Heir to the Glimmering World

by Cynthia Ozick

  But it was decided; he understood. Forgotten Jewish sect, my eye! Surely it was this refugee madonna who had finagled a fortune out of his client, it had to be ... yet the instant Mr. Brooks was persuaded of this possibility, he discarded it. Too young; married anyhow, the baby and that ring. Lord only knows why the good-for-nothing did himself in. Crazed. The letter was crazed. Promote Rudolf Mitwisser's studies of, and so forth and so on. Was it the drink that did it? That going off to the Levant, did it turn his head? People get religious delusions of the brain in places like that, it wasn't a Cook's tour, after all. More's the pity, good New England stock twisted out of recognition. The father never dreamed of such an outcome.

  His hat was surrounded by empty teacups. They had never been filled. He picked up the hat.

  "Well," Mr. Brooks said, "so much for that."

  Mrs. Mitwisser seized him by the sleeve of his coat. "Not to go!"

  "I beg your pardon?"

  "You must see first our baby! My daughter's child, black eyes!"

  "Madam," he said coldly, "my driver is waiting."

  "You don't look! You don't see!"

  He looked. He saw. The tall young madonna, a tower of beauty.

  "Bad, you do bad mistake!" The woman was accusing him; she was pleading with him. She importuned him not to misjudge them. He was in error, he was misjudging them all. His client had been a barbarian, he was not to assume that they were barbarians! Here was her proper son-in-law; here was her proper daughter. His client had brought them disorder, but now all was in order, only look, see, the pretty baby, the mother, the mother's husband, a proper family! His client's contaminations had been swept away at last.

  What was the woman carrying on about? She held on to his sleeve.

  "Elsa," Mitwisser called—a mumbling, a weakness—"why do you make this commotion?"

  "This man, he will not see what we are!"

  Mr. Brooks shook her off. "I see that well enough. Now if you please, I've got poor Felix circling out there."

  Mitwisser unfolded his long bones inch by inch, laboring out of his chair. He went to stand between his wife and the lawyer.

  "My daughter's child," he said, "is the child of James."

  Mrs. Mitwisser instantly appealed to her son-in-law. "Ach, why must Rudi say this? Bertram, tell how everything is in order, he must not say this—"

  But Bertram only gave her a little push. "Go away," he told the boys. "Get upstairs, scram! Heinz, take the baby from Waltraut. Waltraut, go with them. Willi, didn't I say not to poke your nose in here?"

  Mr. Brooks took off his hat and again placed it on the table. Then he walked all around, cutting a furrow of silence behind him.

  "Come here," he said finally.

  The young madonna obliged him.

  "Rudolf Mitwisser is your father?"

  She nodded sleepily; her hands were absent-mindedly cupping her breasts. They were heavy with milk.

  "And your child is the child of my late client? Will you swear to this?"

  Anneliese nodded.

  "No, no, my son-in-law, he is now the proper father," Mrs. Mitwisser broke in.

  "Be quiet, Elsa," Bertram said.

  "Then you must understand that Rudolf Mitwisser cannot be the legatee. In case of issue, issue inherits."

  "So the old man can't get the money," Bertram said, "is that it?"

  The lawyer scowled. "My client's child is my client's heir. What came before is abrogated. Null and void. There exists a child. The child takes legal precedence. The infant will require a guardian, customarily the mother—"

  The colloquy continued. Bertram filled the gold-rimmed teacups and passed round the little frosted cakes; no one took any. But he himself bit into one of the cakes. In this instance, he explained, it was impractical for the infant's mother to assume the responsibility of guardianship. She was still too much an outsider, too untried. Too bewildered and unknowing. She lacked the necessary competence, she barely comprehended the custom of the country—imagine, only a little while ago she thought she needed a passport to cross from New York to Massachusetts! She was in crucial ways still a child herself.

  "Your client had no scruples," Bertram said.

  "Barbarisch," said Mrs. Mitwisser.

  "Nevertheless," Mitwisser said into his beard, "he is the father of my grandchild."

