Familiarity brought tedium. I half-heard all this, and at so distant a time I can barely give its gist. Besides, so commonplace in chapel were these exhortations, they might well have been tattooed on the palms of our hands. As for me, I had my eye on a brilliant red blemish at the edge of that restless puddle of Seventh Formers who had come to swell the assembly. Ben-Zion Elefantin was now fifteen, and nearly as small as before. I tried to catch his look, but his watchfulness seemed inward: on this day of farewell was he thinking of me, of how he cast me away for some preternatural cause? Was my father’s stork, with its blinded eye, the abomination, or was it I?
Really, I ask myself to this very hour, was it I?
* * *
*
January 26, 1950. A catastrophe. How could this have happened? I blame it on my increasing forgetfulness, but how could I have forgotten what clings fast to my heart? Or perhaps I did not forget it, and those burly defectors Hedda called back from the city to pack up my things (one hundred or so boxes) carelessly left it behind? Too late now to retrieve it. Worse yet, given its weakened carriage and its increasing rust (that vinegar bath), was it mistaken for debris, and disposed of? The wrecking ball, I hear, has already had its way. So here I sit, with a bottle of ink before me, and my old Montblanc grudgingly resurrected (I had to replace the nib). In my eyrie on the highest floor of this solid old building the new windows admit no street noises, and the walls are inches thick. In this place no one could complain of my Remington! And I have nothing else as a sign of what was. Her grave is far away.
I am no longer accustomed to longhand, it tires my palsied wrists. (With my Remington it was the shoulders.) And even so fine a pen as a Montblanc can sometimes falter on a thin sheet of paper and spurt a droplet of ink; the cuff of my sleeve is spattered. No matter. I can see ahead almost to the close of my memoir; I am loath to put paid to it now. (I despise unfinished effort, as I have often reminded my son.) And then what will become of it? What of value or interest can it have? I have all along spoken of my reader, but can such a chimera exist? These days I sometimes feel as if I myself am a chimera: I walk the city streets in a cloud of uncertainty. I hardly know which way to turn, which is East and which is West. What was once second nature (the life of offices all around me, the lunches, the drinks, the handshake) dizzies me a little, the sidewalk density, the careless mob of unseeing people one must sidestep to avoid collision. Here and there the dirty pigeons, and overhead no birds. The absence of birds! The sky turned zigzag by the contours of this and that high-rise. And no trees.
It was my good fortune to have the December 15th date of eviction put off, though it inconvenienced the scheduled demolition and the difference affected the cost (which I was satisfied to reimburse). Ned Greenhill, or was it his son, managed to persuade Morgan (via John Theory) to allow me to remain through the holidays. Strange as it was, I spent Christmas Eve with Hedda in the kitchen. When Temple House was new, and the Trustees numbered twenty-five and the staff thirty-two, how convivial we were, all those fine fellows now long gone, the gossip, the overblown stories of old business triumphs, the somewhat modest tree (artificial, but genuine silver and costly), the feasting (stuffed goose and liver terrine and buttered shallots and curried lamb), and up and down the table, an infinite row of wines. And while I speak of remembered holidays, I am unhappy to mention that childhood’s Christmases were more somber. The fir with its fragile colored glass globes and its gilt star nearly touching the ceiling, and the gaudily wrapped presents below, among them, I knew, the standard toy army and, one glorious year, my coveted chessmen. (Wooden, but I had dreamed of ivory.) And sometimes, when my mother seemed out of sorts and complained of feeling sick, it was only the two of us: my saddened father and I.
