Chapter XIII: The Dreamer Wakes

DR. ZERNEKE was not in when he arrived at her home at ten o’clock, and he let himself in as before.

Waiting for her, he turned to the book-shelves. He caught the name of Freud on the back of certain imposing volumes.... Ferenczi.... Flexner.... Frazer.... Fabre....

All very informative, no doubt.... Sanger.... Spencer and Gillen.... Stendhal’s _L’Amour_.... Stopes.... If he read all those large books, he might understand his own situation better. But it was a little late to begin his education. Perhaps a younger generation, that babbled of sex and psychoanalysis instead of nursery rhymes, as it was reputed to do, would find clear sailing. And maybe not. He had thought he knew something, himself. He had had a smattering of modern ideas. He had thought of himself as a liberal.

Goethe.... Godwin.... Groos.... Remy de Gourmont. Guyot’s _Breviare de l’amour experimentale_.... All about sex, it seemed.... Janet.... James Joyce.... Ernest Jones.... Jung.... Kammerer.... Kempf.... Ellen Key.... The Koran.... Krafft-Ebing.... An omnium gatherum of biology, sociology, psychiatry, poetry, plays, and what not.... Adler.... Grant Allen’s “The Woman Who Did”--a novel Norman vaguely remembered having read in his ’teens; it was about a woman who deliberately and on theory had an illegitimate child; the child, as Norman recalled, did not thank her mother for conferring upon her that heroic but embarrassing distinction.... Aretino.... The Apocrypha....

Norman took down the Apocrypha, and looking into it at random was interested to see there the name Thecla. He had wondered who was the St. Thecla for whom the Adoption Society was named. He would read the Apocrypha some time and find out.... He put the book back at the sound of some one coming up the stairs.

Dr. Zerneke entered, and greeted him cordially.

“Well, Mr. Overbeck,” she said, “I suppose you are feeling pretty good about everything?”

Norman was disconcerted.

“What about?” he asked suspiciously. Was she making fun of him?

“Why, you have your son,” she said. “That hasn’t palled already, has it?”

“Oh,” he said. “I thought--”

“You thought what?”

“I hadn’t intended to tell you,” he said. “But the fact is, I’ve lost my job.”

“That’s too bad,” she said sympathetically. “As a matter of fact,” she added, “I knew.”

“Oh’you did?”

“Yes. I happened to call up Wilkins and Freeman, and they said you weren’t there any more.”

“Of course.... It was foolish to think I could keep it a secret.”

“You haven’t another yet, I suppose?”

“No,” he admitted. “I’ve been looking for another all week without any success. I--I seem to have lost my nerve. I’m frightfully discouraged. To tell the truth, I took a job of dishwashing to-day.”

“Dishwashing?”

“Yes. So as to keep up my payments to Mrs. Czermak, while I’m looking for a real job.... Oh, things will turn out all right, I know, but this week my prospects haven’t looked so cheerful. It was something of a shock, losing that job at Wilkins and Freeman’s. And looking for a job and being turned down every day--it’s hard to keep up one’s courage.”

“So now,” Dr. Zerneke commented, “you know how a good many other young fathers feel. Well, it may be good for you.”

“It may take me, of course,” said Norman, “several weeks to find another job.”

“Or several months, even,” said the doctor. “Do you know Mr. Victor, at Mrs. Case’s rooming-house? He’s been out of work since New Year’s.”

“How do they keep up?”

“Some of them don’t. Others have a little money put by for hard times. When you were a prosperous lawyer, didn’t you save anything?”

“I had a bank account, yes.”

“Why not draw on it, then?”

“It’s not really mine, any longer, since I’ve quit the firm.”

“Suit yourself. But I hope you’re not going to be silly.”

“I’ve broken with my life in Vickley. I’d rather stay broken--not go back for help. Is that so foolish?”

“Are you engaged in some private quarrel with your father? Or are you trying to make a career for yourself here in Chicago? If your son, when he grows up, goes to New York to look for a job, don’t you think he will need some money to live on before he gets started? Of course, you can do dishwashing jobs in cheap restaurants if you want to. It may be good for your soul. But I doubt it. I think you’re ashamed of having lost your job.”

“Why shouldn’t I be?”