  Mr. Brooks retrieved his hat. "There we have it. It seems my client has been cheated of his wish, and I can't say that I mind. I don't suppose the infant'll go chasing after dead old sects, hah? Though you can never predict."

  From somewhere overhead a pulsating howl began, growing wilder by the second. Anneliese looked frightened.

  "Hungry!" she cried, and fled.

  "Then who will be the guardian?" the lawyer asked.

  "Now that you've seen the lay of the land out here," Bertram said, "isn't it obvious?"

  62

  A RIVER OF PAPERS: first, the waiver—Mitwisser must acknowledge and renounce his invalid status as beneficiary; the legacy will be ceded to the valid heir, a minor. Anneliese must attest to the identity of the natural father. Bertram must be appointed legal guardian to the heir until she should reach her majority.

  After which, the house would be free of the lawyer—except if or when Bertram might wish to consult with the firm, for which there would be the usual fee.

  "Well, Rosie," he said, "what d'you think of that? We're knee-deep in capitalism, the kid's a goddamn tycoon."

  Bertram was now installed as administrator and conduit of Bear Boy Royalties and Rights.

  "But you named her after Ninel."

  "I didn't name the kid. Elsa did. Sentimental, that photo and all."

  "She does whatever you want her to do."

  "Look, her mother was called Miriam, she's stuck on her mother. All I said was why not honor the dead."

  "Does Anneliese know that Ninel was really Miriam?"

  "Now why would my wife want to know a thing like that? Why make a fuss over a pointless coincidence? Hundreds of girls are named Miriam."

  "And Ninel was one of them. Anneliese's got her ring, the baby's got her name. What do you call that?"

  "Exorcism," Bertram said, and I discovered that I believed him: for Bertram exorcism was the same as acquisition—one preceded the other.

  Certain acquisitions, formerly unwelcome, entered the house. Bertram brought in a Victrola ("Elsa's stuck on Bach"), a telephone, a radio.

  "Papa doesn't let mama have a radio," Heinz said.

  "You've got one."

  "It's mostly static on my set, and it's not a real radio anyhow."

  The real radio was encased in a polished wooden cabinet shaped like a miniature Gothic vault.

  "She'll hear bad things, papa says."

  "There are always bad things," Bertram said cheerily. "You can't avoid them. Meanwhile I'm thinking we could use a car, but I'm afraid my wife thinks a car's one of the bad things."

  Son-in-law. My wife. Bach came spinning out of the Victrola, over and over again.

  Bertram disappeared for a whole day. When he returned, he revealed that he had gone to see Mr. Brooks about buying a house. The house was in Mr. Brooks's own neighborhood in Mr. Brooks's own county. It was a very large house. You could even call it a mansion if you wanted to be grandiloquent.

  "In a few months we'll be out of this rabbit warren," Bertram informed me.

  There were no more trips to the shops under the trestle. Mrs. Mitwisser was pleased to be put in charge of the household supplies. Her voice on the telephone, ordering groceries and seeing to the hour of their delivery, had the accustomed ring of a mistress interrogating a servant. Wine was restored to the table. The telephone seemed to have no other use, except for Bertram's infrequent conversations with Mr. Brooks. They were always brief. Whatever Bertram had to say appeared to satisfy Mr. Brooks.

  It was understood that my task was to watch over Mitwisser. He clung to me uneasily, and became strangely anxious when for any reason I was called out of his sig
ht. Bertram's sympathies, flowing everywhere (hadn't he quenched Elsa's thirst, confided to him alone, for Bach?), stopped before they reached Mitwisser; and anyhow Anneliese's child was the center of things, and engaged them all. The infant might just as well be infantry, Bertram joked, a whole military brigade—it crowded the house with scores of appurtenances and a range of precipitate noises not unlike gunfire. Waltraut declared the baby to be hers, and clumsily put on its bonnet and took it off again, while Anneliese warned her not to be rough. Life was turning on its hinge: they would soon leave this place, they would go where Bertram was taking them.

