Heir to the Glimmering World (12 page)

"He teaches to be
ein Bettler, ein Schmarotzertier! Ein Parasit!
"

And she sang:

Fünf Finger, aber keine Hand,
Ein Schuh, doch ohne Sohle,
Erst weiss wie eine Wand,
Dann schwarz wie eine Kohle.

"Please," I said. "It's not the time now, Mrs. Mitwisser."

"Such a funny song,
ja?
" The smile had resumed. "I explain it for you
—ein Handschuh!
What is clean you make dirty. You put in this glove the hand, it becomes puppet, you see? And if you teach to hold out the hand, it becomes beggar, dirty,
Parasit,
you see? It is because we have no more money. No money!" She threw out the kind of laughter that had long ago married itself to satire.

In her unpredictability, Mrs. Mitwisser had grown predictable; she specialized in refrains. Her broken mind, wherever it wandered, came back to money—though often enough, because of the needle-eye of taunting through which she threaded those refrains and obstinacies, I doubted that it was broken at all.

I missed my nights at the typewriter; I missed Mitwisser's Karaite recitations and emanations. I envied Anneliese, closeted with the conflagration of her father's furies. I even envied the three boys, who seemed wilder every day (they were gradually turning more and more American), departing in the morning with shouts and returning with shouts and punches, schoolboy style, their bookbags spilling loose sheets. School had solidified their names: they were now, incontrovertibly, Hank, Jerry, and Bill, though only with one another, and never for Anneliese. I envied them the liberated boisterousness of their lives outside our decorous and disciplined walls. Within these walls, only Elsa Mitwisser had chosen unrestraint.

It did not occur to me to envy Waltraut, still clinging to a motherless infancy she ought to have outgrown. Except for the two chocolate bars I remembered to give her, her fourth birthday had passed without notice. Her crib was her refuge—lately she was refusing to climb out of it, and lingered there all afternoon, dozing like an elderly dwarf. Or else she would sit on her pillow and dress and undress her doll, sometimes peering through the bars to see if anyone was happening by. The doll was an early possession, a refugee along with the Mitwisser family: it had a porcelain head, a red circle on each cheek, a tiny tongue protruding from partly open lips, and long legs stuffed with straw; also black fabric shoes frayed at the toes. It was a yellow-haired Bavarian doll in a dirndl. Now and then Waltraut dropped the doll and squeezed her knuckles against her ears; I had been witness to this oddness more than once, when Mrs. Mitwisser's singing drifted down the stairwell. I pitied Waltraut—I was her only playmate, and an unwilling one. In that house no one inflamed my thinking more than Professor Mitwisser.

"Have you started mama on her English?" Anneliese asked, a few days after her father's directive.

I said we had begun a novel.

"An American novel? Papa says it ought to be something that won't get her agitated."

"An English one."

Anneliese was satisfied; she trusted that what was not American would not shout or punch or agitate.

The novel we had begun was
Sense and Sensibility.
There were books all around—rows and rows of them, quantities and quantities— but, as far as I could tell (so many were in recondite tongues and alphabets), no books of invention. The Karaites, to be sure, had invented themselves—not out of nothingness, but, as heretics will, out of an already existing splendor; yet they subtracted from imagination rather than added to it. Mitwisser's ten thousand volumes, with their bottomless excavations of Karaite heresy, could be thought of as fable, since history, in its own way, is fable, or at least parable. But what was wanted—what was wanted for Mrs. Mitwisser—was simply Story: a story about men and women free of history, except their own. "She must be induced," Mitwisser had decreed. Mrs. Mitwisser was not to be induced; she would slip away like a cloud altering the light, or she would thin her cheeks with the irritable vibrations of her little songs and lullabies. And since she was not to be induced, I reflected, she must be seduced.

This idea sent me to the middle drawer of the dresser next to my bed (the drawer just above the Bear Boy and Bertram's envelope—that blueness for which Mrs. Mitwisser had been forgiven a hundred times), where Ninel's scavenged presents lay among my underthings, the claylike smell of the Salvation Army's damp cellar still faintly in their pages.
Hard Times,
which had Ninel's tepid approval, I set aside at once—Mrs. Mitwisser had endured enough of hard times. It was Jane Austen I snatched up, and I knew exactly why. It was because of the money. Ninel had intended
Sense and Sensibility
as punishment or rebuke or sneer, to remind me that the novels I loved were steeped in the pre-Marxist capitalist darkness of their wickedly imperialist times; their domestic attractions eluded her.

