“Ach, I knew it would happen, I knew it,” said Mrs. Felman. “Here’s what you get from your ma-anooal labor! What kind of work is that for an educated boy like you? With your brains, now, you could go out on the road and sell goods. You should have more get-up about you. Mrs. Feinsthal was telling me at my whist-club today that her son Harry is making piles of money with Liebman and Company. Sells notions and knick-knacks. You could easy do the same if you had any sense in your head.”
“Carrie’s right, this slavery is no work for a smart man,” said Mr. Felman. “Any fool, you know, can work with his hands, but it takes real intelligence to make a man buy something. I want you to be able to laugh at people, and feel independent, and not be a poor schlemiel all your life.”
“Well, you’ve been a travelling salesman for twenty years,” said Carl, with a weary smile, “and before that you tried a general merchandise store, but it doesn’t seem to have brought you much money or happiness. You recommend a treacherous wine. The thing that you’ve fought for has always scarred and eluded you. What’s the reason?”
Mr. Felman lowered his head while the round fatness of his face revealed a huddled confusion of emotions in which shame and annoyance predominated. He sat, tormenting his greyish red moustache, as though it were a fraudulent badge, and gazing with still eyes at a newspaper which he was not reading.
“Perhaps I’ve inherited nothing from you save your curious inability at making money,” said Carl, trying to feel a ghost of compassion for this petrified, minor soldier lost in the uproar of a battle but still worshipping his glittering general. “You’ve spent all of your life in chasing a frigid will-o’-the-wisp, made out of the lining of your heart, and you want me to stumble after the same mutilated futility. You’re not unintelligent, as far as business ability goes, and yet, you’ve always been doomed to a kind of respectable poverty. Something else within you must have constantly fought with another delusion to produce such a result. You can’t simply blame it on luck—that’s an overworked excuse. Perhaps you failed to win your god because you’ve never been able to teach efficiency and strength to the spirit of cruelty within you. You have not been remorselessly shrewd, my father, and now you are paying the penalty.”
“Well, because I’ve been a fool that’s no sign that you should be one, too,” answered Mr. Felman in a voice of reluctant and secretly tortured self-reproach. “Yes, I’ve been too kind-hearted for my own good, dammit, but I want that you should be different. It’s been too easy for people to swindle me. Yes, I want you to show them something that your poor old father couldn’t. Yes. And as for your talk about chasing money, tell me, how can a man live decent without plenty of money? How can he?”
“We would have our nice store this very minute if your father had listened to me,” said Mrs. Felman, mournfully. “He never would let me handle the reins. I know how to be firm with people, believe me, but your father would always give credit to every Tom-Dick-and-Harry that walked into the store. And whenever he did have money he always gambled it away. Gambling has been the ruination of his life! All of your wildness, Carl, has come from your father’s side and not from mine!”
Mr. Felman looked at his son with an embarrassed admission of secret sins, while for a moment he became a faun lamenting his awkwardness, and his uneasy smile quivered as it tried to say: “Alas, I am not so much better than you are, my crazy, foolish son.” Carl grinned in return and for the first time in his life was on the verge of feeling a slight communion with his shamefaced father. As the mother went on with her endless story of the father’s crimes and incapacities the rubbing of her words produced a glimmer of ill-temper.
“Noo, don’t you ever stop?” he cried. “Always nagging about the past! I might be a rich man now if you hadn’t driven me crazy with your endless complaints and hollering. Never a moment of peace from the day I married you.”
“I’ll have to give both of you something else to complain about,” said Carl. “I’m going to stop working for a while and write poetry, and send it away to magazines.”