AEgypt (36 page)

Twenty years before, Axel Moffett had won a good amount of money on one of the high-rolling TV quiz shows then popular. His field was Western Civilization, and he had the advantage of knowing and loving deeply all the hoary anecdotes and Great Moments and imaginary Turning Points and romantic incidents in the supposed lives of the supposed heroes of that civilization, from Alexander and Boadicea to Napoleon and Garibaldi; Pierce, schooled in a more scientific history, would have done far less well. There were no essay questions asked, and Axel, though shaky on exact dates, could almost anticipate, as soon as any question was begun, which of the relatively small number of great stories was being fished for. To an uninstructed audience, though, his knowledge must have seemed unimaginably wide; it had seemed so, for that matter, to Pierce, fourteen years old, watching his black-and-white and strangely reduced father answer firmly what Austrian had briefly been emperor of Mexico (Axel had loved the movie, poor poor Carlotta, and Brian Aherne's soft and hopeless eyes). Around the TV in Kentucky, they all cheered, except Pierce's mother, who only shook her head smiling, as though it were only another unfathomable oddity of her husband's, only another to be forgiven and forgotten.

He got about halfway up the pyramid of cash on offer before being stopped; the producers decided that he was too queer a fish to be allowed the highest prizes (though he had amused for a while, with his antique courtliness and his way of answering with blazing eyes and a loud of-course tone, as though he were being challenged). It wasn't a question of rigging—Axel could not have been rigged, and ever after could reenact his horror and shame on discovering that others on that very program had been; it was a simple matter of asking him for a fact so obscure, so out-of-the-way, so disconnected from the Great Themes that a specialist would not have known it (and it was tried out on some). To the masses, of course, it seemed no more of a crusher than many others Axel had answered easily or anyway sweated out (What song did the sirens sing? What name did Achilles take when he hid among the women?), but Axel hearing it could only stand stupefied in his glass box without the vaguest guess, until the clock ran out.

What was odd was that Pierce had known the answer to that question.

He had listened to it asked—in the TV lounge at St. Guinefort's Academy this last time—and had heard the tick-tock music begin which marked the time in which an answer had to be given, syncopated with a distant Ping-Pong game elsewhere in the school hall. He had heard, unbelieving, the answer worth thousands unfold in his own mind while Axel stared. The music stopped; there was a moment's grace, but it did Axel no good. From his card the host read out the answer, the same answer that had unfolded within Pierce; the studio audience mourned, Pierce's schoolmates turned from the screen to look at him, some jeering, some curious, some groaning over the lost bucks. Pierce sat silent. Axel was led away after being commiserated with by the gleeful host, his stricken head held high, a look on his face, all lost save honor, that Pierce would never forget: if he had seen his father led to the block it could not have made a more heartrending memory.

He never told his father that he had known the answer.

The money Axel had by that time won seemed anyway a vast treasure; in retrospect it would appear almost trivial, as so many dollar figures of those days would, but it had been enough then to buy the pretty if shabby building off Park Slope in which Axel lived, and to which Pierce had been born. Axel had thus become a landlord, which he hated, but the building would support him without a lot of labor in the often mismanaged and sometimes dreadful years that lay ahead for him. Even now when its rent-controlled tenantry hardly paid the taxes and the most minimal of maintenance, it was somewhere for Axel to lay his head. That was how he put it to Pierce: “At least,” tears often blooming in his eyes, “at least somewhere to lay my head."

This Christmas afternoon Pierce found him standing in the entranceway of the building, like a homeless bum taking shelter there (the comparison was Axel's). “The bell's broken,” he said, fumbling with the key, “and Gravely's gone to his people on the island. I didn't want you standing out here ringing, thinking I was gone, though where I'd be I don't know.” Gravely was the super, a black man of great kindliness, even sweetness, who had been there since Pierce was a child; Axel revered Gravely, and Gravely called Axel Mr. Moffett; stooped, gracious, slow, and wise, he was one of the almost fictional characters that entered Axel's life as though from the old movies he loved, and who had passed out of real life everywhere else, if indeed they had ever inhabited it. Pierce feared for Axel when Gravely was dead.

