Heir to the Glimmering World

by Cynthia Ozick

  After rain the revived sun bursts out like a gong. The heat caught him with the force of a thrown net. He remembered a nook of a delicatessen on the street just past the Quaker college and headed there, hoping for a sandwich: by now he was hungry enough. On the pavement in front of the green plot and the white columns he saw the girl. She was standing with her back to him—a long back—holding the small child by the hand.

  "Well, hello," he said.

  She turned and moved half a yard away, toward the iron fence.

  "I saw you at the hotel yesterday. Having breakfast, your whole family. Is your mother all right?" Then it occurred to him that she might not understand.

  But she said politely, "Thank you. My mother is well."

  She was aloof. She had a kind of adolescent hauteur. This startled him. It was as if it was she who was conscious of a foreignness—as if he was the foreigner. And he knew she lied, or was simply wary. Clearly there was something not right about the mother.

  "Then you do speak English," he said.

  "I was taught it in school. Also by my father. But now I must study more."

  "What about all those other kids?"

  "My brothers must learn from the beginning." She said this in the tone of a command. Her chin rose up; she lifted her tidy head. She was nearly as tall as himself. He supposed she was no more than thirteen or fourteen, but she had a woman's decisiveness, and a woman's long back.

  The child had found a stick, and was rhythmically beating it against a metal plaque attached to the fence. A sign of some kind.

  "Waltraut, nein!" the girl admonished. But the child went on noisily hitting the sign.

  "What did you call her?"

  "Waltraut."

  "There's a funny name." He felt in his pockets and pulled out some coins. He chose two of the shiniest ones and held them out to the child. She dropped the stick and came to him eagerly. "Here's a penny, and that one's a dime."

  "Please, no," the girl said. "In my family we do not—"

  He broke in, "For God's sake, it's only a couple of cents."

  This seemed to fluster her. "We are here a little time only, I do not know yet how one explains the money."

  He spilled a cascade of coins onto the sidewalk. The child looked up in delight. "See, that one's a nickel, five cents, and that one's a quarter, that's twenty-five. Go ahead," he told the child, "jiggle 'em, pile 'em up." And to the older girl he said, "I could show you the paper bills if you want."

  A redness flooded her neck. "Please, no. We go now—" She bent to scoop up the coins. "Here, take please."

  It was—what to call it?—trained probity. It struck him as stupidity—stupid pride over a handful of change. The small child playing at his feet charmed him: his pennies were being washed in a rain puddle. "Let the kid have 'em, same as mud pies, what's the harm?"

  "Please, no," she said again. It was a directive, not an appeal. "My mother does not permit." And then, with the air of an empress: "We do not receive money that is not our own."

  "Say it's a loan then. Hey, little one," he said, making a clown face, "you be sure to give me back all that used United States currency when I see you over at the hotel, okay?"

  The child giggled.

  "We have left the hotel."

  "You have?"

  "In the morning. My mother and my brothers are already in our new house. And here is my father."

  He was striding toward them from between the columns that enclosed the College entrance. A towering Teuton in a heavy suit. Wool in June! It was outlandish; but the girl was an oddity in herself: the gravity, the self-possession. She had inherited the father's height, but not the father's eyes. His eyes were as blue as a Swedish sailor's; yet no Swedish sailor's glare was so fierce as this. The father growled down at the child, in German; the child was sitting in the middle of the puddle, wet underpants and a wet dress, washing money.

  "From the hotel," the girl was saying (English emerging from German), "he gave them to her. But mama said—"

  The father cut her off with a German grunt and majestically extended his hand. "You are kind to amuse my little daughter. You have bestowed on us our first American treasure."

  So what mama would not permit was overruled by foreign courtliness.

