XI-XV

CHAPTER XI



Now there's a dark Westminster of a time when a multitude of objects cannot be clear; they're too dense and there's an island rain. North Sea lightlessness, the vein of the Thames. That darkness in which resolutions have to be made--it isn't merely local; it's the same darkness that exists in the fiercest clearnesses of torrid Messina. And what about the coldness of the rain? That doesn't deheat foolishness in its residence of the human face, nor take away deception nor change defects, but this rain is an emblem of the shared condition of all. It maybe means that what is needed to mitigate the foolishness or dissolve the deception is always superabundantly about and insistently offered to us--a black offer in Charing Cross; a gray in Place Pereires where you see so many kinds and varieties of beings go to and fro in the liquid and fog; a brown in the straight unity of Wabash Avenue. With the dark, the solvent is in this way offered until the time when one thing is determined and the offers, mercies, and opportunities are finished.

The house where I was living on the South Side was a student house within range of the university chimes and chapel bell when the evenings were still, and it had a crowded medieval fullness, besides, of hosts inside the narrow walls, faces in every window, every inch occupied.

I had some student book customers and even several friends here.

In fact I really knew everybody through the circumstance that Owens, the old Welshman who operated the place, had me answering telephone calls and distributing the mail in the little varnished hole called the lobby. This I did in exchange for my rent. And as I sorted the letters I unavoidably read return addresses and postcards, and, signaling by bell to call people to the telephone, I had to hear their conversations since there was no booth. Owens too listened in, he and his spinster sister who was housekeeper; the door of their stale parlor was always open--the smell of the kitchen governed over all the other smells of the house--where I at my post in the wicker rocker two hours every evening could see their after-supper state, their square pillars of walnut, the madnesses of starched lace, the insects'-eye inspiration of cut-glass, the screwy detail of fern both fiddle-necked and expanded, the paintings of fruit, which were full of hardness against liberty, plus the wheels of blue dishes around the wainscoting. With such equipment making an arsenal of their views--I mustn't forget the big fixtures of buffalo glass hanging on three chains--they demonstrated how they were there to stay and endure. Their tenants were transient, hence the Owenses probably needed something like this to establish home for themselves, and it was made very heavy.

Clem Tambow took to visiting me. His father the old politician had died, and Clem and his brother, now a tap dancer on the Loew's circuit, had divided an insurance policy. Clem wouldn't say how much he had inherited, out of a queer personal niceness or privacy, or maybe from superstition. But he had registered at the university, in the psychology department, and was living in the neighborhood.

"What do you think of the old man leaving me money?" he said, laughing, shy of his big mouth and carious teeth--he still had the big clear whites of his eyes and his head furry at the back as when a boy; and he went on confessing the trouble of his ugliness to me, being somber about the grief of his nose, but interrupting his complaints with enormous laughs, suddenly and swiftly moving his hand to save his cigar from falling. Now that he had money he wore a row of Perfecto Queens in his coat.

"I didn't appreciate my old man enough. I was all-out for my mother. I mean out. I would be still, but now she's just plain too old.

Can't kid myself about it any more, especially since I've read a few psychology books."

Speaking of psychology, he always laughed. He said, "I'm only on campus because of the pussy." And then, a little melancholy, "I have some dough now, so I may as well harvest. I wouldn't get anywhere otherwise, with this fish mouth and my nose. Educated girls, you can appeal to their minds, and they don't expect you to spend too much on them." He couldn't consider himself a student; he was a sort of fee-paying visitor; he played poker in the law-school basement and pool at tlie Reynold's Club and went to a handbook on Fifty-third Street to bet on horses. If he attended a class he was apt to "haw-hawhaw" in the big lecture hall at Kent, the amphitheater, at any standard joke of the science, or from private fun, unpreventably.

"But," he would explain, "that dumbbell was trying to put over some behaviorist junk, that all thinking is in words and so it must take place partly in the throat, in the vocal cords--what he said was 'inhibited sub-vocalization.' So they got curious as to what happened with mutes, and got some and put dinguses on their necks and read them syllogisms. But all the stuff was escaping through the fingers, because of course they talk with their hands. Then they poured plaster casts on their hands. Well, when the guy got this far I started laughing _haw-haw! And he asked me to leave."

Clem said this with one of his convulsions of embarrassment and shyness which then was wiped out by further laughter. Haw-haw-haw! Then a big flush of delight. Then gloom again, as he recalled his troubles, his having been shortweighed as to gifts by nature. I tried to tell him that he was wrong and that he didn't need to make up for anything. It was his ramming time, and his appearance was strongly virile in spite of exaggerations, such as his mustache, the gambler's stripe of the $22.50 suits he bought on time--he had the money but he preferred to pay installments. He said, "Don't be nice to me, Augie.

You don't have to." Sometimes he took the air toward me of an uncle with a nephew of nearly the same age. He sought middie-agedness.

He had decided that he could appeal to women whose taste was for experience; a little worn, somewhat bitter, debauched uncle. And that was how he tried to play it.

"Well, what about you, Augie, what's the matter with you?" he said. "What are you slopping around here for? You've got more possibilities than you know what to do with. The trouble with you is that you're looking for a manager. Now you're in cahoots with this Mexican.

What are you postponing everything for?"

"What's everything?"

"I don't know. But you lie here in a wicker chair, taking it easy, holding a book on your chest, and letting time go by when there are a thousand things you could do."

Clem had a vast idea of what things there were to be had, which was quite natural when you consider how it wounded and stung him to believe that they were out of his reach. He meant, I know, money, admiration, women made absolutely helpless before you by love. The goods of fortune. He was disturbed by these thousand things, and, rometimes, so was I. He insisted that I should be going somewhere, east ^at I should be practicing how to go, that I should concentrate on how to be necessary, and not be backward but energetic, absolute, an so forth. And of course I had some restlessness to be taken up 203 into something greater than myself. I could not shine the star of great individuality that, by absorbed stoking, became a sun of the world over a throng to whom it glitters--whom it doesn't necessarily warm but only showers down a Plutarch radiance. Being necessary, yes, that would be fine and wonderful; but being Phoebus's boy? I couldn't even dream of it. I never tried to exceed my constitution. In any case, when someone like Clem urged me and praised me, I didn't listen closely.

I had my own counseling system. It wasn't infallible, but it made mistakes such as I could bear.

Clem wasn't fooling with me on this great topic, but it wasn't his main purpose to talk to me when he came to the house. He wasn't there to hop me up or tell me news about Jimmy Klein, who was already married, and the father of a child, and working in a department store; or about his brother's trying to get on Broadway big-time. He came because he was after a girl named Mimi Villars who lived in the house.

Mimi wasn't a student; she waited on tables in a student hash-house on Ellis Avenue. I had noted her with appreciation, maybe the more fit to judge because I had no thought of making her myself. She was very fair and ruddy, of a push-faced tough beauty, long brows continued in very thin pencil slightly upward, like the lash of the euglena, away from their natural line toward tight blond ears that had to be looked for amid her curls, and a large mouth, speaking for a soul of wild appetite, nothing barred; she'd say anything, and had no idea of what could hinder her. Her hips were long and narrow, her bust was large, and she wore close-fitting skirts and sweaters and high heels that gave a tight arch of impatience to the muscles of her calves; her step was small and pretty and her laughter violent, total, and critical.

She didn't much remind me of Willa from the Symington, also a waitress. Willa, whom I preferred personally, this country girl--I think I could have been perfectly happy with Willa and lived all my life in a country town if the chance had ever presented itself. Or, anyhow, I sometimes tell myself that.

Mimi came from Los Angeles. Her father had been an actor in the silent movies. She'd speak of him when she wanted to say how she hated Englishmen. Originally she came to Chicago to study, but she was expelled from the university for going past the bounds of necking at Greene Hall, in the lounge. She was a natural for being bounced.

You wouldn't doubt that she was capable of the offense, if it was one, and as for the penalty, it was a favorite subject of her ferocious humor.

I knew that Clem didn't stand a chance with her. The cause of her strong color was not sheer health or self-excitement: love also con204 tributed to it. By a coincidence her lover was one of the customers Padilla had passed on to me, a man named Hooker Frazer who was a graduate assistant in Political Science. He was hard to deal with, for he ordered rare and out-of-print books. Two volumes of Nietzsche's Will to Power I had a hell of a time swiping, for they were in a closed case at the Economy Book Store; I also got him Hegel's Philosophy of Right, as well as the last volumes of Capital from the Communist bookshop on Division Street, Herzen's Autobiography, and some de Tocqueville.

He bargained keenly, just as he spoke keenly, with unusual concision, and he was a man the university ought to have been pleased about, with his tall, free look of intelligence early crow-footed from the practice of consideration, a young Calhoun or statesman already, with clear blue spaces indicative of rigorous consistency and an untimely wrinkle, like the writing of a seismograph. He was not one of those tall men of whom you think that they must come in sections of different mechanical principle, but was not awkward although his posture was loose. The fact that he lived in Burton Court, so much like a new Christ Church or Magdalen, and in a don's state, that learned bachelorhood, itself fetched me. It didn't Padilla, with his stiff nose of Gizeh's mummy and livid eye-patches, his narrow vault of shoulders and back, and his hard, sharp step on the getting-to-bevenerable stones. Manny came from a high mountain slum and had a cultureless disposition. He didn't go in for the Old World much.

But Hooker Frazer was Mimi Villars' man, and, seeing them together on the stairs of Owens' house, I admired them, both made so well, she hard and spirited, editing her words for no one, and he so distinct-looking he might have been lineally direct from Cro-Magnon man--but of course with present-day differences, including the disorders.

He had a temper that didn't go with the rest of him, with his composure and even toploftiness. His teeth were often set hard, and his straight nose ended in a nervous fancifulness that must have originated in character rather than inheritance. But even Padilla, who didn't like him much, said he was muy hombre, a considerable man. Padilla was, however, down on him for his condescension to us; to me more than to him, for Frazer was aware that Padilla was a genius at mathematical physics. But he called us both "mister," as though he were a West Pointer, and treated us like amusing thieves. As if he wasn't a receiver of stolen goods himself. He'd say, "Mr. March, will you take a trip downtown and expropriate from the expropriators a good copy of the c.sprh des Lois? The other day I noticed one at the Argus " I'd laugh io\1^ at his mixture of pompousness and revolutionist's jargon and his amended Tennessee accent. At first he seemed to consider me an agreeable nitwit and joshed me about my color. "Anybody would say that you spent your days in the cow pasture, Mr. March, from your rosiness, instead of breathing the air of bookshops." Later he was more grave with me and offered me old copies of Communist and Trotskyist papers and magazines--he had them in stacks, sheaves, and bundles in his room, in various languages; he received all kinds of journals and bulletins. He even invited me once to hear him lecture, but that may have been because I was his cheap source of supply; I extended him credit, and he wanted to stay on good terms with me.

Padilla threw fits when he heard that I gave him books on the cuff; I thought he would haul off and punch me with his skinny, longfingered fist; he screamed at me, "Bobo!" and "you gringo dummy!"

And I said I'd stop Frazer's credit at twenty-five dollars. It was a lie to calm him; he was already into me for nearer to forty. "Shit! I wouldn't give him a penny. This is just the way he shows he's better than you," Manny said. But I wasn't affected. Probably I too much enjoyed delivering a few books to Frazer for the chance of spending half an hour in the atmosphere of his rooms and hearing him talk.

Often I stole two copies of what he ordered, from curiosity, to read one myself, and thus had some dull and difficult afternoons.

I never blamed myself for throwing aside such things as didn't let themselves be read with fervor, for they left nothing with me anyhow, and I took my cue from Padilla not to vex myself about what didn't come easy. After all, I wasn't yet in any special business, but merely trying various things on.

But I had to tell Clem that he wouldn't get anywhere with Mimi Villars.

"Why," he said, "because I'm so homely? I figure her for the kind that doesn't care about looks. She's a hot girl."

"Your looks have nothing to do with it. She has a man already."

"What, and you think she'll never have another one? That's how much you know."

So he backed his belief about her stubbornly, and came to sit with me, washed and fresh-shaved, long black shoes gleaming, and acted with his depressed gallantry, practicing it even on me, lacking only laces and swords to be a follower of decayed Stuarts in exile--his heavy drama of boredom. Only his unlicked electric fur of boyish back-hair and the soft glossiness of his eye whites and his haw-haw! told a different story about him. I was glad of his company. But of course I couldn't tell him all I knew about Mimi. It wasn't only that I read nostcards and couldn't help listening to telephone conversations; it "as that Mirnii didn't care about secrecy. She led a proclaimed life, and once she got talking she held back nothing. Frazer would occasionally send her a card breaking a date, and she would go into a temper, flinging it away, and say to me furiously, tearing open the clasp of her purse, "Sell me a slug"; and to him on the phone she'd saw "You yellow bastard, can't you call me and tell me why you won't come? Don't give me any of that old crap about working on your thesis! What were you doing on Fifty-seventh Street the other night with those fat goofs when you were supposed to be working on it? Who are they? One of them was an English fairy, I could spot him a mile away. Don't tell me I don't understand. I'm tired of your bullshit, you preacher!"

In her breathers, I could hear his voice going on measuredly as I sprawled and listened in the rocker. And then Owens' beefy wrist would come out to fetch the door and slam it. He didn't care what tenants did in their rooms, but he didn't like her swearing to reach his parlor--he was sitting in there on his leather, crunching like dry snow; his main sounds were, at close range, breathing, and, at a distance, turning his weight. "You'll never live to hear me beg for anything," were Mimi's last words to Frazer, and when she slammed phone and hook together with cruelty it was as a musician might shut the piano after he had finished storming chords of mightiest difficulty without a single flinch or error.

To rip off a piece of lover's temper was pleasure in her deepest vein of enjoyment. She said to me then, "If that bastard calls back, tell him I ran out of the house swearing." However, she would be waiting for his next call.

What made me sure, though, that she would have no interest in Clem, at least for the time being, was that lately Frazer had been phoning with regularity, and she took her time about descending when I buzzed her. He, knowing it was I that answered the phone, said, 'Can't you get her to make it a little faster, Mr. March?" To which I said, "I can try, but I'm not King Canute, you know," and let the big club of the receiver hang from the cord.

What do you want?" were her first words when she laid her burning cigarette on the instrument box. "I can't talk to you. I'm stymied. If you want to find out how I am you can come over in person and ask."

And then in her joyful, reckless way of welcoming her anger, "All right, you don't care, I don't care either. No, I haven't come around yet, ut don't worry, you won't have to marry me. I wouldn't marry a man and his amended Tennessee accent. At first he seemed to consider me an agreeable nitwit and joshed me about my color. "Anybody would say that you spent your days in the cow pasture, Mr. March, from your rosiness, instead of breathing the air of bookshops." Later he was more grave with me and offered me old copies of Communist and Trotskyist papers and magazines--he had them in stacks, sheaves, and bundles in his room, in various languages; he received all kinds of journals and bulletins. He even invited me once to hear him lecture, but that may have been because I was his cheap source of supply; I extended him credit, and he wanted to stay on good terms with me.

Padilla threw fits when he heard that I gave him books on the cuff; I thought he would haul off and punch me with his skinny, longfingered fist; he screamed at me, "Bobo!" and "you gringo dummy!"

And I said I'd stop Frazer's credit at twenty-five dollars. It was a lie to calm him; he was already into me for nearer to forty. "Shit! I wouldn't give him a penny. This is just the way he shows he's better than you," Manny said. But I wasn't affected. Probably I too much enjoyed delivering a few books to Frazer for the chance of spending half an hour in the atmosphere of his rooms and hearing him talk.

Often I stole two copies of what he ordered, from curiosity, to read one myself, and thus had some dull and difficult afternoons.

I never blamed myself for throwing aside such things as didn't let themselves be read with fervor, for they left nothing with me anyhow, and I took my cue from Padilla not to vex myself about what didn't come easy. After all, I wasn't yet in any special business, but merely trying various things on.

But I had to tell Clem that he wouldn't get anywhere with Mimi Villars.

"Why," he said, "because I'm so homely? I figure her for the kind that doesn't care about looks. She's a hot girl."

"Your looks have nothing to do with it. She has a man already."

"What, and you think she'll never have another one? That's how much you know."

So he backed his belief about her stubbornly, and came to sit with me, washed and fresh-shaved, long black shoes gleaming, and acted with his depressed gallantry, practicing it even on me, lacking only laces and swords to be a follower of decayed Stuarts in exile--his heavy drama of boredom. Only his unlicked electric fur of boyish back-hair and the soft glossiness of his eye whites and his haw-haw! told a different story about him. I was glad of his company. But of course I couldn't tell him all I knew about Mimi. It wasn't only that I read nostcards and couldn't help listening to telephone conversations; it "as that Mimi. didn't care about secrecy. She led a proclaimed life, and once she got talking she held back nothing. Frazer would occasionally send her a card breaking a date, and she would go into a temper, flinging it away, and say to me furiously, tearing open the clasp of her purse, "Sell me a slug"; and to him on the phone she'd say "You yellow bastard, can't you call me and tell me why you won't come? Don't give me any of that old crap about working on your thesis! What were you doing on Fifty-seventh Street the other night with those fat goofs when you were supposed to be working on it? Who are they? One of them was an English fairy, I could spot him a mile away. Don't tell me I don't understand. I'm tired of your bullshit, you preacher!"

In her breathers, I could hear his voice going on measuredly as I sprawled and listened in the rocker. And then Owens' beefy wrist would come out to fetch the door and slam it. He didn't care what tenants did in their rooms, but he didn't like her swearing to reach his parlor--he was sitting in there on his leather, crunching like dry snow; his main sounds were, at close range, breathing, and, at a distance, turning his weight. "You'll never live to hear me beg for anything," were Mimi's last words to Frazer, and when she slammed phone and hook together with cruelty it was as a musician might shut the piano after he had finished storming chords of mightiest difficulty without a single flinch or error.

To rip off a piece of lover's temper was pleasure in her deepest vein of enjoyment. She said to me then, "If that bastard calls back, tell him I ran out of the house swearing." However, she would be waiting for his next call.

What made me sure, though, that she would have no interest in Clem, at least for the time being, was that lately Frazer had been phoning with regularity, and she took her time about descending when I buzzed her. He, knowing it was I that answered the phone, said, '

'Can't you get her to make it a little faster, Mr. March?" To which I said, "I can try, but I'm not King Canute, you know," and let the big club of the receiver hang from the cord.

What do you want?" were her first words when she laid her burning cigarette on the instrument box. "I can't talk to you. I'm stymied. If you want to find out how I am you can come over in person and ask."

And then in her joyful, reckless way of welcoming her anger, "All right, you don't care, I don't care either. No, I haven't come around yet, "t don't worry, you won't have to marry me. I wouldn't marry a man who doesn't know what love is. You don't want a wife, you want a looking glass. What! What do you mean, money! You still owe me forty-seven dollars. That's okay. I don't care what it was spent for.

If I'm up the stump I'll take care of it myself. Sure you owe everybody. Don't give me that kind of stuff. Tell it to your wife. She seems to swallow everything."

Frazer was not yet divorced from his first wife, from whom Mimi, in her version of it, had rescued him. "Do you remember a picture called The Island of Dr. Moreau? This mad scientist made men and women out of animals? And they called the laboratory 'The House of Pain'? Well, with his wife he was living like one of those animals," she once told me, speaking of how she had first found him. "This girl had a flat--you wouldn't believe a man like Hooker could live in it; no matter what I think of his personality, he's intelligent, he has ideas; when he was a Communist he was chosen to go study at the Lenin Institute, where they train national leaders like Cachin and Mao; he didn't make it because he was expelled over the German question.

Well, in this flat there were chenille rugs in the toilet so you felt you were doing wrong, going in your shoes. A man can't do anything while putting up with that. Women really are no good, Augie," she declared with her characteristic and favorite humorous rage. "They're no f-- good. They want a man in the house. Just there, in the house.

Sitting in his chair. They pretend to take what he thinks and says seriously. Is it about government? Is it about astronomy? So they play along and make believe they care about parties and stars. They baby men, and they don't care what game they play, just so there's i im a man in the house. If the husband is a Socialist, she's a Socialist, I! hotter than he, and if he changes into a Technocrat she beats him to it --she makes him think so. All she really cares about is to have a man in the house and doesn't give a hoot in hell what she says she is. And m it isn't even hypocritical, it's deeper than that. It's having the man." a With things like this--and it was one of many--Mimi tried to pierce you through. Sufficiently said, I suppose, the thing was true for her. | She believed in words, in speaking, and if she convinced you, then she ^ herself could believe what her inspiration told her. And when it came | to speaking, she had borrowed some from Frazer--that private forensic method that didn't always seem quite right in personal conversation: he with his long knees spread and elbows resting on them, hands clasped, perfect earnestness of eyes, and, as a further warrant of plain talk, the straight white middle part of his sandy hair. Mimi followed his manner as much as she might, and she had more knottedness in her and passion, and the speed you can get from narrow gauge and high compression.

She was, as Einhorn had rightly said that I was, in opposition; only she named names and wrongs, and was an attacker where I had other ways, temperamentally, and she didn't persuade me. I didn't believe she was right because emphatic. "Well," she said, "if you don't agree with me, why are you quiet? Why don't you say what you think instead of turning down what I say by grinning? You try to look more simple than you are, and it isn't honest. But if you know better, come on and speak up."

"No," I said, "I don't know. But I don't like low opinions, and when you speak them out it commits you and you become a slave of them.

Talk will lead people on until they convince their minds of things they can't feel true."

She took this as a harder criticism of her than I had meant it to be, and answered me nastily with a kind of cat's electric friction and meanness of her face.

"Why, you're a lousy bohehead! If you don't even know how to be indignant--why, 'Christ, even a cow gets indignant! And what do you mean, low! You want to have high opinions of garbage? What do you want to become, a sewage plant? Hell, I say no! If a thing is bad it's bad, and if you don't hate it you kiss it on the sly."

She shot it off in my face that I wasn't mad enough about abominations or aware enough of them, didn't know how many graves were underneath my feet, was lacking in disgust, wasn't hard enough against horrors or wrathful about swindles. The worst of which swindles was in getting terrible payment for what should be a loving exchange of bodies and the foundation of all the true things of life. The women to blame for this were far worse than whores. And I guess that she exploded against me in this conversation because I wasn't enough of an enemy of such things but smiled at such ruining wives^ too for their female softnesses. I was too indulgent about them, about the beds that would be first stale and then poisonous because their manageresses' thoughts were on the conquering power of chenille and dimity and the suffocation of light by curtains, and the bourgeois ambering of adventuring man in parlor upholstery. These things not appearing so threatening to me as they ought to appear, I was, on this topic any"ow, a fool to her, one who also could be stuck, leg-bent, in that white spiders' secretion and paralyzed inside women's edifices of safety. She had torn Frazer out of that. He was worth saving.

And here I could see what a value she set on the intelligence of men.

If they didn't breathe the most difficult air of effort and nobility, then she wished for them the commonplace death in the gas cloud of settled existence, office bondage, quiet-store-festering, unrecognized despair of marriage without hope, or the commonness of resentment that grows unknown boils in one's heart or bulbs of snarling flowers. She had a high, absolute standard, and she preferred people to miss it from suffering, vice, being criminal or perverted, or of loony impulse. I learned about her when I knew her better that she was a thief too; she stole her clothes from department stores, stole a good deal, since she liked to dress well, and had even been arrested but got off on suspended sentence.

Her method was to put on layers of dresses in the fitting booths, also underpants and slips; and the way she had gotten out of the rap was to convince the court psychiatrist that she had money and could pay but was afflicted with kleptomania. She was proud of this and urged me to do the same should I be caught--she knew of course that I was lifting books. There was another thing of which she was not so proud.

About a year before, late one night as she was passing an alley on Kimbark Avenue, a stickup man had tried to take her pocketbook, and she had kicked him in the groin, snatched the gun when he dropped it, and shot him through the thigh. It made her wretched to remember this, and when she talked about it her hands became nervous and worked inward at her waist--which was small: she drew notice to its smallness by wearing broad belts--and her color got rough enough to be a symptom of scarlatina. She tried to get into Bridewell Hospital to see him, and wasn't allowed.

"The poor guy," she said, and this was remorse over her savage speed and rashness as well as pity for this boy, haunting the mouth of an alley with that toy of swift decisions For the robbery money can shrink mighty small; and you can soon handle the satisfaction out of it, but having someone do precisely what you say is a thing of a different order. And a woman too. She didn't interpret this as cowardice of the assailant but as special mark of crude love appeal, that a citytutored rough child struggled for his instinct and was less cared about, providentially speaking, than the animal in the woods who was at least in the keeping of nature. Well, she had to go to court and testify, to explain why she had shot him. She didn't, however, want to bring charges, and she tried to speak a piece to the judge and was prevented.

So the boy was given five years for armed robbery, and now she sent him packages and letters. Not because she feared harm from him when he got out, but out of remorse.

This time she wasn't up the stump, as she spoke of it. Eventually he was able to give Frazer better news. But she made him wait for it.

She wanted him to worry, or to give him practice in learning to worry about her and not about himself. She was not easy toward him. She knew it was unequal, that she loved him more than he could her or anyone. But neither was love his calling, as it was hers. And she was very severe and exalted about this. She too could have lived in desert wilderness for the sake of it, and have eaten locusts.

The thing I began to learn from her was of the utmost importance; namely, that everyone sees to it his fate is shared. Or tries to see to it.

You may say that I should have known this before. I should have, and in a way I did, or else Grandma Lausch or Einhom or the Renlings would have had more success with me. But it was never so clear in anyone as in Mimi Villars, whose actual body was her recruiting place and who more conspicuously issued her own warrant, license, diploma, asserting what she was, and she had no usual place of legitimate activity, like a store, office, or family, or membership anywhere, but banked all on her clinching will, her hard reason, and her obstinate voice. I think she must have recognized--and how could it fail to give her sharp pain?--the contradiction of harsh persuasion to such a love belief as hers. But the thick rind of world-organized resistance made that inevitable. Well, that too was a fate to be shared and another underlying bitterness.

By the end of summer we were already close friends and under suspicion by Tambow of being more. But there was nothing to that except his envious although not grudging imagination, backed by such slight apparent proof as that she came into my room in her petticoat.

This was only because we lived on the same floor. She went into Kayo Obennark's the same way--we had the attic between the three of us; it just was proximity; even if provocation was never far away it came simply from unremitting practice, like that of the fiddler who has a rubber ball in the pocket of his great alpacuna as he rides the train to a concert and is never far from, for him, the greatest thing, along the accidentals and slides of landscape and steel rail. No, she came to borrow a cigarette or to use the closet where she kept the overflow of her dresses. Or to talk.

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 ec Iie 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 glasscutters 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 goddamnedest 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-theeyes 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 dreams ing 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 doublebreasted 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 place myself. It won't take long. No, it hasn't been so hard," he aid 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 qualitv eray 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 fi so it was spoken of in a kind of fun and terrible persiflage. Simon ^d 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 lae 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 insids-out as to who had paid the price that it had to be taken as "sing, and she hurried and came down from a romantic, senti215 mental 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 selfpresentation, 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 nieces; he was boisterous, capacious, 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 slowwitted 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 " .217 mental 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 selfpresentation, 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, be 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 nieces; 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 slowwitted 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 ", .217 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 k 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 ri'dn't play whist. Simon could play pinochle. (Where had he learned?

Well where, for that matter, had all his new accomplishments come from'9) "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 voun" 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.

More relatives came; the vast apartment filled. It was family custom on Friday night, and, moreover, the word was out that Charlotte was engaged. People wanted to see Simon. He already knew most of them, the giant uncles and heavy-pelted aunts in their Siberian furs who came up from their Cadillacs and Packards: Uncle Charlie Magnus who owned the coal yards; Uncle Artie who owned a big mattress factory; Uncle Robby who was a commission merchant in South Water Street, ponderous, white, and caracul-haired--like Stiva Lausch--and with a hearing-aid plugged-in. There were sons in uniform, from military academy, and others with football letters, and daughters, and little children. Simon was ready for the uncles and aunts, very familiar and even already overbearing to some. He had a natural hang of their whole system of fellowship and contempt--how not to be caught under any circumstances in a position where to be looked down on was unavoidable, so that you could read in a back, bearishly turned, that you were a schmuck.

I have to say that Simon's confidence was superb, and it was he who was getting them under, though he was deferential with a few of the women. Toward these, heartiness or brazening wasn't indicated, but what was necessary was to prove that in addition to everything he was also a lover. I must say also that he had no embarrassment because of "so; he assumed my complicity and was teaching and leading me. So I followed him around, because there was nobody else for me to stand close to comfortably. It lacked white stockings and fans to resemble the Ulrectorate--I'm thinking of commoners suddenly in the palaces of power. But the Magnuses seemed less to know what to do. However, in all the world there was no one who had more than they of anything ex- "pt money--a gap that could perhaps be closed.

Over this tumultuousness and family heat, melding yells at the pnochle table, the racing of the kids, pitchers of cocoa and tea and 'asses of ^ffee cake carried in, political booming and the sharper neighing of women and all this grand vital discord, there was the supervision of Uncle Charlie standing, or rather rearing, beside his wigged mother in her black dress. If it strikes me as advisable to add "rearing" it is because of the tightness of his belly and the great weight supported by his feet, and possibly also because the old woman wore a collar of things in gold shaped like grizzly-teeth, and that reminds me of creatures.

He was white, thick, and peevish, and had the kind of insolence that sometimes affects the eyes like snowblindness, making you think there's something arctic about having a million bucks. At least an immigrant who during the Depression was a millionaire had this dazzle.

Not that Uncle Charlie was formidable in all respects; I'm taking him at a posed moment, during a family occasion, a niece to be married off and new kin to be added.

Through Simon I had got to be a candidate too. If he worked out well then I might also be considered as a husband, for there wasn't any lack of daughters to marry, some of them pretty and all with money.

So far Simon had had nothing but successes. For several weeks he had been working under Uncle Charlie's eye, first as weighmaster and cashier and then learning to buy, meeting brokers and salesmen and learning about freight rates and the different coal fields. Uncle Charlie certified that he was fehig, or apt, a naturally good businesshead, and all were very pleased. Simon was already looking for a yard of his own, hoping to find one with an overhead track that would reduce unloading costs. In short. Uncle Charlie was extremely indulgent with him as an up-and-comer, and he received all the marks of the old boy's favor, the simple cordial obscenities and hand on the shoulder; he wagged his head near Simon's face and opened up all bounties. His humor made everybody laugh with pleasure. Nobody thought to remonstrate about children and young girls when Uncle Charlie said, "Sonofabitch, you're fo-kay, my boy, fo-kay. You got the goods. I think you can put it down between the sheets too, eh?" because this was just his usual manner of speaking.

"What do you think?" said Simon. "Leave it to me."

"Yes, I think .1 leave it to you. You think I'm goin' to take it myself?

Wouldn't be fun for Charlotte. Look how she's built. Nothing was left out. She has to have a young husk."

Here I came in for my share of the notice. Kelly Weintraub, one of the distant cousins by marriage and a trucker who worked for Uncle Robby, said, "Look at his brother. The girls are popping their eyes out at him. Your daughter Lucy the worst. You got no shame, kid?

In this family the girls can't hardly wait."

There were shrieks about this. Through them Lucy Magnus continued to smile at me though her color deeply changed. She was slighter than most of her family; she wasn't shy to make a declaration of honest pnsuality under the scrutiny of the whole clan. None of the Magnuses took the trouble to conceal such things; it wasn't necessary. The young nnes could tell their parents exactly what they wanted, which I found admirable. I could look at Lucy with pleasure too. She was plain but had a healthy face, very clear skin, and pretty breasts that she swung where she pleased. Only her nose might have been finer; it was a little broad, as was her mouth, but her black eyes were strong and declarative and her hair black and delicate. It made me think of her maiden hair and there were suggestions I didn't try at all to evade. But these were lover's not husbandly thoughts. I had no special mind to get married.

I saw Simon's difficulties too clearly for that.

"Come here," said her father to me, and I had to stand close inspection.

"What do you do?" he said, winking with the full snowblindness.

Simon answered for me, "He's in the book business. Until he saves enough to go back to the university and finish his degree."

"Shut up!" he said. "C--sucker! I asked him, not you, budinski!

What do you do?"

B I said, "I'm in the book business, as Simon told you." I thought the old man must be able to pierce by strength of suspicion my crockery, all the oddity of Owens' house and my friends there. What a book business could signify to him but starving Pentateuch peddlers with beards full of Polish lice and feet wrapped in sacking, I couldn't fathom.

"Goddammit the schools. There's schoolboys now until gray hair.

