The Adventures of Augie March (Penguin Classics)

by Saul Bellow

  We then went to his father’s room with an empty cardboard file, locked the doors and turned on the lights, and began to go through the Commissioner’s papers. He handed me things with instructions. “Tear this. This is for the fire, I don’t want anyone to see it. Be sure you remember where you put this note—I’ll ask for it tomorrow. Open the drawers and turn them over. Where are the keys? Shake his pants out. Put his clothes on the bed and go through the pockets. So this was the deal he had with Fineberg? What a shrewd old bastard, my dad, a real phenomenon. Let’s keep things in order now—that’s the main thing. Clear the table so we can sort stuff out. Lots of these clothes can be sold, what I won’t be able to wear myself, except it’s pretty old-fashioned. Don’t throw any little scraps of paper away. He used to write important things down that way. The old guy, he thought he’d live forever, that was one of his secrets. I suppose all powerful old people do. I guess I really do myself, even on the day of his death. We never learn anything, never in the world, and in spite of all the history books written. They’re just the way we plead or argue with ourselves about it, but it’s only light from the outside that we’re supposed to take inside. If we can. There’s a regular warehouse of fine suggestions, and if we’re not better it isn’t because there aren’t plenty of marvelous and true ideas to draw on, but because our vanity weighs more than all of them put together,” said Einhorn. “Here’s a thing about Margolis, who lied yesterday when he said he didn’t owe Dad anything. ‘Crooked Feet, two hundred dollars!’ He’ll pay me or I’ll eat his liver, that two-faced sonofabitch confidence man!”

  At midnight we had a pile of torn papers, like the ballots of the cardinals whose smoke announces a new pontiff. But Einhorn was dissatisfied with the state of things. Most of his father’s debtors were indicated as Margolis had been—“Farty Teeth,” “Rusty Head,” “Crawler,” “Constant Laughter,” “Alderman Sam,” “Achtung,” “The King of Bashan,” “Soup Ladle.” He had made loans to these men and had no notes, only these memoranda of debts amounting to several thousand dollars. Einhorn knew who they were, but those who didn’t want to pay didn’t actually have to. It was the opening indication that the Commissioner had not left him as strong as he believed, but subject to the honor of lots of men he hadn’t always treated well. He became worried and thoughtful.

  “Is Arthur in yet?” he nervously said. “He’s got an early train to make.” In the demolition of the once gorgeous room where the old man had been camped ruggedly in female luxury, he reflected with the round eyes of a bird about his son, and then, more easily, he observed, “Well, this stuff isn’t for him, anyway; he’s with poets and intelligent people, having conversation.” He always spoke this way of Arthur, and it gave him first-rate solace.

  Chapter 7

  I’M THINKING of the old tale of Croesus, with Einhorn in the unhappy part. First the proud rich man, huffy at Solon, who, right or wrong in their argument over happiness, must have been the visiting Parisian of his day, and condescending to a rich island provincial. I try to think why didn’t the warmth of wisdom make Solon softer than I believe he was to the gold- and jewel-owning semibarbarian. But anyway he was right. And Croesus, who was wrong, taught his lesson with tears to Cyrus, who spared him from the pyre. This old man, through misfortune, became a thinker and mystic and advice-giver. Then Cyrus lost his head to the revengeful queen who ducked it in a skinful of blood and cried, “You wanted blood? Here, drink!” And his crazy son Cambyses inherited Croesus and tried to kill him in Egypt as he had put his own brother to death and wounded the poor bull-calf Apis and made the head-and-body-shaved priests grim. The Crash was Einhorn’s Cyrus and the bank failures his pyre, the poolroom his exile from Lydia and the hoodlums Cambyses, whose menace he managed, somehow, to get round.

