The Adventures of Augie March (Penguin Classics)

by Saul Bellow

  Now the lights began to twitter as Bavatsky fiddled in the fuse box, and it was discovered that instead of considering this as I should have been, I was bawling. I think Einhorn was disappointed and maybe even shocked; shocked, I mean, by his misjudgment of my fitness to follow him in his shooting trajectory into what a soul should be. He gave me chilly gentleness such as he might have offered a girl. “Don’t worry, we’ll work something out for your mother,” he said, for he seemed to think it was mainly that. He didn’t know I was mourning Grandma too. “Blow out these candles. Tillie’s bringing coffee and sandwiches. You can sleep with Dingbat tonight, and tomorrow we’ll start on something.”

  Next day I hunted for Simon and couldn’t locate him; he hadn’t been back to see Mama. I did find Kreindl at home, however, as he sat at a late breakfast of smoked fish and rolls. He said to me, “Sit down and catch a bite.”

  “I see you finally found a bride for my cousin,” said I to the cockeyed old artilleryman, observing how the short, sufficient muscles of his forearms were operating in the skinning of the golden little fish and how the scabbards of his jaw were moving.

  “A beauty. Such tsitskies! But don’t blame me, Augie. I don’t force anybody. Zwing keinem. Especially a pair of proud tsitskies like that. Do you know anything about young ladies? I should hope! Well, when a girl has things like that nobody can tell her what to do. There’s where your brother made his mistake, because he tried. I’m sorry for him.” He whispered, mounting his eyes to make sure his wife was at a distance, “This girl makes my little one stand up. At my age. And salute! Anyways, she’s too independent for a young fellow. She needs an older man, a cooler head who can say yes and do no. Otherwise she could ruin you. And maybe Simon is too young to marry. I’ve known you since you both was snot-noses. Pardon, but it’s true. Now you’re big, so you’re hungry, and you think you’re ready to marry, but what’s the hurry? You got plenty of jig-jig ahead of you before you settle down. Take it! Take, take if they give you! Never refuse. To come together with a peepy little woman who sings in your ear. It’s the life of the soul!” He argued this to me with a squeeze of his awkward eyes, the old pimp and egger-on; he even made me smile, and I was in no mood for smiling. “Besides,” said he, “you can see what kind of a man your brother is, that when he gets it in his mind he can sell the goods of the house and put his mother out.”

  I expected him to mention this and pass from defense to the practical matter of Mama’s support. In the past Kreindl had always been a kind enough neighbor, but we couldn’t expect him to keep Mama. Especially as Simon now had him down as one of his chief enemies. Furthermore, I couldn’t let her stay in that brick vault, and I told Kreindl I’d make other arrangements for her.

  I went to appeal to Lubin, at the Charity, on gloomy Wells Street. Lubin had always visited us as a sort of distant foster-uncle, formerly. In his office, to my maturer eyes, he came out differently. Something in his person argued what the community that contributed the money wanted us poor bastards to be: sober, dutiful, buttoned, clean, sad, moderate. The sadness and confusion of the field he was in made him sensible. Only a certain heaviness of breath that drew notice to the thickness of his nostrils gave you a sense of difficulty and, next, one of the labor of being patient. I made note in this broad man of the tame ape-nature promoted to pants and offices. This is the opposite of that disfigured image of God that falls away by its sin from Eden; or of the same bad copy excited and inflamed by promise of grace to recover its sacredness and golden stature. Lubin’s belief was that he didn’t fall from Paradise but rose from the caves. But he was a good man, and this is no slander of him, but merely his own view.

  When I told him Simon and I had to find a home for Mama he doubtless thought we were getting rid of everyone—Georgie first, then Grandma, and now Mama. Therefore I said, “It’s only temporary, till we get on our feet, and then we’ll have another flat and housekeeper for her.” But he took this very aridly, which wasn’t to be wondered at, considering the tramp appearance I made, in the wrack of my good clothes, inflamed at the eyes, and looking garbage-nourished. However, he said he could get her into a Home for the blind on Arthington Street if we could pay part of the cost. It came to fifteen bucks a month.

