loaded with dough, probably. And I bet he doesn’t give his children any. Some of them must be in their fifties. This is what keeps middle-aged men as children. He’s master over the dough. Think — just think! Who controls everything? Old men of this type. Without needs. They don’t need therefore they have. I need, therefore I don’t have. That would be too easy.
“I’m older even than Churchill,” said Rappaport.
Now he wanted to talk! But if you asked him a question in the market, he couldn’t be bothered to answer.
“I bet you are,” said Wilhelm. “Come, let’s get going.”
“I was a fighter, too, like Churchill,” said the old man. “When we licked Spain I went into the Navy. Yes, I was a gob that time. What did I have to lose? Nothing. A the battle of San Juan Hill, Teddy Roosevelt kicked me off the beach.”
“Come, watch the curb,” said Wilhelm.
“I was curious and wanted to see what went on. I didn’t have no business there, but I took a boat and rowed myself to the beach. Two of our guys was dead, layin’ under the American flag to keep the flies off. So I says to the guy on duty, there, who was the sentry, ‘Let’s have a look at these guys. I want to see what went on here,’ and he says, ‘Naw,’ but I talked him into it. So he took off the flag and there were these two tall guys, both gentlemen, lying in their boots. They was very tall. The two of them had long mustaches. They were high-society boys. I think one of them was called Fish, from up the Hudson, a big-shot family. When I looked up, there was Teddy Roosevelt, with his hat off, and he was looking at these fellows, the only ones who got killed there. Then he says to me, ‘What’s the Navy want here? Have you got orders?’ ‘No, sir,’ I says to him. ‘Well, get the hell off the beach, then.’
Old Rappaport was very proud of this memory. “Everything he said had such snap, such class. Man! I love that Teddy Roosevelt,” he said, “I love him!”
Ah, what people are! He is almost not with us, and his life is nearly gone, but T. R. once yelled at him, so he loves him. I guess it is love, too. Wilhelm smiled. So maybe the rest of Tamkin’s story was true, about the ten children and the wives and the telephone directory.
He said, “Come on, come on, Mr. Rappaport,” and hurried the old man back by the large hollow elbow; he gripped it through the thin cotton cloth. Re-entering the brokerage office where under the lights the tumblers were speeding with the clack of drumsticks upon wooden blocks, more than ever resembling a Chinese theater, Wilhelm strained his eyes to see the board.
The lard figures were unfamiliar. That amount couldn’t be lard! They must have put the figures in the wrong slot. He traced the line back to the margin. It was down to .19, and had dropped twenty points since noon. And what about the contract of rye? It had sunk back to its earlier position, and they had lost their chance to sell.
Old Mr. Rappaport said to Wilhelm, “Read me my wheat figure.”
“Oh, leave me alone for a minute,” he said, and positively hid his face from the old man behind one hand. He looked for Tamkin, Tamkin’s bald head, or Tamkin with his gray straw and the cocoa-colored band. He couldn’t see him. Where was he? The seats next to Rowland were taken by strangers. He thrust himself over the one on the aisle, Mr. Rappaport’s former place, and pushed at the back of the chair until the new occupant, a redheaded man with a thin, determined face, leaned forward to get out of his way but would not surrender the seat. “Where’s Tamkin?” Wilhelm asked Rowland.
“Gee, I don’t know. Is anything wrong?”
“You must have seen him. He came in a while back.”
“No, but I didn’t.”
Wilhelm fumbled out a pencil from the top pocket of his coat and began to make calculations. His very fingers were numb, and in his agitation he was afraid he made mistakes with the decimal points and went over the subtraction and multiplication like a schoolboy at an exam. His heart, accustomed to many sorts of crisis, was now in a new panic. And, as he had dreaded, he was wiped out. It was unnecessary to ask the German manager. He could see for himself that the electronic bookkeeping device must have closed him out. The manager probably had known that Tamkin wasn’t to be trusted, and on that first day he might have warned him. But you couldn’t expect him to interfere.
“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.”
VII
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.