XXI-XXVI

CHAPTER XXI



On the way back from Mexico to Chicago I took a side trip or pilgrimage out of East St. Louis and went toward Pinckneyville to see my brother George after many years. He was already a grown man, a large hulk insecure in his steps. Darkenings of brown in his fair skin under the eyes showed how after his own fashion he too made the struggle that we make if we consent to live. Just as though, the time for it coming round, we left what company we were in and went privately to take a few falls with our own select antagonist in his secret room, like inside a mountain or down in a huge root-cellar. This was how it was with George too.

Nevertheless he was a man of fine appearance, as he had been a beautiful child. Now as then his shirt still bagged out in that senseless style over his back, and his hair grew like chestnut burr the same as formerly, brown, and gold, close bristles. I was kind of proud of him that he took his fate with dignity. They had made a shoemaker of him.

He couldn't run one of those machines you see thumping under their fender in a repair shop with the screaming disks and circular brushes, and he wasn't equal to making shoes by hand, but he was good at heeling and soling. Down in the basement, under the veranda, was where he worked. It was a wide veranda, for the place was far enough downstate to be reckoned Southern, and the buildings were big, white, of wood. Vines gave green color to his dusty half-window below. I saw him bent over the last, taking nails out of his mouth and sending them through the leather.

"George!" I said, looking at the man he had grown to be. He knew me right away, and he stood up, happy, and exactly as in the old days said, "Hi, Aug! Hi, Aug!" in his nasal voice. This repetition of two words if it went on long enough led usually to howling. So I went up to him, as he didn't move toward me. "Well, how is it, old man?" I said to him. I pulled him to me with one arm and put my head on his shoulder.

He wore a blue work shirt; he was big, white, and clean, except his hands. Eyes, nose, and small mouth of his undeveloped face were as they had always been, simple. I was moved that he couldn't know how much of a complaint be had against me for neglect, and no sooner saw me than was happy.

He hadn't had a visitor in three or four years, so they let me see him by special permission for the whole day.

"What do you remember, Georgie?" I asked him. "Grandma, and Mama, Simon, Winnie?" With his small smile he said these names after me, as in the song he used to sing when he trotted with the dog along the curl-wired fence, singing how everybody loved Mama. Within his moist mouth his teeth were white and good, though his eye-teeth were very sharp. I took him by the hand, which now was bigger than mine, and we went walking in the grounds.

It was the beginning of May and the oak leaves were shot out full, dark and healthy; worked through just as richly were the big dandelion blades and warm bottom-land-smelling air surrounded us. We walked along the wall, which at first was simply a wall to me. But then suddenly I was disturbed to think that he was a prisoner and never got outside, poor George. So without asking permission I took him off the grounds.

He looked at his feet in the unfamiliar road to watch where they were going, for he was frightened. In a crossroads store I bought him a package of chocolate marshmaliow cookies. He took them but wouldn't eat them, putting the package in his pocket. His eyes were now turning very uneasily, and I said, "Okay, George, we're going back right away."

That calmed him.

When he heard the dinner bell go--which was like the clink of the church bell of mouse-town in a children's zoo--trained to answer right away, he went to the rambly green cafeteria. He left me here. I had to follow him. He picked up his tray, and with those disconnected others who scraped their tinware and fed, wagging their weak noggins, without talk or observation, we sat down and ate.

It must be as simple as the blue and white of pillow-ticking to lay plans to take care of creatures so, clothe them, feed them, put them in their dormitory. There is probably just nothing to it.

The rest of the trip I kept thinking that something should be done for Georgie, not to let him spend his entire life like that; also I thought how quick we were to latch on to the excuse to deal practically with any element, like jailbirds, orphans, cripples, the weak-brained or the old. And I decided that after I had visited Mama I'd go and talk to Simon about Geprgie. I didn't have anything specific to propose. But I said to myself that Simon had money, therefore he ought to know what money could do. And anyway, as I was coming back to Chicago I thought of Simon. I wanted to see him.

I went from the one institution straight to the other in Chicago. But the two places were very different. Mama wasn't any longer right off the kitchen but established in almost an apartment with a Gulistan on the floor and drapes on the window. I had phoned that I was coming, and she waited for me down in front and rested on her white cane.

While still at a distance I spoke to her, so she wouldn't be startled. She weaved her head to locate me and with her crying-out voice of painful joy called my name. From the top rims of her goggles, which were dull dark, the brows of her pink long face lifted as if she were trying to use her eyes too. She then kissed me and whispered to me. She felt my face and said, "You're skinny. Augie, why you're so skinny?" And then, a long figure herself, nearly as tall as I, she led me up to her room by the back entrance. An odor of boiling fish spouted up the stairs; that passed into my home-coming mood and made me feel the kitchen heat of old days, sitting with my mother.

On the dresser all my postcards from Mexico were set out, and there were photos of Simon and Charlotte also. To show the seeing people who came. But besides the supervisor and his wife, who hated Simon, who did come? Only once in a while Anna Coblin. Or Simon himself. He'd come in, see how fixed up she was in her bourgeois parlor, and be satisfied. She too realized that she was being treated in a satisfactory way. On her wrist was a silver bracelet, she wore high heels, she had a radio with a big chromium zigzag across the speaker. In fact when Grandma Lausch had put on her black Od&ssa best in the Nelson Home she was laying claim feebly to the style Mama here was living in.

That was how the Lausch brothers had let the old lady down, failing to appreciate legitimacy and without any sense of standards. Yet it wasn't a light duty for Mama that she had to live up to what Simon and Charlotte were doing for her. Simon was if anything even more difficult than Charlotte, I gathered. He was very fussy. He opened her closet and inspected all her clothes to see if they were cleaned or if any were missing from the rack. I knew how Simon could be when he was doing something for your good and welfare; he could make things hot.

But maybe that spicy, sumptuous fish-gravy odor that belonged to the past made me too much of a critic of the present moment, exaggerating Mama's difficulties and imagining that the Gulistan and the drapes were the softenings of a cage. A blind woman, growing elderly, she had to live in a room, some room, and therefore why not a comfortable room? Moreover, it was perhaps my fault that I saw both Georgie and Mama as prisoners, and was unhappy that I was tooting freely around while they were confined.

"Augie, go see him," she said. "Don't be mad on Simon. I told him he shouldn't be."

"I will, Ma, as soon as I find a room and begin to settle down."

"What are you going to do?" she said.

"Oh--something. I hope something interesting."

"What? Do you make a living, Augie?"

"Well, here I am. What do you mean, Ma? I am living."

"Why are you so skinny? But the clothes are good--I felt the material."

They ought to have been good. Thea had paid a fancy price for them.

"Augie, don't wait too long to call Simon. He wants you to. He told me I should tell you. He talks about you all the time."

Simon did want to see me. As soon as he heard my voice over the phone he said, "Augie! Where are you? Stay put. I'll come and pick you up right away."

I was calling from a booth near my new place, which wasn't far from the old, on the South Side. He lived in the vicinity and was there within a few minutes in his black Cadillac, this beautiful enamel shell coming so softly to the curb, inside like jewelry. He beckoned and I got in.

"I have to go right back," he said. "I left without a shirt; I just put on this coat and hat. Well, let's look at you."

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

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

"I was in love with a girl."

"You were, uh? And what else?"

I didn't say anything about the bird or my failures and lessons.

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

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

"How much do you think I'm worth now?"

"A hundred grand?"

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

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

The question made me laugh, and maybe I laughed more than I should have. I said, "That's a strange thing to be asking. How can I?

And if I can, why should you care?" Then I said, "I guess it's true that people fix it to come out better than those near to them. Why, sure I'd like to have money too."

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

My answer satisfied him. "You're wasting a lot of time," he said.

"I know it."

"You ought to quit stalling. You're not a boy. Even George is something, he's a shoemaker."

You know, I did admire Georgie for the way he took his fate. I wished I had one that was more evident, and that I could quit this pilgrimage of mine. I didn't fee! I was better than Simon, not at all.

If there had been real ease in me, he might have envied me. As it was, what was there to envy?

Bodily overbearing, his fashionable pointed shoe on the rubber pad of the accelerator, he drove over the streets. This proud car, it had heraldry, it was royal, and wasn't my brother like a prince of Detroit, full of force and darkness? Why, what was the matter with that, to be a power of the world of machinery? Wasn't it good enough? And to what should you go rather? I wasn't proud of myself, believe me, and my stubbornness about a "higher," independent fate .1 was no wizard, for sure, nor gazetted as anything illustrious, nor billed to stand up to Apollyon with his horrible scales and bear's feet, nor slated to find the answer to all my shames like Jean-Jacques on the way to Vincennes sinking down with emotion of the conception that evil society is to blame for all that happened to warm, impulsive, loving me. There was no such first-rate thing that I could boast, and who was I, not to make up my mind and be so obstinate? The one thing I could say was that though I wanted this independent fate it wasn't merely for my own sake I wanted it.

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

"So when are you going to start what you're going to do?"

"I wish I knew. But it seems to be one of those things you can't rush."

"Well, people don't trust you if they don't know what you do, and you can't blame them."

He pulled up before his apartment, and he left the Cadillac tripleparked in the street for the doorman to worry about. Rising up swift and soundless in the elevator, we came to the ivory white door of his flat. As he opened it he was already yelling for the maid to cook some ham and eggs right away. He took on like a king, a Francis back from the hunt; he swelled, hollered, turned things round, not so much showing me the great rooms as dominating them typically. Well, there were vast rugs and table lamps as tall as life-sized dolls or female idols, walls that were all mahogany, drawers full of underwear and shirts, sliding doors that opened on racks of shoes, on rows of coats, cases of gloves, of socks, bottles of eau^de cologne, little caskets, lights lining the corners, water hissing criss-cross in the showerstall. He took a shower.

I went alone into the parlor; a huge China vase was there, and in secret I got up on a chair to lift the lid and look down, where I saw the reverse white bulge of the dragons and birds. The candy dishes were full of candy--I had some coconut balls and apricot marshmallows walking around while Simon took his shower. Then we went to eat, on a handsome marble-topped round table. The chairs were red leather. The metal circle that held up the marble was worked all around with peacocks and children's faces. The maid came from the blazing white of the kitchen with the ham and eggs and coffee. Simon's hand with its rings went out to test the heat of the cup. He behaved like some Italian Lord Moltocurante, jealous over the quality and exacting all he had coming.

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

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

He wanted me to know what his life was like. And maybe he thought I'd run into something that would appeal to me, for my future's sake.

"Wait a minute though," he said. "What kind of clown's suit are you wearing there? You can't go among people dressed like that."

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

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

In his office Simon wore his hat like a Member of Parliament, and while he phoned his alligator-skin shoes knocked things off the desk.

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

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

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

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

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

Those players who weren't glaring or grinning appeared to be holding their breath, and I thought sure Simon would end by being clouted.

Then he said, "Listen, you cruds, I want you to take a good look at my brother. He's a radical and he just got back from Mexico. Augie, tell them how soon the revolution's coming when they'll get sash weights tied on their necks and be thrown in the drainage canal."

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

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

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

"Then why do you belong to their club?"

"Why not? I enjoy being a member of a club."

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

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

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

"Oh, very much."

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

One thing that disturbed her was that without having a cent I seemed perfectly at home with many of the satisfactions that the rich enjoy.

Free of charge and trouble. It wasn't true, of course, but only another one of those appearances. However, she was particularly concerned that I didn't at least look more anxious.

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

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

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

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

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

"I have to," she told me simply.

"But why do you have to?"

"Because my son-in-law doesn't want to see me."

"But what's the matter?" I asked Charlotte and Simon.

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

"Because," said Simon, angry, "she comes here wearing nineteenfifty dresses. A woman with half a million dollars! She looks like the ragman's horse."

Owing to me, Charlotte brought her mother in to sit at the table. We were eating cherries and drinking coffee. Charlotte laid off me, but Simon worked himself into a rage at Mrs. Magnus in her brown dress.

He tried to read the paper and cut her--he hadn't said a word when she came in--but finally he said, and I could see the devil in him now, "Well, you lousy old miser, I see you still buy your clothes off the janitor's wife."

"Let her alone," said Charlotte sharply.

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

"Hide, hide!" he said, laughing.

"You crazy fool," cried Charlotte. She ran away on her high heels to bring her mother a coat and came back laughing also. They were' downright proud, I guess.

Simon wrote out a check and gave it to Mrs. Magnus. "Here," he said, "buy yourself something and don't come here looking like the scrubwoman." He went and kissed her on the braids, and she took his head and gave his kisses back two for one and with tremendous humor.

I went to see Einhorn, who was kind of white- and peaky. Things were not too good with him. He had gone to the hospital and had a prostate operation while I was away. All the same he still had a fine presence, much as in the insurance literature and in the clippings and photos all over the place. In the midst of all these hung the portrait of the Commissioner--there was a man! What a fine, great head--with the famous obituary under it! Tillie was away on a holiday with the grandchild, and Mildred who was more than ever Einhorn's friend was in charge. In her stout orthopedic shoes she stood up at the office barrier, which was cut down from the old office across the way. She had a way about the eyes of making you go to war with her. Not me, thanks.

Her hair was beginning to be gray. Einhorn's was snowy, which made his eyes blacker. He saw the double-breasted suit Simon had given me and said, "You certainly are doing fine, Augie." The house stunk. The books were falling off the shelves. The busts of great men were lost up near the ceiling. The black leather chairs on casters were aging well, but aging.

Einhom made a powerful complaint against Mimi Villars, who was ruining his son.

Mimi was even more unkind when she spoke of him and what he had done to Arthur. "I'll tell you about that old man," she said. "He's a damned impresario for himself. Every time he goes to the toilet he wants to publish an article about it. I know everybody is vain, and that that's what makes the world go round. Maybe it isn't even vanity.

Maybe it's like, with a bullet in your brain, you go on thinking of your nice hat. You go on thinking about the party you were invited to on Saturday, and so forth. But there ought to be a limit somewhere. If you can't help it, at least you should know that it isn't a good thing.

All that old man wants is that Arthur should be a credit to him and bring him glory, but as for helping him worth a damn, no, he won't come across with a nickel. And parents who have money and won't give any to their children ought to have it all taken away. They ought to go and beg. I'd take and put the old man on the corner of State and Lake with a tin cup, that's what I'd do. And you know the grandfather left it all to Arthur. He knew better than to trust his son. Arthur has been trying to finish a book, which is a great book. I believe in it. You know he can't be expected to work while doing that."

Einhorn did have some money though she exaggerated his wealth.

However, I didn't argue with her. I was down on Einhorn myself. Since the time when I came back from Buffalo and found the family wiped out, when he urged me to be hard on Simon, I didn't feel the old friendliness toward him. And, if you want to know, because he and Tillie had warned me in the old days not to expect anything, repeating how Arthur would come into all, I couldn't help feeling no one had been good enough for them and now they were not good enough for one another. Now maybe was my chance to pass them by.

"Of course," Mimi said with some of her old-time bitterness, "I have a pretty good job now, but last winter I was down with the flu and couldn't work. Not only that but Owens kicked us out because I couldn't pay the rent and a friend of ours on Dorchester took us in. But all Arthur and I had to sleep on was the sofa. Both of us on the sofa, and I had the flu. By morning he was so tired that when my friend went to work he got into her bed. So," she said with her universal-comedy laugh, "finally I said he should try to get a job. He said he'd try, and he got up one morning at eight and was back at ten. He said he had a job in the toy department at Wieboldt's and he was going to learn the details the next day. He left at nine that morning and was back at eleven. They had showed him, but before he started he wanted to clean up an important chapter about Kierkegaardwhat do I know about it?

'So then he went away next day at half-past eight and was back at noon, fired, because the floorwalker told him to pick up a piece of paper and he said, 'Pick it up yourself, you dog. Your back isn't broken.'

"Then Arthur came down with the flu and I had to get up and give him the sofa. But," she said, "I love him. It's never dull with him. The worse our life gets, the more good I feel in love. And you?" she said, looking closely at me, how I had been browned by Mexico, aged by hard going and experience, finally thrown on those rocks by Bizcocho and eating cinders and ashes over Thea. Why, the way I came back I must have had something in common with a survivor of Crassus's army in the eastern desert, barely making it back from the massacre in tattered armor scales.

Well, people had warned me in the first place. Padilla, for instance, said, "Holy Christ, March, what did you have to go there for, with a broad like that and this bird! A girl who catches snakes, and God knows what else! What do you expect? No wonder you look like this.

I hate like hell to be rubbing it in, but it seems to me you had it coming."

"Manny, what was I supposed to do? I fell in love with her."

"Is love supposed to ruin you? It seems to me you shouldn't destroy yourself out of life for purposes of loveor what good is it?"

"That's right, but I didn't love her as I ought to have. You see, I missed out. I should have been more pure, and stayed with it. There was something wrong with me."

"Old pal, let me tell you something," said Padilla. "You take too much blame on yourself, and the real reason is not such a good one.

It's because you're too ambitious. You want too much, and therefore if you miss out you blame yourself too hard. But this is all a dream.

The big investigation today is into how bad a guy can be, not how good he can be. You don't keep up with the times. You're going against history. Or at least you should admit how bad things are, which you don't do either. You should cut out this junketing around and go back to the university."

"I think I might do that. Only I'm still collecting my thoughts."

"Collect them meanwhile, in the evening. Can't you do two things at a time?"

And then Clem Tambow told me practically the same thing. He was getting his degree soon, and he looked very mature now with his heavy mustache and the cigar. He dressed like a poor man's press agent and his clothes smelled of cleaning fluid and the masculine odor. "Well, big boy, I see you're the same as when you left," he said. Now Clem and I liked each other very much, a splendid and goodhearted fellow, salt of the earth, ready with sympathy and appreciative of the general human plight. But I went on a toot with a rich woman, as he saw it, and if I was roughed up I had it coming to me. That was what he meant, for I wasn't at all the same as when I left.

"How is your campaign after a worth-while fate, Augie?" asked Clem, for he knew a lot about me, you see. Alas, why should he kid me so! I was only trying to do right, and I had broken my dome, lost teeth, got burned in my progress, a mighty slipshod campaigner. Lord, what a runner after good things, servant of love, embarker on schemes, recruit of sublime ideas, and good-time Charlie! Why, it was a crying matter, no fooling, to anyone who might know which side was up, that here was I trying to refuse to lead a disappointed life. A hell of a cause of sympathetic tears but also, as Clem saw, of haw-haws, as great jokes often are. So I looked desolated, and Clem laughed like anything. I couldn't feel sore at him.

You know why I struck people funny? I think it was because of the division of labor. Specialization was leaving the likes of me behind. I didn't know spot-welding, I didn't know traffic management, I couldn't remove an appendix, or anything like that. I discussed it with Clem, who was of like opinion. Clem was no slouch. He now said he was pushing ahead in the field of psychology and a lot was clear to him that was a mystery before. Oh, he still knocked himself. He said, "I bought all my fine notions at a fire sale," but he was growing more confident of his point of view. He made a big thing of my coming back, declaring that we were among the few true friends around. That was no lie. I had the. warmest feelings toward him. Well, then, he came around and said we must go to the Oriental Theatre and have supper. Till his last penny, Clem had to treat, and then he didn't mind if you stood him to something. He liked to look well, though his face was often raging, wrinkled, or his laugh was enormous while his teeth were snaggly, his head huge, and the suit he wore was prosperous, solid, middle-aged, a banker's suit, but his shanks were long, 432.. his shoes were wrecked, his socks old Argyles, he wore a turtleneck sweater and stunk of cigars.

So we went to the Oriental. The stars crept in the blue heavens there, like Arabian nights. We heard Milton Berie singing "River, Stay Away from My Door," then floppy dancers, as couch-dolls in velvet, followed by an act of little dogs zipping across the stage in automobiles, and then a troupe of girls playing bagpipes. First they performed "Annie Laurie" and then went into classical numbers. They did the "Liebestod" and "Vaise Triste," and then came the feature, which was so lousy we walked out and went to a restaurant.

Dignified again after his windy haw-haws in the wild gallery, Clem ordered a big Chinese dinner--sweet and sour pork, bamboo shoots, chicken chow mein with pineapple, egg too yung, and tea, rice, sherbet, almond cakes. We cleaned up on this and meanwhile had a conversation.

"Now just suppose," he said, "we were on our way up the Nile to the first cataract, sailing in a dahabiyeh. The green fields and boys shying rocks at the heavy birds, and the splashing flowers, while we eat dates with aphrodisiacs in them and beautiful. Coptic girls come rowing up to the music of the lateen sails and so on. Going to Kamak to copy inscriptions. How would that be?"

"Well, I just came back from one exotic place."

"Yes, but you jumped the gun. You weren't ready to go yet. You won't take things step by step. That's why your trip wasn't a success.

Now if you were ah Egyptologist you could go on this trip up the'

Nile."

"Good, then I'll become one. All I need is about ten-years' preparation."

"Look at you, you look so bright and happy after supper and your face is so pleasant, why, you might be the owner of this building. Haw, haw! Oh, brother, you're swell!"

"The only thing is," said I, flattered and smiling, "why the Nile?"

"For you? Something exceptional," said Clem. "When I think of you I have to think in terms of something exceptional. On the level of achievement." He had picked up this vocabulary at the university.

One of his favorite words was "reinforced," which meant to give food to a rat who has solved a problem, to encourage him. Meantime, with big red lips, scowling laughter, and territorial face, the great nose with its passages, he looked like a king. "Are you like one of the lousy crowd cheering the Coptics who row out to the boat? You are not.

You are a distinguished personality. You are a man of feeling. Among us poor drips at the human masquerade you come like an angel."

I tried to tut-tut him, but he said, "Oh, keep your shirt on, I'm not finished yet. You may not like it so much before I finish."

"Well, don't build me up so, and you won't have to tear me down."

"We aren't in the same universe of discourse. This is not yet what St. Thomas calls my level of first intention. I didn't say I thought you were an angel; only us common-clay, step-by-step, unfortunate ordinary personnel see you arrive as for a ball, smiling and beaming. You have ambitions. But you're ambitious in general. You're not concrete enough. You have to be concrete. Now Napoleon was. Goethe was. You take this Professor Sayce who actually had this Nile deal.

He knew everything along the banks for a thousand miles. Specific!

Names and addresses. Dates. The whole mystery of life is in the specific data."

"What makes you so keen about Egypt suddenly?" I said. "And besides I know there's plenty that's wrong with me. Don't you worry."

"Why, of course, even though you're beaming you're full of anxiety.

Don't I know it! I can see you pissing against the wind. What you need is some of Dr. Freud's medicine. It could do you a whole lot of good."

"As a matter of fact," I said, now somewhat disturbed, "I've been having plenty of peculiar dreams lately. Just listen. Last night I dreamed that I was in my own house, somewhere--it was enough of a surprise to have a house of my own, much less dream what I dreamed.

I was standing in my beautiful front room, entertaining a guest. And what do you think? I had two pianos. There were two grand pianos, as if ready for a concert. Then my guest, who had wonderful manners-- and me too, regular society--he said, 'Isn't it unusual for somebody to own three grand pianos?' Three! I turned around, and God! if there wasn't another piano. And I had been trying to figure out how come I had two in my house, as I can't play any more than a bull can sew cushions. This seemed downright sinister. But even though I was thrown by it I didn't let on or show anything. I told this guy, 'Sure, of course there are three of them'; as if who could do with less? So I felt like a terrible faker."

"Oh, what a case! You'd be a regular conservatory for a scientific mind. You'd be the greatest collection of unknowns ever to lie on a couch. What I guess about you is that you have a nobility syndrome.

You can't adjust to the reality situation. I can see it all over you. You want there should be Man, with capital M, with great stature. As we've been pals since boyhood, I know you and what you think. Remember how you used to come to the house every day? But I know what you want .0 paidea! 0 King David! 0 Plutarch and Seneca! 0 chivalry, 0 Abbot Suger! 0 Strozzi Palace, 0 Weimar! 0 Don Giovanni, 0 lineaments of gratified desire! 0 godlike man! Tell me, pal, am I getting warm or not?"

"You are, yes you are," said I. We were in this woodwork bower, you see, of the Chinese restaurant, and all seemed right, good-tempered, friendly. When important thought doesn't have to be soliloquy, I know how valuable an occasion that is. Because to whom can you speak your full mind as to yourself?

"Go on, Clem, go on," I told him.

"I went to the Mottley School in the fourth grade. Mrs. Minsick was the teacher. She'd call you up to the front of the class and hand you a piece of chalk. 'Now, Dorabella, what flower are you going to smell?'

Haw, haw! It was a riot. This little Dorabella Feingold would smell up until her pants showed and turn her eyes with ecstasy. She'd say, 'Sweetpea.' It was a regular drill. Inhale and exhale. Stephanie Kriezcki, she'd say, 'Violet, rose, nasturtium.' " He held the cigar by the stem and smelled with his inflated nose. "Just catch the picture of this lousy classroom, and all these poor punks full of sauerkraut and bread with pig's-feet, with immigrant blood and washday smells and kielbasa and home-brew beer. Where did they get off with this flora elegance? Why, hell! And then old lady Minsick would give a goid star to reinforce the good ones. She, with that kisser of hers with sharp teeth and tits that hung down to her belly, she'd hawk into the wastepaper basket. Well, the wild kids would say, 'Skunk cabbage, teach,'

' or, 'Wild schmooflowers,' or 'Dreck.' For this she'd grab you by the neck and rush you down to the principal. But these tough kids were right. Whoever saw any sweetpeas? Why, I'd fish through the sewer lid with a diaper pin because my wiseguy brother told me I'd catch goldfish."

"This is a sad story. But don't you see both kinds of kids were right? Some stood up for what they knew and some longed for what they didn't. What do you mean, that there are some kids or people for whom there can't be flowers? That couldn't be true."

"I knew you'd go for this chalk-smelling. You have a strong superego.

You want to accept. But how do you know what you're accepting? You have to be nuts to take it come one come all. Nobody is going to thank you for trying. And you know you're going to ruin yourself ignoring the reality principle and trying to cheer up the dirty scene. You should accept the data of experience. Why don't you read some psychology?

It did me a lot of good."

"Well, I'll borrow some of your books, since you think it's so important, Only you've got the whole thing wrong already. I'll put it to you as I see it. It can never be right to offer to die, and if that's what the data of experience tell you, then you must get along without them.

I also understand what you're driving at about my not being concrete.

It's as follows: In the world of today your individual man has to be willing to illustrate a more and more narrow and restricted point of existence. And I am not a specialist."

"Well, you tell me you can train birds."

Yes, so far that had been my only field of specialization.

And it's perfectly true, you have to be one of these spirits that get as if jumped into and driven far and powerfully by a social purpose.

If somebody is needed to go and lie under the street, you be it. Or in a mine. Or work out joyrides in the carnival. Or invent names of new candy. Or electroplate babies'. shoes. Or^go around and put cardboard pictures of bims in barbershops or saloons. Or go die in one subdivided role or another, with one or two thoughts, these narrow, persistent ideas of your function.

I always believed that for what I wanted there wasn't much hope if you had to be a specialist, like a doctor or other expert. If so, as an expert, you'd be dealing with other experts. You wouldn't care for amateurs, for experts are like that about amateurs. And besides specialization means difficulty, or what's there to be a specialist about? I had Padilla's slogan of "Easy or not at all."

Mimi got a big laugh out of my Mexican experiences. "What a ball you've been having," she said. She made me feel unpleasant about Thea; and about Stella she said, "Guys like you make life easy for some women."

There hadn't been anything easy for anyone, but you couldn't tell Mimi that. Having gotten the story as she wanted it, she didn't listen to more, but with her push-faced vigor, her broad red mouth stretching and giving out with her helicon or hunting-hom voice, she let me have it almost the same as Clem. I'd better be cured of my attitudes. The reason why I didn't see things as they were was that I didn't want to; because I couldn't love them as they were. But the challenge was not to better them in your mind but to put every human weakness into the picture--the bad, the criminal, sick, envious, scavenging, wolfish, the living-on-the-dying. Start with that. Take the fact that people generally were full of loathing and it cost them an effort to look at one another. Mostly they wanted to. be let alone. And they dug for unreality more than for treasure, unreality being their last great hope because then they could doubt that what they knew about themselves was true. Maybe she exaggerated her rake-the-heavens wrath and went beyond how she truly felt. However, there were blue marks of worry beneath her eyes these days.

When Arthur came around she talked about money and jobs. Four times out of five she changed the subject to that as soon as he showed up.

There was a certain job she kept after him to take. But he said, "Why, it's a farce!" And gently began to laugh in his dark way, crowfooted.

"The money's no farce."

"Oh, please, Mimi. Don't be absurd.",/ "There'd be practically no work connected with it."

However, he made it seem absolutely impossible. I began to think it was a job I might put in for myself, if qualified.

I met Arthur out walking and I asked him why he didn't want it.

