16. The Adventures of Augie March, by Saul Bellow (in Novels 1944-1953), pp. 928-995

Chapter XXIV

Augie and Stella get married, but first Augie has to have one of his life-examining chats, this time with an Armenian named Mintouchian in a Turkish bath. (Bellow is perhaps making some kind of grim joke by putting an Armenian in a Turkish bath, but I'll resist exploring that.) Mintouchian is a wealthy lawyer, and his mistress, Agnes Kuttner, is a friend of Stella's. "These two, Agnes and Mintouchian, were the only people we ever saw when I got liberty from the base on weekends." Mintouchian and Agnes had met in Cuba, and he pays off her husband to make him stay there. But his chief role in the novel is a familiar one: "He was another of those persons who persistently arise before me with life counsels and illumination throughout my entire earthly pilgrimage."

And as usual, Augie resists the advice but finally gives in to it. When Mintouchian tells him tales of the woe that is in marriage, he asks, "how are these stories supposed to apply, just now, before my marriage?" Mintouchian back-pedals a bit, but Augie gets the point obliquely: "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, so far, it has been in Augie's love life. He asks Mintouchian what he's getting at:

He answered readily, "Secrets. Society make 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. Blas who was killed by wool combs and was made the patron saint of woolcombers."

So Augie opens up to Mintouchian: "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?" Mintouchian reassures him, "You must take your chance on what you are." Augie receives this advice with gratitude.

And then it turns out that Mintouchian himself needs reassuring. He has discovered that Agnes recently pulled a scam: She had claimed she was mugged in Central Park and a diamond ring was stolen. She collected five thousand dollars in an insurance claim, but Mintouchian has discovered that she faked the mugging even to the extent of choking herself with her own hands. One of her friends actually has the ring. Mintouchian doesn't know why she feels compelled to do such a thing when he provides all the money she needs. But once again, it fits with his notion that the world is full of secrets.

Including Mintouchian, of course, as Augie finds out when he meets Mrs. Mintouchian. She tells him, "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 even have to leave this room."  

Chapter XXV

So the wedding takes place despite any intentions Mintouchian may have had in discouraging it. And in fact he arranges the catering for the wedding luncheon and buys the flowers. Augie is "drugged with love." He remembers thinking, when he was recovering from the hernia operation in County Hospital a year ago, "how of all our family, 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." He had graduated from training at Sheepshead the day before the wedding, and the Merchant Marine had paid for new teeth to replace the ones that had been kicked out in Mexico. The only blot on the occasion is that Augie is due to ship out soon after the wedding, and that Stella is leaving for the Aleutians as part of a USO show. In addition to Mintouchian, the wedding party also includes Agnes (wearing a high collar to conceal her throat), Sylvester, Robey, and Frazer.

Two days later, Augie leaves for Boston to ship out. He reassures Stella that this new device called radar will protect the ship from any submarines. (And if you don't catch the foreshadowing there, you don't read enough fiction.) The ship, the Sam MacManus, is old, but Augie has his own office for his combined bookkeeping and pharmacist's duties. "In my privacy I read books and wrote an endless letter chronicle to Stella which I hoped to send from Dakar, out to Alaska. Of course there were guns and a radar ring to remind you of danger, but the time was very pleasant." He also becomes "ship's confidant" -- the guy people went to for advice. "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."

He listens to various worries and sexual confessions and the like. "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 MacManus was sent down by a torpedo." In the confusion he finds a lifeboat, but the mechanism for lowering it gets jammed. He climbs into the boat to try to free it, and it falls into the water and knocks him overboard. When he resurfaces he sees another boat a hundred yards away and swims toward it. Another man is clinging to it, and Augie helps him climb into the boat, but when he calls for the man to help him in, he gets no response. Finally he manages to clamber aboard and finds the man just sitting there. Angrily, Augie slugs him but he doesn't respond. "He lurched but otherwise didn't move, only turned up a pair of animal-in-the-headlights eyes. Augie curses him, but he still doesn't react.

Augie looks for the oars so they can row around and pick up survivors, but there is only one oar. "There was nothing to do but sit and drift.... And by the time night fell completely there wasn't the light of boat of [sic] raft to be seen anywhere." There is enough food and water to last two people for quite a while, and smudgepots and flares for signaling.

Finally his companion speaks, to say he recognizes him as "Mr. March, the purser." He identifies himself as "Basteshaw, ship's carpenter," and as a fellow Chicagoan. Augie recognizes the name: There had been a Basteshaw who had had some real estate dealings when Einhorn was in the business. It turns out to have been Basteshaw's father, who "was in the produce business. Basteshaw the Soupgreens King." Augie remembers that Einhorn used to call him "Butcher-Paper." Basteshaw the son has no fond memories of his father, which shocks Augie, whose mind is occupied with thoughts of family and friends, "whether I'd ever see Stella again, or my mother, my brothers, Einhorn, Clem." Basteshaw tells Augie his father drowned when he had a mild heart attack and fell into the water. On the day he died, Basteshaw "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 would never let him have it and kept it like a Swiss watch." Augie feels sorry for the father.

Basteshaw also tells him that he broke up the engagement his father had arranged for him with his cousin Lee, with whom he had been sleeping. She had a fatal lung condition, "So I told her I couldn't possible marry her. Why string her along?" Augie is enraged at this: "He had hastened her death. I couldn't bear the look of him for a while." But even though he realizes that his boatmate is a creep or worse, Augie realizes he has to get along with him, so he continues to listen to his stories, including one of Basteshaw's narcoleptic Aunt Ettl, who slept for fifteen years, and then one day woke up and went about her business as if nothing had happened. For Basteshaw, this is a lesson in the value of inertia.

"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."

Henri Rousseau, The Sleeping Gypsy, 1897

(The "next poet laureate of England" Basteshaw refers to is presumably T.S. Eliot, who never achieved that honor.)

Augie's estimation of Basteshaw begins to improve. "And then I had to bring to mind how many times, thinking myself right, I had been wrong." He asks how someone so obviously educated wound up as a ship's carpenter. Basteshaw tells him that "he was a biologist or biochemist; or psycho-biologist, which he liked best of all." And that he had been fired from six universities because of his "strange ideas." Going to sea gave him time to work on his experiments. He also tells Augie that his aim in life is to be a Renaissance cardinal, "A wicked one,smoking with life, neighing and plunging." And that he grew so bored because of his inability to fulfill this aim that he decided to study boredom itself and "become the world's leading authority on it." Augie is "stupefied. I watched hm climb around like an alpinist of the mountains of his own brain."

And then he claims to have created life in the laboratory: that's what the six universities threw him out for claiming. And he had continued his experiments on board the MacManus, so some of the protoplasm he had created is now floating in the ocean. Augie has a horrified thought that it might survive somehow and begin to evolve.

Soon Basteshaw begins to see what he thinks are signs that the boat is drifting closer to land. And then one day Augie thinks he sees a ship on the horizon. He gets a smudgepot ready to signal with, but Basteshaw asks why he wants to do that. Augie realizes that Basteshaw doesn't want to be rescued. He makes no move to help as Augie lowers the pot overboard and the signal smoke begins to rise. Augie loses sight of the ship, and Basteshaw claims he was hallucinating. He says they are drifting due east, and will land in Spanish territory. They will be interned, he says, and he can stay there for the rest of the war and do his research. Augie, he says, can be trained as his assistant. Augie wants no part of this plan.

The smudgepot is still giving off smoke, and when Augie turns to scan the horizon, Basteshaw hits him with the oar. "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." But Basteshaw is stronger; he overpowers Augie, and ties him up in Augie's own clothes. That night, when Basteshaw falls asleep, Augie manages to get loose. But when he goes to Basteshaw to tie him up, he discovers that Basteshaw is burning with fever and his heart is racing. Augie turns a piece of canvas into a makeshift poncho, and sits up with his adversary all night.

Basteshaw is out of his mind with fever in the morning, but late that day Augie sights a British tanker that rescues them. They are well past the Canaries and off the coast of Africa. The ship takes them to Naples, where they are hospitalized. After he tells Basteshaw that he saved his life, and that they were way off course, Basteshaw refuses to speak to him again. Six months later, Augie returns to New York, where Stella is waiting for him.

Chapter XXVI

Augie abandons his idea of a school and foster home, telling Mintouchian, "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." Anyway, Stella isn't keen on the idea, and "Pretty soon I understood that I would mostly do as she wanted because it was I who loved her most." When the war ends, Augie and Stella move to Europe. At a cafe he runs into Hooker Frazer, who is working with the World Education Fund, and Augie tells him that Stella works in the movies and he has gotten involved, through Mintouchian, in a slightly shady business involving international trade. They have an apartment in Paris that they from "an old Britisher and his French wife."

One day, when Stella comes home from the film studio, she takes a bath and calls out to Augie for a towel. When he joins her in the bathroom, he has an epiphany.

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, excavating 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.

