“I don’t know,” I said. “Why?”
“I don’t know why,” Morty said, suddenly weary.
“Morty,” I said.
“It’s no good. I can’t even state the problem.”
“It is good, Dr. Perlmutter,” I said.
“It stinks.”
“Work on it, Morty.”
“Do you want this candy?” Morty asked. “I break out.” He shoved the candy across the table to me.
It was painful to see him subdued again. I wondered if he had a third and fourth wind. What he said about the names had excited me. After all, if I had a field, that was it — brand names. The grand brands of the great. I wished Morty would go on, but I saw that he wouldn’t. He was tired, bored. I decided to find out more about him.
We sat quietly for a few moments. When the waitress came over and took our orders I ordered a hamburger and potatoes. Morty wanted tea.
“Morty,” I asked after a while, “was that all true what you told Gibbenjoy? About the six wives and all the rest?”
“Certainly it’s true.”
“You’d have to be eighty-five years old,” I said admiringly.
“I’m fifty-six,” he answered sadly.
I was astonished. He seemed fifteen years younger.
The waitress brought our food. I was hungry and ate my hamburger quickly. I offered Morty some French fried potatoes, but he hook his head. He played with the little tag attached by a string to the tea bag inside the pot.
“Morton’s tea,” he said, showing me the tag.
“You could still work it out.”
He ignored me. “Well, maybe I saved myself in time on that one. It’s too bad it’s such horseshit. You see how it is? That’s the sort of thing I have to depend on. ‘The key to the culture.’ Right in the old home town, the old back yard, Grandma’s trunk in the attic. I’m too old for anything else now.”
“Too old, I said. “I thought you were about forty.
“Appearance and reality, sonny. The real key to the culture. Intrigue, secret letters, what the President really said, what really happened. Inside stuff!”
“That’s true,” I said. “That’s very true.”
“What do you know about it?”
“I believe,” I said, “that certain people are in control of everything that happens, and that unless we find out about them we can’t know about ourselves.”
“Infant,” he said, “I know about myself. I’m a dying Jewish anthropologist. Too old for the really important things in the field. It’s changing. There’s Coca-Cola in the jungle. It’s all different now. The new stuff is about the death of the old cultures. It’s a de-mystification process. There are medicine men at Oxford, chiefs in Harvard Law School. You get to a place you think is still raw and the UN has been there before you. They’re singing folk songs. They’re not wild. Do you understand that? They’re not wild any more, all those savages. They’re just like everybody else now, or soon will be.”
“Is that bad?”
“It’s terrible,” he said. “It’s awful.” He closed his eyes. “There ought to be killing. There ought to be blood. Murder. Atrocity. My beauties have their violence intact. It won’t be all that easy for the new men. They could have their tape recorders smashed.” He laughed softly.
“You talk as though you were retiring.”
“It’s too hard,” he said. “Tuberculosis is the anthropologist’s disease, did you know that?”
“Really?”
“Sure,” he said. “TB and the various jaundices. I’ve had them all. And six wives. Can you imagine that, a little shrimp like me? I’m a very licentious man,” he said softly. “I became interested in anthropology because of the color photographs of the bare-breasted native girls in The National Geographic.” He looked at me to see if I believed him. I did.
“What the hell,” he said, “it was a life. If you waste it you waste it.”
“You didn’t waste it. You’ve got the Nobel Prize.”
He laughed.
“You’ve got the Nobel Prize, Morty.”
“For work I did eighteen years ago,” he said. “Anyway, what has that got to do with it?” One prize. I’m a man of appetite. I need committees in all the world capitals; I need clamor.” He called the waitress over. “I’ll have some more tea, please, sweetheart,” he said. His elbow was against her thigh. “Have you read my books?” he asked me.“The Proper Study of Mankind. Chicago University Press. Four volumes. Six ninety-five each. The proper study of mankind. I failed, do you know that? Don’t breathe a word to Stockholm. I failed. I tried to get at their savagery, their violence. Somehow it all came out sweet. The worst things sounded like the acts of naïve, unsophisticated children — like those cartoons in The New Yorker where the cannibals roast the missionaries in big kettles. I’m a satirist. No one understood that. Have you read my books?”
“No, Morty, I haven’t yet.”
“‘A popularizer.’ That’s what the professionals call me. ‘Not serious.’ The Journal of International Anthropology said that. ‘Not serious.’ I’m serious, I’m serious.
“Of course,” I said. “I’m serious too.”
“It’s the impulses,” he said. “I’ve lost my energy in impulses, but even the impulses never interfered with my seriousness. It was what I really saw in the jungle. They could do it… I don’t know… gracefully. They made impulse seem calm. Not me. I still had the other thing— the civilization, the good manners at the last minute. Still, I have leaped before I have looked. I have pounced on my life,” he said bitterly. “Now I pay. I pay and pay.” He groaned.
“Morty?”
“What is it?”
“What is the proper study of mankind?”
“It’s man,” he said. “At his worst.”
“No,” I said. “It’s men at their best. I’m a kind of anthropologist, too. Morty, you’re a great man.”
“I am not finally a public person,” he said.
The waitress brought our check and this time Morty didn’t even look at her. He poured the last of the tea into his cup and smiled. “Look at me,” he said, “I won the Nobel Prize less than a week ago and I’m sitting in a fly-specked café drinking tea with some kid I don’t even know. Always I get the kids. What’s your name? I don’t remember your name.”
“It’s Boswell,” I said.
“‘A popularizer.’ Well, maybe so. I’ve always been very interested in the education of the sorority girl. Maybe all my professional life I’ve been writing to the chubby knees in the first row. None of my wives have been Jewish, do you know that? I mean, what the hell kind of a record is that for a man who can’t hear a dialect story without getting sick? Christ, what am I doing here, Boswell? I should never have left that party.”
I moved uneasily in the booth. “We had to get out of there. After what Gibbenjoy said, how could you stay?”
“What Gibbenjoy said. I didn’t even hear him. Impulse. Always impulse.”
“Morty, he’s nothing.”
“What do you know about it? He’s a rich, generous man.”
“He called you a little Yid.”
“What am I, tall?”
“Morty.”
“Forget it. I’m persona non grata now.”
I was a little alarmed. I couldn’t understand why he seemed so worried about Gibbenjoy. This wasn’t a third wind; it was a fresh wind in a new race. “What difference does it make?” I said.