by Saul Bellow
It was not all dismay; in part he seemed glad of it.
“Not a full-time crook, Jim.”
“But even part-time it doesn’t go with what I’ve heard about you and Simon, that you’re so successful.”
“He’s doing fine—married and in business.”
“That’s what I heard from Kreindl. And you was going to the university. Is that why you were copping books? We catch a lot of students. Most of them don’t make a good impression.”
I explained to him my need for money, letting him assume that I was Mimi’s lover, for otherwise it would have been difficult to make him understand; and though it was curious to meet Jimmy as the cop that caught me, and I felt light with relief and one foot on paradox and all the spirited melancholy that came of that, I had to get on with my money-raising and the other things there were to attend to. However, Jimmy was aroused by what I told him, and his eyes and all the skin of his face expanded with concern and with the immediate determination he took.
“How far gone is she?”
“Over two months.”
“Listen, Augie, I’ll help you as much as I can.”
“No, Jimmy,” said I, surprised, “I couldn’t tap you. I know you have it hard.”
“Don’t be a dummy. Compare a few bucks to a life of grief. Say it’s for my own sake—me not wanting to see it happen to anybody I used to be buddies with. How much do you need?”
“About fifty bucks.”
“Easy. Between me and Eleanor it won’t be anything. She has some dough put aside. I won’t tell her what it’s for. She wouldn’t ask, but anyway why should she know? You don’t have to tell me why you don’t put the bee on your brother. You wouldn’t be stealing it if he’d be willing to give it to you.”
“If push came to shove I might ask him, but there’re special reasons why I can’t. Well, Jim—thanks. It’s great of you. Thanks, Jimmy!”
The extent of my gratitude made him laugh at me. “Don’t exaggerate. I’ll see you here Monday, this same time, and give you the fifty bucks.”
Jimmy had no confidence that he could keep company with kind motives; he was abashed by them. And I understood well that he wanted to defeat a mechanism as much as he wanted to help a onetime friend.
However that was, he gave me the money, and I made the appointment with the doctor for the end of Christmas week. Things were difficult to arrange. I had a date with Lucy that same night and couldn’t break it with Simon’s knowledge because I needed the car. Therefore, when I had left Mimi with the doctor I went down in great nervousness and phoned Lucy from a drugstore.
“Honey, I’ll have to be very late tonight,” I told her. “Something’s come up. It’ll be ten o’clock before I can get to your place.”
She, however, had not much thought of me tonight. She whispered on the phone, “Darling, I ran into a fence and bent my fender. I haven’t told Daddy. He’s downstairs, so I’m stymied.”
“Oh, he won’t be so angry.”
“But, Augie, I’ve had the car less than a month. He said he’d sell it if I didn’t take good care of it. I had to promise there wouldn’t be any trouble for six months.”
“Maybe we can have it fixed without his knowing.”
“Do you think I could?”
“Oh, probably. I’ll dope out something. I’ll be around late.”
“Not too late.”
“Well, then, if I’m not there by ten, don’t expect me.”
“In that case maybe I ought to get some sleep before New Year’s Eve. You’ll be on time tomorrow, won’t you? And don’t forget it’s formal.”
“Tomorrow at nine, in my tuxedo, and maybe even this evening. But I promised to help out a friend who’s having a little trouble. Don’t worry about the car.”
“I do though. You don’t know Daddy.”
Empty, I left the booth; feeling stiff, and the soldier of my fears, and all that I didn’t know had power over me.
Stracciatella was closed, and in the gaunt glass curled saxophones and guitars shrunk in their sides. Deeper, cracks of goblin light out of the spaghetti-feasting kitchen where the family sat.
I waited upstairs in the corridor by the door, which, in time, I heard unlocked. Mimi passed through it alone, handed out, and it shut before I could see the doctor to question him. I couldn’t now, having to support Mimi, who tottered. She was only two days out of the hospital, and the variety of decisions she had made alone, not counting pain and blood loss, was enough to have taken away her strength. She was faint to such a degree that for the first time I saw her without expression, like a kid asleep on the excursion train, fatigued at night from picnicking. Except that when her head rolled on my shoulder and approached my neck, she drew on the skin of it with her lips, weakly, a reflex of sensuality. For the moment perhaps I was Frazer and she was confirming that no matter what complication, injury, foulness, she didn’t back down from her belief that all rested on the gentleness in privacy of man and woman—they did in willing desire what in the rock and water universe, the green universe, the bestial universe, was done from ignorant necessity.
