SEIZE THE DAY
305
as he stood by Rubin's showcase with his
Tribune
to recall the crazy
course of the true events. 'I didn't seem even to realize that there was
a Depression. How could I have been such a jerk as not to prepare
for anything and just go on luck and inspiration.' With round gray
eyes expanded and his large shapely lips closed in severity toward
himself he forced open all that had been hidden. 'Dad I couldn't
affect one way or another. Mama was the one who tried to stop me,
and we carried on and yelled and pleaded. The more I lied the
louder I raised my voice, and charged-like a hippopotamus. Poor
Mother! How I disappointed her.' Rubin heard Wilhelm give a
broken sigh as he stood with the forgotten
Tribune
crushed under
his arm.
When Wilhelm was aware that Rubin watched him loitering and
idle, apparently not knowing what to do with himself this morning,
he turned to the Coca-Cola machine. He swallowed hard at the coke
bottle and coughed over it, but he ignored his coughing for he was
still thinking, his eyes upcast and his lips closed behind his hand. By
a peculiar twist of habit he wore his coat collar turned up always, as
though there were a wind. It never lay flat. But on his broad back,
stooped with its own weight, its strength warped almost into deform–
ity, the collar of his sports coat appeared anyway to be no wider than
a ribbon.
He was listening to the sound of his own voice as he explained,
twenty-five years ago in the living room on West End Avenue, "But
Mother, if I don't pan out as an actor I can still go back to school."
But she was afraid he was going to destroy himself. She said.
"Wilky, Dad could make it easy for you
if
you wanted to go into
medicine." To remember this stifled him.
"I can't stand hospitals. Besides, I might make a mistake and
hurt someone or even kill a patient. I couldn't stand that. Besides, I
haven't got that sort of brains."
Then his mother had made the mistake of mentioning her
nephew Artie, Wilhelm's cousin who was an honor student at
Columbia in math and languages. That dark little gloomy Artie
with his disgusting narrow face, and his moles and selfish sniffing
ways and his unclean table manners, the boring habit he had of con–
jugating verbs when you went for a walk with him. "Romanian is
an easy language. You just add a
-tl
to everything." He was now a