So what are you studying for, a lawyer? Fo-kay! I guess we got to have them, the crooks. My sons don't go to school. My daughters go, so long it keeps them out of trouble."

"Augie was thinking of going to law school," Simon said to Lucy's mother.

"Yes, that's right," I too said.

"Fine, fine, fine, fine," said Uncle Charlie, my hearing done and his face of thick white hide turned in dismissal from us all; he threatened with his mtensest care his daughter Lucy, who answered him with one o1 her smiles. I saw that she promised him obedience and he promised "ack the satisfaction of all legitimate needs as long as she obeyed "irn.

, e was another special glance on me, that of my sister-in-law arlotte, with her investigative, warm, and to some extent despairing yss. I don't doubt that she already knew some displeasing things about Simon, and perhaps she was trying to see them in me also. I presume she was thinking what risks her cousin Lucy ran with me.

Meanwhile Kelly Weintraub was saying, "He has a pair of bedroom eyes, Augie." But I was the only one of the principals to hear and I took a good look at him to see how much harm he really meant me and to what extent he was kidding, the handsome teameo, slick-haired, with certainly horny eyes of his own and a suggestive pad of a chin.

"I know you guys," he said to me.

Then I recognized him, not greatly different, really, from what he had been in the schoolyard, in his sweaters.

"You had a little brother, George."

"We still have him. He's not little any more," I said. "He's big and he's living downstate."

"Where, in Manteno?"

"No, it's in another town, a little place down near Pinckneyville.

You know that part of the state?" I didn't know it myself. Simon was the only one of us who had ever gone down there, the Renlings having been unable at that time to spare me.

"No, I don't. But I remember George," he said.

"I remember you too, skitching rides on the ice wagons." I shrugged, smiling. It was foolish of him to be suggesting a menace. He thought he could put a stick in Simon's spokes; Simon was way ahead of him.

"Of course Charlotte knows," said Simon when I told him about Kelly Weintraub. "Why should we make a secret of it? She even wants to put George into a private institution. Don't worry, nobody pays any attention to this guy. He doesn't count around here. Anyhow, I recognized him first and got the jump on him. Leave it to me, I have them all eating out of my hand." He added, "You'll be doing the same if you'll listen to me. You made a good first impression."

I quickly learned what power he really had with them. For he had absolutely meant it when he said he had plans for me, and he came for me several times a week to take me on his rounds. We had lunch with uncles and cousins in the rich businessmen's restaurants and clubs, fancy steakhouses. Simon was hard with them and didn't yield ground whether it was a joke or an argument that came up, while in an undertone he gave me the lowdown on them, contemptuously. I saw him developing some terrible abilities in quarrelsomeness; he differed with all their opinions no matter on what subject. It might be about tailors, or entertainers, or heavyweight fighters, or politics--things on which he informed himself as he went along. He was impatient even in his jokes; he made waiters fear him, sending dishes back to the kitchen, ,. ^gn he gave large tips also. He seemed to have no regard for money _Lg always carried a big bankroll now--but actually, by the way he handled wallet and the bills, he convinced me that he knew what he was doing.

He said to me, "With these people you've got to spend. If they see you cautious with a buck, you lose your standing with them. And I have to stand in good. They know everybody, and I'm going out for myself soon and I need them. Just these bull-session lunches and going to the Chez Paree and the Glass Derby, proving I can keep up their speed, you see, that's the first thing. They're not going to deal with anybody that's not one of them. Now you understand why a slob like Kelly Weintraub doesn't count. He can't afford to eat lunch in joints like these, he can't take a check at the Chez Paree without everybody being uncomfortable and reckoning he can't afford it, because they know exactly what he's pulling down a week. You see, he's a negligible factor and nobody will listen to him. I'll remember him though," he said with dangerous promise. I knew he kept a file of accounts to settle. Did Cissy and Five Properties have a folder in it to themselves? I thought they must.

"Ah!" he said. "Come downtown with me. Let's get our hair cut."

We drove to the Palmer House and went below into the big radiance of the barbershop. Simon would have let his fine English coat fall to the ground if the Negro attendant hadn't run in time to gather it in his arms.

We sat before the huge mirrors in those episcopal machines, the big chairs, and were groomed and shampooed. Simon had himself steamed and singed, manicured, had everything lavished on himself, and not simply urged me but forced me to do as he did. He wanted to try all they knew how to do.

It was getting so that I had to undergo an examination of almost brass-hat severity when I appeared before him. My heels must not be turned over by so much as an eighth of an inch, my cuffs had to strike my shoes right, he supplied me with ties, taking mine away and leaving a dozen of his own choice on the rack. He yelled and bullied if he thought I didn't wear my clothes exactly as he thought I should. And these were things I had lost interest in since Evanston. I had to expect ridicule from Mimi for having polished nails. I let it be done. I didn't consider my fingers much. It was probably an asset to me as a book tlef- Looking at my hands and at my ties, who would suspect me? For hadn't, of course, stopped stealing. I didn't any longer have to support '"

"a; Simon took care of that. But while he paid for me wherever e went, it was still expensive to go with him. Occasionally there were tips or drinks or cigars or corsages for Charlotte that slipped his mind, and I had larger cleaning and laundry bills than ever before. Once in a while I went, moreover, with Padilla for a Saturday night with our friends on Lake Park Avenue. And besides, I was trying to get together the university entrance fee. Shrewdly, Simon gave me little money; mostly he gave me things. He wanted me to learn to have expensive needs, and the desire for dough would come of itself. Then if I were to begin to ask him for more, he could hook me.

From the barbershop we'd go to Field's to buy him a dozen or so shirts, imported Italian underclothes or slacks or shoes, all things of which he already had a surplus; he showed me drawers, closets, shelves full, and still kept buying. Some part of this was due to his having been on the wrong side of the counter, or the servile back on the shoefitting stool, and in part this was his way of tempting me. put also I knew that in the barbershop and on the shopping trips he was aiming to refresh himself; he slept badly and was looking flabby and ill, and one morning when he came to fetch me he locked himself in the toilet and cried. After that day he wouldn't come upstairs; he honked his horn for me in the street. He said, "I can't stand the joint you live in; they don't keep it clean. Are you sure they don't have bed animals? And the can is filthy. I don't see how you can go into it." Soon he took to saying this with the same inspection glare he had for my appearance.

"When are you going to move out of this rat nest! Jesus, it's the sort of place plagues and epidemics start in!" Eventually he stopped calling J for me. He'd phone when he wanted me; sometimes he'd send wires. I At first, however, he wanted me with him constantly. So, then, we were in the gleaming lanes and warm indoor puffing of the department store, but after when he started back to the West Side, wearing one of his new ties and temporarily in a better state, suddenly he would lose it all, it seemed, and, pressing on the gas pedal, he must have seen himself * speeding across the last boundary of his strength. But just as the car, squealing around corners, righted itself, he too kept balance. However, it was evident that his feelings were suicidal from the way he drove and the way he leaped forward in arguments; hit him who would; he kept a tire tool under the driver's seat for his weapon in traffic arguments, and he cursed everybody in the street, running through lights and scattering pedestrians. The truth back of all this was that he had his pockets full of money as an advance on his promised ability to make a rich man of himself and now had to deliver.



In spring he leased a yard, at the end of the coal season. It had no overhead track, only a long spur of siding, and the first rains made a marsh of the whole place. It had to be drained. The first coal was unloaded in the wet. The office itself was a shack; the scale needed exnensive repairs. His first few thousand dollars ran out and he had to ask for more; he had a credit to establish with the brokers, and it was important that he meet his bills on time. Uncle Charlie made that easier. Nevertheless, there was Uncle Charlie himself to satisfy.

There was, besides, a substantial wage to pay his yard manager and weighmaster. Happy Kellerman, whom he had lured away from a large old'West Side company. He'd have hired me instead (at perhaps a little less) if I'd been able to handle the job, and he insisted on my coming to learn the ropes from Happy, so that presently I was spending a good amount of time at the office; for when he grabbed my wrist and told me, almost drunkenly, with the grime and chapping of the mouth that comes of long nervous talking, saying low, huskily, viciously, "There's got to be somebody here I can trust. Got to be!" I couldn't refuse. However, there was not much that Happy could be dishonest about. He was a beer saufer, droopy, small, a humorist, wry, drawn, weak, his tone nosy and quinchy, his pants in creases under his paunch; his nose curved up and presented offended and timorous nostrils, and he had round, disingenuous eyes in which he showed he was strongly defended.

He was a tio listo, a carnival type, a whorehouse visitor. His style was that of a hoofer in the lowest circuit, doing a little cane-swinging and heel-and-toe routine, singing, "I went to school with Maggie Murphy," and telling smokehouse stories while the goofy audience waited for the naked star to come out and begin the grinds. He had a repertory of harmless little jokes, dog yipes, mock farts; his best prank was to come up behind and seize you by the leg with a Pekinese snarl. By Simon's wish I had to spend afternoons with him studying the business.

Especially since I had heard him weeping in the can Simon wasn't easy for me to turn down.

Often I relieved Happy at lunch. He hopped a car down to Halsted Street because he detested walking. Coming back at two, he would shuffle off at the stop by the driveway, carrying his coat and straw skimmer, vest stuffed with cigarettes, pencils, and cards--he had his own business card: "Happy Kellerman representing March's Coal and Coke": a rooster chasing a frantic hen, with the line beneath, "/ mean business." Walking in, he tested the beam of the scale, put the Times in the stove, walked around the yard, and then, these being the dog days, great heat, we would sit where the coolness rose from the concrete pit of the scale. The office had the appearance of a squatter's s ack or end house of a Western street. Over the way was a stockyards H* 225 siding, dusty animals bawling in the waiting cars, putting red muzzles to the slats; truck wheels sucked through the melting tar, the coal split and tarnished on the piles, the burdocks died on the stalk. There were rats in a corner of the yard who did not stir or go away for anyone, whole families, nursing, creeping, feeding there. I had never seen them so domestic, going whither they list, walking by your feet without fear.

Simon bought a pistol--"We need one anyhow," he said--and shot at them, but they only scattered to come back. They didn't even bother to dig holes, only scooped out shallow nesting places.

There were a few sales. Happy entered them on the big yellow sheets; an elegant penman, boastful of his hand, he sat up on the high stool in his flat straw, feathering out the wide and thin strokes. This oldfashioned bookkeeping desk of a scratched yellow brought the writer's face to a tiny square of window over the scale, and at times I saw Simon there, making out checks in the wide triple checkbook. Writing checks had fascinated him at first. He had wormed out of me that I owed Padilla two bucks for the satisfaction of paying one of my debts with his signature. There was no such satisfaction now, as the figures of the balance took fewer spaces, and he thought of his last audaciousness in money when he had tried to grab a fast buck in order to marry Cissy.

This time he believed his whole life was staked. He had not merely been shooting his mouth off the day he had come to tell me he was getting married about how earnest he was over money; it was now proved by the mental wounds of his face, the death of its color, and the near-insanity of his behavior. The misery of his look at this black Sargasso of a yard in its summer stagnation and stifling would sometimes make my blood crawl in me with horror. If I took so much time from my own enterprises of theft and reading to walk around this yard with him, hands in pockets, it wouldn't be enough to say it was from solicitude, it was downright fright. The loose way he handled the pistol shooting at the rats was ominous to me. And that he complained of seething in his head, saying, "My brains are going to boil out of my ears,"

I had to keep him from clouting Happy once when he misjudged the moment to grab Simon's leg with his yiping-dog prank. It was a near thing. And just a while ago he had been laughing with Happy at his stories of being a shill during the Florida land boom; and about his love affair with a Turkish woman who wouldn't let him out of the house; and his account of his first dose, when he said, "It was like getting into a can of hot angleworms." This change from great laughter to savagery made Happy ready to quit, his big, skillful, poachy eyes morose, warn226 o filling up, as I tried to iron things out. For it was up to me to bring hack. the peace. "I never took no shit in bigger concerns," said Happy from the corner of his mouth to me, but that Simon should hear. I knew that Simon had a strongly beating heart by the way his head hune downward, his mouth open on that still unmended front tooth, and that his craving which he would of necessity fight off was to take Happy by the seat of the pants and throw him into the street.

At last Simon said, "Okay, I want to say I'm sorry. I'm kind of nervous today. You ought to realize. Happy..." Thought of the Magnuses had overcome him, and a horror of so far forgetting that he was a young man in business and Happy merely a drip as to get himself towering about this nonsense. Simon's patience and swallowing were worse to me than his wrath or flamboyance--that shabby compulsory physical patience. Another such hard thing was his speaking low and with an air of difficult endurance to Charlotte on the telephone and answering her questions with subdued repetitiousness, near the surrender point.

"Well," he said to Happy and me, "why don't you two take the car and go see some of the dealers? Try to drum up some trade. Here's five bucks for beer money. I'll stay here with Coxie and try to get that back fence in shape. They'll steal us blind of we don't do something about it." Cox was the handyman, an old wino in a slap-happy painter's cap that looked like an Italian officer's lid. He sent him scouting along the fence of the Westinghouse plant for old planks. Coxie worked for hamburgers and a bottle of California K. Arakelian's sherry or of yocky-dock. He was watchman too, and slept on rags back of the green lattice before the seldom used front door. Off he limped--he carried a bullet, he claimed, from San Juan Hill--by the mile-long big meshed fence of the corporation in which such needs as fences were met by sub-officers' inviting contractors' bids and a tight steel net permitted all to look in at the vast remote shimmer, the brick steeples, the long power-buildings and the Vesuvian soft coal under the scarcely smeared summer sky and gaudiness.

I went with Happy, who drove. His fear in the Bohunk streets was that he would run over a kid and a crowd would tear him to pieces in its rage. "If it's their kids anything happens to, then look out, even if it s not your fault, the way they chase around." So he was always somewhat m this terror and wouldn't let me have the wheel, who didn't read this enough to be vigilant. We took the coal-and-ice dealers into averns a Dd drank beer and swapped talk, in those sleepy and dark w ^eat Joints where the very flies crept rather than flew, seeming doped by the urinal camphors and malt sourness, and from the heated emptiness and woodblock-knocking of the baseball broadcast that gave only more constriction to the unlocatable, uhdiagnosed wrong. If you thought toward something outside, it might be Padilla theorizing on the size of the universe; his scientific interest kept the subject from being grim. But in such places the slow hairy fly-crawl from drop to drop and star to star, you could pray the non-human universe was not entered from here, and this was no sack-end of it that happened to touch Cook County and Northern Illinois.

Such a consideration never would trouble Simon. Whatever the place was, he would make it pay off, the only relation with it that concerned him; it had dollars, as the rock water, as the waste-looking mountain is made to spit its oil or iron, where otherwise human beings would have no wish to go, the barrens, the Newfoundlands, the scaly earths and the Antarctic snow blackened with the smoke of fuel tapped in Texas or Persia.

Hrapek, Drodz, Matuczynski these dealers were called; we found them in their sheds, by the church, by the funeral home, or on a moving job. They sold coal by the ton and by the bag; they had stake trucks or dump trucks; they had to be convinced and sold, entertained, offered special deals, flattered, bantered, told secrets about the veins of the mines, made up with specious technical information about BTU's and ash percentages. Happy was crafty with them, an excellent dealer's man with talents comparable to those of a ship's chandler; he drank as much piva as they did, glass for glass, and he got results. Enticed by undercut prices and the pick of the coal, they began to come in.

Also, Simon ran some sales, just to get things moving. He had me pass out handbills in Chinatown, advertising coke which the laundry Chinese favored above other fuel, and slowly he accumulated customers.

He also covered the city and hit his new relatives for orders; Charlie Magnus threw business his way, and little by little things began to stir.

Simon was wised up as to how to do things politically--to be in a position to bid on municipal business--and he saw wardheelers and was kissing-cousins with the police; he took up with lieutenants and captains, with lawyers, with realestate men, with gamblers and bookies, the important ones who owned legitimate businesses on the side and had property. During the chauffeurs' and hikers' strike he had squad cars to protect his two trucks from strikers who were dumping coal in the streets. I had to wait for his calls in the police station to tell the cops when a load was setting out from the yard, my first lawful sittin" in such a place, moving from dark to lighter inside the great social protoplasm. But the dark of this West Side station! It was very dark It was spoiled, diseased, sore and running. And as the mis-minted ard wrench-struck figures and faces stooped, shambled, strode, gazed, dreaded, surrendered, didn't care--unfailing, the surplus and superabundance of human material--you wondered that all was stuff that was born human and shaped human, and over the indiscriminateness and lack of choice. And don't forget the dirt-hardness, the dough fats and raw meats, of those on the official side. And this wasn't even the bio Newgate of headquarters downtown but merely a neighborhood tributary.

As a son-in-law of the Magnuses, and also because he wanted to be, Simon was on very good terms with Lieutenant Nuzzo, than whom few were more smooth and regular-looking. I am not sure how the lieutenant managed. A cop, who even in the friendliness of a joke must take you by the shoulder as if in an arrest, with hands whose only practice is to be iron. In some manner Lieutenant Nuzzo had stayed a Valentine, even though his flesh was heavy and his face kept imprints long, like sleep creasings and the marks of fingers. We had dates to go to the Chez Paree with him--a party of five until I began to take Lucy Magnus, making it six--and had spaghetti and chicken livers with sparkling burgundy or champagne; the lieutenant, he looked around like a master of ceremonies on a visit from a much better night club.

His wife seemed like a woman on probation; as everybody is, after a fashion, with a police lieutenant. Even a wife. He was an Italian, he brought the style of ancient kingdoms with him. A lot of them do.

Authority must have death behind it. To cut off Masaniello's head; to hang great admirals themselves, as Lord Nelson did in Naples harbor.

This I believe was how to read the lieutenant's smooth face while he sat in the enjoyable noise of the Chez Paree, viewing Veioz and Yolanda or the near-naked chicks who didn't altogether know what they were doing but suggested the motions of busy people bringing their private pleasures to a head. Anyway, while this night club remained tops, Simon and Charlotte were great ones for it, as much, shrewdly, for the lowdown to be gotten there and contacts and public life and business, as to have their pictures taken by flashbulbs, laughing and in shenanigan embraces with paper caps and streamers, an important race at their table, a singer in strapless gown appealing with her lifted ^m and fine teeth, or the chairman of a board finishing a drink.

Simon grasped very soon the importance for business of such close Fontact. Didn't the Chief Executive pass sleepless nights at Yalta be229 cause Stalin for the first two days did not smile? He couldn't deal with a man who wouldn't yield to charm or trade on the basis of love. There had to be sport and amiability to temper decisions that could not all be pleasant, and at least the flash of personality helped. This was something Simon well understood, how to be liked, and how to reach an accord on the basis of secret thoughts with people similarly placed.

But I'm still in the middle of the summer with him, at the worst of his trouble when he was envenomed with the fear that he'd go bankrupt, and he had to confess to himself, I'm sure, that he was really afraid of the Magnuses, and terrified by what he had taken on himself.

So I spent most of these months with him. I won't say we were never closer--he kept his ultimate thoughts stubbornly to himself--but we were never more together. From the fresh of morning to the grime and horn color of late afternoon I rode in the car with him and made all his stops--downtown, the union hall, the bank, the South Water market office Charlotte was managing for her Uncle Robby, the kitchen at Magnuses' where we stopped to get sandwiches from the black cook, or the back room where they had put the marriage bed--the marriage still the secret of the immediate family. Here the door opened on what supported the weight of this heaped-up life. The room had been refurnished for him and Charlotte with silk-shaded reading lamps, bedside fleeces, drapes against the alley view and its barbarity--as in a palazzo against the smell of the canals--a satin cover on the bed, and auxiliary pillows on the roll of the bolster.

To save steps to the dresser Simon walked on the bed. He changed clothes, letting things lie where they were dropped or flung, kicking his shoes into the corner and drying the sweat from his naked body with an undershirt. There were days when he changed three times, or four, and others when he might sit listless and indifferent, and get up from his office chair heavy after hours of silence, saying, "Let's get out of here."

Instead of going home to change, sometimes he'd drive to the lake.

We'd go swimming at the North Avenue point the late Commissioner had loved. In whose mouth, as he floated by, I used to place cigarettes.

The loose spread of Simon's legs as he plunged and the embracing awkwardness of his arms to the water gave me the worry that he threw himself in with a thought of never coming back to the surface alive, as if he went to take a blind taste of the benefits of staying down. He came up haggard and with a slack gasp of his mouth and rough blood in his face. I knew it made a strong appeal to him to go down and not come up again. Even if he didn't make a display of this half-a-desire and swam up and down, sullen, with flattened coarse hair, making master passes at the water; the water turned around on the shore and its crowd and carried black spools in its horizon, the cool paving of one of the imaginary series of worlds, clear into the naming ether.

My brother down there, as if Alexander in the harmful Cydnus whose cold made him sick when he leaped in after battle, I stood in striped trunks with toes bent over the wood of a pile, ready to jump after if need be. I didn't go in when he did. He came up the ladder shivering, the big flies bit nastily, the hullabaloo waterside carnival turned your head. I'd help him dry; he'd lie down on the stone like a sick man.

But when he'd warm and get his comfort back, he'd start to make bullish approaches to women and girls, his eyes big and red, and as if someone who bent over to choose a plum from her lunch bag was making the offer of a Pasiphae. And then he'd start to blare like brass and he'd hit me on the arm and say to me, "Look at the spread on that broad!" forgetting that he was not only married but also engaged-- the engagement had taken place before the eyes of the world, in a reception at a hotel. He didn't think of that. Instead he thought of the powerful possibility in a new Pontiac standing near Lincoln Park, and the money he had; also the things to be done in one street, building, room that need have no bearing on what came later in the day elsewhere. So he got violent and lustful, with step and sidle, and protrusion of his head that made a kind of wall of his neck, charged and hard like that of a fighter who has been hit but not damaged, only roused.

There wasn't anything in his new class or of his speed at the North Avenue beach (called a beach, it was merely a stone slab waterfront); the place was rough and hard, the young fellows were tough and the girls battlesome, factory hands, salesgirls, with some dark Street sluts and dance-hall chicks. Therefore Simon said and proposed without sorting or choosing words. "You look good to me. You interested?"

Direct, without game, not even nickel phrases of circumlocution. That very fact maybe made it no indecency; instead it created awe and fear, that brute charge that gave the veins too much to bear and seemed to endanger his underjaw by crowding, his eyeballs darkening with currents of heat violet and darker, to near black. The girls were not always frightened of him; he had a smell of power, he was handsome, and I don't know what floors his bare feet left in shade-drawn hot rooms.

Unly a year ago he would not have given a second glance at such bims.

Now, where he went, he had information unavailable to me, but e had to have advantages and prerogatives, I reckon, in exchange for scrifiees. Yes, principals like that practice an anger not everyone is 231 ' allowed. They come playing the god like bloody Commodus before the Senate, or run with jockeys and wrestlers like Caracalla, while knowing that somewhere the instrument of their downfall is beginning to gather thought to thought about them, like loops on the knitting needle. That was how it was with Simon, as I had had the chance to see before, when he put on a lady's hat at the Chez Paree and pranced around, or when he had brought me along to a bachelor's stag where two naked acrobatic girls did stunts with false tools. From circus games to private dissoluteness, then, and only doing as many others did--except that from the force of his personality he was prominent and played a leading part.

"And you? Do you?" said Simon to me. "What a question! Who's that babe who lives on your floor? Is that why you don't want to move?

Mimi, isn't that her name? She looks like an easy broad."

I denied it, and he didn't believe me. On her side Mimi was interested in Simon. "What's eating him?" she asked me. "It was him I heard crying in the can, wasn't it? What's he want to be such a sharp dresser for? What's the matter? He has a woman on his neck, huh?" She was prepared to approve of him despite the satire, noting something extravagant and outlaw about him that she approved of.

He wasn't all brashness, however, and headlong despair, Simon.

No, he >vas also making a prize showing. It was summer, and slow, and naturally he was losing money. Charlotte, an excellent businesswoman, and highly important as backer, counselor, consultant, gave him just what united them closer than common conjugality. Though he fought with her and even from the very first roared and cursed her, saying astonishing things, she held on steady, A close watcher could see her recoil and then come back to the great, the all-important thing, which was that he was one of those anointed to be rich and mighty.

His very outrageousness when he yelled "You goofy cow!" was proof.

She took it with a nervous laugh that recalled him to his better judgment and reminded him that such things were supposed to 'come out as comedy. Whereat he almost never tailed to add the laughter drop of the entertainer, even while the glare of his eyes might remain savage.

And he was made to do that even when feelings on both sides had burst out so close to injury that it was too much to try to kid them back into something that could pass for affectionate roughness. But Charlotte's first aim and the reason for her striving was to make the union serious by constructing a fortune on it. She said to me, "Simon has real business ability. This stuff now"--he was already, at the time she spoke, making money_"is just nothing." When she said this, sometimes, it was in the territory of seriousness where distinctions of sex do not exist; the power invoked is too great for that. It is of neither man nor woman. As when Macbeth's wife made that prayer, "Unsex me here!" A call so hard, to what is so hard, that it makes the soul neuter.

Neither her ladies' trimming and gewgawing, the detail of her tailored oerson, nor the decorating of the flat when they furnished one, nor his way of carrying on was of real consequence. But in what related to the bank, the stock, the taxes, head approached to head discussing these, the great clear and critical calculations and confidences made in the kev to which real dominion was set, that was what wedlock really rested on. Even though she was continually singing and whistling songs to herself like "My Blue Heaven" and "A Faded Summer's Love," doing her nails, revising her hair, she didn't live in these vanities. Which indeed were hopeless. She gave them all their due, and more. High heels, sheer hose, beautiful suits, hats, earrings, feathers, and the colors of pancake maquillage, plus electrolysis, sweet-sweats, and the hidden pinnings where adoration could come to roost. She neglected nothing in this respect, she had a lot of dignity, she could be monumentally handsome. But her ultimate disbelief in this was unmistakable in the real mouth, unconforming to the painted one, impatient, discounting less important things. She wouldn't have chosen a young man to marry from the pictures on the sheet music of her piano any more than she'd have chosen a schoolboy; she bore her ambition tight and was prepared to see, without being moved in her purpose, any limits of coarseness, rashness, harshness, scandal. She knew this in advance by consulting with herself, and she didn't have to wait to see a great part in actuality; it first arose in her mind and there was where she dealt with it.

Simon, in the odd way of these things, was all for her. He said, "She's got more brain and ability than six women. She's a hundred per cent straight, no faking. She's as goodhearted as they come"--there was a considerable element of truth in this--"and she likes you too, Augie."

He said this with a view to my beginning to court Lucy Magnus, as I presently agreed to do. "She keeps sending Mama stuff. She wants to board her with a private family. Her idea. Mama never has complained about the Home. The company there is good for her. What do you think?".

While driving around the city we sometimes stopped to see Mama. lost often we simply passed the building. But you never knew with imon what your destination was. Saying, "Hop in," he'd perhaps himnot know where he was off to, answering a need he didn't under stand yet. Perhaps it was food he was after, perhaps a fight, perhaps disaster, perhaps a woman beckoning from behind, or a business order, a game of billiards, a lawyer's office, a steam bath at the athletic club.

So then among these possible stops was the Home on Arthington Street.

It was of gray stone, the porch just a widening before the doorway on which there were two benches. There were benches inside too. It was furnished like a meeting hall or public forum, all the common space of it bare; only the bad state of the windows kept the outsider from looking in; the panes were full of glassy gnarls and dirty, probably from the hands of people who had touched them to discover that this i was not wall but window. Everything that could have made a hazard I in the old house had been taken away; thus there were a bar of plaster, where the mantelpiece had been and a cork grade at the doorsills. But the blind did not go around very much. They sat, and didn't seem to have any conversation, and soon you were aware of leisure gone bad.

I had learned something of this during Einhorn's days of dirty mental weather. Or of the soul, not the mind, the sick evil of not even knowing why anything should all you since you're resigned to accept all conditions.

The director and his wife boasted that they fed their people well; it was a fact that you knew the next menu in advance by the smell of the kitchen.

In general I considered it a blessing that Mama was simple. I thought that if there were any characters here that were intriguing or quarrelsome--and how would there fail to be?--there must be some awful events in the innermost privacy of the house. But Mama had put in many years of appeasing tempestuousness or staying out of its way, and she very likely had more trouble as a result of one of Simon's visits than she ever did with her companions. For he came to check on how she was treated, and he had a harsh way of inquiring. He was tough with the director, who hoped to get mattresses wholesale from Arthur Magnus through him. Simon had promised him this favor. But he threw his weight around, full of menace, pleased with nothing. He objected to Mama's having roommates, and when he obtained a private room for her it was next to the kitchen and all its noise and smell, and that was nothing to thank him for. And then, one summer afternoon, we found her sitting on her bed at the task of fitting pins into Roosevelt campaign buttons; she was getting ten. cents a hundred and earning a few dollars a week by the goodheartedness of the precinct captain. Seeg her with her unskillful hands of rough housework at the brass pins, ; eling the two objects together in her lap, Simon went into a rage that ing her' feeling the two of made her flinch, and knowing that I was with him she turned her face and tried to find me and get me to intercede; she was frightened, too, to discover that she had been doing wrong unawares.

"Stop roaring," I said, "for God's sake!"

But he couldn't be stopped. "What do they mean! Look what they've got her doing! Where's that sonofabitch?"

It was the director's wife who came, in her house dress. She meant to remain respectful but not be servile; she was white, and she already had a fighting face and quivered, but spoke up, practical and proud.

"Are you responsible for this?" he shouted at her.

She said, "Mrs. March wasn't made to do anything she didn't want.

She was asked and she wanted to. It's good for her to have something to keep her occupied."

"Asked? I know how people are asked so they're afraid to say no.

I'll have you know that my mother isn't going to do any piecework for ten, twenty, thirty cents, or a dollar an hour. She gets all the money she needs from me."

"You don't have to yell like this. These are all very sensitive people and easy disturbed."

In the passage I saw many of the blind stop and a group gathered, while in the kitchen the big sloven-haired cook turned with her knife from the meatblock.

"Simon, / wanted, / asked," said Mama. She was unable to put weight in her tones; she had never been able; she lacked experience.

"Calm down," I said to him with some eifect at last.

It appeared that he could no longer take out the first intention of his heart without touching the inflamed place of self-distinction. Wrongly blessing and cursing like Balaam, but without any outside power to reverse him, only his own arbitrariness doubling back on him. So he could not speak for Mama without commanding how he himself was to be looked upon.

Next he went to the closet to see whether the things were there that Charlotte had given her, the shoes, handbag, dresses, and he missed at once a light coat, handed down by a more robust person, that didn't fit her anyway.

^'Where is itwhat have they done with that coat?"

I sent it to the cleaners. She spilled coffee on it," the director's wife explained.

I did," said Mama in her clear, tuneless voice.

And the woman, "I'll take it in for her when it comes back, it's too "_ the siroylders."

Simon wore a look of anger and detestation, silent, still regarding the closet. "She can afford a good tailor if she needs alterations. I want her to look right."

He left her money each time, single dollars so that she could not be cheated in the changing. Not that he really distrusted the director and his wife; he wanted them, however, to realize that he did not have to depend on their honesty.

"I want her to go for a walk every day." | "It's the rule, Mr. March." '> "I know rules. You keep them when you want to." I spoke to him in a low tone, and he said, "That's all right. Be quiet. I want her to go to the hairdresser at least once a week."

"My husband takes all the ladies in the car together. He can't bs taking one at a time."

"Then hire a girl. Isn't there a high-school girl you can get to go with her once a week? I'll pay for it. I want her to be taken care of. I'm getting married soon."

"We'll try to accommodate you, sir," she said, and he, not missing her derision though all she looked was steadfast and unintimidated, stared, spoke to himself, and took up his hat.

"Good-by, Ma."

"Good-by, good-by, boys."

"And take away this junk," said Simon, scattering the pins with a tug of the bedcover.

He left, and the woman tartly said to me, "I hope at least FDR is good enough for him personally."







CHAPTER XII



When the cold weather came Simon started to make money and everything went well. His spirits rose. The wedding was a great affair in the main ballroom of a big hotel, the bridal party getting organized in the governor's suite where Simon and Charlotte also. spent the first night.

I was an usher, Lucy Magnus the bridesmaid opposite me. Simon went along with me to rent a tuxedo, and then liked the fit of it so well he bought it outright. On the wedding day Mimi helped me with the studs of the boiled shirt and the tie. My neighbor Kayo Obermark sat in to observe, on my bed, fat feet bare, and laughed over Mimi's digs at marriage.

"Now you look like the groom himself," said Mimi. "You probably aim to become one soon, don't you?"

