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."

7. The Adventures of Augie March, by Saul Bellow (in Novels 1944-1953), pp. 613-654

Chapter XI

Augie pays his rent for his room in a student house on the South Side by answering the common telephone and distributing the mail, chores that the owner, Owens, considers beneath him. He gets regular visits from Clem Tambow, who, like others of his old friends, regards him as a slacker, "postponing everything." Augie admits that he "had some restlessness to be taken up into something greater than myself," but the path in that direction hasn't presented itself yet.

Clem's real reason for visiting Augie so often is that he is trying to hook up with Mimi Villars, a waitress who lives in the house. She is originally from Los Angeles, where her father had been a movie actor in silent films, and had come to Chicago "to study, but she was expelled from the university for going past the bounds of necking at Greene Hall, in the lounge." She has a boyfriend, Hooker Frazer, a graduate student in political science who is one of Augie's regular customers. Augie sometimes steals two copies of the books Frazer wants so he can talk with him about them.

Frazer is not yet divorced from his first wife, so he and Mimi can't marry, even if she wanted to. She opens up to Augie on all aspects of her life

I could see what a value she set on the intelligence of men. If they didn't breathe the most difficult air of effort and nobility, then she wished for them the commonplace death in the gas cloud of settled existence, office bondage, quiet-store-festering, unrecognized despair of marriage without hope, or the commonness of resentment that grows unknown boils in one's heart or bulbs of snarling flowers. She had a high, absolute standard, and she preferred people to miss it from suffering, vice, being criminal or perverted, or of loony impulse. 

Like Augie, she is a thief, stealing her clothes from department stores. "The thing I began to learn from her was of the utmost importance; namely, that everyone sees to it his fate is shared. Or tries to see to it." Clem Tambow becomes suspicious that Augie and Mimi are lovers, but they aren't. Augie is surprised to find that she used to be the sister-in-law of Sylvester, the man for whom Augie once passed out handbills: He had been married to Mimi's sister.

Meanwhile, Simon has gotten married, though from Augie's point of view the consequences are decidedly mixed. "In the peculiar fate of people that makes them fat and rich, when this happens very swiftly there is the menace of the dreamy state that plunders their reality." And in the case of Simon's marriage, there is a mixture of appearance and reality, for though he and Charlotte Magnus are in fact married, they have been forced by her parents to maintain the fiction that they are only engaged. Simon pays rent at a bachelor's club while in fact living with the Magnuses in their West Side flat.

He is better dressed now, and he drives a new gray Pontiac. He is learning the coal business at one of the yards owned by the Magnuses. The family has a tradition of arranging marriages for their daughters, believing they can control things better that way. Simon explains, "They'd rather have a poor young man. A poor young man gets up more steam and pressure. They were like that themselves, and they know." Simon's arrival to wealth is so new that "his shirt smelled of the store; it hadn't been to the laundry yet."

Augie goes with him to the "hot interior of lamps and rugs" that is the Magnuses' flat. "Everything was ungainly there, roomy and oversized." The Magnuses, too, are oversized, including Charlotte. When Augie is left alone with Simon and Charlotte, Simon jokes, "'Nobody's ever been laid better at any price.' It was so ambiguous and inside-out that it had to be taken as amusing, and she hurried and come down from a romantic, sentimental position and denied it all by pretending that this randy talk was the joke of sincerity and deep underlying agreement, a more realistic sort of love."

Underneath everything, however, "it came through to me that he was being tortured by thought of suicide, stronger than a mere hint, but simultaneously he could dive to clasp his compensations, such as his pride in audaciousness and strength of nerve and body or the luxury he was coming into." With the family Simon "was boisterous, capricious, haughty, critical, arbitrary, mimicking and deviling, and he crowed, croaked, made faces and had the table all but spinning in this dining room of stable and upright wealth." He tells Augie they were unlucky "not to have this kind of close and loyal family." Augie doesn't take this well: "I had a fit of hate for the fat person he was becoming." But he has to admit that he "was a sucker for it too, family love." He senses that he is very much the outsider in this gathering. "Well, they owned stores; maybe they smelled a thief in me." And he becomes even more the outsider when he reveals that he doesn't play pinochle, and is forced into a corner with the children who teach him the game.

Uncle Charlie Magnus is the owner of the coal yards. "He was white, thick, and peevish, and had the kind of insolence that sometimes affects the eyes like snowblindness, making you think there's something arctic about having a million bucks."

Nobody thought to remonstrate about children and young girls when Uncle Charlie said, "Sonofabitch, you're fo-kay, my boy, fo-kay. You got the goods. I think you can put it down between the sheets too, eh?" because this was just his usual manner of speaking.

