by Saul Bellow
She gave me a very upstage reception.
“Harold, the martinis have to be mixed in the kitchen,” she said to Mintouchian. So he went out, and as soon as he left she said, almost with violence, “Who are you, young man?”
“Me? I’m a client of Mr. Mintouchian. You see, I’m just about to get married.”
“I don’t expect you to tell me anything,” she said. “I know that Harold has his secrets. I mean, he thinks he has. I really know all about him, because I think about him all the time. It isn’t so hard if you spend all your time thinking about somebody. I don’t have to leave this room.”
I was astonished. I felt my eyes get wide.
I said, “I haven’t known Mr. Mintouchian long, ma’am, but in my opinion he’s a great man.”
“Oh, you realize that? He is great, even if he’s all too human.”
It awed me that when this lion, Mintouchian, sobbed in the brakes of, he thought, most solitude, this invalid was standing listening behind him.
But then he came carrying the glasses and the conversation was finished.
Chapter 25
AS DRUGGED WITH LOVE as I was, why, nothing could deter me from marriage. I’m not not sure whether Mintouchian was trying to do that, but if he was he didn’t stand a chance, because I wasn’t hospitable to suspicions. However, he acted the part of a good friend. He arranged with the catering service for the wedding lunch and bought roses and gardenias for everybody. By City Hall the air was blue, and there seemed to be trembles of music. When we came down in the elevator I remembered how more than a year before I was standing on top of County Hospital, Chicago, and reflecting how of all our family, including old Grandma, Simon was the only one who had managed to stay out of an institution. But now I didn’t have any more reason to envy him. Envy? Why, I thought I had it all over him, seeing I was married to a woman I loved and therefore I was advancing on the only true course of life. I told myself my brother was the kind of man who could only leave the world as he found it and hand on the fate he inherited to any children he might now have—I didn’t for sure know whether he had any. Yes, this was how such people were subject to all the laws in the book, like the mountain peaks leaning toward their respective magnetic poles, or like crabs in the weeds or crystals in the caves. Whereas I, with the help of love, had gotten in on a much better thing and was giving this account of myself that reality comes from and was not just at the mercy. And here was the bride with me, her face was burning with happy excitement; she wanted what I wanted. In her time she had made mistakes, but all mistakes were now wiped out.
We came out on the steps. The doves were walking around, and Mintouchian had arranged for a photographer to be there and make a picture of the wedding party. He was very thoughtful and acted kind to everyone.
I had graduated from Sheepshead the day before and had my new rating in my pocket. My smile was changed, because they had given me some lower teeth gratis to replace the ones I lost in Mexico. I have to confess that in addition to passionate love and the pride of the day I had a bubble in me like the air bubble of the carpenter’s level. But I was shaved and combed like a movie actor and dressed in the new high-pressure uniform, which lacked only service ribbons and stars. I would have liked some, and to have married a beauty as a hero of the service of his country. I promised myself that I would have been modest. However, you wouldn’t have been able to tell how nervous I was, I think. It wasn’t just because I had to ship out soon after the wedding that I was nervous, but also because Stella was bound the week after for Alaska and the Aleutians with a USO show. I didn’t want her to go.
Of course I wouldn’t say anything to spoil the occasion. We had pictures taken of the wedding party, which included also Agnes and Sylvester. I looked with changed eyes on Agnes since hearing of her self-strangulation. She was wearing a fine gray suit that showed off her hips, and a collar sweeping upward as if to keep you from seeing her throat.
Anyway, turkey, ham, champagne, cognac, fruit, and cake were set up on the buffet in Stella’s apartment. It was very grand. Robey and Frazer had showed up in town together, and I invited them, so I was well represented. Frazer wore a major’s uniform. Robey’s beard was fuller and he had put on weight down in Washington. He sat by himself in a corner, clasping his knee in two hands and never saying anything. There was enough conversation without him.
After a few glasses of champagne Sylvester broke out in grins. He was a funny, melancholy guy, Sylvester He wanted to be taken serious and straight, but gave himself away in his dark-lined grins, and the un-thoughtful part of him fought its way out. In his double-breasted pinstriped business suit he sat by me. I held Stella around the waist and stroked her satin wedding dress.
“What a dish!” said Sylvester to me. “What you’ve fallen into! And when I think you used to work for me!”
This was when he had owned the Star Theatre on California Avenue, below that dentist who tormented Grandma. Sylvester was no kid; he was getting on. He said he was off politics now. I wanted to ask him about Mexico, but the wedding day was no time for that, so I passed the question over.
The man of the hour at this party was not myself so much as Frazer, in a way.
Frazer had just come back from the Orient. He was in the Intelligence and attached to a mission to Chungking.
