In this brief excerpt, the decision has been made to send Georgie, the weak-minded youngest of the family, to a “home” because he is getting older physically without aging enough mentally. The decision belongs primarily to Grandma Lausch, the autocratic head of the poor family. The narrator is Augie March, Georgie’s elder brother, who sees the sending away of his brother as a symbol of the family’s disintegration. Simon is Augie’s elder brother. Winnie is the family dog. Lubin is a social worker. “The cars” was the familiar way to refer to streetcars.
I now began to spend full time with Georgie, in the last month, pulling him around on the sled, walking him in the park, and taking him to the Garfield Park conservatory to see the lemons bloom. The administrative wheels were already going; eleventh hour efforts did no good. Lubin, who had always said that Georgie would be better off in an institution, brought the commitment papers, and Mama, without Simon’s support against the old lady (and probably even that would not have stopped her, since Grandma was in a decisive action and was carried along with the impulse of a doom), had to sign. No, Grandma Lausch couldn’t have been withstood, I’m convinced. Not now, not in this. Everything considered, it was, no matter how sad, wiser to commit the kid. As Simon said, we would later have had to do it ourselves. But the old lady made of it something it didn’t necessarily have to be, a test of strength, tactless, a piece of sultanism; it originated in things we little understood: disappointment, angry giddiness from self-imposed, prideful struggle, weak nearness to death that impaired her judgment, maybe a sharp utterance of stubborn animal spirit, or bubble from human enterprise, sinking and discharging blindly from a depth.
Do I know? But sending Georgie away could have been done differently.
At last notice arrived that there was place for him in the Home. I had to go and buy him a valise at the Army-Navy store-a tan, bulldog gladstone, the best I could get. The thing would be his for life, and I wanted it to be right. I taught him how to work the clasps and the key. Where he was going there would always be people, of course, to help him, but my idea was that he should be master of a little of his own, when he went from place to place. We also bought him a hat in the drygoods store.
It was sunless but snow-melting weather at the late start of spring, and the trees and roofs dripped. In that grown man’s hat and the coat he didn’t wear intelligently-not appearing to feel the need to settle it right on his shoulders-he looked grown up and like a traveler. In fact, beautiful, and the picture of a far traveler, with his pale, mind-crippled, impotent handsomeness. It was enough to make you break down and cry, to see him. But nobody did cry; neither of us, I mean, for by then there were only my mother and I-Simon had given him a kiss on the head when leaving in the morning and said, “Good-by, old socks, I’ll come and see you.” As for Grandma Lausch, she stayed in her room.
Mama said, “Go and tell Gramma we’re ready to go.”
“It’s Augie,” I said at Grandma’s door. “Everything is set.”
She answered, “Well? Go, then.” This she said in her one-time decisive and impatient way, but without the brightness or what you might call the sea ring of real command. The door was locked, and I suppose she was lying on the featherbed in her apron, shawl, and pointing slippers, with the bric–brac of her Odessa existence on her vanity table, dresser top, and on the walls.
“I think Mama wants you to say good-by.”
“What is there to say good-by? I’ll come and visit him later on.”
She didn’t have the strength to go and look at the results she had worked hard to get and then still keep on trying to hold power in her hands. And how was I supposed to interpret this refusal if not as feebleness and a cracking of organization?
Mama showed at last the trembling anger of weak people that it takes much to bring on. She seemed determined that Georgie should get the treatment of a child from the old woman. But in a few minutes she returned alone from the bedroom and said with harshness not intended for me, “Pick up the satchel, Augie.” I took hold of Georgie’s arm through the wide sleeve and we left by the door of the front room, where Winnie was snoozing under the ferns. Georgie softly chewed at a corner of his mouth as we went. It was a slow trip on the cars; we changed three times, and the last stretch on the West Side, took us by Mr. Novinson’s shop.
We were about an hour getting to the Home-wired windows, dogproof cyclone fence, asphalt yard, great gloom. In the tiny below-stairs office a moody-looking matron took the papers and signed him into the ledger. We were allowed to go up to the dormitory with him, where other kids stood around under the radiator high on the wall and watched us. Mama took off George’s coat and the manly hat, and in his shirt of large buttons, with whitish head and big white, chill fingers-it was troubling that they were so man-sized-he kept by me beside the bed while I again showed him the simple little stunt of the satchel lock. But I failed to distract him from the terror of the place and of boys like himself around-he had never met such before. And now he realized that we would leave him and he began to do with his soul, that is, to let out his moan, worse for us than tears, though many grades below the pitch of weeping. Then Mama slumped down and gave in utterly. It was when she had the bristles of his special head between her hands and was kissing him that she began to cry. When I started after a while to draw her away he tried to follow. I cried also. I took him back to the bed and said, “Sit here.” So he sat and moaned. We went down to the car stop and stood waiting by the black, humming pole for the trolley to come back from city limits.
After that we had a diminished family life, as though it were care of Georgie that had been the main basis of household union and now everything was disturbed. We looked in different directions, and the old woman had outsmarted herself. Well, we were a disappointment to her too. Maybe she had started out by dreaming she might have a prodigy in one of us to manage to fame. Perhaps. The force that directs these things in us higher beings and brings together lovers to bear the genius that will lead the world a step or two of the slow march toward its perfection, or find the note that will reach the ear of the banded multitude and encourage it to take that step, had come across with a Georgie instead, and with us. We were far from having the stuff in us that she must have wanted. . . .
. . . The house was changed also for us; dinkier, darker, smaller; once shiny and venerated things losing their attraction and richness and importance. Tin showed, cracks, black spots where enamel was hit off, threadbarer, design scuffed out of the center of the rug, all the glamour, lacquer, massiveness, fluorescence, wiped out. The old-paste odor of Winnie in her last days apparently wasn’t noticed by the house-dwelling women; it was by us, coming in fresh from outdoors.
Winnie died in May of that year, and I laid her in a shoe box and buried her in the yard.
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“The Adventures of Augie March” and nearly all of Saul Bellow’s other novels are still in print in a variety of editions.
