The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [95]
by becoming his full-time secretary, as well as other things--his servant and confidante. Someone who could literally say, biblically, "Thy handmaiden." Pushing his rolling chair for him, she needed its support in her limping and foot-dragging. He sat, well satisfied, well served. He looked severe and even impatient, but the truth was otherwise. The spirit I found him in was the Chanticleer spirit, by which I refer to male piercingness, sharpness, knotted hard muscle and blood in the comb, jerky, flaunty, haughty and bright, with luxurious slither of feathers. Ah, but there are other facts that have to be satisfied too, after this comparison. It's too bad but it is so. Humankind does not have that sort of simplicity--not the single line that a stick draws on the ground but a vast harrow of countless disks. His spirit was piercing, but there has to be mentioned his poor color, age-impoverished and gray; plus the new flat's ugliness; dullness of certain hours, dry ness of days, drear Lness and shabbiness-mentioned that the street was bare, dim and low in life, bad; and that there were business thoughts and malformed growths of purpose, terrible, menacing, salt-patched with noises and news, and pimpled and dotted around with lies, both practical and gratuitous. To Tillie Einhorn, as far as anybody could tell, Mildred was acceptable. The force of Einhorn on Tillie was such that to judge him wrong was too much of an operation for her. Besides, you have to think of a condition of people that gets into them like a cobbler's stretcher into a shoe; this stretcher for Tillie was Einhorn's special need as a cripple. She was used to making allowances. Well, this was how Einhorn was situated when I came to ask him tor advice; I found him too busy to give me his attention. He kept ookmg to the street as I talked, then asked me to push him to the oilet, which I did, on the gaggling casters that could, as always, stand an oiling. All he replied was, "Well, it's pretty unusual. It's quite an offer. You were born lucky." He gave it less than half his mind, thinking I was telling him the news that the Renlings wanted to adopt me, not that I considered refusing. Naturally he was wrapped up in his own affairs. And I could look at Mildred Stark if I wanted an example of how someone became attached to, and then absorbed into, a family. I finished the afternoon downtown, and while I was eating a liver sandwich at Elfman's and watching the unemployed musicians on the Dearborn corner, I saw a guy named Clarence Ruber passing and knocked on the plate glass with my ring till he noticed me and came in to talk. I knew this Ruber from Crane College, where he had run a baseball pool at the Enark Cafe; he was quiet and dirty-spoken, smooth in the face, fat behind, with a slow, shiny Assyrian fringe on his head and a soft-bosomed fashion of clothes, silky shirts, yellow silk tie, and gray flannel suit. Looking me over, he saw that I was doing well too, in contrast to the Depression musicians and the other eaters, and we traded information. He had opened a small shop on the South Shore, in partnership with a cousin's widow who had a little money. They dealt in lamps, pictures, vases, piano scarves, ashtrays and such bric-a-brac, and since the cousin and his wife had been, before the Bust, interior decorators with big hotels for clients, they did a good trade. "There's dough in this. It's one of these rackets where people pay for being handled a particular way. Dazzle business. Because, if they knew it, they could buy a lot of this crap at the dime store, but they can't trust their judgment. It's a woman's line," he said, "and you have to understand how to tickle their bellies." I asked him what he was doing here among the musicians. "Musicians, my ass," he said. He had been seeing a man in the Bumham Building who had invented a rubberized paint for bathrooms, a waterproof product that, with the widow-cousin's contacts in hotels, ought to make him a fortune. It kept walls from rotting; the water didn't harm the plaster. The inventor was just beginning to go