The Adventures of Augie March (Penguin Classics)

by Saul Bellow

  He said this, but actually didn’t much look, despite his rush to get down. Of course he was driving, but just the touch of manicured hands on the valuable stones on the wheel—something like jade—did the trick. The thing pretty well ran itself. I thought he was sorry about the fight we had had over Lucy and Mimi. I wasn’t angry any more but was looking ahead. Simon was heftier than before. The light raglan with its chestnut buttons came open on his hard bare belly. Also his face was larger, and rude, autocratic. The fat of it was not clear, as it is in some faces. Mrs. Klein, Jimmy’s mother, had had a fat face, almost oriental, but there the fat illuminated something. However, I found out that I couldn’t be critical of Simon when I saw him after a long interval. No matter what he had done or what he was up to now, the instant I saw him I loved him again. I couldn’t help it. It came over me. I wanted to be brothers again. And why did he come running for me if he didn’t want the same?

  Well, now he wanted to know how rugged things had been for me, and I didn’t have any intention of telling him. What was I up to in Mexico?

  “I was in love with a girl.”

  “You were, uh? And what else?”

  I didn’t say anything about the bird or my failures and lessons. Maybe I should have. He criticized me anyway in his mind for my randomness and sentiment. So what did I stand to lose by telling him the facts? However, something haughty kept me. That was how brief the first warmth of love turned out to be. So he was judging me—what of it? Let him. Wasn’t I busted down, creased, head-damaged, missing teeth, disappointed, and so forth? And couldn’t I have said, “Well, all right, Simon, here I am.” No, what I told him was that I had gone down to Mexico to work out something important.

  Then he started to talk about himself. He had built up his business and sold it at a whopping profit. Since he didn’t want to have to do with the Magnuses he had gone into other kinds of business and he was very lucky. He said, “I certainly do have the gold touch. After all, I did start in the Depression when everything was supposed to be over and done with.” Then he described how he had bought an old hospital building at auction and turned it into a tenement. Inside of six months he had cleared fifty thousand bucks on this, and then had organized a management company and run the place for the new owners. He had a large interest in a Spanish cobalt mine now. They sold the stuff in Turkey, or some place in the Middle East. He also had a potato-chip concession in several railroad stations. In fact, Einhorn himself couldn’t have dreamed up such deals, much less have made them pay off.

  “How much do you think I’m worth now?”

  “A hundred grand?”

  He smiled. “Let yourself go a little,” he said. “If I’m not a millionaire soon there’s a hitch in my arithmetic.”

  It impressed me; who wouldn’t be impressed? He couldn’t help seeing this. Nevertheless, with his autocratic blue eyes darkening, he looked at me and asked, “Augie, you don’t think you’re superior to me because you have no money, do you?”

  The question made me laugh, and maybe I laughed more than I should have. I said, “That’s a strange thing to be asking. How can I? And if I can, why should you care?” Then I said, “I guess it’s true that people fix it to come out better than those near to them. Why, sure I’d like to have money too.”

  I didn’t say that I had to have a fate good enough, and that this came first.

  My answer satisfied him. “You’re wasting a lot of time,” he said.

  “I know it.”

  “You ought to quit stalling. You’re not a boy. Even George is something, he’s a shoemaker.”

  You know, I did admire Georgie for the way he took his fate. I wished I had one that was more evident, and that I could quit this pilgrimage of mine. I didn’t feel I was better than Simon, not at all. If there had been real ease in me, he might have envied me. As it was, what was there to envy?

