Saul Bellow - Collected Stories

Wilhelm was reluctant to part with his good mood. The doctor had little sense of humor. He was looking at him earnestly.

“I’d bet you any amount of money,” said Tamkin, “that the facts about you are sensational.”

“Oh–ha, ha! You want them? You can sell them to a true confession magazine.”

“People forget how sensational things are that they do. They don’t see it on themselves. It blends into the background of their daily life.”

Wilhelm smiled. “Are you sure this boy tells you the truth?”

“Yes, because I’ve known the whole family for years.”

“And you do psychological work with your own friends? I didn’t know that was allowed.”

“Well, I’m a radical in the profession. I have to do good wherever I can.”

Wilhelm’s face became ponderous again and pale. His whitened gold hair lay heavy on his head, and he clasped uneasy fingers on the table. Sensational, but oddly enough, dull, too. Now how do you figure that out? It blends with the background. Funny but unfunny. True but false. Casual but laborious, Tamkin was. Wilhelm was suspicious of him when he took his driest tone.

“With me,” said Dr. Tamkin, “I am at my most efficient when I don’t need the fee. When I only love. Without a financial reward. I remove myself from the social influence. Especially money. The spiritual compensation is what I look for. Bringing people into the here-and-now. The real universe. That’s the present moment. The past is no good to us. The future is full of anxiety. Only the present is real — the here-and-now. Seize the day.”

“Well,” said Wilhelm, his earnestness returning. “I know you are a very unusual man. I like what you say about here-and-now. Are all the people who come to see you personal friends and patients too? Like that tall handsome girl, the one who always wears those beautiful broomstick skirts and belts?”

“She was an epileptic, and a most bad and serious pathology, too. I’m curing her successfully. She hasn’t had a seizure in six months, and she used to have one every week.”

“And that young cameraman, the one who showed us those movies from the jungles of Brazil, isn’t he related to her?”

“Her brother. He’s under my care, too. He has some terrible tendencies, which are to be expected when you have an epileptic sibling. I came into their lives when they needed help desperately, and took hold of them. A certain man forty years older than she had her in his control and used to give her fits by suggestion whenever she tried to leave him. If you only knew one per cent of what goes on in the city of New York! You see, I understand what it is when the lonely person begins to feel like an animal. When the night comes and he feels like howling from his window like a wolf. I’m taking complete care of that young fellow and his sister. I have to steady him down or he’ll go from Brazil to Australia the next day. The way I keep him in the here-and-now is by teaching him Greek.”

This was a complete surprise! “What, do you know Greek?”

“A friend of mine taught me when I was in Cairo. I studied Aristotle with him to keep from being idle.”

Wilhelm tried to take in these new claims and examine them. Howling from the window like a wolf when night comes sounded genuine to him. That was something really to think about. But the Greek! He realized that Tamkin was watching to see how he took it. More elements were continually being added. A few days ago Tamkin had hinted that he had once been in the underworld, one of the Detroit Purple Gang. He was once head of a mental clinic in Toledo. He had worked with a Polish inventor on an unsinkable ship. He was a technical consultant in the field of television. In the life of a man of genius, all of these things might happen. But had they happened to Tamkin? Was he a genius? He often said that he had attended some of the Egyptian royal family as a psychiatrist. “But everybody is alike, common or aristocrat,” he told Wilhelm. “The aristocrat knows less about life.”

An Egyptian princess whom he had treated in California, for horrible disorders he had described to Wilhelm, retained him to come back to the old country with her, and there he had had many of her friends and relatives under his care. They turned over a villa on the Nile to him. “For ethical reasons, I can’t tell you many of the details about them,” he said — but Wilhelm had already heard all these details, and strange and shocking they were, if true. If true — he could not be free from doubt. For instance, the general who had to wear ladies’ silk stockings and stand otherwise naked before the mirror — and all the rest. Listening to the doctor when he was so strangely factual, Wilhelm had to translate his words into his own language, and he could not translate fast enough or find terms to fit what he heard.

“Those Egyptian big shots invested in the market, too, for the heck of it. What did they need extra money for? By association, I almost became a millionaire myself, and if I had played it smart there’s no telling what might have happened. I could have been the ambassador.” The American? The Egyptian ambassador? “A friend of mine tipped me off on the cotton. I made a heavy purchase of it. I didn’t have that kind of money, but everybody there knew me. It never entered their minds that a person of their social circle didn’t have dough. The sale was made on the phone. Then, while the cotton shipment was at sea, the price tripled. When the stuff suddenly became so valuable all hell broke loose on the world cotton market, they looked to see who was the owner of this big shipment. Me! They investigated my credit and found out I was a mere doctor, and they canceled. This was illegal. I sued them. But as I didn’t have the money to fight them I sold the suit to a Wall Street lawyer for twenty thousand dollars. He fought it and was winning. They settled with him out of court for more than a million. But on the way back from Cairo, flying, there was a crash. All on board died. I have this guilt on my conscience, of being the murderer of that lawyer. Although he was a crook.”

Wilhelm thought, I must be a real jerk to sit and listen to such impossible stories. I guess I am a sucker for people who talk about the deeper things of life, even the way he does.

“We scientific men speak of irrational guilt, Wilhelm,” said Dr. Tamkin, as if Wilhelm were a pupil in his class. “But in such a situation, because of the money, I wished him harm. I realize it. This isn’t the time to describe all the details, but the money made me guilty. M oney and M urder both begin with M . M achinery. M ischief.”

Wilhelm, his mind thinking for him at random, said, “What about M ercy? M ilk-of-human-kindness?”

“One fact should be clear to you by now. Moneymaking is aggression. That’s the whole thing. The functionalistic explanation is the only one. People come to the market to kill. They say, ‘I’m going to make a killing.’ It’s not accidental. Only they haven’t got the genuine courage to kill, and they erect a symbol of it. The money. They make a killing by a fantasy. Now, counting and number is always a sadistic activity. Like hitting. In the Bible, the Jews wouldn’t allow you to count them. They knew it was sadistic.”

“I don’t understand what you mean,” said Wilhelm. A strange uneasiness tore at him. The day was growing too warm and his head felt dim. “What makes them want to kill?”

“By and by, you’ll get the drift,” Dr. Tamkin assured . him. His amazing eyes had some of the rich dryness of a brown fur. Innumerable crystalline hairs or spicules of light glittered in their bold surfaces. “You can’t understand without first spending years on the study of the ultimates of human and animal behavior, the deep, chemical, organismic, and spiritual secrets of life. I am a psychological poet.”