  That was as good as I could expect. Also he sent me with a note to an employment bureau, but there was nothing doing at the time. I went to my room on the South Side and took most of my clothes to hock, the tuxedo, sports clothes, and hound’s-tooth coat. I pawned them and I got Mama established, and then started to hunt work. Being as they say up against it and au pied du mur, I took the first job that came, and I’ve never had one that was more curious.

  Einhorn got it for me through Karas-Holloway, who had a financial interest in the business. It was a luxury dog service on North Clark Street, among the honkytonks and hock shops, antique stores and dreary beaneries.

  In the morning I drove out in a station wagon along the Gold Coast to pick up the dogs, at the back doors of mansions or up the service elevators of lakeshore apartment hotels, and I brought the animals back to this club joint—it was called a club.

  The chief was a Frenchman, a dog-coiffeur or groom or maître de chiens; he was rank and rough, from Place Clichy near the foot of Montmartre, and from what he told me he had been a wrestler’s shill in the carnivals there while studying this other profession. Some ways his face was short of humanity, by its energetic stiffness and abruptness of color, like an injection. His relation with the animals was a struggle. He was trying to wrest something from them. I don’t know what. Perhaps that their conception of a dog should be what his was. He was on the footing of Xenophon’s Ten Thousand in Persia, here in Chicago; for he washed and ironed his own shirts, did his own marketing, and cooked his own meals in his beaverboard quarters in a corner of this doggish place—his lab, kitchen, and bedroom. I realize much better now what it means to be a Frenchman abroad, how irregular everything must appear, and not simply abroad but on North Clark Street.

  We were located in no mere firetrap but had two stories of a fairly new modern building just off the Gold Coast, not far from the scene of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre and, for that matter, from the Humane Society on Grand Avenue. It was the great feature of this outfit, I say, paid for by the subscribers, that it was a club for dogs, that the pets were entertained as well as steamed, massaged, manicured, clipped, that they were supposed to be taught manners and tricks. The fee was twenty dollars a month, and no shortage of dogs; more in fact than Guillaume could handle, and he had to fight the front office continually, which wanted to go beyond capacity. The club was already as hell-deep as dogs’ throats could scrape it; the Cerberus slaver-choke turmoil was at the full when I came in from the last pick-up and changed from truck livery to rubber boots and ponchos; the racket made the skylight glass shiver. Organization was marvelous, however. Guillaume had real know-how; and let people go a little and they’ll build you an Escurial. The enormous noise, as of Grand Central, was only the protest of chaos coming up against regulation—the trains got off on time; the dogs got their treatment.

  Though Guillaume used the hypo more than I thought he should. He gave piqûres for everything, and charged it extra. He’d say, “Cette chienne est galeuse—this is a mangy bitch!” and in with the needle. Moreover, he’d give a drop of dope to the savage ones whenever organization was threatened, yelling, “Thees jag-off is goin’ to get it!” Consequently I carried home some pretty wan dogs, and it wasn’t easy to come up a flight of stairs with a sleeping boxer or shepherd and explain to the colored cook that he was only tuckered out from playing and pleasure. Dogs in heat Guillaume wouldn’t tolerate either. “Grue! En chasse!” Then he’d say to me anxiously, “Did anything ‘appen in the back?” But since I had been driving, how was I to know? He was furious with the owners, especially if the animal was a chienne de race, and its aristocracy was not respected, and he wanted the office to slap an extra charge on them for letting them into the club in this state. Any pe
digree made a courtier of him, and he could call on a very high manner, if he wanted to, and get his lips into a tight suppressive line of dislike to baseness—the opposite to breeding. He had the staff come over, two Negro boys and me, to show us the fine points of the animal, and I will say for Guillaume that his idea was to run an atelier and to act like master in a guild, so that when he got a good poodle to trim it was down-tools for us while he demonstrated; there was then a spell of good feeling and regard for him and for the lamb-docile, witty, small animal. Oh, it wasn’t always vexation or the snapping and bickering of little dogs to which Marcus Aurelius compares the daily carryings on of men, though I once in a while see what he was getting at. But there’s a dog harmony also, and to be studied by dog eyes, many of them, has its illumination too.