  Bodily overbearing, his fashionable pointed shoe on the rubber pad of the accelerator, he drove over the streets. This proud car, it had heraldry, it was royal, and wasn’t my brother like a prince of Detroit, full of force and darkness? Why, what was the matter with that, to be a power of the world of machinery? Wasn’t it good enough? And to what should you go rather? I wasn’t proud of myself, believe me, and my stubbornness about a “higher,” independent fate. I was no wizard, for sure, nor gazetted as anything illustrious, nor billed to stand up to Apollyon with his horrible scales and bear’s feet, nor slated to find the answer to all my shames like Jean-Jacques on the way to Vincennes sinking down with emotion of the conception that evil society is to blame for all that happened to warm, impulsive, loving me. There was no such first-rate thing that I could boast, and who was I, not to make up my mind and be so obstinate? The one thing I could say was that though I wanted this independent fate it wasn’t merely for my own sake I wanted it.

  Oh, but why get too earnest? Seriousness is only for a few, a gift or grace, and though all have it rough only the favorites can speak of it plain and sober.

  “So when are you going to start what you’re going to do?”

  “I wish I knew. But it seems to be one of those things you can’t rush.”

  “Well, people don’t trust you if they don’t know what you do, and you can’t blame them.”

  He pulled up before his apartment, and he left the Cadillac triple-parked in the street for the doorman to worry about. Rising up swift and soundless in the elevator, we came to the ivory white door of his flat. As he opened it he was already yelling for the maid to cook some ham and eggs right away. He took on like a king, a Francis back from the hunt; he swelled, hollered, turned things round, not so much showing me the great rooms as dominating them typically. Well, there were vast rugs and table lamps as tall as life-sized dolls or female idols, walls that were all mahogany, drawers full of underwear and shirts, sliding doors that opened on racks of shoes, on rows of coats, cases of gloves, of socks, bottles of eau de cologne, little caskets, lights lining the corners, water hissing criss-cross in the showerstall. He took a shower. I went alone into the parlor; a huge China vase was there, and in secret I got up on a chair to lift the lid and look down, where I saw the reverse white bulge of the dragons and birds. The candy dishes were full of candy—I had some coconut balls and apricot marshmallows walking around while Simon took his shower. Then we went to eat, on a handsome marble-topped round table. The chairs were red leather. The metal circle that held up the marble was worked all around with peacocks and children’s faces. The maid came from the blazing white of the kitchen with the ham and eggs and coffee. Simon’s hand with its rings went out to test the heat of the cup. He behaved like some Italian Lord Moltocurante, jealous over the quality and exacting all he had coming.

  I knew we had gone way up in the elevator but hadn’t noticed to what floor. Now, after breakfast, when I strayed into one of the enormous carpeted rooms, dark as a Pullman when it sits with drawn blinds in the station, I drew a drape aside and saw we were on the twentieth story at least. I hadn’t had a look at Chicago yet since my return. Well, here it was again, westward from this window, the gray snarled city with the hard black straps of rails, enormous industry cooking and its vapor shuddering to the air, the climb and fall of its stages in construction or demolition like mesas, and on these the different powers and sub-powers crouched and watched like sphinxes. Terrible dumbness covered it, like a judgment that would never find its word.

  Simon came looking for me. He cried, “Hey, what the hell are you doing in a dark room, for Chrissake? Come on, you’re going around with me today.”

  He wanted me to know what his life was like. And maybe he thought I’d run into something that would appeal to me, for my future’s sake. “Wait a minute though,” he said. “What kind of clown’s suit are you wearing there? You can’t go among people dressed like that.”

  “Listen, a friend of mine picked this out for me. Anyway, just feel the material. There’s nothing wrong with this suit.”

  But his face was impatient, and
he pulled the jacket from me and said, “Strip!” He dressed me in a double-breasted flannel, very elegant soft gray. It certainly was my fortune to be poor in style. From the skin out he reclothed me in swell linen and silk socks, new shoes, and called the maid to have my old suit cleaned and sent to me—it was sort of shiny on the elbows. The other stuff he ordered her to throw down the incinerator. So it plunged down into the fire. I wiped my face with the monogrammed handkerchief, now mine, and felt around with my toes in the narrow shoes, trying to accustom myself to them. To top it off he gave me fifty bucks. I made efforts to refuse this, but my tongue got in its own way. “Go! Stop mumbling,” he said. “You have to have a little something in your pocket to live up to this outfit.” He had a big gold money-clip and all the bills were new. “Now let’s go. I have things to do at my office and Charlotte wants to be picked up at five. She’s at the accountant’s, going over some of the books.” He called down for the Cadillac, and we drove away, stopping for scarcely anything in this lustrous hard shell with radio playing.

