The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [77]
anxious cares about being revealed a profession. I didn't feel moved to take it seriously. Nevertheless I turned in a fairly good performance in French and History. In things like Botany, my drawings were cockeyed and smudgy and I was behind the class. Though I had been Einhorn's office clerk I hadn't learned much of neatness. And besides I was working five afternoons a week and all day on Saturday. This was not at Einhom's any longer, but in women's shoes, in the basement of the downtown clothing shop where Simon was upstairs in men's suits. His situation had gotten better, and he was excited by the change. It was a fashionable store where the management wanted you to be well dressed. But he went beyond anything demanded of a salesman and was not just natty but hot stuff, in a double-breasted striped suit, with a tape measure around his neck. I hardly knew him there, among mirrors, rugs, racks of clothes, eight stories above the Loop; he was big, fast and busy, heavy in his body, and his blood evident in him, in his face. Below, I was in a bargain department under the sidewalk, seeing and hearing the shoppers pass over the green circles of glass set in concrete, skirts of heavy coats flying as shadows through these lenses, 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 were cardboard-cell walls of boxes and fitting stools in a circle under the honeycomb of the sidewalk. A few weeks of apprenticeship here and the buyer had me up to the main floor. Only to help out, in the beginning, and run stock for the salesmen or return boxes to the shelves. And then I became a shoe-dog myself, only having to be told by the buyer to cut my hair shorter. He was a worried guy and his stomach was bad. From shaving twice a day his skin was tender, and, on a Saturday morning when he got the salesmen together before opening to give them a speech, his mouth would bleed a little at the corners. He hoped to be more severe than he could be, and I expect his trouble was that he was really not the man to direct a snazzy operation. For the place was a salon, with Frenchy torches held by human-arm brackets out from the walls, furled drapes, and Chinese furniture--such corners as are softened, sheltered from the outside air, even from the air of the Rue de Rivoli, by oriental rugs that swallow sounds in their nap, and hangings that make whispers and protocol unavoidable. Differences of inside and outside hard to reconcile; for up to the threshold of a salon like this there was a tremendous high tension and antagonistic energy asked to lie still that couldn't lie still; and trying to contain it caused worry and shivers, the kind of thing that could erupt in raging, bloody Gordon or Chartist riots and shoot up fire like the burning of a mountain of egg crates. This unknown, superfluous free power streaming around a cold, wet, blackened Chicago day, from things laid out to be still, incapable, however, of being still. Financially Simon and I were doing first rate; he was getting fifteen dollars a week before commissions, and I was pulling down thirteenfifty. Therefore it didn't matter that we were disqualified from Charity. Practically blind, Mama couldn't do the housework any longer. Simon hired a mulatto named Molly Simms, a strong lean woman, about thirty-five, who slept in the kitchen--on George's old cot, in fact --and whispered or sang out to us when we came home late. We never had gotten the habit of using the front entrance, forbidden to us in the old lady's time. "She means you, sport," Simon said. "Bushwah, you're the one she looks at all the time." On New Year's Day she didn't show up, and I kept things running and fixed the meals. Simon was away too. He had gone to a New Year's Eve party, leaving the house in his best: bowler hat, polka-dot