The Adventures of Augie March (Penguin Classics)

by Saul Bellow

  The Depression had altered Einhorn too. Retrospectively, he was rather green in the Commissioner’s lifetime, and some ways, for his years, unformed. Now he was no longer second-to-last, but the last and end-term of his family; there was nobody expected to die before he did, and, you could say, troubles came directly to his face, and he showed the test of them. No more willowiness; he had to get thicker and harder, and so he did. But toward women he didn’t change at all. He saw fewer of them, naturally, than in past days. What women entered a poolroom? Lollie Fewter didn’t come back to him. And for him—well, I suppose that souls not in the very best state have to have organizing acts, devices that brace them, must shave or must dress. To Einhorn, the enjoyment of a woman not his wife was such an organizing act. And Lollie must have been important to him, for he kept track of her to the last, for better than ten years, that is, when she was shot by a teamster-lover, the father of several children, whom she got involved in black marketing. He was caught, and there was prison coming to him, and no rap for her. Therefore he killed her, he said, “So another guy wouldn’t live rich with her off my troubles.” Einhorn saved the clippings from the papers. “You see what he says—‘live rich’? Living rich was what it was with her. I can tell you.” He wanted me to know he could. He could tell me indeed, and there were few people better placed than I to hear it from him.

  “Poor Lollie!”

  “Ah, poor, poor kid!” he said. “But I think she was bound to die like that, Augie. She had a Frankie-and-Johnny mentality. And when I knew her she was beautiful. Yes, she was rich.” All white-headed, and shrunken some from his former size, he told me about her with fervor. “They say she was getting sloppy toward the end, and greedy about money. That was bad. There’s trouble enough from fucking. She was made to have a violent thing happen to her. The world doesn’t let hot blood off easy.”

  Wrapped and planted in this was an appeal to me to remember his hot blood. My services to him had put me in some striking positions—he wanted to know what thought I had of them, maybe; or, humanly enough, whether I would celebrate them with him. Oh, the places where pride won’t make a stand!

  What I was particularly bidden to recall in this talk was the night of my graduation from high school. The Einhorns had been extremely kind to me. A wallet with ten dollars in it was my present from the three of them, and Mrs. Einhorn came to the graduation exercises with Mama and the Kleins and Tambows that February night. Afterward there was a party at the Kleins’, where I was expected. I drove Mama home from the assembly—I didn’t have my name in the evening program, like Simon, but Mama was pleased and smoothed my hand as I was leading her upstairs.

  Tillie Einhorn waited below in the car. “You go to your party,” she said as I was taking her back to the poolroom. My having finished high school was of immense importance in her eyes, and she honored me extraordinarily, in the tone she took. She was a warm woman, in most matters very simple, she wanted to give me some sort of blessing, and my “education” had, I think, suddenly made her timid of me. So we drove in the black and wet cold to the poolroom, and she said several times over, “Willie says you got a good head. You’ll be a teacher yourself.” And then she crushed up against me in her sealskin coat, belonging to the good days, to kiss me on the cheek, and had the happy tears of terribly deep feeling to wipe from her face before we went into the poolroom. Behind this, probably, was my “orphancy,” and the occasion woke it up. We were dressed in our best; Mrs. Einhorn even gave off a perfume, in the car, from her silk scarf and dress established with silver buttons on her breast. We crossed the wide sidewalk to the poolroom. Below, the windows, as required by law, were curtained, and above, the rods of the signs writhed in their colors in the wet. The crowd in the poolroom was small tonight because of graduation. So you could hear the kissing of the balls from the farthest cavelike lights and soft roaring of green tables, and the fat of wieners on the grill. Dingbat came from the back, holding the wooden triangular ball rack, to shake hands.

  “Augie is going to a party by Klein,” said Mrs. Einhorn.

  “Congratulations, son,” said Einhorn with state manners. “He’s going, Tillie, but not right away. I have a treat for him first. I’m taking him to a show.”

  “Willie,” she said, disturbed, “let him go. Tonight it’s his night.”

  “Not just a neighborhood movie, but to McVicker’s, a stage show with little girls, trained animals, and a Frenchman from the Bal Tabarin who stands on his head on a pop bottle. How does that sound to you, Augie? Like a good thing? I planned it out a week ago.”

  “Sure, that’s all right. Jimmy said the party would run late, and I can go after midnight.”

  “But Dingbat can take you, Willie. Augie wants to be with young people tonight, not with you.”

  “If I’m going out Dingbat is needed here and will stay here,” said Einhorn and shook off her arguments.

  I wasn’t so intoxicated with its being my night that I couldn’t see a reason for Einhorn’s insistence, a small darkness of a reason no bigger than a field mouse yet and very swift.

