The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [31]
knee in the snowy passageway. Fallen. It was hurtful to see her. She never before had gone out without protection. I flung away the tin drawer and ran id she fastened on my thin-shirted arm with the snow-wet see on her feet, though, she. wanted no support from me, use of a big, swollen consciousness of sacrifice or maybe tious thought of retribution. She got up the stairs alone and taight through the house to her room, where she further aecedent by locking the door. Till then I had never even ere was a key; she must have kept it hidden from the earliest I her jewels and family papers. Mama and I stood outside, I, and asked if she was hurt, until we got the answer of firm away and let her alone, and I was enough shaken up by ya her snow-spitten face to tremble now at the cat-intensity Ece. And there was a change in the main established order: if less to be thought of locked than the door of a church, and ccssible, should have a key, and that that key should be used! icance of this election-day fall was all the deeper since usually if and kitchen burns were treated with great seriousness and jaess, with downright melancholy and the haunting of the treat. After applying the iodine or oil and bandages she would (arette for her nerves. But the Murads were in her sewing Die kitchen and she didn't come out of her room. bae passed, and it was well on in the afternoon before she (She was wearing a thick bandage on her leg. She came along fths of the house, the parrot colors of the rug worn down to liime skirting the parlor stove and entering the short hall |pn the kitchen, where the trail changed to brown in the It-good part of this the work of her own feet and flint-colored |ng steadily along this fox run for the better part of ten j-Wore her everyday clothes and shawl again, so that every|tp be presumed back to normal or almost so; whereas it |ly nerve-silent, and her face, attempting to be steady and |blenched as if she really had lost blood, or else her long|e composure at the sight of blood. She had to have been |yed and scared to lock her door, but apparently she had It she had to come back and, moony-pale as she was, turn ence. But there was something missing. Even the frazzled, latch whose white wool had gone brown around her eyes, if walk with clickety claws, as if she sensed that new days % out the last of an old regime, the time when counselors gcs see the finish of their glory, and Switzers and Praetorian gutless. ibm to spend full time with Georgie, in the last month, pull- t\ 55 ing him around on the sled, walking him in the park, and taking him to the Garfield Park conservatory to see the lemons bloom. The administrative wheels were already going; eleventh-hour efforts did no good. Lubin, who had always said that Georgie would be better off in an institution, brought the commitment papers, and Mama, without Simon's support against the old lady (and probably even that would not have stopped her, since Grandma was in a decisive action and was carried along with the impulse of a doom), had to sign. No, Grandma Lausch couldn't have been withstood, I'm convinced. Not now, not in this. Everything considered, it was, no matter how sad, wiser to commit the kid. As Simon said, we would later have had to do it ourselves. But the old lady made of it something it didn't necessarily have to be, a test of strength, tactless, a piece of sultanism; it originated in things we little understood: disappointment, angry giddiness from self-imposed, prideful struggle, weak nearness to death that impaired her judgment, maybe a sharp utterance of stubborn animal spirit, or bubble from human enterprise, sinking and discharging blindly from a depth. Do I know? But sending Georgie away could have been done differently. At last notice arrived that there was place for him in the Home. I had to go and buy him a valise at the Army-Navy store--a tan, bulldog gladstone, the best I could get. The thing would be his for life, and I wanted it to be right. I taught him how to work the clasps and the key. Where he was going there would always be people