  In his office Simon wore his hat like a Member of Parliament, and while he phoned his alligator-skin shoes knocked things off the desk. He was in on a deal to buy some macaroni in Brazil and sell it in Helsinki. Then he was interested in some mining machinery from Sudbury, Ontario, that was wanted by an Indo-Chinese company. The nephew of a Cabinet member came in with a proposition about waterproof material. And after him some sharp character interested Simon in distressed yard-goods from Muncie, Indiana. He bought it. Then he sold it as lining to a manufacturer of leather jackets. All this while he carried on over the phone and cursed and bullied, but that was just style, not anger, for he laughed often.

  Then we drove to his club for lunch, arriving late. There was no service in the dining room. Simon went into the kitchen to bawl out the headwaiter. Seeing some pot roast on a platter he broke off a piece of bread and sopped the gravy, covering the meat with crumbs. The waiter hollered and Simon yelled back, furiously laughing in his face too, “Why don’t you wait on people then, you jerk!”

  Finally they fed us, and then Simon seemed to find the afternoon dragging.

  We went into the cardroom where he forced his way into a poker game. I could tell he was hated, but no one could stand up to him. He said to some bald-headed guy, “Push over, Curly!” and sat in. “This is my brother,” he said as if bidding them to look at me in the opulent gray flannel and button-down collar. I lounged just behind him in a leather chair.

  Then he would turn and describe various people to me, pretending to lower his voice. “You see that guy in the blue, the one with the cigar, Augie? He’s a lawyer but doesn’t practice, only he keeps an office so he can say he’s at the bar. He makes a living at cards. If nobody played with him he’d be on relief next week. Same with his wife. She plays in all the fancy hotels. And this other one, over there, that’s Goonie. His father owns a sausage factory and he’s a Harvard man. If I had a son like that I’d just as soon pour champagne on my dick as send him to college. The sonofabitch. I’d make him stuff wurst. He’s a bachelor. He’ll never have sons of his own, but he likes little boys, and last year he tried to pick up a sailor at the State and Lake and the kid gave him a shiner. Over there is Ruby Ruskin—he’s a good fellow. He visits his old dad down in Joliet Penitentiary at least once a month. The old man took the rap for them both in an arson case.”

  Those players who weren’t glaring or grinning appeared to be holding their breath, and I thought sure Simon would end by being clouted. Then he said, “Listen, you cruds, I want you to take a good look at my brother. He’s a radical and he just got back from Mexico. Augie, tell them how soon the revolution’s coming when they’ll get sash weights tied on their necks and be thrown in the drainage canal.”

  He took a big pot—he must have won because the rest were too rattled to play their cards—and left the table with a swagger.

  “They could drown you in a teaspoonful of water,” I said. “Why do you want to make them hate you so?”

  “Because I hate them. I want them to know it. What do I care if those jag-offs hate me? Why, they’re all lice! I despise them!”

  “Then why do you belong to their club?”

  “Why not? I enjoy being a member of a club.”

  He played the Twenty-Six girl at a bar for smokes at the green baize board, socking down the leather dice cup, and won again. Putting some Havanas in my breast pocket, he said, “Let’s visit a barbershop. You need it and I like it. God, I love barbershops!” We stopped at the Palmer House where they had those grand episcopal chairs. By the time we were finished with all the cutting, shaving, toweling, steaming, polishing, it was five o’clock, and on the run we got into the car and sped through illegal alley shortcuts out of the Loop. Charlotte was waiting in the street in her fur-trimmed suit, grimly handsome and immense. She was terribly put out at having had to wait, and right away she started, “Simon, where have you been? Do you know how late you are?”

