Heir to the Glimmering World

by Cynthia Ozick

"I went to the city. I met someone."

  "What does it matter where you went," Anneliese said, and stopped there.

  Heinz said, "You don't know anybody, so how could you meet somebody?"

  What should I tell this unkind long-limbed boy? That I had met Mitwisser gazing at his hat? That I had met Ninel's mockery and her stick?

  "I ran into a sorceress on Fifth Avenue," I said. There was a contagion of grimness; there was grimness all around.

  James looked at me, not casually; a new way of looking.

  "Where did this thing come from?" he said.

  Then I saw the Bear Boy with its torn flyleaf lying open on the table.

  "It was in my father's things when he died."

  "Your father," he said. "Is this a joke, your father?"

  "I don't know why he had it."

  "But you know what it's worth, don't you."

  The Bear Boy was sitting in a tree. He had long loose brown bangs. His legs were dangling from a branch. He was wearing blue socks and brown shoes with two sets of buckles, and a white blouse with a ruffled round lace collar. The collar was edged with blue piping; a bird with an orange worm in its beak was embroidered on a pocket. On the ground below—the grass was very green—stood an outsized green hat, high and broad and grand, as green as the grass. The hat might have passed for a green hillock, except for a tall peacock's tail of green feathers sticking up from it.

  Underneath was this rhyme:

  I don't like me

  partic'larly,

  but when I see

  the other boys,

  ruffians in their filth and noise,

  oh! I—like—me!

  "That hat," James said, "was bought in 1911 by J. P. Morgan for sixty thousand dollars."

  "But it's only a picture," Gert said.

  "A picture copied from a real hat."

  "Why would anyone pay so much for a silly hat?"

  "Because of the Bear Boy. Anything the Bear Boy touched turned into money. His shirts, his eyeglasses. The Bear Boy," James said, "was the King Midas of his day."

  "I know that story," Willi said. "Whatever King Midas touched stopped being alive."

  "It's a baby story," Gert said. "And this whole Bear Boy's a baby story. We used to have it at home, only it was called Bürknabe—"

  "I know that," Willi said.

  "You don't remember, you were too little."

  "Yes I do. I do so remember, I even told her." Like an accuser, he pointed a finger at me. And as if I had been rightly accused, I felt a flare of guilt, though I could not tell for what.

  "And this thing," James said, "is worth piles more than that hat."

  "But the front of it's ripped and it's got spots all over—"

  "The Bear Boy's spots. His spots are worth plenty. His butter, his jam. The book his father gave him when he was five, he wore it out until he hated it.... What a joke."

  Anneliese stiffened. "You should see about mama," she broke in. "To go off that way and leave her alone—"

  "She was asleep. She was perfectly safe," I protested, "and the boys would be coming home—"

  "She sleeps too much." She turned to Heinz: "When you brought up mama's tray, was she still sleeping?"

  "They were playing handball after school, and Gert wanted to stay, so we sent Willi home to do it."

  "I made the toast and got the milk," Willi said; but his neck had begun to redden. I had seen Anneliese's neck redden in just that way. "Mama wasn't in her bed, so that's when I went and got the Bear Boy. Because no one was watching, but it was just to show James—"

  "Mama wasn't in her bed?" Anneliese said.

  "No."

  "Where was she?"

  The redness spread to his forehead; his ears flamed, his head flamed. "I looked all over the house—"

  "Tell where mama was," Anneliese said.

  "In James's bed. With a scissors, cutting up his pillow."

  To me Anneliese muttered, "And this is what we pay you for?" There was more rote than fervor in it; she was grim and dry.

  But I thought: it's James who pays me, not you!

  "What a joke," James said again. He slapped the Bear Boy shut, and I understood my guilt. It was not because I had deserted Mrs. Mitwisser. It was, as always, on account of my father's vice.

  23

  THE NEXT MORNING, after the boys had left for school, Professor Mitwisser took up his briefcase as usual, put on his hat, and called me to him. He looked vaguely unkempt, and I saw that he had not troubled to shave. A thin white frost misted his chin.

