And again I told him that my father had once traveled to Egypt, and while sailing upstream on the Nile had observed on his left the jumbled greenery of Elephantine Island and the white masses of storks crowding the banks. I told him more: I said that my father, fresh from Sir Flinders Petrie’s tutelage, had recognized from afar the broken earth mounds of abandoned excavations, and had ordered his guide to take him ashore. No, the guide said, there has come recently a very strong khamsin, it tears up the ground and overturns the ruins, it is not safe now to tread there. But my father insisted, and the two of them picked their way through silted stones and newborn chasms while the guide went on groaning his refusal. It was here, pulled up from a deep ditch resembling a tunnel, that my father found what I keep in this box.
The reader may well wonder at these prevarications. Nothing of the sort is recorded in my father’s fading notes as I have described them here. Under the woolen socks that covered my shoebox I had hidden what I felt to be a tribute, a token, a proof, though of what? For a long time I was unknowing; but now nothing was obscured and I knew and I knew and I knew. Our knees, our shoulders, our breathings, had touched. It was as if the crisis of my father’s desires were destined to fall upon such a bony specter as Ben-Zion Elefantin; yet I was in fear of his repugnance, and of my own diffidence before it. I had seen how the meek bent of his scrawny shoulders could flame into an obdurate certainty: would he scoff at my father’s chief finding as he had scoffed at all the others? And how could he dare to scoff if I convinced him, however falsely, of my father’s credibility? And of the khamsin and the silted stones and the storks?
Then I took out from my shoebox the beaker with its long stork’s neck and its one emerald eye.
Here it is, I said, it’s for you, I want you to have it. You can show it to your parents to decide if it’s real. It can’t be fake, my father didn’t get it from some shady shopkeeper or anything fishy like that. Look, it’s in the shape of a stork! No, he said, not a stork, the body of the ibis is white like a stork’s but the beak is black and curved downward. All right, I said, but it’s yours anyway, it was meant for you, some day you will be going from here, your parents will send for you. Oh, he said, I can never predict when my uncle will come, and my parents are far away.
I felt his reluctance. I saw that he preferred silence, turning his hungry face to the silhouetted shelves of Reverend Greenhill’s books, as if by his look he could swallow them all. The carpet under the deluding moonlight seemed all at once botanically alive, a real garden, with rose-red petals and grass-green stalks, and the beaker standing on its base of avian knees like some wild wayward bird that had lost its way and landed there. The minutes of quiet took on the gravity of the ceremonial, though I could not have named it that, nor am I confident even now of that sacerdotal term. What I knew was only that something crucial, some merciless thirst, was at stake: that my connection, however fearful or tenuous, with Ben-Zion Elefantin must not be cut off. Sooner or later he would leave. Sooner or later I would never see him again. He put out his hand to me and I took it. Thank you, he said, but it is impossible, what is such a vessel to me?
He left me behind then, as one would abandon a person infected by plague. I somehow understood, for a reason I cannot unravel, that this was not the first time he had come to this place in the night.
* * *
*
October 7, 1949. My evenings with Hedda in the kitchen are quite pleasant. Only yesterday she confided that she has begun to look for employment elsewhere, but is willing to stay on until I know where I am to go. To my relief, she has agreed to substitute lighter fare for those dense stews, and my digestion is much the better for it. In addition, we have fallen into a practice entirely alien to my experience. I was at first acutely embarrassed. Her idea struck me as a foolish game, and under normal circumstances I believe it would surely be so. She had removed from the pantry shelves (at my urging, it may be recalled) the work of some foreign poet, and not long ago showed me, on facing pages, an English version. She would read aloud from the German, she proposed, and I was to do the same for the translation. I dislike the sounds of that distasteful language, but when I see how at home she is in those growly syllables, and how they transform her from an inconsequential domestic to a woman who thinks, I am, I admit, carried away. I can still remember verbatim all four lines of the verse that uncannily fell to me:
At first I almost despaired,
And thought I would never be able to bear it;
Yet even so, I have borne it—
But do not ask me how.
My lost and dearest Peg, Valorous and Pure. It is as if this long-dead Jew (so Hedda tells me he is), of whom I know nothing, mourns in my own voice.