I snatched up my coat and ran, for I had to pick up Mama. I had the Pontiac for the purpose. She was my charge; I was supposed to see her through. Simon ordered me to have her wear dark glasses. The day was frosty, windy, clear, the waves piled up, from the slugging green water, white over the rocks of the Outer Drive. And then we came to the proud class of the hotel and its Jupiter's heaviness and restless marble detail, seeking to be more and more, introducing another pot too huge for flowers, another carved figure, another white work of iron; and inside luxuriously warm--even the subterranean garage where I parked had this silky warmth. And coming out of the white elevator, you were in an Alhambra of roses and cellular ceilings, gilt and ivory, Florida feathering of plants and muffling of carpets, immense distances, and everywhere the pure purpose of supporting and encompassing the human creature in conveniences. Of doing unto the body; holding it precious; bathing, drying, powdering, preparing satin rest, conveying, _eding. I've been at Schonbrunn and in the Bourbon establishment in Madrid and seen all that embellishment as the setting of power. But Simon wore a look of anger and detestation, silent, still regarding the closet. "She can afford a good tailor if she needs alterations. I want her to look right."

He left her money each time, single dollars so that she could not be cheated in the changing. Not that he really distrusted the director and his wife; he wanted them, however, to realize that he did not have to depend on their honesty. | "I want her to go for a walk every day." I "It's the rule, Mr. March." 1 "I know rules. You keep them when you want to." I spoke to him in a low tone, and he said, "That's all right. Be quiet. I want her to go to the hairdresser at least once a week."

"My husband takes all the ladies in the car together. He can't ba taking one at a time."

"Then hire a girl. Isn't there a high-school girl you can get to go with her once a week? I'll pay for it. I want her to be taken care of, I'm getting married soon."

"We'll try to accommodate you, sir," she said, and he, not missing her derision though all she looked was steadfast and unintimidated, stared, spoke to himself, and took up his hat.

"Good-by, Ma."

"Good-by, good-by, boys."

"And take away this junk," said Simon, scattering the pins with a tug of the bedcover.

He left, and the woman tartly said to me, "I hope at least FDR is good enough for him personally.", ^ CHAPTER XII When the cold weather came Simon started to make money and everything went well. His spirits rose. The wedding was a great affair in the main ballroom of a big hotel, the bridal party getting organized in the governor's suite where Simon and Charlotte also, spent the first night.

I was an usher, Lucy Magnus the bridesmaid opposite me. Simon went along with me to rent a tuxedo, and then liked the fit of it so well he bought it outright. On the wedding day Mimi helped me with the studs of the boiled shirt and the tie. My neighbor Kayo Obermark sat in to observe, on my bed, fat feet bare, and laughed over Mimi's digs at marriage.

"Now you look like the groom himself," said Mimi. "You probably aim to become one soon, don't you?"

I snatched up my coat and ran, for I had to pick up Mama. I had the Pontiac for the purpose. She was my charge; I was supposed to see her through. Simon ordered me to have her wear dark glasses. The day was frosty, windy, clear, the waves piled up, from the slugging green water, white over the rocks of the Outer Drive. And then we came to the proud class of the hotel and its Jupiter's heaviness and restless marble detail, seeking to be more and more, introducing another pot too huge for flowers, another carved figure, another white work of iron; and inside luxuriously warm--even the subterranean garage where I parked had this silky warmth. And coming out of the white elevator, you were in an Alhambra of roses and cellular ceilings, gilt and ivory, Florida feathering of plants and muffling of carpets, immense distances, and everywhere the pure purpose of supporting and encompassing the human creature in conveniences. Of doing unto the body; holding it precious; bathing, drying, powdering, preparing satin rest, conveying, ceding. I've been at Schonbrunn and in the Bourbon establishment in Madrid and seen all that embellishment as the setting of power. But luxury as the power itself is different--luxury without anything ulterior.

Except insofar as all yearning, for no matter what, just so its scope is vast, is of one cluster of mysteries and always ulterior. And what will this power do to you? I know that I in, say, an ancient place like Venice I or in Rome, passing along the side of majestic walls where great men once sat, experienced what it was to be simply a dot, a speck that scans across the cornea, a corpuscle, almost white, almost nothing but air: I to these ottimati in their thought. And this spectacular ancient aggrandizement with its remains of art and many noble signs I could appreciate even if I didn't want to be just borne down by the grandeur of | it. But in this modern power of luxury, with its battalions of service workers and engineers, it's the things themselves, the products that are distinguished, and the individual man isn't nearly equal to their great sum. Finally they are what becomes great--the multitude of baths with never-failing hot water, the enormous air-conditioning units and the elaborate machinery. No opposing greatness is allowed, and the disturbing person is the one who won't serve by using or denies by not wishing to enjoy.

I didn't yet know what view I had of all this. It still wasn't clear to me whether I would be for or against it. But then how does anybody form a decision to be against and persist against? When does he choose and when is he chosen instead? This one hears voices; that one is a saint, a chieftain, an orator, a Horatius, a kamikazi; one says Ich kann | Night anders--so help me God! And why is it / who cannot do otherwise?

Is there a secret assignment from mankind to some unfortunate person who can't refuse? As if the great majority turned away from a thing it couldn't permanently forsake and so named some person to remain faithful to it? With great difficulty somebody becomes exem- I plary, anyhow.

Conceivably Simon felt that I was this kind of influenceable person and looked liable to become an example. For God knows there are abandoned and hungry principles enough flowing free and looking for attachment. So he wanted to get to me first.

Simon's idea was that I should marry Lucy Magnus, who had more money even than Charlotte. This was how he outlined the future to me.

I could finish my pre-legal course and go to John Marshall law school at night while I worked for him. He'd pay my tuition and give me eighteen dollars a week. Eventually I could become his partner. Or if his business didn't suit me, we could go into real estate with our joint capital. Or perhaps into manufacturing. Or, if I chose to be a lawyer, I wouldn't need to be a mere ambulance chaser, shyster, or birdseed wiseguy and con- 'i Q niver in two-bit cases. Not with the money I'd have to play with as Lucy Magnus's husband. She was a juicy piece besides, even if he didn't care for the way her collarbones stood out when she wore a formal, and she was full of willingness. He would back me while I courted her. I didn't need to worry about the expenses; he'd give me the use of the Pontiac for taking her out, build me up with the family, remove the obstacles.

All I had to do was play along, make myself desired, interpret, as I could do, the role of the son-in-law her parents wanted. It was a leadpipe cinch.

We were alone in his room in the governor's suite, a room of white walls and gold paneling, heavy mirrors hung on silk hawsers, a Louis XIV bed. Having come out of the glass stall of the shower, dried in a thick Turkish mantle, put on black socks and a stiff shirt, he was now lying on the bed, smoking a cigar, while he explained this to me, practical and severe. He sprawled out with his big body, the mid-part of it nude. This comfort and luxury were not what he preached at me, but the thing to do: not to dissolve in bewilderment of choices but to make myself hard, like himself, and learn how to stay with the necessary, undistracted by the trimmings. This was what he thought, and to some extent I thought it too. Why shouldn't I marry a rich man's daughter? If I didn't want to do as Simon did in every respect, couldn't I arrange my life somewhat differently? Wasn't there any other way to ride this gorgeous train? Provided Lucy was different from her cousin, why shouldn't there be? I wasn't unwilling to look into this and profit by Simon's offers. I was already taking so many of his orders, putting in so much time, that I might as well accept wages too, go the whole way and make it official. And I may as well say that I had a desire to go along with him out of the love I felt for him and enthusiasm for his outlook.

In which I didn't fundamentally believe. However, that I shouldn't be too good to do as he was doing was of enormous importance to him, and the obstinacy that had always made me hold out against him for unspoken or anyway insufficient reasons seemed at last over. I didn't oppose him, so he spoke to me with unusual affection.

He rolled from the bed to finish dressing, saying, "Now we begin go- '"g places, you and me. I wondered when you'd start to show some sense, if ever, and worried you wouldn't be anything but a punk. Here, "xthis stud for me in back. My mother-in-law got this set for me. Christ!

"ow'm I going to find my dress shoes? All this tissue paper. You can't "nd anything. Get rid of it. Leave it in the can for the governor," he sald> ^irited and nervous in his laugh. "The world hasn't set too tight 'e There's room, if you find the openings to it. If you study it out you can find them. Horner is a Jew too, after all, and probably didn't have a better start than we did, and is governor."

"Are you thinking of giving politics a try?"

"Maybe. Why not? It depends on how things shape up. Uncle Artie knows a guy who was made ambassador by contributing often enough to campaign drives. Twenty, thirty, even forty thousand bucks, and what's that to a man who has it?"

This being an ambassador couldn't be envisioned as in the old days-- a Guicciardini arriving from Florence with his clever face, or a Russian coming to Venice, or an Adams--such grandeurs have sunk down as the imagination has been transferred from the bearer of his country's power walking on rugs to his blowing shellac through the waterpipes of Lima to stop the rust.

Simon, when he put on his tails and walked from mirror to mirror, doubling back his fingers to tug down the white cuffs and pulling up his chin to make his strong neck freer in the band of the butterfly collar, had the vigor to make the place live up to him; more--the thought lay in the open--than the governors for whom it was reserved. And having gotten in without ever having been a candidate he could perhaps get far beyond them without running or going through the tiresome part of politics. He had come into a view of mutability, and I too could see that one is only ostensibly born to remain in specified limits. That's what you'll be told in the ranks. I don't say that I exactly shared his feelings, or spirits of the dauphin's horse, almost tearing down hangings and shouldering into mirrors with that bucking pride, but with him now I certainly felt less boxed than I ever before had, nothing that others did so inconceivable for me.

However, people were waiting below and Simon was holding things up, taking his time. Charlotte came in herself, like a big bridal edifice in her veil and other lace, carrying long-stemmed flowers. With her there wasn't much hiding of the behind-the-scenes of life to keep a man in the bonds of love, as Lucretius advises when he tells you to make allowances for mortality. You only had to see her practical mouth to know everything about mortality was admitted in advance, though she did for form's sake all that other women do. Her frankness gave her a kind of nobility. But here when she came into the room was the visible means to governors' suites and ambassadorships, and the best that Simon could do brought him back to her.

"Everybody else is ready. What are you doing?"

She spoke to me, for she wouldn't blame him in any circumstances where she could blame me instead, his stand-in.

"I've been dressing and shmoosing," said Simon. "There's plenty of ,._g_what's the big rush? Anyhow, you didn't have to come, you could have phoned. Now, honey, don't be nervous; you look beautiful and everything is going to be fine."

"It will be if I see to it. Now will you go and talk to the guests?" she said in her bidding tone.

She sat on the bed to call the caterer, the musicians, the florist, the management, the photographer, for she kept all under close control and had made every arrangement herself, relying on no one; and with her white shoes on a chair and a pad on her knees she made figures and dickered with the photographer, at the last moment still trying to beat down his price. "Listen, Schultz, if you try to hold me up you'll get no business out of any of the Magnuses ever again, and there're plenty of us."

"Augie," said Simon when we went out, "you can have the car to take Lucy out. You'll probably need some dough, so here's ten bucks. I'll send Mama home in a cab. I want you at the office at eight though.

Is she wearing those glasses I told you to get her?"

Mama had obediently put on the glasses, but it displeased him to see that she carried her white cane. She was sitting with Anna Coblin in the lounge, the cane between her knees, and he tried to take it away from her, but she wouldn't yield it up.

"Ma, give me that stick, for Chrissake! How will it look? They're going to take a picture."

"No, Simon, people will bump into me."

"They won't bump into you--you'll be with Cousin Anna."

"Hear, let her keep it," said Anna.

"Ma, give that cane to Augie and he'll check it for you."

"I don't want to, Simon."

"Mama, don't you want everything to look nice?" He tried to loosen her fingers.

"Cut it out!" I said to him, and Cousin Anna with her burning morose face muttered something to him.

"You shut up, you cow!" he said to her. He went, but left me instructions.

"You get it away from her. What a turnout from our side!"

I let her keep the cane, and had to pacify Cousin Anna and beg her to stay for Mama's sake.

Money makes you meshuggah," she said, sitting heavy and tall in "er corset, glaring maddened into the luxurious lounge. approved of Mama's exhibition of will, wondering at the surprises the meek will pull. Anyway, Simon dropped the matter; he was too / to fight every fight through, a^ he was somewhere off the ba UDUS7, where the ceremony was s\- I went around looking roo. g the guests for some I knew, ^ ^ad invited the Einhoms, inam , ng Arthur. Arthur, who had gr^uated from the University of Illici" was m Chicago, where he was doing nothing in particular. Occano1 ally I saw him on the South Side ^d knew that he was friendly with m^1 s set and that he was ^PP^d to be translating poems from the " ^ch. Einhorn would always ba^ him in any intellectual pursuit. l_ fe were the Emhorns then, in t^ ballroom, the old man with a sort l"iditary cloak, gray, looking like ^e former possessor of a splendor of as good as this who, without sp^al rancor but understanding how 1^,1 comes about, watches it chan^ hands. He said to me, "You look fit fine in y^tuxedo> ^g10-" ^Ilie kissed me, taking my face in her w K hands, Arthur smiling. He co^ behave with exceptional charm, w this was absent-mindedly conferred on you bu^ went on to welcome Happy Keiierman and his wife, a thin blond ,le of a woman who bore out he,. belly and was wound high and low K1 (i beads and pearls. Next I saw l^e Properties and Cissy. Simon had ^ ^d them from motives not hard to understand, partly to show Cissy y he had gone on to d0 and ALSO to ^b)01 Five Properties to a cruel w. ipanson. Cissy defeated all, t^ugh, with that sly provoking dec ^cy about her female gifts, brea^ touching breast in the low opening c tier dress. She showed her ton^g softly in the few words that she ^m o ike. Five Properties had come for a reconciliation of cousins. She Ji st J taught him to comb his Scythe ^air differently; it now came lower t^ the rugged forehead without modifying the skeptical grinning of his | 0 ^s; that savage green would a^ays express everything that Five ^perties thought. He too was dr^sed in a tuxedo, wore it on his enor V t, us trunk to be equal to the opuig^ce Simon had invited him to see. %d so he grinned all around with his gum-buried teeth and green eyes. r was evident that Cissy steered (^ ^g^ him civilized behavior--^. fi who had loaded and driven t^e wagon of jolting corpses the Rus*

.^ns and Germans had made of one another in the Polish mud. She yched him. All the same she CQu^n't prevent him by her smile and , t, w murmured word from feelii^ her on the back and fondling her.

"',$0 what's wrong, babe?" he saiq Well, the wedding music bega^ t went to see that Mama was taken ^ a plush bench, her place inside ^e flower cage beside the altar--the ^bims were with her--and then ^to rehearsed position in the proces^n, with Lucy Magnus, along the white carpet down which the princi,1s came: Charlotte and her fa^er with rose-scattering children be' fore Mrs. Magnus and Uncle Charlie, and then Simon with Lucy's brother Sam, first-string guard on the Michigan team, a hulky walker.

Throufhout the ceremony Lucy looked at me in her unambiguously declarative way, and when the ring was on and Simon swung Charlotte back before all to kiss her, and all clapped and cried out, Lucy came and took my arm. We went in to the banquet; ten dollars a plate, it was _for that day a staggering price. But I couldn't sit through the meal in peace. An usher came to tell me I was wanted and rushed me to the back of the hall. Five Properties, angry, was walking out because he and Cissy had been put at a little table apart behind a pillar. Whether it was Charlotte who was responsible for this, or Simon himself, I never found out. One was as capable of it as the other. Whoever had done it, Five Properties was powerfully offended.

" 'S okay, Augie. Against you I got nothing. He asked me? I came.

I wish him all. But what way is it to treat a cousin? Okay. Eat I can where I want. I don't. God forbid, need his meal. Babe, come on."

I went to get her fur, knowing it was useless to argue, and I saw them to the garage elevator with some dawning thought about rudeness as the measure of achievement and the systems of storing up injury. As Cissy passed into the elevator she said, "Tell your brother congratulations.

His wife is awfully pretty."

But this was one game in which I wasn't going to play intermediary, and when Simon asked me eagerly about their leaving I said casually, "Oh, they just didn't have the time to stay. They came only for the ceremony." I gave no satisfaction.

But as for that other more important game into which he had gotten me, I played it to the full, going to night clubs, sorority dances, and shows and night-football games at which Lucy and I pitched and necked. She was, up to the last thing of all, unrestrained and exploratory; and where she stopped I stopped. You never know what forms self-respect will take, especially with people whose rules of life are few.

But I enjoyed all that was allowed and to that extent I remained myself.

But I wasn't much myself in other ways, and it was very disturbing, and sometimes pressed on my head with very heavy weight, and I realized I was in the end zone of my adaptability. It was my pride to make it seem easy though. So that if you took me at Uncle Charlie's house on a Sunday afternoon, after dinner, by the fire, among the fam"y, with Mrs. Magnus knitting a shawl that rose out of a tapestry oarpetbag; with Sam, Lucy's brother, standing by, his chin picked up o make way for the foulard beneath it and his dressing gown swelling over his behind while every now and then he treated his plastered hair busy to fight every fight through, and he was somewhere off the ballroom where the ceremony was shaping up. I went around looking among the guests for some I knew. He had invited the Einhoms, including Arthur. Arthur, who had graduated from the University of Illinois, was in Chicago, where he was doing nothing in particular. Occasionally I saw him on the South Side and knew that he was friendly with Frazer's set and that he was supposed to be translating poems from the French. Einhorn would always back him in any intellectual pursuit.

There were the Einhorns then, in the ballroom, the old man with a sort of military cloak, gray, looking like the former possessor of a splendor just as good as this who, without special rancor but understanding how it all comes about, watches it change hands. He said to me, "You look very fine in your tuxedo, Augie." Tillie kissed me, taking my face in her dark hands, Arthur smiling. He could behave with exceptional charm, but this was absent-mindedly conferred on you.

I went on to welcome Happy Kellerman and his wife, a thin blond rattle of a woman who bore out her belly and was wound high and low with beads and pearls. Next I saw Five Properties and Cissy. Simon had asked them from motives not hard to understand, partly to show Cissy what he had gone on to do and also to subject Five Properties to a cruel comparison. Cissy defeated all, though, with that sly provoking decency about her female gifts, breast touching breast in the low opening of her dress. She showed her tongue softly in the few words that she spoke. Five Properties had come for a reconciliation of cousins. She had taught him to comb his Scythian hair differently; it now came lower on the rugged forehead without modifying the skeptical grinning of his eyes; that savage green would always express everything that Five Properties thought. He too was dressed in a tuxedo, wore it on his enormous trunk to be equal to the opulence Simon had invited him to see.

And so he grinned all around with his gum-buried teeth and green eyes.

It was evident that Cissy steered him, taught him civilized behavior-- him who had loaded and driven the wagon of jolting corpses the Russians and Germans had made of one another in the Polish mud. She coached him. All the same she couldn't prevent him by her smile and slow murmured word from feeling her on the back and fondling her.

"So what's wrong, babe?" he said.

Well, the wedding music began. I went to see that Mama was taken to a plush bench, her place inside the flower cage beside the altar--the Coblins were with her--and then into rehearsed position in the procession, with Lucy Magnus, along the white carpet down which the principals came: Charlotte and her father with rose-scattering children be242 fore Mrs. Magnus and Uncle Charlie, and then Simon with Lucy's brother Sam, first-string guard on the Michigan team, a bulky walker.

Throughout the ceremony Lucy looked at me in her unambiguously declarative way, and when the ring was on and Simon swung Charlotte back before all to kiss her, and all clapped and cried out, Lucy came and took my arm. We went in to the banquet; ten dollars a plate, it was _for that day a staggering price. But I couldn't sit through the meal in peace. An usher came to tell me I was wanted and rushed me to the back of the hall. Five Properties, angry, was walking out because he and Cissy had been put at a little table apart behind a pillar. Whether it:; was Charlotte who was responsible for this, or Simon himself, I never found out. One was as capable of it as the other. Whoever had done it, Five Properties was powerfully offended.

" 'S okay, Augie. Against you I got nothing. He asked me? I came.

I wish him all. But what way is it to treat a cousin? Okay. Eat I can where I want. I don't, God forbid, need his meal. Babe, come on."

I went to get her fur, knowing it was useless to argue, and I saw them to the garage elevator with some dawning thought about rudeness as the measure of achievement and the systems of storing up injury. As Cissy passed into the elevator she said, "Tell your brother congratulations.

His wife is awfully pretty."

But this was one game in which I wasn't going to play intermediary, and when Simon asked me eagerly about their leaving I said casually, "Oh, they just didn't have the time to stay. They came only for the ceremony." I gave no satisfaction.

But as for that other more important game into which he had gotten me, I played it to the full, going to night clubs, sorority dances, and shows and night-football games at which Lucy and I pitched and necked. She was, up to the last thing of all, unrestrained and exploratory; and where she stopped I stopped. You never know what forms self-respect will take, especially with people whose rules of life are few.

But I enjoyed all that was allowed and to that extent I remained myself.

But I wasn't much myself in other ways, and it was very disturbing, and sometimes pressed on my head with very heavy weight, and I realized I was in the end zone of my adaptability. It was my pride to make it seem easy though. So that if you took me at Uncle Charlie's house on a Sunday afternoon, after dinner, by the fire, among the fam"y> with Mrs. Magnus knitting a shawl that rose out of a tapestry Garpetbag; with Sam, Lucy's brother, standing by, his chin picked up to malre way for the foulard beneath it and his dressing gown swelling over nis behind while every now and then he treated his plastered hair with affection; with Uncle Charlie listening to Father Coughlin who hadn't yet begun to shag out the money-changers but had that boring fervor of the high-powered and misleading who won't let you be but have to make you feel all the trembling vacancy of winter space between Detroit and Chicago--if you took me there, by the firelight, facing Uncle Charlie who had one leg thrown forward and his fingers inside the crevice of his shirt drawing at the mat of his chest, I wasn't the success envy might have believed me to be. My own envy went out with, I don't doubt, sick eyes through the clear gray panes where the kids were warring and shooting snowballs that spiatted on the black trunks and soared in the elegant scheme of twigs. Not that Lucy, in dark wool dress that just covered the tops of stockings she had helped me loosen the night before so that I could stroke her skin, didn't make up for much. In some way, not the deepest nor yet trivially, I was gone on her and as far as I was allowed gave her a real embrace that she returned, licking my ear and praising and promising me; she already called me husband.

The deep consideration women give, as seen privately in their thoughtful eye, to demands for the most part outlawed out of fear for everything that has been done to make a reasonable, continuous life, the burden that made Phedra cry she wanted to throw off her harmful clothes, you could find that in Lucy too. It took her as far as to choose me. It was evident I was less desirable than Simon from her family's standpoint. Their main investigation was conducted on my willingness to be as they were in everything. They never were too sure, and were forever asking to have another look at my credentials, and, so to speak, would come in without knocking, as if I were at West Point, to see whether all was dusted and the hospital corners satisfied regulations.

Lucy stood up for me; it was her only disobedience so far as I, a wayward but close student of the situation, could see. When I suggested that we run away and get married at Crown Point she refused flat, and I could see the difference between her and Charlotte. I probably shouldn't forget the difference between Simon and me; he had been able to talk Charlotte into eloping. And if Lucy already called me "husband,"

Mimi Villars would have said, no compliment intended, that she was a wife, wanting the whole wifely racket. In other words, minor sensuality and no trouble. Unless she was flirting with trouble by having detected a source of it in me.

But I was, as at the Renlings', under an influence and not the carrier of it. I had to get around; I had a figure to cut, the car to drive, the money to spend, the clothes to wear, and served before I had it clear ' .244 whether I wanted or liked the doing of it at all. Even if her father stole in on us at two in the morning as we were loving-up, he stole through a mansion, and it was hard to think him wrong when the lights went on and he prowled peevish toward us. I suppose I saw nothing very wrong anywhere, and it took me longer than it should have taken to discover that he didn't like me, because everything flashed so, all was rich, was heavy, velvet, lepidopterous.

The circuit I was in, at the Glass Derby and Chez Paree and the dances at Medinah Club, kept me very busy. Here what had to be established was whether I was qualified in pocket to mix with the sons of established fathers. I had to mind my step, for Simon kept me on a minimum budget; he somehow thought that I could do what he had done on just a little less. It was true that I could make money go farther, but Lucy thought less about economics than Charlotte. And I had to notice cover charges, tips, the cost of a parking lot, and slip out to the store for Camels instead of buying them from the cigarette girl. I got through examination by Lucy's set, not hearing what I didn't want to hear, or forcing others to give ground, and even if it did strengthen the hypocrite's muscle in my face and harden my stomach I thought it did me credit to bluff it through.

These weren't our only company. We went to visit Simon and Charlotte in their flat--they had, for a beginning, only three rooms--and to eat off the trousseau linen and the wedding china. The Magnuses went to exceptional lengths to procure anything for one of their own, and these plates and cups had been baked in an English kiln, as the rug was really from Bokhara and the silver by Tiffany. If we stayed after dinner we. played bridge or rummy, and at ten o'clock Charlotte phoned the drugstore to send peppermint ice-cream and hot fudge. So we licked spoons and I was in general sociable, helpful, debonair, and thought of the two colors of my silk suspenders and the fit of my shirt, Simon's gifts.

Obedient to him. Charlotte treated Lucy and me like an engaged pair, but with wariness and reserve camouflaged from him. With the instinct of her family she knew that I didn't have Simon's qualities, that I really didn't intend to follow in his steps, his difficulties perhaps too much for me to undertake.

This he was becoming aware of too. He was pleased at first by my willingness and fluency and spoon-lickery and obliging and niceness that continued while I moved before the regard of the Magnuses and made the most that could be made of the appeal of their seductions-- all that opulence, the strength of cars in the great rout of cars in the cold-lit darkness of the North Side Drive, and that mobile heraldry on soft tires rushing toward the floating balls and moons of the Drake Hotel and the towers around it; the thick meat, solid eating, excitement of dancing. Following the lake shore, you left the dry wood and grayed brick of the thick-built, jammed, labor-and-poverty Chicago standing | apart, speedily passed to the side. Ah no! but the two halves of the prophecy were there together, the Chaldee beauties and the wild beasts and doleful creatures shared the same houses together.

Being in the yard daily, the beginning of this winter, I was not in a position to forget even if my evenings and Sundays were in another sphere. And my Sundays themselves were divided. Simon had me open the gates Sunday morning to catch what trade there was in the very cold weather. He drove me hard, bound to discipline me. Some mornings he checked on the time I arrived. If once in a while I overslept it wasn't to be wondered at, since, after taking Lucy home and leaving his car in the garage, I had to ride home on the trolley and so rarely got into the sack before one in the morning. He wouldn't, however, take any excuses from me. He said, "Well, why don't you make your time with her a little faster? Marry her and you'll get more rest." This, at first, was half a joke, but later, when he began more to doubt me, he was surly and before long fierce toward me. He grudged me the extra money, thinking it was merely thrown away. "What the hell are you waiting for, goddam you, Augie! She ought to be a pushover. If it was me I'd show you how, but fast." He was more violent as the resistance of her family began to shape up, though this I didn't understand for a while.

But should I come in at eight-fifteen instead of eight I might find him at the scale, glaring at me. "What's the matter, did that Mimi keep you?" He was convinced that I had carried on and continued still with Mimi.

We had other difficulties too. As I was assistant bookkeeper as well as weighmaster, he expected me to take from the pay-envelopes of the Negro hikers installments on the cast-off clothing he had sold them, and on a few occasions there was bad feeling between us. As in December, once, a lushed-up dealer named Guzynski tore onto the scale out of the slushy yard with white steam gushing from his busted radiator. He was buying a ton of coal and was overweight by several hundred pounds; when I told him he was heavy he cursed me, and he came down from the truck to force his way into the office and break my arm for cheating.

I met him at the door and threw him out, and when he picked himself up from the snow, instead of pushing me again, he dumped his coal on the scale. There was now a jam of trucks and wagons in the street as well as in the yard. I told a hiker to clear the scale, but Guzynski was standing over his coal with a shovel and swung on him when he came near. Happy Kellerman was phoning for a squad car when Simon arrived.

Simon went for the gun at once, and as he was running from the office with it I caught him by the arm and swung him back, and in his rage he drove a punch at me and hit me in the chest. I yelled at him as he eot away, "Don't be an idiot! Don't shoot!" and then saw him stagger for his balance in the coaly slush as he turned the corner. Guzynski was not too drunk to see the gun and he threw himself, burly in his short filthy coat and seaman's watch cap, to the side of his truck, trying to get to the cab. Here, in the narrow space between the truck and the office wall, Simon caught him, had him by the throat, and hit him in the face with the side of the gun. This happened right below Happy and me; we were standing at the scale window, and we saw Guzynski, trapped, square teeth and hideous eyes, foul blue, and his hands hooked, not daring to snatch the gun with which Simon hit him again. He laid open Guzynski's cheek. My heart went back on me when the cuts were torn, and I thought. Does it make him think he knows what he's doing if the guy bleeds? Now he let him go and with the pistol signed to the hikers to clear the scale platform, and their shovels began to scrape or gouge the dirty silence of Guzynski looking with loathing at his blood.

He sprang into his truck, and I feared he would crash it into the gates, but he skidded into the snow mash of the street and the tracks caught his wheels and straightened him out in the traffic that took him up with it toward the sunless, faint direction.

"Any odds he's going to the station to swear out a warrant?" said. Happy.

I Simon, who had put down the gun, listened to him, and with a heavy breath he said, "Get me Nuzzo on the phone." He spoke to me, and it was in a fashion I had made up my mind to get used to and generally obeyed. He no longer looked up a number himself or did the dialing but took the instrument only when his party was already waiting. This time, however, I didn't stir. My arms were crossed and I held my place by the scale. He marked me down for this, grimly. Happy got the number for him.

"Nuzzo!" said Simon. "This is March. How y'doin'? What? No, it's cold enough, I can't kick. Now listen, Nuzzo, we just had a little trouble "own here from a squarehead dealer who hit one of my men with a shovel. What? No, he was drunk as a lord, dumped his load on my scale and tied me up for an hour. Look, he's probably on his way to make a romplaint because I roughed him up. Take care of him for me, will you? Keep him in the clink till he cools off. Sure I will, I got witnesses.

You tell him if he's thinking of laying for me after, you'll fix his clock good. What? He does bushel business down by that church on Twentyeighth.

Do that for me, will you?"

He did, and Guzynski was in the lockup several days. Next time I saw him he wasn't plotting any revenge. His scars were crusty yet when he came back still a customer, quiet, and I know that Simon was watching his eyes and would have acted on the least hint. But there was no trouble to hint. Nuzzo, or Nuzzo's people, had put a deep fright in him in their cellar below cellar, and gave him a Saturn's bite in the shoulder to show him how he could be picked up whole and eaten. He must even come back a customer. And Simon, too, knew how to put home the clincher, and at Christmas gave Guzynski a bottle of Gordon's Dry Gin and his wife a box of New Orleans pecan pralines in the form of a cotton bale. She said to him that it had done Guzynski good.

"Of course," said Simon. "He's satisfied now. Because he knows where he stands. When he swung that shovel he didn't know and was trying to find out. Now he knows."

For Simon wanted to show me how justly he handled such crises, and how badly, by contrast--because of chicken-heartedness--I did. I should have quelled Guzynski's riot as soon as it broke. But I wasn't prompt, wasn't brave, didn't understand that Guzynski had to be pistolwhipped and thrown in jail if he wasn't to become a Steelkilt mutineer to buffalo all captains. The inference was clear that if I didn't make time with Lucy Magnus it was from these same shortcomings. If I became her husband in two-armed fact, the rest was merely a formality.

But I didn't mount the step of power. I could have done so from love, but not to get to the objective.

Thus things became more tough for me at the yard; Simon increased my hardships both for my good and because it didn't displease him to do it. At this time he couldn't say how many high things were suitable for him and was trying on guises. His last thoughts at breakfast sometimes were the next new policy, and this might be to devote himself absolutely to the bottom-most detail or fistful in a business that reckoned by tons; or, again, to skim in the big space of principle only and leave the details to subordinates--as he could do if they, and mainly I, were trustworthy; or to be a Jesuit of money; or to be self-made: that was one of his weakest ideas but it was also persistent. I said, "Oh, but you're not a Henry Ford. After all, you married a rich girl."

"The question is," he said, "what you have to suffer to get money, how much effort there is in it. Not that you start with a nickel, like the Alger story"--I 248., I here remembered what a reader Simon had been--"and run it into a fortune. But if you get a stake, what you do with it, whether you plunge or not." But this was the discussion of theory, which became rarer between us. Mostly I had to see in his disgusted eyes what his theory was and how disadvantageously I fitted into it, where I trailed, lagged, and missed the mark.

