But then, of course, he couldn’t be. After all, even if — picking me were a stunt, the ultimate act of arbitrary power, transmogrification of frog into prince, why, at least he could see prince somewhere within the rolls and folds of frog flap. Anyway, this is what I thought then, when I still lived behind my adolescent pimples and worried (even after I had fathered a child) whether girls would kiss me. But in a way, that kind of skill still amazes me. Any sort of insight does. I am mystified, too, by music coming from portable radios, and by the novelist’s induction of character through a description of his hero’s bone structure. I remember one book I read where everyone in a family was against a proposed daughter-in- law because when they met her they all felt she looked sickly. I can never tell when someone looks sickly. Broken bones, yes, because that’s surface. Blindness, arthritis, mumps and measles. Beyond that I cannot go. Some can. I can’t. Maybe that’s why I must talk to people, ask them leading questions, put them in contrived situations, turn the pressure on. I want to hear them yell for help. That I can understand. I suppose Herlitz saw all this. That Herlitz!
What else could he see? My clothes? I dress like a sergeant in civvies — seven-ninety-five slacks in Webster’s-New-Collegiate Dictionary-cover blue, wastepaper-basket green, woodwork brown; two-ninety-five white short-sleeve shirts, or white short-sleeve shirts with speckles of color; brown Toby Tyler shoes. That I was an only child? Really, this is embarrassing. It is not my method to speak of myself — or rather, of my past. I find I can barely remember it. At any rate, since I cannot speak uncritically if I speak at length, I will speak briefly.
My name is James Boswell. My parents are dead. My mother, poor woman, died when I was seven and left me to be raised by my father until I was ten. Then he died. My father left me his taste in clothes and his sister with whom I lived until I was fourteen, when she died. A sister of my mother brought me along until I was sixteen. She died and I reverted back to my father’s side, where a bachelor uncle took me the rest of the way.
I am thirty-five years old, but I have a son twenty. He was born out of wedlock to a fifteen-year-old girl who died bearing him. Her parents took my child in exchange ’ for their own. He knows me and who I am.
That kind of childhood gives a kid a pretty solid taste in funerals, but not much else. Of course, a real knowledge of funerals is no small thing. In a way, it qualifies one for life. It gives one, too, a certain sense of transience. Maybe that helps to explain my fascination with famous men. The famous are not transients at all, and this is odd. They spend so much time being guests one might think there would be something impermanent about them, but it’s not so. Of course they die, but I don’t mean that. Everybody dies. And all this wailing about Ozymandias is a pile of crap. They remember his name, yes? They get it right in the papers, no?
Herlitz shouldered the others aside and came right toward me. “Him,” he said, pointing at me with his cane. “Come,” he said. “Come, come.” He turned to Kohler, the principal. “We can be alone, where?”
I trailed behind the two of them, and every so often Kohler would pause, turn around, and look at me. I knew he was trying to remember my name, who played no piano, who made no speeches in the assembly hall, who shot no baskets. “Come. Come,” Herlitz said, although Kohler led us. He seemed to say it as much to himself as to Kohler or me, as though he were dissatisfied with a merely implicit urgency. The great, I remember thinking, are articulate. I followed Herlitz, his checkered jacket in the heavily dated Clark Gable style, his white, widely belled trousers, his old man’s white shoes. From behind, his impatience manifest in the angry taps of his cane, he suggested something strongly imperial, a cousin of the prince, an arch archduke. The high school corridor might have been the czar’s green lawn, Herlitz’s cane, a croquet mallet.
Kohler stopped. “You may use Mr. Fossier’s office.” He opened the door and Herlitz went in. I stood clumsily just inside the threshold, feeling as I have in doctors’ examining rooms when faced with more than one chair to sit in. Herlitz was as alien in that office as I was myself, of course — more, presumably, since I had been there before and he had not. But the great, as I say, are used to being guests, used to using other people’s facilities. He took command easily behind Fossier’s desk, placing his cane carefully across the faces of Fossier’s children beaming ceilingward beneath the desk’s glass top.
“Come,” Herlitz said angrily. I sat across the room from him primly, feeling queerly like a woman.
Herlitz glared at me without speaking.
It’s a test, I thought, afraid even of shifting in the chair. Look, my life was on the line. I knew his reputation. Suppose I made a mistake. Suppose I accidentally sat down as an actor would sit down, or maybe even as the secretary I felt like. Suppose Herlitz wasn’t that good. Suppose he couldn’t see that it wasn’t really me sitting there. I had to trust him, had to trust his test. I thought of the examining room again, remembering the seemingly dissociated questions of doctors who had quizzed me. You have a pain in your back. “Do you like bananas?” the doctor asks. Your elbow tingles. “Have you ever been sued by a Frenchman?” he wants to know. We don’t see how, but they’re able to tell a great deal from our answers.
Herlitz continued to stare at me. “Do you know Freud?” he asked finally, speaking so softly I could barely hear him.
“The psychiatrist,” I said.
“One of the five greatest Jews,” Herlitz said.
I nodded agreeably.
“Name them,” he said.
I could not seem to speak. I looked at Herlitz guiltily, shaking my head. This man who before had struck me as so impatient suddenly seemed content, massively placid and serene. We might have been passengers together in an open car, riding smoothly at dusk past beautiful fields.
“Moses,” he said. He seemed to exhale the word.
“Moses, yes,” I said.
“Christ,” he said.
“Christ.”
“Marx,” he said.
“Marx.”
“Einstein,” he said.
“Einstein.”
“And Freud.”
I nodded again, but not just agreeably this time. I could not tell what had come over me.
“Only Freud and Einstein I knew,” he said. “I just missed Marx.”
“You know Einstein?” I said.
“Einstein only twelve people in the world understand. I know ten of them.” He leaned forward. “Listen,” he said. “We can’t waste time. I killed a man.”
I stared at him.
“Okay,” he said, “here’s how it happened. It was in connection with Schmerler.”
“Schmerler.”
“That’s what I said.”
“You killed him?”
“Killed Schmerler? What are you talking about? I loved Schmerler.” He sighed. “I did him early. There have been many great men since but I’m proudest of him, I think.” He coughed. “He was my baby,” he said shyly.
“I don’t know Schmerler,” I said.
“Who knew Schmerler? I told him a million times, ’Schmerler, you’re an enigma, Schmerler.’ It was a shame he didn’t make himself understood better. He could have been the biggest name in the Zionist Movement. But no, he had to insist upon making the Jewish Homeland in Northern Ireland. He used to argue with Weizmann night and day. ‘Weizmann,’ he says, ‘your Jew isn’t basically a desert-oriented guy.’ That was Schmerler for you. If you say you don’t know him, there’s your clue. He was always correct in principle, in theory. Mao used to call him ‘The On-Paper Tiger.’”