The Adventures of Augie March (Penguin Classics)

by Saul Bellow

  “I have to bring back the car, Grandma,” I said at last, “so I’ll have to go now, if there isn’t anything else you want done.”

  “What else? Nothing.”

  I started to leave.

  She said, “There’s my shoebag I forgot to take. The chintz one inside the clothescloset door.”

  “I’ll bring it out soon.”

  “Mama can keep it. And for your trouble, Augie, here’s something.” She opened her purse of dull large silver antennae and with short gesture she gave me an angry quarter—the payoff—which I couldn’t refuse, couldn’t pocket, could scarcely close my hand on.

  Things were in a queer way at Einhorns’ too, where the Commissioner was dying in the big back room, while up front, in the office, deeds were changing hands with more thousands and greater prosperity than ever. A few times a day Einhorn had himself wheeled to his father’s bedside to ask advice and get information, now everything was in his hands, grave and brow-drawn as he began to feel the unruliness of what he had to manage, and all the social chirping of the office became the dangerous hints of the desert. Now you could see how much he had been protected by the Commissioner. After all, he became a cripple at a young age. Whether before or after marriage I never did find out—Einhorn said after marriage, but I heard it told here and there that the Commissioner had paid off Mrs. Einhorn’s cousin Karas (Holloway) and bought his paralytic son a bride. That she loved Einhorn wasn’t any evidence against this, for it’d be constitutional with her to adore her husband. Anyhow, regardless of what he bragged, he was a son who had lived under his father’s protection. That’s something that I wouldn’t have failed to see. And his world-gypping letters and operations, and all his poetical schemes, even if he had a son at the university himself, were doings of a boy. And, indulged so long, into middle age, how was he going to get over it? He thought, by being fierce and serious. He stopped his old projects; “The Shut-In” wasn’t published any more and the on-approval packages no longer opened—I toted them down to the storeroom with the pamphlets and the rest of the daily prizes of the mail; and he got himself consumed by business and closed and opened the deals on the Commissioner’s calendar, began or dissolved partnerships in lots or groceries in the suburbs, and, on his own—the kind of thing he loved—cheaply bought up second mortgages from people who needed ready money. He insisted on kickbacks from plumbing, heating, or painting contractors with whom the Commissioner had always been cronies, and so made enemies. That didn’t bother him, to whom the first thing was that the fainéants shouldn’t be coming after Charlemagne—as long as people understood that. And furthermore, the more difficulty and tortuousness there were, the more he felt safe. So there were quarrels about broken agreements; he’d never pay bills till the last day of grace; and most people who put up with this did it for the Commissioner’s sake. He grabbed command very toughly. “I can argue all day the runner didn’t touch base,” he said, “even if I know damn well he did. The idea shouldn’t get started that you can be made to back down.”

  This was the way the lessons and theories of power were taught to me in the intervals of quiet that became fewer and fewer; and these lessons were self-addressed mostly, explanations of what he was doing, that it was right.

  At this time all his needs were very keen, and he wanted things in the house he hadn’t cared much about before—a special kind of coffee that only one place in town carried, and he ordered several bottles of bootleg rum from Kreindl, which was one of Kreindl’s sidelines; he brought them in a straw satchel from the South Side, where he was in second- or third-hand touch with all kinds of demon, dangerous elements. But Kreindl had an instinct to get people what they had a craving for—of a steward or batman or fag or a Leporello or pimp. He hadn’t quit on Five Properties. And now that the Commissioner was dying, and Dingbat, who would inherit a lot of money, was still unmarried, Kreindl hung out at Einhorn’s, keeping the Commissioner company in the bedroom, talking to Dingbat, and having long conversations privately with Einhorn, who made use of him in various ways.

