The packet from Thrace arrived, shockingly thick, stuffed with hundred-dollar bills. It was bloodied by a long row of reddish stamps.
"I told you, didn't I?" Bertram crowed. "You see? We're in the money again." He licked his thumb and, one by one, counted out five bills. "Here," he said, "I guess I owe you this."
I protested, "It's not yours to give."
"Why not? Have a look, there's a fortune here. And plenty left over."
"I don't want it, Bertram, and you can't do this, the money's for the house. It isn't yours."
"This much is yours anyhow, so take it. You'll need it when you go."
"It's for the house," I insisted, and shoved the bills back into their packet.
He twisted up his mouth, half thoughtful, half beaming. "And aren't I the house nowadays?"
60
Fullerton, Brooks, & Winberry
One Wall Street
New York, N.Y.
March 19, 1937
Professor Rudolf Mitwisser
328 St. Peter's Street
The Bronx, N.Y.
Dear Professor Mitwisser:
This office has been belatedly notified, by Detective Martin Corrie of the Police Department of Thrace, N.Y., of the untimely death of my client, James Philip A'Bair. It is my duty to inform you that in a letter addressed here on June 12, 1936, my client has designated you as his sole heir. Pursuant to this matter, the relevant documentation will follow in due course. You should be aware that Mr. A'Bair's estate, denominated in part as "Bear Boy Royalties and Rights," is in possession of assets of considerable value.
Very truly yours,
George C. Brooks, Esq.
61
THE MONEY FROM Bear Boy Royalties and Rights was delayed by several months. There were, to begin with, certain obligatory inquiries and investigations; there were reports and many more letters; there was a whisper concerning Surrogate's Court; there were dozens of discussions and ruminations and speculations—how rattled the landlady must have been, coming home that night to find the dinner heating in the double boiler untouched, and the body of her tenant already cold in the Ford. The shrieks, the excitement, the police, the identification: a passing notoriety in dusty Thrace; the town boys swarmed round to stare. A drunkard, hardly ever out of that stuffy room, and the stuck-up girl with the ugly accent and the long hair, who could figure what those two were up to? At least they'd been good for the money.
And the Ford, was it rusting now in her garden, red-browning into a surreal sculpture, sparrows nesting in the seats, the windshield knocked out? She was not so wasteful. The weathered pair of old wicker chairs that had once been in the garden, where they were beginning to rot in the sun, had been hauled upstairs to furnish her room-to-let. She was eager to sell the Ford. It would make up for the rent that henceforth would always be missing: a suicide's ghost is restless, everyone knows it returns to its last habitation, who would pay to sleep in a suicide's bed? And since Bear Boy Royalties and Rights, in the person of Mr. Brooks, made no claim against her for the return of the Ford, or for the equivalent of its value (he thought it a worthless detail), she was free to enjoy the dead man's bounty. It was almost as if he had left it to her.
Inquiries, reports, speculations; and finally Mr. Brooks himself, who came to us on a warm Sunday afternoon toward the end of October. Though the air still smelled of summer—a drift of seaweed up from the bay—he wore a gray tweed vest under a camel's hair overcoat. He was a widower who had the dryness of a man who has been long married to his firm. His purpose, he told us, was to make the acquaintance of his late client's chosen legatee. His visit would be brief; he had instructed his chauffeur to return in an hour. Bertram led him into the dining room, where he placed his hat on the table and declined to take off his coat. He had a freckled bald head; the lobes of his ears were scarcely formed, and grew directly back into the sides of his neck, and the wings of his nose—the nostrils' lobes—did exactly the same: flat and only faintly indented, they retreated into the surrounding pink flesh. Power and plenitude lived in that flesh. The careful nostrils took us in like an extra pair of eyes. They warned that just below them lurked a cold moral force: a mouth accustomed to speechifying.
His business here, he began, had a personal aspect.