It was a cool afternoon, and he was wearing cap and coat. He had lost much weight and was very bony, his shoulders up sharp, so that I was impressed with his resemblance to his uncle Dingbat and how he had subdued the same inheritance by a different life. He was of that same sharp skinny-chested build, with long face and a quick walk of inward-pointed toes". His shoes were tapered, as elegant as chivalry in' the stirrups or the end of a lizard entering a crevice. But Arthur's health was poorer than Dingbat's and he had a swarthier color; his breath was strong with coffee and tobacco. He owned up to inferior teeth with his smile. Nevertheless he had all the charm of the Einhorns when he wanted to turn it on.

There was great style in his thinking. Sometimes I believed he was ready to say or consider anything. My personal preference was for useful thoughts. I mean thoughts that answered questions that moved you. Arthur said this was wrong; truth was truer when it had less to do with your needs. What personal need, for instance, is there in the investigation of the creep of light from the outermost stars which even at that unimaginable speed decays and breaks down because it grows so ancient in its travel? It fascinated me, this question.

However, about the job: there was a millionaire engaged in writing a book and he was looking for a research assistant. '

"Do you think I'd fill the bill?"

"Of course you would, Augie. Are you interested?"

"Well, I need a job. Something that'll leave me the free time I want."

"I like the way you arrange your life. What do you intend to do with this free time?"

"I intend to use it." I didn't like the implication of this. Why should he need his lime free and I be questioned?

"I'm just curious. Some people always appear to know what they're going to do, and others never. Of course I'm a poet, and relatively lucky. I've often thought. If I weren't a poet, what would I be? A politician? But just see how Lenin's life work turned out. A professor?

That's much too tame. A painter? But nobody knows what painting's about any more. Whenever I write a dramatic poem I can't understand why the characters should ever want to be anything but poets themselves."

Well, this is how it was in Chicago when I came back. I stayed on the South Side. I got my case of books back from Arthur and I read in my room. The heat of June grew until the shady yards gave up the smell of the damp soil, of underground, and the city-Pluto kingdom of sewers and drains, and the mortar and roaring tar pots of roofers, the geraniums, lilies-of-the-valley, climbing roses, and sometimes the fiery devastation of the stockyards stink when the wind was strong.

I read my books and almost each day wrote to Thea in care of Wells Fargo, but no answer came. One letter was forwarded from Mexico, and that one was from Stella. She was in New York. I never expected her to write such a good letter; I decided that I had underrated her.

She said she couldn't pay me yet; she had to square herself with her union. But as soon as she landed a job she'd settle her debt.

Simon had given me some money so that I could take summer courses at the university. Now I thought I might like to be a schoolteacher and I was registered in several Education courses. I found it hard to sit in classes and read the textbooks. Simon was always ready to stand by me if I wanted to, though he himself didn't have much use for universities.

I was still after the job Arthur refused to take with the millionaire who wanted to write a book. This millionaire's name was Robey. He had studied with Frazer when Frazer was an instructor, and that was why Mimi knew him. He was tall and bent, he had a bad stammer, he wore a beard, he had been married four or five times--Mimi told me these facts. Arthur said the book was to be a survey or history of human happiness from the standpoint of the rich. I wasn't so sure that I wanted to do this but I didn't want Simon to keep on suppor11"^ me. I tried to fish a loan from Einhom but he held it against me taat I was an old friend of Mimi. He said, "I can't lend you anything. ^ou realize that I have to support my grandchild. The extra burdert is tough. And what if Arthur decides to bless my last years with another"

He was p. o.

So reluctantly I went to Arthur to ask him to phone Robey for roe.

"This is a very strange fellow, Augie, he ought to amuse you."

"Oh hell, I don't want him to amuse me. I just want a job."

"Well, you'll have to try to understand him. He's very peculiar. He partly gets it from his mother. She thought she was the quee0 ^ Rockford, Illinois. She wore a crown. She had a throne. She enpected everyone in town to bow to her."

"Does he live in Rockford now?"

"No, he has a mansion here on the South Side. When he ^s a student a chauffeur used to drive him to campus. For a long tlme he was mad on Great Books and he used to buy space in the wan1 a(^ and put in quotations from Plato or Locke, Like, "The unexani1"^ life is not worth living.' He has a sister who's wacky too--Car O^i"- She think she's a Spaniard. But you have a gift of getting along wltn these temperaments. You were a jewel with my dad."

"I was kind of in love with him."

"Maybe you'll love Robey too."

"He sounds to me like another crank. I can't always be connsc1^ with ridiculous people. It's wrong."

But not long afterward, on a drizzly afternoon, I found riiyself' face to face with this man Robey in his house on the lakefront. And what a face it was--what an appearance! Big, inflamed, reticent e^s, a reddish beard, red sullen lips, and across his nose a blotch; the night before, when he was drunk or sleepy, he had walked into the door of a taxi. His stutter was bad; when it really caught him he niade a great effort, fixed his soul, and twisted his head while his eyes tok on this discipline and almost hatred. At first I was astonished, an^ I was sorry for his sake when his teeth clicked or a snarl escaped- But I soon found out how fluent he could be in spite of it.

With those reticent, blood-flickered eyes of his he looked at r^s like someone who had to explain he was born to difficulty and hard l1"^, and he opened his lips before starting to speak, as if to separ^s ^s upper and lower hairs of the beard.

He said, "What about 11lunch?"

We had a rotten lunch--thin clam chowder, a smoked ham which he sliced himself, boiled potatoes, wax beans, and twice-heated coffee.

It made me kind of sore that a millionaire should invite you to lunch and put on such a lousy feed.

He did the talking. Background first, he said. As his collaborator I'd have to have some personal knowledge of him. He started to tell me of his five marriages, taking his share of the blame for each divorce.

But the marriages formed part of his education; therefore he had to evaluate them. I was disgusted. I took a sip of the coffee and let it flow back into the cup through my teeth, and made a face. But he didn't notice. He was on his third wife, terribly boring. The fourth gave him real insight into his character. I think he still carried the torch for her. As he was vibrating his neck over a troublesome word I interrupted. I was about to say, "What about some fresh coffee at least?" but I didn't have the heart. Instead I asked, "But can you give me an idea as to what my work will be?"

He became more tongue-free then. "I need advice," he said. "Help.

I need to clear up some of my concepts, m-my thinking, nn-need cl-clarity. This is s-something, this book."

"But what's it about?"

"It's not j-just a book--it's a guide, a p-p-program. I originated the idea b-but now it's too much for me. I need help." As he spoke of help he sounded frightened. "I discovered much too m-much. It was just an accident that it happened to be me, and now I'm stu-stuck with the responsibility.": We went into the salon to continue the conversation. His walk was belly-heavy, dragging, as if he had to remind himself not to step on his own dong.

It kept on drizzling; the lake looked like milk. Indoors, moony lamps glowed on the plush and Far East crimson and mahogany. There were Persian screens and Invalides horsehair helmets, busts of Pericles and Cicero and Athena, and who-else-not. And there was a portrait of his mother. Sure enough, she looked demented and wore a crown, a scepter in one hand and a rose in the other. The fog-cradled ore-boats from Duluth to Gary were moaning. Robey sat under a light, which showed the acne-exploded follicles under his beard.

He mightn't be very bright, Robey humbly started, but what could he do? he couldn't escape ideas. None of us could escape ideas, and everybody was up against the same thing, namely, that there were hundreds of things to think about and to know. He had a duty to do his best at it. This was how he covered up his zeal, which I felt, however, powerfully trembling in the back.

This book, he went on, he wanted to call The Needle's Eye. Because there never had been a spiritual life for the rich if they didn't give up everything. But it wasn't any longer merely the rich who were headed for trouble. In the near future technology was going to create abundance and everyone would have enough of everything. There'd be inequality but not starvation or great need. People would eat. Well, when they ate, what then? The Eden of liberty, plenty, and love, the dream of the French Revolution coming to pass. But the French had been too optimistic and thought that when the decrepit old civilizations were busted nothing could stop us from entering the earthly paradise. But it wasn't so simple. We were facing the greatest crisis in history. And'he didn't mean the war, then coming on. No, we'd find out if there was going to be this earthly paradise or not.

"B-bread's almost free now in America. What'll hap-happen when the struggle for bread is o-o.... Will goods free man or enslave him?"

You almost forgot to think about his goofy looks and about the lavish collection of screens, antiques, irons, Russian sleighs, hanks and tails of helmets, and mother-of-pearl boxes. All the same, even when he was in the top spheres he looked miserable, ready to weep tears. In the meantime the moldy ham taste kept coming up on me.

"M-machinery'll make an ocean of commodities. Dictators can't stop it. Man will accept death. Live without God. That's a b-brave project. End of an illusion. But with what values instead?"

"That's quite a deal," I said.

"But," he said, "that's toward the end of the b-book. I think weshould start with Aristotle discussing how much of worldly goods you need before you can practice virtue."

"I haven't read much Aristotle."

"Well, that's one of the th-things you have to do. You'll be paid for it, never you worry. But I want this to be a solid piece of work and real scholarly. We're going to cover the Greeks and Romans, Middle Ages, Renaissance Italy, and I'm p-planning a chart, the Min Minoans way high, Calvin down low. Sir Walter Raleigh, up; Carlyle, stinks; modern science, stand-still. Not even interested."

In the next half-hour he made sense only now and then; he seemed to tire, and he rambled, he blinked his fire-streaked eyes and coughed in his fist.

"N-now-now you tell me about yourself," he said. I didn't know where to begin and I damned him for asking me. But he wasn't lisr tening. By the way he looked at his wristwatch I could tell he was wondering how soon he could be by himself again.

So I asked to be shown the can, and he pointed it out. When I came back he appeared to have recovered his interest in the book and wanted to discuss it some more. He said he was sure I was the man to help him. And he started to outline the whole thing for me. Part one, general statement. Part two, pagans. Three, Christians and so forth. Four, practical examples of the highest happiness. His excitement again rose. He took off a house slipper and laid it on a book or album that Illlllll II f was on ^ ^ffs table and every now and then he put it on again.

'. llllllilll " He was saying that Christianity originally was aimed at the lowly and slaves, and that was why crucifixion and nailing and all such punitive grandeur of martyrdom were necessary. But at the pole opposite, the happy pole, there ought to be an equal thickness. Joy without sin, love without darkness, gay prosperity. Not to be always spoiling things.

0 great age of generous love and time of a new man! Not the poor, dark, disfigured creature cramped by his falsehood, a liar from the cradle, flogged by poverty, smelling bad from cowardice, deeper than a latrine in jealousy, dead as a cabbage to feeling, a maggot to beauty, a shrimp to duty, spinning the same thread of cocoon preoccupation from his mouth. Without tears to weep or enough expendable breath to laugh; cruel, frigging, parasitic, sneaking, grousing, anxious, and sluggardly. Drilled like a Prussian by the coarse hollering of sergeant fears. Robey poured it on me; he let it come down.

I thought, Oh, what a crazy bastard! What kind of screwloose millionaire have they sent me to? All the same my heart responded to this and these things went home. My bottommost thought was, God have mercy on us poor human saps! And this bottommost thought budded out with another: Even if God did have mercy, this was what He'd have mercy on.

Then Robey switched on me. He was a quick changer of mood.

The damn bourgeoisie, he said, should have been leaders and offered practical examples of happiness. But they were a historic failure.

They fumbled it. A weak dominant class, because all they had known how to do was to imitate the flow of money around the world, fill in all the opportunities for profit, like water seeking its own level, and to imitate the machine. Robey didn't sound like himself now, not, that is, as earnest as before, but bookish. He scratched his foot and went on like a lecturer, and with his beard, which looked straw-stuck, he was just one more oddity of this room.

But I was still enough of an Einhorn worshiper to be taken with him.

And I set aside some of my criticisms and said, "You were talking about the salary before. Could you be more definite?"

This made an unpleasant impression. "How m-much do you expect?

Till I tell how you pan out, I c-can start you at a reasonable figure."

"What's reasonable?"

"Fifteen a week?"

"You must be making a mistake in your figure. Fifteen? I can get that much on relief and never lift a finger." It made me indignant.

"Eighteen then," he followed up fast.

"You try to get a plumber to fix your washbasin for less than half a buck an hour. Are you trying to hoax me or something? I don't think you're being serious."

"You ought to th-think of the eded-ucation you'll be getting. And it isn't just a job but a cau-cau-cause." He was very disturbed. "Well, twenty bu-bucks and you can live upstairs rent free."

So he could lay hold of me and chew my ear whenever he felt like it, night and day? Not on his life. "No," I said, "thirty a week for thirty hours."

It hurt him to put out dough. I could see what a labor it was for his soul just to think about it.

Finally he said, "Okay, when you work out. Twenty-five to start."

"No, thirty, I told you."

He cried, "Why do you put me through this t-temble haggle? It's really t-terrible. What the devil! It defeats the whole purpose." His look was positively full of hatred. But he hired me anyway.

From day to day he changed his plan. First he wanted to do the historical section and assigned me to read Max Weber, Tawney, and Marx. Next I had to drop all this to start research on a pamphlet on philanthropy. He hated all philanthropist millionaires and wanted to hit all the puritanical rich who looked so bad and felt so unhappy. He named some of his cousins among them, so I could see it was all a family affair. Even the big brazen Wall Street louse with his suckers full of blood did more good in the form of a devil than these rich men who were worried, he said, like everybody else. Simply worried. And he'd rave against them by the hour.

I was used to enthusiastic projects that would never leave the inventor's hangar. Like Einhom's indexed Shakespeare back in the old days. And I really understood that Robey wanted from me what Ein- horn had wanted, the very same thing, namely, a listener. He was on the telephone continually or sending the car for me or hunting for me in the library or waiting outside classrooms for me all the time.

The first few months he heaped readings on me. I never could have gotten through all those Greeks and Fathers and histories of Rome and the Eastern Empire and whatnot in years. I don't even know that anybody should want to wade through so much stuff. But it suited me fine to sit in the library amid a heap of books.

Twice a week we had official conferences. I'd come with my notebooks ready to answer his questions with quotations and paraphrases.

It was all right when he was businesslike, but he had peculiar moods, when his voice straggled, he was in woe, his hair in spikes and his color bloodshot, tears or anger in his voice, and much too vexed and bothered to talk to me about Aristotle and theories of happiness and so forth. He sometimes gave me some real jolts and astonishments.

As when, looking for him through the mansion one day, I found him standing on a kitchen chair, wrapped in his bathrobe, pumping Flit into a cupboard while hundreds of roaches rushed out practically clutching their heads and falling from the walls. What a moment that was! He wildly raised hell as he worked the spray gun, full of lust, and breathed as loudly as the spray itself while the animals landed as thick as beans or beat it, crazy, like an Oklahoma land rush, in every direction.

Caught by me like this, Robey tried to swallow down his emotions and to act as though he didn't hate the cockroaches or kill them with thrilling satisfaction. It was kind of too bad he couldn't admit it.

Moreover, I knew I had barged in at the wrong moment and that he'd hold it against me. He wouldn't be able to help it.

He gave a bad twitch, as if I had touched him in the small of the back, and came down from the chair. "It's just too much. They're r-r-running away with the hou-hou--the house. I put a slice of bread in the toaster and a roach po-popped up toasted with the bread, so I couldn't t-take it any more."

All his rage, like an ember eating a hole through straw, suddenly was out, and he led me to the salon where in the sunlight was seen much busted-out stuffing and tears in buttonless royal green velvet and dust. He wiped the oily killer juice off on his gown, saying, "Did you work up that Italian Renaissance stuff for me about the p-princes and the h-humanists? How they suffered without God!" he said, looking off. "But they were godlike themse-selves. What courage! And terrible, t-t-too. But it had to happen, that m-man would dare."

In the autumn he lost his grip on himself. He went on giving me assignments and I collected my thirty bucks with a free conscience, but he didn't do any work.

I had often wondered what sort of women he went around with when unmarried, whether spiny whores or ladies of his own set, or Back-of-the-Yards pickups, or nice little university girls, or what. I was surprised. He went for ordinary strippers from the Near North Side, from dark Street, Broadway, Rush, and those parts, who were rough on him in their dealings. And as if it were a just punishment he took it from them and even smiled. He tried to sell me on these girls, but I had taken up once more with Sophie Geratis. He mostly seemed to want me-to come with him. Which I did a few times to North Side joints. One stripper insulted him about the beard; he bowed to this.

Only his red eyes, which he didn't take off her--she was dressed now, Wearing a gray* tailored suit--were something scandalous. But he merely said pedantically, "In the old days of Elizabeth the barbers had lutes and guitars in the shop so the gentlemen waiting could sing and play. It was because the beards and the lovelocks took so long to fix."

On the same evening as he made this mild observation he went on a rampage and tore the meter off in a taxi. I was supposed to get out at Fifty-fifth Street but I worried lest the driver sock him for this and so took him home first.

But he gave me a rough time just the same. He was very sensitive and wanted my good opinion; however, he was extremely variable, humble one minute and making sure of his money's worth the next, and yelling or being sullen, sticking out his big red mouth in unhappiness or anger. I remember one day in particular. There were snow and sunshine all around, and it was fresh and beautiful, but he was in a nasty mood, prodding his hands knuckle to knuckle in the pigskin gloves. He hitched at me and kept on and on. So I said, "You don't want me to work for you. You want somebody who'll take this lousy nervousness from you." And I wrapped my old coat around me, which was a camel's hair going bald in places, and set off across the yard. He came after me to take it all back. In the thick powder of snow I had on overshoes, but he came on in his fine tan shoes which were slipperlike, saying, "Augie, let's not have a fight. For the love of God. Listen, I'm sorry." But I went on, good and mad. And that evening he phoned me and asked me to come and get him downtown. I could hear that things weren't right. He said he'd be at the Pump Room, than which few places were considered niftier in the city. When I got there and ;' asked for him, two knickered footmen brought him out. He was drunk, mute, numb, and could scarcely budge a feature of his face or work his tongue.

Little by little he had come to depend on me. Somewhat like Einhom in the old days, he had found I wouldn't take advantage of him and that I was dependable. And with his peculiarity and confusion, downright Guiana jungle manifestations or freaks that the power of life will squeeze into sometimes, there nevertheless was something in him that drew me. Just that power, no doubt, tormenting his humanity and tormented in return. And while he was a bachelor and shared that mansion with his sister Caroline--well, she didn't do him much good.

She was screwy. And when she found I had been in Mexico she took a shine to me, believing herself Spanish. She wrote me notes, such as, "Eres muy Guapo." And now and then a telegram arrived, like, "Amiga, que te vaya con toda suerte, Carolina." She was terribly scrambled, poor woman.

After all, I had taken care of my brother George. That ability or quality was with me yet, and sometimes people sensed it.

Sometimes I wished I could become a shoemaker too.







CHAPTER XXII



In my old room up at Owens' which I finally got back I went along with the changes of the times, industrial, military, scientific. Personally I experienced steep variations myself, bad news, wasted expenditures, wicked dreams, wizard happenings like the appearance of animals in the heat of evenings to desert Fathers, still I am thankful to say that as I view it I was not harmed. The police couldn't have had any complaint against me, regardless of what the moralists might have had. The worse offenses were in my imagination, where such belong, while like a big and busy enterprise that tries to cover all it can, I also brooded in my higher mind over my course of life. I came to certain conclusions too, which were -sometimes fragmentary--such as, The reason for solitude can only be reunion; or. Oh, it's very tiring to have your own opinions on everything--but other times were very full indeed, as will be shown in due course. I rambled around Chicago, my sociable self as always. But I was reverberating still from the plucks and pulls of Mexico.

Thea didn't write, having disappeared for good to some blue shores of the ancient seas, probably on the trail of flamingos, with some new lover who would understand her no better than I did, and camping on a parapet with her guns and nooses, cameras, long-distance glasses.

She'd pass into old age like this and never be any different.

I wasn't getting any younger myself, and my friends would make pleasantries about my appearance, which wasn't at all prosperous. I smiled minus a couple of teeth of the lower line and was somewhat smeared, or knocked, kissed by the rocky face of clasping experience.

My hair grew upward, copious, covering my old mountain hunter's scars. Undeniably I had a touch of the green of cousin Five Properties' eyes in my own, and I went along whiffing a cigar and lacking any air of steady application to tasks, forgetful, elliptical, gleeful sometimes, but ah, more larky formerly than now. While I mused I often picked Wp-i St up objects off the street because they looked to me like coins; slugs, metals from bottletops, and tinfoil scraps buried, thus obviously hoping for a lucky break. Also I wished somebody would die and leave me everything. This was bad, for who could benefit me by dying that I shouldn't love and want to keep on earth? And what good did finding coins do, even if each was a quarter, in the consummation and final form of my life? Why, no good, friends, not. the least bit.

It also gave amusement that I was after a teaching certificate for grade school, for I hardly looked to be the type, I suppose. Yet this I was persistent about. I loved the practice teaching. It moved me while I did it; it was no problem to be my natural self with the kids-- as why, God help us, should it be with anyone? But let us not ask questions whose answers are among the world's well-kept secrets. In the classroom, or outside in the playground holleration, smelling pee in the hall, hearing the piano trimbles from the music room, among the busts, maps, and chalk-dust sunbeams, I was happy. I felt at home. I wanted to give the kids my best and tell them all I knew.

At this same school, teaching Latin and algebra, was my onetime neighbor, Kayo Obermark. Bushy, sloppy, and fat, he used to lie on his bed at Owens' when he had the room next to mine in his underpants, his thighs curl-haired and feet smelly, and stare at the wall with determined thought as he put out cigarettes behind him without looking in the grease of an old skillet in which he fried salami. He kept a milk bottle by the bed to do duty in, disliking trips to the bathroom.

Now the kids were springing like locusts around him while he walked in the schoolyard, sullen, like an emperor. His face was big, moody, white, unevenly scraped. Crumbled Kleenexes stuck to him; he smelled of a cold and sounded snotty. But he wasn't really sullen, this was just his dignity, and I was pleased that he was a teacher here.

He said, "I saw you drive up here in your car."

"It started this morning for a change." I did in fact own a ten-year- old Buick on which a very pleasant guy had gypped me like fury. It wouldn't start on cold mornings and was a trial to me. I put in two batteries on Padilla's advice but there was a fundamental defect in that the rods were bent. However, with a push it would go, and as it had a rumble seat and a long hood it looked powerful.

"Are you married yet?" said Kayo. '

"No, I'm sorry to say."

"I have a son," he said proudly. "You better get on the ball. Don't you have anybody? Women are easy to get. It's your duty to have sons.

There was an old philosopher caught by his disciple behind the Stoa 448 ~ with a woman, and he said, 'Mock not! I plant a man.' But I've been hearing all kinds of things about you, that you went to Mexico with a circus or carnival and that you were nearly assassinated too."

He was in quite a mood, and he walked me round the schoolyard several times, being extremely kind in his haughty way and quoting various poems in his tense tenor voice.

Perish strife, both from among gods and men, And wrath which maketh even him that is considerate cruel, Which getteth up in the heart of a man like smoke, And the taste thereof is sweeter than drops of honey.

Les vrais voyageurs sont ceux-la seuls qui portent Pour partir; caws legers, semblables aux ballons, De lew fatalite jamais Us ne s'ecartent, Et, sans savoir powquoi, disent toujours: Allans.'

This last was probably aimed at me and accused me of being too light of heart and ignorantly saying good-by. I seemed to have critics everywhere. However, for a cold day this had a very bright sun, the trains were passing in blackness over an embankment of yellow concrete, the kids were screaming and whirling over the whole vast play yard, around the flagpole and in and out of the portables, and I felt especially stirred.

"You should get married," said Kayo.

"I'd like to. I think about it often. As a matter of fact I dreamed last night that I was, but it wasn't so pleasant. I was very disturbed. It started out all right. I came home from work and there were gorgeous little birds by the window, and I smelled barbecue. My wife was very handsome, but her beautiful eyes were filled with tears and twice as big as normal. 'Lu, what's the matter?' I said. She said, 'The children were born unexpectedly this afternoon and I'm so ashamed I've hidden them.'

'But why? What's there to be ashamed of?'

'One of them is a calf,' she said, 'and the other is a bug of some kind.'

'I can't believe it. Where are they?'

'I didn't want the neighbors to see, so I put them behind the piano.' I felt terrible. But still they were our children and it wasn't right that they should be behind the piano, so I went to look. But there on a chair behind the upright, who should be sitting but my mother--who, as you know, is blind. I said, 'Mama, what are you sitting here for?

Where are the children?' And she looked at me with sort of pity and said, 'Oh, my son, what are you doing? You must do right.' Then I l> - 449 started to sob. I felt full of tragedy, and I said, 'Isn't that what I want to do?'"

"Ah, you poor guy," said Kayo, sorry for me. "You're no worse than anybody else, don't you know that?"

"I really should simplify my existence. How much trouble is a person required to have? I mean, is it an assignment I have to carry out? It can't be, because the only good I ever knew of was done by people when they were happy. But to tell you the truth. Kayo, since you are the kind of guy who will understand it, my pride has always been hurt by my not being able to give an account of myself and always being manipulated. Reality comes from giving an account of yourself, and that's the worst of being helpless. Oh, I don't mean like the swimmer on the sea or the child on the grass, which is the innocent being in the great hand of Creation, but you can't lie down so innocent on objects made by man," I said to him. "In the world of nature you can trust, but in the world of artifacts you must beware. There you must know, and you can't keep so many things on your mind and be happy. 'Look on my works ye mighty and despair!' Well, never mind about Ozymandias now being just trunkless legs; in his day the humble had to live in his shadow, and so do we live under shadow, with acts of faith in functioning of inventions, as up in the stratosphere, down in the subway, crossing bridges, going through tunnels, rising and falling in elevators where our safety is given in keeping. Things done by man which overshadow us. And this is true also of meat on the table, heat in the pipes, print on the paper, sounds in the air, so that all matters are alike, of the same weight, of the same rank, the caldron of God's wrath on page one and Wieboldt's sale on page two. It is all external and the same. Well, then what makes your existence necessary, as it should be? These technical achievements which try to make you exist in their way?"

Kayo said, not much surprised by this, "What you are talking about is moha--a Navajo word, and also Sanskrit, meaning opposition of the finite. It is the Bronx cheer of the conditioning forces. Love is the only answer to moha, being infinite. I mean all the forms of love, eros, agape, libido, philia, and ecstasy. They are always the same but sometimes one quality dominates and sometimes another. Look, I'm glad we've had this chance to meet again. You seem to have become a much more serious fellow. Why don't you come and meet my wife? My mother-inlaw lives with us and she's kind of a dull old woman who fusses about everything, but we can ignore her. She's a big help with the kid incidentally.

But she's always giving me an earful about how my brotherin-law is doing so well for himself. He's a radio-repair man and a real fool. But come to dinner and we can have some conversation. I want to show you my kid too."

So I did go home with him; that was kind of Kayo. But his wife was unfriendly, highly suspicious. The child was very nice, for his age, of course, which was young. While I was there the brother-in-law came over; he was interested in the Buick, which fortunately was running well that night. He asked me questions, attracted by the rumble seat, and then drove it around and offered to buy it. I set a moderate price, taking some loss but never mentioning the bent rods, I am ashamed to say.

Well, he wanted to buy it right off, so we went to his house where he gave me a check for one hundred and eighty dollars on the Continental Illinois. But then he wouldn't let me get out of the house. Jokingly he said I should let him win back some of his money at poker. His wife played too. Obviously they were going to try to strip me. Kayo had to sit in on the game as well, so it would look friendly. It was really an attempted swindle. We sat at the circular table by the stove with a pot of coffee and condensed milk and played far into the night. The workbench with its busted radios was right there in the large kitchen. The husband got angry at the wife because she lost. If she had won they'd have won double, but since she lost he swore at her and she screamed at him. Kayo lost too. I was the only winner and would rather not have been. In fact I refunded Kayo's money on the way home. But then the brother-in-law stopped the check two days later, and I had to come and fetch the car, for it wouldn't run. There was an angry scene. And Kayo was very put out and wouldn't talk much to me at school for a time, though he eventually thawed out. I guess I really shouldn't have sold the car without telling of the bent rods.

Sophie Geratis, my friend of hotel-organizer days, was married now but wanted to divorce her husband and marry me. She told me he had a vice with other men and didn't pay attention to her at all. He gave her charge accounts and a car but he wanted her only as window dressing.

His business was to sell a product to greenhouses, and this certain product was a monopoly, so his life was easy and he was chauffeured every day in his homburg hat and gloves around the hothouse belt of the city. Therefore Sophie spent a lot of time with me, fixing up my room at Owens' as it had never been fixed up before. She wondered that I would sleep on a pillow without a pillowcase, and she brought over several. "You're stingy," she told me. "You're not just sloppy, you appreciate good things." She was right. Sophie was very intelligent, never mind that she had been a chambermaid. About some things I was tight. When I went into a good bar or club I would feel my pocket and worry about the check. Naturally she knew this. "But also I know that you give your dough away if somebody touches you the right way.