I recited:

The family of Dashwood had been long settled in Sussex. Their estate was large, and their residence was at Norland Park, in the center of their property, where for many generations they had lived in so respectable a manner as to engage the good opinion of their surrounding acquaintance.

Mrs. Mitwisser understood all this very well; it glimmered with unfamiliar familiarity; none of it was beyond her comprehension. She understood it
pleasurably
—remembering when she had herself lived in so respectable a manner as to engage, etc.; and when the Dashwood fortunes fell—"Their mother had nothing, and their father only seven thousand pounds in his own disposal"—she warmed to the affinities she instantly felt: the loss of money, the necessity of money, the hope of money; standing, expectation, repute.

I read and read until my throat thickened and my voice blurred. I read aloud night after night, the Scheherazade of that half-barren spot in the distant reaches of the city. The squat wooden chest on which Mrs. Mitwisser had been working her puzzles was still in its old position. I placed a lamp on it and drew up a chair; Mrs. Mitwisser sank back into her pillow. Below, in Mitwisser's study, the cadenced iambic murmurs of father and daughter, question and answer, intermingled. The boys slept on. Waltraut, secure in her crib, never woke. The madwoman's songs were snuffed.

We had got as far as Chapter Thirty, with the faithless Willoughby betraying Marianne Dashwood, and Mrs. Jennings deploring the man who "has no business to fly off from his word only because he grows poor, and a richer girl is ready to have him," when Anneliese appeared at the door and whispered my name.

"Rosie! Come out here for a minute."

Mrs. Mitwisser's head, under the lamp, bucked like a small shaggy horse. Her quick hand took hold of my knee. "You must finish," she said.

"Anneliese wants me—"

"First you must finish."

Anneliese stepped toward us. The two brown braids that coiled around her ears had lost their pins; her hair flooded down past her shoulders and over her breasts. I had not known that her hair was so long. It was as if, with its release, the danger I had always been wary of, the danger of a restrained ferocity, was draining out of her: out of the ends of her spreading hair. One demon was dissolving; another was forming: it had begun by undoing her braids.

She caught up the book—her wild arm circled and made a wind—and threw it on Mrs. Mitwisser's bed.

"Come out, I want to tell you something!"

I followed her. We stood in the dark of the hall.

"Papa gave me the news just now. Just now, though he's known it all day—since this morning. There's a letter finally."

An impatient shifting in the bed. "Röslein, where do you go,
komm schnell zurück—
"

"If mama hears, she'll just carry
on.
" Anneliese pushed me deeper into the dark. "It's James," she whispered. "James is coming! Papa kept it to himself—he waited till the boys were asleep, he doesn't want them to get all excited too soon. But we need to get ready right away. Heinz goes in with Gert and Willi, and I go in with Waltraut, and James goes across from papa, in my room, so we need to do the sheets and things."

"And your mother?"

"She stays just where she is. In with you."

"No, I mean about—this James."

"Well, she has to take it, she has to swallow it, that's all!"

I thought this over. Fear of Anneliese was dying in me: with her hair unbound and raining down, hiding those diminutive matronly alien earrings, she was, I saw, only a girl.

I said, "Will Professor Mitwisser have to swallow it too?"

"What a stupid thing to say," Anneliese spat out. "Papa and James, you don't know a thing about it. They're like one person. They're exactly the same." She whirled away from me so forcefully that the spray of her hair came whipping against my face. "I need you to help with the bedding early tomorrow morning, that's the point. Now go back to mama."

Half-sitting, sunk into her pillow, Mrs. Mitwisser had grown quiescent. I believed she had fallen into a doze in spite of herself. The lamp was pulled nearer; she was very still. The light whitened the visible bones of her wrist and her narrow fingers. But her eyes were unsealed, sleepless, rapt. The small white fingers were gripping the book that smelled of cellar. Mrs. Mitwisser was reading, in a seizure of concentrated intelligence, an English novel.

Her canny husband had accomplished the obliteration of German in every room of the house except his own.

