She stared up over the top of her dictionary and asked whether he believed in God.
—Oh no, no, nothing like that.
—Then how can you feel like one of papa's people? All they ever talk about is God, papa told me that.
He didn't explain. He said she was too young to figure out what he meant, and he wasn't convinced of his meaning anyhow.
Except for that one time, she never asked him about himself. She accepted that he was drawn to her papa—but the truth was he was drawn to all of them. In this different part of the world it wasn't unnatural that he dressed badly—for a tutor!—and not quite respectably, and that he wore a knit cap like a stevedore (the stevedores at Hamburg had worn such caps), and that his hair was uncut and spilled over his glasses, and that he carried a grimy knapsack and whistled and laughed and schemed tricks with her brothers and teased her small sister. He was everything her family was not. And when she learned, along with the rest of them, that he had once been der Bärknabe, how magical, how ghostly—a grown man rising out of a storybook! The very storybook Madame Mercier had read aloud to her brothers at home; and before that, Mademoiselle De Bonrepos.
Only her mother was not impressed. Her mother was discontent, her mother would not speak English, her mother would not put on her shoes.
At fourteen and a half, Anneliese discerned that James was nearly as much in the grip of her papa's people as her papa was, no matter that he didn't believe in God. There was something about her papa's people, the thought of them, that caught him by the throat, he said; and anyhow her papa was so in love with his people, it was almost as if he became them. Her papa and James! They were exactly alike, even though her papa was scrupulous about his hat and his jacket, and James was not. And even though James went away and came back and went away again. Whenever he turned up (you could never tell when it would be) he brought a quickening—the house quickened, her breath quickened, the boys went amuck, Waltraut ran in circles like a maddened pup. And her papa, who rarely laughed, laughed, together with James—they were so alike!
At fifteen and a half, she saw how he rubbed his lenses with his thumb and looked at her with his naked eyes. Her face dissolved, as it does for the nearsighted, into a watercolor indistinctness. Her long arms in their sleeves had grown longer; she was now very tall. He restored his glasses and observed a metamorphosis: she was all at once not merely a hint of a young woman, but genuinely womanly, in manner, in form. The breathing curve of her breasts, agitated. The neck, slightly bent; he wasn't prepared for the vulnerability of that top vertebra, so exposed, so brutally skeletal. The pure sweep of the jawline. The hair bound up in those restraining coils—what would it resemble, if she let it go? A brown scroll unfurling. She was as sealed as a nun. Was it because she was being kept from school? It was abnormal to be kept from school. He was willing to go on surveying her, the thin neck, the mazy ears with their ornaments bright as pinheads—but the boys were distracting him, demanding him, challenging him to knock them about; and meanwhile old Wally was clawing at his pockets, searching for pennies.
When she was sixteen and a half he discovered a flaw, an implausible flaw, in her constraint. She was subordinate only to her father; otherwise she was unyielding; she ruled the family. Authority shone from her like a nimbus. She spoke little and was obeyed. But there was an interloper in the house now, a girl older than Anneliese, something like a servant, ill at ease; at home they were used to having servants. This new person was not a servant exactly; they were no longer in a position to have servants. A secretary to the father? (He heard the rapid typing, like rain beating on canvas.) A kind of helper to the mother? She was too close to the mother; the mother hid herself from him; he resented the mother, he resented this new person.
—But it's you who hold the reins, he said to Anneliese.
—What a funny thing to say, what does it mean?
She had not mastered idiom. It was likely she never would.
—They all depend on you. That's what it means.
—At home we had an old wooden horse. The reins were missing and Heinz made new ones.
She held out her long arms to him then, to show him the invisible reins. She was untouchable; he would not dare to touch her. She was enclosed in a carapace, in a snow-white eggshell. The implausible flaw—she could yield, after all; she intended to yield—took him by surprise. She was an infant bird tapping with her little beak against the shell. Or else, with her rounded small breasts, and her sleeves streaming toward him, she was pleading for escape.
