Saul Bellow - Collected Stories

“You get hit?” said Mr. Rowland.

And Wilhelm, quite coolly, said, “Oh, it could have been worse, I guess.” He put the piece of paper into his pocket with its cigarette butts and packets of pills. The lie helped him out — although, for a moment, he was afraid he would cry. But he hardened himself. The hardening effort made a violent, vertical pain go through his chest, like that caused by a pocket of air under the collar bones. To the old chicken millionaire, who by this time had become acquainted with the drop in rye and lard, he also denied that anything serious had happened. “It’s just one of those temporary slumps. Nothing to be scared about,” he said, and remained in possession of himself. His need to cry, like someone in a crowd, pushed and jostled and abused him from behind, and Wilhelm did not dare turn. He said to himself, I will not cry in front of these people. I’ll be damned if I’ll break down in front of them like a kid, even though I never expect to see them again. No! No! And yet his unshed tears rose and rose and he looked like a man about to drown. But when they talked to him, he answered very distinctly. He tried to speak proudly.

“…going away?” he heard Rowland ask.

“What?”

“I thought you might be going away too. Tamkin said he was going to Maine this summer for his vacation.”

“Oh, going away?”

Wilhelm broke off and went to look for Tamkin in the men’s toilet. Across the corridor was the room where the machinery of the board was housed. It hummed and whirred like mechanical birds, and the tubes glittered in the dark. A couple of businessmen with cigarettes in their fingers were having a conversation in the lavatory. At the top of the closet door sat a gray straw hat with a cocoa-colored band. “Tamkin,” said Wilhelm. He tried to identify the feet below the door. “Are you in there, Doctor Tamkin?” he said with stifled anger. “Answer me. It’s Wilhelm.”

The hat was taken down, the latch lifted, and a stranger came out who looked at him with annoyance.

“You waiting?” said one of the businessmen. He was warning Wilhelm that he was out of turn.

“Me? Not me,” said Wilhelm. “I’m looking for a fellow.” Bitterly angry, he said to himself that Tamkin would pay him the two hundred dollars at least, his share of the original deposit. “And before he takes the train to Maine, too. Before he spends a penny on vacation — that liar! We went into this as equal partners.”

I was the man beneath; Tamkin was on MY back, and I thought I was on his. He made me carry him, too, besides Margaret. Like this they ride on me with hoofs and claws. Tear me to pieces, stamp on me and break my bones.

Once more the hoary old fiddler pointed his bow at Wilhelm as he hurried by. Wilhelm rejected his begging and denied the omen. He dodged heavily through traffic and with his quick, small steps ran up the lower stairway of the Gloriana Hotel with its dark-tinted mirrors, kind to people’s defects. From the lobby he phoned Tamkin’s room, and when no one answered he took the elevator up. A rouged woman in her fifties with a mink stole led three tiny dogs on a leash, high-strung creatures with prominent black eyes, like dwarf deer, and legs like twigs. This was the eccentric Estonian lady who had been moved with her pets to the twelfth floor.

She identified Wilhelm. “You are Doctor Adler’s son,” she said.

Formally, he nodded.

“I am a dear friend of your father.”

He stood in the corner and would not meet her glance, and she thought he was snubbing her and made a mental note to speak of it to the doctor.

The linen-wagon stood at Tamkin’s door, and the chambermaid’s key with its big brass tongue was in the lock.

Has Doctor Tamkin been here?” he asked her.

“No, I haven’t seen him.”

Wilhelm came in, however, to look around. He examined the photos on the desk, trying to connect the faces with the strange people in Tamkin’s stories. Big, heavy volumes were stacked under the double-pronged TV aerial. Science and Sanity, he read, and there were several books of poetry. The Wall Street Journal hung in separate sheets from the bed-table under the weight of the silver water jug. A bathrobe with lightening streaks of red and white was laid across the foot of the bed with a pair of expensive batik pajamas. It was a box of a room, but from the windows you saw the river as far uptown as the bridge, as far downtown as Hoboken. What lay between was deep, azure, dirty, complex, crystal, rusty, with the red bones of new apartments rising on the bluffs of New Jersey, and huge liners in their berths, the tugs with matted beards of cordage. Even the brackish tidal river smell rose this high, like the smell of mop water. From every side he heard pianos, and the voices of men and women singing scales and opera, all mixed, and the sounds of pigeons on the ledges.

Again Wilhelm took the phone. “Can you locate Doctor Tamkin in the lobby for me?” he asked. And when the operator reported that she could not, Wilhelm gave the number of his father’s room, but Dr. Adler was not in either. “Well, please give me the masseur. I say the massage room. Don’t you understand me? The men’s health club. Yes, Max Schilper’s — how am I supposed to know the name of it?”

There a strange voice said, “Toktor Adler?” It was the old Czech prizefighter with the deformed nose and ears who was attendant down there and gave out soap, sheets, and sandals. He went away. A hollow endless silence followed. Wilhelm flickered the receiver with his nails, whistled into it, but could not summon either the attendant or the operator.

The maid saw him examining the bottles of pills on Tamkin’s table and seemed suspicious of him. He was running low on Phenaphen pills and was looking for something else. But he swallowed one of his own tablets and, went out and rang again for the elevator. He went down to the health club. Through the steamy windows, when he emerged, he saw the reflection of the swimming pool swirling green at the bottom of the lowest stairway. He went through the locker-room curtains. Two men wrapped in towels were playing Ping-pong. They were awkward and the ball bounded high. The Negro in the toilet was shining shoes. He did not know Dr. Adler by name, and Wilhelm descended to the massage room. On the tables naked men were lying. It was not a brightly lighted place, and it was very hot, and under the white faint moons of the ceiling shone pale skins. Calendar pictures of pretty girls dressed in tiny fringes were pinned on the wall. On the first table, eyes deeply shut in heavy silent luxury lay a man with a full square beard and short legs, stocky and black-haired. He might have been an orthodox Russian. Wrapped in a sheet, waiting, the man beside him was newly shaved and red from the steambath. He had a big happy face and was dreaming. And after him was an athlete, strikingly muscled, powerful and young, with a strong white curve to his genital and a half-angry smile on his mouth. Dr. Adler was on the fourth table, and Wilhelm stood over his father’s pale, slight body. His ribs were narrow and small, his belly round, white, and high. It had its own being, like something separate. His thighs were weak, the muscles of his arms had fallen, his throat was creased.

The masseur in his undershirt bent and whispered in his ear, “It’s your son,” and Dr. Adler opened his eyes into Wilhelm’s face. At once he saw the trouble in it, and by an instantaneous reflex he removed himself from the danger of contagion, and he said serenely, “Well, have you taken my advice, Wilky?”

“Oh, Dad,” said Wilhelm.

“To take a swim and get a massage?”