the hairs on his small hands. He wore a Countess Mara painted necktie. As Wilhelm approached, Rubin did not see him; he was looking out dreamily at the Hotel Ansonia, which was visible from his corner, several blocks away. The Ansonia, the neighborhood’s great landmark, was built by Stanford White. It looks like a baroque palace from Prague or Munich enlarged a hundred times, with towers, domes, huge swells and bubbles of metal gone green from exposure, iron fretwork and festoons. Black television antennae are densely planted on its round summits. Under the changes of weather it may look like marble or like sea water, black as slate in the fog, white as tufa in sunlight. This morning it looked like the image of itself reflected in deep water, white and cumulous above, with cavernous distortions underneath. Together, the two men gazed at it.
Then Rubin said, “Your dad is in to breakfast already, the old gentleman.”
“Oh, yes? Ahead of me today?”
“That’s a real knocked-out shirt you got on,” said Rubin. “Where’s it from, Saks?”
“No, it’s a Jack Fagman—Chicago.”
Even when his spirits were low, Wilhelm could still wrinkle his forehead in a pleasing way. Some of the slow, silent movements of his face were very attractive. He went back a step, as if to stand away from himself and get a better look at his shirt. His glance was comic, a comment upon his untidiness. He liked to wear good clothes, but once he had put it on each article appeared to go its own way. Wilhelm, laughing, panted a little; his teeth were small; his cheeks when he laughed and puffed grew round, and he looked much younger than his years. In the old days when he was a college freshman and wore a raccoon coat and a beanie on his large blonde head his father used to say that, big as he was, he could charm a bird out of a tree. Wilhelm had great charm still.
“I like this dove-gray color,” he said in his sociable, good-natured way. “It isn’t washable. You have to send it to the cleaner. It never smells as good as washed. But it’s a nice shirt. It cost sixteen, eighteen bucks.”
This shirt had not been bought by Wilhelm; it was a present from his boss—his former boss, with whom he had had a falling out. But there was no reason why he should tell Rubin the history of it. And although perhaps Rubin knew—Rubin was the king of man who knew, and knew and knew. Wilhelm also knew many things about Rubin, for that matter, about Rubin’s wife and Rubin’s business, Rubin’s health. None of these could be mentioned, and the great weight of the unspoken left them little to talk about.
“Well, y’lookin’ pretty sharp today,” Rubin said.
And Wilhelm said gladly, “Am I? Do you really think so?” He could not believe it. He saw his reflection in the glass cupboard full of cigar boxes, among the grand seals and paper damask and the gold-embossed portraits of famous men, Garcia, Edward the Seventh, Cyrus the Great. You had to allow for the darkness and deformations of the glass, but he thought he didn’t look too good. A wide wrinkle like a comprehensive bracket sign was written upon his forehead, the point between his brows, and there were patches of brown on his dark-blond skin. He began to be half amused at the shadow of his own marveling, troubled, desirous eyes, and his nostrils and his lips. Fair- haired hippopotamus!—that was how he looked to himself. He saw a big round face, a wide, flourishing red mouth, stump teeth. And the hat, too; and the cigar, too. I should have done hard labor all my life, he reflected. Hard labor that tires you out and makes you sleep. I’d have worked off my energy and felt better. Instead, I had to distinguish myself—yet.
He had put forth plenty of effort, but that was not the same as working hard, was it? And if as a young man he had got off to a bad start it was due to this very same face. Early in the nineteen-thirties, because of his striking looks, he had been very briefly considered star material, and he had gone to Hollywood. There for seven years, stubbornly, he had tried to become a screen artist. Long before that time his ambition or delusion had ended, but through pride and perhaps also through laziness he had remained in California. At last he turned to other things, but those seven years of persistence and defeat had unfitted him somehow for trades and businesses, and then it was too late to go into one of the professions. He had been slow to mature, and he had lost ground, and so he hadn’t been able to get rid of his energy and he was convinced that this energy itself had done him the greatest harm.
“I didn’t see you at the gin game last night,” said Rubin.
“I had to miss it. How did it go?”
