hat dripping, needlessly asking the manager if he remembered.
“Yes, sir, I know,” the manager had said. He was a cold, mild, lean German who dressed correctly and around his neck wore a pair of opera glasses with which he read the board. He was an extremely correct person except that he never shaved in the morning, not caring, probably, how he looked to the fumblers and the old people and the operators and the gamblers and the idlers of Broadway uptown. The market closed at three. Maybe, Wilhelm guessed, he had a thick beard and took a lady out to dinner later and wanted to look fresh-shaven.
“Just a question,” said Wilhelm. “A few minutes ago I signed a power of attorney so Doctor Tamkin could invest for me. You gave me the blanks.”
“Yes, sir, I remember.”
“Now this is what I want to know,” Wilhelm had said. “I’m no lawyer and I only gave the paper a glance. Does this give Doctor Tamkin power of attorney over any other assets of mine - money, or property?”
The rain had dribbled from Wilhelm’s deformed, transparent raincoat; the buttons of his shirt, which always seemed tiny, were partly broken in pearly quarters of the moon, and some of the dark, thick golden hairs that grew on his belly stood out. It was the manager’s business to conceal his opinion of him; he was shrewd, gray, correct (although unshaven) and had little to say except on matters that came to his desk. He must have recognized in Wilhelm a man who reflected long and then made the decision he had rejected twenty separate times. Silvery, cool, level, long-profiled, experienced, indifferent, observant, with unshaven refinement, he scarcely looked at Wilhelm, who trembled with fearful awkwardness. The manager’s face, low-colored, long-nostriled, acted as a unit of perception; his eyes merely did their reduced share. Here was a man like Rubin, who knew and knew and knew. He, a foreigner, knew; Wilhelm, in the city of his birth, was ignorant.
The manager had said, “No, sir, it does not give him.”
“Only over the funds I deposited with you?”
“Yes, that is right, sir.”
“Thank you, that’s what I wanted to find out,” Wilhelm had said, grateful.
The answer comforted him. However, the question had no value. None at all. For Wilhelm had no other assets. He had given Tamkin his last money. There wasn’t enough of it to cover his obligations anyway, and Wilhelm had reckoned that he might as well go bankrupt now as next month. “Either broke or rich,” was how he had figured and that formula had encouraged him to make the gamble. Well, not rich; he did not expect that, but perhaps Tamkin might really show him how to earn what he needed in the market. By now, however, he had forgotten his own reckoning and was aware only that he stood to lose his seven hundred dollars to the last cent.
Dr. Tamkin took the attitude that they were a pair of gentlemen experimenting with lard and grain futures. The money, a few hundred dollars, meant nothing much to either of them. He said to Wilhelm, “Watch. You’ll get a big kick out of this and wonder why more people don’t go into it. You think the Wall Street guys are so smart- geniuses? That’s because most of us are psychologically afraid to think about the details. Tell me this. When you’re on the road, and you don’t understand what goes on under the hood of your car, you’ll worry what’ll happen if something goes wrong with the engine. Am I wrong?” No, he was right. “Well,” said Dr. Tamkin with an expression of quiet triumph about his mouth, almost the suggestion of a jeer. “It’s the same psychological principle, Wilhelm. They are rich because you don’t understand what goes on. But it’s no mystery, and by putting it in a little money and applying certain principles of observation, you begin to grasp it. It can’t be studied in the abstract. You have to take a specimen risk so that you feel the process, the money-flow, the whole complex. To know how it feels to be a seaweed you have to get in the water. In a very short time we’ll take out a hundred-per-cent profit.” Thus Wilhelm had had to pretend at the outset that his interest in the market was theoretical.
“Well,” said Tamkin when he met him now in the lobby, “what’s the problem, what is this family situation? Tell me.” He put himself forward as the keen mental scientist. Whenever this happened Wilhelm didn’t know what to reply. No matter what he said or did it seemed that Dr. Tamkin saw through him.
“I had some words with my dad.”
Dr. Tamkin found nothing extraordinary in this. “It’s the eternal same story,” he said. “The elemental conflict of parent and child. It won’t end, ever. Even with a fine old gentleman like your dad.”
