A Father-To-Be

Saul
Bellow(1915-------)

The strangest notions had a way of
forcing themselves into Rogin's mind.Just thirty-one and
passable-looking,with short black hair,small eyes, but a high,open
forehead, he was a research chemist,and his mind was generally
serious and dependable.But on a snowy Sunday evening while this
stocky man,buttoned to the chin in a Burberry coat and walking in
his preposterous gait----feet turned outward --- was going toward the subway, he fell into a peculiar state.

He was on his way to have supper with
his Fiancee.She had phoned him a short while ago and said,“You'd
better pick up a few things on the way."

"What do we need?"

"Some roast,for one thing.I bought a
quarter of a pound coming home from my aunt's"

"Why a quarter of a pound,Joan?"said
Rogin , deeply annoyed."That's just about enough for one good
sandwich."

"So you have to stop at a
delicatessen. I had no more money."

He was about to ask,"What happened to
the thirty dollars I gave on Wednesday?"but he knew that would not
be right.

"I had to give Phyllis money for the
cleaning woman."said Joan.

Phyllis Joan's cousin,was a young
divorcee, extremely wealthy. The two woman shared an
apartment.

"Roast beef,"he said,"and what
else?"

"Some shampoo,sweetheart. We've used
up all the shampoo.And hurry,darling,I've missed you all
day."

“And I’ve missed you.”said Rogin,but
to tell truth he had been worrying most of the time.He had a
younger brother whom he was putting through college,and his mother,
whose annuity wasn’t quite enough in these days of inflation and
high taxes,needed money,too.Joan had debts he was helping her to
pay,for she wasn’t working.She was looking for something suitable
to do.Beautiful, well-educated,aristocratic in her attitude,she
couldn’t clerk in a dime store,she couldn’t model clothes (Rogin
thought this made girls vain and stiff,and he didn’t want her
to);she couldn’t be a waitress or a cashier.What could she
be？Well，something would turn up,and meantime Rogin hesitated to
complain.He paid her bills----the dentist, the department store,the
osteopath,the doctor,the psychiatrist.At Christmas,Rogin almost
went mad.Joan bought him a velvet smoking jacket with frog
fasteners,a beautiful pipe,and a pouch.She bought Phyllis a garnet
brooch , an Italian silk umbrella,and a gold cigarette holder.For
other friends,she bought Dutch pewter and Swedish glassware.Before
she was through,she had spent five hundred dollars of Rogin’s
money.He loved her too much to show his suffering.He believed she
had a far better nature than his.She didn’t worry about money.She
had a marvelous character,always cheerful, and she really didn’t
need a psychiatrist at all.She went to one because Phyllis did and
it made her curious.She tried too much to keep up with her
cousin,whose father had made millions in the rug
business.

While the woman in the drugstore was
wrapping the shampoo bottle a clear idea suddenly arose in Rogin’s
thoughts.Money  surrounds you in life as the earth
does in death.Super-imposition is the universal law.Who is free?No
one is free.Who has no burdens?Everyone is under pressure.The very
rocks,the waters of the earth,beasts,men,children---everyone has
some weight to carry. This idea was extremely clear to him at
first. Soon it became rather vague,but it had a great effect
nevertheless,as if someone had given him a valuable gift.( Not like
the velvet smoking jacket he couldn’t bring himself to wear,or the
pipe it choked him to smoke.)The notion that all were under
pressure and affliction, instead of saddening him,had the opposite
influence.It put him in a wonderful mood. It was
extraordinary

how happy he became and,in addition,
clear-sighted. His eyes all at once were opened to what was around
him. He saw with delight how the druggist and the woman who wrapped
the shampoo bottle were smiling and flirting,how the lines of worry
in her face went over into lines of cheer and the druggist’s
receding gums did not hinder his kidding and friendliness.And in
the delicatessen,also,it was amazing how much Rogin noted and what
happiness it gave him simply to be there.