That's not good either. And there's that car of yours, but that's just plain dumbness. You were a knucklehead to buy it."

With her floating wide gaze, brown and slow, Sophie was very pretty.

In addition to which, as I've said, she had gifts of the mind, though she was inclined to use them in a scornful way. She wouldn't use the fancy charge accounts her husband gave her. Wearing a hat of Polish flowers she had bought at Goldblatt's she would wash her things in my sink.

She was in her slip and smoked a cigarette. The paradoxical part is that she was a very tender person, she was good to me, and not just because she needed me but somehow just the reverse, because I needed her. However, I wasn't prepared to marry.

"We'd get along fine if I fitted in more with your ambitions," she said. "I'm all right for bed, but not to marry. When that other girl came to fetch you, you dropped me in a second. You probably would be ashamed of me. You have the most use for me when you're feeling weak or low. I know you. Nothing is ever good enough for you to stick to. Your old man must have been some aristocrat bastard."

"I doubt it. My brother says he drove a truck for a laundry on Marshfield.

I never thought that he was a hotshot. Besides, he found my mother working in a Wells Street loft."

"You don't really want me, do you?"

Well, she meant why wasn't I going to set my feet on a path of life and stop looking over the field. Why, there was nothing that I longed for more than that. Let it come! Let there be consummation, and superfluity be finished from the next drop of the pendulum onward! Let the necessity for the mystical great things of life, which, not satisfied, lives in us as the father of secret miseries, be fulfilled and have a chance to show it's not the devil himself. Did Sophie think I didn't want to have a wife, and sons and daughters, or be busy at my appropriate daily work? I stood up then and there and told her how entirely wrong she was about me.

"What are we waiting for?" she said, glad. "Let's start! I'll be a good -wife to you, you know I will. I need to begin too."

Then I got red and embarrassed, and my tongue wouldn't move.

"See?" she said with sad frankness and wide, shadowed, rouged mouth while the electric light shone down on her clear bare shoulders. "I ain't good enough. Well, who is?"

I wasn't marrying just yet, that was what I said. But what Sophie had to tell me was what my Cossack pal also had meant, that time he hurt my pride. What he had really meant to say to me, as I sensed infallibly and right off, was that I couldn't be hurt enough by the fate of other people. He should have known, as he himself was wandering from here to there, and what should he be kicking around for, from Moscow to Turkestan, to Arabia, to Paris, Singapore? Nobody gets out of these pains like a pilgrim, looking at temples and docks and smoking cigarettes past the bone heaps of history and over many times digested soil, there where people stayed at home and caught it in the neck.

So Sophie's face, which was maturer now than the pretty face in the union office that I had first seen, was hurt. But she didn't quit me this time as when, after Thea knocked at the door, she suddenly had covered the backs of her thighs. By now she knew, I reckon, how much disappointment is in the taste of existence. But I didn't wish to marry her. She would have scolded me for my own good too much, I thought.

So this one more soul I would fly by, that wanted something from me.

"You're waiting for that girl," she said with envy, wrongly.

I said, "No, I'll never see her again."

Nevertheless I was getting somewhere, you mustn't go entirely by appearances. I was coming to some particularly important conclusions.

In fact I was lying on my couch in the state of grand summary one afternoon, still in my bathrobe and having called off all duties in the inspiration of the day, when Clem Tambow arrived, full of an idea of his own.

I don't believe Clem had many of the vices that lead to damnation, but such as they were they were very evident on this occasion--late rising, puffiness, double-breasted slovenliness of the kind that old gentleman La Bruyere thought so sordid, tobacco stink, lint, and cat hairs on him, kept up by dime-store purchase and cheap accommodation, as in aftershave lotion, Sta-comb, artificial silk socks, and so forth, besides his lordly self-abuse look. Be that as it might, he had been lying in bed too this solemn brown Chicago day and working also on a scheme.

He was going out into professional life. As soon as he got his psychology degree in the winter he aimed to get an office in one of the older skyscrapers on Dearborn near Jackson and set up as a vocationalguidance counselor.

"You?" I said. "You never did a day's work in your life!"

"That's what makes me so ideal," he answered, ready for me. "I'm relaxed. No bunk, Augie. You remember Benny Fry from the poolroom?

He's cleaning up. He does marriage counseling too, and gives rabbit tests."

"If it's the same guy I'm thinking of, the one who wore the elevator shoes, didn't they have him in court last month for a phony?"

"Yes, but we can do the same thing legitimately."

"I don't want to throw cold water," I said, still full of my own experience.

"But how will you get clients?"

"Oh, that's no problem. Do people seem to you to know what they want? They beg you to tell them. So we'll be the experts they come to."

"Oh no, Clem. Not 'we.' "

"Augie, I want you to come into this with me. I don't like to go into things by myself. I'll give the aptitude tests and you do the interviews.

With the new Rogers nondirective technique you let them do the talking anyway. There's nothing to it. Listen here, you can't go on from one screwball job to another."

"I know, but Clem, something has just happened to me today."

"You're just being stubborn again," he said. "We can clean up in this mm,! i racket."

"No, Clem. What could I do for these guys or women? I'd be ashamed to take their dough in this kind of an employment bureau."

"Oh, bushwah! You don't send guys out on jobs, you tell them what they're good for. This is modern activity. Modem activity is entirely different."

"Stop arguing," I said severely. "Can't you see something has happened to me too today?" Then he saw that I really was moved. I made a lengthy declaration, which I remember went somewhat as follows: "I have a feeling," I said, "about the axial lines of life, with respect to which you must be straight or else your existence is merely clownery, hiding tragedy. I must have had a feeling since I was a kid about these axial lines which made me want to have my existence on them, and so I have said 'no' like a stubborn fellow to all my persuaders, just on the obstinacy of my memory of these lines, never entirely clear. But lately I have felt these thrilling lines again. When striving stops, there they are as a gift. I was lying on the couch here before and they suddenly went quivering right straight through me. Truth, love, peace, bounty, use'!|j fulness, harmony! And all noise and grates, distortion, chatter, distraction, effort, superfluity, passed off like something unreal. And I believe that any man at any time can come back to these axial lines, even if an unfortunate bastard, if he will be quiet and wait it out. The ambition of something special and outstanding I have always had is only a boast that distorts this knowledge from its origin, which is the oldest knowledge, older than the Euphrates, older than the Ganges. At any time life can come together again and man be regenerated, and doesn't have to be a god or public servant like Osiris who gets torn apart annually for the sake of the common prosperity, but the man himself, finite and taped as he is, can still come where the axial lines are. He will be brought into focus. He will live with true joy. Even his pains will be joy if they are true, even his helplessness will not take away his power, even wandering will not take him away from himself, even the big social jokes and hoaxes need not make him ridiculous, even disappointment after disappointment need not take away his love. Death will not be terrible to him if life is not. The embrace of other true people will take away his dread of fast change and short life. And this is not imaginary stuff, Clem, because I bring my entire life to the test."

"You really are a persistent and obstinate type of a guy," said Clem.

"I thought if I knew more my problem would be simplified, and maybe I should complete my formal education. But since I've been working for Robey I have reached the conclusion that I couldn't utilize even ten per cent of what I already knew, I'll give you an example. I read about King Arthur's Round Table when I was a kid, but what am I ever going to do about it? My heart was torched by sacrifice and pure attempts, so what should I do? Or take the Gospels. How are you supposed to put them to use? Why, they're not utilizable! And then you go and pile on top of that more advice and information. Anything that just adds information that you can't use is plain dangerous. Anyway, there's too much of everything of this kind, that's come home to me, too much history and culture to keep track of, too many details, too much news, too much example, too much influence, too many guys who tell you to be as they are, and all this hugeness, abundance, turbulence, Niagara Falls torrent. Which who is supposed to interpret? Me?

I haven't got that much head to master it all. I get carried away. It doesn't give my feelings enough of a chance if I have to store up and become like an encyclopedia. Why, just as a question of time spent in getting prepared for life, look! a man could spend forty, fifty, sixty years like that inside the walls of his own being. And all great experience would only take place within the walls of his being. And all high conversation would take place within those walls. And all achievement would stay within those walls. And all glamour too. And even hate, monstrousness, enviousness, murder, would be inside them. This would be only a terrible, hideous dream about existing. It's better to dig ditches and hit other guys with your shovel than die in the walls."

"Well, come on, what are you trying to prove?"

"I don't want to prove a single thing, not a thing. Do you think I have this kind of ambition to stand out and prove something? Almost everybody I ever knew wanted to show in some way how he held the world together. This only comes from feeling the strain of holding yourself together, and it gets exaggerated into the whole world from the hard labor you put into it. But it doesn't take hard labor. Or at least shouldn't. You don't do that. The world is held for you. So I don't want to be representative or exemplary or head of my generation or any model of manhood. All I want is something of my own, and bethink myself.

This is why I'm sounding off now and am so excited. I want a place of my own. If it was on Greenland's icy mountain, I'd take and go to Greenland, and I'd never loan myself again to any other guy's scheme."

"So tell me before I die from impatience, what's this deal of yours?"

"I aim'to get myself a piece of property and settle down on it. Right here in Illinois would suit me fine, though I wouldn't object to Indiana or Wisconsin. Don't worry, I'm not thinking about becoming a farmer, though I might do a little farming, but what I'd like most, is to get married and set up a kind of home and teach school. I'll marry--of course my wife would have to agree with me about this--and then I'd get my mother out of the blind-home and my brother George up from the South. I think Simon might give me some dough to get a start. Oh, I don't expect to set up the Happy Isles. I don't consider myself any Prospero. I haven't got the build. I have no daughter. I never was a king, for instance. No, no, I'm not looking for any Pindar Hyperborean dwelling with the gods in ease a tearless life, never aging--"

"This is the most fantastic thing I ever heard come out of you yet.

It's a scheme worthy of your mind. It makes me proud of you, kind of, though I'm also appalled when I think of the things you must think about when you look so calm and restful. But where are you going to get the kids for your school?"

"I thought maybe I could get accredited with the state or county, or whoever does it, as a foster-parent, and get kids from institutions.

This way the board and keep would be taken care of, and we'd have these kids."

"Plus children of your own?"

"Of course. I'd love to have my own little children. I long for little children. And these kids from institutions who have had it rough--"

"And who might turn out to be little John Dillingers or Basil Bangharts or Tommy O'Connors. But I know what you're hoping. You think you'll love them so they'll turn into little'Michelangelos and Tolstois, and you'll give them their chance in life and rescue them, so you'll be their saint and holy father. But if you make them so good, how will they get along in the world? They'll have to pass their whole life all alone."

"No, really, I could live with them. I'd be very happy. I'd fix up a shop for woodwork. Maybe I'd even learn how to repair my own car.

My brother George could be the shoemaking instructor. Maybe I'd study languages so I could teach them. My mother could sit on the porch and the animals would come around her, by her shoes, the roosters and the cats. Maybe we could start a tree nursery."

"You do too want to be a king," said Clem. "You sonofabitch, you want to be the kind goddam king over these women and children and your half-wit brother. Your father ditched the family, and you did your share of ditching too, so now you want to make up for it."

"You can always find bad motives," I said. "There are always bad motives. So all I can say is I don't want to have them. I don't know , about my unfortunate father--he seems to have done as most others, get in and then take off. Seemingly for liberty. Most likely for other trouble or suffering. But why should I want to cheat on a thing like this, when I'm looking for something lasting and durable and trying to get where those axial lines are? I realize this may not sound like such a great scheme to many people. But I know I can't have much of a chance to beat life at its greatest complication and meshuggah power, so I want to start in lower down, and simpler."

"I wish you luck," he said. "But I don't think it ever can happen."

Well, now I had this sterling idea, my project. I was at the turning point. For a while I thought seriously that I might marry Sophie but that was in my hurry to make a start. When all of a sudden--wham! the .; war broke out on that terrible Sunday afternoon, and then there was < nothing but war that you could think about. I got carried away immediately.

Overnight I had no personal notions at all. Where had they gone to? They were on the bottom somewhere. It was just the war I cared about and I was on fire. How much are you required to care when such an event comes? Me, I cared like anything. At first I went off my rocker, I hated the enemy, I couldn't wait to go and fight. I was a madman in the movies and yelled and clapped in the newsreel. Well, what you terribly need you take when you get the chance, I reckon.

After a while, if I thought of my great idea, I told myself that after the war I'd get a real start, but I couldn't do it while the whole earth was busy in this hell-making project, or man-eating Saturns were picking guys up left and right around me. I went around and made a speech to my pals, much to the amazement of people, about the universal ant heap the enemy would establish if they won, a fate nobody could escape then, mankind under one star of government, a human desert rolling up to monster pyramids of power. A few centuries after, and on this same earth's surface, under the same sun and moon, where there once had been men like gods there would be nothing but this bug-humanity that would make itself as weird as the threatening universe outside and would imitate it by creating human mechanical regularity as invariable as physical laws. Obedience would be God, and freedom the Devil.

There wouldn't any new Moses arise to lead an exodus, because amidst the new pyramids there wouldn't any new Moses be bred. Oh yes, I got up on my hindiegs like an orator and sounded off to everyone.

Then I went to volunteer, but it turned out that Bizcocho had ruptured me. The Army and Navy doctors had me cough for them and agreed that I had inguinal hernia. They recommended that I be operated on, which was free of charge.

So I weni to County Hospital to have this done. I didn't mention it to Mama, never telling her of such things. Sophie said, "You're absolutely nuts, going under the knife while well and having an out from the draft." She took it personally. Her husband was being inducted, which was all the more reason for me to stick around, and if I was going to the hospital that meant I didn't want her. However, she saw me through.

Clem also dropped around to see me in the ward, and so did Simon, but Sophie was there every visiting hour.

The operation was rough on me, and when it was done I couldn't stand straight for a long time and went slightly bent over.

The hospital was mobbed and was like Lent and Carnival battling.

This was Harrison Street, where Mama and I used to come for her specs, and not far from where I had to go once to identify that dead coal heaver, the thundery gloom, bare stone brown, while the red cars lumbered and clanged. Every bed, window, "separate frame of accommodation, every corner was filled, like the walls of Troy or the streets of Clermont when Peter the Hermit was preaching. Shruggers, hobblers, truss and harness wearers, crutch-dancers, wall inspectors, wheelchair people in bandage helmets, wound smells and drug flowers blossoming from gauze, from colorful horrors and out of the deep sinks.

Not far the booby-hatch voices would scream, sing, and chirp and sound like the tropical bird collection of Lincoln Park. On warm days I went up to the roof and had a look at the city. Around was Chicago.

In its repetition it exhausted your imagination of details and units, more units than the cells of the brain and bricks of Babel. The Ezekiel caldron of wrath, stoked with bones. In time the caldron too would melt. A mysterious tremor, dust, vapor, emanation of stupendous effort traveled with the air, over me on top of the great establishment, so full OF AXJGIE MARCH as it was, and over the clinics, clinks, factories, flophouses, morgue, skid row. As before the work of Egypt and Assyria, as before a sea, you're nothing here. Nothing.

Simon came to see me and threw a bag of oranges on the bed. He bawled me out that I hadn't gone to a private hospital. His temper was bad and nothing and nobody was spared in his glare.

But they were letting me out, so why fuss? I was still stooped, as if stitched in the wrong places, but they said it was just temporary.

Well and good, I got back to the South Side and found that Padilla had a girl staying in my room, his guest, and he moved me into his own place. This was just a formality that the young lady occupied my room, and sheer etiquette, because he did too. He was never at home. Over at the university he was working in the uranium project.

Where he lived was a little stale-air flat in a tenement. The plaster stuck on the laths mostly by the force of the paint. The neighbors were relief families, night owls who walked to the window at 4 p.m. in their skivvies curiously to greet the day, chicks, Filipinos neat and sharp, drunk old women and gloomy guys. After a descent of many flights you came out of this structure and crossed an entry of unusual architectural fantasy, horizontally long, a Chinese hothouse where nothing grew beneath the vermilion frames but sundry sticks, old Tribunes of the cats and dogs, trash. In the street, by cylinders of garbage cans, you were just a step from a place of worship for Buddhists that was formerly a church. Then a chop-suey joint. Then a handbook behind, as usual, a dummy cigar store where the shoppers were with racing forms, and the retired, or precinct leaders, and heavy on their feet cigar chewers, and cops. I wasn't feeling very keen while in this tenement. It took me many long months to get better, and I was doing very poorly. And about this time I got a letter from Thea, APO San Francisco, telling me that she had married an Air Force captain. She felt she should tell me, but she maybe shouldn't have, because the grief of it laid me up. My eyes sunk even deeper than before, and my hands and feet were cold, and I lay in Padilla's dirty bed, feeling sick and broken up.

Naturally I couldn't be comforted by Sophie. It wasn't even the right thing to do, to accept comfort from her and not tell her the trouble. It was Clem I told how broken up I was.

"I know how it is. I had an affair with a copper's daughter and she did the same to me last year," he said. "She married some gambler and went to Florida. Anyway, you told me long ago it was over."

"It was," I said.

"But I see you Marches are a romantic family. I keep running into your brother with a blond doll. Even Einhom has seen them. He was being carried piggyback from the Oriental Theatre, from Lou Holtz over to see Juno and the Paycock--he doesn't go out often, and when he does, as you know, he likes a full day. And while he was riding in his black cape on Louie Elimeiek, the ex-welter, whom should he bump into but Simon and this broad. By his description the same broad.

A zaftige piece too, in a mink stole."

"Poor Charlotte," I said, thinking at once of my sister-in-law.

"What's the matter with Charlotte? You mean that Charlotte doesn't understand about leading a double life? A woman with money and not know that? Double if not more? When it's practically the law of the land?"

So I had something more to think about during my convalescence, when I wanted to be gone from Chicago anyhow, to where world events were thick.

One day I was on the West Side. I had gone to take Mama for a walk in Douglas Park. It was good for us both, as I still dragged somewhat.

Douglas Park in a cold sunlight, mossy, benches not well kept up in wartime, with elderly folks on them, newspapers, furs, stucco walls--paper sailing wild over (he lagoon. Mama was beginning to have the aging stiffness and was somewhat bowlegged; she enjoyed the cold air though, and still had her calm smooth color of health.

I was taking her back to the Home when Simon's car drew up beside us. A woman, not Charlotte, was with him. I saw the fur stole and golden hair. Right away Simon, with smiles, wigwagged that Mama wasn't to be aware of her. Then he came out on the sidewalk and it seemed just plain not good enough for him, this West Side concrete so powerfully cracked and with grocers' and butchers' sawdust. He looked very good. From the shell cordovans to the ruby points of his cufflinks, the shirt white on white, most likely a Sulka tie, a Strook coat, everything handstitched and not intended just for cover like a Crusoe goatskin.

I have to confess that, arriving like this, he was enviable to see.

Was he here to visit Mama? Or to point her out to the girl? To identify me for her he said, with pleasure, "Well, my brother! Isn't this a swell surprise! Why don't I ever see you? And, Mama, how are you?"

An arm around each of us, he turned us to face the car, where the girl acknowledged us, friendly. "It's great the family's together," he said.

I wondered whether Mama felt him acting toward someone; maybe she did. But how would she in her innocence have known what to think about these two specially treated or gardened, enveloped in finery, pampered bodies that traveled on the Cadillac chassis and high cushions like a pair of carnival Romans cruising the Corso, this highbreasted girl and Simon?

He was making real dough now. A company he had invested in was manufacturing a gimmick for the Army. When he told me how the money poured in he always laughed, as if astonished himself, and said he hoped to catch up with my millionaire, Robey, and write a book himself. Then I'd be his helper. A crack I didn't like. Robey, by the way, was getting ready to go to Washington. He didn't seem able to explain why but just had to go.

Simon said, "I just stopped to find out if you were all right, Ma. I can't stay. And I'm taking Augie with me."

"Go, boys," she said. She wanted us to have business together.

We took her up the stone stairs and let her into the Home. When we were alone Simon said, and meant every word of it, "Before you start to think any different, I love this girl."

"You do? Since when?"

"Quite a while now."

"But who is she? Where does she come from?"

Smiling, he told me, "She left her husband the same night we met.

It was at a night club in Detroit. I was there just two days on business.

I danced with her and she said she'd never stay another day with this guy. I said, 'Come'along,' and she's been with me ever since."

"Here, in Chicago?"

"Of course here--where do you think! Augie, I want you to know ,, her. It's time you knew each other. She's alone a lot because--you can ^understand why. She knows all about you. Don't worry, I told her' nothing but good things. All right!" he said, standing up straight over me with his advantage in height of an inch or two; the red was in his cheeks like a polish, or the color of effrontery. He answered my thought about Charlotte by saying, "I didn't think it would be so hard for you to understand how this is."

"No, it's not so hard."

"This has nothing to do with Charlotte. I don't tell Charlotte what to do. Let her go and do the same."

"Would she? Can she?"

"That's her problem if she can't. My problem--my problem is Renee here. And myself." For a second, as he said "myself," he looked grim and somehow in thought followed his soul past lots of dangers, downward. I couldn't see what there could be of such danger. I didn't yet understand. However, I was fascinated by him, by them both.

"Renee, this is Augie," he said, turning me down the steps. It was a hard thing for me to get through my head, after I came to know her, that she could be so important to him.

Though slight, she certainly was stacked. You could see how her breasts went on with great richness under her clothes--du monde an balcon is the way they say it in the capital of sex--and her endowments went down into, and were visible through, her silk stockings. Extremely young, her face was made up to some thickness of gold tone, lips drawn to a forward point by thick rouge; her lashes and brows seemed to have gold dust sprinkled and rubbed into them; her hair, golden, appeared added to, like the hair of Versailles; her combs were gold, her glasses gold-trimmed, and she wore golden jewelry. I was about to say that she looked immature, but maybe that means that she didn't bear this gold freight with the fullest confidence; perhaps only some big woman could have done that. Not necessarily a physical giantess but a person whose capacity for adornment was really very great. One of that old sister-society whose pins and barrettes and little jars and combs from Assyria or Crete lie so curious with the wavy prongs and stained gold and green-gnawed bronze in museum cases--those sacred girls laid in the bed by the priests to wait for the secret night visit of Attis or whoever, the maidens who took part in the hot annual battles of gardens, amorous ditty singers, Syrians, Amorites, Moabites, and so on. The line continuing through femmes galantes, courts of love, Aquitaines, infantas, Medicis, courtesans, wild ladies, down to modern night clubs or first-class salons of luxury liners and the glamorous passengers for whom chefs plot their biggest souffle, pastry-fish, and other surprises. This was what Renee was supposed to be, and in my opinion she wasn't entirely. You may think that for this all you have to do is surrender to instinct. As if that were so easy! For start that and how do you know which instincts are going to come out on top?

Renee seemed like a very suspicious girl to me. Along her nose, like a light, there was sort of a suspicion and uncertainness.

As soon as Simon had to step out of the car for a few minutes her first remark was, "I love your brother. The first minute I saw him I fell in love, and I'll love him till I die." She gave me her hand, in the glove, to take. "Believe me, Augie."'

As this may have been true it was kind of a pity that she had to throw suspicion on it by extra effort. Games and games. Games within games.

Even though, despite the games, somehow there remain things meant in earnest.

"I want us to know each other," she went on. "Maybe you don't realize it but Simon watches over you; you mean the world and all to him. You should hear how he talks about you! He says as soon as you really settle down to something you'll become a great man. And I only want you to consider me as a person who loves Simon and not judge me harshly."

"Why should I do that? Because of my sister-in-law?"

It made her stiffen, when I mentioned Charlotte. But then she saw I meant no harm.

Simon would speak of Charlotte all the time. It surprised me. He said to his girl friend, "I want no trouble out of you about her. I respect her. I'll never leave her under any circumstances. In her way she's as close to me as anybody in the world." He was romantic about Charlotte too. And Renee had to bear it and know she could never have any exclusive claim on him. It didn't fail to occur to me that I had once done the same thing after my own style with Thea and Stella, covered myself from one by putting one in the way of the other, so I wouldn't be at the mercy of either. So neither one could do harm. Oh, I caught wise to this. You bet I knew it. It wasn't as Simon said. It wasn't even the common-sense consideration that he and Charlotte owned property jointly. I tried to explain this and warn him, but I only astonished him.

However, before I tried I waited till I knew the situation well.

And how he and Renee did was as follows: Nearly every morning he picked her up at her apartment; she was waiting outside or in a restaurant nearby. She then drove him to his office, which she didn't enter though most of his employees knew her. Afterward she went off by herself to shop or to do his errands; or she read a magazine and waited till he'd be free. All day long she was with him or not far off, and then in the evening she drove him almost to his door and she went back home in a taxi. And during the day, every hour nearly, there were crises when they shouted and screamed at each other--she enlarged her eyes and arched and hardened her neck and he lost his head and sometimes tried to swat her while his skin wrinkled and teeth set with fury. He never had done anything about that broken front tooth, by which I saw in him still, this blond Germanic-looking ruddy businessman and investor, the schoolboy Grandma Lausch had sent to wait on tables in the resort hotel. The things he and Renee fought about were usually such as clothes, some gloves, a bottle of Chanel perfume, or the servant. She didn't need a servant was what he said, since she was never at home and could make the bed herself. What was the good of a woman sitting there? But Renee had to have whatever Charlotte had.

She was completely posted on Charlotte, better than a sister, and often turned up at the same night club or had tickets to the same musical.

Thus she knew how she looked and what she wore, and studied her.

She demanded the same at least, and as long as it was for items like bags, dresses, lizard shoes, harlequin glasses, Ronson lighter, the demands could be pretty well satisfied. But the worst fight took place when she wanted a car of her own, like Charlotte's.

"Why, you beggar!" he said. "Charlotte has her own money, don't you realize that?"

"But not what you want. I've got that."

He roared, "Not you only! Don't fool yourself. Lots of women have it." And this was one of the few times when he minded my seeing him.

Usually he didn't seem to care. And she, after her speech about wanting us to know each other better, assumed she had covered the ground by so saying and hardly ever spoke to me. "You see how your brother is?" she cried.

No, I didn't see how he was. Mainly what I saw was that he was all the time in a rage, open or disguised.

He'd break out and yell, "Why didn't you go to the doctor yesterday?

How long are you going to neglect that cough? How do you know what you've got in your chest?" (Which made me glance toward that chest, approximately--like any living creature's, under the furs and the silk, under the brassiere, under the breasts, it was there.) "No, sir, you did not go. I checked on you. I phoned there, you liar! I bet you thought I feel too important to phone him about you or am afraid of it getting back to Charlotte." (She went to Charlotte's doctor; but he was the best doctor.) "Well, I did it. You never showed up there. You can't tell the truth. Never! I doubt if even in bed you ever do. Even when you say you love me you're conniving."

Well, this is an example of his rage in the form of solicitude.

I couldn't wait to recover from the hernia and go to the war. Let me get going! I thought. But I wasn't fit yet, and meantime I had a stopgap position with a business-machine company. This was a fancy, select job. I could only get into it on account of the manpower shortage. If I had stayed with the company I might have turned into a salesmanprince, traveling parlor car to St. Paul twice a month, seven good cigars to the trip and a dignified descent at the station, breathing winter steam and holding a portfolio. But no, I had to get into the service.

"Well, you horse's foot," said Simon, "I expected you to live to see middle age, but I guess you're too dumb to make it and want to get yourself wiped out. If you have to go and get shot up, and be in a cast and vomit blood, and lie in mud and eat potato peel, go! If you get on the casualty list it will do my business good. What a hell of a deal for Ma it is to have only one normal son! And me? It leaves me alone in the world. The idea of making a buck is my intelligent companion, my brother not."

But I went ahead anyway. Only I still wasn't acceptable to the Army or the Navy and so I signed with the Merchant Marine and was scheduled to leave for Sheepshead Bay to go into training there.

Next time I saw Simon I ran into him on Randolph Street and he didn't behave as usual. "Let's go in and have a bite," he said, for we were in front of Henrici's and they had a vat of out-of-season strawberries in the window. The waiters knew him but he hardly even answered when they spoke to him, instead of being proud, as would have been normal. When we sat down and he lifted off his hat, the whiteness of his face gave me a start.

I said, "What's the matter--what goes on?"

"Renee tried to commit suicide last night," he said. "She took sleeping pills. I got there as she was passing out, I shook her and slapped her, I made her walk, threw her in a cold bath until the doctor got there-- and she's alive. She'll be all right."

"Was it a real attempt? Did she mean business?"

"The doctor said she wasn't really in danger. Maybe she didn't know how many pills to take."

"That doesn't sound likely to me." l "Me neither. She must have been faking. She is a counterfeiter. It- wasn't the first time by a long shot." I got a glimpse of struggles that probably could never make sense. It afflicted me.