  He walked on to his delicatessen, ate his corned beef sandwich, and thought: why run? Not on a full stomach anyhow, but why run at all? Why run ever again? He had no destination, there was no finish line. When he came to the end of the run he found only himself: the same, the same. The more he moved on, the more he arrived at himself. Intoxication was brief—a seduction, an illusion. It didn't last. A snap of the dice, the Bear Boy gone in a flash. The impromptu thrill, and he was back to himself. Knapsack a tad lighter. Himself a bit—what? Cleaner. Not that he could ever be shut of the Bear Boy's residue, it was in his liver and his lungs. Contamination. Live without premeditation, that's the way. On the fly. Kif, booze, roses for old ladies, the bug-eyed fellow in the schoolyard. Bridget. The impromptu thrill, the moment's mastery, how different it must be for people who get thrown out of their old lives and afterward can't recognize themselves. Himself, he hadn't been thrown out, he'd crawled out on his own. Those people—foreigners. They looked dumbfounded. In a different language the larynx grows dumb. He knew the feeling, he'd been a foreigner himself (no, a traveler, a wayfarer, a wanderer, he hadn't been thrown out). The girl wasn't dumb, she'd said a few words in English. The father, somehow formidable. Spiraled out that elaborate—what? Mockery? You have bestowed on us our first American treasure, my God, what was that? Treasure, bestowed, what was all that?

  He bought himself a couple of new shirts, paid for two months ahead, and settled in at the William Penn.

  The girl had called it their new house, but it was old, in a fallen neighborhood. An abandoned filling station on the corner. Rotted objects in a vacant lot. Still, nice old-fashioned touches on the housefronts—you see them in these time-worn American cities, pitted brass lamps hanging from porch ceilings, a stained-glass fanlight above a door. At first it was only the girl—the imperial woman-girl—who was worth watching. The snail-braids over the ears, the tiny ugly earrings, the knowingness. That sober secret look. But finally it was the father he came for, the Teuton who was no Teuton, installed there among bits of cast-off tables and beds, the charitable leavings of good-hearted Christians, departing in the morning for that white-columned College, the oversized loping gait, the wool suit, at night doggedly unpacking crates of books in alien alphabets, sorting them out as if his life hung on their proper sequence.

  He was there as tutor to the girl, but not for long: she flew past him, sitting for hours with one of her father's dictionaries, diligently writing on the topics he set out for her. Sometimes she was docile, sometimes recalcitrant. She refused "The History of My Family" but lowered her brown braided head obediently over "Gardens and Parks I Have Loved." She had grown quickly fluent, no tutor was really needed (such as he was, an actor again, an impersonator, the Bear Boy in yet another outfit), and anyhow she had responsibilities. The small child, the mother. Away from the hotel the mother improved. In the hotel she had been fearful, lashing out at ghosts in the blueberries, lashing out at the father, the children turned to stone—was it that she recoiled from the provisional, the betwixt and between? The Board had arranged for them to be put up at the William Penn—a temporary stopover while the house was being readied. In the worn-out Albany house with the pretty fanlight above the door, half filled with other people's discarded furniture, the mother was almost peaceful. The creaky stairs, her husband's regular comings and goings, his familiar scratchings among his books, her young sons safe in the public school, what were they if not a normal family? But still the mother was nervous. He could see how nervous, especially when he was in the house. He was taking her boys in hand, those solemn-faced foreign children. In school they were embarrassed. They were as quiet as sticks. They did not understand when spoken to. Their ugly foreign names were a humiliation, names
as ugly and foreign as that ugly foreign Waltraut. (To have saddled a little kid with that!) Their new classmates ridiculed their unsayable names and their high black socks and their awful foreign earnestness.

  He began by finding them new names, the kind that blurted out everything they were not. Hank, Jerry, Bill. Names like these go fishing with live worms for bait. Names like these are rowdy and raucous and poke and pummel and knock each other down and talk ordinary Albany lingo and jump from the top of the wardrobe, shaking plaster fragments out of the ceiling below. The new names changed them. The frightened little foreign gentlemen were becoming recognizable boys. He rough-housed with them and wrestled them to the floor and suffocated them with multiplication drills (his nanny, the one with the drooping jowl who had insisted on getting him eyeglasses, had suffocated him), and made them learn lists of words, not all of them polite. He taught them the rules of baseball. It wasn't at all the same as with Bridget's son. He never gave any of them so much as a nickel.

