The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [68]
to pick up the whole of a class besides, and he wouldn't have Sylvester's moral sentiments any more than he would i buy a suit that didn't fit. But he sat in Zechman's shop, calm, smoking sponged cigarettes, under the inciting proletarian posters, hearing I Latinistic, Germanic, exotic conversation, with large young side of jaw at rest on his collar in the yellow smoke of cold air, mentally blackballing it all. That he showed up in the poolroom was a surprise to me too, in view of what he had formerly said about my tie-in with the Einhoms. But the explanation was the same--because it was a dull time, because he was broke; he soon kept company with bear-eyes Sylvester in his pamphlet-armed war with the bourgeoisie and took lessons in pool from Dingbat. He became good enough at it to win some in rotation at a nickel a ball, staying away from the deadeyes who made their career in the parlor. Occasionally he played craps in the back room, and his luck at this was pretty fair, too. He kept clear of the hoodlums, torpedoes, and thieves on their professional side. In that regard he was smarter than I, for I somehow got to be party to a robbery. 1 ran with Jimmy Klein and Clem Tambow much of the time. Toward the last high-school terms I hadn't been seeing a lot of them either. Jimmy's family was hard hit by the unemployment--Tommy lost his job at City Hall when the Republicans were pushed out by Cermak--and Jimmy was working a great deal; he was also studying bookkeeping at night, or trying to, for he was no good at figures or at any head work for that matter. Only he had much determination to get ahead for the sake of his family. His sister Eleanor had gone to Mexico, by bus the entire journey, to see whether she could make a go of it with the cousin there, the one that had started Jimmy's interest in genealogy. As for Clem Tambow, his contempt of school was extreme, and he passed as much time as he could get away with in bed, reading screen news, going over scratch sheets. He was developing into a superior bum. Through his mother, he carried on a long-term argument with her second husband, who didn't have a job either, about his habits. A neighbor's son was working as a pin boy in a downtown alley for thirty cents an hour; why, therefore, did he refuse to look for work? They were all four living in the back rooms of the infants'-wear shop that the ex-Mrs. Tambow ran by herself. Bald, with harsh back-hair, Clem's stepfather, in his undershirt, read the Jewish Courier by the stove and prepared lunch of sardines, crackers, and tea for them all. There were always two or three King Oscar cans on the table, rolled i open, and also canned milk and oysterettes. He was not a fast-thinking I man and didn't have many subjects. When I visited and saw him in } 112 the cirrus-cloud weave of his wool undershirt, the subject was always what was I earning. "Do stoop labor?" said Clem to his mother when she took it up with him. "If I can't find anything better I'll swallow cyanide." And the thought of swallowing cyanide made him laugh enormously, with a great "haw, haw, haw!" big-mouthed, and shake his quills of hair. "Anyhow," he said, "I'd rather stay in bed and play with myself. Ma" ._his mother in her skirts and with feet of a dancer of Spanish numbers--"you're not too old to know what I mean. You're in the room next to mine, remember, you and your husband." He made her gasp, unable to answer because of me, but staring at him with furious repudiation. "Put on with me, that's okay--what should I suppose you got married for?" "You oughtn't talk to your old lady like that," I said privately to him. He laughed at me. "You should spend a couple of days and nights around here--you'd say I was going easy on her. Her pince-nez takes you in, and you don't know what a letch she's got. Let's face the facts." And of course he told me these facts, and it seemed even I figured in them, that she had made sly inquiries about me and said how strong I looked. In the afternoon Clem took a walk; he carried a cane and had British swagger. He read the autobiographies