"People will act themselves into something at last though," he went on. "They get carried away." And he said, "If it's for pleasure you pay a steep price, okay. But suppose it's a price for no_pleasure. Only trying to have it. Wanting pleasure. You pay for what you want, not always what you get. That's what a price means. Otherwise where's the price?

The payment is in something you're liable to run short on."

"I wish I knew of anything I could do."

"You could shove me in front of a train," he said.

He began to tell me what had happened. Charlotte had found out about Renee. "I think she knew for a long time," he said, "but I guess she wanted to wait." It would have been surprising if Charlotte hadn't known. Information and thoughts about Simon were streaming through her mind all the time. Everybody knew him in the downtown district.

The waiter who brought the strawberries in the pewter dishes said, "Here you are, Mr. March." Renee was with Simon all the time too, and they were continually playing with the chance of discovery. Why did she drive him almost to the door? One day after she left I picked up a gold comb from the floor of the car, and he said, "Damn her, she's too careless," and put it in his pocket. Now it couldn't be that during two years Charlotte hadn't found anything--no gold hairs, no hankies, no matches in the glove compartment from salons she didn't go to; or that she couldn't read in Simon's husbandly home-coming with hat and evening paper, kiss of the cheek or married joke on the backside, that only five minutes before, in only the time it took to park the car and ride up in the elevator, he had been with another woman. She certainly must have. I figure that for a while she'd have said to herself, "What I don't see with my own eyes won't hurt me"--this not quite deliberate blindness but the tight grasp of people who devise very deeply. Somebody wrestling a bear for dear life, and with forehead lost against the grizzly pelt, figuring anyway what to do next Sunday, whom to invite to dinner and how to fix the table.

But with Charlotte you never could tell. She perhaps understood that with a lot of noise she'd drive him to be rash, because of romantic honor, and she therefore was cautious with him.

Once she explained to me, "Your brother needs money, a whole lot of money. If he didn't have it to spend, as much as he needed, he'd die."

This astounded me when I heard it--on a hot morning it was, in the sunny, barbaric-carpeted skyscraper living room and its vases, hot breezes that blew the plants, and she herself a large figure in a white satin coat and with a cigarette holder in her rouged mouth but looking as severe as any Magnus, any of her uncles or cousins. She was as good as telling me that she was saving Simon's life.

But he did need dough. Renee lived in the same style as Charlotte.

He had a feeling that that was right; also he owed it to himself not to try to do things cheaply. When he and Charlotte went to Florida the girl came along a day or so later and stayed at as swanky a hotel. He didn't so much worry about the expenses. What poisoned his life by this time was the slavery of constant thought and arrangement-making.

He went to defy his wife, and soon he found himself twice-married.

Poor Simon! I pitied him. I pitied my brother.

All along he had been telling me the affair would never be permanent.

So? How short is temporary? Eventually his idea was Renee would marry some rich man. I was once present when they discussed it.

"This guy Karham at the club," he said. "He asked me about you after we ran into him. He wants to go out with you."

"I won't do it," she said.

"You will. Don't be a sap. We have to set you up. He's got a lot of dough. A bachelor. In the paving business."

"I don't care what he's got. He's an ugly old man. His mouth is full of bridges. What do you think I am! Leave me alone." She folded her arms, angry, holding her small bicepsit being warm summer she was in a sleeveless dress; she brought her knees together and looked fixedly through the windshield. You have to remember these conversations took place mostly in the car.

I told Simon afterward, "It's you she aims to marry."

"No, she only wants to stay with me. It suits her this way. She's got it better than a wife."

"Some conceit you've got, Simon. You mean to say she can't think up anything better than to ride around with you every day and read movie magazines while you make your calls?"

But what he was telling me at Henrici's now was that a few weeks before, Charlotte had come out and said the affair had gone far enough.

It had to stop now. Fights broke out. But not because he disagreed with Charlotte. He knew he had to stop and told Renee, and what happened with her was even worse. She screamed, threatened to take him to court, and fainted. Next Simon's lawyer came into the picture.

He called a meeting in his office to settle everything. Renee was told Charlotte wouldn't be there, but then Charlotte showed up. Renee cursed her. Charlotte slapped her. Simon slapped Renee too. Then they all cried, for which there seemed to be plenty of reason.

"Why did you have to slap her?"

"You should have heard what she was saying. You would have done the same," he said. "I got carried away."

Finally Renee agreed to go away to California provided she was paid off. And she did go. But now she was back again and said on the phone that she was pregnant. "I don't care," Simon told her. "You're a crook.

You took the dough and went to California when you knew you'd be coming right back." After a silence she hung up. This was when he thought she would kill herself. And, sure enough, when he got to the hotel it was just after she had swallowed the pills.

She was in her fourth month of pregnancy.

"What'll I do?" he said.

"What's there to do? Nothing. There'll be a kid now. Who knows but that this is the way you and George and I happened to come into the world."

I comforted him the best I knew how.







CHAPTER XXIII



If the great Andromeda galaxy had to depend on you to hold it up, where would it be now but fallen way to hell? Why, March, let the prophetic soul of the wide world dreaming on things to come (S. T. Coleridge) summon its giants and mobilizers, Caesars and Atlases. But you! you pitiful recruit, where do you come in? Go on, marry a loving wife and settle at March's farm and academy, and don't get in the way when the nations are furiously raging together. My friend, I said, speaking to myself, relax and knock off effort. The time is in the hands of mighty men to whom you are like the single item in the mind of the chief of a great Sears, Roebuck Company, and here come you, wishing to do right and not lead a disappointed life (sic!).

However, my conscience had already decided. I was committed and couldn't stay, and at last the hour struck. There was a windy, flattening rain that beat the smoke down, the whole city sodden and black, the pillars of La Salle Street Station weeping. Clem said to me, "Don't push your luck. Don't take a risk with the clap. Don't tell your secrets to anybody to satisfy their curiosity. Don't get married without a sixmonth engagement. If you get in dutch I can always spare you a few bucks."

I put in for the Purser's and Pharmacist's Mate's School, and the^ took my application. For a while I had a wrangle with a psychiatrist fellow.

Why had I indicated with an X that I was a bed-wetter? I insisted my bed was always dry. "But here's the X opposite the question in the Yes column." Didn't he realize, I said, that in filling out twenty questionnaires and taking five examinations after thirty hours without sleep on the train a man might make a single slip? "But why this slip, not another?" he said cunningly. I began to hate him very much, sitting there on his cool white fanny while his lazy eyes arrived at unpleasant conclusions about me. I said, "Do you want me to confess that I do wet the bed even though it's not so? Or do you mean that I'd like to wet the bed?" He told me I had an aggressive character.

Anyway, before I could start at the school, they sent us away on a training cruise in Chesapeake Bay. We sailed up and down through nickering heat. The ship was a many-decked old contraption from Mc Kinley's time. White, an iron, floury, adrift bakery, it wallowed wide and aimless all week. The white ferries with Dixie pillars passed us by, very elegant. Or the flattop whales that had planes like kids' jacks on the deck, and monstrous hair-stuffing smoke came from their sides.

We did fire-fighting and abandon-ship drills eight or ten times a day.

The boats crashed down from the davits; the trainees poured into them from manlines and cargo nets, rambunctious, mauling and horsing around, prodding with boat hooks, goosing and carrying on, screaming about female genitals. Then rowed. Hours and hours of rowing. The water curled like a huge bed of endive.

Between times you could bask on the fantail of this painted old vertical bakery, and crates, spoiled lettuces, oranges, turds, and little crabs followed on the stream or departed. The sky enamel, the sun with gold spindles. It makes me think of the picture of the fools with fish and cake and the boaters with soup-ladle oars in the painting of the old master Hieronymus B.--this idle craft with the excursion strummers, roast chicken trussed in a tree; death's head in the little twigs above. Other scenes too: eegs spitted on knives trotting with tiny feet; men inside oyster shells carried to a cannibal banquet. Herring, meat, and other belly-goods. But, all the same, human eyes were looking out. Up to no good, maybe, but how do you know? Or the rich kings at Bethlehem. Joseph by a fire of sticks. But off in the meadow, what goes on? A wolf bleeding at a knife wound eating the swineherd who struck him, and someone else dashing like mad for the goofy towers of the city, the potato-masher castles and the pots, double-boilers, and smokehouses of habitations.

We ate plenty: flapjacks, chops, ham, spuds, steak, chili con and rice, ice cream, pie. Everybody talked about the chow, discussed the menus, and remembered home recipes.

Saturday we put in at Baltimore where the tramps of the port were waiting on Clap Hill, and the denominations with printed verses. There was mail call. Simon had been turned down for service because of a bad ear. "A way out I could've used," he said. Clem wasn't doing well at his new business. There were two letters from Sophie Geratis, now with her husband at Camp Blanding. She said farewell but kept saying it in different letters. From Einhom there was a mimeographed mes469 sage to his friends in the service, full of corny sentiment and comedy.

In a personal note he added that Dingbat was a soldier in New Guinea, driving a jeep, and that he himself was ailing.

And so, more weeks of captivity on this cruise, back and forth over the bay; the same endive waves and blare of public-address system, horseplay in the head, boat drills, brine, heavy meals, sun, hell-raising, and this continual whanging away on a few elements so as to deafen you.

At last we were returned to Sheepshead, and I started to study bookkeeping and ship's doctoring. The science part consoled me. As long as I could keep improving my mind, I figured, I was doing okay.

Sylvester was in New York. Also Stella Chesney, the girl I had helped escape in Mexico. Of course I went to see her first. On my first liberty I phoned her, and she said to come right over. So I bought a bottle of wine and the delicacies of the season and went; and of course I told myself I could use the dough she owed me and what not, but I ought to have known myself better than that.

What use was war without also love?

The place where she lived seemed to be among dress factories, silent on Saturday. As I climbed the stairs I was very excited. But I warned myself not to think we could take up where we had stopped at Cuernavaca. Oliver being in jail, chances were that there was someone else.

But there was the object of these wicked thoughts with a warm healthy face, looking innocent and happy to see me. What a beauty!

My heart whanged without pity for me. I already saw myself humbled in the dust of love, the god Eros holding me down with his foot and forcing all kinds of impossible stuff on me.

She made the same impression on me that she had made the first time when I saw her on the little porch above the Carta Blanca beer shield with bulge-eyed Oliver and the two friends. Then I thought of her in the lace dress she wore in court the time Oliver socked Louie Fu.

Then in the mountains under the tarpaulin when her dress and petticoat went up so fast. And there were those same legs above me. They were bare, I saw, by the white of the skylight and the reflection of the green carpet.

"Well, if it isn't a pleasure," she said and put out her hand. I was all dressed up in my brand-new government goods, and as I walked I felt upon me the skivvies and socks, new shoes and tight jumper and pants. To say nothing of the white cap and the embroidery of anchors on the sailor collar. "You didn't tell me you were drafted. What a surprise!"

"When I look, I'm surprised myself," I said.

But what I really thought of was whether to kiss her. It suddenly came back to me, to my cheek itself, what the sensation of her lips had been like in the hot market place. My face heated now. Finally I decided I'd better speak my mind, and I told her, "I can't decide whether it would be right to kiss you."

"Please! Don't create a problem." She laughed, meaning that I should. I put my lips on the side of her face, exactly as she had done to me, and I flushed instantaneous as electricity. She colored too, pleased that I had done it.

Was she not so simple and free of ulterior motives as she looked?

Well, neither was I.

We sat down to talk. She wanted to know about me. "What do you do?" she asked. When not a rich young beauty's friend, nor an eagletamer nor poker player, was what she meant.

"I've had a hard time deciding just what I should do. But now I think I was cut out to be a teacher. I want to get a place of my own and have a family. I'm tired of knocking around."

"Oh, you like children? You'd make a good father."

I thought it was very nice of her to say so. I wanted to offer her everything I had, suddenly. Glorious constructions began to rise in my mind, golden and complicated. Maybe she would give up whatever life she was leading for my sake. If she had another man maybe she'd quit him.

Maybe he'd be killed in an automobile accident. Maybe he'd go back to his wife and children. You perhaps know yourself what such vain imaginings can be .0 ye charitable gods, don't hold it against me!

My heart was beginning to bake. I couldn't see her straight; she dazed me.

She wore velvet houseshoes, with ties; her dark hair was piled three ways; she had on an orange skirt. Her eyes looked soft and gentle. I wondered if she could look so fresh without having a lover and bothered myself about it.

I should hope!--about the father part, I mean. And what did she do?

Well, it was hard to get a clear account. She mentioned various things unfamiliar to me. Women's colleges, musical career, stage career, painting.

From college there were books; from music, piano, etcetera; from the theater inscribed photos, also a sewing machine of spidery castiron, circa 1910, which I connected with costumes; her pictures were on the walls--flowers, oranges, bedsteads, nudes in the bath. She talked about getting on the radio and mentioned the USO and Stage-Door Canteen. I did my best to follow. \ 471 "You like my house?" she said.

It wasn't a house but a room, a parlor, high, long, and old-fashioned, with archduke moldings of musical instruments and pears. Plants, piano, a big decorative bed, fishes, a cat and dog. The dog was a heavy breather--he was getting on in years. The cat played around her ankles and scratched them; I quickly walloped him with a newspaper, but she didn't like that. He sat on her shoulder, and when she said, "Kiss, Ginger--kiss, kiss," he licked her face.

Over the way were dress factories. Scraps of material floated and waved from the wire window guards. Planes with powerful rotary noise cut the blue air clear from Britain to California. She served the wine I brought. I drank and my head gave a throb in its injured place. Then I became very heated and filled with amorous anxiety. But I thought, There's her pride to consider. I wanted to get away from her in Cuemavaca.

Why should she believe I'm falling for her now? And maybe I shouldn't fall. What if she's the Cressida type, as Einhom used to call Cissy F.?

"I still intend to pay you the money you were so kind as to lend me," she said.

"No, please, I didn't come for that."

"But you probably need it now."

"Why, I haven't even touched my last month's pay."

"My father sends me an allowance from Jamaica. That's where he is. Of course I can't live on it. I haven't done any too well recently."

This was not a complaint but sounded as though soon she'd do better.

"Oliver set me back. I depended on him. I thought I was in love with him. Did you love that girl you were with?"

"Yes," I said. I'm glad I didn't lie, I may say.

"She must have hated me like poison."

"She married a captain out in the Pacific."., "I'm sorry."

"Oh no, don't be. It's been over for quite a while."

"I felt in the wrong afterward. But you were the only person who would have helped me. And I never thought--"

"I'm glad I was able to help. As far as that goes, I came out way ahead."

"It's nice of you to say so. But you know--now that it's finished you won't care if I say it--I thought we were in the same boat. Everybody said how she--"

"Went hunting without me. I know." I hoped she wouldn't mention Talavera....

"You got into trouble without knowing it, the way I did. Maybe you deserved it though--like me. It served me right. I was on my way to Hollywood with him. Mexico was just a side trip; he was going to make a star of me. Wasn't that ridiculous?"

"No, it wasn't. You'd make a first-rate star. But how could Oliver do that to you when he knew he was going to jail?"

"He put it over easily because for a while I was in love."

It went to my head when she spoke that word.

I was constructing higher and higher, up to the top spheres, and simultaneously committing a dozen crimes to achieve my end. The cat scratched my hand as it swung by the chair. I thought I was going to have a nosebleed also, from passion. One minute I felt gross and swollen, and the next my soul was up there concertizing among her brilliant sister souls.

"Or worse than ridiculous," said she, pointedly.

Worse? Oh, how she paid her way, did she mean? She didn't have to say that. It pained me that she should feel such explanations necessary.

I certainly was lucky to be seated; my legs wouldn't have kept me up.

"Why, what's the matter?" she said in her warmhearted voice.

I begged her not to make fun, please. I said, "When I was covered with bandages and playing poker at the Chinaman's, how could you' think we were in the same boat?"

"I'm sure you remember how we looked at each other that day in the bar where they had that monkey thing."

"The kinkajou."

Crossing her hands in her lap and bringing her knees together around them--which I admired and wished she would, however, not do--she said, "Nobody should pretend to be always one hundred per cent honest. I wish I knew how to be seventy, sixty per cent."

I swore she must be one hundred and ten, two hundred. Then I said something I didn't expect myself. I said, "Nobody should be a mystery intentionally. Unintentionally is mysterious enough."

"I'll try not to be. With you, anyway."

She was sincere. I knew it. I saw how her throat suddenly grew full.

My body, which is maybe all I am, this effortful creature, felt subject to currents and helpless. I wanted to go and hug her by the legs, but I thought I'd better wait. For why should I assume it would be right?

Because I felt like?

I said, "I suppose you see how I'm getting to feel about you. If I'm making a mistake, you'd better tell me."

"A mistake? Why do you say that?"

"Well, in the first place," I said, "I haven't been here long. You'll think I'm in too much of a hurry." './ "And the second place? What makes you speak so slowly?"

Was I speaking in an unusual way? I didn't even know it. "In the second, I feel I did wrong in Cuemavaca by going back."

"Maybe you can do right this time," she said.

Then I dropped to the ground and hugged her legs. She bent to kiss me. I would have hurried, but her idea was to be slower. She said, "We'd better shut the animals in the kitchen." She collared the dog, I lifted up the cat from underneath, and we put them there. The kitchen door was fastened with a bent nail, having no knob or hook.

Then she took the cover from the bed and we helped each other to undress.

"What are you saying to yourself?" she whispered when we lay down. I wasn't aware that I was saying anything. I was afraid she would bump her head against the wall and tried to cover it with my hands, which she then understood, and helped me. I was hungry and kissed her wherever my mouth could reach, till she kept my lip in her teeth and drew on me, drew on me. Nothing could be put over by effort any more, and there was nothing to try.

Was she a vain person, or injurious or cynical, it couldn't make any difference now. Or was I a foolish, uncorrected, blundering, provisional, unreliable man, this was taken away as of no account and couldn't have any sense or meaning. The real truth about one or the other was simpler than any such description.

I told her I loved her. It was true. I felt I had come to the end of my trouble and hankering, and it was conclusive. As we lay in bed kissing, whispering, and loving all weekend long, the air was strong and blue outside, the sun was splendid and sailed around handsome and haughty.

We got up only to take the dog, Harry, to the roof. The cat walked on the covers over the bed and kneaded us with its paws. The only people we saw were two old guys playing pinochle on a cutting table of the dress factory over the way.

However, Monday morning I had to be back at the base. She woke me in the middle of the night and got me dressed and went down with me to the subway.

I kept asking, Would she marry me? She said, "You want all your troubles to be over all of a sudden and you're so anxious for it you may be making a mistake."

This was just before dawn, by the descent-into-hell stairs of the .474" -.,, subway, just under the Eastern vault of wired glass, and the blackout light like a dumb posy on its thick iron. So by this blue illumination we were kissing with loving faces until it began to drizzle and her slippers got wet.

"Darling, go home," I said.

"Will you phone me?"

"Every chance I get. Do you love me?"

"Of course I love you."

Every time she said this I was so moved that happy gratitude poured over me down to my very feet while my back-hair prickled. Like when you're swimming in the pleasure of the sea and feel some contact come up behind. All the deep breathes like silent concertinas and the shore is gay with stripes and bunting.

Finally I had to go down into the tunnel and take a train. I couldn't see her for five days. And meantime I didn't dare fall behind in the Purser's School or tangle with a master-at-arms and lose my next liberty. Every evening I went down by the sea where the phone booths were; and she was often out, having a busy life. I had a terrible fear that she had spent the weekend with me out of friendliness alone, or so that I would understand better what should have happened in the mountains that night. If this was so, I was sunk, for by now I was more in love than-I could stand, as if some mineral had got into my veins and arteries and I ached, flesh and bones, the way you will on the verge of the grippe.

All week the freighters groaned in from the sea, while Coney Island was wrapped in gray or lilac fog and I sat with a suffering spirit of love in the phone booth after evening chow trying to do my lessons and waiting for her to answer. I was afraid I was too much of a latecomer and had nothing to expect. In which case I was ruined, because everything now depended on her.

On Saturday, in a fever, I got off the base as soon as the usual parade shenanigans were over. What a state I was in! When I rode over the bridge from Brooklyn suspended on those heaven-hung struts over the brick valleys, then the fiery flux of harbor water, the speedy gulls, the battleships open like vast radio sets in the yards, beast-horns of Hengist and Horsa, and then the tunnel again, I felt that if I had to continue to ride and ride I would certainly not last but would give out.

But there was no need to be scared, for Stella was waiting. She had been sick all week because I wasn't there, running a temperature, wondering did I love her. She cried when we were in bed, with her hands pressed on my back and her breasts against me. She said that when she saw me in front of the cathedral from the balcony of the bar where the Carta Blanca shield was hung she fell in love with me. She didn't even need the money she borrowed from me at Cuemavaca but took it as a means of keeping in touch. As for Oliver-- "What's it to me what happened with Oliver? It's none of my business,"

I said. "I want to get married."

Clem had urged me to be engaged for six months, in view of my personality and make-up. But this advice was good for people who were merely shopping, not for someone who had lived all his life with one great object.

"Of course," she said, "I want to get married if you love me."

I deeply assured her.

"If you still love me after lunch," she said, "ask me again."

She brought the lunch to me in bed, which was a bed she had bought at an auction, ivory colored and painted with wreaths and Arcadia roses. It came from Bavaria. Well, she served me here, and wouldn't even let me butter my own bread. As if I was the Elector, I got waited on hand and foot, and in turn I gave the animal staff ham trimmings and leftovers.

She felt obliged to tell me all she could about herself.

"I buy a ticket in the Irish Sweepstakes every year," she said.

I could see nothing objectionable in this. r- "Also I'm a mystic, a Gurdjieff follower."

This was a new one on me. She showed me a picture of this old boy, a shayed head, deep eyes, and mustachios of the old school of Crimean fighter. I saw no special harm in him.

What else? She spent lots of money on clothes. This I could see; her closets were stuffed with dresses. But I didn't bother my head about it. Since she went along with me in my scheme for the fosterhome and academy, and she enthusiastically did, what difference could her wardrobe make? In fact, I was proud that she was so elegant. Also she owed money, she said.

"Why, darling, don't worry, we'll pay everybody. C'est la moindre des chases, as they say on the other side." When I was loved and sitting in a fine bed like this, I was just like royalty and disposed-of all matters with a word.

We decided to get married as soon as I graduated from Sheepshead.







CHAPTER XXIV



I see before me next a fellow named Mintouchian, who is an Armenian, of course. We are sitting together in a Turkish bath having a conversation, except that Mintouchian is doing most of the talking, explaining various facts of existence to me, by allegory mostly. The time is a week before Stella and I were married and I shipped out.

This Mintouchian was a monument of a person, with his head very abrupt at the back, as Armenian heads tend sometimes to be, but lionlike in front, with red cheekbones. He had legs on him like that statue of Clemenceau on the Champs Elysees where Clemenceau is striding against a wind and is thinking of bread and war, and the misery and grandeur, going on with last strength in his longjohns and gaiters.

Sitting together in this little white-tile room, Mintouchian and I' were quite pals in spite of differences of age and income--Mintouchian was supposed to be loaded. He looked overpowering, and he had tones in his voice like the dumping of coal. This must have done him good in court, as he was a lawyer. He was a friend of a friend of Stella whose name was Agnes Kuttner. Agnes lived in big style in an apartment off Fifth Avenue near one of the Latin-American embassies, furnished in Empire, with tremendous mirrors and chandeliers, Chinese screens, alabaster birds of night, thick drapes, and all luxuries like that. She went around to auction rooms and bought up treasures of the Romanoffs and Hapsburgs; she herself came from Vienna. Mintouchian had set up a trust fund for her, so she wasn't at all in the business of antiques, and her apartment was his home away from home, as hotels sometimes falsely speak of themselves. His other home was also in New York, but his wife was an invalid. Every evening he went and had dinner with her, served by her nurse in the bedroom.

But before this he had visited Agnes. Usually his chauffeur was driving him across Central Park at 7:45 for the meal with his wife.

The reason why I was with him in the bath this particular afternoon was that Stella had gone shopping with Agnes for the wedding.

These two, Agnes and Mintouchian, 'were the only people, we ever saw when I got liberty from the base on weekends. He enjoyed taking us to Toots Shor's or the Diamond Horseshoe, I think, and other scarlet-and-gold-door places. The one time I tried to pick up the tab he pushed me away. I would have had to borrow from Stella to pay it.

But Mintouchian was very openhanded, a grand good-time Charlie.

Almost always in evening clothes of Rembrandt blackness, with his rededged eyes and craggy head and ears, and as if smelling the sands and savannahs with his flat nose, but a smile of spin-onthe-music, spend-the-money; his teeth were long, and he was ever so slightly felinewhiskered to go with his corrupt, intelligent wrinkles and expanding mouth. Amid the ladies he didn't let go with this smile, but now when he sat like a village headman of the south of Asia in his carnivalcolors towel, he did; and while conversing more man to man he was pinching himself under the eyes to make the bags disappear--his yellow toenails were lacquered with clear polish, except the small toes grievously buried in the lifeworn foot with its skinful of vessels. I wondered if he was really one of those hot-to-the-touch and perilous guys like Zaharoff or Juan March, or the Swedish Match King or Jake the Barber or Three-Finger Brown. Stella said he had money he hadn't even folded yet. He certainly was laying out plenty for Agnes, whom he had met in Cuba; he paid her husband a remittance to stay there.

However, even though I found out that Mintouchian wasn't strictly honest, he was never a rogue's-gallery character. To get his legal education, as a matter of fact, he had played the organ in silent movies.

But he was a crack lawyer now and had global business interests, and, moreover, he was a lettered person and reader. It was one of his curiosities to figure out historical happenings like the building of the Berlin-Baghdad Railway or the Battle of Tannenberg, and he furthermore knew a lot about the lives of Martyrs. He was another of those persons who persistently arise before me with life counsels and illumination throughout my entire earthly pilgrimage.

I couldn't figure out what he saw in Agnes, who was obviously the boss over him. Her eyes were deep brown, of an aristocratic favorite of cafes and carriages of Imperial days, although she must have been only a child in those times. And what's more, she had a slight depression on either side of her turned-up nose which made her look not exactly of an open nature. Nevertheless she was Stella's friend, and Mintouchian loved her. This made me think of the deep wishes of elderly people, or desires unslayable short of total demolition by death.

"Death!" Mintouchian said it himself. He was describing how he was subject to strokes. He said, "I don't want to make you gloomy, so close to your wedding."

"Oh no, sir, you couldn't make me gloomy. I love Stella too much to consider it."

"Well, I won't say that I was as happy as you, but I was also very feeling when I got married. Maybe it came from playing the mood music, which I was then doing. For sea adventures I'd play 'Fingal's Cave.' For Rudolph Valentine, 'Orientale,' Cesar Cui, Tchaikovsky's 'Sehnsucht.' Also 'Poet and Peasant.' You try to fight this stuff, when Milton Sills sees Conway Tearle didn't go down on the Titanic, or something. I was playing it all from my book on torts, boning up for the bar exam. But all the same, those were times of emotion. Or maybe you think this is guff?"

"No, why?"

"You think I'm a bandit, only you wouldn't say it on a bet. You fight your malice too much."

"Everybody says so. It's as if you were supposed to have low opinions. I'd never say I was angelic, but I respect as much as I can."

Mintouchian said, "In-one day of practice I see more than you could imagine if it was a project. The Balzac Comedie Humaine is child's play in comparison. I wake up in the morning and have to ask myself, 'Now in the case of Shimi versus Shimi, who is screwing who? Who is going to be in worse shape in the end? The man who takes the child away from the living-in-sin mother? The lover who makes her give up the kid to avoid the publicity so it won't harm his business? The mother who does anything for the lover?' Ribono shel Olam!"

I was surprised by this phrase, which he explained as follows: "My father was janitor of a synagogue, and I hung around the cellar. I had an uncle who was a colonel in the Boer War. Who is what? So if history casts a strange or even ridiculous light on us, we are still all serious, aren't we? We die anyway." He went back to the subject of his strokes.

"Here several years ago I was sitting on the toilet figuring a big deal mentally when suddenly the Angel of Death plucked me by the nose.

My mind turned black. I fell on my face. I think if my belly hadn't been in the way to break the force I might have been killed. As it was, the blood from my nose sprayed the door like seltzer. Which, in my vanity, I had shut. Then by and by the spark of life came back to me. My mind filled again with the typical thought and light of Mintouchian.

Now, I reflected, you're Mintouchian again. As if I had an option. Do I have to come back Mintouchian, including the distressing parts? Yes, because to live is to be Mintouchian, my dear man. I went over all my secrets and found they were still in place. I still didn't know who was screwing whom, and 1 crept into my bed and shivered from the touch of death.

