The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [201]
get it right, and, soberer, she said, Watch out you don't get in trouble. And why are you quitting your job? Grammick told me you had a future as an organizer." "I don't want any more of that. Arthur can have it." As if she thought I spoke of Arthur with disrespect she said, "Don't "e silly. He has to finish those translations, and he's working very hard; l .32; he's in the middle of an essay on the poet and death," and she began to tell me how poets must be allowed to run funerals. Arthur was installed in my room, and he had discovered the fire-ruined set of Dr. Eliot's classics in the old box under the bed and asked to be allowed to take care of it for me. Since the books were stamped "W. Einhorn," it would have been hard to refuse even if I had wanted to. Meanwhile he was in a cure for his clap, and Mimi watched over him and could have only side concerns about anybody else. It was easy to explain my going off to Mama. Of course I didn't have to tell her much, only that I was engaged to a young lady who had to go to Mexico, and that I was going too. Though Mama no longer did kitchen work, the knife marks in her hands had stayed, and there probably always would be those dark lines; so, also, her color still was gentle, but her eyes increasingly cloudy and her lower lip expressed continually less sense. I suppose what I said was pretty well indifferent to her, as long as the tone of it didn't distress her. That was what she listened to. And why should it distress her, since I was riding high and in the best silks and colors? Say if the main bonds of attachment were death ropes, crazy, in the end, at least I felt them now as connections of joy, and if that was a deception it would never appear more substantial or marvelous. But I denied it would be a deception, unless nothing so vivid can be substantial. No, I wouldn't admit that. "Is she a rich girl, like Simon's wife?" I thought perhaps she believed Thea was Lucy Magnus. "This isn't any of Charlotte's family, Ma." "Well, then don't let her make you unhappy, Augie," she said. And what lay behind this, I believe, was that if Simon hadn't helped me to choose, if I had picked for myself, my mother thought me to be sufficiently like her to get myself in a bad fix. I said nothing of the hunting to her, but it did occur to me how it was inevitable for the son of a Hagar to go chase wild animals at one time or another. I asked about Simon. The only recent news I had of him was from Clem Tambow, who had seen him in a fistfight with a Negro on Drexel Boulevard. "He bought a new Cadillac car," said Mama, "and he came to give me a ride. Oh, it's wonderful! He's going to be a very rich fellow." ]h It didn't hurt me to hear of him in prosperity, and even if he was Duke of Burgundy, let him go ahead and be it. But I have to admit that I couldn't keep down the satisfaction of the thought that Thea was an heiress too. I don't want to pretend that I could. I looked up Padilla too before I left, and found him in front of his institute. He was in a blood-spotted lab coat, although he was hired to do calculations, as far as I knew, not experiments, and he smoked one of his stinking dark-tobacco cigarettes while in his swift way he debated about two curves with a character who held open a big looseleaf notebook. Padilla wasn't so terribly pleased that I was bound for Mexico, and he warned me not to go near Chihuahua, his province. He said that in Mexico City, where he himself had never been, he had a cousin, whose address I took. "If he'll rob you or help I can't predict, but look him up if you want somebody to look up," he said. "He was piss-poor fifteen years ago when he went away. He sent me a postcard last year when I got my M. A. Which maybe means that he wants me to send for him. Fat chance! Well, enjoy your trip, if they let you, but don't tell me afterward I didn't warn you to stay home." Suddenly he smiled in the sunshine and creased his short curved nose and forehead which sloped backward into his handsome Mexican hair. "Go easy with that wild native tail." I couldn't even grin at