when they waken in the night and reach blindly toward the foot of the bed for the extra cover.
You are in duty bound to go through all of their possessions, to feel their curtains and look for the tradename on the bottomof their best dinner plates and stand before their pictures (especially the one they have been compelled to paint themselves, which is not a good painting but seems better if you stay long enough to know the country in more than one kind of light) and lift the lids off their cigarette boxes and sniff their pipe tobacco and open, one by one, their closet doors. You should test the sharpness and shape of their scissors. You may play their radio and try, with your fingernail, to open the locked door of the liquor cabinet. You may even read any letters that they have been so careless as to leave around. Through all of these things, through the attic and the cellar and the tool shed you must go searching until you find the people who live here or who used to live here but now are in London or Acapulco or Galesburg, Illinois. Or who now are dead.
19
“W hen you grow up,” Mr. Peters said, “there won’t be anybody to make things easier for you.”
Lymie, who had brought this lecture on himself by losing his return ticket, was walking ahead of his father down the white cemetery path. In his right hand he held a long narrow cardboard box done up in green florist’s paper. In the other hand he carried a Mason jar filled with water, which slopped over occasionally. His shoes, which had been shined in the railway station at the same time as his father’s, were now scuffed and muddy. He had no hat. The sun was out and it was windy but not cold.
“You’ll want to provide yourself with a nice home andpleasant surroundings and all the comforts and conveniences you’ve been used to,” Mr. Peters said. “You’ll want to marry and have a family, which you can’t do if you spend all your time reading and going to art museums.”
So far as Mr. Peters was concerned, there was a definite connection between Lymie’s absent-mindedness and the fact that he seemed to gravitate toward whatever was artistic and impractical. Mr. Peters wanted to be proud of his son and he was glad that Lymie had a good mind, but he was not a millionaire (how much Mr. Peters made exactly was nobody’s business) and he had tried therefore to make Lymie realize that before you have a right to indulge in any kind of activity which is not practical, you must learn the value of money. If earning a living takes all your time and energy, it is something that you must resign yourself to. There is no use pretending that life is one long Sunday school picnic. Nothing is ever gained without hard work and plenty of it. But if a person is ambitious and really wants to make something of himself; if he can keep his chin up no matter what happens to him, and never complains, never offers excuses or alibis; and if, once he has achieved success, he can keep from resting on his laurels (also his equilibrium through it all and his feet on the ground) he will have all the more success to come and he need feel no fear of the future.
This philosophy was too materialistic to be very congenial to Lymie, and as a matter of fact Mr. Peters didn’t take much stock in it himself. It was not something that he had learned from experience (his own business methods were quite different) but mostly catch phrases from the lips of businessmen he envied and admired. Where they got it, there is no telling.
Mr. Peters’ career in business had never been very successful, never wholly unsuccessful. He was a salesman by accident rather than by disposition. His first job was with a bill-postingconcern and had involved free passes to circuses, street carnivals, and moving picture houses. He still remembered it with pleasure. After that he tried real estate and life insurance, both of which had their drawbacks. When his wife died he decided that he wanted to move, to get away
You are in duty bound to go through all of their possessions, to feel their curtains and look for the tradename on the bottomof their best dinner plates and stand before their pictures (especially the one they have been compelled to paint themselves, which is not a good painting but seems better if you stay long enough to know the country in more than one kind of light) and lift the lids off their cigarette boxes and sniff their pipe tobacco and open, one by one, their closet doors. You should test the sharpness and shape of their scissors. You may play their radio and try, with your fingernail, to open the locked door of the liquor cabinet. You may even read any letters that they have been so careless as to leave around. Through all of these things, through the attic and the cellar and the tool shed you must go searching until you find the people who live here or who used to live here but now are in London or Acapulco or Galesburg, Illinois. Or who now are dead.
19
“W hen you grow up,” Mr. Peters said, “there won’t be anybody to make things easier for you.”
Lymie, who had brought this lecture on himself by losing his return ticket, was walking ahead of his father down the white cemetery path. In his right hand he held a long narrow cardboard box done up in green florist’s paper. In the other hand he carried a Mason jar filled with water, which slopped over occasionally. His shoes, which had been shined in the railway station at the same time as his father’s, were now scuffed and muddy. He had no hat. The sun was out and it was windy but not cold.
“You’ll want to provide yourself with a nice home andpleasant surroundings and all the comforts and conveniences you’ve been used to,” Mr. Peters said. “You’ll want to marry and have a family, which you can’t do if you spend all your time reading and going to art museums.”
So far as Mr. Peters was concerned, there was a definite connection between Lymie’s absent-mindedness and the fact that he seemed to gravitate toward whatever was artistic and impractical. Mr. Peters wanted to be proud of his son and he was glad that Lymie had a good mind, but he was not a millionaire (how much Mr. Peters made exactly was nobody’s business) and he had tried therefore to make Lymie realize that before you have a right to indulge in any kind of activity which is not practical, you must learn the value of money. If earning a living takes all your time and energy, it is something that you must resign yourself to. There is no use pretending that life is one long Sunday school picnic. Nothing is ever gained without hard work and plenty of it. But if a person is ambitious and really wants to make something of himself; if he can keep his chin up no matter what happens to him, and never complains, never offers excuses or alibis; and if, once he has achieved success, he can keep from resting on his laurels (also his equilibrium through it all and his feet on the ground) he will have all the more success to come and he need feel no fear of the future.
This philosophy was too materialistic to be very congenial to Lymie, and as a matter of fact Mr. Peters didn’t take much stock in it himself. It was not something that he had learned from experience (his own business methods were quite different) but mostly catch phrases from the lips of businessmen he envied and admired. Where they got it, there is no telling.
Mr. Peters’ career in business had never been very successful, never wholly unsuccessful. He was a salesman by accident rather than by disposition. His first job was with a bill-postingconcern and had involved free passes to circuses, street carnivals, and moving picture houses. He still remembered it with pleasure. After that he tried real estate and life insurance, both of which had their drawbacks. When his wife died he decided that he wanted to move, to get away
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