Chapter IX




Just when Mrs. Renling's construction around me was nearly complete I shoved
off. The leading and precipitating reason was that she proposed to adopt me.
I was supposed to become Augie Renling, live with them, and inherit all their
dough. To see what there was behind this more light is needed than probably I
can turn on. But first of all there was something adoptional about me. No doubt
this had something to do with the fact that we were in a fashion adopted by
Grandma Lausch in our earliest days; to please and reward whom I had been pli-
able and grateful-seeming, an adoptee. If not really so docile and pliable,
this was the hidden ball and surprise about me. Why had the Einhorns, protect-
ing their son Arthur, had to underscore it that they didn't intend to take me
into their family? Because something about me suggested adoption. And then there
were some people who were especially adoption-minded. Some maybe wishing to
complete their earthly work. Thus Mrs. Renling in her strenuous and hacked-up
way, and the whiteness that came from her compression into her intense
purposes. She too had her mission on earth.

There's one thing you couldn't easily find out from Mrs. Renling; I never
knew what was her most deep desire, owing to her cranky manners and swift
conversation. But she wanted to try being a mother. However, I was in a state
of removal from all her intentions for me. Why should I turn into one of these
people who didn't know who they themselves were? And the unvarnished truth
is that it wasn't a fate good enough for me, because that was what came out
clearly when it became a question of my joining up. As son. Otherwise I had
nothing against them; just the opposite, I had a lot to thank them for. But all
the same I was not going to be built into Mrs. Renling's world, to consolidate
what she affirmed she was. And it isn't only she but a class of people who trust
they will be justified, that their thoughts will be as substantial as the seven
hills to build on, and by spreading their power they will have an eternal city
for vindication on the day when other founders have gone down, bricks and planks,
whose thoughts were not real and who built on soft swamp. What this means is
not a single Tower of Babel plotted in common, but hundreds of thousands of
separate beginnings, the length and breadth of America. Energetic people who
build against pains and uncertainties, as weaker ones merely hope against them.
And, even literally, Mrs. Renling was very strong, and as she didn't do any
visible work it must have come, the development in her muscles, from her covert
labor.

Mr. Renling also was willing to adopt me and said he would be happy to be my
father. I knew it was more than he would say to anyone else. From his stand-
point, for me, reared by poor women, it was a big break to be rescued from
the rat race and saved by affection. God may save all, but human rescue is
only for a few.

When I told Mrs. Renling that Simon was going to get married and that Cissie
was the daughter of a busted drygoods man, she began to work it out and do the
sociology of it for me. She showed me the small flat and the diapers hanging in
the kitchen, the installment troubles about furniture and clothes and my brother
an old man at thirty from anxiety and cut-off spirit, the captive of the girl and
babies. "While you at thirty, Augie, will just start thinking about getting mar-
ried. You'll have money and culture and your pick of women. Even a girl like Thea
Fenchel. An educated man with a business is a lord. Renling is very clever and
has come far, but with science, literature, and history he would have been a
real prince and not just average prosperous--"

She pressed in the right place when she mentioned the Fenchels. It opened up
a temptation. But it was only one temptation and that was not enough. I didn't
believe Esther Fenchel ever would have me. And, moreover, though I was still in
love with her, my attitude toward her wasn't what it had been. I more and more
believed what her sister had said. And then, when I told myself absolutely the
truth, I conceded that I didn't have a chance.

Anyway, Mrs. Renling put tender weights on me. She called me "son," and
she would introduce me to people as "our youngster," and she petted me on the
head and so forth. And I was robust and in possession of my sex; I mean by that
that it wasn't stroking a boy of eight on his new glossy hair, and there was
something more to be assumed than that I was a child.

That I didn't want to be adopted never spontaneously occurred to her, and she
assumed, as if it were normal but not to be mentioned, something else: that,
like everyone, I was self-seeking. So that if I had any objections in reserve,
they'd be minor ones, and I'd keep them covered. Or if I had thoughts of helping
my brothers or Mama, those thoughts would be bound up and kept in the back. She
had never seen Mama and didn't intend to; and when I told her in St. Joe that
Simon was coming she didn't ask to meet him. There was a little in it of Moses
and the Pharaoh's daughter; only I wasn't a bulrush-hidden infant by any means.
I had family enough to suit me and history to be loyal to, not as though I had
been gotten off of a stockpile.

So I drew back; I turned down the hints, and when they became open offers I
declined them. I said to Mr. Renling, "I appreciate your kindness, and you two
are swell. I'll be grateful to you as long as I live. But I have folks, and I
just have a feeling--"

"You fool!" said Mrs. Renling. "What folks? What folks?"

"Why, my mother, my brothers."

"What have they got to do with it? Baloney! Where's your father--tell me!"

I couldn't say.

"You don't know even who he is. Now, Augie, don't be a fool. A real family
is somebody, and offers you something. Renling and I will be your parents
because we will give you, and all the rest is bunk."

"Well, let him think about it," said Renling.

I think that Renling was out of sorts that day; he had a cowlick at the back,
of his hair and the loops of his suspenders showed from his vest. Which indi-
cated that he suffered some, with a despair of his own, nothing to do with me,
for as a usual thing he presented himself perfect.

"Oh, what's to think!" Mrs. Renling cried. "You see how he thinks! He has to
learn how to think first, if he wants to be a dumbbell and work for other peo-
ple all his life. If I let him, he'd be married already to the waitress next
door, that Indian with the squashed nose, and waiting for a baby, so in two
years he'd be ready to take gas. Offer him gold and he says, no, he chooses
shit!"

She went on like that and worked ugly terror on me. Renling was disturbed.
Not terribly disturbed, but in the manner a nightbird, that knows all about
daylight, will beat through it if he must, a crude, big, brown-barred shape,
but only if he must, and then he will fly toward the thick of the woods and
get back to the darkness.

And I--I always heard from women that I didn't have the profounder know-
ledge of life, that I didn't know its damage or its suffering or its stupendous
ecstasies and glories. Being not weak, nor with breasts where its dreads could hit
me. Looking not so strong as to be capable of a superior match with it. Other
people showed me their achievements, claims and patents, paradise and hellevi-
dence, their prospectors' samples--often in their faces, in lumps--and, espe-
cially women, told me of my ignorance. Here Mrs. Renling was menacing me, crying
out that I was the child of fools, dead sure that I would be crushed in the gate,
stamped out in the life struggle. For, listen to her, and I was made for easy
conditions, and to rise from a good bed to the comfort of a plentiful breakfast,
to dip my roll in yolk and smoke a cigar with coffee, in sunshine and comfort,
free from melancholy or stains. Such the kind faction of the world wanted for
me, and if I refused my chance there was oblivion waiting for me instead; the
wicked would get hold of me. I tried not to reject the truth in what I was
told, and I had a lot of regard for the power of women to know it.

But I asked for time to think the matter over, and I could have thought very
successfully, for the weather favored it--the first and best of autumn, football
weather, cold yellow asters in the fine air, and the full sounds of punting and
horses stamping on the bridle path.

I took an afternoon off to consult Einhorn.

Einhorn's luck had begun to turn again and he had opened a new office,
moving from the poolroom to a flat across the street where he could continue to
keep an eye on it. The change made him somewhat egotistical, as also the fact
that there was a woman in love with him. It gave him a big boost. He had been
putting out his paper for shut-ins again, on the mimeograph machine, and one of
his readers, a crippled girl named Mildred Stark, had fallen for him. She wasn't
in first youth any more; she was aged about thirty and heavy, but she had a
vital if somewhat struggle-weakened head, hair and brows strong and black. She
wrote answers in verse to his inspirational poems and at last she had her sis-
ter bring her to the office, where she made a scene and wouldn't go away until
Einhorn had promised to let her work for him. She didn't ask for any salary,
only that he should rescue her from home-boredom. Mildred's trouble was with her
feet, and she wore orthopedic shoes. They made slow going, and, as I later had
the chance to learn, Mildred was somebody for whom impulses came fast and in
force, and these impulses ran onto non-conductors and were turned back, stored
up until she got dark in the face. In her person, as I say, she was heavy, and
her eyes were black, her skin was not well lit. To develop from crippled girl
into crippled woman, in the family, in the house, such staleness and hardship--
that's what it makes for, darkness, saturninity, oversat grievance. Being with-
out what's needed to put a satisfied, not dissatisfied, face at the window.

But Mildred wouldn't accept lying down and dying, though she never recovered
from looking near middle-aged and dark and sore, as a woman forced to sit,
or someone who has missed out on children, or whom men have swindled. It
could not be rubbed out, though it was arrested by her love for Einhorn, who
permitted her to love him. In the beginning she came only two or three times
a week to type some letters for him, and ended by becoming his full-time
secretary, as well as other things--his servant and confidante. Someone who
could literally say, biblically, "Thy handmaiden." Pushing his rolling chair
for him, she needed its support in her limping and foot-dragging. He sat, well
satisfied, well served. He looked severe and even impatient, but the truth was
otherwise. The spirit I found him in was the Chanticleer spirit, by which I
refer to male piercingness, sharpness, knotted hard muscle and blood in the
comb, jerky, flaunty, haughty and bright, with luxurious slither of feathers.

Ah, but there are other facts that have to be satisfied too, after this com-
parison. It's too bad but it is so. Humankind does not have that sort of sim-
plicity--not the single line that a stick draws on the ground but a vast harrow
of countless disks. His spirit was piercing, but there has to be mentioned his
poor color, age-impoverished and gray; plus the new flat's ugliness; dullness of
certain hours, dryness of days, dreariness and shabbiness--mentioned that the
street was bare, dim and low in life, bad; and that there were business thoughts
and malformed growths of purpose, terrible, menacing, salt-patched with noises
and news, and pimpled and dotted around with lies, both practical and gratuitous.

To Tillie Einhorn, as far as anybody could tell, Mildred was acceptable. The
force of Einhorn on Tillie was such that to judge him wrong was too much of an
operation for her. Besides, you have to think of a condition of people that gets
into them like a cobbler's stretcher into a shoe; this stretcher for Tillie
was Einhorn's special need as a cripple. She was used to making allowances.

Well, this was how Einhorn was situated when I came to ask him for advice; I
found him too busy to give me his attention. He kept looking to the street as I
talked, then asked me to push him to the toilet, which I did, on the gaggling
casters that could, as always, stand an oiling. All he replied was, "Well, it's
pretty unusual. It's quite an offer. You were born lucky." He gave it less than
half his mind, thinking I was telling him the news that the Renlings wanted to
adopt me, not that I considered refusing. Naturally he was wrapped up in his
own affairs. And I could look at Mildred Stark if I wanted an example of how
someone became attached to, and then absorbed into, a family.

I finished the afternoon downtown, and while I was eating a liver sandwich at
Elfman's and watching the unemployed musicians on the Dearborn corner, I saw
a guy named Clarence Ruber passing and knocked on the plate glass with my
ring till he noticed me and came in to talk. I knew this Ruber from Crane
College, where he had run a baseball pool at the Enark Café; he was quiet and
dirty-spoken, smooth in the face, fat behind, with a slow, shiny Assyrian fringe
on his head and a soft-bosomed fashion of clothes, silky shirts, yellow silk
tie, and gray flannel suit. Looking me over, he saw that I was doing well too,
in contrast to the Depression musicians and the other eaters, and we traded
information. He had opened a small shop on the South Shore, in partnership with
a cousin's widow who had a little money. They dealt in lamps, pictures, vases,
piano scarves, ashtrays and such bric-a-brac, and since the cousin and his wife
had been, before the Bust, interior decorators with big hotels for clients, they
did a good trade. "There's dough in this. It's one of these rackets where people
pay for being handled a particular way. Dazzle business. Because, if they knew
it, they could buy a lot of this crap at the dime store, but they can't trust
their judgment. It's a woman's line," he said, "and you have to understand how
to tickle their bellies." I asked him what he was doing here among the musi-
cians. "Musicians, my ass," he said. He had been seeing a man in the Burnham
Building who had invented a rubberized paint for bathrooms, a waterproof
product that, with the widow-cousin's contacts in hotels, ought to make him a
fortune. It kept walls from rotting; the water didn't harm the plaster. The
inventor was just beginning to go into production. Ruber himself was going to
go out and sell it, for there was a lot of money in it. Therefore, he said,
they would need a man to replace him in the shop. And since I had experience
with rich customers, a ritzy clientele, I was just the man for the substitu-
tion. "I don't want any more fucking relatives around; they get in my hair.
So if you're interested come out and have a look at the setup. If you like
it we can talk terms."

Seeing that I could not stay with the Renlings unless I became their adopted
son, which by now I knew would suffocate me, no other arrangement possible
after I had turned them down, I closed a deal with Ruber. I made up a story
to tell Renling about a marvelous business opportunity of a lifetime with a
school chum, and I pulled out of Evanston in a cold air--Mrs. Renling iron
with anger toward me, and Renling himself on the cool side of well-wishing,
but saying anyway that I was to come to him if ever I needed help.

I took a room on the South Side, in a house on Blackstone Avenue, four flights
up, three of mingy red carpet and one of thready wood, up in the clumsy dust,
next door to the can. Here I wasn't far from the Nelson Home, and as it was
a Sunday morning when I set myself up, and I had time, I went to visit Grand-
ma Lausch. By now she was almost like everyone else in the joint, to my eyes,
having lost her distinguishing independence, weakened, mole-ish, needing to
look around for her old-time qualities when she greeted me, as if she had laid
them down, forgetting where. She didn't seem to recall what grievances she had
against me either, and when we sat down together on a bench in the parlor,
between some silent old people, asked me, "And how is--is jener, the idiot?"
She had forgotten Georgie's name, and it horrified me; yes, it sent me for a loop
until I remembered to think how small a part of her life compared with the whole
span she had spent with us, and how many bayous and deadwaters there must be
to the sides of an old varicose channel. And as there is a strength or stubbornness
about people that doesn't want the first fact about them spoken, also there is a
time when that fact or truth can't any more be helpful--what can it do for the
ruin of an old woman?--but it appears as a blot in the eyes over old expressions.
What good can this fact be so near death? Except as a benefit to its witnesses,
since we human creatures have many reasons to believe there's advantage and
profit for someone in everything, even in the worst muds, wastes, and poison by
products; and a charm of chemical medicine or industry is how there are endless
uses in cinders, slag, bone, and manure. But in reality we're a long way from
being able to profit from everything. Yes, and besides even a truth can get cold
from solitude and solitary confinement, and doesn't live long outside the Bas-
tille; if the rescuing republican crowd is the power of death it doesn't live at
all. This was how it was with Grandma Lausch, who had only a few months left
of life. Whose Odessa black dress was greasy and whitening; who gave me an
old cat's gape; who maybe didn't too well place me; who had this blob of
original fact, of what had primarily counted with her, like a cast in the eye;
weakly, even infant and lunatic. Her we always thought so powerful and
shockproof! It really threw me. Yet I also thought she did remember who I was
and that old consciousness was not lost but in a phase of a turntable that
turned too slowly. I even thought that she appreciated the visit and said I
was her neighbor now and would come again. But I couldn't make it, and the
same winter she died of pneumonia.

In my new job I had a downgrade from the start. Ruber's cousin's widow was
a dissatisfied woman; she didn't trust me very much. This lady--she wore her
fur coat in the style of a cloak in the store, with a hat of the same creature
like a prickly crown, and a face always aware of its imperfections and suffer-
ing from them, wretched skin and meager lips--she had stomach troubles and a
stiff clamp on bad temper. She cramped my style, the style learned with what I
thought was anyway a better class of customers, and she wouldn't let me come
near the important ones. And in the office she locked drawers; she didn't want
me to know costs. What she wanted was to confine me to the work in the back,
packing, wrapping, matting, framing, and winding cellophane on lampshades. So
that, with being kept in the rear or out on errands to various little factories
and potteries in lofts around Wabash Avenue, I quick caught on that she was
pushing me toward the door. And as soon as the rubberized paint went into pro-
duction I became a salesman for it, as I think Ruber too had all the time in-
tended. He said that the shop didn't actually need me since I seemed satisfied
to be errand boy and didn't take enough interest in the business. "I thought
you'd have some ideas, not be just a salary man, but that ain't the way it's
been," he told me.

"Well," I said, "Mrs. Ruber has ideas about me."

"Of course," said Ruber, "I seen she's been trying to make you suck hind titty.
But the thing is why you let her."

Now he took me off salary and put me on a commission basis. There was nothing
I saw to do but accept, and went around on the streetcars and El with a can of
the paint, to hotels, hospitals, and such, trying to get orders. It was a flop.
I couldn't land anything, money was so tight, and I was dealing with a peculiar
sort of people. I had leads from Mrs. Ruber, into hotels, where she claimed to
be better known than she actually was (or managers would not acknowledge her
till they knew my business); and, moreover, these were not easy people to lay
hold of, in the backstairs and workshops of the cream, noble marble, footmanned,
razmataz, furnished-for-pontiffs lakeside joints. Also, many hotels had painting
contractors or graft arrangements; controlled by receivers, appointed by the
courts, the original corporations in bankruptcy; the receivers were themselves
interested in the insurance, plumbing, catering, decorating, bars, concessions,
and the rest of the interlocking system. To be sent by the manager to the paint-
ing contractor was to be given a runaround. They didn't want to see my rubber
paint. I waited on enough of them in outside offices, which I don't say breeds
the best thoughts, and soon this was clear.

It was now full winter, and barbarous how raw; so going around the city on
the spidery cars, rides lasting hours, made you stupid as a stoveside cat because
of the closeness inside; and there was something fuddling besides in the mass
piled up of uniform things, the likeness of small parts, the type of newspaper
columns and the bricks of buildings. To sit and be trundled, while you see:
there's a danger in that of being a bobbin for endless thread or bolt for yard
goods; if there's not much purpose anyway in the ride. And if there's some
amount of sun in the dusty weep marks of the window, it can be even worse for
the brain than those iron-deep clouds, just plain brutal and not mitigated.
There haven't been civilizations without cities. But what about cities without
civilizations? An inhuman thing, if possible, to have so many people together
who beget nothing on one another. No, but it is not possible, and the dreary
begets its own fire, and so this never happens.

I did make a few sales. Karas, Einhorn's cousin-in-law, in the Holloway
Enterprises, gave me a break and bought a few gallons to try in a little Van
Buren Street gray-bedding hotel, almost a bum's flop, near the railroad station,
and he said he would never use it in any of his better establishments because it
made a loud smell of rubber in the heat and moisture of the shower room. There
was also a doctor at State and Lake, a buddy of Ruber's, an abortionist; he was
doing over his suite and I got an order from him; and here Ruber tried to chisel
from the commission; he didn't need me, he said, to make this sale. I would have
quit him flat then and there if I hadn't gotten pretty familiar by then with
the situations-wanted columns of the Tribune. I wasn't earning enough to give
anything toward Mama's support any more, but at least I was making expenses
and Simon didn't have to support me. Of course he beefed because I had quit
Renling. How was he going to marry if he had to keep Mama by himself? I said,
"You and Cissy can move in with her." But this made him look black, and I
understood that Cissy wasn't having any of that, the old flat and Mama to take
care of. "Well, Simon, you know I don't want to stick you," I said, "and that
I'll try my best." We were having coffee in Raklios's, and my pot of paint was
on the table and my gloves on top of that. Open at the seams, the gloves showed
how I had lost my grip on prosperity. And I was getting dirty, for a salesman,
for whose appearance there are laws which are supposed to guarantee a certain
firmness of personality. I had fallen below the standard, unable to afford
cleaning and repairing, nor was able to spare much feeling for it.

The way I was living was becoming crude, and I was learning some squatter
lessons. Up in my room the heat didn't reach, and I wore my coat and socks at
night. In the morning I went down to the drugstore to warm up on a cup of
coffee and lay out my route for the day. I carried my razor in my pocket and
shaved downtown with the free hot water, liquid soap, and paper towels of pub-
lic toilets, and I ate in YMCA cafeterias or one-arm joints and beat checks as
often as I could. Vigorous at nine, my hope ran out by noon, and then one of my
hardships was that I had no place of rest. I could try to pass the afternoon in
Einhorn's new office; he was accustomed to people on his bench, outside the
railing, who had no special tasks. But I who had worked for him had to be doing
something, and he would send me on his business. So that I might as well have
been on my own, once I was already on the streetcar. Besides I had an obliga-
tion to Simon that would not let me loaf, although simply to move around was
in itself of no advantage. It was not only for me that being moored wasn't
permitted; there was general motion, as of people driven from angles and corners
into the open, by places being valueless and inhospitable to them. In the example
of the Son of Man having no place to lay His head; or belonging to the world in
general; except that the illuminated understanding of this was absent, nobody
much guessing what was up on the face of the earth. I, with my can of paint, no
more than others. And once I was under way, streetcars weren't sufficient, nor
Chicago large enough to hold me.

Coming out of an El station one day, when the snow was running off, at the
tail end of winter, I ran into Joe Gorman whom I hadn't seen since after the
robbery. He was in a good blue coat of narrow style, and a freshly blocked
fedora, dented like a soft bread by the fingers. He was buying magazines, out of
the wall of them that hung by the stand. His nose was raised up and he looked
ruddy and well, benefited by a good breakfast and the cold morning--although it
would have been more like his habit of life to have come from an all-night poker
game. Sizing me up, with my sample paint can, it was plain to him that I was
having it bad. I had the face of someone pretty much beat.

"What's this racket you're in?" he asked me, and when I explained it he said,
but not in a triumphing way, "Sucker!" He was certainly right, and I didn't put
much force into defending myself. "It's a way of meeting people," I answered,
"and something may open up one of these days."

"Yes," he said, "a deep hole. What if you do meet people--you think somebody
is going to do something for you because you're a pretty boy? Give you a big
break? These days they take care of their relatives first. And what have
you got in the way of relatives?"

I didn't have much. Five Properties was still driving his milk truck, but I
didn't mean to ask him for a job. Coblin had lost everything except his paper
route in the crash. Anyway, I hadn't seen much of either of them since the
Commissioner's funeral.

"Come and have some cheese and pie on me," he said, and we went into a
restaurant.

"What's up with you?" I said, for I didn't want to ask explicitly; it was bad
manners. "Do you ever see Sailor Bulba?"

"Not that dumbhead, he's no good to me. He's in an organization now,
slugger for a union, and it's all he's good for. Besides, what I'm in now, I have
no use for anybody like that. But I could do something for you if you wanted to
earn a fast buck."

"Is it risky?"

"Nothing like what worried you last time. I don't go in for that any more
myself. It's not legitimate, what I'm doing, but it's a lot easier and safer. And
what do you think makes the buck so fast?"

"Well, what is it?"

"Running immigrants over the border from Canada, from around Rouse's
Point over to Massena Springs, New York."

"No," I said, not having forgotten my conversation with Einhorn. "I can't do
that"

"There's nothing to it."

"And if you're caught?"

"And if I'm caught? And if I'm not caught?" he said with savage humor,
poking fun at me. "You want me to go around and peddle paint? I'd rather sit
still, like the pilot light inside the gas; and I can't sit around or I'd go bats."
"This is federal."

"You don't have to tell me what it is. I only asked you because you look as if
you needed a break. I make this trip two and three times a month, and I'm
getting tired of doing all the driving. So if you want to come along and be my
relief on the road as far as Massena Springs I'll give you fifty bucks and all
expenses. Then if you decide to come the rest of the way I'll up it to a hundred.
There'll still be time to think it over on the way, and we'll be back in three
days."

I took him up on this and considered it a break. Fifty dollars, clear, would
go a long way toward easing my mind about Simon. I was fed up with trying to
peddle the rubberized paint, and my reckoning was that with a little dough to
tide me over I could spend a week or two looking for something else, perhaps
dope out a way to get back to college, for I had not altogether given up on that.
All this was how I decided, in my outer mind, to go; with the other, the inner, I
wanted a change of pressure, and to get out of the city. As for the immigrants,
my thought about them was, Hell, why shouldn't they be here with the rest of us
if they want to be? There's enough to go around of everything including hard
luck.

I gave the paint to Tillie Einhorn, to decorate her bathroom, and early in the
morning Joe Gorman picked me up in a black Buick; it was souped up, I could
tell the first instant, from the hell-energy that gives you no time to consider. I
wasn't even well settled, with spare shirt wrapped in a newspaper in the back
seat and my coat straightened under me, before we were on the far South Side,
passing the yards of Carnegie Steel; then the dunes, piled up like sulphur; in and
out of Gary in two twists and on the road for Toledo, where the speed increased,
and the mouth of the motor opened out like murder, not panting, but liberated to
do what it was made for.

Slender, pressing down nervous on the wheel, with his long nose of broken
form and the color running fast up his face and making a narrow crossing on his
forehead, Gorman was like a jockey in his feeling toward the car. You could
see what pleasure he got out of finding what he needed to wrap his nerves
in. Outside Toledo I took the wheel, and occasionally found him looking
sardonically sidewise from his narrow face, a long dark eye making a new
measure of me from its splotch of discoloration by fatigue or by the trouble of
a busy will; and he said--they seemed his first words to me, though they weren't
literally--"Step it up!"

So I apologized that I didn't have the feel of the car yet and obeyed. But he
didn't like my driving, particularly that I hesitated to pass trucks on the hills,
and took the wheel from me before we had covered much of the ground to Cleveland.

It was beginning April, and the afternoon was short, so that it was getting dark
when we approached Lackawanna. Some way beyond it we stopped for gas, and
Gorman gave me a bill to buy some hamburgers at a joint next door. There I
went to the can first, and from the window saw a state trooper by the pump,
examining the car, and no sign of Gorman. I slipped into the filthy side hall
and glanced into the kitchen, where an old Negro was washing dishes, and pass-
ed behind him without being noticed, over a bushel in the doorway, into the
intervening yard, or lot, and I saw Gorman beating it along the wall of the
garage, swiftly, toward the border of trees and bushes where the fields began. I
ran parallel, having a start of ten yards or so, and met him back of these trees,
and there was almost a disaster before he recognized me, for he had a pistol in
his hand--the gun Einhorn had warned me he carried. I clapped my hand to the
barrel and pushed it away.

"What've you got that out for?"

"Take your hands off, or I'll clobber you with it!"

"What's got into you? What're you running from the cops for? It's only for
speeding."

"The car's hot. Speeding hell!"

"I thought it was your car!"

"No, it's stolen."

We started to run again, hearing the motorcycle in the lot, and threw ourselves
down in plowed field. It was open country, but dusk. The trooper came as far as
the trees and looked but did not come through. Luck was with us that he didn't,
since Gorman had him covered with the gun on a sod for a rest, and was cowboy
enough to shoot, so that I tasted puke in my throat from terror. But the trooper
turned off, splitting the beams of his lamp on the evergreens, and we beat it over
the plowland to a country road well back from the highway. This place, for sure,
had a demon; it was blue, lump-earthed, oil-rank, and machinery was cooking in
the dark, not far back of us, into heaven, from the Lackawanna chimneys.

"You weren't going to shoot, were you?" I said. He was reaching inside his sleeve
with a lifted shoulder, almost like a woman pulling up an inside strap. He put
away his gun. Each of us, I suppose, was thinking in his own fashion that we
didn't make a pair--I of the vanity of being so leaping dangerous, and he,
despisingly, that I must have shit in my blood, or such poolroom contempt.

"What did you run for?" he said.

"Because I saw you running."

"Because you were scared."

"That too."

"Did the guy in the garage notice two of us?"

"He must have. And if he didn't somebody in the hamburger joint must be
wondering where I went"

"Then we'd better split up. We're not far outside of Buffalo, and I'll pick you
up there tomorrow in front of the main post office at nine o'clock."

"Pick me up?"

"In a car. By then I'll have one. You've got the tenner I gave you for the chow
--that'll take care of you. There must be a bus into town. You go up the road
and take it; I'll go down. Let a couple of buses go by so we won't be getting on
the same one."

So we split up, and I felt safer without him.

Narrow, tall, sharp in the way his shoulders, hat, and features broke, he
seemed, as he watched me get started up the road, like a city specialist on this
unfamiliar interurban ground. Then he turned swiftly too, going low on his legs
downhill, fast, scraping on the stones.

I tramped a considerable distance to take the first crossroad back to the
highway. Headlights on a barn approached around a curve and made me drop down.
It was a state police car, and what would it be doing on a side lane like this
if not looking to pick us up? Probably Gorman hadn't even bothered to change
the license plates of the car. I got off the lane into the fields then, and
made up my mind to take the shortest way back to Lackawanna and not to meet
him in Buffalo. He was too inspired for me, and his kind of outlawry wasn't any
idea of mine; therefore why should I be sprawling in the mud waiting for him to
commit a hothead crime and get me in as accessory for a stiff sentence? When I
had left him to go up the road I had already begun to think of this and was
actually on my way back to Chicago.

I began to run cross-country because I was tired of picking my way, and I
came out to the highway near town, where the edge of Lake Erie approaches.
And there I saw a crowd, forming up in old cars, with banners and signs,
blocking the traffic. I think it was an organization of the unemployed, many
veterans, wearing Legion caps; I was too hard pushed in the crude hard air of
darkness to get it straight. But they were gathering for a march on Albany or
Washington to ask for a relief increase and starting out to meet the Buffalo
contingent. I came up slowly and saw that there were more troopers around, who
were trying to keep traffic open, and also town cops, and I figured it to be safer
to mingle than to try to go into town. By the lamps I was able to see how much
mud had stuck to me, too wet to get off. There was such yelling and sheaving of
old engines jockeying to form a line that I got to the tail gate of a jalopy, and,
giving a man a hand putting in planks for benches and laying a tarpaulin over the
top, I made myself a part of his outfit in the dusk. And now, though no distance
at all from Lackawanna, I was about to start for Buffalo anyhow. I might have
returned to the fields and gone around into town, but I calculated that, looking
as I did, I might be picked up.

As I was tying down canvas behind the cab the crowd was slowly forced back,
and from the beam that was painting back and forth on the people, yellow and
red, I knew that a squad car was forcing a path and saw the eye of it swiveling
and rolling smoothly from the top. I twisted backward from the running board to
look, and it was as fear had inspired me to suspect, Joe Gorman was sitting in the
back seat between two troopers, with blood lines over his chin showing that he
had probably tried to fight with them and they had opened up his lip, doing their
cops' work. This was what he had come a long way to get, and got it, and looked
not dazed but bright awake--which may have been an appearance, as the red of
the blood appeared black. I felt powerfully heartsick to see him.

The squad car passed, and we started off in the truck at a slow sway, something
like twenty men stowed in shank to shank behind the black open roar of the en-
gine. There was nasty weather; rain, first thing, and the wet blowing in,
which made a human steam like the steam of rinsing in a dairy, and while we
were squelching and rocking over the swells of the road I was thinking of the
misery of Joe Gorman's being picked up, how they must have nabbed him, and
if he had had a chance to pull his gun. Behind the canvas I didn't get to see the
gas station and whether the car we had left was still there, or anything else.
Until the truck got into the city I couldn't see a thing.

I dropped off the tail gate in the middle of town and found myself a hotel
where I was dumb enough not to ask the price; but I was more concerned that the
clerk shouldn't see the dirt on me and carried the coat on my arm. Besides, I was
so sick over Joe Gorman I didn't think. Then, when they had beaten me out of
two bucks in the morning, or about twice what a fleabag like that should have
cost, and after I had paid for a big breakfast, which I had to have, there wasn't
enough money for a bus ticket back to Chicago. I telegraphed Simon to wire me
some money, and then I went to see the main drag, and I took the excursion to
Niagara Falls where nobody seemed to have any business that day, only a few
strays beside the crush of the water, like early sparrows in the cathedral square
before Notre Dame has opened its doors; and then in the brute sad fog you know
that at one time this sulphur coldness didn't paralyze everything, and there's
the cathedral to prove it.

So I walked around the rails by the dripping black crags until it began to
drizzle again, and I returned to see whether Simon's reply had come in yet. Till
late afternoon I kept asking, and at last the girl in the cage looked tired of see-
ing me, and I recognized that I had the option of another night in Buffalo or hit-
ting the road. And I was dim with the troubles I had got into, all this speeding
and scattering, Gorman in the squad car pressing through the crowd, then the ter-
rific emptying of Niagara waters, and also bobbling on the Buffalo cars, eating
peanuts and hard rolls, my bowels like a screw of rubber, and the town unfriendly
and wet--because if I hadn't been in such a dim state I'd have realized sooner
that Simon wasn't going to send any money. But all of a sudden I realized that
that was so. He might not even have it to spare, just after the first of the
month when there was the rent to pay.

Thinking this, I told the telegraph girl to forget about the wire, I was leaving
town.

Not to be picked up on the road in northern New York, I took a ticket to Erie
at the Greyhound Station, and I was in the Pennsylvania corner that evening. To
get off in Erie gave me no feeling that I had arrived somewhere, in a place that
was a place in and for itself, but rather that it was one which waited on other
places to give it life by occurring between them; the breath of it was thin, just
materialized, waiting.

The flop I found was in a tall clapboard hotel, a kind of bone of a building,
with more laths than plaster, with burns in the blanket, splits in the sheet o-
pening on the mattress and its many stains. But I didn't care too much where I
was; it would have been a nuisance to care; and I dropped off my shoes and climb-
ed in. It sounded like a gale on the lake that night.

Nevertheless it was a serene warm morning when I went out on the road to
start thumbing. I wasn't alone; people in great numbers were on the highways.
Sometimes they traveled in pairs, but more usually alone, because it was easier
to get rides alone. There was the CCC, draining swamps and planting trees in the
distance, and on the road was this wanderer population without any special Jer-
usalem or Kiev in mind, or relics to kiss, or any idea of putting off sins, but
only the hope their chances might be better in the next town. In this competition
it was hard to get lifts. Appearances were against me too, for the Renling clothes
were both smart and filthy. And then in my hurry to put distance between me and
the stretch of road near Lackawanna where Joe Gorman had been picked up, I didn't
have the patience to stand and flag for long but walked.

The traffic dived and quivered past me, and when I reached a place near Ash-
tabula, Ohio, where the Nickel Plate line approaches the highway, I saw a
freight going toward Cleveland with men sitting on the boxcars, and in the flats,
and in under-angles of gondolas, and eight or ten guys shagging after and flip-
ping themselves up on the rungs. I ran too, down from the unlucky highway,
up the rocky grade where I felt the thinness of my shoes, and took hold of a
ladder. I wasn't agile, so ran with the red car, unable to swing from the ground
until I was helped by a boost from behind. I never saw who it was that gave it--
someone among the runners who didn't want me tearing my arms from their
sockets or breaking the bones of my feet.

So I climbed to the roof. It was a high-backed cattle car topped with broad red
planks. Ahead the slow bell was turning over and over, and I was in plenty of
company, the rough-looking crowd of non-paying passengers the Nickel Plate
was carrying. I felt the movement of the stock against the boards and sat in the
beast smell. Until Cleveland, with the great yards and overbuilt hills and fume,
chaff and grit flying at your face.

There was a hotshot or nonstop express to Toledo making up in the yards, the
word came, which would be ready in a couple of hours. Meanwhile I went up to
the city to get some food. Going back to the yards, I climbed down a steep path,
like a cliff of Pisgah, below the foundations of factories, and emerged on rusty
tracks by the Sherwin Williams paint factory--the vast field of rails and hum-
mocky ground to the sides covered with weed stalks where people were waiting:
catching a nap, reading old papers, mending.

This was both a boring and a tense afternoon, soon dark with on-coming rain,
while we squatted in the weeds, waiting; brackish and yet nerve-touching.
Therefore I rushed up when I saw by the rising and motion along the darkening
line that the train was coming. In the sudden shift toward the open and the tracks
it seemed that hundreds had risen, the most distant already closing in upon the
train. The locomotive came slowly, like a bison, the iron shell of the boiler
black.

The train crashed its boxes and went backwards a moment It was picking up its
last cars. In that moment I got under a gondola carrying coal, into the angle
of it between the slope end and the wheels. When we rolled forward the wheels
creaked and bit out sparks like grindstones, and the couplings played free and
hooked tight in a mechanical game into which your observation and brain were
forced. Having to recognize whose kingdom you were in, with tons of coal at the
back and riding in the tiny blind gallery with the dashing dark rain at the sides.
There were four of us sitting in this space; a lean, wolfy man, who stretched his
legs clear over the wheels, on the bar, while the rest of us fetched ours up short.
I saw his face when he lit a butt, grinning and somewhat sick, blues under his eyes
like chain links. He held his fingers in his crotch. On the other side was a young
boy. The fourth man, as I didn't know till we were chased off the train at Lorain,
was a Negro. All I saw of him as we were running was his yellow raincoat, but
when I caught up by a trackside shack he was leaning on the boards, his big eyes
shut, a stumpy, heavy man getting his breath with much trouble and his beard
sparkling about his mouth with sweat or drizzle.

The hotshot stopped at Lorain; it wasn't a hotshot at all. Or perhaps they stop-
ped it because it carried too many free riders. These made a ragged line, like
a section gang that draws aside at night back of the flares as a train comes
through, only much more numerous. There were flashlights swinging from car to
car as the cops emptied them, and then the train went off, cleared of riders,
down into the semaphore lights and the oily blues of the track.

This stocky young boy--Stoney was his name--attached himself to me and we went
into the town. The harbor with its artificial peaks and cones of sand and coal
was visible from the muddy main stem. In the featureless electric faces of bulbs
hung on the dredges, cranes, cables, the rain looked like nothing either and
was nullified. I laid out some of my money for bread and peanut butter and a
couple of bottles of milk and we had supper.

It was after ten and streaming rain. I wasn't going to chase another freight that
night, I was too bushed. I said, "Let's find a place to flop," and he agreed.

On the sidings we found some boxcars retired from service, of great age, rotten
and swollen, filled with old paper and straw, a cheesy old hogshead stink of
cast-off things such as draws rats, a marly or fungus white on the walls. There
we bedded down in the refuse. I buttoned up, for security as well as the cold,
and stretched out. There was plenty of room at first. But till far into the night
men kept arriving, rolling back the door, and passing back and forth over us,
discussing where to sleep. I heard them coming, grating with the feet along the
rows of cars, until our boxcar was so full that newcomers would look in and then
pass on. It was no time to be awake, or half awake, with the groaning and sick
coughing, the grumbles and gases of bad food, the rustling in paper and straw
like sighs or the breath of dissatisfaction. And when I fell asleep I didn't sleep
long, for the man next to me began to press up, and I thought it was only his
unconscious habit of the night, that he was used to a bedmate, and I just drew
away, but he drew after. Then he must have worked long in secret to open his
pants and first to touch my hand as if by accident and then to guide my fingers.
I had trouble getting free because he finally held my wrist with both hands, and
I knocked his head against the boards. That couldn't have hurt much, the wood
was so rotten it was almost soft, but he let me go and said almost with laughter,
"Don't raise a fuss." He rolled back from me a space. I sat up and I reasoned that
if I didn't move he might think he wasn't unwelcome to me. As a matter of fact
he was waiting and he began to talk, with a hard tremble, both cynical and
hopeful, about the filth of women, and when I heard that I went away, helping
myself up in back against the wall and stepping over bodies to where I had seen
Stoney lie down. A bad night--the rain rattling hard first on one side and then on
the other like someone nailing down a case, or a coop of birds, and my feelings
were big, sad, comfortless, of a thinking animal, my heart acting like an orb
filled too big for my chest, not from revulsion, which I have to say I didn't
feel, but over-all general misery.

And I lay down by Stoney, who roused a little, recognized me, and fell asleep.
Only it was cold; toward morning, deathly cold; and now and then we'd find we
were pressed close, rubbing faces and bristles, and we would separate. Until it
was too freezing to take account of being strangers--we were trembling too hard
--and had to clasp close. I took off my coat and spread it over the both of us
to keep in the warmth a little, and even so we lay shivering.

There was a rooster some brakeman's family nearby owned, and he had the in-
stinct or the temerariousness to crow in the wet and ashes of the backyard.
This morning signal was good enough for us, and we got out of the car. Was it
really day? The sky was dripping, and cloud was running as light as smoke; there
was pink in it, but whether that was the reflection of the sun or of railroad
fire how could you tell? We entered the station where there was a stove of which
the bottom skirt was hot to transparency, and we steamed ourselves by it. The
heat pushed into your face.

"Stand me a cup of coffee," said Stoney.

It took five such days of travel to get back to Chicago, for I got a train to
Detroit by error. A brakeman told us there was a train for Toledo coming soon,
and I went to catch it. Stoney came along. Our luck seemed good. Because of the
hour this freight was practically empty. We had a car to ourselves. Furniture
must have been hauled in it the last trip, for there was clean excelsior on the
floor, and we made beds in this paper fleece and lay there sleeping.

I woke when the angle of the sun was very narrow in the door and guessed it
must be noon. If it was that late we must already have gone through Toledo and
be crossing Indiana. But these oak woods and the deep-lying farms and scarce
cattle were not what I had seen in Indiana crossing it with Joe Gorman. We were
going very fast, flying, the locomotive and the empty cars. Then I saw a Mich-
igan license on a truck at a crossing.

"We must be bound for Detroit; we missed Toledo," I said.

As the sun went south it was back of us and not on the left hand; we were going
north. There was no getting off either. I sat down, legs hanging at the open
door, back-broken and dry, hungry furthermore, and my eyes followed the spin
of the fields newly laid out for sowing, the oak woods with hard bronze survivor
leaves, and a world of great size beyond, or fair clouds and then of abstraction,
a tremendous Canada of light.