He was talking to Agnes and Mintouchian about the East. I still admired Frazer a whole lot and looked up to him. He was a mighty attractive and ideal man. There was a lanky American elegance about him, in the ease of his long legs and his cropped-on-the-sides head which from chin to top showed the male molding on the strong side of haggardness; his gray eyes on the cool side of frankness. All the markings of his face were strong, with creases beginning to deepen from world pressure. And there was something else about him—as if he were in the barber’s chair at the conclusion of shaving, the witch hazel drying, the fine Western shoes stuck out. He knew so much too. Suppose that you said something about D’Alembert or Isidore of Seville, Frazer would have been ready to discuss them. You couldn’t find a subject that stumped him. He was going to become an important person. You could see how he was flying at the highest, from one peak of life to the next. And yet he looked relaxed. But the more ease and leisure he achieved the more distance and flashing there were; he talked about Thucydides or Marx and showed pictures of history-like visions. You got shivers on the back and thrills clear into the teeth. I was real proud to have such a friend come. He gave tone to the wedding and was a great success.
But as you listened to this brilliant educational discussion it was somewhat scary too; like catching hold of high voltage.
Declarations, resolutions, treaties, theories, congresses, bones of kings, Cromwells, Loyolas, Lenins and czars, hordes of India and China, famines, huddles, massacres, sacrifices, he mentioned. Great crowds of Benares and London, Rome, he made me see; Jerusalem against Titus, Hell when Ulysses visited, Paris when they butchered horses in the street. Dead Ur and Memphis. Atoms of near silence, the dead acts, that formed a collective roar. Macedonian sentinels. Subway moles. Mr. Kreindl shoving a cannon wheel with his buddies. Grandma and legendary Lausch in his armor cutaway having an argument in the Odessa railroad station the day the Japanese war broke out. My parents taking a walk by the Humboldt Park lagoon the day I was conceived. Flowery springtime.
And I thought there was altogether too much of this to live with. Better forget it, in part. The Ganges is there with its demons and lords; but you have a right also, and merely, to wash your feet and do your personal laundry in it. Or even if you had a good car it would take more than a lifetime to do a tour of all the Calvaries.
Whether I was all I might be troubled me as Frazer held forth, but much less than it would have done before my conversations with Clem about the axial lines and with Mintouchian in the Turkish bath. It gave me great comfort that Mintouchian was here. And in the end it was marriage-day tribute—all that happened. The champagne being at an end, the white meat eaten, the two pin
ochle players of the cutting table opposite putting on their jackets to depart, our company bowed out too. Farewell all, and many thanks.
“Isn’t my friend Frazer smart?” I said.
“Yes, but you’re my darling,” said Stella and kissed me. So we went to the bridal bed.
Two days of honeymoon were all we had.
I had to ship from Boston. Stella went up on the train with me the night before. And separating of course was tough. I sent her back in the morning.
“Go, sweetheart.”
“Augie, darling, good-by,” she said from the platform of the train. Some people can’t bear a train departure at any time, and how crushing these departures were in the stations during the war, as the cars moved away and left throngs behind, and the oil-spotted empty tracks and the mounting, multiplying ties. “Please,” she said, “be careful about everything.”
“Oh, I will,” I promised her. “Don’t worry about that. I love you too much to go and get sunk, on my first trip out. You take care too, out there in Alaska.”
She made it sound as though it were somehow up to me, as though I could make my own safe way over the Atlantic waters of wartime. But I knew what she was trying to say.
“Radar has licked the submarines,” I told her. “It says so in the papers.”
This piece of news was improvised; it did a lot of good, however, and I went on talking, so extremely salty you’d have taken me for an old sailor.
The conductor came to close the door, and I said, “Go on inside, honey, go on.”
Till the last moment I saw her big eyes at the window. As she bent forward from the hips in her seat, the prettiness and grace of it was a killing thing to have to miss during months on the water.
So the train went and I was left in the crowd and felt low and bleak.
To add to it, the weather was gray and windy and the ship, the Sam MacManus, was old. Black machinery beside it, at the wharf, grim gimmicks on it, grease, darkness, blues, the day itself housed in iron. The ocean was waiting with grand and bitter provocations, as if it invited you to think how deep it was, how much colder than your blood or saltier, or to outguess it, to tell which were its feints or passes and which its real intentions, meaning business. It wasn’t any apostle-crossed or Aeneas-stirred Mediterranean, the clement, silky, marvelous beauty-sparkle bath in which all the ancientest races were children. As we left the harbor, the North Atlantic, brute gray, heckled the ship with its strength, clanging, pushing, muttering; a hungry sizzle salted the bulkheads.
But next morning, in the sun and warmth, we were steaming south with all our might. I came on deck from an all-night bout of seasickness—the Mothersills pills, even, hadn’t helped—and being torn by longing and worry about Alaska.
The middle-aged ship was busting through the water so as to make you feel great depth and the air was sweet, radiant. It was pellucid. Even the sooty MacManus in the flush, like a kitchen insect escaping into the garden at dawn. The bluey deck rattled underfoot with the chainlike drag of the rudder engine. A few confused resemblances: clouds or distant coast, birds or corpuscles, fled across my eyes.