"But I was saying"--he gave me a genial smile with heart-felt squint and then he yawned and enjoyed the golden light--"how a guy struggles with malice. How life goes beyond the conscience of nice wellreared people. A good upbringing stops them from knowing what they think even. Because we all think the same, more or less. You love Stella --all right, don't you?"

"Like I never loved anyone before."

"That's swell. That's what I call answering like a man. When is your birthday?"

"In January."

"I'd have sworn to it. So is mine. I believe the highest types are born in January. It's barometric--you can look it up in Ellsworth Huntington. The parents make love in spring when the organism is healthiest and then the best specimens are conceived. If you want children you should plan to knock up your dear one in that season.

Ancient wisdom is right. Now science comes lately and finds it out.

But what I wanted to say about your bride, even she, is that she's no different from the rest of us except more gifted and beautiful. It is absolutely certain that she has thought of the future both with and without you.



I should worry, I should care,

I should marry a millionaire,

He should die and I should cry,

I should marry another guy.



But this has taken place in inner consciousness, which is outlaw and accepts no check. What of it? Life is possible anyhow. Except that even legitimate and reasonable things have to eome through this. Mongolia, or clear-light desert minus trees. What do we respect more than commerce and industry? But when Mr. Cecil Rhodes of the British Empire weeps many tears because he can't do business with the blazing stars, this is not decadence but inner consciousness speaking over all the highest works of presumptuous man."

I was deeply wounded when he spoke of Stella in this way. Where did he get off, this rude bastard, having her bump me off in her inner consciousness? I burned with resentment. "First you talk about ancient wisdom," I said, angry, "and then you take a crack at love."

"Well, I'm a sonofabitch!" he said, getting up in the Turkish heat and rewrapping the towel. "I didn't mean to hurt any feelings. Damn!

If I did in this idle conversation to while away time, please forgive me..1 see you really are, really, in love. God bless you for such noble feelings! You're going to ship out soon too, and the danger as well as separation from the loved one has stirred up natural emotions. But this little, song of little girls also is ancient wisdom. This is not a reason for cynicism, but pride in the conquest of nature. The human mind has bounded the exploding oceans of universal space; the head has swallowed up the empyrean. But you shouldn't overlook also how much secret thought and conniving goes on.

"Listen, since we're talking, let me give you a few examples from my practice of what goes on in other parts of the soul. A few years ago a client's wife reports she has lost a valuable bracelet. Perfectly trustworthy woman, and mother of three, a wealthy husband who has given her a hundred thousand dollars' worth of property, only keeping the power of attorney for himself. The bracelet is lost? Very well. It's just a routine matter for the company. They investigate, come back to the husband, and tell him, 'Your wife did not lose this bracelet, she gave it to her lover who was broke.' Yoy, indignation! 'My wife, a lover? My respected spouse, mother of children, who shows me constant affection and proofs of loyalty? My dear wife, my beloved of years?' Nevertheless her can has been over a barrel, she has spread, or equivalent. This poor man. Heart-shattered! How could it be! Imagine his pain and bewilderment that she should have such a secret from him.

What a failure of life when he worked so hard that there should be a certain, guaranteed reason that life might last longer than from Thursday to Saturday. If anything deserves tears this does. However, he mustn't take the word of the insurance investigator, so he comes to me and I get him a private eve. He comes back with the same facts, that this lover is a bum with a prison record for pimping and dealing in hot goods. They show the poor husband a photo, even, so he can describe this character Thick nose, long sideburns. You know the type. Well, the poor fellow is going crazy. And now he finds that in the whole suburb where he lives he's the only one who didn't know about it. They're seen in the car, parked all over the vicinity. The woods, the bushes. It comes down on him like a busted house. 'Who is left among you that saw this house in her first glory? and how do ye see it now?'"

Now, I reflected, you're Mintouchian again. As if I had an option. Do I have to come back Mintouchian, including the distressing parts? Yes, because to live is to be Mintouchian, my dear man. I went over all my secrets and found they were still in place. I still didn't know who was screwing whom, and 1 crept into my bed and shivered from the touch of death.

"But I was saying"--he gave me a genial smile with heart-felt squint and then he yawned and enjoyed the golden light--"how a guy struggles with malice. How life goes beyond the conscience of nice wellreared people. A good upbringing stops them from knowing what they think even. Because we all think the same, more or less. You love Stella --all right, don't you?"

"Like I never loved anyone before."

"That's swell. That's what I call answering like a man. When is your birthday?"

"In January."

"I'd have sworn to it. So is mine. I believe the highest types are born in January. It's barometric--you can look it up in Ellsworth Huntington. The parents make love in spring when the organism is healthiest and then the best specimens are conceived. If you want children you should plan to knock up your dear one in that season.

Ancient wisdom is right. Now science comes lately and finds it out.

But what I wanted to say about your bride, even she, is that she's no different from the rest of us except more gifted and beautiful. It is absolutely certain that she has thought of the future both with and without you.



I should worry, I should care,

I should marry a millionaire,

He should die and I should cry,

I should marry another guy.



But this has taken place in inner consciousness, which is outlaw and accepts no check. What of it? Life is possible anyhow. Except that even legitimate and reasonable things have to eome through this. Mongolia, or clear-light desert minus trees. What do we respect more than commerce and industry? But when Mr. Cecil Rhodes of the British Empire weeps many tears because he can't do business with the blazing stars, this is not decadence but inner consciousness speaking over all the highest works of presumptuous man."

I was deeply wounded when he spoke of Stella in this way. Where did he get off, this rude bastard, having her bump me off in her inner consciousness? I burned with resentment. "First you talk about ancient wisdom," I said, angry, "and then you take a crack at love."

"Well, I'm a sonofabitch!" he said, getting up in the Turkish heat and rewrapping the towel. "I didn't mean to hurt any feelings. Damn!

If I did in this idle conversation to while away time, please forgive me.. I see you really are, really, in love. God bless you for such noble feelings! You're going to ship out soon too, and the danger as well as separation from the loved one has stirred up natural emotions. But this little, song of little girls also is ancient wisdom. This is not a reason for cynicism, but pride in the conquest of nature. The human mind has bounded the exploding oceans of universal space; the head has swallowed up the empyrean. But you shouldn't overlook also how much secret thought and conniving goes on.

"Listen, since we're talking, let me give you a few examples from my practice of what goes on in other parts of the soul. A few years ago a client's wife reports she has lost a valuable bracelet. Perfectly trustworthy woman, and mother of three, a wealthy husband who has given her a hundred thousand dollars' worth of property, only keeping the power of attorney for himself. The bracelet is lost? Very well. It's just a routine matter for the company. They investigate, come back to the husband, and tell him, 'Your wife did not lose this bracelet, she gave it to her lover who was broke.' Yoy, indignation! 'My wife, a lover? My respected spouse, mother of children, who shows me constant affection and proofs of loyalty? My dear wife, my beloved of years?' Nevertheless her can has been over a barrel, she has spread, or equivalent. This poor man. Heart-shattered! How could it be! Imagine his pain and bewilderment that she should have such a secret from him.

What a failure of life when he worked so hard that there should be a certain, guaranteed reason that life might last longer than from Thursday to Saturday. If anything deserves tears this does. However, he mustn't take the word of the insurance investigator, so he comes to me and I get him a private eye. He comes back with the same facts, that this lover is a bum with a prison record for pimping and dealing in hot goods. They show the poor husband a photo, even, so he can describe this character. Thick nose, long sideburns. You know the type. Well, the poor fellow is going crazy. And now he finds that in the whole suburb where he lives he's the only one who didn't know about it. They're seen in the car, parked all over the vicinity. The woods, the bushes. It comes down on him like a busted house. 'Who is left among you that saw this house in her first glory? and how do ye see it now?'"

Oh, the poor guy. My heart broke for him.

"People start to tell him, 'Throw her out, man! Don't be a damn chump. This other guy has been ramming her and been her fancy-man at your expense.' So not able to stand it any more, he accuses her.

Why, she denies everything. Every single thing. He brings out names, dates, places, therefore, and there's nothing she can say. All is true.

Then she says, 'I won't leave this house and the children, they're mine.'

He comes to me and asks advice. All the law is on his side. He can throw her in the street if he wants. But does he want? No!"

Like the wife of Hosea who fooled around, I thought: "Thou shalt abide for me many days."

"And I'll tell you something else. She loved her husband too. That's how clouded the situation can be. She gave up the fancy pimp. And then the neighbors saw her and the husband in the movies holding hands and kissing like young lovers."

I was glad it had turned out like that, and they forgave each other.'

My heart gave a happy bound that they had made it.

I said, "You have to pity the wife also."

"You have to pity her more," said Mihtouchian, "because she had to do the lying and lead the two lives. This secrecy is what the real burden is. You come home still panting or dripping or dizzy from an encounter. And what's here? Another world, another life; you are another self. You also know exactly what you are doing. Exactly as a druggist when he goes from one prescription to another. Just the right amount of atropine or arsenic. There'd better be. There'd better!"

Mintouchian said with kind of personal barbarism or force of heart.

He couldn't stop it up. "You come home. 'Hello, husband or wife.'

'What was in the office today?'

'Just the usual.'

'I see you changed the sheets.'

'I also sent out the insurance premium.'

'That's good.' So you are another person. Where are the words you spoke an hour before?

Gone! Where is Central? Oh my dear friend. Central is listening in from Mongolia. Do you say a double life? It's secret over secret, mystery and then infinity sign stuck on to that. So who knows the ultimate, and where is the hour of truth?

"Of course," he said, "this has got nothing to do with you." He grinned and tried to get brighter, but there was some sort of darkness at this time in the superilluminated little sweat room. He went on after this effort, as follows: "But just for the interest of it I give you another case. There was a rich couple I had before the war. Husband handsome, wife gorgeous. Connecticut, Yale, and so forth background. The. husband goes to Italy on a business trip, meets an Italian lady and has aft affaire de cceur, and then he indiscreetly corresponds with the lady after he comes back. The wife catches a letter of love he kept in his back pocket. Not only did he keep it, March, but where the words of the dear hand were faded by his perspiration he restored them with his own pen. Then the wife comes to me with blood in her eye. Now I know for a fact that while he was gone she had herself a ball with someone, a man friend. But now she wants the husband punished. Because she caught him! She wants to go to Italy with the husband, confront the Italian lady, and have the husband deny before them both he ever loved her. Otherwise, divorce. Naturally I can't tell the husband what to do, and he goes. Seven-thousand-mile trip to perform | this necessary act. They then come home, and what do you think?

You're an intelligent man, you know what then." a, "He finds out about her. Listen," I said, now smelling a rat, "how ' are these stories supposed to apply, just now, before my marriage?

Are you saying that I should put the shoe on to see if it fits?" The thought made me boil.

"Hup! Now don't take it personally. I never said these stories applied to you. They probably apply only in general. Would I say anything against Miss Chesney? Not only is she Agnes's friend, but I wouldn't be a killjoy and interfere with genuine love, which I see all over you.

"You may be as interested as I was, though, in what a clever fellow once said to me about the connection of love and adultery. On any certain day, when you're happy, you know it can't last, but the weather will change, the health will be sickness, the year will end, and also life will end. In another place another day there'll be a different lover.

The face you're kissing will change to some other face, and so will your face be replaced. It can't be helped, this guy said. Of course he was a lousy bastard himself and a counterfeit no-good mooch, and he was in and out of Bellevue, and women supported him all his life; he deserted his kid and nobody could depend on him. But love is adultery, he said, and expresses change. You make your peace with change.

Another city, another woman, a different bed, but you're the same and so you must be flexible. You kiss the woman and you show how you love your fate, and you worship and adore the changes of life. You obey this law. Whether or not this bum was right, may God hate his soul! don't think you don't have to obey the laws of life."

My strange teacher, for he certainly was teaching, said further, "Erratic is nothing. Only system taps the will of the universe."

"I want to obey those laws," I said. "I'm not trying to get out from under. I never did try."

By now the sweat was running very fast down both our faces, and his carnival towel, which had fallen from his fat chest and armpits down to the everglades moss of his belly, was like the robe of a sage.

I would never agree that love had to be adultery. Never! Why, imagine!

Even if I had to admit that many lovers were adulterers, such as Paolo and Francesca or Anna Karenina, Grandma Lausch's favorite. Which led my mind toward suffering that got mixed with love. As eating the damaged fruit so as not to offend the gods, for whom pure joy is reserved.

He looked as if he were grinning, with great, bland, pouring-faced kindness, like a sage, prophet, or guru, a prince of experience with his jewel toes. I wanted him to give me wisdom.

"Why do you have to think that the thing that kills you is the thing that you stand for? Because you are the author of your death. What is the weapon? The nails and hammer of your character. What is the cross? Your own bones on which you gradually weaken. And the husband or the wife gets the other to do the deed. 'Kind spouse, you will make me my fate,' they might as well say, and tell them and show them how. The fish wills water, and the bird wills air, and you and me our dominant idea."

"Can you say what is your dominant idea, Mr. Mintouchian?"

He answered readily, "Secrets. Society makes us have some, of course. The brotherhood of man wants to let us out of them by the power of confession. But I must beget secrets. I will be known by secrets at my death, like St. Bias who was killed by wool combs and was made the patron saint of woolcombers.

"Complications, lies, lies, and lies!" he said. "Disguises, vaudevilles, multiple personalities, diseases, conversations. Even in a few minutes' conversation, do you realize how many times what you feel is converted before it comes out as what you say? Somebody tells you A. Your response is B. B you can't say, so you transform it, you put it through the coils of your breast. From DC to AC, increased four hundred volts, filtered. So instead of B there comes out gamma sub one. The longer the train of transformation, the worse the stink of gamma sub one. Mind you, I'm a great admirer of our species. I stand in awe of the genius of the race. But a large part of this genius is devoted to lying and seeming what you are not. We love when this man Ulysses comes back in disguise for his revenge. But suppose he forgot what he came back for and just sat around day in, day out in the disguise. This happens to many a frail spirit who forgets what the dis484 guises are for, doesn't understand complexity, or how to return to simplicity. From telling different things to everyone, forgets what the case is originally and what he wants himself. How rare is simple thought and pureheartedness! Even a moment of pureheartedness I bow to, down to the ground. That's why I think well of you when you tell me you're in love. I appreciate this durability, and I'm a lover myself."

God bless Mintouchian! What a good man! He really paid attention, and I returned him love for love.

"You will understand, Mr. Mintouchian, if I tell you that I have always tried to become what I am. But it's a frightening thing. Because what if what I am by nature isn't good enough?" I was close to tears as I said it to him. "I suppose I better, anyway, give in and be it.

I will never force the hand of fate to create a better Augie March, nor change the time to an age of gold."

"That's exactly right. You must take your chance on what you are.

And you can't sit still. I know this double poser, that if you make a move you may lose but if you sit still you will decay. But what will you lose? You will not invent better than God or nature or turn yourself into the man who lacks no gift or development before you make the move. This is not given to us."

"That's right, and I'm grateful to you," I said. "I owe you much for this explanation."

This took place on the fifty-eighth story of a building in midtown Manhattan, behind sliding glass doors. No use being so blase as not to mention it.

"It is better to die what you are than to live a stranger forever," he said.

After this he concentrated in silence for a while, as though he were counting drops from an invisible dropper. What were the drops of, of pure essence, or of gall?

"I think you will be interested in a matter that's bothered me the last few months." Gall. I saw that now. His large eyes grew heavy and sad.

"The reason why I told of a bracelet before," he said, "is that I have jewelry on my mind on account of a diamond ring that Mrs.

Kuttner, Agnes, lost several months ago. She said she was mugged in Central Park while walking the dog in the evening. It happens of course that people are mugged."

"But why wear a diamond ring while walking a dog?"

"That is explained by the fact that we had a date. On her throat fingermarks. Good enough evidence, huh? Also, she was found lying on a path between the Met and the children's playground. The cops took her home. Pretty convincing, isn't it?"

"It sounds absolutely--"

"She collected the insurance of five thousand dollars. And now I tell you in strict confidence that she did it all herself."

"What?"

"Choked herself unconscious. The marks on her throat she made with her own fingers."

"How could she!"

"She could."

The vision of the Vienna beauty choking herself in the night park stupefied me. "How do you know?"

"Because one of her friends is keeping the ring for her."

"But what is she trying to put over?"

"That's the whole thing. I give her all the money she needs. Plus sending a check to her husband in Cuba. So what does she want this extra swindle for?"

"Maybe it's just social-security money, like? Have you provided for her?"

"She is very managing about property. That's my best hope. Provided?

Of course. I gave her a house on the Island. But what if it isn't that? You get the pitch? She has secrets from me; she's double-lifing me."

"It might turn out to be something very ordinary, like a brother in trouble she doesn't want to tell you about. Or she's tired of just being handed money and wants to make money."

He was aware that I was trying to comfort him.

"There must be easier ways. No, what if it's to pay off somebody?

Ah, law practice makes me very suspicious. But don't you see where I'm at?" Mintouchian asked me. "With my outlook?"

Sometimes on short acquaintance you can get very closely knitted to someone. And Mintouchian and I now were.

On this particular Saturday, Stella and Agnes not showing up because of a misunderstanding about the arrangements, Mintouchian became very nervous as we waited in his office for them. Dinner hour with his wife was approaching, that was why. Finally he sent word by his chauffeur to Stella's apartment that we'd join them at half-past nine, and then took me home with him in a cab, across the park.

So I met Mrs. Mintouchian. I couldn't figure out her complaint. She was dressed in a quilted blue robe and her hair was gray. She was dignified, if not haughty; I felt her conduct like a kind of touching athletic prowess.

She gave me a very upstage reception.

"Harold, the martinis have to be mixed in the kitchen," she said to Mintouchian. So he went out, and as soon as he left she said, almost with violence, "Who are you, young man?"

"Me? I'm a client of Mr. Mintouchian. You see, I'm just about to get married."

"I don't expect you to tell me anything," she said. "I know that Harold has his secrets. I mean, he thinks he has. I really know all about him, because I think about him all the time. It isn't so hard if you spend all your time thinking about somebody. I don't have to leave this room."

I was astonished. I felt my eyes get wide.

I said, "I haven't known Mr. Mintouchian long, ma'am, but in my opinion he's a great man."

"Oh, you realize that? He is great, even if he's all too human."

It awed me that when this lion, Mintouchian, sobbed in the brakes of, he thought, most solitude, this invalid was standing listening behind him.

But then he came carrying the glasses and the conversation was finished.







CHAPTER XXV



As drugged with love as I was, why, nothing could deter me from marriage. I'm not sure whether Mintouchian was trying to do that, but if he was he didn't stand a chance, because I wasn't hospitable to suspicions. However, he acted the part of a good friend. He arranged with the catering service for the wedding lunch and bought roses and gardenias for everybody. By City Hall the air was blue, and there seemed to be trembles of music. When we came down in the elevator I remembered how more than a year before I was standing on top of County Hospital, Chicago, and reflecting how of all our famiiy, including old Grandma, Simon was the only one who had managed to stay out of an institution. But now I didn't have any more reason to envy him. Envy? Why, I thought I had it all over him, seeing I was married to a woman I loved and therefore I was advancing on the only true course of life. I told myself my brother was the kind of man who could only leave the world as he found it and hand on the fate he inherited to any children he might now have--I didn't for sure know whether he had any. Yes, this was how such people were subject to all the laws in the book, like the mountain peaks leaning toward their respective magnetic poles, or like crabs in the weeds or crystals in the caves. Whereas I, with the help of love, had gotten in on a much better thing and was giving this account of myself that reality comes from and was not just at the mercy. And here was the bride with me, her face was burning with happy excitement; she wanted what I wanted. In her time she had made mistakes, but all mistakes were now wiped out.

We came out on the steps. The doves were walking around, and Mintouchian had arranged for a photographer to be there and make a picture of the wedding party. He was very thoughtful and acted kind to everyone.

I had graduated from Sheepshead the day before and had my new 4S8 rating in my pocket. My smile was changed, because they had given me some lower teeth gratis to replace the ones I lost in Mexico. I have to confess that in addition to passionate love and the pride of the day I had a bubble in me like the air bubble of the carpenter's level. But I was shaved and combed like a movie actor and dressed in the new high-pressure uniform, which lacked only service ribbons and stars.

I would have liked some, and to have married a beauty as a hero of the service of his country. I promised myself that I would have been modest. However, you wouldn't have been able to tell how nervous I was, I think. It wasn't just because I had to ship out soon after the wedding that I was nervous, but also because Stella was bound the week after for Alaska and the Aleutians with a USO show. I didn't want her to go.

Of course I wouldn't say anything to spoil the occasion. We had pictures taken of the wedding party, which included also Agnes and Sylvester. I looked with changed eyes on Agnes since hearing of her self-strangulation. She was wearing a fine gray suit that showed off her hips, and a collar sweeping upward as if to keep you from seeing her throat.

Anyway, turkey, ham, champagne, cognac, fruit, and cake were set up on the buffet in Stella's apartment. It was very grand. Robey and Frazer had showed up in town together, and I invited them, so I was well represented. Frazer wore a major's uniform. Robey's beard was fuller and he had put on weight down in Washington. He sat by himself in a corner, clasping his knee in two hands and never saying anything. There was enough conversation without him.

After a few glasses of champagne Sylvester broke out in grins. He was a funny, melancholy guy, Sylvester. He wanted to be taken serious and straight, but gave himself away in his dark-lined grins, and the unthoughtful part of him fought its way out. In his double-breasted pinstriped business suit he sat by me. I held Stella around the waist and stroked her satin wedding dress.

"What a dish!" said Sylvester to me. "What you've fallen into! And when I think you used to work for me!"

This was when he had owned the Star Theatre on California Avenue, below that dentist who tormented Grandma. Sylvester was no kid; he was getting on. He said he was off politics now. I wanted to ask him about Mexico, but the wedding day was no time for that, so I passed the question over.

The man of the hour at this party was not myself so much as Frazer, in a way.

Frazer had just come back from the Orient. He was in the Intelligence and attached to a mission to Chungking.

He was talking to Agnes and Mintouchian about the East. I still admired Frazer a whole lot and looked up to him. He was a mighty attractive and ideal man. There was a lanky American elegance about him, in the ease of his long legs and his cropped-on-the-sides head which from chin to top showed the male molding on the strong side of haggardness; his gray eyes on the cool side of frankness. All the markings of his face were strong, with creases beginning to deepen from world pressure. And there was something else about him--as if he were in the barber's chair at the conclusion of shaving, the witch hazel drying, the fine Western shoes stuck out. He knew so much too.

Suppose that you said something about D'Alembert or Isidore of Seville, Frazer would have been ready to discuss them. You couldn't find a subject that stumped him. He was going to become an important person.

You could see how he was flying at the highest, from one peak of life to the next. And yet he looked relaxed. But the more ease and leisure he achieved the more distance and flashing there were; he talked about Thucydides or Marx and showed pictures of history-like visions.

You got shivers on the back and thrills clear into the teeth. I was real proud to have such a friend come. He gave tone to the wedding and was a great success.

But as you listened to this brilliant educational discussion it was somewhat scary too; like catching hold of high voltage.

Declarations, resolutions, treaties, theories, congresses, bones of kings, Cromwells, Loyolas, Lenins and czars, hordes of India and China, famines, huddles, massacres, sacrifices, he mentioned. Great crowds of Benares and London, Rome, he made me see; Jerusalem against Titus, Hell when Ulysses visited, Paris when they butchered horses in the street. Dead Ur and Memphis. Atoms of near silence, the dead acts, that formed a collective roar. Macedonian sentinels.

Subway moles. Mr. Kreindl shoving a cannon wheel with his buddies.

Grandma and legendary Lausch in his armor cutaway having an argument in the Odessa railroad station the day the Japanese war broke out. My parents taking a walk by the Humboldt Park lagoon the day I was conceived. Flowery springtime.

And I thought there was altogether too much of this to live with.

Better forget it, in part. The Ganges is there with its demons and lords; but you have a right also, and merely, to wash your feet and do your personal laundry in it. Or even if you had a good car it would take more than a lifetime to do a tour of all the Calvaries.

Whether I was all I might be troubled me as Frazer held forth, but much less than it would have done before my conversations with Clem about the axial lines and with Mintouchian in the Turkish bath.

It gave me great comfort that Mintouchian was here. And in the end it was marriage-day tribute--all that happened. The champagne being at an end, the white meat eaten, the two pinochle players of the cutting table opposite putting on their jackets to depart, our company bowed out too. Farewell all, and many thanks.

"Isn't my friend Frazer smart?" I said.

"Yes, but you're my darling," said Stella and kissed me. So we went "to the bridal bed.

Two days of honeymoon were all we had.

I had to ship from Boston. Stella went up on the train with me the night before. And separating of course was tough. I sent her back in the morning.

"Go, sweetheart."

"Augie, darling, good-by," she said from the platform of the train.

Some people can't bear a train departure at any time, and how crushing these departures were in the stations during the war, as the cars moved away and left throngs behind, and the oil-spotted empty tracks and the mounting, multiplying ties. "Please," she said, "be careful about everything."

"Oh, I will," I promised her. "Don't worry about that. I love you too much to go and get sunk, on my first trip out. You take care too,' out there in Alaska."

She made it sound as though it were somehow up to me, as though I could make my own safe way over the Atlantic waters of wartime.

But I knew what she was trying to say.

"Radar has licked the submarines," I told her. "It says so in the papers."

This piece of news was improvised; it did a lot of good, however, and I went on talking, so extremely salty you'd have taken me for an old sailor.

The conductor came to close the door, and I said, "Go on inside, honey, go on."

Till the last moment I saw her big eyes at the window. As she bent forward from the hips in her seat, the prettiness and grace of it was a killing thing to have to miss during months on the water.

So the train went and I was left in the crowd and felt low and bleak.

To add to it, the weather was gray and windy and the ship. the Sam 491 Mac Manus, was old. Black machinery beside it, at the wharf, grim gimmicks on it, grease, darkness, blues, the day itself housed in iron.

The ocean was waiting with grand and bitter provocations, as if it invited you to think how deep it was, how much colder than your blood or saltier, or to outguess it, to tell which were its feints or passes and which its real intentions, meaning business. It wasn't any apostlecrossed or Aeneas-stirred Mediterranean, the clement, silky, marvelous beauty-sparkle bath in which all the ancientest races were children. As we left the harbor, the North Atlantic, brute gray, heckled the ship with its strength, clanging, pushing, muttering; a hungry sizzle salted the bulkheads.

But next morning, in the sun and warmth, we were steaming south with all our might. I came on deck from an all-night bout of seasickness the Mothersills pills, even, hadn't helpedand being torn by longing and worry about Alaska.

The middle-aged ship was busting through the water so as to make you feel great depth and the air was sweet, radiant. It was pellucid.

Even the sooty Mac Manus m the flush, like a kitchen insect escaping into the garden at dawn. The bluey deck rattled underfoot with the chainlike drag of the rudder engine. A few confused resemblances: clouds or distant coast, birds or corpuscles, fled across my eyes.

I went to investigate my office and duties. Nothing much, in fact.

Druggist and bookkeeper setup, as I've already said. Green old filing cases. Lockers of same color. A swivel chair and fair light to read by.

I squared myself away for the voyage.

So there were several days of mechanical progress over the water, the horizon sea rising to grip after a cloud like a crab after a butterfly, with armored totter, then falling and travailing. Plus the sun's heat and the patriarch wake, spitting and lacy.

In my privacy I read books and wrote an endless letter chronicle to Stella which I hoped to send from Dakar, our first port, out to Alaska.

Of course there were guns and a radar ring to remind you of danger, but the time was very pleasant.

Before long the word got around that I was a listener to hard-luck stories, personal histories, gripes, and that I gave advice, and by and by I had a daily clientele, almost like a fortuneteller. By golly, I could have taken fees! Clem knew what he was talking about when he urged me to come into the advice business. Here I was doing it free of charge, and in dangerous conditions. Although all seemed tranquil enough. Of an early evening, say, red and gold, with the deep blue tense surface, the full-up ocean, and some guy came darkening between me and the light, as if to a session of spiritual guidance. I can't claim it annoyed me. It gave me a chance to learn secrets, and also to sound off on the problems of life. I was on fine terms practically with everyone. Even the union delegate, when he saw I didn't intend to be hard-nosed and difficult about the company's interests. And the Old Man--he did correspondence courses in philosophy at a bunch of universities, it was his hobby, and was forever writing out assignments--he took to me too, though he didn't approve of my leniency.

Anyway, I became ship's confidant. Though not all the confidences gave hope to the soul.

More than one guy dropped in to sound me out on a black-market proposition or fast buck on foreign soil.

One planned to become a hairdresser after the war, he told me, because then he'd have his hands on the head of every broad in Kenosha.

One who had washed out of paratroop school and still wore his Fort Benning boots told me frankly when the matter of his beneficiary came up that he had three legal wives in different parts of Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

Some wanted diagnosis, as if I were a professional head-feeler. and not the humble understudy's understudy of the cult of Asclepius the Maritime Commission had made me.

