The Adventures of Augie March (Penguin Classics)

by Saul Bellow

  As I opened the gray car door Owens called from the porch, “Eh, March!” He had come out in his shirt and was giant and shrunk-shouldered, knees together, in the cold of this bad death of the year. “Important, on the telephone.”

  I ran up. It was Simon.

  “Augie!”

  “Talk fast. What’s up? I’m in a hurry!”

  “It’s you who’d better talk fast,” he said, furious. “I just had a call from Charlotte, and Kelly Weintraub is spreading a story about you that you took a bim to have an abortion.”

  “So? What about it, Simon?”

  “That’s the dame, isn’t it, that one from your house? So you went and fixed yourself, you jazzed yourself right out into the cold. This is where I shake you, Augie, before you do worse to me. I can’t carry you along any more. I’m going to have a tough time explaining this, how you were fucking this girl all the time you were engaged to Lucy. I’ll say you’re no damned good, which is no lie since you’re too dumb to live.”

  “Aren’t you even going to ask me if Kelly’s story is true?”

  Contemptuous that I should be so simple as to think him foolish enough to believe what I would feed him, he said in an almost amused voice, “All right—what? You were doing another guy a favor, huh? You’ve never been between this doll’s legs? You’ve been living next door to her without touching her? Listen, we’re no more ten years old, kid. I’ve seen that tramp. She wouldn’t let you alone even if you wanted to be let alone. And you didn’t. Don’t try to tell me you’re not horny. We all are, in our family. What do you think started us out in the first place—all three of us? Someone found he could come ring the bell whenever he wanted. Do you think I care if you were laying that girl? But you had to get tied up this way too—in dutch good and solid; that’s the way it has to be to feel right. You must really be like Ma. Well, that’s nothing to me if you have to do it that way. But I won’t let you get me in trouble with the Magnuses.”

  “There isn’t any reason why you should be in trouble with the Magnuses. Listen, I’ll tell you about this tomorrow.”

  “No, you won’t. Not after tomorrow either. You’re not with me from here on. Just bring back the car.”

  “I’ll come by and tell you what this really is—”

  “Stay away, that’s the last and only thing I’ll ever ask you.”

  “You sonofabitch!” I yelled with tears. “You shit! I hope to see you dead!”

  Padilla came running for me and called into the sitting room, “Hurry, cut out the gabbing.”

  Bawling, I shoved and kicked past the wicker or paper furniture and plunged out.

  “What’s the matter? What’s the tears for? This too much for you?”

  I answered when able, “No, I had a scrap.”

  “Let’s go. You want me to drive?”

  “No, I can.”

  We drove first to the hospital where she had had her operation. Soberer in the cold air, she said she would go in herself. We led her up to the emergency entrance and let her walk in, then sat in the car, hoping she would not come out. But presently, through the gilded, frosted drops of the windshield, I saw her appear in the door and I rushed to get her.

  “I said—”

  “Why didn’t they take you in?”

  “There’s this guy. When I told him he said, ‘We got no room in a place like this for people like you. Why didn’t you have the kid? Go home and wait for the undertaker.’”

  “Chinga su madre!”

  Padilla helped me lead her back to the car. “I think I know a guy in a hospital on the North Side working in a lab, if he’s still there. I’ll call him.”

  I drove him to a cigar store and he went in to phone.

  “We should try it,” he said when he returned. “We should say she did it to herself. Lots of women do. He told me who to ask for. If this other guy is on duty. He’s supposed to be a good guy.” In lower tones he said, “We may have to dump her there and beat it. She’s just about passing out. What will they do? They can’t put her in the street.”

  “No, we won’t dump her.”

  “Why not? They see you and throw her right back at you because they don’t want her on their hands. They pick what troubles they want to help. But let’s use our heads. I’ll go in first and case the doctor.”

  However, we all entered together. I couldn’t wait in the car with her and was determined anyhow that they would take her in or I’d smash everything in sight. So we went through the near-empty first rooms; I made a one-handed grab at a guy in an orderly’s gray coat who advanced in the way. He ducked and Padilla said to me, “What the Jesus are you doing! You’re going to queer everything. Now take her over there and sit down till I find out if this buddy of mine is on duty.”

  Mimi drooped on me, and I felt her heat in the cheek. She could no longer sit; I held her propped until a stretcher was brought for her.

  Padilla had gone, and they had me, at first, as if in arrest. There was a cop on duty. Together with the orderly he came out of a side door with a cup of coffee, in blue shirt, even holding a club.

  “Now what’s the story?” said a doctor.

  “Instead of asking, why don’t you take care of her?”

  “Did you smack this guy?” said the cop. “Did he swing on you?”

  “He swung, but he didn’t hit.”

  Conceivably the cop now observed that I wore a tuxedo, because he wasn’t quite so deadly packed in the flesh of the neck and small-eyed when he spoke to me. I was in the clothes of a gentleman, and therefore why should he take chances?

  “What’s the matter with this woman? What are you, the husband? She doesn’t wear a wedding band. Are you related, or just friends?”

  “Mimi? Has she passed out?”

  “No, she’s just not answering. She moves her eyes.”