The short afternoon soon darkened; between the trees and stumps it turned
blue. The towns became industrial, factories riding up and tank cars and reefers
sitting on the spurs. Queer that I didn't worry more about being taken these
hundreds of miles out of my way when there were only a few quarters and some
thinner stuff in my pocket, about a buck in all. Riding in this dusk and semi-
winter, it was the way paltry and immense were so mixed, perhaps, the jointed
spine of train racing and swerving, the steels, rusts, bloodlike paints extend-
ed space after space in the sky, and then other existence, space after space.

Factory smoke was standing away with the wind, and we were in an industrial
sub-town--battlefield, cemetery, garbage crater, violet welding scald, mountains
of tires sagging, and ashes spuming like crests in front of a steamer, Hoover-
ville crate camps, plague and war fires like the boiling pinnacle of all sack-
ings and Napoleonic Moscow burnings. The freight stopped with a banging and
concussion, and we jumped out and were getting over the tracks when someone
got us by the shoulders from behind and gave us each a boot in the ass. It was
a road dick. He wore a Stetson and a pistol hung on the front of his vest; his
whisky face was red as a winter apple and a crazy saliva patch shone on his chin.
He yelled, "Next time I'll shoot the shit out of you!" So we ran, and he threw
rocks past us. I wished that I could lay for him till he came off duty and tear
his windpipe out.

However, we were legging it over the rails on the lookout for anything swift
that might come down on us out of the steel coldly laid out in the dark and the
shrivels of steam and cyclops headlamps, a loose-rolling car. Also the coal
rumbled in the hoppers and bounded grim to the ground. We ran, and I didn't
feel angry any more.

A highway marker told us we were twenty miles from Detroit. As we stood
there the fellow came up who had ridden out of Cleveland under the gondola
with us, the wolf-looking one. Though it was dark, I spotted him coming in the
road. He didn't seem to have anything special in mind, only to hang around.
I said to this stocky boy Stoney, "I have a buck to take me back to Chicago, so
let's get some chow."

"Hang on to it, well mooch something," he said. He tried a few stores along
the highway and by and by turned up some stale jelly bismarcks.

A truck carrying sheet-metal took all three of us into town. We lay under the
tarpaulin, for it was cold now. The truck dragged up the hills in low gear, and it
took hours, with all the stops. Stoney slept. Looking capable of harm, Wolfy
didn't seem to mean us any; he had only tied in with us to be carried along as we
were. As we started again in the late night for the city he began to tell me what
a rough town it was, that he had heard the cops were mean and everything rugged;
he said he had never been here before himself.

While we penetrated more, by a series of funnels of light, into the city, he
made me feel dejected, describing it as he did. Then the truck stopped and the
driver let us off. I couldn't see where; it was empty and silent, past midnight.
There was a small restaurant; all else was closed doors. So we went into this
joint to ask where we were. It was narrow as a corridor, laid out with oilcloth.
The short-order guy told us we were off the center of town, about a mile, if we
followed the car line from the next intersection.

When we came out, there was a squad car waiting with open doors and a cop
blocking the way who said, "Get in."

Two plainclothesmen were inside, and I had to hold Wolfy on my lap while
Stoney lay on the floor. This Stoney was only a young boy. Nothing was said.
They brought us into the station--concrete, and small openings everywhere, the
bars beginning at the end of a short flight of stairs not far from the sergeant's
desk.

The cops kept us to one side, for there was another matter being heard, and
four or five faces of peculiar night-wildness by the electric globe of the desk,
and the sergeant with his large flesh and white fatty face presiding. There was a
woman, and it was hard to take in the fact that she had been in the middle of a
brawl, she was so modest-looking and dressmakerish, with a green trout knot to
her hat. Alongside her there were two men, one with a bloody beehive of
bandages, totter-headed, and the other shut up with defiance and meanwhile his
hands pressing all his concern to his chest. He was supposed to be the offender. I
say supposed because it was the cop who did the explaining, the three principals
being deaf-mutes. This guy attacked the other with a hammer, was what he said;
he said that the woman was a lousy bitch and didn't care for whom she spread,
and the bastard was the biggest cause of trouble in the deaf-mute community
even if she did look like a schoolteacher. I report what the cop told the sergeant.

"What's my idea," he said, "is that this poor jerk thought he was engaged to
her and then he caught her with this other joker."

"What doin'?"

"I wouldn't know. It depends on how much of a sorehead he is. But with the
pants off, I wouldn't be surprised."

"I wonder what makes 'em so randy. They fight more about love than the dagoes,"
said the sergeant. His face had a one-eye emphasis, and his cheek was so much
rough wall. The arm he had up his sleeve was very thick; I wouldn't have liked
to see it used. "Why do they have t'be all the time hittin'? Maybe because they
talk with their hands."

Stoney and Wolfy grinned, wishing to be of the same humor as the cops.

"Well, is anything broke under them bandages?"

"They took a couple of stitches on his dome."

The bloody-haired topple-bandage was pushed into the light where the
sergeant could see.

"Well," he said when he had looked, "take an' lock 'em up till we can see if
we can get an interpreter tomorrow, and if we can't, then just kick 'em out in
the morning. What would they do with this cocky in the workhouse? Anyway, a
night in the clink will show them they aren't alone by themselves in the world
and can't be carryin' on as if they was."

We were next, and I had meantime been worrying about a connection between
Joe Gorman's arrest and our being picked up, but there was no such connection.
There was only that shirt in the back seat of the stolen Buick to trace me by. The
laundry mark. That was farfetched, but I didn't know what else to think. I was
relieved when I heard what they had us in for: theft of automobile parts from
wrecking yards.

"We've never been in Detroit before," I said. "We just arrived in town."

"Yeah, where from?"

"Cleveland. We're hitch-hiking."

"You're a sonofabitch liar. You belong to the Foley gang and you been
stealing car parts. But we caught up with you. We'll get all you guys."

I said, "But we're not even from Detroit. I'm from Chicago."

"Where you goin'?"

"Home."

"That's a fine way to get to Chicago from Cleveland, by way of this town.
Your story stinks." He started on Stoney. "Where're you gonna say you come
from?"

"Pennsy."

"Where's that?"

"Near Wilkes-Barre."

"And where you headin' for?"

"Nebraska, to study to be a vet'narian."

"And what's that?"

"About dogs and horses."

"About Fords and Chevvies, you mean, you little asswipe hoodlum! And you,
where's home for you, what's your story?" He started on Wolfy.

"I'm from Pennsylvania too."

"Whereabouts?"

"Around Scranton. It's a little town."

"How little is it?"

"About five hundred population or so."

"And what's the name of it?"

"It ain't much of a name."

"I bet. Well, tell me, what is it?"

He said, his eyes moving tensely, which was poison to his effort to smile
easily. "The name of it is Drumtown."

"It must be a tough little hole to breed up rats like you. Okay, we'll see where
it is on the map." He opened his drawer.

"It ain't on the map. It's too small."

"That's okay, if it has a name it'll be on my map. It's got them all."

"What I mean is it ain't really incorporated. It's just a little burg and hasn't
got around to be incorporated yet."

"What do they do there?"

"Dig up a little coal. Nothin' much."

"Hard coal or soft coal?"

"Both," said Wolfy, sinking his head and still grinning a little; but his underlip
was somewhat withdrawn from his teeth and his sinews were out.

"You belong to Foley's gang, friend," the sergeant said.

"No, I never been in this town before."

"Fetch me Jimmy," the sergeant instructed one of the cops.

Jimmy came, slow and old, from the narrow stairs of the lower cells; his flesh
was like a stout old woman's; he was wearing cloth slippers and a front-buttoned
sweater holding up his wide breasts; he seemed to die a little with every breath.
But his eyes were as explicit as otherwise everything was vague about this gray,
yellow, and white-haired head, bent with weakness. The eyes, however, trained
so they were foreign to anything but their long-time function, they had no
personal regard. This Jimmy gazed on Stoney and me and passed us and his look
rested on Wolfy. To him he said, "You was in here three years ago. You rolled a
guy, and you got six months. It won't be three years yet till May. One month
more."

This great classifying organ of a police brain!

"Well, Bumhead, Pennsylvania?" said the sergeant.

"That's right, I did six months. But I don't know Foley, that's the truth, and
never stole car parts. I don't know anything about cars."

"Lock 'em all up."

We had to empty our pockets; they were after knives and matches and such
objects of harm. But for me that wasn't what it was for, but to have the bigger
existence taking charge of your small things, and making you learn forfeits as a
sign that you aren't any more your own man, in the street, with the contents of
your pockets your own business: that was the purpose of it. So we gave over our
stuff and were taken down, past cells and zoo-rustling straw where some priso-
ner got off his sack for a look through the bars. I saw the wounded deafmute
like a magus holding his head, on a bunk. We were marched to the end of the row
where the great memory-man sat sleeping, or perhaps he was only at dim rest all
night, in a chair below a fish tail of ribbon tied into the grill of a ventilator. They
stuck us in a large cell, a yell going up over us, "We got no room. We got no
more room!" and obscene lip sounds and razzberries and flushing of the toilet,
ape-wit and defiances. It really was a crowded cell, but they pushed us in any-
way, and we did as well as we could, squatting on the floor. The other mute
was in here, sitting by the feet of a drunk, crouched up as if in a steerage.
An enormous light was on at all hours. There was something heavy about it, like
the stone rolled in front of the tomb.

Then by the wall, at day, a big dull rolling began, choking, the tube-clunk of
trucks and heavy machine fuss, and also the needle-mouth speed of trolleys, fast
as dragonflies.

I must say I didn't get any great shock from this of personal injustice. I
wanted to be out and on my way, and that was nearly all. I suffered over Joe
Gorman, caught and beat.

However, as I felt on entering Erie, Pennsylvania, there is a darkness. It is for
everyone. You don't, as perhaps some imagine, try it, one foot into it like a
barbershop "September Morn." Nor are lowered into it with visitor's curiosity,
as the old Eastern monarch was let down into the weeds inside a glass ball to
observe the fishes. Nor are lifted straight out after an unlucky tumble, like
a Napoleon from the mud of the Arcole where he had been standing up to his
thoughtful nose while the Hungarian bullets broke the clay off the bank. Only
some Greeks and admirers of theirs, in their liquid noon, where the friendship of
beauty to human things was perfect, thought they were clearly divided from this
darkness. And these Greeks too were in it. But still they are the admiration of
the rest of the mud-sprung, famine-knifed, street-pounding, war-rattled, difficult,
painstaking, kicked in the belly, grief and cartilage mankind, the multitude, some
under a coal-sucking Vesuvius of chaos smoke, some inside a heaving Calcutta
midnight, who very well know where they are.

In the dinky grayness and smell of morning, after giving us coffee and bread,
they let Stoney and me out; Wolfy was kept on suspicion.

The cops said to us, "Get out of town. We give you a flop last night, but next
time you'll get a vagrancy hung on you." There was a dawn smokiness and scratch-
iness in the station as the patrolmen off the night beat were taking a load
off themselves, unstrapping guns, lifting off hats, sitting down to write out
reports. Was there a station next door to Tobit, the day the angel visited, it
would have been no different.

We went along with the main traffic and ended in Campus Martius, which is
not like the other Champs de Mars I know. Here all was brick, shaly with oil
smoke and the shimmying gas of cars.

We started off to ride to city limits on the trolleys; and then it happened that
the conductor shook my shoulder to warn me that we were at a transfer point,
and I jumped out thinking that Stoney was back of me, but I saw him still asleep
by the window as the car passed with air-shut doors, and pounding on the glass
didn't wake him. Then I waited the better part of an hour before going on to the
end of the line where the highway was. I stayed there till nearly noon. He maybe
thought I had shaken him off, which wasn't so. I felt despondent that I had lost
him.

At last I started to flag rides. First a truck took me to Jackson. I found a cheap
flop there. Next afternoon a salesman for a film company picked me up. He was
going to Chicago.




Chapter X




When evening came on we were tearing out of Gary and toward South Chicago,
the fire and smudge mouth of the city gorping to us. As the flamy bay shivers
for home-coming Neapolitans. You enter your native water like a fish. And there
sits the great fish god or Dagon. You then bear your soul like a minnow before
Dagon, in your familiar water.

I knew I wasn't coming back to peace and an easy time. In rising order of
difficulty, there'd be the Polish housekeeper, always crabbing about money;
next Mama, certain to feel my unreliability; and Simon who'd have been stor-
ing up something for me. I was ready to hear hard words from him; I felt I
deserved some for going off on this trip. I also had a few to answer with,
about the telegram. But I wasn't approaching the usual kind of family fight
with its hot feelings and wrangled-out points; it was something different and
much worse.

A new, strange Polish woman who spoke no English came to the door. I thought
the old housekeeper had quit and this one had replaced her, but it was odd how
the new woman had filled the kitchen with bleeding hearts, crucifixes, and saints.
Of course, if she had to have them in her place of work, Mama couldn't see them
anyhow. But there were also little children, and I wondered if Simon had taken
in an entire family; and then, from the way the woman kept me standing, I began
to grasp that this was no longer our flat, and an older girl wearing the dress
of St. Helen's parochial school came to tell me that her father had bought the
furniture and taken over the flat from the man who owned it. That was Simon.

"But isn't my mother here any more? Where's my mother?"

"The blind lady? She's downstairs by the neighbors."

The Kreindls had put her in Kotzie's room, which had only a small window
with bars on the passage where people ducked through the brick subterranean
vault on a shortcut through the alley or stopped to take a leak. Since she could
only just distinguish light from dark and didn't need a view, you couldn't say on
that score it was an unkindness to have been put there. The deep kitchen cuts in
her palms had never softened out, and I felt them when she took my hands and
said in her cracky voice, queerer than ever just then, "Did you hear about
Grandma?"

"No, what?"

"She died."

"Oh no!"

That was a shaft! It went straight and cold into my bowels, and I couldn't
bring up my back or otherwise move, but sat bent over. Dead! Horrible, to
imagine the old woman dead, in a casket, underground, with the face covered
and weight thrown on her, silent. My heart shrunk before the idea of this
violence. Because it would have had to be violent. She, who always tore off
interferences as she did that dentist's hand, would have had to be smothered. For
all her frailty she was a hard fighter. But she fought when clothed and standing
up, alive. And now it was necessary to picture her captured and pulled down into
the grave, and lying still. That was too much for me.

My grates couldn't hold it. I shed tears with my sleeve over my eyes.

"What did she die of, Ma, and when?"

She didn't know. A few days ago, before she had moved down, Kreindl had told
her, and she had been in mourning ever since. According to her notions of
how she should mourn.

All that she had in this vault of a room was a bed and chair. Well, I tried to
find out from Mrs. Kreindl why Simon had done this. As it was suppertime, Mrs.
Kreindl was at home. Usually she was away, afternoons, playing poker with other
housewives; they played in earnest, for blood. How she had the repose of a
big sheep, don't ask me, since she was always in a secret fever from gambling
and from warring with her husband.

She couldn't tell me anything about Simon. Was it to get married that he had
sold everything? He had been desperate, before I left, about marrying Cissy. But
the furniture was old stuff, and how much would the Pole have paid for it? What
would anyone give for that cripple kitchen stove? Or for the beds, even older;
and the leatherette furniture we used to slide and rock on when we were kids?
This stuff went back to the time of Rameses' Americana set, to the last century.
Maybe my father had bought the furniture. All pain-causing reflections. Simon
must have been in a terrible way for money to have sold off all of that veteran
metal and leather and left Mama in this cell with the Kreindls.

I was empty with hunger as I questioned Mrs. Kreindl but couldn't apply to
her for a meal, remembering her to be not very free about food. "Do you have
any money, Mama?" I said. But all she had in her purse was a fifty-cent piece.
"Well, it's a good idea for you to have some change," I told her, "in case you
happen to want something, like gum drops or a Hershey bar." I'd have taken a
buck from her if Simon had left her something, but I could make out a little
longer without her last fifty-cent piece. To ask for it, I thought, would scare
her, and that would be barbarous. Especially on top of Grandma's death. And she
already was frightened, although, as when sick, she was upright in her posture
and like waiting for the grief to come to a stop; as if this stop would be called
by a conductor. She wouldn't discuss with me what Simon had done but clung
rather to her own idea of it. To which she didn't wish me to add anything. I
knew her.

I stayed a little longer because I sensed she wanted it, but then I had to leave,
and when I scraped back my chair she said, "You going? Where do you go?"

This was a question about my absence when the flat was sold up. I couldn't
answer it.

"Why, I have that room on the South Side still that I told you about."

"Are you working? You have a job?"

"I always have something. Don't you know me? Don't worry, everything is
going to be all right."

Answering, I shunned her face a little, though there was no reason to, and felt
my own face bitten as though it were a key, notched and filed out, some
dishonorable, ill-purpose key.

I headed for Einhorn's, and on the boulevard, where the trees had begun to
bud in the favorite purple of Chicago April evening, instilled with carbon and
with the smells of crocodile beds of guck from the cleaned sewers, by the lamps
of the synagogue, people were coming out in new coats and business hats, with
square velvet envelopes for their prayer things. It was the first night of Pass-
over, of the Angel of Death going through all doors not marked with blood to
take away the life of the Egyptian first-born, and then the Jews trooping into
the desert. I wasn't permitted to pass by; I was stopped by Coblin and Five
Properties, who had seen me as I got into the street to walk around the crowd.
They were on the curb, and Five Properties snatched me by the sleeve. "Look!"
he said. "Who is in shul tonight!" Both were grinning, bathed-looking, in their
best cleanliness and virile good condition.

"Hey, guess what?" said Coblin.

"What?"

"Doesn't he know?" said Five Properties.

"I don't know anything. I've been out of town and just got back."

"Five Properties's getting married," said Coblin. "At last. To a beauty. You
ought to see the ring he's giving. Well, we're through with whores now, aren't
we? Ah, boy, somebody's in for it!"

"True?"

"So help me the Uppermost," said Five Properties. "I invite you to my wed-
ding, kid, a week from next Sunday at the Lion's Club Hall, North Avenue,
four o'clock. Bring a girl. I don't want you should have anything against
me."

"What is there to have against you?"

"Well, you shouldn't. We're cousins, and I want you to come."

"Happy days, man!" I said to him, doing my best, and thankful the murk was
so deep they couldn't see me well.

Coblin began to draw me by the arm. He wanted me to come to the Seder
dinner. "Come along. Come home."

While I stunk of jail and before I had begun to digest my misery? Before I
found Simon? "No, some other time, thanks, Cob," I said, going backwards.

"But why not?"

"Leave him, he's got a date. Have you got a date?"

"As a matter of fact I do have to see somebody."

"He's starting his horny time of life. Bring your little pussy to the wedding."

Cousin Hyman still smiled, but he thought probably of his daughter and so
didn't urge me more; he clammed up.

In Einhorn's door I met Bavatsky as he descended to replace a fuse. Tillie had
blown it with her curling iron, and, upstairs, one woman hobbled and the other
just as slow from weight and uncertainty approached with candles and so
recalled to me a second time it was the night of Exodus. But there was no dinner
or ceremony here. Einhorn observed only one holy day, Yom Kippur, and only
because Karas-Holloway, his wife's cousin, insisted.

"What happened to that drunken wart Bavatsky?"

"He couldn't get to the fuse box because the cellar was locked, so he went to
fetch the key from the janitor's wife," said Mildred.

"If she has beer in the house we go to bed in the dark tonight."

Suddenly Tillie Einhorn, with candle in a saucer, saw me by the flame.

"Look, it's Augie," she said.

"Augie? Where?" said Einhorn, quickly glancing between the uneven sizes of
light. "Augie, where are you? I want to see you."

I came forward and sat by him; he shifted his shoulder in token of wanting to
shake hands.

"Tillie, go in the kitchen and make coffee. Mildred, you too." He sent them
back into the dark kitchen. "And take the plug out of the curler. I go nuts with
their electric appliances."

"It is out," said Mildred, with a voice tired of, but always ready for, the duty
of these answers. Obedient in the smallest point, however, she shut the doors,
and I was alone with him. In his night court. At least I thought he was grimacing
with strictness at me. He had shaken hands only to give me a formal feel of his
fingers and of the depth of his coldness. And the candles were now as genial to
me as though they had been the ones stuck into loaves of bread by night and
sailed on a black Indian lake to find the drowned body sunk to the bottom. Now
the white middle way of his hair was down near the plate glass of his desk as he
fixed to get and light a cigarette--as ever, the methodical struggle and pulling of
the arms by the sleeves, that transport of flies by the ants. Then he began to blow
smoke and prepared to speak. I decided I couldn't allow myself to be chided like
a kid of ten for the Joe Gorman deal, of which he by now certainly knew. I had
to talk to him about Simon. But then it seemed he wasn't going to lecture me at
all. I must have looked too sick--low, gaunt, pushed to an extreme, burned. Last
time we met I had had my Evanston fat on me; I had come to consult him about
the adoption.

"Well, you haven't been doing so well, it looks like."

"No."

"Gorman was caught. How did you get away?"

"By dumb luck."

"Dumb? In a hot car, without even changing the plates! Talk about brain-
lessness! Well, they brought him back. The picture was in the Times. You
want to see?"

No, I didn't want to, for I knew what it would be like: between two hefty
detectives and probably trying to tip his hat over his eyes as much as his
held arms would allow, and spare his family direct eyes into the camera, or
his plastered face. It was always like that.

"How come it took you so long to get back?" said Einhorn.

"I bummed, and I wasn't very lucky."

"But why did you have to bum? Your brother told me he was sending you the
money to Buffalo."

"Why, did he come and tell you?" I creased my brow with effort "You mean
he tried to borrow from you?"

"He got it from me. I made him another loan too."

"What loan? I didn't get anything from him."

"That's no good. I was stupid. I should have sent it to you myself. Beh?" He
let out his tongue and his eyes went bright, looking surprised. "He took me--
well, so he took. But he shouldn't have let you down. Especially since I gave
it to him over and above what I lent him personally. Even if he was in bad
shape that's too much."

I was powerfully bitter and mad, but I felt an advance sway from a wave of
something even worse, below the present depth.

"What do you mean--in bad shape? Why was he raising money? What did he
want?"

"If he had told me for what I might have helped. I lent it to him because he
is your brother; otherwise I hardly know the man. He went into a proposition
with Nosey Mutchnik--the one I had that deal with in the lot. Remember? Now I
could hold my own with him, but your brother is green. He took an interest in a
betting pool, and the first game the White Sox played this season they told him
he lost his share and if he wanted to stay in he'd have to bring another hundred
bucks--I have the whole story now. They took that from him too, and he got a
sock in the teeth when he became hotheaded. Mutchnik's hooligans knocked him
into the gutter. That's what happened. I suppose you know why he wanted to
make a fast buck?"

"Yes, to get married."

"To get on top of Joe Flexner's daughter, who made him wild. He never will
now."

"But why not? They're engaged."

"I begin to feel sorry for your brother, though he isn't very smart, and if I
did drop seventy-eight bucks…" As I saw the anguishing thing of Simon knocked
over and bloodied in the gutter, I only listened and didn't speak of Grandma's
death, or the furniture, and Mama put out of the house. "Now she won't marry
him," said Einhorn.

"She won't? Tell me!"

"Kreindl is the one I heard it from. He made a match for her with a relative of
yours."

"Not Five Properties--with him?" I shouted.

"Your greenhorn cousin. It's going to be his hand that sets apart those fine
legs."

"Oh hell! No! They couldn't do that to Simon!"

"They did."

"And by now I guess he knows."

"Does he! He went to Flexner's and started a riot, breaking chairs. The girl
went and locked herself in the toilet, and then the old man had to send for
the police. The squad car came and got him."

Arrested too! I suffered to myself for Simon. It was crazy, how. It crushed me
to hear and picture.

"Cynical quiff, ah?" Einhorn said. He wanted to bring it all home to me with
his queer stare of severity. "Cressida going over to the Greek camp--"

"And where's Simon, in jail still?"

"No, old Flexner let the charge drop when he promised no more trouble. Flex-
ner is a decent old man. He went broke owing nobody. He wouldn't have the
heart. He's a sport too. They kept your brother one night and let him out
this morning."

"He spent last night in jail?"

"One night, that's all," said Einhorn. "Now he's out."

"Where is he though? Do you know?"

"No. But I can tell you you won't find him at home." Kreindl had told him
about Mama, and he was preparing to let me hear all; but I said I had already
been home. I sat before him stripped; I knew of nowhere to turn and had no
force to leave.

Till now, as a family, we had had some privacy, even if it was known that we
were deserted as kids and on Charity. In Grandma's time nobody, not even the
caseworker Lubin, was informed exactly about us. At the free dispensary I'd
go and do my guile not just on account of the money but so we should have
some power of guidance over ourselves. Now there were no secrets, so anybody
interested could look. This maybe was the consideration which made me not say
to Einhorn what was the crudest thing of all, that Grandma was dead.

"I'm sorry for you; especially for your mother," Einhorn started out, trying to
raise me up. "Your brother got ahead of himself. Too inspired by tail. What got
him so hot?"

In part I thought this question came from envy that anyone should be subject
to such inspirations and heat. But also, on this side, Einhorn couldn't be
altogether unsympathetic.

Gradually, talking, he lost view of his first aim, which was to comfort me, and
he got so bitter he tried to curl his fists inward and breasted the desk. "Why
should you care if your brother gets a rupe up the behind!" he said. "He deserves
it. He left you in a hole, he sold the flat, he got the money out of me because of
you and you didn't smell a dime of it. If you were honest with yourself you'd be
glad. You'd do yourself some good by saying so, and I'd respect you more for
it."

"Say what? That it's all his fault and I'm glad of that? That falling in love
made him not care what happened to Mama? Or just that he's miserable? What
am I supposed to be glad about, Einhorn?

"Don't you realize the advantage you have from now on? You'd better not be
easy on him. He's got to make it right to you. The advantage has passed to you,
and you've got him by the balls. Don't you understand that? And if there's only
one thing you can get out of this right now it's to admit at least that you're
happy he caught it in the neck. Jesus! if anybody did this to me I'd certainly
have satisfaction knowing he was good and burned himself. If I didn't, I'd wor-
ry I wasn't clear in my head. Good for him! Good, good!"

I'm not sure why Einhorn worked over me with such savagery approaching waked-
up despair. He even forgot to raise hell about Joe Gorman. I guess, back of
it, that he thought of Dingbat's inheritance which he had run into the ground.
Maybe he didn't want me to be despised as he somewhat despised Dingbat for
not being angry. No, there was even more to the view he was driving so strongly,
though sprawl-handed, against the desk. He intended that, as there were no more
effective prescriptions in old ways, as we were in dreamed-out or finished
visions, that therefore, in the naked form of the human jelly, one should choose
or seize with force; one should make strength from disadvantages and make
progress by having enemies, being wrathful or terrible; should hammer on the
state of being a brother, not be oppressed by it; should have the strength of voice
to make other voices fall silent--the same principle for persons as for peoples,
parties, states. This, and not a man-chick, plucked and pinched, with scraggle
behind and anxious face full of sorrow-wrinkles, human fowl chased by brooms.

Now the lights began to twitter as Bavatsky fiddled in the fuse box, and it was
discovered that instead of considering this as I should have been, I was bawling.
I think Einhorn was disappointed and maybe even shocked; shocked, I mean, by
his misjudgment of my fitness to follow him in his shooting trajectory into what
a soul should be. He gave me chilly gentleness such as he might have offered a
girl. "Don't worry, we'll work something out for your mother," he said, for he
seemed to think it was mainly that. He didn't know I was mourning Grandma
too. "Blow out these candles. Tillie's bringing coffee and sandwiches. You can
sleep with Dingbat tonight, and tomorrow we'll start on something."

Next day I hunted for Simon and couldn't locate him; he hadn't been back to
see Mama. I did find Kreindl at home, however, as he sat at a late breakfast
of smoked fish and rolls. He said to me, "Sit down and catch a bite."

"I see you finally found a bride for my cousin," said I to the cockeyed old
artilleryman, observing how the short, sufficient muscles of his forearms were
operating in the skinning of the golden little fish and how the scabbards of
his jaw were moving.

"A beauty. Such tsitskies! But don't blame me, Augie. I don't force anybody.
Zwing keinem. Especially a pair of proud tsitskies like that. Do you know
anything about young ladies? I should hope! Well, when a girl has things like
that nobody can tell her what to do. There's where your brother made his mis-
take, because he tried. I'm sorry for him." He whispered, mounting his eyes
to make sure his wife was at a distance, "This girl makes my little one stand
up. At my age. And salute! Anyways, she's too independent for a young fellow.
She needs an older man, a cooler head who can say yes and do no. Otherwise she
could ruin you. And maybe Simon is too young to marry. I've known you since
you both was snot-noses. Pardon, but it's true. Now you're big, so you're
hungry, and you think you're ready to marry, but what's the hurry? You got
plenty of jig-jig ahead of you before you settle down. Take it! Take, take if
they give you! Never refuse. To come together with a peepy little woman who sings
in your ear. It's the life of the soul!" He argued this to me with a squeeze of
his awkward eyes, the old pimp and egger-on; he even made me smile, and I was in
no mood for smiling. "Besides," said he, "you can see what kind of a man your
brother is, that when he gets it in his mind he can sell the goods of the house
and put his mother out."

I expected him to mention this and pass from defense to the practical matter
of Mama's support. In the past Kreindl had always been a kind enough neighbor,
but we couldn't expect him to keep Mama. Especially as Simon now had him down
as one of his chief enemies. Furthermore, I couldn't let her stay in that
brick vault, and I told Kreindl I'd make other arrangements for her.

I went to appeal to Lubin, at the Charity, on gloomy Wells Street. Lubin had
always visited us as a sort of distant foster-uncle, formerly. In his office, to
my maturer eyes, he came out differently. Something in his person argued what
the community that contributed the money wanted us poor bastards to be: sober,
dutiful, buttoned, clean, sad, moderate. The sadness and confusion of the field he
was in made him sensible. Only a certain heaviness of breath that drew notice to
the thickness of his nostrils gave you a sense of difficulty and, next, one of the
labor of being patient. I made note in this broad man of the tame ape-nature
promoted to pants and offices. This is the opposite of that disfigured image of
God that falls away by its sin from Eden; or of the same bad copy excited and
inflamed by promise of grace to recover its sacredness and golden stature. Lu-
bin's belief was that he didn't fall from Paradise but rose from the caves. But
he was a good man, and this is no slander of him, but merely his own view.

When I told him Simon and I had to find a home for Mama he doubtless thought
we were getting rid of everyone--Georgie first, then Grandma, and now Mama.
Therefore I said, "It's only temporary, till we get on our feet, and then
we'll have another flat and housekeeper for her." But he took this very aridly,
which wasn't to be wondered at, considering the tramp appearance I made, in the
wrack of my good clothes, inflamed at the eyes, and looking garbage-nourished.
However, he said he could get her into a Home for the blind on Arthington Street
if we could pay part of the cost. It came to fifteen bucks a month.

That was as good as I could expect. Also he sent me with a note to an em-
ployment bureau, but there was nothing doing at the time. I went to my room
on the South Side and took most of my clothes to hock, the tuxedo, sports
clothes, and hound's-tooth coat. I pawned them and I got Mama established, and
then started to hunt work. Being as they say up against it and au pied du mur,
I took the first job that came, and I've never had one that was more curious.
Einhorn got it for me through Karas-Holloway, who had a financial interest in
the business. It was a luxury dog service on North Clark Street, among the
honkytonks and hock shops, antique stores and dreary beaneries.

In the morning I drove out in a station wagon along the Gold Coast to pick up
the dogs, at the back doors of mansions or up the service elevators of lakeshore
apartment hotels, and I brought the animals back to this club joint--it was
called a club.

The chief was a Frenchman, a dog-coiffeur or groom or maître de chiens; he
was rank and rough, from Place Clichy near the foot of Montmartre, and from
what he told me he had been a wrestler's shill in the carnivals there while
studying this other profession. Some ways his face was short of humanity, by its
energetic stiffness and abruptness of color, like an injection. His relation with
the animals was a struggle. He was trying to wrest something from them. I don't
know what. Perhaps that their conception of a dog should be what his was. He
was on the footing of Xenophon's Ten Thousand in Persia, here in Chicago; for
he washed and ironed his own shirts, did his own marketing, and cooked his own
meals in his beaverboard quarters in a corner of this doggish place--his lab,
kitchen, and bedroom. I realize much better now what it means to be a French-
man abroad, how irregular everything must appear, and not simply abroad but
on North Clark Street.

We were located in no mere firetrap but had two stories of a fairly new
modern building just off the Gold Coast, not far from the scene of the St.
Valentine's Day Massacre and, for that matter, from the Humane Society on
Grand Avenue. It was the great feature of this outfit, I say, paid for by the
subscribers, that it was a club for dogs, that the pets were entertained as well
as steamed, massaged, manicured, clipped, that they were supposed to be taught
manners and tricks. The fee was twenty dollars a month, and no shortage of
dogs; more in fact than Guillaume could handle, and he had to fight the front
office continually, which wanted to go beyond capacity. The club was already as
hell-deep as dogs' throats could scrape it; the Cerberus slaver-choke turmoil was
at the full when I came in from the last pick-up and changed from truck livery to
rubber boots and ponchos; the racket made the skylight glass shiver. Organization
was marvelous, however. Guillaume had real know-how; and let people go a little
and they'll build you an Escurial. The enormous noise, as of Grand Central, was
only the protest of chaos coming up against regulation--the trains got off on
time; the dogs got their treatment.

Though Guillaume used the hypo more than I thought he should. He gave
piqûres for everything, and charged it extra. He'd say, "Cette chienne est
galeuse--this is a mangy bitch!" and in with the needle. Moreover, he'd give a
drop of dope to the savage ones whenever organization was threatened, yelling,
"Thees jag-off is goin' to get it!" Consequently I carried home some pretty wan
dogs, and it wasn't easy to come up a flight of stairs with a sleeping boxer or
shepherd and explain to the colored cook that he was only tuckered out from
playing and pleasure. Dogs in heat Guillaume wouldn't tolerate either. "Grue!
En chasse!" Then he'd say to me anxiously, "Did anything 'appen in the back?"
But since I had been driving, how was I to know? He was furious with the own-
ers, especially if the animal was a chienne de race, and its aristocracy was
not respected, and he wanted the office to slap an extra charge on them for
letting them into the club in this state. Any pedigree made a courtier of him, and
he could call on a very high manner, if he wanted to, and get his lips into a tight
suppressive line of dislike to baseness--the opposite to breeding. He had the
staff come over, two Negro boys and me, to show us the fine points of the animal,
and I will say for Guillaume that his idea was to run an atelier and to act like
master in a guild, so that when he got a good poodle to trim it was down-tools
for us while he demonstrated; there was then a spell of good feeling and regard
for him and for the lamb-docile, witty, small animal. Oh, it wasn't always
vexation or the snapping and bickering of little dogs to which Marcus Aurelius
compares the daily carryings on of men, though I once in a while see what he
was getting at. But there's a dog harmony also, and to be studied by dog eyes,
many of them, has its illumination too.

Only the work fatigued me, and I stunk of dog. People would move from me
on the streetcar, as they do from the hoof-and-hides stockyards' man, or give
me round-eye glares and draw down their mouths on the mobbed Cottage Grove
line. Furthermore, there was something Pompeian that I minded about the job--
the opulence for dogs, and then their ways that reflected civilized mentality,
spoiled temperaments of favorites, mirrors of neuroticism. Plus the often
needling thought that their membership fee in the club was more than I had to
pay for Mama in the Home. All this together once in a while got me down. From
my neglected self-betterment I had additional pricks. I should be more
ambitious. Often I looked for vocational hints in magazines, and I considered
training at night school to become a court reporter, should I have the aptitude,
and even going back to the university for something bigger. And then I not
seldom had Esther Fenchel on my mind, since I moved around the dog-owning
height of society. I never had a back-door glimpse of it without a twinge of the
soul for her sake, and similar childishness. The sun of that childishness goes on
shining even when the larger bodies of hotter stars have risen to smelt you and
cover you with their influence. The recenter stars may be more critical, more in
the eye, but that earlier sun still remains a long time.

I had some spells of adoring-sickness, and then I had deeper pangs of sex,
later; from service with animals maybe. The street too was aphrodisiac, the
honkytonks and titty photos, legs with sequins. Plus Guillaume's girl friend,
who was a great work of ripple-assed luxury with an immense mozzarella bust, a
middle-aged lady who'd go straight to bed and wait for him just as we started to
close up shop in the evening, soughing in there like a white stout tree. But
there wasn't much I could do about my needs. I was too strapped by money to
chase. Though I risked running into the Renlings in that neighborhood, I went to
Evanston to look for my friend Willa at the Symington, but she had quit to get
married. As I returned on the El I was engrossed in thoughts of marriage bed, of
Five Properties' behavior with Cissy, and of my brother's losing his head when
he thought of their nuptials and honeymoon.

Simon meanwhile stayed away from me and didn't answer the messages I left
with Mama and elsewhere. I knew he must be in a bad way. He wasn't giving
any money to Mama, and folks who saw him told me how beat he looked. So his
keeping to himself, in some hole of a room like mine, or worse, was under-
standable; he never before had had to approach me abashed, owing explana-
tions and excuses, and wasn't going to do it now. With my last message
to him I enclosed five bucks. He took this fin all right, but I didn't hear
from him till he was able to repay it, and that was some months later.

One possession of mine that was saved from the sale of the furniture was the
damaged set of Dr. Eliot's Five-Foot Shelf that Einhorn gave me after his fire.
I had it with me in my room and read at it when I could. And I was blasting
out a paragraph of von Helmholtz one day, on a corner downtown, between cars,
when a onetime classmate of mine, at Crane College, a Mexican named Padilla,
took it out of my hand to see what I was reading and gave it back saying, "What
are you on this stuff for? It's been left way far behind." He started to tell me
the latest, and I had to say I couldn't keep up with him. He asked me how things
were then, and we had a long conversation.

In my math section Padilla had been the great equation cracker. He sat at the
back of the room, rubbing his narrow front peak and working over smoothed-out
pieces of paper others had stuffed into the desk, since he couldn't afford to
buy a notebook. Called to the board whenever everyone else was stumped, he
came with haste in his filthy whitish or creamed-herring suit, of cloth used in the
cheapest summer caps, and naked feet in a pair of Salvation Army rummage shoes,
also white, and would start hanging up the answer, covering his scrappy chalk-
ings with his skinny body, infinity symbols like broken ants, and blittering
Greek letters aimed downward to the last equal sign. As far as I was concerned,
it was godlike that relations should be so clear to anyone. Sometimes he'd get
a hand for his performance when he went clacking back swiftly in his shoes,
which were loose because he had no socks. But his face, with small beak and the
pricked skin of smallpox, didn't stock anything in gratification as we understand
it. Anyway, he didn't deal much in expression. He often seemed chilly. And I'm
not speaking of his character now, but it was cold winter, and sometimes I'd see
him flying down Madison Street in his white suit, across the snow, running from
home to warm himself in the school building. He never did look warm enough,
but chill and sickly and with primitive prohibition of anyone's approaching him.
Smoking Mexican cigarettes, he went through the halls by himself, often with a
comb, running it through his hair, which was beautiful, black and high.

Well, there had been some changes. He looked healthier, or at least didn't have
that thistle-flower purple in his tinge, and he wore a better suit. Under his
arm were heavy books.

"Are you at the university?" I said.

"I got a scholarship in math and physics. What about you?"

"I wash dogs. Can't you tell I spend my time with dogs?"

"No, I don't notice anything. But what are you doing?"

"That is what I'm doing."

It greatly bothered him that I had such a flunky job, washing cages and sweep-
ing up dogs' hair; and also that I was no longer a college man but trying to
keep up on Helmholtz who was a dead number to him; in other words, that I
should be of the unformed darkened-out mass. It was often that way with me,
that people would feel the world owed me distinctness.

"What would I do at the university? I'm not like you, Manny, with a special
talent."

"Don't tear yourself down," he said. "You should see the snots there are on
campus. What special have they got, except the dough? You should go and find
out what you can do, and then after four years if you aren't any good at any
special thing, you at least have this degree, and it won't be just any sonofa-
bitch who can kick you around."

My aching back! I thought. There'd still be black forces waiting to give me
the boot, and if I had a degree the indignity would be all the greater, and I'd
have heartburn from it.

"You shouldn't waste your time," he further said. "Don't you see that to do
any little thing you have to take an examination, you have to pay a fee and get
a card or a diploma? You better get wise to this. If people don't know what you
qualify in they'll never know where to place you, and that can be dangerous.
You have to get in there and do something for yourself. Even if you're just
waiting, you have to know what you're waiting for, you have to specialize. And
don't wait too long or you'll be passed by."

It wasn't so much what he said that affected me, though that was interesting
and probably full of truth; it was his friendship that I responded to. I didn't
want to let go of him, and I clung to him. I was moved that he thought of me.

"How'm I supposed to go to school, Manny, if I'm broke?"

"How do you think I do it? The scholarship isn't enough, it's only a tuition
scholarship. I get a little dough from the NYA and I'm in a racket swiping
books."

"Books?"

"Like these. I stole them this afternoon. Technical books, texts. I take orders
even. If I pick up twenty or thirty a month and get from two to five bucks apiece,
I make out all right. Texts cost. What's the matter, are you honest?" he said,
looking to see if he had queered himself with me.

"Not completely. I'm just surprised, Manny, because all I knew about you was
that you were a wizard at math."

"Also I ate once a day and didn't own a coat. You know that. Well, I give myself
a little more now. I want to have it a little better. I don't go stealing for the
kicks. As soon as I can I'll quit."