  "You must never again do such a thing. You must never again go out from the house in that way. My sons are only children, they are not responsible, you must rely on them for nothing. You must never again leave my poor wife by herself. Is this understood?"

  His head was low, his shoulders high; his shoulders were a cave. He made his way into the street too cautiously, like a man in hiding.

  "You'll be in charge of Waltraut today," Anneliese told me. "James needs me to go with him."

  "You're not taking her with you?"

  "Your job is to look after Waltraut and mama. Please remember that."

  "My job is to assist Professor Mitwisser."

  It was easy now to be defiant; Anneliese no longer had influence over me. She had grown lenient. It was as if she no longer had influence over herself.

  "Papa has to be away all day for his work, you know that. And his nights belong to James." An egg was boiling in a pot. She was preparing Mrs. Mitwisser's morning tray—but her look flickered upward, to Mitwisser's study, where James sat with his teacup in Mitwisser's chair. "You shouldn't mind about Willi. Now go and get Waltraut."

  "Mrs. Mitwisser won't let me come near her," I complained.

  "Oh, just do your job, won't you?" An unfamiliar idleness purred in her throat. "I told you, papa and James are exactly the same, nothing else counts."

  Waltraut lay in James's lap, playing with a string.

  "Teaching old Wally cat's cradle," James said.

  I said, "That's not tea you've got in there—"

  "The real stuff, right. Braces a man for the day. Saves his soul from yesterday." He gave a small push; Waltraut, fists entangled in webs, slid off his knees. "I suppose you've got an inkling about your dad liking his dice," he said.

  Now I felt his power: the power that clutched at the house, the power of health and sickness, the power that drew Mrs. Mitwisser to her scissors. A tramp, a vagabond, an idler, an invader! Dieser'Säufer. But he divined things; he knew things.

  "He won it off me," James said. "I would've given it to him, I'm always looking to get rid of all that sort of trash. Those goddamn fancy shirts ended up in London, in some museum over there." The stretched-out laugh. "But that fella wanted to play the odds. He was hard up, and still he wanted the odds."

  Then, in the whirligig of incoherence I already suspected the world to be, it was confirmed that the Bear Boy had gambled with my father, and my father had won, or had slyly been permitted to win, the Bear Boy's own relic, spotted with the Bear Boy's own jam. The relic could be turned into gold, and I was its heir.

  Anneliese was standing in the doorway. "Here's mama's breakfast. No cereal, she's tired of cereal, she leaves it in the dish. Take it up, please, I don't have time." To James she said, "I'm ready."

  "I want to come too," Waltraut squealed in her high lamblike voice. She looked up at James with her round stare—the Mitwisser eye, but with this difference: it had grown used to a cornucopia of puppet shows and carousels.

  "No, you don't," James whispered. "Today the mouse doesn't want to come out of the house"—and I caught, vibrating under the cajoling words, an electric burr that seemed to say: you have served your purpose.

  24

  MRS. MITWISSER was again begging my forgiveness. She confessed to a crude offense, an insult, she was all contrition, she had done me an injustice, an injury, not once but twice: first she had taken my money, and then she had blamed me for taking James's mon
ey. The first was theft, the second was ... she did not know what to call the second. I was a servant in the house—wasn't that what I was, a kind of servant? and as such I deserved to be paid, and since they ("we," she said, with the loftiness of an empress) were incapable of paying me themselves ... At home the servants—the maid, the cook—were always promptly paid, every Friday morning, except for the governess, Mademoiselle De Bonrepos, who received her salary on the first of the month in a little silken drawstring sack, along with some small gift, so that it should appear the gift was what was being handed over, rather than money, it would not do to be too overt, too bald, a governess is not a maid...

