Heir to the Glimmering World (8 page)

At night at the Mitwissers', when the briny smell of the bay traveled feebly on the summer wind, and when I could be sure that Mrs. Mitwisser was turned to the wall or asleep, I sometimes lifted the Bear Boy, soiled and torn, out of the bottom drawer of my dresser—I had deposited him there, on top of Bertram's blue envelope filled with money—to watch him creep into that gargantuan feathered hat. In those wandering moments I tried to believe that my father, overwhelmed by his deceits, had in the same way wished to hide himself away from his own complexities. And then I would pull out Bertram's blue envelope, look into it, and count my fortune.

10

D
AY BY DAY
Mrs. Mitwisser improved. She had begun to walk out with Anneliese in the mornings, at first as far as the corner, and then circling the nearby streets, observing (she was becoming more attentive) the little houses of the neighborhood, each with its low hedges squared off to mark a miniature front yard dominated by a single pared evergreen shrub or lilacs struggling to escape their enforced boundaries. She had grown almost docile about putting on her shoes, and would complain only that she had no others. Except for this recurrent grumbling, she seemed agreeable enough. Now and then I would take Waltraut by the hand and join these modest walks; but Mrs. Mitwisser's newly awakened scrutiny, searching everywhere, continued to avoid the face of her child. Instead she would stop to examine a bit of green stalk burst up from a crack in the pavement, or a purple clover-head sprouting from the curb; or else she would remark on the needling glints of mica in the sidewalk, or the starlike configurations of straw caught in a puddle of sun-melted tar. Her look was that of a microscope, enlarging with a relentless eye whatever fell under it, and I thought I might be witnessing evidences—diminished though they were—of the scientist she had been. The refugee physicist formerly attached to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin suddenly sat down on the ground and picked up a lady-bug and let it run companionably along her finger. But when Waltraut came near, tentatively, distrustfully, drawn by the insect's tiny round spotted back, Mrs. Mitwisser instantly blew it away.

The walks lengthened. If the day's heat was not too heavy, Mrs. Mitwisser could be cajoled to the outer margins of the bay, untenanted except by her own vagabond boys. They were generally bloody, their feet and shins cut by shells and small sharp stones. A shower of butterflies, wave after wave of whirling white ruffles, splashed up like an inverted fountain around their heads; they dashed through the fluttering clouds, shrieking when thorny grasses caught at their bare legs—they were the captains of this half-wild ring of neglected marsh. Mrs. Mitwisser made no move in their direction. She stood gazing over the water, as if (but this may have been my own imagining) Europe, and not a distant extrusion of the mundanely inhabited Bronx, darkened the opposite shore; and then she bent to study a stray goose feather. Anneliese tried to take her mother's arm; she shook it off. She was enormously—excessively—concentrated. She fixed on a single object as if she could see into its molecular structure, or as if some luring being within it, god or lurking elf, was summoning. She had put on her shoes and awakened to the natural world: the botanical, the ornithological—that goose feather—seized her notice. Her children did not.

These were days almost pastoral. Professor Mitwisser departed in the morning, attired like an ambassador about to address an assembly of fellow diplomats. Five minutes after the green front door shut behind him, it was jerked open with a force that strained its hinges, and the boys shot out—three dervishes clutching paper-bag lunches and heading for cattails and empty watery lots. Then Anneliese and Mrs. Mitwisser would venture out on their wandering excursions, and usually I followed with Waltraut, who, when the trek began to tire her, rode high on my shoulders. There was a summer stillness in the streets; every few yards Mrs. Mitwisser halted our little parade to investigate a spray of leaves on a fallen twig, or a beetle swimming in a rain-channel. In the afternoons, while Mrs. Mitwisser fell into a doze on her bed, and Waltraut napped in her crib, Anneliese vanished to some other part of the house, shunning me. I understood that she no longer wished to be her family's historian: I had pressed her too hard. Or she feared I would again ask about money. In the motionless quiet of those shadowed hours I was perfectly idle, and perfectly alone.

This way of life—it had begun to feel exactly that, as immutable as if years were passing in these identical routines—was all at once ruptured. Three weeks after our arrival, Anneliese announced that her father was waiting for me in his study. "Never mind that," she told me (I was helping Mrs. Mitwisser into her nightdress; she had stopped to stare at the crossed threads of one of its buttons), "just go. Papa wants you right now."