  I sat with Mitwisser in the tiny back yard. He clutched my hand as usual. Or else we would walk, he with his eyes half shut, allowing me to guide him into the harmless familiarity of nearby streets. He had balked at revisiting the water's edge, even when the tide was high and the bay turned lionlike, heaping up its mane of foam and devouring the seaweed and its acrid smells. One day we went a little farther, in a new direction, and came to a rundown granite bench set in a rectangle of dry grass and a few reluctant tiger lilies. An old lilac bush, split down the middle and ailing, hung over the bench: several heads of purple florets, every head as big as a cabbage, sent their syrupy fumes rushing at us. A scarred metal plate sunk in the ground, partly covered by dirt, disclosed that the bench was a gift to the citizens of the Bronx in memory of Theobald Bartlett Vandergild, 1859…1913, Councilman and Promoter of Public Improvements. If this place was an improvement, it had no public but ourselves. It lured us; it led away from commotion. The house was all activity, all turbulence—it was like Albany before the move to New York; and yet it was not. At the heart of it stood the young madonna, her solemn face lit by serenity. Anneliese with her child; with her wedding ring. It dangled loose and large on the finger of her left hand; it was destined never to slip off. This was the hand that could not curl into a fist, these were the bones that Frau Koch had hammered. No ring would ever escape this invisibly misshapen finger. The ring was sympathy. The ring was rescue. The ring was her mother's dignity. Only her papa was sickened.

  Under the lilac heads, in the autumnal thick of their jungly scent—they were untended and untamed and wildly sweet—I devoted myself to Mitwisser's gloom. Weakness was in his gait, his silences, his unwillingness to look up; but coiled in Mitwisser's brain was the force I knew. Deformed, displaced. He had invested his old powers in melancholia.

  "They're starting the packing today," I said mildly. "Bertram's supervising, so your books won't get mixed up. Anneliese's helping—she's the one who can read the titles."

  He made no reply.

  "The new house has nine bedrooms, Bertram says. He says it'll fit the family exactly. A room for each of the boys, one for Waltraut, one'll be the baby's, and then two more"—I skipped over Bertram's designations for these: the marital chambers of Anneliese and her husband, of Mitwisser and his wife—"and one for your study."

  "I have no need of a study."

  I had lied twice. Bertram had not spoken of a study; and it was Anneliese alone who had made certain that the books should be properly categorized.

  "There has to be a place for your work. All those boxes of papers, everything I've typed up over the months—"

  "My dear Rose, haven't you understood?"

  "I have. There's new life now."

  "New life? For whom? Do you speak of James's child?"

  "Anneliese's," I said.

  "Your cousin's," he retorted; and now I heard his buried force.

  "Bertram's not really my cousin—"

  "What does it matter? The man has married my daughter. And my wife rejoices," he said sourly. "She who rejected manna now relishes it."

  "It's not James's money anymore."

  "Whose is it then? The child's? By which is meant my son-in-law. Manna in the hands of my son-in-law. Is it James's any the less?"

  He was gripping my shoulders; his eyes were full of the sea when it turns purple at dusk. The lilacs had got into them.

  "In the past it came and it went. And now it is to come and to come and to come."

  "Isn't that what you wanted? To be free to think?"

  He loosened me and fell back. "Does thought command what happens, or does what happens command thought? Can one put things right by thinking? What use are such conundrums?"

  "Things have been put right," I said.

  "By what means, by what means," he groaned. A panicked blue stare. "You will be leaving us soon, is this not so?"

  I did not deny it.

  And for the second time he flung the wilderness of his head into my arms.

  "Oh my poor Rudi," I said, "my poor, poor Rudi."

