel
all over; a few days before I had been in Sicily where it was warm. Here it was
freezing when I arrived; when I came out of the station the mountain stars were
barking. The wind called the Tramontana was pouring in. In the morning when I
woke, in the Hotel Porta Rossa, just behind the Arno, I felt cold. The maid
brought coffee, which warmed me some. Some light shell of old metal in a church
tower rung in the swift glossy rush of the free-sight mountain air. I washed
with hot water, splashing the wooden floor. It was a comfort on an icy day to
go out in a rubbed body, wrapped in a warm coat.

I asked the clerk, "What's a good thing to see that I can go out and see in an
hour? I have an appointment at noon."

I knew this was a very American question, but it happened to be the truth.

I won't conceal what the appointment was about. I was acting for Mintouchian
in a piece of business and had to contact a man who was arranging to obtain
an Italian import license for us so we could unload Army surplus goods bought
cheap in Germany. Vitamin pills especially, and other pharmaceutical goods.
Mintouchian knew all about this type of speculation and we were making a
lot of dough. There was this Florentine uncle of a Rome bigshot I had to pay
off, and he was one of these civilized personalities with about five motives to
my one. However, I have got the hang of dealing with them by now, and when in
doubt I talk to Mintouchian on the transatlantic phone and he tells me what to
do.

The clerk at the Porta Rossa said, "You can see the gold doors of the Baptist-
ery with the sculptures of Ghiberti."

I recollected that that lunatic Basteshaw had spoken of this Ghiberti and so I
followed the man's directions to the Piazza del Duomo.

Horses were shivering from the cutting wind. Down the cold alleys flames tore
from the salamander cans of the people selling chestnuts far in the stone
angles of walls and cobblestones.

There were not many people by the Baptistery, due to this cold, only a few
huddlers with teary eyes who offered souvenirs for sale and were flapping packs
of postcards hinged together. I went and looked into the gold panels telling the
entire history of humankind. As I stared and these gold heads of our supposedly
common fathers and mothers burned in the sun while they told once and for all
what they were, an old lady came up to explain what they represented, and she
began to tell me the story of Joseph, of Jacob wrestling with the Angel, about
the flight from Egypt and about the Twelve Apostles. She got everything balled
up, for they're not well up on the Bible in Latin countries. And I wanted to be
let alone and moved away, but she followed. She carried a stick down which her
pocketbook was sliding by the handle and she wore a veil. At last I looked at her
face beneath the veil, this aged face of a great lady covered by mange spots and
with tarry blemishes on her lips. The fur of her coat was used up and the bald
hide broken and crustlike. What she had to say to me was, "Now I'll tell you
about these gates. You're an American, aren't you? I'll help you, because you'll
never understand things like these without help. I knew many Americans during
the war."

"You're not an Italian, are you?" I said. She had a German sort of accent.

"I'm a Piedmontese," she answered. "Many people tell me I don't speak English
like an Italian. I'm not a Nazi, if that's what you're driving at. I'd tell you my
name if you knew something about distinguished names, but you probably
don't, so why should I pronounce it?"

"You're absolutely right. You shouldn't have to tell strangers your name."

I walked on, with my face stung by the Tramontana, and applied myself again
to the sculptures of the gate.

She was after me again on her sprawl feet, but quick.

"I don't want a guide," I said, and I took some dough out of my pocket and
gave her a hundred lire.

"What is this?" she said.

"What do you mean? It's money."

"What are you giving me? Do you know I have to stay in a convent in the
mountains with the nuns and that they put me in a room with fourteen other
women? All sorts of women? I have to sleep with fourteen other people. And I
have to walk into the city because the Sisters won't give us the bus fare."

"Do they want you to stay up there?"

"The nuns are not very intelligent," she said. She wasn't able to stay up there
and do dull tasks and escaped into town. She was full of rebellion. But her bones
were showing through, her teeth were mixed up, her veil didn't quite hide the
quavery hairs of her chin and mouth, this unfunny joke on former lady smooth-
ness.

I wanted to look at the doors and thought, Why can't they let you alone in this
country?

"This is Isaac going to his own sacrifice," she said.

I looked, and doubted if that could be right. I said to her, "I don't want a guide.
I understand how it is, but what do you want me to do? People are coming
up to me all the time. So why don't you please take this money and--" I was
beginning to be in pain over it.

"People! But I am not other people. You should realize that. I am--" and she
was voice-stopped, she was so angry. "This is happening to me!" she said. She
seemed to crowd her heart with her elbow and came up close and started it again,
that queer begging and demanding.

O destroying laws!

What was the matter, hadn't this thing taken long enough, wasn't it gradual
enough? I mean, the wrinkles coming, the gray choking out the black, the skin
slackening and sinews getting stringy? Did she still have fresh in her mind the
villa she had lost, the husband or lovers, the children, the carpets and piano, the
servants and money? What was the matter that she still was as if in the first pain
of a deep fall?

I gave her another hundred lire.

"Give me five hundred and I'll show you the cathedral and I'll take you to
Santa Maria Novella. It's not far, and you won't know anything if someone
doesn't tell you."

"As a matter of fact, I have to meet a man right away on business. Thanks just
the same."

I took off. I might as well have, since Ghiberti didn't have much of a spell
over me anyhow just then.

This ancient lady was right too, and there always is a me it happens to. Death
is going to take the boundaries away from us, that we should no more be
persons. That's what death is about. When that is what life also wants to be
about, how can you feel except rebellious?