“I don’t suppose it will. I’ve never been able to get anywhere with him. He objects to my feelings. He thinks they’re sordid. I upset him and he gets mad at me. But maybe all old men are alike.”
“Sons, too. Take it from one of them,” said Dr. Tamkin. “All the same, you should be proud of such a fine old patriarch of a father. It should give you hope. The longer he lives, the longer your life-expectancy becomes.”
Wilhelm answered, brooding, “I guess so. But I think I inherit more from my mother’s side, and she died in her fifties.”
“A problem arose between a young fellow I’m treating and his dad — I just had a consultation,” said Dr. Tamkin as he removed his dark gray hat.
“So early in the morning?” said Wilhelm with suspicion.
“Over the telephone, of course.”
What a creature Tamkin was when he took off his hat! The indirect light showed the many complexities of his bald skull, his gull’s nose, his rather handsome eyebrows, his vain mustache, his deceiver’s brown eyes. His figure was stocky, rigid, short in the neck, so that the large ball of the occiput touched his collar. His bones were peculiarly formed, as though twisted twice where the ordinary human bone was turned only once, and his shoulders rose in two pagoda-like points. At mid-body he was thick. He stood pigeon-toed, a sign perhaps that he was devious or had much to hide. The skin of his hands was aging, and his nails were moonless, concave, clawlike, and they appeared loose. His eyes were as brown as beaver fur and full of strange lines. The two large brown naked balls looked thoughtful — but were they? And honest — but was Dr. Tamkin honest? There was a hypnotic power in his eyes, but this was not always of the same strength, nor was Wilhelm convinced that it was completely natural. He felt that Tamkin tried to make his eyes deliberately conspicuous, with studied art, and that he brought forth his hypnotic effect by an exertion. Occasionally it failed or drooped, and when this happened the sense of his face passed downward to his heavy (possibly foolish?) red underlip.
Wilhelm wanted to talk about the lard holdings, but Dr. Tamkin said, “This father-and-son case of mine would be instructive to you. It’s a different psychological type completely than your dad. This man’s father thinks that he isn’t his son.”
“Why not?”
“Because he has found out something about the mother carrying on with a friend of the family for twenty-five years.”
“Well, what do you know!” said Wilhelm. His silent thought was, Pure bull. Nothing but buff!
“You must note how interesting the woman is, too. She has two husbands. Whose are the kids? The fellow detected her and she gave a signed confession that two of the four children were not the father’s.”
“It’s amazing,” said Wilhelm, but he said it in a rather distant way. He was always hearing such stories from Dr. Tamkin. If you were to believe Tamkin, most of the world was like this. Everybody in the hotel had a mental disorder, a secret history, a concealed disease. The wife of Rubin at the newsstand was supposed to be kept by Carl, the yelling, loud-mouthed gin-rummy player. The wife of Frank in the barbershop had disappeared with a GI while he was waiting for her to disembark at the French Lines’ pier. Everyone was like the faces on a playing card, upside down either way. Every public figure had a character-neurosis. Maddest of all were the businessmen, the heartless, flaunting, boisterous business class who ruled this country with their hard manners and their bold lies and their absurd words that nobody could believe. They were crazier than anyone. They spread the plague. Wilhelm, thinking of the Rojax Corporation, was inclined to agree that many businessmen were insane. And he supposed that Tamkin, for all his peculiarities, spoke a kind of truth and did some people a sort of good. It confirmed Wilhelm’s suspicions to hear that there was a plague, and he said, “I couldn’t agree with you more. They trade on any thing, they steal everything, they’re cynical right to the bones.”
“You have to realize,” said Tamkin, speaking of his patient, or his client, “that the mother’s confession isn’t good. It’s a confession of duress. I try to tell the young fellow he shouldn’t worry about a phony confession. But what does it help him if I am rational with him?”
“No?” said Wilhelm, intensely nervous. “I think we ought to go over to the market. It’ll be opening pretty soon.”
“Oh, come on,” said Tamkin. “It isn’t even nine o’clock, and there isn’t much trading the first hour anyway. Things don’t get hot in Chicago until half-past ten, and an hour behind us, don’t forget. Anyway, I say lard will go
