Saul Bellow - Collected Stories

“Well,” said Tamkin when he met him now in the lobby, “what’s the problem, what is this family situation? Tell me.” He put himself forward as the keen mental scientist. Whenever this happened Wilhelm didn’t know what to reply. No matter what he said or did it seemed that Dr. Tamkin saw through him.

“I had some words with my dad.”

Dr. Tamkin found nothing extraordinary in this. “It’s the eternal same story,” he said. “The elemental conflict of parent and child. It won’t end, ever. Even with a fine old gentleman like your dad.”

“I don’t suppose it will. I’ve never been able to get anywhere with him. He objects to my feelings. He thinks they’re sordid. I upset him and he gets mad at me. But maybe all old men are alike.”

“Sons, too. Take it from one of them,” said Dr. Tamkin. “All the same, you should be proud of such a fine old patriarch of a father. It should give you hope. The longer he lives, the longer your life-expectancy becomes.”

Wilhelm answered, brooding, “I guess so. But I think I inherit more from my mother’s side, and she died in her fifties.”

“A problem arose between a young fellow I’m treating and his dad — I just had a consultation,” said Dr. Tamkin as he removed his dark gray hat.

“So early in the morning?” said Wilhelm with suspicion.

“Over the telephone, of course.”

What a creature Tamkin was when he took off his hat! The indirect light showed the many complexities of his bald skull, his gull’s nose, his rather handsome eyebrows, his vain mustache, his deceiver’s brown eyes. His figure was stocky, rigid, short in the neck, so that the large ball of the occiput touched his collar. His bones were peculiarly formed, as though twisted twice where the ordinary human bone was turned only once, and his shoulders rose in two pagoda-like points. At mid-body he was thick. He stood pigeon-toed, a sign perhaps that he was devious or had much to hide. The skin of his hands was aging, and his nails were moonless, concave, clawlike, and they appeared loose. His eyes were as brown as beaver fur and full of strange lines. The two large brown naked balls looked thoughtful — but were they? And honest — but was Dr. Tamkin honest? There was a hypnotic power in his eyes, but this was not always of the same strength, nor was Wilhelm convinced that it was completely natural. He felt that Tamkin tried to make his eyes deliberately conspicuous, with studied art, and that he brought forth his hypnotic effect by an exertion. Occasionally it failed or drooped, and when this happened the sense of his face passed downward to his heavy (possibly foolish?) red underlip.

Wilhelm wanted to talk about the lard holdings, but Dr. Tamkin said, “This father-and-son case of mine would be instructive to you. It’s a different psychological type completely than your dad. This man’s father thinks that he isn’t his son.”

“Why not?”

“Because he has found out something about the mother carrying on with a friend of the family for twenty-five years.”

“Well, what do you know!” said Wilhelm. His silent thought was, Pure bull. Nothing but buff!

“You must note how interesting the woman is, too. She has two husbands. Whose are the kids? The fellow detected her and she gave a signed confession that two of the four children were not the father’s.”

“It’s amazing,” said Wilhelm, but he said it in a rather distant way. He was always hearing such stories from Dr. Tamkin. If you were to believe Tamkin, most of the world was like this. Everybody in the hotel had a mental disorder, a secret history, a concealed disease. The wife of Rubin at the newsstand was supposed to be kept by Carl, the yelling, loud-mouthed gin-rummy player. The wife of Frank in the barbershop had disappeared with a GI while he was waiting for her to disembark at the French Lines’ pier. Everyone was like the faces on a playing card, upside down either way. Every public figure had a character-neurosis. Maddest of all were the businessmen, the heartless, flaunting, boisterous business class who ruled this country with their hard manners and their bold lies and their absurd words that nobody could believe. They were crazier than anyone. They spread the plague. Wilhelm, thinking of the Rojax Corporation, was inclined to agree that many businessmen were insane. And he supposed that Tamkin, for all his peculiarities, spoke a kind of truth and did some people a sort of good. It confirmed Wilhelm’s suspicions to hear that there was a plague, and he said, “I couldn’t agree with you more. They trade on any thing, they steal everything, they’re cynical right to the bones.”

“You have to realize,” said Tamkin, speaking of his patient, or his client, “that the mother’s confession isn’t good. It’s a confession of duress. I try to tell the young fellow he shouldn’t worry about a phony confession. But what does it help him if I am rational with him?”

“No?” said Wilhelm, intensely nervous. “I think we ought to go over to the market. It’ll be opening pretty soon.”

“Oh, come on,” said Tamkin. “It isn’t even nine o’clock, and there isn’t much trading the first hour anyway. Things don’t get hot in Chicago until half-past ten, and an hour behind us, don’t forget. Anyway, I say lard will go up, and it will. Take my word. I’ve made a study of the guilt-aggression cycle which is behind it. I ought to know something about that. Straighten your collar.”

“But meantime,” said Wilhelm, “we have taken a licking this week. Are you sure your insight is at its best? Maybe when it isn’t we should lay off and wait.”

“Don’t you realize,” Dr. Tamkin told him, “you can’t march in a straight line to the victory? You fluctuate toward it. From Euclid to Newton there was straight lines. The modern age analyzes the wavers. On my own accounts, I took a licking in hides and coffee. But I have confidence. I’m sure I’ll outguess them.” He gave Wilhelm a narrow smile, friendly, calming, shrewd, and wizard-like, patronizing, secret, potent. He saw his fears and smiled at them. “It’s something,” he remarked, “to see how the compeition-factor will manifest itself in different individuals.”

“So? Let’s go over.”

“But I haven’t had my breakfast yet.”

“I’ve had mine.”

“Come, have a cup of coffee.”

“I wouldn’t want to meet my dad.” Looking through the glass doors, Wilhelm saw that his father had left by the other exit. Wilhelm thought, He didn’t want to run into me, either. He said to Dr. Tamkin, “Okay, I’ll sit with you, but let’s hurry it up because I’d like to get to the market while there’s still a place to sit. Everybody and his uncle gets in ahead of you.”

“I want to tell you about this boy and his dad. It’s highly absorbing. The father was a nudist. Everybody went naked in the house. Maybe the woman found men with clothes attractive. Her husband didn’t believe in cutting his hair, either. He practiced dentistry. In his office he wore riding pants and a pair of boots, and he wore a green eyeshade.”

“Oh, come off it,” said Wilhelm.

“This is a true case history.”

Without warning, Wilhelm began to laugh. He himself had had no premonition of his change of humor. His face became warm and pleasant, and he forgot his father, his anxieties; he panted bearlike, happily, through his teeth. “This sounds like a horse-dentist. He wouldn’t have to put on pants to treat a horse. Now what else are you going to tell me? Did the wife play the mandolin? Does the boy join the cavalry? Oh, Tamkin, you really are a killer-diller.”

“Oh, you think I’m trying to amuse you,” said Tamkin. “That’s because you aren’t familiar with my outlook. I deal in facts. Facts always are sensational. I’ll say that a second time. Facts always! are sensational.”