In our doomed and abandoned Temple House, Hedda had enlivened the kitchen as well as she could, hanging red and green crepe-paper streamers from cabinet door to cabinet door. The dinner, she told me, was to be anything I desired, but dessert must be a Viennese treat. I dreaded another Sacher torte; too much sugar makes my teeth ache. The pots on the stove were steaming as always, and while the oven was baking whatever it might be, I was not unpleased to go on with our whimsical game. Hedda surprised me instead with what I supposed was a Christmas song (she had learned it in kindergarten, she said, and still remembered every word), as well as a scrap of paper in her own striving half-English. To me it has no holiday resonance of any kind, but I put it in my pocket and keep it still, if only to take note of Hedda’s Teutonic script; and I record it here, I hardly know why.
A pine tree high in the North he lonely stands.
Under snow and wind he sleeps.
A palm tree he dreams a land to the East,
traurig on the desert sand.
If these words can claim some coherent sense, I cannot discern it; but when Hedda sang them in her emotional German, she appeared to feel its meaning. Her eyes were wet. North, East, what fleeings, what unwilled supplantings? The author, she reminded me, is the very one who echoed the loss of my darling Peg.
Yet the Christmases referenced above are, if I may say so, boilerplate. Certainly I favor tradition; I am aware that ancestral decorum ought not to be scorned. The aberrant is to be shunned. Life’s fundamental rhythms depend on sameness, not deviation. All this I long ago learned from my mother.
Hedda’s dessert turned out to be an elaborate pancake called (a name I cannot pronounce) Kaiserschmarren, filled with caramelized almonds and raisins soaked in rum. It did make my teeth ache; but the rum, she said, would numb the pain, and she brought out a sizable bottle and a cup for each of us, and poured a second cup, and a third, and at last a fourth, and then it was midnight. Enough there is yet also for New Year’s, Hedda said, nicht wahr?
An anomaly. Out of the ordinary. A deviation from the natural. This homeless old man, this wandering Jewess.
* * *
*
January 27, 1950. These furnishings, these tables and chairs and credenzas and whatnot, make me uneasy. I suppose such modern geometries are the fashion in hotels that pretend to the comforts of luxury. Rectangular surfaces, ruler-straight legs, steel tops, nothing cushioned, nothing rounded. The bed, with its excessive pillows (they strain my back), has the width, or so it seems, of a horizonless continent. In the night, under a far-off ceiling, I see no end of vacuity. I feel myself a stranger in this bed, as I have not felt since my Academy cell: that narrow hard bed, my shoebox hidden beneath and my chessboard teetering on a bumpy blanket above. (And Ben-Zion Elefantin silently pondering.) Or not since the bed in which my son was conceived.
My Peg’s sweet bed, there I was never a stranger.
* * *
*
January 29, 1950. Hedda telephones now and then (she is still unemployed), asking how I am, are my new surroundings pleasant, and so on; but as her world is scarcely akin to mine, I trust these exchanges will soon fade away.
* * *
*
February 2, 1950. The disadvantage of such a high floor is the beating of the wind on the panes. A disturbing noise, different from the tapping of rain. (There are times when the latter mimicks the persistent diligence of my old Remington.) But a wild winter wind, especially at night, is frightening, like some misunderstood warning.
* * *
*
February 4, 1950. The reader, if he has not already abandoned me, will be reminded that he has been deliberately banned from viewing the contents of my father’s cigar box. During the confusion and may I say the distress of my relocation, I myself rarely looked into it, but even now, while I have the leisure to parse its perplexities (and a lone nightly meal in a reputed restaurant turns out to be less appealing than the kitchen in Temple House), I am unable to fathom its origin or its mode. For want of something more plausible, I have on occasion described these papers as a transcription. And again as a plea. And again as a deposition. But
for all their particularity, there is nothing verbatim here, and how could there be? I remember nothing. I remember everything. I believe everything. I believe nothing. The frenzied murmurings of two agitated boys prone and under a spell. A liar’s screed, an invention? An apparition’s fevered pedantry? And who knows such things, this garble of history and foreign babble? Not I. Nor am I a man of imagination.