So those were evil days for me, in that particular field of feeling that had the shape of the yard, the forms of the fence, coal heaps, machinery, the window of the scale, and that long, brass, black-graduated beam where I weighed. These things: and also the guys that worked, the guys that bought, the cops that came for theirs, the mechanics and the railroad agents, the salesmen, got into me. My head was full of things to remember; I must not quote a wrong price and stumble in arithmetic or any dealing. Mimi Villars heard me talking in my sleep one night about prices and came in and asked me questions, as though in a telephone conversation. She quoted the prices back to me in the morning, all correctly. "Brother! things must be bad for you," she said, "if that's all you can dream." I might have confessed even worse, if I'd cared to, since Simon had decided on the roughest treatment for me and sent me on errands not exactly for Hesperides apples. I had to fight with janitors about clinkers, soothe and bribe them, sweeten dealers. with beer, wrangle with claims agents about shrinkage, make complicated deposits in the pushing, barking crowd at the bank, everybody in a hurry and temper; I had furthermore to hunt up shovelers in flop. houses and court them in the Madison Street gutter when we were suddenly shorthanded. I had to go to the morgue to identify one found shot with our pay envelope empty in his shirt pocket. They lifted the bristling, creased wrap from him and I recognized him, his black body rigid, as if he died in a fit of royal temper, making fists, feet out of shape, and crying something from the roof of his mouth, which I saw.

"You know him?"

"That's Ulace Padgett. He worked for us. What happened to him?"

"Girl friend shot him, they say." He pointed out the wound in his breast.

"Have they caught her?"

'Naw, they won't even look for her. They never do." S>imon had given me this mission because, he said, I was driving the car anyway, to take Lucy out, and might as well attend to it on the way "ome. I had to hurry and change, and I didn't have the time to wash any but the exposed dirt of face, neck, and ears. All over the rest of me was grit from the yard, up my heels and legs. Even in the corners of the eyes there were shadowed places I didn't get into. They widened out my look by darkness. I had no time to eat, even if I had enjoyed an appetite, for the morgue had taken long and Lucy was waiting. I drove faster than I had any business to, and had a near thing at Western Avenue and Diversey, a long, downhill skid that turned the Pontiac round so that I finished backwards, against a streetcar. The motorman had had a good forty yards to see me and was standing on a grade, under the railroad bridge. So I didn't hit hard. I smashed the rear lights but couldn't see much other damage, and was congratulated by that sudden gathering that always collects on such an occasion. I was told how lucky I was and laughed it all off, hopped back of the wheel again and continued. I got to the Magnuses' in marvelous spirits, in the black night of the drive and the snow head of the portico, confident and whistling, the keys melodious in the coat I tossed down on the bench in the hall. However, when Lucy's brother Sam gave me a drink I went back, infinitely quicker than the speed at which I had come, to the morgue--the smell of the whisky on an empty stomach did that for me--and to the accident, which now made my work-filthy legs too weak to hold me. I sank down in a chair. Lucy said, "Why are you so white?"

And Sam came near, like the host of a B movie, concerned after all lest his sister, huggable, press-bosom dolly, get herself engaged to a weakling. With more of this interest than mercy he bent to me, the stripes of his dressing gown stretched tight over his can. H "Am I white?" I struggled to say and picked up my head. "Maybe because I haven't eaten."

"Oh, how silly. Since when? Why, it's after nine." She sent Sam to the kitchen to get a sandwich and a glass of milk from the cook.

"I also had an accident--almost," I said to her when he had gone, and described what had happened.

I'm not sure which most came through, her concern, or the sudden thought at the rear of her mind that I was a Jonah--I, the happy lover of the present moment. Trained fine in foresight, when, as now, she wanted to make use of it, she must have been seeing a drift of hard luck if not downright misery in the horizon. "Did you damage the car badly?" she said.

"It's banged up a little." < She didn't like my vagueness about it.

"The trunk?" j "I don't know exactly. I broke the tail lights, that I know. About the rest it's hard to tell in the dark, but it probably isn't much."

"We'll go in my car tonight," she said, "and I'll drive. You must be shaky from the accident."

So we went out in her roadster, a new one her father had recently given her, to our party on the North Shore, and afterward parked in one of the big sectors of shadow around the Bahai temple to stroke, struggle and shiver at the base of that cold religious knoll and its broken-up moonlight. Things seemed as usual but were not, either for her or for me. When we got back she wanted to have another look at the damage, afraid for me. I wouldn't go bend over the back of the car with her and put my finger in the dents. I turned off her headlights, under which the examination was taking place. And in the front hall afterward, when I was in coat and hat, fondling her and being assured she loved me, I knew there was an obstruction of sympathy. She foresaw that Simon would raise hell about the damage--as he did--and what's more, no point of view but his seemed possible to her, and she was somewhat frightened at me, feeling that I had one. And I might smell her shoulder and lift up her breast, but it wasn't the same intimacy any more in that riches-cluttered hall partly inventoried by the moon, the old man snuffing upstairs, vigilant whether asleep or not.

I was therefore worn out in advance of the dripping yellow morning and its sick cold and the close filthy heat of the oil-squirting stove indoors.

There is a way, I don't doubt, to carry all such things like little sticks in the bulge of the flood water, if you determine your energy to flow that way, and the weight of morgues and cars depends on the hydraulic lifting power you dispose of. Napoleon when he escaped in the old box of a sledge from wintry Russia, the troops of his dead lying like so many flocks covered in snow, talked three days to Caulaincourt who probably couldn't hear very well because his ears were bandaged --his master couldn't practice his old trick of pulling them--but he must have seen in his boss's swollen face the depth that kept floating a whole Europe of details.

Yes, these business people have great energy. There's a question as to what's burned to produce it and what things we can and can't burn.

There's the burning of an atom. Wild northern forests go like so many punk sticks. Where's the competitor-fire kindling, and what will its strength be?

And another thing is that while for the sake of another vigor is lack- ^g, for the sake of the taste 01 egg in one's mouth there's all-out effort, and that's how love is lavished.

I couldn't hold up all of these different elements. Simon came in and awled me out over the car and I was too broken-down to give any back talk or even feel he was doing me wrong. All I did reply was, "What are you fussing about? It wasn't much of an accident, and you're insured."

This was just where the error was; it was that I had to feel bad about the back shell of the car and those crustacean eyes that were draggino by the wires, and it wasn't so much the accident as my failure to care as I should that he minded. That was why he burned me with his eyes and showed his brokenedged tooth while his head settled downward with menace. I was too despondent to stand up to him. Nothing visible backed me, as it did him, to see and trust, but all was vague on my side and yet it was also very stubborn.

I stayed in that evening to read. According to our agreement I was to start at the university in the spring, when business would let up a little and Simon could spare me. I still had the craving that I had given in to all summer long when I had lived on books, to have the reach to grasp both ends of the frame and turn the big image-taking glass to any scene of the world. By now Padilla had sold most of my books for me--he himself had given up stealing lately since he had taken a parttime job calculating the speed of nerve impulses in a biophysics lab-- and I had only a few things left. However, there was Einhorn's firedamaged set of classics in a box under the bed, and I picked out Schiller's Thirty Years' War and was lying in my socks reading when Mimi Villars came in.

Often she came and went without talking to me, only for her things in the closet. But she had something to say tonight, and didn't spar, but told me, "Frazer knocked me up."

"Gosh, are you sure?"

"Of course I'm sure. Come out with me. I want to talk to you and I don't want Kayo to be in on it. He listens through the wall."

It was black weather, not too cold but very windy, and the street light was hacked and banged like a cymbal.

"But where's Frazer?" I said, having been out of touch with the house lately.

"He had to leave. He has to read a damn paper at a convention in Louisiana, Christmas, and so he went to see his folks first, because he can't be with them for the holiday. But what difference is it where he is--what's the good of him?"

"Well, honestly now, Mimi, wouldn't you like it if you could get married?"

She gave me enough silence in which to take it back, looking at me252 | "You must think I lose my head easily," she said when I didn't retract.

We hadn't gone down into the wind yet; we were on the porch.

She had one foot pointed to the side and her hand coming from her deep sleeve held the back of her neck while her round face of tough happiness was turned close under mine. Tough happiness? Yes, or hard amusement, or something spiritual and gymnastic, with pain done to the brows to make them point finely. "If I wouldn't marry him before, why should I now because of an accident? I see you've been under pood influences. Let's go get a cup of coffee."

She took my arm, and we got as far as the corner, where we stopped again and were talking when a little dog came up, followed by his mistress in a Persian lamb coat and astrakhan hat, and an astonishing thing happened of the sort that made me see how believable it was that Mimi should have grabbed the gun from a stickup man and shot him; for the dog, somehow misoriented, perhaps because of the strong weather, wet on Mimi's ankle, and she shouted at the woman, who seemed incapable of looking to see what was happening, "Take away your dog!" And then she tore off the woman's high fur hat to dry herself with it and left her like that, her hairdress beginning to be destroyed by the wind as she cried out, "My hat!" The hat was on the street where Mimi had flung it.

That lack of respect in occurrences for the difficulties that there already are! But then proofs always flocked to Mimi to help her make her case. Anyway, in the drugstore, when she had stripped off and rolled her stocking and put it in her bag, it only made her laugh. A real and pure chance for temper tickled her heart.

But what she wanted to discuss over coffee was a new method of abortion she had heard about. She had already tried drugs like ergoapiol, with walking, climbing stairs, and hot baths, and now one of the waitresses at the co-op told her of a doctor near Logan Square who brought on miscarriages by injection.

"I never heard of such a thing before, but it's worth a try, and I'm going to try."

"What is it that he uses?"

"How should I know? I'm not a scientist."

'And if it has a bad effect you'll have to go to the hospital, and then what?" ' 6 v Oh, they have to take you in if you're in danger of your life. Only they'd never get out of me'how it happened."

'^It sounds risky. Maybe you'd better not try at all."

"And have a baby? Me? Can you see me with a kid? You don't care how the world gets populated, do you! Maybe you're thinking about your mother"--I thus knew that either Sylvester or Clem Tambow had talked to her about me--"and that you wouldn't be here if your mother had ideas like mine. Nor your brothers either. But even if I could be sure I'd have a son like you," she said, with her usual comment of laughter, "not that I don't think the world of you, pal, even with all your faults--why should I get into this routine? So the souls of these things shouldn't get after me when I die and accuse me of not letting them be born? I'd tell them, 'Listen, stop haunting me. What do you think you ever were? Why, a kind of little scallop, that's all. You don't know how lucky you are. What makes you think you would have liked it? Take it from me, you're indignant because you don't know.' "

We were sitting near the counter, and all the help stopped and listened to this speech. Among them was a man who said, "What a crazy broad!"

She heard him, he caught her eye, and she laughed at him and said, "Here's a guy who'll live and die trying to look like Cesar Romero."

"First thing, she comes in, she has to take off her stockings and show her gams..."

This argument had to run its course, and then we couldn't stay; we _ finished our conversation in the street. li "No," I said, "I can't complain about having been born." | | "Yes, sure, you'd even feel grateful if you knew to whom, and for what was only an accident."

"It couldn't have been all an accident. On my mother's side at least I can be sure there was love in it."

"Is it love that saves it from being an accident?"

"I mean the desire that there should be more life; from gratitude."

"Show me where that is! Why don't you go down to the Fulton egg market and think it over there. Find me the gratitude--"

"I can't argue with you that way. But if you ask me whether obliviousness would have been better for me, then I'd be a liar if I answered 'yes' or even 'maybe,' because the facts are against it. I couldn't even swear that I knew what obliviousness was, but I could tell you a lot about how pleasant my life has been."

"That's hunky-dory for you; maybe you like the way you are, but most people suffer from it. They suffer from what they are, such as they are; this woman because she's getting wrinkled and her husband won't love her; and that one because she wants her sister to die and leave her her Buick; and still another who is willing to devote her whole life to keep her fanny in the right shape; or getting money out of somebody; or thinking about getting a better man than her husband. Do you want me to give you a list on men too"? I could go on as long as you like.

They'll never change, one beautiful morning. They can't change. So maybe you're lucky. But others are stuck; they have what they have; and if that's their truth, where are we?"

Me, I couldn't think all was so poured in concrete and that there weren't occasions for happiness that weren't illusions of people still permitted to be forgetful of permanent disappointment, more or less permanent pain, death of children, lovers, friends, ends of causes, old age, loathsome breath, fallen faces, white hair, retreated breasts, dropped teeth; and maybe most intolerable the hardening of detestable character, like bone, similar to a second skeleton and creaking loudest before the end. But she, who had to make up her mind practically, couldn't be expected to make it up by my feelings. She let you know, but quick, that you, a man, could talk, but she was the one for whom it was the flesh and blood trouble, and she even had a pride about it that made her cheeks shine, that in her was something ultimate.

I didn't keep up these arguments with her. And although not convinced by her, I wasn't utterly horrified for the unborn either. To be completely consistent in that kind of economy of souls you would have to have great uneasiness and remorse that wombs should ever be unoccupied; likewise, that hospitals, prisons, and madhouses and graves should ever be full. That wide a spread is too much. The decision was really up to her, whether to have a child by Frazer who wasn't free to' marry her now, even if she wanted to marry him. And, by the way, I | didn't take at face value all that she said about him.

However, I wasn't any too sure about the injection. I wanted to ask Padilla about it, who was my scientific authority, and I tried to get him at his laboratory. If he didn't know the answer himself he could ask one of his biological buddies in that semi-skyscraper of a building where there were always dogs barking with abnormal strain, which made me flinch a little when I heard it. Padilla didn't seem to mind this; he only went there to do calculations in that slip-slop queer swift way, standing on an eccentric point, a hand in his pocket and an untouched cigarette burning with forked smoke. But I couldn't find him before Mimi's appointment with the doctor. To which I took her.

Inis doctor was a man made dolorous, or anyhow heavy of mood, y the bad times, and he looked very unprofessional. There was a careess office of old equipment, and he sat in rolled sleeves and smoked 'gars at a desk where my book-accustomed eyes spotted a Spinoza a Hegel and other things odd for a doctor, and especially one in his line. Under him there was a music shop. My memory gives me back the name: Stracciatella. In the window there was the entire family, playing guitars to a microphone--the young girls and bareleooed boys whose feet didn't yet touch the floor, and the sounds covering the street, cold that night, after a snowfall, with a noise of wires stronger even than the competition of the streetcars, old on that line and passing with a ruckus.

The doctor didn't misrepresent what he had to offer--he was too careless even for that. He wasn't hardhearted maybe, but he appeared to ask, "What could I accomplish by caring?" Perhaps there was a disdain about him for the double powerlessness of creatures, first to oppose love and then to be free of the consequences. Naturally he took me for the lover. I suppose Mimi wanted him to; as for me, that wasn't what I cared about. Therefore, this was how we were, in the office, the stout doctor explaining his injection for our lay understanding, fatfaced, dry, unarduous, heavy of breath, his arms hairy, the office stinking of cigars and of his sedentary career in old black leather. He was not actually unkind, in his goggles, and partly a man of thought--just as far as the difficulties that purify, and no farther. Then the guitars breaking their step, a wiry woe and clatter. And Mimi with fair face and hair, red cheeks, a cloth rose laying down its folds front and center of her hat, assisted by white and less serious flowers .0 that red! of summer walls and yet of fabric and the counters of stores. Also her demonish or ciliary eyebrows, so hard-set and yet she was also so confused.

But the time was one of the highest opportunity, if I understood her spirit, having to do with that same powerlessness the doctor ohserved--the powerlessness of women waiting for what will be done to them, and that way and none other to buy glory.

"This injection causes contractions," said the doctor, "and it may expel your trouble. Nobody can promise that it will, and sometimes even if it works you still need a dilation and curettage. The thing actresses in Hollywood describe in the paper as appendicitis."

"I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't make any jokes. I'm only interested in your medical services," Mimi told him right off, and he saw he wasn't dealing with a timid little knocked-up factory girl who was grateful, he'd think, for his wit and signal back to him dimly with a smile over the vast separating distances of real grief and danger. Some poor body in trouble from tenderness. But Mimi--her tenderness didn't have an easy visibility. You wondered what it would be, and after what terrific manifestations it would appear.

"Let's just keep everything professional," she said.

He said, with offended dark nose holes, "Okay, do you want the injection or not?"

"Well, what the hell do you think I came all this way for, a cold night!"

"He got up and put an enamel pot on the gas ring--a grizzly-claw collar of fires giving hot scratches. His handling of the pot was suggestive of the laziness and sloppiness of his morning egg in the kitchen; he dropped the hypo in, fished it up again with tongs, and was ready.

"And suppose I need other help, if this only works halfway, will I get it from you?"

He shrugged.

Her voice began to ring. "Well, you're one hell of a doctor! Don't discuss it before you start? Or don't you give a damn what happens to people after they take your injection? You think they're so desperate you don't have to give a damn and they're only fooling with their lives, is that the way it is?"

"If I had to, I might be able to do something for you."; I said, "You mean you do if you get paid. How much do you soak for it?": ^ "A hundred bucks.".,:?

"You wouldn't settle for fifty?" she said..

"You might find somebody who would." He meant to show--and I thought it was genuine--that he didn't care. Non curo! That was what came easiest to him. He would just as soon have put away the hypo and gone back to picking his nose and to his ideas.

I counseled her not to talk money with him. I said to her, "That part of it isn't important."

"You want to go ahead with it? Look, to me it's just the same."

"Mimi, you can still change your mind," I said for her own ear. ^i; "And where will I be if I change it? On the same spot still."

I helped her off with her fur-collared coat, and she took me by the hand as if it were I that had to be led to the needle. At the moment of my putting my arm around her--feeling her need and wanting greatly to do all I could to meet it--she broke into sobs. The thing affected me too; I caught it from her. So we held together like what we were not, a pair of lovers.

However, the doctor would not let us forget he was waiting. Sorrow^1 or tiresome, was this for him? Something between the two, and he watched how I would comfort her. Whatever there was to envy before, taking me as her lover, this was not enviable to him now. Well, he Qidn'tknow.

But Mimi had decided, and she wasn't wavering; these tears didn't mean that. She gave him her arm, and he sank the needle in it; the hardlooking fluid went down. He told her she would have pains like birth pangs and had better go to bed. The bite for this was fifteen bucks, which she was able to pay; she didn't want any money from me at the moment. Not that I had a lot of it. Going with Lucy kept me broke.

Frazer owed me something, but if he had been able to pay he would also have been able to send money to Mimi. She didn't want him to be bothered about it. He was still raising money for his divorce. Besides, it was part of Frazer's style not to know about such things. There was always something superior to what was happening in the immediate view, more eminent. This was a part of him that Mimi's satire was always aimed at, and yet she encouraged it as something precious as well as foolish. It wasn't that he was specially ungenerous but that he put things off to give his generosity a longer and more significant route.

Anyway, Mimi went to bed, cursing the doctor, for the action had already set in. However, it was "dry," she said, and the cramps weren't going to effect anything. She shuddered and sweated, her bare shoulders thin and square above the quilt, and the childish form of her forehead painfully determined with lines, eyes greatly widened, strongly lighted blue.

"Oh, that dirty, bloody gypper!";'. "Mimi, but he said nothing might happen. Wait--" rsti "What in the name of hell can I do now but wait when I'm shot full of this terrible poison? I must be caught strong, for it's squeezing my guts out. That lousy clumsy cow doctor! Oh!"

Intermittently the spasms passed off and she found the spirit for a relieving joke. "It's sitting tight, won't budge; stubborn thing. While some women have to stay on their backs nine months to keep theirs.

Listen to the radio. But"--increasing in seriousness--"I can't let it alone now and be born, with all the stuff I've taken. It might be hurt.

Groggy. If not, it might be dangerous because it's so obstinate, and be a criminal. I think if he'd be wild enough and kick the world around I might let him come. Why do I say 'he' though? It might be a girl, and what would I do to a daughter, poor child? Still women--women. They do themselves more credit, there's more reality in women. They live closer to their nature. They have to. It's more with them. They have the breasts. They see their blood, and it does them good, while men are let to be vainer. Oh! give me your hand, will you, Augie, for Chrissake?"

It was the return of the gripes, making her sit stiffly and squeeze and bear down on my hand. With shut eyes she let the spasm pass throuoh and then lay back, and I helped her cover up.

Little by little the effect of the drug ended and left her tired in the muscles and belly, furious with the doctor and angry also with me.

"But you know he didn't make any promises."

"Don't be stupid," she said, ugly. "How do you know he gave me a bie enough dose? Or if he didn't want me to come back and have it done the other way, so he'd get more? And that's what it will have to be. Only I'm not going to him."

Seeing how she was, fiery and sullen, though weakened, and wanting nobody near, I let her be and went to my room.

Kayo Obermark had the room between us, and of course he was on to what was happening; in spite of Mimi's efforts to keep him out, how could he miss? He was young, about my own age of twenty-two, but ponderous already, a big, important, impatient face, irritable, smoky with thought that went out far. He was gloomy and rough. His life was rugged in there, that room; he didn't like classes, his notion being that he could do all his own learning; the room was foul from the moldering of old things and smelled of bottles he used for urine, because he didn't like to make trips to the toilet when he was working. He lived halfnaked in his bed, which all the rest of the room approached, heaped up with commodities and dirt. He was melancholy and brilliant. He thought the greatest purity was outside human relations, that those only begot lies and cabbage-familiarity, and he told me, "I prefer stones any time.

I could be a geologist. I'm not even disappointed in humankind, I just don't care about it, and if there's one thing that's sure, it's that this world is certainly not enough, and if there isn't any more they can have it all back."

Kayo wanted to know about Mimi although she always baited him.

"What's the matter, she having it rough? She has hard luck."

"Yes, it's bad."

"But nah! it's not all luck," he said--one of the things he couldn't stand was that you should agree with him. "You notice people have the same kind of thing happen to them, over and over and over."

His attitude to her had something in common with the doctor's; it was woman's trouble she had, and neither of them could place it very high. Kayo, however was a much more intelligent man than the doctor, and though as he stood in my room on bare weight-flattened feet in undershirt, the hair in tufts on his shoulders, and that large face from which everyone was reproached for letting him down and coming short tlle "wk--though, in other words, he was the hard figure of prej259 udice, there was still in him an extra effort of justice, a channel kept open.

"Well--you understand. Everyone has bitterness in his chosen thine.

Bitterness in his chosen thing. That's what Christ was for, that even God had to have bitterness in his chosen thing if he was really going to be man's God, a god who was human. She also goes in for it." He gave a heave of terrible impatience. "That was Christ. Other gods poured on the success, knocked you down with their splendor. Those that didn't give a damn. Real success, you see, is terrifying. Can't face that. Rather ruin everything first. Everything would have to be changed. You can't find a pure desire except the one that everything should be mixed. We run away from what can be conceived pure, and everyone acts out this disappointment in his own way as if to prove that the mixed and impure will and must win."

I was always impressed by him and his big horse's eyes startled by wisdom or the shadow of it, as a horse may shy at a ridiculous thing the same as at an important one. I felt what he was saying. I knew there was truth in it, and had respect for him as the source of illumination; even while himself he was in dark colors, some of smudge, and green and blue by the eyes, but some of radiance; and, hands on his fat hips, he looked at me with a face in which some original beauty was turned down as a false lead. That this fact that all had to give in was acted out I could see, and the accompanying warning that to hope too much was a killing disease. Yes, pestilential hope that passes under the evils and leaves them standing. I had enough of a dose of it to recognize it. So I was both drawn to Kayo's view and resistant to it. No painted sky of the human theater for him, but always on the outside toward the diamond-drop true sky by means of the long, star-crawling clear fog of the medulla and brain, a copy of the Milky Way.

But I had the idea also that you don't take so wide a stand that it makes a human life impossible, nor try to bring together irreconcilables that destroy you, but try out what of human you can live with first. And if the highest should come in that empty overheated tavern with its flies and the hot radio buzzing between the plays and plugged beer from Sox Park, what are you supposed to do but take the mixture and say imperfection is always the condition as found; all great beauty too, my scratched eyeballs will always see scratched. And there may gods turn up anywhere..; "If you go into reasons," I said to Kayo, "there may be reasons for these mixed things too."

"Not real," he answered. "You wouldn't try to live on a movie screen. When you understand that, you'll be on your way to something. You can be too, if I'm not wrong about your character. You wouldn't be afraid to believe in something. What I don't get is why you want to make a dude of yourself. It won't keep up though."

Mimi heard that we were talking and she called me. I went back to her.

"What does he want?" she said.

"Kayo?"

"Yes, Kayo."

"We were just talking."

"You were talking about me. If you tell him anything I'll murder you. All he ever looks for is proof he's right, and he'd walk on my chest with his big feet if he could."

"It's you yourself that don't keep your own secrets," I said, trying to be easy about it, however. It wasn't the time to talk back in any fashion, and she stared at me, harsh, from the bent-metal bed with its so many cast-iron nuclei and iron ribbon bows.

"What I say, I say, but I can tell you not to."

"Just take it easy, Mimi, I won't."

Nevertheless I had to ask Kayo to keep an eye on her next day, not knowing what might come up and worrying through it at the office and at the supper meeting of the Magnus Cousins Club that took place once a month in an oak room downtown. I tried phoning the house and couldn't get anyone but Owens himself, who when peeved, and he was with Mimi, put on a Welsh accent I couldn't penetrate, so that it was- just wasting nickels to continue phoning. Lucy wanted to go dancing I after the meeting; I got out of that by alleging tiredness, which I didn't have to counterfeit, and cut out for home.

Mimi was there, and she had happy news. Dressed in a black and white suit, a black ribbon in her hair, she was sitting in my room.

"I used my head today," she said. "I started by saying to myself, 'Are there any ways to get this done legally?' Well, there are a few. One is if you go to an alienist and get him to say you're nuts. They don't want madwomen to be having kids. I once got off a rap that way so it's on a court record. But I don't feel like doing it now. You can go too far.

So I decided, to hell with that stuff of putting on a wacky act. The other thing is that if your heart is weak or your life in danger they'll do it for you. So I went to the clinic today and said I thought I was pregnant but "of normally, and kept having trouble. There was a guy who examined "ie and thought he was pretty sure I had a tube pregnancy. So I have to e examined again, and if they still think so they might have to operate."

This was what overjoyed her. She already was banking on it.

I said to her, "What did you do, bone up in a book on what a tube pregnancy was like and then go down and describe the symptoms to them?"

"Baby, what an idea! Do you think I'm such a daredevil? And do you think you can walk in there, tell them any old thing, and take them in?"

"They can be fooled about some things at a clinic. That I 'can tell you. But watch what you're getting into, Mimi. Don't try to put it over on them."

"It isn't all my idea; they think so too, and I have some of the symptoms.

But I won't go back, I'll go to that veterinarian."

I couldn't keep watch over her the next few days, having a full calendar of suppers and gatherings, and the times I looked in on her, late at night or at half-past six in the morning when I had to turn out, she was too sleepy to talk to me. When I went to wake her she seemed to know at once whose hand was on her shoulder and what the question was, and answered as though out of sleep, "No, nothing, no soap."

Winter was pouring on, late December, smoky and dark. Clobbering down the steps in my galoshes these mornings of mist and smoke, usually running late, I made for the car line in the seeping-back of night from the bad filters of low sky. Nine o'clock, after the first rush of business, I could catch up with breakfast at Marie's greasy-spoon, walled with decorative tin panels, one-arm chairs by the walls, no great amount of light because of the height of the fixtures.

On a Saturday afternoon I was taking a break at Marie's. She had the opera on the radio, tuned in from New York, and that eloquence turned loose didn't reach me but went on in my ears. There you have a service formerly paid for, as when a Burgundian duke in prison in Bruges sent for a painter to alleviate the dark shutters with gold faces and devotional decoration. This kind of aid to people in trouble now diffused practically free, as in magazines or on the air. However, I didn't hear it well, except as powerful and formal voices.

Sent by Happy Kellerman, a shoveler came to say that I was wanted on the phone by a lady.

It was a nurse from a South Side hospital, calling with a message from Mimi.

"Hospital? What's the matter? Since when has she been there?"

"Since yesterday," the woman said, "and perfectly all right, but says she wants to see you."

I told Simon, who listened to me with suspicion, irony, reprimand, already hard and waiting to spurn my explanation that I had to get off early to see a friend in the hospital.

"Which friend? You mean that broad of yours, the roughneck blonde? Pal, you have too many irons in the fire. How are you mixed up with her? I think you're going a little too fast, aren't you, trying to keep up with two dames? That's why you look so dug-up lately. If one of them didn't haul your ashes you might make faster time with the other. Or is it more than an ash-haul job? Ah, that would be just like you, to fall in love too! You can't hold your load of love, can you!

What do you have to give for a piece of tail? You can't climb in bed with a girl without feeling that you have to take care of her for life?"

"You don't have to say all this, Simon, it doesn't have any bearing.

Mimi's sick and wants me to come see her."

"As long as the boy is getting laid, I don't see what's such a rush to marry," said Happy.

"If this gets around to them," said Simon, out of Happy's hearing; and, strangely, his look got hung up on something that resembled satisfaction and pleasure more than anything else, and I saw that he had already handled the consequences of this to himself; he'd repudiate me, and it would do him no harm. As for his notions, the wedding night, of what we two would be able to combine and achieve, he had no doubt changed them, deciding that all should be the work of a single mind and authority.

But I was not thinking of this much, but rather of Mimi in the hospital.

I was sure she had gone through with her plan to trick the doctors.

Late afternoon I saw her, in a ward; I was in the door, and she was snapping her fingers from the distance and trying to sit up in bed.

"You went through with it?"

"Oh, sure! Didn't you know I would?"

"Well? At least, is it over?"

"Augie, I've had an operation for nothing. It's all normal. I still have the thing to go through with."

I didn't get it at first; I felt block-headed and stupid.

She said with devilish towering humor and plunging bitterness, Augie, they all come in to congratulate me that I'm going to have a normal baby. It's not a fallopian pregnancy. The doctor, the internes, the nurses, they think I should be wild with happiness, and I can't even yell at them. I've been crying. I'm so crossed up."

But why did you go through with it? Didn't you know? You invented the symptoms."

' 263 "No, I wasn't sure. I didn't invent everything, I had some. Maybe it was that injection. And when they thought it might be in the tube I was afraid not to have the operation. Then I thought when they had me on the operating table they'd do it for me. But they didn't."

"Of course they didn't, they're not allowed to. That's what it was all about in the first place."

"I realize. I realize. I thought I could crash the gate, I suppose. One of my bright schemes." She wasn't crying now, though in her eyes there were the crimson threads that tear salts bring out, and her nose was stung with them too, but she was not less but more, as was clear on her push-faced beauty, an aristocrat in her idea of the energy you should devote to love.

"How long are you supposed to stay in bed, Mimi?"

"I'm not going to stay as long as they think. I can't."

"But you have to."

"Oh no. It's getting late. A little more and I won't be able to. You call that man and get an appointment for me for late next week. By that time I'll be able to take it."

This touched me very wrong, and I couldn't help it, I showed my horror at such nerve to practice on one's own body. "Oh, you think a woman should be more fragile than that," she said. "I keep forgetting you're just about engaged to be married."

"But shouldn't you wait at least until they let you out?"

"They say ten days, and it'll only weaken me to stay in bed that long.

Anyhow, I can't stand the ward. And the nurses' being so pleased about the blessed event. I can't put up with it. And I'm beginning to be nervous.

Do you have any dough?"

"Not much. Do you?"

"Not even half of what I need, and can't raise much. He won't touch me for a buck under the price, I know. Frazer hasn't got anything either."

"If I could get into his room I could take some of his books and sell them. There are things there worth good money."

"He wouldn't like that. Anyhow, you can't get in." She broke her preoccupation to give me a look for my own sake, straight, and said with a laugh that didn't last, "You take my side, don't you?" I saw no necessity to answer. "You can see the point of love, I mean." She kissed me feelingly, and with some pride in me'. All the rest, the women, wan, visiting or gazing around.

"Well," I said, "we can raise this money. How much short of the hundred are you?"

"I'll need at least fifty more."

"We'll get it."

The easiest way I knew to raise'extra dough--so easy I was rather proud of it--was to steal books. I needed to ask no one, and Simon least of all.

I headed downtown right away. It was still early in the evening, glittering with electric, with ice; and trembling in the factories, those nearly all windows, over the prairies that had returned over demolitions with winter grass pricking the snow and thrashed and frozen together into beards by the wind. The cold simmer of the lake also, blue; the steady skating of rails too, down to the dark.

