skin, with the eye-bags of a fishing hird seamy, greenish, and gray. Patient, diligent-looking, and gross, ^'is chair like a vaquero deep sunk in the saddle, he whistled when he breathed from his burden of weight and the bite on his cigar; hair crrew from his nose and about the various rings on his knuckles. All? imes of the year were alike to him. May or November, he had his eleven o'clock breakfast of tea with milk and lump sugar and sweet rolls dinner of steak and baked potatoes, he smoked ten or twelve Ben Beys, wore the same pants of aldermanic stripe, a hat of dark convention drawing the sphere of social power over his original potent face while he considered what to meld and when to play jack or ace, or whether he could give his son Clementi the two bucks he often came in to ask for. Clementi was the younger son who lived with his mother and stepfather back of their infants'-wear store. "Mine boy, with pleasure," or, "Tomorrow, with pleasure," Tambow said. Tambow didn't say no to sons who had a stepfather. And, a good five rinds inside his old Adam, in the grease, tea, and onion blaze of his restaurant headquarters, crumbling ashes on his lap and picking up his cards with one hand, he wasn't, with his other sins, worried over money; he was grand-ducal with it, like the Kleins. And Clem was an easy spender too, and stood treat. But he wouldn't work, not for his father or for anyone else. So old Tambow set us up in the Milwaukee Avenue throng with, usually, Sylvester in charge, put in a fix with the cops so we wouldn't be bothered, and went back to his card game. It was a bad time for Sylvester. He had lost the lease on his movie, which had been failing anyway--it was now a wallpaper and paint shop--and he was living with his father, for his wife had left him and, he told us himself, threw stones at him when he tried to come through the backyard to see her. He had given her up for crazy and sent a letter agreeing to an annulment. To raise the money for his fees at Armour Tcch, where he was trying to finish his work for an engineer's degree, he had sold his furniture and movie equipment, and now he said that he had been away from school too long to sit in a classroom. Eyes tearing in the November wind as he stood with us on Milwaukee Avenue, thick hands in his overcoat pocket, neck sunk, foot knocking "oot, he made depressed jokes. The difference in our ages was no consideration with him. He told all his thoughts. When he finished his degree he was off to see the total globe. Foreign governments were crying for American engineers, and he could write his own ticket. He'd go 10 Kimberley, where he understood it was true that the natives tried to hide the diamonds in their guts. Or to Soviet Russia--now giving us 41" the whole story, that he sympathized with the Reds and admired Lenin, and especially Trotsky, who had won the civil war, traveling in a tank and reading French novels, while czar, priests, barons, generals, and landlords were being smoked out of the palaces. Meantime, Jimmy and I were sitting on Tambow's two big suitcases, and we called, "Get ya blades here!" and tended to business. Sylvester collected the money.
CHAPTER IV
All the influences were lined up waiting for me. I was born, and there they were to form me, which is why I tell you more of them than of myself. At this time, and later too, I had a very weak sense of consequences, and the old lady never succeeded in opening much of a way into my imagination with her warnings and predictions of what was preparing for me--work certificates, stockyards, shovel labor, penitentiary rockpiles, bread and water, and lifelong ignorance and degradation. She invoked all these, hotter and hotter, especially from the time I began to go with Jimmy Klein, and she tried to tighten house discipline, inspected my nails and shirt collar before school, governed my table conduct more sharply, and threatened to lock me out nights if I stayed in the streets after ten. "You can go to the Kleins, if they'll take you in. Listen to me, Augie, I'm trying to make something of you.