Heir to the Glimmering World (29 page)

44

A
LONE WITH MITWISSER,
the Bear Boy settled it. He would come and go; it wasn't his habit to stay stuck in one spot. He would come and go, and when he came he would give them—he said it outright—money.

—A stipend? No, no, nothing like that, he said. I'm not the sort that thinks that way, I'm not a goddamn lawyer, I don't care to be tied to any goddamn calendar. The first thing is you want to get to New York, right?

—Not for two years, Mitwisser said. My contract with the College goes to 1935.

—Well, break it, why not? Just pick up and leave.

—Oh no, not possible. If not for the College...

—What? You'd've been stuck over there? They'd get you? Listen, if you didn't want to be stuck over there, why stay stuck over here?

He broke into a laugh at this, and Mitwisser—he felt diseased—laughed with him, hugely, hilariously, a joke, everything the same, throwing over a position for which he was indebted no different from the terror of a family uprooted and pursued, all things in this place of exile level, level, level!

They went on laughing together. The tutor—a tutor no more—wound his arm around Mitwisser's neck.

—I shall not give up my obligations here. I am obligated, Mitwisser said.

—Your choice, fine. Here, take this for now.

The money changed hands. The beggar chose; he chose to be a beggar.

The Bear Boy came and went. He went, by train, straight across the breast of the land to have a look at the Pacific, and found a yellow beach, and lay there in the sun, with a bottle in his knapsack. The waves frothed like lions' manes. One day, for the lark of it, he got a job as an extra in a Western—they dressed him in spurs and a ten-gallon hat: it was the bar brawl scene. He turned up at six on the first day and not at all on the second. There was a joke in that, too: he'd been too drunk to get up on time to play a drunk. In California everything started too early. He didn't mind getting drunk in California, on the beach with the high waves curling nearby.

Mitwisser wondered whether he would return; he hoped he would not. The money was a disease—yet it was ease. It was meat; they had not had meat for months. It was new clothes for his children, especially for his sons, who were growing like young trees—his splendid Heinz, now almost as tall as Anneliese! His sons in their new clothes were more boisterously American than ever. Only Anneliese kept her old dignity. His wife kept her old shoes, and he kept his old wool suit, because the unclean money (as he thought of it, separating it from the clean money his position at the College sparsely supplied) was beginning to trickle away. Would the tutor come back, and give them some more?

For a long time he did not; Mitwisser's children ate rice. Far away, the Bear Boy dozed on a California beach. The tide rose and ebbed. He knew they were waiting for him—he had them in his hands. A whole family of children in that house with the pretty fanlight. He could open and shut the door.

By the time he reappeared (a season had passed), the money did not seem so unclean. It startled Mitwisser—civic deleteriousness!—that the man who had been his sons' tutor now addressed him as Rudi.

—James, Mitwisser acceded.

—Much better. Why don't you people get some more light in here?—More light, Mrs. Mitwisser said to herself. Goethe's last words on his deathbed.

He sat with Mitwisser and told, laughing, how those movie people had outfitted him in a cowboy getup.

—They never got it back either. I gave it to some hobo on the beach. My father, James said, had me dressed up sillier than that.

And laughed. Mitwisser laughed with him; it was the least he could do for his children.

He came and he went. The tide of money rose and ebbed. More the first year, less the second. At the start he would take a room in the neighborhood (the William Penn be damned), but after a while it seemed to the girl that it was only right to invite him in, and he obliged. The father did not object; he had the father in his grip. Annie. Half child, half woman. Those tiny glints in her ears. The mother, he saw, withdrew to another part of the house when he was there.

He went, by bus, to New York. The lawyers' offices were smaller than he remembered them; Mr. Brooks was smaller. Mr. Fullerton was in the hospital, but was expected to recover fully, and would soon return.

He instructed Mr. Brooks to facilitate the rental of a large apartment within walking distance of the Library on Forty-second Street.

—Is it for you? Mr. Brooks inquired.

—No. Not for me, why would I want that?

—You intend this apartment to be lived in—used—by others?