Delicatessens on Sunday night, when
all other stores are shut, will overcharge you ferociously,and
Rogin would normally have been on guard,but he was not tonight,or
scarcely so.Smells of pickle, sausage, mustard,and smoked fish
overjoyed him.He pitied the people who would buy the chicken salad
and chopped herring;they could do it only because their sight was
too dim to see what they were getting ---the fat flakes of pepper
on the chicken,the soppy herring, mostly vinegar-soaked stale
bread.Who would buy them? Late risers, people living alone,waking
up in the darkness of the afternoon , finding their refrigerators
empty, or people whose gaze was turned inward.The roast beef looked
not bad, and Rogin ordered a pound.

While the storekeeper was slicing the
meat,he yelled at a Puerto Rican kid who was reaching for a bag of
chocolate cookies,”Hey,you want to pull me down the whole display
on yourself? You, chico, wait a half a minute.”This
storekeeper,though he looked like one of Pancho Villa’s bandits,
the kind that smeared their enemies with syrup and staked them down
on anthills, a man with toadlike  eyes and stout
hands made to clasp pistols hung around his belly,was not so bad.He
was a New York man,thought Rogin --- who was from Albany himself
--- a New York man toughened

by every abuse of the city, trained
to suspect everyone.But in his own realm, on the board behind the
counter,there was justice. Even clemency.

The Puerto Rican kid wore a complete
cowboy outfit----a green hat with white braid, guns,
chaps,spurs,boots,and gauntlets---but he couldn’t speak any
English.Rogin unhooked the cellophane bag of hard circular cookies
and gave it to him. The boy

Tore the cellophane with his teeth
and began to chew one of those dry chocolate discs.Rogin recognized
his state----the energetic dream of childhood.Once ,he,too, had
found these dry biscuits delicious.It would have bored him now to
eat one.

What else would Joan like?Rogin
thought fondly.Some strawberries?”Give me some frozen
strawberries.No,raspberries,she likes those better.And heavy
cream.And some rolls,cream cheese,and some of those rubber-looking
gherkins.”

“What rubber?”

“Those,deep green, with eyes.Some ice
cream might be in order,too.”

He tried to think of a compliment,a
good comparison,an endearment,for Joan when she’d open the
door.What about her complexion?There was really nothing to compare
her sweet, small, daring,shapely,timid,defiant,loving face to. How
difficult she was, and how beautiful!

As Rogin went down into the
stony,odorous,metallic,captive air of the subway,he was diverted by
an unusual confession made by a man to his friend.These were two
very tall men , shapeless in their winter clothes,as if their coats
concealed suits of chain mail.

“So,how long have you known me””said
one.

“Twelve years.”

“Well,I have an admission to make, “
he said.”I’ve decided that I might as well. For years I’ve been a
heavy drinker.You didn’t know. Practically an
alcoholic.”

But his friend was not surprised,and
he answered immediately,”Yes, I did know.”

“You knew? Impossible!How could
you?”

Why,thought Rogin,as if it could be a
secret!Look at that long,austere,alcohol-washed face,that
drink-ruined nose,the skin by his ears like turkey wattles, and
those whiskey-saddened eyes.

“Well,I did
know,though.”

“You couldn’t have. I can’t believe
it.”He was upset,and his friend didn’t seem to want to soothe him.
“But it’s all right now.”he said. “I’ve been going to a doctor and
taking pills,a new revolutionary Danish discovery.It’s a miracle.
I’m beginning to believe they can cure you of anything and
everything. You can’t beat the Danes in science. They do
everything. They turn a man in to a woman.”

“That isn’t how they stop you from
drinking, is it?”

“No,I hope not.This is only like
aspirin. It’s super-aspirin.They call it the aspirin of the
future.But if you use it,you have to stop
drinking.”

Rogin’s illuminated mind asked of
itself while the human tides of the subway swayed back and forth,
and cars linked and transparent like fish bladders raced under the
streets:How come he thought nobody would know what everybody
couldn’t help knowing?

