5 The Day My Accountant Cried
I dislike being interrupted when I am interesting someone in a book. One late afternoon while I was engaged in making a sale, my accountant tiptoed over and stood close to me. I moved away, but he came close again. I frowned; generally that was enough to frighten him. But not this time.
“I must speak with you,” he said. “It’s very important.”
“Well, what is it?” I said.
His thin shoulders sagged and when he finally spoke, his voice contributed to the general impression of a small, furry animal in a trap. “You are bankrupt,” he squeaked.
My accountant was a limp rag of a man with a lined, ashen face and a bald head spotted with a few patches of nondescript hair. The color of his eyes was an odd mixture, neither grey nor brown, and he never met your gaze, but looked down at your feet or to one side. He wore a grey suit with a vest that had specially made pockets to contain his pharmaceutical supplies, including not only pill boxes and bottles, but his own spoon and a collapsible cup.
Although he was very neat, he bit his fingernails to the quick. Still, I found his hands fascinating when he added up columns of figures. His figure 8’s and his 7’s had a special quality about them, a precision bordering upon elegance.
He came into the store once a month, went over my bookkeeping, prepared the necessary forms for my signature, and left. Sometimes he would linger for just a few minutes looking at titles on the bookshelves. Then he would turn, shrug his shoulders, and depart.
When he looked up and informed me tragically, “You are bankrupt,” the words were utterly meaningless to me. “Wait until I finish,” I said, waving him aside, “then we’ll talk.” His distress was pitiful, yet I couldn’t help laughing.
Talk we did. He showed me the stack of unpaid statements, then my bank balance, then the cost of my inventory. There was no doubt about it: I was bankrupt. Those pretty 8’s and magnetic 7’s proved it. The ledger sheets with the long red and blue lines and the numbers so small and so beautifully shaped within the spaces spoke the awful truth. But somehow this truth meant nothing to me, except strangely to remind me of a story told by my father about a man who lost a leg but ran on as though he still possessed two.
I looked at my accountant in silence. He sat next to me, his squeaky voice now still, his red-rimmed eyes peering at me and at the evidence lying before us on the desk, along with a neat pile of Kleenex sheets, a spoon, and a bottle of pink medicine. My accountant’s adam’s apple began moving silently in his throat and as I observed this, I placed my man as a literary character with whom I was well familiar, the awful little man in The Magic Mountain who mashed all his food together, bent his head over it, and shoveled and pushed the mess into his mouth. Again I began to laugh helplessly, and my accountant kept saying, “Not funny, not funny, remember—you are bankrupt.”
“What do you suggest?” I finally asked.
“There is not much to suggest,” he said. “The books show bankruptcy. File for bankruptcy and call it a day.”
“Just like that?” I said.
“The figures are correct,” he said. “To me this means you must go out of business.”
“But what does it mean to me? I love this business and want to remain in it. I’ve spent three years building it and look at the progress I’ve made!”
“It can’t be helped,” he said. “Business is business. Your publishers are not sentimental. When they send you books, they want to be paid.”
Of course I intended to pay, I assured him. But I couldn’t pay everyone all at once. And if I was serving as an agent for their wares, couldn’t some of them wait? Or couldn’t I go to the bank for another loan?
“Impossible,” he said. “Furthermore, no one cares about your good work or your bad work. Your problem is that you haven’t the money to meet your bills.”
Strangely enough—immorally perhaps—it had never occurred to me that this was my problem. Finally I said, “As a favor to me, could you pretend that you hadn’t come here this evening? Could you forget this conversation? As I see it, nothing has changed whatsoever. So far, the only person threatening me with bankruptcy is yourself. It seems to me that if you will just stop talking about it, I am no longer bankrupt.”
My accountant poured himself a cupful of pink medicine, smacked his lips, and burst into tears. He assured me that I was partially responsible for his ulcerated stomach. And he told me of his fate... the three times he had tried to pass the C.P.A. examinations... the scorn and derision to which he was subjected by fools like me... the plight of his wife and his children... and his simple allegiance to the truth of numbers.
I began to feel terribly guilty. What had I done to him by not breaking beneath the impact of his shocking pronouncement? “Please don’t cry,” I said. “Nothing is really changed, actually. I just don’t believe in figures. I don’t believe in bankruptcy. I still believe in people, in myself, in my work. Sometimes I wake up in the morning feeling joyous and sometimes I go to bed feeling wretched, but that’s life. However, it is entirely my fault for making you cry. I meant to take you seriously, but I have a complete contempt for figures.”
I brought him some water in his own antiseptic cup and told him the story of the Little Prince and the Fox and how the Fox made the Prince repeat: “Remember always—what is essential is invisible to the eye. It is the time you have wasted on your rose that makes her so important. Love means care and labor and respect. You are responsible for what you love.”
I observed a different accountant sitting before me. In the course of my resistance to the destruction of my dream, I had apparently turned upon him in a way that was completely novel, neither scorning him nor using him, but speaking to him as a member of the human race.
“I’ve never done this before,” he admitted, wiping his eyes. “But your attitude in the face of certain failure just broke me up. And here I am... owning two houses, a piece of a hotel, and some stocks and bonds... more money than you’ll probably ever see. Yet I realize how very little I have... on the other side of the ledger.”