Through Simon's influence, Augie becomes another potential husband for the Magnus daughters, "for there wasn't any lack of daughters to marry, some of them pretty and all with money." He finds Lucy Magnus, "slighter than most of her family," somewhat attractive, but "I had no special mind to get married. I saw Simon's difficulties too clearly for that." One strike against Augie, however, is his lack of a definable occupation. Simon has put it out that Augie is in the "book business" and that he's planning to go back to college. This doesn't go over particularly well with Charlotte's father.

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

Among the Magnus cousins Augie recognizes an old schoolfellow, Kelly Weintraub, who knows about the March family, including Simon and Augie's brother, George. But Simon is way ahead of him: He has told Charlotte about George, and he knows enough about Kelly to counter anything he might have to tell the Magnuses about himself.

Augie soon learns that Simon has plans to integrate him into the Magnus circles, taking him to "lunch with uncles and cousins in the rich businessmen's restaurants and clubs, fancy steakhouses." Simon also has plans, a sort of mental file, to settle old scores with people: "Did Cissy and Five Properties have a folder in it to themselves? I thought they must." Before he goes out with Simon, Augie has to undergo a kind of military inspection of his clothes and his person, and he goes with him to barbershops to have everything taken care of to Simon's specifications. "I had larger cleaning and laundry bills than ever before," which bothers Augie because he's saving for the university fees.

But the other side of Simon also shows itself: "he slept badly and was looking flabby and ill, and one morning when he came to fetch me he locked himself in the toilet and cried." He begins to refuse to come inside Augie's rooming house, which he detests. First he would honk his horn outside when he picked Augie up, then he began telephoning or even sending wires when he wanted him. He drives recklessly, and it becomes evident to Augie "that his feelings were suicidal from the way he drove and the way he leaped forward in arguments." He curses at other drivers and at pedestrians and keeps a tire tool under his seat as a weapon for traffic arguments.

In the spring he leases a coal yard. It is the end of the coal season, and he spends the summer making the repairs it needs. "By Simon's wish I had to spend afternoons with him studying the business. Especially since I had heard him weeping in the can Simon wasn't easy for me to turn down." Augie sometimes serves as lunch relief for the yard manager and weighmaster, Happy Kellerman. But Augie also notices the self-doubt preying on Simon: "The misery of his look at this black Sargasso of a yard in its summer stagnation and stifling would sometimes make my blood crawl in me with horror." But he retains his determination to succeed:

Simon was wised up as to how to do things politically -- to be in a position to bid on municipal business -- and he saw wardheelers and was kissing cousins with the police; he took up with lieutenants and captains, with lawyers, with real-estate men, with gamblers and bookies, the important ones who owned legitimate businesses on the side and had property.... I had to wait for his calls in the police station to tell the cops when a load was setting out from the yard, my first lawful sitting in such a place, moving from dark to lighter inside the great social protoplasm. 

Simon is on special terms with Lieutenant Nuzzo, "an Italian [who] brought the style of ancient kingdoms with him."

Sometimes Simon and Augie go swimming in the lake, and Augie notices the way Simon dives, worrying that "he threw himself in with a thought of never coming to the surface alive, as if he went to take a blind taste of the benefits of staying down." Augie makes a habit of not going in the water when his brother does, just in case he is needed to pull him out of the water. Simon also casts a lascivious eye at the women at the lake. "The girls were not always frightened of him; he had a smell of power, he was handsome, and I don't know what floors his bare feet left in shade-drawn hot rooms. Only a year ago he would not have given a second glance at such bims." But in Charlotte he has a mate whose "first aim and the reason for her striving was to make the union serious by constructing a fortune on it." For Augie her attitude recalls Lady Macbeth's "'Unsex me here!' A call so hard, to what is so hard, that it makes the soul neuter."

Sometimes when he is out with Simon they visit their mother. But one time Simon finds her affixing pins to Roosevelt campaign buttons, for which she is being paid ten cents a hundred and earning a few dollars a week. He goes into a rage: "I'll have you know that my mother isn't going to do any piecework for ten, twenty, thirty cents, or a dollar an hour. She gets all the money she needs from me." Even when his mother pleads that she asked to do the work, he won't give in. He also gets angry when he finds that a coat Charlotte has given her is missing from the closet, and when the director's wife explains that it was sent to the cleaners because his mother spilled coffee on it, and offers to alter its fit when it comes back, Simon protests, "She can afford a good tailor if she needs alterations."