"But what if you get nailed?"

He said, "I'll explain how I feel about it. You see, I don't have larceny in my
heart; I'm not a real crook. I'm not interested in it, so nobody can make a fate of
it for me. That's not my fate. I might get into a little trouble, but I never would
let them make it my trouble, get it?"

I did get it, having been around Joe Gorman, who looked at the same question
another way.

But Padilla was a gifted crook all the same and took pride in his technique.
We made a date for Saturday, and he gave me an exhibition. When we walked
out of a shop I couldn't tell whether or not he had taken anything, he was
so good at maneuvering. Outside he'd show me a copy of Sinnott's Botany or
Schlesinger's Chemistry. Valuable books only; he'd never take orders for
cheaper ones. Handing me his list, he'd tell me to pick the next title and he'd
swipe it even if it was kept back of the cash desk. He went in carrying an old
book with which he covered the one he wanted. He never hid anything under his
coat, so that if they were to stop him he could always plead he had set down his
own book to look at something and then picked up his own and another, unawares.
Since he delivered the books on the same day he stole them, there was nothing
incriminating in his room. It was greatly in his favor that he didn't in the
least look like a crook, but only a young Mexican, narrow-shouldered, quick in
his movements, but somewhat beaten down and harmless, that entered the shop,
put on specs, and got lost with crossed feet in thermodynamics or physical
chemistry. That he was pure of all feeling of larceny contributed a lot to his
success.

There's an old, singular, beautiful Netherlands picture I once saw in an Italian
gallery, of a wise old man walking in empty fields, pensive, while a thief behind
cuts the string of his purse. The old man, in black, thinking probably of God's
City, nevertheless has a foolish length of nose and is much too satisfied with his
dream. But the peculiarity of the thief is that he is enclosed in a glass ball, and
on the glass ball there is a surmounting cross, and it looks like the emperor's
symbol of rule. Meaning that it is earthly power that steals while the ridiculous
wise are in a dream about this world and the next, and perhaps missing this one,
they will have nothing, neither this nor the next, so there is a sharp pain of satire
in this amusing thing, and even the painted field does not have too much charm;
it is a flat place.

Well, Padilla in his thieving wasn't of this earthly-power class, and had no
ideas such as involved the whole world. It wasn't his real calling. But he enjoyed
being good at it and liked the whole subject. He had all kinds of information
about crooks, about dips, wires, and their various tricks; about Spanish
pickpockets who were so clever they got to the priest's money through the
soutane, or about the crooks' school in Rome of such high tuition that the
students signed a contract to pay half their take for five years after graduation.
He knew a lot about Chicago clipjoints and rackets. It was a hobby with him, as
other people go in for batting averages. What fascinated him was the little
individual who tries to have a charge counter to the central magnetic one and
dance his own dance on the periphery. He knew about B girls and how the hip-
chicks operated in the big hotels; a book he read often was the autobiography of
Chicago May, who used to throw her escorts' clothes out of the window to her
accomplice in the alley, and was a very remarkable woman.

Padilla himself when he went to have a good time didn't stint; he spent
everything he had. I was his guest at a flat on Lake Park Avenue that a couple
of Negro girls kept together. First he shopped at Hill-man's; he bought ham,
chicken, beer, pickles, wine, coffee, and Dutch chocolate; then we went there
and spent Saturday evening and Sunday in those two rooms, kitchen and bedroom.
The only retiring space was the toilet, so everything was in common. This suit-
ed Padilla. Toward morning he started to say that we should make an exchange
so no exclusive feelings would develop. The girls were glad and voted that
this made sense. They appreciated Padilla and his spirit of the thing, so let
themselves into the fun. Nothing was very serious nor much held back but in the
very best sympathy. I liked best the girl I had first, as she was willing to be
more personal with me and wished our cheeks to touch. The second was taller and
less given to it; she seemed to have more of a private life to defend against us.
There was more style to her. Also she was an older girl.

Anyway, it was Padilla's show. If he got out of bed to eat or dance he wanted
me to do likewise, and on and off during the night he was sitting up on the
pillows, talking of his life.

"I once was married," said Padilla when the subject came to that. "In
Chihuahua when I was fifteen. I had a kid before I was a man myself."

I didn't approve of his boasting that he had left a wife and kid behind in
Mexico, but then the tall girl said she had a child too, and maybe the other did
also and just didn't say, and so I let the subject pass, since if so many do the
same wrong there maybe is something to it that's not right away apparent.

We were lying in the two beds, all four, with only as much shape as there was
light to reveal it proceeding from the curtains in the slow opening of Sunday,
originating white in the east but falling gray upon the upright staggers of walls.
Such a sight as the old Negro walls in these streets had a peculiar grandness, if
dread too, where this external evidence was of a big humanity which you now
couldn't see. It was like the Baths of Caracalla. The vast hidden population slept
away into the morning of Sunday. The little girl I liked lay with saddle nose and
her sleepy cheeks and big sensitive, thoughtless mouth, smiling a little at
Padilla's speeches. We lay and warmed ourselves by the girls, like kings, till
nearly evening, then we left, kissing and fondling while dressing and then to the
door, promising we'd be back.

Broke, Padilla and I had supper at his house, a more empty house than the one
we had just left; that at least had old carpets, old soft chairs, and doodad girls'
ingenuities, whereas Padilla lived with some aged female relatives in a big
railroad flat off Madison Street. It was almost empty; in one room was a table
with a few chairs and in another nothing but mattresses laid on the floor. The
old women sat in the kitchen and cooked, fanning a charcoal fire, fat-burdened,
slow, stone-inexpressive old creatures to whom he didn't even speak. We ate
soup with ground meat at the bottom of the bowl and tortillas which came
wrapped in a napkin. Finishing quickly, Padilla left me at the table, and when
I went to see what had become of him found him already in bed, an army blanket
drawn up to his face, with sharp nose and hair fallen back.

He said, "I have to get some sleep. I have a quiz first thing in the morning."

"Are you ready for it, Manny?"

He said, "Either this stuff comes easy or it doesn't come at all."

And that stayed with me. Therefore I was thinking on the streetcar. Of course!
Easily or not at all. People were mad to be knocking themselves out over
difficulties because they thought difficulty was a sign of the right thing. So I
decided to try this out and, to begin with, to experiment with book stealing. If
it went easily I'd leave the dog club. And if I made as much at it as Padilla did,
that would be double what Guillaume paid me, and I could start saving toward
the tuition fee at the university. I didn't mean to settle down to a career of
stealing even if it were to come easy, but only to give myself a start at some-
thing better.

So I began; at first with more excitement than I could tolerate. I had nausea
after, on the street, and sweated. It was a big Jowett's Plato that I took. But I
was severe with myself to finish the experiment. I checked the book in a dime locker
of the Illinois Central station as Padilla had told me to do and immediately went
after another, and then I made good progress and became quite cool about it. The
difficult moment wasn't that of walking out of the store; it came when I picked
the books up and put them under my arm. But then I felt more casual, confident
that if stopped I'd be able to explain myself, laugh it off as an error of
thoughtlessness and charm my way out. In the store, Padilla told me, the dicks
would never arrest you; it was when you stepped into the street that they nabbed
you. However, in a department store, without glancing back, I'd drift into
another section--men's shoes at Carson Pirie's, candy or rugs at Marshall
Field's. It never entered my mind to branch out and steal other stuff as well.

Sooner than I had planned I quit the dog club, and it wasn't only confidence
in my crook's competence that made me do it, but I was struck by the reading
fever. I lay in my room and read, feeding on print and pages like a famished
man. Sometimes I couldn't give a book up to a customer who had ordered it, and
for a long time this was all that I could care about. The sense I had was of some
live weight driven into tangles or nets of hungry feeling; I wanted to haul it in.
Padilla was sore and fired up when he came to my room and saw stacks of books
I should have gotten rid of long ago; it was dangerous to keep them. If he had
restricted me to books on mathematics, thermodynamics, mechanics, things
probably would have been different, for I didn't carry the germ of a Clerk
Maxwell or Max Planck in me. But as he had turned over to me his orders for
books on theology, literature, history, and philosophy, and I copped Ranke's
History of the Popes and Sarpi's Council of Trent for the seminary students,
or Burckhardt or Merz's European Thought in the Nineteenth Century, I sat
reading. Padilla raised hob with me about the Merz because it took so long to
finish and a man in the History department was after him for it. "You can use my
card and get it out of the library," he said. But somehow that wasn't the same.
As eating your own meal, I suppose, is different from a handout, even if calory
for calory it's the same value; maybe the body even uses it differently.

Anyhow, I had found something out about an unknown privation, and I realized
how a general love or craving, before it is explicit or before it sees its
object, manifests itself as boredom or some other kind of suffering. And what
did I think of myself in relation to the great occasions, the more sizable being
of these books? Why, I saw them, first of all. So suppose I wasn't created to read
a great declaration, or to boss a palatinate, or send off a message to Avignon,
and so on, I could see, so there nevertheless was a share for me in all that
had happened. How much of a share? Why, I knew there were things that would
never, because they could never, come of my reading. But this knowledge was
not so different from the remote but ever-present death that sits in the corner
of the loving bedroom; though it doesn't budge from the corner, you wouldn't stop
your loving. Then neither would I stop my reading. I sat and read. I had no eye,
ear, or interest for anything else--that is, for usual, second-order, oatmeal,
mere-phenomenal, snarled-shoelace-carfare-laundry-ticket plainness, unspecified
dismalness, unknown captivities; the life of despair-harness, or the life of
organization-habits which is meant to supplant accidents with calm abiding.
Well, now, who can really expect the daily facts to go, toil or prisons to go,
oatmeal and laundry tickets and all the rest, and insist that all moments be raised
to the greatest importance, demand that everyone breathe the pointy, star-furn-
ished air at its highest difficulty, abolish all brick, vaultlike rooms, all dreari-
ness, and live like prophets or gods? Why, everybody knows this triumphant life
can only be periodic. So there's a schism about it, some saying only this trium-
phant life is real and others that only the daily facts are. For me there was no
debate, and I made speed into the former.

This was when I heard from Simon again. He said on the phone he was coming
to repay the five bucks I had sent him. It meant that he felt ready to face
me--otherwise he'd have mailed the money. Thus when he entered I sensed how
he carried a load of lordly brass and effrontery; that's how he was ready; he
was prepared to put me down, should I begin to holler and blame. But when he saw
me surrounded by books, barefoot in an old gown, and noted, probably, the air
puffs and yellow blisters of wallpaper and the poverty of light, he was more
confident and easy. For he very likely felt that I was the same as before, that
my wheels turned too freely, that I was hasty, too enthusiastic, or, in few words,
something of a schlemiel. Suppose he touched on Grandma's death, I'd easy be
led to cry, and then he'd have me. The question for him was always whether I
was this way by character or choice. If by choice I could maybe be changed.

Me, on my side, I was glad he had come and eager to see him. I could never in
the world have taken Einhorn's advice to be hard with him and keep him down.
It's true he ought to have sent me that money when I wired from Buffalo, but
he'd been in dutch and I could forgive him that. Then the loan from Einhorn
wasn't too grievous either, since Einhorn himself had let lots of people down for
far larger amounts; and he, Einhorn, was big enough and gentleman enough not
to scream and moan about it. So far so good. But what about Mama and the flat?
I confess that had gone down hard, and that if I had seen Simon when I was
rushing downstairs to Kreindl's to look for Mama I'd have broken his head for
him. But later when I had thought it through I conceded to myself that we
couldn't have kept the old home going much longer and set up a gentle kind of
retirement there for Mama, neither of us having that filial tabby dormancy that
natural bachelors have. Something in us both consented to the busting up of the
house. All Simon had to do was speak of this; if he didn't it was because he felt
his blame too much to have a clear head.

I expected to see him haggard; instead he was fatter. However, it wasn't
comfortable-looking fat but as if it came from not eating right. It took me a
minute to get over my uneasiness about his creasing smile and the yellow and
gold bristles on his chin--it wasn't like him not to shave; but then he was all
right and sat down, big fingers knit on his chest.

It was summer, a late afternoon, and though I was on the top floor of this old
frame house the shade tree was so huge it passed the roof, so all around it was
green, as if in the woods, glossy; and underneath on the lawn this bird was,
like a hammer tapping a waterpipe in the grass. It could have helped us to feel
peaceful, but it didn't.

I believe people never knew how to observe one another so damagingly as they
do now. Kin too, of course. I tried to avoid it with Simon, but we couldn't.
So on each side, for a moment, the worst was thought. Then he said, "What are
you doing out on the South Side with all these books, becoming a student?"

"I wish I could afford to."

"So you must be in the book business. It can't be much of a business though,
because I see you read them too. Leave it to you to find a business like this!" He
said it scornfully, or meant to, but there was a dead place where the scorn should
have rung; and he said reasonably, "But I suppose you could ask where my
mastermind got me."

"I don't have to ask. I know. I can see."

"Are you sore, Augie?"

"No," I said, husky, and with one glance he could see how far from anger my
feeling was. One glance was all he wanted, and he dropped his eyes. "I was sore
when I found out. It came all together, including the news about Grandma."

"Yes, she's dead, isn't she? I guess she must have been very old. Did you ever
find out how old? I guess we'd never …" And so he passed over it with irony,
sadness, even awe. We'd always smile and attribute extraordinary things to her.

Then Simon put off the brass he had come in, and he said, "I was a damn fool
to get mixed up with that mob. They took away the dough and beat me up. I
knew they were dangerous, but I thought I could hold my own with them. I
didn't think, I mean, because I was in love. Love! She let me go only so far. On
the sun porch at night. I thought I'd bust out of my skin. I was dying for her,
just to get a touch of it, and that's about all I got." He said it with coarse
anger, despisingly. It gave me a shiver. "When I heard they were married I had
dreams about them jazzing, like a woman with an ape. She wouldn't care. And you
know what he's like. But it makes no difference, he can raise hell up there same
as any other man. Besides he has dough. That's what she thinks is dough! All he
owns is a few buildings. It's chickenfeed. It'll look like a lot to her until she
gets to know better." Now his face was red, and with an emotion different from
that despising anger. He said, "You know I hate to be like this and have such
thoughts. I'm ashamed of it, I tell you honestly. Because she wasn't all that
glorious and he's not all that bad. He wasn't bad to us when we were kids. You
haven't forgotten that, have you? I don't want her to make me act like a damn
Eskimo dog with his scruff up about a piece of fish. I used to have my sights set
kind of high, as a kid. But after a while you find out what you've really got or
haven't, and you wise up to the fact that first comes all the selfish and jealous
stuff, that you don't care what happens to anybody else as long as you get yours;
you start to think such things as how pleasant it would be if somebody close to
you would die and leave you free. Then I thought it would be all the same to the
somebodies if I died."

"What do you mean, died?"

"By suicide. I came close to it in jail, there on North Avenue."

This reference to suicide was only factual. Simon didn't work me for pity; he
never seemed to require it of me.

"I don't have much feeling against death, do you, Augie?" he said. In the
change of leaves about him he was calmer, heavy in his seated position, with the
crown of his felt hat taking the side against variants, played by the green shadow
and yellow of the leaves. "Well, say, do you?"

"I'm not so hot about dying."

This, after two or three thoughts had come in succession to his face, made him
easier and more relaxed, softer with me. He laughed at last. He said, "You'll die
like everybody else. But I have to admit that's not what you make people think
of when they look at you. You're a pretty gay numero, I'll say that for you. But
you're not much good at taking care of yourself. Any other brother but you
would have sweated the money out of me. If you had pulled what I pulled I'd
have made things rough for you. Or anyway I'd be glad to see you land on your
ass the way I've done. I'd say, 'It serves you right. Good for you!' Well, since
you won't look out for your interests I see I'm going to have to do it for you."

"My interests?"

"Sure," he said, a little angered by the question. "Don't you believe I ever
think about you? We've both been running too much with the losers, and I'm
tired of it."

"Where're you living now?" I said.

"On the Near North Side," he said, brushing this off, that I wanted to know
definite things about him. He wasn't going to say whether there was a sink in his
room, or carpet or linoleum, or whether he was on a car line or facing a wall.
It's normal for me to have such curiosity about details. But he wasn't going to
satisfy this curiosity, since to dwell on such things implied it would be hard to
get away from them; for him they were things to pass quickly. "I'm not going to
stay there," he said.

"What have you been living on?" I asked. "What are you doing?"

"What do you mean, living on?" He threw difficulties in my way by repeating
questions. He stood too much on his pride to say how things were and show
what a bad rip he had gotten in his stuff. A kind of gallantry of presentation he
had always had in the quality of older brother he wouldn't give up. He had been
a fool and done wrong, he showed up sallow and with the smaller disgrace that
he was fat, as if overeating were his reply to being crushed--and with this all
over him he wasn't going to tell me, he balked at telling, some small details. He
took my asking as a blow at him while he was trying to climb out of the hole of
mortification, and he warded it off with a stiff arm, saying, "What do you
mean?" as if he'd remember later I had tried to hit him or at least goad him.
Later he didn't mind telling me that he had washed floors in a beanery, but this
was long afterward. But now he fought this off. Loaded on the hard black
armchair--I put it that way because of his increased bulk--he passionately
pulled together his nerves and energies--I could see him concentrate and do it--
and he started to deal with me. He did it more strongly than was necessary, with
pasha force. "I haven't been wasting my time," he said. "I've been working on
something. I think I'm getting married soon," he said, and didn't allow himself
to smile with the announcement or temper it in some pleasant way.

"When? To whom?"

"To a woman with money."

"A woman? An older woman?" That was how I interpreted it.

"Well, what's the matter with you? Yes, I'd marry an older woman. Why
not?"

"I bet you wouldn't." He was still able to amaze me, as though we had
remained kids.

"We don't have to argue about it because she's not old. She's about twenty-two,
I'm told."

"By whom? And you haven't even seen her?"

"No, I haven't seen her. You remember the buyer, my old boss? He's fixing
me up. I have her picture. She's not bad. Heavy--but I'm getting heavy too.
She's sort of pretty. Anyhow, even if she weren't pretty, and if the buyer isn't
lying about the dough--her family is supposed to have a mountain of dough--
I'd marry her."

"You've already made up your mind?"

"I'll say I have!"

"And suppose she doesn't want you?"

"I'll see that she does. Don't you think I can?"

"Maybe you can, but I don't like it. It's cold-blooded."

"Cold-blooded!" he said with sudden emotion. "What's cold-blooded about it?
I'd be cold-blooded if I stayed as I am. I see around this marriage and beyond it.
I'll never again go for all the nonsense about marriage. Everybody you lay eyes
on, except perhaps a few like you and me, is born of marriage. Do you see
anything so exceptional or wonderful about it that makes it such a big deal? Why
be fooling around to make this perfect great marriage? What's it going to save
you from? Has it saved anybody--the jerks, the fools, the morons, the schleppers,
the jag-offs, the monkeys, rats, rabbits, or the decent unhappy people or what
you call nice people? They're all married or are born of marriages, so how
can you pretend to me that it makes a difference that Bob loves Mary who
marries Jerry? That's for the movies. Don't you see people pondering how to
marry for love and getting the blood gypped out of them? Because while they're
looking for the best there is--and I figure that's what's wrong with you--
everything else gets lost. It's sad, it's a pity, but it's that way."

I was all the same strongly against him; that he saw. Even if I couldn't just
then consider myself on the active list of lovers and wasn't carrying a live torch
any more for Esther Fenchel. I recognized his face as the face of a man in the
wrong. I thought there was too much noise of life around him for a right decision
to be made. Furthermore, the books I had been reading--I noticed that Simon
was aware of their contribution to my opposition and his eye marked them as
opponents, and there was a little bit of derision in his glance too. But I couldn't
deny or be disloyal to, at the first hard blink of a challenger or because of
derision, things I took seriously and consented to in my private soul as I sat
reading.

"What do you want me to agree with you for? If you believe what you're saying,
it shouldn't make any difference whether I agree or not."

"Oh hell!" he said, sitting forward and looking into me with widened eyes.
"Don't flatter yourself, kid. If you really understood you'd agree. That would
be nice, but I can certainly get along without if I have to. And besides, though
this may not flatter either of us, we're the same and want the same. So you
understand."

I wasn't of that opinion, and not from pride; only because of the facts. Seeing
that he needed me to be similar, however, I kept quiet. And if he was talking
about the mysterious part of parentage, that our organs could receive waves or
quanta of the same length, I didn't know enough about it to differ with him.

"Well, maybe it's as you say. But what makes you think this girl and her
family are going to want you?"

"What are my assets? Well, first of all we're all handsome men in our family.
Even George, if he were normal, would have been. The old lady knew that and
thought we'd capitalize on it. But besides, I'm not marrying a rich girl in order
to live on her dough and have a good time. They'll get full value out of me,
those people. They'll see that I won't lie down and take it easy. I can't. I have
to make money. I'm not one of those guys that give up what they want as soon
as they realize they want it. I want money, and I mean want; and I can handle it.
Those are my assets. So I couldn't be more on the level with them."

You couldn't blame me for listening to this with some amount of skepticism.
But then things like this are done by people with the specific ambition to do
them. I didn't like the way he talked; for instance, the boast that we were
handsome men--it made us sound like studs. However, I couldn't hope that he'd
have another failure; he wasn't that rich in heart that he could make good use
of it.

"Let's see the girl's picture."

He had it in his pants pocket. She seemed young enough, a big girl, with a
pretty good face. I thought she was rather handsome, though not of an open or
easy nature.

"She's attractive, I told you. A little too heavy maybe."

Her name was Charlotte Magnus.

"Magnus? Wasn't it a Magnus truck that delivered coal to the Einhorns?"

"That's her uncle, in the coal business. Four or five big yards. And her father
owns property by the acre. Hotels. Also a few five-and-dime stores. It'll be the
coal business for me. That's where I think the most dough is. I'll ask for a yard
as a wedding present."

"You have it all pretty well figured out."

"Sure. I have something figured out for you too."

"What, am I supposed to get married also?"

"In time, yes, we'll fix you up. Meanwhile you have to help me out. I have to
have some family. I've been told they're family-minded people. They wouldn't
understand or like it, the way we are, and we have to make it look better.
There'll be dinners and such things, and probably a big engagement party. You
don't expect me to go downstate and fetch George here to show them, do you?
No, I have to have you. We need clothes. Do you have any?"

"They're in hock."

"Get them out."

"And what am I going to use for money?"

"Don't you have any at all? I thought you were in some kind of book business
here."

"Mama gets all the money I have to spare."

He said tightly, "All right, don't be wise. I'll take care of all that soon. I'll
raise the dough."

I wondered where his credit might still be good. Perhaps his buyer friend lent
him some money. Anyway, I got a postal order from Simon a few days later, and
when I redeemed the clothes he came to borrow one of my Evanston suits. Soon
he said that he had met Charlotte Magnus. He believed she was already in love
with him.




Chapter XI




Now there's a dark Westminster of a time when a multitude of objects cannot be
clear; they're too dense and there's an island rain, North Sea lightlessness, the
vein of the Thames. That darkness in which resolutions have to be made--it isn't
merely local; it's the same darkness that exists in the fiercest clearnesses of
torrid Messina. And what about the coldness of the rain? That doesn't deheat
foolishness in its residence of the human face, nor take away deception nor
change defects, but this rain is an emblem of the shared condition of all. It
maybe means that what is needed to mitigate the foolishness or dissolve the
deception is always superabundantly about and insistently offered to us--a black
offer in Charing Cross; a gray in Place Pereires where you see so many kinds
and varieties of beings go to and fro in the liquid and fog; a brown in the straight
unity of Wabash Avenue. With the dark, the solvent is in this way offered until
the time when one thing is determined and the offers, mercies, and opportunities
are finished.

The house where I was living on the South Side was a student house within
range of the university chimes and chapel bell when the evenings were still,
and it had a crowded medieval fullness, besides, of hosts inside the narrow
walls, faces in every window, every inch occupied. I had some student book cus-
tomers and even several friends here. In fact I really knew everybody through
the circumstance that Owens, the old Welshman who operated the place, had me
answering telephone calls and distributing the mail in the little varnished hole
called the lobby. This I did in exchange for my rent. And as I sorted the letters
I unavoidably read return addresses and postcards, and, signaling by bell to call
people to the telephone, I had to hear their conversations since there was no
booth. Owens too listened in, he and his spinster sister who was housekeeper;
the door of their stale parlor was always open--the smell of the kitchen gov-
erned over all the other smells of the house--where I at my post in the wicker
rocker two hours every evening could see their after-supper state, their square
pillars of walnut, the madnesses of starched lace, the insects'-eye inspiration
of cut-glass, the screwy detail of fern both fiddle-necked and expanded, the
paintings of fruit, which were full of hardness against liberty, plus the
wheels of blue dishes around the wainscoting. With such equipment making
an arsenal of their views--I mustn't forget the big fixtures of buffalo glass
hanging on three chains--they demonstrated how they were there to stay and
endure. Their tenants were transient, hence the Owenses probably needed
something like this to establish home for themselves, and it was made very
heavy.

Clem Tambow took to visiting me. His father the old politician had died, and
Clem and his brother, now a tap dancer on the Loew's circuit, had divided an
insurance policy. Clem wouldn't say how much he had inherited, out of a queer
personal niceness or privacy, or maybe from superstition. But he had register-
ed at the university, in the psychology department, and was living in the
neighborhood.

"What do you think of the old man leaving me money?" he said, laughing, shy
of his big mouth and carious teeth--he still had the big clear whites of his
eyes and his head furry at the back as when a boy; and he went on confessing
he
trouble of his ugliness to me, being somber about the grief of his nose, but
interrupting his complaints with enormous laughs, suddenly and swiftly moving
his hand to save his cigar from falling. Now that he had money he wore a row of
Perfecto Queens in his coat.

"I didn't appreciate my old man enough. I was all-out for my mother. I mean
out. I would be still, but now she's just plain too old. Can't kid myself a-
bout it any more, especially since I've read a few psychology books."

Speaking of psychology, he always laughed. He said, "I'm only on campus
because of the pussy." And then, a little melancholy, "I have some dough now,
so I may as well harvest. I wouldn't get anywhere otherwise, with this fish
mouth and my nose. Educated girls, you can appeal to their minds, and they
don't expect you to spend too much on them." He couldn't consider himself a
student; he was a sort of fee-paying visitor; he played poker in the law-school
basement and pool at the Reynold's Club and went to a handbook on Fifty-third
Street to bet on horses. If he attended a class he was apt to "haw-haw-haw"
in the big lecture hall at Kent, the amphitheater, at any standard joke of the
science, or from private fun, unpreventably.

"But," he would explain, "that dumbbell was trying to put over some behavior-
ist junk, that all thinking is in words and so it must take place partly in
the throat, in the vocal cords--what he said was 'inhibited sub-vocalization.'
So they got curious as to what happened with mutes, and got some and put dinguses
on their necks and read them syllogisms. But all the stuff was escaping through
the fingers, because of course they talk with their hands. Then they poured
plaster casts on their hands. Well, when the guy got this far I started laughing
--haw-haw! And he asked me to leave."

Clem said this with one of his convulsions of embarrassment and shyness
which then was wiped out by further laughter. Haw-haw-haw! Then a big flush
of delight. Then gloom again, as he recalled his troubles, his having been
shortweighed as to gifts by nature. I tried to tell him that he was wrong and
that he didn't need to make up for anything. It was his ramming time, and his
appearance was strongly virile in spite of exaggerations, such as his mustache,
the gambler's stripe of the $22.50 suits he bought on time--he had the money
but he preferred to pay installments. He said, "Don't be nice to me, Augie. You
don't have to." Sometimes he took the air toward me of an uncle with a nephew
of nearly the same age. He sought middle-agedness. He had decided that he
could appeal to women whose taste was for experience; a little worn, somewhat
bitter, debauched uncle. And that was how he tried to play it.

"Well, what about you, Augie, what's the matter with you?" he said. "What
are you slopping around here for? You've got more possibilities than you know
what to do with. The trouble with you is that you're looking for a manager. Now
you're in cahoots with this Mexican. What are you postponing everything for?"

"What's everything?"

"I don't know. But you lie here in a wicker chair, taking it easy, holding a
book on your chest, and letting time go by when there are a thousand things
you could do."

Clem had a vast idea of what things there were to be had, which was quite
natural when you consider how it wounded and stung him to believe that they
were out of his reach. He meant, I know, money, admiration, women made abso-
lutely helpless before you by love. The goods of fortune. He was disturbed
by these thousand things, and, sometimes, so was I. He insisted that I should
be going somewhere, at least that I should be practicing how to go, that I
should concentrate on how to be necessary, and not be backward but energetic,
absolute, and so forth. And of course I had some restlessness to be taken up into
something greater than myself. I could not shine the star of great individuality
that, by absorbed stoking, became a sun of the world over a throng to whom it
glitters--whom it doesn't necessarily warm but only showers down a Plutarch
radiance. Being necessary, yes, that would be fine and wonderful; but being
Phoebus's boy? I couldn't even dream of it. I never tried to exceed my consti-
tution. In any case, when someone like Clem urged me and praised me, I didn't
listen closely. I had my own counseling system. It wasn't infallible, but it made
mistakes such as I could bear.

Clem wasn't fooling with me on this great topic, but it wasn't his main purpose
to talk to me when he came to the house. He wasn't there to hop me up or
tell me news about Jimmy Klein, who was already married, and the father of a
child, and working in a department store; or about his brother's trying to get
on Broadway big-time. He came because he was after a girl named Mimi Villars
who lived in the house.

Mimi wasn't a student; she waited on tables in a student hash-house on Ellis
Avenue. I had noted her with appreciation, maybe the more fit to judge because I
had no thought of making her myself. She was very fair and ruddy, of a push-
faced tough beauty, long brows continued in very thin pencil slightly upward, like
the lash of the euglena, away from their natural line toward tight blond ears
that had to be looked for amid her curls, and a large mouth, speaking for a soul
of wild appetite, nothing barred; she'd say anything, and had no idea of what
could hinder her. Her hips were long and narrow, her bust was large, and she
wore close-fitting skirts and sweaters and high heels that gave a tight arch of
impatience to the muscles of her calves; her step was small and pretty and her
laughter violent, total, and critical. She didn't much remind me of Willa from the
Symington, also a waitress. Willa, whom I preferred personally, this country girl
--I think I could have been perfectly happy with Willa and lived all my life in
a country town if the chance had ever presented itself. Or, anyhow, I sometimes
tell myself that.

Mimi came from Los Angeles. Her father had been an actor in the silent
movies. She'd speak of him when she wanted to say how she hated Englishmen.
Originally she came to Chicago to study, but she was expelled from the
university for going past the bounds of necking at Greene Hall, in the lounge.
She was a natural for being bounced. You wouldn't doubt that she was capable
of the offense, if it was one, and as for the penalty, it was a favorite subject
of her ferocious humor.

I knew that Clem didn't stand a chance with her. The cause of her strong color
was not sheer health or self-excitement: love also contributed to it. By a
coincidence her lover was one of the customers Padilla had passed on to me, a
man named Hooker Frazer who was a graduate assistant in Political Science. He
was hard to deal with, for he ordered rare and out-of-print books. Two volumes
of Nietzsche's Will to Power I had a hell of a time swiping, for they were in
a closed case at the Economy Book Store; I also got him Hegel's Philosophy of
Right, as well as the last volumes of Capital from the Communist bookshop on
Division Street, Herzen's Autobiography, and some de Tocqueville. He bargain-
ed keenly, just as he spoke keenly, with unusual concision, and he was a man
the university ought to have been pleased about, with his tall, free look of
intelligence early crow-footed from the practice of consideration, a young
Calhoun or statesman already, with clear blue spaces indicative of rigorous
consistency and an untimely wrinkle, like the writing of a seismograph. He was
not one of those tall men of whom you think that they must come in sections of
different mechanical principle, but was not awkward although his posture was
loose. The fact that he lived in Burton Court, so much like a new Christ Church
or Magdalen, and in a don's state, that learned bachelorhood, itself fetched me.
It didn't Padilla, with his stiff nose of Gizeh's mummy and livid eye-patches, his
narrow vault of shoulders and back, and his hard, sharp step on the getting-to-
be-venerable stones. Manny came from a high mountain slum and had a culture-
less disposition. He didn't go in for the Old World much.

But Hooker Frazer was Mimi Villars' man, and, seeing them together on the
stairs of Owens' house, I admired them, both made so well, she hard and
spirited, editing her words for no one, and he so distinct-looking he might
have been lineally direct from Cro-Magnon man--but of course with present-day
differences, including the disorders. He had a temper that didn't go with the rest
of him, with his composure and even toploftiness. His teeth were often set hard,
and his straight nose ended in a nervous fancifulness that must have originated
in character rather than inheritance. But even Padilla, who didn't like him
much, said he was muy hombre, a considerable man. Padilla was, however, down
on him for his condescension to us; to me more than to him, for Frazer was a-
ware that Padilla was a genius at mathematical physics. But he called us both
"mister," as though he were a West Pointer, and treated us like amusing thieves.
As if he wasn't a receiver of stolen goods himself. He'd say, "Mr. March, will
you take a trip downtown and expropriate from the expropriators a good copy of
the Esprit des Lois? The other day I noticed one at the Argus." I'd laugh out
loud at his mixture of pompousness and revolutionist's jargon and his amended
Tennessee accent. At first he seemed to consider me an agreeable nitwit and
joshed me about my color. "Anybody would say that you spent your days in the
cow pasture, Mr. March, from your rosiness, instead of breathing the air of
bookshops." Later he was more grave with me and offered me old copies of
Communist and Trotskyist papers and magazines--he had them in stacks, sheaves,
and bundles in his room, in various languages; he received all kinds of jour-
nals and bulletins. He even invited me once to hear him lecture, but that may
have been because I was his cheap source of supply; I extended him credit, and
he wanted to stay on good terms with me. Padilla threw fits when he heard that
I gave him books on the cuff; I thought he would haul off and punch me with his
skinny, long-fingered fist; he screamed at me, "Bobo!" and "you gringo dummy!"
And I said I'd stop Frazer's credit at twenty-five dollars. It was a lie to
calm him; he was already into me for nearer to forty. "Shit! I wouldn't give him
a penny. This is just the way he shows he's better than you," Manny said. But I
wasn't affected. Probably I too much enjoyed delivering a few books to Frazer
for the chance of spending half an hour in the atmosphere of his rooms and
hearing him talk. Often I stole two copies of what he ordered, from curiosity,
to read one myself, and thus had some dull and difficult afternoons.

I never blamed myself for throwing aside such things as didn't let themselves
be read with fervor, for they left nothing with me anyhow, and I took my cue
from Padilla not to vex myself about what didn't come easy. After all, I wasn't
yet in any special business, but merely trying various things on.

But I had to tell Clem that he wouldn't get anywhere with Mimi Villars.

"Why," he said, "because I'm so homely? I figure her for the kind that doesn't
care about looks. She's a hot girl."

"Your looks have nothing to do with it. She has a man already."

"What, and you think she'll never have another one? That's how much you
know."

So he backed his belief about her stubbornly, and came to sit with me, wash-
ed and fresh-shaved, long black shoes gleaming, and acted with his depressed
gallantry, practicing it even on me, lacking only laces and swords to be a
follower of decayed Stuarts in exile--his heavy drama of boredom. Only his
unlicked electric fur of boyish back-hair and the soft glossiness of his eye
whites and his haw-haw! told a different story about him. I was glad of his
company. But of course I couldn't tell him all I knew about Mimi. It wasn't
only that I read postcards and couldn't help listening to telephone conversa-
tions; it was that Mimi didn't care about secrecy. She led a proclaimed life,
and once she got talking she held back nothing. Frazer would occasionally send
her a card breaking a date, and she would go into a temper, flinging it away,
and say to me furiously, tearing open the clasp of her purse, "Sell me a slug";
and to him on the phone she'd say, "You yellow bastard, can't you call me and
tell me why you won't come? Don't give me any of that old crap about working on
your thesis! What were you doing on Fifty-seventh Street the other night with
those fat goofs when you were supposed to be working on it? Who are they? One of
them was an English fairy, I could spot him a mile away. Don't tell me I don't
understand. I'm tired of your bullshit, you preacher!"

In her breathers, I could hear his voice going on measuredly as I sprawled and
listened in the rocker. And then Owens' beefy wrist would come out to fetch the
door and slam it. He didn't care what tenants did in their rooms, but he didn't
like her swearing to reach his parlor--he was sitting in there on his leather,
crunching like dry snow; his main sounds were, at close range, breathing, and,
at a distance, turning his weight. "You'll never live to hear me beg for anything,"
were Mimi's last words to Frazer, and when she slammed phone and hook together
with cruelty it was as a musician might shut the piano after he had finished
storming chords of mightiest difficulty without a single flinch or error.

To rip off a piece of lover's temper was pleasure in her deepest vein of en-
joyment. She said to me then, "If that bastard calls back, tell him I ran out
of the house swearing." However, she would be waiting for his next call.

What made me sure, though, that she would have no interest in Clem, at least
for the time being, was that lately Frazer had been phoning with regularity, and
she took her time about descending when I buzzed her. He, knowing it was I that
answered the phone, said, "Can't you get her to make it a little faster, Mr.
March?" To which I said, "I can try, but I'm not King Canute, you know," and
let the big club of the receiver hang from the cord.

"What do you want?" were her first words when she laid her burning cigarette
on the instrument box. "I can't talk to you. I'm stymied. If you want to find out
how I am you can come over in person and ask." And then in her joyful, reckless
way of welcoming her anger, "All right, if you don't care, I don't care either.
No, I haven't come around yet, but don't worry, you won't have to marry me. I
wouldn't marry a man who doesn't know what love is. You don't want a wife,
you want a looking glass. What! What do you mean, money! You still owe me forty-
seven dollars. That's okay. I don't care what it was spent for. If I'm up the
stump I'll take care of it myself. Sure you owe everybody. Don't give me that
kind of stuff. Tell it to your wife. She seems to swallow everything."

Frazer was not yet divorced from his first wife, from whom Mimi, in her ver-
sion of it, had rescued him. "Do you remember a picture called The Island of
Dr. Moreau? This mad scientist made men and women out of animals? And they
called the laboratory 'The House of Pain'? Well, with his wife he was living like
one of those animals," she once told me, speaking of how she had first found
him. "This girl had a flat--you wouldn't believe a man like Hooker could live in
it; no matter what I think of his personality, he's intelligent, he has ideas; when
he was a Communist he was chosen to go study at the Lenin Institute, where
they train national leaders like Cachin and Mao; he didn't make it because he
was expelled over the German question. Well, in this flat there were chenille
rugs in the toilet so you felt you were doing wrong, going in your shoes. A man
can't do anything while putting up with that. Women really are no good, Augie,"
she declared with her characteristic and favorite humorous rage. "They're no
fucking good. They want a man in the house. Just there, in the house. Sitting in
his chair. They pretend to take what he thinks and says seriously. Is it about
government? Is it about astronomy? So they play along and make believe they
care about parties and stars. They baby men, and they don't care what game they
play, just so there's a man in the house. If the husband is a Socialist, she's a
Socialist, hotter than he, and if he changes into a Technocrat she beats him to
it --she makes him think so. All she really cares about is to have a man in the
house and doesn't give a hoot in hell what she says she is. And it isn't even
hypocritical, it's deeper than that. It's having the man." With things like this--
and it was one of many--Mimi tried to pierce you through. Sufficiently said, I
suppose, the thing was true for her. She believed in words, in speaking, and if
she convinced you, then she herself could believe what her inspiration told her.
And when it came to speaking, she had borrowed some from Frazer--that private
forensic method that didn't always seem quite right in personal conversation:
he with his long knees spread and elbows resting on them, hands clasped, perfect
earnestness of eyes, and, as a further warrant of plain talk, the straight white
middle part of his sandy hair. Mimi followed his manner as much as she might,
and she had more knottedness in her and passion, and the speed you can get from
narrow gauge and high compression.

She was, as Einhorn had rightly said that I was, in opposition; only she named
names and wrongs, and was an attacker where I had other ways, temperamentally,
and she didn't persuade me. I didn't believe she was right because emphatic.
"Well," she said, "if you don't agree with me, why are you quiet? Why don't
you say what you think instead of turning down what I say by grinning? You try
to look more simple than you are, and it isn't honest. But if you know better,
come on and speak up."

"No," I said, "I don't know. But I don't like low opinions, and when you
speak them out it commits you and you become a slave of them. Talk will lead
people on until they convince their minds of things they can't feel true."

She took this as a harder criticism of her than I had meant it to be, and
answered me nastily with a kind of cat's electric friction and meanness of
her face.

"Why, you're a, lousy bonehead! If you don't even know how to be indignant
--why, Christ, even a cow gets indignant! And what do you mean, low! You
want to have high opinions of garbage? What do you want to become, a sewage
plant? Hell, I say no! If a thing is bad it's bad, and if you don't hate it
you kiss it on the sly."

She shot it off in my face that I wasn't mad enough about abominations or
aware enough of them, didn't know how many graves were underneath my feet,
was lacking in disgust, wasn't hard enough against horrors or wrathful about
swindles. The worst of which swindles was in getting terrible payment for what
should be a loving exchange of bodies and the foundation of all the true things
of life. The women to blame for this were far worse than whores. And I guess
that she exploded against me in this conversation because I wasn't enough of
an enemy of such things but smiled at such ruining wives too for their female
softnesses. I was too indulgent about them, about the beds that would be first
stale and then poisonous because their manageresses' thoughts were on the
conquering power of chenille and dimity and the suffocation of light by cur-
tains, and the bourgeois ambering of adventuring man in parlor upholstery. These
things not appearing so threatening to me as they ought to appear, I was, on this
topic anyhow, a fool to her, one who also could be stuck, leg-bent, in that white
spiders' secretion and paralyzed inside women's edifices of safety. She had torn
Frazer out of that. He was worth saving.