The ruse was her own invention. It didn't begin as a ruse; she was possibly not even aware, or only half aware, that it was a ruse, since her intent was only, to start with, a bouquet of lollipops, each wrapped in a different colored paper, with a rubberband around their stems. An outing for Waltraut, she's too confined, you said so yourself, no child should be so confined. So they walked with the child, he and Anneliese (he called her Annie now), to the shadowed shops under the train trestle, where a little grocery run by a couple from Sicily sold Italian ices and penny candy. The procession to the street of shops was a sweet impersonation—of family (he was rid of his), of ordinary domestic life. It was noisier and busier here, the grocery, the dry goods shop, the pharmacy with its two globes, the overhead grinding of the trains setting out and returning, a curving trolley track and the yellow trolley cars with their wicker sides rattling round it, the perpetual dusk under the trestle, an occasional solitary taxi passing. The unassuming hum of village commerce—and Waltraut, her tongue dancing over a bright lollipop, chanting in her new English purple, orange, red, green, purple, orange, red, green. Sometimes they chose to turn away from the bustle, toward the war monument and past the big meadow and the marshy edge of the water, where, when the tide was low late in the day, the frogs grunted in the mud, and a smear of pink horizon reappeared in the still pools. They stepped from stone to stone among the cattails, careful to select the flatter ones. What an oddly countrified corner of the Bronx Mr. Brooks had dutifully stumbled on! A dense whorl of mites revolved around their heads, catching the light like a length of silk. He picked up Waltraut, and Anneliese put out her hand to him, to steady herself on the crest of a wobbly rock. The hand felt fire-hot, as if a furnace lived in the hollows of her finger-bones.
At home, she said, there was a Punch-and-Judy in the park, or a children's concert, and always a gaudy carousel. Here, in this low scrubby neighborhood, there was nothing; they must go farther afield. The taxi didn't always arrive when summoned, especially when it was Gert she sent out to the shops to scout for a driver, who, seeing a gesturing boy jumping in the road, suspected mischief and raced away. But when Heinz was sent, his straight sober silhouette looking more man than boy, the driver would allow himself to be directed to where the three of them waited just behind the green front door—the tall girl, the small one, and James. And then followed a deluge of puppet shows and carousels, carousels and puppet shows!—during which Anneliese would slyly search in his pockets for pennies to give to Waltraut. He took her hand; he was accustomed to it by now. The fingers had cooled. On a gray afternoon the taxi drove them to a county fair somewhere in Connecticut. There were pony rides for children, led by bored boys dressed like farmers in overalls and straw hats. Waltraut was placed in a tiny chair atop a saddle, while a boy in a straw hat paced round and round a circular path. The ride was guaranteed for ten minutes if anyone cared to pay as much as half a dollar.
—Come, Anneliese said, and pulled him into a copse of elms. Now you must kiss me, she said.
Her fingers under his cap, twining his hair.
And after that the child was left to Professor Mitwisser's typist. (What else could you call her, if not that?)
—My mother is afraid of hotels, Anneliese told him. Because of the danger.
—Are you afraid? There's no danger here.
She was not afraid of an unfamiliar bed in an unfamiliar room with stains in the carpet—she didn't mind. But there was danger for him, even
in this unprepossessing place the taxi had taken them to. The danger was that she didn't mind, the danger was the flaw in her, the yield-ingness that was growing more urgent, her fragile neck, the gem-sparks that shot from her ears when she lifted her chin, her pinned-up hair when she released it. The half-inch drawstring of concentration between her eyebrows. She had schemed the ruse—the excursions with the child. It had never been for the sake of the child, or perhaps only for a time; it was for the sake of her fingers twisting under his cap, it was for the sake of those kisses out of sight of the pony path, or, before that, in the dark of the puppet theater, in a deserted patch behind the carousel, where the music was the loudest. And finally the child was discarded, pretext was discarded, she was becoming bolder and bolder. What had seemed to be reticence was a kind of waiting.
