The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [301]
wedding that I was nervous, but also because Stella was bound the week after for Alaska and the Aleutians with a USO show. I didn't want her to go. Of course I wouldn't say anything to spoil the occasion. We had pictures taken of the wedding party, which included also Agnes and Sylvester. I looked with changed eyes on Agnes since hearing of her self-strangulation. She was wearing a fine gray suit that showed off her hips, and a collar sweeping upward as if to keep you from seeing her throat. Anyway, turkey, ham, champagne, cognac, fruit, and cake were set up on the buffet in Stella's apartment. It was very grand. Robey and Frazer had showed up in town together, and I invited them, so I was well represented. Frazer wore a major's uniform. Robey's beard was fuller and he had put on weight down in Washington. He sat by himself in a corner, clasping his knee in two hands and never saying anything. There was enough conversation without him. After a few glasses of champagne Sylvester broke out in grins. He was a funny, melancholy guy, Sylvester. He wanted to be taken serious and straight, but gave himself away in his dark-lined grins, and the unthoughtful part of him fought its way out. In his double-breasted pinstriped business suit he sat by me. I held Stella around the waist and stroked her satin wedding dress. "What a dish!" said Sylvester to me. "What you've fallen into! And when I think you used to work for me!" This was when he had owned the Star Theatre on California Avenue, below that dentist who tormented Grandma. Sylvester was no kid; he was getting on. He said he was off politics now. I wanted to ask him about Mexico, but the wedding day was no time for that, so I passed the question over. The man of the hour at this party was not myself so much as Frazer, in a way. Frazer had just come back from the Orient. He was in the Intelligence and attached to a mission to Chungking. He was talking to Agnes and Mintouchian about the East. I still admired Frazer a whole lot and looked up to him. He was a mighty attractive and ideal man. There was a lanky American elegance about him, in the ease of his long legs and his cropped-on-the-sides head which from chin to top showed the male molding on the strong side of haggardness; his gray eyes on the cool side of frankness. All the markings of his face were strong, with creases beginning to deepen from world pressure. And there was something else about him--as if he were in the barber's chair at the conclusion of shaving, the witch hazel drying, the fine Western shoes stuck out. He knew so much too. Suppose that you said something about D'Alembert or Isidore of Seville, Frazer would have been ready to discuss them. You couldn't find a subject that stumped him. He was going to become an important person. You could see how he was flying at the highest, from one peak of life to the next. And yet he looked relaxed. But the more ease and leisure he achieved the more distance and flashing there were; he talked about Thucydides or Marx and showed pictures of history-like visions. You got shivers on the back and thrills clear into the teeth. I was real proud to have such a friend come. He gave tone to the wedding and was a great success. But as you listened to this brilliant educational discussion it was somewhat scary too; like catching hold of high voltage. Declarations, resolutions, treaties, theories, congresses, bones of kings, Cromwells, Loyolas, Lenins and czars, hordes of India and China, famines, huddles, massacres, sacrifices, he mentioned. Great crowds of Benares and London, Rome, he made me see; Jerusalem against Titus, Hell when Ulysses visited, Paris when they butchered horses in the street. Dead Ur and Memphis. Atoms of near silence, the dead acts, that formed a collective roar. Macedonian sentinels. Subway moles. Mr. Kreindl shoving a cannon wheel with his buddies. Grandma and legendary Lausch in his armor cutaway having an argument in the Odessa railroad station the day the Japanese war broke out. My parents taking a walk by the Humboldt Park lagoon the day I was conceived.