The Adventures of Augie March (Penguin Classics)

by Saul Bellow

  But Einhorn wasn’t exactly buried in front of his pleasures. He carried on with one woman or another, and in particular he had a great need of girls like Lollie Fewter. His explanation was that he took after his father. The Commissioner, in a kindly, sleepy, warm-aired, fascinated way, petted and admired all women and put his hands wherever he liked. I imagine women weren’t very angry when he saluted them in this style because he picked out whatever each of them herself prized most—color, breasts, hair, hips, and all the little secrets and connivances with which she emphasized her own good things. You couldn’t rightly say it was a common letch he had; it was a sort of Solomonic regard of an old chief or aged sea lion. With his spotty big old male hands, he felt up the married and the unmarried ones, and even the little girls for what they promised, and nobody ever was offended by it or by the names he invented, names like “the Tangerines,” or “the Little Sled,” “Madame Yesteryear,” “the Six-Foot Dove.” The grand old gentleman. Satisfied and gratified. You could feel from the net pleasantness he carried what there had been between him and women now old or dead, whom he recognized, probably, and greeted in this nose or that bosom.

  His sons didn’t share this quality. Of course you don’t expect younger men to have this kind of evening-Mississippi serenity, but there wasn’t much disinterestedness or contemplation in either of them. There was more romantic feeling in Dingbat than in his brother. There scarcely was a time when Dingbat wasn’t engaged to a nice girl. He scrubbed himself and dressed himself to go to see her in a desperate, cracked rage of earnest respect. Sometimes he would look ready to cry from devotion, and in his preparations he ran out of the perfumed bathroom, clean starched shirt open on his skinny hairiness, to remind me to fetch the corsage from Bluegren’s. He could never do enough for these girls and never thought himself good enough for them. And the more he respected them the more he ran with tramps between times, whom he picked up at Guyon’s Paradise and took to the Forest Preserves in the Stutz, or to a little Wilson Avenue hotel that Karas-Holloway owned. But Friday evenings, at family dinner, there was often a fiancée, now a piano teacher, now a dress designer or bookkeeper, or simply a home girl, wearing an engagement ring and other presents; and Dingbat with a necktie, tense and daffy, homage-fully calling her “Honey,” “Isabel, hon,” “Janice dear,” in his hoarse, thin black voice.

  Einhorn, however, didn’t have such sentiments at all, whatever sentiments he entertained on other scores. He took the joking liberties his father did, but his jokes didn’t have the same ring; which isn’t to say that they weren’t funny but that he cast himself forward on them toward a goal—seduction. What the laugh was about was his disability; he was after a fashion laughing about it, and he was not so secretly saying to women that if they’d look further they’d find to their surprise that there was the real thing, not disabled. He promised. So that when he worked his wicked, lustful charm, apparently so safe, like a worldly priest or elderly gentleman from whom it’s safe to accept a little complimentary badinage or tickle, he was really singlemindedly and grimly fixed on the one thing, ultimately the thing, for which men and women came together. And he was the same with them all; not, of course, foreseeing any great success, but hoping all the same that one of them—beautiful, forward, intrigued with him, wishing to play a secret game, maybe a trifle perverse (he suggested), would see, would grasp, would crave, would burn for him. He looked and hoped for this in every woman.

  He wouldn’t stay a cripple, Einhorn; he couldn’t hold his soul in crippledom. Sometimes it was dreadful, this; he’d lose everything he’d thought through uncountable times to reconcile himself to it, and be like the wolf in the pit in the zoo who keeps putting his muzzle to the corners of the walls, back and forth, back and forth. It didn’t happen often; probably not oftener than ordinary people get a shove of the demon. But it happened. Touch him when he was off his feed, or had a cold and a little fever, or when there was a rift in the organization, or his position didn’t feel so eminent and he wasn’t getting the volume of homage and mail he needed—or when it was the turn of a feared truth to come up unseen through the multitude of elements out of which he composed his life, and then he’d say, “I used to think I’d either walk again or else swallow iodine. I’d have massages and exercises and drills, when I’d concentrate on a single muscle and think I was building it up by my will. And it was all the bunk, Augie, the Coué theory, etcetera. For the birds. And It Can Be Done and the sort of stuff that bigshot Teddy Roosevelt wrote in his books. Nobody’ll ever know all the things I tried before I finally decided it was no go. I couldn’t take it, and I took it. And I can’t take it, yet I do take it. But how! You can get along twenty-nine days with your trouble, but there’s always that thirtieth day when goddammit you can’t, when you feel like the stinking fly in the first cold snap, when you look about and think you’re the Old Man of the Sea on Sinbad’s neck; and why should anybody carry an envious piece of human junk? If society had any sense they’d give me euthanasia. They’d leave me the way the Eskimos do their old folks in an igloo with food for two days. Don’t you look so miserable. Go on away. See if Tillie wants you for something.”