  63

  THINGS HAD BEEN put right. Mrs. Mitwisser felt it. The boys felt it. Even Waltraut felt it, pulling on the limbs of the warm-blooded puppet that had come to stay. Anneliese surely felt it: the infant's smallest cry caused droplets to spring from her breasts; she hurried to snatch the child from Waltraut to save it from famishment. What could be righter than the round, round face of this tiny angel, its round eyes, the round red button of its mouth? The little fingers pressed tightly around Anneliese's finger, tighter than the ring Bertram had given her. She knew the ring had been intended for Ninel. She didn't mind; death was erasure. Ninel was dead, James was dead. But here was Bertram, more motherly than her own mother, and here was her living child, more beautiful than any child on earth—more beautiful than Willi, who was anyhow leaving beauty behind, turning from child to rugged boy. Heinz and Gert were nearly men—it was manly to have witnessed a birth almost without flinching. Bertram had made them brave. He had obliged them to gaze straight into Mother Nature's naked wisdom. And he had restored all three to their true names: Hank, Jerry, and Bill, he said, were signs of insincerity. Under Bertram's patronage they withered away. Bertram had put everything right.

  I filled my two suitcases: my belongings had been few when I entered the Mitwisser household; they were fewer now. I quietly added Hard Times and The Communist Manifesto to one of the boxes of books being readied for the move to the new house. Willi saw.

  "Those aren't papa's. You shouldn't put them in with papa's."

  "I got them from Bertram and I'm giving them back. Bertram can sort them out later."

  But I was almost certain the books would remain in their boxes. The new house was not friendly to books. Bertram, together with Mrs. Mitwisser, had gone several times to look it over. Its last inhabitants (who had asked a pretty penny, he reported), owned horses and rode. There were so many windows that there was really no wall space to speak of, and without wall space it would hardly be possible to accommodate shelves. Besides, the old man was no longer inclined to bury himself in those unfathomable lucubrations. The abundance of windows was the most remarkable aspect of the house—all that light, those views!

  "Views of what?" I asked.

  "Big lawns. Houses even bigger. The neighborhood's swanky," Bertram supplied.

  Willi had come to watch me pack.

  "I'm going to have my own room," he announced, "the way it was at home." But he said this mechanically. It was a fading echo. Home—the life before—was vanishing for him, as it already had for Waltraut.

  His hand went to the tattered Bear Boy. He picked it up. "James's thing," he said, and stopped. The name had slipped out. He had not meant to say it. Like Heinz and Gert, he would not or could not speak of James. It was a superstition about death; or else, to spare Anneliese, Bertram had cajoled them all into muteness. Was it Bertram, or was it superstition? One put things right, the other put them wrong. They came to nearly the same. James was being erased, already receding into the white light of myth that had swallowed Ninel.

  "Give me that," I snapped, and folded a sweater around it and put it in the suitcase, close to the ruined sneaker that held the sum of my erstwhile salary. It was not very much; for many months the formality of payment had ceased. No one mentioned it; no one noticed. I did not expect it or miss it. Mitwissers were an organism, and
I was part of its flesh.

  Willi recovered his tongue. "Papa doesn't want to move, but Bertram says you'll get him to."

  I hesitated. I had so far told no one; Rudi had breathed it out of the lilacs. Was I to begin by telling this wanton boy?

  "I won't be coming with you. I'm going away."

  He looked at me shrewdly. "Mrs. Tandoori! Mrs. Tandoori!" It was his old trick—jumping out of corners to stage-whisper you're going to marry Dr. Tandoori, and lately you've got a baby in your belly, just like An- neliese. Willi too believed in Mother Nature, even when she was busy elsewhere; and in this domestic maelstrom of death and birth and a wedding ring, who could blame him?

  The news reached Bertram instantly.

  "You're doing the right thing," he beamed. "Here, this is yours really, I wanted you to have it long ago, only ... well, there's no reason now not to take it." He tore a check out of his checkbook (another new acquisition), and placed it in my obediently open palm. Above his signature I read: Five hundred dollars and no cents. "That should last awhile," he said.

  The turnabout made me self-conscious; my face heated up. The money that had spilled from my hand into Bertram's was now flowing in the opposite direction. Mother Nature herself had no power to change a river's course, but Bertram could convert downstream to upstream, Anneliese the fallen to Anneliese the wife, mad Mrs. Mitwisser to mundanely triumphant Elsa. And me he had released. I was freed. He wanted me out. I had no further responsibilities here. Like its ancestor in the blue envelope, the check was a bribe to chuck me from the scene.