LIFE OF AUGIE MARCH
IOSI
"You see how it is, do I have to say more? There's no man in the
house and children to bring up." This was her most frequent argu–
ment. When Lubin, the case-worker, came round and sat in the
kitchen, familiar, bald-headed, in his gold glasses,
his
weight com–
fortable, his mouth patient, she shot it at him: "How do you expect
children to be brought up?" while he listened trying to remain com–
fortable but gradually becoming like a man determined not to let a
grasshopper escape from his hand. "Well, my dear, Mrs. March could
raise your rent," he said. She must often have answered, for there
were times when she sent us all out to be alone with him, "Do you
know what things would be like without me? You ought to be grateful
for the way 1 hold them together." I'm sure she even said, "And
when 1 die, Mr. Lubin, you'll see what you've got on your hands."
I'm one hundred percent sure of it. To us nothing was ever said that
might weaken her rule 'by suggesting it would ever end. Besides, it
would have shocked us to hear it, and she, in her miraculous know–
ledge of us, able to be extremely close to our thoughts-she was one
sovereign who knew exactly the proportions of love, respect and fear
of power in her subjects-understood how we would have been
shocked. But to Lubin, for reasons of policy and also because she had
to express feelings she certainly had, she must have said it. He had a
harassed patience with her of "deliver me from such clients," though
he tried to appear master of the situation. He had his derby between
his thighs (his suits, always too scanty in the pants, exposed white
socks and bulldog shoes, crinkled, black and bulging with toes) and
looked into the hat as though debating whether it was wise to release
his
grasshopper on the lining for a while.
"1 pay as much as 1 can afford," she would say.
She took her cigarette case out from under her shawl, she cut a
Murad in half with her sewing scissors and picked up the holder. This
was still at a time when women did not smoke. Save the intelligentsia
-the term she applied to herself. The holder in her dark little gums
between which all her guile, malice and command issued, she had
her best inspirations of strategy. She was as wrinkled as an old paper
bag, an autocrat, hard-shelled and jesuitical, a pouncy old hawk of a
bolshevik, her small ribboned and gray feet immobile on the shoe-kit
and stool Simon had made in the manual-training class, the dingy old
wool Winnie whose bad smell filled the flat on the cushion beside