Yes, Europe is where Stella and I went after I made three other voyages in the
war.

I have written out these memoirs of mine since, as a traveling man, traveling
by myself, I have lots of time on my hands. For a couple of months last year I
had to be in Rome. It was summer, and the place broke out in red flowers, hot
and sleepy. All the southern cities are sleep cities in summer, and daytime sleep
makes me heavy and tasteless to myself. To wake up in the afternoon I would
drink coffee and smoke cigars, and by the time I came to myself after the siesta
it was well-nigh evening. You have dinner, and it's soft nerveless green night
with quiet gas mantles in the street going on incandescent and making a long
throbbing scratch in the utter night. Time to sleep again, so you go and subside
thickly on the bed.

Therefore I got into the habit of going every afternoon to the Café Valadier
in the Borghese Gardens on top of the Pincio, with the whole cumulous Rome
underneath, where I sat at a table and declared that I was an American, Chicago
born, and all these other events and notions. Said not in order to be so highly
significant but probably because human beings have the power to say and ought
to employ it at the proper time. When finally you're done speaking you're dumb
forever after, and when you're through stirring you go still, but this is no
reason to decline to speak and stir or to be what you are.

I try most of the time to be in Paris because that's where Stella works. She's
with a film company that does international movies. We have an apartment on
Rue François Ier, a pretty fancy section near the Hôtel Georges V. It's the
ornamental and luxury quarter, but the joint Stella and I rented was terrible.
It belonged to an old Britisher and his French wife. They took off for Mentone
to live off the high rent they soaked us, and here all winter the rain and fog
never let up. I'd pass days trying to get used to this moldy though fancied-up
apartment, somewhat obstinate, seeing that it was now my place. But there was
no getting anywhere with the carpets and chairs, the lamps that looked as if
grown on Coney Island, cat-house pictures, alabaster owls with electric eyes,
books of Ouida and Marie Corelli in leather binding, smelling like spit. The
old crook of a Britisher who was the locataire had something he called a study,
which was a sort of closet with a nasty piece of carpet, a set of Larousse's
encyclopedia from way back, and a green table. The drawers of this green felt
table were full of pieces of paper covered with figures on conversion of pounds
and francs, dollars, pesetas, schillings, marks, escudos, piasters, and even ru-
bles. This old man, Ryehurst, practically dead, sat here in a suit like for bur-
ial, purple flannel without lapels or buttons or buttonholes, and he calculated
about money and wrote letters to the papers on the Fall of France and how to
get the peasants' gold out of hiding, or which passes to Italy were the best for
motorists. In his youth he had broken the speed record from Turin to London.
There was a photo of him in his racer. A little Irish terrier sat in the cockpit
with him.

The front rooms were bad enough, but the dining room was too much for me.
Stella would leave early to be on the lot, and even though there was a bonne
à tout faire to fix my breakfast I couldn't always bring myself to sit down at
the yellow red-embroidered Turkestan cloth for my coffee.

So I would go out to a little café for breakfast, and here one day I ran into my
old friend Hooker Frazer. At this café, the Roseraie, which was a jazzy kind of
place, there were round tables, wicker chairs, palms in brass tubs, candy-striped
fiber carpet, red and white awnings, steam of a huge coffee machine of hundreds
of gimmicks, cakes in cellophane, and all that kind of stuff. After I set up the
coal stoves--this maid, Jacqueline, was very nice but she didn't know a thing
about getting coal to catch; I was an expert from way back--I'd go to breakfast.
Thus one morning I was ordering coffee at the Roseraie. Old folks in slippers,
as if in their own lace-veined parlors, walked in the street, with horsemeat and
strawberries, etcetera, coming from the market on Place de I'Alma. All at once
Frazer came by. I hadn't seen him since my wedding day.

"Frazer, hey!"

"Augie!"

"What brings you to Paris, old pal?"

"How are you? Same healthy color as always, and smiling away! Why, I'm working
with the World Educational Fund. I think I've seen everyone I ever knew here dur-
ing this past year. But what a surprise to run across you, Augie, in the City
of Man!"

He was feeling very grand, the place inspired him, and he sat down and gave
me a sort of talk--pretty amazing!--about Paris and how nothing like it existed,
the capital of the hope that Man could be free without the help of gods, clear
of mind, civilized, wise, pleasant, and all of that. For a minute I felt rather in-
sulted that he should laugh when he asked me what I was doing here. It might be
incongruous, but if it was for Man why shouldn't it be for me too? If it wasn't,
perhaps that wasn't one hundred per cent my fault. Which Man was it the City
of? Some version again. It's always some version or other.

But who could complain of this pert, pretty Paris when it revolved like a
merry-go-round--the gold bridge-horses, the Greek Tuileries heroes and stone
beauties, the overloaded Opéra, the racy show windows and dapper colors, the
maypole obelisk, the all-colors ice-cream, the gaudy package of the world.

I don't suppose Frazer meant to hurt my feelings; he was merely surprised to
see me here.

"I've been over since the end of the war," I said.

"Is that so? What doing?"

"I'm connected in business with that Armenian lawyer you met at my wedding.
Remember?"

"Oh, of course, you're married. Is your wife here with you?"

"Naturally. She works in pictures. Maybe you've seen her in Les Orphelines.
It's about displaced persons."

"No, as a matter of fact I don't see many movies. But I'm not surprised to hear
she's an actress. She's very beautiful, you know. How are things working out?"

"I love her," I said.