And , as a chemist, he asked himself
what kind of compound this new Danish drug might be,and started
thinking about various inventions of his own.synthetic albumen, a
cigarette that lit itself,a cheaper motor fuel.Ye gods, but he
needed money!As never before.What was to be done?His mother was
growing more and more difficult.On Friday night , she had neglected
to cut up his meat for him. And he was hurt.She had sat at the
table motionless,with her long-suffering face,severe, and let him
cut his own meat,a thing she almost never did.She had always
spoiled him and made his brother envy him.But what she expected
now!Oh,Lord,how he had to pay, and it had never even occurred to
him formerly that these things might have a
price.

Seated, one of the passengers,Rogin
recovered his calm,happy,even clairvoyant state of mind.To think of
money was to think as the world wanted you to think;then you’d
never be your own master.When people said they wouldn’t do
something for love and money,they meant that love and money were
opposite passions and one the enemy of the other.He went on to
reflect how little people knew about this,how they
 slept through life,how small a light the light of
consciousness was.Rogin’s clean, snub-nosed face shone while his
heart was torn with joy at these deeper thoughts of our
ignorance.You might take this drunkard as an example, who for long
years thought his closest friends never suspected he drank.Rogin
looked up and down the aisle for this remarkable knightly symbol,
but he was gone.

However，there was no lack of things
to see.There was a small girl with a new white muff;into the muff a
doll’s head was sewn,and the child was happy and affectionately
vain of it,while her old man,stout and grim,with a huge scowling
nose,kept picking her up and resettling her in the seat,as if he
were trying to change her into something else.Then another child,
led by her mother,boarded the car, and this other child carried the
very same doll-faced muff, and this greatly annoyed both
parents.The woman ,who looked like a difficult， contentious woman，
took her daughter away.It seemed to Rogin that each child was in
love with its own muff

And didn’t even see the other, but it
was one of his foibles to think he understood the hearts of little
children.

A foreign family next engaged his
attention . They looked like Central Americans to him. On one side
the mother, quite old, dark-faced,white-haired,and worn out;on the
other a son with the whitened ,porous hands of a dishwasher.But
what was the dwarf who sat between them---a son or a daughter? The
hair was long and wavy and the cheeks smooth, but the shirt and tie
were masculine. The overcoat was feminine , but the shoes--- the
shoes were a puzzle.A pair of brown oxfords with an outer seam like
a man’s, but Baby Louis heels like a woman’s-----a plain toe like a
man’s, but a strap across the instep like a woman’s.No
stockings.That didn’t help much. The dwarf’s fingers were
beringed,but without a wedding band.There were small grim dents in
the cheeks. The eyes were puffy and concealed,but Rogin did not
doubt that they could reveal strange things if they chose and that
this was a creature of remarkable understanding.He had for many
years owned De la Mare’s Memoirs of a Midget.Now he took a
resolve;he would read it.As soon as he had decided, he was free
from his consuming curiosity as to the drawf’s sex and was able to
look at the person who sat beside him.

Thoughts very often grow fertile in
the subway,because of the motion, the great company, the subtlety
of the rider’s state as he rattles under streets and rivers, under
the foundations of great buildings,and Rogin’s mind had already
been strangely stimulated. Clasping the bag of groceries from which
there rose odors of bread and pickle spice, he was following a
train of reflections, first about the chemistry of sex
determination, the X and Y chromosomes, hereditary linkages, the
uterus, afterward about his brother as a tax exemption.He recalled
two dreams of the night before. In one,an undertaker had offered to
cut his hair and he had refused.In another he had been carrying a
woman on his head.Sad dreams both!Very sad! Which was the woman
---Joan or mother？ And the undertaker----his lawyer?He gave a deep
sign,and by force of habit began to put together bis synthetic
albumen that was to revolutionize the entire egg
industry.

