THE EINHORNS
635
down so hard. This was the food of the house, in the system of
its normalcy like its odors and furnishings, and if you were the visit–
ing albatross come to light, you'd eat the food you ne'er had eat and
offer no gripe. The Commissioner, Einhorn and Dingbat asked no
questions about it but ate a great deal, with tea or coca cola as usual.
Then Einhorn took a white spoonful of Bisodol and a glass of
Waukesha water for his gas. He made a joke of it but he
n~ver
forgot to take them and heeded
all
his processes with much serious–
ness, careful that his tongue was not too coated and his machinery
smooth. Very grave, he was sometimes, when he acted as his own
physician. He liked to say that he was fatal to doctors, especially to
those who had never given him much hope. "I buried two of them,"
he said. "Each one told me I'd be gone in a year, and before the
year was out he croaked." It made him feel good to tell other
doctors of this. Still, he was zealous about taking care of himself;
and with this zeal he had a brat's self-mockery about the object of
his cares, bottomless self-ribbing; he let
his
tongue droop over his
lip, comic and stupid, and made dizzy crosses with his eyes. Never–
theless, he was always thinking about his health and took his powders
and iron and liver pills. You might almost say he followed assimilation
with his thoughts; all through his body that death had already
moved in on, to the Washington of his brain, to his sex and study–
ing eyes. Ab, sure, he was still a going concern, very much so, but
he had to take thought more than others did about themselves, since
if
he
went wrong he was a total loss, nowise justified, a dead account,
a basket case, an encumbrance, zero. I knew this because he ex–
pressed everything and though he wouldn't talk openly about the
money he had in the bank or the property he owned, he was abso–
lutely outspoken about vital things and he'd open his mind to me,
especially when we were together in his study and busy with one
of his projects that got more fanciful and muddled the more notions
he had about being systematic, so that in the end there'd be a
super monstrous apparatus you couldn't set in motion either by
push or crank.
"Augie, you know another man in my position might be out
of life for good. There's a view of man anyhow that he's only a
sack of craving guts; you find it in Hamlet, as much as you want
of it. What a piece of work is a man, and the firmament fretted with
