The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [136]
respected--there was a grandmother there that evening--and they bought the best of everything, clothes, furniture, or machinery. Also they were grateful for entertainment and admired speed of wit, which they didn't have themselves, and dramatic selfpresentation, which Simon gave them. He more than pleased them and more than made a big hit. He went both deep and far into the place of star and sovereign. They had patriarchs and matriarchs but they had no prince before him. To make this of himself, the prince, he went through a metamorphosis. That was the next of my astonishments. Elsewhere I've said that he had always, even when silent, been noticeable But he wasn't silent any more, and his old reserve was gone to nieces; he was boisterous, capacious, haughty, critical, arbitrary, mimicking and deviling, and he crowed, croaked, made faces and had the table all but spinning in this dining room of stable and upright wealth. I saw Grandma's satire in him, across the plaited white bread and the sprigged fish and candles--yes, the old woman's hardness of invention and travestying savagery, even certain Russian screams. I didn't know Simon had gotten so much from her. I could draw my mind back over some six or seven hundred Friday nights and see his uncommenting eyes follow a performance of the old woman's. And how deep that had sunk in, without even appearing to. At the shrieks he caused I nearly heard her comment of disdain, a disdain of which Simon was not all innocent either. He both borrowed from her and burlesqued her. His appearance was new in more than one way; more was new than the shirt, or the jewel on his finger and minor gems in his cuffs, or even the fat, and the haggardness from unwanted thought that lit on him in instants between the turns of his performance. The task of doing bold things with an unhappy gut, that was it. In a way he made them meet the expense of this too, as when he imitated his good queen mother-in-law's accent. But it was just the opposite of offensive to her and to them all; it was grand and uproarious. However, he wasn't just their entertainer; when he turned grave and stopped the vaudeville with a pair of somber eyes he got earnest silence for the speech he was going to make, and a full weight of respect. He spoke to me, but of course his words were in large part for them. "Augie," he said, putting his arm around Charlotte--she laid her painted nails on his hand--"you can see how unlucky we were not to have this kind of close and loyal family. There isn't anything these people won't do for one another. We don't even understand what that is because we never experienced it, we missed it all our lives. We had no luck. Now they've taken me in and made me one of them, as if I were their own child. I never understood what a real family was till now, and you ought to know how grateful I am. They may seem a little slowwitted to you"--Mr. and Mrs. Magnus didn't quite get this, Simon's tone being enough for them and the fine satisfaction they took in him, but Charlotte was seized with a laugh in the throat at this mischief interrupting his seriousness--"but they have something you'll have to learn to appreciate, and that's their kindness and the way they stick by their own." when he scrawled this on me, I had a fit of hate for the fat person " .217 mental position and denied it all by pretending that this randy talk was the joke of sincerity and deep underlying agreement, a more realistic sort of love. But leaning above him like a kind of flounced Pisan tower construction--she dressed with luxury and daring--keeping a hand on his hair, she had instants of great difficulty before me. She had difficulty only for a while, until she absorbed from Simon the attitude that I was a featherhead, affectionate but not long on good sense. She soon enough learned to deal with me. But it was painful until she found confidence, and I suppose that at the time she hadn't' recovered from the honeymoon, which, Simon had been frank to tell me, was awful. He didn't specify in which way, but he expressed enough to make it