  The Commissioner died before the general bust, and wasn’t very long in his grave when the suicides by skyscraper leaps began to take place in La Salle Street and downtown New York. Einhorn was among the first to be wiped out, partly because of the golden trust system of the Commissioner and partly because of his own mismanagement. Thousands of his dough were lost in Insull’s watered and pyramided utilities—Coblin too dropped lots of money on them—and he lost his legacy, and Dingbat’s and Arthur’s inheritance as well, by throwing it into buildings that in the end he couldn’t hold. And at the finish he had nothing but vacant lots in the barren Clearing and around the airport, and of these several went for taxes; and when I sometimes took him for a ride he’d say, “We used to have that block of stores, over there,” or, of a space full of weeds between two shanties, “Dad got that in a trade eight years ago and wanted to build a garage on it. Just as well he never did.” So it was a melancholy thing to drive him, although he didn’t make a heavy grouse; his observations were casual and dry.

  Even the building in which he lived, constructed by the Commissioner with a cash outlay of a hundred thousand dollars, was finally lost as the shops closed and the tenants in the flats upstairs stopped paying rent.

  “No rent, no heat,” he said in the winter, resolving to be tough. “A landlord ought to act like one or give up his property. I’ll stick by economic laws, good times, bad times, and be consistent.” This was how he defended his action. He was taken to court, however, and lost, legal costs and all. He then rented the empty stores as flats, one to a Negro family and another to a gypsy fortuneteller, who hung a painted hand and giant, labeled brain in the window. There were fights in the building and thefts of pipes and toilet fixtures. By now the tenants were his enemies, led by the red-headed Polish barber Betzhevski, who had given mandolin concerts on the sidewalk in affable days, and now glared with raw winter eyes when he passed in front of Einhorn’s plate glass. Einhorn started eviction proceedings against him and several others, and for this he was picketed by a Communist organization.

  “As if I didn’t know more about communism than they do,” he said with bitter humor. “What do they know about it, those ignorant bastards? What does even Sylvester know about revolution?” Sylvester was now a busy member of the Communist party. So Einhorn sat at the Commissioner’s front desk where the pickets could see him, to await action by the sheriff’s office. He had his windows smeared with candle wax, and a paper sack of excrement was flung into the kitchen. Whereupon Dingbat organized a flying squad from the poolroom to guard the building; Dingbat was in a killing rage against Betzhevski and wanted to raid his shop and smash his mirrors. It wasn’t much of a shop Betzhevski had moved into at this point of the Depression, a single chair in a basement, where he also kept canaries in a sad Flemish gloom. Clem Tambow still went to him to be shaved, saying that the red-headed barber was the only one who understood his beard. Dingbat was annoyed with him for it. But Betzhevski was evicted, and his wife stood on the sidewalk and cursed Einhorn for a stinking Jew cripple. There was nothing Dingbat could do to her. Anyhow, Einhorn had commanded, “No rough stuff unless I say so.” He didn’t rule it out, but he was going to control it, and Dingbat was obedient, even though Einhorn had lost him every cent of his legacy. “It didn’t hit only just us,” Dingbat said, “it hit everybody. If Hoover and J. P. Morgan didn’t know it was coming, how should Willie? But he’ll bring us back. I leave it to him.”

  The reason for the evictions was that Einhorn had had an offer from a raincoat manufacturer for the space upstairs. Walls were torn out in several apartments before City Hall came down on him for violating fire and zoning ordinances and trying to get industrial current into a residential block. By that time some of the machinery had already been installed, and the manufacturer—a shoestring operator himself—was after him to foot the bill for removal. There was another suit about this when Einhorn tried to claim, throwing away all principle, that the machinery was bolted to the floor, hence real property belonging to him. He lost this case too, and the manufacturer found it handier to break out windows and lower his equipment by pulley than to disassemble it, and he got a court order to do so. Einhorn’s huge, chain-hung sign was damaged
. Only this didn’t matter any more because he lost the building, his last large property, and was out of business. The office was shut down and most of the furniture sold. Desks were piled on desks in the dining room and files by his bed, so that it could be approached only from one side. Against better times, he wanted to keep as much furniture as he could. There were swivel chairs in the living room, where the burned furniture (the insurance company was kaput and had never paid his claim), cheaply reupholstered and smelling of fire, was brought back.