He had foreseen that he would yield to her yieldingness. She belonged to an aberrant family. He had never imagined a family like this one. His own—it was so long ago, his mother dead of lung cancer, his father dead of a stroke, hardly a family to begin with, it had more in common with all these puppet shows (himself the puppet, Pinocchio or some other fabrication) than with a normal household, it was all commerce and dress-up and performance, he was alone on a stage. These foreigners, refugees, how they clung to one another, clumped together in that narrow house; they were afraid of the stranger. So many children, the mother unbalanced by loss, the father gluttonous for news of an elusive ancient schism. Looking backward, the two of them. The mother hated him. He didn't doubt that the father hated him too—or at least he suspected it: false cheer, false embraces, agonized false laughter. The father was greedy for the money. The daughter was greedy (slowly it came to him) for the stranger. He liked getting rid of the money: trash money, contaminated by the rouged knees and the lace collar. The money made him master wherever he landed. He didn't think of it—he would repudiate such a proposition had there been anyone alive to put it to him, and no one, living or dead, knew to say it, certainly not dry-hearted Mr. Brooks, who had unaccountably got hold of the narrow house in this lonesome marshy niche of the otherwise swarming Bronx, the house narrow from the first and high because of its latter-day third story, stucco-flanked but shaped like the wooden doll house with its peaked roof: he possessed it now, the doll house and the doll house people, whose heads he had once pinched, maneuvering them upstairs and downstairs, his will their will.
She didn't mind the smell of the bottle he kept by him. She didn't mind this used-up room and its blotted carpet. Tears? Urine? Blood? She pulled him close to her; she didn't mind the look of the sheets.
—Now I will tell a secret, she said. It was really mine. Mine really! I put it there. I didn't want you to know, even though I did want you to know.
—What are you saying? Your mother ... she did it, one of those crazy tricks. To get me out.
—No, no...
—And that Rose in cahoots with her.—No, no, myself, I did it!
—You?
—But I didn't think mama would find it. I wanted you to find it.
One night, in wild daring, she recounted, not three perilous yards from the shut door of her father's study, where he sat laughing with James, she slipped into what had been her own bed, and was now his, to deposit under the pillow a moist brown curl of her sweat-dampened hair.
When he took her away—or did she take him?—a bleakness seeped through him. Bridget or Annie or anyone, what difference? Her yieldingness drove him, he was not unwilling, but his susceptibilities were elsewhere. They rushed toward Mitwisser's mocking heretics, those old lost runaways, swallowed by oblivion like whiskey in the throat.
50
HEINZ CALLED breathlessly, "There's a man out there."
On an oblong concrete slab, an inadvertently benchlike perch at the side of the green front door of our house ... but here I must stop, in order to attend to these last words. Our house: more and more I thought of it as that. I was not entitled to this thought—I had too frequently been declared an outsider. But everything was so familiar, every cranny of every room, the sounds of the house in the day and at night, and I was so accustomed to my labors with Professor Mitwisser, and to Mrs. Mitwisser's plaints and Willi's slynesses (I distrusted Willi), that I felt oddly settled, as I never had felt before. The years with my father had always been precarious. My sojourn with Bertram—it was only that, a visitor's brevity—had been too quickly cut off. I was as rooted in this house as if I had been living among Mitwissers under a timeless dome. There was no comfort in it, yet it had begun to take on the repetitive consolations of the ordinary. Even that other outsider, James, had come to seem merely another bruise in a house of bruises.
The man was sitting on the benchlike slab. He had a little suitcase with him. Heinz had opened the door and there he was, just sitting. He hadn't so much as rung the bell.
"He said he was working up his nerve. And then he asked if Rose lived here, and I said yes. This time," Heinz insisted, "it really is a man."
I imagined then that it might be Dr. Tandoori hesitating at the door—Dr. Tandoori returning to woo me, possibly preparing a speech of courtship (a more comprehensive description of his w.c. perhaps), or else a reprise of his employer's pitch.
But the man was already in the house. Heinz had escorted him into the dining room, where he was circling the big table, surveying the scattered detritus of the Mitwisser children's lives—spent balloons, a be-headed lead soldier, a doll's torn petticoat, checkers spilling out of a broken box.
"Go away now," I told Heinz. "Go see about your mother." My tone surprised me: it flew out in Anneliese's old imperious voice, the voice he had once been quick to obey.