  Only the work fatigued me, and I stunk of dog. People would move from me on the streetcar, as they do from the hoof-and-hides stockyards’ man, or give me round-eye glares and draw down their mouths on the mobbed Cottage Grove line. Furthermore, there was something Pompeian that I minded about the job—the opulence for dogs, and then their ways that reflected civilized mentality, spoiled temperaments of favorites, mirrors of neuroticism. Plus the often needling thought that their membership fee in the club was more than I had to pay for Mama in the Home. All this together once in a while got me down. From my neglected self-betterment I had additional pricks. I should be more ambitious. Often I looked for vocational hints in magazines, and I considered training at night school to become a court reporter, should I have the aptitude, and even going back to the university for something bigger. And then I not seldom had Esther Fenchel on my mind, since I moved around the dog-owning height of society. I never had a back-door glimpse of it without a twinge of the soul for her sake, and similar childishness. The sun of that childishness goes on shining even when the larger bodies of hotter stars have risen to smelt you and cover you with their influence. The recenter stars may be more critical, more in the eye, but that earlier sun still remains a long time.

  I had some spells of adoring-sickness, and then I had deeper pangs of sex, later; from service with animals maybe. The street too was aphrodisiac, the honkytonks and titty photos, legs with sequins. Plus Guillaume’s girl friend, who was a great work of ripple-assed luxury with an immense mozzarella bust, a middle-aged lady who’d go straight to bed and wait for him just as we started to close up shop in the evening, soughing in there like a white stout tree. But there wasn’t much I could do about my needs. I was too strapped by money to chase. Though I risked running into the Renlings in that neighborhood, I went to Evanston to look for my friend Willa at the Symington, but she had quit to get married. As I returned on the El I was engrossed in thoughts of marriage bed, of Five Properties’ behavior with Cissy, and of my brother’s losing his head when he thought of their nuptials and honeymoon.

  Simon meanwhile stayed away from me and didn’t answer the messages I left with Mama and elsewhere. I knew he must be in a bad way. He wasn’t giving any money to Mama, and folks who saw him told me how beat he looked. So his keeping to himself, in some hole of a room like mine, or worse, was understandable; he never before had had to approach me abashed, owing explanations and excuses, and wasn’t going to do it now. With my last message to him I enclosed five bucks. He took this fin all right, but I didn’t hear from him till he was able to repay it, and that was some months later.

  One possession of mine that was saved from the sale of the furniture was the damaged set of Dr. Eliot’s Five-Foot Shelf that Einhorn gave me after his fire. I had it with me in my room and read at it when I could. And I was blasting out a paragraph of von Helmholtz one day, on a corner downtown, between cars, when a onetime classmate of mine, at Crane College, a Mexican named Padilla, took it out of my hand to see what I was reading and gave it back saying, “What are you on this stuff for? It’s been left way far behind.” He started to tell me the latest, and I had to say I couldn’t keep up with him. He asked me how things were then, and we had a long conversation.

  In my math section Padilla had been the great equation cracker. He sat at the back of the room, rubbing his narrow front peak and working over smoothed-out pieces of paper others had stuffed into the desk, since he couldn’t afford to buy a notebook. Called to the board whenever everyone else was stumped, he came with haste in his filthy whitish or creamed-herring suit, of cloth used in the cheapest summer caps, and naked feet in a pair of Salvation Army rummage shoes, also white, and would start hanging up the answer, covering his scrappy chalkings with his skinny body, infinity symbols like broken ants, and blittering Greek letters aimed downward to the last equal sign. As far as I was concerned, it was godlike that relations should be so clear to anyone. Sometimes he’d get a hand for his performance when he went clacking back swiftly in his shoes, which were loose because he had no socks. But his face, with small beak and the pricked skin of smallpox, didn’t stock anything in gratification as we understand it. Anyway, he didn’t deal much in expression. He often seemed chilly. And I’m not speaking of his character now, but it was cold winter, and sometimes I’d see him flying down Madison Street in his white suit, across the snow, running from home to warm himself in the school building. He never did look warm enough, but chill and sickly and with primitive prohibition of anyone’s approaching him. Smoking Mexican cigarettes, he went through the halls by himself, often with a comb, running it through his hair, which was beautiful, black and high.