  Padilla returned, the doctor hurrying before him. “Just bring her here and we’ll see what gives,” said the doctor.

  Manny gave me a great look of success. We got rid of the whole ugly sniff-nosed crowd wanting to be in on trouble and went with the doctor. As we followed Manny gave him a story.

  “She did it to herself. She’s a working girl and couldn’t have a kid.”

  “How did she do it?”

  “With something, I guess. Don’t women make a study of these things all their life long?”

  “I’ve seen some dandies. But also I’ve heard pretty stinking stories made up. Well, if the women live we don’t look for the abortionist, because what good does it do the profession?”

  “How does she look offhand?”

  “A lot of blood lost is all I can tell until I look it over. Who’s this second fellow who’s so worried?”

  “Her friend.”

  “All he had to do was really smack that orderly and he’d have had New Year’s fan in the calaboose with the drunks. Why is he in the monkey suit?”

  “Hey, what about your date?” said Padilla as he put his hand to his long face with shock. It was after eight by the smooth-pulled electric clock in the brilliant room we entered.

  “When I find out what’s up with Mimi.”

  “Go on. You better. I’ll be here. I have no date tonight and was staying in anyway. The doctor doesn’t think it’s so bad. What do you have on?”

  “A ball at the Edgewater.”

  I stood waiting until the doctor returned.

  “It’s mostly blood loss and infection from the belly surgery, I think,” he said. “Where did she get that done?”

  “She’ll answer your questions herself if she wants to,” I told him. “I don’t know.”

  “What do you know? Do you know, for instance, who can be billed?”

  Padilla said, “There’s money. Can’t you see how good her clothes are?” And he said to me, for it worried him deeply, “Are you blowing or not? This guy’s engaged to a millionaire’s daughter and on New Year’s Eve he keeps her waiting.”

  “Write me a pass so I can get back tonight to see Mimi,�
�� I said to the doctor. He made a perplexed face to Padilla about me and I said further, “For Chrissake, Doc, don’t fiddle around with me, but write the thing out. What’s it to you if I come back? I’d tell you my whole hard luck story but don’t have the time.”

  “Ah, go on, it’s no skin off your nose,” said Padilla to him.

  “A pass from me wouldn’t do you any good in front. I’m on now till morning, so just come and ask for me, Castleman.”

  “I may be back before long,” I said. For I was sure that Kelly Weintraub, since he was talking, had already gotten to Uncle Charlie Magnus. But I reckoned also that he and his wife had not told Lucy, not on New Year’s Eve, when she was going to a dance. Later they’d throw me out on my prat. But why had she asked me to come an hour sooner? The dance didn’t really begin until ten o’clock. I phoned her once more and asked, “Are you waiting?”

  “Of course I’m waiting. Where are you?”

  “Not far.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “I had to stop at a place. I’ll hurry now.”

  “Please!”

  About that last word of hers I thought as I drove that it was not like lovers’ impatience, but neither soft nor hard. Turning too wide at the driveway, with a last-minute twist I put my wheels through mud and bushes and scraped back under the portico. Inside, on the turned-over heels of the yard shoes I hadn’t remembered to change, I walked to the mirror to knot my black tie and saw backward, by the drape in the living room, the tense belly of Uncle Charlie, his sharp feet prepared, and sitting waiting in the oriental mix-up of brass, silk, wool, and all that gave the place so much power, Lucy, her mother, and Sam, observing me. I felt there was a big machine set against me. But I had come in order not to disappoint Lucy, toward whom, given their chance, my feelings could have shone and warmed again. I expected poisoned looks, against which I was coated and immune; at least, my greater trouble made such looks seem negligible; and I wasn’t willing to be tagged for lascivious crime and false pretenses or whatever the counts were that they thought they had against me. By no means nervous, therefore, I judged that I had to do only with Lucy, no fortune hunting now involved, for I could go any distance independent of brothers, relations, and all, provided that her impulse was a true one and she was, as she had always said, in love. This was the thing, for I saw that she had been worked on, though I didn’t know how much she had been told. The large-mouthed smile she gave me, staying at her seated distance instead of coming to kiss me, was curious—that pretty sketch of charm, in lipstick, widening, the relative of the awful cleft, running the other way, of the schismatics in the sixth bulge of hell, hit open from the bottom and split through the face. Ah, dear face! treasured as the representative of all the body which, though, dies away from this top delegate when it becomes too gorged and valuable. She, now so unearnest with me through her worked-up countenance, I saw she had been gotten to by her parents and that decisions had been made. My only cue was to leave. But not a single word had been spoken yet in this oriental assembly, and I had no pretext. I was still the escort, dolled up, if you didn’t scrutinize me too close, like a chorus boy, in a boiled shirt, and thinking of nothing but courtship and dances.

  “Why don’t you sit down?” said Mrs. Magnus.

  “I thought we were leaving right away.”

  “Well, Lucy!” said her father.

  And on this signal she told me, “I’m not going with you, Augie.”

  “Now or ever,” he directed.

  “Never again.”

  “You’ll go to the dance with Sam.”

  “But I came to take her, Mr. Magnus.”

