The Syme Papers (84 page)
Authors: Benjamin Markovits
Borne on the flood of forgotten high spirits, I soon discovered Kendal Place, at the southern tip of Highland Park, a broad green neighbourhood of bluish clapboard houses set amid unfenced lawns. Sagging inflatable baby-pools, dirty with green water, lay in the front yards, next to kicked-over tricycles and flat footballs; minivans and Volvos gleamed in the open drives. Kendal Place itself proved to be a short, kerbless dead-end, running into a green bank of wood, which fell to a creek littered with orange peels, candy wrappers and beer-cans. A yellow truck had pulled in front of number seventeen. The Jenkynses were home, it seemed; and
moving
home,
as the phrase is. A long white couch sat, implausibly and imperturbably, in the front yard; two small boys perched upon it, stretching their legs straight out, too short to touch the ground. They stared disconsolately at the clutter in the front yard – television sets, two; a refrigerator on its back; several boxes in various states of disrepair; a tumble of books spilling out of one; a glass case, empty, it seemed, antique, beside the sofa; loose heaps of clothes – waiting, as boys do, for the world to bear them along wherever it would.
I supposed the Reverend Thomas to be that exasperated gentleman, at his wits’ end – he seemed, to be fair, quite comfortable there, and accustomed to it – standing on the doorstep and directing a traffic of box and bag from house to truck. He was an affable, fattening young man, fair-haired, dressed in a plaid shirt and a pair of outgrown corduroys that exposed, above the slackening tube-socks, an inch of honey-coloured ankle. No one listened to him – not wife, not labourer, as they dismantled, in Phidy’s phrase, their
home
on
the
river
until
a
houseful
of
things
had
shrunk
squarely
into
three
large
wooden
boxes
and
two
trunks,
my
own
among
them.
Afterwards,
Sam
perched
on
top
of
one
of
the
boxes
with
dirty
hands
and
dusty
knees
and
remarked
in
a
rare
flight
of
whimsy,
It
is
like
sitting
on
top
of
a
year
–
a
very
small
year.’
The Reverend Thomas, however, had accumulated a greater
quan
tity
of years, it seemed, than Syme had – or an equal number of
larger
years, perhaps. In any case, they refused to fit in a yellow Leviathan of a rental truck, never mind a few boxes and trunks. So I approached him gently, gingerly, with all the deference at my disposal. ‘Reverend Jenkyns, sir!’ I cried, running across the yard. ‘Thomas Jenkyns, I believe – a minute of your time‚’ huffing as I strode to take his hand.
Phidy’s description, I discovered on a closer view, of Tom’s beloved cousin had come to life before me. The Reverend Thomas seemed the
Word
itself
made
flesh
(several generations along the line):
James
greeted
us
mopping
a
wet
brow
with
a
wet
handkerchief,
and
extending
a
newly
dried
hand.
A
fine
light
sweat
still
pricked
from
the
skin
…
He
was
a
kindly,
sweating
man.
His
hair
was
always
moist
and
his
hand
always
damp.
He
ran
to
fat,
too,
like
Jeb;
but
James’s
spreading
waist
seemed
accretions
of
hesitant
contentment,
too
polite
to
form
actions
or
words.
He
was
still
a
young
man,
though
he
would
not
be
long.
I knew at once that I had found my man, so sure a stamp is genealogy (pity my poor boys).
‘Of course, of course‚’ he said, with the faintest echo of slow Virginia in his voice. Take a minute. Take as much as you like. I’ll tell you a secret, Mr –’
‘Doctor.
Doug Pitt, from the University of – of …’
Tom spared my shame, stooped to my ear and whispered, ‘No one heeds me, anyway. Pull up a chair – a temporary blessing of moving house – somewhere to sit in the front yard.’ He lay back heavily in a leather armchair, lifting his eyes to the heavens, and arching his neck till the knuckles of it cracked. ‘Oh‚’ he sighed. Pitt sat at the edge of a kitchen stool – Tom was a man who took his
own pleasures, and expected the rest of the world to do the same. ‘If my wife asks‚’ he said, ‘this is parish business. Now, what can I do for you?’