  Mrs. Einhorn dropped her hands to her sides. “Willie, when he wants—” she apologized to me. But I was practically one of the family, now that no inheritances were in the way. I tied on his cloak and carried him to the car. My face was red in the night air, and I was annoyed. For it was a chore to take Einhorn to the theater, and there were many steps and negotiations necessary. First to park the car, and then to find the manager and explain that two seats had to be found near the exit; next to arrange to have the steel firedoors opened, to drive down the alley, tote Einhorn into the theater, back out of the alley, and find another parking space. And at that, once in the theater, you sat at a bad angle to the stage. He had to be right next to the emergency exit. “Imagine me in the middle of a stampede in case of fire,” he said. Hence we saw things to the side of the main confrontation of the big dramatic shell, powder and paint on the faces, and voices muffled, then loud, or glenny silver, and frequently didn’t know what made the audience laugh.

  “Don’t speed,” said Einhorn to me on Washington Boulevard. “Take it slow here.” I suddenly observed that he had an address in his hand.

  “It’s near Sacramento. You didn’t think I really was going to drag you to McVicker’s tonight, did you, Augie? No, we’re not going downtown. This place I’m taking you to, I’ve never been in before. It’s a back entrance, I understand, and on the third floor.”

  I stopped the car and went out to scout, came back when I had found the joint, and got him on my back. He used to talk about himself as the Old Man of the Sea riding Sinbad. But there was Aeneas too, who carried his old dad Anchises in the burning of Troy, and that old man had been picked by Venus to be her lover; which strikes me as the better comparison. Except that there was no fire or war cry around us, but dead-of-night silence on the boulevard, and ice. I went down the narrow cement walk, below sleeping windows, with Einhorn telling me, clear and loud, to watch my step. Luckily I had cleared out my locker that day and was wearing the rubbers that had lain at the bottom of it the better part of a year, and so my feet didn’t slip. But it was difficult work all the same, up the wooden stairs and under the short clotheslines on the porches. “This better be it,” he said when I rang the bell on the third floor, “or they’ll be asking me what the hell I’m doing.” It always was he who was principally present in a place.

  But we hadn’t rung the wrong bell. A woman opened the door, and I said, “Where?” out of wind. “Go on, go on,” said Einhorn. “This is only the kitchen.” Which it was; a beery place. I walked with him carefully into the parlor and put him down before the astonished people there, on the couch. Seated, he felt equal to them all and looked at all the women. I stood beside him and looked too, in great eagerness and excitement. I always felt, in taking him somewhere, a great sense of responsibility; and here, far more than ever, I sensed how heavy his dependence on me was. And I didn’t want to have to worry about it now. Though he
didn’t look at a disadvantage, only imperious and imperturbable, with no uneasy flinch of disgrace at being a man of importance seen helpless before terrible needs. “I heard the girls were nice here,” he said, “and they are nice. Pick one out.”

  “Me?”

  “Of course you. Which one of you girls is going to entertain this handsome boy who graduated from high school tonight? Look around, kid, and keep your head,” he said to me.

  The madam came to the parlor from one of the rooms. Her peculiarity was in the paint of her face, the insect dust or lamp-black of colors and moth’s wing red of the cheek pigment.

  “Mister,” she began to say.

  But it was all right. Einhorn had a card from someone, and it had been prearranged, as she recalled. Only she hadn’t been told, I could see, that Einhorn would be carried in. He wouldn’t have trusted himself here without an introduction.

  Nevertheless there was embarrassment, and Einhorn sat shoe to shoe and in the banker’s trousers covering his immovable legs. When I think of it with a collected mind, Einhorn, asking who would entertain me, might well have been voicing anticipation of the aversion of the girl he chose. Even here, where he was paying. But perhaps it wasn’t so. My head was a long way from being clear in this lionish place, the paltry, ritzy den of a parlor, and he maybe was not as bold and easy as he sounded.

  At last Einhorn said to the girl he had called over to chat with, “Which is your room, kid?” and with perfect calm, ignoring the effect of it, had me carry him there. A pink coverlet was on the bed (this was a better-class place as I was later to know by contrast), and she skimmed it off. I laid him down. As the girl, in a corner of the room, began to take off her clothes, he beckoned me to bend to him again and whispered, “Take my wallet,” and I took out the heavy leather article and put it in my pocket. “Hang on to it,” he said. The look of his eye was bold, full, even resentful. Resentful of this posture, I think, not of me. There was a pressure in his face, and his hair spread on the pillow. He began to talk to the woman in a tone of instruction. “Take off my shoes,” he said. She did. He watched in that active way; along the line of his entire body his glance went, to the woman in her wrapper who bent over his feet, this woman of strong neck and red fingernails, standing in a pair of felt slippers by the bed. “Just a thing or two more I have to tell you,” he said. “There’s my back; I have to go easy till I’m set right, miss, and take everything step by step.”

  “Haven’t you gone yet?” He saw me by the door. “Go on, do you have to be told what to do? I’ll send them for you after.”

  I didn’t have to be told, but as long as he didn’t send me from him I’d have delayed.

