It was a mistake, but still she begged Rudi to prevail on the Board to get them out of the hotel. In this place there were many mistakes. Charismites are not Karaites—her poor Rudi. They would leave this place as soon as there was money, he said, they would go to New York, it was of course useful to his work to be near a great library. But they had no money, there would never be money, they were thrown out, Charismites are not Karaites, she could not recognize her own children! Danger everywhere. Oh, if her mother could know how they had all been brought low! Her mother, ten years dead, the tinted face in the silver frame saved by a tremulous lie: it's nothing but worthless plate, nicht Silber, sondern nur eine dünne Silberauflage. Völlig wertlos!
He had given her a fright. She did not trust him. He was teaching her sons strange things. He was asking her strange questions—Rudi's work, Rudi's people. Rudi's people were runaways. Why did he wish to pursue them, why did he come to her, why did he not go to Rudi? But Rudi would deny him. Rudi was cautious, he was wary, he guarded his people, they were the same to him as his children, and also—how strict he was! how arrogant! To seize Rudi's people one must first penetrate their languages, their writings, their beliefs, their history, their exclusions. They abjured all that was not Essence. They denounced every abuse of Essence, every addition, every embellishment. What has fallen from the hand of God must remain precisely as it was received. What is first is eternal. To add is to undermine. Rudi's people, she told him in her thwarted English—she, her quick brain and tongue hobbled by unnatural, unwanted, impositions!—Rudi's people, she said, care for nothing but God's own word and will.
There is no God. He didn't believe in God. God was nothing to him. His mother, long ago, had murmured to him about the Baby Jesus, and his nanny had spoken sternly of the Cross and the Resurrection as if they were no different from the times tables, and had to be learned by heart. Among the scores of presents heaped at his bedroom door each morning there was sometimes a pillow embroidered with a religious picture, mostly clouds and cherubs with fat dimpled elbows and tiny wings surrounding a bearded saint wearing a halo. The halo was like the golden rings on his mother's new teacups. He was indifferent to cherubs and saints. They weren't toys, and the only toy that mattered (it was more than a toy, it had a real roof and windows you could peer into and a door that opened and shut) was the one that disappeared, the one that was taken away, the one that was an unconscionable distraction (his father grumbled) from the business at hand.
Her tongue was hobbled, but she knew her Rudi, she knew his people, and it was rare that anyone came to her to tell who they were! Rudi's people are perfectly obscure, she said in her hobbled voice (making do with fragments of meaning, pressed by him into eruptions of meaning), and except for Rudi they are of interest only to a handful of others, three or four in all the world. There are also the enemies of Rudi's people, who become Rudi's own enemies, even if Rudi's people are merely specks on the face of the earth, hidden lost particles incapable of revivification, so who should fear them? And who should desire them? They are no more substantial than fireflies.
Rudi's enemies, particles and fireflies, she was roaming now, ruminating foreignly, slipping away from what is first is eternal, to add is to undermine, how it burned in him! They denounce every abuse of Essence.
He fell to his knees before the battered table that held the silver frame. What, what was he doing? He grasped her two wrists, she was shaking, he was making her shake, he was threatening her, what was he doing? A tutor, no! What hideous creature had Rudi let in? His hideous eyes behind their lenses! The yellow light of the lamp, the yellow glints spiking his lenses, what was he doing? Would he harm her, would he harm her sons, her little daughter?
She could not see into his mind, but he—he saw, it was clarified, it lay before him, there in the thorny nettles of her half-choked thoughts, the pocked fragments of her telling. The monstrous burning. He released her wrists; he kissed them. He was frightening her, he recognized how he frightened her, but it couldn't be helped, it was monstrous, a conflagration, what is first is eternal, to add is to undermine!
"Verrückt!" she cried.
Somewhere a door opened: Mitwisser returning from his afternoon's lectures—the wool vest, the felt hat with its ribbon band, the cheap new briefcase.
