The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [57]
just an easygoing guy and don't want to be ungrateful to the old dame for what she's done. We did things for her too, don't forget. She's been riding Ma for years and put on the ritz at our expense. Well, Ma can't do it any more. If the Lausches want to hire a housekeeper, that's a fair way to settle it, but if they don't they're going to have to take her out of here." He wrote a letter to her son in Racine. I don't know what things were like with these two Quaker-favored men in their respective towns. I've never gone through a place like Racine without thinking which house with the rubber-tire swing for kids and piano-practicing inside was like Stiva Lausch's, who had two daughters brought up with every refinement, including piano lessons, and how such little-speaking Odessa-bred sons had gotten on a track like this through the multiverse. What did they go for, that they were so regular and unexcitable of appearance? Well, there was at least a hint of what in the note that Stiva sent, pretty calmly saying that he and his brother didn't feel a housekeeper was the solution and that they were making arrangements for their mother to live in the Nelson Home for the Aged and Infirm, and would consider it a great service if we would move her there. Which, considering our long association with their mother (a dig at our ingratitude), they didn't hesitate to request. "This is it then," said Simon, and even he looked as if we had gone too far. But the thing was done, and there were only last details to attend to. Grandma had received a letter in Russian at the same time, and took it with considerable coolness, as you expect from somebody with that degree of pride, boasting even, "Ha! How well Stiva writes Russian! In the gymnasium, when you learned, you learned something." We heard from Mama also what Grandma said about the Home, that it was a very fine old place, just about a palace, built by a millionaire, and had a greenhouse and garden, was near the university and therefore most of the people retired professors. Going to a better place. And she was glad of rescue from us by her sons; where she would be among equals and exchange intelligent views. Mama was confounded, aghast at the thing, and not even she was so simpleminded as to believe that Grandma, so many years bound to us, would have thought it up herself, as she now apparently claimed. The packing went on for two weeks. Pictures came off the walls, the monkeys with scarlet nose holes, the runner from Tashkent, egg cups, salves and medicines, her eiderdown from the closet shelf. I brought up her wood trunk from the shed, a yellow old pioneer piece with labels from Yalta, Hamburg Line, American Express, old Russian journals in its papered interior of blue forest flowers, smelly from the cellar. She wrapped with caution each of her things of great value, the crushable and breakable on top, and covered all with the harsh snow of mothflakes. On the final day she watched the trunk wag down the front stairs, on the back of the mover, with an amazing, terrible look of presidency, and supervised everything, every last box, in this fashion, gruesomely and violently white so that her mouth's corner hairs were minutely apparent, but in rigid-backed aristocracy, full face to the important transfer to something better, from this (now that she turned from it) disgracefully shabby flat of a deserted woman and "^ sons whom she had preserved while a temporary guest. Ah, regardless how decrepit of superstructure, she was splendid. You forgot how loony she'd become, and her cantankerousness of the past year. What was a year like that when now her shakiness of mind dropped off in this moment of emergency and she put on the strictness and power of her most grande-dame days? My heart went soft for her, and I felt admiration that she didn't want from me. Yes, she made retirement out of banishment, and the newly created republicans, the wax not cool yet on their constitution, had the last pang of loyalty to the deposed, when mobs, silent, see off the limousine, and the prince and princely family