It was ten o'clock at night. I had never before stepped inside Professor Mitwisser's study, even in daylight. Only Anneliese had permission to go in and out, and for the most domestic of tasks: she was to change the bedsheets and clear out the wastebaskets. The place was sacrosanct. Its very walls, with those scores of esoteric volumes arrayed on the newly carpentered shelves, declared their untouchability. I had been invited into a shrine. In its absolute center—presumably so that the books might be unobstructed and accessible—stood a small wooden desk, on which an old-fashioned typewriter rested. I had not known that such a machine was in the house; I had never heard it in use, and it seemed to defy everything around it.

Professor Mitwisser placed his large rough hand on the keys. "You will assist me here," he said, "immediately." He did not ask about my competence. He merely assumed it, which was logical enough in those years, when most young women without a university degree (and many with one) went to work as typists in offices. This, in fact, had been Ninel's advice when she drove me out of Bertram's life; she herself was a secretary for the AFL. She admitted that she admired my typing; she admired little else. She was familiar with the fierce and rapid rattle of Bertram's old Remington, on which I would sometimes copy out a paragraph from whatever novel was currently claiming me, partly for the bliss of seeing the words fly out of my fingers as if I were inventing them myself, and partly (or mainly) to drown out Ninel's voice, murmuring and murmuring into Bertram's ear. At other times—and then the keys would crack their little whips far more reluctantly, with long slow silences in between—I would be typing a letter to my father at Croft Hall: a letter he never answered.

"Please to duplicate what I have written," Mitwisser ordered.

I sat down at the typewriter and took a paper from him. I saw with relief that its language was English: a clear foreign hand. But when I struck the keys only the ghosts of letters appeared.

"The ribbon's worn out. This one must be ten years old, it's useless," and I stood up again.

I noticed now the color of his eyes—startlingly different from the brown intelligence of the rest of that family. Professor Mitwisser's eyes were acutely blue, as blue as the intensest blue of Dutch porcelain; they looked dyed: dipped once, dipped twice. I was shocked by their waver of bewilderment—like heat vibrating across a field—and it occurred to me that he scarcely knew what I meant by a ribbon, that the machine was as alien to him as the map of any mythical island. He was a man who had been much served. He was accustomed to privilege: at home in Berlin, at the University, he had been surrounded by a haze of attentive acolytes; his students bowed to him, waiters in restaurants recognized him from newspaper photographs and bowed to him, he was Herr Doktor Professor, esteemed lecturer before the Religionswissenschaftliche Vereinigung, honored by his colleagues all over Germany. And then—overnight—they threw him out. His poor wife, a respected senior fellow of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, her too they threw out—it unsettled her spirit, her spirit was unsettled, she felt herself emptied out, a pariah. The good Quakers had somewhat restored them, true enough, and they were grateful for their lives, but Inner Light could not comprehend Outer Darkness, and besides it was impossible to continue genuine scholarship at an insignificant provincial American college, however good-hearted their hosts were; nor were their hosts to be blamed for mistaking Karaites for Charismites, after all they had given him a house for his family and an office and a part-time secretary, and when it was incumbent on him, despite all their generosity, to leave, they were again generous, and presented him with the very typewriter the part-time secretary had used: it was his to carry away.

Here was a man—this severe paterfamilias, this formidable scholar of the Karaites!—who had barely spoken a syllable to me or even, as far as I could tell, of me, for nearly a month, since the day I had clumsily disorganized his library. And this looming large man, with his great ugly hands clapped on the body of a hapless half-obsolete typewriter, was numbering his losses in the full cry of inconsolable lamentation. He had, in effect, no wife, and though he had all those children, they were only children, and one no more than a baby. As for Anneliese, he said, her young shoulders were burdened enough, and though capable in two languages—unlike you, Fräulein—she was without capacity in relation to this accursed machine, this devil's contrivance, and what was he to do, how to proceed with his work if it could not be properly recorded? What was to become of his work?

The helpless hand on the typewriter curled into a hard white bloodless fist: Anneliese's fist. They were remarkably alike: she had inherited his big frame and his burning fury over Outer Darkness. But the daughter was colder than the father. Out of Mitwisser's twice-dyed eyes, dyed by some physiological thaumaturgy to the bluest depth of topaz, there fell, as I stood watching, a thin and horrible stream of tears.

