by Saul Bellow
A queer look came over Wilhelm’s face with its eyes turned up and his silent mouth with its high upper lip. He went several degrees further—when you are like this, dreaming that everybody is outcast, you realize that this must be one of the small matters. There is a larger body, and from this you cannot be separated. The glass of water fades out. You do not go from simple a and simple b to the great x and y, nor does it matter whether you agree about the glass but, far beneath such details, what Tamkin would call the real soul says plain and understandable things to everyone. There sons and fathers are themselves, and a glass of water is only an ornament; it makes a hoop of brightness on the cloth; it is an angel’s mouth. There truth for everybody may be found, and confusion is only—only temporary, thought Wilhelm.
The idea of this larger body had been planted in him a few days ago beneath Times Square, when he had gone downtown to pick up tickets for the baseball game on Saturday (a double-header at the Polo Grounds). He was going through an underground corridor, a place he had always hated and hated more than ever now. On the walls between the advertisements were words in chalk: “Sin No More,” and “Do Not Eat the Pig,” he had particularly noticed. And in the dark tunnel, in the haste, heat, and darkness which disfigure and make freaks and fragments of nose and eyes and teeth, all of a sudden, unsought, a general love for all these imperfect and lurid-looking people burst out in Wilhelm’s breast. He loved them. One and all, he passionately loved them. They were his brothers and his sisters. He was imperfect and disfigured himself, but what difference did that make if he was united with them by this blaze of love? And as he walked he began to say, “Oh my brothers—my brothers and my sisters,” blessing them all as well as himself.
So what did it matter how many languages there were, or how hard it was to describe a glass of water? Or matter that a few minutes later he didn’t feel anything like a brother toward the man who sold him the tickets?
On that very same afternoon he didn’t hold so high an opinion of this same onrush of loving kindness. What did it come to? As they had the capacity and must use it once in a while, people were bound to have such involuntary feelings. It was only another one of those subway things. Like having a hard-on at random. But today, his day of reckoning, he consulted his memory again and thought, I must go back to that. That’s the right clue and may do me the most good. Something very big. Truth, like.
The old fellow on the right, Mr. Rappaport, was nearly blind and kept asking Wilhelm, “What’s the new figure on November wheat? Give me July soy beans too.” When you told him he didn’t say thank you. He said, “Okay,” instead, or, “Check,” and turned away until he needed you again. He was very old, older even than Dr. Adler, and if you believed Tamkin he had once been the Rockefeller of the chicken business and had retired with a large fortune.
Wilhelm had a queer feeling about the chicken industry, that it was sinister. On the road, he frequently passed chicken farms. Those big, rambling, wooden buildings out in the neglected fields; they were like prisons. The lights burned all night in them to cheat the poor hens into laying. Then the slaughter. Pile all the coops of the slaughtered on end, and in one week they’d go higher than Mount Everest or Mount Serenity. The blood filling the Gulf of Mexico. The chicken shit, acid, burning the earth.
How old—old this Mr. Rappaport was! Purple stains were buried in the flesh of his nose, and the cartilage of his ear was twisted like a cabbage heart. Beyond remedy by glasses, his eyes were smoky and faded.
“Read me that soy-bean figure now, boy,” he said, and Wilhelm did. He thought perhaps the old man might give him a tip, or some useful advice or information about Tamkin. But no. He only wrote memoranda on a pad, and put the pad in his pocket. He let no one see what he had written. And Wilhelm thought this was the way a man who had grown rich by the murder of millions of animals, little chickens, would act. If there was a life to come he might have to answer for the killing of all those chickens. What if they all were waiting? But if there was a life to come, everybody would have to answer. But if there was a life to come, the chickens themselves would be all right.
Well! What stupid ideas he was having this morning. Phooey!
Finally old Rappaport did address a few remarks to Wilhelm. He asked him whether he had reserved his seat in the synagogue for Yom Kippur.
“No,” said Wilhelm.
“Well, you better hurry up if you expect to say Yiskor for your parents. I never miss.”
