Saul Bellow - Collected Stories

“What are you doing?” cried the old man.

“I’m showing you what she does to me.”

“Stop that—stop it!” the old man said and tapped the table commandingly.

“Well, Dad, she hates me. I feel that she’s strangling me. I can’t catch my breath. She has just fixed herself on me to kill me. She can do it long distance. One of these days I’ll be struck down by suffocation or apoplexy because of her. I just can’t catch my breath.”

“Take your hands off your throat, you foolish man,” said his father. “Stop this bunk. Don’t expect me to believe in all kinds of voodoo.”

“If that’s what you want to call it, all right.” His face flamed and paled and swelled and his breath was laborious.

“But I’m telling you that from the time I met her I’ve been a slave. The Emancipation Proclamation was only for colored people. A husband like me is a slave, with an iron collar. The churches go up to Albany and supervise the law. They won’t have divorces. The court says, ‘You want to be free. Then you have to work twice as hard—twice, at least! Work! you bum.’ So then guys kill each other for the buck, and they may be free of a wife who hates them but they are sold to the company. The company knows a guy has got to have his salary, and takes full advantage of him. Don’t talk to me about being free. A rich man may be free on an income of a million net. A poor man may be free because nobody cares what he does. But a fellow in my position has to sweat it out until he drops dead.”

His father replied to this, “Wilky, it’s entirely your own fault. You don’t have to allow it.”

Stopped in his eloquence, Wilhelm could not speak for a while. Dumb and incompetent, he struggled for breath and frowned with effort into his father’s face.

“I don’t understand your problems,” said the old man. “I never had any like them.”

By now Wilhelm had lost his head and he waved his hands and said over and over, “Oh, Dad, don’t give me that stuff, don’t give me that. Please don’t give me that sort of thing.”

“It’s true,” said his father. “I come from a different world. Your mother and I led an entirely different life.”

“Oh, how can you compare mother Mother,” Wilhelm said. “Mother was a help to you. Did she harm you ever?”

“There’s no need to carry on like an opera, Wilky,” said the doctor. “This is only your side of things.”

“What? It’s the truth,” said Wilhelm.

The old man could not be persuaded and shook his round head and drew his vest down over the gilded shirt, and leaned back with a completeness of style that made this look, to anyone out of hearing, like an ordinary conversation between a middle-aged man and his respected father. Wilhelm towered and swayed, big and sloven, with his gray eyes red-shot and his honey-colored hair twisted in flaming shapes upward. Injustice made him angry, made him beg. But he wanted an understanding with his father, and he tried to capitulate to him. He said, “You can’t compare Mother and Margaret, and neither can you and I be compared, because you, Dad, were a success. And a success—is a success. I never made a success.”

The doctor’s old face lost all of its composure and became hard and angry. His small breast rose sharply under the red and black shirt and he said, “Yes. Because of hard work. I was not self-indulgent, not lazy. My old man sold dry goods in Williamsburg. We were nothing, do you understand? I knew I couldn’t afford to waste my chances.”

“I wouldn’t admit for one minute that I was lazy,” said Wilhelm. “If anything, I tried too hard. I admit I made many mistakes. Like I thought I shouldn’t do things you had done already. Study chemistry. You had done it already. It was in the family.”

His father continued, “I didn’t run around with fifty women, either. I was not a Hollywood star. I didn’t have time to go to Cuba for a vacation. I stayed at home and took care of my children.”

Oh, thought Wilhelm, eyes turning upward. Why did I come here in the first place, to live near him? New York is like a gas. The colors are running. My head feels so tight, I don’t know what I’m doing. He thinks I want to take away his money or that I envy him. He doesn’t see what I want.

“Dad,” Wilhelm said aloud, “you’re being very unfair. It’s true the movies was a false step. But I love my boys. I didn’t abandon them. I left Margaret because I had to.”

“Why did you have to?”

“Well—” said Wilhelm, struggling to condense his many reasons into a few plain words. “I had to—I had to.”

With sudden and surprising bluntness his father said, “Did you have bed-trouble with her? Then you should have stuck it out. Sooner or later everyone has it. Normal people stay with it. It passes. But you wouldn’t, so now you pay for your stupid romantic notions. Have I made my view clear?”

It was very clear. Wilhelm seemed to hear it repeated from various sides and inclined his head different ways, and listened and thought. Finally he said, “I guess that’s the medical standpoint. You may be right. I just couldn’t live with Margaret. I wanted to stick it out, but I was getting very sick. She was one way and I was another. She wouldn’t be like me, so I tried to be like her, and I couldn’t do it.”

“Are you sure she didn’t tell you to go?” the doctor said.

“I wish she had. I’d be in a better position now. No, it was me. I didn’t want to leave, but I couldn’t stay. Somebody had to take the initiative. I did. Now I’m the fan guy too.”

Pushing aside in advance all the objections that his son would make, the doctor said, “Why did you lose your job with Rojax?”

“I didn’t, I’ve told you.”

“You’re lying. You wouldn’t have ended the connection. You need the money too badly. But you must have got into trouble.” The small old man spoke concisely and with great strength. “Since you have to talk and can’t let it alone, tell the truth. Was there a scandal—a woman?”

Wilhelm fiercely defended himself. “No, Dad, there wasn’t any woman. I told you how it was.”

“Maybe it was a man, then,” the old man said wickedly.

Shocked, Wilhelm stared at him with burning pallor and dry lips. His skin looked a little yellow. “I don’t think you know what you’re talking about,” he answered after a moment. “You shouldn’t let your imagination run so free. Since you’ve been living here on Broadway you must think you understand life, up to date. You ought to know your own son a little better. Let’s drop that, now.”

“All right, Wilky, I’ll withdraw it. But something must have happened in Roxbury nevertheless. You’ll never go back. You’re just talking wildly about representing a rival company. You won’t. You’ve done something to spoil your reputation, I think. But you’ve got girl friends who are expecting you back, isn’t that so?”

“I take a lady out now and then while on the road,” said Wilhelm. “I’m not a monk.”

“No one special? Are you sure you haven’t gotten into complications?”

He had tried to unburden himself and instead, Wilhelm thought, he had to undergo an inquisition to prove himself worthy of a sympathetic word. Because his father believed that he did all kinds of gross things.

“There is a woman in Roxbury that I went with. We fell in love and wanted to marry, but she got tired of waiting for my divorce. Margaret figured that. On top of which the girl was a Catholic and I had to go with her to the priest and make an explanation.”

Neither did this last confession touch Dr. Adler’s sympathies or sway his calm old head or affect the color of his complexion.

“No, no, no, no; all wrong,” he said.