As if that was an answer! But how can you blame me if I was unwilling to say
more to Frazer? Suppose I started to explain that she loved me too, but loved me
in the same way that Paris is the City of Man, or with what she brought to it,
given her preoccupations--love being the victory of love over preoccupations,
or what Mintouchian called dominant ideas that afternoon in the Turkish bath. I
wasn't going to go into all this with Frazer. When I took it up with Stella, and
once in a while I did, or tried to, I seemed to sound like a fanatic, and maybe
sounded to her as other people had to me, sounding off about their idea that they
were trying to sell or to recruit you for. This made her a mirror, like, where I
could see my own obstinacy of yore and how it must have looked when I balked.
She was right when we took cover in the garden of the Japanese villa in Acatla
and she observed that we were very similar. So we are.

However, even if I am not the honestest type in the world I don't want to lie
more than is average. Stella does. Of course you can call it lying or you can call
it protection of your vision. I think I prefer the second description. Stella looks
happy and firm and wants me to look the same. She sits down by the bird-breasted
stove in the salon, on the chair the old English gent Ryehurst warned me--having
damages in mind--was a genuine Chippendale, and she's calm, ntelligent, forceful,
vital, tremendously handsome, and this is how she wants to put herself across.
It's the vision. Naturally it often takes me a while to know where we're really
at. She talks about happenings at the studio and laughs with her clear, bosomy
voice about the jokes of the day. And what have I been doing? Well, perhaps I
had a meeting with a person who used to be in Dachau and did some business with
him in dental supplies from Germany. That took an hour or two. After which I may
have gone to the cold halls of the Louvre and visited in the Dutch School, or
noticed how the Seine smelled like medicine, or went into a café and wrote a
letter, and so passed the day.

She sits and listens with crossed legs under the batik house-wrap she wears,
with her heavy three-way-piled hair and cigarette at her mouth and refuses me--
for the time being, anyway--the most important things I ask of her.

It's really kind of tremendous how it all takes place. You'd never guess how
much labor goes into it. Only some time ago it occurred to me how great an
amount. She came back from the studio and went to take a bath, and from the
bath she called out to me, "Darling, please bring me a towel." I took one of
those towel robes that I had bought at the Bon Marché department store and came
along with it. The little bathroom was in twilight. In the chauffe-eau machine,
the brass box with teeth of gas burning, the green metal dropped crumbs inside
from the thousand-candle blaze. Her body with its warm woman's smell was cover-
ed with water starting in a calm line over her breasts. The glass of the medi-
cine chest shone like a deep blue place in the wall, as if a window to the
evening sea and not the ashy fog of Paris. I sat down with the robe over my
shoulder and felt very much at peace. For a change the apartment seemed clean
and was warm; the abominations were gone into the background, the stoves
drew well and they shone. Jacqueline was cooking dinner and it smelled of
gravy. I felt settled and easy, my chest free and my fingers comfortable and
open. And now here's the thing. It takes a time like this for you to find out
how sore your heart has been, and, moreover, all the while you thought you
were going around idle terribly hard work was taking place. Hard, hard work,
excavation and digging, mining, moling through tunnels, heaving, pushing,
moving rock, working, working, working, working, working, panting, hauling,
hoisting. And none of this work is seen from the outside. It's internally done.
It happens because you are powerless and unable to get anywhere, to obtain
justice or have requital, and therefore in yourself you labor, you wage and
combat, settle scores, remember insults, fight, reply, deny, blab, denounce,
triumph, outwit, overcome, vindicate, cry, persist, absolve, die and rise
again. All by yourself! Where is everybody? Inside your breast and skin, the
entire cast.

Lying in the bath, Stella was performing labor. It was obvious to me. And
generally I was doing hard work too. And what for?

Everybody gives me a line about Paris being a place of ease and mentions calme,
ordre, luxe, et volupté, and yet there is this toil being done. Every precious
personality framed dramatically and doing the indispensable work. If Stella
weren't bound to do her hardest work we wouldn't be in this city of calm and
luxury, so called. The clothes, the night clubs and entertainment, the suppos-
ed play of the studio and the friendship of the artists--who strike me as be-
ing characters of pretty high stomach, like our buddy Alain du Niveau--there's
nothing easy in it. I'll tell you about this du Niveau. He's what the Paris-
ians call a noceur, meaning that it's always the wedding night for him or
that he plays musical beds. That's just about the least of it.

Anyway, I would have preferred to stay in the States and have children. In-
stead I'm in the bondage of strangeness for a time still. It's only temporary.
We'll get out of it.

I said that Stella lied more than average, unfortunately. She told me a number
of things that weren't so; she forgot to tell me others that were so. For in-
stance, she said she was getting money from her dad in Jamaica. There was no
such party in Jamaica. She had never gone to college either. And she had never
cared anything about Oliver. He wasn't the important man. The important one was
a big operator whose name was Cumberland. It wasn't she who first told me about
him. I found out from someone else that there was such a man. And then she told
me that this Cumberland was a crook. Of morals, that is; in business he was not
only respectable but great. In fact he was one of these powerful characters whose
pictures don't even get into the papers because they're too strong to be named.
And gradually this man, with whom she had taken up while still a high-school
girl, built up to be about like Jupiter-Ammon, with an eye like that new tele-
scope out at the Mount Palomar observatory, about as wicked as Tiberius, a czar
and mastermind. To tell the truth, I'm good and tired of all these big personal-
ities, destiny molders, and heavy-water brains, Machiavellis and wizard evildo-
ers, big-wheels and imposers-upon, absolutists. After Basteshaw clobbered me I
took an oath of unsusceptibility. But this oath is probably a mice-and-man matter,
for here the specter of one of this breed was over me. Brother! You never are
through, you just think you are!