  At the start he believed it was because of the girl that he had located them in the house with the fanlight. Located them, that's the ticket, they were dislocated people, no ordinary tourists, they weren't visitors from abroad, they hadn't come equipped with guidebooks for Niagara and the Adirondacks. He had seen the father leaving that white building with the columns. In the front office he asked about the sign on the iron fence outside: FRIENDS OVERSEAS RELIEF. He was taken to another office and interviewed—what exactly was he in a position to offer?

  —Furniture always helps, you know. They get here with nothing.

  —I'm a tutor, he said, I have experience as a tutor.

  —What do you teach?

  —Well, I've taught reading.

  —I see. Can you teach English to newcomers? We have two families, he was told, the Steiners and the Mitwissers. The Steiners have only one child, the Mitwissers have a slew. They've just been brought over, and we've placed the father here. Distinguished scholar of religious history, specializes in Charismites. The family well-known over there, the mother something or other in her own right. A little disoriented by the trip, you know. The kids, not a word of English in the whole pack, except the oldest one, the daughter. I'd take the Steiners, the Steiners have only the one. Nice people too, they didn't give us a bit of bother.

  —No, no, he said, the other ones, the Whatchamacallits?

  —Mitwisser. The father is Professor Rudolf Mitwisser, we have him lecturing here.

  —What a mouthful, fine, I'll take the Mitwissers.

  —If they'll take you, he was told. The father is very particular about the family, we've seen that ourselves. He rushed us into getting the house prepared, it was awkward enough. His wife was uncomfortable in the hotel. She doesn't like hotels. An odd brood. You understand, he was told, all this is charitable work, you won't be paid for your time.

  —I understand, he said.

  —Your name and address? Ah, the William Penn, then you've run into them already? How long will you be staying?

  —I'm living there for the time being.

  He was handed a slip of paper: 22 Westerley.

  —We'll inform Professor Mitwisser. These people generally show gratitude for whatever you do for them, but this one's a hard case.

  Ultimately he was there for the father. It all came down to the father; it was the father he kept his eye on. The girl was only a child, a mysterious child; she wore a kind of Delphic pride. That look of knowingness had taken him in. Knowingness like a sickness. Was it the tallness that made her seem so womanly? The gravity, the veil of melancholy. Not a speck of laughter in any of them. Well, no, the boys—the boys were lately a herd of cattle, bellowing with the best of them. Or the worst. They pulled their long socks down to their ankles and scuffed their shoes and aimlessly punched the air or each other. He had them chattering in English now, even among themselves—not that it was all his doing. The drive to be like the others. They were picking up some nasty street words, though they still had the viscous slide of German in their speech, the curled-up l's and the gargled r's. The oldest, Hank, would never get free of an accent. The younger ones maybe. Not the girl. He rarely saw her now—she was always with the mother or the small child.

  It was more than a month since the father had agreed to let him approach his children. He was absorbed in their safekeeping. He ringed them round with barriers; the barriers were all in the father's heedful blue gaze. There was, to begin with, the question of credentials. The Friends had sent him, so that was all right, but—how must one put this?—there was also ... how must one put this?

  —My children, my family, Mitwisser said, we are accustomed to ... certain expectations. European ways, perhaps. I regret that we cannot provide recompense, the College is very kind, everyone is so very kind, but my own recompense here is ... let me say insufficient. Unfortunately we are not...

  —I'm a volunteer, he said, and grinned. Didn't they tell you that? It means I can come and go. No obligation either way. You won't owe me a thing.

  —My daughter, my sons, they must not be ... how shall I say? They must not be diminished. Always there has been a governess, but when we ... and here, as you see...

  —I had a nanny myself, growing up.

  —Ah.

  —I had more toys than I knew what to do with.

  —My poor children, Mitwisser said, it was necessary to leave everything behind.

  The interview was all at once at an end. The huge Teuton who was no Teuton. Distinguished scholar of religious history. The man stood before him like a beaten child, blazing with shame. Or like a child who has been made to stand and stand and stand.