"I have to talk to my cousin," I said, and again surprised myself; was I beginning to believe that Bertram was truly my cousin?
He looked shrunken; the sparse twist of his smile was a dry inch-worm. His curly hair was dusted all over, I could hardly tell with what: it was as if a peculiar rime had grown over him, or out of him, like a coating of flour.
"Got off at the wrong stop and had to walk. I forgot Ninel said it's the end of the line."
He had come up from the Village by subway, he explained. "Charlie's back there now—he's got a bad limp. Lots of Ninel's crowd are back. She's the only one. The only one who didn't make it back."
His shirt was rimmed with dirt.
"I figured Ninel's old gang would give me a break. Help out a little. Nothing doing, you know why? Ninel told them I'm against the Party. She told them I'd turned. They kicked me out after three nights, Charlie's idea."
"Isn't he the one who threw paint down the toilet at the Library?" I asked.
"Ninel never said anything like that." His hoarse breath was all denial, as if it was Ninel herself I was accusing. "Sometimes I feel ... I mean if I hadn't let her have that money—"
I was afraid he would burst into weeping; I remembered that when we were last together, it was I who had wept. But instead he only twisted up his mouth.
"She would've gone anyway," he said, "hook or crook, I realize that. They're a bunch of Johnny One Notes. Cranks. If you're not with them they'll slap you down. Only—with Ninel—it was something else, I knew it, it was something else..."
"Thunder and lightning," I put in.
"The old lady down in Georgia—Thomas's mother-in-law—well, his wife and kid came back in mourning, and I had to get out. Prescott ponied up the train fare, he was decent enough for that. And there's what you sent, and even a bit of a handout from Mrs. Capolino ... Albany's a dead end."
He threw himself into a chair, exhausted. His head dropped down; the coating of flour, I saw, was a crop of gray hairs.
"I had in mind Ninel's people could put me up awhile, at least for Ninel's sake ... just until I found something. Believe me, I didn't intend to show up here. The way things are now—"
I was suddenly alarmed: did he mean for me to take him in? How could I? How was it possible? I may have fancied this stricken house to be "our" house, but it was Mitw
isser's, not mine. Yet how could I refuse Bertram? Hadn't he taken me in? And paid my tuition, and cared for me, and kissed me...
"I didn't know where else to go. A dog on your doorstep," he said.
"Oh, Bertram, don't—"
"I'm down to my last dime, Rosie, that's how it is. Maybe just for tonight, what d'you say?"
Bertram pleading: it was horrible to see. It made me ashamed, but also angry. I had surrendered the blue envelope to Ninel; I had nothing to give him.
I left him there in the litter of discarded toys and went up the stairs and, without knocking, stepped into Mitwisser's study. He was bent over a flurry of manuscripts and a row of books faced upside down, with their backs exposed in A-shaped peaks, like tepees, to secure a page. It was an awkward habit: he objected to inserting strips of paper to mark the passages he might wish to return to—books, he said, were not foxes, and ought not to have protruding white tails. For an instant I stood watching him write—in German, I noticed, and lethargically, lifting his pen in the air and keeping it suspended before bringing it down again, almost unwillingly, to eke out the next words. Across the room the disheveled bedclothes made a frozen tumble, like wreckage recently washed up on a beach. Claimed by Mrs. Mitwisser, I hadn't tidied up that morning.
He said, without looking up, "I did not call for you, why are you here?"
The newly carpentered shelves all around were prematurely arced under the weight of his library, as if mimicking the wearied curve of his shoulders. Behind the scissors-sharp blue of Mitwisser's eyes a dread was lurking; a smoke of desolation hung over him. But those eyes, which could so easily cut, were turned away from me, fixed on the idling point of his pen. "It may in fact be in vain," he had murmured the night before. I heard in it the tainted germ of something wayward, some pale interrupting doubt. My hands were still on the typewriter. He removed them, one at a time. The touch of his skin on mine had been unpleasantly tentative, like a clump of shed fur—harmless, but reminiscent of claws.
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