The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [140]
manner of speaking. "What do you think?" said Simon. "Leave it to me." "Yes, I think .1 leave it to you. You think I'm goin' to take it myself? Wouldn't be fun for Charlotte. Look how she's built. Nothing was left out. She has to have a young husk." Here I came in for my share of the notice. Kelly Weintraub, one of the distant cousins by marriage and a trucker who worked for Uncle Robby, said, "Look at his brother. The girls are popping their eyes out at him. Your daughter Lucy the worst. You got no shame, kid? In this family the girls can't hardly wait." There were shrieks about this. Through them Lucy Magnus continued to smile at me though her color deeply changed. She was slighter than most of her family; she wasn't shy to make a declaration of honest pnsuality under the scrutiny of the whole clan. None of the Magnuses took the trouble to conceal such things; it wasn't necessary. The young nnes could tell their parents exactly what they wanted, which I found admirable. I could look at Lucy with pleasure too. She was plain but had a healthy face, very clear skin, and pretty breasts that she swung where she pleased. Only her nose might have been finer; it was a little broad, as was her mouth, but her black eyes were strong and declarative and her hair black and delicate. It made me think of her maiden hair and there were suggestions I didn't try at all to evade. But these were lover's not husbandly thoughts. I had no special mind to get married. I saw Simon's difficulties too clearly for that. "Come here," said her father to me, and I had to stand close inspection. "What do you do?" he said, winking with the full snowblindness. Simon answered for me, "He's in the book business. Until he saves enough to go back to the university and finish his degree." "Shut up!" he said. "C--sucker! I asked him, not you, budinski! What do you do?" B I said, "I'm in the book business, as Simon told you." I thought the old man must be able to pierce by strength of suspicion my crockery, all the oddity of Owens' house and my friends there. What a book business could signify to him but starving Pentateuch peddlers with beards full of Polish lice and feet wrapped in sacking, I couldn't fathom. "Goddammit the schools. There's schoolboys now until gray hair. So what are you studying for, a lawyer? Fo-kay! I guess we got to have them, the crooks. My sons don't go to school. My daughters go, so long it keeps them out of trouble." "Augie was thinking of going to law school," Simon said to Lucy's mother. "Yes, that's right," I too said. "Fine, fine, fine, fine," said Uncle Charlie, my hearing done and his face of thick white hide turned in dismissal from us all; he threatened with his mtensest care his daughter Lucy, who answered him with one o1 her smiles. I saw that she promised him obedience and he promised "ack the satisfaction of all legitimate needs as long as she obeyed "irn. , e was another special glance on me, that of my sister-in-law arlotte, with her investigative, warm, and to some extent despairing yss. I don't doubt that she already knew some displeasing things about Simon, and perhaps she was trying to see them in me also. I presume she was thinking what risks her cousin Lucy ran with me. Meanwhile Kelly Weintraub was saying, "He has a pair of bedroom eyes, Augie." But I was the only one of the principals to hear and I took a good look at him to see how much harm he really meant me and to what extent he was kidding, the handsome teameo, slick-haired, with certainly horny eyes of his own and a suggestive pad of a chin. "I know you guys," he said to me. Then I recognized him, not greatly different, really, from what he had been in the schoolyard, in his sweaters. "You had a little brother, George." "We still have him. He's not little any more," I said. "He's big and he's living downstate." "Where, in Manteno?" "No, it's in another town, a little place down near Pinckneyville. You know that part of the state?" I didn't know it myself. Simon was the only one of us who had ever gone down there, the Renlings having been unable at that time