Through their friend Alain du Niveau Augie learns a few of Stella's secrets -- "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." One of them is about Cumberland, whose mistress she had been before she took up with Oliver. Augie had suspected something of his presence when he first knew Stella in New York, living in a style and an apartment that were somewhat beyond her means, and receiving mysterious bills and business correspondence. After du Niveau lets his name slip, he confronts Stella about Cumberland, and she confesses, though she reminds Augie of his own brushes with the law. He is set back: "Was I going to be wrong again?" But after he talks to Mintouchian, the matter is relegated to the bygone.

Simon and Charlotte come to visit in Paris, and Simon is impressed: "My kid brother has turned out to be a man of the world." When he asks Simon about Renée, Simon doesn't want to talk about it, but Charlotte clues Augie in: "Evidently Simon's trouble with Renée 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." Renée had sued Augie claiming he had fathered her child. But there were three other men who could be the father. All along, Renée had been planning to blackmail Simon, collecting matchbooks from the restaurants he took her to and writing the date inside the cover. In the end, she married someone else.

Augie has to drive to Bruges on a business deal, and he takes the maid, Jacqueline, with him so she can visit her family in Normandy. On the way she tells him, "the dream of my life is to go to Mexico!" The idea of it, that one person's dream may be another person's painful memories, causes Augie to laugh. But it also reminds Augie of the persistence of people's dreams and ambitions.

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 in 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.

15. The Adventures of Augie March, by Saul Bellow (in Novels 1944-1953), pp. 893-927

Chapter XXII

Returning to his Chicago haunts, Augie begins working on getting a teaching certificate, and the school at which he does his practice teaching employs his old neighbor, Kayo Obermark. Augie also buys a used Buick, which won't start on cold mornings without a push. Kayo nags him about not being married and becoming a father. "I seemed to have critics everywhere," Augie reflects, and he tells Kayo "my pride has always been hurt by my not being able to give an account of myself and always being manipulated." In fact, Augie's drift through life has been a series of manipulations: by Grandma, by Einhorn, by Simon, by the Renlings, by the Magnuses, and by Thea -- among others. He asserts that "Reality comes from giving an account of yourself, and that's the worst of being helpless."

Kayo invites Augie home to meet his wife, and while he's there Kayo's brother-in-law offers to buy the Buick. Augie sells it to him for one hundred eighty dollars, paid by check, but then the brother-in-law insists they play poker. Kayo and his brother-in-law's wife play too, but Augie is the only winner. He gives Kayo his money back on the way home, but the brother-in-law stops the check when the Buick stops running, and Augie has to come fetch it.

He resumes his affair with Sophie Geratis, who is married now. But Sophie's husband has turned out to be gay, and she wants to divorce him and marry Augie. Despite Kayo's advice, Augie isn't ready to get married and tells Sophie so. She says, "I'm all right for bed, but not to marry.... Nothing is ever good enough for you to stick to. Your old man must have been some aristocrat bastard." Augie tells her that all he knows about his father is that he drove a truck for a laundry. But he knows that Sophie "would have scolded me for my own good too much."

Another friend, Clem Tambow, has an idea: He and Augie will open a vocational counseling service. Clem is about to get his psychology degree, so he'll give aptitude tests and Augie can conduct interviews. Augie rejects the idea as too much of a scam. He tells Clem that he has had a revelation: "since I've been working for Robey I have reached the conclusion that I couldn't utilize even ten percent of what I already knew.... Anything that just adds information that you can't use is just plain dangerous." So he wants to simplify his life: He wants to buy a little land and settle on it. He'll "get married and set up a kind of home and teach school." He'll get his mother and his brother out of their respective institutions, and he'll get the students for his school from state institutions. He'll teach woodworking and maybe his brother George can teach shoe repair. "Maybe I'll 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."

Clem scoffs at Augie's little utopia, starting with the students: "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?" Augie wants to be a king, he says, "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."

Augie persists in this daydream, however, and even thinks about marrying Sophie. But then Pearl Harbor is attacked, and suddenly his attention shifts elsewhere: "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." But when he goes to volunteer he discovers that he has developed a hernia from the fall with Bizcocho. So he goes into County Hospital to have the operation done.

Sophie visits him every day in the hospital, though she thinks he's crazy for having the operation when it could get him out of the draft. Her husband has been drafted, which she sees as another reason for Augie to stick around. "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." Padilla has let his girlfriend use Augie's room while he was in the hospital, so he's essentially living there, too. So he lets Augie move into his own place. "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."

Augie goes to visit his mother, and they go for a walk. On their way back, Simon drives up with a blond woman in the car. He signals to Augie not to let their mother know about the woman. Simon "was making real dough now. A company he had invested in was manufacturing a gimmick for the Army." After taking their mother home, Simon introduces Augie to his mistress, Renée. "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," Augie recalls. She seems immature and somehow suspicious and uncertain to him. Though Simon proclaims his love for Renée, "He was romantic about Charlotte too. And Renée had to bear it and know she could never have any exclusive claim on him." Augie reflects, however, that he had treated Stella pretty much the same way when Thea turned up in his life. Renée gets her own by demanding from Simon everything that Charlotte has. They fight about it: "Charlotte has her own money, don't you realize that?" Renée replies, "But not what you want. I've got that."

While waiting to recover from the hernia operation, Augie takes a job as a salesman with a business machine company -- a plum job made available by the wartime manpower shortage. But he remains eager to get into the service, to Simon's disgust -- Simon has been declared 4F because of an ear problem. The Army and Navy continue to reject Augie, so he joins the Merchant Marine. While he's waiting to go to Sheepshead Bay for training, Augie runs into Simon, who tells him that Renée tried to commit suicide -- though he admits that she may have been faking it. Charlotte had found out about Renée and told Simon that it had to stop. After a meeting in which Renée cursed Charlotte and both Charlotte and Simon slapped Renée, Simon paid Renée off and sent her to California. But she had come back and telephoned Simon with the news that she was pregnant. Simon told her he didn't care and called her a crook. "After a silence she hung up. This was when he thought she would kill herself." So he went to check on her and found her unconscious. She is in her fourth month of pregnancy, and he asks Augie what to do.

"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."

Chapter XXIII

Augie applies to the Purser's and Pharmacist's Mate School, but has to do training on Chesapeake Bay first. In Baltimore there are letters from friends, including Sophie, who has joined her husband at Camp Blanding. "She said farewell but kept saying it in different letters." They return to Sheepshead, where he studies bookkeeping and "ship's doctoring." Stella Chesney, whom he helped get out of Mexico, is in New York. He learns that Oliver had promised to make her a star in Hollywood, and that they had wound up in Mexico on a kind of side trip. On a weekend leave, Augie and Stella resume their affair, and he falls in love with her.

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. 

He has to return to the base on Monday morning, and he is on his best behavior for fear that his next weekend leave will be canceled. He hurries back to her the next Saturday and finds her sick in bed, partly because she was worried if he really loved her. He proposes to her, and they decide to get married once his training at Sheepshead is over.

14. The Adventures of Augie March, by Saul Bellow (in Novels 1944-1953), pp. 861-892

Chapter XXI

Augie makes his way back to Chicago with a detour to see his brother George who despite his mental handicap is "a man of fine appearance, as he had been a beautiful child." He is being trained as a shoemaker. After he leaves, he wishes he could find a way other than institutionalization for his brother: "I thought how quick we were to latch onto the excuse to deal practically with any element, like jailbirds, orphans, cripples, the weak-brained or the old." So he goes from the one institution to the other, the one where his mother lives. Simon has kept their mother supplied with everything that his money can buy, though his occasional visits are mainly to check to see if the money is being well-spent. "I knew how Simon could be when he was doing something for your good and welfare; he could make things hot."

Augie's mother frets about how thin he is, and urges him to see his brother, so Augie complies. Simon turns out to be eager to see him, and Augie "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." But he has no intention of telling him the full story of what had happened in Mexico. "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."

But Simon really wants to talk about himself anyway, about how successful he has been and how much money he has made, buying and selling businesses. "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 tells Augie, "If I'm not a millionaire soon there's a hitch in my arithmetic." But of course now he wants to take Augie on as a project. They go to Simon's opulent apartment where Augie is forced to get rid of his old clothes and Simon dresses him in new and expensive ones. He has the old clothes thrown down the incinerator. They go to his office where Simon wheels and deals on an international scale: "He was in on a deal to buy some macaroni in Brazil and sell it in Helsinki. Then he was interested in some mining machinery from Sudbury, Ontario, that was wanted by an Indo-Chinese company." They go to Simon's club where "he forced his way into a poker game. I could tell he was hated, but no one could stand up to him" as he slanders the other players.

Augie asks why he wants to make them hate him, and Simon replies, "Because I hate them. I want them to know it." So why does he belong to a club with people he hates?  "Why not? I enjoy being a member of a club." (Which is the flip side of Groucho Marx's line about not wanting to be a member of any club that would let him in.)

On the way home they pick up Charlotte, "grimly handsome and immense." Then Mrs. Magnus arrives, and Augie witnesses the bizarre relationship of Simon and his mother-in-law. He nags her about her cheap clothes, and when she comes to the table he sits there reading the paper and ignoring her.

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 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.

