Seize the Day

by Saul Bellow

  “Gee, I don’t know. Is anything wrong?”

  “You must have seen him. He came in a while back.”

  “No, but I didn’t.”

  Wilhelm fumbled out a pencil from the top pocket of his coat and began to make calculations. His very fingers were numb, and in his agitation he was afraid he made mistakes with the decimal points and went over the subtraction and multiplication like a schoolboy at an exam. His heart, accustomed to many sorts of crisis, was now in a new panic. And, as he had dreaded, he was wiped out. It was unnecessary to ask the German manager. He could see for himself that the electronic bookkeeping device must have closed him out. The manager probably had known that Tamkin wasn’t to be trusted, and on that first day he might have warned him. But you couldn’t expect him to interfere.

  “You get hit?” said Mr. Rowland.

  And Wilhelm, quite coolly, said, “Oh, it could have been worse, I guess.” He put the piece of paper into his pocket with its cigarette butts and packets of pills. The lie helped him out—although, for a moment, he was afraid he would cry. But he hardened himself. The hardening effort made a violent, vertical pain go through his chest, like that caused by a pocket of air under the collar bones. To the old chicken millionaire, who by this time had become acquainted with the drop in rye and lard, he also denied that anything serious had happened. “It’s just one of those temporary slumps. Nothing to be scared about,” he said, and remained in possession of himself. His need to cry, like someone in a crowd, pushed and jostled and abused him from behind, and Wilhelm did not dare turn. He said to himself, I will not cry in front of these people. I’ll be damned if I’ll break down in front of them like a kid, even though I never expect to see them again. No! No! And yet his unshed tears rose and rose and he looked like a man about to drown. But when they talked to him, he answered very distinctly. He tried to speak proudly.

  “… going away?” he heard Rowland ask.

  “What?”

  “I thought you might be going away too. Tamkin said he was going to Maine this summer for his vacation.”

  “Oh, going away?”

  Wilhelm broke off and went to look for Tamkin in the men’s toilet. Across the corridor was the room where the machinery of the board was housed. It hummed and whirred like mechanical birds, and the tubes glittered in the dark. A couple of businessmen with cigarettes in their fingers were having a conversation in the lavatory. At the top of the closet door sat a gray straw hat with a cocoa-colored band. “Tamkin,” said Wilhelm. He tried to identify the feet below the door. “Are you in there, Doctor Tamkin?” he said with stifled anger. “Answer me. It’s Wilhelm.”

  The hat was taken down, the latch lifted, and a stranger came out who looked at him with annoyance.

  “You waiting?” said one of the businessmen. He was warning Wilhelm that he was out of turn.

  “Me? Not me,” said Wilhelm. “I’m looking for a fellow.” Bitterly angry, he said to himself that Tamkin would pay him the two hundred dollars at least, his share of the original deposit. “And before he takes the train to Maine, too. Before he spends a penny on vacation—that liar! We went into this as equal partners.”

  VII

  I was the man beneath; Tamkin was on my back, and I thought I was on his. He made me carry him, too, besides Margaret. Like this they ride on me with hoofs and claws. Tear me to pieces, stamp on me and break my bones.

  Once more the hoary old fiddler pointed his bow at Wilhelm as he hurried by. Wilhelm rejected his begging and denied the omen. He dodged heavily through traffic and with his quick, small steps ran up the lower stairway of the Gloriana Hotel with its dark-tinted mirrors, kind to people’s defects. From the lobby he phoned Tamkin’s room, and when no one answered he took the elevator up. A rouged woman in her fifties with a mink stole led three tiny dogs on a leash, high-strung creatures with prominent black eyes, like dwarf deer, and legs like twigs. This was the eccentric Estonian lady who had been moved with her pets to the twelfth floor.

  She identified Wilhelm. “You are Doctor Adler’s son,” she said.

  Formally, he nodded.

  “I am a dear friend of your father.”

  He stood in the corner and would not meet her glance, and she thought he was snubbing her and made a mental note to speak of it to the doctor.

  The linen wagon stood at Tamkin’s door, and the chambermaid’s key with its big brass tongue was in the lock.

  “Has Doctor Tamkin been here?” he asked her.

