The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [67]
of impersonal worry in the forehead. My opinion is that at one time it was genuine in Simon. And if it was once genuine, how could you say definitely that the genuineness was ever all gone. But he used these things. He employed them, I know damned well. And when they're used consciously, do they turn spurious? Well, in a fight, who can lay off his advantages? Maybe Grandma Lausch had gotten her original dream scheme of Rosenwald or Carnegie favors from appreciation of this gift of Simon's. Standing at a corner brawl, he would be asked by a cop, from among a dozen volunteer witnesses, what had happened. Or when the coach came out of the gym-supply room with a new basketball, tens of arms waving around, beseeching, it would be Simon, appearing passive, that he flung it to. He expected it and was never surprised. And now he was on soggy ground and forced to cut down the speed he had been making toward the mark he secretly aimed at. I didn't know at the time which mark or exactly understand why there needed to be a mark; it was over my head. But he was getting in, all the time, a big variety of information and arts, like dancing, conversation with women, courtship, gift-giving, romantic letter-writing, the ins and outs of restaurants and night clubs, dance halls, the knotting of four-inhands and bow ties, what was correct and incorrect in tucking a hand110 kerchief in the breast pocket, how to choose clothes, how to take care of himself in a tough crowd. Or in a respectable household. This last was a poser for me, who had not assimilated the old woman's conduct lessons. But Simon, without apparently paying attention, had got the essential of it. I name these things, negligible to many people, because we were totally unfamiliar with them. I watched him study the skill of how to put on a hat, smoke a cigarette, fold a pair of gloves and put them in an inner pocket, and I admired and wondered where it came from, and learned some of it myself. But I never got the sense of luxury he had in doing it. In passing through the lobbies of swank places, the Palmer Houses and portiered dining rooms, tassels, tapers, string ensembles, making the staid bouncety tram-tram of Vienna waltzes, Simon had absorbed this. It made his nostrils open. He was cynical of it but it got him. I ought to have known, therefore, how ugly it was for him to be in the flatness of the neighborhood, spiritless winter afternoons, passing time in his long coat and two days unshaven, in a drugstore, or with the Communist Sylvester in Zechman's pamphlet shop; sometimes even in the poolroom. He was working only Saturdays at the station, and that, he said, because Borg liked him. We had a little time for palaver, in the slowness of the undeveloping winter, sitting at the lunch counter of the poolroom by the window that showed out on horse-dropped, coal-dropped, soot-sponged snow and brown circulation of mist in the four o'clock lamplight. When we had done the necessary at home for Mama, set up the stoves, got in groceries, taken out the garbage and ashes, we didn't stay there with her-- I less than Simon, who sometimes did his college assignments on the kitchen table, and she kept a percolator going for him on the stove. I didn't pass on to him the question that Jimmy Klein and Clem asked of me, namely, whether Sylvester was converting him to his politics. I had confidence in the answer I gave, which was that Simon was hard up for ways to kill time, and that he went to meetings, bull sessions and forums, socials and rent parties, from boredom, and in order to meet girls, not because he took Sylvester for one of the children of morning, but he went for the big babes in leather jackets, low heels, berets, and chambray workshirts. The literature he brought home with him kept coffee rings off the table the morning after, or he tore the mimeographed pages with his large blond hands to start the stove. I read more f it than he did, with puzzled curiosity. No, I knew Simon and his idea of the right of things. He had Mama and me for extra weight, he believed, and wasn't going