At the same time Leventhal was reasonable enough to admit that he might be trying to release himself from a sense of obligation to Williston by finding fault with him. He had never been able to repay him. Was he looking for a chance to cancel the debt? He did not think so. He wished he could be sure. Ah, he told himself, he was sure. He had never felt anything but gratitude. Again and again he had said — Mary could testify — that Williston had saved him.
But then, as he dwelt on it, the whole affair began to lose much of its importance. It was, after all, something he could either take seriously or dismiss as an annoyance. It was up to him. He had only to insist that he wasn’t responsible and it disappeared altogether. It was his conviction against an accusation nobody could expect him to take at face value. And what more was there for him to say than that his part in it was accidental? At worst, an accident, unintentional.
The morning, with its brilliance and its simple contrasts, white and blue, shining and darkened, had a balancing effect on him of which he was conscious. He looked up, and a slight smile appeared on his face, swarthy in the sunlight. His clean white shirt was crookedly buttoned and tight at the neck; he put his fingers inside the band and tugged at it, drawing his chin up, and he straightened his shirt front clumsily, his gold wedding ring clicking on the buttons.
At noon he was in the west Forties. He ate a bowl of chili in a place opposite a music shop where a man in shirt sleeves, standing at one of the broad-swung windows on the second floor, blurted out an occasional note, testing a horn, one arm embracing the shining roundness of the brass. He was blowing erratically rich impatient notes and deep snores whose resonance Leventhal felt somehow entering his very blood as he gazed into the sun and dust of the peaceful street. He broke a cigar out of its wrapper, making a ball of the cellophane small enough to squeeze into the band. He felt along his thigh for matches and, when he had blown out his first puff, he walked into a booth and phoned Elena. One of the Villani children was sent to fetch her. Leventhal’s eyes remained fixed on the horn player during the conversation.
Elena sounded quieter than usual. She was going to visit Mickey at three o’clock. He asked her about Philip and while Elena, after she had said, “Oh, Phillie? He’s upstairs,” went on talking about the hospital, Leventhal conceived the idea of spending the day with him and interrupted her to propose that Philip come over to Manhattan.
“I’ll meet him at South Ferry. If you want me to, I’ll come for him.”
“Oh, I’ll send him,” said Elena. “That’s fine. He’ll like it. No, he can go on the ferry himself. What’s there to it?”
Already full of plans, Leventhal hurried into the street. They would take a ride along the Drive on an open bus. The boy might enjoy that. Perhaps he would prefer Times Square, the shooting galleries, the penny arcades and pinball games. He congratulated himself on having thought of Philip; he was delighted. He would have passed the time tolerably well, he reflected, until some time toward evening when he realized he had not spoken three words to a living soul and the blues descended on him. And Philip, too, would have been left alone when his mother went to the hospital. Leventhal took the train downtown and sat in the small square on a bench commanding the ferry gates.
He kept his swarthy, unimpassioned face turned to the exit. The strain of waiting made him almost tremble, yet it was pleasurable, a pleasurable excitement. He wondered why it was that lately he was more susceptible than he had ever been before to certain kinds of feeling. With everybody except Mary he was inclined to be short and neutral, outwardly a little like his father, and this shortness of his was, when you came right down to it, merely neglectfulness. When you didn’t want to take trouble with people, you found the means to turn them aside. Well, the world was a busy place — he scanned the buildings, the banks and offices in their Saturday stillness, the pillars ribbed with soot, and the changeable color of the windows in which the more absolute color of the sky was darkened, dilated, and darkened again. You couldn’t find a place in your feelings for everything, or give at every touch like a swinging door, the same for everyone, with people going in and out as they pleased. On the other hand, if you shut yourself up, not wanting to be bothered, then you were like a bear in a winter hole, or like a mirror wrapped in a piece of flannel. And like such a mirror you were in less danger of being broken, but you didn’t flash, either. But you had to flash. That was the peculiar thing. Everybody wanted to be what he was to the limit. When you looked around, that was what you saw most distinctly. In great achievements as well as in crimes and vices. When that woman faced her husband this morning after he had most likely tracked her all night from joint to joint and finally caught her catting, too red-handed to defend herself; when she faced him, wasn’t she saying, silently, “I’m being up to the limit just what I am”? In this case, a whore. She may have been mistaken in herself. You couldn’t expect people to be right, but only try to do what they must. Therefore hideous things were done, cannibalistic things. Good things as well, of course. But even there, nothing really good was safe.
There was something in people against sleep and dullness, together with the caution that led to sleep and dullness. Both were there, Leventhal thought. We were all the time taking care of ourselves, laying up, storing up, watching out on this side and on that side, and at the same time running, running desperately, running as if in an egg race with the egg in a spoon. And sometimes we were fed up with the egg, sick of it, and at such a time would rather sign on with the devil and what they called the powers of darkness that run with the spoon, watching the egg, fearing for the egg. Man is weak and breakable, has to have just the right amounts of everything — water, air, food; can’t eat twigs and stones; has to keep his bones from breaking and his fat from melting. This and that. Hoards sugar and potatoes, hides money in his mattress, spares his feelings whenever he can, and takes pains and precautions. That, you might say, was for the sake of the egg. Dying is spoiling, then? Addling? And the last judgment, candling? Leventhal chuckled and rubbed his cheek. There was also the opposite, playing catch with the egg, threatening the egg.