Saul Bellow - Collected Stories

He said, “As a matter of fact, Father, I am as tired as hell.”

But Mr. Perls began to smile and said, “I understand from Doctor Tamkin that you’re going into some kind of investment with him, partners.”

“You know, he’s a very ingenious fellow,” said Dr. Adler. “I really enjoy hearing him go on. I wonder if he really is a medical doctor.”

“Isn’t he?” said Perls. “Everybody thinks he is. He talks about his patients. Doesn’t he write prescriptions?”

“I don’t really know what he does,” said Dr. Adler. “He’s a cunning man.”

“He’s a psychologist, I understand,” said Wilhelm.

“I don’t know what sort of a psychologist or psychiatrist he may be,” said his father. “He’s a little vague. It’s growing into a major industry, and a very expensive one. Fellows have to hold down very big jobs in order to pay those fees. Anyway, this Tamkin is clever. He never said he practiced here, but I believe he was a doctor in California. They don’t seem to have much legislation out there to cover these things, and I hear a thousand dollars will get you a degree from LA correspondence school. He gives the impression of knowing something about chemistry, and things like hypnotism. I wouldn’t trust him, though.”

“And why wouldn’t you?” Wilhelm demanded.

“Because he’s probably a liar. Do you believe he invented all the things he claims?”

Mr. Perls was grinning.

“He was written up in Fortune ,” said Wilhelm. “Yes, in Fortune magazine. He showed me the article. I’ve seen his clippings.”

“That doesn’t make him legitimate,” said Dr. Adler. “It might have been another Tamkin. Make no mistake, he’s an operator. Perhaps even crazy.”

“Crazy, you say?”

Mr. Perls put in “He could be both sane and crazy. In these days nobody can tell for sure which is which.”

“An electrical device for truck drivers to wear in their caps,” said Dr. Adler, describing one of Tamkin’s proposed inventions. “To wake them with a shock when they begin to be drowsy at the wheel. It’s triggered by the change in blood-pressure when they start to doze.”

“It doesn’t sound like such an impossible thing to me,” said Wilhelm.

Mr. Perls said, “To me he described an underwater suit so a man could walk on the bed of the Hudson in case of an atomic attack. He said he could walk to Albany in it.”

“Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!” cried Dr. Adler in his old man’s voice. “Tamkin’s Folly. You could go on a camping trip under Niagara Falls.”

“This is just his kind of fantasy,” said Wilhelm. “It doesn’t mean a thing. Inventors are supposed to be like that. I get funny ideas myself. Everybody wants to make something. Any American does.”

But his father ignored this and said to Perls, “What other inventions did he describe?”

While the frazzle-faced Mr. Perls and his father in the unseemly, monkey-striped shirt were laughing, Wilhelm could not restrain himself and joined in with his own panting laugh. But he was in despair. They were laughing at the man to whom he had given a power of attorney over his last seven hundred dollars to speculate for him in the commodities market. They had bought all that lard. It had to rise today. By ten o’clock, or half-past ten, trading would be active, and he would see.

Between white tablecloths and glassware and glancing silverware, through overfull light, the long figure of Mr. Perls went away into the darkness of the lobby. He thrust with his cane, and dragged a large built-up shoe which Wilhelm had not included in his estimate of troubles. Dr. Adler wanted to talk about him. “There’s a poor man,” he said, “with a bone condition which is gradually breaking him up.”

“One of those progressive diseases?” said Wilhelm.

“Very bad. I’ve learned,” the doctor told him, “to keep my sympathy for the real ailments. This Perls is more to be pitied than any man I know.”

Wilhelm understood he was being put on notice and did not express his opinion. He ate and ate. He did not hurry but kept putting food on his plate until he had gone through the muffins and his father’s strawberries, and then some pieces of bacon that were left; he had several cups of coffee, and when he was finished he sat gigantically in a state of arrest and didn’t seem to know what he should do next.

For a while father and son were uncommonly still. Wilhelm’s preparations to please Dr. Adler had failed completely, for the old man kept thinking, You’d never guess he had a clean upbringing, and, What a dirty devil this son of mine is. Why can’t he try to sweeten his appearance a little? Why does he want to drag himself like this? And he makes himself look so idealistic.

Wilhelm sat, mountainous. He was not really so slovenly as his father found him to be. In some aspects he even had a certain delicacy. His mouth, though broad, had a fine outline, and his brow and his gradually incurved nose, dignity, and in his blond hair there was white but there were also shades of gold and chestnut. When he was with the Rojax Corporation Wilhelm had kept a small apartment in Roxbury, two rooms in a large house with a small porch and garden, and on mornings of leisure, in late spring weather like this, he used to sit expanded in a wicker chair with the sunlight pouring through the weave, and sunlight through the slug-eaten holes of the young hollyhocks and as deeply as the grass allowed into small flowers. This peace (he forgot that the time had had its troubles, too), this peace was gone. It must not have belonged to him, really, for to be here in New York with his old father was more genuinely like his life. He was well aware that he didn’t stand a chance of getting sympathy from his father, who said he kept his for real ailments. Moreover, he advised himself repeatedly not to discuss his vexatious problems with him, for his father, with some justice, wanted to be left in peace. Wilhelm also knew that when he began to talk about these things he made himself feel worse, he became congested with them and worked himself into a clutch. Therefore he warned himself, Lay off, pal. It’ll only be an aggravation. From a deeper source, however, came other promptings. If he didn’t keep his troubles before him he risked losing them altogether, and he knew by experience that this was worse. And furthermore, he could not succeed in excusing his father on the ground of old age. No. No, he could not. I am his son, he thought. He is my father. He is as much father as I am son—old or not. Affirming this, though in complete silence, he sat, and sitting, he kept his father at the table with him.

“Wilky,” said the old man, “have you gone down to the baths here yet?”

“No, Dad, not yet.”

“Well, you know the Gloriana has one of the finest pools in New York. Eighty feet, blue tile. It’s a beauty.”

Wilhelm had seen it. On the way to the gin game you passed the stairway to the pool. He did not care for the odor of the wall-locked and chlorinated water.

“You ought to investigate the Russian and Turkisk baths, and the sunlamps and massage. I don’t hold with sunlamps. But the massage does a world of good, and there’s nothing better than hydrotherapy when you come right down to it. Simple water has a calming effect and would do you more good than all the barbiturates and alcohol in the world.”

Wilhelm reflected that this advice was as far as his father’s help and sympathy would extend.

“I thought,” he said, “that the water cure was for lunatics.”

The doctor received this as one of his son’s jokes and said with a smile, “Well, it won’t turn a sane man into a lunatic. It does a great deal for me. I couldn’t live without my massages and steam.”