The fright of it—the revered scholar, the severe paterfamilias, undone by a devilish contrivance fit for a junkyard—made me stammer. "To-tomorrow," I brought out, "I'll look for a, for a place where they sell these things. A ribbon, and paper, and some carbon sheets if you like." But I was certain that "carbon" came to him as no more pertinent to his purpose than if I had uttered "coal mine." He was a man used to service in all things large and small; he had already told me so, and I had observed it for myself.

He did not dismiss me. I ran. I ran to my bed; my tongue was a dry rag in my mouth. He had frightened me, I was in a chill of shock, my fear amazed me with its headlong insistence, it was beyond volition, it took me over, it pinched and shook me. He had opened—to me!—his violation, his rending. They had torn him—like wild beasts, they had torn him. They had thrown him out, he had escaped with his life, with all of their lives; and they had severed him from the Karaites, who were as dear to him as his children. For the sake of the Karaites—to repair the breach—he journeyed every day to the Reading Room, where they lay concealed in tomes kept under lock and key, untouched for generations perhaps, who could tell? When he returned in the evening his fingertips were black with old dust and, no doubt, new inferences. The Karaites—his mind's inhabitants—were as dear to him as Anneliese or Willi or Gert or Heinz or Waltraut; and surely dearer than his Elsa, whom he had banished from his sheets.

There she was, his Elsa, across the room, asleep, her secretive face to the wall, the wife who was no wife.

He had wept! And how was I to get some money? I had promised to buy a ribbon, paper, carbons—what else would that miserable fossil of a machine require? Well, finally the reason for my employment was exposed: I was to be the caretaker of a cast-off typewriter. I could not ask Professor Mitwisser for money; it was the shame of that dilapidated instrument, his dependence on it, his dependence on so unformed a creature as myself, that had crushed him. The machine had made him weep—him to whom the salons of Berlin had once bowed! My pockets were empty. I had spent my last dollar on chocolate bars. I was afraid to approach Anneliese, even on behalf of her father: she was adamant, it was forbidden, she was not to speak to me of money. And I was not to speak to her or anyone about my unpaid salary: I was to wait and wait, and I could not object, because they had taken me in when I had nowhere to go—a refugee of sorts.

In the meantime, I was hiddenly flush with money of my own, in twenty-dollar bills. Ribbon, carbon, paper; alcohol for cleaning the keys; a small can of oil. For a few dollars the fossil might be restored to life, and then my acquaintance with the Karaites, whatever they were, could begin; I knew only that Karaites were not Charismites. Cautiously, noiselessly, I pulled open the bottom drawer of my dresser. The Bear Boy, quiescent in his scalloped collar, lay there as silently as Mrs. Mitwisser in her bed. I pushed him aside to find Bertram's blue envelope.

It was not there. My fortune was gone.

11

I
N THE MORNING
I raised a hullabaloo.

I was eighteen, an unformed creature, and (as people say) ignorant of the world. I had endured my stringent childhood in Thrace, a backwater townlet where lives were turned away from the impress of events even as they were unfolding—a period of turbulence that had begun to shake the ground of Europe. For the denizens of Thrace—for Lena and her sons, and for every other native household—Europe was beyond reality, and for me it was nearly the same: the fanciful habitation of Pinocchio and Becky Sharp and Sidney Carton. (Only many decades later would I come to agree with Ninel about the useless delusions of literature.) Yet I question now why I did not question then, in that third-floor bedroom in the marshy reaches of the Bronx, what even I, in my unformed ignorance, could see was Professor Mitwisser's peculiar situation. Why, after his rescue by the conscientious if mistaken Board of the Hudson Valley Friends College, was he not instantly recruited by some eager university? It was an era—I have since understood—of foreign flooding: an influx of refugee scholars, injured, diminished, confused, streaming into the chaos of an alien haven and hoping for an academic berth of some kind; for a replica of the old life, the old reverence. A substantial flock settled in the New School in New York; a handful went to Chicago and Princeton; the rest, in their broken dignity, dragging their medals and degrees, drooped toward whatever uncertain welcome they might find in institutions north or west or south. Mitwisser was not among any of these.