The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [156]
her. "So what's wrong, babe?" he said. Well, the wedding music began. I went to see that Mama was taken to a plush bench, her place inside the flower cage beside the altar--the Coblins were with her--and then into rehearsed position in the procession, with Lucy Magnus, along the white carpet down which the principals came: Charlotte and her father with rose-scattering children be242 fore Mrs. Magnus and Uncle Charlie, and then Simon with Lucy's brother Sam, first-string guard on the Michigan team, a bulky walker. Throughout the ceremony Lucy looked at me in her unambiguously declarative way, and when the ring was on and Simon swung Charlotte back before all to kiss her, and all clapped and cried out, Lucy came and took my arm. We went in to the banquet; ten dollars a plate, it was _for that day a staggering price. But I couldn't sit through the meal in peace. An usher came to tell me I was wanted and rushed me to the back of the hall. Five Properties, angry, was walking out because he and Cissy had been put at a little table apart behind a pillar. Whether it:; was Charlotte who was responsible for this, or Simon himself, I never found out. One was as capable of it as the other. Whoever had done it, Five Properties was powerfully offended. " 'S okay, Augie. Against you I got nothing. He asked me? I came. I wish him all. But what way is it to treat a cousin? Okay. Eat I can 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 Garpetbag; with Sam, Lucy's brother, standing by, his chin picked up to malre way for the foulard beneath it and his dressing gown swelling over nis behind while every now and then he treated his plastered hair with affection; with Uncle Charlie listening to Father Coughlin who hadn't yet begun to shag out the money-changers but had that boring fervor of the high-powered and misleading who won't let you be but have to make you feel all the trembling vacancy of winter space between Detroit and Chicago--if you took me there, by the firelight, facing Uncle Charlie who had one leg thrown forward and his fingers inside the crevice of his shirt drawing at the mat of his chest, I wasn't the success envy might have believed me to be. My own envy went out with, I don't doubt, sick eyes through the clear gray panes where the kids were warring and shooting snowballs that spiatted on the black trunks and soared in the elegant scheme of twigs. Not that Lucy, in dark wool dress that just covered the tops of stockings she had helped me loosen the night before so that I could stroke her skin, didn't make up for much. In some way, not the deepest nor yet trivially, I was gone on her and as far