“That’s amazing,” a woman said.
“What’s so amazing about it, lady?” Perlmutter demanded.
“Well, it’s amazing, that’s all,” the woman said uneasily.
“There I beg to disagree,” Perlmutter said fiercely. “Where are my pills? Where are they? They must have dropped out of my pocket during the demonstration. Who has a flashlight? Darling, run get a flashlight from the house. Ask for the gardener. The gardener has to come out sometimes in the middle of the night after rainstorms to see the damage to the flowers. He’d have a flashlight.”
“Here they are, Doctor,” a man said, handing him a small flat box.
“Thank you.” Perlmutter opened the box and took out two shiny white pills and popped them into his mouth. He waited until they dissolved before he spoke again. “Interesting about these pills,” he said. “There’s a direct correlation between a society and the form of its medicines. In Ur-societies — in no place in my forty-seven published works do I ever use the pejorative word ‘primitive’—among people whose cultures the lady here describes as ‘amazing,’ the medicines are always taken in their raw states. Bark. Herbs. Grasses. Flowers. That’s natural, of course, but I mean they aren’t even cooked. But wait. In cultures like Tahiti where the people have seen Europeans — let’s face it, white men are Europeans — but live apart from them, they begin to prepare the medicines. The bark is scraped, the flowers are pressed for their juices. Now, in only partially industrialized societies, or in economically underprivileged areas like Poland or Nazi Spain, the medicines are almost invariably in a liquid solution. Only in technocracies do you find tablets, pills. Why? It’s no cheaper to prepare a liquid solution than a pill. The only reason for this phenomenon is that a liquid solution is closer to a natural form and has a counterpart in nature — water, sap, flowing lava, et cetera. The pill, however, has no counterpart in nature and thus flourishes only in a society like ours.”
“That’s amazing,” the same woman said.
Perlmutter glared at her. “It’s obvious to me, lady, that you’ve had no formal intercourse either with science or with scientists. Everything amazes you! The world exists as a fiction for you, does it?” He put another pill in his mouth and, impatient for it to dissolve, began to speak thickly, careful not to crunch it with his teeth. He had a very strong New York accent, but pronounced his words, burdened even as they were by the pill, with a distinctness that made me believe English was a second language for him. One felt he might have learned the language and the accent at two different times; he sounded somehow like a ventriloquist who had confused his normal voice with the voice of his dummy. Even in the dim light, and though he was still sitting, I could tell that he was an extraordinarily slight man. His face was clear, and very pale. He seemed indeed a little Yid, everybody’s tailor, everybody’s Talmudic scholar — like someone who still took piano lessons at forty. Nevertheless, his head, brittle as it seemed in the watery light, gave the same impression of weight and value that I had observed in other great men. He had the same odd precision about his body, the same carved aspect to his features, and, despite the fact that he was the only man there not in a tuxedo, the same faint dapperness. Of course, I realized, hadn’t I been thinking in terms of the ventriloquist and his dummy? Of the miniature reproductions of statues? There was something doll-like about the great. Here was a new substance, that’s all, something satirical and a little vicious.
“You’re a victim of a Philadelphia civilization which smothers credulity,” Dr. Perlmutter said. “That’s the difference between you and the so-called primitive — only a difference of the heart. The savage isn’t shocked by the world, and you are. He can believe in appeasable rain gods, in implacable demons, and you can’t. You say he’s more naïve. I say he’s more sophisticated. Your sophistication consists in saying ‘No, no,’ or, when the evidence or the authority is irrefutable, ‘Amazing. Amazing,’ while his sophistication, like my own, consists in a willingness to concede everything. Tell me, lady, when you saw the newsreels of Buchenwald did you say then, as you do to me, ‘Amazing, amazing’?” He looked accusingly at the rest of us. “The Philadelphia fascist mentality makes me sick,” he said. “Help me up!”
Whether by design or unconsciously, he offered his hand to the same woman he had been attacking. With a terrible self-effacement she reached down and pulled him to his feet. She was not a tall woman, but when he stood he came only to her shoulders. He pushed through the crowd. “I’m going inside,” he announced.
The others made room for him. I ran after him. He was going toward the house. I couldn’t risk going inside after him, so I stopped him on the lawn.
“Dr. Perlmutter,” I said.
He looked around at me. “Call me Morty,” he said.
“I’m James Boswell.”
A little piece of Dr. Perlmutter’s index finger was missing. We shook hands. “There’s a little piece of my index finger missing,” Dr. Perlmutter said, “but nobody ever notices it until I tell them about it.”
We walked along toward the house. Morty had a slight limp. “I’ll let you don’t notice my limp,” he said.
“Are you limping, Morty?” I asked. His left shoulder was slightly higher than his right.
“Yes,” he said. “It’s my left shoulder. It’s just a little higher than my right. I try to have my clothes cut to compensate for it. You’ve got to be loyal to your own culture.”
“That’s right,” I said.
We walked along. “You know what a lot of that Nobel Prize dough is going for?” Morty said. “Suits.”
“You can get a lot of suits with all that money,” I said.
“Appearance is very important in our culture,” Morty said solemnly.
Walking next to him I could see that his nose had an odd down-plunging aspect to it.
“My nose was broken once in the jungle and improperly set by a medicine man. It was so long before I got back to a non-Ur civilization that the bones had already healed. I think it’s too late to do anything about it. Probably people don’t notice, but I’m conscious of it.”
“Was your nose broken, Morty?”
“Kid,” he said, “I’m a dying Jewish anthropologist.”
We were on the steps of the Gibbenjoys’. “Morty, don’t let’s go in there,” I said.
“Why not? Gibbenjoy is all right.”
“He called you a little Yid,” I said desperately.
“He what?” Morty exploded. “When did he say that?”
“Before. When you were saying all those interesting things on the lawn to his guests.”
“He did, did he? Let go of my arm. Let go of my arm, damn it, I need a pill.” I let him put a pill in his mouth. He pushed past me.
“Where’s Gibbenjoy?” he asked Miller angrily.
“I think Gibbenjoy is in the library, sir.”
“Come on, Morty,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”
I looked at Miller nervously, but he didn’t seem to remember who I was so I brushed past him and rushed after Morty. He must have been familiar with the house, for he was hurrying in what I supposed was the direction of the library. “The library’s always on the ground floor in these places,” he called back, stretching his neck over the shoulder that was slightly higher than the other one. “Conspicuous consumption,” he explained spitefully. He pushed through a double door. We were in the dining room. “Come on,” he said. I followed him into another room, a sort of office. An elderly man was kissing the young lady I had spoken to on the bench. “Where’s the damn library?” Morty yelled.