Collected Stories

grandfather you had inherited such and such a head of hair which looks like honey when it whitens or sugars in the jar; from another, broad thick shoulders; an oddity of speech from one uncle, and small teeth from another, and the wide gray eyes with darkness diffused even into the whites, and a wide-lipped mouth like a statue from Peru. Wandering races have such looks, the bones of one tribe, the skin of another. From his mother he had gotten sensitive feelings, a soft heart, a brooding nature, a tendency to be confused under pressure.

The changed name was a mistake, and he would admit it as freely as you liked. But this mistake couldn’t be undone now, so why must his father continually remind him how he had sinned? It was too late. He would have to go back to the pathetic day when the sin was committed. And where was that day. Past and dead. Whose humiliating memories were these? His and not his father’s. What had he to think back on that he could call good? Very, very little. You had to forgive. First, to forgive yourself, and then general forgiveness. Didn’t he suffer from his mistakes far more than his father could.

“Oh God,” Wilhelm prayed. “Let me out of my trouble. Let me out of my thoughts, and let me do something better with myself. For all the time I have wasted I am very sorry. Let me out of this clutch and into a different life. For I am all balled up. Have mercy.”

II

The clerk who gave it to him did not care what sort of appearance he made this morning. He only glanced at him from under his brows, upward, as the letters changed hands. Why should the hotel people waste courtesies on him? They had his number. The clerk knew that he was handing him, along with the letters, a bill for his rent. Wilhelm assumed a look that removed him from all such things. But it was bad. To pay the bill he would have to withdraw money from his brokerage account, and the account was being watched because of the drop in lard. According to the Tribune’s figures lard was still twenty points below last year’s level. There were government price supports. Wilhelm didn’t know how these worked but he understood that the farmer was protected and that the SEC kept an eye on the market and therefore he believed that lard would rise again and he wasn’t greatly worried as yet. But in the meantime his father might have offered to pick up his hotel tab. Why didn’t he? What a selfish old man he was! He saw his son’s hardships; he could so easily help him. How little it would mean to him, and how much to Wilhelm! Where was the old man’s heart? Maybe, thought Wilhelm, I was sentimental in the past, and exaggerated his kindliness—warm family life. It may never have been there.

Not long ago his father had said to him in his usual affable, pleasant way, “Well, Wilky, here we are under the same roof again, after all these years.”

Wilhelm was glad for an instant. At last they would talk over old times. But he was also on guard against insinuations. Wasn’t his father saying, “Why are you here in a hotel with me and not at home in Brooklyn with your wife and two boys. You’re neither a widower nor a bachelor. You have brought me all your confusions. What do you expect me to do with them?”

So Wilhelm studied the remark for a bit, then said, “The roof is twenty-six stories up. But how many years has it been?”

“That’s what I was asking you.”

“Gosh, Dad, I’m not sure. Wasn’t it the year Mother died? What year was that?”

He asked this question with an innocent frown on his Golden Grimes, dark blond face. What year was it! As though he didn’t know the year, the month, the day, the very hour of his mother’s death.

“Wasn’t it nineteen thirty-one?” asked Dr. Adler.

“Oh, was it?” said Wilhelm. And in hiding the sadness and the overwhelming irony of the question he gave a nervous shiver and wagged his head and felt the ends of his collar rapidly.

“Do you know?” his father said. “You must realize, an old fellow’s memory becomes unreliable. It was in winter, that I’m sure of. Nineteen-thirty-two?”

Yes, it was age. Don’t make an issue of it, Wilhelm advised himself. If you were to ask the old doctor in what year he had interned, he’d tell you correctly. All the same, don’t make an issue. Don’t quarrel with your own father. Have pity on an old man’s failings.

“I believe the year was closer to nineteen-thirty-four, Dad,” he said.

But Dr. Adler was thinking. Why the devil can’t he stand still when we’re talking? He’s either hoisting his pants up and down by the pockets or jittering with his feet. A regular mountain of tics, he’s getting to be. Wilhelm had a habit of moving his feet back and forth as though, hurrying into a house, he had to clean his shoes first on the doormat.

Then Wilhelm had said, “Yes, that was the beginning of the end, wasn’t it, Father?”

Wilhelm often astonished Dr. Adler. Beginning of the end? What could he mean—what was he fishing for? Whose end? The end of family life? The old man was puzzled but he would not give Wilhelm an opening to introduce his complaints. He had learned that it was better not to take up Wilhelm’s strange challenges. So he merely agreed pleasantly, for he was a master of social behavior, and said, “It was an awful misfortune for us all.”

He thought, What business has he to complain to me of his mother’s death?

Face to face they had stood, each declaring himself silently after his own way. It was: it was not; the beginning of the end—some end.

Unaware of anything odd in his doing it, for he did it all the time, Wilhelm had pinched out the coal of his cigarette and dropped the butt in his pocket, where there were many more. And as he gazed at his father the little finger of his right hand began to twitch and tremble; of that he was unconscious, too.

And yet Wilhelm believed that when he put his mind to it he could have perfect and even distinguished manners, outdoing his father. Despite the slight thickness in his speech—it amounted almost to a stammer when he started the same phrase over several times in his effort to eliminate the thick sound—he could be fluent. Otherwise he would never have made a good salesman. He claimed also that he was a good listener. When he listened he made a tight mouth and rolled his eyes thoughtfully. He would soon tire and begin to utter short, loud, impatient breaths, and he would say, “Oh yes… yes… yes. I couldn’t agree more.” When he was forced to differ he would declare, “Well I’m not sure. I don’t really see it that way. I’m of two minds about it.” He would never willingly hurt any man’s feelings.

But in conversation with his father he was apt to lose control of himself. After any talk with Dr. Adler, Wilhelm generally felt dissatisfied, and his dissatisfaction reached its greatest intensity when they discussed family matters. Ostensibly he had been trying to help the old man to remember a date, but in reality he meant to tell him, “You were set free when Ma died. You’d like to get rid of Catherine, too. Me, too. You’re not kidding anyone”— Wilhelm striving to put this across, and the old man not having it. In the end he was left struggling, while his father seemed unmoved.

And then once more Wilhelm had said to himself, “But man! you’re not a kid. Even then you weren’t a kid!” He looked down over the front of his big, indecently big, spoiled body. He was beginning to lose his shape, his gut was fat, and he looked like a hippopotamus. His younger son called him “a hummuspotamus”; that was little Paul. And here he was still struggling with his old dada, filled with ancient grievances. Instead of saying, “Good-by, youth! Oh, good-by those marvelous, foolish wasted days. What a big clunk I was—I am.”

Wilhelm was still paying heavily for his mistakes. His wife Margaret would not give him a divorce, and he had to support her and the two children. She would regularly agree to divorce him, and then think things over again and set new and more difficult conditions. No court would have awarded her the amounts he paid. One of today’s letters, as he had expected, was from her. For the first time he had sent her a postdated check, and she protested. She also enclosed bills for the boys’ educational insurance policies, due next week. Wilhelm’s mother-in-law had taken out these policies in Beverly Hills, and since her death two years ago he had to pay the premiums. Why couldn’t she have minded her own business! They were his kids, and he took care of them and always would. He had planned to set up a trust fund. But that was on his former expectations. Now he had to rethink the future, because of the money problem. Meanwhile, here were the bills to be paid. When he saw the two sums punched out so neatly on the cards he cursed the company and its IBM equipment. His heart and his head were congested with anger. Everyone was supposed to have money. It was nothing to the company. They published pictures of funerals