by Saul Bellow
We now had something more to talk about, for by and by we found we had another connection. It was through that swarthy Sylvester for whom I used to pass out movie handbills and who had tried to make a Communist of Simon. He had never finished his degree at Armour Tech. He said it was from lack of dough and hinted also his political assignment elsewhere, but it was everybody’s thought that he had washed out. Be that as it might, he was living in New York and working for the subway at a technical job. Under Forty-second Street. He seemed bound to have occupations in the darkness, and by now this had laid a peculiar coloring on him, his face darkened sallow and slack-cheeked and his eyes, injured by worry, now more Turkish from a thickening of the skin by the continual effort and wrinkling his eyes, probably, at the ruby and green cut buttons of his burrow office—there where he sat at a drawing board and copied blueprints and read pamphlets in his leisure time. He had been expelled, like Frazer, from the Communist party. On charges of Infantile Leftism and Trotskyist Deviationism—the terms were queer to me, and just as queer was his assuming that I understood them. He belonged to another party now, the Trotskyites, and was still a Bolshevik, and disclosed that he was never free from duty, never unassigned, never went anywhere without permission from party chiefs. Even returning to Chicago, ostensibly to visit his father, the old man called by Grandma “the Baker,” he had a mission, which was to contact Frazer. So I inferred that Frazer was being recruited to the new party. I happened to walk behind them on Fifty-seventh Street one day. Sylvester was toting a fat briefcase and looking up at Frazer and talking with special slowness in a kind of political accent while Frazer was looking past and over him with aloof gravity and had his hands clasped at his back.
I also saw Sylvester on the stairs of the rooming house, with Mimi. He was, or had been, Mimi’s brother-in-law, married in New York to her sister Annie, who had now left him and was getting a divorce. I recalled how his first wife threw stones at him when he tried to come through her father’s backyard to talk to her, and I even remembered the surroundings in which I had heard about this from him, the grim air of cold Milwaukee Avenue when we peddled razorblades and glass-cutters with Jimmy Klein. Sylvester wanted Mimi to plead with her sister for him. “Hell,” Mimi told me, as much for my private ear as any of her opinions were, “if I had known him before they were married I would have told Annie not to do it. He leaks misery all over. I wonder how she could stand two full years of him. Young girls do the god-damnedest things. Can you imagine being in bed with him, and that mud face and those lips? Why, he looks like the frog prince. I hope now she’ll get under the sheets with a young strong stevedore.” If somebody fell against Mimi’s lines she had no mercy, and as she listened to Sylvester she kept in mind her sister bolt upright in a huskier man’s clasp and struggling her arms with pleasure, and it made me for a minute dislike her for her cruelty that she held her eyes open for Sylvester so that he might look in and see this. What was to make it an acceptable joke was the supposition that he couldn’t see. No, he probably couldn’t.
It needs to be explained that in Mimi’s hard view all that you inherited from the mixing peoples of the past and the chance of parents’ encountering like Texas cattle was your earthy material, which it was your own job to make into admirable flesh. In other words, applied to Sylvester, he was in large measure to blame for how he looked; his spirit was a bad kiln. And also it was his fault that he couldn’t keep his wives and girls. “I hear his first one was a dizzy bitch. And Annie has something of a slut about her too. What makes them go for him at the start? That really interests me,” said Mimi. And she supposed that they must take his little gloom for real devilishness and expect him to visit their places with prickles and fire, like a genuine demon; when he failed to, turning out to be mere uncompleted mud, they threw stones at him, real or figurative. She was savage-minded, Mimi, and prized her savagery as proof that there was no monkey business about her; she punished and took blows as the real thing.
That humiliated, bandy-legged, weak-haired, and injured-in-the-eyes Sylvester, however, the subterranean draftsman and comedy commissar of a Soviet-America-to-be, teaching himself the manner and even the winner’s smile and confidence, why, he was going to blast off the old travertine and let the gold and marble shine for a fresh humanity. He tried to impress me with the command he had over Marxian coal and cotton, plenary dates, factional history, texts of Lenin and Plekhanov; what he had really was the long-distance dreaming gaze of the eyes into the future and the pick of phrase, which he smiled and smelled like a perfume, heavy-lidded. He condescended to me and dutch-uncled me because he knew that I liked him and wasn’t aware how much I knew about him. Which I was bound to spare him. Anyway, his defects weren’t as serious to me as they were to Mimi.
