Saul Bellow - Collected Stories

“Ha, Wilky,” said the old man to his tardy son. “You haven’t met our neighbor Mr. Perls, have you? From the fifteenth floor.”

“How d’do,” Wilhelm said. He did not welcome this stranger; he began at once to find fault with him. Mr. Perls carried a heavy cane with a crutch tip. Dyed hair, a skinny forehead—these were not reasons for bias. Nor was it Mr. Perls’s fault that Dr. Adler was using him, not wishing to have breakfast with his son alone. But a gruffer voice within Wilhelm spoke, asking “Who is this damn frazzle-faced herring with his dyed hair and his fish teeth and this drippy mustache? Another one of Dad’s German friends. Where does he collect all these guys? What is the stuff on his teeth? I never saw such pointed crowns. Are they stainless steel, or a kind of silver? How can a human face get into this condition? Uch!” Staring with his widely spaced gray eyes, Wilhelm sat, his broad back stooped under the sports jacket. He clasped his hands on the table with an implication of suppliance. Then he began to relent a little toward Mr. Perls, beginning at the teeth. Each of those crowns represented a tooth ground to the quick, and estimating a man’s grief with his teeth as two per cent of the total, and adding to that his flight from Germany and the probable origin of his wincing wrinkles, not to be confused with the wrinkles of his smile, it came to a sizable load.

“Mr. Perls was a hosiery wholesaler,” said Dr. Adler.

“Is this the son you told me was in the selling line?” said Mr. Perls.

Dr. Adler replied, “I have only this one son. One daughter. She was a medical technician before she got married—anesthetist. At one time she had an important position in Mount Sinai.”

He couldn’t mention his children without boasting. In Wilhelm’s opinion, there was little to boast of. Catherine, like Wilhelm, was big and fair-haired. She had married a court reporter who had a pretty hard time of it. She had taken a professional name, too — Philippa. At forty she was still ambitious to become a painter. Wilhelm didn’t venture to criticize her work. It didn’t do much to him, he said, but then he was no critic. Anyway, he and his sister were generally on the outs and he didn’t often see her paintings. She worked very hard, but there were fifty thousand people in New York with paints and brushes, each practically a law unto himself. It was the Tower of Babel in paint. He didn’t want to go far into this. Things were chaotic all over.

Dr. Adler thought that Wilhelm looked particularly untidy this morning — unrested, too, his eyes red-rimmed from excessive smoking. He was breathing through his mouth and he was evidently much distracted and rolled his red-shot eyes barbarously. As usual, his coat collar was turned up as though he had had to go out in the rain. When he went to business he pulled himself together a little; otherwise he let himself go and looked like hell.

“What’s the matter, Wilky, didn’t you sleep last night?”

“Not very much.”

“You take too many pills of every kind—first stimulants and then depressants, anodynes followed by analeptics, until the poor organism doesn’t know what’s happened. Then the luminal won’t put people to sleep, and the Pervitin or Benzedrine won’t wake them up. God knows! These things get to be as serious as poisons, and yet everyone puts all their faith in them.”

“No, Dad, it’s not the pills. It’s that I’m not used to New York anymore. For a native, that’s very peculiar, isn’t it? It was never so noisy at night as now, and every little thing is a strain. Like the alternate parking. You have to run out at eight to move your car. And where can you put it? If you forget for a minute they tow you away. Then some fool puts advertising leaflets under your windshield wiper and you have heart failure a block away because you think you’ve got a ticket. When you do get stung with a ticket, you can’t argue. You haven’t got a chance in court and the city wants the revenue!”

“But in your line you have to have a car, eh?” said Mr. Perls.

“Lord knows why any lunatic would want one in the city who didn’t need it for his livelihood.”

Wilhelm’s old Pontiac was parked in the street. Formerly, when on an expense account, he had always put it up in a garage. Now he was afraid to move the car from Riverside Drive lest he lose his space, and he used it only on Saturdays when the Dodgers were playing in Ebbets Field and he took his boys to the game. Last Saturday, when the Dodgers were out of town, he had gone out to visit his mother’s grave.

Dr. Adler had refused to go along. He couldn’t bear his son’s driving. Forgetfully, Wilhelm traveled for miles in second gear; he was seldom in the right lane and he neither gave signals nor watched for lights. The upholstery of his Pontiac was filthy with grease and ashes. One cigarette burned in the ashtray, another in his hand, a third on the floor with maps and other waste paper and Coca-Cola bottles. He dreamed at the wheel or argued and gestured, and therefore the old doctor would not ride with him.

Then Wilhelm had come back form the cemetery angry because the stone bench between his mother’s and his grandmother’s graves had been overturned and broken by vandals. “Those damn teen-age hoodlums get worse and worse,” he said. “Why, they must have used a sledgehammer to break the seat smack in half like that. If I could catch one of them!” He wanted the doctor to pay for a new seat, but his father was cool to the idea. He said he was going to have himself cremated.

Mr. Perls said, “I don’t blame you if you get no sleep up where you are.” His voice was tuned somewhat sharp, as though he were slightly deaf. “Don’t you have Parigi the singing teacher there? God, they have some queer elements in this hotel. On which floor is that Estonian woman with all her cats and dogs. They should have made her leave long ago.”

“They’ve moved her down to twelve,” said Dr. Adler.

Wilhelm ordered a large Coca-Cola with his breakfast. Working in secret at the small envelopes in his pocket, he found two pills by touch. Much fingering had worn and weakened the paper. Under cover of a napkin he swallowed a Phenaphen sedative and a Unicap, but the doctor was sharp-eyed and said, “Wilky, what are you taking now?”

“Just my vitamin pills.” He put his cigar butt in an ashtray on the table behind him, for his father did not like the odor. Then he drank his Coca-Cola.

“That’s what you drink for breakfast, and not orange juice?” said Mr. Perls. He seemed to sense that he would not lose Dr. Adler’s favor by taking an ironic tone with his son.

“The caffeine stimulates brain activity,” said the old doctor. “It does all kinds of things to the respiratory center.”

“It’s just a habit of the road, that’s all,” Wilhelm said. “If you drive around long enough it turns your brains, your stomach, and everything else.”

His father explained, “Wilhelm used to be with the Rojax Corporation. He was their northeastern sales representative for a good many years but recently ended the connection.”

“Yes,” said Wilhem. “I was with them from the end of the war.” He sipped the Coca-Cola and chewed the ice, glancing at one and the other with his attitude of large, shaky, patient dignity. The waitress set two boiled eggs before him.

“What kind of line does this Rojax corporation manufacture?” said Mr. Perls.

“Kiddies’ furniture. Little chairs, rockers, tables, Jungle-Gyms, slides, swings, seesaws.”

Wilhelm let his father do the explaining. Large and stiff-backed, he tried to sit patiently, but his feet were abnormally restless. All right! His father had to impress Mr. Perls? He would go along once more, and play his part. Fine! He would play along and help his father maintain his style. Style was the main consideration. That was just fine!