3. The Adventures of Augie March, by Saul Bellow (in Novels 1944-1953), pp. 477-524

Chapter VI


Like so many of Bellow's protagonists, Augie is afflicted with a certain aimlessness. Henderson, for example, "wants" but doesn't seem to be able to specify what it is that he wants. So Augie observes, "My brother Simon wasn't much my senior, and he and others at our age had already got the idea there was a life to lead and had chosen their directions, while I was circling yet." Einhorn doesn't make it easier for him, because "what I was to get from him wasn't at all clear. I know I longed very much, but I didn't understand for what."

So he lingers on the fringe of the Einhorn family, watching the course their lives take. Dingbat decides to become the manager of a heavyweight fighter named Nails Nagel. "And it was just what he needed, to make speeches (his brother was a lodge and banquet orator) and to drag Nails out of his room in the morning for road work." Not that he was much good at being a manager: "Nails had won two fights in six." And the fight game ended when Nails got seasick on Lake Michigan before a fight in Muskegon and is flattened in the third round. Dingbat had been counting on a purse for the fight and is broke, so he, Nails, and Augie have to hitchhike their way back to Chicago.

While Augie is away with Dingbat and the fighter, there is a fire at the Einhorn residence that destroys the living room. It seems to have been set by Einhorn as an insurance scam, because "he had insured himself with the copany that got most of his business" and Mrs. Einhorn had been wanting to redecorate. Among the items ruined by the fire was a set of Harvard Classics whose covers had been damaged by the fire extinguisher; Augie gets those.

Unfortunately, Augie doesn't get much peace at home for reading because Grandma Lausch "had become loose in the wires and very troublesome, with the great weaknesses of old age." Because Simon is working downtown, Augie has to take over cleaning responsibilities, which are complicated by Grandma's new, unhousebroken puppy. And Augie's mother is unable to go to visit Georgie alone because of her eyesight, so he and Simon have to go with her. Georgie is getting too old for the boys' institution, so they are facing the probability that he will have to move to one of the institutions for adults downstate.

Grandma's increasing debility also becomes a burden on their mother, especially with her own worsening sight problems. Simon puts it bluntly. "She's been riding Ma for years and put on the ritz at our expense. Well, Ma can't do it anymore. If the Lausches want to hire a housekeeper, that's a fair way to settle it, but if they don't they're going to have to take her out of here." He writes to the son in Racine to this effect, and as a result, the sons arrange for Grandma to move into "the Nelson Home for the Aged and Infirm."  Grandma boasts about how splendid the facility is, and supervises the packing and the move with her usual authoritarian manner. Augie, who has been taught by Dingbat how to drive, borrows a car from Einhorn and takes her there. The facility is not the millionaire's mansion that Grandma claimed it was, but rather an old apartment house, a dumping-ground for worn-out American lives:

We came up the walk, between the slow, thought-brewing, beat-up old heads, liver-spotted, of choked old blood salts and wastes, hard and bone-bare domes, or swollen, the elevens of sinews up on collarless necks crazy with the assaults of Kansas heats and Wyoming freezes, and with the strains of kitchen toil, Far West digging, Cincinnati retailing, Omaha slaughtering, peddling, harvesting, laborious or pegging enterprise from whale-sized to infusorial that collect into the labor of the nation.

Grandma doesn't show any signs of disappointment in the actuality of the place, of course, but she treats Augie with harsh indifference. "I knew she needed to be angry and dry if she was to avoid weeping. She must have cried as soon as I left, for she wasn't so rattlebrained by old age that she didn't realize what her sons had done to her." She gives him "an angry quarter" when he leaves.

Age is taking its toll at the Einhorns' too. The Commissioner is dying. Augie notes the effect on William Einhorn: "you could see how much he had been protected by the Commissioner. After all, he became a cripple at a young age. Whether before or after marriage I never did find out." He begins to devote himself to assuming his father's part of the business, giving up his own schemes and projects. From him, Augie learns "the lessons and theories of power."

After the Commissioner's funeral, Augie helps Einhorn sort through the papers in his father's room, destroying some, saving others. Einhorn becomes aware of how much of his father's business was a matter of goodwill transactions with cronies. "It was the opening indication that the Commissioner had not left him as strong as he believed, but subject to the honor of logts of men he hadn't always treated well. He became worried and thoughtful."

Chapter VII

The 1929 Wall Street crash happens not long after the Commissioner's death, and "Einhorn was among the first to be wiped out." He even loses the building in which he lives, though he retains the poolroom, and takes over managing it, setting up his office there. But he claims that the loss is not so bad for him: "I was a cripple before and am now. Prosperity didn't make me walk, and if anybody knew what a person is liable to have happen to him, it's William Einhorn."