"You think I maybe have an inferiority complex, do you think?" one of them asked me.

Indeed I saw many ravages, but I never said.

Beside-itself humanity, hurrying, hurrying, with liquid eyes.

'Suppose you was the guy in a fix like this..."

"There was this certain friend of mine..."

"He said, 'You support the old man for a while and see how you like it.' "

"He ran away for a Carnie."

"Now this girl, who was a cripple in one leg, she worked in the paint lab of the stove factory."

"He was a Rumania-box type of swindler, where you put in a buck and it comes out a river."

"If he floated down the river with a hard-on he expected them to raise the bridges for him, that's how he was an egotist."

"I said, 'You listen here to me, fart-blossom, you chiseler...' "

"Though I knew she was so sweet and we had the kids, the time just came when I couldn't keep the multiplication table out of my head, and then I knew, 'Bitches is all you deserve and should be with. Let them rob you and kick you around. That's okay!' "

Lasciar le donne? Pazzo! Lasciar le donne!

"I was trying to have one night with this girl before I shipped out.

We both worked in the shipping department. But I couldn't swing it.

So for weeks I was carrying a safety in my pocket and couldn't get to use it. One time it was all set and then my wife's grandmother died.

I had to go fetch grandfather to the funeral. He couldn't understand what it was all about. We sat in the chapel where the organ played.

He said, 'Why, that's the music the old dog died to,' and made one joke after another. Then he recognized her in the coffin, and he said, excited, 'Why, there's Mother! I saw her yesterday in the A and P.

What's she doing here? Mother, why, Mother!' And then he understood and bust into tears. Oh, he cried. Me too. All of us. Me with the safety still in my pocket. What do you think? Everybody is some kind of tricker. Even me.

"Then my wife and kid took me to the station. I still hadn't made it with that girl and probably she forgot all about it and started with another guy. My little daughter said, 'Daddy, I got to take a pisst.'

She'd heard the boys talk. We had to laugh. But then, good-by. My heart weighed a ton. So long, honey. She was cryin' away by the train window, and I felt the same. And meantime that safety was in my vest pocket. I didn't throw it away."

This man's face was flat, slender, rosy, bony-nosed, gray-eyed, and his mouth was small.

I passed out advice in moderate amounts; nobody is perfect. I advocated love, especially.

Some terribly strange personalities came forward.

Griswold, for instance, one of the stewards. A former undertaker and also zoot-suiter and cat. A light Negro, extremely handsome and grand, short beard full of graceful glitters, hair rich and oiled; a bum on his cheek gleamed with Unguentine. His pants flowed voluminous and stripy down to a two-strap shoe. He smoked tea for his quiet recreation and studied grammar in a number of languages for kicks. Griswold handed me the following poem of his own writing: " How much, you ask me, do I suffer.

Now, baby, listen, I am not a good bluffer.

My ambitions and aspirations don't leave me no rest; I am born with a high mind and aim for the best.

His knee went up and down rapidly while I read this, and his eyes were dark and anxious.

If I dwell on these individual members of the crew it's in the nature of a memorial. For on the fifteenth day out, when we were off the Canaries, the Sam Mac Manus was sent down by a torpedo.

It happened while I was hearing one of these unofficial confiteors, in fact. It was night, and we must have been making twelve knots, when suddenly there came a crushing great blow on the side; we were flung down. There were bucklings and crashes and then the inside stun of an explosion. We rushed for the outer deck, fast. Already hairs of fire came up through the busted plates, and the superstructure was lighted clear by the flames. Patches of water also burned close by, and the bright water approached. Hungry yells and steam blasts, plunges; the huge rafts swooped over the side, released, and the boats crashed from the davits. We scrambled up to the boats, this guy and I, and started to wind one out. It hung caught and crooked. I shouted to him to jump in and see what was fouling. He didn't seem to get this, his eyes looking wildly at me. "Get in there!" I yelled, weirdly hoarse with the terror. Then I hopped in myself to free the boat, whereupon, the winch letting go, unbraked, the boat slammed fast and hard on the water, knocking me overboard. My thought when I went under was that the ship would suck me with it as it sank. The fear squeezed and milked the strength out of my arms and legs, but I tried to fight, hearing grunts and Orpheus pulls of string from the deep bottom, and then all the consciousness there was to me seemed a hairlash in the crushing water universe.

I came up wanting to howl but unable to; my jaws tore open only to breathe. And where was the lifeboat? Well, there were boats and rafts here and there in the water-fires. I was spitting, vomiting up sea, weeping, and straining to get distance from the flaming ship from which, in the white of the fire, men were still jumping.

I made for a boat that floated a hundred yards or so off. I labored after it in terror lest it pull away. However, I saw no oars out. I couldn't have hollered after; my voice seemed to have gone. But it only drifted, and I made it. I grabbed the painter and called to whoever might be lying inside, for I was too beat to get in. But the boat was vacant. Then the Mac Manus went down. The sudden quench of the white light was how I knew it. Fire still burned all over the surface, but the current was carrying fast. I saw a loaded raft in the torn light of flames. Then I had another go at climbing into the boat. I worked my way to the middle, where the gunwale was lower. From that position I saw a guy who held on to the stem. poor bastard. I yelled to him, thrilled, glad, but his head hung back. I frantically swam behind him to see what was wrong.

"You hurt?" I asked.

"No, bushed," he muttered.

"Come, I'll boost you over and then you give me a hand. We've got to see if we can pick up any other guys."

We had to wait until he had the strength to try. Finally I gave him a hand-stirrup, and he made it.

I waited for his assistance but it didn't come. He let me trail for I don't know how long. I hollered and cried, cursed, rocked the boat. No soap. At last I threw a leg over the side and toiled and dragged myself astride the gunwale. He was sitting on a thwart, there, hands between his knees. Furious, I drove my fist down on his sodden back. He lurched but otherwise didn't move, only turned up a pair of animal-in-theheadlights eyes. "Le' me drown, you sonofabitch? I'll bash your brains out!" I yelled. He didn't answer, only covered me with his cold eyes and his face twitched.

"Grab an oar and let's go pick up survivors," I said.

But there was only one oar to grab. The rest were gone.

There was nothing to do but sit and drift. I gazed and called over the water in case there should be someone carried out this way. But there wasn't anybody. The fires were receding and going out. I half expected the sub to surface and take stock, and I half wanted it to. It was around, all right, beating it down in the sea. What did I think-- that I'd get a chance to holler and give them a piece of my mind? No, they went away, no doubt, continuing their supper perhaps, or playing cards. And by the time night fell completely there wasn't the light of boat or raft to be seen anywhere.

I sat and waited for daylight, when I hoped there'd something show on the horizon.

Nothing showed. At dawn we were in a haze like the swelter of an old-fashioned laundry Monday, with the sun a burning copper-bottom, and through this air distortion and diffused color you couldn't see fifty yards. We sighted some wreckage but no boats. The sea was empty. I was awed by the death of those guys and the disappearance of the survivors, swept away. Down in the engine room they couldn't have had much of a chance.

Glum and bitter, I started to take stock. There were smudgepots and flares for signaling, and there was no food or water problem for the time being, since there were only two of us. But who was it that fate had billeted on me? This guy sitting on the thwart whom I had beaten last night, as far as my strength permitted, what trouble would I have with him? He was the ship's carpenter and handyman, and from one point of view I was in luck, having no manual skill or ingenuity myself.

He rigged up a kind of sail by stepping up the oar; and he claimed we couldn't be more than two hundred miles west of the Canaries, and that if we had any luck at all we'd sail right into them. He told me that every day he'd gone and looked at the charts, and so he knew exactly where we were and what the currents were doing. He figured it out with great satisfaction and self-confidence, and he seemed absolutely untroubled.

About my beating and cursing him, not a single word.

He was of broad, stocky build, carrying a judicious big ball of a head, cut close. Many of his bristles were white, but not with age; he had a dark mustache that followed the corners of his mouth calmly downward. His eyes were blue and he wore specs. A pair of bleachedat-the-knees overalls dried slowly on his wide calves.

I took a flier of imagination at his past and saw him at age ten reading Popular Mechanics.

Even as I sized him up, he did me, of course.

"You're Mr. March, the purser," he said at last. He commanded, when he wanted to, a very cultured deep voice.

"That's right," said I, surprised by the sudden viola tone.

"Basteshaw, ship's carpenter. By the way, aren't you a Chicagoan too?"

Basteshaw, after all, was a name I had heard before. "Wasn't your dad in the realestate business? Around Einhorn's, back in the twenties, there w. as a man named Basteshaw."

"He dabbled in real estate. He was in the produce business. Basteshaw the Soupngreens King."

"That's not what Commissioner Einhorn called him."

"What was that?"

It was too late now to back out, and so I said, "He nicknamed him Butcher-Paper."

Basteshaw laughed. He had broad teeth. "That's great!" he said.

Imagine! Over this trouble, solitude, danger, heartbreak of the disaster, there blows suddenly home-town familiarity, and even a faux pas about the nickname.

He didn't respect his old father. I didn't approve of that.

Respect? Why, it came out how he downright hated him. He was glad he was dead. I'm willing to believe old Basteshaw was a tyrant, a miser, a terrible man. Nevertheless he was the fellow's father.

In beauty or doom colors, according to what was in your heart, the sea and skies made their cycles of day and night, the jeweled water gadding universally, the night-glittering fury setting in. The days were sultry. We sat under the crust of the canvas, in the patch of shade.

There was scarcely any wind for the first few days, which was lucky.

I tried to master my anxious mind, which kept asking whether I'd ever see Stella again, or my mother, my brothers, Einhom, Clem. I kept the smudgepot and flares by me, dry. Our chances of being picked up were not bad in these parts. It wasn't as though we had gone down in the extreme south where there wasn't much shipping then.

As the heat fanned over you, you sometimes heard the actual salt in the water, like rustling, or like a brittle snow when it starts to melt.

Basteshaw was forever watching me through those goggles. Even during a nap he seemed to watch, his head backed off, studious, vigilant.

Cousin Anna Coblin didn't look more persistently into mirrors. There he sat, with his thick chest interposed, ponderous. He was built like a horse, this Basteshaw. As if hoofs, not hands, were on his knees. If he had hit back at me that first night there'd have been real trouble. But then we were both too weak to fight. And now he seemed to have forgotten all about it. His poise was that of a human fortress, and you could never catch him off balance. He often laughed. But while the sounds of his laughter went out into the spaces of the sea his eyes, blue and small, never lost sight of me through the goggles.

"One thing I'm glad of," he said, "is that I didn't meet my end by drowning. Not yet, anyway. I'd rather die of hunger, exposure, anything else. My dad, you see, drowned in the lake."

"Did he?" Ah, then, farewell Butcher-Paper. This was when I learned of his death.

"At Montrose Beach during his vacation. Busy men often die on their holiday, as if they had no time for it during the business week.

Relaxation kills them. He had a heart attack."

"But I thought he drowned?"

"He fell in the water and was drowned. Early in the morning. He was sitting on the pier, reading the Trib. He always got up before dawn, from years in the market. The coronary was slight and wouldn't have been fatal. It was the water in his lungs."

Basteshaw, I discovered, loved medical and all scientific conversation of any sort.

"The guards found him when they came on duty. The afternoon papers carried a story of foul play. There was a wad of money in his pocket, big thick rings on his fingers. That infuriated me. I went down to Brisbane Street to give them a piece of my mind. I thought it was scandalous. Trading on people's emotions like that. There was poor Ma, horrified. Murder? I forced them to print a retraction."

I know those small paragraphs of retraction on page thirty, in tiny print.

However, Basteshaw announced it with real pride. He put on his old man's best Borsalino hat, he told me, and he took the Cadillac out of the garage and smashed it up. He drove it into a wall on purpose. For the old man never would let him have it and kept it like a Swiss watch.

The late Butcher-Paper had had a thing about breakage. When he had a violent fit and was about to smash something, Mrs. Basteshaw would cry, "Aaron, Aaron, the drawer!" Old pie tins were kept in a kitchen drawer for him that he could fling and stamp on. No matter how enraged, he always used these pie tins, not good china.

Basteshaw laughed as he told this, but I was sad for the old man.

"The car couldn't be used in the funeral because it was in smithereens.

That made it a Viking funeral, after a fashion. After he was planted my next move"--I flinched in advance--"was to break off with my cousin Lee. The old man made me get engaged to her on the ground that I trifled with her affections. After he mixed in I never intended to marry her."

"Trifle? What did he mean?"

"That I was in the sack with her. But I swore I'd never give the old man the satisfaction."

"You might have been in love with her, old man or no old man."

He gave me a sharp glance. I didn't know what sort of person I was dealing with.

"She had pulmonary phthisis, and people like that are frequently highly stimulated. Increased temperatures often act on the erogenous zones spectacularly," said he in his lecturer's tone.

"But was she in love with you?"

"Birds with their higher temperature also lead a more intense emotional life. I see from the way you speak of love that you don't know a thing about psychology or biology. She needed me and therefore loved me. If another guy had been around she would have loved him.

Suppose I had never been born, does that mean she wouldn't have loved anyone? If the old man hadn't interfered I might have married her, but he was pro so I was contra. Besides, she was dying. So I told her I couldn't possibly marry her. Why string her along?"

Brute!

Pig!

Snake!

Murderer!

He had hastened her death. I couldn't bear the look of him for a while.

"Within a year she died. Toward the end her face was absolutely mealy, poor girl. She was quite pretty originally."

"Why don't you shut up!"

He was surprised at me. "Why, what's eating you?" he said.

"Listen, drop dead!"

He would have let me drown too, or be eaten by sharks.

Nevertheless the conversation was resumed by and by. Under the circumstances, what else?

So now Basteshaw told me about another relative, an aunt. She slept for fifteen years. And then one day suddenly arose and went about the house as if nothing had happened. "She dropped off when I was ten years old. She woke up when I was twenty-five, and she knew me right as soon as she saw me. She wasn't even surprised."

I'll bet.

"One day my uncle Mort was coming home from workthis was out in Ravenswood. You know how they build the bungalows there?

He was going around to the back, between two houses, and as he passed the bedroom he saw her hand reach out to pull the window blind. He recognized the hand by the wedding band, and he came close to filling his pants. He stumbled in, and sure enough, she had cooked supper and it was on the table. She said, 'Go wash!' "

"Incredible! Could it really happen? Why, it's a regular sleepingbeauty story. Was it sleeping sickness?"

"If she had been a beauty she wouldn't have slept so long. My own diagnosis is some form of narcolepsy. Etiology purely mental. It may account for Lazarus. For Miss Usher of the House of Usher and many others. Only my aunt's case is extremely illuminating. Deep secrets of life. Deeper than this ocean. To hold tight is the wish of every neurotic character. While she slept she ruled. In some part of her mind she knew what was going on, as evidenced by the fact that she could resume life after fifteen years with accuracy- She knew where things were, and she was not surprised by the changes. She had the power achieved by those who lie still."

I had to think of Einhom in his wheel chair, lecturing me about strength.

"While battles rage, planes fly, machinery produces, money changes hands, Eskimos hunt, kidnapers sweep the roadsthat person is safe who by lying in bed can make the world come to him, or to her. My Aunt Ettl's whole life was a preparation for this miracle."

"It's something, all right," 1 said. '

"You bet your sweet life. It's of the utmost significance too. Do you remember how the great Sherlock Holmes doped things out in his room on Baker Street? But compared to his brother Mycroft he was no place. That Mycroft! There was a brain, March! He never budged from his club, and he was a real mastermind and knew everything. So when Sherlock was stumped he came to Mycroft, who gave him the answer. You know the reason? Because Mycroft sat tighter than Sherlock.

Sitting tight is power. The king sits on his prat, and the common folks are on their feet. Pascal says people get in trouble because they can't stay in their rooms. The next poet laureate of England--I figure --prays God to teach us to sit still. You know that famous painting of the gypsy Arab traveler sleeping with his mandolin and the lion gazing on him? That doesn't mean the lion respects his repose. No, it means the Arab's immobility controls the lion. This is magic. Passivity plus power. Listen to me, March, that old Rip van Winkle conked out on purpose."

"Who took care of your aunt all that time?"

"A Polack woman--Wadjka. And let me say that after the miracle was over my uncle was in a hell of a spot. Because he had arranged his life around my sleeping aunt. She slept, and he had his card parties and his honeybunch. After she woke we all pitied him."

"As far as compassion goes," I said, "what about some for your aunt? She put in all that time, a chunk of her life like that. Like a long prison term practically."

A smile began to draw Basteshaw's mustache.

"I once was bugs on the history of art," he said. "Instead of being on the hustle in the summer, as my old man wanted, I'd slip away to the Newberry library where I'd be the only lad among eight or ten nuns at a reading table. I picked up a book by Ghiberti once, anyhow, and it made a great impression on me. He told about a German goldsmith of the Duke of Anjou who was the equal of the great sculptors of Greece. At the end of his life he had to stand by and watch his masterpieces melted down for bullion. His labor all in vain. He prayed on his knees, '0 Lord, creator of all, let me not follow after false gods.'

Then he went into a monastery, this holy man, where he cashed in his chips and checked out for good."

0 blight! That the firm world should give out at the end of life.

Blasted! But he had God to fall back on. And what if there had been no God for him? What if the truth should be even more terrible and furious?

"So what was Aunt Ettl's sickness but a work of art? And just like this poor German fellow, she had to be prepared for failure. That's what they mean by the ruins of time Or go to Rome, which is the sepulcher.

I suppose you know Shelley



Go thou to Rome at once the Paradise,

The grave, the city, and the wilderness.



So works of art aren't eternal. So beauty is perishable. Didn't this saintly German wake up many mornings inspired, with joy in his heart? What more can you ask? He couldn't be both happy and sure of being right for eternity. You have to take your chance that being happy is also being right."

I was with him there; I nodded with answering intelligence. I had a better opinion of him. There was something to him, after all. He had some nobility of heart and was a good guy in some mysterious respects.

Though what a mixture!

Meanwhile the boat sauntered through glassy stabs of light and wheewhocked on the steep drink.

And then I had to bring to mind how many times, thinking myself right, I had been wrong.

And wrong again.

And wrong again.

And again.

And how long would I be right now?

But I had great confidence in my love of Stella and her love of me.

And then again, perhaps all matters of right and wrong would finish soon, as we might not survive.

Points and crosses of diamond dazzled from the slopey blue ever-full waters. Fish and monsters did their business within. Some of our drowned were near, maybe, and passed beneath us.

Now he talked of his aunt Etti as an artist and sounded pompous.

Here it wasn't so many days ago that he was scarcely able to fiddle his legs, and shrunk down to nothing with fright, and now look at him, astride his mental powers, sweating and round-headed, sitting there so sturdy.

"Why does an educated fellow like you ship out as carpenter?" I said, asking the question that had puzzled me for some time.

And then it came out that he was a biologist or biochemist; or psycho-biophysicist, which he liked best of all. Six universities had canned him for his strange ideas and refused to look at his experimental results. With all this scientific training he wasn't going to be an infantry man. So he shipped, and this was his fifth voyage. At sea he could keep up his scientific work.

Why did I always have to fall among theoreticians!

He started in to tell me of this work of his, beginning with a survey of his life.

"You know how there are things every child wants to be. For instance, when I was twelve I was very fast on the ice and could have become a skating champion. But I lost interest. Then I became a stamp expert. I lost interest in that too. Next a socialist, and that didn't last. I took up the bassoon and I quit. So I went through a large number of interests and nothing suited me. Then when I was in college I caught an extreme desire to be--or to have been--a Renaissance cardinal.

That was the one thing I'd have loved. A wicked one, smoking with life, neighing and plunging. Yeah, boy! I'd put my mother in a nunnery.

I'd keep my father in a gunny sack. I'd commission Michelangelo to go beyond the Farnese and the Strozzi. Spontaneous, I'd have been. Vigorous.

Without embarrassment. Happy as a god. Ah, well, what can you do, impose your ideas on life? Everybody wants to be the most desirable kind of man.

"And how does it start? Well, go back to when I was a kid in the municipal swimming pool. A thousand naked little bastards screaming, punching, pushing, kicking. The lifeguards whistle and holler and punish you, the cops on duty squash you in the ribs with their thumbs and call you snot-nose. Shivery little rat. Lips blue, blood thin, scared, your little balls tight, your little thing shriveled. Skinny you. The shoving multitude bears down, and you're nothing, a meaningless name, and not just obscure in eternity but right now. The fate of the meanest your fate. Death! But no, there must be some distinction. The soul cries out against this namelessness. And then it exaggerates. It tells you, 'You were meant to astonish the world. You, Hymie Basteshaw, Stupor mundi! My boy, brace up. You have been called, and you will be chosen. So start looking the part. The generations of man will venerate you as long as calendars exist!' This is neurotic, I know--excuse the jargon--but to be not neurotic is to adjust to what they call the reality situation. But the reality situation is what I have described. A billion souls boiling with anger at a doom of insignificance. Reality is also these private hopes the imagination invents. Hopes, the indispensable evils of Pandora's Box. Assurance of a fate worth suffering for. In other words, desiring to be cast in the mold of true manhood. But who is cast in this mold? Nobody knows.

'I did my best to be as much of a Renaissance cardinal as one can under modem conditions.

"After much effort to live up to a glorious standard there came fatigue, wan hope, and boredom. I experienced extreme boredom. I saw others experiencing it too, many denying, by the way, that any such thing existed. And finally I decided that I would make boredom my subject matter. That I'd study it. That I'd become the world's leading authority on it. March, that was a red-letter day for humanity. What a field! What a domain! Titanic! Promethean! I trembled before it. I was inspired. I couldn't sleep. Ideas came in the night and I wrote them down, volumes of them. Strange that no one had gone after this systematically.

Oh, melancholy, yes, but not modern boredom.

"I did a fair amount of research in literature and among modem thinkers. The first conclusions were obvious. Boredom starts with useless effort. You have shortcomings and aren't what you should be?

Boredom is the conviction that you can't change. You begin to worry about loss of variety in your character and the uncomplimentary comparison with others in your secret mind, and this makes you feel your own tiresomeness. On your social side boredom is a manifestation of the power of society. The stronger society is, the more it expects you to hold yourself in readiness to perform your social duties, the greater your availability, the smaller your significance. On Monday you" are justifying yourself by your work. But on Sunday, how are you justified?

Hideous Sunday, enemy of humanity. Sunday you're on your own-- free. Free for what? Free to discover what's in your heart, what you feel toward your wife, children, friends, and pastimes. The spirit of man, enslaved, sobs in the silence of boredom, the bitter antagonist.

Boredom therefore can arise from the cessation of habitual functions, even though these may be boring too. It is also the shriek of unused capacities, the doom of serving no great end or design, or contributing to no master force. The obedience that is not willingly given because nobody knows how to request it. The harmony that is not accomplished.

This lies behind boredom. But you see the endless vistas."

Did I! I was stupefied. I watched him climb around like an alpinist of the mountains of his own brain, sturdy, and with his calm goggles and his blue glances of certitude.

"And I wanted to approach it scientifically," he went on. "So my first project was to study the physiology of boredom. I looked into the muscular fatigue experiments of Jacobson and others and that led me into biochemistry. I knocked out my M. A. in record time, I may add, in cell chemistry. Keeping rat tissues alive in vitro, after Harrison and the technique improved by Carrel. This drew me on to von Wettstein, Leo Loeb, and so forth. How come the simple cells wish for immortality whereas the complex organisms get bored? The cells have the will to persist in their essence..."

There ensued certain descriptions which I don't command the physical chemistry to repeat, the kinesis of enzymes and so forth. But the upshot of this was, that as he investigated the irritability of protoplasm he discovered some of the secrets of life. "I'm sure you'll find it hard to believe what happened next. Nobody else has believed it."

"You didn't create life!"

"In all humility, that's exactly what I did. Six universities have thrown me out for claiming it."

"Why, it's crazy! Are you sure that's what you did?"

He said stiffly, "I'm a serious person. My whole existence has been intensely serious. I don't intend to jeopardize my own sanity by making wild claims. I get the same results time after time--protoplasm."

"You must be a genius."

He didn't offer to deny this.

He'd better be one. If he wasn't a genius I was in this boat with a maniac.

"I stumbled on this," he said. "I am not God." '

"But couldn't they see you had done it?"

"I couldn't get them to. And then the first cells I made lacked two essential powers, the regenerative and the reproductive, and were sterile and fragile forms. But in the last two years I've made a special study of biological organizers. I've been in embryology, and I've made some further discoveries."

He had to take a swig of water, for he had talked himself onto dry spittle. Huge-headed, huge-chested, stalwart, calm, he was like an enormous case of the finest capacities. Like one of those Egyptian mummy cases that follow the outlines of the bodies they enclose. And also his resemblance to a horse continued very strong.

"But still you haven't explained what a man of your ability was doing as ship's carpenter on the Mac Manus."

"Continuing my experiments."

"You mean there was some of that protoplasm aboard?"

"As a matter of fact, there was."

"And it's floating in the ocean now?"

"I'm sure it is." k 505 "And what's going to happen?"

"I don't know. It's one of my later forms, a great advance over that earlier, perishable form."

"What if a new chain of evolution begins?"

"Exactly. What if?"

"Something terrible maybe. Damn you guys, you don't care how you fiddle with nature!" I said, feeling extremely angry. "Somebody is going to burn up the atmosphere one day or kill us all with a gas."

He conceded that it was not impossible.

"Why should one man have the power to damage all nature or pollute the entire world?" I asked him.

"I don't think there's much chance of that," he said. And then he wouldn't continue the conversation but fell into fascinated thought.

Often Basteshaw seemed to be thinking over my head, and he would be in a strange humor in which you could see him make an observation, both grim and amusing to himself. It made me wonder what he was up to. And for long spells, though he patrolled me still from the side of his eyes and knew my every move, he sometimes sat as heavy as a piece of foundry brass. I became very uneasy.

A couple of days went by and not a single remark was spoken. This was a strange thing, first to be overwhelmed with talk and then to be utterly isolated. Speak of boredom! Why, I'began to feel as stiff as the boat itself. But I took some of the blame for this. I said to myself, "You have only this one person, one soul to deal with here--what's the matter, can't you do better? It's enough like yours, this soul, as one lion is pretty nearly all the lions, and there are just the two here, and some of the last things of all could be said. You're not doing so good, if you want to know the truth."

I had a very strange dream on the boat's bottom that night, which was this, that a flatfooted, in gym shoes, pug-nosed old woman panhandled me. I laughed at her. "Why, you old guzzler, I can hear the beer cans clinking in your shopping bag!"

"No, them ain't beer cans," she said, "it's my window-washer stuff, my squeegee and Bon Ami and such, and for the love of God, must I wash my forty-fifty windows every day of my life? Give us something, won't you?"

"Okay, okay,"

I said, me the bighearted, grinning. Among other things it made me feel good to see the West Side of Chicago again. I put my hand in my pocket, and I meant to give her only chickenfeed. Being not downright stingy, but a little close on some days, to tell the truth. But to my own surprise, instead of giving her the price of a beer I gave her one coin of each kind--half a buck, a quarter, a dime, a jitney, and a penny.

All these were lined up in my palm, ninety-one cents, and I dropped them in her hand. The same instant I was sorry, for it was far too much.

But then I began to feel clean proud of myself. And Ugly Face, she thanked me; she was almost like a dwarf, with a wide behind. "Well, there's a few windows free," I said. "I haven't got one I can call my own."

"Come," said she warmly, "and let me treat you to a beer."

"No, thanks, mother, I've got to go. Thanks all the same." I felt kindness in the depth of my breast. In kindness, I touched her on the crown of her old head and a great thrill passed through me from it. "Why, old woman," I said, "you've got the hair of an angel!"

"Why shouldn't I have," she said gently, "like other daughters of men?"

My bosom was full of stormy surprises and dark bursts of happiness.

"God send you truth," said the window-washer dwarf. She went toward the shadow and the cool of the beer cavern.

I gave a long sigh and unwillingly woke. The stars were restless and fevery. Basteshaw was asleep in a sitting position, transversely.

I regretted he wasn't awake so I could immediately start to talk to him.

But instead of bosom fraternity, what took place next day was a battle.

Basteshaw claimed we must be close to land; he said he had seen land birds and also seaweed and floating branches. I didn't believe him.

Also, the color of the water was changing, he said, and was a yellower green. It didn't seem so to me. He pulled his scientific authority on me.

'Because, he said, after all, he was a scientist; he had seen the charts and studied the currents and made the calculations and watched all the signs, so there couldn't be any two ways about it. But the reason I resisted believing him was that I was afraid to encourage my joy and increase the heaviness of the opposite if he should be wrong.

However, the trouble didn't start until I thought I saw a ship on the west horizon. I began to shout and leap and wave my shirt. I was frantic. And then I rushed to put a smudgepot into the water. I had taken good care of the signaling equipment and had read the instructions for using it fifty times if I'd read them once. So now with sweaty hands and anxiety-crippled fingers I started to get the pot ready.