He writes her a check ordering her to buy something that doesn't make her look like a 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."

Next Augie goes to see Einhorn, who is recovering from a prostate operation and is complaining about the relationship of his son with Mimi Villars. Mimi and Arthur are living together while Arthur works on a book. She has tried to help him get a job, but Arthur is incapable of holding one. Augie also visits Manny Padilla, who is not sympathetic when he hears about Augie's experiences in Mexico: "Holy Christ, March, what did you have to go there for, with a broad like that and a bird!" Augie protests that he was in love, but Padilla replies, "Is love supposed to ruin you? It seems to me you shouldn't destroy yourself out of life for purposes of love -- or what good is it?"

Padilla diagnoses Augie's problem: "you're too ambitious. You want too much, and therefore if you miss out you blame yourself too hard." It's a familiar problem of Bellow's protagonists: Remember Henderson's "I want, I want" or Herzog's obsessions over Madeleine. Talking to Clem Tambow, Augie decides that his problem is his refusal to specialize: "Specialization was leaving the like 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." Clem tells him, "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 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. O paidea! O King David! O Plutarch and Seneca! O chivalry, O Abbot Suger! O Strozzi Palace, O Weimar! O Don Giovanni, O lineaments of gratified desire! O godlike man!" 

So far, Augie admits, he has found only one specialization: He trained a bird. "I always believed that for what I wanted there wasn't much hope if you had to be a specialist.... 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 puts him on to a job opportunity that she had found for Arthur, but he doesn't want to be tied down by it: "there was a millionaire engaged in writing a book and he was looking for a research assistant." Augie needs the money: He has finally heard from Stella, but she tells him she is unable to repay his debt just yet -- she will when she finds a job, she promises. So Augie goes to see the millionaire, a man named Robey, who had been one of Frazer's students when Frazer was teaching. "Arthur said the book was to be a survey or history of human happiness from the standpoint of the rich." Augie is justifiably skeptical, but he doesn't want to be dependent on Simon, so he goes to see Robey.

The house sits on a lakefront, and is lavishly and eccentrically furnished. There is a portrait of Robey's mother, who "looked demented and wore a crown, a scepter in one hand and a rose in the other." Arthur has told Augie that she believed "she was the queen of Rockford, Illinois.... She had a throne. She expected everyone in town to bow to her." Though he is afflicted with a stammer, Robey rambles on about his plans for the book. "I thought, Oh, what a crazy bastard! What kind of screwloose millionaire have they sent me to?" But he decides to go through with it, and after some haggling gets Robey to agree to pay him thirty dollars a week for thirty hours work. "I was used to enthusiastic projects that would never leave the inventor's hangar. Like Einhorn's indexed Shakespeare back in the old days." (Or, he might have added, Thea's hunting trip.)

So he submits to Robey's reading assignments and twice-a-week conferences in which he reports on what he's read and answers Robey's questions. "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." Robey comes to depend on Augie for some kind of stability. "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, or yelling or being sullen, sticking out his big red mouth in unhappiness or anger."

His even more eccentric sister, Caroline, also lives in the mansion. "She was screwy. And when she found I had been in Mexico she took a shine to me, believing herself Spanish." But Augie reflects, "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."

13. The Adventures of Augie March, by Saul Bellow (in Novels 1944-1953), pp. 839-860

Chapter XIX

Iggy finds a room for Augie in the place where he lives, and keeps him company while Augie works through the depression after Thea's departure. "Iggy knew I was in a crisis and didn't want me to be alone." He also has a telling response when Augie asks what he can do to prove to Thea that he loves her: "I don't know what. Maybe you couldn't prove it because you don't." Augie rejects that premise at first, but as he debates with himself he comes around to the realization that perhaps he doesn't really know what love is.

That realization isn't enough to stop him from deciding to go confront Thea in Chilpanzingo "and say that though I was a weak man I could little by little alter if she'd bear with me." As he's boarding the bus Moulton comes out to try to stop him. He tells Augie, "Talavera was Thea's friend, old man. He's there with her in Chilpanzingo." Iggy joins in the attempt to stop Augie, telling him that Talavera had been Thea's lover even before she came there with Augie, and that he left for Chilpanzingo just after Thea did. Moulton also insists that Thea and Talavera were having sex when they were in the mountains while Augie was laid up after the accident.

Enraged, Augie threatens to kill Moulton, but Iggy restrains him while Moulton runs away. Augie is nevertheless determined to get on the bus, so Iggy sees him off. On the bus he thinks about the cat that Thea had in Chicago. "And where was this cat now? Left behind somewhere, nowhere special, and that was how permanent Thea's attachments were." When they reach Chilpanzingo, Augie tries to prepare himself for an encounter with Talavera, and realizes that he doesn't have a weapon. He looks in vain for a shop where he can buy a knife, and even goes into a cafe with the thought of stealing one, but there are none in sight.

"Coming out of the café, I saw the station wagon parked in front of New Orleans ironwork king of place from which there were pieces missing." He goes inside and asks for Thea's room number, and send a man up to ask if she will see him. She calls down to him, and lets him into her room, where he looks for signs of Talavera's presence. "Her eyes were not as keen as usual and she looked ill." He asks if Talavera is there with her, and she says it's none of his business, which he takes as a yes. She insists that he isn't there, "so you can set your mind at rest." Augie takes this as confirmation that he had been there.

She tells him that she's going to Acapulco and then flying to Vera Cruz where she's going to Yucatán to see some rare flamingos. But when he asks her to let him come with her she says no.

Chapter XX

Augie returns to Acatla, where he drinks and pals around with a Russian exile who had been kicked out of troupe of Cossack chorus members. But eventually he decides to pull himself together. He sells his riding boots and other equipment that had been bought for him with Smitty's money and buys a ticket for Mexico City. The money Stella promised to leave for him at Wells Fargo isn't there, so  he looks up Manny Padilla's cousin, but winds up lending him money and never sees him again. So finally he gets in touch with Sylvester, who loans him some money and says that one of the Trotskyites has a place Augie can stay if Frazer vouches for him. Frazer does, so Augie moves in with a man named Paslavitch, "a friendly Yugoslavian who lived in a little villa out in Coyoacán."

After Augie has gotten himself together again, Frazer tells him that he might have a job for him. The chief of the Russian police is in Mexico plotting against "the Old Man," Trotsky. One scheme to elude him is for Trotsky to assume a disguise and travel around the country, posing as a tourist. "If the Old Man is going to travel incognito as a visitor to Mexico he's going to need a nephew from the States" -- Augie and a woman would pose as husband and wife and travel with Trotsky. Augie resists the idea: "Please God! I thought, keep me from being sucked into another one of those great currents where I can't be myself." But when Frazer assures him that it would be only for a few weeks until the Russian agent loses the trail, Augie reluctantly agrees.

In the end, though, the plan falls through, to Augie's relief. So he borrows two hundred pesos from Paslavitch and buys a ticket to Chicago.  

12. The Adventures of Augie March, by Saul Bellow (in Novels 1944-1953), pp. 797-838

Chapter XVII

Augie suffers a concussion and loses some teeth, but Bizcocho breaks a leg and has to be shot, which Augie regrets: "he had been whanged at by blasting shotguns, and it had to be me that killed him." When Caligula returns, he is shipped off to her the zoo run by the friend of Thea's father.

After a few weeks of recuperation, Augie suggests that Thea continue her expeditions. "We had one of those arguments of sacrifice; she didn't want to leave me alone and I insisted that she go out, though I didn't want it to be after snakes that she went." So for a while she contents herself with hunting wild pigs, but eventually comes home with a bag of snakes. Augie is through with hunting, though he doesn't tell her that, and suggests that she gets some friends to go with her. Sometimes Talavera accompanies her.

Still plagued by dysentery as well as his injuries, Augie continues reading in the utopia book. The weather also provides some comfort: "Daily there was this sure blue, while the powerful forces of heaven took it easy over the mossy tiles. The blue beauty compensated me considerably, as did the book when I was in the right mood for it." He also talks to Stella, Oliver's girlfriend, over the wall between the house and the hotel, and she tells him that they are moving out of the hotel into the villa owned by the Japanese man, who has to return to Nagasaki. As they are talking, Oliver comes up and takes her away, without speaking to Augie. Moulton tells Augie that Oliver is jealous.


Augie begins hanging out more with the exiles.

As the house was void, as there were more snakes on the porch, as I wasn't strong enough to go with Thea but wasn't too weak to be restless, as I was horse-shy and hunt-shy, as I was in reality in a fork about my course of life, I stalled and delayed. Besides, I was intrigued with Moulton and Iggy and others of the international colony.

He spends much of his time with Iggy, while he is writing his tales about men on Mars, and at the bar playing poker, "which I had learned in a great school, Einhorn's poolroom."

The tension with Thea continues to grow, partly because Augie loathes her snake collection: "they had parasites that got between the scales, and they had to be dusted or washed with mercurochrome; some had to be given inhalations of eucalyptus oil for their lung ailments, for snakes get tuberculosis." So even after he regains his health, Augie continues to claim that he's not strong enough to go out hunting with her. For her part, she is disgusted by the set Augie hangs out with. "I think they must make you feel ashamed of me, ever since Caligula. They make fun of me." Augie denies it.

