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.

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.  

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."