With me he could be fully confident, and some of his charm couldn’t live except in the presence of confidence. “How’s tricks, kid?” he said with a rejoicing smile—but darkness and bitterness could never wholly leave it any more—and while he gentled his palms on his double-breasted joint belly and chest. “What are you up to? Getting by? What are you here, a student? No. A macher? A proletarian?” This word, even jesting, he pronounced with veneration.
“Well, a sort of student.”
“Our boys,” he replied, more deeply smiling. “Anything but honest labor. And how’s your brother Simon? What’s he doing? I thought I could recruit him once. He’d have made a good revolutionary. Where are they going to come from if not from your kind of background? But I guess I couldn’t make him see it. He’s very intelligent though. One day he’ll see it himself.”
In the peculiar fate of people that makes them fat and rich, when this happens very swiftly there is the menace of the dreamy state that plunders their reality. Let’s say that anyway old age and death would come, so why shouldn’t the passage be comfortable? But this proposal doesn’t make a firm mind, in the strange area where things swim too fast. Against this trouble thought may be a remedy; force of person is another one, and money and big-scale lavishness, unpierceable concreteness, organizational deeds. So there are these various remedies and many more, older ones, but you don’t actually have full choice among all the varieties, especially those older ones of the invisible world. Most people make do with what they have, and labor in their given visible world, and this has its own stubborn merit.
Not only did Simon make what he had do, but he went the limit. It astonished me how he took his objectives and did exactly what he had projected. It was well-nigh unfair to have called the turns so accurately and to do to people what he planned while he was still a stranger to them. Charlotte was in love with him. Not only that, but they were already married, and it wasn’t only he who had hastened and pushed the thing, but she too was in a hurry. Partly because he was too broke to court her long. He told her that, and she and her parents agreed they shouldn’t waste time. Only, the ceremony was performed out of town to keep the news out of the papers, and for the rest of the family there had to be an engagement and a wedding. So Charlotte and her mother had worked it out, and while Simon paid rent in a good bachelor’s club downtown he was actually living with the Magnuses in their huge old West Side flat.
He came to see me after the one-day honeymoon which was all the secrecy of the marriage gave them time for. They had been in Wisconsin. Already he had more new attributes than I could keep track of, draped in comfortable flannel, owning a new lighter, and effects in his pockets he didn’t yet have the hang of. He said, “The Magnuses have been wonderful to me.” There was a new gray Pontiac at the curb—he showed it to me from the window; and he was learning the coal business at one of the Magnuses’ yards.
“And what about your own yard? Didn’t you say—”
“Certainly, I said. They’ve promised me that as soon as I can run a place myself. It won’t take long. No, it hasn’t been so hard,” he said further, understanding my unasked question. “They’d rather have a poor young man. A poor young man gets up more steam and pressure. They
were like that themselves, and they know.”
Already he didn’t look like such a poor young man in the high quality gray flannel, and shoes with new stitching; his shirt smelled of the store; it hadn’t been to the laundry yet.
“Get dressed, I’m taking you to dinner there,” he said. When we were outside, walking down the path to the car, he took a stiff shot of breath and hawked, exactly as on the day I went with him to the La Salle Street Station where apparently I was too dumb to sell papers. Except that this time he had gloomy big rings round his eyes; and we sat down in the car, which had that sour spice of new rubber and car upholstery. It was the first time I had seen him drive. He swung it round like a veteran, even somewhat recklessly.
