The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [19]
tears of mist running on the windows, he felt the strength of his position as the one getting ready to take the control of the family into his own hands. For he sometimes spoke to me of Grandma as of a stranger. "She's really nothing to us, you know that, don't you, Aug?" It wasn't so much rebellion as it was repudiation she had to fear, not being heeded, when he spread his paper over the entire table and read with his hand to his forehead and the darkening blond hair falling over it. Still, he didn't have any plan for deposing her and didn't interfere with her power over the rest of us-especially over Mama, who remained as much a slavey as before. And with her eyes deteriorating, so that the glasses fitted the year before were no longer strong enough. We went back to the dispensary for a new pair and cleared another inquisition; we only just cleared it. They had Simon's age on the record and asked whether he wasn't working. I thought I didn't need Grandma's rehearsing any more and could invent answers myself; and even Mama didn't obey as usual by being silent, but lifted up her odd clear voice and said, "My boys are still in school, and after school I need them to help me out." Then we were nearly caught by the clerk in the making out of the budget and were terrified, but we were favored by the crowd that day anrt got the slip to the optical department. We were not ready yet to do without the old woman's coaching. Simon's news became the chief interest of the house now, when he was shifted from the trains to a stand in the La Salle Street Station and men to the centra! stand that carried books and novelties, just where the most rushing and significant business was done, in the main path of travel. There he was able to see the celebrities in their furs or stetsons and alpacunas, going free in the midst of their toted luggage, always more proud or more melancholy or more affable or more lined than they were represented. They arrived from California or from Oregon on the Portland Rose in the snow whirled from the inhuman "eights of La Salle Street or cleaving hard in the speed lines of the trains; they took off for New York on the Twentieth Century, in their flower-garnished, dark polished parlor-like compartments upholstered b. - 33 in deep green, washing in silver sinks, sipping coffee out of china, smoking cigars. Simon reported, "I saw John Gilbert today in a big velour hat," or, "Senator Borah left me the change of a dime from his Daily News," or, "If you saw Rockefeller you'd believe that he has a rubber stomach, as they say," When he gave these accounts at the table he set off the hope that somehow greatness might gather him into its circle since it touched him already, that he might appeal to somebody, that Insull's eye might be taken by him and he would give him his card and tell him to report at his office next morning. I have a feeling that soon Grandma began to blame Simon in her secret thought for not making the grade. Maybe he didn't care enough to seem distinguished, maybe his manner wasn't right, impudent, perhaps. Because Grandma believed in the stroke or inspiration that brought you to the notice of eminent men. She collected stories about this, and she had a scheme for writing to Julius Rosenwald whenever she read that he was making a new endowment. It was always to Negroes, never to Jews, that he gave his money, she said, and it angered her enormously, and she cried, "That German Yehuda!" At a cry like that the age-crippled old white dog would stand up and try to trot to her. "That Deutsch!" Still, she admired Julius Rosenwald; he belonged to the inside ring of her equals; where they sat, with a different understanding from ours, and owned and supervised everything. Simon, meanwhile, was trying to find a Saturday place for me in the La Salle Street Station and rescue me from the dime-store cellar, where Jimmy Klein had taken his place. Grandma and even Mama were after him to do something. "Simon, you must pull Augie in." "Well, I ask Borg every time I see him. Holy Jesus, folks, everybody has relatives