It was Bertram he was addressing. His look dismissed whatever struck him as unnecessary. Waltraut and the boys had been standing gawking in the doorway—with the arrow of his elbow Bertram pointed them away and out of sight, into the silence they were pledged to. He had explained the lawyer's arrival as a momentous thing: it would disclose their future; but their future depended on their decorum, and their decorum depended on their silence. He herded them into the kitchen, where he had set out a row of baked apples, as a bribe. The sweet autumnal fragrance eddied through the house. Mr. Brooks had been announced, awaited, prepared for. James's gold-rimmed teacups were out, and the china teapot, and the rosebud-frosted little cakes that had not been seen since that August night long ago, when Mitwisser's doubters had come to assail him. They had believed him to be godless, and I, a novice at his feet, had believed the same.
I was no longer at his feet. He was sunk into his chair. I hovered behind him, as if tending a child in a pram. His big hand crept upward to feel for mine; he gripped it and would not let go. The months since Anneliese's return had aged him horribly. It had become his habit to shut his eyes when we walked out together—there was nothing he wished to see. We often went on walks, he and I, and always he sought out my hand. By now I was used to the map of his broad coarse palm, and those great hard knuckles bulging. When he spoke—he spoke little—it was usually of his wife. "My wife," he said, "is well. I observe how very well she is." But his eyes were half shut, and he stepped cautiously beside me, like a blind man. "You see for yourself," he said, "how well she is. My wife has come back to her life, is this not so?"
Mrs. Mitwisser had put on her blue pumps, to please Mr. Brooks. Her teeth gleamed contentedly: her smile was meant to adorn the hour. I saw how robust she had become. The middle of her small frame had widened—her stomach had grown a mildly protruding hillock—and her breasts and arms were roundly thick. Bertram cooked; Mrs. Mitwisser ate, always with fresh appetite. She was fat and strong and glad. Her gladness appealed to Mr. Brooks to notice her importance; to attend to the new importance of the house.
He ignored her. She was secondary and therefore unnecessary. He hadn't had Felix drive him back-of-beyond into the Bronx sticks to trifle with the secondary. He hadn't expected to be maneuvered into a place with so many chairs, at a table set for a party, what was the matter with these people? There were too many of them pressing all around, he wasn't their guest; he had come on his own steam. And he wasn't a peddler out to display his wares. First that mob of ogling children—finally it had dawned on someone, evidently the beneficiary himself, to pack them off, though even now there was an annoying clatter of spoons behind the door. And this bold overeager woman with her foolish twinkling beribboned ball slippers! Did she imagine herself a middle-aged Cinderella, about to be carried off to the palace? And over there the old fellow, mentally out of it probably, hanging on to his caretaker, why did they bring that one into it, what was the point? It was the heir he had come to survey, not this gaggle of gapers.
"I will admit," he told Bertram, "that my late client took me by surprise, though not for the first time. He has been, what shall I say, difficult, difficult since his teens. That such a cherub of a child should turn ... but it's not for me to judge. He was very young when the father died. Gifted man. Worldwide reputation. The firm made every attempt to stand in loco parentis, and I can't say it's been easy. A young man of whims. A maverick all his life, you could never depend on him to settle down. I'll tell you frankly, sir, this legacy is merely the latest of innumerable whims—unfortunately there's no remedy for it."
"You mean it can't be undone," Bertram said. He too had dressed for the lawyer. He had borrowed Mitwisser's jacket and tie. Traces of a lost r
egnancy clung to the creases in those elongated sleeves; they swallowed up Bertram's short arms, encasing him in their worn authority.
"I regret to say no. We've been through probate, it's all in order. I believe if my partner Fullerton were alive he'd have found some way around it, he was good at that sort of thing. Mental incompetence, the boy was never stable. There's no responsibility in it, from start to finish. Sends a letter, does himself in. All these years the firm pleaded for a will, something respectable. He wouldn't hear of it, everything loose, he had to have his way. I thank the good Lord his mother and father didn't live to grieve over what became of him. A wild man. A savage."
"Wahrheit!" Mrs. Mitwisser burst out. "Barbarisch!"