And here I could see what a value she set on the intelligence of men. If they
didn't breathe the most difficult air of effort and nobility, then she wished
for them the commonplace death in the gas cloud of settled existence, office
bondage, quiet-store-festering, unrecognized despair of marriage without hope,
or the commonness of resentment that grows unknown boils in one's heart or
bulbs of snarling flowers. She had a high, absolute standard, and she preferred
people to miss it from suffering, vice, being criminal or perverted, or of loony
impulse. I learned about her when I knew her better that she was a thief too; she
stole her clothes from department stores, stole a good deal, since she liked to
dress well, and had even been arrested but got off on suspended sentence. Her
method was to put on layers of dresses in the fitting booths, also underpants
and slips; and the way she had gotten out of the rap was to convince the court
psychiatrist that she had money and could pay but was afflicted with klepto-
mania. She was proud of this and urged me to do the same should I be caught--
she knew of course that I was lifting books. There was another thing of
which she was not so proud. About a year before, late one night as she was
passing an alley on Kimbark Avenue, a stickup man had tried to take her
pocketbook, and she had kicked him in the groin, snatched the gun when he
dropped it, and shot him through the thigh. It made her wretched to remember
this, and when she talked about it her hands became nervous and worked inward
at her waist--which was small: she drew notice to its smallness by wearing
broad belts--and her color got rough enough to be a symptom of scarlatina.
She tried to get into Bridewell Hospital to see him, and wasn't allowed.

"The poor guy," she said, and this was remorse over her savage speed and rash-
ness as well as pity for this boy, haunting the mouth of an alley with that toy
of swift decisions. For the robbery money can shrink mighty small, and you can
soon handle the satisfaction out of it, but having someone do precisely what you
say is a thing of a different order. And a woman too. She didn't interpret this as
cowardice of the assailant but as special mark of crude love appeal, that a city-
tutored rough child struggled for his instinct and was less cared about, provi-
dentially speaking, than the animal in the woods who was at least in the keeping
of nature. Well, she had to go to court and testify, to explain why she had shot
him. She didn't, however, want to bring charges, and she tried to speak a piece
to the judge and was prevented. So the boy was given five years for armed rob-
bery, and now she sent him packages and letters. Not because she feared harm
from him when he got out, but out of remorse.

This time she wasn't up the stump, as she spoke of it. Eventually she was able
to give Frazer better news. But she made him wait for it. She wanted him to
worry, or to give him practice in learning to worry about her and not about
himself. She was not easy toward him. She knew it was unequal, that she loved
him more than he could her or anyone. But neither was love his calling, as it was
hers. And she was very severe and exalted about this. She too could have lived
in desert wilderness for the sake of it, and have eaten locusts.

The thing I began to learn from her was of the utmost importance; namely, that
everyone sees to it his fate is shared. Or tries to see to it. You may say that
I should have known this before. I should have, and in a way I did, or else
Grandma Lausch or Einhorn or the Renlings would have had more success with
me. But it was never so clear in anyone as in Mimi Villars, whose actual body
was her recruiting place and who more conspicuously issued her own warrant,
license, diploma, asserting what she was, and she had no usual place of legit-
imate activity, like a store, office, or family, or membership anywhere, but
banked all on her clinching will, her hard reason, and her obstinate voice. I
think she must have recognized--and how could it fail to give her sharp pain?--
the contradiction of harsh persuasion to such a love belief as hers. But the
thick rind of world-organized resistance made that inevitable. Well, that too
was a fate to be shared and another underlying bitterness.

By the end of summer we were already close friends and under suspicion by
Tambow of being more. But there was nothing to that except his envious al-
though not grudging imagination, backed by such slight apparent proof as that
she came into my room in her petticoat. This was only because we lived on the
same floor. She went into Kayo Obermark's the same way--we had the attic be-
tween the three of us; it just was proximity; even if provocation was never far
away it came simply from unremitting practice, like that of the fiddler who has
a rubber ball in the pocket of his great alpacuna as he rides the train to a
concert and is never far from, for him, the greatest thing, along the accident-
als and slides of landscape and steel rail. No, she came to borrow a cigarette
or to use the closet where she kept the overflow of her dresses. Or to talk.

We now had something more to talk about, for by and by we found we had
another connection. It was through that swarthy Sylvester for whom I used to
pass out movie handbills and who had tried to make a Communist of Simon. He
had never finished his degree at Armour Tech. He said it was from lack of dough
and hinted also his political assignment elsewhere, but it was everybody's
thought that he had washed out. Be that as it might, he was living in New York
and working for the subway at a technical job. Under Forty-second Street. He
seemed bound to have occupations in the darkness, and by now this had laid a
peculiar coloring on him, his face darkened sallow and slack-cheeked and his
eyes, injured by worry, now more Turkish from a thickening of the skin by the
continual effort and wrinkling his eyes, probably, at the ruby and green cut
buttons of his burrow office-there where he sat at a drawing board and copied
blueprints and read pamphlets in his leisure time. He had been expelled, like
Frazer, from the Communist party. On charges of Infantile Leftism and Trot-
skyist Deviationism--the terms were queer to me, and just as queer was his
assuming that I understood them. He belonged to another party now, the Trot-
skyites, and was still a Bolshevik, and disclosed that he was never free from
duty, never unassigned, never went anywhere without permission from party
chiefs. Even returning to Chicago, ostensibly to visit his father, the old man
called by Grandma "the Baker," he had a mission, which was to contact Frazer.
So I inferred that Frazer was being recruited to the new party. I happened to
walk behind them on Fifty-seventh Street one day. Sylvester was toting a fat
briefcase and looking up at Frazer and talking with special slowness in a kind
of political accent while Frazer was looking past and over him with aloof gra-
vity and had his hands clasped at his back.

I also saw Sylvester on the stairs of the rooming house, with Mimi. He was, or
had been, Mimi's brother-in-law, married in New York to her sister Annie, who
had now left him and was getting a divorce. I recalled how his first wife threw
stones at him when he tried to come through her father's backyard to talk to
her, and I even remembered the surroundings in which I had heard about this from
him, the grim air of cold Milwaukee Avenue when we peddled razorblades and
glass-cutters with Jimmy Klein. Sylvester wanted Mimi to plead with her sister
for him. "Hell," Mimi told me, as much for my private ear as any of her opinions
were, "if I had known him before they were married I would have told Annie not
to do it. He leaks misery all over. I wonder how she could stand two full years
of him. Young girls do the goddamnedest things. Can you imagine being in bed
with him, and that mud face and those lips? Why, he looks like the frog prince.
I hope now she'll get under the sheets with a young strong stevedore." If
somebody fell against Mimi's lines she had no mercy, and as she listened to
Sylvester she kept in mind her sister bolt upright in a huskier man's clasp and
struggling her arms with pleasure, and it made me for a minute dislike her for
her cruelty that she held her eyes open for Sylvester so that he might look in
and see this. What was to make it an acceptable joke was the supposition that
he couldn't see. No, he probably couldn't.

It needs to be explained that in Mimi's hard view all that you inherited from
the mixing peoples of the past and the chance of parents' encountering like
Texas cattle was your earthy material, which it was your own job to make into
admirable flesh. In other words, applied to Sylvester, he was in large measure to
blame for how he looked; his spirit was a bad kiln. And also it was his fault that
he couldn't keep his wives and girls. "I hear his first one was a dizzy bitch. And
Annie has something of a slut about her too. What makes them go for him at the
start? That really interests me," said Mimi. And she supposed that they must take
his little gloom for real devilishness and expect him to visit their places with
prickles and fire, like a genuine demon; when he failed to, turning out to be mere
uncompleted mud, they threw stones at him, real or figurative. She was savage-
minded, Mimi, and prized her savagery as proof that there was no monkey business
about her; she punished and took blows as the real thing.

That humiliated, bandy-legged, weak-haired, and injured-in-the-eyes Sylvester,
however, the subterranean draftsman and comedy commissar of a Soviet-America-
to-be, teaching himself the manner and even the winner's smile and confidence,
why, he was going to blast off the old travertine and let the gold and marble
shine for a fresh humanity. He tried to impress me with the command he had
over Marxian coal and cotton, plenary dates, factional history, texts of Lenin
and Plekhanov; what he had really was the long-distance dreaming gaze of the
eyes into the future and the pick of phrase, which he smiled and smelled like
a perfume, heavy-lidded. He condescended to me and dutch-uncled me because he
knew that I liked him and wasn't aware how much I knew about him. Which I was
bound to spare him. Anyway, his defects weren't as serious to me as they were
to Mimi.

With me he could be fully confident, and some of his charm couldn't live
except in the presence of confidence. "How's tricks, kid?" he said with a
rejoicing smile--but darkness and bitterness could never wholly leave it any
more--and while he gentled his palms on his double-breasted joint belly and
chest. "What are you up to? Getting by? What are you here, a student? No. A
macher? A proletarian?" This word, even jesting, he pronounced with
veneration.

"Well, a sort of student."

"Our boys," he replied, more deeply smiling. "Anything but honest labor. And
how's your brother Simon? What's he doing? I thought I could recruit him once.
He'd have made a good revolutionary. Where are they going to come from if not
from your kind of background? But I guess I couldn't make him see it. He's very
intelligent though. One day he'll see it himself."


In the peculiar fate of people that makes them fat and rich, when this happens
very swiftly there is the menace of the dreamy state that plunders their real-
ity. Let's say that anyway old age and death would come, so why shouldn't the
passage be comfortable? But this proposal doesn't make a firm mind, in the
strange area where things swim too fast. Against this trouble thought may be
a remedy; force of person is another one, and money and big-scale lavishness,
unpierceable concreteness, organizational deeds. So there are these various
remedies and many more, older ones, but you don't actually have full choice
among all the varieties, especially those older ones of the invisible world.
Most people make do with what they have, and labor in their given visible world,
and this has its own stubborn merit.

Not only did Simon make what he had do, but he went the limit. It astonished
me how he took his objectives and did exactly what he had projected. It was
well-nigh unfair to have called the turns so accurately and to do to people what
he planned while he was still a stranger to them. Charlotte was in love with him.
Not only that, but they were already married, and it wasn't only he who had
hastened and pushed the thing, but she too was in a hurry. Partly because he was
too broke to court her long. He told her that, and she and her parents agreed
they shouldn't waste time. Only, the ceremony was performed out of town to keep
the news out of the papers, and for the rest of the family there had to be an
engagement and a wedding. So Charlotte and her mother had worked it out, and
while Simon paid rent in a good bachelor's club downtown he was actually
living with the Magnuses in their huge old West Side flat.

He came to see me after the one-day honeymoon which was all the secrecy of
the marriage gave them time for. They had been in Wisconsin. Already he had
more new attributes than I could keep track of, draped in comfortable flannel,
owning a new lighter, and effects in his pockets he didn't yet have the hang
of. He said, "The Magnuses have been wonderful to me." There was a new gray
Pontiac at the curb--he showed it to me from the window; and he was learning
the coal business at one of the Magnuses' yards.

"And what about your own yard? Didn't you say--"

"Certainly, I said. They've promised me that as soon as I can run a place
myself. It won't take long. No, it hasn't been so hard," he said further,
understanding my unasked question. "They'd rather have a poor young man. A
poor young man gets up more steam and pressure. They were like that them-
selves, and they know."

Already he didn't look like such a poor young man in the high quality gray
flannel, and shoes with new stitching; his shirt smelled of the store; it
hadn't been to the laundry yet.

"Get dressed, I'm taking you to dinner there," he said. When we were outside,
walking down the path to the car, he took a stiff shot of breath and hawked,
exactly as on the day I went with him to the La Salle Street Station where
apparently I was too dumb to sell papers. Except that this time he had gloomy
big rings round his eyes; and we sat down in the car, which had that sour spice
of new rubber and car upholstery. It was the first time I had seen him drive.
He swung it round like a veteran, even somewhat recklessly.

So I was taken into that hot interior of lamps and rugs, to the Magnuses'.
Everything was ungainly there, roomy and oversized. The very parrots painted
on the lampshades were as big as Rhode Island Reds. The Magnuses too were
big; they had a Netherlandish breadth of bone. My sister-in-law was of that
size also, and was aware or shy of it as indelicacy, giving me the touch of her
hand as though it were a smaller one. She needn't have. It's difficult when
outsized people worry about their presentation, and women especially, who have
secret dismay of grossness. She had remarkably handsome eyes, soft, with oc-
casional lights of distaste though, shrewd, and expressing immense power of
management; but also they were warm. So was her bosom, which was abundant,
and she had large hips. She was on her guard with me, as if afraid of my
criticism, of what I would say to Simon the first time we were alone. She must
have convinced herself that he had done her a great favor by marrying her, he
was so obviously smart and good-looking, and at the same time she was swept
with resentment lest she shouldn't be thought good enough or the money be too
much remembered. The issue most alive was whether he would have married her
without money. It was much too troubling not to be spoken of, so it was spoken
of in a kind of fun and terrible persiflage. Simon did it with the kind of coarse-
ness that has to be laughed at because to take it seriously would be murder
--his saying, for instance, when the three of us were left alone in the parlor
to become acquainted, "Nobody's ever been laid better at any price." It was so
ambiguous and inside-out as to who had paid the price that it had to be taken as
amusing, and she hurried and came down from a romantic, sentimental position
and denied it all by pretending that this randy talk was the joke of sincerity and
deep underlying agreement, a more realistic sort of love. But leaning above him
like a kind of flounced Pisan tower construction--she dressed with luxury and
daring--keeping a hand on his hair, she had instants of great difficulty before
me.

She had difficulty only for a while, until she absorbed from Simon the attitude
that I was a featherhead, affectionate but not long on good sense. She soon
enough learned to deal with me. But it was painful until she found confidence,
and I suppose that at the time she hadn't recovered from the honeymoon, which,
Simon had been frank to tell me, was awful. He didn't specify in which way, but
he expressed enough to make it profoundly believable; he had some notes in the
end of the scale that I would rather not have heard played for the consents to
death that rang in them, but I was forced to listen to all he had, struck right
on the key and sounded from top to bottom. I could be sure these said-in-jest
things were the weirdest of their kind ever to be laughed at and spoken in that
carpeted peace and brown-gravy velour. It was all supposed to pass for fun and
bridegroom's lustiness, energy, and play-wickedness, and it came through to me
that he was being tortured by thought of suicide, stronger than a mere hint, but
simultaneously he could dive to clasp his compensations, such as his pride in
audaciousness and strength of nerve and body or the luxury he was coming into,
and furthermore, a certain recklessness in demands: the sense of what he could
do and what he could exact without caring what anybody thought was much to
him.

Then the family came in, wondering what type of person I might be. I
wondered at them no less. They were so big you thought what could prevent
them from handling even Simon and me like children, though we were by no
means midgety--Simon was nearly six feet tall and I only an inch shorter than
he. It was their width that made the difference, and even now that he was getting
stout Simon didn't begin to approach them. They were substantial in their lives
as in girth; they made their old people respected--there was a grandmother there
that evening--and they bought the best of everything, clothes, furniture, or
machinery. Also they were grateful for entertainment and admired speed of wit,
which they didn't have themselves, and dramatic self-presentation, which Simon
gave them. He more than pleased them and more than made a big hit. He went
both deep and far into the place of star and sovereign. They had patriarchs and
matriarchs but they had no prince before him. To make this of himself, the
prince, he went through a metamorphosis. That was the next of my astonishments.
Elsewhere I've said that he had always, even when silent, been noticeable. But
he wasn't silent any more, and his old reserve was gone to pieces; he was bois-
terous, capricious, haughty, critical, arbitrary, mimicking and deviling, and he
crowed, croaked, made faces and had the table all but spinning in this dining
room of stable and upright wealth. I saw Grandma's satire in him, across the
plaited white bread and the sprigged fish and candles--yes, the old woman's
hardness of invention and travestying savagery, even certain Russian screams.
I didn't know Simon had gotten so much from her. I could draw my mind back
over some six or seven hundred Friday nights and see his uncommenting eyes
follow a performance of the old woman's. And how deep that had sunk in, with-
out even appearing to. At the shrieks he caused I nearly heard her comment of
disdain, a disdain of which Simon was not all innocent either. He both borrow-
ed from her and burlesqued her. His appearance was new in more than one way;
more was new than the shirt, or the jewel on his finger and minor gems in his
cuffs, or even the fat, and the haggardness from unwanted thought that lit on
him in instants between the turns of his performance. The task of doing bold
things with an unhappy gut, that was it. In a way he made them meet the expense
of this too, as when he imitated his good queen mother-in-law's accent. But it
was just the opposite of offensive to her and to them all; it was grand and up-
roarious.

However, he wasn't just their entertainer; when he turned grave and stopped the
vaudeville with a pair of somber eyes he got earnest silence for the speech he
was going to make, and a full weight of respect.

He spoke to me, but of course his words were in large part for them. "Augie,"
he said, putting his arm around Charlotte--she laid her painted nails on his
hand --"you can see how unlucky we were not to have this kind of close and loyal
family. There isn't anything these people won't do for one another. We don't
even understand what that is because we never experienced it, we missed it all
our lives. We had no luck. Now they've taken me in and made me one of them,
as if I were their own child. I never understood what a real family was till now,
and you ought to know how grateful I am. They may seem a little slowwitted to
you"--Mr. and Mrs. Magnus didn't quite get this, Simon's tone being enough for
them and the fine satisfaction they took in him, but Charlotte was seized with
a laugh in the throat at this mischief interrupting his seriousness--"but they
have something you'll have to learn to appreciate, and that's their kindness and
the way they stick by their own."

When he scrawled this on me, I had a fit of hate for the fat person he was
becoming, and I wanted to say, "This is crummy, to boost them and tear down
your own. What's the matter with Mama or even Grandma?" But then what he said
of the Magnuses had its truth, you couldn't miss it. I was a sucker for it too,
family love. And though Simon did this thing in a bad gross way I doubt that he
could have been absolutely insincere and putting on. Finding yourself amongst
warm faces, why, there're many objections that recede, as when enemy women
may kiss. Many common lies and hypocrisies are like that, just out of the
harmony of the moment. And with Simon there was also a revulsion from his
gnawing trouble and his need to get some breath on his Valley of Ezekiel slain.
Therefore he was building up his causes for gratitude. And therefore, also, I
answered nothing.

As he had said this to me, however, they were watching and were suspicious
because I didn't grab a piece of this love feast. I had consented to play his
game, but I wasn't fast enough to do everything. I had a sea of feeling of my
own which I was straining under. And then I think all their unresolved suspicions
about Simon came to gather on me. They seemed to expect me to clear myself--
all, in their ruddiness and size, including the granny who was dissolving from
both, losing color and getting small, an old creature in black, wearing pious wig
and amulets, who looked to have metaphysical judgmental powers. Well, they
owned stores; maybe they smelled a thief in me. Anyway, they looked at me so
acutely that I could perceive myself with their eyes, just about, my sizable
head and uncommitted smile, my untrained and anti-disciplinary hair. Instead
of asking, "Who are they?" about both Simon and me, they could demand of
themselves, "Who is he?" Indeed, who was I to be sharing their gold soup of
supper light and putting their good spoons in my mouth?

Observing this difficulty, Simon quickly came up with a remedy, saying,
"Augie is a good kid, he just doesn't know his own mind yet." They were glad
to be reassured about me; all they asked was that I should be regular, that I
should speak up more, make a few jokes, laugh when all laughed. I ought not to
be so different from Simon. Of course there was an obstacle to being like him,
which was that I hadn't yet grasped him in his new character. But I soon caught
on a little and made myself more acceptable, even welcome, by joining in the
fun and dancing in the parlor after dinner. The only nearly serious hitch,
with Mr. Magnus, was that I didn't know how to play pinochle. How was it that
a decently brought-up young fellow didn't know how? Otherwise an indulgent
easygoing character, Mr. Magnus was dissatisfied about this. Like Talleyrand
making a tight mouth about the man who didn't play whist. Simon could play
pinochle. (Where had he learned? Well, where, for that matter, had all his new
accomplishments come from?) "Oh, Augie is a sort of studious type and he
doesn't go in for such things," he said. This wasn't good enough for Mr.
Magnus, with the long gray threads of baldness on his robust head. "I don't
like a young man should gamble either," he said. "But he should play a friendly
game." I felt he wasn't unjustified. "I'll play if you teach me," I said,
which went a long way toward improving the situation and making me one of the
house. I sat in a corner with some of the younger children to study pinochle.

More relatives came; the vast apartment filled. It was family custom on Fri-
day night, and, moreover, the word was out that Charlotte was engaged. People
wanted to see Simon. He already knew most of them, the giant uncles and hea-
vy-pelted aunts in their Siberian furs who came up from their Cadillacs and
Packards: Uncle Charlie Magnus who owned the coal yards; Uncle Artie who
owned a big mattress factory; Uncle Robby who was a commission merchant in
South Water Street, ponderous, white, and caracul-haired--like Stiva Lausch--
and with a hearing-aid plugged in. There were sons in uniform, from military
academy, and others with football letters, and daughters, and little children.
Simon was ready for the uncles and aunts, very familiar and even already
overbearing to some. He had a natural hang of their whole system of fellowship
and contempt--how not to be caught under any circumstances in a position
where to be looked down on was unavoidable, so that you could read in a back,
bearishly turned, that you were a schmuck.

I have to say that Simon's confidence was superb, and it was he who was
getting them under, though he was deferential with a few of the women. Toward
these, heartiness or brazening wasn't indicated, but what was necessary was to
prove that in addition to everything he was also a lover. I must say also that
he had no embarrassment because of me; he assumed my complicity and was
teaching and leading me. So I followed him around, because there was nobody
else for me to stand close to comfortably. It lacked white stockings and fans to
resemble the Directorate--I'm thinking of commoners suddenly in the palaces of
power. But the Magnuses seemed less to know what to do. However, in all the
world there was no one who had more than they of anything except money--a
gap that could perhaps be closed.

Over this tumultuousness and family heat, melding yells at the pinochle table,
the racing of the kids, pitchers of cocoa and tea and masses of coffee cake
carried in, political booming and the sharper neighing of women and all this
grand vital discord, there was the supervision of Uncle Charlie standing, or
rather rearing, beside his wigged mother in her black dress. If it strikes me as
advisable to add "rearing" it is because of the tightness of his belly and the
great weight supported by his feet, and possibly also because the old woman
wore a collar of things in gold shaped like grizzly-teeth, and that reminds me
of creatures. He was white, thick, and peevish, and had the kind of insolence
that sometimes affects the eyes like snowblindness, making you think there's
something arctic about having a million bucks. At least an immigrant who
during the Depression was a millionaire had this dazzle. Not that Uncle Charlie
was formidable in all respects; I'm taking him at a posed moment, during a
family occasion, a niece to be married off and new kin to be added.

Through Simon I had got to be a candidate too. If he worked out well then I
might also be considered as a husband, for there wasn't any lack of daughters
to marry, some of them pretty and all with money. So far Simon had had nothing
but successes. For several weeks he had been working under Uncle Charlie's
eye, first as weighmaster and cashier and then learning to buy, meeting brokers
and salesmen and learning about freight rates and the different coal fields. Uncle
Charlie certified that he was fehig, or apt, a naturally good businesshead, and
all were very pleased. Simon was already looking for a yard of his own, hoping
to find one with an overhead track that would reduce unloading costs. In short,
Uncle Charlie was extremely indulgent with him as an up-and-comer, and he rec-
eived all the marks of the old boy's favor, the simple cordial obscenities and
hand on the shoulder; he wagged his head near Simon's face and opened up all
bounties. His humor made everybody laugh with pleasure. Nobody thought to
remonstrate about children and young girls when Uncle Charlie said, "Sonofa-
bitch, you're fo-kay, my boy, fo-kay. You got the goods. I think you can put
it down between the sheets too, eh?" because this was just his usual manner
of speaking.

"What do you think?" said Simon. "Leave it to me."

"Yes, I think. I leave it to you. You think I'm goin' to take it myself?
Wouldn't be fun for Charlotte. Look how she's built. Nothing was left out.
She has to have a young husk."

Here I came in for my share of the notice. Kelly Weintraub, one of the distant
cousins by marriage and a trucker who worked for Uncle Robby, said, "Look at
his brother. The girls are popping their eyes out at him. Your daughter Lucy
the worst. You got no shame, kid? In this family the girls can't hardly wait."

There were shrieks about this. Through them Lucy Magnus continued to smile
at me though her color deeply changed. She was slighter than most of her
family; she wasn't shy to make a declaration of honest sensuality under the
scrutiny of the whole clan. None of the Magnuses took the trouble to conceal
such things; it wasn't necessary. The young ones could tell their parents exactly
what they wanted, which I found admirable. I could look at Lucy with pleasure
too. She was plain but had a healthy face, very clear skin, and pretty breasts that
she swung where she pleased. Only her nose might have been finer; it was a little
broad, as was her mouth, but her black eyes were strong and declarative, and her
hair black and delicate. It made me think of her maiden hair and there were
suggestions I didn't try at all to evade. But these were lover's not husbandly
thoughts. I had no special mind to get married. I saw Simon's difficulties too
clearly for that.

"Come here," said her father to me, and I had to stand close inspection. "What
do you do?" he said, winking with the full snowblindness.

Simon answered for me, "He's in the book business. Until he saves enough to
go back to the university and finish his degree."

"Shut up!" he said. "C--sucker! I asked him, not you, budinski! What do you
do?"

I said, "I'm in the book business, as Simon told you." I thought the old man
must be able to pierce by strength of suspicion my crookery, all the oddity of
Owens' house and my friends there. What a book business could signify to him
but starving Pentateuch peddlers with beards full of Polish lice and feet wrapped
in sacking, I couldn't fathom.

"Goddammit the schools. There's schoolboys now until gray hair. So what are
you studying for, a lawyer? Fo-kay! I guess we got to have them, the crooks. My
sons don't go to school. My daughters go, so long it keeps them out of trouble."

"Augie was thinking of going to law school," Simon said to Lucy's mother.

"Yes, that's right," I too said.

"Fine, fine, fine, fine," said Uncle Charlie, my hearing done and his face of
thick white hide turned in dismissal from us all; he threatened with his intensest
care his daughter Lucy, who answered him with one of her smiles. I saw that she
promised him obedience and he promised back the satisfaction of all legitimate
needs as long as she obeyed him.

There was another special glance on me, that of my sister-in-law Charlotte,
with her investigative, warm, and to some extent despairing eyes. I don't doubt
that she already knew some displeasing things about Simon, and perhaps she
was trying to see them in me also. I presume she was thinking what risks her
cousin Lucy ran with me.

Meanwhile Kelly Weintraub was saying, "He has a pair of bedroom eyes, Augie."
But I was the only one of the principals to hear and I took a good look at
him to see how much harm he really meant me and to what extent he was kidding,
the handsome teameo, slick-haired, with certainly horny eyes of his own and a
suggestive pad of a chin.

"I know you guys," he said to me.

Then I recognized him, not greatly different, really, from what he had been in
the schoolyard, in his sweaters.

"You had a little brother, George."

"We still have him. He's not little any more," I said. "He's big and he's living
downstate."

"Where, in Manteno?"

"No, it's in another town, a little place down near Pinckneyville. You know
that part of the state?" I didn't know it myself. Simon was the only one of us
who had ever gone down there, the Renlings having been unable at that time to
spare me.

"No, I don't. But I remember George," he said.

"I remember you too, skitching rides on the ice wagons." I shrugged, smiling.
It was foolish of him to be suggesting a menace. He thought he could put a stick
in Simon's spokes; Simon was way ahead of him.

"Of course Charlotte knows," said Simon when I told him about Kelly Weintraub.
"Why should we make a secret of it? She even wants to put George into a private
institution. Don't worry, nobody pays any attention to this guy. He doesn't
count around here. Anyhow, I recognized him first and got the jump on him.
Leave it to me, I have them all eating out of my hand." He added, "You'll
be doing the same if you'll listen to me. You made a good first impression."

I quickly learned what power he really had with them. For he had absolutely
meant it when he said he had plans for me, and he came for me several times a
week to take me on his rounds. We had lunch with uncles and cousins in the rich
businessmen's restaurants and clubs, fancy steakhouses. Simon was hard with
them and didn't yield ground whether it was a joke or an argument that came up,
while in an undertone he gave me the lowdown on them, contemptuously. I saw
him developing some terrible abilities in quarrelsomeness; he differed with
all their opinions no matter on what subject. It might be about tailors, or
entertainers, or heavyweight fighters, or politics--things on which he informed
himself as he went along. He was impatient even in his jokes; he made waiters
fear him, sending dishes back to the kitchen, but then he gave large tips also.
He seemed to have no regard for money--he always carried a big bankroll now--
but actually, by the way he handled wallet and the bills, he convinced me that
he knew what he was doing.

He said to me, "With these people you've got to spend. If they see you cau-
tious with a buck, you lose your standing with them. And I have to stand in
good. They know everybody, and I'm going out for myself soon and I need them.
Just these bull-session lunches and going to the Chez Paree and the Glass Derby,
proving I can keep up their speed, you see, that's the first thing. They're
not going to deal with anybody that's not one of them. Now you understand why
a slob like Kelly Weintraub doesn't count. He can't afford to eat lunch in joints
like these, he can't take a check at the Chez Paree without everybody being
uncomfortable and reckoning he can't afford it, because they know exactly what
he's pulling down a week. You see, he's a negligible factor and nobody will
listen to him. I'll remember him though," he said with dangerous promise. I
knew he kept a file of accounts to settle. Did Cissy and Five Properties have
a folder in it to themselves? I thought they must.

"Ah!" he said. "Come downtown with me. Let's get our hair cut."

We drove to the Palmer House and went below into the big radiance of the
barbershop. Simon would have let his fine English coat fall to the ground if the
Negro attendant hadn't run in time to gather it in his arms. We sat before the
huge mirrors in those episcopal machines, the big chairs, and were groomed and
shampooed. Simon had himself steamed and singed, manicured, had everything
lavished on himself, and not simply urged me but forced me to do as he did. He
wanted to try all they knew how to do.

It was getting so that I had to undergo an examination of almost brass-hat
severity when I appeared before him. My heels must not be turned over by so
much as an eighth of an inch, my cuffs had to strike my shoes right, he supplied
me with ties, taking mine away and leaving a dozen of his own choice on the
rack. He yelled and bullied if he thought I didn't wear my clothes exactly as he
thought I should. And these were things I had lost interest in since Evanston. I
had to expect ridicule from Mimi for having polished nails. I let it be done. I
didn't consider my fingers much. It was probably an asset to me as a book thief.
Looking at my hands and at my ties, who would suspect me? For I hadn't, of
course, stopped stealing. I didn't any longer have to support Mama; Simon took
care of that. But while he paid for me wherever we went, it was still expensive to
go with him. Occasionally there were tips or drinks or cigars or corsages for
Charlotte that slipped his mind, and I had larger cleaning and laundry bills than
ever before. Once in a while I went, moreover, with Padilla for a Saturday night
with our friends on Lake Park Avenue. And besides, I was trying to get together
the university entrance fee. Shrewdly, Simon gave me little money; mostly he
gave me things. He wanted me to learn to have expensive needs, and the desire
for dough would come of itself. Then if I were to begin to ask him for more, he
could hook me.

From the barbershop we'd go to Field's to buy him a dozen or so shirts, import-
ed Italian underclothes or slacks or shoes, all things of which he already had
a surplus; he showed me drawers, closets, shelves full, and still kept buying.
Some part of this was due to his having been on the wrong side of the counter,
or the servile back on the shoe-fitting stool, and in part this was his way of
tempting me. But also I knew that in the barbershop and on the shopping trips he
was aiming to refresh himself; he slept badly and was looking flabby and ill, and
one morning when he came to fetch me he locked himself in the toilet and cried.
After that day he wouldn't come upstairs; he honked his horn for me in the street.
He said, "I can't stand the joint you live in; they don't keep it clean. Are
you sure they don't have bed animals? And the can is filthy. I don't see how you
can go into it." Soon he took to saying this with the same inspection glare he had
for my appearance. "When are you going to move out of this rat nest! Jesus, it's
the sort of place plagues and epidemics start in!" Eventually he stopped calling
for me. He'd phone when he wanted me; sometimes he'd send wires. At first,
however, he wanted me with him constantly. So, then, we were in the gleaming
lanes and warm indoor puffing of the department store, but after when he started
back to the West Side, wearing one of his new ties and temporarily in a better
state, suddenly he would lose it all, it seemed, and, pressing on the gas pedal,
he must have seen himself speeding across the last boundary of his strength. But
just as the car, squealing around corners, righted itself, he too kept balance.
However, it was evident that his feelings were suicidal from the way he drove
and the way he leaped forward in arguments, hit him who would; he kept a tire
tool under the driver's seat for his weapon in traffic arguments, and he cursed
everybody in the street, running through lights and scattering pedestrians. The
truth back of all this was that he had his pockets full of money as an advance
on his promised ability to make a rich man of himself and now had to deliver.

In spring he leased a yard, at the end of the coal season. It had no overhead
track, only a long spur of siding, and the first rains made a marsh of the whole
place. It had to be drained. The first coal was unloaded in the wet. The office
itself was a shack; the scale needed expensive repairs. His first few thousand
dollars ran out and he had to ask for more; he had a credit to establish with the
brokers, and it was important that he meet his bills on time. Uncle Charlie made
that easier. Nevertheless, there was Uncle Charlie himself to satisfy.

There was, besides, a substantial wage to pay his yard manager and weighmaster,
Happy Kellerman, whom he had lured away from a large old West Side company.
He'd have hired me instead (at perhaps a little less) if I'd been able to handle
the job, and he insisted on my coming. to learn the ropes from Happy, so that
presently I was spending a good amount of time at the office; for when he grab-
bed my wrist and told me, almost drunkenly, with the grime and chapping of the
mouth that comes of long nervous talking, saying low, huskily, viciously,
"There's got to be somebody here I can trust. Got to be!" I couldn't refuse.
However, there was not much that Happy could be dishonest about. He was a beer
saufer, droopy, small, a humorist, wry, drawn, weak, his tone nosy and quinchy,
his pants in creases under his paunch; his nose curved up and presented offended
and timorous nostrils, and he had round, disingenuous eyes in which he showed he
was strongly defended. He was a tío listo, a carnival type, a whorehouse visitor.
His style was that of a hoofer in the lowest circuit, doing a little cane-swing-
ing and heel-and-toe routine, singing, "I went to school with Maggie Murphy,"
and telling smokehouse stories while the goofy audience waited for the naked
star to come out and begin the grinds. He had a repertory of harmless little
jokes, dog yipes, mock farts; his best prank was to come up behind and seize
you by the leg with a Pekinese snarl. By Simon's wish I had to spend afternoons
with him studying the business. Especially since I had heard him weeping in the
can Simon wasn't easy for me to turn down.

Often I relieved Happy at lunch. He hopped a car down to Halsted Street
because he detested walking. Coming back at two, he would shuffle off at the
stop by the driveway, carrying his coat and straw skimmer, vest stuffed with
cigarettes, pencils, and cards--he had his own business card: "Happy Kellerman
representing March's Coal and Coke": a rooster chasing a frantic hen, with the
line beneath, "I mean business." Walking in, he tested the beam of the scale, put
the Times in the stove, walked around the yard, and then, these being the dog
days, great heat, we would sit where the coolness rose from the concrete pit of
the scale. The office had the appearance of a squatter's shack or end house of a
Western street. Over the way was a stockyards siding, dusty animals bawling in
the waiting cars, putting red muzzles to the slats; truck wheels sucked through
the melting tar, the coal split and tarnished on the piles, the burdocks died on
the stalk. There were rats in a corner of the yard who did not stir or go away for
anyone, whole families, nursing, creeping, feeding there. I had never seen them
so domestic, going whither they list, walking by your feet without fear. Simon
bought a pistol--"We need one anyhow," he said--and shot at them, but they
only scattered to come back. They didn't even bother to dig holes, only scooped
out shallow nesting places.

There were a few sales. Happy entered them on the big yellow sheets; an elegant
penman, boastful of his hand, he sat up on the high stool in his flat straw,
feathering out the wide and thin strokes. This old-fashioned bookkeeping desk of
a scratched yellow brought the writer's face to a tiny square of window over the
scale, and at times I saw Simon there, making out checks in the wide triple
checkbook. Writing checks had fascinated him at first. He had wormed out of
me that I owed Padilla two bucks for the satisfaction of paying one of my debts
with his signature. There was no such satisfaction now, as the figures of the
balance took fewer spaces, and he thought of his last audaciousness in money
when he had tried to grab a fast buck in order to marry Cissy. This time he
believed his whole life was staked. He had not merely been shooting his mouth
off the day he had come to tell me he was getting married about how earnest he
was over money; it was now proved by the mental wounds of his face, the death
of its color, and the near-insanity of his behavior. The misery of his look at
this black Sargasso of a yard in its summer stagnation and stifling would some-
times make my blood crawl in me with horror. If I took so much time from my own
enterprises of theft and reading to walk around this yard with him, hands in
pockets, it wouldn't be enough to say it was from solicitude, it was downright
fright. The loose way he handled the pistol shooting at the rats was ominous to
me. And that he complained of seething in his head, saying, "My brains are
going to boil out of my ears."

I had to keep him from clouting Happy once when he misjudged the moment
to grab Simon's leg with his yiping-dog prank. It was a near thing. And just a
while ago he had been laughing with Happy at his stories of being a shill during
the Florida land boom; and about his love affair with a Turkish woman who wouldn't
let him out of the house; and his account of his first dose, when he said, "It
was like getting into a can of hot angleworms." This change from great laughter
to savagery made Happy ready to quit, his big, skillful, poachy eyes morose,
warning, filling up, as I tried to iron things out. For it was up to me to bring
back the peace. "I never took no shit in bigger concerns," said Happy from
the corner of his mouth to me, but that Simon should hear. I knew that Simon
had a strongly beating heart by the way his head hung downward, his mouth
open on that still unmended front tooth, and that his craving which he would of
necessity fight off was to take Happy by the seat of the pants and throw him
into the street.

At last Simon said, "Okay, I want to say I'm sorry. I'm kind of nervous today.
You ought to realize, Happy…" Thought of the Magnuses had overcome him,
and a horror of so far forgetting that he was a young man in business and Happy
merely a drip as to get himself towering about this nonsense. Simon's patience
and swallowing were worse to me than his wrath or flamboyance--that shabby
compulsory physical patience. Another such hard thing was his speaking low
and with an air of difficult endurance to Charlotte on the telephone and
answering her questions with subdued repetitiousness, near the surrender point.

"Well," he said to Happy and me, "why don't you two take the car and go see
some of the dealers? Try to drum up some trade. Here's five bucks for beer mon-
ey. I'll stay here with Coxie and try to get that back fence in shape. They'll
steal us blind of we don't do something about it." Cox was the handyman, an old
wino in a slap-happy painter's cap that looked like an Italian officer's lid.
He sent him scouting along the fence of the Westinghouse plant for old planks.
Coxie worked for hamburgers and a bottle of California K. Arakelian's sherry or
of yocky-dock. He was watchman too, and slept on rags back of the green lattice
before the seldom used front door. Off he limped--he carried a bullet, he
claimed, from San Juan Hill--by the mile-long big meshed fence of the corpor-
ation in which such needs as fences were met by sub-officers' inviting contract-
ors' bids and a tight steel net permitted all to look in at the vast remote shim-
mer, the brick steeples, the long power-buildings and the Vesuvian soft coal
under the scarcely smeared summer sky and gaudiness.

I went with Happy, who drove. His fear in the Bohunk streets was that he
would run over a kid and a crowd would tear him to pieces in its rage. "If it's
their kids anything happens to, then look out, even if it's not your fault, the
way they chase around." So he was always somewhat in this terror and wouldn't
let me have the wheel, who didn't dread this enough to be vigilant. We took the
coal-and-ice dealers into taverns and drank beer and swapped talk, in those
sleepy and dark with heat joints where the very flies crept rather than flew,
seeming doped by the urinal camphors and malt sourness, and from the heated
emptiness and woodblock-knocking of the baseball broadcast that gave only
more constriction to the unlocatable, undiagnosed wrong. If you thought toward
something outside, it might be Padilla theorizing on the size of the universe; his
scientific interest kept the subject from being grim. But in such places the slow
hairy fly-crawl from drop to drop and star to star, you could pray the non-human
universe was not entered from here, and this was no sack-end of it that happened
to touch Cook County and Northern Illinois.

Such a consideration never would trouble Simon. Whatever the place was, he
would make it pay off, the only relation with it that concerned him; it had
dollars, as the rock water, as the waste-looking mountain is made to spit its
oil or iron, where otherwise human beings would have no wish to go, the barrens,
the Newfoundlands, the scaly earths and the Antarctic snow blackened with the
smoke of fuel tapped in Texas or Persia.

Hrapek, Drodz, Matuczynski these dealers were called; we found them in their
sheds, by the church, by the funeral home, or on a moving job. They sold coal
by the ton and by the bag; they had stake trucks or dump trucks; they had to
be convinced and sold, entertained, offered special deals, flattered, bantered,
told secrets about the veins of the mines, made up with specious technical
information about BTU's and ash percentages. Happy was crafty with them, an
excellent dealer's man with talents comparable to those of a ship's chandler;
he drank as much piva as they did, glass for glass, and he got results. Enticed
by undercut prices and the pick of the coal, they began to come in.