As we stood at the head of the stairs, her lips at my neck while I clasped her and whispered, “Easy now, let’s start down easy,” a man came up from the street and I nervously thought I saw something familiar about him. Mimi too was aware that someone was approaching and took several steps. So it happened that we were in the shadow, not in the main light of the corridor, when he came up. Nevertheless we recognized each other. It was Kelly Weintraub, the Magnuses’ cousin by marriage who came from my neighborhood, the one who had threatened me about Georgie. By the slow increase of his smile when he saw me, and what there was in the flesh of his mouth more jubilant than mere smiling, also by the setting of his eyes, more clear to me than the eyes themselves in this obscurity, I realized that he had me. He knew.
“Why, Mr. March, what a hell of a surprise this is! You been to see my cousin?”
“Who’s your cousin?”
“The doctor is.”
“That makes sense.”
“What does?”
“That you’re his cousin.”
I could never run so far or plunge so deep that this man, this Weintraub, wouldn’t have enough erotic line to pay out after me, so he was telling me with his full, handsome teameo’s look, fleshy and brow-bent, while he swaggered a little at the knees.
“I have other cousins also,” he said.
I felt like hitting him, since I probably would never be seeing him after he had blabbed, but I couldn’t do it because I was supporting Mimi. It may have been the dilation of the senses by rage that made me think I smelled blood, raw, but the result in horror is what counted. I said to him, “Get out of the way!”
To take Mimi home and get her into bed was all I cared about now.
“He’s not my boy friend,” said Mimi to Kelly. “He’s only going out of his way to help me out of trouble.”
“That makes sense too,” he answered.
“Oh, you dirty bastard!” she said. She was too weakened to put in all the power of savagery she felt.
Shaking, I carried her to the car and drove off fast.
“Kid, I’m sorry. I loused things up for you. Who is he?”
“Just a guy—he doesn’t amount to anything. Nobody ever listens to him. Never mind about that, Mimi. Was it all right?”
“He was rough,” she said. “First he took the money.”
“But it’s over?”
“It’s all gone now, if that’s what you mean.”
The drive was clear of snow, and I went fast over the endless varieties of black and smooth, along the tracks, through tunnels, lights streaming as if wind had gotten into a church and flown over the candles, sucking out breath, so much the speed fused things down.
We arrived. I lifted her up the four flights, and while she was getting under the covers ran down to get an icebag from Miss Owens, who fussed with me about the ice.
“What!” I yelled. �
�It’s the middle of winter.”
“Go out and chop some then. Ours is made in the refrigerator and takes electricity.”
I stopped yelling, seeing that I had snagged a spinsterish trouble upsetting her by rushing in wildly, not thinking how I showed anguish. Calming down, I reasoned with her, turning on what charm I had on reserve. There can’t have been much, the low charge in my trembling wires there was at this moment.
I said, “Miss Villars has had a tooth pulled and it’s very bad.”
“A tooth! You young people get so excited.” She gave me the ice tray and I scooted back with it.
Ice, however, didn’t help much. She bled very swift, and she tried to keep it secret, but presently she had to tell me, as she herself, astonished, with open eyes, tried to keep track of it. She began to soak the bed. I was for taking her to the hospital at once, but she said, “It’ll get better soon. I think it has to be like this at first.”
Going below, I phoned the doctor, who told me to watch and he’d tell me what to do if it didn’t slacken. He’d stand by. There was fright in his tone.
When I pulled off her sheets and made up her bed with my sheets her hands came up to oppose me, but I said, “Look, Mimi, this has to be done”; she shut her eyes and let me make the change, laying her cheek down to the hollow of her shoulder.
There have great things been done to mitigate the worst human sights and teach you something different from revulsion at them. All the Golgothas have been painted with this aim. But since probably very few people are now helped by these things and lessons, each falls back on whatever he has.
I flung the bloody bedclothes into the closet, and she noticed the energy of the swing and said, “Don’t be panicky, Augie.”
I sat down by her, trying to be calmer. “Did you realize it might be like this?”
“Or even tougher,” she said; and as her eyes were yellowish and lacking in moisture and her mouth was pale, it occurred to me that possibly she couldn’t grasp just how tough it already was. “But …”
“But what?” I said.
“You can’t let your life be decided for you by any old thing that comes up.”
“A champion way to be independent,” I said, intending the words for myself, but she heard me.
“It makes a difference what you go down from, don’t fool yourself. It does to me, now. Though,” she said, face frowning and then growing smooth while she made the concession, “probably that is only if I come up again. If you’re dead, does it make a difference for what?”
I couldn’t bear to talk now, and sat quiet, watching. And as she had thought it would, the hemorrhaging gradually let up; she was less braced and stiff-spread on the bed, and I was less benumbed in the muscles. My thoughts were crumbled, for I had been having fancies about how I was going to get her into a hospital, knowing how tough it was in such cases, and I imagined pleading and being refused, and official highhandedness and being driven mad.
“Well,” she said, “it looks as if even he couldn’t croak me.”
“You beginning to feel better?”
“I’d like a drink.”