  One of their subjects was Lollie Fewter, who had quit in September and was working downtown. Einhorn suffered over her no longer being in the house, impossible as it would have been during his father’s sickness and his increased work to put the blocks to her as in the leisurely summer. There were always people in the flat and office. But it was now that he wanted her and kept sending her notes and messages and harping about it. And at such a time! It hurt him too. Nevertheless he kept thinking how, in spite of the time, he could carry it off, and didn’t merely brood, but discussed, obstinately, how it could be done. I heard him with Kreindl. And still he was the family leader, the chief, the man of administration and thought, responsible custodian, remarkable son of a remarkable father. Awfully damn remarkable. Even the rising of his brows toward his whitening hair was that. And what if, together with this, he had his inner and personal growths of vice, passion, even prurience, unbecoming obscenity? Was it unbecoming because he was a cripple? And then if you satisfy that difficult question by saying it’s not up to us to declare what a man should renounce because he is crippled or otherwise cursed, there’s still the fact that Einhorn could be ugly and malicious. You can know a man by his devils and the way he gives hurts. But I believe he has to run a chance of injuring himself too. In this way you can judge, if he does it safely for himself, that he is wrong. Or if he has no spur gear to something not himself. And Einhorn? Jesus, he could be winsome—the world’s charm-boy. And that was distracting. You can grumble at it; you can say it’s a ruse or feint of gifted people to sidetrack you from the viper’s tangle and ugly knottedness of their desires, but if the art of it is deep enough and carried far enough into great play, it gets above its origin. Providing it’s festive, which sometimes it was with Einhorn, when he was not merely after something but was gay. He could be simple-hearted. Nevertheless I was down on him occasionally, and I said to myself he was nothing—nothing. Selfish, jealous, autocratic, carp-mouth, and hypocritical. However, in the end, I every time had high regard for him. For one thing, there was always the fight he had made on his sickness to consider. No doubt smiting the sledded Polack on the ice was more, or being a Belisarius, and Grail-seeking was higher, but weighing it all up, the field he was put into and the weapons he was handed, he had made an imposing showing and, through mind, he connected with the spur gear that I mentioned. He knew what retributions your devils are liable to bring for the way you treat wife and women or behave while your father is on his deathbed, what you ought to think of your pleasure, of acting like a cockroach; he had the intelligence for the comparison. He had the intelligence to be sublime. But sublimity can’t exist only as a special gift of a few, due to an accident of origin, like being born an albino. If it were, what interest could we have in it? No, it has to survive the worst and find itself a dry corner of retreat from the mad, bloody wet, and mud-splashing of spike-brains, marshals, Marlboroughs, goldwatch-consulting Plug-sons, child-ruiners, human barbecuers, as well as from the world-wide livery service of the horsemen of St. John. So why be down on poor Einhorn, afflicted with mummy legs and his cripple-irritated longings?

  Anyway, I stood by him, and he said to me, “Oh, that bitch! That lousy freckle-faced common coal-mine whore!” And he sent messages by Kreindl to her, downtown, with lunatic offers. But also he said, “I know I’m no goddam good to have pussy on the brain at a time like this. It’ll be my downfall.” Lollie answered his notes but didn’t come back. She had other ideas for herself.

  And meantime the Commissioner was passing out of the picture. At first he had lots of friends coming to see him in the onetime sumptuous bedroom, furnished by his third wife, who had left him ten years ago, with an Empire four-poster bed and gilded mirrors, Cupid with his head inside a bow. Spittoons on the floor, cigars on the dresser, check stubs and pinochle decks, it had become an old businessman’s room. He seemed to enjoy himself, when old-country and synagogue buddies and former partners were there, te
lling them he was done for. It wasn’t a habit he could check, joking, having joked all his life. Coblin came often, on Sunday afternoons, and Five Properties in the milk truck during the week—for a young man, he had considerable orthodoxy; respectful form, anyhow. I can’t say I believe he cared a whole lot, but his presence was not a bad thing and showed he knew at least where the right place for the heart was. And probably he approved of the way the Commissioner was making his death, his first-class stoicism. Kinsman the undertaker, the Einhorns’ tenant, was very disturbed that he could not visit and stopped me in the street to ask after the Commissioner, begging me not to mention it. “Those are my worst times,” he said. “When a friend is passing I’m about as welcome as old Granum who works for me.” Old Granum was the deathbed watcher and Psalm reciter, feeble and ruination-faced, in Chinatown black alpaca and minute, slippered feet. “If I come,” said Kinsman, “you know what people think.”