Augie is "a luxury," and has to be let go. He gets a job as an "apprentice soda jerk." The family savings are lost when the bank closed. Simon goes to "the municipal college, with the idea that everyone had then of preparing for one of the Civil-Service examinations." Simon has a trustworthy look that stands him in good stead, "a lifted look of unforgiving, cosmological captaincy; that look where honesty has the strength of a prejudice." Augie, on the other hand, gets mixed up in a robbery.

He is still hanging with Jimmy Klein and Clem Tambow, but in the poolroom he meets Joe Gorman, who has done time in jail for car theft, and has a plot to rob a leather-goods store. His accomplice is Sailor Bulba, whom Augie knows from school. They would break into the store and steal the handbags, and a fence named Jonas would sell them. Augie acts as lookout, but when he gets home after the robbery, he is conscience-stricken about what he has done. He tells Gorman that he won't take part in any more robberies.   

But Einhorn hears about it and is angry. He takes Augie aside in the poolroom and tells him, "if I hear of you on another job I'm going to have you thrown out of here. You'll never see the inside of this place or Tillie and me again. If your brother knew about this, by Jesus Christ! he'd beat you. I know he would." He frightens Augie by asking if Gorman had a gun, and describes a scenario in which the police arrive and Gorman shoots a cop. Then he tells Augie something about himself that Augie acknowledges to be true: "You've got opposition in you. You don't slide through everything. You just make it look so." And he warns Augie against falling "into the first trap life digs for you." He's a "setup" for a fatal mistake that could blight his life. He also adds, "'I don't ask you to take me for your model either,' too well realizing the contradiction, that I knew about his multifarious swindles.... 'But I'm not a lowlife when I think, and really think,' he said. 'In the end you can't save your soul and life by thought. But if you think, the least of the consolation prizes is the world.'"

In the end, Einhorn hires Augie again, not just to keep him out of trouble, but because he needs his help. He pays him less money, though. One of his first jobs, ironically, is helping Einhorn swindle a gangster, Nosey Mutchnik. Einhorn goes in as partner with Mutchnik in buying a piece of property that in fact Einhorn already owns. Einhorn makes more than four hundred dollars on the deal, although if Mutchnik "had found out he would have shot Einhorn or had him shot."

Einhorn's wife, Tillie, runs the lunch counter in the poolroom, managing to stay aloof from the raucous behavior and obscene talk. There are fewer women in her husband's life now, because of the poolroom. Lottie Fewter has left, though Einhorn keeps track of her up until the time 'when she was shot by a teamster-lover, the father of several children, whom she got involved in black marketing. He was caught, and there was prison coming to him, and no rap for her. Therefore he killed her." Einhorn's reaction to the murder:

"They say she was getting sloppy toward the end, and greedy about money. That was bad. There's trouble enough from fucking. She was made to have a violent thing happen to her. The world doesn't let hot blood off easy." 

When Augie graduates from high school, Mrs. Einhorn comes to the ceremony.  Afterward, he drives her back to the poolroom, where Einhorn says he's going to take Augie to a show. He's supposed to go to a party at the Kleins', but he says he can arrive late. But instead of driving Einhorn downtown, he's instructed to go somewhere that Einhorn has never been to before: a brothel. When they get there, Augie takes Einhorn on his back to the third floor.

He used to talk about himself as the Old Man of the Sea riding Sinbad. But there was Aeneas too, who carried his old dad Anchises in the burning of Troy, and that old man had been picked by Venus to be her lover, which strikes me as the better comparison.

He tells Augie to pick out any girl he wants, but when the madam enters and sees the crippled Einhorn on Augie's back, she's surprised. But he hands her a card from someone who had arranged the visit but apparently forgot to tell her about Einhorn's condition. He takes Einhorn to a room -- "this was a better-class place as I was later to know by contrast" -- where a woman is waiting for him, and gives Augie his wallet for safekeeping. Then he sends Augie away. His own prostitute is waiting for him in the parlor.

As always with strangers, I behaved as if I knew exactly what I was doing and from an idea that at a critical time it was best and most decent to have my own momentum. She did not take this away from me.... She wasn't young -- the women had made the right choice for me -- and she had sort of a crude face; but she encouraged me to treat her lover-like... I knew later that I had been lucky with her, that she had tried not to be dry with me, or satirical, and done it mercifully.... Paying didn't matter. Nor using what other people used. That's what city life is.