Saul Bellow - Collected Stories

He managed to find a table, and Dr. Tamkin came along with a tray piled with plates and cups. He had Yankee pot roast, purple cabbage, potatoes, a big slice of watermelon, and two cups of coffee. Wilhelm could not even swallow his yogurt. His chest pained him still.

At once Tamkin involved him in a lengthy discussion. Did he do it to stall Wilhelm and prevent him from selling out the rye — or to recover the ground lost when he had made Wilhelm angry by hints about the neurotic character? Or did he have no purpose except to talk?

“I think you worry a lot too much about what your wife and your father will say. Do they matter so much?”

Wilhelm replied, “A person can become tired of looking himself over and trying to fix himself up. You can spend the entire second half of your life recovering from the mistakes of the first half.”

“I believe your dad told me he had some money to leave you.”

“He probably does have something.”

“A lot?”

“Who can tell,” said Wilhelm guardedly.

“You ought to think over what you’ll do with it.”

“I may be too feeble to do anything by the time I get it. If I get anything.”

“A thing like this you ought to plan out carefully. Invest it properly.” He began to unfold schemes whereby you bought bonds, and used the bonds as security to buy something else and thereby earned twelve per cent safely on your money. Wilhelm failed to follow the details. Tamkin said, “If he made you a gift now, you wouldn’t have to pay the inheritance taxes.”

Bitterly, Wilhelm told him, “My father’s death blots out all other considerations from his mind. He forces me to think about it, too. Then he hates me because he succeeds. When I get desperate — of course I think about money. But I don’t want anything to happen to him. I certainly don’t want him to die.” Tamkin’s brown eyes glittered shrewdly at him. “You don’t believe it. Maybe it’s not psychological. But on my word of honor, a joke is a joke, but I don’t want to joke about stuff like this. When he dies, I’ll be robbed, like I’ll have no more father.”

“You love your old man?”

Wilhelm grasped at this. “Of course, of course I love him. My father. My mother—” As he said this there was a great pull at the very center of his soul. When a fish strikes the line you feel the live force in your hand. A mysterious being beneath the water, driven by hunger, has taken the hook and rushes away and fights, writhing. Wilhelm never identified what struck within him. It did not reveal itself. It got away.

And Tamkin, the confuser of the imagination, began to tell, or to fabricate, the strange history of his father. “He was a great singer,” he said. “He left us five kids because he fell in love with an opera soprano. I never held it against him, but admired the way he followed the life-principle. I wanted to do the same. Because of unhappiness, at a certain age, the brain starts to die back.” (True, true! thought Wilhelm.) “Twenty years later I was doing experiments in Eastman Kodak, Rochester, and I found the old fellow. He had five more children.” (False, false!) “He wept; he was ashamed. I had nothing against him. I naturally felt strange.”

“My dad is something of a stranger to me, too,” said Wilhelm, and he began to muse. Where is the familiar person he used to be? Or I used to be? Catherine — she won’t even talk to me any more, my own sister. It may not be so much my trouble that Papa turns his back on as my confusion. It’s too much. The ruins of life, and on top of that confusion — chaos and old night. Is it an easier farewell for Dad if we don’t part friends? He should maybe do it angrily– “Blast you with my curse!” And why, Wilhelm further asked, should he or anybody else pity me; or why should I be pitied sooner than another fellow? It is my childish mind that thinks people are ready to give it just because you need it.

Then Wilhelm began to think about his own two sons and to wonder how he appeared to them, and what they would think of him. Right now he had an advantage through baseball. When he went to fetch them, to go to Ebbets Field, though, he was not himself. He put on a front but he felt as if he had swallowed a fistful of sand. The strange, familiar house, horribly awkward; the dog, Scissors, rolled over on his back and barked and whined. Wilhelm acted as if there were nothing irregular, but a weary heaviness came over him. On the way to Flatbush he would think up anecdotes about old Pigtown and Charlie Ebbets for the boys and reminiscences of the old stars, but it was very heavy going. They did not know how much he cared for them. No. It hurt him greatly and he blamed Margaret for turning them against him. She wanted to ruin him, while she wore the mask of kindness. Up in Roxbury he had to go and explain to the priest, who was not sympathetic. They don’t care about individuals, their rules come first. Olive said she would marry him outside the Church when he was divorced. But Margaret would not let go. Olive’s father was a pretty decent old guy, an osteopath, and he understood what it was all about. Finally he said, “See here, I have to advise Olive. She is asking me. I am mostly a freethinker myself, but the girl has to live in this town.” And by now Wilhelm and Olive had had a great many troubles and she was beginning to dread his days in Roxbury, she said. He trembled at offending this small, pretty, dark girl whom he adored. When she would get up late on Sunday morning she would wake him almost in tears at being late for Mass. He would try to help her hitch her garters and smooth out her slip and dress, even put on her hat with shaky hands; then he would rush her to church and drive in second gear in his forgetful way, trying to apologize and to calm her. She got out a block from church to avoid gossip. Even so she loved him, and she would have married him if he had obtained the divorce. But Margaret must have sensed this. Margaret would tell him he did not really want a divorce; he was afraid of it. He cried, “Take everything I’ve got, Margaret. Let me go to Reno. Don’t you want to marry again?” No. She went out with other men, but took his money. She lived in order to punish him.

Dr. Tamkin told Wilhelm, “Your dad is jealous of you.”

Wilhelm smiled. “Of me? That’s rich.”

“Sure. People are always jealous of a man who leaves his wife.”

“Oh,” said Wilhelm scornfully. “When it comes to wives he wouldn’t have to envy me.”

“Yes, and your wife envies you, too. She thinks, He’s free and goes with young women. Is she getting old?”

“Not exactly old,” said Wilhelm, whom the mention of his wife made sad. Twenty years ago, in a neat blue wool suit, in a soft hat made of the same cloth — he could plainly see her. He stooped his yellow head and looked under the hat at her clear, simple face, her living eyes moving, her straight small nose, her jaw beautifully painfully clear in its form. It was a cool day, but smelled the odor of pines in the sun, in the granite canyon. Just south of Santa Barbara, this was.

“She’s forty-some years old,” he said.

“I was married to a lush,” said Tamkin. “A painful alcoholic. I couldn’t take her out to dinner because she’d say she was going to the ladies’ toilet and disappear in the bar. I’d ask the bartenders they shouldn’t serve her. But I loved her deeply. She was the most spiritual woman of my entire experience.”

“Where is she now?”

“Drowned,” said Tamkin. “At Provincetown, Cape Cod. It must have been a suicide. She was that way — suicidal. I tried everything in my power to cure her. Because,” said Tamkin, “my real calling is to be a healer. I get wounded. I suffer from it. I would like to escape from the sicknesses of others, but I can’t. I am only on loan to myself, so to speak. I belong to humanity.”