Then Basteshaw, with that calm of voice that was his specialty and made me doubt I heard right, said, "What do you want to make signals for?"

Damn! The guy didn't want to be saved! He wanted to pass up a chance of rescue!

I turned my back on him and lowered the pot on the water. The black E smoke began to rise against the pure color of the air. I went on flagging my shirt. I could almost feel Stella's arms slip round my waist and her face touch my shoulder. And meantime my heart filled with black murder at this lunatic Basteshaw, who sat in the stem with crossed arms. It was maddening to see him.

But now there wasn't anything on the horizon, and I had to think my imagination had pulled a stunt on me. I was deeply graveled and felt my fatigue and weakness for the first tune; with just that clong of hope departing that I had been afraid of, and sunken darkness.

"I'm sorry to tell you you were hallucinated," he said, while I was covered with weak sweat., "Why, you blind bastard, there is a ship out there, just over the horizon!"

"My vision is corrected to twenty-twenty," he said. It was just that kind of pedantry that made me hate him wildly.

"You damn four-eyed fool, what makes you want to croak out here?

Do you think you have a built-in compass? Maybe you believe you can navigate, but don't expect me to have the same sublime confidence. I'm not passing up any chances."

"Now take it easy. Nobody's going to croak. I had a careful look at the course a few hours before we went down and I know we're close to land. We must be, we've been going due east. We're going to land on Spanish territory and be interned. Don't you be a damn fool. Haven't you had enough war yet? But for dumb luck you'd have been burned alive or become shark food. Now," he said, getting severe, "listen attentively.

I don't like to chew my cabbage twice. I've been figuring this, and I believe luck is on our side. I'm going to land in the Canaries and be interned. For the rest of the war I'll just stay there and do my research.

Which they wouldn't exempt me for at home though I went to Washington with an appeal. Now. I have plenty of money in the States; my old man left me close to a hundred grand and we can work here.

I'll teach you. You're a pretty smart fellow, though you have all kinds of cockeyed ideas about yourself. In a year you'll know more than a Ph. D. in biochemistry. Think of the opportunity you've fallen into. To understand the birth of life and be in on the profoundest secrets. Wiser than the Sphinx. You'll gaze on the riddle of the universe with comprehension!"

He went on with his oratory. I was frightened and awed. Not just by the storming of his mind, great as that was, but by the appearance once more of the sign of the recruit under which I had been born.

"I say to you this is a great chance for you, not simply to rise to eminence, not just to give your intellectual powers the very highest development, but to assist in making a historic contribution to the happiness of mankind. These experiments with cells, March, will give the clue to the origin of boredom in the higher organisms. To what used to be called the sin of acedia. The old fellows were right, for it is a sin. Blindness to life, secession, unreceptivity, a dull wall of anxious, overprotected flesh, ignorant of the subtlety of God or Nature and unfeeling toward its beauty. March, when liberated from this boredom, every man will be a poet and every woman a saint. Love will fill the world. Injustice will go, and slavery, bloodshed, cruelty. They will belong to the past, and, seeing all these horrors of past times, all mankind will sit down and weep at the memory of them, the memory of blood and the horrible life of monads, at misunderstanding and murderous rages and carnage of innocents. The breasts and bowels will melt at this vision of the past. And then a new brotherhood of man will begin. The prisons and madhouses will be museums. Like the pyramids and the ruins of Maya, they will commemorate an erroneous development of human genius. Real freedom will manifest itself, not based on politics and revolutions, which never gave it anyhow, because it's not a gift but a possession of the man who is not bored. March, this is what my experiments are leading toward. I am going to create a serum --a serum like a new River Jordan. With respect to which I will be a Moses. And you Joshua. To lead an Israel consisting of the entire human race across it. And this is why I don't want to go back to the States."

I was wrought up, choked. The very air that passed over me was as if from the mouth of prophecy. Meantime the pot went on diffusing smoke. He was watching it like an enemy.

"I'm not passing up any chance to be saved. I don't want to be interned. I've just gotten married. So even if I was sure you knew what you were talking about I'd still say no."

"You think I don't know what I'm talking about?"

I should have been more tactful. He saw that that was exactly what I thought.

"I'm offering you a great course of life," he said. "Worth taking a risk for."

"I already have a course of life."

"Indeed?" he said.

"Yes, and I'm dead against doing things to the entire human race.

I don't want any more done to me, and I don't want to tamper with anyone else. No one will be a poet or saint because you fool with him.

When you come right down to it, I've had trouble enough becoming what I already am, by nature. I don't want to go to the Canaries with you. I need my wife."

He sat with his big arms crossed and his face devoid of expression while the smudgepot sent silky, oily curls into the sea freshness of morning.

The early red was still on the water from the east fringe of the sky .1 kept glancing toward the horizon.

"I assure you I don't think your answer is frivolous," he said. "I think it is sincere, but it is minor. Life has a much greater scale. I'm sure you will agree with me later on, after we have worked and discussed, in the islands. Which I understand are charming."

"We may be passing a hundred miles to the north or the south and never see those islands at all," I said. "You want to put it over on me that you're such a great scientist you can steer by the power of your brain. Well, go ahead, but I'm getting rescued if I can."

"It is my conviction that we may see land at any time," he said. "So why don't you extinguish that smudge?"

"No, I won't!" I shouted. "No, and that's final!" The fellow was really out of his mind. But even then, in anger, I thought, what if he really was a genius too, and I was lacking in faith.

He said quietly, "Okay."

I turned to give my full attention to the horizon, when suddenly a heavy blow descended on me and knocked me flat. He had clobbered me with the oar. He was getting ready to hit me again, with the loom this time, having hit me with the blade before. That Moses, Savior and Messiah! He raised up on his heavy legs. More of a look of a task to be done than lust was on his face. I tried to roll away from this blow and I yelled, "For Chrissake, don't kill me!"

Then I made a rush for him, and the minute I got my hands on him I felt I'd kill him if I could, that much rage was in me. I wanted to strangle him. He dropped the oar and gripped me round the ribs. The way he grabbed me I couldn't use my arms. I butted and kicked while he put on more pressure, till I couldn't breathe.

He was a maniac.

And a murderer.

Two demented land creatures struggling on the vast water, head to head, putting out all the strength they had. I would certainly have killed him then if I'd been able. But he was the stronger man. He threw his immense weight on me, he was heavy as brass, and I fell over a thwart with my face on the cleats of the bottom.

I made ready for the end.

The powers of the universe should take me back as they had sent me forth.

Death!

But he didn't mean to murder me. He was tearing my clothes off and binding me with them. He twisted the shirt into bonds for my wrists. My pants he tied my legs with. Then he tore off my skivvies to wipe the blood from my face and the sweat from his. He yanked the painter off and reinforced my bonds.

Then he doused the smudgepot, and he stepped up the oar again with its piece of canvas and sat looking eastward for the shore he was so sure of while I lay naked and gasping, still on my side as he had left me.

Later he picked me up and set me down under the tarpaulin because the sun was burning on me. When he laid hands on me I flinched and heaved. "Anything busted?" he said, doctorlike, and felt my person, my ribs and shoulders. I cursed him till my throat was raw.

When it came time to eat he fed me; and he said, "Better let me know when you have to go to bathroom, otherwise there'll be a problem."

I said, "If you untie me, I give my word of honor I won't send any signals."

"I can't take chances with you," he said. "This is too important."

Once in a while he'd chafe the arms and legs to help my circulation.

I begged him now. I said, "I'll get gangrene."

But no, he told me; I had made my choice. Besides, he said, we'd hit those happy isles soon. Late in the afternoon he declared he could smell the land breeze. He also said, "It's getting hotter," and took to shading his eyes. And when evening came on he stretched out. He did it with heaviness, and, while I watched and wished him the worst, stretched out those doughty big legs and that bowl of tireless contemplations from which the instructions had come to lam me and leave me tied for the night, and which might direct him to do worse yet.

The moon shone, a damp fell, and the boat crept; it scarcely budged on the water. I wore out my wrists trying to pull free, and then I thought that if I could crawl that far I might find a corner of the metal locker on which I could saw myself free. I turned on my back and began to work toward it, using my heels. Basteshaw didn't wake. He lay like that great painted mummy case, his feet cocked out and his head like stone.

He had made a big welt on my back, and this I scraped as I crawled, and I had to stop and take it out on my lip with my teeth. It didn't seem any use. Terrible deep sorrow came on me, and I wept to myself.

So as not to wake him.

It took me half the night to reach the locker and work my hands loose. But finally the shirt tore off and I flaked away at the painter, soaking it to make it expand. At last it came off. I crouched there and licked my raw wrists. My back was flaming from the beating it had taken, but there was one cool place in my body, which was where I kept murder in my heart toward Basteshaw. I crept over to him; I didn't stand up because he might wake and see me standing in the moonlight. I had my choice now of pushing him in the water, of strangling him, of beating him with the oar as he had done me, of breaking his bones and seeing his blood.

I decided as the first step to tie him and take off his goggles. Then we'd see.

Well, as I stood poised over him on my toes, full of revenge, holding the painter, I felt heat rising off him. I lightly touched his cheek. The guy was burning up with fever. I listened to his heart. Some kind of gunnery seemed to be going on there, hollow and terrible.

I was gypped of revenge. For as a matter of course I took care of him. I cut a hole in a piece of canvas to make myself a poncho, my other clothes being ripped to tatters, and I sat up with him all night.

Like Henry Ware of the Kentucky border and the great chief of the Ohio, Timmendiquas. He might have stabbed Timmendiquas but he let him go.

I felt sorrow and pity for him too. I realized how much he was barren of, or trying to be barren of in order to become the man of his ideas.

Didn't he, even if mainly from his head rather than from his heart, want to bring about redemption and rescue the whole brotherhood of man from suffering?

He was off his rocker all the next day. It would have been the end of him if I hadn't sighted and signaled a British tanker late that day. It would have been the end of me too, for it turned out that we were way past the Canaries and somewhere off the Rio de Oro. This scientist Basteshaw! Why, he was cuckoo! Why, we'd both have rotted in that African sea, and the boat would have rotted, and there would have been nothing but death and mad ideas to the last. Or he'd have murdered and eaten me, still calm and utterly reasonable, and gone on steering to his goal.

Anyway, they dragged us aboard, both in a bad way. Naples was the first port this Limey ship made. There the authorities stuck us in a hospital. And it was a few weeks before I was afoot again, and I met Basteshaw in the corridor in a bathrobe, coming along slowly. He seemed himself again, confident and proud-headed. But he was de512 cidedly cool to me. I could see he was blaming me for frustrating his great plan. Now he'd have to ship again. No Canaries. His research, so essential to human survival itself--that was no small thing to postpone.

"Do you realize," I said, driving it home, still indignant at what might have happened, "that you missed, you great navigator? I might never have seen my wife again if I had listened to you."

He heard me out and meanwhile took my measure. He said, "The power of an individual to act through his intellect on the reason of mankind is smaller now than ever."

"Go ahead! Save mankind!" I said. "But don't forget if you had your way you'd be dead now."

He wouldn't talk to me after that, and I didn't care. We snubbed each other in the corridor. All I thought about was Stella anyhow.

It was six months before I saw New York again, for they found ona reason after another to detain me at the hospital.

So it was a night in September when the taxi let me off at Stella's door, which now also was mine, and she came running down the stairs to me.







CHAPTER XXVI





If I could have come back and started to lead a happy, peaceful life I think very few people would have the right to complain that I wasn't ready yet or hadn't paid the admission price that's set by whoever sets prices. Guys like the broken-down Cossack of the Mexican mountains and other spokesmen would at least have to agree that I had a breather coming. Nevertheless I have had almost none. It probably is too much to ask.

I said when I started to make the record that I would be plain and heed the knocks as they came, and also that a man's character was his fate. Well, then it is obvious that this fate, or what he settles for, is also his character. And since I never have had any place of rest, it should follow that I have trouble being still, and furthermore my hope is based upon getting to be still so that the axial lines can be found. When striving stops, the truth comes as a gift--bounty, harmony, love, and so forth. Maybe I can't take these very things I want.

Once I said to Mintouchian when we were discussing this, "Wherever I stay it has always been on somebody's hospitality. First on old Grandma--it was really her house. Then those people in Evanston, the Renlings, then this Casa Descuitada in Mexico, and with Mr. Paslavitch the Yugoslavian."

"Some people,. if they didn't make it hard for themselves, might fall asleep," said Mintouchian. "Even the Son of Man made it hard so He would have enough in common with our race to be its God."

"I had this idea of an academy foster-home or something like that."

"It could never work. Excuse me, but it's a ridiculous idea. Of course some ridiculous ideas do work, but yours wouldn't, having so many children to take care of. You're not the type, and Stella even less."

"Oh, I know it was a goofy idea that I should educate children. Who am I to educate anybody? It wasn't so much education as love. That was the idea. What I wanted was to have somebody living with me for a change, instead of the other way around."

I always denied that I was the only creature of my kind. But how seldom two imaginations coincide! That's because they are ambitious imaginations, both. If they meant to be satisfied, then they would coincide.

I saw one thing and Stella another when we thought about matters like this academy and foster-home. What I had in my mind was this private green place like one of those Walden or Innisfree wattle jobs under the kind sun, surrounded by velvet woods and bright gardens and Elysium lawns sown with Lincoln Park grass seed. However, we are meant to be carried away by the complex and hear the simple like the far horn of Roland when he and Oliver are being wiped out by the Saracens. I told Stella I was keen about beekeeping. Hell, I thought, I had got along with an eagle, why not get along, with different winged creatures and there be honey instead? So she bought me a book on beekeeping and I took it out with me on my second voyage. But I already knew what she thought the academy would look like: a beatenup frame house of dead-drunk jerry-builders under dusty laborious trees, laundry boiling in the yard, pinched chickens of misfortune, rioting kids, my blind mother wearing my old shoes and George cobblering, me with a crate of bees in the woods.

At first Stella said it was a lovely idea, but what else was she going to say in the emotions of reunion when I told her how the ship went down, and the rest. She cried, holding on to me, and her tears fell on my chest, almost spurted. "Oh, Augie," she said, "the things that happen to you! Poor Augie!" We were in bed. I saw her round smooth back by the Italian mirror, a big circular one that hung over the mantel.

"Well, to hell with this war and falling in the water and all of that," I said. "I want to get this place where we can have a settled life."

"Oh yes," she said. But at that time what else could she say?

However, I didn't have the least idea of how to go about it. And of course it was only one of those bubble-headed dreams of people who haven't yet realized what they're like nor what they're intended for.

Pretty soon I understood that I would mostly do as she wanted because it was I who loved her most. What it was that she wanted wasn't clear for a time. You see, there was all the immense giubbilo of homecoming and being saved from the sea and this Basteshaw, a romantic survivor and escapee; it was appropriate there should be cries of Thanksgiving as if written down by Franz Joseph Haydn and sung by the Schola Cantorum, and so on. And after all Stella did love me, and we had a honeymoon still to catch up on. So if sometimes I saw she was preoccupied I considered that probably her preoccupations were with me. That was the intelligent thing to consider. Yet it wasn't really I who absorbed her most. What do you think it is, to drag people from their preoccupations, where they do their habitual toil! At first you wouldn't think anything in such a connection with a woman who looks as she does, with those endowments, not light but solid, her body rising toward a delicate head with feathery dark bangs. Around some people the space is their space, and when you want to approach them it has to be across their territory so that how you are to behave to them is mainly under their control, and then it is always astonishing to learn that they suffer, and perhaps worse than others, from their predominant ideas. Now my foster-home and academy dream was not a preoccupation but one of those featherhead millenarian notions or summer butterflies.

You should never try to cook such butterflies in lard. So to speak.

Other preoccupations are my fate, or what fills life and thought. Among them, preoccupation with Stella, so that what happens to her happens, by necessity, to me too.

Guys may very likely think. Why hell! What's this talk about fates? and will feel it all comes to me from another day, and a mistaken day, when there were fewer people in the world and there was more room between them so that they grew not like wild grass but like trees in a park, well set apart and developing year by year in the rosy light.

Now instead of such comparison you think. Let's see it instead not even as the grass but as a band of particles, a universal shawl of them, and these particles may have functions but certainly lack fates. And there's even an attitude of mind which finds k almost disgusting to be a person and not a function. Nevertheless I stand by my idea of a fate. For which a function is a substitution of a deeper despair.

Not long ago I was in Florence, Italy. Stella and I-are in Europe now and have been since the end of the war. She wanted to come for professional reasons, and I'm in a kind of business I'll soon tell about. Anyway, I was in Florence; I travel all over; a few days before I had been in Sicily where it was warm. Here it was freezing when I arrived; when I came out of the station the mountain stars were barking. The wind called the Tramontana was pouring in. In the morning when I woke, in the Hotel Porta Rossa, just behind the Amo, I felt cold. The maid brought coffee, which warmed me some. Some light shell of old metal in a church tower rung in the swift glossy rush of the free-sight mountain air. I washed with hot water, splashing the wooden floor. It was a comfort on an icy day to go out in a rubbed body, wrapped in a warm coat.

I asked the clerk, "What's a good thing to see that I can go out and see in an hour? I have an appointment at noon."

I knew this was a very American question, but it happened to be the truth.

I won't conceal what the appointment was about. I was acting for Mintouchian in a piece of business and had to contact a man who was arranging to obtain an Italian import license for us so we could unload Army surplus goods bought cheap in Germany. Vitamin pills especially, and other pharmaceutical goods. Mintouchian knew all about this type of speculation and we were making a lot of dough. There was this Florentine uncle of a Rome bigshot I had to pay off, and he was one of these civilized personalities with about five motives to my one.

However, I have got the hang of dealing with them by now, and when in doubt I talk to Mintouchian on the transatlantic phone and he tells me what to do.

The clerk at the Porta Rossa said, "You can see the gold doors of the Baptistery with the sculptures of Ghiberti."

I recollected that that lunatic Basteshaw had spoken of this Ghiberti and so I followed the man's directions to the Piazza del Duomo.

Horses were shivering from the cutting wind. Down the cold alleys flames tore from the salamander cans of the people selling chestnuts far in the stone angles of walls and cobblestones.

There were not many people by the Baptistery, due to this cold, only a few huddlers with teary eyes who offered souvenirs for sale and were flapping packs of postcards hinged together. I went and looked into the gold panels telling the entire history of humankind. As I stared and these gold heads of our supposedly common fathers and mothers burned in the sun while they told once and for all what they were, an-, old lady came up to explain what they represented, and she began to tell me the story of Joseph, of Jacob wrestling with the Angel, about the flight from Egypt and about the Twelve Apostles. She got everything balled up, for they're not well up on the Bible in Latin countries. And I wanted to be let alone and moved away, but she followed. She carried a stick down which her pocketbook was sliding by the handle and she wore a veil. At last I looked at her face beneath the veil, this aged face of a great lady covered by mange spots and with tarry blemishes on her lips. The fur of her coat was used up and the bald hide broken and crustlike. What she had to say to me was, "Now I'll tell you about these gates. You're an American, aren't you? I'll help you, because you'll never understand things like these without help. I knew many Americans during the war."

"You're not an Italian, are you?" I said. She had a German sort of accent.

"I'm a Piedmontese," she answered., "Many people tell me I don't speak English like an Italian. I'm not a Nazi, if that's what you're driving at. I'd tell you my name if you knew something about distinguished names, but you probably don't, so why should I pronounce it?"

"You're absolutely right. You shouldn't have to tell strangers your name."

I walked on, with my face stung by the Tramontana, and applied myself again to the sculptures of the gate.

She was after me again on her sprawl feet, but quick.

"I don't want a guide," I said, and I took some dough out of my pocket and gave her a hundred lire.

"What is this?" she said.

"What do you mean? It's money."

"What are you giving me? Do you know I have to stay in a convent in the mountains with the nuns and that they put me in a room with fourteen other women? All sorts of women? I have to sleep with fourteen other people. And I have to walk into the city because the Sisters won't give us the bus fare."

"Do they want you to stay up there?"

"The nuns are not very intelligent," she said. She wasn't able to stay up there and do dull tasks and escaped into town. She was full of rebellion.

But her bones were showing through, her teeth were mixed up, her veil didn't quite hide the quavery hairs of her chin and mouth, this unfunny joke on former lady smoothness.; i I wanted to look at the doors and thought, Why can't they let you alone in this country?

"This is Isaac going to his own sacrifice," she said.

I looked, and doubted if that could be right. I said to her, "I don't want a guide. I understand how it is, but what do you want me to do?

People are coming up to me all the time. So why don't you please take this money and--" I was beginning to be in pain over it.

"People! But I am not other people. You should realize that. I am--" and she was voice-stopped, she was so angry. "This is happening to me!" she said. She seemed to crowd her heart with her elbow and came up close and started it again, that queer begging and demanding.

0 destroying laws!

What was the matter, hadn't this thing taken long enough, wasn't it OF AUGt E MARCH gradual enough? I mean, the wrinkles coming, the gray choking out the black, the skin slackening and sinews getting stringy? Did she still have fresh in her mind the villa she had lost, the husband or lovers, the children, the carpets and piano, the servants and money? What was the matter that she still was as if in the first pain of a deep fall?

I gave her another hundred lire.

"Give me five hundred and I'll show you the cathedral and I'll take you to Santa Maria Novella. It's not far, and you won't know anything if someone doesn't tell you."

"As a matter of fact, I have to meet a man right away on business.

Thanks just the same."

I took off. I might as well have, since Ghiberti didn't have much of a spell over me anyhow just then.

This ancient lady was right too, and there always is a me it happens to. Death is going to take the boundaries away from us, that we should no more be persons. That's what death is about. When that is what life also wants to be about, how can you feel except rebellious?

Yes, Europe is where Stella and I went after I made three other voyages in the war.

I have written out these memoirs of mine since, as a traveling man, traveling by myself, I have lots of time on my hands. For a couple of months last year I had to be in Rome. It was summer, and the place broke out in red flowers, hot and sleepy. All the southern cities are sleep cities in summer, and daytime sleep makes me heavy and tasteless to myself. To wake up in the afternoon I would drink coffee and smoke cigars, and by the time I came to myself after the siesta it was wellnigh evening. You have dinner, and it's soft nerveless green night with quiet gas mantles in the street going on incandescent and making a long throbbing scratch in the utter night. Time to sleep again, so you go and subside thickly on the bed.

Therefore I got into the habit of going every afternoon to the Cafe Valadier in the Borghese Gardens on top of the Pincio, with the whole cumulous Rome underneath, where I sat at a table and declared that I was an American, Chicago born, and all these other events and notions.

Said not in order to be so highly significant but probably because human beings have the power to say and ought to employ it at the proper time. When finally you're done speaking you're dumb forever after, and when you're through stirring you go still, but this is no reason to decline to speak and stir or to be what you are.

I try most of the time to be in Paris because that's where Stella works.

She's with a film company that does international movies. We have an apartment on Rue Francois I", a pretty fancy section near the Hotel Georges V. It's the ornamental and luxury quarter, but the joint Stella and I rented was terrible. It belonged to an old Britisher and his French wife. They took off for Mentone to live off the high rent they soaked us, and here all winter the rain and fog never let up. I'd pass days trying to get used to this moldy though fancied-up apartment, somewhat obstinate, seeing that it was now my place. But there was no getting anywhere with the carpets and chairs, the lamps that looked as if grown on Coney Island, cat-house pictures, alabaster owls with electric eyes, books of Ouida and Marie Corelli in leather binding, smelling like spit.

The old crook of a Britisher who was the locataire had something he called a study, which was a sort of closet with a nasty piece of carpet, a set of Larousse's encyclopedia from way back, and a green table.

The drawers of this green felt table were full of pieces of paper covered with figures on conversion of pounds and francs, dollars, pesetas, schillings, marks, escudos, piasters, and even rubles. This old man, Ryehurst, practically dead, sat here in a suit like for burial, purple flannel without lapels or buttons or buttonholes, and he calculated about money and wrote letters to the papers on the Fall of France and how to get the peasants' gold out of hiding, or which passes to Italy were the best for motorists. In his youth he had broken the speed record from Turin to London. There was a photo of him in his racer. A little Irish terrier sat in the cockpit with him.

The front rooms were bad enough, but the dining room was too much for me. Stella would leave early to be on the lot, and even though there was a bonne a tout faire to fix my breakfast I couldn't always bring myself to sit down at the yellow red-embroidered Turkestan cloth for my coffee.

So I would go out to a little cafe for breakfast, and here one day I ran into my old friend Hooker Frazer. At this cafe, the Roseraie, which was a jazzy kind of place, there were round tables, wicker chairs, palms in brass tubs, candy-striped fiber carpet, red and white awnings, steam of a huge coffee machine of hundreds of gimmicks, cakes in cellophane, and all that kind of stuff. After I set up the coal stoves-- this maid, Jacqueline, was very nice but she didn't know a thing about getting coal to catch; I was an expert from way back--I'd go to breakfast.

Thus one morning I was ordering coffee at the Roseraie. Old folks in slippers, as if in their own lace-veined parlors, walked in the street, with horsemeat and strawberries, etcetera, coming from the market on Place de 1'Alma. All at once Frazer came by. I hadn't seen him since my wedding day.

"Frazcr, hey!"

"Augie!"

"What brings you to Paris, old pal?"

"How are you? Same healthy color as always, and smiling away!

Why, I'm working with the World Educational Fund. I think I've seen everyone I ever knew here during this past year. But what a surprise to run across you, Augie, in the City of Man!"

He was feeling very grand, the place inspired him, and he sat down and gave me a sort of talk--pretty amazing!--about Paris and how nothing like it existed, the capital of the hope that Man could be free without the help of gods, clear of mind, civilized, wise, pleasant, and all of that. For a minute I felt rather insulted that he should laugh when he asked me what I was doing here. It might be incongruous, but if it was for Man why shouldn't it be for me too? If it wasn't, perhaps that wasn't one hundred per cent my fault. Which Man was it the City of? Some version again. It's always some version or other.

But who could complain of this pert, pretty Paris when it revolved like a merry-go-round--the gold bridge-horses, the Greek Tuiieries heroes and stone beauties, the overloaded Opera, the racy show windows and dapper colors,. the maypole obelisk, the all-colors ice-cream, the gaudy package of the world.

I don't suppose Frazer meant to hurt my feelings; he was merely surprised to see me here.

"I've been over since the end of the war," I said.

"Is that so? What doing?"

"I'm connected in business with that Armenian lawyer you met at my wedding. Remember?"

"Oh, of course, you're married. Is your wife here with you?"

"Naturally. She works in pictures. Maybe you've seen her in Les Orphelines. It's about displaced persons."

"No, as a matter of fact I don't see many movies. But I'm not surprised to hear she's an actress. She's very beautiful, you know. How are things working out?"

"I love her," I said.

As if that was an answer! But how can you blame me if I was unwilling to say more to Frazer? Suppose I started to explain that she loved me too, but loved me in the same way that Paris is the City of Man, or with what she brought to it, given her preoccupations--love being the victory of love over preoccupations, or what Mintouchian called dominant ideas that afternoon in the Turkish bath. I wasn't going to go into all this with Frazer. When I took it up with Stella, and once in a while I did, or tried to, I seemed to sound like a fanatic, and maybe sounded to her as other people had to me, sounding of! about their idea that they were trying to sell or to recruit you for. This made her a mirror, like, where I could see my own obstinacy of yore and how it must have looked when I balked. She was right when we took cover in the garden of the Japanese villa in Acatia and she observed that we were very similar. So we are.

However, even if I am not the honestest type in the world I don't want to lie more than is average. Stella does. Of course you can call it lying or you can call it protection of your vision. I think I prefer the second description. Stella looks happy and firm and wants me to look the same. She sits down by the bird-breasted stove in the salon, on the chair the old English gent Ryehurst warned me--having damages in mind--was a genuine Chippendale, and she's calm, intelligent, forceful, vital, tremendously handsome, and this is how she wants to put herself across. It's the vision. Naturally it often takes me a while to know where we're really at. She talks about happenings at the studio and laughs with her clear, bosomy voice about the jokes of the day.

And what have I been doing? Well, perhaps I had a meeting with a person who used to be in Dachau and did some business with him in dental supplies from Germany. That took an hour or two. After which I may have gone to the cold halls of the Louvre and visited in the Dutch School, or noticed how the Seine smelled like medicine, or went into a cafe and wrote a letter, and so passed the day.

She sits and listens with crossed legs under the batik house-wrap she wears, with her heavy three-way-piled hair and cigarette at her mouth and refuses me--for the time being, anyway--the most important things I ask of her.