  He still owned the poolroom, and personally took over the management of it; he had a sort of office installed in the front corner, around the cash register, and still, after a fashion, did business. Dropped down into this inferior place, he was slow to get over it. But in time he became chief here too, and had reorganizing ideas for which he began to accumulate money. First, a lunch counter. The pool tables were shifted to make room. Then a Twenty-Six green dice-board. He had remained a notary public and insurance agent, and he got himself accredited by the gas, electric, and telephone companies to take payment of bills. All this slowly, for things had low action these mortified times, and even his ingenuity was numb from the speed and depth of the fall, and much of his thought went into tracing back the steps he should have taken to save at least Arthur’s money—and Dingbat’s. Besides, there was the environment, narrowed down to a single street and place now that he had lost all other property, the thickened and caked machine-halted silence from everywhere lying over this particular sparseness and desolation, plus the abasement from dollars to nickels. And he, a crippled and aging man, scaled down from large plans to mere connivances. In his own eyes, the general disaster didn’t excuse him sufficiently—it was that momentum he had which often blurred out others—and it appeared that as soon as he inherited the Commissioner’s fortune it darted and wriggled away like a collection of little gold animals that had obeyed only the old man’s voice.

  “Of course,” he explained sometimes, “it isn’t personally so terrible to me. I was a cripple before and am now. Prosperity didn’t make me walk, and if anybody knew what a person is liable to have happen to him, it’s William Einhorn. You can believe that.”

  Well, yes, I both could and couldn’t. I knew this assurance was a growth of weak light, more pale than green, and what a time of creeping days he had had when he lost the big building and the remaining few thousands of Arthur’s legacy in the final spurt to save it, inspired by pride instead of business sense. He officially let me go then, saying weakly, “You’re a luxury to me, Augie. I’ll have to cut you out.” Dingbat and Mrs. Einhorn took care of him during that bad period when he kept to his study, hard hit, overcome, in his black thought, many days unshaved—and he a man who depended for the whole tone of life on regularity in habit—before he left the drab, bookish room and declared he was taking over in the pool hall. An Adams, beaten for the presidency, going back to the capital as a humble congressman. Unless he took Arthur out of the university and sent him to work—provided Arthur would have agreed—he had to do something, for there was nothing to fall back on; he had even turned his insurance policies in to raise cash for the building.

  And Arthur had no profession; he had been—unlike Kreindl’s son Kotzie, the dentist, who now supported his family—given a liberal education in literature, languages, and philosophy. Suddenly what the sons had been up to became exceedingly important. Howard Coblin earned money with his saxophone. And Kreindl didn’t any longer scoff to me about his son’s unnatural coolness with women. Instead he advised me to ask him for a job in the pharmacy below his office. Kotzie got me a relief spot behind the counter as apprentice soda jerk. I was thankful, for Simon had graduated from high school and was cut off from Charity. Also, he had lost some of his days at the La Salle Street Station. Borg was putting in his own jobless brothers-in-law and giving others the shove, left and right.

  As for the savings, the family money Simon had handled as Grandma’s successor, they were gone. The bank had closed in the first run, and the pillared building was now a fish store—Einhorn had a view of it from his poolroom corner. Still, Simon graduated pretty well—I can’t understand how he managed—and was elected class treasurer, in charge of buying rings and school pins. It was his rigorous-looking honesty, I suppose. He had to account to the principal for the money, but that didn’t keep him from fixing a deal with the jeweler and making a clear fifty dollars for himself.

  He was up to much; so was I. We kept it from each other. But I, because I watched him by long habit, knew somewhat what he was up to, whereas he didn’t pause to look back over my doings. He signed up at the municipal college, with the idea that everyone had then of preparing for one of the Civil-Service examinations. There was a rush on for Weather Bureau, Geological Survey, and post-office jobs, from the heavy-print announcements in layers of paper on the school and library bulletin boards.