I went to Carson's on Wabash Avenue, the book section on the ground floor, warm and busy with a late crowd of shoppers under the Christmas bells and silvery ivies. I didn't as a rule loiter long, thus drawing attention. I knew what books I was after, a rare Plotinus, an English edition of The Enneads worth a whole lot of money, more than it was priced. I took the volumes down, leafed them, looked over the bindings, put them under my arm, and with fair ease made my way to the Wabash Avenue door. It was spinning slowly. I got into the quadrant that opened up for me and was half through when the door stuck and caught me, inches from the street. I turned to see whether the cause of the jamming was the worst that could be, having in my mind already police, court, and prison, up to a terrible year in Bridewell. But behind me was Jimmy Klein, practically a stranger to me since the old days, but not a stranger nevertheless. It was he who had me caught in the- brass barrel that the doors turned within, and he signaled me that he I would release me, that I was to wait in the street. There was a good deal of practice in his regard, under the felt brim, and the hook of the forefinger downward, meaning precisely, "Stop outside."

By these signs I knew him to have become a store dick. Hadn't Clem Tambow told me that he was working at Carson's? I wasn't going to make a break. The first thing was to get free of the trap, and I surrendered the books to him in the street. He said quickly, "By the stoplight on the corner. I'll be there right away."

I saw his hasty back and hat as he ran in the circle of the door. His behavior was not angry, but he appeared to deal with what he had foreseen and been ready for. By the stoplight, in the crowd, I sweated in the cold air, weak and grateful after the passed danger. Grandma's warning against Jimmy, that he was a crook, came back to me. He "salt, anyway, with lawbreaking.

"Okay," he said, returning. "You dropped the books and beat it THB ADVENTURES when I hollered. I didn't see your face, but I'm out looking if I can spot you, you understand? Now you just go to Thompson's on Monroe. I'll be right behind."

I set off, drying my face with my silk muffler. In the cafeteria I carried my cup from the counter to a table. Presently he came too, and sat down.

He considered me for a while; he had gotten to be wrinkled at the eyes, sallow, shrewd, stillish, a commentator. Yet on both sides, as much as the circumstances let it be, there was happiness at meeting again.

"Was you scared in the door?" he finally said.

"Jesus, yes--what do you think?" I said, smiling.

"Same jerk as you always were. A train could hit you and you'd think it was just swell and get up with smiles, like knee-deep in June.

What's all the happy joy this time?"

"Well, I'm glad it was you, not a real dick."

"I am a real dick, only not for you, you fool. I had to chase you. I was standing with the buyer and you came right smack in our sights, two yards' range. So what could I do but go for you? But what are you swiping books for? I thought they beat it out of us both at the same time when we worked that Santa Claus deal. My old man almost killed me. He almost killed me."?;?;' "And he made a detective of you?"

"He? Shit! I go where they put me and do what they tell me."

I knew his mother was dead; that, limping and corpulent, she had sunk into coffin and gone down to grave. But what had happened to the others?

"What about your dad now?"

"Putzin' on. He got married again after Ma died. It turned out he had a romance from the old country lasting about forty years. Isn't that something? While he had eight kids by Ma and the woman had four by her husband, both eating their hearts out with love. She became a widow, so they went and got married. What's the matter, you surprised?"

"Why, yes. I remember your father always being at home."

"Well, he had to go to the West Side sometimes, and when he did he had a transfer good for the Sixteenth-Street Kenton streetcar, so he used it."

"Don't be so rough on him, Jimmy."

"I'm not against him. I'd be happy if it did him good, but he stayed the same. He's the same now."

"And how's Eleanor? She went to Mexico, I heard."

"Oh, you're out of date. That was a long time ago. She's been back a good while. You should visit her. You was her favorite in the old davs, and she still talks about you. Eleanor has a big heart. I wish she was better."

"She sick?"

"She was. She's working again, at Zarropick's on Chicago Avenue where they make the suckers they sell in the stores next-door to schools.

She shouldn't be working though. She got sick in Mexico."

"I thought she was going there to marry."

"Oh, you remember?"

"Your Spanish relative."

He smiled downward. "Yeah. Well, he runs a sweatshop of leather poods, and he had Eleanor working in it for about a year while they were supposed to be engaged. But he was laying the other broads workins, there too, and he wasn't really thinking of getting married. Finally she got sick and came home. She's not heartbroken; it was great to see another country."

"I'm sorry for Eleanor."

"Yeah, she hoped to be in love. She banked a lot on it."

He was contemptuous beyond measure, not toward Eleanor for whom he happened to care a lot. No, perhaps for her sake, toward love, as to something that had undermined and debilitated her.

"You're kind of hard on it."

"I don't think anything of it."

"But you're married, Clem told me."'

This innocence of mine pleased him. "That's right, and have a son.

He's a winner."

"And your wife?"

"Oh, she's a good kid. She has sort of a hard life. We live with her folks, we have to. And there's another married sister and brother-inlaw.

Well, what do you think it's like, with fights about who's going to use the toilet or take down the wash, or cook, or yell at the kid?

There's still another sister who's a tramp and spreads on the stairs, so you can step on her in the dark coming home from the show, so there's brawls all the time. What I get out of it is space in a double bed. Don't you know how it is by now? It's all that you want from life comes to you as one single thing--f----; so you and some nice kid get together, and after a while you have more misery than before, only now it smore permanent. You're married and have a kid."

"Is that how it happened to you?"

"I fooled around with her, I got her in the family way, and I married her."

The path of wretchedness as Mrs. Renling had drawn it for me when she predicted what would happen if Simon married Cissy.

"You're set up like the July fourth rocket," said Jimmy. "Just charge enough to explode you. Up. Then the stick falls down after the flash.

You live to bring up the kid and oblige your wife."

"Is that what you do?"

"Well, it's not much to me; I give up on that. I don't think I give her much of a bang. But what are we talking about me for? You're the wonder boy. And what the hell are you doing, or think you're doing?

I died when I saw you glom onto those books. That's a fine way to meet again. Augie, a crook!"

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 te! l me why you don't nut 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 I 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 knov/ing."

"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. Gut 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 a- tn'lt 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 thai 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 get'ting 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, aston271 ished, 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 casss, 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 Ober- mark 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 wzited 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, fuming 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.

As I opened the gray car door Owens called from the porch, "Eh, March!" He had come out in his shirt and was giant and shrunkshouldered, knees together, in the cold of this bad death of the year.

"Important, on the telephone."

I ran up. It was Simon.

"Augie!"

"Talk fast. What's up? I'm in a hurry!"

"It's you who'd better talk fast," he said, furious. "I just had a call from Charlotte, and Kelly Weintraub is spreading a story about you that you took a him to have an abortion."

"So? What about it, Simon?"

"That's the dame, isn't it, that one from your house? So you went and fixed yourself, you jazzed yourself right out into the cold. This is where I shake you, Augie, before you do worse to me. I can't carry you along any more. I'm going to have a tough time explaining this, how you were f----this girl all the time you were engaged to Lucy. I'll say you're no damned good, which is no lie since you're too dumb to live."

"Aren't you even going to ask me if Kelly's story is true?"

Contemptuous that I should be so simple as to think him foolish enough to believe what I would feed him, he said in an almost amused voice, "All right--what? You were doing another guy a favor, huh?

You've never been between this doll's legs? You've been living next door to her without touching her? Listen, we're no more ten years old, kid. I've seen that tramp. She wouldn't let you alone even if you wanted to be let alone. And you didn't. Don't try to tell me you're not horny. We all are, in our family. What do you think started us out in the first place all three of us? Someone found he could come ring the bell whenever he wanted. Do you think I care if you were laying that girl? But you had to get tied up this way too--in dutch good and solid; that's wway it has to be to feel right. You must really be like Ma. Well, that's nothing to me if you have to do it that way. But I won't let you get me in trouble with the Magnuses."

"There isn't any reason why you should be in trouble with the Magnuses. Listen, I'll tell you about this tomorrow."

"No, you won't. Not after tomorrow either. You're not with me from here on. Just bring back the car."

"I'll come by and tell you what this really is--"

"Stay away, that's the last and only thing I'll ever ask you."

"You sonofabitch!" I yelled with tears. "You shit! I hope to see you dead!"

Padilla came running for me and called into the sitting room, "Hurry, cut out the gabbing."

Bawling, I shoved and kicked past the wicker or paper furniture and plunged out.

"What's the matter? What's the tears for? This too much for you?"

I answered when able, "No, I had a scrap."

"Let's go. You want me to drive?"

"No, I can."

We drove first to the hospital where she had had her operation.

Soberer in the cold air, she said she would go in herself. We led her up to the emergency entrance and let her walk in, then sat in the car, hoping she would not come out. But presently, through the gilded, frosted drops of the windshield, I saw her appear in the door and I rushed to get her.

"I said--"

"Why didn't they take you in?"

"There's this guy. When I told him he said, 'We got no room in a place like this for people like you. Why didn't you have the kid? Go home and wait for the undertaker.' "

"Chinga su madre!"

Padilla helped me lead her back to the car. "I think I know a guy in a hospital on the North Side working in a lab, if he's still there. I'll call him."

I drove him to a cigar store and he went in to phone.

"We should try it," he said when he returned. "We should say she did it to herself. Lots of women do. He told me who to ask for. If this other guy is on duty. He's supposed to be a good guy." In lower tones he said, "We may have to dump her there and beat it. She's just about passing out. What will they do? They can't put her in the street."

"No, we won't dump her."

"Why not? They see you and throw her right back at you because they don't want her on their hands. They pick what troubles they want to help. But let's use our heads. I'll go in first and case the doctor."

However, we all eptered together. I couldn't wait in the car with her and was determined anyhow that they would take her in or I'd smash everything in sight. So we went through the near-empty first rooms; I made a one-handed grab at a guy in an orderly's gray coat who advanced in the way. He ducked and Padilla said to me, "What the Jesus are you doing! You're going to queer everything. Now take her over there and sit down till I find out if this buddy of mine is on duty."

Mimi drooped on me, and I felt her heat in the cheek. She could no longer sit; I held her propped until a stretcher was brought for her.; Padilla had gone, and they had me, at first, as if in arrest. There was a cop on duty. Together with the orderly he came out of a side door with a cup of coffee, in blue shirt, even holding a club.

"Now what's the story?" said a doctor.

"Instead of asking, why don't you take care of her?"

"Did you smack this guy?" said the cop. "Did, he swing on yon?"

"He swung, but he didn't hit."

Conceivably the-cop now observed that I wore a tuxedo, because he wasn't quite so deadly packed in the flesh of the neck and small-eyed when he spoke to me. I was in the clothes of a gentleman, and therefore why should he take chances?

"What's the matter with this woman? What are you, the husband?

She doesn't wear a wedding band. Are you related, or just friends?"

"Mimi? Has she passed out?"

"No, she's just not answering. She moves her eyes."

Padilla returned, the doctor hurrying before him. "Just bring her here and we'll see what gives," said the doctor.

Manny gave me a great look of success. We got rid of the whole ugly sniff-nosed crowd wanting to be in on trouble and went with the doctor.

As we followed Manny gave him a story.

"She did it to herself. She's a working girl and couldn't have a kid."

"How did she do it?"

"With something, I guess. Don't women make a study of these things all their life long?"

'I've seen some dandies. But also I've heard pretty stinking stories made up. Well, if the women live we don't look for the abortionist, because what good does it do the profession?", __How does she look offhand?"

"A lot of blood lost is all I can tell until I look it over. Who's this second fellow who's so worried?"

"Her friend."

"All he had to do was really smack that orderly and he'd have had New Year's fun in the calaboose with the drunks. Why is he in the monkey suit?"

"Hey, what about your date?" said Padilla as he put his hand to his long face with shock. It was after eight by the smooth-pulled electric/c clock in the brilliant room we entered.

"When I find out what's up with Mimi."

"Go on. You better. I'll be here. I have no date toni'ght and was staying in anyway. The doctor doesn't think it's so bad. What do you have on?"

"A ball at the Edgewater."

I stood waiting until the doctor returned.

"It's mostly blood loss and infection from the belly surgery, I think," he said. "Where did she get that done?"

"She'll answer your questions herself if she wants to," I told him.

"I don't know."

"What do you know? Do you know, for instance, who can be billed?"

" Padilla said, "There's money. Can't you see how good her clothes are?" And he said to me, for it worried him deeply, "Are you blowing or not? This guy's engaged to a millionaire's daughter and on New Year's Eve he keeps her waiting,"

"Write me a pass so I can get back tonight to see Mimi," I said to the doctor. He made a perplexed face to Padilla about me and I said further, "For Chrissake, Doc, don't fiddle around with me, but write the thing out. What's it to you if I come back? I'd tell you my whole hard luck story but don't have the time."

"Ah, go on, it's no skin off your nose," said Padilla to him.

"A pass from me wouldn't do you any good in front. I'm on now till morning, so just come and ask for me, Castleman."

"I may be back before long," I said. For I was sure that Kelly Weintraub, since he was talking, had already gotten to Uncle Charlie Magnus.

But I reckoned also that he and his wife had not told Lucy, not on New Year's Eve, when she was going to a dance. Later they'd throw me out on my prat. But why had she asked me to come an hour sooner?

The dance didn't really begin until ten o'clock. I phoned her once more and asked, "Are you waiting?"

"Of course I'm waiting. Where are you?"

"Not far."

"What are you-doing?"

"I had to stop at a place. I'll hurry now."

"Please!"

About that last word of hers I thought as I drove that it was not like lovers' impatience, but neither soft nor hard. Turning too wide at the driveway, with a last-minute twist I put my wheels through mud and bushes and scraped back under the portico. Inside, on the turned-over heels of the yard shoes I hadn't remembered to change, I walked to the mirror to knot my black tie and saw backward, by the drape in the living room, the tense belly of Uncle Charlie, his sharp feet prepared, and sitting waiting in the oriental mix-up of brass, silk, wool, and all that gave the place so much power, Lucy, her mother, and Sam, observing roe. I felt there was a big machine set against me. But I had come in order not to disappoint Lucy, toward whom, given their chance, my feelings could have shone and warmed again. I expected poisoned looks, against which I was coated and immune; at least, my greater trouble made such looks seem negligible; and I wasn't willing to be tagged for lascivious crime and false pretenses or whatever the counts were that they thought they had against me. By no means nervous, therefore, I judged that I had to do only with Lucy, no fortune hunting now involved, for I could go any distance independent of brothers, relations, and all, provided that her impulse was a true one and she was, as she had always said, in love. This was the thing, for I saw that she had been worked on, though I didn't know how much she had been told. The iarge-mouthed smile she gave me, staying at her seateddistance instead of coming to kiss me, was curious--that pretty sketch ^_of charm, in lipstick, widening, the relative of the awful cleft, running ^|thc other way, of the schismatics in the sixth bulge of hell, hit open from the bottom and split through the face. Ah, dear face! treasured as the representative of all the body which, though, dies away from this top delegate when it becomes too gorged and valuable. She, now so unearnest with me through her worked-up countenance, I saw she had been gotten to by her parents and that decisions had been made. My only cue was to leave. But not a single word had been spoken yet in this oriental assembly, and I had no pretext. I was still the escort, dolled up, if you didn't scrutinize me too close, like a chorus boy, in a boiled shirt, and thinking of nothing but courtship and dances.

"Why don't you sit down?" said Mrs. Magnus.

'I thought we were leaving right away."

"Well, Lucy!" said her father.

And on this signal she told me, "I'm not going with you, Augie."

"Now or ever," he directed.

"Never again.".. '

"You'll go to the dance with Sam."

"But I came to take her, Mr. Magnus."

"No, these things when you decide to break them, it's better to break at once," said Mrs. Magnus. "I'm sorry, Augie. I personally don't wish you any bad luck. But I advise you to control yourself. It's not too late, You're a handsome and intelligent young man. There's nothing against your family; I respect your brother. But you're not what we had in mind for Lucy."

"What about what Lucy had in mind?" I said with a rising throatful of rage.

The old man was impatient with Mrs. Magnus's effort toward queenly dignity and wisdom. "No dough if she marries you!" he said.

"Well, Lucy, to whom does that make the difference, to you or to me?"

Her smile spread wider and lost all other intentions in the single suggestion that it was she who had inflamed me and when hot I had discharged it all upon someone else but that it really didn't matter since she wasn't so little her father's child, though a girl, that all that ardor in the car and in the parlor and with the lips and tongues and fingertips and the rest could make her really lose her head and be unwise.

I couldn't be sure just what the deal was. Something was said about the damage to her car. Now she confessed it. Her father said of course it would be fixed. As long as nothing else was broken, this being his delicacy about the hymen. But it was worth a laugh to him; this way a threat and groan also escaping in his fatherly joy that she had remained intact.

There was nothing further to stay for. I was threatened by her brother Sam, whom I found near me when I picked up my coat in the hall, that he would break my back if I bothered his sister; but with all his thickset hairiness and spreading keister, he couldn't make it mean anything to me.

I started the car, to which I also felt commitment ending, and drove to the hospital.

Padilla had given Mimi blood, and he was lying down after the transfusion in the room where I had left him, sucking an orange; his skimpy arm with its one curious ball of muscle taped, and his eyes, below surface indifference, black and active toward what I couldn't readily see.

"How is Mimi?"

"They took her'upstairs. She's still off her head, but this Castleman says he gives her a good chance."

"I'm going up to see her. How is it with you?"

"Well, I don't think I'll be sticking around now. I'll be going home soon. Are you staying?"

I gave him the cab fare, for I didn't want him to bang all that long way to Hyde Park in a streetcar on a crowded holiday night.

"Thanks, Manny."

He put the money in the pocket of his shirt, and suddenly he asked, surprised, "Say, what are you doing back from the dance already?"

I didn't stand and answer but went out.

Mimi was in one of the maternity wards. Castleman said that there had been no other place to put her, and I thought that she more or less belonged there. So I went up. It was a tall, big chamber, and in the middle on a table was a little Christmas fir with lit bulbs and under it a box with cotton wool and nativity dolls.

Castleman told me, "You can stick around, but don't make yourself noticed or you'll be thrown out. I think she's going to pull out of it though she did everything she could not to except cut her wrists and take poison."

There I sat by her bed, it being half-darkness. Nurses coming to bring infants for the breast now and then, there were whispers and crimped cries and sounds of turning in bed, and of coaxing and sucking.

I was open to feelings that had no obstacle in coming to cover me, as I was, in darkness and to the side, scorched, bitter, foul, and violent; ' and these feelings receding by and by, I was aware of others full of great suggestion and of this place where I was cast up. I began to breathe by my own normal measure and grew much calmer. When the midnight noise exploded, the tooting, sirens, horns, all that jubilation, it came in rather faint, all the windows being shut, and the nursery squalling continued just the same.

At about one o'clock, alert enough to hear me stirring, Mimi whispered, "What are you doing here?"

"I don't have any place special to go."

She knew where she was, hearing the infants cry. Her comment to roe was melancholy, about whether she had outwitted a fate or met it. That was perhaps according as she was weak or strong toward what she had chosen and done, and in the truth of her feeling at the present moment, hearing the suckling and crying, and the night-time business of mothering.

"Anyhow, I think you're in good hands," I told her.

" K 281 I went out to take a stroll, looking at the infant faces through the glass, and then, no one interfering, the nurses probably in a New Year's gathering of their own to snatch a moment's celebration, I passed through to another division where the labor rooms were, separate cubicles, and in them saw women struggling, outlandish pain and hugebellied distortion, one powerful face that bore down into its creases and issued a voice great and songlike in which she cursed her husband obscenely for his pleasure that had got her into this; and others, calling on saints and mothers, incontinent, dragging at the bars of their beds, weeping, or with faces of terror or narcotized eyes. It all stunned me.

So that when a nurse hurried up to investigate who I was and what business I had to be there, she made me falter. And just then, in the elevator shaft nearby, there were screams. I stopped and waited for the rising light I saw coming steadily through the glass panels. The door opened; a woman sat before me in a wheel chair, and in her lap, just born in a cab or paddy wagon or in the lobby of the hospital, covered with blood and screaming so you could see sinews, square of chest and shoulders from the strain, this bald kid, red and covering her with the red. She too, with lost nerve, was sobbing, each hand squeezing up on itself, eyes wildly frightened; and she and the baby appeared like enemies forced to have each other, like figures of a war.

They were pushed out, passing me close by so that the mother's arm grazed me.

"What are you doing here?" said the nurse with angry looks. I had no right to be there.

I found my way back, and when I saw Mimi resting, much cooler, I cleared out of the hospital by the stairs Castleman had shown me and went to the car, new snow floating at my feet over the gray plating of ice.

I didn't exactly know where I was when I started. I went slowly in the increasing, snow, through side streets, hoping to come out on a main drag, and at last I did hit Diversey Boulevard in a deserted factory part, not far from the North Branch of the river. And here, as the thought of soon sacking in began to seem agreeable, I had a flat, at the rear. The tire sunk, and I dragged to the curb on the wheel rim and killed the motor. I had to thaw the lock of the trunk with matches, and when I got out the tools I didn't understand the working of the bumper jack. It was new that year, and I was used to the axle type that Einhorn had had. For a while I tried, though the boiled shirt cut me and the cold gripped my feet and fingers, and then I flung the pieces back, locked up, and started to look for a place where I could get warm. But everything was shut, and now that I had my bearings I knew that I was not far from the Coblins'. Knowing Coblin's hours, I didn't hesitate to go there and wake him.

When the yellow lamp flashed in the black cottage hall and he discovered who was ringing he blinked his eyes, astonished.

"The car broke down on Diversey and I thought I could come by because you get up around this time for the route."

"No, not today. It's New Year's; no presses working. But I wasn't sleeping. I just before heard Howard and Friedl when they got in from a party. Come inside, for God's sake, and stay. I'll give you a blanket on the couch."

I went in gratefully, took off the tormenting shirt, and covered my feet with cushions.

Coblin was delighted. "What a surprise they'll have in the morning when they see Cousin Augie! Boy, that's great! Anna will be in seventh heaven."

Because of the brightness of the morning and also the kitchen noise, I was up early. Cousin Anna, no less slovenly than in other days, had pancakes and coffee goim; and a big spread on the table. Her hair was becoming white, her face with its blebs and hairs darker; her eyes were gloomy. But this gloom was the form of her emotion and not any radical pessimism; Weeping and catching me in her arms, she said, "Happy New Year, my dearest boy. You should know only happiness, as you deserve. I always loved you." I kissed her and shook hands with Coblin, and we sat down to breakfast.

"Whose car broke down, Augie?"

"Simon's." | "Your bigshot brother."

"It didn't break down. It's a flat, and I was too cold to change it."

"Howard will help you when he gets up."

"Don't have to bother--" I thought I might mail Simon the keys and let him come after his damned car himself. This angry idea was momentary, however. I drank coffee and looked out into the brilliant first morning of the year. There was a Greek church in the next street of which the onion dome stood in the snow-polished and purified blue, cross and crown together, the united powers of earth and heaven, snow in all the clefts, a snow like the sand of sugar. I passed over the church too and rested only on the great profound blue. The days have not changed, though the times have. The sailors who first saw America, that sweet sight, where the belly of the ocean had brought them, didn't see more beautiful color than this.

Augie, it was too bad Friedl couldn't come down from Ann Arbor for your brother's wedding; she had exams. You haven't seen her since a child, and you should. She's so beautiful. I don't say because she is my child--God is my witness. You'll see her soon for herself. But here, look, this is a picture from the school. And this one was in the paper when she was chairlady of the junior benefit. And not only beautiful, Augie--"

"I know she's very pretty. Cousin Anna."

"And why do you want to get mixed up with your brother's new relatives, those coarse people? Look how developed she is on this picture.

She was your little sweetheart when you were kids. You used to say you were engaged."

I almost corrected her, "No, you used to say it." Instead I laughed, and she thought I was laughing over those pleasant memories and joined in, clasping her hands and closing her eyes. Slowly I realized that she was shedding tears as well as laughing.

"I ask one thing only, that before I die I should see my child happy with a husband.", "And children."

"And children--"

"For the love of mike, let's have pancakes. There's nothing on the plate," said Coblin.

She hurried to the stove, leaving the pictures spread before me, album and clippings; at which I stared. Only to turn my eyes at last again to the weather.







CHAPTER XIII



I was no child now, neither in age nor in protectedness, and I was thrown for fair on the free spinning of the world. If you think, and some do, that continual intimacy, familiarity, and love can result in falsehood, this being thrown on the world may be a very desirable even if sad thing. What Christ meant when he called his mother "Woman." That after all she was like any woman. That in any true life you must go and be exposed outside the small circle that encompasses two or three heads in the same history of love. Try and stay, though, inside. See how long you can.

I remember I was in a fishmarket square in Naples (and the Neapolitans are people who don't give up easily on consanguinity)--this fishmarket where the mussels were done up in bouquets with colored string and slices of lemon, squids rotting out their sunk speckles from their flabbiness, steely fish bleeding and others with peculiar coins of scales --and I saw an old beggar with his eyes closed sitting in the shells who had had written on his chest in mercurochrome: Profit by my imminent death to send a greeting to your loved ones in Purgatory: 50 lire.

Dying or not, this witty old man was sassing everybody about the circle of love that protects you. His skinny chest went up and down with the respiration of the deep-sea stink of the hot shore and its smell of explosions and fires. The war had gone north not so long before. The Neapolitan passersby grinned and smarted, longing and ironical as they read this ingenious challenge.

You do all you can to humanize and familiarize the world, and suddenly it becomes more strange than ever. The living are not what they were, the dead die again and again, and at last for good.

1 see this now. At that time not.

Well, I went back to books, to reading not stealing them, while I wed on the money Mimi repaid, and on what she loaned me when she was on her feet and working once more. Through with Frazer, Mimi had met Arthur Einhorn and had taken up with him. She was still waiting on tables. I got my meals at the joint where she worked. And I lay down and finished the Five-Foot Shelf Einhorn had given me, the fire- and water-spotted books I had kept in the original cardboard box.

They had a somewhat choky smell. So if Ulysses went down to hell or there were conflagrations in Rome or London or men and women lusted as they did in St. Paul, I could breathe an odor that supplemented the reading. Kayo Obermark lent me volumes of poets and took me to lectures now and then. This improved his attendance. He didn't like to go alone.

I can't be sure it isn't sour grapes that the university didn't move me much--I say that because according to the agreement I had made with Simon I was to have gone back in the spring--but it didn't. I wasn't convinced about the stony solemnity, that you couldn't get into the higher branches of thought without it or had to sit down inside these old-world-imitated walls. I felt they were too idolatrous and monumental.

After all, when the breeze turned south and west and blew from the stockyards with dust from the fertilizer plants through the handsome ivy some of the stages from the brute creation to the sublime mind seemed to have been bypassed, and it was too much of a detour.

That winter I had a spell of the WPA. Mimi urged me to go and be certified. She said it would be simple, which it certainly was. I had the two requirements, being indigent and a citizen.

The trouble was that I didn't care to be put on one of the street details I'd see picking up bricks and laying them down, and with that shame of purposelessness you smelled as the gang moved a little, just enough to satisfy the minimum demand of the job. However, she said I could always quit if too proud to be assigned to this; she thought it wasn't a good sign in me that I had to have a clerical job; I'd be in better shape in the open ah- among simpler people. It wasn't the people that I complained of, but the clinking on a brick and that melancholy percussion of fifty hammers at a time. But I went to apply because she felt obliged to take care of me, making me her responsibility, giving me money, and as we weren't lovers this would be unfair.

Anyhow, I was certified and got a strolling kind of job that was about as good as I could expect. I was with a housing survey, checking on rooms and plumbing back-of-the-yards. I could fix up my own time card and soldier considerably, as everyone expected me to do; in bitter weather I could pass the time in the back booth of a coffeepot until the check-out hour. Also, the going into houses satisfied my curiosity. It was finding ten people to a room and the toilets in excavations under the street, or the rat-bitten kids. That was what I didn't like too much.

The stockyard reek clung to me worse than the smell of the dogs at Guillaume's. And even to me, as accustomed to slums as Indians are 1 to elephants, it was terra incognita. The different smells of flesh in all 1 degrees from desire to sickness followed me. And all the imagination, passion, or even murder you could conceive were wrapped up in apparent simplicity or staleness, with elementary coarseness of a housewife feeling cabbages in a Polack store, or a guy who lifted a glass of beer to his white, flat-appearing face, or a merchant hanging ladies' bloomers and elastics in the drygoods window.

I stayed with this deal until the end of winter, and then Mimi, who was always up on these things, had an idea that there might be something for me in the CIO drive that had just started. This was soon after the first sitdown strikes. Mimi was an early member of the restaurant workers' union CIO. Not that she had any special grievance where she worked, but she believed in unions and she was on fine terms with her organizer, a man named Grammick. She brought us together.

This Grammick was no rough-and-tumble type but had points of similarity with Frazer and also Sylvester. He was "a college man, softspoken, somewhat of a settlement-house minister doing his best, meek with the punks but used to them, and causing you a sense of regret. He ^1 had a long chest but his legs were relatively short; he walked quickly, ^^ toes in, slovenly in his double-breasted long jacket, a densely hairy,. mild, even delicate person. But he wasn't an easy man for opponents to deal with. He couldn't be caught off balance, he clung hard, he was ^clever, and he knew a thing or two about deceit himself, Grammick did. ^* I produced a pretty favorable impression, and he agreed I might make an organizer. In fact his behavior toward me was very sweet. I had an idea that my good impression wasn't all my doing, but that he was trying to make time with Mimi.

But I got to value Grammick for various reasons. Though he was so inconspicuous that he could come and go, not specially noticed around hotel lobbies and service passages, still when a matter came to a head he could act with authority and not be frightened by a situation he had created. I appreciated his consciousness in advance of rights and wrongs that hadn't risen to view yet.

"Yes, they're hiring organizers. They want experienced people, but where are they going to find them? The problems are piling up too fast."

'Augie is the kind of person you ought to have," said Mimi, "somebody who can speak the workers' language."

"Oh, really, does he?" said Grammick, looking at me. It made me laugh to hear this advertised of me, and I said I didn't know whose language I spoke.

It couldn't have made less difference I soon learned when I began to work at the job. People were rushing to join up, and it was a haste that practically belonged to nature, like a change of hives, and, bent on their ends, they had that touchiness from being immersed in the sense of their own motion that causes striking and stinging. It must have resembled a migration, land race, or Klondike. Except that this time the idea was about justice. The big strikes had set it off, those people sitting down by their machines and holding parties, but grim parties. That was in the automobile and rubber industries, and of this I saw the farreaching result, down to the most negligible pearldiver on skid row.

I started out at a table of the union hall--which wasn't the kind of rugged place you might picture but as solid as a bank building, on Ashland Avenue; it even had a restaurant of its own as well as a pool parlor--just a toy, for the members' recreation, nothing like Einhorn's --in the basement. I was supposed to be Grammick's inside man and take care of the telephone and office part of things. It was anticipated I wouldn't be busy above what was average and could gradually pick up what I needed to know. Instead there was a rush on me of people having to have immediate action; some hand-hacked old kitchen stiff as thickened with grease as a miner or sandhog would be with clay, wanting me to go and see his boss, subito; or an Indian would bring his grievances written in a poem on a paper bag soaked with doughnut oil. There wasn't an empty chair in my room, which was a room well apart from the main offices reserved for workers in the big industries. It made no difference how hidden I was. I'd have been found had I been in a steel vault by the feeblest signal of possible redress, or as faint a trace as makes the night moth scamper ten miles through clueless fields.

There were Greek and Negro chambermaids from all the hotels, porters, doormen, checkroom attendants, waitresses, specialists like the director of the garde-manger from flossy Gold Coast joints, places where I had gone with the dog-wagon and so understood a little. All kinds were coming. The humanity of the under-galleries of pipes, storage, and coal made an appearance, maintenance men, short-order grovelers; or a ducal Frenchman, in homburg, like a singer, calling himself "the beauty cook," who wrote down on his card without taking off his gloves. And then old snowbirds and white hound-looking faces, guys with Wobbly cards from an earlier time, old Bohunk women with letters explaining what was wanted, and all varieties of assaulted kissers, infirmity, drunkenness, dazedness, innocence, limping, crawling, insanity, prejudice, and from downright leprosy the whole way again to the most vigorous straight-backed beauty. So if this collection of people has nothing in common with vhat would have brought up the back of a Xerxes' army or a Constantine's, new things have been formed; but what struck me in them was a feeling of antiquity and thick crust. But I expect happiness and gladness have always been the same, so how much variation should there be in their opposite?

Dealing with them, signing them into the organization and explaining what to expect, wasn't all generous kindness. In large part it was rough, when I wanted to get out of the way. The demand was that fierce, the idea having gotten around that it was a judgment hour, that they wanted to pull you from your clerical side of the desk to go with them. Instead I had to promise to investigate.

