Bellow short stories: A Father-to-Be

Saul Bellow's 1955 story A Father-to-Be (collected in Mosby's Memoirs) is of a bygone time in NYC (one of his first works in that setting?) when the only shops open on a Sunday night were delicatessens and when pretty much everyone rode the subways - most notably when the only roles for an intelligent, educated young woman of a certain social status were secretary, modeling, maybe teaching, volunteering, or subservient wife. Good riddance to that - but still a hilarious story as the protagonist, Rogin, a 30ish chemist who thinks about potential great inventions such as artificial albumen and a self-lighting cigarette ride the subway to the apartment his fiancée shares w wealthy, dislikable sister. He's bearing a bag of deli groceries that waft aromas of bread and pickles. He has several observations en route - in one of a man who he overheard confessing to a friend that he's an alcoholic and is surprised that the friend has known this for years - what delusions do all of us live w and endure?, R wonders - and another when he observes an unpleasant-looking fellow rider whom he thinks looks like his fiancée and whom he imagines to be his/their son 40 years hence - an extremely upsetting observation. But when he arrives at fiancee's door in her G Village apartment (unaffordable today!) she fusses over him and brings him into the bathroom to wash his hair - a gesture of live w of course religious overtones (baptism?) and perhaps an allusion to emasculation (Delilah). One does not have high hopes for this impending marriage.

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