  Simon had forefront ability. Maybe his reading was related to it, and the governor’s clear-eyed gaze he had developed. Of John Sevier. Or of Jackson in the moment when the duelist’s bullet glanced off the large button of his cloak and he made ready to fire—a lifted look of unforgiving, cosmological captaincy; that look where honesty had the strength of a prejudice, and foresight appeared as the noble cramp of impersonal worry in the forehead. My opinion is that at one time it was genuine in Simon. And if it was once genuine, how could you say definitely that the genuineness was ever all gone. But he used these things. He employed them, I know damned well. And when they’re used consciously, do they turn spurious? Well, in a fight, who can lay off his advantages?

  Maybe Grandma Lausch had gotten her original dream scheme of Rosenwald or Carnegie favors from appreciation of this gift of Simon’s. Standing at a corner brawl, he would be asked by a cop, from among a dozen volunteer witnesses, what had happened. Or when the coach came out of the gym-supply room with a new basketball, tens of arms waving around, beseeching, it would be Simon, appearing passive, that he flung it to. He expected it and was never surprised.

  And now he was on soggy ground and forced to cut down the speed he had been making toward the mark he secretly aimed at. I didn’t know at the time which mark or exactly understand why there needed to be a mark; it was over my head. But he was getting in, all the time, a big variety of information and arts, like dancing, conversation with women, courtship, gift-giving, romantic letter-writing, the ins and outs of restaurants and night clubs, dance halls, the knotting of four-in-hands and bow ties, what was correct and incorrect in tucking a handkerchief in the breast pocket, how to choose clothes, how to take care of himself in a tough crowd. Or in a respectable household. This last was a poser for me, who had not assimilated the old woman’s conduct lessons. But Simon, without apparently paying attention, had got the essential of it. I name these things, negligible to many people, because we were totally unfamiliar with them. I watched him study the skill of how to put on a hat, smoke a cigarette, fold a pair of gloves and put them in an inner pocket, and I admired and wondered where it came from, and learned some of it myself. But I never got the sense of luxury he had in doing it.

  In passing through the lobbies of swank places, the Palmer Houses and portiered dining rooms, tassels, tapers, string ensembles, making the staid bouncety tram-tram of Vienna waltzes, Simon had absorbed this. It made his nostrils open. He was cynical of it but it got him. I ought to have known, therefore, how ugly it was for him to be in the flatness of the neighborhood, spiritless winter afternoons, passing time in his long coat and two days unshaven, in a drugstore, or with the Communist Sylvester in Zechman’s pamphlet shop; sometimes even in the poolroom. He was working only Saturdays at the station, and that, he said, because Borg liked him.

  We had a little time for palaver, in the slowness of the undeveloping winter, sitting at the lunch counter of the poolroom by the window that showed out on horse-dropped, coal-dropped, soot-sponged snow and brown circulation of mist in the four o’clock lamplight. When we had done the necessary at home for M
ama, set up the stoves, got in groceries, taken out the garbage and ashes, we didn’t stay there with her—I less than Simon, who sometimes did his college assignments on the kitchen table, and she kept a percolator going for him on the stove. I didn’t pass on to him the question that Jimmy Klein and Clem asked of me, namely, whether Sylvester was converting him to his politics. I had confidence in the answer I gave, which was that Simon was hard up for ways to kill time, and that he went to meetings, bull sessions and forums, socials and rent parties, from boredom, and in order to meet girls, not because he took Sylvester for one of the children of morning, but he went for the big babes in leather jackets, low heels, berets, and chambray workshirts. The literature he brought home with him kept coffee rings off the table the morning after, or he tore the mimeographed pages with his large blond hands to start the stove. I read more of it than he did, with puzzled curiosity. No, I knew Simon and his idea of the right of things. He had Mama and me for extra weight, he believed, and wasn’t going to pick up the whole of a class besides, and he wouldn’t have Sylvester’s moral sentiments any more than he would buy a suit that didn’t fit. But he sat in Zechman’s shop, calm, smoking sponged cigarettes, under the inciting proletarian posters, hearing Latinistic, Germanic, exotic conversation, with large young side of jaw at rest on his collar in the yellow smoke of cold air, mentally blackballing it all.