"I'm not close to him." He looked at me defiantly. "But he's put his whole life into this. He's no Freud or Jung or Pavlov or Watson, but he's doing something important and I respect his dedication—maybe even more because he's just an ordinary man trying to do a great man's work, while the great men are all busy making bombs."
"I'd like to hear you call him ordinary to his face."
"It doesn't matter what he thinks of himself. Sure he's egotistic, so what? It takes that kind of ego to make a man attempt a thing like this. I've seen enough of men like him to know that mixed in with that pompousness and self-assertion is a goddamned good measure of uncertainty and fear."
"And phoniness and shallowness," I added. "I see them now as they really are, phonies. I suspected it of Nemur. He always seemed frightened of something. But Strauss surprised me."
Burt paused and let out a long stream of breath. We turned into a luncheonette for coffee, and I didn't see his face, but the sound revealed his exasperation.
"You think I'm wrong?"
"Just that you've come a long way kind of fast," he said. "You've got a superb mind now, intelligence that can't really be calculated, more knowledge absorbed by now than most people pick up in a long lifetime. But you're lopsided. You know things. You see things. But you haven't developed understanding, or—I have to use the word—tolerance. You call them phonies, but when did either of them ever claim to be perfect, or superhuman? They're ordinary people. You're the genius."
He broke off awkwardly, suddenly aware that he was preaching at me.
"Go ahead."
"Ever meet Nemur's wife?"
"No."
"If you want to understand why he's under tension all the time, even when things are going well at the lab and in his lectures, you've got to know Bertha Nemur. Did you know she's got him his professorship? Did you know she used her father's influence to get him the Welberg Foundation grant? Well, now she's pushed him into this premature presentation at the convention. Until you've had a woman like her riding you, don't think you can understand the man who has."
I didn't say anything, and I could see he wanted to get back to the hotel. All the way back we were silent.
***
Am I a genius? I don't think so. Not yet anyway. As Burt would put it, mocking the euphemisms of educational jargon, I'm exceptional—a democratic term used to avoid the damning labels of gifted and deprived (which used to mean bright and retarded) and as soon as exceptional begins to mean anything to anyone they'll change it. The idea seems to be: use an expression only as long as it doesn't mean anything to anybody. Exceptional refers to both ends of the spectrum, so all my life I've been exceptional.
Strange about learning; the farther I go the more I see that I never knew even existed. A short while ago I foolishly thought I could learn everything—all the knowledge in the world. Now I hope only to be able to know of its existence, and to understand one grain of it.
Is there time?
Burt is annoyed with me. He finds me impatient and the others must feel the same. But they hold me back and try to keep me in my place. What is my place? Who and what am I now? Am I the sum of my life or only of the past months? Oh, how impatient they get when I try to discuss it with them. They don't like to admit that they don't know. It's paradoxical that an ordinary man like Nemur presumes to devote himself to making other people geniuses. He would like to be thought of as the discoverer of new laws of learning—the Einstein of psychology. And he has the teacher's fear of being surpassed by the student, the master's dread of having the disciple discredit his work. (Not that I am in any real sense Nemur's student or disciple as Burt is.)
I guess Nemur's fear of being revealed as a man walking on stilts among giants is understandable. Failure at this point would destroy him. He is too old to start all over again.
As shocking as it is to discover the truth about men I had respected and looked up to, I guess Burt is right. I must not be too impatient with them. Their ideas and brilliant work made the experiment possible. I've got to guard