And Wilhelm thought, Yes, I suppose I should say a prayer for Mother once in a while. His mother had belonged to the Reform congregation. His father had no religion. At the cemetery Wilhelm had paid a man to say a prayer for her. He was among the tombs and he wanted to be tipped for the El molai rachamin. “Thou God of Mercy,” Wilhelm thought that meant. B’gan Aden—“in Paradise.” Singing, they drew it out. B’gan Ay-den. The broken bench beside the grave made him wish to do something. Wilhelm often prayed in his own manner. He did not go to the synagogue but he would occasionally perform certain devotions, according to his feelings. Now he reflected, In Dad’s eyes I am the wrong kind of Jew. He doesn’t like the way I act. Only he is the right kind of Jew. Whatever you are, it always turns out to be the wrong kind.
Mr. Rappaport grumbled and whiffed at his long cigar, and the board, like a swarm of electrical bees, whirred.
“Since you were in the chicken business, I thought you’d speculate in eggs, Mr. Rappaport.” Wilhelm, with his warm, panting laugh, sought to charm the old man.
“Oh. Yeah. Loyalty, hey?” said old Rappaport. “I should stick to them. I spent a lot of time amongst chickens. I got to be an expert chicken-sexer. When the chick hatches you have to tell the boys from the girls. It’s not easy. You need long, long experience. What do you think, it’s a joke? A whole industry depends on it. Yes, now and then I buy a contract on eggs. What have you got today?”
Wilhelm said anxiously, “Lard. Rye.”
“Buy? Sell?”
“Bought.”
“Uh,” said the old man. Wilhelm could not determine what he meant by this. But of course you couldn’t expect him to make himself any clearer. It was not in the code to give information to anyone. Sick with desire, Wilhelm waited for Mr. Rappaport to make an exception in his case. Just this once! Because it was critical. Silently, by a sort of telepathic concentration, he begged the old man to speak the single word that would save him, give him the merest sign. “Oh, please—please help,” he nearly said. If Rappaport would close one eye, or lay his head to one side, or raise his finger and point to a column in the paper or to a figure on his pad. A hint! A hint!
A long perfect ash formed on the end of the cigar, the white ghost of the leaf with all its veins and its fainter pungency. It was ignored, in its beauty, by the old man. For it was beautiful. Wilhelm he ignored as well.
Then Tamkin said to him, “Wilhelm, look at the jump our rye just took.”
December rye climbed three points as they tensely watched; the tumblers raced and the machine’s lights buzzed.
“A point and a half more, and we can cover the lard losses,” said Tamkin. He showed him his calculations on the margin of the Times.
“I think you should put in the selling order now. Let’s get out with a small loss.”
“Get out now? Nothing doing.”
“Why not? Why should we wait?”
“Because,” said Tamkin with a smiling, almost openly scoffing look, “you’ve got to keep your nerve when the market starts to go places. Now’s when you can make something.”
“I’d get out while the getting’s good.”
“No, you shouldn’t lose your head like this. It’s obvious to me what the mechanism is, back in the Chicago market. There’s a short supply of December rye. Look, it’s just gone up another quarter. We should ride it.”
“I’m losing my taste for the gamble,” said Wilhelm. “You can’t feel safe when it goes up so fast. It’s liable to come down just as quick.”
Dryly, as
though he were dealing with a child, Tamkin told him in a tone of tiring patience, “Now listen, Tommy. I have it diagnosed right. If you wish I should sell I can give the sell order. But this is the difference between healthiness and pathology. One is objective, doesn’t change his mind every minute, enjoys the risk element. But that’s not the neurotic character. The neurotic character—”
“Damn it, Tamkin!” said Wilhelm roughly. “Cut that out. I don’t like it. Leave my character out of consideration. Don’t pull any more of that stuff on me. I tell you I don’t like it.”
Tamkin therefore went no further; he backed down. “I meant,” he said, softer, “that as a salesman you are basically an artist type. The seller is in the visionary sphere of the business function. And then you’re an actor, too.”
“No matter what type I am—” An angry and yet weak sweetness rose into Wilhelm’s throat. He coughed as though he had the flu. It was twenty years since he had appeared on the screen as an extra. He blew the bagpipes in a film called Annie Laurie. Annie had come to warn the young Laird; he would not believe her and called the bagpipers to drown her out. He made fun of her while she wrung her hands. Wilhelm, in a kilt, barelegged, blew and blew and blew and not a sound came out. Of course all the music was recorded. He fell sick with the flu after that and still suffered sometimes from chest weakness.
“Something stuck in your throat?” said Tamkin. “I think maybe you are too disturbed to think clearly. You should try some of my ‘here-and-now’ mental exercises. It stops you from thinking so much about the future and the past and cuts down confusion.”