Also, Simon ran some sales, just to get things moving. He had me pass out
handbills in Chinatown, advertising coke which the laundry Chinese favored
above other fuel, and slowly he accumulated customers. He also covered the city
and hit his new relatives for orders; Charlie Magnus threw business his way,
and little by little things began to stir.

Simon was wised up as to how to do things politically--to be in a position to
bid on municipal business--and he saw wardheelers and was kissing-cousins with
the police; he took up with lieutenants and captains, with lawyers, with real-e
state men, with gamblers and bookies, the important ones who owned legitimate
businesses on the side and had property. During the chauffeurs' and hikers'
strike he had squad cars to protect his two trucks from strikers who were dump-
ing coal in the streets. I had to wait for his calls in the police station to
tell the cops when a load was setting out from the yard, my first lawful sitting
in such a place, moving from dark to lighter inside the great social protoplasm.
But the dark of this West Side station! It was very dark. It was spoiled, diseas-
ed, sore and running. And as the mis-minted and wrong-struck figures and faces
stooped, shambled, strode, gazed, dreaded, surrendered, didn't care--unfailing,
the surplus and superabundance of human material--you wondered that all was stuff
that was born human and shaped human, and over the indiscriminateness and lack
of choice. And don't forget the dirt-hardness, the dough fats and raw meats,
of those on the official side. And this wasn't even the big Newgate of
headquarters downtown but merely a neighborhood tributary.

As a son-in-law of the Magnuses, and also because he wanted to be, Simon
was on very good terms with Lieutenant Nuzzo, than whom few were more
smooth and regular-looking. I am not sure how the lieutenant managed. A cop,
who even in the friendliness of a joke must take you by the shoulder as if in an
arrest, with hands whose only practice is to be iron. In some manner Lieutenant
Nuzzo had stayed a Valentino, even though his flesh was heavy and his face kept
imprints long, like sleep creasings and the marks of fingers. We had dates to go
to the Chez Paree with him--a party of five until I began to take Lucy Magnus,
making it six--and had spaghetti and chicken livers with sparkling burgundy or
champagne; the lieutenant, he looked around like a master of ceremonies on a
visit from a much better night club. His wife seemed like a woman on probation;
as everybody is, after a fashion, with a police lieutenant. Even a wife. He was
an Italian, he brought the style of ancient kingdoms with him. A lot of them do.
Authority must have death behind it. To cut off Masaniello's head; to hang great
admirals themselves, as Lord Nelson did in Naples harbor. This I believe was
how to read the lieutenant's smooth face while he sat in the enjoyable noise of
the Chez Paree, viewing Veloz and Yolanda or the near-naked chicks who didn't
altogether know what they were doing but suggested the motions of busy people
bringing their private pleasures to a head. Anyway, while this night club
remained tops, Simon and Charlotte were great ones for it, as much, shrewdly,
for the lowdown to be gotten there and contacts and public life and business, as
to have their pictures taken by flashbulbs, laughing and in shenanigan embraces
with paper caps and streamers, an important face at their table, a singer in
strapless gown appealing with her lifted chin and fine teeth, or the chairman
of a board finishing a drink.

Simon grasped very soon the importance for business of such close contact.
Didn't the Chief Executive pass sleepless nights at Yalta because Stalin for the
first two days did not smile? He couldn't deal with a man who wouldn't yield to
charm or trade on the basis of love. There had to be sport and amiability to
temper decisions that could not all be pleasant, and at least the flash of
personality helped. This was something Simon well understood, how to be liked,
and how to reach at accord on the basis of secret thoughts with people similarly
placed.

But I'm still in the middle of the summer with him, at the worst of his trouble
when he was envenomed with the fear that he'd go bankrupt, and he had to
confess to himself, I'm sure, that he was really afraid of the Magnuses, and
terrified by what he had taken on himself. So I spent most of these months with
him. I won't say we were never closer--he kept his ultimate thoughts stubbornly
to himself--but we were never more together. From the fresh of morning to the
grime and horn color of late afternoon I rode in the car with him and made all
his stops--downtown, the union hall, the bank, the South Water market office
Charlotte was managing for her Uncle Robby, the kitchen at Magnuses' where
we stopped to get sandwiches from the black cook, or the back room where they
had put the marriage bed--the marriage still the secret of the immediate family.
Here the door opened on what supported the weight of this heaped-up life. The
room had been refurnished for him and Charlotte with silk-shaded reading lamps,
bedside fleeces, drapes against the alley view and its barbarity--as in a pal-
azzo against the smell of the canals--a satin cover on the bed, and auxiliary
pillows on the roll of the bolster.

To save steps to the dresser Simon walked on the bed. He changed clothes,
letting things lie where they were dropped or flung, kicking his shoes into the
corner and drying the sweat from his naked body with an undershirt. There were
days when he changed three times, or four, and others when he might sit listless
and indifferent, and get up from his office chair heavy after hours of silence,
saying, "Let's get out of here."

Instead of going home to change, sometimes he'd drive to the lake.

We'd go swimming at the North Avenue point the late Commissioner had loved.
In whose mouth, as he floated by, I used to place cigarettes. The loose spread
of Simon's legs as he plunged and the embracing awkwardness of his arms to the
water gave me the worry that he threw himself in with a thought of never coming
back to the surface alive, as if he went to take a blind taste of the benefits
of staying down. He came up haggard and with a slack gasp of his mouth and
rough blood in his face. I knew it made a strong appeal to him to go down and
not come up again. Even if he didn't make a display of this half-a-desire and
swam up and down, sullen, with flattened coarse hair, making master passes at
the water; the water turned around on the shore and its crowd and carried black
spools in its horizon, the cool paving of one of the imaginary series of worlds,
clear into the flaming ether.

My brother down there, as if Alexander in the harmful Cydnus whose cold made
him sick when he leaped in after battle, I stood in striped trunks with toes
bent over the wood of a pile, ready to jump after if need be. I didn't go in when
he did. He came up the ladder shivering, the big flies bit nastily, the hullabaloo
waterside carnival turned your head. I'd help him dry; he'd lie down on the stone
like a sick man. But when he'd warm and get his comfort back, he'd start to
make bullish approaches to women and girls, his eyes big and red, and as if
someone who bent over to choose a plum from her lunch bag was making the offer
of a Pasiphaë. And then he'd start to blare like brass and he'd hit me on the
arm and say to me, "Look at the spread on that broad!" forgetting that he was not
only married but also engaged--the engagement had taken place before the eyes
of the world, in a reception at a hotel. He didn't think of that. Instead he thought
of the powerful possibility in a new Pontiac standing near Lincoln Park, and the
money he had; also the things to be done in one street, building, room that need
have no bearing on what came later in the day elsewhere. So he got violent and
lustful, with step and sidle, and protrusion of his head that made a kind of wall
of his neck, charged and hard like that of a fighter who has been hit but not
damaged, only roused.

There wasn't anything in his new class or of his speed at the North Avenue
beach (called a beach, it was merely a stone slab waterfront); the place was
rough and hard, the young fellows were tough and the girls battlesome, factory
hands, salesgirls, with some Clark Street sluts and dance-hall chicks. There-
fore Simon said and proposed without sorting or choosing words. "You look
good to me. You interested?" Direct, without game, not even nickel phrases of
circumlocution. That very fact maybe made it no indecency; instead it created
awe and fear, that brute charge that gave the veins too much to bear and seemed
to endanger his underjaw by crowding, his eyeballs darkening with currents of
heat violet and darker, to near black. The girls were not always frightened of
him; he had a smell of power, he was handsome, and I don't know what floors
his bare feet left in shade-drawn hot rooms. Only a year ago he would not have
given a second glance at such bims.

Now, where he went, he had information unavailable to me, but he had to
have advantages and prerogatives, I reckon, in exchange for sacrifices. Yes,
principals like that practice an anger not everyone is allowed. They come
playing the god like bloody Commodus before the Senate, or run with jockeys
and wrestlers like Caracalla, while knowing that somewhere the instrument of
their downfall is beginning to gather thought to thought about them, like loops
on the knitting needle. That was how it was with Simon, as I had had the chance
to see before, when he put on a lady's hat at the Chez Paree and pranced around,
or when he had brought me along to a bachelor's stag where two naked acrobatic
girls did stunts with false tools. From circus games to private dissoluteness,
then, and only doing as many others did--except that from the force of his
personality he was prominent and played a leading part.

"And you? Do you?" said Simon to me. "What a question! Who's that babe who
lives on your floor? Is that why you don't want to move? Mimi, isn't that
her name? She looks like an easy broad."

I denied it, and he didn't believe me.

On her side Mimi was interested in Simon. "What's eating him?" she asked me.
"It was him I heard crying in the can, wasn't it? What's he want to be such a
sharp dresser for? What's the matter? He has a woman on his neck, huh?" She
was prepared to approve of him despite the satire, noting something extravagant
and outlaw about him that she approved of.

He wasn't all brashness, however, and headlong despair, Simon. No, he was
also making a prize showing. It was summer, and slow, and naturally he was
losing money. Charlotte, an excellent business-woman, and highly important as
backer, counselor, consultant, gave him just what united them closer than
common conjugality. Though he fought with her and even from the very first
roared and cursed her, saying astonishing things, she held on steady. A close
watcher could see her recoil and then come back to the great, the all-important
thing, which was that he was one of those anointed to be rich and mighty. His
very outrageousness when he yelled "You goofy cow!" was proof. She took it
with a nervous laugh that recalled him to his better judgment and reminded him
that such things were supposed to come out as comedy. Whereat he almost never
failed to add the laughter drop of the entertainer, even while the glare of his
eyes might remain savage. And he was made to do that even when feelings on both
sides had burst out so close to injury that it was too much to try to kid them
back into something that could pass for affectionate roughness. But Charlotte's
first aim and the reason for her striving was to make the union serious by
constructing a fortune on it. She said to me, "Simon has real business ability.
This stuff now"--he was already, at the time she spoke, making money--"is just
nothing." When she said this, sometimes, it was in the territory of seriousness
where distinctions of sex do not exist; the power invoked is too great for that.
It is of neither man nor woman. As when Macbeth's wife made that prayer,
"Unsex me here!" A call so hard, to what is so hard, that it makes the soul
neuter.

Neither her ladies' trimming and gewgawing, the detail of her tailored person,
nor the decorating of the flat when they furnished one, nor his way of carrying
on was of real consequence. But in what related to the bank, the stock, the
taxes, head approached to head discussing these, the great clear and critical
calculations and confidences made in the key to which real dominion was set,
that was what wedlock really rested on. Even though she was continually singing
and whistling songs to herself like "My Blue Heaven" and "A Faded Summer's
Love," doing her nails, revising her hair, she didn't live in these vanities. Which
indeed were hopeless. She gave them all their due, and more. High heels, sheer
hose, beautiful suits, hats, earrings, feathers, and the colors of pancake
maquillage, plus electrolysis, sweet-sweats, and the hidden pinnings where
adoration could come to roost. She neglected nothing in this respect, she had a
lot of dignity, she could be monumentally handsome. But her ultimate disbelief
in this was unmistakable in the real mouth, unconforming to the painted one,
impatient, discounting less important things. She wouldn't have chosen a young
man to marry from the pictures on the sheet music of her piano any more than
she'd have chosen a schoolboy; she bore her ambition tight and was prepared to
see, without being moved in her purpose, any limits of coarseness, rashness,
harshness, scandal. She knew this in advance by consulting with herself, and she
didn't have to wait to see a great part in actuality; it first arose in her mind
and there was where she dealt with it.

Simon, in the odd way of these things, was all for her. He said, "She's got
more brain and ability than six women. She's a hundred per cent straight, no
faking. She's as goodhearted as they come"--there was a considerable element
of truth in this--"and she likes you too, Augie." He said this with a view to my
beginning to court Lucy Magnus, as I presently agreed to do. "She keeps sending
Mama stuff. She wants to board her with a private family. Her idea. Mama never
has complained about the Home. The company there is good for her. What do
you think?"

While driving around the city we sometimes stopped to see Mama. Most often
we simply passed the building. But you never knew with Simon what your
destination was. Saying, "Hop in," he'd perhaps himself not know where he was
off to, answering a need he didn't understand yet. Perhaps it was food he was
after, perhaps a fight, perhaps disaster, perhaps a woman beckoning from behind,
or a business order, a game of billiards, a lawyer's office, a steam bath at
the athletic club. So then among these possible stops was the Home on Arthing-
ton Street.

It was of gray stone, the porch just a widening before the doorway on which
there were two benches. There were benches inside too. It was furnished like a
meeting hall or public forum, all the common space of it bare; only the bad state
of the windows kept the outsider from looking in; the panes were full of glassy
gnarls and dirty, probably from the hands of people who had touched them to
discover that this was not wall but window. Everything that could have made a
hazard in the old house had been taken away; thus there were a bar of plaster
where the mantelpiece had been and a cork grade at the doorsills. But the blind
did not go around very much. They sat, and didn't seem to have any conversa-
tion, and soon you were aware of leisure gone bad. I had learned something of
this during Einhorn's days of dirty mental weather. Or of the soul, not the
mind, the sick evil of not even knowing why anything should ail you since
you're resigned to accept all conditions.

The director and his wife boasted that they fed their people well; it was a fact
that you knew the next menu in advance by the smell of the kitchen.

In general I considered it a blessing that Mama was simple. I thought that if
there were any characters here that were intriguing or quarrelsome--and how
would there fail to be?--there must be some awful events in the innermost
privacy of the house. But Mama had put in many years of appeasing tempestu-
ousness or staying out of its way, and she very likely had more trouble as
a result of one of Simon's visits than she ever did with her companions. For
he came to check on how she was treated, and he had a harsh way of inquiring.
He was tough with the director, who hoped to get mattresses wholesale from
Arthur Magnus through him. Simon had promised him this favor. But he threw
his weight around, full of menace, pleased with nothing. He objected to Mama's
having roommates, and when he obtained a private room for her it was next to
the kitchen and all its noise and smell, and that was nothing to thank him for.
And then, one summer afternoon, we found her sitting on her bed at the task of
fitting pins into Roosevelt campaign buttons; she was getting ten cents a hundred
and earning a few dollars a week by the goodheartedness of the precinct captain.
Seeing her with her unskillful hands of rough housework at the brass pins, feel-
ing the two objects together in her lap, Simon went into a rage that made her
flinch, and knowing that I was with him she turned her face and tried to find me
and get me to intercede; she was frightened, too, to discover that she had been
doing wrong unawares.

"Stop roaring," I said, "for God's sake!"

But he couldn't be stopped. "What do they mean! Look what they've got her
doing! Where's that sonofabitch?"

It was the director's wife who came, in her house dress. She meant to remain
respectful but not be servile; she was white, and she already had a fighting face
and quivered, but spoke up, practical and proud.

"Are you responsible for this?" he shouted at her.

She said, "Mrs. March wasn't made to do anything she didn't want. She was
asked and she wanted to. It's good for her to have something to keep her
occupied."

"Asked? I know how people are asked so they're afraid to say no. I'll have
you know that my mother isn't going to do any piecework for ten, twenty, thirty
cents, or a dollar an hour. She gets all the money she needs from me."

"You don't have to yell like this. These are all very sensitive people and easy
disturbed."

In the passage I saw many of the blind stop and a group gathered, while in the
kitchen the big sloven-haired cook turned with her knife from the meatblock.

"Simon, I wanted, I asked," said Mama. She was unable to put weight in her
tones; she had never been able; she lacked experience.

"Calm down," I said to him with some effect at last.

It appeared that he could no longer take out the first intention of his heart
without touching the inflamed place of self-distinction. Wrongly blessing and
cursing like Balaam, but without any outside power to reverse him, only his own
arbitrariness doubling back on him. So he could not speak for Mama without
commanding how he himself was to be looked upon.

Next he went to the closet to see whether the things were there that Charlotte
had given her, the shoes, handbag, dresses, and he missed at once a light coat,
handed down by a more robust person, that didn't fit her anyway.

"Where is it--what have they done with that coat?"

"I sent it to the cleaners. She spilled coffee on it," the director's wife
explained.

"I did," said Mama in her clear, tuneless voice.

And the woman, "I'll take it in for her when it comes back, it's too big in the
shoulders."

Simon wore a look of anger and detestation, silent, still regarding the closet.
"She can afford a good tailor if she needs alterations. I want her to look right."

He left her money each time, single dollars so that she could not be cheated in
the changing. Not that he really distrusted the director and his wife; he wanted
them, however, to realize that he did not have to depend on their honesty.

"I want her to go for a walk every day."

"It's the rule, Mr. March."

"I know rules. You keep them when you want to." I spoke to him in a low tone,
and he said, "That's all right. Be quiet. I want her to go to the hairdresser
at least once a week."

"My husband takes all the ladies in the car together. He can't be taking one at
a time."

"Then hire a girl. Isn't there a high-school girl you can get to go with her once
a week? I'll pay for it. I want her to be taken care of. I'm getting married soon."

"We'll try to accommodate you, sir," she said, and he, not missing her derision
though all she looked was steadfast and unintimidated, stared, spoke to himself,
and took up his hat.

"Good-by, Ma."

"Good-by, good-by, boys."

"And take away this junk," said Simon, scattering the pins with a tug of the
bedcover.

He left, and the woman tartly said to me, "I hope at least FDR is good enough
for him personally."




Chapter XII




When the cold weather came Simon started to make money and everything went
well. His spirits rose. The wedding was a great affair in the main ballroom of
a big hotel, the bridal party getting organized in the governor's suite where
Simon and Charlotte also spent the first night. I was an usher, Lucy Magnus the
bridesmaid opposite me. Simon went along with me to rent a tuxedo, and then
liked the fit of it so well he bought it outright. On the wedding day Mimi
helped me with the studs of the boiled shirt and the tie. My neighbor Kayo
Obermark sat in to observe, on my bed, fat feet bare, and laughed over Mimi's
digs at marriage.

"Now you look like the groom himself," said Mimi. "You probably aim to
become one soon, don't you?"

I snatched up my coat and ran, for I had to pick up Mama. I had the Pontiac
for the purpose. She was my charge; I was supposed to see her through. Simon
ordered me to have her wear dark glasses. The day was frosty, windy, clear, the
waves piled up, from the slugging green water, white over the rocks of the Outer
Drive. And then we came to the proud class of the hotel and its Jupiter's
heaviness and restless marble detail, seeking to be more and more, introducing
another pot too huge for flowers, another carved figure, another white work of
iron; and inside luxuriously warm--even the subterranean garage where I parked
had this silky warmth. And coming out of the white elevator, you were in an
Alhambra of roses and cellular ceilings, gilt and ivory, Florida feathering of
plants and muffling of carpets, immense distances, and everywhere the pure
purpose of supporting and encompassing the human creature in conveniences.
Of doing unto the body; holding it precious; bathing, drying, powdering, pre-
paring satin rest, conveying, feeding. I've been at Schönbrunn and in the
Bourbon establishment in Madrid and seen all that embellishment as the setting
of power. But luxury as the power itself is different--luxury without anything
ulterior. Except insofar as all yearning, for no matter what, just so its scope
is vast, is of one cluster of mysteries and always ulterior. And what will this
power do to you? I know that I in, say, an ancient place like Venice or in Rome,
passing along the side of majestic walls where great men once sat, experienced
what it was to be simply a dot, a speck that scans across the cornea, a corpuscle,
almost white, almost nothing but air: I to these ottimati in their thought. And
this spectacular ancient aggrandizement with its remains of art and many noble
signs I could appreciate even if I didn't want to be just borne down by the grand-
eur of it. But in this modern power of luxury, with its battalions of service
workers and engineers, it's the things themselves, the products that are distin-
guished, and the individual man isn't nearly equal to their great sum. Finally
they are what becomes great--the multitude of baths with never-failing hot water,
the enormous air-conditioning units and the elaborate machinery. No opposing
greatness is allowed, and the disturbing person is the one who won't serve by
using or denies by not wishing to enjoy.

I didn't yet know what view I had of all this. It still wasn't clear to me
whether I would be for or against it. But then how does anybody form a decision
to be against and persist against? When does he choose and when is he chosen
instead? This one hears voices; that one is a saint, a chieftain, an orator,
a Horatius, a kamikazi; one says Ich kann nicht anders--so help me God! And
why is it I who cannot do otherwise? Is there a secret assignment from mankind
to some unfortunate person who can't refuse? As if the great majority turned
away from a thing it couldn't permanently forsake and so named some person to
remain faithful to it? With great difficulty somebody becomes exemplary,
anyhow.

Conceivably Simon felt that I was this kind of influenceable person and
looked liable to become an example. For God knows there are abandoned and
hungry principles enough flowing free and looking for attachment. So he wanted
to get to me first.

Simon's idea was that I should marry Lucy Magnus, who had more money even
than Charlotte. This was how he outlined the future to me. I could finish
my pre-legal course and go to John Marshall law school at night while I worked
for him. He'd pay my tuition and give me eighteen dollars a week. Eventually I
could become his partner. Or if his business didn't suit me, we could go into real
estate with our joint capital. Or perhaps into manufacturing. Or, if I chose to
be a lawyer, I wouldn't need to be a mere ambulance chaser, shyster, or birdseed
wiseguy and conniver in two-bit cases. Not with the money I'd have to play with
as Lucy Magnus's husband. She was a juicy piece besides, even if he didn't care
for the way her collarbones stood out when she wore a formal, and she was full
of willingness. He would back me while I courted her. I didn't need to worry
about the expenses; he'd give me the use of the Pontiac for taking her out, build
me up with the family, remove the obstacles. All I had to do was play along,
make myself desired, interpret, as I could do, the role of the son-in-law her
parents wanted. It was a lead-pipe cinch.

We were alone in his room in the governor's suite, a room of white walls and
gold paneling, heavy mirrors hung on silk hawsers, a Louis XIV bed. Having come
out of the glass stall of the shower, dried in a thick Turkish mantle, put on
black socks and a stiff shirt, he was now lying on the bed, smoking a cigar, while
he explained this to me, practical and severe. He sprawled out with his big body,
the mid-part of it nude. This comfort and luxury were not what he preached at
me, but the thing to do: not to dissolve in bewilderment of choices but to make
myself hard, like himself, and learn how to stay with the necessary, undistracted
by the trimmings. This was what he thought, and to some extent I thought it too.
Why shouldn't I marry a rich man's daughter? If I didn't want to do as Simon
did in every respect, couldn't I arrange my life somewhat differently? Wasn't
there any other way to ride this gorgeous train? Provided Lucy was different
from her cousin, why shouldn't there be? I wasn't unwilling to look into this and
profit by Simon's offers. I was already taking so many of his orders, putting in
so much time, that I might as well accept wages too, go the whole way and make
it official. And I may as well say that I had a desire to go along with him out
of the love I felt for him and enthusiasm for his outlook. In which I didn't
fundamentally believe. However, that I shouldn't be too good to do as he was
doing was of enormous importance to him, and the obstinacy that had always
made me hold out against him for unspoken or anyway insufficient reasons
seemed at last over. I didn't oppose him, so he spoke to me with unusual
affection.

He rolled from the bed to finish dressing, saying, "Now we begin going places,
you and me. I wondered when you'd start to show some sense, if ever, and wor-
ried you wouldn't be anything but a punk. Here, fix this stud for me in back.
My motherin-law got this set for me. Christ! how'm I going to find my dress
shoes? All this tissue paper. You can't find anything. Get rid of it. Leave it
in the can for the governor," he said, spirited and nervous in his laugh. "The
world hasn't set too tight yet. There's room, if you find the openings to it. If
you study it out you can find them. Horner is a Jew too, after all, and probably
didn't have a better start than we did, and is governor."

"Are you thinking of giving politics a try?"

"Maybe. Why not? It depends on how things shape up. Uncle Artie knows a guy
who was made ambassador by contributing often enough to campaign drives.
Twenty, thirty, even forty thousand bucks, and what's that to a man who
has it?"

This being an ambassador couldn't be envisioned as in the old days--a Guic-
ciardini arriving from Florence with his clever face, or a Russian coming to
Venice, or an Adams--such grandeurs have sunk down as the imagination has
been transferred from the bearer of his country's power walking on rugs to
his blowing shellac through the waterpipes of Lima to stop the rust.

Simon, when he put on his tails and walked from mirror to mirror, doubling
back his fingers to tug down the white cuffs and pulling up his chin to make
his strong neck freer in the band of the butterfly collar, had the vigor to
make the place live up to him; more--the thought lay in the open--than the
governors for whom it was reserved. And having gotten in without ever having
been a candidate he could perhaps get far beyond them without running or going
through the tiresome part of politics. He had come into a view of mutability,
and I too could see that one is only ostensibly born to remain in specified
limits. That's what you'll be told in the ranks. I don't say that I exactly
shared his feelings, or spirits of the dauphin's horse, almost tearing down
hangings and shouldering into mirrors with that bucking pride, but with him
now I certainly felt less boxed than I ever before had, nothing that others
did so inconceivable for me.

However, people were waiting below and Simon was holding things up, taking
his time. Charlotte came in herself, like a big bridal edifice in her veil and
other lace, carrying long-stemmed flowers. With her there wasn't much hiding
of the behind-the-scenes of life to keep a man in the bonds of love, as Lucretius
advises when he tells you to make allowances for mortality. You only had to see
her practical mouth to know everything about mortality was admitted in advance,
though she did for form's sake all that other women do. Her frankness gave her
a kind of nobility. But here when she came into the room was the visible means
to governors' suites and ambassadorships, and the best that Simon could do
brought him back to her.

"Everybody else is ready. What are you doing?"

She spoke to me, for she wouldn't blame him in any circumstances where she
could blame me instead, his standin.

"I've been dressing and shmoosing," said Simon. "There's plenty of time--
what's the big rush? Anyhow, you didn't have to come, you could have phoned.
Now, honey, don't be nervous; you look beautiful and everything is going to be
fine."

"It will be if I see to it. Now will you go and talk to the guests?" she said
in her bidding tone.

She sat on the bed to call the caterer, the musicians, the florist, the
management, the photographer, for she kept all under close control and had
made every arrangement herself, relying on no one; and with her white shoes
on a chair and a pad on her knees she made figures and dickered with the
photographer, at the last moment still trying to beat down his price. "Listen,
Schultz, if you try to hold me up you'll get no business out of any of the
Magnuses ever again, and there're plenty of us."

"Augie," said Simon when we went out, "you can have the car to take Lucy
out. You'll probably need some dough, so here's ten bucks. I'll send Mama
home in a cab. I want you at the office at eight though. Is she wearing those
glasses I told you to get her?"

Mama had obediently put on the glasses, but it displeased him to see that she
carried her white cane. She was sitting with Anna Coblin in the lounge, the cane
between her knees, and he tried to take it away from her, but she wouldn't yield
it up.

"Ma, give me that stick, for Chrissake! How will it look? They're going to
take a picture."

"No, Simon, people will bump into me."

"They won't bump into you--you'll be with Cousin Anna."

"Hear, let her keep it," said Anna.

"Ma, give that cane to Augie and he'll check it for you."

"I don't want to, Simon."

"Mama, don't you want everything to look nice?" He tried to loosen her fingers.

"Cut it out!" I said to him, and Cousin Anna with her burning morose face mut-
tered something to him.

"You shut up, you cow!" he said to her. He went, but left me instructions.
"You get it away from her. What a turnout from our side!"

I let her keep the cane, and had to pacify Cousin Anna and beg her to stay for
Mama's sake.

"Money makes you meshuggah," she said, sitting heavy and tall in her corset,
glaring maddened into the luxurious lounge.

I approved of Mama's exhibition of will, wondering at the surprises the meek
will pull. Anyway, Simon dropped the matter; he was too busy to fight every
fight through, and he was somewhere off the ballroom where the ceremony was
shaping up. I went around looking among the guests for some I knew. He had
invited the Einhorns, including Arthur. Arthur, who had graduated from the
University of Illinois, was in Chicago, where he was doing nothing in particular.
Occasionally I saw him on the South Side and knew that he was friendly with
Frazer's set and that he was supposed to be translating poems from the French.
Einhorn would always back him in any intellectual pursuit. There were the Ein-
horns then, in the ballroom, the old man with a sort of military cloak, gray,
looking like the former possessor of a splendor just as good as this who, with-
out special rancor but understanding how it all comes about, watches it change
hands. He said to me, "You look very fine in your tuxedo, Augie." Tillie kissed
me, taking my face in her dark hands, Arthur smiling. He could behave with
exceptional charm, but this was absent-mindedly conferred on you.

I went on to welcome Happy Kellerman and his wife, a thin blond rattle of a
woman who bore out her belly and was wound high and low with beads and pearls.
Next I saw Five Properties and Cissy. Simon had asked them from motives not
hard to understand, partly to show Cissy what he had gone on to do and also
to subject Five Properties to a cruel comparison. Cissy defeated all, though,
with that sly provoking decency about her female gifts, breast touching breast
in the low opening of her dress. She showed her tongue softly in the few words
that she spoke. Five Properties had come for a reconciliation of cousins.
She had taught him to comb his Scythian hair differently; it now came lower on
the rugged forehead without modifying the skeptical grinning of his eyes; that
savage green would always express everything that Five Properties thought. He
too was dressed in a tuxedo, wore it on his enormous trunk to be equal to the
opulence Simon had invited him to see. And so he grinned all around with his
gum-buried teeth and green eyes. It was evident that Cissy steered him, taught
him civilized behavior--him who had loaded and driven the wagon of jolting
corpses the Russians and Germans had made of one another in the Polish mud.
She coached him. All the same she couldn't prevent him by her smile and slow
murmured word from feeling her on the back and fondling her. "So what's
wrong, babe?" he said.

Well, the wedding music began. I went to see that Mama was taken to a plush
bench, her place inside the flower cage beside the altar--the Coblins were with
her--and then into rehearsed position in the procession, with Lucy Magnus,
along the white carpet down which the principals came: Charlotte and her father
with rose-scattering children before, Mrs. Magnus and Uncle Charlie, and then
Simon with Lucy's brother Sam, first-string guard on the Michigan team, a
hulky walker. Throughout the ceremony Lucy looked at me in her unambiguously
declarative way, and when the ring was on and Simon swung Charlotte back before
all to kiss her, and all clapped and cried out, Lucy came and took my arm. We
went in to the banquet; ten dollars a plate, it was--for that day a staggering
price. But I couldn't sit through the meal in peace. An usher came to tell me
I was wanted and rushed me to the back of the hall. Five Properties, angry,
was walking out because he and Cissy had been put at a little table apart be-
hind a pillar. Whether it was Charlotte who was responsible for this, or Simon
himself, I never found out. One was as capable of it as the other. Whoever had
done it, Five Properties was powerfully offended.

"'S okay, Augie. Against you I got nothing. He asked me? I came. I wish him
all. But what way is it to treat a cousin? Okay. Eat I can where I want. I
don't, God forbid, need his meal. Babe, come on."

I went to get her fur, knowing it was useless to argue, and I saw them to the
garage elevator with some dawning thought about rudeness as the measure of
achievement and the systems of storing up injury. As Cissy passed into the
elevator she said, "Tell your brother congratulations. His wife is awfully
pretty."

But this was one game in which I wasn't going to play intermediary, and
when Simon asked me eagerly about their leaving I said casually, "Oh, they just
didn't have the time to stay. They came only for the ceremony." I gave no
satisfaction.

But as for that other more important game into which he had gotten me, I play-
ed it to the full, going to night clubs, sorority dances, and shows and night-
football games at which Lucy and I pitched and necked. She was, up to the last
thing of all, unrestrained and exploratory; and where she stopped I stopped. You
never know what forms self-respect will take, especially with people whose rules
of life are few. But I enjoyed all that was allowed and to that extent I remained
myself. But I wasn't much myself in other ways, and it was very disturbing, and
sometimes pressed on my head with very heavy weight, and I realized I was in
the end zone of my ada+ptability. It was my pride to make it seem easy though.
So that if you took me at Uncle Charlie's house on a Sunday afternoon, after
dinner, by the fire, among the family, with Mrs. Magnus knitting a shawl that
rose out of a tapestry carpetbag; with Sam, Lucy's brother, standing by, his chin
picked up to make way for the foulard beneath it and his dressing gown swelling
over his behind while every now and then he treated his plastered hair with
affection; with Uncle Charlie listening to Father Coughlin who hadn't yet begun
to shag out the money-changers but had that boring fervor of the high-powered
and misleading who won't let you be but have to make you feel all the trembling
vacancy of winter space between Detroit and Chicago--if you took me there, by
the firelight, facing Uncle Charlie who had one leg thrown forward and his fing-
ers inside the crevice of his shirt drawing at the mat of his chest, I wasn't the
success envy might have believed me to be. My own envy went out with, I don't
doubt, sick eyes through the clear gray panes where the kids were warring and
shooting snowballs that splatted on the black trunks and soared in the elegant
scheme of twigs. Not that Lucy, in dark wool dress that just covered the tops of
stockings she had helped me loosen the night before so that I could stroke her
skin, didn't make up for much. In some way, not the deepest nor yet trivially, I
was gone on her and as far as I was allowed gave her a real embrace that she
returned, licking my ear and praising and promising me; she already called me
husband.

The deep consideration women give, as seen privately in their thoughtful eye,
to demands for the most part outlawed out of fear for everything that has been
done to make a reasonable, continuous life, the burden that made Phedra cry she
wanted to throw off her harmful clothes, you could find that in Lucy too. It took
her as far as to choose me. It was evident I was less desirable than Simon from
her family's standpoint. Their main investigation was conducted on my willing-
ness to be as they were in everything. They never were too sure, and were
forever asking to have another look at my credentials, and, so to speak, would
come in without knocking, as if I were at West Point, to see whether all was
dusted and the hospital corners satisfied regulations. Lucy stood up for me;
it was her only disobedience so far as I, a wayward but close student of the
situation, could see. When I suggested that we run away and get married at
Crown Point she refused flat, and I could see the difference between her and
Charlotte. I probably shouldn't forget the difference between Simon and me; he
had been able to talk Charlotte into eloping. And if Lucy already called me
"husband," Mimi Villars would have said, no compliment intended, that she was
a wife, wanting the whole wifely racket. In other words, minor sensuality and no
trouble. Unless she was flirting with trouble by having detected a source of it
in me.

But I was, as at the Renlings', under an influence and not the carrier of it. I
had to get around; I had a figure to cut, the car to drive, the money to spend,
the clothes to wear, and served before I had it clear whether I wanted or liked
the doing of it at all. Even if her father stole in on us at two in the morning
as we were loving-up, he stole through a mansion, and it was hard to think him
wrong when the lights went on and he prowled peevish toward us. I suppose I saw
nothing very wrong anywhere, and it took me longer than it should have taken to
discover that he didn't like me, because everything flashed so, all was rich,
was heavy, velvet, lepidopterous.

The circuit I was in, at the Glass Derby and Chez Paree and the dances at
Medinah Club, kept me very busy. Here what had to be established was whether
I was qualified in pocket to mix with the sons of established fathers. I had to
mind my step, for Simon kept me on a minimum budget; he somehow thought that I
could do what he had done on just a little less. It was true that I could make
money go farther, but Lucy thought less about economics than Charlotte. And I
had to notice cover charges, tips, the cost of a parking lot, and slip out to the
store for Camels instead of buying them from the cigarette girl. I got through
examination by Lucy's set, not hearing what I didn't want to hear, or forcing
others to give ground, and even if it did strengthen the hypocrite's muscle in
my face and harden my stomach I thought it did me credit to bluff it through.

These weren't our only company. We went to visit Simon and Charlotte in
their flat--they had, for a beginning, only three rooms--and to eat off the
trousseau linen and the wedding china. The Magnuses went to exceptional lengths
to procure anything for one of their own, and these plates and cups had been
baked in an English kiln, as the rug was really from Bokhara and the silver
by Tiffany. If we stayed after dinner we played bridge or rummy, and at ten
o'clock Charlotte phoned the drugstore to send peppermint ice-cream and hot
fudge. So we licked spoons and I was in general sociable, helpful, debonair, and
thought of the two colors of my silk suspenders and the fit of my shirt, Simon's
gifts. Obedient to him, Charlotte treated Lucy and me like an engaged pair, but
with wariness and reserve camouflaged from him. With the instinct of her family
she knew that I didn't have Simon's qualities, that I really didn't intend to
follow in his steps, his difficulties perhaps too much for me to undertake.

This he was becoming aware of too. He was pleased at first by my willingness
and fluency and spoon-lickery and obliging and niceness that continued while I
moved before the regard of the Magnuses and made the most that could be made
of the appeal of their seductions--all that opulence, the strength of cars in the
great rout of cars in the cold-lit darkness of the North Side Drive, and that
mobile heraldry on soft tires rushing toward the floating balls and moons of the
Drake Hotel and the towers around it; the thick meat, solid eating, excitement of
dancing. Following the lake shore, you left the dry wood and grayed brick of the
thick-built, jammed, labor-and-poverty Chicago standing apart, speedily passed
to the side. Ah no! but the two halves of the prophecy were there together, the
Chaldee beauties and the wild beasts and doleful creatures shared the same
houses together.

Being in the yard daily, the beginning of this winter, I was not in a posi-
tion to forget even if my evenings and Sundays were in another sphere. And my
Sundays themselves were divided. Simon had me open the gates Sunday morning
to catch what trade there was in the very cold weather. He drove me hard, bound
to discipline me. Some mornings he checked on the time I arrived. If once in a
while I overslept it wasn't to be wondered at, since, after taking Lucy home
and leaving his car in the garage, I had to ride home on the trolley and so
rarely got into the sack before one in the morning. He wouldn't, however,
take any excuses from me. He said, "Well, why don't you make your time with
her a little faster? Marry her and you'll get more rest." This, at first, was
half a joke, but later, when he began more to doubt me, he was surly and before
long fierce toward me. He grudged me the extra money, thinking it was merely
thrown away. "What the hell are you waiting for, goddam you, Augie! She ought
to be a pushover. If it was me I'd show you how, but fast." He was more violent
as the resistance of her family began to shape up, though this I didn't understand
for a while.

But should I come in at eight-fifteen instead of eight I might find him at the
scale, glaring at me. "What's the matter, did that Mimi keep you?" He was
convinced that I had carried on and continued still with Mimi.

We had other difficulties too. As I was assistant bookkeeper as well as
weighmaster, he expected me to take from the pay-envelopes of the Negro hikers
installments on the cast-off clothing he had sold them, and on a few occasions
there was bad feeling between us. As in December, once, a lushed-up dealer
named Guzynski tore onto the scale out of the slushy yard with white steam
gushing from his busted radiator. He was buying a ton of coal and was over-
weight by several hundred pounds; when I told him he was heavy he cursed
me, and he came down from the truck to force his way into the office and break
my arm for cheating. I met him at the door and threw him out, and when he
picked himself up from the snow, instead of pushing me again, he dumped his
coal on the scale. There was now a jam of trucks and wagons in the street as
well as in the yard. I told a hiker to clear the scale, but Guzynski was stand-
ing over his coal with a shovel and swung on him when he came near. Happy Kell-
erman was phoning for a squad car when Simon arrived. Simon went for the gun at
once, and as he was running from the office with it I caught him by the arm and
swung him back, and in his rage he drove a punch at me and hit me in the chest.
I yelled at him as he got away, "Don't be an idiot! Don't shoot!" and then saw
him stagger for his balance in the coaly slush as he turned the corner. Guzynski
was not too drunk to see the gun and he threw himself, burly in his short filthy
coat and seaman's watch cap, to the side of his track, trying to get to the cab.
Here, in the narrow space between the track and the office wall, Simon caught
him, had him by the throat, and hit him in the face with the side of the gun.
This happened right below Happy and me; we were standing at the scale window,
and we saw Guzynski, trapped, square teeth and hideous eyes, foul blue, and his
hands hooked, not daring to snatch the gun with which Simon hit him again. He
laid open Guzynski's cheek. My heart went back on me when the cuts were torn,
and I thought, Does it make him think he knows what he's doing if the guy
bleeds? Now he let him go and with the pistol signed to the hikers to clear the
scale platform, and their shovels began to scrape or gouge the dirty silence of
Guzynski looking with loathing at his blood. He sprang into his truck, and I
feared he would crash it into the gates, but he skidded into the snow mash of the
street and the tracks caught his wheels and straightened him out in the traffic
that took him up with it toward the sunless, faint direction.

"Any odds he's going to the station to swear out a warrant?" said Happy.

Simon, who had put down the gun, listened to him, and with a heavy breath he
said, "Get me Nuzzo on the phone." He spoke to me, and it was in a fashion I
had made up my mind to get used to and generally obeyed. He no longer looked
up a number himself or did the dialing but took the instrument only when his
party was already waiting. This time, however, I didn't stir. My arms were
crossed and I held my place by the scale. He marked me down for this, grimly.
Happy got the number for him.

"Nuzzo!" said Simon. "This is March. How y'doin'? What? No, it's cold enough,
I can't kick. Now listen, Nuzzo, we just had a little trouble down here from
a squarehead dealer who hit one of my men with a shovel. What? No, he was
drunk as a lord, dumped his load on my scale and tied me up for an hour.
Look, he's probably on his way to make a complaint because I roughed him up.
Take care of him for me, will you? Keep him in the clink till he cools off.
Sure I will, I got witnesses. You tell him if he's thinking of laying for me
after, you'll fix his clock good. What? He does bushel business down by that
church on Twenty-eighth. Do that for me, will you?"