So I was taken into that hot interior of lamps and rugs, to the Magnuses’. Everything was ungainly there, roomy and oversized. The very parrots painted on the lampshades were as big as Rhode Island Reds. The Magnuses too were big; they had a Netherlandish breadth of bone. My sister-in-law was of that size also, and was aware or shy of it as indelicacy, giving me the touch of her hand as though it were a smaller one. She needn’t have. It’s difficult when outsized people worry about their presentation, and women especially, who have secret dismay of grossness. She had remarkably handsome eyes, soft, with occasional lights of distaste though, shrewd, and expressing immense power of management; but also they were warm. So was her bosom, which was abundant, and she had large hips. She was on her guard with me, as if afraid of my criticism, of what I would say to Simon the first time we were alone. She must have convinced herself that he had done her a great favor by marrying her, he was so obviously smart and good-looking, and at the same time she was swept with resentment lest she shouldn’t be thought good enough or the money be too much remembered. The issue most alive was whether he would have married her without money. It was much too troubling not to be spoken of, so it was spoken of in a kind of fun and terrible persiflage. Simon did it with the kind of coarseness that has to be laughed at because to take it seriously would be murder—his saying, for instance, when the three of us were left alone in the parlor to become acquainted, “Nobody’s ever been laid better at any price.” It was so ambiguous and inside-out as to who had paid the price that it had to be taken as amusing, and she hurried and came down from a romantic, sentimental position and denied it all by pretending that this randy talk was the joke of sincerity and deep underlying agreement, a more realistic sort of love. But leaning above him like a kind of flounced Pisan tower construction—she dressed with luxury and daring—keeping a hand on his hair, she had instants of great difficulty before me.
She had difficulty only for a while, until she absorbed from Simon the attitude that I was a featherhead, affectionate but not long on good sense. She soon enough learned to deal with me. But it was painful until she found confidence, and I suppose that at the time she hadn’t recovered from the honeymoon, which, Simon had been frank to tell me, was awful. He didn’t specify in which way, but he expressed enough to make it profoundly believable; he had some notes in the end of the scale that I would rather not have heard played for the consents to death that rang in them, but I was forced to listen to all he had, struck right on the key and sounded from top to bottom. I could be sure these said-in-jest things were the weirdest of their kind ever to be laughed at and spoken in that carpeted peace and brown-gravy velour. It was all supposed to pass for fun and bridegroom’s lustiness, energy, and play-wickedness, and it came through to me that he was being tortured by thought of suicide, stronger than a mere hint, but simultaneously he could dive to clasp his compensations, such as his pride in audaciousness and strength of nerve and body or the luxury he was coming into, and furthermore, a certain recklessness in demands: the sense of what he could do and what he could exact without caring what anybody thought was much to him.
Then the family came in, wondering what type of person I might be. I wondered at them no less. They were so big you thought what could prevent them from handling even Simon and me like children, though we were by no means midgety—Simon was nearly six feet tall and I only an inch shorter than he. It was their width that made the difference, and even now that he was getting stout Simon didn’t begin to approach them. They were substantial in their lives as in girth; they made their old people respected—there was a grandmother there that evening—and they bought the best of everything, clothes, furniture, or machinery. Also they were grateful for entertainment and admired speed of wit, which they didn’t have themselves, and dramatic self-presentation, which Simon gave them. He more than pleased them and more than made a big hit. He went both deep and far into the place of star and sovereign. They had patriarchs and matriarchs but they had no prince before him. To make this of himself, the prince, he went through a metamorphosis. That was the next of my astonishments. Elsewhere I’ve said that he had always, even when silent, been noticeable. But he wasn’t silent any more, and his old reserve was gone to pieces; he was boisterous, capricious, haughty, critical, arbitrary, mimicking and deviling, and he crowed, croaked, made faces and had the table all but spinning in this dining room of stable and upright wealth. I saw Grandma’s satire in him, across the plaited white bread and the sprigged fish and candles—yes, the old woman’s hardness of invention and travestying savagery, even certain Russian screams. I didn’t know Simon had gotten so much from her. I could draw my mind back over some six or seven hundred Friday nights and see his uncommenting eyes follow a performance of the old woman’s. And how deep that had sunk in, without even appearing to. At the shrieks he caused I nearly heard her comment of disdain, a disdain of which Simon was not all innocent either. He both borrowed from her and burlesqued her. His appearance was new in more than one way; more was new than the shirt, or the jewel on his finger and minor gems in his cuffs, or even the fat, and the haggardness from unwanted thought that lit on him in instants between the turns of his performance. The task of doing bold things with an unhappy gut, that was it. In a way he made them meet the expense of this too, as when he imitated his good queen mother-in-law’s accent. But it was just the opposite of offensive to her and to them all; it was grand and uproarious.
