The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [17]
she said with hatred and her Jehovah jealousy of outside influences. "What else did he teach you?" she menacingly asked. "Nothing." ';. -.: "Nothing is right!" And she would make me stand and endure a punitive silence, a comment on myself and my foolishness, overgrown and long-legged in my short pants, large-headed, with black mass of hair and cleft chin--a source of jokes. And also a healthy complexion. wasted on me evidently, for she would say, "Look, look, look at his face! Look at it!" grinning and gripping the holder in her gums, smoke trickling up from her cigarette. She once caught me in the street, which was being paved, chewing tar from one of the seething tar-pots, with my friend Jimmy Klein whose family she didn't approve of anyhow, and I was in her bad books for a longer time than ever. These periods kept increasing, my misdemeanors growing worse. From taking my punishments very hard, consulting Mama as to how to be forgiven and asking her to approach the old lady for me, and shedding tears when I was pardoned, I got to the stage of feeling more resistant, through worldly comparisons that made me see my crimes more tolerantly. That isn't to say that I stopped connecting her with the highest and the best--taking her at her own word--with the courts of Europe, the Congress of Vienna, the splendor of family, and all kinds of profound and cultured things as hinted in her conduct and advertised in her speech--she'd call up connotations of the utmost importance, the imperial brown of Kaisers and rotogravures of capitals, the gloominess of deepest thought. And I wasn't unaffected by her nagging. I didn't want to go out at fourteen with a certificate and work in the packing plants, so occasionally, for a spell, I'd pick up; I'd do my homework and almost climb out of my seat, wagging my arm with zeal to answer questions. Then Grandma would swear that I'd not only go to high school but, if she lived and had strength, to college. "Just so you want! Heaven and earth will be moved." And she spoke of her cousin Dasha who had rolled on the floor nights to stay awake, studying for her medical exam. When Simon graduated and gave the commencement address I was skipped a grade, and the principal mentioned us in his speech, both March brothers. The whole family was present--Mama at the back where she had placed herself with George, in case he should act up. She wasn't going to leave him at home today, and they were in the last' row, where the floor and the bottom of the gallery came the closest. I was sitting up in front, in the feather-trailed air, with the old lady, who was dressed up in dark silk and multiply-wound gold chains with the heart of a locket that one of her teething children had dented; she was narrow-nosed with pride, and distinguished, in a kind of fury of silent trying, from the other immigrant relatives, her double spray of feathers busv hanging in two directions. This was what she had been attempting to et over to us, that if we did as she said we could expect plenty of results like this public homage. "Now I want to see you up there next year," she said to me. But she wasn't going to. It was already too late, notwithstanding that I had applied myself enough to skip; my past record was against me, and anyhow I didn't take permanent inspiration from this success. I wasn't cut out for it. And besides, Simon didn't keep it up himself. He remained more attentive to school than I, but he went through a change the summer he waited on tables in Benton Harbor, and came back with some different aims from his original ones and new ideas about conduct. A sign of his change, and of great importance for me, was that he returned in the fall brawnier and golden-colored but with an upperfront tooth broken, sharp and a little discolored among the whole and white ones, and his face, laughter and all, altered by it. He wouldn't say how it had happened. Was it in a fight that someone had cracked it? "Kissing a statue," he said to me. "No, I was biting a dime in a crap game." Six months before such an answer would have been unthinkable.