And here, in the helter-skelter of Reverend Greenhill’s books, many with their leaves gnarled by the steam of kettles and stewpots over the years, you have only to put in your hand and pull out a plum: my son’s current idée fixe, so to say, unless he has already fled off to other fantasies. I and Thou, a little thing, no thicker than a pamphlet, by this Buber he spoke of. Yet another Jew. I have looked into it: impenetrable.
Hedda’s anxious perusal of the help-wanted columns puts me in mind of a public resource I have never before contemplated using. My immediate intention is to place brief advertisements in various newspapers, not excluding the tabloids, in the hope of relieving me of the dread that too often worries my nights. If this small scheme should reveal nothing, well and good. And if a reply should come, what am I to think?
* * *
*
October 12, 1949. This morning an extraordinary telephone call from Ned Greenhill. I regret being out of touch, he said, how long has it been since that fine afternoon at the Oyster Bar? I hear they are tearing the place apart and redoing it from scratch, dozens of new hires and so forth, it seems the world doesn’t stand still. And how are you in general, Lloyd? Comfortably suspended in lassitude, I told him; but I dislike these obligatory maunderings that conceal an as yet unspoken purpose. Oh yes, he said, everything up in the air, what’s to become of the old mausoleum in the woods? That thicket of antediluvian maples always gave me a feeling, especially at night, of wolves prowling there, it wouldn’t be a loss to have them come down, roots and all. The real estate section in last week’s Tribune, if you happened to see it, was full of probable buyers. Yes, I said, I saw that, and isn’t your son one of them? Well Lloyd, he said, it’s problematic, the place has a history, not altogether unsavory, and typical of its era after all, so there’s some vestige of nostalgia, don’t you think, at least for the likes of us elderly fellows. I’ve told Edwin, keep it low, don’t go too high, but this new generation’s got no use for such ideas, it’s nothing but taller and taller, so how would you feel, Lloyd, about relocating to the fifteenth floor over on East Seventy-sixth? Used to be the old Winthrop Court, Edwin’s converting it into a live-in hotel, all the amenities, maid service and so on. And an actual courtyard, a little private garden of shrubs and paths, all hidden from any casual pedestrian eye. Very fine restaurants in the vicinity, as I can personally testify. I know you’ve all had to get out of that moth-eaten wreck, I heard this only last week from John Theory, turns out he’s a classmate of Edwin’s at Amherst. It would do you good to get away from the grasshoppers and back into the life of the city, so what do you say? And understand me, Lloyd, except for taxes and suchlike this would be something I hope you’d accept as a tribute from me.
Our conversation went on for more than two hours. He explained that his son planned for the initial tenants to be of a certain standing, in order to lure others of similar status. A prestige building, they call it. And because of our old connection, Ned said, for you, Lloyd, and solely for you, the fifteenth-floor suite has been set aside, if you would accept it, as a lifetime gift from me, though who knows which of us will go graveward first. So Lloyd, he said, you’ll think about it, won’t you?
&nb
sp; Of course I pressed him to tell what could possibly have motivated this inconceivable gesture. His response was at bottom offensive, and on three counts. First, I am a man of dignified wealth in my own right, not to be regarded as a recipient of another man’s benefaction. Second, wittingly or not, he flaunts his son’s prosperity when he is fully aware of my own paternal disappointment. Third, lurking below this seeming generosity of heart, is its price: I am to serve as a decoy to further his son’s ambition. I had thought better of Ned, but much like his portion of the bulk of mankind, he puts his own interest first, undeniably sugar-coated by reminiscence.
Of his recollections, and his claims, I recognize very little. I knew him from a distance; I knew him hardly at all. In those hurtful years at the Academy, he told me, there were only two persons who regarded him with decency. One was Reverend Greenhill and the other was Lloyd Petrie. You never put me down, Lloyd, you never called me Hebe, and that time when a mob of them came and tore whole pages out of my Greek grammar, you had nothing to do with it. You were among the very few who kept away. I was suffering all those years at school, Lloyd, and it’s not something a person forgets. You never went out of your way to do me harm.