The vestigial earlobes paled. "My dear woman, what I say of my client is not for you to say. Let me remind you that you people are being enriched by this savage. The assets he leaves are immense, and none of his doing. His father's labors created him, he was nothing in himself. To my mind, it all goes down in dishonor." He turned back to Bertram. "If you ask me, the letter was mad. I'm all for learning, I've got nothing against learning. A library, a museum, a university, normal philanthropy! Something public and understandable. I wouldn't have cared if he gave it to the church, not that he'd ever do the decent thing. But this foreign parochial rot no one's ever heard of, no point or purpose in the real world, a private hole-in-the-wall hobbyhorse, a uselessness, a foolishness ... well, my hands are tied. I won't conceal from you that I regret it. I regret it deeply."
"Then why do you come here?" Mitwisser muttered from the depths of his chair; he kept me in the vise of his fist.
But Mr. Brooks's look was on Bertram. "What's done is done. The fool threw it all away. I came to see for myself where it landed. You, sir," he told Bertram, "are the beneficiary of a fool."
Bertram drew out the angle of his smile. "Not me. It's the old man you want. What I am," he said, "is the son-in-law."
How he loved to pronounce these words! Son-in-law, son-in-law: they were still new in his mouth, not three months old. They were newer than the crib, the mattress for the crib, the tiny baby things, the baby bottles, the diaper pins—and anyhow these were not strictly new.
Bertram had found them all at the Salvation Army store under the trestle, a train stop away. The birth itself had gone well, with Elsa knowledgeably at hand and Mother Nature, as Bertram liked to say, in charge of the rest. Mother Nature was now a vivid presence among us. It was Mother Nature who brought on Anneliese's pains, and Mother Nature who accounted for her frights. Mother Nature allowed Heinz and Gert to watch the baby's head pulse itself out, and to see the umbilical cord severed; but Mother Nature in her wisdom kept Willi and Waltraut away. Mitwisser had shut himself up in a corner of his study (no more a study), as if hoping to hide in some dark crevice. But it was three in the afternoon, and the window was awash in thick light. The light had become entangled in Mitwisser's beard, bleaching it whiter yet, when Mother Nature gave her final signal; and then the birth wail rang out.
The child was called Miriam. Mrs. Mitwisser was gratified. "My mother's name," she said. Her fingers rubbed the place under her blouse where the scars had begun to fade. It was nearly a year since she had left the house. She squeezed into her blue pumps: "We go now," she insisted happily. She had never before set eyes on the great city; though they had docked at New York, the Quakers had sent a van—it was a kind of autobus—to carry them straight from the ship to Albany. Such buildings, such a city! They rode (she, and Anneliese, and Bertram) on something like the'S-bahn, at first up high, curtains dangling over windowsills, and then even higher, flat tenement rooftops, and then a narrow curving river, and then, suddenly, the blinking tunnel. When they came out on Chambers Street, it was not at all like Berlin (the dear Berlin that had been theirs, before those insect-leg flags infested the storefronts), but also not unlike it. The morning whirl, the young women hurrying to their offices, the busyness, the streetcars, the traffic—only here the policeman had no wooden platform to stand on, and the churches were merely copies of real churches: they pretended to be old. She almost thought the three of them would run into Hermannplatz around the corner, and the big Karstadt with its escalators and floorwalkers—and how was this square, and that patch of green, different from Königsplatz? The Municipal Building, a gray wall rising from shadowy elephantine arches, might just as well have been the Staatsoper! Her heartbeat was loud in her ears, her toes throbbed in the blue pumps. The City Clerk's office was not very clean, chewing-gum wrappers in the seats, disinfectant in the air. Twenty-four hours between the license and the ceremony: they had all been here the morning before, the same hour's ride in the'S-bahn, the same mock-cathedrals, the same halfvision of Hermannplatz and Königsplatz; and again these darkened elephantine portals. A voice summoned her forward: she must identify herself as the witness. She had no wedding ring of her own, Fritz had taken it from her, there was nothing to put on Anneliese's bridal finger—but look! Bertram was ready with a ring, it had come to him from his mother long ago, he had meant it for someone else, it was too large for Anneliese, but never mind, it would do for the little ceremony, which was no ceremony at all, only a fleeting transaction in a bureaucrat's tedious day. The dusty artificial flowers on the City Clerk's desk made their obeisance, and Bertram and Anneliese were man and wife.