He has become hooked by poker. "I was ahead and couldn't quit." His pockets are full of his winnings in various currencies. "I didn't know exactly what I had. But I did have money. It was mine, not Smitty's." When the divorce papers come, he asks Thea to marry him, but "she simply shook her head." Augie suspects that it's because of their differing social status: "I remembered how once when afraid of pregnancy she let escape the fear of explaining to her family that I was the father."

Leon Trotsky

One day he sees several cars drive up in front of the cathedral, and watches as bodyguards emerge from the cars. Finally the man they are protecting emerges. "As I looked at him I decided with a real jolt that this must be Trotsky, down from Mexico City, the great Russian exile." With him are men with briefcases: "members of radical organizations I used to know in Chicago always had briefcases like those." And then he recognizes one of the bodyguards as "my old friend Sylvester, the one-time owner of the Star Theater, the engineering student from Armour Tech, the ex-husband of Mimi Villar's [sic] sister, the former subway employee." He calls out to Sylvester, and they talk for a while. He asks for an introduction to Trotsky, but Sylvester puts him off, saying, "When you get up to the city phone me. I'd like to see you; we'll have a beer." He also mentions that Mimi's ex-lover, Frazer, is one of Trotsky's secretaries.

Oliver is preparing to have a big party when he finally moves into the villa owned by the Japanese man, but before that a Treasury agent shows up in town, and rumor has it that Oliver is in some sort of trouble. He feigns indifference, but it is evident to Augie that Stella is afraid of what might happen. She signals to Augie that she'd like to talk to him about it, but "Oliver watched her very closely." Oliver gets into more trouble when he discovers that Louie Fu, the owner of the Chinese restaurant where they often gather, is pouring the leftovers from orange soda bottles into a single bottle at the end of the day. "Oliver caught him and punched him in the face," and is hauled into jail for it. The city magistrate is not sympathetic to Oliver's defense "that what Louie had done was very dangerous because of the amoeba." The magistrate doesn't want word getting out that dysentery is rife in the town, so he gives Oliver a heavy fine. Stella, who is present in the court, "appealed to me with her large disturbed eyes to see for myself what she was up against."

When Thea hears about all of this, she suggests that they leave town and get away from the exiles until the summer tourist season is over. She wants to drive down to Chilpanzingo, "in the hot country." He tries to hedge: "Well, I think I may feel up to it soon." But Thea is determined to get away, and blames his slow recovery on his drinking. "You never touched a drop before you got down here." So he gives in: "I will go to Chilpanzingo with you. I'd rather be with you than with anyone in the world." But he wonders what he will do there.

Chapter XVIII

Before they can depart, however, Oliver's housewarming party takes place. Augie is eager to go, but he knows she doesn't. He rationalizes his forcing her to attend by thinking, "If I can stand her snakes, she can take this for one evening." But by the time they arrive at the party it's evident that it is turning into something of a wild rout, with guests passed out and empty tequila bottles floating in the fishpond. "Thea wanted to leave immediately, but as she began to say so I saw Stella by an orange tree. She made me a small sign, and I had to go and talk to her." Then Moulton comes up and asks Thea to dance, and although he knows she loathes Moulton and is angry with him for forcing her to come to the party, he leaves her on the dance floor and goes to find Stella. "But it did occur to me that the last time I had been called aside like this for a discussion apart was with Sophie Geratis, when we had fallen into each other's arms."

Stella tells him that the magazine Oliver edits had been bought with money from the Italian government, and the man who owns it has been arrested. "All the important things that were printed were planned in Rome." That's why the government agent has come for Oliver.  Stella doesn't know much more than that, except that Oliver wants to run away, perhaps to South America. Augie comments, "That poor fool! He thinks he's a big-league fugitive. You'll have to get away from him." He offers to lend her the money to leave, but she says she was hoping he'd take her to Mexico City himself. He tells her he can't do that, but that he can get her out of town.

He arranges to meet her with the station wagon, but when he goes to find Thea he finds she has left. Iggy tells him, "She was in quite a mood.... We looked for you. then she said to tell you she was pulling out for Chilpanzingo first thing in the morning. She was all nervous and shaking." So Augie goes to where the station wagon is parked and waits for Stella. The battery is low because the station wagon hasn't been driven for a while, and while he is trying to start it with a hand crank Thea shows up. He tells her that he is taking Stella to safety because "Oliver went crazy and tried to kill her today." Thea isn't buying it: "I've seen you with women. I know what you look like when a handsome woman or even not such a handsome woman passes by." They argue, and she suggests that they take Stella to their house to protect her. He digs in his heels but suggests that she come along. "I'll drive her up to Cuernavaca and we'll be back in a few hours." When she refuses, he starts the car and leaves.

The road to Cuernavaca is steep and dark. There is a detour when they get out of town, but the sign pointing the way has been tampered with and he can't tell which direction to take. He decides to go to the left, but the road gets worse and worse, and when he tries to back up to turn around, the engine dies. He gets out and discovers that they are on the edge of a steep mountain. There is no one around to help, and the crank no longer works to start the station wagon, so they take canvas and blankets out of the car and bed down for the night. Both of them give in to their impulses and make love. Augie reflects, "Thea foresaw that I'd do this. It annoyed me all the more with her, as though if she hadn't made the prediction it wouldn't have happened."

In the morning some men help them get the car turned around and when it starts to roll downhill the engine starts. They drive to Cuernavaca where he hires a car to take her to Mexico City and gives her all his money. She vows to pay him back, but he doesn't believe her.

Waiting in the sun for the taxi, we were at the side of the market, by the flowers, and stood where the stones were slippery from the cast-off blooms, just the light greasiness of the flowers underfoot. Facing us were the butchers' stalls, and on the hooks the tripes and lights and the carcasses were slung, on which the flies gave out nearly a roar and bounded like the first drops of cloudburst on a red wall. Under a chopping block squatted a naked kid and he slowly made a strange color of defecation. We went slowly around the broad steel gallery, the glass roof rising over the packed tinware, peppers, beef, bananas, pork, orchids, baskets, and this flash, rage, the chitin, electric loud tissue sound of fond love, the wild loving hum of the bluebottles and green. As if a huge spool were revolving that caught up all the threads from the sunlight.

Stella gives him the name of her theatrical agent who, she says, will always know where to reach her.

He returns to Thea and finds her ready to leave for Chilpanzingo. He tries to tell her about the car breaking down in the mountains, but she isn't interested in hearing it. He bitterly replies, "It wouldn't be so hard to tell you after what you've told me about yourself, about the Navy man and so forth, while you were married to Smitty. You're quite a few up on me." They reach an impasse on this subject, and she tells him that Oliver was picked up by the police at about the time he was leaving with Stella. Augie admits, "I guess I shouldn't have been in such a hurry. But I was afraid he'd drag her with him. Because he did have a gun, and he hit Louie Fu, he was getting to be violent and I though he'd force her --" But Thea just scoffs at the idea of Oliver forcing anyone, and suggests that Augie has been played by Stella.

Augie then delivers a cruel blow to Thea by revealing that he was just playing along with her on her hunting ambitions. She replies, "What, were you jut being indulgent with me? About the eagle? That didn't mean anything to you? All along you thought I was only fantastic?" He tries to back down and claim that he never thought she was eccentric in her enthusiasms, but the damage has been done.

"I must be a little crazy." She said it in a husky and quite tone. "I must be, I have to admit. But I thought if I could get through to one other person I could get through to more. So people wouldn't tire me, and so I wouldn't be afraid of them.... I was so happy to find you.... I'm sorry you're here now. You're not special. You're like everybody else. You get tired easily. I don't want to see you any more." 

She tells him that she is going to Chilpanzingo without him. And when she leaves, he goes berserk, demolishing the furniture and curtains and pictures in the house, and destroying the snake cages, watching "the panic of the monsters as they flowed and fled, surged for cover." He puts his things into a valise and goes into the village where, when he meets Moulton and Iggy, he curses them. But he follows Iggy into the market where, when Iggy sees his suitcase, he realizes what Augie has done. Augie bursts into tears.

11. The Adventures of Augie March, by Saul Bellow (in Novels 1944-1953), pp. 758-796

Chapter XV

They are off on their Mexican adventure, but Augie at least realizes what an odd couple they are.

We had all the luck in love we could ask, and it was maybe improved by the foreignness we found in each other, for in some ways Danaë or Flora the Belle Romaine couldn't have been stranger to me, while only God can guess what sort of oddity out of barbarous Chicago I was to her. But these differences I think reduced the weight of precious personality and the veteran burden that familiarity is always a part of.

On the other hand, he admits, "Thea and I had our troubles. She kept me uncertain, as I did her." Part of his uncertainty stems from the fact that he can't believe that her husband is divorcing her because of that fling with the naval cadet. "I figured in those high-up social circles a falling-off here and there was not of such importance." She admits that it's not the only reason for the breakup, but doesn't elaborate. She just assures him that "we don't have to think about that. Because nothing like you has ever happened to me." Still, Augie is not without his doubts: "Sometimes I reckoned that mere jealousy of her sister had interested her in me in the first place."

