The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [155]
where I want. I don't. God forbid, need his meal. Babe, come on." I went to get her fur, knowing it was useless to argue, and I saw them to the garage elevator with some dawning thought about rudeness as the measure of achievement and the systems of storing up injury. As Cissy passed into the elevator she said, "Tell your brother congratulations. His wife is awfully pretty." But this was one game in which I wasn't going to play intermediary, and when Simon asked me eagerly about their leaving I said casually, "Oh, they just didn't have the time to stay. They came only for the ceremony." I gave no satisfaction. But as for that other more important game into which he had gotten me, I played it to the full, going to night clubs, sorority dances, and shows and night-football games at which Lucy and I pitched and necked. She was, up to the last thing of all, unrestrained and exploratory; and where she stopped I stopped. You never know what forms self-respect will take, especially with people whose rules of life are few. But I enjoyed all that was allowed and to that extent I remained myself. But I wasn't much myself in other ways, and it was very disturbing, and sometimes pressed on my head with very heavy weight, and I realized I was in the end zone of my adaptability. It was my pride to make it seem easy though. So that if you took me at Uncle Charlie's house on a Sunday afternoon, after dinner, by the fire, among the fam"y, with Mrs. Magnus knitting a shawl that rose out of a tapestry oarpetbag; with Sam, Lucy's brother, standing by, his chin picked up o make way for the foulard beneath it and his dressing gown swelling over his behind while every now and then he treated his plastered hair busy to fight every fight through, and he was somewhere off the ballroom where the ceremony was shaping up. I went around looking among the guests for some I knew. He had invited the Einhoms, including Arthur. Arthur, who had graduated from the University of Illinois, was in Chicago, where he was doing nothing in particular. Occasionally I saw him on the South Side and knew that he was friendly with Frazer's set and that he was supposed to be translating poems from the French. Einhorn would always back him in any intellectual pursuit. There were the Einhorns then, in the ballroom, the old man with a sort of military cloak, gray, looking like the former possessor of a splendor just as good as this who, without special rancor but understanding how it all comes about, watches it change hands. He said to me, "You look very fine in your tuxedo, Augie." Tillie kissed me, taking my face in her dark hands, Arthur smiling. He could behave with exceptional charm, but this was absent-mindedly conferred on you. I went on to welcome Happy Kellerman and his wife, a thin blond rattle of a woman who bore out her belly and was wound high and low with beads and pearls. Next I saw Five Properties and Cissy. Simon had asked them from motives not hard to understand, partly to show Cissy what he had gone on to do and also to subject Five Properties to a cruel comparison. Cissy defeated all, though, with that sly provoking decency about her female gifts, breast touching breast in the low opening of her dress. She showed her tongue softly in the few words that she spoke. Five Properties had come for a reconciliation of cousins. She had taught him to comb his Scythian hair differently; it now came lower on the rugged forehead without modifying the skeptical grinning of his eyes; that savage green would always express everything that Five Properties thought. He too was dressed in a tuxedo, wore it on his enormous trunk to be equal to the opulence Simon had invited him to see. And so he grinned all around with his gum-buried teeth and green eyes. It was evident that Cissy steered him, taught him civilized behavior-- him who had loaded and driven the wagon of jolting corpses the Russians and Germans had made of one another in the Polish mud. She coached him. All the same she couldn't prevent him by her smile and slow murmured word from feeling her on the back and fondling