He did, and Guzynski was in the lockup several days. Next time I saw him he
wasn't plotting any revenge. His scars were crusty yet when he came back still
a customer, quiet, and I know that Simon was watching his eyes and would have
acted on the least hint. But there was no trouble to hint. Nuzzo, or Nuzzo's
people, had put a deep fright in him in their cellar below cellar, and gave him
a Saturn's bite in the shoulder to show him how he could be picked up whole and
eaten. He must even come back a customer. And Simon, too, knew how to put
home the clincher, and at Christmas gave Guzynski a bottle of Gordon's Dry Gin
and his wife a box of New Orleans pecan pralines in the form of a cotton bale.
She said to him that it had done Guzynski good.

"Of course," said Simon. "He's satisfied now. Because he knows where he
stands. When he swung that shovel he didn't know and was trying to find out.
Now he knows."

For Simon wanted to show me how justly he handled such crises, and how
badly, by contrast--because of chicken-heartedness--I did. I should have
quelled Guzynski's riot as soon as it broke. But I wasn't prompt, wasn't brave,
didn't understand that Guzynski had to be pistol-whipped and thrown in jail if he
wasn't to become a Steelkilt mutineer to buffalo all captains. The inference was
clear that if I didn't make time with Lucy Magnus it was from these same
shortcomings. If I became her husband in two-armed fact, the rest was merely a
formality. But I didn't mount the step of power. I could have done so from love,
but not to get to the objective.

Thus things became more tough for me at the yard; Simon increased my hard-
ships both for my good and because it didn't displease him to do it. At this time
he couldn't say how many high things were suitable for him and was trying
on guises. His last thoughts at breakfast sometimes were the next new policy,
and this might be to devote himself absolutely to the bottom-most detail or
fistful in a business that reckoned by tons; or, again, to skim in the big space of
principle only and leave the details to subordinates--as he could do if they, and
mainly I, were trustworthy; or to be a Jesuit of money; or to be self-made: that
was one of his weakest ideas but it was also persistent. I said, "Oh, but you're
not a Henry Ford. After all, you married a rich girl." "The question is," he said,
"what you have to suffer to get money, how much effort there is in it. Not that
you start with a nickel, like the Alger story"--I here remembered what a reader
Simon had been--"and run it into a fortune. But if you get a stake, what you do
with it, whether you plunge or not." But this was the discussion of theory, which
became rarer between us. Mostly I had to see in his disgusted eyes what his
theory was and how disadvantageously I fitted into it, where I trailed, lagged,
and missed the mark.

So those were evil days for me, in that particular field of feeling that had the
shape of the yard, the forms of the fence, coal heaps, machinery, the window of
the scale, and that long, brass, black-graduated beam where I weighed. These
things: and also the guys that worked, the guys that bought, the cops that came
for theirs, the mechanics and the railroad agents, the salesmen, got into me. My
head was full of things to remember; I must not quote a wrong price and stumble
in arithmetic or any dealing. Mimi Villars heard me talking in my sleep one
night about prices and came in and asked me questions, as though in a telephone
conversation. She quoted the prices back to me in the morning, all correctly.
"Brother! things must be bad for you," she said, "if that's all you can dream." I
might have confessed even worse, if I'd cared to, since Simon had decided on
the roughest treatment for me and sent me on errands not exactly for Hesper-
ides apples. I had to fight with janitors about clinkers, soothe and bribe them,
sweeten dealers with beer, wrangle with claims agents about shrinkage, make
complicated deposits in the pushing, barking crowd at the bank, everybody in a
hurry and temper; I had furthermore to hunt up shovelers in flophouses and court
them in the Madison Street gutter when we were suddenly shorthanded. I had to
go to the morgue to identify one found shot with our pay envelope empty in his
shirt pocket. They lifted the bristling, creased wrap from him and I recognized
him, his black body rigid, as if he died in a fit of royal temper, making fists, feet
out of shape, and crying something from the roof of his mouth, which I saw.

"You know him?"

"That's Ulace Padgett. He worked for us. What happened to him?"

"Girl friend shot him, they say." He pointed out the wound in his breast.

"Have they caught her?"

"Naw, they won't even look for her. They never do."

Simon had given me this mission because, he said, I was driving the car
anyway, to take Lucy out, and might as well attend to it on the way home. I had
to hurry and change, and I didn't have the time to wash off any but the exposed
dirt of face, neck, and ears. All over the rest of me was grit from the yard, up
my heels and legs. Even in the corners of the eyes there were shadowed places I
didn't get into. They widened out my look by darkness. I had no time to eat,
even if I had enjoyed an appetite, for the morgue had taken long and Lucy was
waiting. I drove faster than I had any business to, and had a near thing at
Western Avenue and Diversey, a long, downhill skid that turned the Pontiac
round so that I finished backwards, against a streetcar. The motorman had had a
good forty yards to see me and was standing on a grade, under the railroad
bridge. So I didn't hit hard. I smashed the rear lights but couldn't see much other
damage, and was congratulated by that sudden gathering that always collects on
such an occasion. I was told how lucky I was and laughed it all off, hopped back
of the wheel again and continued. I got to the Magnuses' in marvelous spirits, in
the black night of the drive and the snow head of the portico, confident and
whistling, the keys melodious in the coat I tossed down on the bench in the hall.
However, when Lucy's brother Sam gave me a drink I went back, infinitely
quicker than the speed at which I had come, to the morgue--the smell of the
whisky on an empty stomach did that for me--and to the accident, which now
made my work-filthy legs too weak to hold me. I sank down in a chair. Lucy
said, "Why are you so white?" And Sam came near, like the host of a B movie,
concerned after all lest his sister, huggable, press-bosom dolly, get herself
engaged to a weakling. With more of this interest than mercy he bent to me, the
stripes of his dressing gown stretched tight over his can.

"Am I white?" I struggled to say and picked up my head. "Maybe because I
haven't eaten."

"Oh, how silly. Since when? Why, it's after nine." She sent Sam to the kitchen
to get a sandwich and a glass of milk from the cook.

"I also had an accident--almost," I said to her when he had gone, and
described what had happened.

I'm not sure which most came through, her concern, or the sudden thought at
the rear of her mind that I was a Jonah--I, the happy lover of the present
moment. Trained fine in foresight, when, as now, she wanted to make use of it,
she must have been seeing a drift of hard luck if not downright misery in the
horizon. "Did you damage the car badly?" she said.

"It's banged up a little."

She didn't like my vagueness about it.

"The trunk?"

"I don't know exactly. I broke the tail lights, that I know. About the rest it's
hard to tell in the dark, but it probably isn't much."

"We'll go in my car tonight," she said, "and I'll drive. You must be shaky
from the accident."

So we went out in her roadster, a new one her father had recently given her, to
our party on the North Shore, and afterward parked in one of the big sectors of
shadow around the Bahai temple to stroke, struggle, and shiver at the base of that
cold religious knoll and its broken-up moonlight. Things seemed as usual but
were not, either for her or for me. When we got back she wanted to have another
look at the damage, afraid for me. I wouldn't go bend over the back of the car
with her and put my finger in the dents. I turned off her headlights, under which
the examination was taking place. And in the front hall afterward, when I was in
coat and hat, fondling her and being assured she loved me, I knew there was an
obstruction of sympathy. She foresaw that Simon would raise hell about the
damage--as he did--and what's more, no point of view but his seemed possible
to her, and she was somewhat frightened at me, feeling that I had one. And I
might smell her shoulder and lift up her breast, but it wasn't the same intimacy
any more in that riches-cluttered hall partly inventoried by the moon, the old
man snuffing upstairs, vigilant whether asleep or not.

I was therefore worn out in advance of the dripping yellow morning and its sick
cold and the close filthy heat of the oil-squirting stove indoors. There is a
way, I don't doubt, to carry all such things like little sticks in the bulge of
the flood water, if you determine your energy to flow that way, and the weight
of morgues and cars depends on the hydraulic lifting power you dispose of.
Napoleon when he escaped in the old box of a sledge from wintry Russia, the
troops of his dead lying like so many flocks covered in snow, talked three days
to Caulaincourt who probably couldn't hear very well because his ears were
bandaged--his master couldn't practice his old trick of pulling them--but he
must have seen in his boss's swollen face the depth that kept floating a whole
Europe of details.

Yes, these business people have great energy. There's a question as to what's
burned to produce it and what things we can and can't burn. There's the burning
of an atom. Wild northern forests go like so many punk sticks. Where's the
competitor-fire kindling, and what will its strength be?

And another thing is that while for the sake of another vigor is lacking, for the
sake of the taste of egg in one's mouth there's all-out effort, and that's how love
is lavished.

I couldn't hold up all of these different elements. Simon came in and bawled
me out over the car and I was too broken-down to give any back talk or even feel
he was doing me wrong. All I did reply was, "What are you fussing about? It
wasn't much of an accident, and you're insured."

This was just where the error was; it was that I had to feel bad about the back
shell of the car and those crustacean eyes that were dragging by the wires, and it
wasn't so much the accident as my failure to care as I should that he minded.
That was why he burned me with his eyes and showed his broken-edged tooth
while his head settled downward with menace. I was too despondent to stand up
to him. Nothing visible backed me, as it did him, to see and trust, but all was
vague on my side and yet it was also very stubborn.


I stayed in that evening to read. According to our agreement I was to start at
the university in the spring, when business would let up a little and Simon could
spare me. I still had the craving that I had given in to all summer long when I
had lived on books, to have the reach to grasp both ends of the frame and turn
the big image-taking glass to any scene of the world. By now Padilla had sold
most of my books for me--he himself had given up stealing lately since he had
taken a part-time job calculating the speed of nerve impulses in a biophysics lab
--and I had only a few things left. However, there was Einhorn's fire-damaged
set of classics in a box under the bed, and I picked out Schiller's Thirty Years'
War and was lying in my socks reading when Mimi Villars came in.

Often she came and went without talking to me, only for her things in the
closet. But she had something to say tonight, and didn't spar, but told me,
"Frazer knocked me up."

"Gosh, are you sure?"

"Of course I'm sure. Come out with me. I want to talk to you and I don't want
Kayo to be in on it. He listens-through the wall."

It was black weather, not too cold but very windy, and the street light was
hacked and banged like a cymbal.

"But where's Frazer?" I said, having been out of touch with the house lately.

"He had to leave. He has to read a damn paper at a convention in Louisiana,
Christmas, and so he went to see his folks first, because he can't be with them
for the holiday. But what difference is it where he is--what's the good of him?"

"Well, honestly now, Mimi, wouldn't you like it if you could get married?"

She gave me enough silence in which to take it back, looking at me. "You
must think I lose my head easily," she said when I didn't retract. We hadn't
gone down into the wind yet; we were on the porch. She had one foot pointed
to the side and her hand coming from her deep sleeve held the back of her
neck while her round face of tough happiness was turned close under mine. Tough
happiness? Yes, or hard amusement, or something spiritual and gymnastic, with
pain done to the brows to make them point finely. "If I wouldn't marry him
before, why should I now because of an accident? I see you've been under good
influences. Let's go get a cup of coffee."

She took my arm, and we got as far as the corner, where we stopped again and
were talking when a little dog came up, followed by his mistress in a Persian
lamb coat and astrakhan hat, and an astonishing thing happened of the sort that
made me see how believable it was that Mimi should have grabbed the gun from
a stickup man and shot him; for the dog, somehow misoriented, perhaps because
of the strong weather, wet on Mimi's ankle, and she shouted at the woman, who
seemed incapable of looking to see what was happening, "Take away your dog!"
And then she tore off the woman's high fur hat to dry herself with it and left
her like that, her hairdress beginning to be destroyed by the wind as she cried
out, "My hat!" The hat was on the street where Mimi had flung it.

That lack of respect in occurrences for the difficulties that there already are!
But then proofs always flocked to Mimi to help her make her case. Anyway, in
the drugstore, when she had stripped off and rolled her stocking and put it in her
bag, it only made her laugh. A real and pure chance for temper tickled her heart.

But what she wanted to discuss over coffee was a new method of abortion she
had heard about. She had already tried drugs like ergoapiol, with walking,
climbing stairs, and hot baths, and now one of the waitresses at the co-op told
her of a doctor near Logan Square who brought on miscarriages by injection.

"I never heard of such a thing before, but it's worth a try, and I'm going to
try."

"What is it that he uses?"

"How should I know? I'm not a scientist."

"And if it has a bad effect you'll have to go to the hospital, and then what?"

"Oh, they have to take you in if you're in danger of your life. Only they'd
never get out of me how it happened."

"It sounds risky. Maybe you'd better not try at all."

"And have a baby? Me? Can you see me with a kid? You don't care how the
world gets populated, do you! Maybe you're thinking about your mother"--I
thus knew that either Sylvester or Clem Tambow had talked to her about me
--"and that you wouldn't be here if your mother had ideas like mine. Nor your
brothers either. But even if I could be sure I'd have a son like you," she said,
with her usual comment of laughter, "not that I don't think the world of you, pal,
even with all your faults--why should I get into this routine? So the souls of
these things shouldn't get after me when I die and accuse me of not letting them
be born? I'd tell them, 'Listen, stop haunting me. What do you think you ever
were? Why, a kind of little scallop, that's all. You don't know how lucky you
are. What makes you think you would have liked it? Take it from me, you're
indignant because you don't know.' "

We were sitting near the counter, and all the help stopped and listened to this
speech. Among them was a man who said, "What a crazy broad!"

She heard him, he caught her eye, and she laughed at him and said, "Here's a
guy who'll live and die trying to look like Cesar Romero."

"First thing, she comes in, she has to take off her stockings and show her
gams …"

This argument had to run its course, and then we couldn't stay; we finished
our conversation in the street.

"No," I said, "I can't complain about having been born."

"Yes, sure, you'd even feel grateful if you knew to whom, and for what was
only an accident."

"It couldn't have been all an accident. On my mother's side at least I can be
sure there was love in it."

"Is it love that saves it from being an accident?"

"I mean the desire that there should be more life; from gratitude."

"Show me where that is! Why don't you go down to the Fulton egg market
and think it over there. Find me the gratitude--"

"I can't argue with you that way. But if you ask me whether obliviousness
would have been better for me, then I'd be a liar if I answered 'yes' or even
'maybe,' because the facts are against it. I couldn't even swear that I knew
what obliviousness was, but I could tell you a lot about how pleasant my life
has been."

"That's hunky-dory for you; maybe you like the way you are, but most people
suffer from it. They suffer from what they are, such as they are; this woman
because she's getting wrinkled and her husband won't love her; and that one
because she wants her sister to die and leave her her Buick; and still another
who is willing to devote her whole life to keep her fanny in the right shape;
or getting money out of somebody; or thinking about getting a better man than her
husband. Do you want me to give you a list on men too? I could go on as long as
you like. They'll never change, one beautiful morning. They can't change. So
maybe you're lucky. But others are stuck; they have what they have; and if that's
their truth, where are we?"

Me, I couldn't think all was so poured in concrete and that there weren't
occasions for happiness that weren't illusions of people still permitted to be
forgetful of permanent disappointment, more or less permanent pain, death of
children, lovers, friends, ends of causes, old age, loathsome breath, fallen
faces, white hair, retreated breasts, dropped teeth; and maybe most intolerable
the hardening of detestable character, like bone, similar to a second skeleton
and creaking loudest before the end. But she, who had to make up her mind
practically, couldn't be expected to make it up by my feelings. She let you know,
but quick, that you, a man, could talk, but she was the one for whom it was the
flesh and blood trouble, and she even had a pride about it that made her cheeks
shine, that in her was something ultimate.

I didn't keep up these arguments with her. And although not convinced by her,
I wasn't utterly horrified for the unborn either. To be completely consistent
in that kind of economy of souls you would have to have great uneasiness and
remorse that wombs should ever be unoccupied; likewise, that hospitals, prisons,
and madhouses and graves should ever be full. That wide a spread is too much.
The decision was really up to her, whether to have a child by Frazer who wasn't
free to marry her now, even if she wanted to marry him. And, by the way, I
didn't take at face value all that she said about him.

However, I wasn't any too sure about the injection. I wanted to ask Padilla
about it, who was my scientific authority, and I tried to get him at his laboratory.
If he didn't know the answer himself he could ask one of his biological buddies
in that semi-skyscraper of a building where there were always dogs barking with
abnormal strain, which made me flinch a little when I heard it. Padilla didn't
seem to mind this; he only went there to do calculations in that slip-slop queer
swift way, standing on an eccentric point, a hand in his pocket and an untouched
cigarette burning with forked smoke. But I couldn't find him before Mimi's
appointment with the doctor. To which I took her.

This doctor was a man made dolorous, or anyhow heavy of mood, by the bad
times, and he looked very unprofessional. There was a careless office of old
equipment, and he sat in rolled sleeves and smoked cigars at a desk where my
book-accustomed eyes spotted a Spinoza and a Hegel and other things odd for a
doctor, and especially one in his line. Under him there was a music shop. My
memory gives me back the name: Stracciatella. In the window there was the
entire family, playing guitars to a microphone--the young girls and barelegged
boys whose feet didn't yet touch the floor, and the sounds covering the street,
cold that night, after a snowfall, with a noise of wires stronger even than the
competition of the streetcars, old on that line and passing with a ruckus.

The doctor didn't misrepresent what he had to offer--he was too careless even
for that. He wasn't hardhearted maybe, but he appeared to ask, "What could I
accomplish by caring?" Perhaps there was a disdain about him for the double
powerlessness of creatures, first to oppose love and then to be free of the
consequences. Naturally he took me for the lover. I suppose Mimi wanted him
to; as for me, that wasn't what I cared about. Therefore, this was how we were,
in the office, the stout doctor explaining his injection for our lay understanding,
fat-faced, dry, unarduous, heavy of breath, his arms hairy, the office stinking of
cigars and of his sedentary career in old black leather. He was not actually
unkind, in his goggles, and partly a man of thought--just as far as the difficulties
that purify, and no farther. Then the guitars breaking their step, a wiry woe and
clatter. And Mimi with fair face and hair, red cheeks, a cloth rose laying down
its folds front and center of her hat, assisted by white and less serious flowers.
O that red! of summer walls and yet of fabric and the counters of stores. Also her
demonish or ciliary eyebrows, so hard-set and yet she was also so confused. But
the time was one of the highest opportunity, if I understood her spirit, having to
do with that same powerlessness the doctor observed--the powerlessness of
women waiting for what will be done to them, and that way and none other to
buy glory.

"This injection causes contractions," said the doctor, "and it may expel your
trouble. Nobody can promise that it will, and sometimes even if it works you still
need a dilation and curettage. The thing actresses in Hollywood describe in the
paper as appendicitis."

"I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't make any jokes. I'm only interested in your
medical services," Mimi told him right off, and he saw he wasn't dealing with a
timid little knocked-up factory girl who was grateful, he'd think, for his wit and
signal back to him dimly with a smile over the vast separating distances of real
grief and danger. Some poor body in trouble from tenderness. But Mimi--her
tenderness didn't have an easy visibility. You wondered what it would be, and
after what terrific manifestations it would appear.

"Let's just keep everything professional," she said.

He said, with offended dark nose holes, "Okay, do you want the injection or
not?"

"Well, what the hell do you think I came all this way for, a cold night!"

He got up and put an enamel pot on the gas ring--a grizzly-claw collar of fires
giving hot scratches. His handling of the pot was suggestive of the laziness
and sloppiness of his morning egg in the kitchen; he dropped the hypo in, fished
it up again with tongs, and was ready.

"And suppose I need other help, if this only works halfway, will I get it from
you?"

He shrugged.

Her voice began to ring. "Well, you're one hell of a doctor! Don't discuss it
before you start? Or don't you give a damn what happens to people after they
take your injection? You think they're so desperate you don't have to give a
damn and they're only fooling with their lives, is that the way it is?"

"If I had to, I might be able to do something for you."

I said, "You mean you do if you get paid. How much do you soak for it?"

"A hundred bucks."

"You wouldn't settle for fifty?" she said.

"You might find somebody who would." He meant to show--and I thought it
was genuine--that he didn't care. Non curo! That was what came easiest to him.
He would just as soon have put away the hypo and gone back to picking his nose
and to his ideas.

I counseled her not to talk money with him. I said to her, "That part of it
isn't important."

"You want to go ahead with it? Look, to me it's just the same."

"Mimi, you can still change your mind," I said for her own ear.

"And where will I be if I change it? On the same spot still."

I helped her off with her fur-collared coat, and she took me by the hand as if
it were I that had to be led to the needle. At the moment of my putting my arm
around her--feeling her need and wanting greatly to do all I could to meet it--
she broke into sobs. The thing affected me too; I caught it from her. So we held
together like what we were not, a pair of lovers.

However, the doctor would not let us forget he was waiting. Sorrowful or
tiresome, was this for him? Something between the two, and he watched how I
would comfort her. Whatever there was to envy before, taking me as her lover,
this was not enviable to him now. Well, he didn't know.

But Mimi had decided, and she wasn't wavering; these tears didn't mean that.
She gave him her arm, and he sank the needle in it; the hard-looking fluid went
down. He, told her she would have pains like birth pangs and had better go to
bed. The bite for this was fifteen bucks, which she was able to pay; she didn't
want any money from me at the moment. Not that I had a lot of it. Going with
Lucy kept me broke. Frazer owed me something, but if he had been able to pay
he would also have been able to send money to Mimi. She didn't want him to be
bothered about it. He was still raising money for his divorce. Besides, it was
part of Frazer's style not to know about such things. There was always something
superior to what was happening in the immediate view, more eminent. This was
a part of him that Mimi's satire was always aimed at, and yet she encouraged it
as something precious as well as foolish. It wasn't that he was specially
ungenerous but that he put things off to give his generosity a longer and more
significant route.

Anyway, Mimi went to bed, cursing the doctor, for the action had already set
in. However, it was "dry," she said, and the cramps weren't going to effect
anything. She shuddered and sweated, her bare shoulders thin and square above
the quilt, and the childish form of her forehead painfully determined with
lines, eyes greatly widened, strongly lighted blue.

"Oh, that dirty, bloody gypper!"

"Mimi, but he said nothing might happen. Wait--"

"What in the name of hell can I do now but wait when I'm shot full of this
terrible poison? I must be caught strong, for it's squeezing my guts out. That
lousy clumsy cow doctor! Oh!"

Intermittently the spasms passed off and she found the spirit for a relieving
joke. "It's, sitting tight, won't budge; stubborn thing. While some women have
to stay on their backs nine months to keep theirs. Listen to the radio. But"--
increasing in seriousness--"I can't let it alone now and be born, with all the
stuff I've taken. It might be hurt. Groggy. If not, it might be dangerous because
it's so obstinate, and be a criminal. I think if he'd be wild enough and kick
the world around I might let him come. Why do I say 'he' though? It might be a
girl, and what would I do to a daughter, poor child? Still women--women. They do
themselves more credit, there's more reality in women. They live closer to their
nature. They have to. It's more with them. They have the breasts. They see their
blood, and it does them good, while men are let to be vainer. Oh! give me your
hand, will you, Augie, for Chrissake?" It was the return of the gripes, making her
sit stiffly and squeeze and bear down on my hand. With shut eyes she let the
spasm pass through and then lay back, and I helped her cover up.

Little by little the effect of the drug ended and left her tired in the muscles
and belly, furious with the doctor and angry also with me.

"But you know he didn't make any promises."

"Don't be stupid," she said, ugly. "How do you know he gave me a big enough
dose? Or if he didn't want me to come back and have it done the other way, so
he'd get more? And that's what it will have to be. Only I'm not going to him."

Seeing how she was, fiery and sullen, though weakened, and wanting nobody
near, I let her be and went to my room.

Kayo Obermark had the room between us, and of course he was on to what
was happening; in spite of Mimi's efforts to keep him out, how could he miss?
He was young, about my own age of twenty-two, but ponderous already, a big,
important, impatient face, irritable, smoky with thought that went out far. He
was gloomy and rough. His life was rugged in there, that room; he didn't like
classes, his notion being that he could do all his own learning; the room was foul
from the moldering of old things and smelled of bottles he used for urine,
because he didn't like to make trips to the toilet when he was working. He lived
half-naked in his bed, which all the rest of the room approached, heaped up with
commodities and dirt. He was melancholy and brilliant. He thought the greatest
purity was outside human relations, that those only begot lies and cabbage-famil-
iarity, and he told me, "I prefer stones any time. I could be a geologist. I'm not
even disappointed in humankind, I just don't care about it, and if there's one
thing that's sure, it's that this world is certainly not enough, and if there isn't
any more they can have it all back."

Kayo wanted to know about Mimi although she always baited him.

"What's the matter, she having it rough? She has hard luck."

"Yes, it's bad."

"But nah! it's not all luck," he said--one of the things he couldn't stand was
that you should agree with him. "You notice people have the same kind of thing
happen to them, over and over and over."

His attitude to her had something in common with the doctor's; it was woman's
trouble she had, and neither of them could place it very high. Kayo, however,
was a much more intelligent man than the doctor, and though as he stood in my
room on bare weight-flattened feet in undershirt, the hair in tufts on his
shoulders, and that large face from which everyone was reproached for letting
him down and coming short of the mark--though, in other words, he was the hard
figure of prejudice, there was still in him an extra effort of justice, a channel kept
open.

"Well--you understand. Everyone has bitterness in his chosen thing.

Bitterness in his chosen thing. That's what Christ was for, that even God had to
have bitterness in his chosen thing if he was really going to be man's God, a god
who was human. She also goes in for it." He gave a heave of terrible impatience.

"That was Christ. Other gods poured on the success, knocked you down with
their splendor. Those that didn't give a damn. Real success, you see, is terrify-
ing. Can't face that. Rather ruin everything first. Everything would have to be
changed. You can't find a pure desire except the one that everything should
be mixed. We run away from what can be conceived pure, and everyone acts out
this disappointment in his own way as if to prove that the mixed and impure
will and must win."

I was always impressed by him and his big horse's eyes startled by wisdom or
the shadow of it, as a horse may shy at a ridiculous thing the same as at an
important one. I felt what he was saying. I knew there was truth in it, and had
respect for him as the source of illumination; even while himself he was in dark
colors, some of smudge, and green and blue by the eyes, but some of radiance;
and, hands on his fat hips, he looked at me with a face in which some original
beauty was turned down as a false lead. That this fact that all had to give in
was acted out I could see, and the accompanying warning that to hope too much
was a killing disease. Yes, pestilential hope that passes under the evils and
leaves them standing. I had enough of a dose of it to recognize it. So I was both
drawn to Kayo's view and resistant to it. No painted sky of the human theater
for him, but always on the outside toward the diamond-drop true sky by means of
the long, star-crawling clear fog of the medulla and brain, a copy of the Milky
Way.

But I had the idea also that you don't take so wide a stand that it makes a hu-
man life impossible, nor try to bring together irreconcilables that destroy you,
but try out what of human you can live with first. And if the highest should come
in that empty overheated tavern with its flies and the hot radio buzzing between
the plays and plugged beer from Sox Park, what are you supposed to do but take
the mixture and say imperfection is always the condition as found; all great
beauty too, my scratched eyeballs will always see scratched. And there may gods
turn up anywhere.

"If you go into reasons," I said to Kayo, "there may be reasons for these
mixed things too."

"Not real," he answered. "You wouldn't try to live on a movie screen. When
you understand that, you'll be on your way to something. You can be too, if I'm
not wrong about your character. You wouldn't be afraid to believe in something.
What I don't get is why you want to make a dude of yourself. It won't keep up
though."

Mimi heard that we were talking and she called me. I went back to her.

"What does he want?" she said.

"Kayo?"

"Yes, Kayo."

"We were just talking."

"You were talking about me. If you tell him anything I'll murder you. All he ever
looks for is proof he's right, and he'd walk on my chest with his big feet if he
could."

"It's you yourself that don't keep your own secrets," I said, trying to be easy
about it, however. It wasn't the time to talk back in any fashion, and she stared at
me, harsh, from the bent-metal bed with its so many cast-iron nuclei and iron
ribbon bows.

"What I say, I say, but I can tell you not to."

"Just take it easy, Mimi, I won't."

Nevertheless I had to ask Kayo to keep an eye on her next day, not knowing what
might come up and worrying through it at the office and at the supper meeting of
the Magnus Cousins Club that took place once a month in an oak room downtown. I
tried phoning the house and couldn't get anyone but Owens himself, who when peev-
ed, and he was with Mimi, put on a Welsh accent I couldn't penetrate, so that it
was just wasting nickels to continue phoning. Lucy wanted to go dancing after
the meeting; I got out of that by alleging tiredness, which I didn't have to
counterfeit, and cut out for home.

Mimi was there, and she had happy news. Dressed in a black and white suit, a
black ribbon in her hair, she was sitting in my room.

"I used my head today," she said. "I started by saying to myself, 'Are there
any ways to get this done legally?' Well, there are a few. One is if you go to an
alienist and get him to say you're nuts. They don't want madwomen to be having
kids. I once got off a rap that way so it's, on a court record. But I don't feel
like doing it now. You can go too far. So I decided, to hell with that stuff of
putting on a wacky act. The other thing is that if your heart is weak or your
life in danger they'll do it for you. So I went to the clinic today and said I
thought I was pregnant but not normally, and kept having trouble. There was a
guy who examined me and thought he was pretty sure I had a tube pregnancy. So I
have to be examined again, and if they still think so they might have to operate."

This was what overjoyed her. She already was banking on it.

I said to her, "What did you do, bone up in a book on what a tube pregnancy
was like and then go down and describe the symptoms to them?"

"Baby, what an idea! Do you think I'm such a daredevil? And do you think you
can walk in there, tell them any old thing, and take them in?"

"They can be fooled about some things at a clinic. That I can tell you. But
watch what you're getting into, Mimi. Don't try to put it over on them."

"It isn't all my idea; they think so too, and I have some of the symptoms. But I
won't go back, I'll go to that veterinarian."

I couldn't keep watch over her the next few days, having a full calendar of
suppers and gatherings, and the times I looked in on her, late at night or at
half-past six in the morning when I had to turn out, she was too sleepy to talk
to me. When I went to wake her she seemed to know at once whose hand was on her
shoulder and what the question was, and answered as though out of sleep, "No,
nothing, no soap."

Winter was pouring on, late December, smoky and dark. Clobbering down the
steps in my galoshes these mornings of mist and smoke, usually running late, I
made for the car line in the seeping-back of night from the bad filters of low sky.
Nine o'clock, after the first rush of business, I could catch up with breakfast at
Marie's greasy-spoon, walled with decorative tin panels, one-arm chairs by the
walls, no great amount of light because of the height of the fixtures.

On a Saturday afternoon I was taking a break at Marie's. She had the opera on
the radio, tuned in from New York, and that eloquence turned loose didn't reach
me but went on in my ears. There you have a service formerly paid for, as when
a Burgundian duke in prison in Bruges sent for a painter to alleviate the dark
shutters with gold faces and devotional decoration. This kind of aid to people in
trouble now diffused practically free, as in magazines or on the air. However, I
didn't hear it well, except as powerful and formal voices.

Sent by Happy Kellerman, a shoveler came to say that I was wanted on the phone
by a lady.

It was a nurse from a South Side hospital, calling with a message from Mimi.

"Hospital? What's the matter? Since when has she been there?"

"Since yesterday," the woman said, "and perfectly all right, but says she wants
to see you."

I told Simon, who listened to me with suspicion, irony, reprimand, already hard
and waiting to spurn my explanation that I had to get off early to see a friend
in the hospital.

"Which friend? You mean that broad of yours, the roughneck blonde? Pal, you
have too many irons in the fire. How are you mixed up with her? I think you're
going a little too fast, aren't you, trying to keep up with two dames? That's
why you look so dug-up lately. If one of them didn't haul your ashes you might
make faster time with the other. Or is it more than an ash-haul job? Ah, that
would be just like you, to fall in love too! You can't hold your load of love,
can you! What do you have to give for a piece of tail? You can't climb in bed
with a girl without feeling that you have to take care of her for life?"

"You don't have to say all this, Simon, it doesn't have any bearing. Mimi's
sick and wants me to come see her."

"As long as the boy is getting laid, I don't see what's such a rush to marry,"
said Happy.

"If this gets around to them," said Simon, out of Happy's hearing; and,
strangely, his look got hung up on something that resembled satisfaction and
pleasure more than anything else, and I saw that he had already handled the
consequences of this to himself; he'd repudiate me, and it would do him no
harm. As for his notions, the wedding night, of what we two would be able to
combine and achieve, he had no doubt changed them, deciding that all should be
the work of a single mind and authority.

But I was not thinking of this much, but rather of Mimi in the hospital. I was
sure she had gone through with her plan to trick the doctors.

Late afternoon I saw her, in a ward; I was in the door, and she was snapping
her fingers from the distance and trying to sit up in bed.

"You went through with it?"

"Oh, sure! Didn't you know I would?"

"Well? At least, is it over?"

"Augie, I've had an operation for nothing. It's all normal. I still have the thing
to go through with."

I didn't get it at first; I felt block-headed and stupid.

She said with devilish towering humor and plunging bitterness, "Augie, they
all come in to congratulate me that I'm going to have a normal baby. It's not a
fallopian pregnancy. The doctor, the internes, the nurses, they think I should
be wild with happiness, and I can't even yell at them. I've been crying. I'm so
crossed up."

"But why did you go through with it? Didn't you know? You invented the symp-
toms."

"No, I wasn't sure. I didn't invent everything, I had some. Maybe it was that
injection. And when they thought it might be in the tube I was afraid not to have
the operation. Then I thought when they had me on the operating table they'd do
it for me. But they didn't."

"Of course they didn't, they're not allowed to. That's what it was all about in
the first place."

"I realize. I realize. I thought I could crash the gate, I suppose. One of my
bright schemes." She wasn't crying now, though in her eyes there were the
crimson threads that tear salts bring out, and her nose was stung with them
too, but she was not less but more, as was clear on her push-faced beauty, an
aristocrat in her idea of the energy you should devote to love.

"How long are you supposed to stay in bed, Mimi?"

"I'm not going to stay as long as they think. I can't."

"But you have to."

"Oh no. It's getting late. A little more and I won't be able to. You call that
man and get an appointment for me for late next week. By that time I'll be able
to take it."

This touched me very wrong, and I couldn't help it, I showed my horror at such
nerve to practice on one's own body. "Oh, you think a woman should be more fra-
gile than that," she said. "I keep forgetting you're just about engaged to be
married."

"But shouldn't you wait at least until they let you out?"

"They say ten days, and it'll only weaken me to stay in bed that long.
Anyhow, I can't stand the ward. And the nurses' being so pleased about the
blessed event. I can't put up with it. And I'm beginning to be nervous. Do you
have any dough?"

"Not much. Do you?"

"Not even half of what I need, and can't raise much. He won't touch me for a
buck under the price, I know. Frazer hasn't got anything either."

"If I could get into his room I could take some of his books and sell them.
There are things there worth good money."

"He wouldn't like that. Anyhow, you can't get in." She broke her preoccupation
to give me a look for my own sake, straight, and said with a laugh that didn't
last, "You take my side, don't you?" I saw no necessity to answer. "You can see
the point of love, I mean." She kissed me feelingly, and with some pride in me.
All the rest, the women, wan, visiting or gazing around.

"Well," I said, "we can raise this money. How much short of the hundred are
you?"

"I'll need at least fifty more."

"We'll get it."

The easiest way I knew to raise extra dough--so easy I was rather proud of it
--was to steal books. I needed to ask no one, and Simon least of all.

I headed downtown right away. It was still early in the evening, glittering with
electric, with ice; and trembling in the factories, those nearly all windows, over
the prairies that had returned over demolitions with winter grass pricking the
snow and thrashed and frozen together into beards by the wind. The cold simmer
of the lake also, blue; the steady skating of rails too, down to the dark.

I went to Carson's on Wabash Avenue, the book section on the ground floor,
warm and busy with a late crowd of shoppers under the Christmas bells and
silvery ivies. I didn't as a rule loiter long, thus drawing attention. I knew what
books I was after, a rare Plotinus, an English edition of The Enneads worth a
whole lot of money, more than it was priced. I took the volumes down, leafed
them, looked over the bindings, put them under my arm, and with fair ease made
my way to the Wabash Avenue door. It was spinning slowly. I got into the quad-
rant that opened up for me and was half through when the door stuck and caught
me, inches from the street. I turned to see whether the cause of the jamming was
the worst that could be, having in my mind already police, court, and prison, up
to a terrible year in Bridewell. But behind me was Jimmy Klein, practically a
stranger to me since the old days, but not a stranger nevertheless. It was he
who had me caught in the brass barrel that the doors turned within, and he sig-
naled me that he would release me, that I was to wait in the street. There was
a good deal of practice in his regard, under the felt brim, and the hook of the
forefinger downward, meaning precisely, "Stop outside."

By these signs I knew him to have become a store dick. Hadn't Clem Tambow
told me that he was working at Carson's? I wasn't going to make a break. The
first thing was to get free of the trap, and I surrendered the books to him in the
street. He said quickly, "By the stoplight on the corner. I'll be there right away."

I saw his hasty back and hat as he ran in the circle of the door. His behavior
was not angry, but he appeared to deal with what he had foreseen and been ready
for. By the stoplight, in the crowd, I sweated in the cold air, weak and grateful
after the passed danger. Grandma's warning against Jimmy, that he was a crook,
came back to me. He dealt, anyway, with lawbreaking.

"Okay," he said, returning. "You dropped the books and beat it when I holler-
ed. I didn't see your face, but I'm out looking if I can spot you, you under-
stand? Now you just go to Thompson's on Monroe. I'll be right behind."

I set off, drying my face with my silk muffler. In the cafeteria I carried
my cup from the counter to a table. Presently he came too, and sat down.

He considered me for a while; he had gotten to be wrinkled at the eyes,
sallow, shrewd, stillish, a commentator. Yet on both sides, as much as the
circumstances let it be, there was happiness at meeting again.

"Was you scared in the door?" he finally said.

"Jesus, yes--what do you think?" I said, smiling.

"Same jerk as you always were. A train could hit you and you'd think it was
just swell and get up with smiles, like knee-deep in June. What's all the happy
joy this time?"

"Well, I'm glad it was you, not a real dick."

"I am a real dick, only not for you, you fool. I had to chase you. I was
standing with the buyer and you came right smack in our sights, two yards'
range. So what could I do but go for you? But what are you swiping books for? I
thought they beat it out of us both at the same time when we worked that Santa
Claus deal. My old man almost killed me. He almost killed me."

"And he made a detective of you?"

"He? Shit! I go where they put me and do what they tell me."

I knew his mother was dead; that, limping and corpulent, she had sunk into
coffin and gone down to grave. But what had happened to the others?

"What about your dad now?"

"Putzin' on. He got married again after Ma died. It turned out he had a
romance from the old country lasting about forty years. Isn't that something?
While he had eight kids by Ma and the woman had four by her husband, both
eating their hearts out with love. She became a widow, so they went and got
married. What's the matter, you surprised?"

"Why, yes. I remember your father always being at home."

"Well, he had to go to the West Side sometimes, and when he did he had a
transfer good for the Sixteenth-Street Kenton streetcar, so he used it."

"Don't be so rough on him, Jimmy."

"I'm not against him. I'd be happy if it did him good, but he stayed the same.
He's the same now."

"And how's Eleanor? She went to Mexico, I heard."

"Oh, you're out of date. That was a long time ago. She's been back a good
while. You should visit her. You was her favorite in the old days, and she still
talks about you. Eleanor has a big heart. I wish she was better."

"She sick?"

"She was. She's working again, at Zarropick's on Chicago Avenue where they
make the suckers they sell in the stores next-door to schools. She shouldn't be
working though. She got sick in Mexico."

"I thought she was going there to marry."

"Oh, you remember?"

"Your Spanish relative."

He smiled downward. "Yeah. Well, he runs a sweatshop of leather goods, and
he had Eleanor working in it for about a year while they were supposed to be
engaged. But he was laying the other broads working there too, and he wasn't
really thinking of getting married. Finally she got sick and came home. She's
not heartbroken; it was great to see another country."

"I'm sorry for Eleanor."

"Yeah, she hoped to be in love. She banked a lot on it."

He was contemptuous beyond measure, not toward Eleanor for whom he happened
to care a lot. No, perhaps for her sake, toward love, as to something that
had undermined and debilitated her.

"You're kind of hard on it."

"I don't think anything of it."

"But you're married, Clem told me."

This innocence of mine pleased him. "That's right, and have a son. He's a
winner."

"And your wife?"

"Oh, she's a good kid. She has sort of a hard life. We live with her folks, we
have to. And there's another married sister and brother-in-law. Well, what do
you think it's like, with fights about who's going to use the toilet or take down
the wash, or cook, or yell at the kid? There's still another sister who's a tramp
and spreads on the stairs, so you can step on her in the dark coming home from
the show, so there's brawls all the time. What I get out of it is space in a double
bed. Don't you know how it is by now? It's all that you want from life comes to
you as one single thing--fucking; so you and some nice kid get together, and
after a while you have more misery than before, only now it's more permanent.
You're married and have a kid."

"Is that how it happened to you?"

"I fooled around with her, I got her in the family way, and I married her."

The path of wretchedness as Mrs. Renling had drawn it for me when she
predicted what would happen if Simon married Cissy.

"You're set up like the July fourth rocket," said Jimmy. "Just charge enough
to explode you. Up. Then the stick falls down after the flash. You live to bring
up the kid and oblige your wife."

"Is that what you do?"

