Heir to the Glimmering World (4 page)

I was seventeen and stabbed by jealousy. My jealousy felt literally like a stab: it resembled the quick pain I would sometimes feel in my groin on the left side, just before my period. Bertram did not hide from me that he had a sex life (his words). Toward me he was affectionate and perfectly chaste: his kiss touched my forehead or my cheek, or, comically, my nose. But he worried about appearances. "Honor is the appearance of honor," he recited. "I read that somewhere. So look, if anyone ever asks, you tell them you're my little sister away from home to go to school. Half of it's true anyhow. But don't say cousins. Nobody believes cousins."

When my father again neglected to send the money for my tuition on time, Bertram said, "There's no point to it, your pa's out of the picture, so never mind. From now on I'll take care of it. A dollar goes a long way these days. Trouble is," he added, "you've got to have the dollar." In my eyes Bertram seemed rich. I marveled that his apartment had a dining room with a glass breakfront and a spacious square table covered by a lace cloth. There were six carved mahogany chairs with green leather seats. All this heavy furniture, Bertram told me, had belonged to his mother. She had left him the dining set, her wedding ring, and his father's considerable life insurance. "I've got some leeway," he said. "You could even say I'm in the money, so don't worry about your pa's not coming through. It's hard times."

Bertram often spoke of hard times. His two themes were the Depression and what he called "the reformation of society." The hospital sweepers were agitating for a union, but more than half of them were afraid to strike. Bertram went out with the strikers. "Have a look at this," he urged me one evening—he was heading for a rally—and handed me a copy of
The Communist Manifesto.
It was a thin little thing, with a pale pink cover.

The next morning he asked me what I had made of it.

"It's like a hymn. A psalm."

"You could think of it as architecture. A blueprint."

"Oh, I don't know," I said. It was true that I did not know; what I knew was that I had been brought up to cynicism. I was not easily inspired or moved.

Bertram's head moved me—the brown ringlets rising straight out of his temples like a waterfall in reverse, the line of his nose with its gradual change of course, the virtuous motherly mouth. At times he caught me looking at him; this disconcerted him. "Hey, you're a kid," he would say. In my classes at the college I shut out the droning assault of lectures—Dewey, Pestalozzi, Montessori, Piaget, how to write a lesson plan—and filled the back pages of my notebook with Bertram's name, scrupulously inscribed over and over again. At night in my bed I shredded his name into mental anagrams, and the next day set them down:
at, am, are, ram, mar, tram, mart, tame, rate, mate, meat, eat, beat, rare, tear, bear, mare, bet, bat, tab, rat, ream, beam, team, art, tar, rear, tare, brat, bare, tea, me, be, ear, term, berm.
It struck me that some magical syllable might be hidden among the letters—a hint, an illumination.

I wanted Bertram's kiss to land just once, even if unintentionally, on my lips.

"What's this?" he said. He had found the paper with the anagrams. I had left it on the dining room table. "Berm? Tare? Is this some sort of test? Something from your psych class?"

"It's everything that comes out of Bertram," I said. "All the words."

"How about that. Rosie, I told you, to me you're a kid."

After that he began bringing his girlfriends home to supper. Sometimes all three of us would walk over to a nearby movie house, I feeling sullen and stifled, Bertram with his arm around whoever his date happened to be. Later he and the woman would march me back, right to the door of Bertram's flat, where the two of them would leave me. Once again I was alone for the night. "Remember to put the chain on," Bertram would remind me. He had a fear of break-ins. It was hard times, he said, not human nature, that promoted thievery.

Bertram thought well of human nature. The women he brought home did not. These were always women he met at rallies, or on picket lines; they all had short black or brown hair and fiery tongues given to malice. Most wore thick lisle stockings stuffed, whatever the weather, into thonged sandals. One dangled long earrings made of shells that clattered; another had nearly identical earrings, but arrived in work shoes and men's trousers. They were like no women I had ever known. They were zealots; they argued and theorized and wept with enthusiasm. I did not understand their talk, wave after wave of Bukharin, Lenin, Trotsky, Budenny, Stalin, Ehrenburg. They disputed over skirmishes, kulaks, trials, solidarity, scabs. I could not tell one alien phrase from another. It was not how Bertram talked or thought. In his dreamy water-color way, Bertram spoke of poverty abolished, the lion lying down with the lamb, the hopes of mankind: it was like a painting on the wall. You could contemplate it or you could ignore it. But these fierce political women spoke of men, living men, whom they despised and would gladly have torn to pieces. Bertram admired their rages and excitements, but I was afraid of them—of their clipped hair, the forwardness of their dress, their hot familiarity with far-away crises, their blurting passion. They were angry and omniscient. It seemed to me that they were in command of the age.

