The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [186]
He's a knacker, Karas, he just bought a big new place in San Antonio." I was now convinced that something was wrong. "Then you think it's a waste of time, what I'm doing?" "Oh, it seems to me on both sides the ideas are the same. What's the use of the same old ideas? On both sides. To take some from one side and give it to the other, the same old economics." He hadn't wanted to talk to me in the first place, but since I didn't go away he drove himself into the subject at first by irritation and then summoning up what he really thought. I wasn't zealous, not as he implied, but I did feel called on to say, "Well, people get up every morning to go to work; it isn't right that it should be an illusion, or that they should be so grateful for being allowed to continue in their habit that they shouldn't ask for anything more." "You think that with a closed shop you're going to make men out of slobs? If they have a steward to gripe for them? Pooey!" "So," I said, "is it better to leave it to Karas or a gorilla of a business- agent who takes graft from him?" "Look here, because they were born you think they have to turn out to be men? That's just an old-fashioned idea. And who tells them that? A big organization. One more big organization. A big organization makes dough or it doesn't last. If it makes dough it's for dough." "If there can't be much sense in these big organizations that's all the more reason why they should stand for a variety of things," said I. "There ought to be all kinds." Meanwhile, ignoring, Mildred went on typing out statements. Einhorn didn't reply; I thought it was the appearance of Arthur from the kitchen half of the house that stopped him, for Arthur's brainy authority made his dad occasionally hesitate to sound off. But this time it wasn't E: that. He came forward only briefly, but it was evident that all the nervousness and difficulty were because of him. In a black sweater, narrow-shouldered, his hands in his back pockets, he sauntered, an elderly... ': 293 wrinkle on him that surprised me, and his eyes retreated with gradations of dark into a very somber color of trouble. He put his head to the side, his bushy hair touched the doorframe, and the smoke of his cigarette escaped to the sun where it became silky. Though he wasn't quite sure who I was at first, his smile was all the same suave, but also sick or fatigued. I was aware that Einhorn, to the very cloth of his coat, was stiff to him and prepared to be curt, within a degree of telling him to beat it, and I realized also that this was why Mildred had been so cold to me and hitting her machine as though it were a way to get me to leave. Then a little kid came running from the kitchen, and Arthur held it with the clasp of a father, unmistakably, the kid swaying from his fingers. Behind, Tillie stood but didn't come forward. If I'm not mistaken they hadn't yet decided whether they could keep this a secret, for I realized it was recent news to the Einhorns too, and it was touch and go about acknowledging the baby, a little boy. He, while Arthur turned back into the kitchen, came running to Mildred and secured himself on her knee. She picked him up eagerly, and his booties catching in her skirt, it rode up on her thighs with their little dark hairs. About which she was calm. Thither I followed Einhorn's look. She kissed the boy with almost adult kisses and sought the hem to straighten her dress. "What do you say to our news!" Einhorn spoke harshly and turned to me with a stiff curve in the back of his neck, partly with intention to bully but also greatly bowed by trouble, and that great representative of him, his face, twitched with an impulse that darted in from a littleexplored place. "That Arthur is married?" I didn't know what to say. "Already divorced. It went through last week, and we didn't know anything about it. The girl was from Champaign." "So you have a grandson. Congratulations!" He looked strained, his eyes gemmy with the determination to sustain all, but his nosy face flat and with a light of pale unhappiness. "And this is his first visit?"