Meanwhile,he had not interrupted his
examination of the passenger and had fallen into a study of the man
next to him.This was a man whom he had never in his life seen
before but with whom he now suddenly felt linked through all
existence.He was middle-aged, sturdy,with clear skin and blue
eyes.His hands were clean, well formed,but Rogin did not approve of
them.The coat he wore was a fairly expensive blue cheek such as
Rogin would never have chosen for himself.He would not have worn
blue suede shoes, either , or such a faultless hat , a cumbersome
felt animal of a hat encircled by a high ,fat ribbon.There are all
kinds of dandies, not all of them are of the flaunting kind;some
are dandies of respectability, and Rogin’s fellow passenger was one
of these.His straight-nosed profile was handsome,yet he had
betrayed his gift, for he was flat-looking.But in his flat way he
seemed to warn people that he wanted no difficulties with them, he
wanted nothing to do with them.Wearing such blue suede shoes, he
could not afford to have people treading on his feet, and he seemed
to draw about himself a circle of privilege, notifying all others
to mind their own business and let him read his paper.He was
holding a Tribune, and perhaps it would be overstatement to say
that he was reading. He was holding it.

His clear skin and blue eyes, his
straight and purely Romannose---even the way he sat ----all
strongly suggested one person to Rogin: Joan.He tried to escape the
comparison,but it couldn’t be helped. This man not only the
comparison,but it couldn’t be helped. This man not only looked like
Joan’s herself,Forty years hence, a son of hers, provided she had
one , might be like this.A son of hers? Of such a son,he
 himself,Rogin, would be the father.Lacking in
dominant traits as compared with Joan, his heritage would not
appear.Probably the children would resemble her. Yes, think forty
years ahead,And a man like this,who sat by him knee to knee in the
hurtling car among their fellow creatures,unconscious participants
in a sort of great carnival of transit---such a man would carry
forward what had been Rogin.

This was why he felt bound to him
through all existence.What were forty years reckoned against
eternity!Forty years were gone,and he was gazing at his own son.
Here he was . Rogin was frightened and moved.”My son! My son!” he
said to himself,and the pity of it almost made him burst into
tears.The holy and frightful work of the masters of life and death
brought this about.We were their instruments. We worked toward ends
we thought were our own. But no!The whole thing was so unjust. To
suffer, to labor, to toil and force your way through the spikes of
life, to crawl through its darkest caverns, to push through the
worst, to struggle under the weight of economy, to make
money---only to become the father of a fourth-rate man of the world
like this , so flat-looking, with his ordinary, clean,
rosy,uninteresting, self-satisfied,fundamentally bourgeois
face.What a curse to have a dull son!A son like this, who could
never understand his father.They had absolutely nothing,but
nothing,in common, he and this neat,chubby,blue-eyed man.He was so
pleased,thought Rogin, with all he owned and all he did and all he
was that he could hardly unfasten his lip.Look at that lip,sticking
up at the tip like a little thorn or egg tooth.He wouldn’t give
anyone the time of day.Would personalities be chillier as the world
aged and grew colder?The inhumanity of the next generation incensed
Rogin.Father and son had no sign to make to each other.Terrible!
Inhuman!What a vision of existence it gave him.Man’s personal aims
were Nothing illusion.The life force occupied each of us in turn in
its progress toward its own fulfillment, trampling on our
individual humanity,using us for its own ends like mere dinosaurs
or bees,exploiting love heartlessly ,making us engage in the social
process,labor, struggle for money,and submit to the law of
pressure, the universal law of layers ,
superimposition!

What the blazes am I getting
into?Rogin thought.To be the father of a throwback to her
father.The image of this white-haired,gross，peevish old man with
his ugly selfish blue eyes revolted Rogin.This was how his grandson
would look.Joan ,with whom Rogin was now more and more displeased,
could not help that. For her, it was inevitable.But did it have to
be inevitable for him?Well,then Rogin ,you fool,don’t be a damned
instrument.Get out of the way!

But it was too late for this,because
he had already experienced the senation of sitting next to his own
son,his son and Joan’s.He kept staring at him,waiting for him to
say something.but the presumptive son remained coldly silent though
he st have been aware of Rogin’s scrutiny. They even got out at the
same stop---Sheridan Square.When they stepped to the platform, the
man, without even looking at Rogin,went away in a different
direction in his detestable blue-checked coat,with his rosy,nasty
face.

