The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [13]
legendary presidential stuff. Only those four miles wouldn't have been a hindrance if the right feelings were kindled. It depended on which way I was drawn. Home made a neat and polished contrast on my half-days off. At Anna's the floors were washed on Friday afternoon, when she got down from bed and waded barefoot after the strokes of the mop, going forward, and afterward spread clean papers that soaked and dried and weren't taken up again till the week was over. Here you smelled the daily cleaning wax, and everything was in place on a studious plan --veneer shining, doilies spread, dime-store cut-glass, elkhorn, clock set in place--as regular as a convent parlor or any place where the love of God is made ready for on a base of domestic neatness and things kept well separated from the sea-composition of brutal and noisy trouble that heaves over every undefended wall. The bed that Simon and I slept in bulged up in full dress with pieces of embroidery on the pillow; books (Simon's hero's library) stacked; college pennants nailed in The; the women knitting by the clear, wall-browned summer air of the kitchen window; Georgie among the sunflowers and green washline poles of the yard, stumbling after slow Winnie, who went to smell where sparrows had lighted. I guess it troubled me to see how absent Simon and I could be from the house and how smooth it went without us. Mama must have felt this and fussed over me as much as was allowable; she'd bake a cake, and I was something of a guest, with the table spread and jam dishes filled. That way my wage-earning was recognized, and it gave me pride to dig the folded dollars out of my watch pocket. Yet when any joke of the old woman's made me laugh harder than usual a noise came out of me which was the echo of the whooping cough--I was only that much ahead of childhood, and although I was already getting rangy and my head was as big as it would ever grow, I was still kept in short pants and Eton collar. "Well, they must be teaching you great things over there," said Grandma. "This is your chance to learn culture and refinement." She meant to boast that she had already formed me and we had nothing to fear from common influences. But a little ridicule was indicated, just in case there should be any danger. "Is Anna still crying?" "Yes." "All day long. And what does he do?--he looks at her and blinks with his eyes. And the kid stammers. It must be lively. And Five Properties, that Apollo--still looking for an American girl to marry?" That was her deft, scuttling way. With the small yellow bone of her hand, the hand that had been truly married in Odessa to a man of real weight, she threw the switch, the water rushed in and the clumsy sank --money, strength, fat, silks, and candy boxes, and all--and left the witty and superb smiling to contemplate the ripples. You had to know, to get this as I did, that on Armistice Day of 1922, when Grandma turned her ankle coming down the stairs at eleven o'clock while the factories brewed up their solemn celebrating noise and she should have been standing still, Five Properties picked her up while she was spitting and wincing and rushed her to the kitchen. But her memory specialized in misdemeanors and offenses, which were as ineradicable from her brain as the patrician wrinkle was between her eyes, and her dissatisfaction was an element and a part of nature. Five Properties was keen on getting married. He took the question up with everybody and naturally had been to see Grandma Lausch about it, and she masked herself up as usual and looked considerate and polite while in secret she checked off and collected what she wanted I for her file. But also she saw a piece of change in it for her, a matchmaker's fee. She watched for business opportunities. Once she had masterminded the smuggling of some immigrants from Canada. And I happen to know that she had made an agreement with Kreind! about a niece of his wife, that Kreindl was to act as go-between while the old woman encouraged Five Properties from her side. The scheme fell through, although Five Properties