The Syme Papers (46 page)

The next thing she said was ‘But this would be fantastic!’ as she twigged the nature of the application, and rifled through the thin pages. At this point, I confess, I felt a certain amount of shame (and that curious flush of tenderness that rises in us when we have done the thing that will upset our loves). ‘At Fordham,’ she said, ‘why that’s perfect! You could catch the train to 59th Street and transfer to the Q. It’s so sweet to be out of the tunnels and over the river. I
could get the yellow bus up 1st Avenue, and leave no later than a  quarter till – just as I used to, riding up to school. Oh my dear,’ she  said, ‘oh my dear.’ (A strange phenomenon, I believe, how sudden  love blooms at even the prospect of being planted in a privately  desired patch of real estate.) ‘Na-na will be just around the corner  from your office. We could all meet up for coffee when class is out.’  And she pressed her fingers to one another and then to her lips, as  if to kiss the prospect they had caught between them.

A word about this Na-na. I first met Susie’s grandmother on a bleak, whistling day in December, before we were married, when school shut because snow had flooded the subway tracks. Susie managed to snaffle a car from the college counsellor and we rode up to the Bronx through a haze of dirty snow and brake-lights. We arrived three hours late for lunch, or three hours early for supper, to a little row house with an old Cadillac in the front yard that hadn’t been driven since 1962, and had begun to grow things and resemble a rusted flower box. There is nothing unusual or shameful in this, only it was known as ‘the family car’, in the sense, I suppose, that all the family benefited equally from it, that is, not at all.

At various points in our history together (this being the first), at the slightest of provocations (such as the bus never came, the subway’s down, the airport’s closed, my back hurts), we were told (or I was told, as Susie didn’t drive at the time, and we had only just begun to ‘go out’ and lived apart) to take it, to take it with all blessings, to take the family car, and not be silly, it’s only sitting there. This much is true – it was only sitting there. This is also true – it
could
only sit there. Regardless, before we left that evening in a blizzard, after a seven-hour supper that involved, it seemed, a single dish at several stages in its evolution, I was told, by Susie’s mother, not to be a fool, to take the family car back to Manhattan, where it could get a run-around, with her blessing, and I should never think twice about it. Only Susie’s insistence that our friend, the college counsellor, may be somewhat put out if we left his car in the Bronx and returned with another prevented our pushing that Cadillac across the Triborough Bridge to get it home.

Na-na had come out of the shower to answer the door; she wore in lieu of a bath-robe an old blue overcoat that belonged once to her husband, and now hunched about her wet shoulders with an air of misplaced military bravado. Clumps of thin black hair hung from her skull, revealing the nude pink of her scalp, slightly steaming in the chill of the doorway. Regardless of her ablutions, she smelled of cabbages and onions. She smelled always of cabbages and onions. There are only some things, I should say now, to which the odour of cabbages and onions can be seen as a welcome addition. Such as sausages. Na-na was not sausages.

Much of the first two hours were taken up with a number of variations on the question, ‘Na-na, why were you in the shower at three in the afternoon?’ We sat down to tea – Na-na, it should be said, still dripping through her overcoat. ‘Lovely tea,’ Susie would say, ‘Na-na, why did you take a shower?’ This was followed, at certain points, by ‘Was it a nice shower?’ and ‘Did you dry off?’ and ‘Do you want me to get you a towel?’ and ‘Did you manage to use the soap we tied to the shower-head?’ But we always returned, faithfully, to the heart of the matter, and ‘Why did you take a shower at three in the afternoon?’ In its own way, the conversation offered no less scope for variety than your ordinary get-ting-to-know-you chats; and I was not ungrateful for being given a set theme to work upon.

The only trouble was that Na-na spoke no English. And neither Susie nor her elegant and assimilated and successfully married (in every sense of the phrase) mother Bétte – the busy and trim head of a gallery, painfully slender to Susie’s eyes, though more of a sister, etc., than anything else – spoke whatever it was that Na-na
did
speak. Regardless of this circumstance, Na-na is held to be something of an oracle; consulted upon the slightest family decision, her advice religiously followed – if anyone can ever figure out what it is. Pitt should have spent his childhood boning up on Lithuanian; his omission to study this has led to the current impasse in his relations with Na-na, who (Pitt should now confess) is not really called Na-na at all, but Nanna or some such nonsense – it is only Pitt who believes a slight misapprehension of a name can be
both humorous and healthful to the subject, and insists upon calling her Na-na, like a goat braying, no, no, no.

