The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [114]
got plenty of jig-jig ahead of you before you settle down. Take it! Take, take if they give you! Never refuse. To come together with a peepy little woman who sings in your ear. It's the life of the soul!" He argued this to me with a squeeze of his awkward eyes, the old pimp and egger-on; he even made me smile, and I was in no mood for smiling. "Besides," said he, "you can see what kind of a man your brother is, that when he gets it in his mind he can sell the goods of the house and put his mother out." I expected him to mention this and pass from defense to the practical matter of Mama's support. In the past Kreindl had always been a kind enough neighbor, but we couldn't expect him to keep Mama. Especially as Simon now had him down as one of his chief enemies. Furthermore, I couldn't let her stay in that brick vault, and I told Kreindl I'd make other arrangements for her. I went to appeal to Lubin, at the Charity, on gloomy Wells Street. Lubin had always visited us as a sort of distant foster-uncle, formerly. In his office, to my maturer eyes, he came out differently. Something in his person argued what the community that contributed the money wanted us poor bastards to be: sober, dutiful, buttoned, clean, sad, moderate. The sadness and confusion of the field he was in made him sensible. Only a certain heaviness of breath that drew notice to the thickness of his nostrils gave you a sense of difficulty and, next, one of the labor of being patient. I made note in this broad man of the tame ape-nature promoted to pants and offices. This is the opposite of that disfigured image of God that fails away by its sin from Eden; or of the ame bad copy excited and inflamed by promise of grace to recover its sacredness and golden stature. Lubin's belief was that he didn't fall from Paradise but rose from the caves. But he was a good man, and this is no slander of, him, but merely his own view. When I told him Simon and I had to find a home for Mama he doubtless thought we were getting rid of everyone--Georgie first, then Grandma, and now Mama. Therefore I said, "It's only temporary, till we set on our feet, and then we'll have another flat and housekeeper for her." But he took this very aridly, which wasn't to be wondered at, considering the tramp appearance I made, in the wrack of my good clothes, inflamed at the eyes, and looking garbage-nourished. However, he said he could get her into a Home for the blind on Arthington Street if we could pay part of the cost. It came to fifteen bucks a month. That was as good as I could expect. Also he sent me with a note to an employment bureau, but there was nothing doing at the time. I went to my room on the South Side and took most of my clothes to hock, the tuxedo, sports clothes, and hound's-tooth coat. I pawned them and I got Mama established, and then started to hunt work. Being as they say up against it and au pied du mur, I took the first job that came, and I've never had one that was more curious. Einhom got it for me through Karas-Holloway, who had a financial interest in the business. It was a luxury dog service on North dark Street, among the honkytonks and hock shops, antique stores and dreary beaneries. In the morning I drove out in a station wagon along the Gold Coast to pick up the dogs, at the back doors of mansions or up the service elevators of lakeshore apartment hotels, and I brought the animals back to this club joint--it was called a club. The chief was a Frenchman, a dog-coiffeur or groom or mattre de chiens; he was rank and rough, from Place Clichy near the foot of Montmartre, and from what he told me he had been a wrestler's shill in the carnivals there while studying this other profession. Some ways his face was short of humanity, by its energetic stiffness and abruptness of color, like an injection. His relation with the animals was a struggle. He was trying to wrest something from them. I don't know what. Perhaps that their conception of a dog should be what his was. He was on the footing of Xenophon's Ten Thousand in Persia, here in Chicago; for he washed and ironed