The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [7]
Then in a chapeau of flowers and a furpiece of tails locked on her shoulder with badger claws she went to the park. With a book she never intended to read. There was too much talk in the arbor for that. It was a place where marriages were made. A year or so after the old atheist's death, Mrs. Anticol found herself a second husband there. This widower traveled down from Iowa City for just the purpose of marriage, and after they were married the news came back that he kept her locked a prisoner in his house and made her sign away all: rights of legacy. Grandma did not pretend to be sorry; she said, "Poor Bertha," but she said it with the humor she was a crackerjack at, as thin and full of play as fiddle wire, and she took much credit for not going in for that kind of second marriage. I quit thinking long ago that all old people came to rest from the things they were out for in their younger years. But that was what she wanted us to believe--"an old baba like me"--and accordingly we took her at her word to be old disinterested wisdom who had put by her vanity. But if she never got a marriage offer, I'm not prepared to say it made no difference to her. She couldn't have been so sold on Anna Karenina for nothing, or an other favorite of hers I ought to mention, Manon Lescaut, and when she was feeling right she bragged about her waist and hips, so, since she never gave up any glory or influence that I know of, I can see it wasn't only from settled habit that she went into her bedroom to lace on her corset and wind up her hair but to take the eye of a septuagenarian Vronsky or Des Grieux. I sometimes induced myself to see, beyond her spotty yellowness and her wrinkles and dry bangs, a voun CTer and resentful woman in her eyes. But whatever she was after for herself, in the arbor, she wasn't forgetting us, and she got me the handbill job through old Sylvester, called "the Baker" because he wore white ducks and white golfer's cap. He had palsy, this the joke of his making rolls, but he was clean, briefspoken, serious in the aim of his bloodshot eyes, reconciled, with an effort of nerve that was copied straight into the curve of his white horseshoe of mustache, to the shortness of his days. I suppose her pitch with him was as usual, about the family she was protecting, and Sylvester took me to see his son, a young fellow whom money or family anxiety always seemed to keep in a sweat. Something, his shadow business and the emptiness of the seats at two o'clock, the violinist playing just for him and the operator in the projection box, made it awful for him and misery to come across with my two bits. It made him act tough. He said, "I've had kids who shoved the bills down the sewer. Too bad if I ever find out about it, and I have ways to check up." So I knew that he might follow me along a block of the route, and I kept watch in the streets for his head with the weak hair of baldness and his worrywounded eyes, as brown as a bear's. "I've got a couple of tricks myself for any punk who thinks he's going to pull a fast one," he warned me. But when he believed I was trustworthy, and at first I was, following his directions about rolling the bills and sticking them into the brass mouthpieces over the be'ls, not fouling up the mailboxes and getting him in dutch with the post office, he treated me to seltzer and Turkish Delight and said he was going to make a ticket-taker of me when I grew jja little taller, or put me in charge of the popcorn machine he was thinking of getting; and one of these years he was going to hire a manager while he went back to Armour Institute to finish his engineering degree. He had only a couple of years to go, and his wife was after him to do it. He took me for my senior, I suppose, to tell me this, as the people at the dispensary did, and as often happened. I didn't understand all that he told me. Anyway, he was just a little deceived in me, for when he said his other boys had dumped bills down the sewer I felt I couldn't do less sither and watched for my chance. Or gave out wads to the kids in George's dummy-room