Pitt, believe me, is familiar with this
bray.
To do him some justice, he has suffered greatly at Na-na’s hands, in that the least decision involving any member of the Wielengrad extended family must first be put to Na-na’s incomprehension – or, rather, it is the family’s incomprehension to which Na-na’s decision must be put. It seems to Pitt more than likely that the ancient oracles were in fact simply cabbage-scented foreigners who never understood their supplicants, and who uttered replies their supplicants never understood (demands, no doubt, for such necessaries as a new overcoat for the shower, or larger onions) – thus manufacturing between them a considerable air of divine mystery. The fact that Na-na
eventually
consented to Susie’s coming to Texas belongs to the more miraculous of these mysteries – it is Pitt’s belief that only the tickling whisper in her boiled ear of his sly suggestion (unheard by Susie) that they would transport themselves in the ‘family car’ to the great Southwest ‘sealed the deal’, as they say, in one of her lucid moments – if lucidity can be defined as that access to understanding that permits the function of a constitutional insanity.

But I digress. (She was
cold,
by the by; that’s why she took a shower at three in the afternoon, because her house was so cold the lettuce froze, and she was losing the feeling in her fingers. That’s why she wore the overcoat, too.) Then Susie said, ‘What was this doing under your goddamn bedside table?’

She had asked the right man, I don’t deny that. I could have given several answers to this question, having made a particular study of Aristotelian notions of causation in all their glorious variety. The
efficient
cause was no doubt Pitt himself, who slid what came to hand under the bedside table – prompted, I believe, by a wobble too far, as he set his cup of tea upon a much-loved copy of Palgrave’s
Golden
Treasury,
and spilled a thin ring of brown over the leather cover.
The
final
cause was obvious enough – to steady the mock-Eames bedside table Pitt had purchased only the week before in a moment of solitary antiquing on Burnet Road. The
for
mal 
cause (though here I am liable to muddles) lay no doubt in some predictable flaw in the carpentry that resulted in the shortened leg (just as such a flaw had resulted in my son’s abbreviated arm?) and the ensuing wobble – the ideal form of the bedside table being in some abstract fashion satisfied by the addition of a heap of folded papers beneath its foot. The
material
cause – and here I venture on firmer ground – was the application for the position of History Lecturer, with a Special Interest in the Sciences, at Fordham University, located in the Bronx, New York: a sheaf of coloured paper, which Pitt had been using as a bookmark in the copy of
Jurassic
Park
he had turned to (he is ashamed to admit) when Palgrave’s
Golden
Treasury
had begun to … pall.

The real trouble with the material cause was that the material was
out
of
date.
(Now that I come to think of it, there may have been some ambiguity in the
final
cause as well.)

‘What’s this? What’s this?’ Susie repeated, frowning and squeezing her eyes, as the penny dropped. And then she gave a large, heartbreaking sigh – a sigh, in the first sweetness of upset, directed more at the vagaries of human nature in general than
Pitt’s
in particular. ‘Oh, Doug,’ she said, at last. ‘Oh, Doug.’ (How plump and lovely her cheeks looked then; how brave and miserable!) ‘Why?’ she asked, now wrinkling her lips into a horrible false smile, a smile of suppressed
distaste,
of stifled condescension. ‘Why?’ she asked again, all her natural loveliness of temper and feature puckered into anger. ‘Why did you not apply for this?’

‘Because …’ Pitt murmured.

‘Why did you not
discuss
this job with your
wife?’

‘Because …’he managed to breathe at last, ‘the date had passed. Because I forgot and the date had passed. Because I am sorry and I forgot and the date had passed. Because I am deeply sorry and the table wobbled and I forgot and the date had passed. Because I am sorry; and it wobbled.’

Susie began to tear the application, with considerable force, and a great red grinding of her jaws and swelling of her cheeks, into little pieces; which she then dropped, effortless and gently (in sharp distinction to the violence of her previous exertions) to the
floor, drifting like snow into a scattered heap, while she said nothing.