  As the old man made deeper progress toward death fewer visitors were allowed, and the klatch ruled by his deep wisecracking tones ended. Now Dingbat was with him most, and he didn’t need to be urged by Einhorn to come out of the poolroom to tend his father but was much affected; he had been the last to accept the doctor’s forecast and said confidently, “That’s the way all croakers talk when an old fellow is sick. Why, the Commissioner is really built, he’s powerful!” But now he hastened in and out of the room on his noisy and clumping tango-master’s heels, fed the Commissioner and rubbed him down and shagged away the kids who played on the furniture in the backyard. “Beat it, you little jag-offs, there’s a sick person here. Damn snots, where’s your upbringing!” He kept the sickroom dark and camped on a hassock, reading Captain Fury, Doc Savage, and other pulp sports stories by the vigil light. I saw the Commissioner afoot only once, at this stage, when Einhorn sent me to his study to fetch some papers, and in the darkness of the living room the Commissioner was rambling slowly in his underclothes, looking for Mrs. Einhorn, to demand an explanation for missing buttons, annoyed that from neck to bottom there were only two and he was exposed and naked between. “That’s no way!” he said. “Lig a naketter.” He was angry still about the fire.

  At last Dingbat surrendered his place in the bedroom to Kinsman’s Granum, when the Commissioner seldom roused and, awake, didn’t easily recognize anyone. But he did recognize the bricky, open sponge-ball cheeks of the old watcher in the towel-looped twelve-watt light, and said, “Du? Then I slept longer than I thought.” Which Einhorn repeated scores of times, mentioning Cato and Brutus and others noted for the calm of their last moments; he was a collector of facts like these, and shook down all he read, Sunday supplements, Monday reports of sermons, Haldeman-Julius blue books, all collections of sayings, for favorable comparisons. Things that didn’t always fit. Not that this old lover the Commissioner doesn’t deserve citation for having no alarm and dying undisgusted, without last minute revision of lifetime habits.

  He was laid out that night in a colossal coffin, at Kinsman’s. When I came in the morning the office was shut, with the shades in green and black wrinkles against the cold sunshine and dry fall weather, and I went round the back. The mirrors had been covered by Mrs. Einhorn, in whom superstition was very strong, and a candle burned down in a pale white ecclesiastical glass in the dark dining room by a photo of the Commissioner taken when his Bill Cody whiskers were still full and glossy. Arthur Einhorn had come from Champaign for his grandfather’s funeral and sat at the table in detached college elegance, hand in his woolly intellectual hair, taking it easy in the expected family folly of such an occasion; he was engaging and witty, though not youthful in appearance—he had lines in his cheeks already—despite his raccoon coat that was lying on the buffet with a beret dropped on it. Einhorn and Dingbat had razor slits in their vests, symbolizing rent clothes. The ex-Mrs. Tambow was there, in duenna hairdress and arched pince-nez, along with her son Donald, who sang at receptions and weddings; and, also on family duty, Karas-Holloway and his wife, she with poodle tuft on the front of her head and her usual concentrated unrest or dislike. She had a lot of flesh, and her face was red, resentful, criticizing. I was aware that she was always after her cousin-in-law to protect herself from the Einhorns. She didn’t trust them. She didn’t trust her husband either, who gave her everything, a large super-decorated flat on the South Side, Haviland china, venetian blinds, Persian rugs, French tapestry, Majestic radio with twelve tubes. That was Karas, in a sharkskin, double-breasted suit and presenting a look of difficulties in shaving and combing terrifically outwitted, the knars of his face gotten-around and his hair flattened. His smoothness was a huge satisfaction to him, as, also, his extraordinary English that hadn’t hampered him in making a fortune, plus his insignificance in the old country—people gave way before his supple wrinkles and small eyes and, comparably, the onslaught of his six-cylinder car, a yellow Packard.