"Well, it's not much to me; I give up on that. I don't think I give her much of
a bang. But what are we talking about me for? You're the wonder boy. And what
the hell are you doing, or think you're doing? I died when I saw you glom onto
those books. That's a fine way to meet again. Augie, a crook!"

It was not all dismay; in part he seemed glad of it.

"Not a full-time crook, Jim."

"But even part-time it doesn't go with what I've heard about you and Simon,
that you're so successful."

"He's doing fine--married and in business."

"That's what I heard from Kreindl. And you was going to the university. Is
that why you were copping books? We catch a lot of students. Most of them
don't make a good impression."

I explained to him my need for money, letting him assume that I was Mimi's
lover, for otherwise it would have been difficult to make him understand; and
though it was curious to meet Jimmy as the cop that caught me, and I felt light
with relief and one foot on paradox and all the spirited melancholy that came of
that, I had to get on with my money-raising and the other things there were to
attend to. However, Jimmy was aroused by what I told him, and his eyes and all
the skin of his face expanded with concern and with the immediate determination
he took.

"How far gone is she?"

"Over two months."

"Listen, Augie, I'll help you as much as I can."

"No, Jimmy," said I, surprised, "I couldn't tap you. I know you have it hard."

"Don't be a dummy. Compare a few bucks to a life of grief. Say it's for my
own sake--me not wanting to see it happen to anybody I used to be buddies
with. How much do you need?"

"About fifty bucks."

"Easy. Between me and Eleanor it won't be anything. She has some dough put
aside. I won't tell her what it's for. She wouldn't ask, but anyway why should
she know? You don't have to tell me why you don't put the bee on your brother.
You wouldn't be stealing it if he'd be willing to give it to you."

"If push came to shove I might ask him, but there're special reasons why I
can't. Well, Jim--thanks. It's great of you. Thanks, Jimmy!"

The extent of my gratitude made him laugh at me. "Don't exaggerate. I'll see
you here Monday, this same time, and give you the fifty bucks."

Jimmy had no confidence that he could keep company with kind motives; he
was abashed by them. And I understood well that he wanted to defeat a
mechanism as much as he wanted to help a onetime friend.

However that was, he gave me the money, and I made the appointment with the
doctor for the end of Christmas week. Things were difficult to arrange. I had
a date with Lucy that same night and couldn't break it with Simon's knowledge
because I needed the car. Therefore, when I had left Mimi with the doctor I
went down in great nervousness and phoned Lucy from a drugstore.

"Honey, I'll have to be very late tonight," I told her. "Something's come up.
It'll be ten o'clock before I can get to your place."

She, however, had not much thought of me tonight. She whispered on the
phone, "Darling, I ran into a fence and bent my fender. I haven't told Daddy.
He's downstairs, so I'm stymied."

"Oh, he won't be so angry."

"But, Augie, I've had the car less than a month. He said he'd sell it if I didn't
take good care of it. I had to promise there wouldn't be any trouble for six
months."

"Maybe we can have it fixed without his knowing."

"Do you think I could?"

"Oh, probably. I'll dope out something. I'll be around late."

"Not too late."

"Well, then, if I'm not there by ten, don't expect me."

"In that case maybe I ought to get some sleep before New Year's Eve. You'll
be on time tomorrow, won't you? And don't forget it's formal."

"Tomorrow at nine, in my tuxedo, and maybe even this evening. But I promised
to help out a friend who's having a little trouble. Don't worry about the car."

"I do though. You don't know Daddy."

Empty, I left the booth; feeling stiff, and the soldier of my fears, and all that I
didn't know had power over me.

Stracciatella was closed, and in the gaunt glass curled saxophones and guitars
shrunk in their sides. Deeper, cracks of goblin light out of the spaghetti-feasting
kitchen where the family sat.

I waited upstairs in the corridor by the door, which, in time, I heard unlocked.
Mimi passed through it alone, handed out, and it shut before I could see the
doctor to question him. I couldn't now, having to support Mimi, who tottered.
She was only two days out of the hospital, and the variety of decisions she had
made alone, not counting pain and blood loss, was enough to have taken away
her strength. She was faint to such a degree that for the first time I saw her
without expression, like a kid asleep on the excursion train, fatigued at night
from picnicking. Except that when her head rolled on my shoulder and approached
my neck, she drew on the skin of it with her lips, weakly, a reflex of sensuality.
For the moment perhaps I was Frazer and she was confirming that no matter what
complication, injury, foulness, she didn't back down from her belief that all
rested on the gentleness in privacy of man and woman--they did in willing desire
what in the rock and water universe, the green universe, the bestial universe,
was done from ignorant necessity.

As we stood at the head of the stairs, her lips at my neck while I clasped her
and whispered, "Easy now, let's start down easy," a man came up from the street
and I nervously thought I saw something familiar about him. Mimi too was
aware that someone was approaching and took several steps. So it happened that
we were in the shadow, not in the main light of the corridor, when he came up.
Nevertheless we recognized each other. It was Kelly Weintraub, the Magnuses'
cousin by marriage who came from my neighborhood, the one who had threatened
me about Georgie. By the slow increase of his smile when he saw me, and what
there was in the flesh of his mouth more jubilant than mere smiling, also by
the setting of his eyes, more clear to me than the eyes themselves in this
obscurity, I realized that he had me. He knew.

"Why, Mr. March, what a hell of a surprise this is! You been to see my cousin?"

"Who's your cousin?"

"The doctor is."

"That makes sense."

"What does?"

"That you're his cousin."

I could never run so far or plunge so deep that this man, this Weintraub,
wouldn't have enough erotic line to pay out after me, so he was telling me with
his full, handsome teameo's look, fleshy and brow-bent, while he swaggered a
little at the knees.

"I have other cousins also," he said.

I felt like hitting him, since I probably would never be seeing him after he had
blabbed, but I couldn't do it because I was supporting Mimi. It may have been
the dilation of the senses by rage that made me think I smelled blood, raw, but
the result in horror is what counted. I said to him, "Get out of the way!"

To take Mimi home and get her into bed was all I cared about now.

"He's not my boy friend," said Mimi to Kelly. "He's only going out of his
way to help me out of trouble."

"That makes sense too," he answered.

"Oh, you dirty bastard!" she said. She was too weakened to put in all the
power of savagery she felt.

Shaking, I carried her to the car and drove off fast.

"Kid, I'm sorry. I loused things up for you. Who is he?"

"Just a guy--he doesn't amount to anything. Nobody ever listens to him.
Never mind about that, Mimi. Was it all right?"

"He was rough," she said. "First he took the money."

"But it's over?"

"It's all gone now, if that's what you mean."

The drive was clear of snow, and I went fast over the endless varieties of
black and smooth, along the tracks, through tunnels, lights streaming as if wind
had gotten into a church and flown over the candles, sucking out breath, so much
the speed fused things down.

We arrived. I lifted her up the four flights, and while she was getting under the
covers ran down to get an icebag from Miss Owens, who fussed with me about
the ice.

"What!" I yelled. "It's the middle of winter."

"Go out and chop some then. Ours is made in the refrigerator and takes
electricity."

I stopped yelling, seeing that I had snagged a spinsterish trouble upsetting
her by rushing in wildly, not thinking how I showed anguish. Calming down, I
reasoned with her, turning on what charm I had on reserve. There can't have
been much, the low charge in my trembling wires there was at this moment.
I said, "Miss Villars has had a tooth pulled and it's very bad."

"A tooth! You young people get so excited." She gave me the ice tray and I
scooted back with it.

Ice, however, didn't help much. She bled very swift, and she tried to keep it
secret, but presently she had to tell me, as she herself, astonished, with open
eyes, tried to keep track of it. She began to soak the bed. I was for taking her
to the hospital at once, but she said, "It'll get better soon. I think it has to
be like this at first."

Going below, I phoned the doctor, who told me to watch and he'd tell me
what to do if it didn't slacken. He'd stand by. There was fright in his tone.

When I pulled off her sheets and made up her bed with my sheets her hands
came up to oppose me, but I said, "Look, Mimi, this has to be done"; she shut
her eyes and let me make the change, laying her cheek down to the hollow of
her shoulder.

There have great things been done to mitigate the worst human sights and
teach you something different from revulsion at them. All the Golgothas have
been painted with this aim. But since probably very few people are now helped
by these things and lessons, each falls back on whatever he has.

I flung the bloody bedclothes into the closet, and she noticed the energy of the
swing and said, "Don't be panicky, Augie."

I sat down by her, trying to be calmer. "Did you realize it might be like this?"

"Or even tougher," she said; and as her eyes were yellowish and lacking in
moisture and her mouth was pale, it occurred to me that possibly she couldn't
grasp just how tough it already was. "But …"

"But what?" I said.

"You can't let your life be decided for you by any old thing that comes up."

"A champion way to be independent," I said, intending the words for myself,
but she heard me.

"It makes a difference what you go down from, don't fool yourself. It does to
me, now. Though," she said, face frowning and then growing smooth while she
made the concession, "probably that is only if I come up again. If you're dead,
does it make a difference for what?"

I couldn't bear to talk now, and sat quiet, watching. And as she had thought it
would, the hemorrhaging gradually let up; she was less braced and stiff-spread
on the bed, and I was less benumbed in the muscles. My thoughts were crumbled,
for I had been having fancies about how I was going to get her into a hospital,
knowing how tough it was in such cases, and I imagined pleading and being re-
fused, and official highhandedness and being driven mad.

"Well," she said, "it looks as if even he couldn't croak me."

"You beginning to feel better?"

"I'd like a drink."

"Shall I bring you something soft? I don't think you ought to drink whisky
tonight."

"I mean whisky. I think you could use some yourself."

I took Simon's car to the garage and came back in a cab with a bottle. She
took a good-sized slug, and I drank the rest, for now that I felt reassured about
Mimi my own trouble came forward; as I was crawling naked into my sheetless
bed in the dark it gave me an enormous squeeze, and I took a last swig at the
bottle for the sake of stupefaction and sleep. But I woke in the small hours,
earlier than my usual rising time. Kelly Weintraub would never let me get by but
would nail me. And what I felt about this more definite than general darkness
and fear, like the unlighted gathered cloud that hung outside, I didn't know.

I dressed in my yard clothes. The whisky was still working in me; I was not
used to drink. In the grimness and mess of her room Mimi seemed to be very hot
but normally asleep. When I went to have coffee I arranged at the drugstore to
have breakfast sent up to her.

Watchfulness and care made me rocky that morning. The weather stayed black,
undispersed soot sitting on the snow. Like the interior of something that
should be closed. It was much more awful than sad, even to me, a native who
didn't have much else to know. Out of this middle-of-Asia darkness, as flat in
humanity as the original is in space, to the yard, on business, came trucks and
wagons, dying nags inquiring through the window with their grenadiers' decora-
tions of velvet green or red, looking at us under the brilliant bulbs making
out receipts and laying the dollars in the cash drawer. The dollar bills felt
snotty and smelled perfumed.

Simon kept examining me, so that I wondered whether Kelly had already reached
him. But no, he was only keeping me under his severity, stout and red in the
eye. And I wasn't doing too well.

It was, however, a short day, the last of the year. We were passing out little
single-snort bottles of bourbon and gin and the joint got merry and jumping,
peppered with these empties on the floor. Even Simon loosened up by and by.
With the scrapping of the calendar and the old twelvemonth sagging off with
his scythe and Diogenes lantern, Simon was after all on a new beginning. His
summer troubles were well behind him.

He said to me, "I understand you and Lucy are going formal tonight: Well,
how can you put on a tux with a head of hair as wild as that? Go and see a
barber. In fact, get some rest. You been balling it somewhere? Take the car and
go on. Uncle Artie is coming for me. Who tired you out like that? It probably
wasn't Lucy. It must be that other snatch. Well, go--Christ, I can't tell if
you look more tired or more dumb." Simon could only vouch for himself alone as
being safe from the touched mentality of our family; when he was irritated his
suspicion fell on me.

I lit out for home, wasting no time, and upstairs ran into Kayo Obermark
coming out of the toilet with a wet towel for Mimi's head. He looked badly
worried; his eyes, a big enough size in themselves, a few times enlarged by his
specs, and his lip stuck out anxiously. His face was dark with bristle or dirt.

"I think she's bad," he said.

"Bleeding?"

"I don't know--but she's burning up."

To accept any help from Kayo she must, I thought, be in bad condition; and so
she was, though talkative and of false alertness and sharpness--false because it
didn't correspond to the expression of her eyes. The little room was overhot and
gamy, everything about it felt stale and sickly, of swampy rottenness commencing
to be dangerous.

I got hold of Padilla, and he came over from his laboratory with pills for her
fever, having consulted with some Physiology grad students. We waited for
results, which were slow to come, and wanting not to lose my head I agreed to
play rummy. He, always alert in numbers, took every game. Until I couldn't any
longer hold the cards. Toward night--I go by the hour and not by darkness,
which was the same that day at six as it had been at three, fuming and slow--
her fever went down somewhat. Then Lucy phoned to ask me to come an hour
earlier than arranged. I felt that there was trouble at that end too and said,
"What's up?"

"Nothing; only please try to be here at eight," she said, sounding a little
stifled.

It was already well past six and I was unshaved. I did the job quickly and
started getting into my tuxedo, meanwhile consulting with Padilla and Kayo.

"The big risk," said Padilla, "is if he gave her a septicemia. Suppose she has
puerperal fever. That's too dangerous to keep her here with. You have to take
her to the hospital."

Without waiting to hear more, in the boiled shirt, I crossed the hall and said to
her, "Mimi, we have to try to get you in a hospital."

"They won't take me in anywhere."

"We'll make them take you."

"Call up and ask, you'll see."

"We won't call," said Padilla. "We'll just go."

"What's he doing?" she said to me. "How many people have to be in on this?"

"Padilla is a good friend of mine, don't worry about this now."

"You know what they'll do there, don't you? They'll try to get me to tell on
the doctor. What do you think, will I keep my mouth shut?" This was a way of
boasting that they could not make her squeal, even on him.

Padilla muttered, "What do you waste time with her for? Get going."

I dressed her in hat and coat, packed a little case with nightgown, toothbrush,
and comb, and Padilla and I took her down to the car covered with a blanket.
As I opened the gray car door Owens called from the porch, "Eh, March!" He
had come out in his shirt and was giant and shrunk-shouldered, knees together,
in the cold of this bad death of the year. "Important, on the telephone."

I ran up. It was Simon.

"Augie!"

'Talk fast. What's up? I'm in a hurry!"

"It's you who'd better talk fast," he said, furious. "I just had a call from
Charlotte, and Kelly Weintraub is spreading a story about you that you took a
bim to have an abortion."

"So? What about it, Simon?"

"That's the dame, isn't it, that one from your house? So you went and fixed
yourself, you jazzed yourself right out into the cold. This is where I shake you,
Augie, before you do worse to me. I can't carry you along any more. I'm going
to have a tough time explaining this, how you were fucking this girl all the time
you were engaged to Lucy. I'll say you're no damned good, which is no lie since
you're too dumb to live."

"Aren't you even going to ask me if Kelly's story is true?"

Contemptuous that I should be so simple as to think him foolish enough to
believe what I would feed him, he said in an almost amused voice, "All right--
what? You were doing another guy a favor, huh? You've never been between
this doll's legs? You've been living next door to her without touching her?
Listen, we're no more ten years old, kid. I've seen that tramp. She wouldn't let
you alone even if you wanted to be let alone. And you didn't. Don't try to tell
me you're not horny. We all are, in our family. What do you think started us out
in the first place--all three of us? Someone found he could come ring the bell
whenever he wanted. Do you think I care if you were laying that girl? But you
had to get tied up this way too--in dutch good and solid; that's the way it has
to be to feel right. You must really be like Ma. Well, that's nothing to me if
you have to do it that way. But I won't let you get me in trouble with the Mag-
nuses."

"There isn't any reason why you should be in trouble with the Magnuses.
Listen, I'll tell you about this tomorrow."

"No, you won't. Not after tomorrow either. You're not with me from here on.
Just bring back the car."

"I'll come by and tell you what this really is--"

"Stay away, that's the last and only thing I'll ever ask you."

"You sonofabitch!" I yelled with tears. "You shit! I hope to see you dead!"

Padilla came running for me and called into the sitting room, "Hurry, cut out
the gabbing."

Bawling, I shoved and kicked past the wicker or paper furniture and plunged
out.

"What's the matter? What's the tears for? This too much for you?"

I answered when able, "No, I had a scrap."

"Let's go. You want me to drive?"

"No, I can."

We drove first to the hospital where she had had her operation. Soberer in the
cold air, she said she would go in herself. We led her up to the emergency en-
trance and let her walk in, then sat in the car, hoping she would not come out.
But presently, through the gilded, frosted drops of the windshield, I saw her
appear in the door and I rushed to get her.

"I said--"

"Why didn't they take you in?"

"There's this guy. When I told him he said, 'We got no room in a place like
this for people like you. Why didn't you have the kid? Go home and wait for the
undertaker.'"

"Chinga su madre!"

Padilla helped me lead her back to the car. "I think I know a guy in a hospital
on the North Side working in a lab, if he's still there. I'll call him."

I drove him to a cigar store and he went in to phone.

"We should try it," he said when he returned. "We should say she did it to
herself. Lots of women do. He told me who to ask for. If this other guy is on
duty. He's supposed to be a good guy." In lower tones he said, "We may have to
dump her there and beat it. She's just about passing out. What will they do?
They can't put her in the street."

"No, we won't dump her."

"Why not? They see you and throw her right back at you because they don't want
her on their hands. They pick what troubles they want to help. But let's use
our heads. I'll go in first and case the doctor."

However, we all entered together. I couldn't wait in the car with her and was
determined anyhow that they would take her in or I'd smash everything in sight.
So we went through the near-empty first rooms; I made a one-handed grab at a
guy in an orderly's gray coat who advanced in the way. He ducked and Padilla
said to me, "What the Jesus are you doing! You're going to queer everything.
Now take her over there and sit down till I find out if this buddy of mine is
on duty."

Mimi drooped on me, and I felt her heat in the cheek. She could no longer sit;
I held her propped until a stretcher was brought for her.

Padilla had gone, and they had me, at first, as if in arrest. There was a cop on
duty. Together with the orderly he came out of a side door with a cup of coffee,
in blue shirt, even holding a club.

"Now what's the story?" said a doctor.

"Instead of asking, why don't you take care of her?"

"Did you smack this guy?" said the cop. "Did he swing on you?"

"He swung, but he didn't hit."

Conceivably the cop now observed that I wore a tuxedo, because he wasn't
quite so deadly packed in the flesh of the neck and small-eyed when he spoke to
me. I was in the clothes of a gentleman, and therefore why should he take
chances?

"What's the matter with this woman? What are you, the husband? She doesn't
wear a wedding band. Are you related, or just friends?"

"Mimi? Has she passed out?"

"No, she's just not answering. She moves her eyes."

Padilla returned, the doctor hurrying before him. "Just bring her here and
we'll see what gives," said the doctor.

Manny gave me a great look of success. We got rid of the whole ugly sniffnosed
crowd wanting to be in on trouble and went with the doctor. As we followed Manny
gave him a story.

"She did it to herself. She's a working girl and couldn't have a kid."

"How did she do it?"

"With something, I guess. Don't women make a study of these things all their
life long?"

"I've seen some dandies. But also I've heard pretty stinking stories made up.
Well, if the women live we don't look for the abortionist, because what good
does it do the profession?"

"How does she look offhand?"

"A lot of blood lost is all I can tell until I look it over. Who's this second
fellow who's so worried?"

"Her friend."

"All he had to do was really smack that orderly and he'd have had New Year's
fun in the calaboose with the drunks. Why is he in the monkey suit?"

"Hey, what about your date?" said Padilla as he put his hand to his long face
with shock. It was after eight by the smooth-pulled electric clock in the bril-
liant room we entered.

"When I find out what's up with Mimi."

"Go on. You better. I'll be here. I have no date tonight and was staying in
anyway. The doctor doesn't think it's so bad. What do you have on?"

"A ball at the Edgewater."

I stood waiting until the doctor returned.

"It's mostly blood loss and infection from the belly surgery, I think," he said.
"Where did she get that done?"

"She'll answer your questions herself if she wants to," I told him. "I don't
know."

"What do you know? Do you know, for instance, who can be billed?"

Padilla said, "There's money. Can't you see how good her clothes are?" And
he said to me, for it worried him deeply, "Are you blowing or not? This guy's
engaged to a millionaire's daughter and on New Year's Eve he keeps her
waiting."

"Write me a pass so I can get back tonight to see Mimi," I said to the doctor.
He made a perplexed face to Padilla about me and I said further, "For Chrissake,
Doc, don't fiddle around with me, but write the thing out. What's it to you if I
come back? I'd tell you my whole hard luck story but don't have the time."

"Ah, go on, it's no skin off your nose," said Padilla to him.

"A pass from me wouldn't do you any good in front. I'm on now till morning,
so just come and ask for me, Castleman."

"I may be back before long," I said. For I was sure that Kelly Weintraub, since
he was talking, had already gotten to Uncle Charlie Magnus. But I reckoned also
that he and his wife had not told Lucy, not on New Year's Eve, when she was
going to a dance. Later they'd throw me out on my prat. But why had she asked
me to come an hour sooner? The dance didn't really begin until ten o'clock. I
phoned her once more and asked, "Are you waiting?"

"Of course I'm waiting. Where are you?"

"Not far."

"What are you doing?"

"I had to stop at a place. I'll hurry now."

"Please!"

About that last word of hers I thought as I drove that it was not like lovers'
impatience, but neither soft nor hard. Turning too wide at the driveway, with
a last-minute twist I put my wheels through mud and bushes and scraped back
under the portico. Inside, on the turned-over heels of the yard shoes I hadn't
remembered to change, I walked to the mirror to knot my black tie and saw
backward, by the drape in the living room, the tense belly of Uncle Charlie, his
sharp feet prepared, and sitting waiting in the oriental mix-up of brass, silk,
wool, and all that gave the place so much power, Lucy, her mother, and Sam,
observing me. I felt there was a big machine set against me. But I had come in
order not to disappoint Lucy, toward whom, given their chance, my feelings
could have shone and warmed again. I expected poisoned looks, against which I
was coated and immune; at least, my greater trouble made such looks seem
negligible; and I wasn't willing to be tagged for lascivious crime and false pre-
tenses or whatever the counts were that they thought they had against me. By
no means nervous, therefore, I judged that I had to do only with Lucy, no for-
tune hunting now involved, for I could go any distance independent of brothers,
relations, and all, provided that her impulse was a true one and she was, as she
had always said, in love. This was the thing, for I saw that she had been worked
on, though I didn't know how much she had been told. The large-mouthed smile
she gave me, staying at her seated distance instead of coming to kiss me, was
curious--that pretty sketch of charm, in lipstick, widening, the relative of the
awful cleft, running the other way, of the schismatics in the sixth bulge of hell,
hit open from the bottom and split through the face. Ah, dear face! treasured
as the representative of all the body which, though, dies away from this top
delegate when it becomes too gorged and valuable. She, now so unearnest with
me through her worked-up countenance, I saw she had been gotten to by her
parents and that decisions had been made. My only cue was to leave. But not a
single word had been spoken yet in this oriental assembly, and I had no pretext.
I was still the escort, dolled up, if you didn't scrutinize me too close, like
a chorus boy, in a boiled shirt, and thinking of nothing but courtship and
dances.

"Why don't you sit down?" said Mrs. Magnus.

"I thought we were leaving right away."

"Well, Lucy!" said her father.

And on this signal she told me, "I'm not going with you, Augie."

"Now or ever," he directed.

"Never again."

"You'll go to the dance with Sam."

"But I came to take her, Mr. Magnus."

"No, these things when you decide to break them, it's better to break at once,"
said Mrs. Magnus. "I'm sorry, Augie. I personally don't wish you any bad luck.
But I advise you to control yourself. It's not too late. You're a handsome and
intelligent young man. There's nothing against your family; I respect your
brother. But you're not what we had in mind for Lucy."

"What about what Lucy had in mind?" I said with a rising throatful of rage.

The old man was impatient with Mrs. Magnus's effort toward queenly dignity
and wisdom. "No dough if she marries you!" he said.

"Well, Lucy, to whom does that make the difference, to you or to me?"

Her smile spread wider and lost all other intentions in the single suggestion
that it was she who had inflamed me and when hot I had discharged it all upon
someone else but that it really didn't matter since she wasn't so little her father's
child, though a girl, that all that ardor in the car and in the parlor and with the
lips and tongues and fingertips and the rest could make her really lose her head
and be unwise.

I couldn't be sure just what the deal was. Something was said about the damage
to her car. Now she confessed it. Her father said of course it would be fixed.
As long as nothing else was broken, this being his delicacy about the hymen.
But it was worth a laugh to him; this way a threat and groan also escaping in
his fatherly joy that she had remained intact.

There was nothing further to stay for. I was threatened by her brother Sam,
whom I found near me when I picked up my coat in the hall, that he would break
my back if I bothered his sister; but with all his thickset hairiness and spread-
ing keister, he couldn't make it mean anything to me.

I started the car, to which I also felt commitment ending, and drove to the
hospital.

Padilla had given Mimi blood, and he was lying down after the transfusion in
the room where I had left him, sucking an orange; his skimpy arm with its one
curious ball of muscle taped, and his eyes, below surface indifference, black
and active toward what I couldn't readily see.

"How is Mimi?"

"They took her upstairs. She's still off her head, but this Castleman says he
gives her a good chance."

"I'm going up to see her. How is it with you?"

"Well, I don't think I'll be sticking around now. I'll be going home soon. Are
you staying?"

I gave him the cab fare, for I didn't want him to bang all that long way to
Hyde Park in a streetcar on a crowded holiday night.

"Thanks, Manny."

He put the money in the pocket of his shirt, and suddenly he asked, surprised,
"Say, what are you doing back from the dance already?"

I didn't stand and answer but went out.

Mimi was in one of the maternity wards. Castleman said that there had been no
other place to put her, and I thought that she more or less belonged there. So
I went up. It was a tall, big chamber, and in the middle on a table was a little
Christmas fir with lit bulbs and under it a box with cotton wool and nativity
dolls.

Castleman told me, "You can stick around, but don't make yourself noticed or
you'll be thrown out. I think she's going to pull out of it though she did
everything she could not to except cut her wrists and take poison."

There I sat by her bed, it being half-darkness. Nurses coming to bring infants
for the breast now and then, there were whispers and crimped cries and sounds
of turning in bed, and of coaxing and sucking. I was open to feelings that had no
obstacle in coming to cover me, as I was, in darkness and to the side, scorched,
bitter, foul, and violent; and these feelings receding by and by, I was aware of
others full of great suggestion and of this place where I was cast up. I began to
breathe by my own normal measure and grew much calmer. When the midnight
noise exploded, the tooting, sirens, horns, all that jubilation, it came in rather
faint, all the windows being shut, and the nursery squalling continued just the
same.

At about one o'clock, alert enough to hear me stirring, Mimi whispered,
"What are you doing here?"

"I don't have any place special to go."

She knew where she was, hearing the infants cry. Her comment to me was
melancholy, about whether she had outwitted a fate or met it. That was perhaps
according as she was weak or strong toward what she had chosen and done, and
in the truth of her feeling at the present moment, hearing the suckling and cry-
ing, and the night-time business of mothering.

"Anyhow, I think you're in good hands," I told her.

I went out to take a stroll, looking at the infant faces through the glass, and
then, no one interfering, the nurses probably in a New Year's gathering of their
own to snatch a moment's celebration, I passed through to another division
where the labor rooms were, separate cubicles, and in them saw women struggling,
outlandish pain and huge-bellied distortion, one powerful face that bore down
into its creases and issued a voice great and songlike in which she cursed her
husband obscenely for his pleasure that had got her into this; and others,
calling on saints and mothers, incontinent, dragging at the bars of their beds,
weeping, or with faces of terror or narcotized eyes. It all stunned me. So
that when a nurse hurried up to investigate who I was and what business I had to
be there, she made me falter. And just then, in the elevator shaft nearby, there
were screams. I stopped and waited for the rising light I saw coming steadily
through the glass panels. The door opened; a woman sat before me in a wheel
chair, and in her lap, just born in a cab or paddy wagon or in the lobby of the
hospital, covered with blood and screaming so you could see sinews, square of
chest and shoulders from the strain, this bald kid, red and covering her with the
red. She too, with lost nerve, was sobbing, each hand squeezing up on itself,
eyes wildly frightened; and she and the baby appeared like enemies forced to
have each other, like figures of a war. They were pushed out, passing me close
by so that the mother's arm grazed me.

"What are you doing here?" said the nurse with angry looks. I had no right to
be there.

I found my way back, and when I saw Mimi resting, much cooler, I cleared out
of the hospital by the stairs Castleman had shown me and went to the car,
new snow floating at my feet over the gray plating of ice.

I didn't exactly know where I was when I started. I went slowly in the increas-
ing snow, through side streets, hoping to come out on a main drag, and at last
I did hit Diversey Boulevard in a deserted factory part, not far from the North
Branch of the river. And here, as the thought of soon sacking in began to seem
agreeable, I had a flat, at the rear. The tire sunk, and I dragged to the curb
on the wheel rim and killed the motor. I had to thaw the lock of the trunk with
matches, and when I got out the tools I didn't understand the working of the
bumper jack. It was new that year, and I was used to the axle type that Einhorn
had had. For a while I tried, though the boiled shirt cut me and the cold gripped
my feet and fingers, and then I flung the pieces back, locked up, and started to
look for a place where I could get warm. But everything was shut, and now that I
had my bearings I knew that I was not far from the Coblins'. Knowing Coblin's
hours, I didn't hesitate to go there and wake him.

When the yellow lamp flashed in the black cottage hall and he discovered who
was ringing he blinked his eyes, astonished.

"The car broke down on Diversey and I thought I could come by because you
get up around this time for the route."

"No, not today. It's New Year's; no presses working. But I wasn't sleeping. I
just before heard Howard and Friedl when they got in from a party. Come inside,
for God's sake, and stay. I'll give you a blanket on the couch."

I went in gratefully, took off the tormenting shirt, and covered my feet with
cushions.

Coblin was delighted. "What a surprise they'll have in the morning when they
see Cousin Augie! Boy, that's great! Anna will be in seventh heaven."

Because of the brightness of the morning and also the kitchen noise, I was up
early. Cousin Anna, no less slovenly than in other days, had pancakes and coffee
going and a big spread on the table. Her hair was becoming white, her face with
its blebs and hairs darker; her eyes were gloomy. But this gloom was the form of
her emotion and not any radical pessimism. Weeping and catching me in her arms,
she said, "Happy New Year, my dearest boy. You should know only happiness, as
you deserve. I always loved you." I kissed her and shook hands with Coblin, and
we sat down to breakfast.

"Whose car broke down, Augie?"

"Simon's."

"Your bigshot brother."

"It didn't break down. It's a flat, and I was too cold to change it."

"Howard will help you when he gets up."

"Don't have to bother--" I thought I might mail Simon the keys and let him
come after his damned car himself. This angry idea was momentary, however. I
drank coffee and looked out into the brilliant first morning of the year. There
was a Greek church in the next street of which the onion dome stood in the
snow-polished and purified blue, cross and crown together, the united powers of
earth and heaven, snow in all the clefts, a snow like the sand of sugar. I passed
over the church too and rested only on the great profound blue. The days have
not changed, though the times have. The sailors who first saw America, that
sweet sight, where the belly of the ocean had brought them, didn't see more
beautiful color than this.

"Augie, it was too bad Friedl couldn't come down from Ann Arbor for your
brother's wedding; she had exams. You haven't seen her since a child, and you
should. She's so beautiful. I don't say because she is my child--God is my
witness. You'll see her soon for herself. But here, look, this is a picture
from the school. And this one was in the paper when she was chairlady of the
junior benefit. And not only beautiful, Augie--"

"I know she's very pretty, Cousin Anna."

"And why do you want to get mixed up with your brother's new relatives,
those coarse people? Look how developed she is on this picture. She was your
little sweetheart when you were kids. You used to say you were engaged."

I almost corrected her, "No, you used to say it." Instead I laughed, and she
thought I was laughing over those pleasant memories and joined in, clasping her
hands and closing her eyes. Slowly I realized that she was shedding tears as
well as laughing.

"I ask one thing only, that before I die I should see my child happy with a
husband."

"And children--"

"For the love of mike, let's have pancakes. There's nothing on the plate," said
Coblin.

She hurried to the stove, leaving the pictures spread before me, album and
clippings; at which I stared. Only to turn my eyes at last again to the weather.




Chapter XIII




I was no child now, neither in age nor in protectedness, and I was thrown for
fair on the free spinning of the world. If you think, and some do, that continual
intimacy, familiarity, and love can result in falsehood, this being thrown on
theworld may be a very desirable even if sad thing. What Christ meant when he
called his mother "Woman." That after all she was like any woman. That in any
true life you must go and be exposed outside the small circle that encompasses
two or three heads in the same history of love. Try and stay, though, inside.
See how long you can.

I remember I was in a fishmarket square in Naples (and the Neapolitans are
people who don't give up easily on consanguinity)--this fishmarket where the
mussels were done up in bouquets with colored string and slices of lemon, squids
rotting out their sunk speckles from their flabbiness, steely fish bleeding
and others with peculiar coins of scales--and I saw an old beggar with his eyes
closed sitting in the shells who had had written on his chest in mercurochrome:
Profit by my imminent death to send a greeting to your loved ones in Purgatory:
50 lire.

Dying or not, this witty old man was sassing everybody about the circle of love
that protects you. His skinny chest went up and down with the respiration of
the deep-sea stink of the hot shore and its smell of explosions and fires. The
war had gone north not so long before. The Neapolitan passersby grinned and
smarted, longing and ironical as they read this ingenious challenge.

You do all you can to humanize and familiarize the world, and suddenly it be-
comes more strange than ever. The living are not what they were, the dead die
again and again, and at last for good.

I see this now. At that time not.

Well, I went back to books, to reading not stealing them, while I lived on the
money Mimi repaid, and on what she loaned me when she was on her feet and
working once more. Through with Frazer, Mimi had met Arthur Einhorn and had
taken up with him. She was still waiting on tables. I got my meals at the joint
where she worked. And I lay down and finished the Five-Foot Shelf Einhorn had
given me, the fire-and water-spotted books I had kept in the original cardboard
box. They had a somewhat choky smell. So if Ulysses went down to hell or there
were conflagrations in Rome or London or men and women lusted as they did in
St. Paul, I could breathe an odor that supplemented the reading. Kayo Obermark
lent me volumes of poets and took me to lectures now and then. This improved
his attendance. He didn't like to go alone.

I can't be sure it isn't sour grapes that the university didn't move me much--I
say that because according to the agreement I had made with Simon I was to
have gone back in the spring--but it didn't. I wasn't convinced about the stony
solemnity, that you couldn't get into the higher branches of thought without it
or had to sit down inside these old-world-imitated walls. I felt they were too
idolatrous and monumental. After all, when the breeze turned south and west
and blew from the stockyards with dust from the fertilizer plants through the
handsome ivy some of the stages from the brute creation to the sublime mind
seemed to have been bypassed, and it was too much of a detour.

That winter I had a spell of the WPA. Mimi urged me to go and be certified.
She said it would be simple, which it certainly was. I had the two requirements,
being indigent and a citizen.

The trouble was that I didn't care to be put on one of the street details I'd see
picking up bricks and laying them down, and with that shame of purposelessness
you smelled as the gang moved a little, just enough to satisfy the minimum
demand of the job. However, she said I could always quit if too proud to be
assigned to this; she thought it wasn't a good sign in me that I had to have a
clerical job; I'd be in better shape in the open air among simpler people. It
wasn't the people that I complained of, but the clinking on a brick and that
melancholy percussion of fifty hammers at a time. But I went to apply because
she felt obliged to take care of me, making me her responsibility, giving me
money, and as we weren't lovers this would be unfair.

Anyhow, I was certified and got a strolling kind of job that was about as good
as I could expect. I was with a housing survey, checking on rooms and plumbing
back-of-the-yards. I could fix up my own time card and soldier considerably, as
everyone expected me to do; in bitter weather I could pass the time in the back
booth of a coffeepot until the check-out hour. Also, the going into houses sat-
isfied my curiosity. It was finding ten people to a room and the toilets in exca-
vations under the street, or the rat-bitten kids. That was what I didn't like
too much. The stockyard reek clung to me worse than the smell of the dogs
at Guillaume's. And even to me, as accustomed to slums as Indians are to ele-
phants, it was terra incognita. The different smells of flesh in all degrees from
desire to sickness followed me. And all the imagination, passion, or even murder
you could conceive were wrapped up in apparent simplicity or staleness, with
elementary coarseness of a housewife feeling cabbages in a Polack store, or a
guy who lifted a glass of beer to his white, flat-appearing face, or a merchant
hanging ladies' bloomers and elastics in the drygoods window.

I stayed with this deal until the end of winter, and then Mimi, who was always
up on these things, had an idea that there might be something for me in the CIO
drive that had just started. This was soon after the first sitdown strikes. Mimi
was an early member of the restaurant workers' union CIO. Not that she had any
special grievance where she worked, but she believed in unions and she was on
fine terms with her organizer, a man named Grammick. She brought us together.

This Grammick was no rough-and-tumble type but had points of similarity
with Frazer and also Sylvester. He was a college man, soft-spoken, somewhat of
a settlement-house minister doing his best, meek with the punks but used to
them, and causing you a sense of regret. He had a long chest but his legs were
relatively short; he walked quickly, toes in, slovenly in his double-breasted long
jacket, a densely hairy, mild, even delicate person. But he wasn't an easy man
for opponents to deal with. He couldn't be caught off balance, he clung hard, he
was clever, and he knew a thing or two about deceit himself, Grammick did.

I produced a pretty favorable impression, and he agreed I might make an
organizer. In fact his behavior toward me was very sweet. I had an idea that my
good impression wasn't all my doing, but that he was trying to make time with
Mimi.

But I got to value Grammick for various reasons. Though he was so
inconspicuous that he could come and go, not specially noticed around hotel
lobbies and service passages, still when a matter came to a head he could act
with authority and not be frightened by a situation he had created. I appreciated
his consciousness in advance of rights and wrongs that hadn't risen to view yet.

"Yes, they're hiring organizers. They want experienced people, but where are
they going to find them? The problems are piling up too fast."

"Augie is the kind of person you ought to have," said Mimi, "somebody who
can speak the workers' language."

"Oh, really, does he?" said Grammick, looking at me. It made me laugh to
hear this advertised of me, and I said I didn't know whose language I spoke.

It couldn't have made less difference I soon learned when I began to work at
the job. People were rushing to join up, and it was a haste that practically
belonged to nature, like a change of hives, and, bent on their ends, they had
that touchiness from being immersed in the sense of their own motion that causes
striking and stinging. It must have resembled a migration, land race, or Klon-
dike. Except that this time the idea was about justice. The big strikes had set
it off, those people sitting down by their machines and holding parties, but grim
parties. That was in the automobile and rubber industries, and of this I saw the
far-reaching result, down to the most negligible pearldiver on skid row.

I started out at a table of the union hall--which wasn't the kind of rugged
place you might picture but as solid as a bank building, on Ashland Avenue; it
even had a restaurant of its own as well as a pool parlor--just a toy, for the
members' recreation, nothing like Einhorn's--in the basement. I was supposed
to be Grammick's inside man and take care of the telephone and office part of
things. It was anticipated I wouldn't be busy above what was average and could
gradually pick up what I needed to know. Instead there was a rush on me of
people having to have immediate action; some hand-hacked old kitchen stiff as
thickened with grease as a miner or sandhog would be with clay, wanting me to
go and see his boss, subito; or an Indian would bring his grievances written
in a poem on a paper bag soaked with doughnut oil. There wasn't an empty chair
in my room, which was a room well apart from the main offices reserved for
workers in the big industries. It made no difference how hidden I was. I'd have
been found had I been in a steel vault by the feeblest signal of possible redress,
or as faint a trace as makes the night moth scamper ten miles through clueless
fields.

There were Greek and Negro chambermaids from all the hotels, porters, doormen,
checkroom attendants, waitresses, specialists like the director of the garde-
manger from flossy Gold Coast joints, places where I had gone with the dog-
wagon and so understood a little. All kinds were coming. The humanity of the
under-galleries of pipes, storage, and coal made an appearance, maintenance
men, short-order grovelers; or a ducal Frenchman, in homburg, like a singer,
calling himself "the beauty cook," who wrote down on his card without taking
off his gloves. And then old snowbirds and white hound-looking faces, guys
with Wobbly cards from an earlier time, old Bohunk women with letters explain-
ing what was wanted, and all varieties of assaulted kissers, infirmity, drunk-
enness, dazedness, innocence, limping, crawling, insanity, prejudice, and from
downright leprosy the whole way again to the most vigorous straight-backed
beauty. So if this collection of people has nothing in common with what would
have brought up the back of a Xerxes' army or a Constantine's, new things have
been formed; but what struck me in them was a feeling of antiquity and thick
crust. But I expect happiness and gladness have always been the same, so how
much variation should there be in their opposite?

Dealing with them, signing them into the organization and explaining what to
expect, wasn't all generous kindness. In large part it was rough, when I wanted
to get out of the way. The demand was that fierce, the idea having gotten around
that it was a judgment hour, that they wanted to pull you from your clerical side
of the desk to go with them. Instead I had to promise to investigate.

"When?"

"Soon. As soon as possible. We have a big backlog. But soon."