"Elsa," Mitwisser said. He turned to his sons' tutor. "How is it that my wife is disturbed? Get up, if you please."
He got up.
"Rudi, Rudi," Mrs. Mitwisser called out, as if her husband were far away, in a distant room. But he was right in front of her.
"Dieser Mann," she called, "er hat so viele Fragen, Fragen, Fragen, er frägt und frägt— "
"Elsa," Mitwisser said, "you must quiet yourself—"
But she looked at the man who had kissed her wrists. Her wrists were still trembling. She saw into his mind. She knew of whose party he was.
"He is Karaite," she said.
And Mitwisser laughed.
43
AN HOUR CAME when the first boy, the boy born Jim, despised the second boy, the make-believe boy. He despised him, he renounced him, he threw him away. The fiery coldness (it was bitterness, it was rage) released him; he was free. The Bear Boy was a shed skin, and if at the same time he was proliferating, if he was a Household Name from one continent to another—according to Mr. Brooks and Mr. Fullerton, he had recently made his mark in South Asia; "lively, winsome, and adorable," noted the Times of India —well, never mind. For him the Bear Boy was a dead thing. Though not entirely. Not quite dead. The money came pouring out of the Bear Boy's head, and whoever believes that money begets absolute freedom has never known money that pours from the Bear Boy's head.
The woman had named him Karaite. She saw into him; she was deeply shrewd. She saw a man who ran; a runaway. A fugitive, a deviant. A danger. She understood him exactly. The husband didn't. The husband saw a man on his knees, his son's tutor; he saw his wife's agitation. And that was nothing anomalous. His wife had dropped something perhaps. She was often in tremor; she often dropped things. When she shook she became agitated. "Get up," he told the tutor. He got up. It was nothing. And when, shaking and agitated, his wife named the tutor Karaite, what else could the husband do but laugh?
It was the beginning of the long, long money-laughter.
The tutor, the impostor (they had taken him for a tutor, beggars can't be choosers, how the mighty, etc.), was given to improvisation: he had this much self-knowledge, though he supposed it was only the itch of restlessness. Living high in Algiers; and then not. Carrying the Bear Boy like a hump on his back for years; and then suddenly not. Arnold Partridge and Bridget. He felt tossed by an inner wind, sometimes a boiling khamsin, sometimes a numbing cold. And sometimes he could not tell whether the wind was a furnace or an ice storm, they were so much the same. Now and then he received a note from Mr. Brooks and Mr. Fullerton (he rented a post office box wherever he landed), tactfully chiding him for "incaution." He was not incautious. He was counterfeit.
The woman opened her nostrils to take him in, as if deciphering an odor. She judged him. The girl—he avoided the long German worm that was her name and called her Annie—the girl had told him that her father burned to be in New York. She told him that at home in Berlin her mother had belonged to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute: a scientist of some sort. That seemed unlikely: she was a witch more than a scientist. She had cast a spell and changed him into a Karaite. The husband laughed then—he laughed as a scholar laughs, hearing absurdity. It was not absurd. How was he, the counterfeit tutor, different from the Karaites, who rejected graftings on the pristinely God-given? He too rejected graftings. He was born unencumbered, nakedly himself, without a lace collar. The author of the Bear Boy had grafted on the lace collar. The moment he was free he tore it off. From then on he was all impulse.
An hourglass filled with money: this was the thought that came to him. An idea of affinity.
—I can get you people out of here, he said.
Mitwisser asked the s
ource of this unusual offer of philanthropy, so unexpectedly, so absurdly, from his sons' tutor. Like the lawyers, he would not utter "money."
—I can get you out of here, he said again. Wherever you want to go. Whatever you need.
—And why would you wish to do that? Mitwisser asked, hearing nonsense.
—Because of those people. The ones you work on. I could set you up, you know. I wouldn't mind, I've got the money.