  “No, these things when you decide to break them, it’s better to break at once,” said Mrs. Magnus. “I’m sorry, Augie. I personally don’t wish you any bad luck. But I advise you to control yourself. It’s not too late. You’re a handsome and intelligent young man. There’s nothing against your family; I respect your brother. But you’re not what we had in mind for Lucy.”

  “What about what Lucy had in mind?” I said with a rising throatful of rage.

  The old man was impatient with Mrs. Magnus’s effort toward queenly dignity and wisdom. “No dough if she marries you!” he said.

  “Well, Lucy, to whom does that make the difference, to you or to me?”

  Her smile spread wider and lost all other intentions in the single suggestion that it was she who had inflamed me and when hot I had discharged it all upon someone else but that it really didn’t matter since she wasn’t so little her father’s child, though a girl, that all that ardor in the car and in the parlor and with the lips and tongues and fingertips and the rest could make her really lose her head and be unwise.

  I couldn’t be sure just what the deal was. Something was said about the damage to her car. Now she confessed it. Her father said of course it would be fixed. As long as nothing else was broken, this being his delicacy about the hymen. But it was worth a laugh to him; this way a threat and groan also escaping in his fatherly joy that she had remained intact.

  There was nothing further to stay for. I was threatened by her brother Sam, whom I found near me when I picked up my coat in the hall, that he would break my back if I bothered his sister; but with all his thickset hairiness and spreading keister, he couldn’t make it mean anything to me.

  I started the car, to which I also felt commitment ending, and drove to the hospital.

  Padilla had given Mimi blood, and he was lying down after the transfusion in the room where I had left him, sucking an orange; his skimpy arm with its one curious ball of muscle taped, and his eyes, below surface indifference, black and active toward what I couldn’t readily see.

  “How is Mimi?”

  “They took her upstairs. She’s still off her head, but this Castleman says he gives her a good chance.”

  “I’m going up to see her. How is it with you?”

  “Well, I don’t think I’ll be sticking around now. I’ll be going home soon. Are you staying?”

  I gave him the cab fare, for I didn’t want him to bang all that long way to Hyde Park in a streetcar on a crowded holiday night.

  “Thanks, Manny.”

  He put the money in the pocket of his shirt, and suddenly he asked, surprised, “Say, what are you doing back from the dance already?”

  I didn’t stand and answer but went out.

  Mimi was in one of the maternity wards. Castleman said that there had been no other place to put her, and I thought that she more or less belonged there. So I went up. It was a tall, big chamber, and in the middle on a table was a little Christmas fir with lit bulbs and under it a box with cotton wool and nativity dolls.

  Castleman told me, “You can stick around, but don’t make yourself noticed or you’ll be thrown out. I think she’s going to pull out of it though she did everything she could not to except cut her wrists and take poison.”

  There I sat by her bed, it being half-darkness. Nurses coming to bring infants for the breast now and then, there were whispers and crimped cries and sounds of turning in bed, and of coaxing and sucking. I was open to feelings that had no obstacle in coming to cover me, as I was, in darkness and to the side, scorched, bitter, foul, and violent; and these feelings receding by and by, I was aware of others fall of great suggestion and of this place where I was cast up. I began to breathe by my own normal measure and grew much calmer. When the midnight noise exploded, the tooting, sirens, horns, all that jubilation, it came in rather faint, all the windows being shut, and the nursery squalling continued just the same.

  At about one o’clock, alert enough to hear me stirring, Mimi whispered, “What are you doing here?”

  “I don’t have any place special to go.”

  She knew where she was, hearing the infants cry. Her comment to me was melancholy, about whether she had outwitted a fate or met it. That was perhaps according as she was weak or strong toward what she had chosen and done, and in the truth of her feeling at the present moment, hearing the suckli
ng and crying, and the night-time business of mothering.

  “Anyhow, I think you’re in good hands,” I told her.

  I went out to take a stroll, looking at the infant faces through the glass, and then, no one interfering, the nurses probably in a New Year’s gathering of their own to snatch a moment’s celebration, I passed through to another division where the labor rooms were, separate cubicles, and in them saw women struggling, outlandish pain and huge-bellied distortion, one powerful face that bore down into its creases and issued a voice great and songlike in which she cursed her husband obscenely for his pleasure that had got her into this; and others, calling on saints and mothers, incontinent, dragging at the bars of their beds, weeping, or with faces of terror or narcotized eyes. It all stunned me. So that when a nurse hurried up to investigate who I was and what business I had to be there, she made me falter. And just then, in the elevator shaft nearby, there were screams. I stopped and waited for the rising light I saw coming steadily through the glass panels. The door opened; a woman sat before me in a wheel chair, and in her lap, just born in a cab or paddy wagon or in the lobby of the hospital, covered with blood and screaming so you could see sinews, square of chest and shoulders from the strain, this bald kid, red and covering her with the red. She too, with lost nerve, was sobbing, each hand squeezing up on itself, eyes wildly frightened; and she and the baby appeared like enemies forced to have each other, like figures of a war. They were pushed out, passing me close by so that the mother’s arm grazed me.