  But this was on the thirtieth day, or more seldom, because in general he enjoyed good health and looked on himself as a useful citizen and even an extraordinary one, and he bragged that there was hardly anything he couldn’t bring off if he put his mind to it. And he certainly did some bang-up things. He’d clear us all out of the way to be alone with Lollie Fewter; he’d arrange for the whole lot of us to drive out to Niles Center and show the Commissioner a piece of property. Ostensibly getting ready to occupy himself with a piece of work while we were away—the files and information were laid out for him—he was unhurried, engaging, and smooth-tempered in his tortoise-shell specs, answering every last question in full and even detaining the excursion to have some last words with his father about frontages or improvements. “Wait till I show you on the map just where the feeder-bus comes through. Bring the map, Augie.” He’d have me fetch it and kept the Commissioner till he became impatient, with Dingbat grinding the klaxon and Mrs. Einhorn already settled with bags of fruit in the back seat, calling, “Come, it’s hot. I’m fainting here.” And Lollie in the passage between the flat and the offices sauntered up and down with the dustmop in the polished dimness, big and soft, comfortable for the heat in a thin blouse and straw sandals, like an overgrown girl walking a doll and keeping a smile to herself about this maternal, matrimonial game, lazy and careless and, you could say, saving force for the game to follow. Clem Tambow had tried to tell me what the score was but hadn’t convinced me, not just because of the oddness of the idea, and that I had a boyish respect for Einhorn, but also because I had made a start with Lollie myself. I found excuses to be with her in the kitchen while she was ironing. She told me of her family in the Franklin County coal fields, and then about the men there, and what they tried and did. She rolled me in feelings. From suggestion alone, I didn’t have the strength to keep my feet. We soon were kissing and feeling; she now held off my hands and now led them inside her dress, alleging instruction, boisterous that I was still cherry, and at last, from kindness, she one day said that if I’d come back in the evening I could take her home. She left me so horny I was scarcely able to walk. I hid out in the poolroom, dreading that Einhorn would send for me. But Clem came with a message from her that she had changed her mind. I was bitter about that but I reckon I felt freed, too, from a crisis. “Didn’t I tell you?” said Clem. “You both work for the same boss, and she’s his little nooky. His and a couple of other guys’. But not for you. You don’t know anything and you don’t have any money.”

  “Why, damn her soul!”

  “Well, Einhorn would give her anything. He’s nuts about her.”

  I couldn’t conceive that. It wouldn’t be like Einhorn to settle his important feelings on a tramp. But that exactly was what he had done. He was mad for her. Einhorn knew, too, that he shared her with a few hoodlums from
the poolroom. Of course he knew. It wasn’t in his life to be without information; he had the stowage of an anthill for it, with weaving black lines of provisioners creeping into the crest from every direction. They told him what would be the next turn in the Lingle case, or what the public-auction schedule would be, or about Appellate Court decisions before they were in print, or where there were hot goods, from furs to school supplies; so he had a line on Lollie from the beginning to the end.

  Eleanor Klein asked me sentimental questions. Did I have a sweetheart yet? It was a thing I appeared ripe for. Our old neighbor, Kreindl, asked me too, but in a different way, on the q.t. He judged I was no longer a kid and he could reveal himself, his cockeyes turning fierce and gay. “Schmeist du schon, Augie? You’ve got friends? Not my son. He comes home from the store and reads the paper. S’interesiert ihm nisht. You’re not too young, are you? I was younger than you and gefährlich. I couldn’t get enough. Kotzie doesn’t take after me.” He much needed to pronounce himself the better, and in fact the only, man in his house; and he did look very sturdy when he massed up his teeth and creased his out-of-doors, rugged face to smile. He saw a lot of weather, for he went through the entire West Side on foot with his satchel of samples. Because he had to count every nickel. And he had the patience and hardness of steady pavement going, passing the same lead-whited windows of a factory twenty times a month and knowing to the last weed every empty lot between him and his destination. Arriving, he could hang around hours for a six-bit commission or a piece of information. “Kotzie takes after my missis. He is kaltblutig.” Sure I knew it was he himself that did all the trumpeting, screaming, and stamping down in his flat, throwing things on the floor.

  “And how is your brother?” he said intriguingly. “I understand the little maidelech wet their pants for him. What is he doing?”

  As a matter of fact I didn’t know what Simon was up to these days. He didn’t tell me, nor did he seem curious as to what was happening to me, having decided in his mind that I was nothing but a handyman at Einhorn’s.