So he confessed. He confessed to being the Bear Boy. Der Bärknabe! Mitwisser's sons roiled in a tumult of excitement: der Bärknabe! The Bear Boy all grown up! But der Bärknabe spoke German; their tutor didn't. He looked like an ordinary man. Was he really the one? How could this be?
The girl explained about artists' models; she stared and stared. He was a nonentity who had come to their door. A nobody who had been somebody and was nobody again: the preposterous future of a fabled child.
Mitwisser did not at once believe him. It was too bizarre a thing to profess. Had he made it up, was it a ludicrous lie? On the other hand, why not believe him? He was not claiming to be a prince of the House of Romanov. He was not claiming to be a prophet. A modest enough assertion: he had oncehad a life in rhyme and pictures, he had once been the subject of a children's book—albeit an internationally famous one; in this lay Mitwisser's suspicions. Was this unprepossessing creature, of whom his sons were so lavishly fond, the destiny of that rosy painted elf? Mitwisser's children, all but the youngest, were intimate with the elf and his doggerel, they knew all of it backward and forward—at home their nanny had read Der grüne Hut to them over and over again. The red-haired Madame Mercier had read it to them in French! And here was the Bear Boy, in all the mystery of his transformation, standing before them like a prince or a prophet—the glamour of it, the enchantment in his sons' eyes!
From her corner the woman began to tremble. She picked up the silver frame from the little side-table and pressed it to her bosom—it slipped from her hands and fell to the floor.
—I used to drag a copy of it around with me, he told them. No more.
—No more, the woman echoed pointlessly.
—But I can't say I'm done with it. I mean it's not done with me. I'm still getting royalties and such, there's no end to it.
Royalties. A plausible word. There was a tincture of plausibility in the man. But also an unconfined raffishness. He was somehow off center, of a piece with this new country and its wild schoolchildren, its disorderly streets—only consider that patch of filth some yards off, where his daughter brought the small child to play in the dirt: at home in Berlin you would not see such civic deleteriousness anywhere! He reflected on disease. He was diseased in this place of exile; his wife diseased, his children tainted. He remembered the watchtowers of ancient citadels, the golden light of distant libraries.
44
ALONE WITH MITWISSER, the Bear Boy settled it. He would come and go; it wasn't his habit to stay stuck in one spot. He would come and go, and when he came he would give them—he said it outright—money.
—A stipend? No, no, nothing like that, he said. I'm not the sort that thinks that way, I'm not a goddamn lawyer, I don't care to be tied to any goddamn calendar. The first thing is you want to get to New York, right?
—Not for two years, Mitwisser said. My contract with the College goes to 1935.
—Well, break it, why not? Just pick up and leave.
—Oh no, not possible. If not for the College...
—What? You'd've been stuck over there? They'd get you? Listen, if you didn't want to be stuck over there, why stay stuck over here?
He broke into a laugh at this, and Mitwisser—he felt diseased—laughed with him, hugely, hilariously, a joke, everything the same, throwing over a position for which he was indebted no different from the terror of a family uprooted and pursued, all things in this place of exile level, level, level!
They went on laughing together. The tutor—a tutor no more—wound his arm around Mitwisser's neck.
—I shall not give up my obligations here. I am obligated, Mitwisser said.
—Your choice, fine. Here, take this for now.
The money changed hands. The beggar chose; he chose to be a beggar.
The Bear Boy came and went. He went, by train, straight across the breast of the land to have a look at the Pacific, and found a yellow beach, and lay there in the sun, with a bottle in his knapsack. The waves frothed like lions' manes. One day, for the lark of it, he got a job as an extra in a Western—they dressed him in spurs and a ten-gallon hat: it was the bar brawl scene. He turned up at six on the first day and not at all on the second. There was a joke in that, too: he'd been too drunk to get up on time to play a drunk. In California everything started too early. He didn't mind getting drunk in California, on the beach with the high waves curling nearby.
