The Fly in the Ointment

Suddenly all the money quarrels of the family, which nagged in the young man’s mind, had been dissolved. His dread of being involved in them vanished. He was overcome by the sadness of his father’s situation. Thirty years of your life come to an end. I must see him. I must help him. All the same, knowing his father, he had paid off the taxi and walked the last quarter of a mile.

The father was well-dressed in an excellent navy-blue suit. He was a vigorous, broad man with a pleased impish smile. The sunburn shone through the clipped white hair of his head and he had the simple, trim, open-air look of a snow man. The son beside him was round-shouldered and shabby, a keen but anxious fellow in need of a hair-cut and going bald.

“I’m all right,” the son said, smiling to hide his irritation. “I’m not worried about anything. I’m just worried about you. This—” he nodded with embarrassment to the dismantled showroom, the office from which even the calendars and wastepaper-basket had gone—“this—” what was the most tactful and sympathetic word to use?—“this is bad luck,” he said. “Bad luck?” said the old man sternly.

A different man was speaking, and even a different face; the son noticed for the first time that like all big-faced men his father had two faces. There was the outer face like a soft warm and careless daub of innocent sealing wax and inside it, as if thumbed there by a seal, was a much smaller one, babyish, shrewd, scared and hard.

“[…]what you want, what we all want, I say this for myself as well as you, what we all want is ideas—big ideas. We go worrying along but you just want bigger and better ideas. You ought to think big. Take your case. You’re a lecturer. I wouldn’t be satisfied with lecturing to a small batch of people in a university town. I’d lecture the world. You know, you’re always doing yourself injustice. We all do. Think big.”

“Be careful,” said the son. “Don’t lose your balance.” The old man looked down. Suddenly he looked tired and old, his body began to sag and a look of weakness came on to his face. “Give me a hand, old boy,” the old man said in a shaky voice. He put a heavy hand on his son’s shoulder and the son felt the great helpless weight of his father’s body. “Lean on me.”

“You know where I went wrong? You know where I made my mistake?” The son’s heart started to a panic of embarrassment. For heaven’s sake, he wanted to shout, don’t! Don’t stir up the whole business. Don’t humiliate yourself before me. Don’t start telling the truth. Don’t oblige me to say we know all about it, that we have known for years the mess you’ve been in, that we’ve seen through the plausible stories you’ve spread, that we’ve known the people you’ve swindled.

“Don’t say I want money,” the old man said vehemently. “Don’t say it. When I walk out of this place tonight I’m going to walk into freedom. I am not going to think of money. You never know where it will come from. You may see something. You may meet a man. You never know. Did the children of Israel worry about money? No, they just went out and collected the manna. That’s what I want to do.”

He coloured. He hated to admit his own poverty, he hated to offer charity to his father. He hated to sit there knowing the things he knew about him. He was ashamed to think how he, how they all dreaded having the gregarious, optimistic, extravagant, uncontrollable, disingenuous old man on their hands. The son hated to feel he was being in some peculiar way which he could not understand mean, cowardly and dishonest.