Regarding magnum opus. This happens to be my line of work so I don’t mind saying a few words. Syme was a crank; a deluded crank who died in deserved obscurity – either drunk or mad and I don’t much care which, to be honest. We know about him. He came to be a figure of fun in Richmond Society; and as late as the 1880s we find references to the ‘Professor’ – a child’s bugaboo and a promise of Doomsday, if you stole apples from the neighbor’s yard. That kind of thing. ‘Sent to the Professor’ was short for ‘the earth would swallow you’. Author and illustrator Howard Pyle picked up the phrase in Virginia and borrowed it for Pepper & Salt in 1886. There’s even a very pretty picture that goes along with it, if you can get your hands on a first edition: shows Syme, shod in sandals, smoking a pipe, grinning broadly as the ground opens to eat him. I don’t mind that but Pitt’s turning into something worse: a crank chasing a crank.
As for the Syme Papers itself, the missing New Platonist, and the supposed connection to Alfred Wegener: a series of improbabilities founded upon inaccuracies, and the rest of it plagiarized, I regret to say. A great shame, for Pitt is a genial little goblin, and I wish him well.
‘Joe said I shouldn’t show you‚’ the Fräulein repeated, when I was through. ‘But I thought it’s only fair. Es tut mir leid‚’ she said, turning to the gentleness of her mother tongue for comfort. ‘I’m very sorry.’
Pitt, curious as ever and quite particular, asked only, ‘Had Joe seen – this’, clutching the memo, “before we made – this?’ waving his arm at the Headless Bicycle, Joe’s nickname for that ‘fantastical device’ proliferated from the collective imaginations of Syme and self.
‘We both had‚’ the Fräulein answered, resting her hand on the seat.
‘You are – very kind‚’ Pitt said, sweating, flushed perfectly crimson from chin to pate. ‘Very kind‚’ he insisted, as he walked into the bright shadows of the street and left her there – in the open garage, staring after him.
The pebbles ground and scattered as he backed into the road, swung outwards, and then – breathing stertorous calm – drove slowly off. Pitt fled the rich hills and green-canopied streets. The sun came out over the highway again, as he turned south and home. Towards Susie and failure. He recalled another sunny occasion, many years before, on which his father had taken young Pitt ‘on the job’ one summer morning over the school holidays. The boy did not know what to expect, he had heard so much of his father’s innovations. ‘Did Dad make this?’ he asked, fingering a jointed gasket. ‘Or this?’
‘Your dad?’ the man said, a barrel-chested figure with hanging arms, stooped against a board to tie his boots. ‘Which one is he?’
Pitt pointed below.
‘Him? I don’t really know what he does. Orders parts, I think. I never see him up here.’
How my face burned at that, grew hot to touch! Fitting, I think: for shame runs in the blood, as deep as love, and just as old. Pitts, I believe, have always been laughed at.
*
‘Have you heard?’ Susie said, as Pitt strode in the door.
‘What? Heard what? What’s there to hear?’
‘I don’t know. I was asking.’
‘Don’t ask. How should I know? They’ve only just started.’
She lay upon the couch in sweet collapse, under a feather-bed, watching TV – the boys hidden about her person, only their heads appearing. Spring break must have begun, Pitt thought, on the quiet. ‘I brought the bed in here‚’ she said. ‘Three little slobs. Shameful.’
‘You should be – out and about. We should all be out and about. This is crazy. Sun shining. Everything.’
‘Heard what?’ Ben said – quick child, attentive to all elision, stubborn in ignorance.
‘We’re cold‚’ Aaron added. ‘And I’m trying to watch.’
‘Do you want us to burn things?’ Ben said. ‘For science?’
Pitt turned off the TV. ‘Come on‚’ Pitt declared, making a fist of the cover, and beginning to pull. ‘Come on. Come on.’
‘Leave it, Doug. Everyone’s snug and happy. Why do you want to spoil it?’
Pitt thought of reasons; then picked one. ‘I’m going to bed‚’ he said. ‘I need the duvet. Come on.’
‘You should treasure such a sight‚’ Susie said, wrinkling her nose, resisting. ‘Wife and babes, in arms.’
How sweet and clear is anger! A bell ringing, summoning old strength. He pulled the feather-bed free, and wrapped himself round – like a bear in snow. ‘Good night!’ he said. ‘Good night!’ (My mind had not been so … lucid … in months. Utterly empty, spick and span, picked clean. Then filled with light. A perfect treat – pristine. Pure and simple as a glass of water.)