The first I heard about this Cumberland was from Alain du Niveau, who was
in New York during the war, in the movie industry. Mintouchian knew him, and
Agnes. He was originally a friend of Agnes. When we met he told me he was a
descendant of the Duc de Saint-Simon. I'm always a sucker for lineage, but this
du Niveau didn't really look very good. He had blue whiskyish eyes in his tight-
packed heavy face with its color of bad good-health. Although he probably meant
no harm by it he had a very insolent expression. Thin and sandy, his hair was
combed like a British officer's, neat and bleak. His shoes were fleece-lined;
his long overcoat was all beautiful suede, down to the ankles; his body was
thick. He was a chaser and wolf after girls on the subway. He'd tell you him-
self how he picked up women, and as he described it these poor weak birdies
when he got them alone were like confronted by a fiery god, etcetera.

When he mentioned Cumberland to me we were in the lobby of the Paramount
Theatre waiting for Stella. Oliver's name came up, and du Niveau said, "He's
still in jail."

"Did you know the guy?" I said.

"Yes. And what a comedown for her after Cumberland. I knew him too."

"Who?"

He didn't realize what he had said. He hardly ever did. I felt as if I had been
trapped in a shaft by a sudden fall of dirt. Terrible despair, rage, jealousy,
burst out in me.

"Who? What Cumberland?"

Then he looked at me and realized that for some reason my eyes were burning
and I was in pain. I think he was very surprised and tried to remove himself
with dignity from this trouble.

Actually I had been aware for some time of something peculiar that would
sooner or later have to be explained. People were dunning Stella constantly.
There was trouble about a car. She didn't own a car. And there was litigation
about an apartment uptown. What sort of apartment had she had uptown? And as
it would have been inhuman not to mention it, I guess, she had told me about
a seventy-five-hundred-dollar mink coat she had had to sell, and a diamond
necklace. Business envelopes came in the mail which she wouldn't open. There's
something about those business envelopes with the transparent oblong address
part that my soul runs away from.

And then, was I supposed to overlook what Mintouchian had said to me in the
Turkish bath? How could I?

"Who is this Cumberland?" I said.

Just then Stella came down from the ladies' lounge and I took her arm and
hurried her out to a cab. We tore back to the apartment and I blew my top. "I
should have known there was something dishonest!" I yelled at her. "Who is this
Cumberland?"

"Augie! Don't carry on," she said, pale. "I should have told you. But what dif-
ference does it make? It proves that I love you and didn't want to lose you by
telling you."

"He was the one that gave you the coat?"

"Yes, darling. But I married you, not him."

"And the car?"

"It was a present, honey. But, sweetheart, it's you I love."

"And all the things in the house?"

"The furniture? Why, it's just stuff. It's only you that matters."

Gradually she calmed me.

"When was the last time you saw him?"

"I haven't had a thing to do with him for two years."

"I can't stand these fellows being brought up," I said. "I can't take it. There
shouldn't be these secret things jumping out."

"But after all," she cried, "it was rougher on me. I was the one that actually
suffered from him. All you suffer from is hearing about it."


Now that the subject was open it became very hard to put an end to. She wanted
to talk about it. To prove that I had no reason to be jealous she had to tell
me every last thing that had happened, and I couldn't stop her--a gallant, active
flashing temperament like that, you see, you can't control her easily.

"What a dog!" she said. "What a coward! He didn't have a single human feeling.
He mainly wanted me to help him entertain his business friends and show off
because he was ashamed of his wife."

It didn't absolutely square with her attitude toward the things she had enjoyed,
like the summer house in New Jersey, the charge accounts, and the Mercedes-Benz
automobile, which was an extremely hardheaded attitude. She was very Benz auto-
mobile, which was an extremely hardheaded attitude. She was very well informed
about the tax situation and the insurance and so on. Of course it's nothing a-
gainst a woman that she should understand these things. Why shouldn't she under-
stand them? But I was afraid I'd have to give up on an ideal explanation of
her past life. Oh well, there didn't have to be one necessarily.

"He wouldn't let me be independent. If he found out I had a savings account he
made me spend the money. He thought I should be helpless. Once the president
of a lumber company whom I knew was going to open a big gambling joint on Long
Island and offered me fifteen thousand a year to be hostess. Cumberland was
furious about it when he heard."

"He found out everything?"

"He hired detectives. You have a lot to learn about such people. He'd rent the
moon if he had any use for it."

"I already have learned all I want to learn."

"Oh, Augie! Please, honey, remember that you made mistakes too. You went
to smuggle immigrants from Canada. You stole. A lot of people led you astray
also."

Okay, but why couldn't she be satisfied that I loved her and stop this talk?
What did she mean, about the lumberman? Had she really intended to become a
hostess? I would meditate over all this and sit there feeling terrible. The very
arms of the chair seemed about to stab me through the sides, and the playful
flowery Bavarian bed and the knickknacks and stuffed orioles, and all were a
drag on me. Was I going to be wrong again? It was the thought I had in the boat
when I was adrift with Basteshaw that I had been wrong again and again.

Nevertheless I believed we would make it, finally. I don't want to give a false
impression of one hundred per cent desperation. It is not like that. I don't know
who this saint was who woke up, lifted his face, opened his mouth, and reported
on his secret dream that blessedness covers the whole Creation but covers it
thicker in some places than in others. Whoever he was, it's my great weakness to
respond to such dreams. This is the amor fati, that's what it is, or mysterious
adoration of what occurs.