I went to investigate my office and duties. Nothing much, in fact. Druggist and bookkeeper setup, as I’ve already said. Green old filing cases. Lockers of same color. A swivel chair and fair light to read by. I squared myself away for the voyage.
So there were several days of mechanical progress over the water, the horizon sea rising to grip after a cloud like a crab after a butterfly, with armored totter, then falling and travailing. Plus the sun’s heat and the patriarch wake, spitting and lacy.
In my privacy I read books and wrote an endless letter chronicle to Stella which I hoped to send from Dakar, our first port, out to Alaska. Of course there were guns and a radar ring to remind you of danger, but the time was very pleasant.
Before long the word got around that I was a listener to hard-luck stories, personal histories, gripes, and that I gave advice, and by and by I had a daily clientele, almost like a fortuneteller. By golly, I could have taken fees! Clem knew what he was talking about when he urged me to come into the advice business. Here I was doing it free of charge, and in dangerous conditions. Although all seemed tranquil enough. Of an early evening, say, red and gold, with the deep blue tense surface, the full-up ocean, and some guy came darkening between me and the light, as if to a session of spiritual guidance. I can’t claim it annoyed me. It gave me a chance to learn secrets, and also to sound off on the problems of life. I was on fine terms practically with everyone. Even the union delegate, when he saw I didn’t intend to be hard-nosed and difficult about the company’s interests. And the Old Man—he did correspondence courses in philosophy at a bunch of universities, it was his hobby, and was forever writing out assignments—he took to me too, though he didn’t approve of my leniency.
Anyway, I became ship’s confidant. Though not all the confidences gave hope to the soul.
More than one guy dropped in to sound me out on a black-market proposition or fast buck on foreign soil.
One planned to become a hairdresser after the war, he told me, because then he’d have his hands on the head of every broad in Kenosha.
One who had washed out of paratroop school and still wore his Fort Benning boots told me frankly when the matter of his beneficiary came up that he had three legal wives in different parts of Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
Some wanted diagnosis, as if I were a professional head-feeler and not the humble understudy’s understudy of the cult of Asclepius the Maritime Commission had made me.
“You think I maybe have an inferiority complex, do you think?” one of them asked me.
Indeed I saw many ravages, but I never said.
Beside-itself humanity, hurrying, hurrying, with liquid eyes.
“Suppose you was the guy in a fix like this …”
“There was this certain friend of mine …”
“He said, ‘You support the old man for a while and see how you like it.’”
“He ran away for a Carnie.”
“Now this girl, who was a cripple in one leg, she worked in the paint lab of the stove factory.”
“He was a Rumania-box type of swindler, where you put in a buck and it comes out a fiver.”
“If he floated down the river with a hard-on he expected them to raise the bridges for him, that’s how he was an egotist.”
“I said, ‘You listen here to me, fart-blossom, you chiseler …’”
“Though I knew she was so sweet and we had the kids, the time just came when I couldn’t keep the multiplication table out of my head, and then I knew, ‘Bitches is all you deserve and should be with. Let them rob you and kick you around. That’s okay!’”
Lasciar le donne? Pazzo! Lasciar le donne!
“I was trying to have one night with this girl before I shipped out. We both worked in the shipping department. But I couldn’t swing it. So for weeks I was carrying a safety in my pocket and couldn’t get to use it. One time it was all set and then my wife’s grandmother died. I had to go fetch grandfather to the funeral. He couldn’t understand what it was all about. We sat in the chapel where the organ played. He said, ‘Why, that’s the music the old dog died to,’ and made one joke after another. Then he recognized her in the coffin, and he said, excited, ‘Why, there’s Mother! I saw her yesterday in the A and P. What’s she doing here? Mother, why, Mother!’ And then he understood and bust into tears. Oh, he cried. Me too. All of us. Me with the safety still in my pocket. What do you think? Everybody is some kind of tricker. Even me.
“Then my wife and kid took me to the station. I still hadn’t made it with that girl and probably she forgot all about it and started with another guy. My little daughter said, ‘Daddy, I got to take a pisst.’ She’d heard the boys talk. We had to laugh. But then, good-by. My heart weighed a ton. So long, honey. She was cryin’ away by the train window, and I felt the same. And meantime that safety was in my vest pocket. I didn’t throw it away.”
&nbs
p; This man’s face was flat, slender, rosy, bony-nosed, gray-eyed, and his mouth was small.
I passed out advice in moderate amounts; nobody is perfect. I advocated love, especially.
Some terribly strange personalities came forward.
Griswold, for instance, one of the stewards. A former undertaker and also zoot-suiter and cat. A light Negro, extremely handsome and grand, short beard full of graceful glitters, hair rich and oiled; a burn on his cheek gleamed with Unguentine. His pants flowed voluminous and stripy down to a two-strap shoe. He smoked tea for his quiet recreation and studied grammar in a number of languages for kicks. Griswold handed me the following poem of his own writing:
How much, you ask me, do I suffer.
Now, baby, listen, I am not a good bluffer.
My ambitions and aspirations don’t leave me no rest;
I am born with a high mind and aim for the best.