‘I am hopeless,’ Pitt freely admitted, believing as always that the best policy is apology, abashed and abased and wholehearted, ‘empty-headed; irresponsible and unreliable; wool-gathering and hare-brained; addled and forgetful; scatter-and feather-brained. I am sorry and the date passed and I could not bring myself to bring it up and the table wobbled.’

‘You’d have been better off,’ she said, in a quite terrifying calm, ‘if you had thrown it away.’

‘I thought of that,’ Pitt said. (Then wished he hadn’t.)

‘You wish you hadn’t said that,’ Susie said.

‘I simply forgot,’ Pitt urged.

‘I thought you were many things, Doug: childish and selfish, a little bit crazy and full of junk ideas. I knew you made things up to please yourself, things that wouldn’t please anybody else, but they pleased you. I never minded that, much. I used to like it. Pompous, too, if you could be, but you can’t be, even when you try, you’re just too
odd,
so it doesn’t count. But I never thought you were dishonest, not dishonest … when it mattered.’

‘I simply forgot,’ Pitt repeated.

The truth is that I simply do not know whether the week I let slip past before I turned again to Robinson Gould’s
The
Science
of
History
&
the
History
of
Science
(in which wonderful and neglected tome I first stuck the packet and proceeded to neglect it further) resulted from
intention
or
inattention,
the tiny insertion of a harmless preposition (‘at’) marking, it seems, a world of difference. In Pitt’s defence, I should say that I am a great
tagger
of books, scribbler of restaurant phone-numbers, jotter of projected revisions of my academic ambitions, presser of leftover receipts and theatre tickets and sandwich coupons. Any book of Pitt’s should scatter an autumn of loose leaves from its hair, when held at the spine and violently
shook.
In my defence, I can honestly say that the sin at least was
characteristic.

The fact is I did not wish to return to Susie’s life and world. And the time passed by … conveniently.

In my youth I remember faintly envying the adult capacity for
indecision-making,
which, according to all sophisticated accounts (of which I read whatever I could lay my hands on, Updike, Amis, C.P. Snow, grand tales of
foreign
life), allowed grown and responsible men to act from motives that were not only mysterious to the heroes themselves but cast such ambiguity over their acts that legitimate doubts could arise regarding
what,
even
on
the
simplest
level,
had
actually
occurred.
Growing up, Pitt committed many dubious but no
doubtable
acts. I knew why I did whatever I did and what I had done. Most of the time, Pitt acted out of hunger – though I am not such a stubborn prole as to limit this hunger to the purely physical appetites. (Of which I had, and still have, plenty, though I also wanted to get up in the world and make a name for myself; and I wanted
class.)
I anticipated, on growing up, experiencing a kind of mild intoxicated pleasure (life enjoyed at one remove) on learning to commit those loose and ambiguous actions that seemed to have not one but many and shifting causes, and not one but various and doubtful effects.

I found this in fact to be the case.

By way of apology, I bought my wife the old telegraphic case of pigeon-holes, as a promise of reform. Pitt would become responsible. Thoughtful; upright; reliable; hopeful and savvy; hawk-eyed and level-headed. (Thesauri are great comforts to Pitt, offer the prospect of advance and evolution by simple association – a phenomenon writ small of the great revival of Syme upon which he is bent.) Not to mention: important, authoritative, powerful and executive. (Nor culpable and full of blame.) Of course, the only things Pitt organized were rejections. Susie still managed the rest.

She used to watch me after work, perched on our bed with her nose in the air to observe my methods – while I sat at the desk and sorted through the heavy Nos that fell on my feet each morning. ‘I’d separate those,’ she would say; or, ‘You don’t need a copy of that.’ She twitched her lips a little and sniffed, like a mouse, a connoisseur among mice, disapproving of the fashion in which a younger, less experienced mouse busied itself about a piece of
(admittedly distasteful) cheese. For Susie, secretly, loved to
sort,
had acquired Pitt himself in this fashion and put him in his proper place. ‘I wouldn’t keep that,’ she said occasionally, when Pitt picked up a particularly nasty review. Pitt, needless to say, kept everything. He did not himself like to take a hand in the forces of oblivion; they are strong enough as it is.