  They were penniless refugees, sunk in distrust. And yet the father had trusted him too quickly. Credentials? He had none: Bridget's surly son, ha!—but look how the mighty have fallen, beggars can't be choosers, and all the rest. They took what they could get. He'd had a nanny himself, that counted somehow. Besides, it turned out that the Mitwisser boys liked him, they were crazy about him, he drilled them for half an hour and then let them run wild for two hours. Behind the father's back, so to speak—the father was out lecturing on Charismites. The girl and the mother and the small child were mostly invisible. The small child, when he glimpsed her, was clinging to a foreign-looking doll dressed in a dirndl: they hadn't left everything behind after all. And all those books Mitwisser was sorting, hundreds of them, maybe thousands. They hadn't left those behind.

  After a while he learned it wasn't Charismites, whatever they were, that preoccupied Professor Mitwisser. It was Karaites, whatever they were. Jews, something to do with Jews. This ancient rabbi and that ancient rabbi. It was all as alien as the moon.

  One day he asked. He was surprised by Mitwisser's half-scowling surprise. It was as if he was defending a fortress. A fortress under siege, filled with deadly weaponry.

  "What is your interest in this?" Mitwisser said. He did not wait for an answer. "My own interest is in theological deviation. In what is called heresy. Have you an interest in this? I think not."

  "Not much interest in rabbis and such," he said.

  That was the first time. The second time he asked the girl. He was heading back to the William Penn—there was a bus stop across from the old gas pumps—and spotted her sitting on a rock in the vacant lot that, from the look of it, had once been a children's playground. Rusted chains, broken swings. Litter all around. The small child squatted nearby, fussing with that doll in the dirndl, pretending to feed it bits of dry grass.

  "Is this where you like to come?"

  "We don't go very far. Papa wishes Waltraut to be close to home. So we come here, even if it is not so very nice."

  He noted that in speaking to him she no longer said "my father": it had become papa.

  "He keeps you on a tight leash, doesn't he?"

  She did not comprehend.

  "He watches over you."

  "Oh yes. We are very much cared for."

  "But there's nothing to be afraid of. It's not
like over there."

  "There is danger everywhere," she said.

  "Those people Professor Mitwisser's involved with," he said, "are they dangerous?"

  "The people at the College?" she said in alarm. "No, no, they are so good to us, papa's work, and also the house—"

  "Not the College people. The ones in those books he's got his nose in."

  She flickered out a rapid little smile. It came and went. "Papa's people have been dead a thousand years."

  A thousand years. That was as far as he could get with the girl. The small child sidled up to him, pulling at his pockets. "Hey, you Wally you," he said, and lifted her to his shoulder and bounced her up there until she shrieked with laughter.

  Mitwisser never laughed. Apparently his people, this old rabbi and that, had declared against it.

  It was Frau Mitwisser who finally explained about the Karaites. He found her on the threadbare sofa in the dimly lit sitting room. She was looking into a silver-framed mirror (something else they hadn't left behind?), studying herself in the half-dark. He understood that they fretted about the electric bill. They ate boiled rice because it was cheap. They wore clothes out of season; the soles of their shoes had thinned.

  When he came near she set down the silver frame on the scarred little table next to her; it wasn't a mirror at all. A hand-tinted old photograph: a small woman, a large plant.

  He knew she disliked him. She had disliked him from the start. Was it that he was nothing like her idea of a proper tutor, deferential in suit and tie, deferential especially to his young charges—surely they were of a station superior to his own? His station: she could not fathom it. He had no station, no standing, no place: he had been sent to them out of nowhere, like the sunken mattresses and the worn tables. He seemed a sort of clown—he cavorted with her sons, he turned them into panting dervishes. Their shouts rang out all day. She felt detached from her own children. She could hardly recognize them.

  She had noticed him in the hotel—in what they called the breakfast parlor. It wasn't very impressive, that hotel. She had known grander hotels at home, so grand that they had caused her to shake and walk with her hand on her chest to hide her fright. The new hotel—the one they had been sent to—was very plain. The breakfast parlor had no servants; one was expected to serve oneself from a bureau, like a waitress in a public café. From the corner of her eye she saw him rooted beside her, shining all over, sweat trickling down his forearms, his face mottled with heat, as if he had been heaving a sledgehammer. He took a step away; now he was behind her. She poured some berries into a dish. He was fearfully close, just behind her, she could smell the mammal heat of his armpits, there was danger everywhere, what did he intend? She began to shake, the berries shot out of the bowl...