I was astounded that he was not angry, found a copy of The Little Prince to give him, and as he left called, “You’ve forgotten your spoon and the medicine.” He hesitated a moment, but did not turn back.
My accountant never again told me I was bankrupt. Several months passed before I next saw him, but since I continued to ignore the “figure” side of the business, his absence did not disturb me. Then one bright and lovely morning he came in wearing a fresh, newly pressed suit and... no vest!
“How marvelous!” I said.
“No vest, ever again,” he assured me.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Well, you remember when I left? I still didn’t believe you, but I read The Little Prince that evening. I used to think that facts and the gathering of facts were the only basis for living. But I realize now it is a much harder job. It is easier to be hypochondriac... or a slave to the logic of the marketplace... or anything but one’s self.”
Does experience teach? Is it possible that a human being may be altered or set free through the written word? Are books important? Is it important to be a bookseller? Even though you are going broke? I had been turning like a worm in an apple for so long that it seemed a little more turning could scarcely hurt me.
One night I was awakened by the insistent ringing of the telephone.
“Can you come down to the restaurant at once, son?” It was Ric Riccardo’s voice.
In less than an hour, I was seated in a booth with Ric, the late Henry Beaudeaux, then art critic for the Chicago Daily News, and Michael Seller, a psychoanalyst, with whose professional world I had just begun an acquaintance through interesting circumstances which I shall soon describe.
After I had sipped my coffee, Ric smiled thinly and said, “Mike, tell him.”
“How would you like to go into the publishing business?” Mike said.
Then Ric took over. Chicago needed a publishing house, he argued. He was going to put up the money and establish the organization. But we would publish only Chicago talent regardless of their métier... art, poetry, novels, whatever. He continued for perhaps an hour in this vein, dwelling upon the resources of talent which existed in the Chicago area and the absurdity of depending on New York to “discover” it. Finally, I wanted to know where I fitted in.
“I supply the money,” Ric said. “You set up the office, start the company going, get the writers. Tomorrow we’ll meet with my lawyer.”
He didn’t ask whether I liked the idea. He knew I was crazy about it and would work day and night to see it through.
“Have you a name for the firm?” I said.
“We’ll call it the BrentR Press,” Ric said solemnly. And with enthusiastic handclasps over this peculiarly ranch house designation, we parted.
Our first book was to be an art book titled, Eleven Plus Four, principally to indicate the number of drawings to be found in the book. The drawings by John Foote were considerably more astounding than the title, and Sydney J. Harris, columnist for the Chicago Daily News, wrote as literate and perceptive an introduction as one is likely to encounter.
Ric and I worked like a pair of furies on the project. My association with the enterprise had a promotional value that helped business at the store and I felt certain that the way ahead lay open and that hard work was all that was required.
When Ric gave me a check for $5,000.00 and said, “Go to a bank and open an account,” I headed straight out to find the vice president of the bank where I had but a few years earlier been turned down for a loan. He was gone, but in his place I found a banker who was also a man.
Following this successful encounter, I rushed back to show Ric the receipted deposit slip. He laughed and took me up to his studio. He pointed to an army footlocker and said, “Open it.”
I did, and the sight of its contents overwhelmed me. It was full of money—currency of every denomination.
“When you need money, come upstairs and help yourself,” he said. “Only tell me afterwards.”
I wondered what my accountant would think. Even after his reformation, this kind of profligacy must have been beyond his comprehension.
At first nobody talked about it. Ric had become ill and he could not be seen. When there were urgent decisions to make, I was told, “Make them yourself.” But I was not sure of myself, I explained. The answer was the same. Ric was not to be disturbed under any circumstances.
Two months passed before I was permitted to go to the hospital to see him. He lay curled up in bed like a child, incredibly thin, the close-cropped hair completely grey, the skin waxen. I sat beside him for a long time before he unwound his body and looked at me.
“Go ahead and work, son,” he said. “You can do everything. When I get better we’ll talk about the book. If you need anything, go see Charley. I’ll call you when I can.”
I left feeling certain that I would never see Ric alive. I called Michael Seller and asked him to level with me. “It was his heart,” Mike said. In his judgment, it was just a question of time.
I hung up feeling that my world was coming to an end. If Ric was wounded, I was, too. If his survival was in doubt, I questioned my own. Every pattern I touched, no matter how vital, seemed to resolve itself into my own lostness.
But we were all wrong, doctors and friends alike. Ric came back strong. To be sure, the bags about the eyes were more pronounced, the skin hung a bit loosely about the face and neck. But one had only to look into the eyes to see that the fire was still there. Ric was all right, loving life, loving people, giving joy to all who came into his presence.
There was a new mark upon him, however, of increased gentleness. He spoke gently, moved gently, dressed gently, even ate gently. When we played chess, it was no longer with the same intensity. He would even interrupt the game to talk about the nature of God. He was becoming non-attached.
Finally the book came off the press. It was a beautiful job of production, and everyone whose name was known in Chicago seemed to have come to the autographing party in the spacious rooms above the restaurant. Ric sat at a table surveying the scene, and couldn’t have cared less. He was gracious to everyone. He nodded his approval at all the checks I had received for advance orders. He seemed pleased with my enthusiasm for success. But something had gone out of him—at least so far as ardor for parties and promotion was concerned.
Ric died one week later, and with him many dreams, the BrentR Press among them.