The woman who wore the shell earrings and dressed like a man (occasionally she turned up in overalls) was called Ninel. It was not her real name; it was a Party name, in honor of Lenin. "Just try spelling it backward," Bertram told me, grinning. Ninel enchanted him; the play of her name enchanted him, and I was stung: he had disliked my search for a secret signal in the letters of his own name. Yet Ninel had done the same, and it pleased him. Even Ninel's big work shoes and clumsy worsted pants with the zipper in front pleased and amused him.

Ninel disapproved of Bertram's flat. If she saw that I had already set the dishes out on the dining room table, it made no difference, we had to move back into the kitchen to eat. Bertram's mother's furniture sickened her: that china-closet thing with the glass doors, she said, whatever it had cost, could feed a famine. She asked Bertram how he could stand to live with it. With Ninel we never went to the movies. She was scornful of stories told by shadows. She maintained that movies were the new church, a diversion for the masses; she was too serious; she was combative. Whenever Ninel came, I ate quickly and ran to hide in my little study with my book: Emma and Mr. Knightly were soon to unite. "Don't you see the
point,
Bert?" I would hear Ninel growl. I had chosen Bertram to be my own Mr. Knightly; instead he was being led away from his proper Emma by a woman who was conducting a revolution in his kitchen. "It's all about exploitation, however you want to look at it."

It turned out that they were arguing about Croft Hall. "You got the kid's father a job at a place like that? What were you
thinking?
"

"The man was out of work, and I knew this fellow at the hospital who had a connection over there. It seemed the right thing. Her father's a math teacher, where else could he go?"

"In this system he could go out and dig ditches, that's what. A decent government would provide something."

"Ninel, the fellow was in trouble, and he had the girl—"

"To keep a place like that in business! It's just a contamination. Posh kids, offspring of the oligarchy. They're being trained to exploit, that's all. A cadet corps for the banks. Schools like that should be burned to the ground."

Gradually the other women Bertram had been bringing home vanished. Now it was only Ninel. One night during our meal I asked her what her real name was. She hooked her thumbs into the loops of her woven-straw belt and blew out a sigh of disgust. "Miriam," she told me, "but don't you ever dare use it." This was hardly likely; we rarely had anything to say to each other. Her eye went ferociously to my book. "Jane Austen, wouldn't you know. Now that's what I call a provocation. Do you realize," she demanded, "how the servants in those big houses
lived?
The hours they had to put in, the paltry wages they got? Chicken-feed! And where the money to keep up those mansions
came
from? From plantations in the Caribbean run on the broken backs of Negro slaves!" It was as if she was leading a meeting.

"Mr. Knightly doesn't have a plantation," I said.

"What do you think the British Empire is? The whole
thing's
a plantation! The whole kit and caboodle!"

Bertram said quietly, "You should listen to Ninel, Rosie. She's right about that."