  “No, I haven’t seen him.”

  Wilhelm came in, however, to look around. He examined the photos on the desk, trying to connect the faces with the strange people in Tamkin’s stories. Big, heavy volumes were stacked under the double-pronged TV aerial. Science and Sanity, he read, and there were several books of poetry. The Wall Street Journal hung in separate sheets from the bed-table under the weight of the silver water jug. A bathrobe with lightning streaks of red and white was laid across the foot of the bed with a pair of expensive batik pajamas. It was a box of a room, but from the windows you saw the river as far uptown as the bridge, as far downtown as Hoboken. What lay between was deep, azure, dirty, complex, crystal, rusty, with the red bones of new apartments rising on the bluffs of New Jersey, and huge liners in their berths, the tugs with matted beards of cordage. Even the brackish tidal river smell rose this high, like the smell of mop water. From every side he heard pianos, and the voices of men and women singing scales and opera, all mixed, and the sounds of pigeons on the ledges.

  Again Wilhelm took the phone. “Can you locate Doctor Tamkin in the lobby for me?” he asked. And when the operator reported that she could not, Wilhelm gave the number of his father’s room, but Dr. Adler was not in either. “Well, please give me the masseur. I say the massage room. Don’t you understand me? The men’s health club. Yes, Max Schilper’s—how am I supposed to know the name of it?”

  There a strange voice said, “Toktor Adler?” It was the old Czech prizefighter with the deformed nose and ears who was attendant down there and gave out soap, sheets, and sandals. He went away. A hollow endless silence followed. Wilhelm flickered the receiver with his nails, whistled into it, but could not summon either the attendant or the operator.

  The maid saw him examining the bottles of pills on Tamkin’s table and seemed suspicious of him. He was running low on Phenaphen pills and was looking for something else. But he swallowed one of his own tablets and went out and rang again for the elevator. He went down to the health club. Through the steamy windows, when he emerged, he saw the reflection of the swimming pool swirling green at the bottom of the lowest stairway. He went through the locker-room curtains. Two men wrapped in towels were playing Ping-pong. They were awkward and the ball bounded high. The Negro in the toilet was shining shoes. He did not know Dr. Adler by name, and Wilhelm descended to the massage room. On the tables naked men were lying. It was not a brightly lighted place, and it was very hot, and under the white faint moons of the ceiling shone pale skins. Calendar pictures of pretty girls dressed in tiny fringes were pinned on the wall. On the first table, eyes deeply shut in heavy silent luxury lay a man with a full square beard and short legs, stocky and black-haired. He might have been an orthodox Russian. Wrapped in a sheet, waiting, the man beside him was newly shaved and red from the steambath. He had a big happy face and was dreaming. And after him was an athlete, strikingly muscled, powerful and young, with a strong white curve to his genital and a half-angry smile on his mouth. Dr. Adler was on the fourth table, and Wilhelm stood over his father’s pale, slight body. His ribs were narrow and small, his belly round, white, and high. It had its own being, like something separate. His thighs were weak, the muscles of his arms had fallen, his throat was creased.

  The masseur in his undershirt bent and whispered in his ear, “It’s your son,” and Dr. Adler opened his eyes into Wilhelm’s face. At once he saw the trouble in it, and by an instantaneous reflex he removed himself from the danger of contagion, and he said serenely, “Well, have y
ou taken my advice, Wilky?”

  “Oh, Dad,” said Wilhelm.

  “To take a swim and get a massage?”

  “Did you get my note?” said Wilhelm.

  “Yes, but I’m afraid you’ll have to ask somebody else, because I can’t. I had no idea you were so low on funds. How did you let it happen? Didn’t you lay anything aside?”

  “Oh, please, Dad,” said Wilhelm, almost bringing his hands together in a clasp.

  “I’m sorry,” said the doctor. “I really am. But I have set up a rule. I’ve thought about it, I believe it is a good rule, and I don’t want to change it. You haven’t acted wisely. What’s the matter?”

  “Everything. Just everything. What isn’t? I did have a little, but I haven’t been very smart.”

  “You took some gamble? You lost it? Was it Tamkin? I told you, Wilky, not to build on that Tamkin. Did you? I suspect—”

  “Yes, Dad, I’m afraid I trusted him.”