"Sonsofbitches! Those guys! We're just waiting there to give it to them. You
should see that kitchen!"

"There'll be an organizer out to contact you."

"When?"

"Well, I'll tell you the truth, we're shorthanded because there's such a rush;
we haven't got enough men. But what you must do meanwhile is get ready, have
your people sign the cards, and prepare your demands and grievances."

"Yeah, yeah. But, mister, when is the man going to come? The boss is gonna
call in the AFL and sign a contract with them, that's some outfit."

I tried to discuss this danger with my higher-ups. Just then hotels and
restaurants were a sideline with them, however; they lacked time to deal with
them, busy with retail clerks who were out on a big strike and with runaway
dress shops in Chicago Heights and so forth, but they couldn't bring themselves
to turn down new memberships and aimed to keep them until they were prepared
to devote the necessary time and money. In short, Grammick and I were intended
to hold the line. I learned to do somewhat as he did. He would work sixteen
hours daily for ten or twelve days at a stretch and then for two whole days
he couldn't be found by anyone. He spent that time in his mother's flat,
sleeping and eating steaks and ice-cream, taking the old lady to the movies or
reading. Once in a while he slipped away to a lecture. He was studying law
too. Grammick wasn't going to be sucked away from all private existence.

I went along with this rush, really needing some such thing now because of
my blowout with Simon. After office hours I was out on the streetcars, traveling
to see cooks and dishwashers or hotel clerks on night duty--those leafy nights of
the beginning green in streets of the lower North Side where the car seemed to
blunder as if without tracks, off Fullerton or Belmont, when the white catalpa
bells were opening and even the dust could have a sweet odor. Many clerks
especially asked you to come at night, when they could speak freely. The
conspiratorial part of it was fine; and with the radical ideas then going, these
people who were placed in a position to be thoughtful, since they were up all
night, wanted the chance to say those self-rehearsed things that sometimes had
been on their hearts too long. True and false light was distributed just about as
usual, is my opinion. But it wasn't my place to judge that, but only to advance
the work. Some of these guys just plain meant business. I suspect they wanted
me to be more dangerous than I appeared to be. I know I seemed too fresh and
well in color, not enough smoked and yellowed to appreciate what they were up
against. My manner was both slipshod and peppy. They were looking for some
fire-fed secret personality that would prepare the moment when they could stand
up yelling rebellion. And here instead I would breeze in--I knew sometimes that
my color and the height of my hair, my relaxed way, would give offense. But
there wasn't any help for that.

Occasionally they'd even ask for my credentials.

"Did they send you from headquarters?"

"You Eddie Dawson?"

"That's right."

"I'm March. You talked to me on the telephone."

"You?" said Dawson. And I knew he had expected to see some sandy, suck-cheeked
devil, veteran of coal fields or oil or New Jersey textile strikes. Yes, that that at
least--someone on whom it was evident that his first strength had been
drawn out of him in the Paterson jail.

"You don't have to worry. I'm reliable."

Then he resigned himself; he had been taken in by my telephone voice. I
could be at least a messenger to the higher-ups who'd be busy Guy-Fawkesing
the Drake Hotel or the Palmer House--because it was that to Eddie Dawson,
hauling up gunpowder in the tunnels.

He would tell me, then, what he wanted my superiors to know and give me
directives.

"I want you to arrange a meeting with your top man down there--"

"Mr. Ackey, you mean?"

"You tell him I can get the employees together, but before we go out on strike
we want to talk to him, all of us. That's to give my people confidence."

"Why are you sure you'll have to go out? Maybe you'll get your demands."

"Do you know who runs this bedbug palace?"

"What, some bank? Is it a receivership? Most of these small joints--"

"It's an outfit called Holloway Enterprises."

"Karas?"

"You know him?"

"Yes, I do, it so happens. I used to work for the insurance man Einhorn who is
his cousin-in-law."

"He writes the policies for this place. You know what kind of a joint this is,
don't you? For quickies."

"Is that so?" I said, observing that the big forehead, flushed and deeply vein-
fed in the light cloud of fair hair, was covered with a sweat and that he wiped
his hands the nails of which were manicured nails on his pink-striped shirt with
an unconscious clutch. "If that's a problem it's a police problem. You don't want
the CIO to start a union of them, do you?"

"Don't talk foolish. I mean I get the brunt of the trouble because I'm night
clerk. Anyhow, if you know Karas you can tell me how easy it'll be to get our
demands."

"He's a pretty tough character."

"Now when I have the shop ready to go, you ask Mr. Ackey for a few minutes
so we can talk to him."

"We can arrange it." I said, who didn't know Ackey well enough to say good
day when passing in and out of the toilet. But I represented him.

The situation was different in the hash-houses. I was more trusted and highly
regarded. In the kitchens were old men--flophouse, County Hospital, and mission
attendance inscribed all over them big and bold, and there was nothing like the
resentment of a fellow like Dawson in that striped shirt, who was close enough
to Karas's condition to figure how he made profit, to hate and envy, and also to
wish to be nifty at the track, to wear hound's-tooth checks, to have a case
and binoculars and be seen with a proud-cheeked fine big broad.

But take one of these old guys from a Van Buren Street greasy-spoon--I'd be
requested by him to come around by the alley, the large paving stones breathing
fumes of piss, and signal him through the window. Whereupon he'd go tight with
caution and make me an oblique response with his head that might be taken by
other eyes as a random motion. At last, by the door, we'd have a shushing
conversation that we could have had just as well after hours. Except that he
would want me to have a look at his place of work probably. The angry skin of
his dish-plunging arms and his twist horse-gauntness, long teeth and spread
liquidness of eyes in the starry alley evening; also that terrible state of food
when you suspect it of approaching garbage that he brought out in his clothes
and on all his person, his breath and the hair of his head just below me. Under
the fragile shell of his skull he leakily was reasoning. And did it matter to
him as it did to Dawson whether I looked like the organizer of his dreams? He
wanted to make his dim contribution to the righting of wrongs, so that it was
enough for him that he could locate me in an office or that I would come down
this reeking alley to talk to him and accept the lists he slipped me of other
stiffs who wanted to belong to the union. I was supposed to hunt them up in
their moldy rooms. Where I had been on altogether different errands while I
worked for Simon, recruiting coal hikers. No use assuming that I had reversed
all and was now entering these flophouse doors from the side of light, former-
ly from that of darkness. Those times that I thought clearly of my duties I de-
cided that I couldn't consider persons so much but rather the one degree of
advancement in which everybody could be included.

Having a call in the old neighborhood one morning, I dropped in on Einhorn
and found him in his sunny parlor office, in that peculiar, familiar staleness
of coffee and bed, papers, his own shaving lotions and the powders of the two
women. Mildred with her orthopedic shoes--she was polite but didn't like me--
was already at her machine, heated and lit on the back of the neck, which had
just been shaved up to the border where her potent hair began. Over the way,
empty, were the windows of the old place of great days and grands circonstanc-
es. I didn't find Einhorn in a good state though I wasn't supposed to know it
from his weighty face. For a while I thought he wanted to sit me out silently,
until I went away. He breathed and felt of himself, looked out in the morning,
smoked, nibbled, croaked off some shallow gas. He appeared melancholy and even
savage.

"How's the pay at this new job of yours?" he asked me, deciding to speak.
"Fair?"

"It's liberal."

"Then there's good coming out of it," he said with his dry decisiveness.

I laughed at him. "Is that all you think?"

"At least that anyway. Kid, I don't want to take away your zeal if you think
you're doing something. And remember, I'm no conservative. Just because I sit
here in a chair. This is no rich guys' club. In fact I have less to lose than
other men, so I don't shrink from thinking to the extreme. I do a little busi-
ness with Karas, but it doesn't follow that my ideas have to be where my inter-
ests are. What interests! Some interests! He's a knacker, Karas, he just bought
a big new place in San Antonio."

I was now convinced that something was wrong. "Then you think it's a waste
of time, what I'm doing?"

"Oh, it seems to me on both sides the ideas are the same. What's the use of the
same old ideas? On both sides. To take some from one side and give it to the
other, the same old economics."

He hadn't wanted to talk to me in the first place, but since I didn't go away he
drove himself into the subject at first by irritation and then summoning up what
he really thought. I wasn't zealous, not as he implied, but I did feel called on
to say, "Well, people get up every morning to go to work; it isn't right that it
should be an illusion, or that they should be so grateful for being allowed to
continue in their habit that they shouldn't ask for anything more."

"You think that with a closed shop you're going to make men out of slobs? If
they have a steward to gripe for them? Fooey!"

"So," I said, "is it better to leave it to Karas or a gorilla of a business agent
who takes graft from him?"

"Look here, because they were born you think they have to turn out to be men?
That's just an old-fashioned idea. And who tells them that? A big organization.
One more big organization. A big organization makes dough or it doesn't last.
If it makes dough it's for dough."

"If there can't be much sense in these big organizations that's all the more
reason why they should stand for a variety of things," said I. "There ought to
be all kinds."

Meanwhile, ignoring, Mildred went on typing out statements. Einhorn didn't
reply; I thought it was the appearance of Arthur from the kitchen half of the
house that stopped him, for Arthur's brainy authority made his dad occasionally
hesitate to sound off. But this time it wasn't that. He came forward only briefly,
but it was evident that all the nervousness and difficulty were because of him. In
a black sweater, narrow-shouldered, his hands in his back pockets, he sauntered,
an elderly wrinkle on him that surprised me, and his eyes retreated with grada-
tions of dark into a very somber color of trouble. He put his head to the side,
his bushy hair touched the doorframe, and the smoke of his cigarette escaped to
the sun where it became silky. Though he wasn't quite sure who I was at first, his
smile was all the same suave, but also sick or fatigued. I was aware that Einhorn,
to the very cloth of his coat, was stiff to him and prepared to be curt, within a
degree of telling him to beat it, and I realized also that this was why Mildred
had been so cold to me and hitting her machine as though it were a way to get
me to leave.

Then a little kid came running from the kitchen, and Arthur held it with the
clasp of a father, unmistakably, the kid swaying from his fingers. Behind, Tillie
stood but didn't come forward. If I'm not mistaken they hadn't yet decided whether
they could keep this a secret, for I realized it was recent news to the Einhorns
too, and it was touch and go about acknowledging the baby, a little boy. He,
while Arthur turned back into the kitchen, came running to Mildred and secured
himself on her knee. She picked him up eagerly, and his booties catching in her
skirt, it rode up on her thighs with their little dark hairs. About which she was
calm. Thither I followed Einhorn's look. She kissed the boy with almost adult
kisses and sought the hem to straighten her dress.

"What do you say to our news!" Einhorn spoke harshly and turned to me with a
stiff curve in the back of his neck, partly with intention to bully but also greatly
bowed by trouble, and that great representative of him, his face, twitched with
an impulse that darted in from a little-explored place.

"That Arthur is married?" I didn't know what to say.

"Already divorced. It went through last week, and we didn't know anything
about it. The girl was from Champaign."

"So you have a grandson. Congratulations!"

He looked strained, his eyes gemmy with the determination to sustain all, but
his nosy face flat and with a light of pale unhappiness.

"And this is his first visit?" I said.

"Visit? She dumped him on us. She put him inside the door with a note and
beat it, and then we had to wait for Arthur to come home and explain."

"Oh, he's dear and sweet," Mildred said with great spirit, the child on her
breast cruelly clasping her neck. "I'll take him any time."

At this from his second wife, which in effect she was, Einhorn had all his
cares come around to his first source: himself; his sensuality. And he looked
angrily struck by this thought for all his Bourbon pride of profile and reflected
it to the very depth of his black eyes. Like the roof-crouched goblin of an old
church, he looked, his hands covered with pale spots placed at the sides of his
often purposeless-appearing pants. His hair had the wave of unstranded rope,
and from the set of his head there was the sense of ruins forming up behind him.
With no motion in his arms, he might have been a man in a cape or a bound pris-
oner. Poor Einhorn! At any hour of his decline he could formerly have taken
out the gilt bond representing Arthur, and now the spite had come upon him that
the value had gone, like that of Grandma's picture-watered czarist money. The
gleaming vault where he had kept this reserve wealth now let out the smell of
squalor. Einhorn didn't even look at the kid, which was a jolly little kid that
trod in Mildred's lap. Tillie stayed out of sight altogether.

I hesitated to show sympathy; he'd have thrown it back, though I was one of
the few remaining people, I imagine, who'd give him full credit on his old-time
greatness. I served a purpose that way for him, that I was prepared to testify
that it was true noble and regal greatness. But he himself now started out weakly,
saying, "It's not a good situation. Augie--you have some idea what capacities
Arthur has. And before he can begin to use them, he gets into this--"

"I don't see what's so wrong," said Mildred. "You have a cute grandson."

"Keep out of this, please, will you, Mildred? A child isn't a toy."

"Oh," she said, "they grow up. Time does it more than fathers and mothers.
The parents take too much credit."

Einhorn said to me in a lower voice, wanting no conversation with her, "I
think Arthur hangs around your part of the woods. And there's a girl named
Mimi he's interested in. You know her?"

"She's a good friend of mine."

Quick his brows rose, and I interpreted the hope that she was my mistress and
therefore Arthur couldn't get into further trouble.

"Not that kind of friend."

"You don't lay her?" he said secretly.

"No."

I disappointed him; there was also a very fine salt of condescension or
mockery, only a glitter on the surface of his look, but I saw it.

"Don't forget I was practically engaged until New Year's Day," I told him.

"Well, what kind of girl is this Mimi? He brought her around a couple of
weeks ago, and Tillie and I thought she was pretty tough, and with somebody
like Arthur whose thoughts always have an intellectual or poetic direction, she
could give him a pretty rough time of it. But maybe she's goodhearted. I don't
want to tear her down needlessly."

"Why, is Arthur thinking of remarrying already? Well, I'm an admirer of
Mimi."

"Platonic?"

I laughed but felt sullen too, for it seemed to me that Einhorn didn't want his
son to succeed me as Mimi's lover, or any girl's. I said, "The best person to ask
about Mimi is Mimi herself. But I was going to say that I don't think she would
be interested in a marriage proposal."

"That's good."

I expressed no agreement.

"Augie," he said with a rich preliminary of the face which I knew belonged to
business, "it occurs to me that maybe my son could fit into your organization
somewhere."

"Is he looking for a job?"

"No, I am for him."

"I could try." It was a discouraging favor to be asked. I could see Arthur stoop-
ing his weight on a desk in the union hall, one finger between the covers of his
Valéry, or whatever he was interested in. "Mimi could help him if she wanted to,"
I said. "I got the job because she knew someone."

"Who knew someone, your friend?" He hoped still, slyly, to trap me into confess-
ing intimacy with Mimi, but he drew a blank. "Well," he said, "you don't mean to
tell me you keep that bursting health without the cooperation of a dear friend?"
He was so pleased to have said this that his own troubles for a moment slipped
his mind. But then the kid crowed on Mildred's neck and he changed again from a
sensual to a sad or austere face.

It was a true guess that I had a friend. She was a Greek girl whose name was
Sophie Geratis and she was chambermaid in a luxury hotel. She spoke for a
delegation that came to me to apply for membership. They were earning twenty
cents an hour, and when they went to their local to ask one of the head guys to
put in for a raise he was playing poker and wouldn't be bothered. They knew he
was in cahoots with the management. This small Greek girl was shapely every
which way, in legs, mouth, and face; her lips went a little forward and their
expression was sweetened a lot by the clear look of her eyes. She had a set of
hard-worked hands and she lived with her beauty on rough terms. I couldn't for
even a minute pretend that I didn't go for her. As soon as I saw her I thought
that in the form of her eye-corners there was a personal hope of tenderness, and
it got me. What I felt was tender too, rather than that heat that makes Nile
mud of you, as like to crack as to be fertile.

As soon as the women signed there was a wild excitement and uprush of indig-
nation and they began to call out, as if it was a working woman's Thesmophoria
of these pale people. They wanted to be led into a strike right away. But I
explained, and felt as usual the creep over me of legalistic hypocrisy, that
it was a case of dual unionism. Legally they were represented by the AFL and
therefore another union couldn't bargain for them. But when a majority of the
employees was on the CIO side an election could be held. They didn't under-
stand this, and as I couldn't talk against their noise I asked Sophie to come
out with me and I would make the position clear. The corridor being empty for
the moment, we kissed at once, riskily. Our legs were shaking. She said under
her breath that I could explain the whole thing to her later; she would take
the women away and come back. I locked up the office, and when she returned I
took her home with me. We couldn't go to her room. She lived with her sister and
the two were engaged to a pair of brothers. They were going to be married in
June, six weeks' time. I saw the photo of her fiancé; he was a calm, respons-
ible-looking gink. She thought she was being sensible, storing up pleasure so
she wouldn't have any unfaithful craving once married. She was made very finely,
all her little formations intricate and close and everything smooth. That was
the happiness Einhorn took notice of, that I enjoyed in Sophie.

Kayo Obermark had too much masculine respect to ask me about her utterances
and noises, laughing and otherwise. But Mimi said, "What kind of dame do you
have who carries on like that?" She took a kidding tone, but I felt her nose
was somewhat out of joint. "She brings her own cheering section."

I had no answer ready because I had never expected to be asked.

"There was someone else looking for you the other day," she went on. "I
forgot to tell you. It's getting to be like a shrine up here."

"Who was it?"

"A young lady and a very pretty one, prettier than the noisy girl."

I wondered if it could be that Lucy had changed her mind. "She didn't leave a
note?"

"No, she said she had to talk to you, and I thought she was very agitated, but
maybe she wasn't used to climbing stairs and was winded."

It didn't especially stir me to think that it had been Lucy. I had no further
interest in her; I was only rather curious about her visit.

I took up Einhorn's suggestion about Arthur with Mimi. If Einhorn had found
fault with her, she was violent against him.

"Why, that old stinker!" she said. "As soon as I was close to him for a minute
he had his hand on my leg. I don't like these old men who think they're all sex."

"Oh, you have to understand him," I said. "That's just his form of salute or
chivalry."

"Hell! Who says an old cripple has to be so randy?"

"He's really a grand old guy. I've known him from a kid, and he means a lot
to me."

"To me he means exactly nothing, and he's terrible to Arthur."

"Why, I think he loves Arthur more than anything in the world."

"That's how much you know! He takes it out on him all the time. In fact I
have to help him get out of there because the old man is riding him to death on
account of the kid."

"Isn't the mother coming back for it?"

"I can't make out from Arthur whether she's a nice girl or a tramp. He's
terribly vague unless discussing ideas. What kind of bitch would ditch a kid--
when she's already had it? Unless she's sick. In the head, you understand."

"Doesn't Arthur tell you what she's like?"

"You can't keep Arthur on a subject like this. His mind won't stick to it."

I said, "I wonder if you've got him straight about what his father does to him.
This has been hard for Einhorn to take. He banked on Arthur. So did Tillie. Now
it's just part of the Depression picture. Children coming back with their kids to
live with the old folks in their flat."

"Why should it be any different for Einhorn than for the Poles or sausage-eat-
ers on his street? It would be bad if it were different and helped the old fool
to put it over that he was entitled to a better fate than anybody around. But
when the things that happen pour over everyone alike, then we can really see
who is better and who's worse. And then what's so awful about what happened to
Arthur? Anyhow, he's better than Frazer. Frazer's back with his wife, they tell
me, and he probably won't pay me the money I lent him because he would be ad-
mitting that he once nearly did wrong, and he's not the guy to admit that any-
thing past, present, or future could be wrong. A girl was laughing over some-
thing in a book yesterday and showed me--you know, I hardly even read novels.
It said, 'Error has never approached my mind.' That was Prince Metternich. Well,
it could be Frazer. I don't think he would ever in his life forget himself. He'd
never miss a train. Jesus, your Mr. Einhorn would love a son like that who al-
ways keeps his head and has a word ready to say and would never miss a train.
But Arthur is a poet, and that old romancer really didn't want that to happen
to him and be the father of a Villon or a Rimbaud."

"Oh, is that it!" I said. "Well, what is Einhorn doing to Arthur that makes him
so cruel?"

"He nags him night and day and looks for chances to insult him. Yesterday it
was that the old man was feeding the baby candy and when Arthur said it wasn't
good for it he told him, "This is my house, he's my grandson, and you can get
the hell out if you don't like it.' "

"Oh, that's rough. He ought to blow then. Why does he take that?"

"He can't leave. He hasn't got any money. And besides he's sick. He's got a
dose."

"Holy smokes! He's got everything. Did he tell you?"

"Well, don't be stupid. How do you think I found out? Of course he told me."

She smiled, and it was with the shine of real excitement. If I hadn't known it
before I would now have realized that she had decided about him. She was for
him.

"I'll see him out of the woods," she said. "He's going to a doctor now, and
when this thing is dried up he's going to leave his father's house."

"With the kid?"

"No. Somebody will take care of the kid. What do you think! Should he
become a housewife because of that crazy girl?"

"If he had given her some money maybe she'd have kept the baby."

"How do you know? Well, perhaps that would have been best. Old people
shouldn't bring up a child."

"Einhorn wanted me to get Arthur an organizer's job."

She was too astonished at this even to smile but started at me firmly, as if
she wanted me to admit there was no limit to how grotesque people could make
themselves, and then she went about her business, washing out stockings and
underwear. She wouldn't answer.

Of course Arthur couldn't anyway try to work while he had the clap, and I
reckoned it was best to invent a pleasant reason for Einhorn, and I did, saying
there was no opening just then on Arthur's level. Even though it mustn't have
been so pleasant for the old man to be referred back to his onetime vanity a-
bout Arthur's superiority. But it did sound reasonable that they couldn't of-
fer someone like Arthur simply any old job that happened to be lying around.

As for Lucy Magnus, and I couldn't imagine who else it might be, I was merely,
in the flattest way, curious, but I didn't give her supposed call much thought
until a few nights later when there was a feminine knock at the door. It came
at an awkward time, when Sophie Geratis was sitting on the bed in her slip
and we were talking away. Seeing her startled, I said, "Don't worry, honey,
nobody's going to bother us." She liked my saying this, so that it led to our
starting to kiss, and the hooked links of the spring made that sound which goes
in such a queer way with love, and which would have sent away anyone but this
particular knocker. She said, "Augie--Mr. March!" and not in the voice of Lucy
Magnus but that of Thea Fenchel. For some reason I remembered it and placed it
immediately. I got out of bed.

"Hey, put on a robe," said Sophie. She was disappointed at the kissing ending
when another woman spoke at the door.

I put my head out and blocked the door with my shoulder and naked foot. It
was Thea. She had said in that note I hadn't seen the last of her, and here she
was.

"I'm sorry," she said, "but I've already come a couple of times and I want to
see you."

"Only once, I thought. How did you find me?"

"I hired a detective. Then that girl didn't tell you about both times. Is she in
there with you? Ask her."

"No, that's not the same one. You actually went to a detective agency?"

"I'm glad it's not that girl," she said.

I didn't answer, only looked.

She wasn't keeping her composure very well. That prompt face, different from
what I remembered, delicate but not so firm in nerve, wide-cheeked and pale,
her nostrils open wide. I recalled that Mimi had told me she was breathing
heavily from the climb, but it must also have been from determination not to
give in to disappointment at not finding me alone. She was dressed in a brown
silk suit, kind of strikingly watermarked; in spite of all, she wanted me to
notice it. But at the same time, by her gloved hands and the unsteadiness of
her hat of flowers, I was aware she was trembling; and as the rustling in mid-
ocean against the bulwarks is the slight sign of very great miles of depth and
extent, the stiffness of the silk gave a small sound of continual tremor.

"It's nothing," she said. "How could you tell that I was coming? I don't
expect…"

I felt no need to be pardoned, as if I should have been waiting for her, and
would have been within my rights in smiling but I wasn't able to do that. I had
thought back on her as an erratic rich girl with whom the main thing was to be
rivals with her sister; I couldn't continue to think so, for no matter how it
had started it was now clearly something else. What sets you off not being good
enough, you find the better reason once you have got going. This might have
happened to her; but I couldn't tell which was uppermost, nobility or illness,
whether she was struggling with personal objections of pride or the social ones
about what is due a young woman from herself--those spiked things that press
with such ugly sharpness on the greater social weakness of women. Whether she
fought against or went out to look for a torturing occasion, I mean. But that was
not all I thought of or felt by any means. Otherwise I'd have shooed her away,
for I liked Sophie Geratis too well to give her up because I was merely interested
or flattered. Or because I saw a chance to get back at Esther Fenchel through her
sister, for, as I've said before, I haven't any grudge-bearing ability to speak of.
But all at once Sophie wasn't even in it.

"What are you doing?" I said, turning to her. She had put on her shoes. I saw her
hold up her arms and the black dress fell on her shoulders. She softly battled
her body into it, pulled it into place across her breasts and over her hips, and
shook her face free of her hair.

"Honey, if this is somebody you want to see…"

"But, Sophie, I'm with you tonight."

"You and me are just having a fling before I'm married, aren't we? Maybe
you want to get married too. It's just an affair, isn't it?"

"You're not going," I said. But she didn't listen, and when she went on to tie
her laces covered the underside of her thigh from me as she lifted her knee.
Because I didn't sound firm enough. And through this act of covering her bare
leg--not sore, but with a resigned sort of drop of her head--she drew back those
vital degrees from lover's heat. To have her again I realized I'd have to pass a
large number of tests and perhaps last of all I'd have to ask her to marry me. So
I admitted in my private mind she was right to go since I couldn't any longer
honestly furnish that gay interest that had brought us together.

A piece of paper slid under the door, and we heard Thea going away.

"At least she's not so brassy as to stand and look at me come out," said
Sophie. "Anyway, she had plenty of brass to knock when she could tell you had
company. Are you engaged to her or something? Go ahead and read your note."

Sophie took her congé and kissed me on the face but wouldn't let me return
the kiss or accompany her down to the door. So, undressed still, I sat on the cot
in the May night air of the high window and opened the piece of paper. It gave
her address and number and said, "Please call me tomorrow, and don't be angry
because of what I can't help."

When I thought how she had been ashamed for the jealousy rising to her face,
and how rich in trouble the moment had been for her to hold fast while I came to
the door naked and talked to her, I wasn't inclined to feel angry at all. In fact
I couldn't help but be glad. Even though it was high-handed to go and proceed
against Sophie as she did and assume that only she had the right grade of love.
And then I had a lot of other notions, such as whether I was in danger of falling
in love to oblige. Why? Because love was so rare that if one had it the other
should capitulate to it? If, for the time, he had nothing more important on? In
this thought there was a good measure of poking fun, with, however, the fact that
I was stirred in all kinds of ways, including the soft shuffle in the treetop of
leaves just broken out of the thick red beaks. I thought the business of a woman
must be only love. Or, at another time, only a child. And I let this be an amuse-
ment and an objection in my light mind. And this lightness of mind--I could have
benefited from the wisdom about it that the heavy is the root of the light. First,
that is, that the graceful comes out of what is buried at great depth. But as wis-
dom has to spread and knot out in all directions, this can also refer to the slight
laugh which is only a little of what is sent upward by great heaviness of heart, or
also to the gravity which passes off by performer's flutter or pitch for laughs.
Even the man who wants to believe, you sometimes note kidding his way to Jesus.

That night I fell deeply asleep, any old way, in and out of the sheets. They
still smelled of Sophie's powder, or whatever she had imparted to them, so I
slept wrapped in her banners, after a fashion. When I waked I thought it had
been a peaceful sleep, and the early day was radiant. But I was mistaken. I
remembered nightmares I had had of the jackals trying to get over the walls of
Harar, Abyssinia, to eat the plague dead--from a book Arthur had left lying a-
round, about one of his favorite poets. I heard Mimi below bitching and yelling
at the telephone, though it was just some ordinary conversation. It was a fresh
day, of beauty nearly material enough to pick up, with corners of the yard full
of the heat of flowers grown in old iron and adapted cast-off boilers. That red
which in the greater strength of the day would make you giddy and attack your
heart with a power almost like a sickness, some sickness causing spat blood, spasm,
and rot just as much and as rich as pleasure. My face prickled as if I had been
hit sharp enough to cause nosebleed. I looked and felt puffy and sullen, and as
if I had a surplus of blood and foresaw trouble from it, that it would have to be
let. Also my hands and feet were that ominous way. I went out half stone, but even
the pavement chafed me through the leather; my veins seemed slowed up with lead.
I couldn't bear being in the confinement of the drugstore even for the minute of
time it took to swallow a cup of coffee. I dragged myself to the office in the
poky cars, and when I had fallen into my chair with my legs spread out, I felt the
toil of all my processes, down to the arteries of the feet as they sprung and shot
with regularity, and I prayed I wouldn't have to get up. The door and window
were open, the fustiness of the hard-trod place having its brief chance to clear
out in the courthouse-hung tranquillity before the resumption of hostilities, the
meadow hour before the ashcan barrage of Flanders tears the skies. And the lark,
who doesn't need to spit or clear his throat, goes up.

But then the business of the day got under way, and in my harassed inability
to keep up, it was like a double-quick-time stamping or dancing; angry grim
waltz in which the clutched partners were out to wear one another down; or solo
clog or tarantella of the hopping mad; or the limper sway of the almost gone
from consciousness; the decorous sevillanas of the stiff whose faces didn't
betray how their heels were slamming; the epidemic kick of German serfdom;
the squatting kazat-sky; the hesitation-step of adolescence; the Charleston.
I confronted all the varieties, and as far as I could I avoided rising. Except
when I had to go to the biffy to take a leak, or when I thought I was hungry
and ducked below to the billiard room and lunch counter, where the green of the
felt went to my head. However, I had no appetite. It was another kind of gnaw-
ing, not emptiness of gut that was the matter.

When I went back there was a fresh crowd waiting to do their stuff. Me the
weary booking agent or impresario, watched by them with wrath and avidity,
with tics, with dignity by some and booby-hatch glares by others. And what
was I going to accomplish for them in the way of redress and throwing open
princedoms by explaining how they must fill out a card? Holy Lord and God! I
know man's labor must be one of those deals figured out by Providence that
saves him by preserving him, or he would be hungry, he would freeze, or his
brittle neck would be broke. But what curious and strange forms he ends up
surviving in, becoming them in the process.

It was in my unusual state of feeling that I reflected about this, and meantime
when I would remember the rustle of Thea's brown silk it made me shiver.
Along with the strange outcomes of the history of toil.

Every chance I got I phoned her. There wasn't any answer, and Grammick reach-
ed me before I could talk to her. He had to have my help in South Chicago that
night in a gauze and bandage factory he had organized more or less in passing.
For it was like a band of Jesuits landing where a heathen people thirsted for
baptism in the dense thousands, thronging out of their brick towns. I had to
fill a bag with literature and blanks and race over to the Illinois Central to
get the electric train and meet Grammick at his headquarters in a tavern, a
rough place but with a ladies' and family entrance, for many of the gauze-wind-
ers were women. I can't say how they kept bandages clean in that sooty, plug-ugly
town built as though so many fool amateur projects for the Tower of Babel that
had got crippled at the second story a few dozen times and then all hands had
quit and gone in for working in them instead. Grammick was in the middle of this
show and busy organizing. He was as firm as a Stonewall Jackson, but he was
also as perfectly pacific as a woodshop instructor in a high school or some
personage of the Congress party, somebody from that white-flutter India setting
out to conquer the whole place flat. By the power of meekness.

Most of the night we were up and were ready in the morning with everything
necessary, committees on their mark, demands drawn up, negotiation machinery
all set and the factions in agreement. At nine o'clock Grammick picked up the
phone to talk to management. At eleven the negotiations were already under
way, and late that night the strike was won and we went out to a wiener and
sauerkraut shindy with the glad union members. It was all a matter of course
to Grammick, though I was hopped up about it and full of congratulation.

I went to the booth in the back with my glass of beer and tried Thea's number
again. This time I got through. I said, "Listen, I'm calling from out of town
where I had to go on business, otherwise you would have heard from me before.
But I expect to be back tomorrow."

"When?"

"Afternoon, I think."

"Can't you come sooner? Where are you now?"

"Out in the sticks, and I'm coming as soon as I can."

"But I don't have long to stay in Chicago."

"Do you have to go? But where?"

"Honey, I'll explain it when I see you. I'll wait in all day tomorrow. If you can't
phone first, ring the doorbell three times."

Like a strong brush the excitement went over me, and I stood up to it with shut
eyes of pleasure, heat snarls at the ears and thrills descending my legs. I was
dying to get to her. But I wasn't able to leave yet. There were loose ends to
tie up. It was important how even victors said au revoir. Grammick couldn't leave
until he had arranged the bookkeeping and everything was in order. Then, when
we got back to the city, I had to go with him to headquarters to report our
success. This was to advance me too, and was to get a knockdown to Mr. Ackey
and be a little thicker with the officials, not stay a supernumerary.

Ackey was waiting for us, not to congratulate us but with a redeployment order
on his spindle. "Grammick," he said, asking him instead of me, "is this your
protégé March? March," he went on, still not finding me with his eyes, as if
the time wasn't just ripe, "you're going to have to do some serious trouble-
shooting today, and right this minute. It's one of those hot dual-union situa-
tions. They're murder. The Northumberland Hotel--that's a ritzy place--how many
people do we have signed up there? Not enough. They must have upward of two
hundred and fifty in a place like that."

I said, "I think we have about fifty cards from the Northumberland, and most
of those from chambermaids. But why, what's going on?"

"They're getting ready to strike, that's what. This morning there have been
about five calls for you from Sophie Geratis, one of the maids. There's a strike
meeting on right now in the linen room, and you get over there and stop them.
The AFL is in there, and the thing to aim for is an election."

"Then what am I supposed to do?"

"Hold the line. You sign them up and keep them from going out. Quick now,
there must be hell broke loose."

I snatched up my pack of membership blanks and lit out for the Northumberland;
a huge building, it was, with florid galleries and Roman awnings fluttering up
to the thirtieth story and looking down at the growth of the elms and flaglike
greens of Lincoln Park.

I flashed up in a Checker cab. There wasn't any doorman on duty; the place
glittered from the copper arms swelling on shields from either side and from the
four glasses of the revolving door and their gold monograms. I didn't think I'd
get far by way of the lobby, and I hurried back to the alley and found a service
entrance. Up three flights of steel stairs, as nobody answered the bell of the
freight elevator, I heard yelling and tracked it through the corridors, now vel-
vet, now cement, to this place, the linen room.

The fight that was going on was between those who were loyal to the recog-
nized union and the rebellious, mostly the underpaid women, who were scalding
mad about the last refusal to raise them from twenty cents an hour. All were
in uniform or livery. The room was white and hot, right in the path of the
sun, the doors open to the laundry, and the women in their service blues and
in white caps shouted and spoiled for war and struggle. They stood on the metal
tables and soap barrels and screamed for the walkout. I looked for Sophie, who
saw me first. She cried, "Here's the organizer. Here's the man. Here comes
March!" She was on top of one of the hogsheads, with her gams wide apart in
their black stockings. Hot, but grim and pale, and her black hair covered by
the cap, her excitement of the eyes was all the blacker. She tried to express
no familiarity in them toward me, so no scrutiny could have found out that our
arms ever had crossed or hands ever stroked up and down.

I looked around and could see my friends and enemies in a minute, jeering or
urging, distrustful, partisan, indignant, crying. There was one gaffer dressed up
as white as any intern, and a face on him like Tecumseh, or one of the painted
attackers of Schenectady; he wanted right away to explain a strategy to me, being
very deliberate in that birdhouse of tropical screaming and laundry heat, to say
nothing of the whiteness of the sun.

"Now wait," I called, taking Sophie's place on the hogshead.

Some began to yell, "We strike!"

"Now please listen. It won't be legal--"

"Oh, the hell! Cry-eye! What's legal, that we get a buck and a half a day?
What's there after carfare and union dues? Do we eat? We're just going to walk
out."

"No, you don't want to do that. It would be a wildcat strike. The Federation
guys would send other people to take your place and it would be legal. The thing
to do is sign with us so there can be an election, and when we win we can
represent you."

"Or if you win. That's again a few months."

"But it's the best you can do."

I broke open a bundle of cards from my bag and was distributing them into the
waving hands when suddenly a bulge started from the direction of the laundry;
several men were fighting through the crowd, thrusting away the women, and the
joint began to jump. Just as I realized that these were the enemy union guy and
his goons I was grabbed from behind, off the barrel, and slugged as I landed, in
the eye and on the nose. I burst into blood. My buddy with the Indian's beak
stepped on me, but that was in his rush at the guy who hit me. As he pushed him
back a Negro chambermaid raised me. Sophie thrust her hand into my pocket
and pulled out my handkerchief.

"Dirty gangsters! Honey, don't worry. Throw your head back."

There was now a ring of women guarding me, formed around the overturned
barrel. When one of the sluggers made a start for me there was a lunge of the
women for that place. Some had picked up scissors, knives, soap scoops, so the
union guy called off his gorillas, and they came to position around him, who was
small by contrast but dangerous-looking, if a runt, in his snappy man-about-town
suit and his Baltimore heater. He appeared like somebody from the sheriff's
office who had changed to the other side of the law; or from cat meat to human
flesh. He seemed as if be would smell at close quarters like a drinking man, but
that was perhaps the color of rage and not of whisky in him. Of unpreventable
meanness, able to harm as much as he threatened. I could somewhat show that
with those bursts of blood on my noserag and shirt, and snorting out more, while
my stinging eye swelled to a slit. However, he was the one who had the law on
his side, being the representative under contract of these people.

"Now, ladies, get out of the way and let my men take over this punk who got
no business here. He's breakin' Acts of Congress and I could swear a warrant
against him. Besides the hotel could jug him for trespassin'."

The women screamed and showed their scissors and weapons, and the Negro
woman, who sounded like a West Indian or some Empire Britisher, said, "Never,
you bloody little peanut!" So, while scared, I was also astonished.

"That's okay, sister, we'll get him," said one of the goons. "He can't go
everywhere with this nooky protection."

His boss told him, "Whyn't you shut your trap!" And he said to me, "What
right you got to come here?"

"I was asked here."

"Damn right he was! You bet we asked him!" While the cooks in their long
hats and others of the better-off faction hollered and scoffed and held
noses and pulled the imaginary toilet chain at me.

"Listen, you-all. I'm your representative. When there's any beefs, what am I
for?"

"To throw us out when we come to the hall to ask you something, while your
feet are on the table and you're drinking from the bottle and pickin' horses!"

"There doesn't have to be any goddam mutiny, does there? Now I see a lot of
cards this sonofabitch meddler passed around, and I want you all to tear 'em
up and have no more truck with him and them."

I said, "Don't do it!"

The guy who had slugged me made a pass to push through the defense of
women and they heaved against him. Sophie pulled me away, through the back
and along service corridors. "There's a firedoor back here," she said.
"You can get down the escape. Take care, honey, they'll be after you now."

"What about you?"

"What can they do me?"

"You'd better forget about striking for the time being."

Drawing strongly, her feet planted wide apart, she hauled open the ponderous
firedoor, and as I went out she said, "Augie, you and me will never get to-
gether again, will we?"

"I think not, Sophie. There is this other girl."

"Good-by, then."

I hustled down the hot black fire-escape frames and swung from the ladder,
jumped, and when I made a choice of streets to run to I had no luck. One of the
goons was there; he came for me, and I took off toward Broadway. I flinched
from the shots he might have taken, that not being unknown in Chicago, that
people should be knocked off in the street. But there was no noise of any gun,
and I reckoned that his object was to work me over, finish the beating, break
bones perhaps, and lay me up.

I had just enough of a lead on the slugger to get across Broadway before him.
I saw him, waist up, stopped by traffic, his eyes still on me, and I breathed on
the dry snot of fear in my blood-clotted nose. A streetcar making slow time came
by, and I sprang to the platform. I was sure to be followed, because of the slow
cumbersomeness of the car approaching the Loop. But I might be able to shake
him in the crowds. Meanwhile I rode in the front with the motorman, where I
could watch the length of the car and also had within reach the switch-iron that
motormen lower through a hole in the floorboards. I could be sure the slugger
was coming on behind in one of the taxis in the file of cars fluddering and shim-
mering off their blue gas stink in this dull hot brute shit of a street. I was
harrowed by my hate for it, as well as for the creeping of the trolley. I was
torn up and sick with it. But gradually the bridge approached and the towers, all
series and the same from top to bottom, the river of washwater filth and the
bone-nosed gulls. The car picked up speed over the clear of the bridge and came
down the swoop with heavy liberty, but then crept again in the Loop and its
crush of traffic. I waited until near Madison Street, and in the middle of the
block I said to the motorman, "Off here!"

"This ain't the stop."

I said, raging, "Open it up or I'll bust your head open," and when he saw the
ugliness of my face and the chink of my eye he let me get off and I ran for it,
but ran only to turn the corner and lose myself. I took the chance of getting
into a line moving rapidly at the Mc-Vickers where there was a Garbo picture, and
inside the thick red cords that looped off in-going from departing crowds, and in
the lobby, which was like an apartment Cagliostro and Seraphina had laid out to
fuddle the court and royalty, I was out of danger for the time. I was anyway
beginning to feel that if he trapped me now it might be dangerous for him too,
as for the overseer killed by Moses. I went down to the can and vomited up my
breakfast. Bathing off the blood, I dried at the electric blower. Then I went up
and lay in one of the seats at the back of the house where I could watch who
entered, and there I rested until the end of the show and next change of audience,
when I went out too, straight to the middle of the street, which was roaring and
flinging up hot midday dust.

I jumped into a taxi and drove to Thea's, which had been my real objective of
days.





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