There is a certain amount of simple-mindedness in Stella as well as deception,
a sort of naïve seriousness. She cries very sincerely and with utmost warmth. But
it's not a simple matter to get her to change her mind on any matter. I've tried,
for instance, to get her to wear her nails shorter; she grows them very long, and
when they tear they tear into the quick and she starts to cry. Then I say, "Good
heavens, why do you let them grow like that!" and take the scissors and trim
them, which she submits to. However, she only lets them grow long again. Or, in
the case of the cat, Ginger, who's very spoiled and wakes you up at night by
turning over lamps and dishes so that you'll feed him, I only made myself look
foolish arguing that he ought to be shut in the kitchen at night. I couldn't get
anywhere.

She'd repeat continually how she had wanted to be independent.

"Naturally. Who doesn't want that?"

"No, I mean I wanted to do something that was my own idea. It wasn't just a
matter of money." He oppressed her, that was what, practically with wrung
hands, she had to put across to me. "Every time he promised to let me do
something he'd go back on his word. So finally I made a break and went to
California. I knew someone there who once offered me a screen test. I took a
wonderful test and got a part in a musical. But when the picture was released
all my lines were cut out. I looked like such a fool, just smiling and getting
ready to say something, and I never said it. After the preview I was sick. He
used his influence to make the producer do it. I sent him a wire and told him
I was through for good. Next day I had an attack of appendicitis and went to
the hospital, and in about twenty-four hours he showed up by my bedside. I
said to him, 'What excuse did you give your wife for this trip!' I was done
with him forever."

I always wince when I hear husbands and wives talking to each other about
past marriages and affairs. I'm unusually sensitive in this respect.

Of course I knew this was Stella's hard work. She wasn't done suffering from
it, not by a long shot. She had to harrow his memory over and over, and in so
doing she dug me up considerably too.

"All right, Stella, now, please," I said at last.

"All right what?" she said, angry. "Am I supposed not to talk about it at all,
ever?"

"But you talk about it all the time, and you talk about him more than anyone
else."

"Because I hate him. I'm still in debt because of all these obligations that were
his fault."

"We'll get rid of them."

"How?"

"I don't know yet I'll take it up with Mintouchian."

She didn't want me to do that. She was seriously opposed, but I went to see
him all the same.

He already knew all about Cumberland, which isn't in the least surprising. We
talked it over in his office on Fifth Avenue. "Since you bring it up," he said,
"excuse me, but she's been a nuisance to him. He was unfair to her, but he's an
older fellow now and the whole thing is over. It's difficult for his family. His
son is now head of the firm and he says she won't get anywhere by threatening
them. She wouldn't have much coming legally."

"Threatening? What threat? You mean to say she's bothering him? Why, she told
me she hasn't had anything to do with him for two years!"

"Well, she hasn't told you the truth--strictly speaking."

I was overthrown by this; I was very ashamed. How are you supposed to proceed?
If you don't defend yourself you can get murdered, and if you do defend your-
self you're liable to die of that too.

"I'm afraid she's impatient to go to law," said Mintouchian. "She's very
restless."

I said to Stella, "You've got to quit this. There isn't going to be any lawsuit.
You always know where this man is and what he's doing. You haven't told me
the truth. It has to stop immediately. I have to ship again in a week and I don't
want to be mulling it over for months and months. If you won't promise to stop I
can't come back."

She gave in. She cried with bitterness that I threatened her, but she promised.
She has a warm, easily coloring face, Stella. When she starts to cry the pink of
it begins to darken and darkens up into her eyes, which seemed so amorous the
first time I saw them in Acatla. Her features rise very slightly from the sur-
face of her face, as if she had a Javanese or Sumatran inheritance. I sat both
hurt and comforted as she wept. Crying is further stubbornness with some women,
but with Stella it's the truthful moment. She knew she shouldn't talk so much
about the old man, she confessed, and try to make him take all the blame.

So I sailed in a better frame of mind, and this was when she bought me a book
on bee culture. I studied it with devotion and learned a lot about bees and
honey, which I knew, however, wouldn't likely be of any practical use.

Of course the whole movie enterprise is to show Cumberland that she could make
the grade independently. She doesn't have any terrific talent for acting, but
that's how it appears to go. People don't do what they have a talent for but what
the preoccupation leads to. If they're good at auto-repairing they have to sing
Don Giovanni; if they can sing they have to be architects; and if they have a gift
for architecture they wish to become school superintendents or abstract painters
or anything else. Anything! It's a spite. It's having to prove full and ultimate self-
sufficiency or some such monster dream that you don't need anyone else to do
these things for you.

Well, Stella is in du Niveau's film company, and I am in illicit dealing--to
discriminate against myself, more than half the business of Europe being the
same. It is indeed cockeyed. But there is nothing I can do about it. It must
be clear, however, that I am a person of hope, and now my hopes have settled
themselves upon children and a settled life. I haven't been able to convince
Stella as yet. Therefore while I knock around on rapides over falling horizons,
over Alps, in steam and haste, or blast the air in my black Citroën, smoking
cigars and watching the road through polaroid glasses, it's unborn children I
pore over far oftener than business deals.

I wonder if it's a phase, or what, but sometimes I feel I already am a father.