A great deal, as it turned out. I feared at first a certain
hacking
might be required, to get my question across – and launched at once (abandoning metaphor and misgiving at once) upon the high seas of my old passion, hoping to carry him along:
And before I could say yea or nay I had begun the whole mad thing from the first. Would you credit it, the half-forgotten thoughts – ideas I had believed long rusted and out of use – flew from my lips as bright as the day they were coined, made of such shadowy stuff time could not touch them? Sam himself could not have explained them better, his words had such a renaissance in my heart, I almost wept, an old foolish man, at the recollections they aroused.
Only the Reverend Thomas cut me off at once. ‘Oh God‚’ he said, smiting his hefty flanks and sitting up. ‘You’ve come about Syme, haven’t you?
Edith‚
’
he called out, loud and idly at once. ‘A fella’s come about Syme!’
‘Does it happen all the time?’
Heavens, no. Only my father always said some day somebody would.’
It took a good half-hour to dig up the relevant box. By some mischance, the thing had gone first into the back of the truck; but Reverend Thomas, on an ancestral quest, clambered into the hold and only blinked smiling when the movers told him angrily it couldn’t be got at. The piano had to be shifted. The piano
couldn’t
be shifted. The piano
was
shifted, at last; and the precious wooden crate – a grapefruit box, filled with papers, home once of Florida’s finest – scraped along the steel bottom into the clouded sunshine again, into the clutch of Pitt’s greedy fingers and the gaze of his greedier eyes. I hauled it back to the leather armchair in the grass, heaved it down at my feet, and dried my sweating paws upon my jeans, before tenderly lifting the first sheet to my lap. I almost wept, in Phidy’s phrase, at the recollections they aroused.
The great thing, of course, would be to find a copy of that elusive rag, the
New
Platonist
itself – final proof of Syme’s genius, of his place in the wonderful evolution of thought that led to Wegener’s breakthrough at last. But I have spent a lifetime holding back the highest joys until the end, to sharpen the sweet appetite – and did so now, working meticulously through the heap of papers (letters, fliers, journals, books, etc.) before me, as the dark sun spun slowly round the heavens, and first the clutter of the house behind me and then the jumble of the yard around me emptied into the back of that yellow truck. (Pitt never begins with ‘the great thing’.) I discovered, of course:
- a gross of fascinating but irrelevant detail – love-notes (passed between Tom and Kitty), then bankers’ bills, household receipts, even recipes (for shepherd’s pie), from the period following their ‘translation to conjugal bliss’;
- a leaven of familiar material – a draft of the note Tom sent to Phidy at his final parting, scribbled over with some tender and some bitter emendations;
- and a spice of novelties, including the heartbreakingly hopeful letter (fluttering out of the old Reverend Jenkyns’s Bible), which I quoted earlier and out of sequence, from Tom to his father, introducing that
German gentleman, a certain Dr Müller, and once a protégé of the great Werner himself [, who] has arrived, to look into the question of Syme’s theories, and adapt them it may be to the service and renown of his own country.
(This I folded and tucked on the sly into my left sock against the flat of my calf, and rolled the jeans down over it.)
But when the sun set in black and yellow through the trees, and two men lifted the sofa (empty of boys) into the back of the truck; when the yard lay green about me again, undecorated by the sitting room; when Granma had come to gather boys and
Edith
to supper, as the household was shifted several neighbourhoods south to Church Hill, and only the Reverend Thomas remained, insisting as
he did on
overseeing
the
men,
hoping in fact to catch the baseball on the radio; when I had lifted the last sermon from the heap – William Jenkyns’s eulogy, as it happens, ‘upon the death of a Mr Seaborn’ (Syme himself), which caused such a ‘stir among the American clergy in 1850, occasioning a flurry of correspondence and a distinctly chilly ecclesiastical
air’
– and no revolutionary ‘journal of the new American science’ lay beneath, I was forced (in some relief) to confess that my quest had died once again, stillborn, at its
rebirth.
