The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [82]
settled on a Princeton collar, took me in the heart with enormous power and hunger. I was given over to it. Briefly I ran with a waitress from the Symington, Willa Steiner. I took her dancing at the Merry Garden and went to the beach with her at night. She kindly let me get by most of the time with putting on the dog and pompousness, being a warm girl. She was nowise shy herself, making no bones about what we were together for. She had a home-town lover too, whom she talked about marrying--I'm certain without any hinder-thought of making me jealous. For she had a number of things against me about which she was probably in the right, my dandy gab and conceit and my care about clothes. Soon informed, Mrs. Renting came down hard on me for getting mixed up with her. Einhom didn't know more of what went on around him than she did about everything in her territory. "Augie, I'm astonished at you," she said. "She's not even a pretty girl. She has a nose like a little Indian"-- I had especially petted Willa Steiner with this pretty nose for my theme; it wasn't courageous of me not to defend it--"and she's covered with freckles. I have freckles too, but mine are different, and anyhow, it's only as an older person that I'm talking to you. Besides, the girl is a little prostitute, and not an honest prostitute, because an honest prostitute, all she wants is your money. And if you have to do this, if you come to me and tell me you have to--and don't be ashamed of that-- I'll give you money to go somewhere on Sheridan Road near Wilson, where such places are." Another instance of people offering to contribute money to keep me out of trouble; as Einhorn had, when he lectured me about the robbery. "Augie, don't you see this little tramp wants you to get her in trouble so that you'll have to marry her? That's all you need now, to have a baby with her right at the start of your career. I would think that you would know what this is about." Sometimes I thought it was clever and free of her to talk as she did, and again that it was terribly stupid. I had an impression that, glancing out from the partitions where she observed, with her dotty, smarting, all-interfering face, she was bent on pulling whom she wanted to her, to infuse and instill. It was the kind of talk gilded dumb young men have heard from protectresses, generals' and statesmen's wives, in all the duchies, villas, and capital cities of the world. "But you don't really know anything about Willa, Mrs. Renling," I said clumsily. "She doesn't--" I didn't go on, because of all the scorn in her face. "My dear boy, you talk like a nitwit. Go on with her if you want. I'm not your mother. But you'll see," she said in her impersonator's voice, "when she has you roped. D'you think all she wants out of life is to wait on tables and work to feed herself just to keep in shape for you, so you'll have nothing to do but enjoy her? You know nothing about girls; girls want to marry. And it's not in the modest old times when they sat on it till somebody would have mercy." She spoke disgustedly; she had disgust to bum. It didn't occur to me, when Mrs. Renling had me drive her to Benton Harbor where she took mineral baths for her arthritis, that she was getting me away from Willa. She said she couldn't think of going out to Michigan alone, and that I would drive and keep her company in the hotel. Afterward I understood. Benton Harbor was plenty different for me from what it had been last time, when I had hitch-hiked back from Muskegon with Nails and Dingbat, with sweat shirt tied on my neck by the sleeves and my feet road-sore. Actually we stayed in St. Joe, next to Lake Michigan, at the Merritt Hotel, right in front of the water and the deep, fresh smell of sea volume in the glossy pink walls of the rooms. The hotel was vast, and it was brick construction, but went after the tone of old Saratoga Springs establishments, greenery and wickerwork, braid cord on the portieres, menus in French, white hall runners and deep fat of money, limousines in the washed gravel, lavish culture of flowers bigger than