"When?"

"Soon. As soon as possible. We have a big backlog. But soon."

"Sonsof bitches! Those guys! We're just waiting there to give it to them. You should see that kitchen!"

"There'll be an organizer out to contact you."

"When?"

"Well, I'll tell you the truth, we're shorthanded because there's such a rush; we haven't got enough men. But what you must do meanwhile | is get ready, have your people sign the cards, and prepare your demands I and grievances."

"Yeah, yeah. But, mister, when is the man going to come? The boss is gonna call in the ALL and sign a contract with them, that's some outfit."

I tried to discuss this danger with my higher-ups. Just then hotels and restaurants were a sideline with them, however; they lacked time to deal with them, busy with retail clerks who were out on a big strike and with runaway dress shops in Chicago Heights and so forth, but they couldn't bring themselves to turn down new memberships and aimed to keep them until they were prepared to devote the necessary time and money.

In short, Grammick and I were intended to hold the line. I learned to do somewhat as he did. He would work sixteen hours daily for ten or twelve days at a stretch and then for two whole days he couldn't be found by anyone. He spent that time in his mother's flat, sleeping and eating steaks and ice-cream, taking the old lady to the movies or read K* ing. Once in a while he slipped away to a lecture. He was studying law too. Grammick wasn't going to be sucked away from all private existence.

I went along with this rush, really needing some such thing now because of my blowout with Simon. After office hours I was out on the streetcars, traveling to see cooks and dishwashers or hotel clerks on night duty--those leafy nights of the beginning green in streets of the lower North Side where the car seemed to blunder as if without tracks, off Fullerton or Belmont, when the white catalpa bells were opening and even the dust could have a sweet odor. Many clerks especially asked you to come at night, when they could speak freely. The conspiratorial part of it was fine; and with the radical ideas then going, these people who were placed in a position to be thoughtful, since they were up all night, wanted the chance to say those self-rehearsed things that sometimes had been on their hearts too long. True and false light was distributed just about as usual, is my opinion. But it wasn't my place to judge that, but only to advance the work. Some of these guys just plain meant business. I suspect they wanted me to be more dangerous than I appeared to be.. I know I, seemed too fresh and well in color, not enough smoked and yellowed to appreciate what they were up against. My manner was both slipshod and peppy. They were looking for some fire-fed secret personality that would prepare the moment when they could stand up yelling rebellion. And here instead I would breeze in--I knew sometimes that my color and the height of my hair, my relaxed way, would give offense. But there wasn't any help for that.

Occasionally they'd even ask for my credentials.

"Did they send you from headquarters?"

"You Eddie Dawson?"

"That's right."

"I'm March. You talked to me on the telephone."

"You?" said Dawson. And I knew he had expected to see some sandy, suck-cheeked devil, veteran of coal fields or oil or New Jersey textile strikes. Yes, that at least--someone on whom it was evident that his first strength had been drawn out of him in the Paterson jail.

"You don't have to worry. I'm reliable."

Then he resigned himself; he had been taken in by my telephone voice. I could be at least a messenger to the higher-ups who'd be busy Guy-Fawkesing the Drake Hotel or the Palmer House--because it was that to Eddie Dawson, hauling up gunpowder in the tunnels.

He would tell me, then, what he wanted my superiors to know and give me directives.

"I want you to arrange a meeting with your top man down there--"

"Mr. Ackey, you mean?"

"You tell him I can get the employees together, but before we go out off strike we want to talk to him, all of us. That's to give my people confidence."

"Why are you sure you'll have to go out? Maybe you'll get your demands."

"Do you know who runs this bedbug palace?"

"What, some bank? Is it a receivership? Most of these small joints--"

"It's an outfit called Holloway Enterprises."

"Karas?"

"You know him?"

"Yes, I do, it so happens. I used to work for the insurance man Einhorn who is his cousin-in-law."

"He writes the policies for this place. You know what kind of a joint this is, don't you? For quickies."

"Is that so?" I said, observing that the big forehead, flushed and deeply vein-fed in the light cloud of fair hair, was covered with a sweat and that he wiped his hands the nails of which were manicured nails on his pink-striped shirt with an unconscious clutch. "If that's a problem it's a police problem. You don't want the CIO to start a union of | them, do you?"

"Don't talk foolish. I mean I get the brunt of the trouble because I'm- night clerk. Anyhow, if you know Karas you can tell me how easy it'll be to get our demands."

"He's a pretty tough character."

"Now when I have the shop ready to go, you ask Mr. Ackey for a few minutes so we can talk to him."

"We can arrange it," I said, who didn't know Ackey well enough to say good day when passing in and out of the toilet. But I represented him.

The situation was different in the hash-houses. I was more trusted and highly regarded. In the kitchens were old men--flophouse. County Hospital, and mission attendance inscribed all over them big and bold, and there was nothing like the resentment of a fellow like Dawson in that striped shirt, who was close enough to Karas's condition to figure how he made profit, to hate and envy, and also to wish to be nifty at (he track, to wear hound's-tooth checks, to have a case and binoculars and be seen with a proud-cheeked fine big broad.

But take one of these old guys from a Van Buren Street greasy-spoon --I'd be requested by him to come around by the alley, the large paving stones breathing fumes of piss, and signal him through the window.

Whereupon he'd go tight with caution and make me an oblique response with his head that might be taken by other eyes as a random motion. At last, by the door, we'd have a shushing conversation that we could have had just as well after hours. Except that he would want me to have a look at his place of work probably. The angry skin of his dish-plunging arms and his twist horse-gauntness, long teeth and spread liquidness of eyes in the starry alley evening; also that terrible state of food when you suspect it of approaching garbage that he brought out in his clothes and on all his person, his breath and the hair of his head just below me. Under the fragile shell of his skull he leakily was reasoning.

And did it matter to him as it did to Dawson whether I looked like the organizer of his dreams? He wanted to make his dim contribution to the righting of wrongs, so that it was enough for him that he could locate me in an office or that I would come down this reeking alley to talk to him and accept the lists he slipped me of other stiffs who wanted to belong to the union. I was supposed to hunt them up in their moldy rooms. Where I had been on altogether different errands while I worked for Simon, recruiting coal hikers. No use assuming that I had reversed all and was now entering these flophouse doors from the side of light, formerly from that of darkness. Those times that I thought clearly of my duties I decided that I couldn't consider persons so much but rather the one degree of advancement in which everybody could be included.

Having a call in the old neighborhood one morning, I dropped in on Einhorn and found him in his sunny parlor office, in that peculiar, familiar staleness of coffee and bed, papers, his own shaving lotions and the powders of the two women. Mildred with her orthopedic shoes --she was polite but didn't like me--was already at her machine, heated and lit on the back of the neck, which had just been shaved up to the border where her potent hair began. Over the way, empty, were the windows of the old place of great days and grands cir Constances. I didn't find Einhom in a good state though I wasn't supposed to know it from his weighty face. For a while I thought he wanted to sit me out silently, until I went away. He breathed and felt of himself, looked out in the morning, smoked, nibbled, croaked off some shallow gas. He appeared melancholy and even savage.

"How's the pay at this new job of yours?" he asked me, deciding to speak. "Fair?"

"It's liberal."

"Then there's good coming out of it," he said with his dry decisiveness.

I laughed at him. "Is that all you think?"

"At least that anyway. Kid, I don't want to take away your zeal if you think you're doing something. And remember, I'm no conservative.

Just because 1 sit here in a chair. This is no rich guys' club. In fact I have less to lose than other men, so I don't shrink from thinking to the extreme. I do a little business with Karas, but it doesn't follow that my ideas have to be where my interests are. What interests! Some interests!

He's a knacker, Karas, he just bought a big new place in San Antonio."

I was now convinced that something was wrong. "Then you think it's a waste of time, what I'm doing?"

"Oh, it seems to me on both sides the ideas are the same. What's the use of the same old ideas? On both sides. To take some from one side and give it to the other, the same old economics."

He hadn't wanted to talk to me in the first place, but since I didn't go away he drove himself into the subject at first by irritation and then summoning up what he really thought. I wasn't zealous, not as he implied, but I did feel called on to say, "Well, people get up every morning to go to work; it isn't right that it should be an illusion, or that they should be so grateful for being allowed to continue in their habit that they shouldn't ask for anything more."

"You think that with a closed shop you're going to make men out of slobs? If they have a steward to gripe for them? Pooey!"

"So," I said, "is it better to leave it to Karas or a gorilla of a business- agent who takes graft from him?"

"Look here, because they were born you think they have to turn out to be men? That's just an old-fashioned idea. And who tells them that? A big organization. One more big organization. A big organization makes dough or it doesn't last. If it makes dough it's for dough."

"If there can't be much sense in these big organizations that's all the more reason why they should stand for a variety of things," said I.

"There ought to be all kinds."

Meanwhile, ignoring, Mildred went on typing out statements. Einhorn didn't reply; I thought it was the appearance of Arthur from the kitchen half of the house that stopped him, for Arthur's brainy authority made his dad occasionally hesitate to sound off. But this time it wasn't E: that. He came forward only briefly, but it was evident that all the nervousness and difficulty were because of him. In a black sweater, narrow-shouldered, his hands in his back pockets, he sauntered, an elderly... ': 293 wrinkle on him that surprised me, and his eyes retreated with gradations of dark into a very somber color of trouble. He put his head to the side, his bushy hair touched the doorframe, and the smoke of his cigarette escaped to the sun where it became silky. Though he wasn't quite sure who I was at first, his smile was all the same suave, but also sick or fatigued. I was aware that Einhorn, to the very cloth of his coat, was stiff to him and prepared to be curt, within a degree of telling him to beat it, and I realized also that this was why Mildred had been so cold to me and hitting her machine as though it were a way to get me to leave.

Then a little kid came running from the kitchen, and Arthur held it with the clasp of a father, unmistakably, the kid swaying from his fingers. Behind, Tillie stood but didn't come forward. If I'm not mistaken they hadn't yet decided whether they could keep this a secret, for I realized it was recent news to the Einhorns too, and it was touch and go about acknowledging the baby, a little boy. He, while Arthur turned back into the kitchen, came running to Mildred and secured himself on her knee. She picked him up eagerly, and his booties catching in her skirt, it rode up on her thighs with their little dark hairs. About which she was calm. Thither I followed Einhorn's look. She kissed the boy with almost adult kisses and sought the hem to straighten her dress.

"What do you say to our news!" Einhorn spoke harshly and turned to me with a stiff curve in the back of his neck, partly with intention to bully but also greatly bowed by trouble, and that great representative of him, his face, twitched with an impulse that darted in from a littleexplored place.

"That Arthur is married?" I didn't know what to say.

"Already divorced. It went through last week, and we didn't know anything about it. The girl was from Champaign."

"So you have a grandson. Congratulations!"

He looked strained, his eyes gemmy with the determination to sustain all, but his nosy face flat and with a light of pale unhappiness.

"And this is his first visit?" I said.

"Visit? She dumped him on us. She put him inside the door with a note and beat it, and then we had to wait for Arthur to come home and explain."

"Oh, he's dear and sweet," Mildred said with great spirit, the child on her breast cruelly clasping her neck. "I'll take him any time."

At this from his second wife, which in effect she was, Einhorn had all his cares come around to his first source: himself; his sensuality.

And he looked angrily struck by this thought for all his Bourbon pride of profile and reflected it to the very depth of his black eyes. Like the roof-crouched goblin of an old church, he looked, his hands covered with pale spots placed at the sides of his often purposeless-appearing pants. His hair had the wave of unstranded rope, and from the set of his head there was the sense of ruins forming up behind him. With no motion in his arms, he might have been a man in a cape or a bound prisoner. Poor Einhorn! At any hour of his decline he could formerly have taken out the gilt bond representing Arthur, and now the spite had come upon him that the value had gone, like that of Grandma's picturewatered czarist money. The gleaming vault where he had kept this reserve wealth now let out the smell of squalor. Einhorn didn't even look at the kid, which was a jolly little kid that trod in Mildred's lap. Tillie stayed out of sight altogether.

I hesitated to show sympathy; he'd have thrown it back, though I was one of the few remaining people, I imagine, who'd give him full credit on his old-time greatness. I served a purpose that way for him, that I was prepared to testify that it was true noble and regal greatness.

But he himself now started out weakly, saying, "It's not a good situation.

Augie--you have some idea what capacities Arthur has. And before he can begin to use them, he gets into this--"

"I don't see what's so wrong," said Mildred. "You have a cute grandson."

"Keep out of this, please, will you, Mildred? A child isn't a toy."

"Oh," she said, "they grow up. Time does it more than fathers and mothers. The parents take too much credit."

Einhorn said to me in a lower voice, wanting no conversation with her, "I think Arthur hangs around your part of the woods. And there^s a girl named Mimi he's interested in. You know her?"

"She's a good friend of mine."

Quick his brows rose, and I interpreted the hope that she was my mistress and therefore Arthur couldn't get into further trouble.

"Not that kind of friend."

"You don't lay her?" he said secretly.

"No."

I disappointed him; there was also a very fine salt of condescension or mockery, only a glitter on the surface of his look, but I saw it.

"Don't forget I was practically engaged until New Year's Day," I told him.

"Well, what kind of girl is this Mimi? He brought her around a couple of weeks ago, and Tillie and I thought she was pretty tough, and with somebody like Arthur whose thoughts always have an intellectual or poetic direction, she could give him a pretty rough time of it. But maybe she's goodhearted. I don't want to tear her down needlessly."

"Why, is Arthur thinking of remarrying already? Well, I'm an admirer of Mimi."

"Platonic?"

I laughed but felt sullen too, for it seemed to me that Einhom didn't want his son to succeed me as Mimi's lover, cr any girl's. I said, "The best person to ask about Mimi is Mimi herself. But I was going to say that I don't think she would be interested in a marriage proposal."

"That's good,"

I expressed no agreement.

"Augie," he said with a rich preliminary of the face which I knew belonged to business, "it occurs to me that maybe my son could fit into your organization somewhere."

"Is he looking for a job?"

"No, I am for him."

"I could try." It was a discouraging favor to be asked. I could see Arthur stooping his weight on a desk in the union hall, one finger between the covers of his Valery, or whatever he was interested in. "Mimi could help him if she wanted to," I said. "I got the job because she knew someone."

"Who knew someone, your friend?" He hoped still, slyly, to trap me into confessing intimacy with Mimi, but he drew a blank. "Well," he said, "you don't mean to tell me you keep that bursting health without the cooperation of a dear friend?" He was so pleased to have said this that his own troubles for a moment slipped his mind. But then the kid crowed on Mildred's neck and he changed again from a sensual to a sad or austere face.

It was a true guess that I had a friend. She was a Greek girl whose name was Sophie Geratis and she was chambermaid in a luxury hotel.

She spoke for a delegation that came to me to apply for membership.

They were earning twenty cents an hour, and when they went to their local to ask one of the head guys to put in for a raise he was playing poker and wouldn't be bothered. They knew he was in cahoots with the management. This small Greek girl was shapely every which way, in legs, mouth, and face; her lips went a little forward and their expression was sweetened a lot by the clear look of her eyes. She had a set of hard-worked hands and she lived with her beauty on rough terms. I couldn't for even a minute pretend that I didn't go for her. As soon as I saw her I thought that in the form of her eye-corners there was a personal hope of tenderness, and it got me. What I felt was tender too, rather than that heat that makes Nile mud of you, as like to crack as to be fertile.

As soon as the women signed there was a wild excitement and up- rush of indignation and they began to call out, as if it was a working woman's Thesmophoria of these pale people. They wanted to be led into a strike right away. But I explained, and felt as usual the creep over me of legalistic hypocrisy, that it was a case of dual unionism.

Legally they were represented by the ALL and therefore another union couldn't bargain for them. But when a majority of the employees was on the CIO side an election could be held. They didn't understand this, and as I couldn't talk against their noise I asked Sophie to come out with me and I would make the position clear. The corridor being empty for the moment, we kissed at once, riskily. Our legs were shaking. She said under her breath that I could explain the whole thing to her later; she would take the women away and come back. I locked up the office, and when she returned I took her home with me. We couldn't go to her room. She lived with her sister and the two were engaged to a pair of brothers. They were going to be married in June, six weeks' time. I saw the photo of her fiance; he was a calm, responsible-looking gink.

She thought she was being sensible, storing up pleasure so she wouldn't have any unfaithful craving once married. She-was made very finely, all her little formations intricate and close and everything smooth. That was the happiness Einhorn took notice of, that I enjoyed in Sophie.

Kayo Obermark had too much masculine respect to ask me about her utterances and noises, laughing and otherwise. But Mimi said, "What kind of dame do you have who carries on like that?" She took a kidding tone, but I felt her nose was somewhat out of joint. "She brings her own cheering section."

I had no answer ready because I had never expected to be asked.

"There was someone else looking for you the other day," she went on. "I forgot to tell you. It's getting to be like a shrine up here."

"Who was it?"

"A young lady and a very pretty one, prettier than the noisy girl."

I wondered if it could be that Lucy had changed her mind. "She didn't leave a note?"

"No, she said she had to talk to you, and I thought she was very agitated, but maybe she wasn't used to climbing stairs and was winded."

It didn't especially stir me to think that it had been Lucy. I had no further interest in her; I was only rather curious about her visit.

I took up Einhom's suggestion about Arthur with Mimi. If Einhom had found fault with her, she was violent against him. knock at the door. It came at an awkward time, when Sophie Geratis was sitting on the bed in her slip and we were talking away. Seeing her startled, I said, "Don't worry, honey, nobody's going to bother us."

She liked my saying this, so that it led to our starting to kiss, and the hooked links of the spring made that sound which goes in such a queer way with love, and which would have sent away anyone but this particular knocker. She said, "Augie--Mr. March!" and not in the voice of Lucy Magnus but that of Thea Fenchel. For some reason I remembered it and placed it immediately. I got out of bed.

"Hey, put on a robe," said Sophie. She was disappointed at the kissing ending when another woman spoke at the door.

I put my head out and blocked the door with my shoulder and naked foot. It was Thea. She had said in that note I hadn't seen the last of her, and here she was.

"I'm sorry," she said, "but I've already come a couple of times and I want to see you."

"Only once, I thought. How did you find me?"

"I hired a detective. Then that girl didn't tell you about both times.

Is she in there with you? Ask her."

"No, that's not the same one. You actually went to a detective agency?"

"I'm glad it's not that girl," she said.

I didn't answer, only looked.

She wasn't keeping her composure very well. That prompt face, different from what I remembered, delicate but not so firm in nerve, widecheeked and pale, her nostrils open wide. I recalled that Mimi had told me she was breathing heavily from the climb, but it must also have been from determination not to give in to disappointment at not finding me alone. She was dressed in a brown silk suit, kind of strikingly watermarked; in spite of all, she wanted me to notice it. But at the same time, by her gloved hands and the unsteadiness of her hat of flowers, I was aware she was trembling; and as the rustling in midocean against the bulwarks is the slight sign of very great miles of depth and extent, the stiffness of the silk gave a small sound of continual tremor.

"It's nothing," she said. "How could you tell that I was coming? I don't expect..."

I felt no need to be pardoned, as if I should have been waiting for her, and would have been within my rights in smiling but I wasn't able to do that. I had thought back on her as an erratic rich girl with whom the main thing was to be rivals with her sister; I couldn't continue to think so, for no matter how it had started it was now clearly something else. What sets you off not being good enough, you find the better reason once you have got going. This might have happened to her; but I couldn't tell which was uppermost, nobility or illness, whether she was struggling with personal objections of pride or the social ones about what is due a young woman from herself--those spiked things that press with such ugly sharpness on the greater social weakness of women.

Whether she fought against or went out to look for a torturing occasion, I mean. But that was not all I thought of or felt by any means. Otherwise I'd have shooed her away, for I liked Sophie Geratis too well to tgive her up because I was merely interested or flattered. Or because I saw a chance to get back at Esther Fenchel through her sister, for, as SSi've said before, I haven't any grudge-bearing ability to speak of. But Isa B at once Sophie wasn't even in it.

|f Ht. K "What are you doing?" I said, turning to her. She had put on her |||Jthoes. I saw her hold up her arms and the black dress fell on her ijshoulders. She softly battled her body into it, pulled it into place across |iher breasts and over her hips, and shook her face free of her hair.

"Honey, if this is somebody you want to see..."

"But, Sophie, I'm with you tonight."

"You and me are just having a fling before I'm married, aren't we? taybe you want to get married too. It's just an affair, isn't it?"

"You're not going," I said. But she didn't listen, and when she went a. to tie her laces covered the underside of her thigh from me as she Pted her knee. Because I didn't sound firm enough. And through this ! X of covering her. bare leg--not sore, but with a resigned sort of drop | her head--she drew back those vital degrees from lover's heat. To |ve her again I realized I'd have to pass a large number of tests and E| ips last of all I'd have to ask her to marry me. So I admitted in my te mind she was right to go since I couldn't any longer honestly sh that gay interest that had brought us together.

A piece of paper slid under the door, and we heard Thea going |ay. t "At least she's not so brassy as to stand and look at me come out," ftsad Sophie. "Anyway, she had plenty of brass to knock when she could ^ffl you had company. Are you engaged to her or something? Go ahead ||ttd read your note."

Sophie took her conge and kissed me on the face but wouldn't let me Morn the kiss or accompany her down to the door. So, undressed still, KSat on the cot in the May night air of the high window and opened f piece of paper. It gave her address and number and said, "Please THE ADVENTURBS call me tomorrow, and don't be angry because of what I can't help."

When I thought how she had been ashamed for the jealousy rising to her face, and how rich in trouble the moment had been for her to hold fast while I came to the door naked and talked to her, I wasn't inclined to feel angry at all. In fact I couldn't help but be glad. Even though it was high-handed to go and proceed against Sophie as she did and assume that only she had the right grade of love. And then I had a lot of other notions, such as whether I was in danger of falling in love to oblige. Why? Because love was so rare that if one had it the other should capitulate to it? If, for the time, he had nothing more important on? In this thought there was a good measure of poking fun, with, however, the fact that I was stirred in all kinds of ways, including the soft shuffle in the treetop of leaves just broken out of the thick red beaks. I thought the business of a woman must be only love. Or, at another time, only a child. And I let this be an amusement and an objection in my light mind. And this lightness of mind--I could have benefited from the wisdom about it that the heavy is the root of the light. First, that is, that the graceful comes out of what is buried at great depth. But as wisdom has to spread and knot out in all directions, this can also refer to the slight laugh which is only a little of what is sent upward by great heaviness of heart, or also to the gravity which passes off by performer's flutter or pitch for laughs. Even the man who wants to'believe, you sometimes note kidding his way to Jesus.

That night I fell deeply asleep, any old way, in and out of the sheets.

They still smelled of Sophie's powder, or whatever she had imparted to them, so I slept wrapped in her banners, after a fashion. When I waked I thought it had been a peaceful sleep, and the early day was radiant.

But I was mistaken. I remembered nightmares I had had of the jackals trying to get over the walls of Harar, Abyssinia, to eat the plague dead --from a book Arthur had left lying around, about one of his favorite poets. I heard Mimi below bitching and yelling at the telephone, though it was just some ordinary conversation. It was a fresh day, of beauty nearly material enough to pick up, with corners of the yard full of the heat of flowers grown in old iron and adapted cast-off boilers. That red which in the greater strength of the day would make you giddy and attack your heart with a power almost like a sickness, some sickness causing spat blood, spasm, and rot just as much and as rich as pleasure.

My face prickled as if I had been hit sharp enough to cause nosebleed.

I looked and felt puffy and sullen, and as if I had a surplus of blood and foresaw trouble from it, that it would have to be let. Also my hands and feet were that ominous way. I went out half stone, but even the pave302 ment chafed me through the leather; my veins seemed slowed up with lead. I couldn't bear being in the confinement of the drugstore even for the minute of time it took to swallow a cup of coffee. I dragged myself to the office in the poky cars, and when I had fallen into my chair with my legs spread out, I felt the toil of all my processes, down to the arteries of the feet as they sprung and shot with regularity, and I prayed I wouldn't have to get up. The door and window were open, the lustiness of the hard-trod place having its brief chance to clear out in the courthouse-hung tranquillity before the resumption of hostilities, the meadow hour before the ashcan barrage of Flanders tears the skies.

And the lark, who doesn't need to spit or clear his throat, goes up.

But then the business of the day got under way, and in my harassed inability to keep up, it was like a double-quick-time stamping or dancing; angry grim waltz in which the clutched partners were out to wear one another down; or solo clog or tarantella of the hopping mad; or the limper sway of the almost gone from consciousness; the decorous sevillanas of the stiff whose faces didn't betray how their heels were slamming; the epidemic kick of German serfdom; the squatting kawtsky; the hesitation-step of adolescence; the Charleston. I confronted all the varieties, and as far as I could I avoided rising. Except when I had to go to the biffy to take a leak, or when I thought I was hungry and ducked below to the billiard room and lunch counter, where the green of the felt went to my head. However, I had no appetite. It was another kind of gnawing, not emptiness of gut that was the matter.

When I went back there was a fresh crowd waiting to do their stuff.

Me the weary booking agent or impresario, watched by them with wrath' and avidity, with tics, with dignity by some and booby-hatch glares by ' I others. And what was I going to accomplish for them in the way of * redress and throwing open princedoms by explaining how they must fill out a card? Holy Lord and God! I know man's labor must be one of those deals figured out by Providence that saves him by preserving him, or he would be hungry, he would freeze, or his brittle neck would ', be broke. But what curious and strange forms he ends up surviving in, '

' becoming them in the process.

It was in my unusual state of feeling that I reflected about this, and ' meantime when I would remember the rustle of Thea's brown silk it ' made me shiver. Along with the strange outcomes of the history of toil. ^ '

Every chance I got I phoned her. There wasn't any answer, and Grammick reached me before I could talk to her. He had to have my help in South Chicago that night in a gauze and bandage factory he had organized more or less in passing. For it was like a band of Jesuits land303 ing where a heathen people thirsted for baptism in the dense thousands, thronging out of their brick towns. I had to fill a bag with literature and blanks and race over to the Illinois Central to get the electric train and meet Grammick at his headquarters in a tavern, a rough place but with a ladies' and family entrance, for many of the gauze-winders were women. I can't say how they kept bandages clean in that sooty, plugugly town built as though so many fool amateur projects for the Tower of Babel that had got crippled at the second story a few dozen times and then all hands had quit and gone in for working in them instead.

Grammick was in the middle of this show and busy organizing. He was as firm as a Stonewall Jackson, but he was also as perfectly pacific as a woodshop instructor in a high school or some personage of the Congress party, somebody from that white-flutter India setting out to conquer the whole place flat. By the power of meekness.

Most of the night we were up and were ready in the morning with everything necessary, committees on their mark, demands drawn up, negotiation machinery all set and the factions in agreement. At nine o'clock Grammick picked up the phone to talk to management. At eleven the negotiations were already under way, and late that night the strike was won and we went out to a wiener and sauerkraut shindy with the glad union members. It was all a matter of course to Grammick, though I was hopped up about it and full of congratulation.

I went to the booth in the back with my glass of beer and tried Thea's number again. This time I got through. I said, '

'Listen, I'm calling from out of town where I had to go on business, otherwise you would have heard from me before. But I expect to be back tomorrow."

"When?"

"Afternoon, I think."

"Can't you come sooner? Where are you now?"

"Out in the sticks, and I'm coming as soon as I can."

"But I don't have long to stay in Chicago."

"Do you have to go? But where?"

"Honey, I'll explain it when I see you. I'll wait in all day tomorrow.

If you can't phone first, ring the doorbell three times."

Like a strong brush the excitement went over me, and I stood up to it with shut eyes of pleasure, heat snarls at the ears and thrills descending my legs. I was dying to get to her. But I wasn't able to leave yet. There were loose ends to tie up. It was important how even victors said au revoir. Grammick couldn't leave until he had arranged the bookkeeping and everything was in order. Then, when we got back to the city, I had to go with him to headquarters to report our success.

This was to advance me too, and was to get a knockdown to Mr. Ackev and be a little thicker with the officials, not stay a supernumerary.

Ackey was waiting for us, not to congratulate us but with a redeployment order on his spindle. "Grammick," he said, asking him instead of me, "is this your protege March? March," he went on, still not finding me with his eyes, as if the time wasn't just ripe, "you're soin" to have to do some serious trouble-shooting today, and right this minute. It's one of those hot dual-union situations. They're murder.

The Northumberland Hotel--that's a ritzy place--how many people do we have signed up there? Not enough. They must have upward of two hundred and fifty in a place like that."

I said, "I think we have about fifty cards from the Northumberland, and most of those from chambermaids. But why, what's going on?"

"They're getting ready to strike, that's what. This morning there have been about five calls for you from Sophie Geratis, one of the maids. There's a strike meeting on right now in the linen room, and you get over there and stop them. The ALL is in there, and the thing to aim for is an election."

"Then what am I supposed to do?"

"Hold the line. You sign them up and keep them from going out.

Quick now, there must be hell broke loose."

I snatched up my pack of membership blanks and lit out for the Northumberland; a huge building, it was, with florid galleries and Roman awnings fluttering up to the thirtieth story and looking down at the growth of the elms and flaglike greens of Lincoln Park.

I flashed up in a Checker cab. There wasn't any doorman on duty; the place glittered from the copper arms swelling on shields from either side and from the four glasses of the revolving door and their gold monograms. I didn't think I'd get far by way of the lobby, and I hurried back to the alley and found a service entrance. Up three flights of steel stairs, as nobody answered the bell of the freight elevator, I heard yelling and tracked it through the corridors, now velvet, now cement, to this place, the linen room.

The fight that was going on was between those who were loyal to the recognized union and the rebellious, mostly the underpaid women, who were scalding mad about the last refusal to raise them from twenty cents an hour. All were in uniform or livery. The room was white and hot, right in the path of the sun, the doors open to the laundry, and the women in their service blues and in white caps shouted and spoiled for war and struggle. They stood on the metal tables and soap barrels and screamed for the walkout. I looked for Sophie, who saw me first. She cried, "Here's the organizer. Here's the man. Here comes March!" She was on top of one of the hogsheads, with her gams wide apart in their black stockings. Hot, but grim and pale, and her black hair covered by the cap, her excitement of the eyes was all the blacker. She tried to express no familiarity in them toward me, so no scrutiny could have found out that our arms ever had crossed or hands ever stroked up and down.

I looked around and could see my friends and enemies in a minute, jeering or urging, distrustful, partisan, indignant, crying. There was one gaffer dressed up as white as any intern, and a face on him like Tecumseh, or one of the painted attackers of Schenectady; he wanted right away to explain a strategy to me, being very deliberate in that birdhouse of tropical screaming and laundry heat, to say nothing of the whiteness of the sun.

"Now wait," I called, taking Sophie's place on the hogshead.

Some began to yell, "We strike!"

"Now please listen. It won't be legal--"

"Oh, the hell! Cry-eye! What's legal, that we get a buck and a half a day? What's there after carfare and union dues? Do we eat? We're just going to walk out."

"No, you don't want to do that. It would be a wildcat strike. The Federation guys would send other people to take your place and it would be legal. The thing to do is sign with us so there can be an election, and when we win we can represent you."

"Or if you win. That's again a few months."

"But it's the best you can do."

I broke open a bundle of cards from my bag and was distributing them into the waving hands when suddenly a bulge started from the direction of the laundry; several men were fighting through the crowd, thrusting away the women, and the joint began to jump. Just as I realized that these were the enemy union guy and his goons I was grabbed from behind, off the barrel, and slugged as I landed, in the eye and on the nose. I burst into blood. My buddy with the Indian's beak stepped on me, but that was in his rush at the guy who hit me.

As he pushed him back a Negro chambermaid raised me. Sophie thrust her hand into my pocket and pulled out my handkerchief.

"Dirty gangsters! Honey, don't worry. Throw your head back."

There was now a ring of women guarding me, formed around the overturned barrel. When one of the sluggers made a start for me there was a lunge of the women for that place. Some had picked up scis- sors, knives, soap scoops, so the union guy called off his gorillas, and they came to position around him, who was small by contrast but dangerous-looking, if a runt, in his snappy man-about-town suit and his Baltimore heater. He appeared like somebody from the sheriff's office who had changed to the other side of the law; or from cat meat to human flesh. He seemed as if he would smell at close quarters like a drinking man, but that was perhaps the color of rage and not of whisky in him. Of unpreventable meanness, able to harm as much as he threatened. I could somewhat show that with those bursts of blood on my noserag and shirt, and snorting out more, while my stinging eye swelled to a slit. However, he was the one who had the law on his side, being the representative under contract of these people.