Recently in Rome a whore tried to pick me up on the Via Veneto. The
circumstances were peculiar; I am a tall man and the girl who propositioned me
was very small, plump, and dressed in second-or third-year mourning. A sad
face. "Come with me," she said. Now let me not be a liar and say I was not in
the least drawn. You always are, somewhat. However, it cost no great effort to
refuse, and when I said no, she looked deeply wounded, personally, and said,
"What's the matter, am I not good enough for you?" I said, "Oh, of course,
signorina, but I'm married. I have children. Io ho bambini." So she was over-
whelmed entirely and said, "I'm very sorry, I didn't know you had children,"
and she was about to cry over this error. To have been perfectly fair I
should have explained this to her, that it was hokum and that I just had an
impulse. But let me say that I am aware where this deception of bambini came
from. It came from that picture of Stella's that I mentioned to Frazer, Les
Orphelines. I had to see it several times, in the course of events, and one
part of it made a deep impression on me once in the cutting room, this boarded,
insulated, burlap-deadened room where it stunk of Gauloise cigarettes and high-
grade perfume. The scene was one in which Stella pleaded with an Italian doctor
for a woman and her baby. They had coached her on the Italian lines and so she
cried out, "Ma Maria, ed il bambino. Il bambino!" And the doctor, who couldn't
offer help, shrugged and said, "Che posso fare! Che posso fare!"

I saw this run over and over and was full of sorrow, almost provoked to an
outburst of tears and ripe to exclaim to Stella, "Here, here, if you want
something to cry out about! Right here! What do you need theoretical people for
and these ghosts of emotions never of this world anyway?" The grief was about
to drop down from my eyes.

It's supposed to be easier to suffer for hypothetical people too, for Hecubas.
It ought to be easier than for the ones you yourself hurt, for you can see their
enemies or persecutors better than you can see yourself balking someone of life
or doing him wrong.

Be that as it may, this was why I imagined I already had the bambini.


Simon and Charlotte came to Paris and put up at the Crillon. I wished that
they had brought Mama too, although it would have been probably lost on her.
Something big would have to be done for her one of these days, I thought; I'd
have to decide what was appropriate, and I could now swing it by myself, hav-
ing the money. It satisfied Simon that I was now in business. Charlotte thought
better of me also, though she wanted to know more particulars. Some chance she
had of getting them out of me! I took them around to the Tour d'Argent and the
Lapin Agile and Casino de Paris, The Rose Rouge and other gaiety haunts, and
picked up the tab. This made Simon say proudly to Charlotte, "Well, what do
you think now? My kid brother has turned out to be a regular man of the world."
Stella and I smiled across the Rose Rouge table.

Charlotte, this solid and suspecting woman in her early thirties, handsome,
immovable in her opinions, was full of grudges. Whatever she had against
Simon she formerly would take out on me. Now that I looked a little more
substantial than I used to and seemed to have a few right ideas anyhow, she
could complain about him to me. I was eager to know the score. The first week
or so there was not much I could find out, because we were on the town. Du
Niveau helped a lot; he made a big hit with them because of being a genuine
aristocrat and the deference of flunkies to him in restaurants and night clubs
and haute-couture joints. Stella helped too. "What a dish!" said Simon. "She's
good for you also; she'll keep you on your toes." He meant that to provide for
a beautiful woman is stabilizing; it makes a man earn money. "The only thing,"
said Simon, "is why you keep her in such a pigpen."

"It's hard to find apartments in this section of Paris near the Champs Elysées.
Besides we're not at home much, either of us. But I aim to get a villa out at
St. Cloud if we have to settle here."

"If you have to? You sound as if you didn't want to."

"Oh--it's all the same to me where I live."

Of all places, we were in the Petit Palais at a picture exhibition from the
Pinacothek of Munich. These grand masterpieces were sitting on the walls. Du
Niveau was along, massive, in his red suede coat and highly polished pointy
shoes. Simon and he admired each other's clothes. Stella and Charlotte were
wearing mink stoles, Simon a double-breasted plaid and crocodile shoes, and
I a camel's-hair coat, so that we looked appropriately gorgeous to pass in
one of those Italian portrait crowds of gold and jewels.

Du Niveau said, "I love pictures, but I can't stand religious subjects."

Nobody was thinking much about painting, unless it was Stella who sometimes
paints. I can't explain how come we were there. Maybe nothing better was
open just then.

Simon and I dropped behind for a while and I asked him, "Whatever happened
to Renée?"

A heavy red color crowded his blond face--he had become very stout. He
said, "Why do you have to ask me here, for the love of God!"

"We can talk, Simon. They won't overhear anything. Did she have a kid?"

"No, no, it was just a bluff. There wasn't any kid."

"But you said--"

"Never mind what I said. You asked me, and I'm telling you."

I didn't know whether or not to believe him, he was in such a rush to get
rid of the subject. And how touchy he was! He didn't want to be talked a-
bout.