  Dr. Adler surrendered his arm to the masseur, who was using wintergreen oil.

  “Trusted! And got taken?”

  “I’m afraid I kind of—” Wilhelm glanced at the masseur but he was absorbed in his work. He probably did not listen to conversations. “I did. I might as well say it. I should have listened to you.”

  “Well, I won’t remind you how often I warned you. It must be very painful.”

  “Yes, Father, it is.”

  “I don’t know how many times you have to be burned in order to learn something. The same mistakes, over and over.”

  “I couldn’t agree with you more,” said Wilhelm with a face of despair. “You’re so right, Father. It’s the same mistakes, and I get burned again and again. I can’t seem to—I’m stupid, Dad, I just can’t breathe. My chest is all up—I feel choked. I just simply can’t catch my breath.”

  He stared at his father’s nakedness. Presently he became aware that Dr. Adler was making an effort to keep his temper. He was on the verge of an explosion. Wilhelm hung his face and said, “Nobody likes bad luck, eh Dad?”

  “So! It’s bad luck, now. A minute ago it was stupidity.”

  “It is stupidity—it’s some of both. It’s true that I can’t learn. But I—”

  “I don’t want to listen to the details,” said his father. “And I want you to understand that I’m too old to take on new burdens. I’m just too old to do it. And people who will just wait for help—must wait for help. They have got to stop waiting.”

  “It isn’t all a question of money—there are other things a father can give to a son.” He lifted up his gray eyes and his nostrils grew wide with a look of suffering appeal that stirred his father even more deeply against him.

  He warningly said to him, “Look out, Wilky, you’re tiring my patience very much.”

  “I try not to. But one word from you, just a word, would go a long way. I’ve never asked you for very much. But you are not a kind man, Father. You don’t give the little bit I beg you for.”

  He recognized that his father was now furiously angry. Dr. Adler started to say something, and then raised himself and gathered the sheet over him as he did so. His mouth opened, wide, dark, twisted, and he said to Wilhelm, “You want to make yourself into my cross. But I am not going to pick up a cross. I’ll see you dead, Wilky, by Christ, before I let you do that to me,”

  “Father, listen! Listen!”

  “Go away from me now. It’s torture for me to look at you, you slob!” cried Dr. Adler.

  Wilhelm’s blood rose up madly, in anger equal to his father’s, but then it sank down and left him helplessly captive to misery. He said stiffly, and with a strange sort of formality, “Okay, Dad. That’ll be enough. That’s about all we should say.” And he stalked out heavily by the door adjacent to the swimming pool and the steam room, and labored up two long flights from the basement. Once more he took the elevator to the lobby on the mezzanine.

  He inquired at the desk for Dr. Tamkin.

  The clerk said, “No, I haven’t seen him. But I think there’s something in the box for you.”

  “Me? Give it here,” said Wilhelm and opened a telephone message from his wife. It read, “Please phone Mrs. Wilhelm on return. Urgent.”

  Whenever he received an urgent message from his wife he was always thrown into a great fear for the children. He ran to the phone booth, spilled out the change from his pockets onto the little curved steel shelf under the telephone, and dialed the Digby number.

  “Yes?” said his wife. Scissors barked in the parlor.

  “Margaret?”

  “Yes, hello.” They never exchanged any other greeting. She instantly knew his voice.

  “The boys all right?”

  “They’re out on their bicycles. Why shouldn’t they be all right? Scissors, quiet!”

  “Your message scared me,” he said. “I wish you wouldn’t make ‘urgent’ so common.”

  “I had something to tell you.”

  Her familiar unbending voice awakened in him a kind of hungry longing, not for Margaret but for the peace he had once known.

  “You sent me a postdated check,” she said. “I can’t allow that. It’s already five days past the first. You dated your check for the twelfth.”

  “Well, I have no money. I haven’t got it. You can’t send me to prison for that. I’ll be lucky if I can raise it by the twelfth.”

  She answered, “You better get it, Tommy.”

  “Yes? What for?” he said. “Tell me. For the sake of what? To tell lies about me to everyone? You—”

  She cut him off. “You know what for. I’ve got the boys to bring up.”

