The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [18]
Also, there was money not accounted for to Grandma's satisfaction. "Don't tell me all you made in tips was thirty dollars! I know that Reimann's is a first-class resort, and they have people all the way from Cleveland and St. Louis. I expected you to spend something on yourself when you were away the whole summer, but--" "Well, sure, and I did spend about fifteen dollars." "You always have been honest, Simon. Now Augie brought us home every cent." "Have been? I am!" he said, mounting up on his pride and tallest falsehood-spurning dignity. "I brought you my wages for twelve weeks, and thirty bucks besides." She let the matter drop with a silent, piercing glitter from the flat of her gold-wired goggles and a warning-off from a false course in her grayness and wrinkles and a quick suck of her cheek. She indicated she could strike a blow when the moment came. But for the first time relt fron-i Simon that he was thinking you didn't have to worry about that. Not that he was ready to jump off into rebellion. But he had some ideas, and by and by we were saying to each other things that couldn't be said before the women. At first we often worked in the same places. We went to Coblin's sometimes when he needed us for his crew, and down in Woolworth's cellar we unpacked crockery from barrels so enormous that you could walk into them; we scooped out stale straw and threw it in the furnace. Or we loaded paper into the giant press and baled it. It was foul down there from the spoiled food and mustard cans, old candy, and the straw and paper. For lunch we went upstairs. Simon refused to take sandwiches from home; he said we needed a hot meal when we were working. For twenty-five cents we got two hotdogs, a mug of root beer, and oie, the dogs in cotton-quality rolls, dripping with the same mustard that made the air bad below. But it was the figure you cut as an employee, on an employee's footing with the girls, in work clothes, and being of that tin-tough, creaking, jazzy bazaar of hardware, glassware, chocolate, chickenfeed, jewelry, drygoods, oilcloth, and song hits--that was the big thing; and even being the Atlases of it, under the floor, hearing how the floor bore up under the ambling weight of hundreds, with the fanning, breathing movie organ next door and the rumble descending from the trolleys on Chicago Avenue--the bloody-rinded Saturday gloom of wind-borne ash, and blackened forms of five-story buildings rising up to a blind Northern dimness from the Christmas blaze of shops. | Simon moved on soon to a better job with the Federal News Company, which had a concession of the stands in the railroad stations and 'the candy and paper sales on trains. The family had to lay out the deposit on a uniform, and he began to keep midnight hours, down- | town and on the trains, smart and cadet-like in the spanty new uniform. Sunday mornings he rose late and came out in his bathrobe, sitting down to breakfast big and easy, emboldened by his new earning power. He was shorter than before with Mama and George, and occasionally he was difficult with me. "Lay off that Tribune before I set to it. Christ, I bring it home at night, and in the morning it's all in pieces before I can look at iti" On the other hand he gave Mama some of his pay without Grandma's knowledge, to spend on herself, and saw to it that I had pocket money and that even George got pennies for soldier-caramels. There was never anything mean about Simon, where money was concerned. He had kind of an oriental, bestowing temperament; he had no peace or rest if he ever lacked dough and would sooner beat a check altogether than go out of a lunchwagon without leaving a good tip. He banged i') OF AUG1E MARCH p on the head once for taking up one of the two dimes he put under our plates in a coffee shop. Ten cents seemed to me enough. "Don't let me catch you doing such piker things again," he said to me and I was afraid of him and didn't dare talk back. Those Sunday mornings in the kitchen, then, with his uniform seen inside the bedroom, hung with care from the foot of the bed, and comfortable