  “Shut up!” he said. “Here’s my kid brother. You haven’t seen him for two years and can’t even say hello but have to start yacking first.”

  “How are you, Augie?” she said, more vigorous than friendly, turning her head upon her furs toward the back seat. “How did you like Mexico?”

  “Oh, very much.”

  She looked to be at the peak of fashion, and with the straight rulings of brow and mouth would have seemed attractive if it wasn’t so evident how tried in flesh and patience she was. Her devices for hiding impatience were in bad repair. Of course she observed that I was already dressed in a suit of Simon’s. Not that she’d object to a thing like that, only she didn’t miss it. When she talked to you she had a nagging, bidding way and was tough, a hard judge, and you a defendant. You had to watch what you said. But she anyhow arrived at the opinion that she wanted. In her far-trimmed suit, large and handsome, she was like an officer of the court all right, even though her lips were painted and eyes mascaraed. And me, I was like some foxy pirate, larron de mer, only I wasn’t really such a bold answerer.

  One thing that disturbed her was that without having a cent I seemed perfectly at home with many of the satisfactions that the rich enjoy. Free of charge and trouble. It wasn’t true, of course, but only another one of those appearances. However, she was particularly concerned that I didn’t at least look more anxious.

  At dinner I wanted to talk about Georgie with Simon, but he said, “Don’t make any new problems. Don’t make any new problems. He’s fine. What do you want?”

  “Why worry about your brother George when you haven’t decided what to do with your own life?” said Charlotte. “It’s very easy to turn into a bum.”

  Simon said, “Be quiet! Better a bum than your cousin Lucy’s husband and your uncle’s son-in-law. Let Augie alone. A bum is just what he doesn’t want to be. What if it takes him a little longer to settle down?”

  “You lost a tooth or two, didn’t you?” said Charlotte. “How did it happen? You look like hell—” She might have gone on but the bell rang and somebody who was admitted by the maid went down the passage into the living room. Charlotte became silent. Later I glanced in, and I saw a giant feminine figure sitting in the dark. I went to see who this Brobdingnag woman could be. Why, it was Charlotte’s mother, Mrs. Magnus, sitting beside the China jug which didn’t make her seem smaller, giant as it was. Even in the dark Mrs. Magnus’s color, beautiful and healthful, and her braided hair and calm saddle nose and her size, touched my feeling.

  “Why do you sit in the dark, Mrs. Magnus?” I said.

  “I have to,” she told me simply.

  “But why do you have to?”

  “Because my son-in-law doesn’t want to see me.”

  “But what’s the matter?” I asked Charlotte and Simon.

  Charlotte said, “Simon bawled her out about the cheap clothes she wears.”

  “Because,” said Simon, angry, “she comes here wearing nineteen-fifty dresses. A woman with half a million dollars! She
looks like the ragman’s horse.”

  Owing to me, Charlotte brought her mother in to sit at the table. We were eating cherries and drinking coffee. Charlotte laid off me, but Simon worked himself into a rage at Mrs. Magnus in her brown dress. He tried to read the paper and cut her—he hadn’t said a word when she came in—but finally he said, and I could see the devil in him now, “Well, you lousy old miser, I see you still buy your clothes off the janitor’s wife.”

  “Let her alone,” said Charlotte sharply.

  But suddenly Simon threw himself across the table, spilling the cherries and overturning coffee cups. He grabbed his mother-in-law’s dress at the collar, thrust in his hand, and tore the cloth down to the waist. She screamed. There were her giant soft breasts wrapped in the pink band. What a great astonishment it was, all of a sudden to see them! She panted and covered the top nudity with her hands and turned away. However, her cries were also cries of laughter. How she loved Simon! He knew it too.