But at lunch, when Stella and du Niveau had gone back to the studio, Char-
lotte opened up. She was sitting upright in her mink and in a velour hat
which suited her face because she has a very downy skin which was covered
with high color. Evidently Simon's trouble with Renée had been all over the
Chicago papers, and she took it for granted that I had read about it. No, I
hadn't heard a thing. I was completely surprised. Simon kept his mouth shut
during this, and perhaps it tormented him that I might add something which
Charlotte didn't happen to know. Not me; I was silent too and didn't ask any
questions. Renée had sued him and made a scandal. She claimed she had a child
by him. She might have accused three other men, said Charlotte, and Charlotte
knew what she was talking about you can be sure; she was a well-informed wo-
man. If the case hadn't been thrown out of court right away she was ready
with plenty of evidence. "I'd have given her a case!" she said. "The little
whore!" Simon wasn't having anything to do with either of us during this
conversation. He sat at the table but, as it were, we didn't have his com-
pany. "Every minute she was with him she was collecting evidence," said Char-
lotte. "They never stopped at a place but what she didn't take a pack of
matches and write the date inside. She even had his cigar butts for evidence.
And all the time it was supposed to be love. What did she love you for?" said
Charlotte with a terrible sudden outburst. "Your fat belly? Your scar on your
forehead? Your bald spot? It was the money. It never was anything except mon-
ey." I wanted to duck as this came down; my shoulders flinched. Down it burned
and beat on us. Simon nevertheless didn't seem much disturbed, only thoughtful,
and continued drawing at his cigar. At no time did he answer anything. Maybe
he thought that as he himself had wanted money he couldn't condemn Renée for
wanting it, but he didn't say.

"Then she'd phone me and say, 'You can't have children, you should let him
go, he wants a family.' 'Go on, take him away if you can,' I said to her. 'You
know you can't get him because you're nothing but a little tramp. You and he
are both no good.' But she got out a summons for him, and when they tried to
serve it I phoned him and told him he'd better get out of town. He wouldn't
leave without me. 'What've you got to be afraid of?' I said. 'It isn't your kid.
It's three other guys'.' I happened to have the flu then and was supposed to
stay in bed, but when he wouldn't leave alone I had to come to the airport to
meet him, and it was a rainstorm. Finally we took off, and we had to make an
emergency landing in Nebraska. And he said, 'I might as well get knocked off.
I've wasted my life anyhow.' And what did I do, if he wasted his life? What was
I there for? What was in it for me? As soon as it got bad he came running to me
for protection, and I protected him. If he didn't have such an abnormal idea
about protection, and I protected him. If he didn't have such an abnormal idea
about being happy in the first place it wouldn't have happened. Who told him
he had any business to expect all that? What right has anybody? There is no
such right," she said.

In the back the musicians were smoothing their bows away over their
instruments.

"Now she's married. She married one of those guys and disappeared with him
somewhere..."

I wanted Charlotte to stop. It now was too much, flying in the rainstorm and
about wasted lives, while he looked more and more indifferent, which he could
do only by making himself abstract like this. I started to cough. I had a long
coughing fit. Shall I explain why? Because many years ago when I was a kid and
went to have my tonsils out I began to cry when the ether mask was put on me.
A nurse said, "Is he crying, a big boy like that?" And another answered, "Why,
no, he's brave. He's not crying, he's coughing." And when I heard that I started
to cough in earnest. This is the kind of coughing it was, of great distress. It
stopped the conversation. The maître d'hôtel came to see what was the matter
and gave me a glass of water.

Lord! How much of this did Simon have to hear? If she didn't stop she'd turn
him into stone. He'd have turned into stone long ago if it hadn't been for
these Renées. What are you supposed to do, lay down your life? That's what she
wanted from him and what she meant by "right." Sheer murder. If she meant that
you have to die anyway and might as well do it sooner than later, it's criminal
murder.

He was ashamed, stony with shame. His secrets were being told. His secrets!
What did they amount to? You'd think they were as towering as the Himalayas.
But all they were about was his mismanaged effort to live. To live and not
die. And this was what he had to be ashamed of.

"You'd better do something for that cold," said Charlotte severely.

I love my brother very much. I never meet him again without the utmost love
filling me up. He has it too, though we both seem to fight it.

"It sounds like the old whooping cough you used to have," Simon said and
looked toward me once again.

Just then I thought that the worst of it for him was not to have the child.


I couldn't spend much time with Simon in Paris. Mintouchian cabled me to go
to Bruges and look up a guy there who had a big nylon deal on his mind, and
so I started out. I had Jacqueline the maid with me as passenger. She has
folks in Normandy and was going to pay them a Christmas visit, and as she
was bringing a couple of suitcases full of presents I gave her a lift.

Jacqueline was referred to Stella by du Niveau. When he first knew her she
was a waitress in Vichy just after the French defeat and he was on his way out
of the country. They must have become friends, and it is hard to conceive be-
cause she looks so grotesque. Though this was some time back and then she might
have been seeing the last of her best days. At the outer corners Jacqueline's
eyes sink down queerly. She has a large, crooked Norman nose, fair hair not in
very good health, veiny temples, a long chin and a disciplinarian mouth that
lipstick doesn't do a great deal to change. She is highly painted and has a
sweet odor of cosmetics and cleaning fluid. Her manner is very busy. She pounds
the floor very rapidly and hard as she walks, but she is a person of sweet temper,
though gossipy and with all kinds of incomprehensible social ambitions. In addi-
tion to doing housework she also is employed as an ouvreuse, or usherette, in a
movie, which is more of du Niveau's influence. Therefore she has a lot of social
history to relate of the movie and the tough night life after closing time when
she stops at the Coupole for a cup of coffee. She is always being offered vio-
lence, like holdup and rape, Arabs hitting her or trying to force their way into
her room at night. Her hips are big and legs varicose for all that she moves so
briskly, and this with her sharp face and breasts that have gone out of shape;
and yet what is it that dismisses a person from desirability? I'm not the one
to say. She has unkillable pride in her sensuality and adventurous spirit, and
if she has these outrageous colors and parrot bite, what about it?

