He pointed his thumb at my father. “You see, George,” he said, “you believe in the soul. You believe your body is like a horse you get up on and ride for a while and then get off. You ride your body too hard, You show it no love. This is not natural. This builds up nervous tension.”
My stool was uncomfortable and Doc Appleton’s philosophizing always afflicted me with embarrassment. I deduced that the verdict had already been handed down and from the fact that the doctor felt leisure to be boring I deduced that the verdict had been favorable. Still I remained in some suspense and studied the table of wiggly probes and angled scissors as if they were an alphabet in which I could read the word. AI AI, they said. Among these silver exclamations -needles and arrows and polished clamps-there was that strange hammer for tapping your knee to make your leg jerk. It was a heavy triangle of red rubber fixed in a silver handle made concave to improve the doctor’s grip. My very first trips to this office that I could remember centered about that hammer, and the table of instruments took its center from this arrowhead of sullen orange as if from something very ancient. It was the shape of an arrowhead but also of a fulcrum and as I watched it it seemed to sink, sink with its infinitesimal cracks and roundnesses of use and age, sink down through time and to be at the bottom sufficiently simple and ponderous to make there a pivot for everything.
“…know thyself, George,” Doc Appleton was saying. His pink firm palm, round as a child’s, lifted in admonition. “Now how long have you been teaching?”
“Fourteen years,” my father said. “I was laid off late in ‘31 and was out of work the whole year the kid was born. In the summer of ‘33, AI Hummel, who as you know is Pop Kramer’s nephew, came up to the house and suggested-”
“Does your father enjoy teaching? Peter.”
It took me a second to realize I had been addressed. “I don’t know,” I said, “at times I suppose.” Then I thought and added, “No, I guess he doesn’t.”
“It’d be O. K.,” my father said, “if I thought I was any good at it. But I don’t have the gift of discipline. My father, the poor devil, didn’t have it either.”
“You’re not a teacher,” Doc Appleton told him. “You’re a learner. This creates tension. Tension creates excess gastric juice. Now George, the symptoms you describe might be merely mucinous colitis. Constant irritation of the digestive track can produce pain and the sensation of anal fullness you describe. Until the X-ray, we’ll assume that’s what it is.”
“I wouldn’t mind plugging ahead at something I wasn’t any good at,” my father said, “if I knew what the hell the point of it all was. I ask, and nobody’ll tell me.”
“What does Zimmerman say?”
“He doesn’t say a thing. He thrives on confusion. Zimmerman has the gift of discipline and us poor devils under him who don’t have it, he just laughs at us. I can hear him laughing every time the clock ticks.”
“Zimmerman and myself,” Doc Appleton said, and sighed, “have never seen eye to eye. I went to school with him, you know.”
“I didn’t know that.”
My father was.lying. Even I had known that, Doc Apple-ton said it so often. Zimmerman was a chafe to him, a lifelong sore point. I was furious with my father for being so obsequious, for laying us both open this way to a long and often-chewed story.
“Why, yes,” Doc Appleton said, blinking in surprise that my father should be ignorant of such a famous fact. “We went all through the Olinger schools together.” He leaned back in the chair that fitted him so exquisitely. “Now when we were born here it wasn’t called Olinger, it was called Til den, in honor of the man who got cheated out of the election. Old Pappy Olinger was still farming all that land to the north of the pike and east of where the cardboard box factory is now. I remember seeing him take his team into Alton, a little old fella not five feet tall with a black hat and a mustache you could have wiped your table silver on. He had three sons: Cot, who went crazy one night and killed two steer with a hand hoe, Brian, who had a child by the Negro woman they had to work in the kitchen, and Guy, the youngest, who sold the land to the real estate developers and died of trying to eat the money up. Cot, Brian, and Guy: they’re all beneath the ground now. Now what did I start to say?”
“About you and Mr. Zimmerman,” I said.
My impudent impatience was not lost on him; he looked over my father’s shoulder at me and his lower lip slid thought fully to one side and then to the other. “Ah, yes,” he pronounced, and spoke to my father. “Well, Louis and I went through the grades together when they were scattered all over the borough. First and second grade was over by Pebble Creek where they put the parking lot for the new diner; third and fourth grades were in Mrs. Eberhardt’s barn that she rented the town for a dollar a year; fifth and sixth were in a stone building on what they used to call the Black Acres, because the loam was so deep, over beyond where the race track used to be. Whenever they’d hold a weekday race, on Tuesdays usually, they used to let us out of class because they needed boys to hold and comb the horses. Then for those that kept on past sixth grade, by the time I was the age they had built the high school at the Elm Street corner. Now didn’t that look grand to’ us then! That’s the building, Peter, where you went to elementary school.”
“I didn’t know that,” I said, trying to atone for my rudeness before.
Doc Appleton seemed pleased. He relaxed into his creaking chair so deeply his creased high-top shoes dangled, just touching their toes to the threadbare carpet. “Now Louis M. Zimmerman,” he went on, “was a month older than myself, and a great hand with the girls and the old women. Mrs. Mettzler, that was our teacher in the first and second grade, a woman not an inch under six feet tall and with legs like the siding slats of a tobacco shed, took a shine to Louis, and for that matter so did Miss Leet and Mrs. Mabry that followed her; all his way through school Louis had the best of attention, while of course nobody thought a second thought about an ugly duckling like Harry Appleton. Louis always had that edge. You see: he was quick.”
“You said a mouthful,” my father said. “He’s always a jump ahead of me, I’ll tell you that.”
“He never had, you see,” Doc Appleton continued, making curious ambiguous motions with his plump scrubbed hands, pressing the palms together, lightly chopping the knuckles of one hand with the edge of the other, “the adversity. He always knew success and never developed the character. So he spreads, you see,” and his white fingers crabbed through the air, “like a cancer. He’s not a man to trust, though he gives the Bible lesson every Sunday up at the Reformed. Tcha. If he was a tumor, George, I’d take a knife”-he shifted his hand and held up his thumb and it did seem very stiff and sharp-”and cut him out.” And his thumb, sickle-shaped backwards with pressure, scooped a curt divot out of the air.
“I appreciate your being frank with me, Doc,” my father said, “but me and those other poor devils up at the high school are stuck with him forever as far as I can see. Three out of four people in this town swear by him-they worship that man.”