And then "the gilded and dallying part of the excursion ended in Texarkana," when they pick up the eagle. It turns out to be "as big as the one in Chicago," to Augie's dismay. Thea loves it, but acknowledges that it "looks full grown and must weigh twelve pounds." Augie guesses more like thirty, but he defers to her judgment. He doesn't trust the man who's selling him, however: "I hadn't sered around Einhorn's poolroom or had Grandma Lausch's upbringing for nothing, and I recognized him for a crooked old bastard and prick in his heart." The eagle lashes out at them when they approach it, and Augie winds up with lacerations in his arm.

Somehow they manage to get the eagle loaded into their station wagon. "I hated him beyond measure, at the start. In the night we had to be up because of him, and it was an interference with love." But for Thea, "He was right away her absorption and idée fixe, almost child, and he made her out of breath." They ride on through the heat of Texas, and they begin the training.

But before the eagle would take the hood he had to be thoroughly mastered, and I carried him on my arm some forty hours without sleep. He wouldn't drop off, and Thea kept me awake. This was in Nuevo Laredo, just over the border.

When they they him out of the station wagon, a crowd gathers, and the children scream out, "El águilda, el águila!" To Augie it sounds like "Caligula," which becomes the eagle's name.

Augie persists in the training, and gets his hand slashed several times. Caligula has to be carried everywhere, and the crowds make him nervous. They even try taking him into a movie theater, but the sound there makes him worse. But finally he submits to having the hood put on him, which "made him more docile. Henceforth he rode either my fist or Thea's and took the hood without using his beak on us."

Left alone all night, he was vicious in the morning, and Thea was by now so wrapped up in his career that for the time very few considerations took precedence. Because she was making history.... She kept reminding me how few people since the Middle Ages had manned eagles. I agreed it was terrific and admired her without limit; I thanked God I was even her supernumerary or assistant.

The bird makes them travel slowly, and they spend some time teaching him to fly after a lure -- a piece of meat tied to a horseshoe on the end of a rawhide line.

They travel on southward, and Augie becomes impressed with the depth of the sky over Mexico. "I thought it held back an element too strong for life, and that the flamy brilliance of blue stood off this menace and sometimes, like a sheath of silk membrane, showed the weight it held in sags." He admired Thea's "barbarous" look, and when she holds out her arm to receive the returning eagle, "I thought it was the most splendid human act I would ever see."

In Mexico City Thea has to see a representative for her husband's lawyer, and they stay a while in a cheap hotel that by night is "a house of assignation" -- "The closets were full of douche pans, the beds were heavily prepared with rubber under the sheets, which was an annoyance." But during the day they have the place to themselves, except for the maids. Augie is finding the experience eye-opening: "I thought the world was really much greater than I had ever fancied. I said to Thea, 'I don't actually know much, I begin to see.'" She asks, "how much are you obliged to know?" But he assures her there is a great deal.

As the training of Caligula continues, Augie begins to grow more attached to him: "He liked to be stroked with a feather. He became pretty tame, but all the same my heart picked up a few beats when we hooded him or struck the hood." They have the hotel maids line up and chatter with one another to get him used to human beings, which seems to work. Thea grows impatient to leave, so they can begin to train him hunt, and to accustom him to the presence of horses, which will be needed in the mountainous country where the giant iguanas are found, but she has to wait until she can see the lawyer.

"I assumed we'd get married when the divorce came through."

Chapter XVI

The chapter begins, unusually, with an epigraph from Antony and Cleopatra:

                                   And strange it is
That nature must compel us to lament
Our most persisted deeds.

They arrive at the house in Acatla, which as Augie reflects, he wasn't sure whether it belonged to Thea or to Smitty. "I thought I'd find out in due time." It is called "Casa Descuitada" -- Carefree House. They use the toilet as a mews for Caligula, perching him "on the waterbox or cistern where the sound of trickling seemed to please him. The bird fascinates the houseboy, Jacinto, though it terrifies his mother, who is the cook.

Acatla is not isolated. In fact, it has begun to attract a contingent of European exiles, "people who once went to Biarritz and San Remo but not wanted to be out of the way of politics." There is also a large American colony. Many of them congregate at the Carlos Quinto, a hotel next door managed by an Italian named da Fiori.

The time has come to train Caligula to catch lizards, and Jacinto is helpful in catching small ones for the training. Augie likes the lizards, which were easy to tame and actually grew affectionate after a while. "I wished we could leave them alone, thinking of that thunderous animal whose weight was on the toilet cistern, with his ripping feet and beak. But Thea mocks his sentimentality.

"Oh, you screwball! You get human affection mixed up with everything, like a savage. Keep your silly feelings to yourself. Those lizards don't want them, and if they felt the way you do they wouldn't be lizards -- they'd be too slow, and pretty soon they'd be extinct." 

She isn't particularly sentimental where Augie is concerned, either. "Unlike Lucy Magnus, she never called me husband, or by any domestic term." He likens her to Mimi in her lack of conventional attitudes toward marriage.

The small lizards are easy prey for Caligula, and Augie dislikes seeing them eviscerated by the eagle. And then Jacinto brings them a larger lizard, which turns on the attacking bird and opens its mouth, showing "a tissue of rage to the big beast over it, then snapped its jaws and hung from the bird's thigh, curved with the force of its attack and bite." Caligula is startled, and when he has torn the lizard from his leg he hops away. "I couldn't show it, but it did my heart good to see Caligula offended." Thea, however, is enraged at the eagle: "Oh, the dirty bastard! We can't let him run away from a little bit of an animal like that. What'll we do? Augie, don't you grin about it." Augie claims the sun is in his eyes, making him squint. Even after the dead lizard has been brought to him to eat, Caligula refuses it, angering Thea further: "Oh, that damned crow! Get him out of my sight!" She also seems to blame Augie for the bird's lack of ferocity.

Augie begins to get acquainted with the village's European and American exiles, who are representatives of "Greenwich Village, or Montparnasse, or the equivalent from a dozen countries. There is a woman named Nettie Kilgore, a pair of writers from New York named Wiley Moulton and Iggy Blaikie, a man named Jepson who was the grandson of an African explorer as well as "the second husband of Iggy's first wife." There is also a young Mexican, Talavera, a "handsome brown strong young chap" who is the only one who realizes how capable Thea is of handling an eagle -- everyone else assumes Augie is the bird's master.

Thea hopes to get Moulton to help her with the articles she plans to write about training and hunting with Caligula, but he says he has all the work he can handle with his assignments for a pulp magazine published by a man named Nicolaides. "I had a bid to go up and interview Trotsky last month and I let it go because I'd rather write for Nicolaides." He suggests that Iggy might be able to write the articles, "but this recommendation everybody knew was a joke, because Iggy specialized in blood-curdlers for Doc Savage and Jungle Thrillers. He couldn't write anything else." Augie likes Iggy, whose real name is Gurevitch, because he's a familiar type: "He had a real poolroom look."

Ramon Novarro

He's not so sure about Talavera. "I wasn't experienced enough to be suspicious of the young man and native of the place who attaches himself to the foreign visitors, especially to women." He looks like Ramon Novarro, "both soft and haughty, and was said to be a mining engineer by profession; that was never proved but he had no need of work, his father was rich, and Talavera was a sportsman." Thea and Augie are renting horses from Talavera's father, but they have trouble finding horses that don't shy around Caligula. Finally they find an old one named Bizcocho "who had been through the Zapatista rebellion and wounded in guerrilla battles."

They go to a plateau to practice with Caligula, and his performance pleases Thea. So a few days later they go into the mountains to hunt the giant lizards. They "were really huge, with great frills or sails -- those ancient membranes.... These beasts were as fast and bold as anything I had ever seen." Jacinto is there to drive the lizards out of cover and into a stony slope. Caligula spots one and makes his dive.

I saw the two sharp fierce faces, and as Caligula put his foot on the monster it opened its angular mouth with strange snake rage and struck the eagle in the neck. Jacinto cried, and Thea even shriller, at this sight. Powerfully Caligula shook, but only to get free. The iguana dropped and fled, glittering its blood on the rocks. Thea yelled, "After him! Get him! There he goes!" But the eagle didn't pursue down the slope; he landed and stood beating his wings. When the thrashing of the lizard couldn't be heard any more he folded them. He didn't fly to me.

Furious, Thea yells at Caligula, "You stinking coward! You crow!" and begins to throw rocks at him. Augie runs to stop her, afraid that Caligula will turn on her, and when she keeps throwing stones he gets the shotgun, to keep her from using it on the eagle. Finally the bird flies off. Augie tries to console Thea, who is now crying in rage and frustration. To himself, Augie reflects that "it was hard to take this from wild nature, that there should be humanity mixed with it; such as there was in the beasts that embraced Odysseus and his men and wept on them in Circe's yard."

