The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [303]
myself away for the voyage. So there were several days of mechanical progress over the water, the horizon sea rising to grip after a cloud like a crab after a butterfly, with armored totter, then falling and travailing. Plus the sun's heat and the patriarch wake, spitting and lacy. In my privacy I read books and wrote an endless letter chronicle to Stella which I hoped to send from Dakar, our first port, out to Alaska. Of course there were guns and a radar ring to remind you of danger, but the time was very pleasant. Before long the word got around that I was a listener to hard-luck stories, personal histories, gripes, and that I gave advice, and by and by I had a daily clientele, almost like a fortuneteller. By golly, I could have taken fees! 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. Although all seemed tranquil enough. Of an early evening, say, red and gold, with the deep blue tense surface, the full-up ocean, and some guy came darkening between me and the light, as if to a session of spiritual guidance. I can't claim it annoyed me. It gave me a chance to learn secrets, and also to sound off on the problems of life. I was on fine terms practically with everyone. Even the union delegate, when he saw I didn't intend to be hard-nosed and difficult about the company's interests. And the Old Man--he did correspondence courses in philosophy at a bunch of universities, it was his hobby, and was forever writing out assignments--he took to me too, though he didn't approve of my leniency. Anyway, I became ship's confidant. Though not all the confidences gave hope to the soul. More than one guy dropped in to sound me out on a black-market proposition or fast buck on foreign soil. One planned to become a hairdresser after the war, he told me, because then he'd have his hands on the head of every broad in Kenosha. One who had washed out of paratroop school and still wore his Fort Benning boots told me frankly when the matter of his beneficiary came up that he had three legal wives in different parts of Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Some wanted diagnosis, as if I were a professional head-feeler. and not the humble understudy's understudy of the cult of Asclepius the Maritime Commission had made me. "You think I maybe have an inferiority complex, do you think?" one of them asked me. Indeed I saw many ravages, but I never said. Beside-itself humanity, hurrying, hurrying, with liquid eyes. 'Suppose you was the guy in a fix like this..." "There was this certain friend of mine..." "He said, 'You support the old man for a while and see how you like it.' " "He ran away for a Carnie." "Now this girl, who was a cripple in one leg, she worked in the paint lab of the stove factory." "He was a Rumania-box type of swindler, where you put in a buck and it comes out a river." "If he floated down the river with a hard-on he expected them to raise the bridges for him, that's how he was an egotist." "I said, 'You listen here to me, fart-blossom, you chiseler...' " "Though I knew she was so sweet and we had the kids, the time just came when I couldn't keep the multiplication table out of my head, and then I knew, 'Bitches is all you deserve and should be with. Let them rob you and kick you around. That's okay!' " Lasciar le donne? Pazzo! Lasciar le donne! "I was trying to have one night with this girl before I shipped out. We both worked in the shipping department. But I couldn't swing it. So for weeks I was carrying a safety in my pocket and couldn't get to use it. One time it was all set and then my wife's grandmother died. I had to go fetch grandfather to the funeral. He couldn't understand what it was all about. We sat in the chapel where the organ played. He said, 'Why, that's the music the old dog died to,' and made one joke after another. Then he recognized her in the coffin, and he said, excited, 'Why, there's Mother! I saw her yesterday in the A and P. What's she doing here? Mother, why, Mother!' And then he understood and bust into tears.