Mitwisser wondered whether he would return; he hoped he would not. The money was a disease—yet it was ease. It was meat; they had not had meat for months. It was new clothes for his children, especially for his sons, who were growing like young trees—his splendid Heinz, now almost as tall as Anneliese! His sons in their new clothes were more boisterously American than ever. Only Anneliese kept her old dignity. His wife kept her old shoes, and he kept his old wool suit, because the unclean money (as he thought of it, separating it from the clean money his position at the College sparsely supplied) was beginning to trickle away. Would the tutor come back, and give them some more?
For a long time he did not; Mitwisser's children ate rice. Far away, the Bear Boy dozed on a California beach. The tide rose and ebbed. He knew they were waiting for him—he had them in his hands. A whole family of children in that house with the pretty fanlight. He could open and shut the door.
By the time he reappeared (a season had passed), the money did not seem so unclean. It startled Mitwisser—civic deleteriousness!—that the man who had been his sons' tutor now addressed him as Rudi.
—James, Mitwisser acceded.
—Much better. Why don't you people get some more light in here?—More light, Mrs. Mitwisser said to herself. Goethe's last words on his deathbed.
He sat with Mitwisser and told, laughing, how those movie people had outfitted him in a cowboy getup.
—They never got it back either. I gave it to some hobo on the beach. My father, James said, had me dressed up sillier than that.
And laughed. Mitwisser laughed with him; it was the least he could do for his children.
He came and he went. The tide of money rose and ebbed. More the first year, less the second. At the start he would take a room in the neighborhood (the William Penn be damned), but after a while it seemed to the girl that it was only right to invite him in, and he obliged. The father did not object; he had the father in his grip. Annie. Half child, half woman. Those tiny glints in her ears. The mother, he saw, withdrew to another part of the house when he was there.
He went, by bus, to New York. The lawyers' offices were smaller than he remembered them; Mr. Brooks was smaller. Mr. Fullerton was in the hospital, but was expected to recover fully, and would soon return.
He instructed Mr. Brooks to facilitate the rental of a large apartment within walking distance of the Library on Forty-second Street.
—Is it for you? Mr. Brooks inquired.
—No. Not for me, why would I want that?
—You intend this apartment to be lived in—used—by others?
—That's the idea.
—If I may say so, that would be extremely incautious. It would require certain restrictions...
—Just get it done.
Some weeks later he telephoned, long distance, from a pay phone in a drugstore and canceled the instructions for the city apartment.
—I'm afraid that at this point, Mr. Brooks began.
—Just do it.
The new plan was to find and rent a house—yes, an entire house—in an outlying section of the city. Countrylike, if possible. Mr. Brooks replied that Mr. Fullerton, a born New Yorker who was
better acquainted with these matters, was in a nursing home. Unfortunately he had been felled by a second stroke.
—I'll do what I can, Mr. Brooks said. I'm up in Greenwich myself, I don't know much about the outer boroughs.
—And get some carpenters for shelves. Plenty of 'em. There's more books than anybody would believe.
He saw that Mrs. Mitwisser was growing querulous. She did not like him there. She complained that he shut himself up with her husband. She complained that he smelled of schnapps.
After setting Mr. Brooks on the right path, he took a train up to Canada for the lark of it (it was true that he had been drinking a little, sitting there laughing with Rudi), and this time forgot to leave them money.
45
THERE HAD BEEN a time when the nights with Professor Mitwisser in his study were my only unspoiled pleasure. I looked forward to the curious tableau we made—years later, that is how I imagine it: a motionless scene, I with my fingers stilled on the light-stippled glass of the typewriter keys, a twisted tail of hair sucked in at the side of my lip, he standing giantly over me, submerged in his dream of forgotten heresies. I see it that way, in stasis, as a kind of trance, in order to isolate those phantasmagorical hours from the turbulence and frights of that unhappy house.
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