  Well, there had been some changes. He looked healthier, or at least didn’t have that thistle-flower purple in his tinge, and he wore a better suit. Under his arm were heavy books.

  “Are you at the university?” I said.

  “I got a scholarship in math and physics. What about you?”

  “I wash dogs. Can’t you tell I spend my time with dogs?”

  “No, I don’t notice anything. But what are you doing?”

  “That is what I’m doing.”

  It greatly bothered him that I had such a flunky job, washing cages and sweeping up dogs’ hair; and also that I was no longer a college man but trying to keep up on Helmholtz who was a dead number to him; in other words, that I should be of the unformed darkened-out mass. It was often that way with me, that people would feel the world owed me distinctness.

  “What would I do at the university? I’m not like you, Manny, with a special talent.”

  “Don’t tear yourself down,” he said. “You should see the snots there are on campus. What special have they got, except the dough? You should go and find out what you can do, and then after four years if you aren’t any good at any special thing, you at least have this degree, and it won’t be just any sonofabitch who can kick you around.”

  My aching back! I thought. There’d still be black forces waiting to give me the boot, and if I had a degree the indignity would be all the greater, and I’d have heartburn from it.

  “You shouldn’t waste your time,” he further said. “Don’t you see that to do any little thing you have to take an examination, you have to pay a fee and get a card or a diploma? You better get wise to this. If people don’t know what you qualify in they’ll never know where to place you, and that can be dangerous. You have to get in there and do something for yourself. Even if you’re just waiting, you have to know what you’re waiting for, you have to specialize. And don’t wait too long or you’ll be passed by.”

  It wasn’t so much what he said that affected me, though that was interesting and probably full of truth; it was his friendship that I responded to. I didn’t want to let go of him, and I clung to him. I was moved that he thought of me.

  “How’m I supposed to go to school, Manny, if I’m broke?”

  “How do you think I do it? The scholarship isn’t enough, it’s only a tuition scholarship. I get a little dough from the NYA and I’m in a racket swiping books.”

  “Books?”

  “Like these. I stole them this afternoon. Technical books, texts. I take orders even. If I pick up twenty or thirty
a month and get from two to five bucks apiece, I make out all right. Texts cost. What’s the matter, are you honest?” he said, looking to see if he had queered himself with me.

  “Not completely. I’m just surprised, Manny, because all I knew about you was that you were a wizard at math.”

  “Also I ate once a day and didn’t own a coat. You know that. Well, I give myself a little more now. I want to have it a little better. I don’t go stealing for the kicks. As soon as I can I’ll quit.”

  “But what if you get nailed?”

  He said, “I’ll explain how I feel about it. You see, I don’t have larceny in my heart; I’m not a real crook. I’m not interested in it, so nobody can make a fate of it for me. That’s not my fate. I might get into a little trouble, but I never would let them make it my trouble, get it?”

  I did get it, having been around Joe Gorman, who looked at the same question another way.

  But Padilla was a gifted crook all the same and took pride in his technique. We made a date for Saturday, and he gave me an exhibition. When we walked out of a shop I couldn’t tell whether or not he had taken anything, he was so good at maneuvering. Outside he’d show me a copy of Sinnott’s Botany or Schlesinger’s Chemistry. Valuable books only; he’d never take orders for cheaper ones. Handing me his list, he’d tell me to pick the next title and he’d swipe it even if it was kept back of the cash desk. He went in carrying an old book with which he covered the one he wanted. He never hid anything under his coat, so that if they were to stop him he could always plead he had set down his own book to look at something and then picked up his own and another, unawares. Since he delivered the books on the same day he stole them, there was nothing incriminating in his room. It was greatly in his favor that he didn’t in the least look like a crook, but only a young Mexican, narrow-shouldered, quick in his movements, but somewhat beaten down and harmless, that entered the shop, put on specs, and got lost with crossed feet in thermodynamics or physical chemistry. That he was pure of all feeling of larceny contributed a lot to his success.