Ninel was angry at Jane Austen not only on account of the British Empire—she was angry at all novels. Novels, like movies, were pretend-shadows; they failed to diagnose the world as it was in reality. "Crutches," she said, "distractions. And meanwhile the moneybags and the corporate dogs eat up the poor." For Ninel, the only invention worse than novels and movies was religion. She hated her given name because it came out of the Bible. She railed against all varieties of worship. "If you want to get the real lowdown on, okay, let's take Christianity," she urged, "try this out. You're a believing Christian of the twentieth century and you're transported by time machine back into ancient Rome. You're walking around the main squares and it's all pretty impressive. Big marble cathedrals with columns. Huge statues all over the place, and folks crowding into the temples, genuflecting and bringing offerings. Plenty of priests and acolytes in fancy dress, the whole society rests on this spectacular stuff. And then you ask what's behind it, what's it all about. You sit down with a couple of these ancient Romans and they start telling you it's Jupiter, the god who lives up in the sky and runs the world. And you think, Jupiter? Jupiter? What's Jupiter? There isn't any Jupiter, it's all imagination, it's all some made-up idea. You know damn well that this sacred Jupiter that everyone's so devoted to, that everyone's dependent on, that everyone praises and carries on about, and writes epics and treatises and holy books about, and mutters prayers to ... you know damn well that their Jupiter is air, their Jupiter is a phantom, there isn't any Jupiter, no Jupiter of any kind, the whole religion's a sham and a fake and a delusion, no matter how many poets and intellectuals adhere to it, no matter how many thrills and epiphanies people get out of it. Then you come back to the twentieth century, and what you've seen and understood doesn't mean a thing, you're blind as a bat, you figure you've got the goods on Jupiter but Jesus is different, Jesus is for real, Jupiter is a vast communal lie but Jesus is a vast transcendent truth...."

Bertram was standing at the stove, heating up the kettle for tea. He gave a pleasurable little chirp and poured the water into our cups. "Well, now you've heard one of Ninel's flights. You don't run into talk like that every day, it doesn't grow on trees."

Bertram, I was beginning to see, was intending to marry Ninel.

In the morning he denied it. "Not possible."

"But you want to," I said.

"What I want doesn't count. Ninel doesn't believe in marriage. She's against it on principle."

Ninel was with us on a night in early March when Bertram opened the door to a seedy fellow in uniform and cap. Bertram gave him a quarter, and the man handed him a yellow envelope. It was a telegram from the dean at Croft Hall. My father had broken the rules: he had taken a group of four third-formers to Saratoga in his car. One boy sat in the front seat next to my father. The other three were in the rear. It was dusk when they headed back to school. A hard rain, propelled by a hard wind, hastened the dark and pelted the road. They drove through swiftly forming lakes, one of which concealed the heavy branch of a middle-sized fallen tree. The wheels, spinning through the black water, struck the branch; the car was brutally flung on its side. The windshield splashed out a fountain of glass splinters and two of the doors were crushed. The three boys in the back seat survived. My father and the boy nearest him were dead.

There was no funeral. My father was in posthumous disgrace; the dead child's parents called him a murderer. Bertram arranged for the burial with an undertaker in Troy, and with no ceremony at all my father's remains were dispatched. A week later the mail brought a package from Croft Hall: it was a box containing my father's papers. In it I found my mother's death certificate and a hospital bill dated February 15,1921—they were folded into the pages of a ragged children's book. Now there was proof: my mother had not died in childbirth. She had succumbed to blood cancer when I was three years old. Lena's disclosure, and my memory of the sofa and the rag doll, were vindicated.

I kept almost none of these papers. They were impersonal and faintly shaming—old grade books, wrinkled lottery tickets, racetrack stubs, a dirty pack of cards, two pairs of scratched dice. Not a single item hinted at my existence. I did not recognize the children's book as mine, though I knew its fame; it was the first of a well-known series. A pair of nearly new shoes was in the box; I wondered when my father had acquired these. They were not the kind of shoes he usually wore. An inscription on the inside of the heel read
HAND-MADE IN LONDONQ.
I imagined something horrible: had he thrown dice for them, had he won them from one of the bigger boys, had he taken them in lieu of cash? I was relieved when Bertram carried them away and gave them to an orderly.

It was Bertram's idea that I should compose a phrase or two for a headstone. On Bertram's typewriter I wrote:

JACOB NEHEMIAH MEADOWS

l887–1935

LOVING FATHER

FRIEND TO YOUTH

Words as conventionally sentimental as these ought to have scandalized me as I set them down, but the irony of their falseness did not touch me. It seemed right to attribute plain virtue to a man whose miniature vices could no longer do harm. I thought of my father's small life, and of Lena and the birthday cake, and the Tricolor, and my father's gambling. Most of all I thought of his lies. His lies took aim but had no point; they seduced risk; they were theatrical, though enacted on a tiny stage for a tiny audience. My father had been a kind of daylight robber. He robbed dailiness of predictability, so that my childhood's every breath hung on a contingency. Living with him had never felt safe.