Still, I must decide. Destroy what cannot be accounted for, or dispatch it all, and the cigar box itself, to the vault where the Academy History lies open to access by scholars. Already, I hear, the History is not infrequently consulted by persons with an interest in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Anglicized education. (If my reader is such a one, he should recall that for the use of citations he ought of course to ask permission of Morgan.)
I shrink from the latter course more out of caution than fear. To honor my father’s memory, I am obliged to defend the family name. I foresee that to submit for preservation an eccentricity so extreme may easily provoke accusations of innate instability, not to say lunacy. At my father’s graveside, I recall, my poor mother, ringed round by Wilkinsons, was made to endure the mutterings of such calumnies: hence the probability of disgrace.
It is betrayal that terrifies. Often and often in my cowardly memoir, I have been tempted to claim Ben-Zion Elefantin’s voice. Logic insists on it. Reason demands it. Logic and reason are themselves cowardly. What is it I am afraid to consent to? That I am beguiled by the enigma of memory? And can memory, like dream, fabricate what ordinary consciousness cannot?
* * *
*
February 7, 1950. Of late I have been reconsidering the usefulness of having my father’s artifacts appraised. What point to my keeping them here in this modernist den, where newness is king? Who will care for them as my father cared, and I after him? Who will be moved by their antiquity? For my son, who never knew his grandfather and anyhow shuns the ancestral, an inheritance of this kind can be no more than an unwanted burden. (As when the Irish maid, with her repellent brogue, recoils from what she calls my filthy pots and ugly dolls.)
Nevertheless, it may be that my father in his Egyptian ramblings may have happened upon objects of actual consequence, worthy perhaps of some museum vitrine. My hope is that a curator’s expertise may validate (dare I say it?) his life. My own craving I keep underground: only suppose that this red-kneed beaker should in fact prove to be the last remnant of Khnum on that stork-mobbed island in the middle of the Nile?
And if so?
* * *
*
February 9, 1950. The decision is made. So certain am I of its rectitude that I would engrave it in stone if I could. I will dispose of my memoir. Possibly I will quietly place it in the trash for the maid to remove. Possibly I will find a more trustworthy solution: but I will be rid of it.
A consultant from the Metropolitan Museum’s History of Near Eastern Art department has agreed to view my father’s artifacts. He makes no promises. So many of these amateur collections, he told me, reflect the collector’s enthusiasm more than his skills or his judgment. That your father worked for a season with Sir Flinders Petrie and engaged with him privately is delightful to know, but entirely irrelevant. And that he retained notes from those conversations, even if of papyri and temples, may be of some personal interest to his son, but is hardly more generally useful. More frequently than not, what is brought to our attention is meaningless detritus, or worse, inept forgeries.
It disappointed me that despite my insistence on the authenticity of Sir Flinders Petrie’s signature, he declined so much as to glance at my father’s notebook. His dismissal persuades me also to destroy it. If for the expert it holds no scientific or historical value, it must carry the same peril as my memoir. And should after my demise those oddments of my Wilkinson cousins (they are included in my will) come upon either notebook or memoir, their ill-natured suspicions of my father’s madness will be confirmed.
My father, then, was an enthusiast. That he anointed his Cousin William, that he was besotted with Cousin William for all of his days, was that mad?
* * *
*
February 12, 1950. Lincoln’s Birthday. The question of the deposition, as I hereafter will term it, secreted in this faintly odorous antiquated box: I must finally call it a deposition, as if it were somehow rendered under oath, never mind that its authorship is ambiguous. Or if it is instead an apologia pro vita sua, then whose entrails is it exposing, whose disordered will?
I am today taken by surprise by a parcel sent to me here from Morgan Bank. John Theory writes that though the late Reverend Henry McLeod Greenhill’s library had suffered constant serious deterioration due to the unfortunate location of its place of storage, in addition to the ravages of insect infestation, and could not be preserved, it seemed prudent to draw up an inventory of its holdings as a supplement to the History of the Temple Academy for Boys by Many Hands (1915), kept here in the vault containing other pertinent Academy materials for which Morgan is now responsible, including an unattributed Sargent portrait of the author Henry James, Jr. And since you, his letter continues, as the sole remaining Trustee whose present address is known, and in view of your ongoing interest in the Academy, a copy of said inventory is herewith enclosed. With kind regards, JT.