"Now, ladies, get out of the way and let my men take over this punk who got no business here. He's breakin' Acts of Congress and I could swear a warrant against him. Besides the hotel could jug him for trespassin'."

The women screamed and showed their scissors and weapons, and the Negro woman, who sounded like a West Indian or some Empire Britisher, said, "Never, you bloody little peanut!" So, while scared, I was also astonished.

"That's okay, sister, we'll get him," said one of the goons. "He can't go everywhere with this nooky protection."

His boss told him, "Whyn't you shut your trap!" And he said to me, "What right you got to come here?"

"I was asked here."

"Damn right he was! You bet we asked him!" While the cooks in their long hats and others of the better-off faction hollered and scoffed and held noses and pulled the imaginary toilet chain at me.

"Listen, you-all. I'm your representative. When there's any beefs, what am I for?"

"To throw us out when we come to the hall to ask you something, while your feet are on the table and you're drinking from the bottle and pickin' horses!"

"There doesn't have to be any goddam mutiny, does there? Now I see a lot of cards this sonofabitch meddler passed around, and I want you all to tear 'em up and have no more truck with him and them."

I said, "Don't do it!"

The guy who had slugged me made a pass to push through the defense of women and they heaved against him. Sophie pulled me away, through the back and along service corridors. "There's a fire307 door back here," she said. "You can get down the escape. Take care, honey, they'll be after you now."

"What about you?"

"What can they do me?"

"You'd better forget about striking for the time being."

Drawing strongly, her feet planted wide apart, she hauled open the ponderous firedoor, and as I went out she said, "Augie, you and me will never get together again, will we?"

"I think not, Sophie. There is this other girl."

"Good-by, then."

I hustled down the hot black fireescape frames and swung from the ladder, jumped, and when I made a choice of streets to run to I had no luck. One of the goons was there; he came for me, and I took off toward Broadway. I flinched from the shots he might have taken, that not being unknown in Chicago, that people should be knocked off in the street. But there was no noise of any gun, and I reckoned that his object was to work me over, finish the beating, break bones perhaps, and lay me up.

I had just enough of a lead on the slugger to get across Broadway before him. I saw him, waist up, stopped, by traffic, his eyes still on me, and I breathed on the dry snot of fear in my blood-clotted nose.

A streetcar making slow time came by, and I sprang to the platform.

I was sure to be followed, because of the slow cumbersomeness of the car approaching the Loop. But I might be able to shake him in the crowds. Meanwhile I rode in the front with the motorman, where I could watch the length of the car and also had within reach the switchiron that motormen lower through a hole in the floorboards. I could be sure the slugger was coming on behind in one of the taxis in the file of cars fluddering and shimmering off their blue gas stink in this dull hot brute shit of a street. I was harrowed by my hate for it, as well as for the creeping of the trolley. I was torn up and sick with it.

But gradually the bridge approached and the towers, all series and the same from top to bottom, the river of washwater filth and the bonenosed gulls. The car picked up speed over the clear of the bridge and came down the swoop with heavy liberty, but then crept again in the Loop and its crush of traffic. I waited until near Madison Street, and in the middle of the block I said to the motorman, "Off here!"

"This ain't the stop."

I said, raging, "Open it up or I'll bust your head open," and when he saw the ugliness of my face and the chink of my eye he let me get off and I ran for it, but ran only to turn the corner and lose myself.

I took the chance of getting into a line moving rapidly at the Me Vickers where there was a Garbo picture, and inside the thick red cords that looped off in-going from departing crowds, and in the lobby, which was like an apartment Cagliostro and Seraphina had laid out to fuddle the court and royalty, I was out of danger for the time. I was anyway beginning to feel that if he trapped me now it might be clanserous for him too, as for the overseer killed by Moses. I went down to the can and vomited up my breakfast. Bathing off the blood, I dried at the electric blower. Then I went up and lay in one of the seats at the back of the house where I could watch who entered, and there I rested until the end of the show and next change of audience, when I went out too, straight to the middle of the street, which was roaring and flinging up hot midday dust.

I jumped into a taxi and drove to Thea's, which had been my real objective of days.









CHAPTER XIV



I was hurrying to fulfill the prophecy Thea Fenchel had made on that swing in St. Joe. And while it was no minor thing to me that I was beat up and chased like this, I couldn't feel the importance of the cause much, or that it would benefit anyone for me to fight on in it. If I had felt this as such a matter of conscience I might have been out in front of Republic Steel at the hour of the Decoration Day Massacre, as Grammick was. He was clubbed on the head. But I was with Thea.

It wasn't even in my power to be elsewhere, once we had started. No, I just didn't have the calling to be a union man or in politics, or any notion of my particle of will coming before the ranks of a mass that was about to march forward from misery. How would this will of mine have got there to lead the way? I couldn't just order myself to become one of those people who do go out before the rest, who stand and intercept the big social ray, or collect and concentrate it like burning glass, who glow and dazzle and make bursts of fire. It wasn't what I was meant to be.

As I ran into Thea's apartment house from the cab and rang the ball three times, fast, I didn't especially observe where I had come.

It was a showy, heavily furnished lobby, no one in it, and as I was trying to find out which of the elegant doors belonged to the elevator, a square of light appeared in one of them. Thea had come down for me.

The door opened. There was a velvet bench and we sank down on it, pressing and kissing as the smooth elevator rose. Not noticing the blood-stiffened shirt, she passed her hand over my chest and up to my shoulders. I opened her housecoat on her breasts. I was not in control of my head. I was unaware, nearly blind. If anyone else had been near neither of us would have known it. I can't for certain say I don't remember a face, maybe that of a maid when the door opened, and we went on embracing in the corridor and then in the apartment, by the door, on the carpet.

With Thea it wasn't at all as it had been with other women, those who gave you their permission, so to speak, to undo one thing at a time and admire it, the next thing guarded again, and the last thing most guarded of all. She didn't delay, or seem to hurry either. As if studying deeply from a surrendered mind, and with the lips, the hands and hair, the rising bosom and legs, without the use of any force, presently it seemed as if an exchange or transfer had happened of us both into still another person who hadn't existed before. There was a powerful feeling of love. And so finally, as if I had been on my bent knees in what's supposed to be an entirely opposite spirit, praying, with my fingers pressed together, I think it would have been no different from what I felt come over me with the fingers not together but touching her on the breasts instead. My bursting face with the swatted eye lay between, and her arms were around my neck.

Now the sun began to heat us by the door, on the rug where we were lying. It had the same filmy whiteness as it had in the linen room.

It had shone dirtier on the Loop sidewalk where I jumped from the streetcar. Here it glowed white once more. Presently I wanted to pull the curtain because of the glare on my eye, and when I stood up she observed for the first time how I looked.

"Who did that to you?" she cried.

I explained the whole business to her, and she kept saying, "Is that why you didn't come? Is that what you were doing all that time?" The time lost was the most important thing of all to her. Although it gave her a tremor to look straight at my bruise, the specific reason for my being beaten didn't interest her and she wasn't very curious about it.

Yes, she had heard of the big union drive, but that I was in it was sort of irrelevant. For while I was not with her, where I was intended to be, it didn't make much difference where I was. All intervening things and interferences were of the same unreal kind and belongedout there.

Gauze-winders, hotel workers on strike, errors like my illusion about her sister, that farce of being taken for Mrs. Renling's gigolo, all that Thea had herself done meanwhile, these were entirely "out there." The reality was now, and in here; she had followed it by instinct since St.

Joe. So this was the reason for the cry of all that time lost and it made me feel what her fear was like of never succeeding in finding her way from the "out there" but blundering forever.

Of course I didn't grasp this right away. It came out during the next few days, during which we stayed in the apartment. We slept and woke, and we didn't really discuss my doings or hers. Suitcases were standing around the bed, but I didn't ask about them. It was just as change from the delivery men and also checks and so forth in the refrigerator. The money was mixed up with rotting salad leaves and lying with saucers of bacon grease, which she didn't like to throw away. Anyway, the fives and tenners were there, and I was to pick up what I needed on the way out, as a man takes a handkerchief from his drawer on slight thought.

I had a conversation with Grammick to ask him to step into my place at the Northumberland. He already had done what he could.

There was no wildcat strike. He said the union guy and his boys were really gunning for me, to lay low. When I told him I was quitting and leaving town he was surprised. However, I explained about Thea, that I absolutely had to go with her, and he appeared to take it better. He said it was a lousy deal anyway to be stuck in these dual-union situations, and the organization ought to put on a real drive in the hotel field or quit.

Thea outfitted me before the trip. In which connection, for some reason, I get the picture something like the Duke of Wellington stepping out in the dress of the Salisbury Hunt, blue coat, black cap, and buckskins. Maybe this is because Thea had such very exact ideas as to what I should put on. We went from shop to shop in the station wagon to try on clothes. When she thought a thing was right she kissed me and cried, "Oh, baby, you make me happy!" u. nmindful of all the stiffness in the salespeople and the other customers. When I picked something she didn't like she'd give a laughing start and say, "Oh, you fool! Take it off. That's like what the old lady in Evanston thought was so smart."

The clothes Simon had given me she disliked too. She wanted me to look like a sportsman, and she got me a heavy leather jacket at Von Lengerke and Antoine's that required you to want to kill game or you couldn't wear it. It was a knockout, with a dozen different kinds of pockets and slits for cartridges and handline, knife, waterproof matches, compass. . You could be thrown in the middle of Lake Huron in it and hope to live. Then for boots we crossed Wabash Avenue to Carson's, where I hadn't gone since Jimmy Klein trapped me that bad moment in the revolving doors.

In these joints it was she who did the talking. Mostly silent, feeling full of blood, I came up smiling to try on the things and walk inside the triple mirror to let her turn me by the shoulder and see. I was glad over her least peculiarity--that she spoke high, that she didn't care that her slip showed a loop from her brilliant green dress, or that there were hairs on her neck that had escaped the gathering of the comb, hairs of Japanese blackness. Her dresses were expensive, but, as I had noticed her hat trembling when she had come up to my room, there never lacked one piece of disorder caused by excitement, and where arrangement failed.

Going through this, being kissed in the stores and the purchases and gifts, my luck didn't make me hangdog, I'll say that for myself. If she had handed me titles and franchises like Elizabeth to Leicester it wouldn't have caused me awkwardness; nor would wearing feathers, instead of the deep Stetson that pleased her. So the checks, plaids, chamois, suedes, or high boots that made me come out on Wabash Avenue like a tall visitor or tourist were no embarrassment but made me laugh and even be somewhat vain, putting on like a stranger in my own home town.

She was cuckoo about dime stores, where she bought cosmetics and pins and combs. After we locked the expensive purchases in the station wagon we went into Mc Crory's or Kresge's and were there by the hour, up and down the aisles with the multitude, mostly of women, and in the loud-played love music. Some things Thea liked to buy cheaply; they maybe gave her the best sense of the innermost relations of pennies and nickels and expressed the real depth of money. I don't know. But I didn't think myself too good to be wandering in the dime store with her .1 went where and as she said and did whatever she wanted because I was threaded to her as if through the skin. So that any trifling object she took pleasure in could become important to me at once; anything at all, a comb or hairpin or piece of line, a compass inside a tin ring that she bought with great satisfaction, or a green-billed baseball cap for the road, or the kitten she kept in the apartment--' she would never be anywhere without an animal. This little striped and spike-tailed torn, like a cat of the sea in the wide darkness of the floors of those rooms of the suite that Thea never used. She rented a big place and then settled in a space-economizing style, gathering and piling things around her. There were plenty of closets and dressers but she was still living out of the suitcases, boxes, cases, and you had to approach the bed at the center of this confusion through spaces between.

She used sheets as towels and towels as shoe rags or mats or to wipe the kitten's messes, for it wasn't housebroken. She gave the maids bribes of perfume and stockings to clean up, wash the dishes, underclothes, and do other extras; or maybe she did it so that they wouldn't criticize her disorderiiness. She thought she was first-rate with clerks and servants. I, the ex-organizer, didn't say anything.

It didn't matter. I let a lot of things go past. Those days, whatever touched me had me entirely, and whatever didn't was like dead, my : 315 heart not giving it a tumble. I was never before so taken up with a single human being. I followed her sense wherever it went. As I wasn't yet old enough to be tired of confinement to my own sense, I didn't appreciate this enough.

What I did at times realize was how I was abandoning some miohtv old protections which now stood empty. Hadn't I been warned enough because of my mother, and on my own account? With terrible warnings?

Look out! Oh, you chump and weak fool, you are one of a humanity that can't be numbered and not more than the dust of metals scattered in a magnetic field and clinging to the lines of force, determined by laws, eating, sleeping, employed, conveyed, obedient, and subject. So why hunt for still more ways to lose liberty? Why go toward, and not instead run from, the huge drag that threatens to wear out your ribs, rub away your face, splinter your teeth? No, stay away!

Be the wiser person who crawls, rides, runs, walks to his solitary ends used to solitary effort, who procures for himself and heeds the fears that are the kings of this world. Ah, they don't give you much of a break, these kings! Many a dead or dying face lies or drifts under them.

Here Thea appeared with her money, her decided mind set on love and great circumstances, her car, her guns and Leicas and boots, her talk about Mexico, her ideas. One of the chiefest of these ideas being that there must be something better than what people call reality. Oh, well and good. Very good and bravo! Let's have this better, nobler reality. Still, when such an assertion as this is backed by one person and maintained for a long time, obstinacy finally gets the upper hand.

The beauty of it is harmed by what it suffers on the way to proof. I know that.

However, Thea had one superiority in her ideas. She was one of those people who are so certain of their convictions that they can fight for them in the body. If the threat to them goes against their very flesh and blood, as with people who are examined naked by police or with martyrs, you soon know which beliefs have strength and which do not. So that you don't speak air. For what you don't suffer in your person is mostly dreaminess, or like shots of light, sky-sprinkling fireworks and creamy wheels that scatter to a sad earth. Thea was prepared for the extremest test of her thoughts.

Not that she herself was always on her own highest standard. I had to accept her version of everything, this being the obstinacy of assertion I spoke of. Also it was evident that she was used to having what she wanted, including me. Her behavior was sometimes curious and crude.

When certain long-distance calls came through she'd just about order me out of the room, and then I could hear her yelling and be startled, astonished that she could have a voice like that. I couldn't catch the words and could only speculate as to the reasons. Then how I'd criticize her if I v/eren't her lover would come to me.

She assumed she understood everything about me, and it was astonishing how much she did know; the remainder she made up with confidence and trusted to closed eyes and fast strokes. She therefore said some harsh and jealous things and her look occasionally was more brilliant than friendly. She was aware of her weakness in having come after me--in her confident moments she thought of it instead as strength and was proud of it.

"Did you like that Greek girl?"

"Yes, sure I did."

"Was it just the same with her as with me?"

"No." ': "I can tell you're just lying, Augie. Of course it was the same for you."

"Don't you find it different with me? Am I like your husband?"

"Like him? Never!"

"Well, can it be so different for you and not also for me? You think I can put it on and not love you?"

"Oh, but I came to look for you, not you for me. I had no pride"-- she was forgetting that I scarcely knew her in St. Joe. "You were getting tired of this little Greek chambermaid, and I happened to show up, and it flattered you so much you couldn't resist. You like to get bou1 quets like that." And now, to say this, made her breathe with labor; [ she was suffering. "You want people to pour love on you, and you soak it up and swallow it. You can't get enough. And when another woman runs after you, you'll go with her. You're so happy when somebody begs you to oblige. You can't stand up under flattery!"

Maybe so. But what I couldn't stand up under at the moment was this glare, when she went so hot and white in the face with its strong nerve and metaphysical reckless assertion. Although she painted her mouth with carnation lipstick she didn't make it sensual, nor did she have a sensual face, but any excitement, no matter what it was, took up her person, her entire being. It was the same whether she was angry or when she was loving and had her breasts against me, clasping hands, touching feet. So even if this jealousy made no sense, still it wasn't play-acting jealousy..

"If I'd been wise enough I'd have come for you," I said. "I just didn't have enough sense, so I'm grateful that you did. And you don't have to be afraid."

No, no, what did I want with the upper hand or pride contests? None of that stuff. When she heard me speak like this there was a tremor in her features of the strain passing off; she shrugged and smiled at herself and a more normal color began to appear.

Not only was she accustomed to independence struggles and to resistance, to going counter to the open direction of everyone else, which made her judgments severe, but she was in many ways suspicious.

Her experience was, socially, much wider than mine, and so she suspected many things which at the time were out of my range. She must have remembered that when we met I seemed an old woman's hanger-on who sponged on her and maybe worse than that. Of course she knew better. What she knew of me by now, really knew, was plenty, from information I gave freely. Because involuntarily. But so was her habitual shrewdness involuntary, the shrewd suspiciousness of a rich girl. And then, once you've irrevocably made up your mind, does that mean you don't sweat and fear you can be wrong? Even Thea with her convictions and confidence wasn't immune to occasional fits of doubt.

"What makes you say these things about me, Thea?" They bothered me. Certainly there was some truth in them; I felt it in my lining, somewhere, like an object that had slipped down out of the pocket.

"Aren't they right? Especially about your being so obliging?"

"Well, partly. I used to be much more so. But not so much now."

I tried to tell her that I had looked all my life for the right thing to do, for a fate good enough, that I had opposed people in what they wanted to make of me, but now that I was in love with her I understood much better what I myself wanted.

But what she had to answer was this: "What makes me say these things is that I see how much you care about the way people look at you. It matters too much to you. And there are people who take advantage of that. They haven't got anything of their own and they'll leave you nothing for yourself. They want to put themselves in your thoughts and in your mind, and that you should care for them. It's a sickness.

But they don't want you to care for them as they really are. No. That's the whole stunt. You have to be conscious of them, but not as they are, only as they love to be seen. They live through observation by the ones around them, and they want you to live like that too. Augie, darling, don't do it. They will make you suffer from what they are. And you don't really matter to them. You only matter when someone loves you.

You matter to me. Otherwise you don't matter, you're only dealt with.

So you shouldn't care how you seem to them. But you do, you care too much."

She went on like this. It was bitter sometimes, for usually her wisdom was against me. As if she foresaw that I'd do her wrong and was warning me. But then, too, I was eager to hear what she said and I understood it, I understood only too well.

These conversations we had more often on the road when we set out for Mexico.

She had several times tried to tell me what we would do in Mexico besides obtaining her divorce, and she seemed to assume that I knew intuitively what her plans were. I frequently was confused. I couldn't tell whether she owned or rented a house in the town of Acatia, and what she described of the country didn't make me altogether happy. It sounded like a risky place when she talked of the mountains, hunting, diseases, robbery, and the dangerous population. I wasn't clear for a long time about the hunting. I thought she intended to hunt eagles, and that seemed peculiar to me, but what I understood wasn't so peculiar as what she really meant. She wanted to hunt with an eagle trained in falconry, and as she had owned hawks she was eager to imitate a British captain' and an American couple who had taught or "manned" golden and American eagles, some of the few since the Middle Ages.

She had gotten the idea for this hunt from reading articles by Clan and Julie Mannix, who actually had gone to Taxco some years before with a trained bald eagle and used the bird to catch iguanas.

Near Texarkana there was a man who had eaglets to sell. He had offered one to George H. Somebody-or-other, an old friend of Thea's father, who kept a private zoo. This friend of her father, who by the accounts she gave seemed to me loony, like the mad King Ludwig of Bavaria, had built himself a copy of the Trianon in Indiana, only with cages inside, and had made Hagenbeck voyages everywhere to fill them with beasts of his own capture. He was in retirement now, too old to travel; but he had asked Thea to bring him some giant iguanas--or challenged her to--these huge furious lizards, mesozoic holdouts in the mountains south of Mexico City. As this information came out, which I didn't know how seriously to take, I thought this was like me and my life--I could not find myself in love without it should have some peculiarity.

I'm not going to say that she was more than I had bargained for, because it has to be absolutely understood that I didn't bargain. What::^. '

' 319 I will say is that she was singular, unforeseen, and contradictory in her flightiness, steadiness, nervousness, or courage. When she tripped on the stairs in the dark she cried out, but she traveled with snake-catching equipment and she showed me snapshots of the outings of a rattlercollectors' club she had belonged to. I saw her holding a diamondback behind the head and milking the poison from him with a slice of rubber.

She told me how she had crawled into a cave after him. In Renling's shop I had sold sports equipment, but the only hunting I had ever watched was in the movies, apart from having seen my brother Simon shooting at the rats in his yard with his pistol. My special memory was of one large one with humped back like a small boar but terrible, swiftclawed feet racing for the fence. I was, however, ready even to become a hunter. Thea took me out into the country before we left Chicago, and I practiced shooting at crows.

This was while we held over in Chicago a few days longer; she was waiting for a letter from Smitty's--her husband's--lawyer and used the time to give me lessons with the guns in the woods off toward the Wisconsin line. When we came home and she took off her breeches and sat in her out-of-doors shirt with bare legs, she might take up a piece of costume jewelry to fix the clasp and sit like a girl of ten, in a rapt way, her neck bent and knees up, her fingers kind of clumsy. Then we'd ride on the Lincoln Park bridle path, and there was nothing clumsy about her there. I hadn't forgotten how to manage a horse since my Evanston days. But that was what it was, managing rather than riding. I followed her speed as fast as I could, red in the face and hitting the saddle hard, using my weight against the animal. I managed to stay on, but how I did it amused her.

I was amused, too, when I caught my breath and climbed down from the saddle, but asked myself just how many new adaptations I was going to have to try to make. Along with the snapshots of the Rattlesnake Club I saw others; she had a leather case full of them.

Some were of that very summer in St. Joe when I met her, of her uncle and aunt, her sister Esther and sports in white pants with tennis rackets and paddling canoes. When she showed me Esther's picture it didn't touch me except through her resemblance to Thea. There were photos also of her parents. Her mother had been a lover of the Pueblos, so there she was, sitting in a touring car in a hat and furs, looking at the cliffs. One picture in particular took my attention. It was of her father in a rikshaw. He wore a white drill suit and a helmet with a nipple, his eyes also whitish, the influence of the sun whose spottiness made the wheels seem like tea-soaked lemon. He looked over the shaved head of 3;0 the Chinese human horse who stood with thick wide calves between the shafts.

Then there were more pictures of hunting. Some of Thea with different falcons on her gloved arm. Several of Smitty, her husband. In ridin" pants. At play, wrangling with a dog. Or again with Thea in a night club--she laughed with eyes closed in the flash of the bulb and he covered his bald head with slender fingers while an entertainer flung arms out over the table. Many of these things troubled me. For instance, in her laughter at the night club I saw the bosom, shoulder, chin, with kind of a happy recognition, but the hands of ridicule and squawk of limelight laughter--no, those were foreign. There was no place for me, there, by the table. Nor by her father in the rikshaw.

Nor by the mother in the touring car with the fur about her neck. And then the hunting troubled me. I didn't know how earnestly I was to take it. Banging at crows, fine, that was okay. But when she bought me a gauntlet so I could handle the eagle, and I put it on, a strange sense came over me as if I were a fielder in a demons' game and would have to gallop here and there and catch burning stone in the air.

So I was very uncertain. Not as to whether I should go with her, which was no decision since I had to, but as to what to expect, what I'd have to go through or put up as my share, where we were headed.

To explain it sensibly to anyone was more than I was capable of. I tried. Mimi, who should have been the one best able to sympathize, was just the friend with whom I had most awkwardness about it. She didn't like it a bit and said, "Now what are you trying to tell me?'* unwilling to believe I was, as I said, in love, and the skin of her fore[ head thickened and drew along her upshot brows. As I explained in more detail she laughed in my face. "What, what, what! You have an eagle to pick up in Arkansas? An eagle? Don't you mean a buzzard?"

From loyalty to Thea I didn't laugh; Mimi couldn't get me to, even if the queerness of the expedition worried me plenty. "Where did you find a babe like this?"

"Mimi, I love her."

This made her take another, nearer look at me, which showed me to be in earnest. And Mimi thought so much of the seriousness of love she doubted there were many who could get it right, and, soberer, she said, Watch out you don't get in trouble. And why are you quitting your job? Grammick told me you had a future as an organizer."

"I don't want any more of that. Arthur can have it."

As if she thought I spoke of Arthur with disrespect she said, "Don't "e silly. He has to finish those translations, and he's working very hard; l .32; he's in the middle of an essay on the poet and death," and she began to tell me how poets must be allowed to run funerals. Arthur was installed in my room, and he had discovered the fire-ruined set of Dr.

Eliot's classics in the old box under the bed and asked to be allowed to take care of it for me. Since the books were stamped "W. Einhorn," it would have been hard to refuse even if I had wanted to. Meanwhile he was in a cure for his clap, and Mimi watched over him and could have only side concerns about anybody else.

It was easy to explain my going off to Mama. Of course I didn't have to tell her much, only that I was engaged to a young lady who had to go to Mexico, and that I was going too.

Though Mama no longer did kitchen work, the knife marks in her hands had stayed, and there probably always would be those dark lines; so, also, her color still was gentle, but her eyes increasingly cloudy and her lower lip expressed continually less sense. I suppose what I said was pretty well indifferent to her, as long as the tone of it didn't distress her. That was what she listened to. And why should it distress her, since I was riding high and in the best silks and colors?

Say if the main bonds of attachment were death ropes, crazy, in the end, at least I felt them now as connections of joy, and if that was a deception it would never appear more substantial or marvelous. But I denied it would be a deception, unless nothing so vivid can be substantial.

No, I wouldn't admit that.

"Is she a rich girl, like Simon's wife?"

I thought perhaps she believed Thea was Lucy Magnus.

"This isn't any of Charlotte's family, Ma."

"Well, then don't let her make you unhappy, Augie," she said. And what lay behind this, I believe, was that if Simon hadn't helped me to choose, if I had picked for myself, my mother thought me to be sufficiently like her to get myself in a bad fix. I said nothing of the hunting to her, but it did occur to me how it was inevitable for the son of a Hagar to go chase wild animals at one time or another.

I asked about Simon. The only recent news I had of him was from Clem Tambow, who had seen him in a fistfight with a Negro on Drexel Boulevard.

"He bought a new Cadillac car," said Mama, "and he came to give me a ride. Oh, it's wonderful! He's going to be a very rich fellow."

]h It didn't hurt me to hear of him in prosperity, and even if he was Duke of Burgundy, let him go ahead and be it. But I have to admit that I couldn't keep down the satisfaction of the thought that Thea was an heiress too. I don't want to pretend that I could.

I looked up Padilla too before I left, and found him in front of his institute. He was in a blood-spotted lab coat, although he was hired to do calculations, as far as I knew, not experiments, and he smoked one of his stinking dark-tobacco cigarettes while in his swift way he debated about two curves with a character who held open a big looseleaf notebook.

Padilla wasn't so terribly pleased that I was bound for Mexico, and he warned me not to go near Chihuahua, his province. He said that in Mexico City, where he himself had never been, he had a cousin, whose address I took. "If he'll rob you or help I can't predict, but look him up if you want somebody to look up," he said. "He was piss-poor fifteen years ago when he went away. He sent me a postcard last year when I got my M. A. Which maybe means that he wants me to send for him. Fat chance! Well, enjoy your trip, if they let you, but don't tell me afterward I didn't warn you to stay home." Suddenly he smiled in the sunshine and creased his short curved nose and forehead which sloped backward into his handsome Mexican hair. "Go easy with that wild native tail." I couldn't even grin at him to be sociable, it was such inaporopriate advice to a man in love.

Nobody, then, gave the, happy bon voyage I'd have liked. Everybody warned me, in some way, and I even thought of Eleanor Klein and what Jimmy had told me of her being rooked there in Mexico, and her mishaps. I argued back to myself that it was just the Rio Grande I had to cross, not the Acheron, but anyway it oppressed me from somewhere. Really, it was the strangeness of the state I was in and not so much that of the destination I was aware of. The great astonishment of this state was that the unit of humanity should maybe be not one but two. Not even the eagle falconry distressed me as much as that what happened to her had to happen to me too, necessarily. This was scary.

This trouble of course wasn't clear to me then. I put it all on Mexico and the hunting. And finally I said to Thea, on an evening while she was playing the guitar--with a rounded-back thumb on the hind string; she treated the instrument easily and it supplied its own strength--I said, "Do we have to go to Mexico?"

"Do we have to?" she said and shut off the strings with her hand.

"You can get a quick divorce in Reno and in other places."

"But why shouldn't we go to Mexico? I've been there several times, many times. What's wrong with it?"

"But what's wrong with other places?"

"There's a house down in Acatia, and we're going there to catch some of those lizards and other animals. Besides, I've arranged with Smitty's lawyer to be divorced there. And there's still another reason why it's better for us to be there."

"What's that?"

"I won't have much money after the divorce."

I shut my eyes and put my palm on my forehead as if trying to help the sudden astonishment go through. "Well, Thea, excuse me if I don't follow you. I thought you and Esther had lots of money. What about the stuff in the icebox?"

"Augie, our part of the family never did have very much. It's my uncle, my father's brother, who's rich, and Esther and I are the only kin, and we always had allowances and were brought up in the money, but we were supposed to make good. Esther did; she married a rich man."

"And so did you."

"But it's over, and I may as well tell you there was a scandal about it. It isn't anything you should mind, it was just foolishness, but I took off from a party with a naval cadet. He looked just like you. It didn't amount to anything. I was thinking of you all the time, but you weren't there."

"A substitute!"

"Well, that Greek girl wasn't even that for you."

"I never said I spent all the time since we were in St. Joseph thinking about you."

"Nor about Esther?"

"No."

"Do you want to argue, or do you want to hear? I'm only trying to explain what happened. My aunt was visiting us--you remember the old lady--and the party was at our house, at Smitty's house. And she saw how this kid and I were petting. Augie, you really don't have to mind that. It was thousands of miles away and I didn't realize that I was going to come to Chicago to look for you. But I couldn't take Smitty any more. I had to have somebody else.' Even if it was only just another boy, like that Navy boy. After that my old aunt went home, and my uncle talked to me long-distance and told me I was on probation with him. And that's one more reason why I have to go to Mexico, to make some money."

"With the eagle?" I cried out. Many kinds of things were disturbing me. "How do you expect to make anything with an eagle! Even if he catches those blasted lizards or whatever you mean. Holy smokes!"

"It isn't just the lizards. We're also going to make movies of hunt324 ing, I have to capitalize on the things I know how to do. We can sell articles about it to the National Geographic."

"How do you know we can? And who can write them?"

"We'll have the material and find somebody to help us. There's always such a person wherever you go."

"But. darling, you can't count on that. What do you think! It's not so easy."

"It's not so terribly hard, I don't believe. I know lots of people everywhere who are crazy to do me a favor. I don't suppose it is going to be very easy to man that bird. But I'm thrilled to try. Besides, we can live cheaper in Mexico."

"But what about the money you're spending now? In this suite?"

"Smitty pays all the expenses until the divorce is final. That doesn't matter to you, does it?"

"No, but you ought to take it easier, not put out all this gold."

"Why?" she said, and genuinely didn't understand.

Any more than I could understand some of her notions about spending.

She would pay thirty dollars for a pair of French sewing scissors in a silver shop on Michigan Boulevard--one big dead sizzle of trousseau silver--and those scissors would never cut a thread or snip a button, but disappear into the flow of articles in the bags and boxes, in the rear of the station wagon, and perhaps never show up again. Yet she could talk about being thrifty in Mexico.; "You don't mind spending Smitty's money, do you?"

"No," I said, and truthfully I scarcely cared. "But suppose I wasn't going to Mexico with you--would you have gone on alone? With the bird, and so on?"

"Of course. Don't you want to come with me, though?"

She knew, however, that I could no more stay here and let her go than I could put out my eyes. Even if it was African vultures, condors, rocs, or phoenixes. She had the initiative and carried me; if I had had a different, independent idea I might have tried to take the lead instead.

But I had none.

So she asked me whether I didn't want to stay behind, and then seeing it all over my face how I loved her she took back her question and was silent; the only sound was the strike of the guitar as it was set down.

Then she said, "If the bird worries you, just forget about it till you see it. I'll show you what to do. Only don't think about it beforehand.

Or think what a kick there may be in it when you get the animal trained, and how beautiful it is."

I tried to take her advice, but all the same my bottom skepticism of West-Side Chicago nagged after me and asked, "Nah, what is this!"

