Heir to the Glimmering World (33 page)

"I have to talk to my cousin," I said, and again surprised myself; was I beginning to believe that Bertram was truly my cousin?

He looked shrunken; the sparse twist of his smile was a dry inch-worm. His curly hair was dusted all over, I could hardly tell with what: it was as if a peculiar rime had grown over him, or out of him, like a coating of flour.

"Got off at the wrong stop and had to walk. I forgot Ninel said it's the end of the line."

He had come up from the Village by subway, he explained. "Charlie's back there now—he's got a bad limp. Lots of Ninel's crowd are back. She's the only one. The only one who didn't make it back."

His shirt was rimmed with dirt.

"I figured Ninel's old gang would give me a break. Help out a little. Nothing doing, you know why? Ninel told them I'm against the Party. She told them I'd turned. They kicked me out after three nights, Charlie's idea."

"Isn't he the one who threw paint down the toilet at the Library?" I asked.

"Ninel never said anything like that." His hoarse breath was all denial, as if it was Ninel herself I was accusing. "Sometimes I feel ... I mean if I hadn't let her have that money—"

I was afraid he would burst into weeping; I remembered that when we were last together, it was I who had wept. But instead he only twisted up his mouth.

"She would've gone anyway," he said, "hook or crook, I realize that. They're a bunch of Johnny One Notes. Cranks. If you're not with them they'll slap you down. Only—with Ninel—it was something else, I knew it, it was something else..."

"Thunder and lightning," I put in.

"The old lady down in Georgia—Thomas's mother-in-law—well, his wife and kid came back in mourning, and I had to get out. Prescott ponied up the train fare, he was decent enough for that. And there's what you sent, and even a bit of a handout from Mrs. Capolino ... Albany's a dead end."

He threw himself into a chair, exhausted. His head dropped down; the coating of flour, I saw, was a crop of gray hairs.

"I had in mind Ninel's people could put me up awhile, at least for Ninel's sake ... just until I found something. Believe me, I didn't intend to show up here. The way things are now—"

I was suddenly alarmed: did he mean for me to take him in? How could I? How was it possible? I may have fancied this stricken house to be "our" house, but it was Mitwisser's, not mine. Yet how could I refuse Bertram? Hadn't he taken
me
in? And paid my tuition, and cared for me, and kissed me...

"I didn't know where else to go. A dog on your doorstep," he said.

"Oh, Bertram, don't—"

"I'm down to my last dime, Rosie, that's how it is. Maybe just for tonight, what d'you say?"

Bertram pleading: it was horrible to see. It made me ashamed, but also angry. I had surrendered the blue envelope to Ninel; I had nothing to give him.

I left him there in the litter of discarded toys and went up the stairs and, without knocking, stepped into Mitwisser's study. He was bent over a flurry of manuscripts and a row of books faced upside down, with their backs exposed in A-shaped peaks, like tepees, to secure a page. It was an awkward habit: he objected to inserting strips of paper to mark the passages he might wish to return to—books, he said, were not foxes, and ought not to have protruding white tails. For an instant I stood watching him write—in German, I noticed, and lethargically, lifting his pen in the air and keeping it suspended before bringing it down again, almost unwillingly, to eke out the next words. Across the room the disheveled bedclothes made a frozen tumble, like wreckage recently washed up on a beach. Claimed by Mrs. Mitwisser, I hadn't tidied up that morning.

He said, without looking up, "I did not call for you, why are you here?"

The newly carpentered shelves all around were prematurely arced under the weight of his library, as if mimicking the wearied curve of his shoulders. Behind the scissors-sharp blue of Mitwisser's eyes a dread was lurking; a smoke of desolation hung over him. But those eyes, which could so easily cut, were turned away from me, fixed on the idling point of his pen. "It may in fact be in vain," he had murmured the night before. I heard in it the tainted germ of something wayward, some pale interrupting doubt. My hands were still on the typewriter. He removed them, one at a time. The touch of his skin on mine had been unpleasantly tentative, like a clump of shed fur—harmless, but reminiscent of claws.

"Well?" he said.

"My cousin's stopped by. He's waiting downstairs."

"Your cousin? You have a cousin?"

"I did mention him once. His name is Bertram. We're very close, and he needs a place to stay—"

"Is this house a public accommodation? I have nothing to do with your relations."

"It would only be for tonight, if you wouldn't mind, and we do have an empty bed—"

He slammed the table with his big fist, so that the queue of tepees rocked and collapsed. "If it is my daughter's bed you are contemplating, no stranger is welcome there."