  Once I went with Dingbat to a party one of his fiancées was giving, and I met my brother with a Polish girl in a fur-trimmed orange dress; he wore a big, smooth, check suit and looked handsome and sufficient to himself. He didn’t stay long, and I had a feeling that he didn’t want to spend his evenings where I did. Or maybe it was the kind of evening Dingbat made of it that didn’t please him, Dingbat’s recitations and hoarse parodies, his turkey girding and obscene cackles that made the girls scream. For several months Dingbat and I were very thick. At parties I horsed around with him, goofy, his straight man; or I hugged girls on porches and in backyards, exactly as he did. He took me under his protection in the poolroom, and we did some friendly boxing, at which I was never much good, and played snooker—a little better—and hung about there with the hoods and loudmouths. So that Grandma Lausch would have thought that the very worst she had ever said about me let me off too lightly, seeing me in the shoeshine seat above the green tables, in a hat with diamond airholes cut in it and decorated with brass kiss-me pins and Al Smith buttons, in sneakers and Mohawk sweatshirt, there in the frying jazz and the buzz of baseball broadcasts, the click of markers, butt thumping of cues, spat-out pollyseed shells and blue chalk crushed underfoot and dust of hand-slickening talcum hanging in the air. Along with the blood-smelling swaggeroos, recruits for mobs, automobile thieves, stick-up men, sluggers and bouncers, punks with ambition to become torpedoes, neighborhood cowboys with Jack Holt sideburns down to the jawbone, collegiates, tinhorns and small-time racketeers and pugs, ex-servicemen, home-evading husbands, hackies, truckers, and bush-league athletes. Whenever someone had a notion to work out on me—and there were plenty of touchy characters here to catch your eye in a misconstrued way—Dingbat flew around to protect me.

  “This kid is a buddy of mine and he works for my bro. Monkey with him and you’ll get something broke on your head. What’s the matter, you tough or hungry!”

  He was never anything but through and through earnest when the subject was loyalty or honor; his bony dukes were ready and his Cuban heels dug down sharply; his furrowed chin was already seeking its fighting position on the shoulder of his starched shirt. Then he was prepared to go into his stamping dance and start slugging.

  But there weren’t any fights over me. If there was one doctrine of Grandma Lausch’s that went home, it was the one of the soft answer, though with her this was of tactical not merciful origin, the dust-off for heathen, stupes, and bruteheads. So I don’t claim it was a trained spirit turning aside wrath, or integer vitae (how could I?) making the wolves respect me; but I didn’t have any taste for the perpetual danger-sign, eye-narrowing, tricky Tybalt all coiled up to stab, for that code, and was without curiosity for what it was like to hit or to be hit, and so I refused all the bids to outface or be outfaced.

  On this I had Einhorn’s views also, whose favorite example was his sitting in the driver’s seat of the Stutz—as he sometimes did, having been moved over to watch tennis matches or sandlot games—and a coal heaver running up with a tire tool because he had honked once or twice for the Stutz to move and Dingbat wasn’t there to move it. “What could I do,” said Einhorn, “if he asked me no questions but started to swing or punch me in the face? With my hands on the wheel, he’d think I was the driver. I’d have to talk fast. Could I talk fast enough? What could make an impression on an animal like that? Would I pretend to faint or play dead? Oh my God! Even before I was sick, and I was a pretty husky young fellow, I’d do anything possible before I started to trade punches with any sonofabitch, muscle-minded ape or bad character looking for trouble. This city is one place where a person who goes out for a peaceful walk is liable to come home with a shiner or bloody nose, and he’s almost as likely to get it from a cop’s nightstick as from a couple of squareheads who haven’t got the few dimes to chase pussy on the high rides in Riverview and so hang around the alley and plot to jump someone. Because you know it’s not the city salary the cops live on now, not with all the syndicate money there is to pick up. There isn’t a single bootleg alky truck that goes a mile without being convoyed by a squad car. So they don’t care what they do. I’ve heard of them almost killing guys who didn’t know enough English to answer questions.”

  And now, with eager shrewdness of nose and baggy eyes, he began to increase his range; sometimes, with what white hair bunched over his ears and his head lifted back, he looked grand, suffering more for than from something, relaxing his self-protective tension. “But there is some kind of advantage in the roughness of a place like Chicago, of not having any illusions either. Whereas in all the great capitals of the world there’s some reason to think humanity is very different. All that ancient culture and those beautiful works of art right out in public, by Michelangelo and Christopher Wren, and those ceremonies, like trooping the color at the Horse Guards’ parade or burying a great man in the Pantheon over in Paris. You see those marvelous things and you think that everything savage belongs to the past. So you think. And then you have another think, and you see that after they rescued women from the coal mines, or pulled down the Bastille and got rid of Star Chambers and lettres de cachet, ran out the Jesuits, increased education, and built hospitals and spread courtesy and politeness, they have five or six years of war and revolutions and kill off twenty million people. And do they think there’s less danger to life than here? That’s a riot. Let them say rather that they blast better specimens, but not try to put it over that the only human beings who live by blood are away down on the Orinoco where they hunt heads, or out in Cicero with Al Capone. But the best specimens always have been maltreated or killed. I’ve seen a picture of Aristotle mounted and ridden like a horse by some nasty whore. There was Pythagoras who got killed over a diagram; there was Seneca who had to cut his wrists; there were the teachers and the saints who became martyrs.