The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [26]
of this theory. Me, I was perfectly willing to believe in such lucky breaks of descent. I worked with Jimmy on the sheet of mechanical-drawing paper, lettering out his family tree in red and india inks. I was uneasy. At the end of the Christmas holiday Deever's caught up with us. The department manager came and had a talk with Grandma. There had been an inventory of the packages. We didn't attempt to deny the theft, and I at any rate didn't argue the figure of seventy dollars that the manager gave, though the amount we took was actually less. The old lady at first refused to see me through. Icy, she told Simon he had better call in Lubin, the caseworker, for she didn't have the strength to give and had only undertaken to help bring up children, not to handle criminals. Simon brought her around because, he said, the Charities would want to know how long we had been working and why they weren't told. Of course the old lady never had the slightest intention of letting me be sent to reform school, as was threatened. But the threat was made, and I was prepared to go to Juvenile Court and pass on to the house of correction with a practically Chinese acquiescence in their right to punish that foretold what I'd let be done with me. It partly showed I felt people were right because they were angry. On the other hand, I lacked the true sense of being a criminal, the sense that I was on the wrong side of the universal wide line with the worse or weaker part of humankind, carrying brow marks or mutilated thumbs and slit ears and noses. There wasn't just threatening and scolding this time but absolute abasement. After the first giant crash, in full brass. Grandma put me on cold treatment. Simon was distant to me. I couldn't throw it up to him that he had given me advice about short-change; he'd only say curtly that I was a chump and act as though he didn't know what I was talking about. Mama must have felt she was in one of her starcrossed hours, and that the result of her unlucky capitulation to our father was beginning to show its final retributive shape. Even she said a few sharp things to me. I suffered like a beaver. However, they couldn't get me to beg and entreat--though I wasn't unmoved by the thought of a jail sentence, head shaven, fed on slumgullion, mustered in the mud, buffaloed and bossed. If they decided I had it coming, why, 1 didn't see how I could argue it. do that. And her tailor father didn't seem to know of my being there, this lean, unshaved, back-bent man, and I could gaze at him as much as I liked while he pinned, sponged, and pressed, fatigued-lookjng and oblivious. Anyhow, once she had gone in Hilda didn't come out again; she sunk into the house and seemed to have no business whatever out of doors. "With all the babes there are to fall for!" said Clem Tambow, scornful and ugly-nosed. "Let me once take you to a whore, and you'll forget all about her," he said. Of course I didn't answer. "Then I'll write her a letter for you," he offered, "and ask for a date. As soon as you've taken one single walk with her and kissed her you'll be washed up. You'll see how beanbrained she is, and she's not pretty; she has lousy teeth." I declined this too. "All right, I'll talk to her then. I'll tell her to grab you while you're still blind. She'll never get anybody handsomer, and she must know it. What gets you about her? That she smokes, I bet." Finally Jimmy said, "Don't bother him, he wants to carry the torch," and they grabbed their genitals obscenely and threw themselves around on the furniture of the Kleins' living room, which was our club. But I didn't stop this sadhearted, worshipful blundering around or standing like painted wood across the street from the tailor shop in the bluey afternoon. Her scraggy father labored with his needle, bent over, and presumably thinking nothing of his appearance to the street in the lighted glass; her chicken-thin little sister in black gym bloomers cut paper with the big shears. It took several weeks before the acute part of this passed, and meanwhile I was still in the doghouse at