“Say, Carrie, you’ll have to get a suit for him. Something cheap, you know, at Pearlman’s,” said the father. “He’ll never get a job in those rags of his.”
“Money, money,” said Mrs. Felman in a mechanically mournful voice. “All I do is spend money. It’s terrible.”
The sound of an opening door invaded the flat tom-tom of their talk.
“It’s Al Levy,” said Mrs. Felman, with fear in her voice. “It would be a shame now if he saw Carl in this condition. Hurry, hurry, Carl, to the bathroom before he comes in here. Your father’s razor is on the shelf and I’ll get you a clean shirt from the ones you left behind. Maybe they still fit you, as I was always careful to buy them a size too large.”
Carl felt like an ignoble marionette who was being hastily mended behind the curtain for fear that he might cast ridicule upon the sleekly vacant play, and his emotions were evenly divided between amusement and contempt. Driving his heart and mind into a fitting blankness, he closed the bathroom door. Levy had a room in the Felman apartment and they treated him with an unctuous respect that almost verged upon an Oriental self-abasement. He was a man of twenty-six who worked for a wealthy uncle, received a large salary, and polished and scrubbed the limited essentials of a semi-professional man-about-town, with minor chorus girls and gamblers helping him to flatter microscopically the fatigue donated by his daily labors.
“Be very friendly to Al, please,” said Mrs. Felman, as they all sat around the dining-room table. “He’s a very smart man—works in the mail-order business, selling cheap jewelry to country people, and makes a pile of money. His seven dollars a week come in mighty handy to us, I can tell you.”
“Dammit, all business is going good except whiskey,” said Mr. Felman, as though he were inviting an elusive conspiracy to share the firmness of his tones. “These prohibition fanatics are ruining everything. The saloon-keepers are all afraid they’re gonna be closed up, and they won’t buy. I haven’t sold a barrel in two days. I don’t know what the world’s coming to with all these here prohibitions. People are entirely too busy telling each other what to do, and nobody minds his own business any more.... Well, anyway, Carl, there’s still sample bottles for you to swipe from my overcoat pockets.”
He said the last words with a bearish joviality, and had the expression of a bear who has paddled to within a mile of irony and is sniffing at the singular realm.
“Sol, don’t remind me of his old wildness,” said Mrs. Felman, with a peevish dread. “I still remember the time when he staggered along the sidewalk in front of all the neighbors. Is there anything bad that he hasn’t done, I want to know?”
One evening, just before running away from home, Carl had taken some tiny bottles of whiskey from his father’s overcoat, without curiosity, but longing for the feeling of sly self-assurance that had balanced his blood from former sneaking sips. He had repaired with the bottles to a neighboring public park and emptied them in swiftly nervous gulps, enjoying the vastly kinglike sneer at the world which had brushed aside his melancholy uncertainties.