"James was," I said meanly.

This seemed to defeat him. The moment's store of rage was used up. He drew his shoulders inward; the whole of his great frame contracted.

"You won't be disturbed at all," I pressed, "it's just for the one night, and he'll be gone in the morning."

"And will you also be gone? Is this why your cousin comes, a relation out of nowhere? All at once a cousin, and he takes you away, is this what I am to expect?"

He feared my leaving. He feared my being taken away: by Dr. Tan-doori, by a relation out of nowhere, by the claims of time. It was a confession: he had no Elsa, he had no Anneliese, he had a small child and three barbarian sons ... The house was already lawless; he feared the ambush of the vacuum that waits beyond commotion.

"I'm not going anywhere," I assured him, and my envy of Anneliese flickered into light. Gone with a lover, gone into velvet silence. Another packet had arrived, this time unaccompanied by any note—voiceless money, silent money.

"Then your cousin may stay," Mitwisser said, "for this one night."

So Bertram entered Anneliese's bed, which had been James's bed, which became Bertram's bed. He did not depart in the morning. Instead, he busied himself cooking omelets—none of the Mitwisser children had ever eaten an omelet—and after that began reorganizing the kitchen, which under my distracted rule had sunk into anarchy. He had rested wonderfully well during the night, he told me; in all the days before he had been suffering from a crazed fatigue. At Charlie's he lay awake, calculating what he might say to make his case against Ninel's charges. In the end it was futile. Nothing he could argue in his defense was persuasive—they dismissed him as too soft (this was particularly painful, Ninel's old nastiness, he suspected they were quoting her). They accused him of shirking, he had avoided Spain, he had sent Ninel as his surrogate. He had turned her into a mercenary. He was heartless, he had paid her to serve in his place. He was a coward, he was unfit, he was not a proper comrade. A shirker, a lowlife, no better than a scab; he ought to have fought with the rest of them.

By now—it was still the first afternoon—Bertram had dusted every corner in the dining room and made order of the children's things. The checkers were back in their box, the doll's petticoat was sewn and restored to its mistress (he showed me the miniature sewing kit he kept with him), the headless soldier had been given to Heinz to be glued whole. This was the tireless Bertram I remembered, the Bertram who would not let a dirty dish remain idle for five minutes, who would sprint to the sink to render it gleaming. He had washed his shirt, I scarcely knew when, and somehow he had discovered the half-lame washing machine, with its creaking wringer, that frightened Waltraut in the blackest region of our faintly sewer-smelling cellar. The rope Anneliese and I had long ago strung from end to end of the cellar was bannered by a row of boys' socks and shirts. Bertram had laundered them all. Clothespins stuck up along the crowded line like live cats' ears, mysteriously bobbing a little, though in that sooty cavern (the coalbin occupied a part of it, and a huge ogrelike furnace growled nearby) there was no wind.

In the evening we all met in the dining room—all but Mrs. Mitwisser. The boys were wary, stealthily subdued, and Waltraut hid under the table. Mitwisser ate nibblingly, sniffing at the food. He seemed to sniff at Bertram too, who was scurrying in and out of the kitchen like a chef in an obscure restaurant attempting to make its name.

When the boys had dispersed, I tried to account for Bertram's not having left.

"He wanted to make the dinner," I told Mitwisser. I stood up to carry her tray to his wife.

"Where are you taking that?" Bertram asked. He was following me, pink-faced and cheerful; yesterday's misery had been swept away, together with the dust.

"Mrs. Mitwisser's got to eat something, she doesn't leave her room."

"I'll bring it to her if you like—"

"No," I said quickly, "a man she doesn't know, she'll think..." But Mitwisser was near, and I did not say what his wife might think.

He thought it himself. "The gentleman is not to intrude on my wife!"

Bertram examined the toast, the cold boiled egg. "I don't frighten people, do I, Rosie? Look, I can do better than that," he said, and seized Mrs. Mitwisser's dry meal and disappeared with it.

After a time a warm fragrance drifted out of the kitchen.

"Bread pudding," Bertram announced: a heap of it lay steaming in a bowl. "Come out from under there, little girl," he called, "and you can have some."

Waltraut peered out. "I don't know what it is."

"Try it tonight and I'll tell you tomorrow."

Mitwisser said grimly, "The gentleman will not be here tomorrow, will he?"

