Saul Bellow - Collected Stories

Someone in a gray straw hat with a wide cocoa-colored band spoke to Wilhelm in the lobby. The light was dusky, splotched with red underfoot; green, the leather furniture; yellow, the indirect lighting.

“Hey, Tommy. Say, there.”

“Excuse me,” said Wilhelm, trying to reach a house phone. But this was Dr. Tamkin, whom he was just about to call.

“You have a very obsessional look on your face,” said Dr. Tamkin.

Wilhelm thought, Here he is, Here he is. If I could only figure this guy out.

“Oh,” he said to Tamkin. “Have I got such a look? Well, whatever it is, you name it and I’m sure to have it.”

The sight of Dr. Tamkin brought his quarrel with his father to a close. He found himself flowing into another channel.

“What are we doing?” he said. “What’s going to happen to lard today?”

“Don’t worry yourself about that. All we have to do is hold on to it and it’s sure to go up. But what’s made you so hot under the collar, Wilhelm?”

“Oh, one of those family situations.” This was the moment to take a new look at Tamkin, and he viewed him closely but gained nothing by the new effort. It was conceivable that Tamkin was everything that he claimed to be, and all the gossip false. But was he a scientific man, or not? If he was not, this might be a case for the district attorney’s office to investigate. Was he a liar? That was a delicate question. Even a liar might be trustworthy in some ways. Could he trust Tamkin — could he? He feverishly, fruitlessly sought an answer.

But the time for this question was past, and he had to trust him now. After a long struggle to come to a decision, he had given him the money. Practical judgment was in abeyance. He had worn himself out, and the decision was no decision. How had this happened? But how had his Hollywood career begun? It was not because of Maurice Venice, who turned out to be a pimp. It was because Wilhelm himself was ripe for the mistake. His marriage, too, had been like that. Through such decisions somehow his life had taken form. And so, from the moment when he tasted the peculiar flavor of fatality in Dr. Tamkin, he could no longer keep back the money.

Five days ago Tamkin had said, “Meet me tomorrow, and we’ll go to the market.” Wilhelm, therefore, had had to go. At eleven o’clock they had walked to the brokerage office. On the way, Tamkin broke the news to Wilhelm that though this was an equal partnership, he couldn’t put up his half of the money just yet; it was tied up for a week or so in one of his patents. Today he would be two hundred dollars short; next week he’d make it up. But, neither of them needed an income from the market, of course. This was only a sporting proposition anyhow, Tamkin said. Wilhelm had to answer, “Of course.” It was too late to withdraw. What else could he do? Then came the formal part of the transaction, and it was frightening. The very shade of green of Tamkin’s check looked wrong; it was a false, disheartening color. His handwriting was peculiar, even monstrous; the e’s were like i’s, the t’s and l’s the same, and the h’s like wasps’ bellies. He wrote like a fourth-grader. Scientists, however, dealt mostly in symbols; they printed. This was Wilhelm’s explanation.

Dr. Tamkin had given him his check for three hundred dollars. Wilhelm, in a blinded and convulsed aberration, pressed and pressed to try to kill the trembling of his hand as he wrote out his check for a thousand. He set his lips tight, crouched with his huge back over the table, and wrote with crumbling, terrified fingers, knowing that if Tamkin’s check bounced his own would not be honored either. His sole cleverness was to set the date ahead by one day to give the green check time to clear.

Next he had signed a power of attorney, allowing Tamkin to speculate with his money, and this was an even more frightening document. Tamkin had never said a word about it, but here they were and it had to be done.

After delivering his signatures, the only precaution Wilhelm took was to come back to the manager of the brokerage office and ask him privately, “Uh, about Doctor Tamkin. We were in here a few minutes ago, remember?”

That day had been a weeping, smoky one and Wilhelm had gotten away from Tamkin on the pretext of having to run to the post office. Tamkin had gone to lunch alone, and here was Wilhelm, back again, breathless, his hat dripping, needlessly asking the manager if he remembered.

“Yes, sir, I know,” the manager had said. He was a cold, mild, lean German who dressed correctly and around his neck wore a pair of opera glasses with which he read the board. He was an extremely correct person except that he never shaved in the morning, not caring, probably, how he looked to the fumblers and the old people and the operators and the gamblers and the idlers of Broadway uptown. The market closed at three. Maybe, Wilhelm guessed, he had a thick beard and took a lady out to dinner later and wanted to look fresh-shaven.

“Just a question,” said Wilhelm. “A few minutes ago I signed a power of attorney so Doctor Tamkin could invest for me. You gave me the blanks.”

“Yes, sir, I remember.”

“Now this is what I want to know,” Wilhelm had said. “I’m no lawyer and I only gave the paper a glance. Does this give Doctor Tamkin power of attorney over any other assets of mine - money, or property?”

The rain had dribbled from Wilhelm’s deformed, transparent raincoat; the buttons of his shirt, which always seemed tiny, were partly broken in pearly quarters of the moon, and some of the dark, thick golden hairs that grew on his belly stood out. It was the manager’s business to conceal his opinion of him; he was shrewd, gray, correct (although unshaven) and had little to say except on matters that came to his desk. He must have recognized in Wilhelm a man who reflected long and then made the decision he had rejected twenty separate times. Silvery, cool, level, long-profiled, experienced, indifferent, observant, with unshaven refinement, he scarcely looked at Wilhelm, who trembled with fearful awkwardness. The manager’s face, low-colored, long-nostriled, acted as a unit of perception; his eyes merely did their reduced share. Here was a man like Rubin, who knew and knew and knew. He, a foreigner, knew; Wilhelm, in the city of his birth, was ignorant.

The manager had said, “No, sir, it does not give him.”

“Only over the funds I deposited with you?”

“Yes, that is right, sir.”

“Thank you, that’s what I wanted to find out,” Wilhelm had said, grateful.

The answer comforted him. However, the question had no value. None at all. For Wilhelm had no other assets. He had given Tamkin his last money. There wasn’t enough of it to cover his obligations anyway, and Wilhelm had reckoned that he might as well go bankrupt now as next month. “Either broke or rich,” was how he had figured and that formula had encouraged him to make the gamble. Well, not rich; he did not expect that, but perhaps Tamkin might really show him how to earn what he needed in the market. By now, however, he had forgotten his own reckoning and was aware only that he stood to lose his seven hundred dollars to the last cent.

Dr. Tamkin took the attitude that they were a pair of gentlemen experimenting with lard and grain futures. The money, a few hundred dollars, meant nothing much to either of them. He said to Wilhelm, “Watch. You’ll get a big kick out of this and wonder why more people don’t go into it. You think the Wall Street guys are so smart-geniuses? That’s because most of us are psychologically afraid to think about the details. Tell me this. When you’re on the road, and you don’t understand what goes on under the hood of your car, you’ll worry what’ll happen if something goes wrong with the engine. Am I wrong?” No, he was right. “Well,” said Dr. Tamkin with an expression of quiet triumph about his mouth, almost the suggestion of a jeer. “It’s the same psychological principle, Wilhelm. They are rich because you don’t understand what goes on. But it’s no mystery, and by putting it in a little money and applying certain principles of observation, you begin to grasp it. It can’t be studied in the abstract. You have to take a specimen risk so that you feel the process, the money-flow, the whole complex. To know how it feels to be a seaweed you have to get in the water. In a very short time we’ll take out a hundred-per-cent profit.” Thus Wilhelm had had to pretend at the outset that his interest in the market was theoretical.