And since we were only a short distance from the zoo I took a walk to see their eagle, who perched on a trunk inside a cage forty feet high and conical like the cage of a parlor parrot, in its smoke and gun colors dipped somewhat with green, and its biped stance and Turkish or Janissary pants of feathers--the pressed-down head, the killing eye, the deep life of its feathers. Oy! In the old-country park green of lawns and verdigris-covered ironwork, ordinary tree shade and garden sunlight, there seemed nothing a bird like this might want. I thought, How could anybody ever tame him? And also, We'd better make speed for Texarkana and start with this thing before it grows too big.

The letter from Smith's lawyer had arrived. The day we received it we loaded up the wagon and left the city, heading toward St. Louis.

As we started late we didn't quite make it that far. We camped, sleeping on the ground under a shelter-half. I figured we weren't too far from the Mississippi, which I was eager to see. I was terribly excited.

We lay beside a huge tree. Such a centuries' old trunk still had such small-change of foliage--it was difficult to think this enormous thing should live merely by these tiny leaves. And soon you distinguished the sound of the leaves, moved by the air, from the insects' sound.

First near and loud; then farther and mountainous. And then you realized that wherever it was dark there was this sound of insects, continental and hemispheric, again and again, like surf, and continuous and dense as stars.







CHAPTER XV



What class we started out in! We were risen up high with pleasure.

We had all the luck in love we could ask, and it was maybe improved by the foreignness we found in each other, for in some ways Danae or Flora the Belle Romaine couldn't have been Stranger to me, while only God can guess what sort of oddity out of barbarous Chicago I was to her. But these differences I think reduced the weight of precious personality and the -veteran burden that familiarity is always a part of.

The way we set out and all that we did or saw, what we ate, under what trees we took off our clothes and what protocol there was about kissing, from the face to the legs and back again up to the breasts, what we agreed and disagreed about, or what animals or people came our way I can always, recall when I want to. Some things I have an ability to see without feeling much previous history, almost like birds or dogs that have no human condition but are always living in the same age, the same at Charlemagne's feet as on a Missouri scow or in a Chicago junkyard. And often that is how the trees, water, roads, grasses may come back in their green, white, blue, steepness, spots, wrinkles, veins, or smell, so that I can fix my memory down to an ant in the folds of bark or fat in a piece of meat or colored thread on the collar of a blouse. Or such discriminations as where, on a bush of roses, you see variations in heats that make your breast and bowel draw at various places from your trying to correspond; when even the rose of rot and wrong makes you attempt to answer and want to stir. Which is to say also that the human heat that circulates and warms, when it's piled at any bar or break, burns inward or out with typical embers or sores, and makes a track of fever or fire whose corresponding part is darkness and cold gaps. So there are burning roses, there are sores, and there are busted circuits. It's rare to find us without these breaks and interferences.

Thea and I had our troubles. She kept me uncertain, as I did her.

I'd do it by looking, through long old habit, casual and unattached; it was hard for me to change. And on her side, she couldn't make me any promises. She just wouldn't. I knew that Smitty wouldn't have divorced her because of one single naval cadet. I figured in those high-up social circles a falling-off here and there was not of such importance.

When I took it up with her she admitted it. "Of course," she said, "now and then. Because of Smitty. Well--also because of myself.

But we don't have to think about that. Because nothing like you has ever happened to me. So what do I know about far in the future?

I've never been this way before. Have you?"

"No."

"Why," she said, exactly right, "this makes you jealous! Why, Augie, the others would be jealous of you. They should be. Those just were incidents. You know, this can be one of the most unimportant things in the world. If it's good, why grudge anybody? And if it's bad you can only feel sorry. And can you blame me if I tried? And don't you want me to tell you the truth?"

"Oh! Yes, I do. No. I'm not sure. Maybe not."

"Suppose I hadn't looked--what would I know? And if I can't tell you the truth, and you can't tell me..."

Yes, yes, I knew the truth had to be appropriate somewhere, but was this the place for it?

She wanted to say and to know all. Pale as she was, she got paler at the approach of this desire to say and know, and often her seriousness was right on the border of panic. For of course she was jealous too. Yes, she was jealous. It did me good sometimes to realize it. She wanted to be hard about the truth, and when she was she shook and got frightened.

Sometimes I reckoned that mere jealousy of her sister had interested her in me in the first place. It wasn't a reassuring thought. But then it's actually very common that at the outset you desire a thing for the wrong reasons; there's an even more deep desire which will bring you out of such reasons. Otherwise there'd never be any human motives but miserable, green ones, and only the illusion of better and riper.

Rather than as the history of the world shows, that inferior reasons are not the only leading ones. Because why have unhappy people persisted in thinking of the best, and the best only? You take that poor Rousseau, in the picture he leaves of himself, stubble-faced and milky, in a rope wig, while he wept at his own opera performed at court for the monarch, how he was encouraged by the weeping of the hearttouched ladies and fancied he'd like to gobble the tears from their cheeks--this sheer horse's ass of a Jean-Jacques who couldn't get on with a single human being, goes away to the woods of Montmorency in order to think and write of the best government or the best system of education. And similarly Marx, with his fierce carbuncles and his poverty and the death of children, whose thought was that the angel of history would try in vain to fly against the wind from the past. And I can mention many others, less great, but however worried, spoiled, or perverse, still wanting to set themselves apart for great ends, and believing in at least one worthiness. That's what the more deep desire is under the apparent ones.

Oh, jealousy, sure. But there were plenty of other defects and inferiorities.

What I sometimes didn't think of myself, in the fine pants and the buckskins, boots, sheath knife, while I drove the station wagon as if from the court at Greenwich and along the Thames, just back from a Spanish raid, goofy flowers in my hat. This was how I'd note myself with satisfaction and glowing; I may ask a partial excuse, because of the swelling of my heart, that I was such a happy jerk. But she could be singular too, when she'd swagger or boast or vie against other women; or fish compliments, or force me to admire her hair or skin, which I didn't have to be forced to do. Or I would find her stuffing toilet paper into her brassiere. Toilet paper! What a strange idea of herself--complete failure to know what she had! What did she want with different breasts? I would look over into her blouse, where they seemed to me perfect, and perplex myself with this question.

I could enumerate more difficulties, like pangs, vexations, bellyaches, anxious nosebleeds and vomiting, continual alarms about pregnancy.

Also she was snobbish now and then about her extraction and would brag about her musical ability. Actually, I heard her play the piano only once, in a roadhouse, in the afternoon. She went up on the bandstand, and the instrument may have been out of whack from use by jazz musicians; anyway, it began to crash from the energy she turned loose on the keys, chords overreached and elements spilled. She abruptly quit and came back silent to the table, drops of sweat on her nose. She said, "This seems to be an off day." Well, I didn't care whether she could play or not, but to her it seemed important.

But these shortcomings, both in her and me, could have been corrected or changed. Whatever wasn't essential I thought might simply be rolled over. Like camp articles we rolled over that were in our way; we forgot to clear them aside--I am thinking of one particular day; there were some aluminum cups and lines and straps that happened to be on the blanket. It was afternoon; we were in the Ozark foothills, well off the road, in the woods near a pasture. Up from where we were there was a totter of small pines, and above them bigger trees, and subsiding land below. Because the water. we had was poor we spiked it with rye for taste. The weather was hot, and the air was glossy, the clouds white and heavy, rich, dangerous, swagging, silk. The open ground glared and baked, the wheat looked like the glass of wheat, the cattle had their feet in the water. First the heat and then the rye made us take off our clothes, shirts, then trousers, finally all. I was startled to see those pinks of her 'breast, so heavy and forward, and despite everything I was still, at first, somewhat shy of them. When I put down my tin plate and began to kiss her, both kneeling, her hand passed over my belly hairs; it sometimes surprised me where she would put a kiss of gentleness, and I didn't know where the jump of happiness would come from. She gave me only the side of her face at first, and, when her lips, she would not let my mouth go for some time, until her arms locked in my head. I felt, when I was roofed and covered with heat, met all over and to the smallest hair, carried on her body, easily. She didn't shut her eyes, but they were not open in order to see me or anything; filled and slow, they made no effort but only received or showed.

Very soon I didn't notice either, but knew I came out of my hidings and confinements, efforts, ends, observations, and I wanted nothing that was not for her and felt the same from her. We stayed a length of time as we were, easing and slowly lying apart on each other's arms, then once more nearer, kissing neck and breastbone and on the edge of the face and on the hair.

Meanwhile the clouds, birds, cattle in the water, things, stayed at their distance, and there was no need to herd, account for, hold them in the head, but it was enough to be among them, released on the ground as they were in their brook or in their air. I meant something like this when I said occasionally I could look out like a creature. If I mentioned a Chicago junkyard as well as Charlemagne's estate, I had my reasons. For should I look into any air, I could recall the bees and gnats of dust in the heavily divided heat of a street of El pillars--such as Lake Street, where the junk and old bottleyards are--like a terribly conceived church of madmen, and its stations, endless, where worshipers crawl their carts of rags and bones. And sometimes misery came over me to feel that I myself was the creation of such places. How is it that human beings will submit to the gyps of previous history while mere creatures look with their original eyes?

We had few such afternoons when we started to train the eagle.

After all, love can be the calling of mythological characters around Mount Olympus or Troy, like Paris, Helen, or Palamons and Emilies, but we had to start to earn our own bread. And it couldn't be in any way other than this one that Thea had chosen, to send out a bird after another animal. And so the gilded and dallying part of the excursion ended in Texarkana.

Seeing that fierce animal in his cage, I felt darkness, and then a streaming on my legs as if I had wet myself: it wasn't so, it was only something to do with my veins. But I really felt dazed in all my nerves when I saw with what we would have to deal, and dark before the eyes.

The bird looked to be close kin to the one that lit on Prometheus once a day. I had hoped this would be a smaller bird, and, brought up by us from a baby, he'd learn something about affection. But no--to my despair--here he was as big as the one in Chicago, with the same Turkish or paratroop knickers down to his merciless feet.

Thea was terribly excited and keen. "Oh, he's so beautiful! But how old is he? He's not an eaglet; he looks full grown and must weigh twelve pounds."

"Thirty," I said.

"Oh, honey, no."

Of course she knew more about it than I did.

"But you didn't get him from the nest, did you?" she asked the owner.

This old guy, who kept a roadside zoo of mountain lions and armadillos, a few rattlers, was an ancient-prospector or desert-rat-looking joker, with the sort of eyes that request you to believe their crookedness is only the freak of nature or effect of unfavorable light. But I hadn't served around Einhorn's poolroom or had Grandma Lausch's upbringing for nothing, and I recognized him for a crooked old bastard and prick in his heart.

"No, I didn't climb for him. Fellow brought him in when he was real tiny. They grow so dum fast."

"He looks older to me. My guess is he's in the prime of life."

Thea said, "I have to know if he was ever a haggard--ever hunted wild."

"He's never been outside that cage since practically from hatching.

You know, miss, I've been shipping animals to your uncle for close on twenty years." He thought George H. Something-or-other was her uncle.

"Oh, of course we're going to take him," said Thea. "He's so magnificent.

You can open the cage."

I rushed forward because I feared for her eyes. Falconry with those little peregrine hawks was all right in the tame meadows out East in the company of ladies and sporting gentlemen; but we were on the edge of Texas, within smell of deserts and mountains, and she had never touched an eagle before even if she was experienced with smaller birds and capable of the capture of poisonous snakes. However, she was very steady when it came to dealing with animals; she had no fear of them at all. With the gauntlet pulled on, she held a piece of meat inside the cage. The eagle struck it out of her hand and then took it. She tried another piece, and he mounted her arm with that almost inaudible whiff of his spread wings that's so fearful in itself, the raised shoulder with its forward power and the fan of the pinions with hidden rust and angel-of-death armpit or deepest hollow inside the wing. His talons held her arm steady while he tore up the meat. However, when she wanted to take him out he attacked and tore with his beak. I reached for him next, and he struck me above the gauntlet and cut gashes in my arm. I expected this, if not worse, and somehow I was relieved that it happened so quick, making me fear him a little less.

As for Thea, fascinated, and whiter than ever in her cap with green bill, quick, strong, erect in the head with her purpose to get and tame him, the spurt of blood on my arm was, just now, only an incident, like the grate of gravel under our boots. In action, she was that way about accidentsspills and falls from horses and motorcycles, knife cuts or any hunting injuries.

Finally we got the bird transferred to the back of the station wagon.

Thea was happy. I had things to do, such as bandaging my arm and stowing the boxes anew to give the bird more space, that allowed me to hide my gloom. While the old man, as Thea described her scheme, could hardiv keep his grin in his whiskers. Like so many enthusiasts, Thea rarely got the number of anyone who pretended to listen seriously.

Since the old man was getting a fancy price for his eagle, or, the way I felt about it, had found a place for this harsh client of his, he was very pleased and malicious. So we drove off, with the thing supervisor of the back of the wagon. I observed how glad and confident Thea was, and took note of the shotgun behind the seat.

I can remember a cousin of Grandma Lausch who recited "The Eagle," by Lermontov, in Russian; which I didn't dig, but the elocution was wonderful and romantic. She was dark, she had black eyes, her throat was ardent but her hands rather powerless. She was much younger than Grandma, and her husband was a furrier. I'm only trying to gather together what a city-bred man knew of eagles altogether, and it's curious: the eagle of money, the high-flying eagles of Bombay, the 332 .

NRA eagle with its gear and lightnings, the bird of Jupiter and of nations, of republics as well as of Caesar, of legions and soothsayers, Colonel Julian the Black Eagie of Harlem; also the ravens of Noah and Elijah, which may well have been eagles; the lone eagle, animal president.

And, as well, robber and carrion feeder., Well, given time, we all catch up with legends, more or less.

The bird had looked to me to be in his prime, but the old man was approximately right, even though he probably lied by as much as eight months. American eagles are generally blackish until maturity; before they get the white part of their plumage they moult a good many times.

Ours didn't yet have his, the full bad eye of the head when it whitens, and was still only Black Prince, not King. He was, however, powerfully handsome, with his onward-turned head and buff and white feathers among the darker, his eyes that were gruesome jewels and meant nothing in their little lines but cruelty, and that he was here for his own need; he was entirely a manifesto of that. I hated him beyond measure, at the start. In the night we had to be up because of him, and it was an interference with love. If we slept out-of-doors and I woke and missed her, I would find her by him; or she would shake and send me to check if all was well--the jesses around his legs, the swivel through the hole of the jesses, the leash through the swivel. If we had a hotel room he shared it. I'd hear his step; he crackled his feathers or hissed as if snow was sliding. He was right away her absorption and idee fixe, almost child, and he made her out of breath. She turned to him continually in her seat as we rode, or when we ate, and I wondered at other times whether he was on her mind.

Of course he had to be subdued, so that we didn't have a mighty and savage animal at our backs, antagonism constantly increasing between captive and masters. And since I had to, I got along with him.

He didn't require that I should love him; he looked the other way from that. Meat was how you came to terms with him. Thea really did understand how to tame him, and naturally, since she had the knowhow, she had to think of him more than I did. Soon he started to come to our fists for his beef. You had to get used to it. Under the gloves your skin was twisted by his talons, and he did do a whole lot of damage. I also had to accustom myself to the work he did with his beak when he ravened. But later when I saw vultures on carcasses I appreciated his prouder pull of a more noble bird.

So as we ran through Texas, and it was very hot. We stopped several times a day to work with the bird. By the time we got close to Laredo, where it was desert, he would come both to my fist and hers from the top of the station wagon. And this open shadow would shut- out your heart with its smell and power--the Etna feathers and clasped beak opening. Often, then, without the preparatory move you observe in other animals, he ejected a straight, heavy squirt of excrement before he wound up to fly again to the top of the wagon. Thea was mad about him for his progress. I was that about her, and for lots of reasons, among them admiration, seeing how she succeeded with the bird.

Birds that hunt have to be hooded; Thea had this thing ready, a tufted cover with drawstrings that you struck or loosened before you released the animal to rise and wait on its game. But before the eagle would take the hood he had to be thoroughly mastered, and I carried him on my arm some forty hours without sleep. He wouldn't drop off, and Thea kept me awake. This was in Nuevo Laredo, just over the border. We put up in a hotel full of flies, a brown room with giant coarse cactus almost in the window. And there I paced at first, rested, at length, in the dark, with my arm on the table, overborne by him. After several hours a numbness grew over my entire side and into my shoulder as deep as the bone. The flies nipped me because I had only one hand free and anyhow didn't want to startle him. Thea had a kid bring up coffee for us, which she took from him at the door. I could see him stare as he tried to dope us out, for he knew we had the bird and perhaps even saw his shape on my victimized arm, or his wakeful eye.

There had been an amazing crowd when we drove up to the hotel and opened the back door of the station wagon. In a few minutes more than fifty men and children had gathered. The eagle came on my hand for his meat and the kids screamed, "Ay! Mira, mira--el dguila, el dguila!" Some sight, I guess, since I'm fairly tall and wore that heightincreasing hat and whipcord breeches, and, moreover, obviously followed the lead of Thea's beauty and importance. And anyway the eagle has ancient respect in Mexico from the old religion and the great class of knights in those days of obsidian sword slaughter that Diaz del Castillo witnessed. The children, I said, were screaming, while he rocked on my fist, "El dguila, el dguila!" And because I heard Spanish for the first time, it was another word I made out, the Roman name of Caligula. I thought in my heart how suitable it was, Caligula!

"El ·guila!"

"Si, Caligula," I said. That name was the first satisfaction I had in him.

Now he had my arm pinned to the table with torture, and my mouth and chest filled with moans I couldn't give out. I had to drag him with me everywhere, to the toilet too, and sitting or standing I had his eye on me and his comment to try to read and will to feel. From moody sunkenness, when I rose to go, he thrashed back, his neck began to swim and his eyes livened; his clutch grew more positive. I won't attempt to play down my fear when I had to take him into the toilet for the first time. I held him as far off as I had the strength to do, while he started to stretch his wings and change the stance of his thick legs.

0 observation! We had our struggle on that very thing, it appears to me. The conversation with Thea about living in the eyes of others, I've reported. When has such damage been done by the gaze and so much awful despotism belonged to the eyes? Why, Cain was cursed between them so he would never be unaware of his look in the view of other men. And police accompany accused and suspects to the can, and jailers see their convicts at will through bars and peepholes. Chiefs and tyrants of the public give no relief from self-consciousness. Vanity is the same thing in private, and in any kind of oppression you are a subject and can't forget yourself; you are seen, you have to be aware. In the most personal acts of your life you carry the presence and power of another; you extend his being in your thoughts, where he inhabits.

Death, with monuments, makes great men remembered like that. So I had to bear Caligula's gaze. And I did.

He resisted the hood for a long time. Several times we tried it on him, and I had my hand slashed badly and cursed him with all my might; but I continued to carry him. Occasionally Thea would spell me, but he was too much of a weight for her and after an hour or so I'd lure him back to my unrested arm. During the last groggy stretch I couldn't any longer stay in and went into the street with him where the cries about him made him restive. We brazened our way into a movie and sat in the back row; here the sound got him even worse, and I was afraid he'd blow his top. I took him back to the room and fed him chunks of meat to soothe him. Then, in the middle of the night, under the infrared bulb of Thea's photographic kit, I tried the hood once more, and he submitted to it at last. We continued to give him meat under it, and he was calm. Covered eyes made him much more docile. Henceforth he rode either my fist or Thea's and took the hood without using his beak on us.

When we had this victory and Caligula was standing on the dresser 'n his hood with tufts, we kissed and danced or tromped around the room. Thea went to get ready for bed and I fell asleep in my breeches and was out for ten hours. She pulled off my boots and let me lie.

Next afternoon, hot and bright, we started out for Monterrey; trees, bushes, stones, as explicit as glare and the spice of that heat could make them. The giant bird, when Thea brought him out, seemed to shoulder it with a kind of rise of sensuality. I felt dizzy from long sleep and the wires of radiant heat curling up from road and rock. Also the paws and pads, the tongues and jaws of cactus and their spines, the dust like resin, the squamous crumbly walls, were a trial to the sight and the skin. But as the wagon climbed and the day cooled we both revived.

We didn't stop over in Monterrey but only got a few supplies--more raw meat for Caligula than anything else. The curiosity of evening in this foreign city would have held me--it was so green, and the buildings red, the humanity so numerous in the flat open beside the railroad station and its length of low entrances and windows. But it was Thea's idea to drive on and beat the hot weather. It wasn't easy going, for the fields weren't fenced and there were cattle in the way; the road had no night markers and took foolish twists. For some time there was a mist although the moon was plain enough. The animals rose up in big shapes from this vague cover, and sometimes we came up with horsemen and left behind the slap of iron shoes and the loose change and slash of harness.

At a town well past Valles we stopped for what was left of the night, and then because I insisted. The air was sharp, the stars pricking, the roosters sounding off, and the never-sleeping element of Mexican towns came to see us take out the eagle, with the same solemnness about it as at the Sunday promenade of a holy image, and, as everywhere, said to one another, astonished, "Es un dguila!" I wanted to leave him in the station wagon where by now his excrement and fowlish smell were so thick, but he wouldn't stand for it. Left alone all night, he was vicious in the morning, and Thea was by now so wrapped up in his career that for the time very few considerations took precedence. Because she was making history. Those gallant young sons of financiers who flew planes in the twenties and took off to break records from New Orleans to Buenos Aires, over the jungles which sometimes collected both them and machines, their passions must have been on this order.

She kept reminding me how few people since the Middle Ages had manned eagles. I agreed it was terrific and admired her without limit; I thanked God I was even her supernumerary or assistant. But I tried to tell her that the eagle in the room disconcerted me at love, which was awkward; and also that he was a beast after all, not a child in cradle for whom you had to have titty or bottle. Thea, however, couldn't see any arguments, only her objective with the bird, which she never doubted that I shared. She thought I disagreed as to how to manage him. The motive of power over her, the same as afflicted practically everyone I had ever known in some fashion, and which in my degree, though in a different place, I had too, carried and plunged us forward.

Of course, when you had an eagle by the tail, so to speak, how could you quit? Having started, you had to follow up. But it wasn't being halfway in a course of difficulties that counted. No, what carried her was the passion for him to capture those huge lizards.

By the door of the posada two dirty lumps of kerosene light were burning, like persimmons streaked with black. The stones of the street were slippery, but neither from dew nor from rain, and the smells which I didn't yet know how to sort rose thickly mixed--smells of straw, clay, charcoal and ocote smoke, cookery, stone, shit and corn meal, boiled chicken, pepper, dog, pig, donkey. Nothing was as before; all was strange. In the barnyard, which gave a heave most likely of terror as Caligula in his hood was brought through; and in the bedroom where the perfumed air of the branchy mountainside washed over the white wall and on the stinks of community, as the long impulse from well out in ocean bobs the rotten oranges and other trash at the wharfside; and the Indian woman who turned down the counterpane of the iron bedstead which was in a form of fantasy, a white spider monkey.

It was not a long night's rest, for early in the morning washerwomen at their tank started slapping their clothes; corn was pounding; the animals were lively, especially the burros, penetrated with necessity; and the church clanged. However, Thea woke happy, and she was busy right away giving Caligula his pacifier of morning meat, while I set out through the damp rooms to find bread and coffee.

Because of the bird we traveled rather slowly. Now Thea wanted to teach him to fly after a lure. This was a horseshoe with chicken or turkey wings and heads tied to it; it was slung by a rawhide line, and when it was thrown he gave a great lurch of preparation and soared after it. Some of his problems were like those of an airline pilot, as to judging distances and the air currents. It wasn't, with him, the simple mechanics of any little bird that went and landed as impulse tickled him, but a task of massive administration. When he was high enough he could look as light as a bee, and later on I saw him at such altitudes that he appeared to tumble or turn somersaults like a mere pigeon-- it must have been that he played the various air pockets of hot and cold. Anyway, it was glorious how he would mount away high and seem to sit up there, really as if over fires of atmosphere, as if he was governing from up there. If his motive was rapaciousness and everything based on the act of murder, he also had a nature that felt the triumph of beating his way up to the highest air to which flesh and bone could rise. And doing it by will, not as other forms of life were at that altitude, the spores and parachute seeds who weren't there as individuals but messengers of species.

The more south we were, the more deep a sky it seemed, till, in the Valley of Mexico, I thought it held back an element too strong for life, and that the flamy brilliance of blue stood o S this menace and sometimes, like a sheath or silk membrane, showed the weight it held in sags. So when later he would fly high over the old craters on the plain, coaly bubbles of the underworld, dangerous red everywhere from the sun, and then coats of snow on the peak of the cones--gliding like a Satan--well, it was here the old priests, before the Spaniards, waited for Aldebaran to come into the middle of heaven to tell them whether or not life would go on for another cycle, and when they received their astronomical sign built their new fire inside the split and emptied chest of a human sacrifice. And also, hereabouts, worshipers disguised as gods and as gods in the disguise of birds, jumped from platforms fixed on long poles, and glided as they spun by the ropes-- feathered serpents, and eagles too, the voladores, or fliers. There still are such plummeters, in market places, as there seem to be remnants or conversions or equivalents of all the old things. Instead of racks or pyramids of skulls still in their hair and raining down scraps of flesh there are corpses of dogs, rats, horses, asses, by the roads; the bones dug out of the rented graves are thrown on a pile when the lease is up; and there are the coffins looking like such a rough joke on the female form, sold in the open shops, black, white, gray, and in all sizes, with their heavy death fringes daubed in Sapolio silver on the black. Beggars in dog voices on the church steps enact the last feebleness for you with ancient Church Spanish, and show their old flails of stump and their sores. The burden carriers with the long lines, hemp lines they wind over their foreheads to hold the loads on their backs, lie in the garbage at siesta and give themselves the same exhibited neglect the dead are shown. Which is all to emphasize how openly death is received everywhere, in the beauty of the place, and how it is acknowledged that anyone may be roughly handled--the proudest--pinched, slapped, and set down, thrown down; for death throws even worse in men's faces and makes it horrible and absurd that one never touched should be roughly dumped under, dumped upon.

When Caligula soared under this sky I sometimes wondered what connection he made with this element of nearly too great strength that was dammed back of the old spouts of craters.

But he wasn't soaring yet. He was still cumbersomely flying after the lure and its slimy giblets spoiled by the sun. Again and again it was flung out, downslope, for that was the only way to get him going. Whenever Thea miscalculated the distance he made me stagger, since we were tied by a rope that passed under my arms. She ran to watch him devour the chicken and signaled when I was to pull at the leash. So gradually he learned to come back to the fist from the lure. No matter how isolated a mountain place we stopped in to practice, there was an audience soon of herdsmen and peasants in their sleeping-suit white costumes and sandals soled with pieces of rubber tire, little kids and the mountaineers with the creased impassivity that showed how gravely they took it. Hi'

As for Thea,' sometimes she looked more barbarous than they did in spite of the civilized lipstick and conventional shape of the jodhpurs she wore. Her arm was held out to the eagle when he descended, braked with his wings and feet together, the stirred air showing on his breast.

Her cap fluttered. I took a great pride in her. I thought it was the most splendid human act I would ever see. It went around my soul like fine ribbon. She'd call out to me too, when I poised myself forward to bring the bird in, admiring how gallant it looked. I was pleased, of course, though not groggy with glory.

After ten days we reached Mexico City. Thea had to see the representative of Smitty's lawyer and we therefore stayed awhile. Against her desire, which was to go on immediately to Acatla. We put up very cheaply in a hotel called La Regina, for only three pesos a day. They didn't appear to mind the eagle, and the place was quiet and modestlooking, unusually clean, with a skylight over the center and galleries onto which you came from rooms, showers, or toilets. The lobby was also very fine, and empty. From above it had a diagrammatic look. The chairs and writing tables were arranged with geometry, but no one was there to use them. And soon we found that the queen for whom the place was named was the licentious old Cyprian one. The closets were full of douche pans, the beds were heavily prepared with rubber under the sheets, which was an annoyance. During the day we were alone in the hotel with the maids, whom we amused. They thought it was fun that we lived in a house of assignation and they waited on us, did laundry and pressed pants, fetched coffee and fruit, because we were the only guests. Thea's Spanish entertained them--I had only begun to pick up a few words--as did her requests, that she summoned them when we were in bed and ordered mangos for us and meat for the bird.

Encouraged to be free around the place, we covered with only a towel when we went to take a shower, and when I wanted to be without the eagle nobody minded if we went into one of the other rooms. It was only at night that there were drawbacks to the Regina; though the clients were probably respectable people they had no ideas whatever about quiet, and very few of the doors had glass in the transom. However, we were out to all hours ourselves, seeing the city,, and we did a lot of daytime sleeping. I rested my arm, of which the gashes were healing. Thea took me to the palaces and night clubs, zoo and churches.

The rideresses in Chapultepec, those patrician ladies in hard hats and immense skirts and foot-conforming little black leather shoes, sitting sidesaddle, they impressed me. I thought the world was really much greater than I had ever fancied. I said to Thea, "I don't actually know much, I begin to see."

She laughed and answered, "You're welcome to all the side of things I can give information about. But how much are you obliged to know?"

"No, there actually is a lot," I said, for I was amazed and struck, it was so splendid. I wanted to stay, but there was our business with the bird, and Thea didn't like the city very much.

I couldn't question her judgment about Caligula--there I went along with her and had confidence by now, based on her proved ability with him, A creature like that, he'd have torn me to strips if I'd ever taken him on myself, assuming that I'd have had the nerve. No, where the eagle was concerned I did as she said, insofar as I backed the undertaking.

When I knew more about it I trembled, thinking of the precautions we didn't take. We ought to have worn wire masks, especially at the time he was being taught to give up the lure for meat on the fist, since bald eagles are most dangerous when they have their quarry under them. She might have been struck in the eyes. But that never happened, and eventually she succeeded in teaching him to respond to our voices and come directly after the stoop for the hand-fed meat.

We talked to him and used every gentleness on him. He liked to be stroked with a feather. He became pretty tame, but all the same my heart picked lip a few beats when we hooded him or struck the hood.

At the Regina the scared maids were called in to be present when we worked with him. Thea lined them up and said, "Hablen, hablen ustedes!" They had to chatter. For the thing was to accustom Caligula to close human presence and sound. So the Indian women, in smocks, frightened as well as amused by us--they stood in a row and watched Thea take the eagle down from the dresser on her hand. What I had imagined at the first sight of him actually happened to one of these young chicks, that she wet her pants when the hood came off from the 340.. unmerciful face and weapon beak with its breathing holes. But it did affect Caligula to be surrounded by these women; he ate and then at one moment he seemed to lean his head toward Thea and act like a cat who wants to wipe and wreathe and ply himself at a woman's legs.

"Oh, look at him," Thea cried. "Augie, see what he's doing, he wants to be petted!" ^ Then she was impatient with having to wait on in the city. "Now's the time to follow up. We ought to be in the country with him."

"Well, let's drive out away."

"No, we can't. I have to see the lawyer. But I can't bear to lose the time. Now, now, we could be getting home. We could start to enter him to his quarry."

By this she meant his first introduction to lizards. Not the giant variety with the high frill of which she had shown me pictures, the game we were after, but littler lizards. And furthermore Caligula had to become accustomed to a horse or burro; these giant lizards were in almost inaccessible parts of the mountain, far from roads, and we couldn't lug Caligula the whole long difficult way.

I felt Thea maybe ought not to hurry the divorce too much. She might not be getting a good deal. I didn't want to ask about the details, and I figured probably she had been an heiress long enough to look after things for herself. What could I tell her of that? Besides, I didn't care to find out in its entirety about the trouble between her and Smitty, and had I asked she would have told me. So I laid off the topic, and we used the spare time to take color pictures of Caligula on my arm infront of the cathedral; until mounted officers who appeared to gallop Rout of the gates of a ministry drove us off the plaza. They were tough with me. I understood them to say the bird was dangerous, and they shouted that they wanted to see my papers. They were more deferential to Thea, but with lady-killer smiles they anyway made us go. Thea still intended to sell illustrated articles about Caligula to the National Geographic or Harper's. She knew a writer in Acatia who would help us; and she kept notes in a little book which was a very classy affair of red leather with a gold pencil attached. At any time at all she'd take it out on her knees and write with bent neck, a few words to a page, while, as she paused to think or remember, she moved her hand like someone in the process of shading a drawing. I studied her so well I even noted that the creases at the joints of her fingers were much like my own.

"Darling, what town was that in Texas where he wanted to go after a jack rabbit?"

"Around Uvalde, wasn't it?"

"Honey, no. Could it have been?"

She took my thigh with her hand. Here in the city she had gilded her nails. They shone. And she had put on a velvet dress, this soft red one, which was heavy. The buttons were in the form of seashells. We sat under a tree on a wrought-iron chair. As I looked at the clear skin of her breast I felt its heat as actual as the heat of her hand through the thin cloth of my trousers. I assumed we'd get married when the divorce came through.