The whole thing upset Rogin very
badly.When he approached Joan’s door and heard Phyllis’s little dog
Henri barking even before he could knock,his face was very tense.”I
won’t be used,”he declared to himself.”I have my own right to
exist.”Joan had better watch out.She had a light way of bypassing
grave questions he had given earnest thought to.She always assumed
no really disturbing thing would happy.He could not afford the
luxury of such a carefree,debonair attitude himself,because he had
to work hard and earn money so that disturbing things would not
happen.Well,at the monment this situation could not be helped,and
he really did not mind the money if he could feel that she was not
necessarily the mother of such a son as his subway son or entirely
the daughter of that awful, obscene father of hers.After all, Rogin
was not himself so much like either of his parents,and quite
different from his brother.

Toan came to the door,wearing one of
Phyllis’s expensive housecoats.It suited her very well.At first
sight of her happy face,Rogin was brushed by the shadow of
resemblance; the touch of it was extremely light, almost
figmentary,but it made his flesh tremble.

She began to kiss him,saying,”Oh,my
baby.You’re covered with snow.Why didn’t you wear your hat?It’s all
over its little head”--her favorite third-person
endearment.

“Well,let me put down this bag of
stuff. Let me take off my coat,”grumbled Rogin,and escaped from her
embrace.Why couldn’t she wait making up to him?“It’s so hot in
here.My face is burning.Why do you  keep this
place at this temperature?And that damned dog keeps barking.If you
didn’t keep it cooped up,it wouldn’t be so spoiled and noisy. Why
doesn’t anybody ever walk him?”

“Oh，it's not really so hot here! You’ve
just come in from the cold. Don’t
you think this housecoat fits me better than Phyllis?Especially
across the hip.She thinks so,too.She may sell it to
me.”

“I hope not ,”Rogin almost
exclaimed.She brought a towel to dry the melting snow from his
short black hair.The flurry of rubbing excited Henri intolerably,
and Joan locked him up in the bedroom,where he jumped persistently
against the door with a rhythmic sound of claws on the
wood.

Joan said,”Did you bring the
shampoo?”

“Here it is.”

“Then I’ll wash your hair before
dinner.Come.”

“I don’t want it
washed.”

“Oh,come on,”she
said,laughing.

Her lack of consciousness of guilt
amazed him.He did not see how it could be.And the carpeted
,furnished,lamplit,curtained room seemed to stand against his
vision.So that he felt accusing and angry,his spirit sore and
bitter,but it did not seem fitting to say why.Indeed,he began to
worry lest the reason for it all slip away from
him.

They took off his coat and his shirt
in the bathroom,and she filled the sink.Rogin was full of his
troubled emotions;now that his chest was bare he could feel them
even more distinctly inside, and he said to himself,I’ll have a
thing or two to tell her pretty soon.I’m not letting them get away
with it.”Do you think,” he was going to tell her,”that I alone was
made to carry the burden of the whole world on me? Do you think I
was born just to be taken advantage of and sacrificed ? Do you
think I’m just a natural resource like a coal mine,or oil well,or
fishery,or the like? Remember,that I’m a man is no reason why I
should be loaded down.I have a soul in me no bigger or stronger
than yours.

“Take away the externals,like the
muscles, deeper voice, and so forth,and what remains? A pair of
spirits ,practically alike, So why shouldn’t there also be
equality?I can’t always be the strong one.”

“Sit here,”said Joan bringing up a
kitchen stool to the sink.”Your hair’s gotten all
matted.”

He sat with his breast against the
cool enamel,his chin on the edge of the basin, the green, hot
radiant water reflecting the glass and the tile , and the
sweet,cool fragrant juice of the shampoo poured on his head.She
began to wash him.

“You have the healthiest-looking
scalp,”she said.”It’s all pink.”

He answered , “Well,it should be
white.There must be something wrong with me.”

“But there’s absolutely nothing wrong
with you,”she said and pressed against him from behind,surrounding
him,pouring the water gently over him until it seemed to him that
the water came from within him,it was the warm fluid of his own
secret loving spirit overflowing into the sink,green and foaming
and the words he had rehearsed he forgot, and his anger at his
son-to-be disappeared altogether,and he sighed,and said to her from
the water-filled hollow of the sink,”You always have such wonderful
ideas,Joan.You know? You have a kind of instinct, a regular
gift.”