“Yes, yes, yes, yes,” said Wilhelm, his eyes fixed on December rye.
“Nature only knows one thing, and that’s the present. Present, present, eternal present, like a big, huge, giant wave—colossal, bright and beautiful, full of life and death, climbing into the sky, standing in the seas. You must go along with the actual, the Here-and-Now, the glory—”
… chest weakness, Wilhelm’s recollection went on. Margaret nursed him. They had had two rooms of furniture, which was later seized. She sat on the bed and read to him. He made her read for days, and she read stories, poetry, everything in the house. He felt dizzy, stifled when he tried to smoke. They had him wear a flannel vest.
Come then, Sorrow!
Sweetest Sorrow!
Like an own babe I nurse thee on my breast!
Why did he remember that? Why?
“You have to pick out something that’s in the actual, immediate present moment,” said Tamkin. “And say to your self here-and-now, here-and-now, here-and-now. ‘Where am I?’ ‘Here.’ ‘When is it?’ ‘Now.’ Take an object or a person. Anybody. ‘Here and now I see a person.’ ‘Here and now I see a man.’ ‘Here and now I see a man sitting on a chair.’ Take me, for instance. Don’t let your mind wander. ‘Here and now I see a man in a brown suit. Here and now I see a corduroy shirt.’ You have to narrow it down, one item at a time, and not let your imagination shoot ahead. Be in the present. Grasp the hour, the moment, the instant.”
Is he trying to hypnotize or con me? Wilhelm wondered. To take my mind off selling? But even if I’m back at seven hundred bucks, then where am I?
As if in prayer, his lids coming down with raised veins, frayed out, on his significant eyes, Tamkin said, “ ‘Here and now I see a button. Here and now I see the thread that sews the button. Here and now I see the green thread.’ ” Inch by inch he contemplated himself in order to show Wilhelm how calm it would make him. But Wilhelm was hearing Margaret’s voice as she read, somewhat unwillingly,
Come then, Sorrow!
. . . .
I thought to leave thee,
And deceive thee,
But now of all the world I love thee best.
Then Mr. Rappaport’s old hand pressed his thigh, and he said, “What’s my wheat? Those damn guys are blocking the way. I can’t see.”
VI
Rye was still ahead when they went out to lunch, and lard was holding its own.
They ate in the cafeteria with the gilded front. There was the same art inside as outside. The food looked sumptuous. Whole fishes were framed like pictures with carrots, and the salads were like terraced landscapes or like Mexican pyramids; slices of lemon and onion and radishes were like sun and moon and stars; the cream pies were about a foot thick and the cakes swollen as if sleepers had baked them in their dreams.
“What’ll you have?” said Tamkin.
“Not much. I ate a big breakfast. I’ll find a table. Bring me some yogurt and crackers and a cup of tea. I don’t want to spend much time over lunch.”
Tamkin said, “You’ve got to eat.”
Finding an empty place at this hour was not easy. The old people idled and gossiped over their coffee. The elderly ladies were rouged and mascaraed and hennaed and used blue hair rinse and eye shadow and wore costume jewelry, and many of them were proud and stared at you with expressions that did not belong to their age. Were there no longer any respectable old ladies who knitted and cooked and looked after their grandchildren? Wilhelm’s grandmother had dressed him in a sailor suit and danced him on her knee, blew on the porridge for him and said, “Admiral, you must eat.” But what was the use of remembering this so late in the day?
He managed to find a table, and Dr. Tamkin came along with a tray piled with plates and cups. He had Yankee pot roast, purple cabbage, potatoes, a big slice of watermelon, and two cups of coffee. Wilhelm could not even swallow his yogurt. His chest pained him still.
At once Tamkin involved him in a lengthy discussion. Did he do it to stall Wilhelm and prevent him from selling out the rye—or to recover the ground lost when he had made Wilhelm angry by hints about the neurotic character? Or did he have no purpose except to talk?
“I think you worry a lot too much about what your wife and your father will say. Do they matter so much?”
Wilhelm replied, “A person can become tired of looking himself over and trying to fix himself up. You can spend the entire second half of your life recovering from the mistakes of the first half.”
“I believe your dad told me he had some money to leave you.”
“He probably does have something.”
“A lot?”
“Who can tell,” said Wilhelm guardedly.
“You ought to think over what you’ll do with it.”