For the last weeks Wilhelm had played gin almost nightly, but yesterday he had felt that he couldn’t afford to lose anymore. He had never won. Not once. And while the losses were small they weren’t gains, were they? They were losses. He was tired of losing, and tired also of the company, and so he had gone by himself to the movies.
“Oh,” said Rubin, “it went okay. Carl made a chump of himself yelling at the guys. This time Doctor Tamkin didn’t let him get away with it. He told him the psychological reason why.”
“What was the reason?”
Rubin said, “I can’t quote him. Who could? You know the way Tamkin talks. Don’t ask me. Do you want the
“It won’t help much to look. I know what they were yesterday at three,” said Wilhelm. “But I suppose I better had get the paper.” It seemed necessary for him to lift one shoulder in order to put his hand into his jacket pocket. There, among little packets of pills and crushed cigarette butts and strings of cellophane, the red tapes of packages which he sometimes used as dental floss, he recalled that he had dropped some pennies.
“That doesn’t sound so good,” said Rubin. He meant to be conversationally playful, but his voice had no tone and his eyes, slack and lid-blinded, turned elsewhere. He didn’t want to hear. It was all the same to him. Maybe he already knew, being the sort of man who knew and knew.
No, it wasn’t good. Wilhelm held three orders of lard in the commodities market. He and Dr. Tamkin had bought this lard together four days ago at 12.96, and the price at once began to fall and was still falling. In the mail this morning there was sure to be a call for additional margin payment. One came every day.
The psychologist, Dr. Tamkin, had got him into this. Tamkin lived at the Gloriana and attended the card game. He had explained to Wilhelm that you could speculate in commodities at one of the uptown branches of a good Wall Street house without making the full deposit of margin legally required. It was up to the branch manager. If he knew you—and all the branch managers knew Tamkin—he would allow you to make short-term purchases. You needed only to open a small account.
“The whole secret of this type of speculation,” Tamkin had told him, “is in the alertness. You have to act fast—buy it and sell it; sell it and buy in again. But quick! Get to the window and have them wire Chicago at just the right second. Strike and strike again! Then get out the same day. In no time at all you turn over fifteen, twenty thousand dollars’ worth of soy beans, coffee, corn, hides, wheat, cotton.” Obviously the doctor understood the market well. Otherwise he could not make it sound so simple. “People lose because they are greedy and can’t get out when it starts to go up. They gamble, but I do it scientifically. This is not guesswork. You must take a few points and get out. Why, ye gods!” said Dr. Tamkin with his bulging eyes, his bald head, and his drooping lips. “Have you stopped to think how much dough people are making in this market?”
Wilhelm with a quick shift from gloomy attention to the panting laugh which entirely changed his face had said, “Ho, have I ever! What do you think? Who doesn’t know it’s way beyond nineteen-twenty-eight—twenty-nine and still on the rise? Who hasn’t read the Fulbright investigation? There’s money everywhere. Everyone is shoveling it in. Money is—is—”
“And can you rest—can you sit still while this is going on?” said Dr. Tamkin. “I confess to you I can’t. I think about people, just because they have a few bucks to invest, making fortunes. They have no sense, they have no talent, they just have the extra dough and it makes them more dough. I get so worked up and tormented and restless, so restless! I haven’t even been able to practice my profession. With all this money around you don’t want to be a fool while everyone else is making. I know guys who make five, ten thousand a week just by fooling around. I know a guy at the Hotel Pierre. There’s nothing to him, but he has a whole case of Mumm’s champagne at lunch. I know another guy on Central Park South—But what’s the use of talking. They make millions. They have smart lawyers who get them out of taxes by a thousand schemes.”
“Whereas I get taken,” said Wilhelm. “My wife refused to sign a joint return. One fairly good year and I got into the thirty-two-per-cent bracket and was stripped bare. What of all my bad years?”
“It’s a businessman’s government,” said Dr. Tamkin. “You can be sure that these men making five thousand a week—”
“I don’t need that sort of money,” Wilhelm has said. “But oh! If I could only work out a little steady income from this. Not much. I don’t ask much. But how badly I need—! I’d be so grateful if you’d show me how to work it.”