"Where I'd be I don't know,” Axel said again as they climbed the stairs. “Where I'd be—I don't know. Oh Pierce. The homeless on a night like this. The homeless man on this night of all nights. This night of all nights in the year."

Pierce's uncle Sam had described Axel once as “a little theatrical.” To nine-year-old Pierce (newly come to live with Sam) this didn't communicate much, but after pondering it Pierce thought that maybe what Sam referred to was Axel's habit of repeating, over and over and almost to himself, a phrase that momentarily struck him, like an actor rehearsing it, trying it this way and that way, pressing emotion or levity into it until it made him laugh or cry. Later on, other meanings of Sam's description seemed more obviously intended, but still it was probably true what Sam also said, that Axel had missed the boat by not going into acting or Holy Orders, one.

They were greeted as Axel opened his door by a harsh shriek of Latin:
"De mortuis nil
squawk wheep!” Then: “Shut up, shut up."

"Amazing,” Pierce said laughing, “how many parrots learn to say ‘shut up.’ I wonder why that is."

"
When
,” said Axel with a look of exhausted patience, “are you going to take that thing
away. Out.
Out of my
life."

"Well,” Pierce said, “that's sort of something I came to announce, in a way.” He pulled the small bottles from their snow-soggy paper bag. Because of his past history, Axel kept no liquor in the house; he drank only beer and a little wine in taverns. But at birthdays and Christmas he must have a martini, two martinis, to remind him of a more festive time, happier days. He was already at work with pitcher, ice, stirring rod.

"People drink them now
on the rocks,
” he said. “Horrible, horrible. That's not a
martini.
Though I think the little sliver of lemon is a good idea. A twist. A
twist
of lemon. Really, Pierce, he should be returned to the jungle. It isn't kind. He looks so
shabby.
He should be flitting through the jungle, the Amazon. Like a green thought in a green shade. He makes me feel like an old maid, something Victorian and dowdy.
Dowdy.
When when
when
are you going to take him away.” He was laughing now.
"Liberate
me from this enslavement to a
bird
.” He stirred. “Like a green thought in a green shade. Like a green thought: in a green shade.
Libera me domine
."

Pierce sat on the colorless sofa, contemplating his bird and his old home. It had acquired a patina of Axel that had obliterated almost all that had remained in it of his own life and his mother's here, even though very little had changed. The walls hadn't been chocolate brown when he was a boy, but he didn't think Axel had painted them so; they had just grown so. This sofa had once been a blue one he could remember; the framed etchings of cathedrals and the Cameron photograph of William Morris had once been pictures he had looked long at. There was even a lost pattern on the rug that belonged to his memories. It was all buried here, like an earlier Troy, beneath the tidy dirtiness, the rummage-sale and salvage acquisitions, the old-man smell.

"
Libera me domine
,” Axel said again as he brought the pitcher and two glasses. Pierce had to strip the twists from the lemon, Axel's plump white tapering fingers were no good at such tasks, “nerveless” as he said; and rub the glasses with them, and then pour and present. It was like a hasty tea ceremony. Axel enjoyed it enormously.

"You see the glasses,” he said. They were tall and etched, with fluted green stems. “Venetian. Well not really Venetian, but
like
Venetian. Victorian copies, I suppose, maybe, possibly.” They struck Pierce as Woolworth's, but he knew little about such things. “Off the truck, of course. The boys brought them to me. Here, Axel, you kinda like this fancy stuff, why don't you take these, heck we'd just break ‘em. They
know
, you see. They can't really appreciate the things themselves, but they know there's something there, something they don't grasp. Beauty. Books: they always bring me the books. Hey, Axel, what's this, I found this. And it was Rabelais in French, a little quarto volume, only one of a set, and I said, Yes, Teddy, this
is
a great classic"—kindly, grave, careful of simpler sensibilities—"and it's in French, of a very old-fashioned kind.... You read that stuff? he said, and I said, Yes, I can make it out, I know the lingo.... Well, they tease me, they're just honest hard-handed kids. Merry, merry Christmas, you know your coming here means a lot to me, a lot. Pierce. It means a lot.” He sighed. “Just hard-handed good simple boys. Rowdy. Rowdy.” He chuckled at a private memory.