  Long afterward I had a queer ten minutes with Mrs. Karas, in a bakery near Jackson Park where I came in with a Greek girl she assumed to be my wife because we were arm in arm, in summer flannels, intimate early in the morning. She recognized me on the spot, with a coloring of extreme pleasure, but with errors of memory there was no stopping or correcting, they were so singular. She told the girl I had been practically a relative to her, she had loved me as much as Arthur, and received me in her own house like kin—all joy and happy reunion, she was, embracing me by the shoulders to say how fine and handsome I had become, but then my complexion had always been the envy of girls (as if I had been Achilles among the maidens, in the office and poolroom). I must say I was stumped by such major will to do over the past with affection and goodness. People have been adoptive toward me, as if I were really an orphan, but she had never been like that, but only morose with her riches, and mad at her mystifying, dapper husband, and critical of the Einhorns. I had been in her flat only as Einhorn’s chauffeur and sat in another room while they visited. Tillie Einhorn, not the hostess, brought me sandwiches and coffee from the table. And now Mrs. Karas, who had come out to buy rolls for breakfast, fell into a lucky chance to adorn the past with imaginary flowers grown in worried secret. I didn’t deny anything; I said it was all true, and allowed her her enthusiasm. She even chided me for not coming to visit her. But I remembered her off-with-their-heads stony-facedness and the breakfast before the funeral when I helped out in the kitchen. Bavatsky made the coffee.

  Einhorn, weary but not crushed, had his black homburg on the back of his head as he smoked—no word to spare for me but an occasional one of command. Dingbat insisted with dry, roughened voice that he was going to wheel his brother into Kinsman’s parlors. After that it was I who carried Einhorn, not Arthur, who walked alongside with his mother. On my back, I took him in and out of the limousine, in the autumn park of the cemetery, low-grown with shrubs and slabs; back again to the cold-cuts dinner for the mourners, and afterward, at nightfall, to the synagogue in his black duds, his feet riding stirrupless and weak by my sides and his cheek on my back.

  Einhorn wasn’t religious, but to go to the synagogue was due form and, regardless of what he thought, he knew how to conduct himself. The Coblins belonged to this congregation too, and I had strung along with Cousin Anna in the oriental, modified purdah of the gallery while she wept for Howard amid the coorooing and smelling salts of the women in finery, sobbing at who would be doomed the coming year by fire or water—as the English text translated it. This was different, however, from the times of crowds praying below in shawls and business hats, and the jinking of the bells on the velvet dresses of the two-legged scrolls. It was dark, and a small group, the shaggy evening regulars, various old faces and voices, gruff, whispered, wheezy, heart-grumbled, noisily swarm-toned, singing off the Hebrew of the evening prayers. Dingbat and Einhorn had to be prompted when it came their turn to recite the orphans’ Kaddish.

  We went back in Karas’s Packard, with Kreindl. Einhorn whispered to me to tell Kreindl to go home. Dingbat turned in. Karas was off to the South Side. Arthu
r had gone to visit friends; he was leaving for Champaign in the morning. I got Einhorn into more comfortable clothes and slippers. There was a cold wind pouring and moonlight in the backyard.

  Einhorn kept me with him that evening; he didn’t want to be alone. While I sat by he wrote his father’s obituary in the form of an editorial for the neighborhood paper. “The return of the hearse from the newly covered grave leaves a man to pass through the last changes of nature who found Chicago a swamp and left it a great city. He came after the Great Fire, said to be caused by Mrs. O’Leary’s cow, in flight from the conscription of the Hapsburg tyrant, and in his life as a builder proved that great places do not have to be founded on the bones of slaves, like the pyramids of Pharaohs or the capital of Peter the Great on the banks of the Neva, where thousands were trampled in the Russian marshes. The lesson of an American life like my father’s, in contrast to that of the murderer of the Strelitzes and of his own son, is that achievements are compatible with decency. My father was not familiar with the observation of Plato that philosophy is the study of death, but he died nevertheless like a philosopher, saying to the ancient man who watched by his bedside in the last moments …” This was the vein of it, and he composed it energetically in half an hour, printing on sheets of paper at his desk, the tip of his tongue forward, scrunched up in his bathrobe and wearing his stocking cap.