“Downtown, I should think,” the old man said calmly, “but it’s probably closed.”
“Oh, come on,” Morty said impatiently.
We went up a staircase. Morty kept putting pills into his mouth. “It’s even worse than I thought,” he said, talking this time over the lower shoulder and appearing oddly taller, “inconspicuous conspicuous consumption. Did you know that there is no word for ’snob’ in any but the Indo-European family of languages?” On the second- floor landing he chose a huge set of double doors and marched through.
There were about a half dozen men in the room. They were smoking cigars and drinking sherry. It was the first time I had ever seen anything quite like it and I was sorry that Morty was about to spoil it.
“Gibbenjoy?” Morty demanded.
By this time he had so many pills in his mouth that it was hard to understand him. “Gibbenjoy?”
“Yes?” Gibbenjoy said, breaking away from the men to whom he had been talking. “Ah, Perlmutter.”
“So I’m a little Yid, am I? Evidently the Nobel committee in Stockholm takes a different view of little Yids than people in Philadelphia. I’m a little Yid with the Nobel Prize. A little Yid with four brothers, all of them brilliant psychiatrists. A little Yid who earned the only doctoral degree ever awarded by the Columbia University Night School. A little Yid who’s been married six times and never had to bury a single wife and who during one of those times was married to a full-blooded black African princess six feet two inches tall. A little Yid who used to drive a taxi in the streets of New York and pulled a rickshaw for ten months in the city of Hong Kong, the only occidental ever so privileged. Also I speak fluently eight European languages, and thirty-one dialects of African and Indian tribes, including Hopi and Shawnee in this country. So that’s your idea of a little Yid, is it? Well, fuck you, Gibbenjoy.”
“Come on, Morty,” I said.
Gibbenjoy stared open-mouthed. If I had bewildered him before, Perlmutter astonished him now. He looked from Morty to me. “What have you to do with all this?” he asked me.
I looked at Morty. He was waiting patiently for me to deliver my evidence. I looked back at Gibbenjoy, rapidly calculating which of my hopelessly severed loyalties was liable to produce the most enduring results.
“You and the whole anti-Semitic crew aren’t worth the little piece of index finger Morty gave to science,” I said drunkenly. “Come on, Morty, let’s get away from these Nazis.” I pulled him with me out of the room. Since his angry speech to Gibbenjoy he seemed calmer, almost sedate.
“You were wonderful, Morty,” I said. I could believe in Morty’s courage though I had no reason to believe in the need for it.
Morty shrugged carelessly. It was neither a modest gesture nor sententious self-effacement. Morty would never buff elegant fingernails down well-bred lapels. His movement seemed instead rather hopeless, and I felt a brief panic of guilt.
“I thought Hitler would have finished all that,” he said quietly.
I nodded helplessly. “Well,” I said, “let’s get out of here.” A little extravagantly, I motioned for him to precede me down the staircase.
He went down the stairs apathetically and we left the house.
“Wait a minute,” I said, “I left my hat and coat in a tree. Wait right here.” I ran off to get them. When I returned a minute later Morty was sitting on the wide patio steps, his elbows on his knees. His chin was in his hands.
“Are you all right, Morty?”
He looked up at me sadly and pointed to his mouth.
“Are you dissolving a pill, Morty?” He nodded. I waited while Morty’s pill dissolved. “Morty, how did you come here tonight? Did you drive?”
Morty swallowed deeply. “I drove,” he said in a minute.
I looked down the long necklace of cars in Gibbenjoy’s curving driveway. “Which is yours, Mort?”
He pointed listlessly down the driveway, indicating a place somewhere near the gates. “It’s a Forty-seven Buick,” he said softly.
“Well, come on,” I said. “You’d better give me the keys.” I pulled him up gently. “Come on, Morty, we can’t stay here.”
I led him down the drive past the shiny Cadillacs and Lincolns and Rollses. Chauffeurs in funereal livery lounged against the highly polished fenders talking quietly to each other, or sat, the driver’s doors thrown widely open, staring vacantly at the tips of their boots.
We came to Morty’s car, black and blocky and vaguely powerful. It was the car of a traveling salesman who did a lot of driving alone and carried his sample cases in the back seat and missed his family. I had a sudden surge of feeling for its owner when I saw it. I imagined him in some midwestern university town on a week night in the winter. He was there to give a lecture and he couldn’t read the street signs very well and he moved with stiff effort inside his heavy overcoat and his thick gloves.
“Shall I drive, Morty? You seem a little tired.”
“Yeah,” he said, “all right. You drive.” He gave me a ring of keys on a dirty bit of string. There were only a few keys on it.
I opened the door for Morty. “Well, where to?” I said when I was sitting behind the wheel.
“Listen,” he said, “there’s really no need for you to leave the party.”
“Come on, Morty, after what I said to Gibbenjoy?”
“Yes,” he said, “I suppose you’re right. I hope I didn’t get you into trouble with him. He’s very powerful.”
“That’s of no importance, Morty,” I said. “I wish you’d put that out of your mind. Everything’s all right.”
“Well,” he said, “I hope so.”
“How about a hamburger, Morty? I know a place on Market Street that’s open all night. Cabbies and cops eat there. And truckers.” I was thinking of the Maryland Café. It was across from the Love.
“All right,” he said without enthusiasm.
We drove through the curving, wooded suburbs of the wealthy and into the city. Beside me Morty sat with his head resting on the back of the seat and this thin short legs stretched out. His eyes were closed. I felt very good, very powerful. I was driving through the streets of the city with the world’s newest Nobel Prize winner beside me. It didn’t bother me at all that I’d practically had to capture him to have him with me in this way. What would General Manara do with someone like Morty? The Mortys were his company clerks. What would Hope Fayespringer do with him? Or Gibbenjoy? He was better off with me. I smiled to myself. I was a Nobel Prize winner winner.
We went down a cobblestoned street with two sets of streetcar tracks. I skidded in one of the ruts and jolted the car in pulling it out. Morty woke up.
“Feel better, Morty?”
He took out his box and put two more pills into his mouth.
I turned onto Market Street, drove down it to the Maryland and pulled near the curb a few doors away from the restaurant. “This is it, Dr. Perlmutter,” I said.
Morty revived when we walked into the café. It was a big place with wide red-plasţic-covered booths along two walls. Down the center of the room was a double row of booths. A counter with stools ran along the back; behind it were grills and ice cream freezers and shelves with small boxes of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes and Rice Krispies and red and white cans of Campbell’s soups. The whole place was lit by strings of long fluorescent tubes that hung exposed from the ceiling.
Morty seemed pleased. “This is very nice,” he said. “This is really nice.”
“Yes,” I said. I had picked it because it was the only place in Philadelphia I knew. I always ate there.