It's really kind of tremendous how it all takes place. You'd never guess how much labor goes into it. Only some time ago it occurred to me how great an amount. She came back from the studio and went to take a bath, and from the bath she called out to me, "Darling, please bring me a towel." I took one of those towel robes that I had bought at the Bon Marche department store and came along with it. The little bathroom was in twilight. In the chauffe-eau machine, the brass box with teeth of gas burning, the green metal dropped crumbs inside from the thousand-candle blaze. Her body with its warm woman's smell was covered with water starting in a calm line over her breasts. The glass of the medicine chest shone like a deep blue place in the wall, as if a window to the evening sea and not the ashy fog of Paris. I sat down with the robe over my shoulder and felt very much at peace. For a change the apartment seemed clean and was warm; the abominations were gone into the background, the stoves drew well and they shone.

Jacqueline was cooking dinner and it smelled of gravy. I felt settled and easy, my chest free and my fingers comfortable and open. And now here's the thing. It takes a time like this for you to find out how sore your heart has been, and, moreover, all the while you thought you were going around'idle terribly hard work was taking place. Hard, hard work, excavation and digging, mining, moling through tunnels, heaving, pushing, moving rock, working, working, working, working, working, panting, hauling, hoisting. And none of this work is seen from the outside. It's internally done. It happens because you are powerless and unable to get anywhere, to obtain justice or have requital, and therefore in yourself you labor, you wage and combat, settle scores, remember insults, fight, reply, deny, blab, denounce, triumph, outwit, overcome, vindicate, cry, persist, absolve, die and rise again. All by yourself! Where is everybody? Inside your breast and skin, the entire cast.

Lying in the bath, Stella was performing labor. It was obvious to me. And generally I was doing hard work too. And what for?

Everybody gives me a line about Paris being a place of ease and mentions caime, ordre, luxe, et volupte, and yet there is this toil being done. Every precious personality framed dramatically and doing the indispensable work. If Stella weren't bound to do her hardest work we wouldn't be in this city of calm and luxury, so called. The clothes, the night clubs and entertainment, the supposed play of the studio and the friendship of the artists--who strike me as being characters of pretty high stomach, like our buddy Alain du Niveau--there's nothing easy in it. I'll tell you about this du Niveau. He's what the Parisians call a noceur, meaning that it's always the wedding night for him or that he plays musical beds. That's just about the least of it.

Anyway, I would have preferred to stay in the States and have children. Instead I'm in the bondage of strangeness for a time still. It's only temporary. We'll get out of it.

I said that Stella lied more than average, unfortunately. She told me a number of things that weren't so; she forgot to tell me others that were so. For instance, she said she was getting money from her dad in Jamaica. There was no such party in Jamaica. She had never gone to college either. And she had never cared anything about Oliver.

He wasn't the important man. The important one was a big operator whose name was Cumberland. It wasn't she who first told me about him. I found out from someone else that there was such a man. And then she told me that this Cumberland was a crook. Of morals, that is; in business he was not only respectable but great. In fact he was one of these powerful characters whose pictures don't even get into the papers because they're too strong to be named. And gradually this man, with whom she had taken up while still a high-school girl, built up to be about like Jupiter-Ammon, with an eye like that new telescope out at the Mount Palomar observatory, about as wicked as Tiberius, a czar and mastermind. To tell the truth, I'm good and tired of all these big personalities, destiny molders, and heavy-water brains, Machiavellis and wizard evildoers, big-wheels and imposers-upon, absolutists. After Basteshaw clobbered me I took an oath of unsusceptibility.

But this oath is probably a mice-and-man matter, for here the specter of one of this breed was over me. Brother! You never are through, you just think you are!

The first I heard about this Cumberland was from Alain du Niveau, who was in New York during the war, in the movie industry. Mintouchian knew him, and Agnes. He was originally a friend of Agnes.

When we met he told me he was a descendant of the Due de Saint Simon.

I'm always a sucker for lineage, but this du Niveau didn't really look very good. He had blue whiskyish eyes in his tight-packed heavy face with its color of bad good-health. Although he probably meant no harm by it he had a very insolent expression. Thin and sandy, his hair was combed like a British officer's, neat and bleak. His shoes were fleece-lined; his long overcoat was all beautiful suede, down to the ankles; his body was thick. He was a chaser and wolf after girls on the subway. He'd tell you himself how he picked up women, and as he described it these poor weak birdies when he got them alone were like confronted by a fiery god, etcetera.

When he mentioned Cumberland to me we were in the lobby of the Paramount Theatre waiting for Stella. Oliver's name came up, and du Niveau said, "He's still in jail."

"Did you know the guy?" I said.

"Yes. And what a comedown for her after Cumberland. I knew him t OO."...!..

"Who?"

He didn't realize what he had said. He hardly ever did. I felt as if I had been trapped in a shaft by a sudden fall of dirt. Terrible despair, rage, jealousy, burst out in me. z.'

"Who? What Cumberland?"

Then he looked at me and realized that for some reason my eyes were burning and I was in pain. I think he was very surprised and tried to remove himself with dignity from this trouble.

Actually I had been aware for some time of something peculiar that would sooner or later have to be explained. People were dunning Stella constantly. There was trouble about a car. She didn't own a car.

And there was litigation about an apartment uptown. What sort of apartment had she had uptown? And as it would have been inhuman not to mention it, I guess, she had told me about a seventy-five-hundreddollar mink coat she had had to sell, and a diamond necklace. Business envelopes came in the mail which she wouldn't open. There's something about those business envelopes with the transparent oblong address part that my soul runs away from.

And then, was I supposed to overlook what Mintouchian had said to me in the Turkish bath? How could I?

"Who is this Cumberland?" I said.

Just then Stella came down from the ladies' lounge and I took her arm and hurried her out to a cab. We tore back to the apartment and I blew my top. "I should have known there was something dishonest!"

I yelled at her. "Who is this Cumberland?"

"Augie! Don't carry on," she said, pale. "I should have told you.

But what difference. does it make? It proves that I love you and didn't want to lose you by telling you."

"He was the one that gave you the coat?"

"Yes, darling. But I married you, not him."

"And the car?"

"It was a present, honey. But, sweetheart, it's you I love."

"And all the things in the house?"

"The furniture? Why, it's just stuff. It's only you that matters."

Gradually she calmed me.

"When was the last time you saw him?"

"I haven't had a thing to do with him for two years."

"I can't stand these fellows being brought up," I said. "I can't take it. There shouldn't be these secret things jumping out."

"But after all," she cried, "it was rougher on me. I was the one that actually suffered from him. All you suffer from is hearing about it."

Now that the subject was open it became very hard to put an end to. She wanted to talk about it. To prove that I had no reason to be jealous she had to tell me every last thing that had happened, and I couldn't stop her--a gallant, active flashing temperament like that, you see, you can't control her easily.

"What a dog!" she said. "What a coward! He didn't have a single human feeling. He mainly wanted me to help him entertain his business friends and show off because he was ashamed of his wife."

It didn't absolutely square with her attitude toward the things she had enjoyed, like the summer house in New Jersey, the charge accounts, and the Mercedes-Benz automobile, which was an extremely hardheaded attitude. She was very well informed about the tax situation and the insurance and so on. Of course it's nothing against a woman that she should understand these things. Why shouldn't she understand them? But I was afraid I'd have to give up on an ideal explanation of her past life. Oh well, there didn't have to be one necessarily.

"He wouldn't let me be independent. If he found out I had a savings account he made me spend the money. He thought I should be helpless.

Once the president of a lumber company whom I knew was going to open a big gambling joint on Long Island and offered me fifteen thousand a year to be hostess. Cumberland was furious about it when he heard."

"He found out everything?"

"He hired detectives. You have a lot to learn about such people.

He'd rent the moon if he had any use for it."

"I already have learned all I want to learn."

"Oh, Augie! Please, honey, remember that you made mistakes too.

You went to smuggle immigrants from Canada. You stole. A lot of people led you astray also."

Okay, but why couldn't she be satisfied that I loved her and stop this talk? What did she mean, about the lumberman? Had she really intended to become a hostess? I would meditate over all this and sit there feeling terrible. The very arms of the chair seemed about to stab me through the sides, and the playful flowery Bavarian bed and the knickknacks and stuffed orioles, and all were a drag on me. Was I going to be wrong again? It was the thought I had in the boat when I was adrift with Basteshaw that I had been wrong again and again.

Nevertheless I believed we would make it, finally. I don't want to give a false impression of one hundred per cent desperation. It is not like that. I don't know who this saint was who woke up, lifted his face, opened his mouth, and reported on his secret dream that blessedness covers the whole Creation but covers it thicker in some places than' in others. Whoever he was, it's my great weakness to respond to such dreams. This is the amor fati, that's what it is, or mysterious adoration of what occurs.

There is a certain amount of simple-mindedness in Stella as well as deception, a sort of naive seriousness. She cries very sincerely and with utmost warmth. But it's not a simple matter to get her to change her mind on any matter. I've tried, for instance, to get her to wear her nails shorter; she grows them very long, and when they tear they tear into the quick and she starts to cry. Then I say, "Good heavens, why do you let them grow like that!" and take the scissors and trim them, which she submits to. However, she only lets them grow long again. Or, in the case of the cat. Ginger, who's very spoiled and wakes you up at night by turning over lamps and dishes so that you'll feed him, I only made myself look foolish arguing that he ought to be shut in the kitchen at night. I couldn't get anywhere.

She'd repeat continually how she had wanted to be independent.

"Naturally. Who doesn't want that?"

"No, I mean I wanted to do something that was my own idea. It wasn't just a matter of money." He oppressed her, that was what, practically with wrung hands, she had to put across to me. "Every time he promised to let me do something he'd go back on his word. So finally I made a break and went to California. I knew someone there who once offered me a screen test. I took a wonderful test and got a part in a musical. But when the picture was released all my lines were cut out. I looked like such a fool, just smiling and getting ready to say something, and I never said it. After the preview I was sick. He used his influence to make the producer do it. I sent him a wire and told him I was through for good. Next day I had an attack of appendicitis and went to the hospital, and in about twenty-four hours he showed up by my bedside. I said to him, 'What excuse did you give your wife for this trip!' I was done with him forever."

I always wince when I hear husbands and wives talking to each other about past marriages and affairs. I'm unusually sensitive in this respect.

Of course I knew this was Stella's hard work. She wasn't done suffering from it, not by a long shot. She had to harrow his memory over and over, and in so doing she dug me up considerably too.

"All right, Stella, now, please," I said at last.

"All right what?" she said, angry. "Am I supposed not to talk about it at all, ever?"

"But you talk about it all the time, and you talk about him more than anyone else."

"Because I hate him. I'm still in debt because of all these obligations that were his fault." _

"We'll get rid of them." | "How?"

"I don't know yet. I'll take it up with Mintouchian."

She didn't want me to do that. She was seriously opposed, but I went to see him all the same.

He already knew all about Cumberland, which isn't in the least sur- 1 prising. We talked it over in his office on Fifth Avenue. "Since you * bring it up," he said, "excuse me, but she's been a nuisance to him.

He was unfair to her, but he's an older fellow now and the whole thing is over. It's difficult for his family. His son is now head of the firm;.; and he says she won't get anywhere by threatening them. She wouldn't 1 have much coming legally." f "Threatening? What threat? You mean to say she's bothering him?

Why, she told me she hasn't had anything to do with him for two years!"

"Well, she hasn't told you the truth--strictly speaking."

I was overthrown by this; I was very ashamed. How are you supposed to proceed? If you don't defend yourself you can get murdered, and if you do defend yourself you're liable to die of that too.

"I'm afraid she's impatient to go to law," said Mintouchian. "She's very restless."

I said to Stella, "You've got to quit this. There isn't going to be any lawsuit. You always know where this man is and what he's doing. You haven't told me the truth. It has to stop immediately- I have to ship again in a week and I don't want to be mulling it over for months and months. If you won't promise to stop I can't come back."

She gave in. She cried with bitterness that I threatened her, but she promised. She has a warm, easily coloring face, Stella. When she starts to cry the pink of it begins to darken and darkens up into her eyes, which seemed so amorous the first time I saw them in Acatla. Her features rise very slightly from the surface of her face, as if she had a Javanese or Sumatran inheritance. I sat both hurt and comforted as she wept. Crying is further stubbornness with some women, but with Stella it's the truthful moment. She knew she shouldn't talk so much about the old man, she confessed, and try to make him take all the blame.

So I sailed in a better frame of mind, and this was when she bought me a book on bee culture. I studied it with devotion and learned a lot about bees and honey, which I knew, however, wouldn't likely be of any practical use.

Of course the whole movie enterprise is to show Cumberland that she could make the grade independently. She doesn't have any terrific talent for acting, but that's how it appears to go. People don't do what they have a talent for but what the preoccupation leads to. If they're good at auto-repairing they have to sing Don Giovanni; if they can sing they have to be architects; and if they have a gift for architecture they wish to become school superintendents or abstract painters or anything else. A nything! It's a spite. It's having to prove full and ultimate self-sufficiency or some such monster dream that you don't need anyone else to do these things for you.

Well, Stella is in du Niveau's film company, and I am in illicit dealing --to discriminate against myself, more than half the business of Europe being the same. It is indeed cockeyed. But there is nothing I can do about it. It must be clear, however, that I am a person of hope, and now my hopes have settled themselves upon children and a settled life. I haven't been able to convince Stella as yet. Therefore while I knock around on rapides over falling horizons, over Alps, in steam and haste, or blast the air in my black Citroen, smoking cigars and watching the road through polaroid glasses, it's unborn children I pore over far oftener than business deals.

I wonder if it's a phase, or what, but sometimes I feel I already am a father.

Recently in Rome a whore tried to pick me up on the Via Veneto.

The circumstances were peculiar; I am a tall man and the girl who propositioned me was very small, plump, and dressed in second- or third-year mourning. A sad face. "Come with me," -she said. Now let me not be a liar and say I was not in the least drawn. You always are, somewhat. However, it cost no great effort to refuse, and when I said no, she looked deeply wounded, personally, and said, "What's the matter, am I not good enough for you?" I said, "Oh, of course, signorina, but I'm married. I have children, lo ho bambini." So she was overwhelmed entirely and said, "I'm very sorry, I didn't know you had children," and she was about to cry over this error. To have been perfectly fair I should have explained this to her, that it was hokum and that I just had an impulse. But let me say that I am aware where this deception of bambini came from. It came from that picture of Stella's that I mentioned to Frazer, Les Orphelines. I had to see it several times, in the course of events, and one part of it made a deep impression on me once in the cutting room, this boarded, insulated, burlap-deadened room where it stunk of Gauloise cigarettes and highgrade perfume. The scene was one in which Stella pleaded with an Italian doctor for a woman and her baby. They had coached her on the Italian lines and so she cried out, "Ma Maria, ed il bambino. II bambino!" And the doctor, who couldn't offer help, shrugged and said, "Che posso fare! Che posso fare!"

I saw this run over and over and was full of sorrow, almost provoked to an outburst of tears and ripe to exclaim to Stella, "Here, here, if you want something to ery out about! Right here! What do you need theoretical people for and these ghosts of emotions never of this world anyway?" The grief was about to drop down from my eyes.

It's supposed to be easier to suffer for hypothetical people too, for Hecubas. It ought to be easier than for the ones you yourself hurt, for you can see their enemies or persecutors better than you can see yourself balking someone of life or doing him wrong.

Be that as it may, this was why I imagined I already had the bambini.

Simon and Charlotte came to Paris and put up at the Crillon. I wished that they had brought Mama too, although it would have been probably lost on her. Something big would have to be done for her one of these days, I thought; I'd have to decide what was appropriate, and I could now swing it by myself, having the money. It satisfied Simon that I was now in business. Charlotte thought better of me also, though she wanted to know more particulars. Some chance she had of getting them out of me! I took them around to the Tour d'Argent and the Lapin Agile and Casino de Paris, The Rose Rouge and other gaiety haunts, and picked up the tab. This made Simon say proudly to Charlotte, "Well, what do you think now? My kid brother has turned out to be a regular man of the world."

Stella and I smiled across the Rose Rouge table.

Charlotte, this solid and suspecting woman in her early thirties, handsome, immovable in her opinions, was full of grudges. Whatever she had against Simon she formerly would take out on me. Now that I looked a little more substantial than I used to and seemed to have a few right ideas anyhow, she could'complain about him to me. I was eager to know the score. The first week or so there was not much I could find out, because we were on the town. Du Niveau helped a lot; he made a big hit with them because of being a genuine aristocrat and the deference of flunkies to him in restaurants and night clubs and haute-couture joints. Stella helped too. "What a dish!" said Simon.

"She's good for you also; she'll keep you on your toes." He meant that to provide for a beautiful woman is stabilizing; it makes a man earn money. "The only thing," said Simon, "is why you keep her in such a pigpen."

"It's hard to find apartments in this section of Paris near the Champs Elysees. Besides we're not at home much, either of us. But I aim to get a villa out at St. Cloud if we have to settle here."

"If you have to? You sound as if you didn't want to."

"Oh--it's all the same to me where I live.".

Of all places, we were in the Petit Palais at a picture exhibition from the Pinacothek of Munich. These grand masterpieces were sitting on the walls. Du Niveau was along, massive, in his red suede coat and highly polished pointy shoes. Simon and he admired each other's clothes. Stella and Charlotte were wearing mink stoles, Simon a doublebreasted plaid and crocodile shoes, and I a camel's-hair coat, so that we looked appropriately gorgeous to pass in one of those Italian portrait crowds of gold and jewels.

Du Niveau said, "I love pictures, but I can't stand religious subjects."

Nobody was thinking much about painting, unless it was Stella who sometimes paints. I can't explain how come we were there. Maybe nothing better was open just then.

Simon and I dropped behind for a while and I asked him, "Whatever happened to Renee?"

A heavy red color crowded his blond face--he had become very stout. He said, "Why do you have to ask me here, for the love of God!"

"We can talk, Simon. They won't overhear anything. Did she have a kid?"

"No, no, it was just a bluff. There wasn't any kid."

"But you said--"

"Never mind what I said. You asked me, and I'm telling you."

I didn't know whether or not to believe him, he was in such a rush to get rid of the subject. And how touchy he was! He didn't want to be talked about.

But at lunch, when Stella and du Niveau had gone back to the studio, Charlotte opened up. She was sitting upright in her mink and in a velour hat which suited her face because she has a very downy skin which was covered with high color. Evidently Simon's trouble with Renee had been all over the Chicago papers, and she took it for granted that I had read about it. No, I hadn't heard a thing. I was completely surprised. Simon kept his mouth shut during this, and perhaps it tormented him that I might add something which Charlotte didn't happen 53i to know. Not me; I was silent too and didn't ask any questions. Renee had sued him and made a scandal. She claimed she had a child by him.

She might have accused three other men, said Charlotte, and Charlotte knew what she was talking about you can be sure; she was a well- informed woman. If the case hadn't been thrown out of court right away she was ready with plenty of evidence. "I'd have given her a case!" she said. "The little whore!" Simon wasn't having anything to do with either of us during this conversation. He sat at the table but, as it were, we didn't have his company. "Every minute she was with him she was collecting evidence," said Charlotte. "They never stopped at a place but what she didn't take a pack of matches and write the date inside. She even had his cigar butts for evidence. And all the time it was supposed to be love. What did she love you for?" said Charlotte with a terrible sudden outburst. "Your fat belly? Your scar on your forehead? Your bald spot? It was the money. It never was anything except money." I wanted to duck as this came down; my shoulders flinched. Down it burned and beat on us. Simon nevertheless didn't seem much disturbed, only thoughtful, and continued drawing at his cigar. At no time did he answer anything. Maybe he thought that as he himself had wanted money he couldn't condemn Renee for wanting it, but he didn't say.

"Then she'd phone me and say, 'You can't have children, you should let him go, he wants a family.'

'Go on, take him away if you can,' I said to her. 'You know you can't get him because you're nothing but a little tramp. You and he are both no good.' But she got out a summons for him, and when they tried to serve it I phoned him and told him he'd better get out of town. He wouldn't leave without me.

'What've you got to be afraid of?' I said. 'It isn't your kid. It's three other guys'.' I happened to have the flu then and was supposed to stay in bed, but when he wouldn't leave alone I had to come to the airport to meet him, and it was a rainstorm. Finally we took off, and we had to make an emergency landing in Nebraska. And he said, 'I might as well get knocked off. I've wasted my life anyhow.' And what did I do, if he wasted his life? What was I there for? What was in it for me?

As soon as it got bad he came running to me for protection, and I protected him. If he didn't have such an abnormal idea about being happy in the first place it wouldn't have happened. Who told him he had any business to expect all that? What right has anybody? There is no such right," she said.

In the back the musicians were smoothing their bows away over their instruments.

"Now she's married. She married one of those guys and disappeared with him somewhere..."

I wanted Charlotte to stop. It now was too much, flying in the rainstorm and about wasted lives, while he looked more and more indifferent, which he could do only by making himself abstract like this.

I started to cough. I had a long coughing fit. Shall I explain why? Because many years ago when I was a kid and went to have my tonsils out I began to cry when the ether mask was put on me. A nurse said, "Is he crying, a big boy like that?" And another answered, "Why, no, he's brave. He's not crying, he's coughing." And when I heard that I started to cough in earnest. This is the kind of coughing it was, of great distress. It stopped the conversation. The maitre d'hotel came to see what was the matter and gave me a glass of water.

Lord! How much of this did Simon have to hear? If she didn't stop she'd turn him into stone. He'd have turned into stone long ago if it hadn't been for these Renees. What are you supposed to do, lay down your life? That's what she wanted from him and what she meant by "right." Sheer murder. If she meant that you have to die anyway and might as well do it sooner than later, it's criminal iriurder.

He was ashamed, stony with shame. His secrets were being told.

His secrets! What did they amount to? You'd think they were as towering as the Himalayas. But all they were about was his mismanaged effort to live. To live and not die. And this was what he had to be ashamed of.

"You'd better do something for that cold," said Charlotte severely.

I love my brother very much. I never meet him again without the utmost love filling me up. He has it too, though we both seem to fight it.

"It sounds like the old whooping cough you used to have," Simon said and looked toward me once again.

Just then I thought that the worst of it for him was not to have the child.

I couldn't spend much time with Simon in Paris. Mintouchian cabled me to go to Bruges and look up a guy there who had a big nylon deal on his mind, and so I started out. I had Jacqueline the maid with me as passenger. She has folks in Normandy and was going to pay them a Christmas visit, and as she was bringing a couple of suitcases full of presents I gave her a lift.

Jacqueline was referred to Stella by du Niveau. When he first knew her she was a waitress in Vichy just after the French defeat and he @ was on his way out of the country. They must have become friends, || and it is hard to conceive because she looks so grotesque. Though this - was some time back and then she might have been seeing the last of her best days. At the outer corners Jacqueline's eyes sink down queeriy. She has a large, crooked Norman nose, fair hair not in very good health, veiny temples, a long chin and a disciplinarian mouth that lipstick doesn't do a great deal to change. She is highly painted and has a sweet odor of cosmetics and cleaning fluid. Her manner is very busy. She pounds the floor very rapidly and hard as she walks, but she is a person of sweet temper, though gossipy and with all kinds of incomprehensible social ambitions. In addition to doing housework she also is employed as an ouvreuse, or usherette, in a movie, which is more of du Niveau's influence. Therefore she has a lot of social history to relate of the movie and the tough night life after closing time when she stops at the Coupole for a cup of coffee. She is always being offered violence, like holdup and rape, Arabs hitting her or trying to force their way into her room at night. Her hips are big and legs varicose for all that she moves so briskly, and this with her sharp face and breasts that have gone out of shape; and yet what is it that dismisses a person from desirability? I'm not the one to say. She has unkillable pride in her sensuality and adventurous spirit, and if she has these outrageous colors and parrot bite, what about it?

It was a big holiday deal when we started out. She removed some stains from my camel's-hair coat with tea, which she claimed was just the thing, and then I carried her jammed cardboard valises with their tin locks down and stowed them in the trunk of the Citroen.

It was cold; a hard cold with snowflakes. We circled the Etoile and roared off toward Rouen. I should have gone by way of Amiens, but it wasn't too much of a detour for her sake. She'-s a kind, grateful, and by and large docile woman. So we went at this hungry speed through Rouen and then bore north toward the channel. She was telling of Vichy in the good old days and of the celebrities she knew there. It was her cunning way of getting the conversation round to du Niveau, for she never missed a chance to discuss him with me, and what she really wanted was to warn me to be on guard, that he was unscrupulous. Not that she wasn't grateful, you understand, but she also was beholden to me and she hinted at various crimes he was guilty of. I realized that she was simply romancing about him. He represented some great ideal to her which her spirit was hungry for.

We were getting close to her destination, and I wasn't too sorry, even though it was a sad, dark day and I'd have to continue to Bruges alone. The ride by way of Dunkerque and Ostend is a terribly melancholy one through ruins and along the grim Channel water.

Only a few kilometers from her uncle's farm the Citroen's engine began to miss and finally we stalled. I picked up the hood, but a lot I know about motors. Besides, it was freezing. So we started to walk toward the farm across the fields. She was going to send her nephew to town for a mechanic when we got there. But we had a good long way to hike, three or four miles across the fields, which were brown, turfy and stiff, these fields where battles of the Hundred Years' War had been fouoht, where the bones of the killed English were bleached and sent back to be buried in churches, where wolves and crows had cleaned up. The cold, after a time, made you gasp. The tears were cutting tracks over Jacqueline's face, which was flaming through the makeup.

I was stung and numb too, hand and foot.

"Our stomachs may freeze," she said to me after we had gone about a mile. "It is very dangerous."

"Stomach? How can the stomach freeze?"

"It can. You can be ailing for life if that happens."

"What do you do to prevent it?" I said.

"The thing to do is sing," she said, desperate in her thin Paris shoes and trying to stretch her cotton muffler over the back of her head. And she started singing some night-club song. The cold blackbirds flapped out of the woods of rusty oaks and even they must have been too cold for noise because I heard no grating from them. Only Jacqueline's poor voice which didn't appear to get far over the thin snowy pockets and furrows. "You must absolutely try to sing," she said. "Otherwise you can never be sure. Something may happen." And because I didn't want to argue with her about medical superstitions and be so right or superior wising her up about modern science I decided, finally, what the hell! I might as well sing too. The only thing I could think to sing was "La Cucaracha." I kept up La Cucaracha for a mile or two and felt more chilled than helped. Then she said, after we had both worn ourselves out trying to breathe in the harsh wind and keep up the song cure, "That wasn't French that you were singing, was it?" H I said it was a Mexican song. "^ At which she exclaimed, "Ah, the dream of my life is to go to Mexico!"

The dream of her life? What, not Saigon? Not Hollywood? Not Bogota? Not Aleppo? I gave a double-take at her water-sparkling eyes and freezing, wavering, mascara-lined, goblin, earnest and disciplinarian, membranous, and yet gorgeous face, with its fairy soot of pink and that red snare of her mouth; yet feminine; yet mischievous; yet still hopefully and obstinately seductive. What would she be doing in Mexico? I tried to picture her there. How queer it was! I started to laugh loudly. And what was I doing here in the fields of Normandy?

How about that?

"Have you thought of something funny, M'sieu March?" she said as she hurried with me, swinging her arms in her short jacket of legof-mutton sleeves.

"Very funny!"

Then she pointed. "Vous voyez les chiens?" The dogs of the farm had leaped a brook and were dashing for us on the brown coat of the turf, yelling and yapping. "Don't you worry about them," she said, picking up a branch. "They know me well." Sure enough they did.

They bounded into the air and licked her face.

The trouble was with the spark plugs, which were soon repaired, and I cut out for Dunkerque and Ostend. Where the British were so punished, the town is ruined. Quonset huts stand there on the ruins.

The back of the ancient water was like wolf gray. Then on the long sand the waves crashed white; they spit themselves to pieces. I saw this specter of white anger coming from the savage gray and meanwhile shot northward, in a great hurry to get to Bruges and out of this line of white which was like eternity opening up right beside destructions of the modern world, hoary and grumbling. I thought if I could beat the dark to Bruges I'd see the green canals and ancient palaces. On a day like this I could use the comfort of it, when it was so raw. I was still chilled from the hike across the fields, but, thinking of Jacqueline and Mexico, I got to grinning again. That's the animal ridens in me, the laughing creature, forever rising up. What's so laughable, that a Jacqueline, for instance, as hard used as that by rough forces, will still refuse to lead a disappointed life? Or is the laugh at nature--including eternity--that it thinks it can win over us and the power of hope? Nah, nah! I think. It never will. But that probably is the joke, on one or the other, and laughing is an enigma that includes both. Look at me, going everywhere! Why, I am a sort of Columbus of those near-at-hand and believe you can come to them in this immediate terra incognita that spreads out in every gaze. I may well be a flop at this line of endeavor.

Columbus too thought he was a flop, probably, when they sent him back in chains. Which didn't prove there was no America.







The End