They are certain that Caligula has flown away from good, but when they get home he is on top of the shed. Thea is finished with him, she says, but Augie feeds him and becomes "his sole custodian." Because he comes down with a case of dysentery and can't stray far from the house, Augie sees more of the eagle than he really wants to. Thea spends most of her time in the darkroom developing the photographs she has taken along the way. Augie finds an old book to read: "It contained Campanella's City of the Sun, More's Utopia, Machiavelli's Discourses and The Prince, as well as long selections from St. Simon, Comte, Marx and Engels." A rainy spell limits his ability to exercise Caligula, and Augie is able to immerse himself in "all that boldness of assumption and reckoning." Thea, of course, has no interest in the book.

One day he puts on raingear and goes into the village on an errand for Thea, and meets up with Wiley Moulton and Iggy, who are drinking with a man named Oliver and his girlfriend, Stella, a beautiful young woman. Moulton gives Augie a nickname, Bolingbroke. He learns that word has gotten out about Caligula's failure. "I had yet to find out how little people want you to succeed in an extraordinary project, and what comfort some have that the negligible is upheld and all other greater effort falls on its face." Oliver turns out to be a magazine editor, and Iggy suggests that he might be interested in the story of the eagle, but Oliver says the new owners of the magazine are only interested in political articles.

Augie goes back home "determined that we would not back down but fly Caligula and catch those giant iguanas." But Thea and Jacinto have gone out to hunt snakes, which she begins to collect, putting them in the cases that had been meant for the iguanas. "In time the porch became a snake gallery, so that the cook wanted to quit, fearing for her kid." But the snake-hunting also revives Thea's interest in the iguanas, so they take Caligula out again to the same spot.

Suddenly I got the idea of what it was to hunt, not with a weapon but with a creature, a living creature you had known how to teach because you'd inferred that all intelligences from the weakest blink to the first magnitude stars were essentially the same.

But just as Augie gets the signal from Thea to release the eagle, that the iguanas had been driven onto the rocky slope, he realizes that the place where he is riding is too steep for the horse. He finds himself going over the horse's head as Bizcocho tries to gain footing. "He was falling and so was I. I felt the push of Caligula's spring as he left my arm, and then I saw the color of my own blood on the slope of stones." Thea cries out for Augie to roll out of the way of the horse, who is kicking out trying to get up. "But one of Bizcocho's hoofs caught me square in the head and I was out."

10. The Adventures of Augie March, by Saul Bellow (in Novels 1944-1953), pp. 739-757

Chapter XIV

Augie gives up his union-organizing job for Thea: "I just didn't have the calling to be a union man or in politics.... It wasn't what I was meant to be." But was he meant to be as head-over-heels in love with Thea as he is?

They fall into a passionate embrace in the elevator of her apartment house. "Not noticing the blood-stiffened shirt, she passed her hand over my chest and up to my shoulders. I opened her housecoat on her breasts. I was not in control of my head, nearly blind." But Augie isn't the only blind one. When she finally notices the bruises from his beating, "the specific reason for my being beaten didn't interest her and she wasn't very curious about it."

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

And for the time being, Augie is the same way. "Suitcases were standing around the bed, but I didn't ask about them." He is only mildly surprised that she keeps money, cash and checks, in the refrigerator, "mixed up with rotting salad leaves and lying with saucers of bacon grease, which she didn't like to throw away." 

Gradually this blind infatuation -- "I loved her to the degree that anything she chanced to do was welcome to me" -- begins to allow reality to creep in. He learns that she is married, but is going to Mexico to get a divorce. Her husband is older and very wealthy. Esther, too, has married a rich man, a lawyer in Washington, D.C. Thea assumes that Augie will go with her to Mexico, and for the moment at least he is not inclined to refuse anything she asks of him.

He calls Grammick at the union offices. "He said the union guy and his boys were really gunning for me, to lay low," and although he is surprised when Augie tells him he's quitting, he admits that the conflict between the unions was "a lousy deal" to get involved in.

Thea starts outfitting Augie for the trip. "She wanted me to look like a sportsman," and buys expensive things for him, squandering money everywhere. Augie notices her foolish extravagances, but "It didn't matter. I let a lot of things go past.... I was never before so taken up with a single human being." He follows Thea's lead in everything, though occasionally is aware that he is "abandoning some mighty old protections."

Here Thea appeared with her money, her decided mind set on love and great circumstances, her car, her guns and Leicas and boots, her talk about Mexico, her ideas. One of the chiefest of these ideas being that there must be something better than what people call reality.

He recognizes "that she was used to having what she wanted, including me." Augie opens up to her about everything, but he sees that "she was in many ways suspicious." But she doesn't open up as completely.

She had several times tried to tell me what we would do in Mexico obtaining her divorce, and she seemed to assume that I knew intuitively what her plans were. I frequently was confused. I couldn't tell whether she owned or rented a house in the town of Acatla, and what she described of the country didn't make me altogether happy. It sounded like a risky place when she talked of the mountains, hunting, diseases, robbery, and the dangerous population.

They are, he learns, going to go hunting with eagles. "She had gotten the idea for this hunt from reading articles by Dan and Julie Mannix, who actually had gone to Taxco some years before with a trained bald eagle and used the bird to catch iguanas." They are going to stop on the way at a place near Texarkana where a man raises eagles. The iguanas are for a friend of her father's who has a private zoo. "As this information came out, which I didn't know how seriously to take, I thought this was like me and my life -- I could not find myself in love without it should have some peculiarity." (The vernacular touch of "without it should have" is a deft reminder that Augie is mostly self-taught.)

Their trip is delayed while Thea waits to hear from her husband's lawyer, and she spends part of the time giving Augie riding lessons. She also shows him an album of family photographs, including some of her husband, Smitty. Augie is struck by these pictures of a wealthy family at play, and finds it difficult to imagine himself fitting in with them. "And then the hunting troubled me. I didn't know how earnestly I was to take it."

He takes his uncertainties to Mimi, who is not exactly sympathetic, especially when he tells her about the eagle. "What, what, what! You have an eagle to pick up in Arkansas? Don't you mean a buzzard?" He finds that Arthur has taken over his room, and has found the Harvard Classics under the bed. He asks to be allowed to take care of them, and since they have Arthur's father's name in them, Augie agrees. Arthur is undergoing treatment for his venereal disease. Augie also goes to see his mother, who asks if Thea is "a rich girl, like Simon's wife?" He wonders if she thinks he's still involved with Lucy Magnus, and assures her that she has nothing to do with Charlotte's family. She tells him that Simon has a new Cadillac. "Oh, it's wonderful! He's going to be a very rich fellow." Augie doesn't grudge him that, "But I have to admit that I couldn't keep down the satisfaction of the thought that Thea was an heiress too."

He also goes to see Padilla, who "wasn't so terribly pleased that I was bound for Mexico, and he warned me not to go near Chihuahua, his province." Padilla gives Augie the name of a cousin in Mexico City, but isn't sure whether "he'll rob you or help." In fact, everyone gives him some sort of warning about the trip, so that he finally asks Thea, "Do we have to go to Mexico?" She could get divorced in Reno, he points out. But she tells him that she's already arranged with Smitty's lawyer to get divorced there.

Then she adds that there's another reason for going to Mexico: "I won't have much money after the divorce." He's astonished to hear this, and she explains that "our part of the family never did have much money." It's her uncle who has the money. And she adds that she caused a scandal by running away from her husband with a naval cadet who looked just like Augie. "I was thinking of you all the time, but you weren't there." So her uncle has put her "on probation." "And that's one more reason why I have to go to Mexico, to make some money." In addition to the lizard-catching eagles, she wants to make movies about hunting and "sell articles about it to the National Geographic."

Augie is floored. What about all the money they're spending now, he asks. She explains that "Smitty pays all the expenses until the divorce is final." Despite all these revelations, Augie realizes "that I could no more stay here and let her go than I could put out my eyes" -- and that Thea knows it. She assures him that it will all be okay, but he is uncertain enough about the hunting part of it that he goes to the zoo to see their eagle. "How could anybody ever tame him? And also, We'd better make speed for Texarkana and start with this thing before it grows too big."

And so they set out on their journey.

9. The Adventures of Augie March, by Saul Bellow (in Novels 1944-1953), pp. 710-738

Chapter XIII

Cut free by Simon, Augie holes up with his books and actually finishes the set of Harvard Classics. (Has anyone ever really done that?) He also sits in on university lectures with Kayo Obermark, but the effect is to make him decide against continuing his education there.

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

He lives for a while on the money Mimi is repaying him. She has stopped seeing Frazer and is now going with Arthur Einhorn. Augie gets a job with the WPA as a housing inspector, but the sordidness of the slums he visits disgusts him: "The different smells of flesh in all degrees from desire to sickness followed me." Then Mimi, who belongs to the restaurant workers' union, suggests he might go to work for the CIO, then in conflict with the other great union movement, the AFL. She introduces Augie to her union's organizer, a man called Grammick.

