The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [33]
with a Georgie instead, and with us. We were far from having the stuff in us that she must have wanted. Our parentage needn't have mattered so much, and it wasn't just a question of high or even legal birth. Fouche got as far as Talleyrand. What counted was natural endowment, and on that score she formed the opinion bitterly that we were not born with talents. Nonetheless we could be trained to be decent and gentlemanly, to wear white collars and have clean nails, brushed teeth, table manners, be brought up to fairly good pattern no matter what office we worked in, store we clerked in, teller's cage we reliably counted in-- courteous in an elevator, prefatory in asking directions, courtly to ladies, grim and unanswering to streetwalkers, considerate in conveyances, and walking in the paths of a grayer, dimmer Castiglione. Instead we were getting to be more common and rude, deepervoiced, hairy. In our underpants, mornings while getting dressed, we punched and grappled in play, banging to the springs, to the floor, knocking over chairs. Passing then into the hall to wash, there, often, we saw the old woman's small figure and her eyes whitely contemptuous, with a terrible little naked yawn of her gums, suck-cheeked with unspoken comment. But power-robbed. Done for. Simon would say sometimes, "Wha'che know, Gram?"--even, occasionally, "Mrs. Lausch." I never repudiated her that much or tried to strike the old influence, such as it had become, out of her hands. Presently Simon too took a less disrespectful tone. By now, however, it didn't matter much. She had seen what we were and what we were capable of. The house was changed also for us; dinkier, darker, smaller; once shiny and venerated things losing their attraction and richness and importance. Tin showed, cracks, black spots where enamel was hit ; r, design scuffed out of the center of the rug, all the er, massiveness, florescence, wiped out. The old-paste 5 in her last days apparently wasn't noticed by the housesa; it was by us, coming in fresh from outdoors. I in May of that year, and.1 laid her in a shoe box and hb the yard. down to the car stop and stood waiting by the black, humming pole for the trolley to come back from city limits. After that we had a diminished family life, as though it were care of Georgie that had been the main basis of household union and now everything was disturbed. We looked in different directions, and the old woman had outsmarted herself. Well, we were a disappointment to her too. Maybe she had started out by dreaming she might have a prodigy in one of us to manage to fame. Perhaps. The force that directs these things in us higher beings and brings together lovers to bear the genius that will lead the world a step or two of the slow march toward its perfection, or find the note that will reach the ear of the banded multitude and encourage it to take that step, had come across with a Georgie instead, and with us. We were far from having the stuff in us that she must have wanted. Our parentage needn't have mattered so much, and it wasn't just a question of high or even legal birth. Fouche got as far as Talleyrand. What counted was natural endowment, and on that score she formed the opinion bitterly that we were not born with talents. Nonetheless we could be trained to be decent and gentlemanly, to wear white collars and have clean nails, brushed teeth, table manners, be brought up to fairly good pattern no matter what office we worked in, store we clerked in, teller's cage we reliably counted in-- courteous in an elevator, prefatory in asking directions, courtly to ladies, grim and unanswering to streetwalkers, considerate in conveyances, and walking in the paths of a grayer, dimmer Castiglione. Instead we were getting to be more common and rude, deepervoiced, hairy. In our underpants, mornings while getting dressed, we punched and grappled in play, banging to the springs, to the floor, knocking over chairs. Passing then into the hall to wash, there, often, we saw the old woman's small figure and her eyes whitely contemptuous, with a terrible