something easy. Write down a general biquadratic equation, say.'
Gomez just looked at him. After a long pause he said in a strangled voice: 'No puedo. I can't. It too I forget. I don't think of the math or physics at all since—' He looked at Rosa and turned a little red. She smiled shyly and looked at her shoes.
'That is it,' Gomez said hoarsely. 'Not since then. Always before in the back of my head is the math, but not since then.'
'My God,' the admiral said softly. 'Can such a thing happen?' He reached for the phone.
He found out that such things can happen.
Julio went back to Spanish Harlem and bought a piece of the Porto Bello with his savings. I went back to the paper and bought a car with my savings. MacDonald never cleared the story, so the Sunday editor had the satisfaction of bulldozing an admiral, but didn't get his exclusive.
Julio and Rosa sent me a card eventually announcing the birth of their first-born: a six-pound boy, Francisco, named after Julio's father. I saved the card and when a New York assignment came my way—it was the National Association of Dry Goods Wholesalers; dry goods are important in our town—I dropped up to see them.
Julio was a little more mature and a little more prosperous. Rosa—
alas!—was already putting on weight, but she was still a pretty thing and devoted to her man. The baby was a honey-skinned little wiggler. It was nice to see all of them together, happy with their lot.
Julio insisted that he'd cook arroz con polio for me, as on the night I practically threw him into Rosa's arms, but he'd have to shop for the stuff. I went along.
In the corner grocery he ordered the rice, the chicken, the gar-banzos, the peppers, and, swept along by the enthusiasm that hits husbands in groceries, about fifty other things that he thought would be nice to have in the pantry.
The creaking old grocer scribbled down the prices on a shopping bag and began painfully to add them up while Julio was telling me how well the Porto Bello was doing and how they were thinking of renting the adjoining store.
'Seventeen dollars, forty-two cents,' the grocer said at last.
Julio flicked one glance at the shopping bag and the upside-down figures. 'Should be seventeen thirty-nine,' he said reprovingly. 'Add up again.'
The grocer painfully added up again and said, 'Is seventeen thirty-nine.
Sorry.' He began to pack the groceries into the bag.
'Hey,' I said.
We didn't discuss it then or ever. Julio just said: 'Don't tell, Beel.' And winked.
Masquerade
A man can wake one morning to read in his tabloid that his father has been shot fleeing the scene of a bank robbery. In these times there is no guarantee against the unexpected striking one down harder than a thunderbolt and almost as quick. From the vast-spreading matrix of the ordinary there may fly into your face the grotesque, the shocking, even the horrible.
Why did Leonard die?
Who were the Whelmers, silent partners in the most horrid nightmare that ever rose to walk the streets of New York?
Mac Leonard, who is now compressed into the small confines of a crematory urn, had always seemed to me to be one of the chosen of the Lord. In Columbia University, where we both studied, he was a shining campus light. I said both studied, but that is a misconception. Keeping the profligate's hours that he did, tumbling into bed dead drunk four nights out of the seven, Leonard could not possibly have studied in the ordinary sense.
Revolving the matter carefully, I realize that Leonard could not possibly have done anything in the ordinary sense. He was a blinding flash of a man; the hardest liver, the most brilliant scholar and the coolest head on the blocks-long campus was his. If he had gone to a smaller school he would have stood out like a beacon. He would probably, furthermore, have been thrown out like a bum for his vices and dissipations. As far as I was concerned, of course, they were his business. He drank and went with the Joe College set, but had no illusions about their capacities.
This was, you will remember, in the Flaming Youth era, when skirts were short and gin was aged in the porcelain for about five minutes.
Mac drank with them, but he talked with men and the rest of the grinds on the school daily and the Journal of the Columbia Philosophical Society.
It comes back to me like a nightmare that was almost funny—the deadly seriousness of the kids. Mac himself had been almost completely taken in by Mr. James Branch Cabell, who had been fortunate enough to have one of his recent puerilities barred from the mails.
Perhaps the business of the mysterious Whelmers was all my fault, for one day I made it my business to catch Mac on the fly between classes.
'Leonard,' I yelled, overtaking him.
Looking at me with the glazed eyes of a hangover, he said: 'Hi. Going in for track, old son of the lamp?' He focussed on the book I was holding out to him. 'What's that mouse-colored tome?'
'Take it. I want you to read it. My very own personally-annotated copy of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. It's about time you learned something in college.'
'Very truly yours,' he said, pocketing it and weaving off down the red brick walk. That, of course, wasn't the last of it. He came around that night—standing up his gin and jazz crowd—to chew the rug about Kant. He had actually read the book in six hours, and assimilated most of the meat.
'It is,' he said, 'quite a change-over from math and science to beat one's brow against a thing like this. Have I been neglecting the eternal verities in my pursuit of hard facts? Speak, O serpent of the thousand diamond scales.'
Modestly I assured him that that had been the idea. And what did he think of Kant in the light of his scientific attainments?
'Stinking,' said Mac briefly. 'But—at least a googolplex advanced above Mr. Cabell. Imbued with that quasi- mystic hogwash I could do naught but agree with the simple-minded laddie that the world is what you make it and that the eternal verity is to get along with one's neighbors. Your friend Kant is all wet, but by no means as wet as that.'
With that he wandered away. When I saw him next he had enrolled in several philosophy courses at the same time. In the Philosophical Society we pinned his ears back with ease whenever he tried to enter into debate, but that was only because he didn't quite know how to use the quaint language of the gentle science.
I've been rambling badly. The point that I wanted to bring out was that Mac Leonard was brilliant, as brilliant as they come in the current mortal mold. Also that he was a student of the physical sciences and the only philosophy they have, mathematics.
By a kind of miracle I survived the crash of 1929 with a young fortune in gold certificates. The miracle was an uncle who had burned his fingers in the crash of 1922 and warned me: 'When you see the board rooms crowded with people who have no business there—laundrymen, grocers, taxi drivers—then sell!' Ignoring the optimistic fictions of Mr.
Roger W. Babson, prophet of the stock exchange, now, I believe, candidate for the presidency on the Prohibition Party's ticket, I sold and came out on top. I didn't even trust to the safe deposit vaults the money I had made; it went into the fireproof, burglarproof, earthquakeproof warrens of the Manhattan Storage and Warehouse Corporation. Quick-money imbeciles who had been stuck considered me a traitor not to have lost by the crash. For years I was as good as ostracized by former friends. That was all right with me—I was a scholar and intended to remain one while my capital lasted, which it did.
A man can be a recluse in the middle of New York; that much I found out in ten years of study. It wasn't in any