Augie goes to work for Grammick, though he "had an idea that my good impression wasn't all my doing, but that he was trying to make time with Mimi." He is quickly deluged with all sorts of demands for attention from union members, but he feels that he needs the hard work to recover from his "blowout with Simon." He is an odd fit with the workers he encounters.

I know I seemed too fresh and well in color, not enough smoked and yellowed to appreciate what they were up against. My manner was both slipshod and peppy. They were looking for some fire-fed secret personality that would prepare the moment when they could stand up yelling rebellion.

One hotel whose workers he's trying to organize turns out to be owned by Karas, a cousin of Einhorn's. Augie drops in on Einhorn one day, and finds that his old employer has nothing against his job as an organizer. "Oh, it seems to me on both sides the ideas are the same.... To take some from one side and give it to the other, the same old economics."

Augie senses some tension in the Einhorn household, and the reason for it is revealed when Arthur Einhorn enters, and soon is followed by a small boy. "Arthur held it with the clasp of a father, unmistakably, the kid swaying from his fingers." Thus Augie learns that Arthur has been married and divorced, but his congratulating Einhorn on being a grandfather is met with an air of "pale unhappiness." It turns out that the boy's mother "dumped him on us. She put him inside the door with a note and beat it, and then we had to wait for Arthur to come home and explain."

Poor Einhorn! At any hour of his decline he could formerly have taken out the gilt bond representing Arthur, and now the spite had come upon him that the value had gone, like that of Grandma's picture-watered czarist money. The gleaming vault where he had kept this reserve wealth now let out the smell of squalor.

Einhorn is also aware of Arthur's liaison with Mimi, and is none too happy about it. He plumbs Augie for information about her, but gets nowhere. Then he suggests that Arthur might find a job like Augie's.  "I could see Arthur stooping his weight on a desk in the union hall," Augie reflects, "one finger between the covers of his Valéry, or whatever he was interested in." So he passes the buck to Mimi, who had suggested him for the job.

Like Simon, Einhorn suspects that Augie and Mimi are lovers, and Augie keeps trying to persuade him of the truth. He is, in fact, involved with a woman named Sophie Geratis, a chambermaid at a luxury hotel, who came to him for help organizing the workers there. Sophie is engaged to be married in June, and Augie "thought she was being sensible, storing up pleasure so she wouldn't have any unfaithful craving once married."

Mimi has told Augie that a woman -- "A young lady and a very pretty one, prettier than" Sophie -- has come to the rooming house looking for him when he wasn't there. Augie wonders if it was Lucy Magnus, but the woman left no note for him. After he returns home he tells Mimi he has been to see Einhorn, who suggested finding a CIO job for Arthur. Mimi doesn't like Einhorn: "As soon as I was close to him for a minute he had his hand on my leg. I don't like these old men who think they're all sex." She knows about Arthur's son and resents Einhorn's attitude toward the boy. As for Arthur's ex-wife, she says, "I can't make out from Arthur whether she's a nice girl or a tramp. He's terribly vague unless discussing ideas. What kind of bitch would ditch a kid -- when she's already had it? Unless she's sick. In the head, you understand." She wants Arthur to move out of Einhorn's, but he hasn't any money -- and he has syphilis.

A few nights later, there's a knock on Augie's door when he's in bed with Sophie. He goes to see who it is, and it's Thea Fenchel. She hired a detective to track Augie down because she wants to talk to him about something. "I had thought back on her as an erratic rich girl with whom the main thing was to be rivals with her sister," Augie reflects. Thea apologizes for interrupting them. Augie turns to see Sophie getting dressed, and pleads with her to stay, but she's determined to leave. Thea slides a note under the door and goes away. It contains her address and phone number and asks him to call her tomorrow.

The next day at work Augie telephones Thea, but gets no answer. Grammick needs him to go to South Chicago to help him that night, and they're not finished until midnight. Augie calls Thea again and when she answers tells her that he's out of town and won't be back till tomorrow afternoon. She pleads for him to come, and tells him, "I don't have long to stay in Chicago." But when he gets back to the city there's an urgent situation at the Northumberland Hotel -- the place where Sophie works. She has called and left messages for Augie because there's a strike meeting, and the AFL is competing for the contract.

Augie finds the meeting and Sophie, who is one of the leaders of the rebels who want to go with the CIO, welcomes him. He climbs up on a barrel and tells the workers that their strike would be illegal and that the AFL would take their jobs. "The thing to do is sign with us so there can be an election, and when we win we can represent you." He hands out cards for them to sign. Then several men begin making their way through the crowd moving toward Augie. "Just as I realized that these were the enemy union guy and his goons I was grabbed from behind, off the barrel, and slugged as I landed, in the eye and on the nose. I burst into blood." A group of women gather around Augie, and Sophie shows him a firedoor he can escape through. As he leaves she says, "Augie, you and me will never get together again, will we?" He replies, "I think not, Sophie. There is this other girl."

Augie makes it down the fire escape, but he's pursued by one of the goons. He manages to get on a streetcar and make his escape, hides out in a movie theater until he's sure the coast is clear, and finally "jumped into a taxi and drove to Thea's, which had been my real objective of days."

8. The Adventures of Augie March, by Saul Bellow (in Novels 1944-1953), pp. 655-708

Chapter XII

When cold weather comes, Simon starts making money and gets married -- officially. Augie, outfitted in his tuxedo, picks up his mother in Simon's Pontiac for the ceremony and takes her to the ostentatious hotel where the wedding is to take place, though he is somewhat underwhelmed by its luxury.

I know that I in, say, an ancient place like Venice or in Rome, passing along the side of majestic walls where great men once sat, experienced what it was to be simply a dot, a speck that scans across the cornea, a corpuscle, almost white, almost nothing but air.... But in this modern power of luxury, with its battalions of service workers and engineers, it's the things themselves, the products that are distinguished, and the individual man isn't nearly equal to their great sum. Finally they are what becomes great -- the multitude of baths with never-failing hot water, the enormous air conditioning units and the elaborate machinery. No opposing greatness is allowed, and the disturbing person is the one who won't serve by using or denies by not wishing to enjoy.

He has, however, fallen in step with Simon's plans: for him to marry Lucy Magnus, "who had more money even than Charlotte," to work for Simon, who will pay his tuition while he finishes pre-law at the university and then goes to John Marshall law school at night. "Eventually I could become his partner. Or if his business didn't suit me, we could go into real estate with our joint capital. Or perhaps into manufacturing." Simon even hints at the possibility of going into politics, noting that Henry Horner, who is Jewish, has become governor of Illinois. "He had come into a view of mutability, and I too could see that one is only ostensibly born to remain in specified limits." 

Simon's exercise in power sometimes becomes overbearing, as when he tries to take his mother's cane away from her at that wedding, claiming that it will mar the photographs. She resists, however, and Augie "approved of Mama's exhibition of will, wondering at the surprises the meek will pull." Simon has invited the Einhorns to the wedding, as well as Five Properties and his wife, Simon's former girlfriend, Cissy, "partly to show Cissy what he had gone out to do and also to subject Five Properties to a cruel comparison. At the reception, Five Properties makes a bit of a scene "because he and Cissy had been put at a little table apart behind a pillar." Augie is uncertain who made this arrangement: Simon or Charlotte.

Augie has grown used to the idea of marrying Lucy Magnus, who looks at him "in her unambiguously declarative way" during the ceremony -- they have been paired off as groomsman and bridesmaid. "In some way, not the deepest nor yet trivially, I was gone on her and as far as I was allowed gave her a real embrace that she returned, licking my ear and praising and promising me; she already called me her husband." He hasn't yet gained the family's full confidence, however. "I was, as at the Renlings', under an influence and not the carrier of it."

At the coal yard, Simon drives Augie hard. He is also convinced that Augie is having an affair with Mimi Villars. But he's okay with that as long as it's just sex, knowing that it will help keep Augie from trying to persuade Lucy Magnus to sleep with him. But Simon's controlling nature also gets him in trouble at the coal yard when he gets into a fight with a dealer named Guzynski whose truck breaks down and causes a jam of other trucks that extends out into the seat. Simon pulls a gun on Guzynski, who is drunk, and pistol-whips him. Guzynski leaves and, afraid that he'll call the cops, Simon calls his friend on the force, Lt. Nuzzo, who has Guzynski locked up pre-emptively. "Nuzzo, or Nuzzo's people, had put a deep fright him in their cellar below cellar," and Guzynski stays on his best behavior thereafter. At Christmas, Simon sends Guzynski a bottle of gin and his wife a box of candy. "Simon wanted to show me how justly he handled such crises, and how badly, by contrast -- because of chicken-heartedness -- I did.

Augie grows so obsessed with trying to stay on Simon's good side, that "Mimi Villars heard me talking in my sleep one night about prices and came in and asked me questions, as though in a telephone conversation. She quoted the prices back to me in the morning, all correctly. 'Brother! things must be bad for you,' she said, 'if that's all you dream.'" One night, late for a date with Lucy, Augie has a minor traffic accident, breaking the taillights on Simon's Pontiac. He is so shaken by it that Lucy notices: "She foresaw that Simon would raise hell about the damage -- as he did -- and what's more, no point of view but his seemed possible to her, and she was somewhat frightened at me, feeling that I had one." When Simon does raise hell, Augie replies:

"What are you fussing about? It wasn't much of an accident, and you're insured." This was just where the error was; it was that I had to feel bad about the back shell of the car and those crustacean eyes that were dragging by the wires, and it wasn't so much the accident as my failure to care as I should that he minded.