“Shame is a luxury no sensible person can afford. Do you want to stay in the advertising business?”

“I do. Very much. That’s really what I’m afraid of--that I’ll have to fall back on something else.”

“Would you consent to let me do you a favor?”

“Why not?”

“I thought you might be too proud. Well--first of all, how much money have you in the bank at Vickley?”

“Of my own--something like a thousand dollars. I was going to spend it on my honeymoon.”

“Write out a check for it and deposit it in some Chicago bank. How much are you paying for your new room?”

“Four dollars a week.”

“Rent a small apartment. You can get one, furnished, for the summer, in this neighborhood, for fifty or sixty dollars a month. Give my name as a reference. You will need such a place to entertain your family in, anyway. Do that Monday.”

“And what then?” Norman asked curiously.

“You are fond of buying pictures, aren’t you?”

“I’ve confined myself to etchings, chiefly. I have a small collection of moderns in Vickley.”

“Send for them. Or go to the galleries and buy something new that you’ll want to put on your walls. Do that on Tuesday. Also, go to a department store and buy some cups and saucers or hangings that please you. Do you dance?”

“Yes.”

“I will send you tickets for a ball next Wednesday, for which you will please remit ten dollars. If you don’t find a girl to take, come alone, and I’ll introduce you. It’s a masquerade, but evening clothes will do.”

“Is that all?” Norman asked grimly.

“Thursday I leave to your own devices. And on Friday go to see Mr. McCullough, of the McCullough Advertising Agency, and ask for a job.”

“I was in there this morning. They haven’t got a job to give me.”

“They will probably have one next Friday.”

“Why should they have one next Friday?” he asked suspiciously.

“Because there is such a thing in this wicked world as ‘pull,’ and I use unscrupulously the little I have for the benefit of my friends. How do you suppose people get jobs?”

“But what do you know about my ability?”

“Nothing. After you get the job, it will be up to you to keep it. That’s not my affair. All I promise you is a two weeks’ trial. But it just happens that the last young man I rashly recommended to Mr. McCullough turned out to be pretty good. If you’re a flop, I’ll merely lose my reputation for intuition, that’s all. Only, if I were you, I’d ask for sixty a week to start on. They’ll not respect you otherwise. Remember that you’ve a baby to support.... And don’t, please, be angry at me for keeping you from conquering the world by your own unaided efforts.”

“I’ll be everlastingly grateful,” he said. “But--I thought poverty was supposed to be an incentive. Evidently you don’t think so. Why should you want me to pretend to myself that I’m rich?”

“Because you’ve always been well-to-do. You are, still, as a plain matter of fact. Your poverty is a fake poverty--a neurotic lie, to please yourself.”

“It didn’t feel so to me. It seemed real enough. And it wasn’t at all pleasing!”

“It was an exercise of your imagination, nevertheless. A dream. I’ve merely waked you up.”

“It was a nightmare,” he said.

“A grim little poetic fantasy. Write a poem about it, and send it to the Daily Worker. It will all be true enough--for others. Not for you! Be honest about this, if you can.”

“I admit I feel better than I did when I came in. But why--aside from the job you’ve more or less promised me--why should the _facts_ seem different now? Because they do!”

“You’re facing realities now. Not fighting shadows any more. The question isn’t whether you can conquer the world with your bare hands. It’s merely whether you can succeed in the advertising business. Maybe you can’t, you know!”

Norman laughed, and thanked her warmly.

“Have you asked your mother to come to see you?”

“Not yet.”

“Well, the sooner the better.”

As Norman walked back to his room, he had a startling apprehension of the fact that what she had said about keeping a job was a really important truth.... There had perhaps been something grimly romantic about the thought of washing dishes and pawning his clothes to pay that twelve dollars a week for his son’s care. This problem of keeping a job after it had been given him--there was, he knew, nothing very romantic about that. It was a quite realistic problem that he had to face now....

“Am I,” he wondered, “a perfectly incorrigible ass?”

If it would help to do the things that Dr. Zerneke advised--if it would keep him from flying off on some preposterous new emotional tangent (he had Monica’s kiss in mind) he would do as she said.

He would get an apartment.... And then he would ask his mother to come....