—That's the idea.

—If I may say so, that would be extremely incautious. It would require certain restrictions...

—Just get it done.

Some weeks later he telephoned, long distance, from a pay phone in a drugstore and canceled the instructions for the city apartment.

—I'm afraid that at this point, Mr. Brooks began.

—Just do it.

The new plan was to find and rent a house—yes, an entire house—in an outlying section of the city. Countrylike, if possible. Mr. Brooks replied that Mr. Fullerton, a born New Yorker who was better acquainted with these matters, was in a nursing home. Unfortunately he had been felled by a second stroke.

—I'll do what I can, Mr. Brooks said. I'm up in Greenwich myself, I don't know much about the outer boroughs.

—And get some carpenters for shelves. Plenty of 'em. There's more books than anybody would believe.

He saw that Mrs. Mitwisser was growing querulous. She did not like him there. She complained that he shut himself up with her husband. She complained that he smelled of schnapps.

After setting Mr. Brooks on the right path, he took a train up to Canada for the lark of it (it was true that he had been drinking a little, sitting there laughing with Rudi), and this time forgot to leave them money.

45

T
HERE HAD BEEN
a time when the nights with Professor Mitwisser in his study were my only unspoiled pleasure. I looked forward to the curious tableau we made—years later, that is how I imagine it: a motionless scene, I with my fingers stilled on the light-stippled glass of the typewriter keys, a twisted tail of hair sucked in at the side of my lip, he standing giantly over me, submerged in his dream of forgotten heresies. I see it that way, in stasis, as a kind of trance, in order to isolate those phantasmagorical hours from the turbulence and frights of that unhappy house.

Some three weeks after Mrs. Mitwisser's injury ("my wife's accident," he called it, as if she had merely dropped and shattered a dish, which sometimes happened), Mitwisser announced that we were to return to the work on al-Kirkisani.

He seemed less concentrated than usual, almost desultory. I waited while he searched through a bundle of papers, murmuring some syllables I could by now identify as Arabic, and tapping the arm of my chair when he could not find what he wanted.

"The passage on ladders and bridges," he said, as if to no one; but he meant me.

I riffled through my old transcriptions, and discovered it there:
ladders and bridges toward the perception of revealed truth.
"It's number four in the 'Principles,'" I said.

Ladders and bridges, lights and watchtowers! All this threw me into a delirium of rapture. It was not only the intoxication of these magicking words (which anyhow were nearly meaningless for me), but the wash of knowledge that came flooding in their wake: that the world was infinitely old, and filled to the brim with schisms and divisions and furies and losses. Not yet out of my teens, historyless, I was confident that I had plumbed the revealed truth of history. And that I was in mystical confraternity with Professor Mitwisser, more so than he could ever conceive.

He fixed his sea-colored look directly on me with a self-consciousness that had never before been evident.

"My son Wilhelm informs me," he said, "that you are in correspondence with Dr. Tandoori. Please to clarify."

"It isn't a correspondence. I mean I haven't answered. He asked me to come and work for him."

"That is scarcely what Wilhelm conveyed."

Willi's a snoop, I did not say.

"Do you intend to leave here? My wife, particularly after her accident, would wish you to remain. Particularly in the absence," he said hoarsely, "of my daughter."

He almost never spoke of this. He would not speak of it now.

"My wife," he resumed, "has grown attached to you, and I myself continue to find you of use. May I suggest that you will not profit from a ... a position, let us call it, with Dr. Tandoori."

I asked why not.

"The man is godless."

It was an odd remark. A signal, or a symptom.

"But you liked him," I said.

"A divertissement. An artful pantaloon." He shut his eyes against me, and it was clear that he was suffering. "Perhaps," he said, "if Dr. Tandoori had not been present—then perhaps I—or you—if you had not lingered, Fräulein, if you had gone where your duty lay, with my wife, the accident might never—"

He wheeled round to spew out his broken accusations in the direction of the big bed across the room. But it was not Dr. Tandoori he was accusing, or his own dereliction, or mine. I remembered how Dr. Tan-doori had charmed him; it was not Dr. Tandoori who harrowed him now.