Mr. Brooks was irritated. He had not come to be duped further. It was more than enough that James Philip A'Bair, Sr., a gentleman if there ever was one, world-renowned, an acclaimed virtuoso (insofar as Mr. Brooks understood these things, the main point being that after all these years the royalties never ceased, in fact they grew, they accelerated, it was almost too much for a single firm)...wasn't it deception enough that so industrious a father, call him an artist but never a bohemian, should have the fruit of a lifetime's toil fall into the hands of some crackpot refugee? Mr. Brooks was chagrined, resentful: why hadn't he recognized right away that this ingratiating little man wasn't the one, he spoke without an accent, and all the rest of them ... not that he could tell anything about the old fellow's caretaker, that girl holding on to him as if he'd tumble out of his chair if she ever let go...
The lawyer said formally, "Then I take it you are not Rudolf Mitwisser?"
"The son-in-law," Bertram repeated, and Mr. Brooks, who knew how to read the fine print, heard in that defining "the" a certain calm proprietorship.
"As I say, we have here a fait accompli," Mr. Brooks resumed, "yet I doubt he'd think of it on his own. I have in mind that my client was influenced—"
"Not by me."
"But you reside in this household—"
"When I got here he was gone."
Mr. Brooks stared all around. His client was capricious, willful, with the easy susceptibility of the willful, attracted to this and that. That recurrent fixation on Sweden, for instance, how he'd tried to get up to Scandinavia from Algiers, of all places, and during the war! Would that have been the next round of nonsense? After this present mania? Mr. Brooks remembered the freakish theater interlude, the costly refurbishment of a marginal troupe.... Someone in this house had infected him. Not the woman in the silly shoes—not clever enough, or she wouldn't have made herself so obvious an antagonist. So this old fellow was the one who was named in the letter, but good Lord, debilitated, powerless! He couldn't influence a flea, and the mute girl behind his chair was there only for what? To catch the old man's drool?
This house! This whim! Narrow and tall, three stories high—it had the configuration of a doll house. Mr. Brooks had gone through three brokers to accommodate his client's obstinacy. A quiet neighborhood. Nearby greenery. Reasonable access to the Library on Forty-second Street, what a stipulation! Everything a whim, every whim a crisis. He was under a spell; he was influenced. And he drank—don't forget that. He drank, he was open to influence, he was nothing in himself, what a descent from the distinguished father, what a squandering of a fortune!
The woman in the Cinderella shoes pivoted her hot victorious e
yes upward, attending to a scarcely audible harmony of squeals. A girl carrying a blanket was coming down the stairs. She appeared to be still in her teens. Earrings glimmering through a long cloak of very dark hair. Wedding ring on the appropriate finger, a loose bad fit. This girl, Mr. Brooks quickly saw, was anything but secondary; she was the lodestar of the house. Even the quiescent old fellow—Lord help us, the heir himself!—raised his sorrowful head. The kitchen door opened a crack, pouring out a path of light into the dimness at the base of the stairs, where the girl had paused to rearrange the blanket. The blanket squirmed, kicked, squealed: an infant was inside it. Standing in that suddenly bright alley, the girl shone from head to foot, as if her figure had been hammered out in bronze. She gazed into the infant's face, as round as a half-dollar. The forum at the set table in the nearby dining room hardly earned her glance. Mr. Brooks was conscious that he was being moved, in spite of himself, by this unaccountable apparition, this tall young madonna whose skin seemed coated in light. He was not here to have his feelings touched. He was here out of indignation, out of disgust for his client's stupidity. To have entangled himself with a swarm of penniless refugees! To have given everything away, all of it, for the sake of a forgotten Jewish sect! (This being the language of the letter: "a forgotten Jewish sect.")
The startling vision—the young madonna had struck him with an inexplicable tenderness—did not last. A deluge of yammering boys, dammed up until now, churned out of the kitchen and made for the blanket. The baby was abducted from its mother and passed, uncomplaining, from hand to hand; clearly it was used to being fondled by these ruffians. It ended in the lap of a small girl, who sat herself down on the bottom step and pulled at the tiny thing's socks, exposing the little naked toes. To Mr. Brooks the sight of these toes, as creaturely as some animal's paws, was all at once obscene.
Heir to the Glimmering World Page 30
