The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [111]
doing my best, and thankful the murk was so deep they couldn't see me well. Coblin began to draw me by the arm. He wanted me to come to the Seder dinner. "Come along. Come home." While I stunk of jail and before I had begun to digest my misery? Before I found Simon? "No, some other time, thanks, Cob," I said, going backwards. "But why not?" "Leave him, he's got a date. Have you got a date?" "As a matter of fact I do have to see somebody." "He's starting his horny time of life. Bring your little pussy to the wedding." Cousin Hyman still smiled, but he thought probably of his daughter and so didn't urge me more; he clammed up. In Einhorn's door I met Bavatsky as he descended to replace a fuse. Tillie had blown it with her curling iron, and, upstairs, one woman hobbled and the other just as slow from weight and uncertainty approached with candles and so recalled to me a second time it was the night of Exodus. But there was no dinner or ceremony here. Einhom observed only one holy day, Yom Kippur, and only because Karas Holloway, his wife's cousin, insisted. "What happened to that drunken wart Bavatsky?" "He couldn't get to the fuse box because the cellar was locked, so he went to fetch the key from the janitor's wife," said Mildred. "If she has beer in the house we go to bed in the dark tonight." Suddenly Tillie Einhorn, with candle in a saucer, saw me by the flame. "Look, it's Augie," she said. "Augie? Where?" said Einhom, quickly glancing between the uneven sizes of light. "Augie, where are you? I want to see you." I came forward and sat by him; he shifted his shoulder in token of wanting to shake hands. "Tillie, go in the kitchen and make coffee. Mildred, you too." He sent them back into the dark kitchen. "And take the plug out of the curler. I go nuts with their electric appliances." "It is out," said Mildred, with a voice tired of, but always ready for, the duty of these answers. Obedient in the smallest point, however, she shut the doors, and I was alone with him. In his night court. At least I thought he was grimacing with strictness at me. He had shaken hands only to give me a formal feel of his fingers and of the depth of his coldness. And the candles were now as genial to me as though they had been the ones stuck into loaves of bread by night and sailed on a black Indian lake to find the drowned body sunk to the bottom. Now the white middle way of his hair was down near the plate glass of his desk as he fixed to get and light a cigaretteas ever, the methodical struggle and pulling of the arms by the sleeves, that transport of flies by the ants. Then he began to blow smoke and prepared to speak. I decided I couldn't allow myself to be chided like a kid of ten for the Joe German deal, of which he by now certainly knew. I had to talk to him about Simon. But then it seemed he wasn't going to lecture me at all. I must have looked too sicklow, gaunt, pushed to an extreme, burned. Last time we met I had had my Evanston fat on me; I had come to consult him about the adoption. "Well, you haven't been doing so well, it looks like." "No." "German was caught. How did you get away?" "By dumb luck." "Dumb? In a hot car, without even changing the plates! Talk about brainlessness! Well, they brought him back. The picture was in the Times. You want to see?" No, I didn't want to, for I knew what it would be like: between two hefty detectives and probably trying to tip his hat over his eyes as much as his held arms would allow, and spare his family direct eyes into the camera, or his plastered face. It was always like that. "How come it took you so long to get back?" said Einhorn. "I bummed, and I wasn't very lucky." "But why did you have to bum? Your brother told me he was sending you the money to Buffalo." "Why, did he come and tell you?" I creased my brow with effort. "You mean he tried to borrow from you?" "He got it from me. I made him another loan too." "What loan? I didn't get anything from him." "That's no good. I was stupid. I should have sent it to you myself. Beh?" He let out his tongue and his eyes went bright, looking surprised.