These multitudinous lists consist of scores and scores of esoteric titles, some in German and French, a cluster of Greek and Latin grammars, a threadbare copy of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, whole shelves of theological studies (Augustine, Origen, Tertullian, and so forth), a History of the Jews (translated from the German, with pencilled notes), and an abundance of volumes related to the early Levant: Development of Epigraphy; Tells of Mesopotamia, Babylon, Nimrud, and Nineveh; Yahweh and the Gods of Canaan, and on and on.
One title among the last catapults me, if I may put it so, into wild surmise. I give it below, as it appears in the inventory:
The Israelite Temple on Elephantine Island, Volume II. Reconstructive diagrams. Maps, including surrounding area. History of tripartite temples. The Khnumian cultic niche. Author: Douglas C. Hesse, Ph.D. Oriental Press, 1912. [Volume I missing.]
Volume I missing? How? Where? Into whose fancies did it go? And what is it that unnerves me so?
* * *
*
February 17, 1950. The building is being rapidly populated. When I go down for my walk, I am no longer alone in the elevator. Three or four times a week a young Japanese woman and her little son join me there. Her face is flawless porcelain, and I think of Miranda’s favorite vase (the willowy maiden on the bridge) and its pride of place on that mahogany console I so much disliked. In our companionable two-minute descent I learn that her husband is second in rank at the Japanese consulate. At half-past three, when school is out, the lobby, with its hideous spider-legged Saarinen chairs (so I am told they are called), is clamorous with the squeals of a flock of children, nearly all of them accompanied by white-shoed nannies. I have yet to see here the silver heads of widows and widowers: am I the only aged occupant? My own silver head is thoroughly overlooked, my name unrecognized: all these ripe and pulsing lives making their way, climbing their rungs, bedding their beloveds, have no use for a retired Trustee of a forgotten patrician academy.
I am no one’s decoy. I live here on the strength of another boy’s honest gratitude. And for what? That a Petrie never called him Hebe?
* * *
*
February 18, 1950. When I am at times too fatigued for my afternoon walk, I sit in the lobby on these comfortless chairs to watch the children come home from school. They put me in mind of birds, always flitting, always chirping, and their quick eyes dart like the eyes of birds, and their cheeks are round and their little brown shoes are buckled and their satchels are of many colors, and when they shout, as they often do, they make a tangled soprano chorus. Strange to find myself among children afte
r years of mouldering in the company of old men. I have picked out one or two of my favorites, the small Japanese boy, always with his mother, and an older girl whose unaware breasts, as I imagine, are already budding. Now and then I catch sight of a child of perhaps eleven or twelve who seems to hold himself apart, and never romps as the others do, but hurries away, though I never see where, and before I can steal a glance at his face. What marks him for me is his blood-red hair.
* * *
*
March 12, 1950. For the last few weeks I have not been entirely myself, and while the weather is bright and I am exacting in my dress even when confined, I am never tempted to walk. I am content enough with the services offered here, despite the incompetence of the laundress who delivers my personal things: time after time, this annoyance of mismatched socks carelessly returned to their drawer where I habitually find them. Luckily, among the promised amenities is a personal shopper who replenishes my socks (without getting rid of the useless singles), and also my shirts, continually speckled with ink on the sleeves. Nor do I miss sitting alone at a restaurant table, while the tables all around are noisy with prattle and cackle. As for room service, the trays arrive on a prettified cart, and depart with not a word beyond Sir and Good Morning. Even the wretched Amelia, and surely Hedda with her Freud and her stews and her Heine, gave proof of the reality of human flesh.
Antiquities Page 9