  Wilhelm in the narrow booth broke into a heavy sweat. He dropped his head and shrugged while with his fingers he arranged nickels, dimes, and quarters in rows. “I’m doing my best,” he said. “I’ve had some bad luck. As a matter of fact, it’s been so bad that I don’t know where I am. I couldn’t tell you what day of the week this is. I can’t think straight. I’d better not even try. This has been one of those days, Margaret. May I never live to go through another like it. I mean that with all my heart. So I’m not going to try to do any thinking today. Tomorrow I’m going to see some guys. One is a sales manager. The other is in television. But not to act,” he hastily added. “On the business end.”

  “That’s just some more of your talk, Tommy,” she said. “You ought to patch things up with Rojax Corporation. They’d take you back. You’ve got to stop thinking like a youngster.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well,” she said, measured and unbending, remorselessly unbending, “you still think like a youngster. But you can’t do that any more. Every other day you want to make a new start. But in eighteen years you’ll be eligible for retirement. Nobody wants to hire a new man of your age.”

  “I know. But listen, you don’t have to sound so hard. I can’t get on my knees to them. And really you don’t have to sound so hard. I haven’t done you so much harm.”

  “Tommy, I have to chase you and ask you for money that you owe us, and I hate it.”

  She hated also to be told that her voice was hard.

  “I’m making an effort to control myself,” she told him.

  He could picture her, her graying bangs cut with strict fixity above her pretty, decisive face. She prided herself on being fair-minded. We could not bear, he thought, to know what we do. Even though blood is spilled. Even though the breath of life is taken from someone’s nostrils. This is the way of the weak; quiet and fair. And then smash! They smash!

  “Rojax take me back? I’d have to crawl back. They don’t need me. After so many years I should have got stock in the firm. How can I support the three of you, and live myself, on half the territory? And why should I even try when you won’t lift a finger to help? I sent you back to school, didn’t I? At that time you said—”

  His voice was rising. She did not like that and intercepted him. “You misunderstood me,” she said.

  “You must realize you’re killing me. Y
ou can’t be as blind as all that. Thou shalt not kill! Don’t you remember that?”

  She said, “You’re just raving now. When you calm down it’ll be different. I have great confidence in your earning ability.”

  “Margaret, you don’t grasp the situation. You’ll have to get a job.”

  “Absolutely not. I’m not going to have two young children running loose.”

  “They’re not babies,” Wilhelm said. “Tommy is fourteen. Paulie is going to be ten.”

  “Look,” Margaret said in her deliberate manner. “We can’t continue this conversation if you’re going to yell so, Tommy. They’re at a dangerous age. There are teen-aged gangs—the parents working, or the families broken up.”

  Once again she was reminding him that it was he who had left her. She had the bringing up of the children as her burden, while he must expect to pay the price of his freedom.

  Freedom! he thought with consuming bitterness. Ashes in his mouth, not freedom. Give me my children. For they are mine too.

  Can you be the woman I lived with? he started to say. Have you forgotten that we slept so long together? Must you now deal with me like this, and have no mercy?

  He would be better off with Margaret again than he was today. This was what she wanted to make him feel, and she drove it home. “Are you in misery?” she was saying. “But you have deserved it.” And he could not return to her any more than he could beg Rojax to take him back. If it cost him his life, he could not. Margaret had ruined him with Olive. She hit him and hit him, beat him, battered him, wanted to beat the very life out of him.

  “Margaret, I want you please to reconsider about work. You have that degree now. Why did I pay your tuition?”

  “Because it seemed practical. But it isn’t. Growing boys need parental authority and a home.”

  He begged her, “Margaret, go easy on me. You ought to. I’m at the end of my rope and feel that I’m suffocating. You don’t want to be responsible for a person’s destruction. You’ve got to let up. I feel I’m about to burst.” His face had expanded. He struck a blow upon the tin and wood and nails of the wall of the booth. “You’ve got to let me breathe. If I should keel over, what then? And it’s something I can never understand about you. How you can treat someone like this whom you lived with so long. Who gave you the best of himself. Who tried. Who loved you.” Merely to pronounce the word “love” made him tremble.