Heir to the Glimmering World

by Cynthia Ozick

  It was true that I was already acquainted with many of the Bear Boy's characteristics—who was not? To be oblivious of him would have been as likely as never having heard of Peter Rabbit, and the Bear Boy and Peter Rabbit had the same—what to call it?—constituency. Little children delighted in the Bear Boy—all, it seemed, but me. My father had never read aloud to me; I could not imagine such a tradition, a father reading to a child. When I finally came to books on my own—and I came to them with a driven hunger—I was already too old for the Bear Boy. I had missed the moment, I had passed him by. He belonged to the very young.

  The apostrophe, I discovered, was an elision: the name had once been apBair, and before that possibly apBlair, somehow corrupted from its Welsh origin—an oddly evolved country name on the style, for instance, of Prichard, condensed from apRichard. James Philip A'Bair, according to my source (a thick and dusty authors' compendium), was born near Cardiff in 1843, emigrated to Boston at the age of nineteen, and was married, late, to Margaret Dilworth, of Gloucester, Massachusetts, in 1887; their only child, James Philip Jr., was born in 1895. How far away these dates seemed! The author of the Bear Boy was long dead; he had sent into the ether three plays, some negligible verse ornamented with a border of birds and blossoms from the poet's own inkpot, and a pair of not very noteworthy novels, all the while supported in these mostly unremunerative strivings by Margaret A'Bair, who designed ladies' hats and eventually ran her own millinery shop.

  It was one of those hats, in a period when women affected great swooping brims adorned by ribbons and feathers, that gave birth to the Bear Boy. Jimmy A'Bair, then age two and a half, plucked his mother's fabrication from the blank-faced dummy-head on which it was displayed for sale, and moved into it. He moved into it literally, like a hermit who has found an agreeable cave. The hat was certainly very broad, and very deep, and very green, and he could curl his entire body into its cavity, overhung, as by fronds in a forest, by waving green feathers. He slept inside it and he ate inside it; he reached up to play with its dangling bows, but he would not come out of it. If he drew together the two ends of its wide encircling brim, he effectively shut his door on any view of the outside scene. At first Margaret A'Bair was amused, and after some days vaguely worried; but James Philip A'Bair, who was already past fifty and had sparse affinity for small boys, was electrified. He took up his neglected watercolors and painted the boy who wanted to live in a hat; a strange and simple tale, made up of strange and simple syllables, tumbled out of him, he hardly knew how, but even as they jetted from his pen he felt them to be enchanting and unprecedented, like his wife's twisted-cloth flowers, the seductive forms of which existed nowhere in nature. From then on, greedily watchful, he kept his eye on the child, though in rather a distant way; he had no sympathetic insight into Jimmy, who nevertheless supplied all the bizarre tricks and curious marvels that the author of the Bear Boy could wish for. He almost believed that the child was his conscious collaborator.

  The Boy Who Lived in a Hat was the first of the celebrated series (and included an actual bear, who was served ginger ale on a visit to the boy in the hat). This was followed by The Boy Whose Thumb Was a Puppet and Six Times Two Is Thirteen Midnights, the acclaimed volume of illustrated rhymes, in which the Bear Boy counts up all the blue-black spaces between the galaxies. Bear Boy book succeeded Bear Boy book—there were fifteen of them, translated into every European language. Riches quickly mounted. Margaret A'Bair gave up her hat shop, and devoted her skills to tailoring fanciful blouses for her son to wear and her husband to paint. By the time Jimmy was six years old, he had the most recognizable tiny chin and round ears and furry hair and scalloped collar of any child on earth. His face and dress and robust little legs—especially their rosy knees—had turned into legend; the Bear Boy was indistinguishable from folklore. And the author was eclipsed by the boy.

  All this was recounted in a reference work in the Carnegie library two blocks from Bertram's flat—the flat he would soon give up for Ninel's sake. I was particularly drawn to those far-off dates of marriage and birth. The story of the hat-cave had disclosed my mother's true fate. Might the Bear Boy have been one of her childhood treasures, precious to her and therefore precious to my father? Cynical about everything else, he was never cynical about his Jenny.

  "The timing doesn't work," Bertram pointed out. "Your mother must have been ten or twelve when the series got started. At that age she wouldn't care for all that Jellydrop stuff."

  It was the Bear Boy's habit to call everyone, human or animal—even his own thumb—Jellydrop. It was a magical spell.

  "If it had nothing to do with Jenny," I said, "my father wouldn't have saved a thing like that. A picture book! It makes no sense. And look how long he's had it—the cover's coming apart."

  "Maybe your mother bought it with you in mind. And was too sick, so it got put away."

  I was skeptical: would my father have preserved something meant for me? His sentiments extended no further than his protracted mourning for his wife.

  "Or it could be," Bertram said (I felt his impatience), "that your father kept the Bear Boy for himself. Because ... well, maybe because he just liked that sort of stuff. Some people do. Look, kid, I'm late. Just put the thing away and don't eat yourself up over it, what d'you say?"

  He was kindly but restless. Ninel was waiting for him on a certain street corner with a placard on a tall stick; she was leading yet another march in favor of the downtrodden. But his words—they were, I saw, unserious, hasty, tossed out—opened a light before me. However my father had got hold of the Bear Boy, it was all at once possible that he had, on his own account, cherished the image of a child who lived in a hat. And why not? My mother was dead; being mortal flesh, he had to cherish someone. Since it wasn't going to be me, why not the make-believe Bear Boy? I could not discover—how would I ever know?—how a children's story came to rest among my father's few last things. He had been a reckless imaginer, a man of caprice, and his attachment to a chimerical boy was an explanation I was, for all my mistrust of him, willing to accept.

  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

  DAY 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.