17

T
HE MITWISSER BOYS
had long bones and long feet. It was plain that they were destined to grow tall. Heinz was already showing signs of lengthening: his arms strained out of their sleeves. Willi, the smallest and the youngest, was the most beautiful. His eyes were as round as wheels, with almost no tapering at the corners, brown melting into a black so dense that one expected distant starlight to filter out of it, as out of a bottomless black firmament. The impatient skin of his temple pulsed; his was the sexless beauty of a young child. Waltraut had none of this. She was languishing, she had lost smiles and affection, she was becoming a tiny crone: the life of the house was aging her. She cared for nothing but her doll.

In that family of long bones—bone of forearm, bone of thigh—only Mrs. Mitwisser was different. She was a little woman with whom a giant had seen fit to couple. Mitwisser, the progenitor of all those long bones, stalked and circled like some great mobile statue quarried out of a mountainside; he was obliged to dip his head down when he entered a room, so as not to strike the lintel. And Anneliese, flying from one household task to another, seemed to rise and rise into loftiness, her elastic neck evolving out of the long level bone of her clavicle. Mitwisser and his daughter, a pair of colossi; and next to them—though she was rarely next to them, and was more often sequestered—Elsa Mitwisser, short-necked, narrow-shouldered, small-fingered. It was as if she had designed this narrowness, this smallness: all her children had been formed on some scientific plan within the confines of her littleness. She was a scientist and a naturalist, and both science and nature are in pursuit of efficacy and economy. Both science and nature rebel against disorder and fracture; and yet disorder and fracture had vanquished and desolated her. They had overturned the governance of her mind.

But I wondered still whether she was truly mad, or whether her madness had itself come into being on some scientific plan. World-upheaval had capsized and stupefied her. Then she must answer! Answer disorder with disorder, fracture with fracture; she must refuse and refuse. Once or twice, having refused, she recanted. She had refused her shoes—but now she wore them. She had refused the language of exile—but now she was in thrall to a narrative wherein mind was governance, and a nation was stable, and disorder and fracture were tamely domesticated. She spoke of "Chane Osten" with an ardor that only anger had been able to ignite, and when she got to the end she began again, though she complained of the smell. She did not protest the language of exile; she was immersed in it, captivated. True madness, I thought, does not reverse itself. True madness will not recant. Was she Hamlet, for whom madness is ruse and defense and trap, or was she Ophelia, whom true madness submerges? And her smallness: she had schemed it to set herself apart from those Mitwisser giants—to escape them by curling into hidden corners. Now she curled with her book. Privy to magickings and delusions denied to others, she shrank herself at will. She was a little woman with unknowable powers. She had no love for her children. Waltraut longed for her and feared her.

Her idea of James was mad. I was sure of it as soon as he came through the green front door with a dirty wet knapsack on his back and a scarred suitcase, running with water, in one hand; the other was pulling off a dripping knit cap. It was raining, pelting, the drops heaving horizontally like bullets in a barrage, a lead curtain of waterfall blown sideways. It was the kind of rain that made me obscurely anxious, in the way of some remembered alarm, or warning, or turning point. We had left Albany in the rain—but that was an ordinary downpour, a thing of chance. Through the open door as he lumbered in, weighed down and soaked through, I smelled that half-metallic smell of earth and concrete, the mixture of contradictory elements that sometimes swelled in my nostrils when I saw, in my dreams, my father's car crumpled in the road, under a hammering screen of murderous rain. I feared those dreams. They swarmed like reenactments of something foretold.

He was not young; neither was he old. He was a ragged sort of fellow. If I had met him in the street I would have taken him for a vagrant and given him a wide berth; I would have dreaded the accidental touch of his sleeve. He wore rubbers over his shoes, but no socks. When his cap was off a heap of black hair went tumbling over the streaming lenses of his glasses: impossible to see his eyes behind all that water. A vagrant; a vagabond; a man with a knapsack and no socks. This was James, James the deliverer, the James who was to deliver my wages, the James who had supplied this house, and the pretty little cakes, and the puzzles and kites, and the lavish apartment in the city that had been relinquished on account of Mrs. Mitwisser's waywardness; this was the James who had made them
Parasiten,
the James whose messianic coming, Anneliese had predicted (was she as mad as her mother?), would shower them all with plenty of money.