The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [125]
since there was no booth. Owens too listened in, he and his spinster sister who was housekeeper; the door of their stale parlor was always open--the smell of the kitchen governed over all the other smells of the house--where I at my post in the wicker rocker two hours every evening could see their after-supper state, their square pillars of walnut, the madnesses of starched lace, the insects'-eye inspiration of cut-glass, the screwy detail of fern both fiddle-necked and expanded, the paintings of fruit, which were full of hardness against liberty, plus the wheels of blue dishes around the wainscoting. With such equipment making an arsenal of their views--I mustn't forget the big fixtures of buffalo glass hanging on three chains--they demonstrated how they were there to stay and endure. Their tenants were transient, hence the Owenses probably needed something like this to establish home for themselves, and it was made very heavy. Clem Tambow took to visiting me. His father the old politician had died, and Clem and his brother, now a tap dancer on the Loew's circuit, had divided an insurance policy. Clem wouldn't say how much he had inherited, out of a queer personal niceness or privacy, or maybe from superstition. But he had registered at the university, in the psychology department, and was living in the neighborhood. "What do you think of the old man leaving me money?" he said, laughing, shy of his big mouth and carious teeth--he still had the big clear whites of his eyes and his head furry at the back as when a boy; and he went on confessing the trouble of his ugliness to me, being somber about the grief of his nose, but interrupting his complaints with enormous laughs, suddenly and swiftly moving his hand to save his cigar from falling. Now that he had money he wore a row of Perfecto Queens in his coat. "I didn't appreciate my old man enough. I was all-out for my mother. I mean out. I would be still, but now she's just plain too old. Can't kid myself about it any more, especially since I've read a few psychology books." Speaking of psychology, he always laughed. He said, "I'm only on campus because of the pussy." And then, a little melancholy, "I have some dough now, so I may as well harvest. I wouldn't get anywhere otherwise, with this fish mouth and my nose. Educated girls, you can appeal to their minds, and they don't expect you to spend too much on them." He couldn't consider himself a student; he was a sort of fee-paying visitor; he played poker in the law-school basement and pool at tlie Reynold's Club and went to a handbook on Fifty-third Street to bet on horses. If he attended a class he was apt to "haw-hawhaw" in the big lecture hall at Kent, the amphitheater, at any standard joke of the science, or from private fun, unpreventably. "But," he would explain, "that dumbbell was trying to put over some behaviorist junk, that all thinking is in words and so it must take place partly in the throat, in the vocal cords--what he said was 'inhibited sub-vocalization.' So they got curious as to what happened with mutes, and got some and put dinguses on their necks and read them syllogisms. But all the stuff was escaping through the fingers, because of course they talk with their hands. Then they poured plaster casts on their hands. Well, when the guy got this far I started laughing _haw-haw! And he asked me to leave." Clem said this with one of his convulsions of embarrassment and shyness which then was wiped out by further laughter. Haw-haw-haw! Then a big flush of delight. Then gloom again, as he recalled his troubles, his having been shortweighed as to gifts by nature. I tried to tell him that he was wrong and that he didn't need to make up for anything. It was his ramming time, and his appearance was strongly virile in spite of exaggerations, such as his mustache, the gambler's stripe of the $22.50 suits he bought on time--he had the money but he preferred to pay installments. He said, "Don't be nice to me, Augie. You don't have to." Sometimes he took the air toward me of an uncle with a nephew of nearly the same age.