“I may be too feeble to do anything by the time I get it. If I get anything.”
“A thing like this you ought to plan out carefully. Invest it properly.” He began to unfold schemes whereby you bought bonds, and used the bonds as security to buy something else and thereby earned twelve per cent safely on your money. Wilhelm failed to follow the details. Tamkin said, “If he made you a gift now, you wouldn’t have to pay the inheritance taxes.”
Bitterly, Wilhelm told him, “My father’s death blots out all other considerations from his mind. He forces me to think about it, too. Then he hates me because he succeeds. When I get desperate—of course I think about money. But I don’t want anything to happen to him. I certainly don’t want him to die.” Tamkin’s brown eyes glittered shrewdly at him. “You don’t believe it. Maybe it’s not psychological. But on my word of honor. A joke is a joke, but I don’t want to joke about stuff like this. When he dies, I’ll be robbed, like. I’ll have no more father.”
“You love your old man?”
Wilhelm grasped at this. “Of course, of course I love him. My father. My mother—” As he said this there was a great pull at the very center of his soul. When a fish strikes the line you feel the live force in your hand. A mysterious being beneath the water, driven by hunger, has taken the hook and rushes away and fights, writhing. Wilhelm never identified what struck within him. It did not reveal itself. It got away.
And Tamkin, the confuser of the imagination, began to tell, or to fabricate, the strange history of his father. “He was a great singer,” he said. “He left us five kids because he fell in love with an opera soprano. I never held it against h
im, but admired the way he followed the life-principle. I wanted to do the same. Because of unhappiness, at a certain age, the brain starts to die back.” (True, true! thought Wilhelm) “Twenty years later I was doing experiments in Eastman Kodak, Rochester, and I found the old fellow. He had five more children.” (False, false!) “He wept; he was ashamed. I had nothing against him. I naturally felt strange.”
“My dad is something of a stranger to me, too,” said Wilhelm, and he began to muse. Where is the familiar person he used to be? Or I used to be? Catherine—she won’t even talk to me any more, my own sister. It may not be so much my trouble that Papa turns his back on as my confusion. It’s too much. The ruins of life, and on top of that confusion—chaos and old night. Is it an easier farewell for Dad if we don’t part friends? He should maybe do it angrily—“Blast you with my curse!” And why, Wilhelm further asked, should he or anybody else pity me; or why should I be pitied sooner than another fellow? It is my childish mind that thinks people are ready to give it just because you need it.
Then Wilhelm began to think about his own two sons and to wonder how he appeared to them, and what they would think of him. Right now he had an advantage through baseball. When he went to fetch them, to go to Ebbets Field, though, he was not himself. He put on a front but he felt as if he had swallowed a fistful of sand. The strange, familiar house, horribly awkward; the dog, Scissors, rolled over on his back and barked and whined. Wilhelm acted as if there were nothing irregular, but a weary heaviness came over him. On the way to Flatbush he would think up anecdotes about old Pigtown and Charlie Ebbets for the boys and reminiscences of the old stars, but it was very heavy going. They did not know how much he cared for them. No. It hurt him greatly and he blamed Margaret for turning them against him. She wanted to ruin him, while she wore the mask of kindness. Up in Roxbury he had to go and explain to the priest, who was not sympathetic. They don’t care about individuals, their rules come first. Olive said she would marry him outside the Church when he was divorced. But Margaret would not let go. Olive’s father was a pretty decent old guy, an osteopath, and he understood what it was all about. Finally he said, “See here, I have to advise Olive. She is asking me. I am mostly a freethinker myself, but the girl has to live in this town.” And by now Wilhelm and Olive had had a great many troubles and she was beginning to dread his days in Roxbury, she said. He trembled at offending this small, pretty, dark girl whom he adored. When she would get up late on Sunday morning she would wake him almost in tears at being late for Mass. He would try to help her hitch her garters and smooth out her slip and dress and even put on her hat with shaky hands; then he would rush her to church and drive in second gear in his forgetful way, trying to apologize and to calm her. She got out a block from church to avoid gossip. Even so she loved him, and she would have married him if he had obtained the divorce. But Margaret must have sensed this. Margaret would tell him he did not really want a divorce; he was afraid of it. He cried, “Take everything I’ve got, Margaret. Let me go to Reno. Don’t you want to marry again?” No. She went out with other men, but took his money. She lived in order to punish him.