  I went back to the parlor, where there was someone waiting for me; the rest had gone, so the choice had been made for me. As always with strangers, I behaved as if I knew exactly what I was doing and from an idea that at a critical time it was best and most decent to have my own momentum. She did not take this away from me. She whose business or burden it was to be calm in the primal thing, where no one else is, and have an advantage of the strong. She wasn’t young—the women had made the right choice for me—and she had sort of a crude face; but she encouraged me to treat her loverlike. Undressing, she had playful frills or point edges on her underthings—these gewgaws that go with the imposing female fact, the brilliant, profound thing. My clothes were off and I waited. She approached and took me round the body. She even set me on the bed. As if, it being her bed, she’d show me how to use it. And she pressed up her breasts against me, she curved her shoulders back, she closed her eyes and held me by the sides. So that I didn’t lack kindness of person and wasn’t pushed off when done. I knew later I had been lucky with her, that she had tried not to be dry with me, or satirical, and done it mercifully.

  Yet when the thrill went off, like lightning smashed and dispersed into the ground, I knew it was basically only a transaction. But that didn’t matter so much. Nor did the bed; nor did the room; nor the thought that the woman would have been amused—with as much amusement as could make headway against other considerations—at Einhorn and me, the great sensationalist riding into the place on my back with bloodshot eyes and voracious in heart but looking perfectly calm and superior. Paying didn’t matter. Nor using what other people used. That’s what city life is. And so it didn’t have the luster it should have had, and there wasn’t any epithalamium of gentle lovers. …

  I had to wait for Einhorn in the kitchen, and to think of him, close by, having this violence done to him for his pleasure. The madam didn’t look pleased about it. Other men were coming in, and she was mixing drinks in the kitchen, and I came in for peevish glances until Einhorn’s girl came in dressed again to have me fetch him. The madam went along with me for the money, and Einhorn paid with finesse and gave tips, and as I carried him through the parlor where my partner was with another man, smoking a cigarette. Einhorn said to me for my private ear, “Don’t look at anybody, understand?” Was he afraid to be recognized, or was this order simply about the best composure for passing through the parlor again with him clinging to my back in his dark garments?

  “You’ll have to be careful as hell about the way you go down,” he said on the porch. “It was stupid not to bring a flashlight. All we need now is a spill.” And he laughed; with irony, but laughed. The house was thoughtful though, and a whore came out, in a coat like any ordinary woman, to light our way down to the yard, where we thanked her and all politely said good night.

  I brought him home and took him into the house, though the poolroom was still open, and he said, “Never mind putting me to bed. Go on to your party. You can take the car, but don’t go getting drunk and joy-riding, that’s all I ask.”

  Chapter 8

  FROM HERE a new course was set—by us, for us: I’m not going to try to unravel all the causes.

  When I face back I can recognize myself as of this time in intimate undress, with my own and family traits of hands and feet, greenness and grayness of the eyes and up-springing hair; but at myself fully clothed and at my new social passes I have to look twice. I don’t know how it all at once came to me to talk a lot, tell jokes, kick up, and suddenly have views. When it was time to have them, there was no telling how I picked them from the air.

  The city college Simon and I attended wasn’t a seminary in charge of priests who taught Aristotle and casuistry and prepared you for European games and vices and all the things, true or not true, actual or not actual, nevertheless insisted on as true and actual. Considering how much world there was to catch up with—Asurbanipal, Euclid, Alaric, Metternich, Madison, Blackhawk—if you didn’t devote your whole life to it, how were you ever going to do it? And the students were children of immigrants from all parts, coming up from Hell’s Kitchen, Little Sicily, the Black Belt, the mass of Polonia, the Jewish streets of Humboldt Park, put through the coarse sifters of curriculum, and also bringing wisdom of their own. They filled the factory-length corridors and giant classrooms with every human character and germ, to undergo consolidation and become, the idea was, American. In the mixture there was beauty—a good proportion—and pimple-insolence, and parricide faces, gum-chew innocence, labor fodder and secretarial forces, Danish stability, Dago inspiration, catarrh-hampered mathematical genius; there were waxed-eared shovelers’ children, sex-promising businessmen’s daughters—an immense sampling of a tremendous host, the multitudes of holy writ, begotten by West-moving, factor-shoved parents. Or me, the by-blow of a traveling man.

  Normally Simon and I would have gone to work after high school, but jobs weren’t to be had anyway, and the public college was full of students in our condition, because of the unemployment, getting a city-sponsored introduction to higher notions and an accidental break into Shakespeare and other great masters along with the science and math leveled at the Civil-Service exams. In the nature of the case it couldn’t be avoided; and if you were going to prepare impoverished young folks for difficult functions, or if merely you were going to keep the
m out of trouble by having them read books, there were going to be some remarkable results begotten out of the mass. I knew a skinny, sickly Mexican too poor for socks and spotted and stained all over, body and clothes, who could crack any equation on the board; and also Bohunk wizards at the Greeks, demon-brained physicists, historians bred under pushcarts, and many hard-grain poor boys who were going to starve and work themselves bitterly eight years or so to become doctors, engineers, scholars, and experts. I had no special eagerness of this kind and never had been led to think I should have, nor gave myself anxious cares about being revealed a profession. I didn’t feel moved to take it seriously. Nevertheless I turned in a fairly good performance in French and History. In things like Botany, my drawings were cockeyed and smudgy and I was behind the class. Though I had been Einhorn’s office clerk I hadn’t learned much of neatness. And besides I was working five afternoons a week and all day on Saturday.