The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [168]
ways to get this done legally?' Well, there are a few. One is if you go to an alienist and get him to say you're nuts. They don't want madwomen to be having kids. I once got off a rap that way so it's on a court record. But I don't feel like doing it now. You can go too far. So I decided, to hell with that stuff of putting on a wacky act. The other thing is that if your heart is weak or your life in danger they'll do it for you. So I went to the clinic today and said I thought I was pregnant but "of normally, and kept having trouble. There was a guy who examined "ie and thought he was pretty sure I had a tube pregnancy. So I have to e examined again, and if they still think so they might have to operate." This was what overjoyed her. She already was banking on it. I said to her, "What did you do, bone up in a book on what a tube pregnancy was like and then go down and describe the symptoms to them?" "Baby, what an idea! Do you think I'm such a daredevil? And do you think you can walk in there, tell them any old thing, and take them in?" "They can be fooled about some things at a clinic. That I 'can tell you. But watch what you're getting into, Mimi. Don't try to put it over on them." "It isn't all my idea; they think so too, and I have some of the symptoms. But I won't go back, I'll go to that veterinarian." I couldn't keep watch over her the next few days, having a full calendar of suppers and gatherings, and the times I looked in on her, late at night or at half-past six in the morning when I had to turn out, she was too sleepy to talk to me. When I went to wake her she seemed to know at once whose hand was on her shoulder and what the question was, and answered as though out of sleep, "No, nothing, no soap." Winter was pouring on, late December, smoky and dark. Clobbering down the steps in my galoshes these mornings of mist and smoke, usually running late, I made for the car line in the seeping-back of night from the bad filters of low sky. Nine o'clock, after the first rush of business, I could catch up with breakfast at Marie's greasy-spoon, walled with decorative tin panels, one-arm chairs by the walls, no great amount of light because of the height of the fixtures. On a Saturday afternoon I was taking a break at Marie's. She had the opera on the radio, tuned in from New York, and that eloquence turned loose didn't reach me but went on in my ears. There you have a service formerly paid for, as when a Burgundian duke in prison in Bruges sent for a painter to alleviate the dark shutters with gold faces and devotional decoration. This kind of aid to people in trouble now diffused practically free, as in magazines or on the air. However, I didn't hear it well, except as powerful and formal voices. Sent by Happy Kellerman, a shoveler came to say that I was wanted on the phone by a lady. It was a nurse from a South Side hospital, calling with a message from Mimi. "Hospital? What's the matter? Since when has she been there?" "Since yesterday," the woman said, "and perfectly all right, but says she wants to see you." I told Simon, who listened to me with suspicion, irony, reprimand, already hard and waiting to spurn my explanation that I had to get off early to see a friend in the hospital. "Which friend? You mean that broad of yours, the roughneck blonde? Pal, you have too many irons in the fire. How are you mixed up with her? I think you're going a little too fast, aren't you, trying to keep up with two dames? That's why you look so dug-up lately. If one of them didn't haul your ashes you might make faster time with the other. Or is it more than an ash-haul job? Ah, that would be just like you, to fall in love too! You can't hold your load of love, can you! What do you have to give for a piece of tail? You can't climb in bed with a girl without feeling that you have to take care of her for life?" "You don't have to say all this, Simon, it doesn't have any bearing. Mimi's sick and wants me to come see her." "As long as the boy is getting laid, I don't see what's such a rush to marry," said Happy. "If this gets around to them,"