However, he wasn’t just their entertainer; when he turned grave and stopped the vaudeville with a pair of somber eyes he got earnest silence for the speech he was going to make, and a full weight of respect.
He spoke to me, but of course his words were in large part for them. “Augie,” he said, putting his arm around Charlotte—she laid her painted nails on his hand—“you can see how unlucky we were not to have this kind of close and loyal family. There isn’t anything these people won’t do for one another. We don’t even understand what that is because we never experienced it, we missed it all our lives. We had no luck. Now they’ve taken me in and made me one of them, as if I were their own child. I never understood what a real family was till now, and you ought to know how grateful I am. They may seem a little slow-witted to you”—Mr. and Mrs. Magnus didn’t quite get this, Simon’s tone being enough for them and the fine satisfaction they took in him, but Charlotte was seized with a laugh in the throat at this mischief interrupting his seriousness—“but they have something you’ll have to learn to appreciate, and that’s their kindness and the way they stick by their own.”
When he scrawled this on me, I had a fit of hate for the fat person he was becoming, and I wanted to say, “This is crummy, to boost them and tear down your own. What’s the matter with Mama or even Grandma?” But then what he said of the Magnuses had its truth, you couldn’t miss it. I was a sucker for it too, family love. And though Simon did this thing in a bad gross way I doubt that he could have been absolutely insincere and putting on. Finding yourself amongst warm faces, why, there’re many objections that recede, as when enemy women may kiss. Many common lies and hypocrisies are like that, just out of the harmony of the moment. And with Simon there was also a revulsion from his gnawing trouble and his need to get some breath on his Valley of Ezekiel slain. Therefore he was building up
his causes for gratitude. And therefore, also, I answered nothing.
As he had said this to me, however, they were watching and were suspicious because I didn’t grab a piece of this love feast. I had consented to play his game, but I wasn’t fast enough to do everything. I had a sea of feeling of my own which I was straining under. And then I think all their unresolved suspicions about Simon came to gather on me. They seemed to expect me to clear myself—all, in their ruddiness and size, including the granny who was dissolving from both, losing color and getting small, an old creature in black, wearing pious wig and amulets, who looked to have metaphysical judgmental powers. Well, they owned stores; maybe they smelled a thief in me. Anyway, they looked at me so acutely that I could perceive myself with their eyes, just about, my sizable head and uncommitted smile, my untrained and anti-disciplinary hair. Instead of asking, “Who are they?” about both Simon and me, they could demand of themselves, “Who is he?” Indeed, who was I to be sharing their gold soup of supper light and putting their good spoons in my mouth?
Observing this difficulty, Simon quickly came up with a remedy, saying, “Augie is a good kid, he just doesn’t know his own mind yet.” They were glad to be reassured about me; all they asked was that I should be regular, that I should speak up more, make a few jokes, laugh when all laughed. I ought not to be so different from Simon. Of course there was an obstacle to being like him, which was that I hadn’t yet grasped him in his new character. But I soon caught on a little and made myself more acceptable, even welcome, by joining in the fun and dancing in the parlor after dinner. The only nearly serious hitch, with Mr. Magnus, was that I didn’t know how to play pinochle. How was it that a decently brought-up young fellow didn’t know how? Otherwise an indulgent easygoing character, Mr. Magnus was dissatisfied about this. Like Talleyrand making a tight mouth about the man who didn’t play whist. Simon could play pinochle. (Where had he learned? Well, where, for that matter, had all his new accomplishments come from?) “Oh, Augie is a sort of studious type and he doesn’t go in for such things,” he said. This wasn’t good enough for Mr. Magnus, with the long gray threads of baldness on his robust head. “I don’t like a young man should gamble either,” he said. “But he should play a friendly game.” I felt he wasn’t unjustified. “I’ll play if you teach me,” I said, which went a long way toward improving the situation and making me one of the house. I sat in a corner with some of the younger children to study pinochle.