The Adventures of Augie March (Penguin Classics)

by Saul Bellow

  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 stand-in.

  “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 muttered 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 Einhorns 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, without 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 behind 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 played 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 adaptability. It was my pride to make it seem easy though. So that if you took me at Uncle Charli
e’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 fingers 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 willingness 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 position 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 overweight 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 standing over his coal with a shovel and swung on him when he came near. Happy Kellerman was phoning for a squad car when Simon arrived. Simon went for the g
un 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 truck, trying to get to the cab. Here, in the narrow space between the truck 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.