LIFE OF AUGIE MARCH
1079
occur to us; it was a contest. TIle dispensary would want to know why
the Charities didn't pay for the glasses. So you must say nothing
about the Charities, but that sometimes money from my father carne
and sometimes it didn't, and that Mama took boarders. This was, in
a delicate and choosy way, by ignoring and omitting certain large
facts, true. It was true enough for
them,
and at the age of nine I
could appreciate this perfectly. Better than my brother Simon, who
was too blunt for this kind of maneuver and anyway, from books, had
gotten hold of some English schoolboy notions of honor. "Tom Brown's
Schooldays" for many years had an influence we were not in a
posi~
tion to afford. He was a blond boy with big cheekbones and wide
gray eyes and had the arms of a cricketer-I go by the illustrations;
we never played anything but softball. Opposed to his British style,
was his patriotic anger at George III. The mayor was at that time
ordering the school-board to get history books that dealt more harshly
with the king, and Simon was very hot at Cornwallis. I admired this
patriotic flash, his terrific personal wrath at the General and his satis–
faction over his surrender at Yorktown which would often come over
him at lunch while we ate our bologna sandwiches: Grandma had a
piece of boiled chicken at noon and sometimes there was the gizzard
for bristleheaded little Georgie who loved it and blew at the ridgy
thing more to cherish than to cool it. But this martial true blood pride
of Simon's disqualified him for the crafty task to be done at tlle
dis–
pensary where he was too disdainful to lie and might denounce every–
body instead. I could be counted on to do the job, because I enjoyed
it. I loved a piece of strategy. I had enthusiasms, too; I had Simon's,
though there was never much meat in Cornwallis for me, and I had
Grandma Lausch's as well. As for the truth of these statements I
was instructed to make, well, it was a fact that my father had deserted
and equally a fact that we had a boarder. Grandma Lausch was our
boarder, not a relation at all. She was supported by two sons, one
from Indianapolis and one from Racine, Wisconsin. The daughters–
in-law did not want her, and she, the widow of a powerful Odessa
businessman-a divinity over us, bald, whiskery, with a fat nose,
greatly armored in a cutaway, a double-breasted vest, powerfully
buttoned; his blue photo, enlarged and retouched by Mr. Lulov,
hung in the parlor, doubled back between the portico columns of the
full length mirror, the dome of the stove beginning where his trunk