“Shall I bring you something soft? I don’t think you ought to drink whisky tonight.”
“I mean whisky. I think you could use some yourself.”
I took Simon’s car to the garage and came back in a cab with a bottle. She took a good-sized slug, and I drank the rest, for now that I felt reassured about Mimi my own trouble came forward; as I was crawling naked into my sheetless bed in the dark it gave me an enormous squeeze, and I took a last swig at the bottle for the sake of stupefaction and sleep. But I woke in the small hours, earlier than my usual rising time. Kelly Weintraub would never let me get by but would nail me. And what I felt about this more definite than general darkness and fear, like the unlighted gathered cloud that hung outside, I didn’t know.
I dressed in my yard clothes. The whisky was still working in me; I was not used to drink. In the grimness and mess of her room Mimi seemed to be very hot but normally asleep. When I went to have coffee I arranged at the drugstore to have breakfast sent up to her.
Watchfulness and care made me rocky that morning. The weather stayed black, undispersed soot sitting on the snow. Like the interior of something that should be closed. It was much more awful than sad, even to me, a native who didn’t have much else to know. Out of this middle-of-Asia darkness, as flat in humanity as the original is in space, to the yard, on business, came trucks and wagons, dying nags inquiring through the window with their grenadiers’ decorations of velvet green or red, looking at us under the brilliant bulbs making out receipts and laying the dollars in the cash drawer. The dollar bills felt snotty and smelled perfumed.
Simon kept examining me, so that I wondered whether Kelly had already reached him. But no, he was only keeping me under his severity, stout and red in the eye. And I wasn’t doing too well.
It was, however, a short day, the last of the year. We were passing out little single-snort bottles of bourbon and gin and the joint got merry and jumping, peppered with these empties on the floor. Even Simon loosened up by and by. With the scrapping of the calendar and the old twelvemonth sagging off with his scythe and Diogenes lantern, Simon was after all on a new beginning. His summer troubles were well behind him.
He said to me, “I understand you and Lucy are going formal tonight. Well, how can you put on a tux with a head of hair as wild as that? Go and see a barber. In fact, get some rest. You been balling it somewhere? Take the car and go on. Uncle Artie is coming for me. Who tired you out like that? It probably wasn’t Lucy. It must be that other snatch. Well, go—Christ, I can’t tell if you look more tired or more dumb.” Simon could only vouch for himself alone as being safe from the touched mentality of our family; when he was irritated his suspicion fell on me.
I lit out for home, wasting no time, and upstairs ran into Kayo Obermark coming out of the toilet with a wet towel for Mimi’s head. He looked badly worried; his eyes, a big enough size in themselves, a few times enlarged by his specs, and his lip stuck out anxiously. His face was dark with bristle or dirt.
“I think she’s bad,” he said.
“Bleeding?”
“I don’t know—but she’s burning up.”
To accept any help from Kayo she must, I thought, be in bad condition; and so she was, though talkative and of false alertness and sharpness—false because it didn’t correspond to the expression of her eyes. The little room was overhot and gamy, everything about it felt stale and sickly, of swampy rottenness commencing to be dangerous.
I got hold of Padilla, and he came over from his laboratory with pills for her fever, having consulted with some Physiology grad students. We waited for results, which were slow to come, and wanting not to lose my head I agreed to play rummy. He, always alert in numbers, took every game. Until I couldn’t any longer hold the cards. Toward night—I go by the hour and not by darkness, which was the same that day at six as it had been at three, faming and slow—her fever went down somewhat. Then Lucy phoned to ask me to come an hour earlier than arranged. I felt that there was trouble at that end too and said, “What’s up?”
“Nothing; only please try to be here at eight,” she said, sounding a little stifled.
It was already well past six and I was unshaved. I did the job quickly and started getting into my tuxedo, meanwhile consulting with Padilla and Kayo.
“The big risk,” said Padilla, “is if he gave her a septicemia. Suppose she has puerperal fever. That’s too dangerous to keep her here with. You have to take her to the hospital.”
Without waiting to hear more, in the boiled shirt, I crossed the hall and said to her, “Mimi, we have to try to get you in a hospital.”
“They won’t take me in anywhere.”
“We’ll make them take you.”
“Call up and ask, you’ll see.”
“We won’t call,” said Padilla. “We’ll just go.”
“What’s he doing?” she said to me. “How
many people have to be in on this?”
“Padilla is a good friend of mine, don’t worry about this now.”
“You know what they’ll do there, don’t you? They’ll try to get me to tell on the doctor. What do you think, will I keep my mouth shut?” This was a way of boasting that they could not make her squeal, even on him.
Padilla muttered, “What do you waste time with her for? Get going.”
I dressed her in hat and coat, packed a little case with nightgown, toothbrush, and comb, and Padilla and I took her down to the car covered with a blanket.