The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [34]
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 off threadbarer, design scuffed out of the center of the rug, all the lamour, lacquer, massiveness, florescence, wiped out. The old-paste odor of Winnie in her last days apparently wasn't noticed by the housedwelline women; it was by us, coming in fresh from outdoors. Winnie died in May of that year, and I laid her in a shoe box and buried her in the yard. ikk, fcr e^.-:...-,, CHAPTER V William Einhom was the first superior man I knew. He had a brain and many enterprises, real directing power, philosophical capacity, and if I were methodical enough to take thought before an important and practical decision and also (N. B.) if I were really his disciple and not what I am, I'd ask myself, "What would Caesar suffer in this case? What would Machiavelli advise or Ulysses do? What would Einhorn think?" I'm not kidding when I enter Einhom in this eminent list. It was him that I knew, and what I understand of them in him. Unless you want to say that we're at the dwarf end of all times and mere children whose only share in grandeur is like a boy's share in fairy-tale kings, beings of a different kind from times better and stronger than ours. But if we're comparing men and men, not men and children or men and demigods, which is just what would please Caesar among us teeming democrats, and if we don't have any special wish to abdicate into some different, lower form of existence out of shame for our defects before the golden faces of these and other old-time men, then I have the right to praise Einhorn and not care about smiles of derogation from those who think the race no longer has in any important decree the traits we honor in these fabulous names. But I don't want to be pushed into exaggeration by such opinion, which is the opinion of students who, at all ages, feel their boyishness when they confront the past. 1 went to work for Einhom while I was a high-school junior, not long before the great crash, during the Hoover administration, when Einhorn was still a wealthy man, though I don't believe he was ever so rich as he later claimed, and I stayed on with him after he had lost most of his property. Then, actually, was when I became essential to him, not just metaphorical right hand but virtually arms and legs. Einhorn v/as a cripple who didn't have the use of either, not even partial; only his hands still functioned, and they weren't strong enough to drive heel chair. He had to be rolled and drawn around the house by his a. fe brother, relations, or one of the people he usually had on call, ther employed by or connected with him. Whether they worked for him or were merely around his house or office, he had a talent for makio supernumeraries of them, and there were always plenty of people heroin0 to become rich, or more rich if already well-to-do, through the Einhorns. They were the most important realestate brokers in the district and owned and controlled much property, including the enormous forty-flat building where they lived. The poolroom in the corner store of it was ov/ned outright by them and called Einhorn's Billiards. There were six other stores--hardware, fruit, a tin shop, a restaurant, barbershop, and a funeral parlor belonging to Kinsman, whose son it was that ran away with my cousin Howard Cobiin to join the Marines aoainst Sandino. The restaurant was the one in which Tambow, the Republican vote-getter, played cards. The Einhoms were his ex-wife's relatives; they, however, had never taken