by Saul Bellow
“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 peeved, 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 symptoms.”
“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 fragile than that,” she said. “I keep forgetting you’re just about engaged to be married.”
“But shouldn’t you wai
t 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 quadrant 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 signaled 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 hollered. I didn’t see your face, but I’m out looking if I can spot you, you understand? 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!”