  I forgave her many times. I watched her take a deep bite out of her boiled egg. Her teeth were as orderly and unspoiled as Waltraut's. "You see?" she said, and displayed the bitten egg: the crescent left by its absent crown. "My first papers, they are from this bite." She copied its curve with her finger in the air. "I go with Herr Doktor Schrödinger to Switzerland, to Arosa, the bite is not there, but anyhow we can know where goes the shape, you see?..." They called it, she explained, Schrödinger's equation, a wave function that extended throughout space, just as the missing outline of the bitten egg extended in principle beyond the existing body of the egg. They had spent the December holidays of 1925 in Arosa, she and Erwin, at a fine hotel. Anneliese, a child of six, was at home in the care of Mademoiselle De Bonrepos, and of course it was in those days not proper, but her husband knew nothing of it, nothing, he was the whole time in Spain, in an archive there, searching after one of his beloved Egyptians, ibn Saghir was it? They were not lovers, she and Erwin, never, in fact they were competitors, rivals, they slept in separate rooms but worked much of the night in his, and it was in his room, past midnight, when they had ordered some refreshment to carry them through, that she had bitten into the boiled egg, and there it was, the explosion of seeing, the possibility that had until that instant eluded them, the idea that the object of their passion, like a wave of the sea, was after all not guaranteed to linger in one place, it was a force not a thing, their wild-hearted wandering fickle electron!—oh, they were elated, and the laughter, the comedy, the absurdity, the thrill of that egg! Together they struggled to formulate the equation, it occupied many nights, by day they walked, arguing, along the mountain paths, the lobby had a great Tannenbaum hung with colored-glass globes sheltering candles, yes, they were suspected of being lovers, the Swiss are eternally suspicious.... Schrödinger, that arrogant tall young Austrian with his tall forehead and his eyelids moistly quivering, like wet lips, with the excitement of it, and she his designated assistant, a married woman and a mother.... At the Institute they accepted her reluctantly, she was fully a colleague yet they took her to be Schrödinger's subordinate, they could see no woman as their equal, but her papers could not be resisted, they could not be denied, she was there on the strength of her papers, they were as much hers as Schrödinger's, and it was she who had bitten the egg.... What times those were! Pauli, Heisenberg, they were all in their twenties, Fermi was just twenty-three, herself twenty-eight, only Erwin Schrödinger was older a little, they all had different theories, they were like a band of mystics pursuing imagined angels: waves and particles!

  "And after," she finished—after what? after Switzerland?—"I become pregnant with Heinz."

  She was abruptly silent.

  In the little hallway outside the bedroom door—just where Anneliese had whispered to me about James—Waltraut loitered, pushing a toy car through a tunnel in a tower built of blocks. The car struck the tower and it clattered down, scattering blue and yellow cubes. Mrs.Mitwisser blinked at the noise, looked out, and turned away. Waltraut did not look in.

  "The little one speaks now all the time English," Mrs. Mitwisser resumed.

  "Children learn quickly," I said. But what Waltraut had learned—it had come quickly—was to keep her distance from her mother.

  "And the boys, they become hooligans—"

  "They're like all boys."

  "Willi, he is thief."

  "It doesn't matter," I said, though it did.

  She was conscious of everything. Even when she slept, she was awake. She lived at the top of the house, an all-knowing goddess in a cloud: she listened, she heard. She contemplated thieves and thievery. Schrödinger, for instance: he was and was not a thief. They had worked side by side, but it was she who had bitten the egg. Yet they called it Schrödinger's equation, and in the end she was driven out! Expelled from the history of the electron. Expelled, she said (like Willi, like Anneliese, she had a neck that reddened), and said it again, in the idiom of truth, so that I should take it in: Vertrieben! Vertrieben aus der Geschichte der Physik.

  History had wronged her—not Schrödinger, not the history of the electron (this was her strange phrase, enveloped in a cascade of those unruly names, Born, Bohr, Dirac, Jordan, Verschaffelt, Kramers, Ehrenfest, Lorentz, and more, and more!). It was world-upheaval that had wronged her. She had run away from world-upheaval, and her mind, her mind, was at all costs not guaranteed to linger in one place, it was a force not a thing, a function that extended throughout space ... and therefore, even if not wholly understood, it could be, after a fashion, trusted.

  I told her then that my father had killed a boy.

  Only Bertram knew this; and Ninel.