I was embarrassed by all this untempered emotion. That is how these people are, their overflowing sentimentalism. Their motion picture style of exaggerated feeling. Well, I said, I do remember that awful night, they had cigarettes and burned holes in your sheets. But why, I asked, did you think I would do any of that sort of thing? Because, he said, you were a Petrie. You were one of them, you thought it was your right.
This, I must acknowledge, unsettled me. I was a Petrie then, and I am a Petrie now. It is for this very reason that Ned, through his son, offers me an advantage, is it not? I could not tell him, if he failed to discern it for himself, that I had been deprived of my right, as he put it, because I had been contaminated by Ben-Zion Elefantin. I dared not tell him how fervently I had longed to be reinstated.
Instead, I firmly declined his largesse.
It is true that I never called him Hebe; but I thought it. And sometimes, I admonish myself, I still think it.
* * *
*
October 18, 1949. There has not been a single reply to my numerous advertisements, though with some trepidation at how outlandish it was, I went so far as to place one in the Jewish Day, a local journal whose existence I have only just now come upon. I kept my anonymity, of course, and supplied only a postal box number. My language too was sparse and direct: if you, I wrote, were at any time ever associated with a children’s home known as the Elijah Foundation, please respond. A far-fetched effort. Boys of twelve seventy years ago would likely today be dead men. I am happy not to have uncovered Ben-Zion Elefantin by this means, or anyone who knew him. And better yet, it promises that he was never a boy sent over to the Academy by some shabby almshouse that has not survived. Absence itself is a kind of proof.
* * *
*
October 20, 1949. It is by now several days since that abrasive talk with Ned Greenhill. On second thought, I believe I will accept his invitation, but on a gentleman’s terms and decidedly sans his benevolence. I am a practical man, as I often say, and the hard truth is that I have nowhere else to lay my head.
As for his son: if these forlorn precincts should fall into his hands, how high will he go?
* * *
*
November 3, 1949. For the remainder of that school term I saw far too little of Ben-Zion Elefantin. Something poisonous had come between us: a remoteness beyond my understanding. When he gave me his hand that fevered winter night on the flowered carpet, it was hot and moist, as if he had combed it through dew. I had no inkling that I would never again know the slightness of his palm or the frailty of his small knuckles. And once more his door was shut against me, and again I would catch the bleats and driftings of what passed for liturgical grumbles, or else the muted wail of some secret weeping; but he was two years older than I, and thereby too old to cry. I, alone on my bed with my disordered chessboard before me, was not.
In the refectory he sat at a distance, and I saw that he spoke to no one, and no one spoke to him. But at certain unaware moments I would feel his look. It was, I thought, altogether washed clean of the meek and the humble. In chapel too he kept apart, and was intent, as always, on the sermon, though of late Reverend Greenhill’s homiletics had departed from the biblical, and for several Sundays in a row he chose as his theme his recent adventures in the Hebrides. His holiday there, he said, had been inspired by Samuel Johnson, a famous Englishman of virtue and wisdom who lived two hundred years ago; and also by James Boswell, a Scotsman equally famous and virtuous. The loyalty to each other of these two friends, he told us, was such that Boswell gave his life to recording the life of Johnson, particularly during a journey to the Hebrides the two of them together undertook.
It was clear that he meant us to seize the meaning of this lesson: friendship and loyalty and attentiveness and decorum. (To illustrate the latter, he read out a paragraph of Boswell’s prose.) All this, I saw, was aimed at the rowdies; but they kept their heads down and were quiet. Or else were drawn in by his tale of crags and abysses, and of ships broken on rocks in the waters that skirt the islands, and especially of a frightening fall from a mossy cliff. (Here, in a sort of purposeful drama, Reverend Greenhill held up his elbow, fractured and healing, he said, but painful still.) And I thought: I have been loyal to Ben-Zion Elefantin, how unfair that he is disloyal to me.
Today as I write (in one of these formless fits of longing and loss that sometimes flood me), it occurs to me to ask: in the many pages of my memoir that heap up under my hand, am I not Ben-Zion Elefantin’s Boswell? It discomfits me to think that if I am Boswell, the small figure I was once so achingly devoted to imagined himself to be Dreyfus.
