The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [76]
but the weight of bodies actual enough, the glass creaking and soles going every which way. This vault was for the poorer class of customers or for solitary-hornet shoppers, girls with outfits to match, hats and accessories; women with three or four little daughters to buy shoes for on the same day. The goods were heaped up on tables by sizes, and then there 126 be, cardboard-cell walls of boxes and fitting stools in a circle under I. honeycomb of the sidewalk. |Afew weeks of apprenticeship here and the buyer had me up to the j Hn floor. Only to help out, in the beginning, and run stock for the tesmen or return boxes to the shelves. And then I became a shoe-dog yself, only having to be told by the buyer to cut my hair shorter. He (S a worried guy and his stomach was bad. From shaving twice a day S skin was tender, and, on a Saturday morning when he got the salesen together before opening to give them a speech, his mouth would eed a little at the corners. He hoped to be more severe than he could i, and I expect his trouble was that he was really not the man to direct {Snazzy operation. For the place was a salon, with Frenchy torches ltd by human-arm brackets out from the walls, furled drapes, and junese furniture--such corners as are softened, sheltered from the itside air, even from the air of the Rue de Rivoli, by oriental rugs ggt swallow sounds in their nap, and hangings that make whispers H protocol unavoidable. Differences of inside and outside hard to rec(pile; for up to the threshold of a salon like this there was a tremen- WAS high tension and antagonistic energy asked to lie still that couldn't |$, till; and trying to contain it caused worry and shivers, the kind of log that could erupt in raging, bloody Gordon or Chartist riots and pot up fire like the burning of a mountain of egg crates. This un||wn, superfluous free power streaming around a cold, wet, blackened icago day, from things laid out to be still, incapable, however, of ftg still. Unancially Simon and I were doing first rate; he was getting fifteen |lars a week before commissions, and I was pulling down thirteen|. Therefore it didn't matter that we were disqualified from Char|j Practically blind, Mama couldn't do the housework any longer. |E>n hired a mulatto named Molly Simms, a strong lean woman, ! thirty-five, who slept in the kitchen--on George's old cot, in fact whispered or sang out to us when we came home late. We never ttten the habit of using the front entrance, forbidden to us in the lady's time. the means you, sport," Simon said. JSushwah, you're the one she looks at all the time." l New Year's Day she didn't show up, and I kept things running d the meals. Simon was away too. He had gone to a New Year's ty, leaving the house in his best: bowler hat, polka-dot muffler, > his two-tone shoes, pigskin gloves. And he didn't get back till Ifyening the next day, out of a rapid, sparkling snow. He was " 127 Normally Simon and I would have gone to work after high school, but jobs weren't to be had anyway, and the public college was full of students in our condition, because of the unemployment, getting a citysponsored introduction to higher notions and an accidental break into Shakespeare and other great masters along with the science and math leveled at the Civil-Service exams. In the nature of the case it couldn't be avoided; and if you were going to prepare impoverished young folks for difficult functions, or if merely you were going to keep them out of trouble by having them read books, there were going to be some remarkable results begotten out of the mass. I knew a skinny, sickly Mexican too poor for socks and spotted and stained all over, body and clothes, who could crack any equation on the board; and also Bohunk wizards at the Greeks, demon-brained physicists, historians bred under pushcarts, and many hard-grain poor boys who were going to starve and work themselves bitterly eight years or so to become doctors, engineers, scholars, and experts. I had no special eagerness of this kind and never had been led to think I should have, nor gave myself