  Mrs. Mitwisser was indifferent to the killing of a boy. It wasn't one of her boys, and anyhow she was indifferent to her own boys too. She was indifferent to my having had a father—had she ever cared whether Mademoiselle De Bonrepos had a father, or whether the cook or the maid had a father? She pushed away her tray. There lay the jagged remains of the half-eaten egg, ridged by her pretty teeth. A gray fatigue— an interior fog—settled over her. The fevered fanatical nights of Switzerland were slipping away; they had been her glory; the memory of them agitated her even now, and wore her out. Or perhaps she was again submerged in that black limousine circling round and round Berlin.

  "He crashed up a car," I persisted, "and killed a boy, and he told lies and he gambled. He gambled with James."

  She was not indifferent to James. "You tell me this why?"

  "It's what Willi did, he took what belonged to my father—but you heard it, you heard! You were just upstairs, and you heard—"

  She said serenely, "I cut with the scissors where he puts his head."

  I said, "My father knew James, at least he met him once—"

  "Then also your father is Parasit! " A cry of triumph, or of sympathy.

  It was as if she had made a gash in my breath. From under her blanket she drew out a tiny scissors with rounded tips: a child's scissors. I recognized it from a doll's toiletry set that lay in the tumble of Waltraut's new toys. The little scissors was, I saw, the natural corollary of Schrödinger's equation, the logical ghost that follows science—if Jane Austen can be shredded and scattered, if James's bedding can be snipped into snowflakes, it is to formulate a proof: that the lightning electrons are everywhere at once, that the particles are both cause and effect, that nothing has shape or stasis, that thought itself is merely flux, that history seeps and seeps and never sleeps; and that James, even James, can be driven out.

  I marveled at how placid she had become, and how her eyes stood out like oil-darkened knots in wood. She leaned across the ruined breakfast and touched my face; it was a kind of experiment, an investigation. It was the first touch I had ever had from her. Was it because she supposed my father too was an enemy of James? But she was mistaken: my father had gambled with James and won. On the other hand, if he had been permitted to win...

  "Now I will say to you," she pressed, "two beliefs. One is for silence, the other not. My husband believes that Heinz is not his son. Consequently he loves him. And this James, dieser'Säufer! He believes he is Karaite. Consequently he loves my husband. Now you will understand, nicht wahr?"

  I asked which belief was for silence.

  "Ach," she said, "my husband's darlings, the fireflies."

  The fireflie
s were the Karaites. They glittered for their little hour, and then they vanished. This she told me with so much obsessive intelligence that it was confirmed she was purely a scientist. The electrons were imagined, yet they were efficacious and plausible. The Karaites were not, so why speak of them, why give one's lifeblood to them, why depend on them? Why not drive them out?

  25

  AT FIRST the Bear Boy loved the pictures his father made. He stood behind his father's drawing board, and saw how the watercolors, pale and magical, flooded the sinews of the drawings. He watched himself slowly bloom into being: it was himself, a furry-haired boy, posed as his father had had him pose, sitting on a branch, say, or poking a stick into a puddle, or painting a face on an onion, all those curious ideas his father had about what he liked to do. He really did like to do some of them, he really did like painting a nose and a mouth on an onion with its funny topknot, and he didn't much mind the blouses his mother sewed, and he didn't care about the long bangs, he could push them away.... At first he loved the pictures, and he was interested in the strange way the stories grew out of his father's seeming to study him, though he didn't like feeling studied, and he didn't like the double buckles on his shoes, and he didn't like it that his mother rouged his knees to please his father's eye when he was sketching. His father was always sketching and always fiddling with the stories, inventing rhymes and words he would never say, never could say, and pretending that his mother's big old green hat could talk, when everyone knows a hat can't talk, even if you fold it, as his father did, into the shape of giant green lips. He didn't like being studied, and he didn't like having his knees rouged, and sometimes even his cheeks, but still something exciting was happening, that was clear, and one morning—his mother was very excited—his father put into his hands a pretty little book with a picture of the green hat on the cover, and himself curled inside it. "Well!" his father said. "There you are!" It wasn't an ordinary book, it was like no other book in the house or in the world, his mother explained, because it had Arrived From The Publisher and his father had Written and Illustrated it.