The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [84]
Why, he was one of the greatest corporation lawyers in Chicago, and he's a trustee for the Robinson Foundation, the glass people. The university gave him an honorary degree, and when he has a birthday the newspapers write editorials. And still his wife is stupid as her own feet, and she drinks, and the daughter is a drunkard too. If I knew she was going to be here I would have gone to Saratoga instead. I wish there was some way to get an advance guest list from these hotels. There ought to be a service like that. They have a suite for six hundred dollars a month in Chicago. And as soon as the chauffeur comes for the old man in the morning--this is something I know!--the bellhop goes out and buys them a bottle of bourbon and bets on a horse for them. Then they drink and wait for the results. But that daughter--she keeps herself a little old-fashioned. If you didn't notice her last night, look for a heavy-built woman who wears feathers. She threw a child out of the window and killed it. They used all their influence and got her free. A poor woman would have gotten the chair, like Ruth Snyder, with the matrons standing all around and picking up their skirts so the photographers couldn't get a picture of it. I wonder if she dresses like this now so as to feel nothing in common with that young flapper who did that thing." You needed a strong constitution to stick to your splendor of moming in the face of these damnation chats. I had to struggle when she called out her whole force of frights, apocalypse death riders, churchporch devils who grabbed naked sinners from behind to lug them down to punishment, her infanticides, plagues, and incests. I managed. But the situation was that I was enjoying what a rich young man enjoys and arranged my feelings accordingly, filling in and plastering over objections. Except that there were rotten moments, ^ch as when she spoke of the Snyder execution and evoked this terrible protection of a woman's modesty who was writhing in thousands of volts. And though I was avoiding everything that didn't agree with what I wanted, the consistent painting of doomedness and evil she specialized in did get under my skin. What if it really was as she said? If, for instance, the woman had thrown her baby out of the window? It wasn't Medea, a good, safe long time ago, chasing her pitiful kids, but a woman I saw in the dining room, wearing feathers, sitting down with her whitehaired father and mother. But there were people at the table near theirs that soon were of more interest to me--two young girls, of beauty to put a stop to such thoughts or drive them to the dwindling point. There was a moment when I could have fallen for either one of them, and then everything bent to one side, toward the slenderer, slighter, younger one. I fell in love with her, and not in the way I had loved Hilda Novinson either, going like a satellite on the back of the streetcar or sticking around her father's tailor shop. This time I had a different kind of maniac energy and knew what sexual sting was. My expectations were greater; more corrupt too, maybe, owing to the influence of Mrs. Renling and her speaking always of lusts, no holds barred. So that I allowed suggestions in all veins to come to me. I never have learned to reproach myself for such things; and then my experience in curtailing them was limited. Why, I had accepted of Grandma Lausch's warning only the part about the danger of our blood and that, through Mama, we were susceptible to love; not the stigmatizing part that made us out the carriers of the germ of ruination. So I was dragged, entrained, over a barrel. And I had a special handicap, because of the way I presented myself--due to Mrs. Renling--as if God had not left out a single one of His gifts, and I was advertising His liberality with me: good looks, excellent wardrobe, mighty fine manners, social ease, wittiness, handsome-devil smiles, neat dancing and address with women--all in the freshest gold-leaf. And the trouble was that I had what you might call forged credentials. It was my worry that Esther Fenchel