"Are you guys making any money?” Pierce asked. He always felt loutish cutting across his father's enthusiasms with questions like that, but he couldn't seem to help it. He mistrusted this salvage business Axel had got involved with, a gang of Brooklynites who after work and on weekends stripped abandoned houses and tenements of copper and lead piping and whatever else of value they could find, under contract to the demolition men. They had a headquarters in an old firehouse they rented from the city, a place to get away from their wives and drink beer prodigiously; they were pledged to one another and to an older man called the Chief, a one-time Navy chief Pierce gathered, who ran the operation—so Axel's stories suggested—in a manner somewhere between a scout camp and a gang of Villon thieves, though Axel insisted there was nothing illegal about it. Axel kept the books; just how much of the fun he joined in he didn't quite say.

"Money, well, money,” he answered. “It takes money to make money.” Suddenly he took umbrage. “Money! What are we talking about
money
for on a day like this! On this day of all days in the year!"

"Squawp wheek!” said Pierce's parrot. Pierce had often noticed how a sudden rise in the noise level made a parrot talk. Axel rose heavily, glass in his hand; the bird sidled along its perch toward him, turning its baggy eyes alternately on him. There was a fixed expression on Axel's face and Pierce wondered if he meant to strangle the bird. But he only stood before it, and after a moment began absently stroking its chin with the back of his forefinger. “I got a card from Winnie,” he said.

"Yes?” Pierce said. “So did I. She sounds good."

Axel sighed hugely. “I went to Midnight Mass last night. At Saint Basil's. You remember we always went. Winnie sang. She sang so purely.” He leaned against the mantelpiece, head low, shoulders drooping. “I mentioned you both, in my intentions. My wife. My son."

Pierce too lowered his eyes for a moment, and said, “You still go, huh. Pretty crowded still?"

"The Mass of the Angels,” Axel said. Axel managed to combine a basic atheism with a certain amount of emotional churchgoing and a special devotion to the Virgin. “The music.
Gloria in excelsis Deo.
Winnie could always just touch the high notes, so, so ... just
touch
."

"Well, she sounds good,” Pierce said. “Rested. Getting a good rest. The card was pretty funny, though. I think it must have been Dora's choice."

"I mentioned you both,” Axel said again. “In my intentions. I did. You're all I have now, Pierce. All I have."

Pierce twisted the Venetian glass in his hand. His remark had not deflected the train of reminiscence charged with guilt and loss that came with the finishing of the first martini and the embarking on the second; but he hadn't expected it to. It was as much a part of Christmas here as a gloomy forecast of declining powers and the deep desire Still to Do Some Good were a part of birthdays, which Axel also took with great seriousness; as he took his marriage vows, and his fatherhood, and his failure at these, or what he took to be his failure. Pierce was never able to reassure him; it was hard, given the depth of Axel's feelings, to tell him to forget it, it didn't matter much, or to suggest to him when Axel approached with grave chivalry the memory of his wife that Winnie (Pierce felt pretty sure) rarely thought of the matter one way or the other. It had always been Sam (and Dora now that Sam was dead) who had remembered Axel, remembered to send cards, remembered that Axel had a part in Pierce and a duty toward him too. Winnie had mostly wanted to rest.

His mother's capacity for rest had been great—Pierce rarely remembered her except as sitting placidly, sweet face vacant, hands loosely folded in her lap—but it had never been enough. Restlessness, in every sense, was for her like one of those obscure and chronic Victorian maladies that show few symptoms but whose prevention or mitigation is a lifetime's work. It had only broken out seriously a few times that Pierce knew of: presumably when she had married Axel, perhaps when she had left him to go live with her brother Sam when Sam's wife died; and after Sam's death, when it had taken over her badly enough that she'd had to go away, to a rest home, to recover her restfulness.

She'd met Dora there. Dora had spent years caring for a widowed elder brother (as she supposed Winnie had done too, though it had been as much the other way around), a brother whom she was visiting almost daily in his final senility at the rest home. His death left Dora nothing to do, a condition she feared as much as Winnie longed for rest; and so she had taken up Winnie's life, with all the fascinating stories and collateral relatives it seemed to contain, including Pierce and Axel, and now she managed it and Winnie from a string of bungalows she had bought in Florida with her own and Winnie's insurance proceeds. There Winnie seemed truly to have come to rest at last.