* * *
*
November 12, 1949. I have spoken before of those wretched showers of our youth: a common space of two overhead nozzles, heated by a coal stove that spat out its fickle warmth no more than inches from its maw. Two showerheads to serve one hundred pupils, with five minutes allotted for each, no matter the season; but from November to March the queue was not long. A boy would prefer to stink, and many did, rather than endure the frigid air of this glacial hell, or the water that was colder than air. It was here that I found myself unexpectedly alone with Ben-Zion Elefantin. He stood before me wet and naked and shivering, and I the same before him; but the blaze of his hair was darkened by water, and his ribs were as skeletal as his pitiful knees. His bare feet were paler than his hands. Without his cap and his blazer, he seemed smaller than ever. Nearly a month had gone by with not a syllable between us. I felt a little afraid; what must I say?
I asked him why.
He said nothing. So again I asked why.
Because I believed you were my friend.
I am your friend, I said.
And again he said nothing. You have to tell me why, I said, you have to.
A cloud of vapor spilled out of his mouth, and I saw the same rise up from mine. It was hard to breathe in that place.
But it’s real. You saw for yourself that it’s real. And your parents, you told me they buy and sell such things.
They keep me safe from them. That is why I am sent to school. To keep me from abomination.
I knew this word. Mr. Canterbury had spoken it in chapel many times.
And it was Ben-Zion Elefantin’s last word to me. I can hear it now, in a kind of self-willed hallucination: that curiously wavering uncharted bookish voice of his own making. An orphaned voice of no known origin.
* * *
*
December 12, 1949. No uncle came for him. He remained with the Fourth Form, moved up to the Fifth and the Sixth and the Seventh, and I, in the Eighth, later that year, in June, wore cap and gown for Commencement. The ceremony was held in a capa
cious tent on the football field, equipped with row upon row of folding chairs to accommodate the mass of parents and well-wishers who were expected to attend. Or were, perhaps, not entirely expected, which may have explained why Reverend Greenhill had appointed the Seventh Form to fill most of the empty places, should there be any. At one side was the dais on which the graduates were to congregate, and at the other a long table freighted with lemonade and cinnamon ices and strawberries and scones heavily blanketed by chocolate syrup and caramel cream, the last an innovation of Reverend Greenhill’s. (I heard him remark to one of the visitors that this violation of a traditional Scottish biscuit might not appeal to a fastidious palate, but the graduates were, after all, still boys.) As the procession shuffled forward to the blare of some hidden operatic loudspeaker, one could see a scattering of fathers, and with them the young women who from their age and attire, I now speculate, might be second wives, or even former nannies. The mothers, with their uplifted faces, were seated nearer the lectern, where Reverend Greenhill waited for the sounds of Aida to ebb. (My own mother was not among them. She had sent me a congratulatory note, fearing she would be too fatigued to sustain the long festivities.) First came the lesser prizes: for Attentiveness, for Patience, for Enterprise, for Courtesy, for Equestrian Skills, and all the rest; and then the Award for Excellence in Latin, renamed Classics (to include private study of Greek), won, predictably, by Edwin J. Greenhill. And following this, the Headmaster’s Oration. Gentlemen, Reverend Greenhill began, I mean not to orate, but rather to bless. As you embark on this new phase of your lives, I hope you will carry with you the aspirations and virtues of our time-honored Academy, and that each of you will strive, as you grow into men, to be both a scholar and yes, a gentleman. But a scholar can be cruel, and a gentleman can be coarse. And here he read out, in his thin but reassuring voice, two passages from Scripture, the first from the Old Testament, the second from the New, in that order, he said, especially to note how the New and the Old are in harmony. A Jew named Abraham, he said, hastened to succor three parched strangers, and gave them water, and fed them, and cooled them from the sun in the shade of a tree, all unaware that they were angels. In the same way, we learn in the Gospel of Luke how a Samaritan, neither Jew nor Christian, found on the highway a man who had been beaten and robbed and lay nearly dead, and carried him to an inn and cared for him like a brother. And so, though I wish each graduate of our beloved Temple Academy for Boys to excel as a scholar and a gentleman, I hope that you will, above all, be kind.
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