Saul Bellow - Collected Stories

“Did you get my note?” said Wilhelm.

“Yes, but I’m afraid you’ll have to ask somebody else, because I can’t. I had no idea you were so low on funds. How did you let it happen? Didn’t you lay anything aside?”

“Oh, please, Dad,” said Wilhelm, almost bringing his hands together in a clasp.

“I’m sorry,” said the doctor. “I really am. But I have set up a rule. I’ve thought about it, I believe it is a good rule, and I don’t want to change it. You haven’t acted wisely. What’s the matter?”

“Everything. Just everything. What isn’t? I did have a little, but I haven’t been very smart.”

“You took some gamble? You lost it? Was it Tamkin? I told you, Wilky, not to build on that Tamkin. Did you? I suspect—”

“Yes, Dad, I’m afraid I trusted him.”

Dr. Adler surrendered his arm to the masseur, who was using wintergreen oil.

“Trusted! And got taken?”

“I’m afraid I kind of—” Wilhelm glanced at the masseur but he was absorbed in his work. He probably did not listen to conversations. “I did. I might as well say it. I should have listened to you.”

“Well, I won’t remind you how often I warned you. It must be very painful.”

“Yes, Father, it is.”

“I don’t know how many times you have to be burned in order to learn something. The same mistakes, over and over.”

“I couldn’t agree with you more,” said Wilhelm with a face of despair. “You’re so right, Father. It’s the same mistakes, and I get burned again and again. I can’t seem to — I’m stupid, Dad, I just can’t breathe. My chest is all up — I feel choked. I just simply can’t catch my breath”

He stared at his father’s nakedness. Presently he became aware that Dr. Adler was making an effort to keep his temper. He was on the verge of an explosion. Wilhelm hung his face and said, “Nobody likes bad luck, eh Dad?”

“So! It’s bad luck, now. A minute ago it was stupidity.”

“It is stupidity — it’s some of both. It’s true that I can’t learn. But I—”

“I don’t want to listen to the details,” said his father. “And I want you to understand that I’m too old to take on new burdens. I’m just too old to do it. And people who will just wait for help — must wait for help. They have got to stop waiting.”

“It isn’t all a question of money — there are other things a father can give to a son.” He lifted up his gray eyes and his nostrils grew wide with a look of suffering appeal that stirred his father even more deeply against him.

He warningly said to him, “Look out, Wilky, you’re tiring my patience very much.”

“I try not to. But one word from you, just a word, would go a long way. I’ve never asked you for very much. But you are not a kind man, Father. You don’t give the little bit I beg you for.”

He recognized that his father was now furiously angry. Dr. Adler started to say something, and then raised himself and gathered the sheet over him as he did so. His mouth opened, wide, dark, twisted, and he said to Wilhelm, “You want to make yourself into my cross. But I am not going to pick up a cross. I’ll see you dead, Wilky, by Christ, before I let you do that to me.”

“Father, listen! Listen!”

“Go away from me now. It’s torture for me to look at you, you slob!” cried Dr. Adler.

Wilhelm’s blood rose up madly, in anger equal to his father’s, but then it sank down and left him helplessly captive to misery. He said stiffly, and with a strange sort of formality, “Okay, Dad. That’ll be enough. That’s about all we should say.” And he stalked out heavily by the door adjacent to the swimming pool and the steam room, and labored up two long flights from the basement. Once more he took the elevator to the lobby on the mezzanine. He inquired at the desk for Dr. Tamkin.

The clerk said, “No, I haven’t seen him. But I think there’s something in the box for you.”

“Me? Give it here,” said Wilhelm and opened a telephone message from his wife. It read, “Please phone Mrs. Wilhelm on return. Urgent.”

Whenever he received an urgent message from his wife he was always thrown into a great fear for the children. He ran to the phone booth, spilled out the change from his pockets onto the little curved steel shelf under the telephone, and dialed the Digby number.

“Yes?” said his wife. Scissors barked in the parlor.

“Margaret?”

“Yes, hello.” They never exchanged any other greeting. She instantly knew his voice.

“The boys all right?”

“They’re out on their bicycles. Why shouldn’t they be all right? Scissors, quiet!”

“Your message scared me,” he said. “I wish you wouldn’t make ‘urgent’ so common.”

“I had something to tell you.”

Her familiar unbending voice awakened in him a kind of hungry longing, not for Margaret but for the peace he had once known.

“You sent me a postdated check,” she said. “I can’t allow that. It’s already five days past the first. You dated your check for the twelfth.”

“Well, I have no money. I haven’t got it. You can’t send me to prison for that. I’ll be lucky if I can raise it by the twelfth.”

She answered, “You better get it, Tommy.”

“Yes? What for?” he said. “Tell me. For the sake of what? To tell lies about me to everyone? You—”

She cut him off. “You know what for. I’ve got the boys to bring up.”

Wilhelm in the narrow booth broke into a heavy sweat. He dropped his head and shrugged while with his fingers he arranged nickels, dimes, and quarters in rows. “I’m doing my best,” he said. “I’ve had some bad luck. As a matter of fact, it’s been so bad that I don’t know where. I am. I couldn’t tell you what day of the week this is. I can’t think straight. I’d better not even try. This has been one of those days, Margaret. May I never live to go through another like it. I mean that with all my heart. So I’m not going to try to do any thinking today. Tomorrow I’m going to see some guys. One is a sales manager. The other is in television. But not to act,” he hastily added. “On the business end.”

“That’s just some more of your talk, Tommy,” she said. “You ought to patch things up with Rojax Corporation. They’d take you back. You’ve got to stop thinking like a youngster.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well,” she said, measured and unbending, remorselessly unbending, “you still think like a youngster. But you can’t do that any more. Every other day you want to make a new start. But in eighteen years you’ll be eligible for retirement. Nobody wants to hire a new man of your age.”

“I know. But listen, you don’t have to sound so hard. I can’t get on my knees to them. And really you don’t have to sound so hard. I haven’t done you so harm.”

“Tommy, I have to chase you and ask you for money that you owe us, and I hate it.”

She hated also to be told that her voice was hard.

“I’m making an effort to control myself,” she told him.

He could picture her, her graying bangs cut with strict fixity above her pretty, decisive face. She prided herself on being fair-minded. We could not bear, he thought, to know what we do. Even though blood is spilled, though the breath of life is taken from someone’s nostrils. This is the way of the weak; quiet and fair. And then smash! They smash!

“Rojax take me back? I’d have to crawl back. They don’t need me. After so many years I should have got stock in the firm. How can I support the three of you, and live myself, on half the territory? And why should I even try when you won’t lift a finger to help? I sent you back to school, didn’t I? At that time you said—”