' 318
PARTISAN
REVIEW
the putty was broken and the white enamel on the frames was
streaming with wrinkles.
"Ha, Wilky," said the old man to his tardy son. "You haven't
met our neighbor Mr. Perls, have you? From the fifteenth floor."
"How d'do," Wilhelm said. He did not welcome this stranger;
he began at once to find fault with him. Mr. Perls carried a heavy
cane with a crutch tip. Dyed hair, a skinny forehead-these were
not reasons for bias. Nor was it Mr. Perls's fault that Dr. Adler was
using him, not wishing to have breakfast with his son alone. But a
gruffer voice within Wilhelm spoke, asking, Who is this damn, frazzle–
faced herring with his dyed hair and his fish teeth and this drippy
mustache? Another one of Dad's German friends. Where does he
collect all these guys? What is the stuff on his teeth? I never saw
such pointed crowns. Are they stainless steel, or a kind of silver?
How can
<t
human face get into this condition. U ch! Staring with
his widely spaced gray eyes, Wilhelm sat, his broad back stooped
under the sports jacket. He clasped his hands on the table with an
implication of suppliance. Then he began to relent a little toward
Mr. Perls, beginning at the teeth. Each of those crowns represented
a tooth ground to the quick, and estimating a man's grief with his
teeth as two per cent of the total, and adding to that his flight from
Germany and the probable origin of his wincing wrinkles, not to be
confused with the wrinkles of his smile, it came to a sizable load.
"Mr. Perls was a hosiery wholesaler," said Dr. Adler.
"Is this the son you told me was in the selling line?" said
Mr. Perls.
Dr. Adler replied, "I have only this one son. One daughter.
She was a medical technician before she got married-anesthetist. At
one time she had an important position in Mount Sinai."
H e couldn't mention his children without boasting. In Wilhelm's
opinion , there was little to boast of. Catherine, like Wilhelm, was
big and fair-haired. She had married a court reporter who had a
pretty hard time of it. She had taken a professional name, too–
Philippa. At forty she was still ambitious to become a painter. Wil–
helm didn't venture to criticize her work. It didn't do much to him,
he said, but then he was no critic. Anyway, he and his sister were
generally on the outs and he didn't often see her paintings. She
worked very hard, but there were fifty thousand people in New
