The Adventures of Augie March (Penguin Classics)

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

  There were a few sales. Happy entered them on the big yellow sheets; an elegant penman, boastful of his hand, he sat up on the high stool in his flat straw, feathering out the wide and thin strokes. This old-fashioned bookkeeping desk of a scratched yellow brought the writer’s face to a tiny square of window over the scale, and at times I saw Simon there, making out checks in the wide triple checkbook. Writing checks had fascinated him at first. He had wormed out of me that I owed Padilla two bucks for the satisfaction of paying one of my debts with his signature. There was no such satisfaction now, as the figures of the balance took fewer spaces, and he thought of his last audaciousness in money when he had tried to grab a fast buck in order to marry Cissy. This time he believed his whole life was staked. He had not merely been shooting his mouth off the day he had come to tell me he was getting married about how earnest he was over money; it was now proved by the mental wounds of his face, the death of its color, and the near-insanity of his behavior. The misery of his look at this black Sargasso of a yard in its summer stagnation and stifling would sometimes make my blood crawl in me with horror. If I took so much time from my own enterprises of theft and reading to walk around this yard with him, hands in pockets, it wouldn’t be enough to say it was from solicitude, it was downright fright. The loose way he handled the pistol shooting at the rats was ominous to me. And that he complained of seething in his head, saying, “My brains are going to boil out of my ears.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Also, Simon ran some sales, just to get things moving. He had me pass out handbills in Chinatown, advertising coke which the laundry Chinese favored above other fuel, and slowly he accumulated customers. He also covered the city and hit his new relatives for orders; Charlie Magnus threw business his way, and little by little things began to stir.

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

  As a son-in-law of the Magnuses, and also because he wanted to be, Simon was on very good terms with Lieutenant Nuzzo, than whom few were more smooth and regular-looking. I am not sure how the lieutenant managed. A cop, who even in the friendliness of a joke must take you by the shoulder as if in an arrest, with hands whose only practice is to be iron. In some manner Lieutenant Nuzzo had stayed a Valentino, even though his flesh was heavy and his face kept imprints long, like sleep creasings and the marks of fingers. We had dates to go to the Chez Paree with him—a party of five until I began to take Lucy Magnus, making it six—and had spaghetti and chicken livers with sparkling burgundy or champagne; the lieutenant, he looked around like a master of ceremonies on a visit from a much better night club. His wife seemed like a woman on probation; as everybody is, after a fashion, with a police lieutenant. Even a wife. He was an Italian, he brought the style of ancient kingdoms with him. A lot of them do. Authority must have death behind it. To cut off Masaniello’s head; to hang great admirals themselves, as Lord Nelson did in Naples harbor. This I believe was how to read the lieutenant’s smooth face while he sat in the enjoyable noise of the Chez Paree, viewing Veloz and Yolanda or the near-naked chicks who didn’t altogether know what they were doing but suggested the motions of busy people bringing their private pleasures to a head. Anyway, while this night club remained tops, Simon and Charlotte were great ones for it, as much, shrewdly, for the lowdown to be gotten there and contacts and public life and business, as to have their pictures taken by flashbulbs, laughing and in shenanigan embraces with paper caps and streamers, an important face at their table, a singer in strapless gown appealing with her lifted chin and fine teeth, or the chairman of a board finishing a drink.

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

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

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

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

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

  My brother down there, as if Alexander in the harmful Cydnus whose cold made him sick when he leaped in after battle, I stood in striped trunks with toes bent over the wood of a pile, ready to jump after if need be. I didn’t go in when he did. He came up the ladder shivering, the big flies bit nastily, the hullabaloo waterside carnival turned your head. I’d help him dry; he’d lie down on the stone like a sick man. But when he’d warm and get his comfort back, he’d start to make bullish approaches to women and girls, his eyes big and red, and as if someone who bent over to choose a plum from her lunch bag was making the offer of a Pasiphae. And then he’d start to blare like brass and he’d hit me on the arm and say to me, “Look at the spread on that broad!” forgetting that he was not only married but also engaged—the engagement had taken place before the eyes of the world, in a reception at a hotel. He didn’t think of that. Instead he thought of the powerful possibility in a new Pontiac standing near Lincoln Park, and the money he had; also the things to be done in one street, building, room that need have no bearing on what came later in the day elsewhere. So he got violent and lustful, with step and sidle, and protrusion of his head that made a kind of wall of his neck, charged and hard like that of a fighter who has been hit but not damaged, only roused.

  There wasn’t anything in his new class or of his speed at the North Avenue beach (called a beach, it was merely a stone slab waterfront); the place was rough and hard, the young fellows were tough and the girls battlesome, factory hands, salesgirls, with some Clark Street sluts and dance-hall chicks. Therefore Simon said and proposed without sorting or choosing words. “You look good to me. You interested?” Direct, without game, not even nickel phrases of circumlocution. That very fact maybe made it no indecency; instead it created awe and fear, that brute charge that gave the veins too much to bear and seemed to endanger his underjaw by crowding, his eyeballs darkening with currents of heat violet and darker, to near black. The girls were not always frightened of him; he had a smell of power, he was handsome, and I don’t know what floors his bare feet left in shade-drawn hot rooms. Only a year ago he would not have given a second glance at such bims.

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

  “And you? Do you?” said Simon to me. “What a question! Who’s that babe who lives on your floor? Is that why you don’t want to move? Mimi, isn’t that her name? She looks like an easy broad.”

  I denied it, and he didn’t believe me.

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

  He wasn’t all brashness, however, and headlong despair, Simon. No, he was also making a prize showing. It was summer, and slow, and naturally he was losing money. Charlotte, an excellent businesswoman, and highly important as backer, counselor, consultant, gave him just what united them closer than common conjugality. Though he fought with her and even from the very first roared and cursed her, saying astonishing things, she held on steady. A close watcher could see her recoil and then come back to the great, the all-important thing, which was that he was one of those anointed to be rich and mighty. His very outrageousness when he yelled “You goofy cow!” was proof. She took it with a nervous laugh that recalled him to his better judgment and reminded him that such things were supposed to come out as comedy. Whereat he almost never failed to add the laughter drop of the entertainer, even while the glare of his eyes might remain savage. And he was made to do that even when feelings on both sides had burst out so close to injury that it was too much to try to kid them back into something that could pass for affectionate roughness. But Charlotte’s first aim and the reason for her striving was to make the union serious by constructing a fortune on it. She said to me, “Simon has real business ability. This stuff now”—he was already, at the time she spoke, making money—“is just nothing.” When she said this, sometimes, it was in the territory of seriousness where distinctions of sex do not exist; the power invoked is too great for that. It is of neither man nor woman. As when Macbeth’s wife made that prayer, “Unsex me here!” A call so hard, to what is so hard, that it makes the soul neuter.