The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [282]
I went up to the roof and had a look at the city. Around was Chicago. In its repetition it exhausted your imagination of details and units, more units than the cells of the brain and bricks of Babel. The Ezekiel caldron of wrath, stoked with bones. In time the caldron too would melt. A mysterious tremor, dust, vapor, emanation of stupendous effort traveled with the air, over me on top of the great establishment, so full OF AXJGIE MARCH as it was, and over the clinics, clinks, factories, flophouses, morgue, skid row. As before the work of Egypt and Assyria, as before a sea, you're nothing here. Nothing. 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. His temper was bad and nothing and nobody was spared in his glare. But they were letting me out, so why fuss? I was still stooped, as if stitched in the wrong places, but they said it was just temporary. Well and good, I got back to the South Side and found that Padilla had a girl staying in my room, his guest, and he moved me into his own place. This was just a formality that the young lady occupied my room, and sheer etiquette, because he did too. He was never at home. Over at the university he was working in the uranium project. Where he lived was a little stale-air flat in a tenement. The plaster stuck on the laths mostly by the force of the paint. The neighbors were relief families, night owls who walked to the window at 4 p.m. in their skivvies curiously to greet the day, chicks, Filipinos neat and sharp, drunk old women and gloomy guys. After a descent of many flights you came out of this structure and crossed an entry of unusual architectural fantasy, horizontally long, a Chinese hothouse where nothing grew beneath the vermilion frames but sundry sticks, old Tribunes of the cats and dogs, trash. In the street, by cylinders of garbage cans, you were just a step from a place of worship for Buddhists that was formerly a church. Then a chop-suey joint. Then a handbook behind, as usual, a dummy cigar store where the shoppers were with racing forms, and the retired, or precinct leaders, and heavy on their feet cigar chewers, and cops. I wasn't feeling very keen while in this tenement. 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. She felt she should tell me, but she maybe shouldn't have, because the grief of it laid me up. My eyes sunk even deeper than before, and my hands and feet were cold, and I lay in Padilla's dirty bed, feeling sick and broken up. Naturally I couldn't be comforted by Sophie. It wasn't even the right thing to do, to accept comfort from her and not tell her the trouble. It was Clem I told how broken up I was. "I know how it is. I had an affair with a copper's daughter and she did the same to me last year," he said. "She married some gambler and went to Florida. Anyway, you told me long ago it was over." "It was," I said. "But I see you Marches are a romantic family. I keep running into your brother with a blond doll. Even Einhom has seen them. He was being carried piggyback from the Oriental Theatre, from Lou Holtz over to see Juno and the Paycock--he doesn't go out often, and when he does, as you know, he likes a full day. And while he was riding in his black cape on Louie Elimeiek, the ex-welter, whom should he bump into but Simon and this broad. By his description the same broad. A zaftige piece too, in a mink stole." "Poor Charlotte," I said, thinking at once of my sister-in-law. "What's the matter with Charlotte? You mean that Charlotte doesn't understand about leading a double life? A woman with money and not know that? Double if not more? When it's practically the law of the land?" So I had something more to think about during my convalescence, when I wanted to be gone from Chicago anyhow, to where world events were thick. One day I was on the West Side. I had gone to take Mama for a walk in Douglas Park. It was good for us both, as I