One evening Mimi Villars comes to his room with the news that she's pregnant. Her lover, Frazer, is out of town, and she wants to have an abortion before he returns. One of the waitresses she works with has given her the name of a doctor who is said to have an injection that will take care of it. Augie is skeptical about anything so untried, and asks why she doesn't have the baby. She scoffs at the idea of herself as a mother, and taunts Augie with the notion that he objects to the abortion because "you wouldn't be here if your mother had ideas like mine. Nor your brothers either." Why should she go through with the pregnancy?

"So the souls of these things shouldn't get after me when I die and accuse me of not letting them be born? I'd tell them, 'Listen, stop haunting me. What do you think you ever were? Why a kind of little scallop, that's all. You don't know how lucky you are. What makes you think you would have liked it? Take it from me, you're indignant because you don't know.'" 

He argues that life isn't so bad, saying, "I could tell you a lot about how pleasant my life has been." She retorts, "That's hunky-dory for you; maybe you like the way you are, but most people suffer from it." But her main point is that Augie is a man, and can't possibly know what she's going through: "she was the one for whom it was the flesh and blood problem."

So he agrees to go with her to see the doctor, who says that the injection causes contractions, and that it may succeed in aborting the fetus, but that there are no guarantees. She goes through with it anyway, paying fifteen dollars for the injection. She returns to her room, where she suffers cramps, but nothing more. She curses the doctor, and then realizes that she can't carry the child to term even if she wanted to: "I can't let it alone now and be born, with all the stuff I've taken. It might be hurt."

The next day when he gets home, Mimi tells him that she has found a way to get rid of the fetus legally:  She had gone to the clinic and said she was pregnant but was having difficulties. The doctor who examined her said "he was pretty sure I had a tube pregnancy. So I have to be examined again, and if they still think so they might have to operate." Augie doesn't see her for several days, being busy at work and then with Magnus family social obligations. But one day at work he has a call from a nurse at a South Side hospital with a message that Mimi is there and wants to see him. He tells Simon that he needs to leave early, and Simon immediately seizes on the truth that he's involved in some way with Mimi. All Simon is worried about is "If this gets around to them" -- the Magnuses. "I saw that he had already handled the consequences of this to himself; he'd repudiate me, and it would do him no harm."

In the hospital he finds Mimi, depressed because she has had an operation to resolve the tubal pregnancy, but during the operation they had found that the pregnancy was entirely normal. Everyone, she says, has been coming in to congratulate her. She sees no recourse but to return to the doctor who had given her the injection and to have him finish the job. They want her to stay in the hospital for ten days, but she insists that she won't stay that long and tells Augie to make an appointment with the first doctor for late in the next week.

They will need money, so Augie goes back to stealing books. Unfortunately, he gets caught. But the store detective who catches him turns out to be Jimmy Klein, his old partner in crime when they were caught skimming quarters. Klein makes up a story that Augie dropped the books when he was pursued, returns the books to the store, then meets Augie at a cafeteria. Augie learns that Klein is married to a girl he got pregnant: "The path of wretchedness as Mrs. Renling had drawn it for me when she predicted what would happen if Simon married Cissy." Augie tells him that he was stealing the books to pay for his friend's abortion, and Klein lends him the money he needs.

On the day of the abortion, Augie has a date with Lucy, but he manages to get out of it, promising that he'll be on time the next night when there is a formal affair for New Year's Eve. He meets Mimi after the abortion, and finds her so faint that he has to prop her up. "She was only two days out of the hospital, and the variety of decisions she had made alone, not counting pain and blood loss, was enough to have taken away her strength." As they are going down the stairs, they meet Kelly Weintraub, "the Magnuses' cousin by marriage who came from my neighborhood, the one who had threatened me about George." And the doctor, it turns out, is Weintraub's cousin. (Coming so soon after Augie's capture by Jimmy Klein, this is, perhaps, one coincidental close encounter too many at this turn of the novel.)

Augie doesn't have time to spare confronting Weintraub, but he's fully aware that damage has been done. He hurries back to the rooming house with Mimi, who hemorrhages when she is put to bed.

There have great things been done to mitigate the worst human sights and teach you something different from revulsion at them. All the Golgothas have been painted with this aim. But since probably very few people are now helped by these things and lessons, each falls back on whatever he has. 

So Augie copes. The hemorrhaging stops and the next morning "Mimi seemed to be very hot but normally asleep." Augie goes to work, where "Simon kept examining me, so that I wondered whether Kelly had already reached him." But it's only Simon's usual severe watchfulness. At the end of the day he tells Augie to take the Pontiac. When he gets home he meets the roomer next door, Kayo Obermark, who has been looking in on Mimi. She's running a high fever, but doesn't seem to be bleeding. Augie calls Padilla, who brings over some pills for the fever recommended by physiology students.

"Then Lucy phoned to ask me to come an hour earlier than arranged. I felt that there was trouble at that end too and said, 'What's up?'"  She doesn't say any more than to try to be there by eight. It's after six, so Augie shaves and starts to get dressed while talking with Kayo and Padilla about Mimi. Padilla says it might be septicemia or puerperal fever, and that Augie has to take her to the hospital. Mimi objects: "They'll try to get me to tell on the doctor," which she stubbornly refuses to do. But they hustle her into the car, and just as they are about to leave Simon telephones: "I just had a call from Charlotte, and Kelly Weintraub is spreading a story about you that you took a bim to have an abortion." Simon refuses to hear the truth about Augie's relationship to Mimi: "Don't try to tell me you're not horny. We all are, in our family. What do you think started us out in the first place?" He tells Augie that he's done with him, and that he won't stand up to the Magnuses on his behalf. "'You sonofabitch!' I yelled with tears. 'You shit! I hope to see you dead!'"


They take Mimi to the hospital where she had the operation, but are turned away. She reports that she was told, "We got no room in a place like this for people like you. Why didn't you have the kid? Go home and wait for the undertaker." But Padilla knows someone who works in a lab in a North Side hospital who might help. Augie goes in this time, and because he is in a tuxedo gets a little respect from the cop at the entrance: "I was in the clothes of a gentleman, and therefore why should he take chances?"

Padilla locates his friend, and tells the doctor that Mimi tried to abort the fetus herself. The doctor doesn't really believe him, but says, "Well, if the women live we don't look for the abortionist, because what good does it do the profession?" Padilla urges Augie to leave, and the doctor gives him his name so he can ask for him when he returns. Augie figures if Weintraub has already seen Uncle Charlie Magnus he won't be there very long.

When he reaches the Magnuses' he adjusts his tie in the mirror and sees "backward, by the drape in the living room, the tense belly of Uncle Charlie, his sharp feet prepared, and sitting waiting in the oriental mix-up of brass, silk, wool, and all that gave the place so much power, Lucy, her mother, and Sam, observing me. I felt there was a big machine set against me." He thinks for a moment that if, as she had always said, Lucy really loved him, they could go it on their own, without an inheritance. But "I saw she had been gotten to by her parents and that decisions had been made."

He is told, "you're not what we had in mind for Lucy." She doesn't go counter to them, and her father says, "No dough if she marries you!" As Augie is putting on his coat in the hall, her brother, Sam, tells him "that he would break my back if I bothered his sister, but with all his thickset hairiness and spreading keister, he couldn't make it mean anything to me."

Back at the hospital, he finds Padilla, who has given Lucy blood. Mimi has been taken upstairs, Padilla says. Augie gives him cab fare for the trip back, but he doesn't answer when Padilla asks why he's back from the party so soon. Upstairs he finds Mimi in a room in the maternity ward, the only available place. The doctor tells him not to attract attention or he'll get thrown out. "I think she's going to pull out of it though she did everything she could not to except cut her wrists and take poison."

As he waits, the New Year's celebrations take place, though the noise is distant and faint. Mimi wakes about one, and after they talk briefly Augie walks through the maternity ward, hearing the groans of women in labor and seeing a woman who had given birth on the way to the hospital wheeled in: "she and the baby appeared like enemies forced to have each other, like figures of a war." A nurse angrily tells Augie that he shouldn't be there, so after checking on Mimi he leaves.

On the way back he has a flat, and he can't figure out how to use the jack. He realizes that he is not far from the Coblins', for whom he used to work, so he goes there. When morning comes, he looks out at the Greek church across the way, outlined against the blue of the sky.

I passed over the church too and rested only on the great profound blue. The days have not changed, though the times have. The sailors who first saw America, that sweet the sight, where the belly of the ocean had brought them, didn't see more beautiful color than this. 

His Cousin Anna shows him a picture of Friedl, whom Augie was always supposed to marry. She is a student at the University of Michigan. Anna asks, "And why do you want to get mixed up with your brother's new relatives, those coarse people?"