The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [108]
CHAPTER X
When evening came on we were tearing out of Gary and toward South Chicago, the fire and smudge mouth of the city gorping to us. As the flamy bay shivers for home-coming Neapolitans. You enter your native water like a fish. And there sits the great fish god or Dagon. You then bear your soul like a minnow before Dagon, in your familiar water. I knew I wasn't coming back to peace and an easy time. In rising order of difficulty, there'd be the Polish housekeeper, always crabbing about money; next Mama, certain to feel my unreliability; and Simon who'd have been storing up something for me. I was ready to hear hard words from him; I felt I deserved some for going off on this trip. I also had a few to answer with, about the telegram. But I wasn't approaching the usual kind of family fight with its hot feelings and wrangled-out points; it was something different and much worse. A new, strange Polish woman who spoke no English came to the door. I thought the old housekeeper had quit and this one had replaced her, but it was odd how the new woman had filled the kitchen with bleeding hearts, crucifixes, and saints. Of course, if she had to have them in her place of work, Mama couldn't see them anyhow. But there were also little children, and I wondered if Simon had taken in an entire family; and then, from the way the woman kept me standing, I began to grasp that this was no longer our flat, and an older girl wearing the dress of St. Helen's parochial school came to tell me that her father had bought the furniture and taken over the flat from the man who owned it. That was Simon. "But isn't my mother here any more? Where's my mother?" "The blind lady? She's downstairs by the neighbors." The Kreindls had put her in Kotzie's room, which had only a small window with bars on the passage where people ducked through the brick subterranean vault on a shortcut through the alley or stopped to take a leak. Since she could only just distinguish light from dark and didn't need a view, you couldn't say on that score it was an unkindness to have been put there. The deep kitchen cuts in her palms had never softened out, and I felt them when she took my hands and said in her cracky voice, queerer than ever just then, "Did you hear about Grandma?" "No, what?" "She died." "Oh no!" That was a shaft! It went straight and cold into my bowels, and I couldn't bring up my back or otherwise move, but sat bent over. Dead! Horrible, to imagine the old woman dead, in a casket, underground, with the face covered and weight thrown on her, silent. My heart shrunk before the idea of this violence. Because it would have had to be violent. She, who always tore off interferences as she did that dentist's hand, would have had to be smothered. For all her frailty she was a hard fighter. But she fought when clothed and standing up, alive. And now it was necessary to picture her captured and pulled down into the grave, and lying still. That was too much for me. My grates couldn't hold it. I shed tears with my sleeve over my eyes. "What did she die of, Ma, and when?" She didn't know. A few days ago, before she had moved down, Kreindl had told her, and she had been in mourning ever since. According to her notions of how she should mourn. All that she had in this vault of a room was a bed and chair. Well, I tried to find out from Mrs. Kreindl why Simon had done this. As it was suppertime, Mrs. Kreindl was at home. Usually she was away, afternoons, playing poker with other housewives; they played in earnest, for blood. How she had the repose of a big sheep, don't ask me, since she was always in a secret fever from gambling and from warring with her husband. She couldn't tell me anything about Simon. Was it to get married that he had sold everything? He had been desperate, before I left, about marrying Cissy. But the furniture was old stuff, and how much would the Pole have paid for it? What would anyone give for that cripple kitchen stove? Or for the beds, even older; and the leatherette furniture we used