It was a big holiday deal when we started out. She removed some stains from
my camel's-hair coat with tea, which she claimed was just the thing, and then I
carried her jammed cardboard valises with their tin locks down and stowed them
in the trunk of the Citroën.

It was cold; a hard cold with snowflakes. We circled the Etoile and roared off
toward Rouen. I should have gone by way of Amiens, but it wasn't too much of
a detour for her sake. She's a kind, grateful, and by and large docile woman.
So we went at this hungry speed through Rouen and then bore north toward the
channel. She was telling of Vichy in the good old days and of the celebrities
she knew there. It was her cunning way of getting the conversation round to
du Niveau, for she never missed a chance to discuss him with me, and what she
really wanted was to warn me to be on guard, that he was unscrupulous. Not
that she wasn't grateful, you understand, but she also was beholden to me and
she hinted at various crimes he was guilty of. I realized that she was simply
romancing about him. He represented some great ideal to her which her spirit
was hungry for.

We were getting close to her destination, and I wasn't too sorry, even though
it was a sad, dark day and I'd have to continue to Bruges alone. The ride by
way of Dunkerque and Ostend is a terribly melancholy one through ruins and a-
long the grim Channel water.

Only a few kilometers from her uncle's farm the Citroën's engine began to miss
and finally we stalled. I picked up the hood, but a lot I know about motors.
Besides, it was freezing. So we started to walk toward the farm across the
fields. She was going to send her nephew to town for a mechanic when we got
there. But we had a good long way to hike, three or four miles across the
fields, which were brown, turfy and stiff, these fields where battles of the
Hundred Years' War had been fought, where the bones of the killed English
were bleached and sent back to be buried in churches, where wolves and crows
had cleaned up. The cold, after a time, made you gasp. The tears were cut-
ting tracks over Jacqueline's face, which was flaming through the make-up.
I was stung and numb too, hand and foot.

"Our stomachs may freeze," she said to me after we had gone about a mile.
"It is very dangerous."

"Stomach? How can the stomach freeze?"

"It can. You can be ailing for life if that happens."

"What do you do to prevent it?" I said.

"The thing to do is sing," she said, desperate in her thin Paris shoes and
trying to stretch her cotton muffler over the back of her head. And she start-
ed singing some night-club song. The cold blackbirds flapped out of the woods
of rusty oaks and even they must have been too cold for noise because I heard
no grating from them. Only Jacqueline's poor voice which didn't appear to get
far over the thin snowy pockets and furrows. "You must absolutely try to sing,"
she said. "Otherwise you can never be sure. Something may happen." And because
I didn't want to argue with her about medical superstitions and be so right or
superior wising her up about modern science I decided, finally, what the hell!
I might as well sing too. The only thing I could think to sing was "La Cucara-
cha." I kept up La Cucaracha for a mile or two and felt more chilled than help-
ed. Then she said, after we had both worn ourselves out trying to breathe in
the harsh wind and keep up the song cure, "That wasn't French that you were
singing, was it?"

I said it was a Mexican song.

At which she exclaimed, "Ah, the dream of my life is to go to Mexico!"

The dream of her life? What, not Saigon? Not Hollywood? Not Bogotá? Not Alep-
po? I gave a double-take at her water-sparkling eyes and freezing, wavering,
mascara-lined, goblin, earnest and disciplinarian, membranous, and yet gorgeous
face, with its fairy soot of pink and that red snare of her mouth; yet femi-
nine; yet mischievous; yet still hopefully and obstinately seductive. What
would she be doing in Mexico? I tried to picture her there. How queer it was!
I started to laugh loudly. And what was I doing here in the fields of Normandy?
How about that?

"Have you thought of something funny, M'sieu March?" she said as she hurried
with me, swinging her arms in her short jacket of leg-of-mutton sleeves.

"Very funny!"

Then she pointed. "Vous voyez les chiens?" The dogs of the farm had leaped
a brook and were dashing for us on the brown coat of the turf, yelling and
yapping. "Don't you worry about them," she said, picking up a branch. "They
know me well." Sure enough they did. They bounded into the air and licked
her face.

The trouble was with the spark plugs, which were soon repaired, and I cut out
for Dunkerque and Ostend. Where the British were so punished the town is ruin-
ed. Quonset huts stand there on the ruins. The back of the ancient water was
like wolf gray. Then on the long sand the waves crashed white; they spit them-
selves to pieces. I saw this specter of white anger coming from the savage
gray and meanwhile shot northward, in a great hurry to get to Bruges and out of
this line of white which was like eternity opening up right beside destructions
of the modern world, hoary and grumbling. I thought if I could beat the dark to
Bruges I'd see the green canals and ancient palaces. On a day like this I could
use the comfort of it, when it was so raw. I was still chilled from the hike a-
cross the fields, but, thinking of Jacqueline and Mexico, I got to grinning again.
That's the animal ridens in me, the laughing creature, forever rising up. What's
so laughable, that a Jacqueline, for instance, as hard used as that by rough forc-
es, will still refuse to lead a disappointed life? Or is the laugh at nature--in-
cluding eternity--that it thinks it can win over us and the power of hope? Nah,
nah! I think. It never will. But that probably is the joke, on one or the other,
and laughing is an enigma that includes both. Look at me, going everywhere! Why,
I am a sort of Columbus of those near-at-hand and believe you can come to them
in this immediate terra incognita that spreads out in every gaze. I may well be
a flop at this line of endeavor. Columbus too thought he was a flop, probably,
when they sent him back in chains. Which didn't prove there was no America.