The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [27]
home. It didn't improve things that during this love-struck time I brought in very little money. Simon now had strange hours for coming and going, and he couldn't be questioned about them, since he was working. We no longer came home for lunch; consequently Mama had the chores we used to do at noon, lugging up the coal, airing Winnie, fetching George from school, and doing all the hard wringing of sheets by herself on washdays, growing leaner and more haggard from the extra work. Anyhow, there was a tone and air of anarchy and unruliness around, and of powers thickening with age and delays, planning the stroke that would make the palace ring as in old times and knock the courtiers' noggins on the walls when they were least dreaming of it. "Well, Augie? What? Are you through working?" Grandma said to me. "Finished work, eh? You want to live on the Charities all your life?" I did have a sort of job at the time, in a flowershop. Only, on the tons when I was attending the meetings of the Bonheur Club or IJSilda Novinson in her heart-trap galoshes through the slush, l^asily say that Bluegren had no deliveries for me. Staea gave me what he felt like giving on any particular after' ad that, usually, was more for helping him shake down and straw cores of wreaths (he had a big gangster clientele) than series, when he reckoned I would get tips, which by and large Hit pretty fair. I didn't like traveling on streetcars with large |^or floral doorpieces for funerals, because early in the evening ||-; the home-going traffic and had to fight for space and hold a "sagainsi conductors and winter-moody passengers, covering the l. with my body, and was pretty harassed. And then if it was an tker's I was bound for, swinging my package overhead like a Idler and making slow way through the beeping, grinding, and pag, there hardly ever was anyone in the quilted, silent plush y; glow of mahogany in the parlor to give me a tip, but only imky received me in my pointed skating cap and with my runny ijpt just decent by an occasional touch of my wool glove. Once in fifd strike on a wake where there was a jar of bootleg redeye I around, in one of those offside green bungalows approached |ardwalk over the long marsh of the yard, a room of friends (Rimers. When you came into one of those whisky-smelling Bg rooms with your flowers, why, nobody was so absorbed that |e ignored, as in other sorts of grieving that I've seen, and you Ife to come out with a buck or so in change weighing down your )t anyway I preferred to be in the shop--in that Elysian Fields' |Eiflowers piled around the loam boxes of the back room or II behind the thick panes of the icebox, the roses, carnations, and Bthemums. Especially as I was in love. (gren was an imposing man too, fair, smooth, and big, with conlte healthy flesh--a friend of gangsters and rum-runners, very |N people like Jake the Barber and, in his time, the chief of the Eaders, Dion O'Bannion, who was a florist himself after a fashion? s knocked off in his own shop by three men said to have been f, Johnny Torrio and who got away in a blue Jewett sedan. Blueled gloves to protect himself from thorns when he whipped out |to treat it to the shears. He had blue, cold eyes, prepared for Id of findings, and a big fleshy nose, a little sick of things. I supi|e confusion will happen of having sharp thoughts and a broad J6 broad thoughts and a sharp face. Bluegren's was the first kind, I reckon, the connection he had with gangsters, and the effects of fear or temporariness. This was what made him that way. He could be rude and bitter, very shrewish sometimes, especially after an important murder of a Genna or Aiello. And a lot of guys were shot that winter. It was a bad winter for everyone--not just for notables but for people oblivious of anything except their own ups and downs and busy with the limited traffic of their hearts and minds. Kreindl, say, or Eleanor Klein, or my mother. These days Kreindl had operatic nerves and made hitching scenes in his English-basement flat; he threw dishes on the floor and stamped his feet. And