"Godless men destroy young women," he finished.

What his wife had seen into long before, he believed at last.

Anneliese and James had been gone a full month. What was customarily done when a girl of sixteen, of her own volition, went off with a man who was a familiar of the house? Was it or wasn't it a question for public scrutiny? I did not dare to broach these uncertain speculations with Professor Mitwisser. His silence was a moat. He could not say his daughter's name.

Mrs. Mitwisser in the privacy of our bedroom bleated it out again and again. That wistful experimental "if"—"If they will come"—had lately turned into a remnant of a wail: "Anneliese, Anneliese, she does not come..."

I said carefully, "The police—"

"No police!"

"They help with missing persons—"

"That one, he is thief. He takes."

"All the more reason—"

"No police, no!"

She shrank from the word; she shrank from uniforms. Uniforms are dangerous, one must not put one's trust in uniforms! No police, no, no, one must have scruples, one must protect one's child, if there is shame it must be hidden, there is danger in police, there is danger in shame!

Fear of uniforms had never occurred to me. Neither, to tell the truth, had shame.

46

c/o Capolino
14½ S.E. State Street
Albany, New York
PLEASE FORWARD

Dear Bertram,

I was so very sad to learn that you've lost your job at the hospital. But since it's weeks since your letter came, by now you've surely found something suitable.

You didn't say how to reach you (that's a habit of yours, or is it Ninel's idea again), so I'm sending this to your old address. Maybe your ex-landlady will know where you've gone to. You say you're relieved that I'm not "strapped for cash." The truth is that this entire household is right now nearly without funds. Hard times.

If you get this and you do want to write again, be sure to mark the envelope
PERSONAL.

Rosie

P.S. You'll be impressed to hear that I've had a marriage proposal!

c/o Mr. Thmas R. Washington
2 Showcorner Blvd., 6B
Albany, New York

Hello Rosie!

I've written
PERSONAL
all over the outside, so any potential cul-prit is well warned. That must be some unwholesome bunch you're with, if that's what's required!

It didn't take very long for your (slightly sour) missive to wend its circuitous way. Mrs. Capolino, out of a guilty conscience I'm sure, brought it right over to the local Y, where I'd been staying (fact is, I ran out of money and had to get out), and the Y—last known address, so to speak—shipped it down here. But Mrs. Capolino says I can have my mail sent to her place from now on, she'll hold it for me. She's got a new tenant and she's feeling sorry for me. I didn't let on that her geranium's dead.

As for work, I haven't found a thing—not so far, anyhow, and not for want of trying. Turns out I've got a bigger—meaning worse—reputation than I knew. I'm blacklisted just about everywhere as a rabble-rouser and troublemaker, if you can believe it! Not one other hospital would touch me—I'm tainted with unionizing. I suppose I've had my name and photo in the papers more than I should, but Ninel thought it was a good thing, scares the bosses, etc. Well, I didn't realize I'd gotten famous all over town!

After the hospitals I tried the drug chains, and one of them, not a bad fellow running it, kept me on for two days, and then sacked me when he sniffed out my evil history. The doctors at my old job wouldn't give me the time of day either—I thought maybe Prescott could help out, Prescott's the one who got your father the job at Croft Hall—but your dad's troubles left a bad taste, I'm afraid. I was hoping I could get to teach chemistry or the like to the oligarchs, but no go. Last week things got so bad that I walked into a restaurant and washed dishes for cash. Twelve hours of hot steam and it doesn't add up to rent money. If not for Thomas I'd be out in the street with the other bums. Thomas is an angel—he's putting me up for a while. You may remember him, he's the orderly I gave your dad's fancy English shoes to. He can't have me here much longer, though—his wife and little girl are on a family visit to Georgia, and when they get back I'll need to move on.

Here's an embarrassment. Since you're gainfully employed and your poor old cousin Bertram isn't, I was thinking if you could spare five or ten bucks now and then? Just till something works out. But it seems you folks have troubles of your own.