Fitting, it seemed, to read over old William Jenkyns’s eulogy of Sam, before the men claimed and pinched the leather armchair from my bottom, and left me alone with my thoughts in northeast Richmond:
I read Mr Seaborn’s account of those Remarkable Journeys with amusement, and a pleasing modicum of instruction. And the Great Dig, my own son’s particular Holy Grail, and on which Syme himself spent the best of his life and indeed a portion of the
last
and
worst,
I believe, summoning a lost enthusiasm for the project only a month before his death, in the pursuit of which, as I had warned him before, he forgot to keep his eye on the dinner-plate, and died of a general weakness and agitation – the attempt to burrow one’s way into the heart of the matter, or, rather, the matter of the earth’s heart, with great drenching and plowing, and tunneling, and occasional Explosions – the great dig, as I say, has a noble ring to it, though I have always thought of it as the Big Dig, which, I cannot deny, sounds less well …
I had just come to that bit, scarce heeded before now, regarding the lost
enthusiasm
summoned
a
month
before
his
death,
‘in the pursuit of which … he forgot to keep his eye on the dinner-plate’, when the Reverend Thomas tutted at my ear and sat in the grass at my feet.
How are you getting along?’ he said, rubbing his brow with the flat of his palm to relieve a tickle or itch from the sweat of the air. ‘I’ll need those, of course‚’ he apologized, ‘Grandfather’s papers, you
know, somewhere along the line. Going now‚’ he added. ‘Only –’ he began, struck by a sudden thought. ‘Edith would be
thrilled,
I’ll say that much. I can’t say I’d mind, either – it gets to be a bit of a burden, all this
history
– don’t you think? – and you never know why, or what it was all about in the first place. The papers are straightforward enough, and sometimes I borrow something for a sermon – keep it in the family way, you see, I like that. But then there’s the matter of
the
second-best
bed.
You wouldn’t want to take it off our hands, by any chance? The glass would likely break in the truck regardless – of course, it’s nothing but
bits
to begin with, and I never could see the point. The case is fine enough – a Jenkyns made it. It’s just the junk inside. Filled with clay-dust when I got it, so we cleaned it up – not that it helped, the rest is clay-dust, too. I see you’re staring, Professor.
The
second-best
bed’s
just what we call it – you know, the short straw of an inheritance. (That’s me all round, I’m afraid.) Here – I’ll get it.’
He roused himself from the grass with his hand on his knee, sighing, and made his way to the truck. Rummaged briefly and returned, carrying
a
small,
wooden,
glass-panelled
box
in one arm, filled with grey fragments of some kind. ‘Well‚’ he said, setting it down at my feet. ‘That’s it. Take it or leave it. (I’m afraid to say, we need the armchair now.)’
I could not leave it, quite; I am not so heartless or hopeless, after all.
*
It took me some time (half an hour, perhaps, sitting beside it in the close, hot car) to realize what I’d got. My hands were thick and clumsy, filled with blood and sticky, as I lifted the first shard from the case and laid it across my lap. Clay, delicate, fragment perhaps from some kind of shell, curving, as it did, gently inwards. Very brittle, dusty to the touch, and carefully rounded at the edges, along which a smattering of numbers and letters (and occasional words) had been scratched by a sharp point. It seemed curiously familiar, as if I had seen it before, or suspected something like it. And then the words came back to me:
Tom
picked
up
the
broom
again
and
formed
a
small
heap
from
the
broken
shards
of
the
globe
in
the
centre
of
the
floor,
which
resembled
nothing
so
much
as
the
remains
of
a
great
grey
egg,
from
which
the
chick
had
escaped.
