The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [14]
went into it eagerly at first, arriving to present himself brushed and burnished, flaming from his shave up to the Eskimo angle of his eyes, at Kreindl's basement where the meetin" was to be. But the girl was thin and pale and didn't satisfy him. He had in mind a bouncing, black-haired, large-lipped, party-going peach. He was gentlemanlv about his refusal and took the thin girl out once or twice; she got a kewpie doll from him and one of those cartwheel crimson Bunte candy boxes, and he was done. The old woman then said she gave him up. However, I believe her arrangement with Kreindl stood for some time after, and Kreindl didn't quit. He still went to the Coblins' on Sundays, and he did a double errand, as he had Hebrew New Year's cards to sell on commission for a printer. It was one of his regular lines, like buying job-lots and auction goods and taking people from the neighborhood to the Halsted Street furniture stores when he got wind of their needing a suite. He worked on Five Propeities craftily, and 1 would see them confabbing in the shed, Kreindl with his rolled legs and his conscript's history pasted on his eager, humiliated back, his beef-eater's face inflated to the height of his forehead with the fine points of the young lady of that day: of good family, nourished from her mother's hand with the purest and whitest food, brought up without rudeness or collision, producing breasts on time, no evil thoughts as yet, giving nothing but the clearest broth, you might say--and I can put myself in Five Properties' thoughts as he listened, crossed his arms, grinned, and appeared to scoff. Was she really so gentle, swell, and white? And if she overflowered into coarseness and grossness, after a little marriage, and lay in the luxury of bed eating fig newtons, corrupt and lazy, sending messages by window shade to sleek young boys? Or if her father was a grafter, her brothers burns and cardsharks, her mother loose or a spendthrift? Five Properties wanted to be awfully careful, and he didn't lack warnings and cautions from his sister, who, by ten years of seniority, could tip him off to American dangers and those of American women for green, old-country boys especially. She was comical when she did it, but grimly comical, for it was time taken from mourning. '"It'll be something different than with me, somebody that undern stands life. If she wants a fur coat, like her swell friends, you'll have to buy a fur coat, and she won't care if it takes your last drop of blood to do it, a fresh young thing." "Not me," said Five Properties, in somewhat the way Anna had said, "Not my son." He was rolling bread pills in his broad fingers and smoking a cigar, his green eyes awake and cold. Busy at his accounts in his BVDs--the afternoon was hot--Coblin blinked me an extra smile, observing how I neglected my book to listen to this conversation. He never had it in for me because I broke in on his privacy in the bathroom; just the contrary. As for the book, it was Simon's copy of the Iliad, and I had been reading how the fair Briseis was dragged around from tent to tent and Achilles racked up his spear and hung away his mail. Early risers, the Coblins went to bed soon after supper, like a farm family. Five Properties was the first up, at half-past three, and waked Coblin. Coblin took me out with him to have breakfast at a joint on Belmont Avenue, a night-crowd hangout of truckers, conductors, postal clerks, and scrubwomen from Loop offices. Bismarcks and coffee for him, flapjacks and milk for me. He was in a big mood of sociability here, with the other steady patrons and with the Greek, Christopher, and the waitresses. He had no repartee but laughed at everything. At the convict hour between four and five when even those with the least to fear are darkened and sober, and back away from waking. It wasn't so for him; in the summer, at least, he loved to get out of the house and have the coffee before him and the bulldog edition under his arm. We would go back to the shed to meet the paper trucks that came booming down the alley, tearing off