"Then I'll have to tell you now," Bertram said. "It's a pudding bird.

Its wings are made of pudding. First you trap it, and after that you roll it in bread crumbs."

"Don't come up with me," I warned him.

I had expected to find Mrs. Mitwisser lying with her hand over her eyes, courting a doze. But she was erect and vigilant in her nightgown, as straight-backed as a caryatid.

"What is that? Who is there? Is it that one? That one?" She gripped my arm: her fingers were strong, but I felt the tremor that shivered through the deep pinch.

"It's only my cousin—on a visit. He made this for you."

I watched her eat. She ate as one emerging from a long fast. The bowl was rapidly emptied. She held it out to me. "More," she commanded, in the style she might once have used with her cook.

Bertram did not leave the next morning, or the next, or the next. It was understood that it was his intention to go, but he never spoke of it; I did not speak of it. Once or twice, at night, leaning over the typewriter, Mitwisser would rasp, "The gentleman abides," with a satiric clip to the words, or else he would say only, "Ah, the cousin," as if there was meaning enough in this. But an unexpected calm was settling over the house: things that had been helter-skelter fell unobtrusively into place. Mitwisser's bedclothes were meticulously smoothed each morning; an unseen hand kept his fountain pen filled. Holes in socks were instantly stitched. The kitchen rang with a clash of pans, and suddenly a row of boys and a small girl sat docilely munching cake.

"Let me," Bertram urged, seeing me ascend, day after day, with Mrs. Mitwisser's tray.

But I answered as I always answered. "She's too nervous, you'll only set her off—"

"I can handle it."

He came down smiling. "She sure likes that pudding bird. You know what's the matter with that woman? She's hungry, that's all."

He had yet to learn of Mrs. Mitwisser's cavernous hungers, I thought—hungers not of the flesh, which no sweetmeat could satisfy. But from then on it was Bertram who took up Mrs. Mitwisser's tray. Waltraut trailed behind him, carefully transporting a napkin and spoon.

One afternoon he went to inquire at the pharmacy under the trestle. "A nice change from Albany, I could've been Trotsky for all they cared. But no luck, they aren't hiring. So there it is," he said, "hard times."

Domesticity pleased Bertram. The fastidiousness I had noticed so long ago was, I fancied, a kind of obeisance to his being a short man: it brought his scrutiny so much closer to dirty floors and sticky table tops. He wanted to undo confusion, to placate
things
—to clear them up, to sort them out, to draw out a peaceable kingdom from hubbub and jumble. He wanted to appease. He made sure to avoid being found in Mitwisser's path, though his study ("the Professor's bedroom," Bertram called it) was no more than a few yards across the hall from Anneliese's old bed. They seldom met, except at dinner, when Bertram in his new capacity as self-appointed chef lingered in the kitchen, mostly out of sight. When they happened to pass, it was usually on the stairs, and Bertram would murmur respectfully, "Good morning, Professor," or "Good evening, Professor." Sometimes Mitwisser nodded; often he did not respond at all. But when our nightly session began, he would drum his fingers musingly on the back of my chair (faltering in his dictation, as he did more and more at this time), and grunt "The gentleman, your cousin," as if reporting on an apparition he was scarcely certain he had seen. Whenever I thought Bertram too exaggeratedly propitiatory, I remembered that he, like me, had nowhere to go.

Bertram's pacifications, his quickness to serve, were an embarrassment. I saw how the boys were muddled by all this self-effacement. He was not so tall as Heinz, and no taller than Gert; even so, he rattled them. Once, when a fight was storming around him—Willi had swiped Heinz's earphones and was running off to hide them—a rush of panic bloomed uncontrollably all over Bertram's curly head. "What bullies you kids are," he said; his breath came hard. It was not a rebuke; it was a plea, spoken in a voice of sorrowing humility. It shocked them—it may have shamed them—and after that they took their quarrels and their fisticuffs out of his hearing. It made no sense to them that Bertram was in the house; it made no sense that their father had permitted it. At home, no cook or maid or nanny had ever resembled Bertram; it made no sense that Bertram was cook and maid and nanny all at once. And anyhow the quarrels and the fisticuffs weren't really out of his hearing—he only pretended they were, and they knew he was pretending. It was Bertram's dogma that if you behaved as if there was peace, then peace would accommodate you by turning genuine. Occasionally this doctrine bore fruit: Gert or Heinz would catch in Bertram's face a wistful look of hope, and the slaps and punches stopped altogether.