‘Why do you spoil everything?’ Susie cried, sitting up, and – from some compulsion – beginning to tie on her tennis shoes. ‘Just when we’re happy? You hate it when anyone’s happy except for you.’
‘Good night‚’ Pitt said, and closed the bedroom door.
Then another door banged shut; and the screen followed lightly behind it.
Pitt awoke from a deep sleep at dusk. Courage, he said, and pointed towards the shore, lines drifted at the edge of his thoughts like loose wood on a slack tide. Outside his window, the yard lay brown, becoming black. The neighbour’s kitchen glowed in the soft air; someone stooped below the counter. Disappeared. Pitt had turned away before she rose again; a hand, perhaps, against her aproned back. Sleep like cotton filled his head: a muffling. He stood quite naked, to his surprise – he did not remember undressing. Then he stepped into the bathroom on cool feet and peed. A bright stream; the sweet stink of it rose into his breath. Afterwards, he dipped behind the shower-curtain, wetting his bare shoulders, and switched on the tap; waited quietly till the hot began to spit and sing against the tiles, then slid in. ‘Du mußt dein Leben ändern‚’ he muttered into the thresh of water. I feel a new man, he thought; only worse.
When he walked into the living room, Susie had a cup in her hand, and poured it trickling into the potted tree beneath the window. ‘The boys are getting changed for the dance‚’ she said. ‘Joe called, with a heavy cold, poor man. The committee have decided. I told him you were asleep.’
‘Yes?’ Pitt asked.
‘No‚’ she sighed.
She drank the rest of the mug, and set it on the television. ‘It doesn’t matter so much, Doug.’
‘I suppose you’re pleased?’
Susie considered, holding her mouth in the palm of her hand. ‘At this point, I’m relieved. The way you were going. I’ll be glad of a – change of pace. We can go home now; no reason not to; in the summer.’
‘It was Bunyon, you know‚’ Pitt said. ‘I got done.’
‘Among other things. Boys!’ she called out. ‘It’s almost time.’ Then ‘No, no, no‚’ she cut in quieter, squeezing her eyes shut and shaking her head, ‘I’m not a bit pleased or relieved, only miserable that you have suffered disappointment, which I would keep from you for all the world, though I can’t.’
Pitt, in the sweet dew of his wife’s pity, began to revive. ‘Only a temporary disappointment‚’ he said, scratching his nose, pinching it, sniffing, in the restless flow of thought. ‘A step – or, rather, a stumble – along the way. Syme had dozens like it – and kept going. Worse, indeed: a mother’s death; a friend’s betrayal; a lover’s faithlessness. There are always Bunyons and Ben Sillimans in the path of – well, there’s no harm in saying it – of inspiration. That’s how we know her when she comes: a breath of sharp air that makes us suddenly feel that everyone else is wrong. Naturally, the uninspired put a kink in the works when they can. But it’s our job, to –’
‘When is it my turn to do what I want?’ Susie said, in a voice as flat as counting to ten. She has round cheeks, my wife, flushed slightly in the heat of her insistence; a strong, short nose, blue eyes, and these she turned on me, sharp as broken glass.
‘What do you want?’
‘I want you to give up‚’ she said.
> ‘That isn’t in the power of your wanting.’
‘I want to go home‚’ she answered. ‘That is. I want – no, there is too much wanting – I would like to move back to Yorkville, to a long flat on a side-street with a tree in the window and leaves on the fire-escape, not far from Carl Schurz Park; to catch the yellow school-bus to the Bronx again, every morning with the boys. And you – at a proper job – that doesn’t swallow your life – our lives. (Somewhere you haven’t failed.) They’ll take us back, you know. They said as much when we left. I would like in time to take time out: for a girl, perhaps, or for me, painting again. Both, perhaps; and leave her at Na-na’s while I set up an easel in the kitchen; and on sunny days in the Socrates Gardens. You have had your years now: five at NYU, three in Texas, one in London. You’ve used them up. I – would like mine.’
‘I don’t think you understand‚’ Pitt said. ‘There is an – evolution. No, let me finish. There is a kind of evolution at work, and I’m a part of it. In the long view, this is all that matters, the only thing. Above the common run of the generations, there is another, much rarer, accumulation: of knowledge.’ (‘Don’t talk to me like this‚’ Susie said, shaking her head. ‘In this manner.’ Pitt continued, declaring, showing his hand at last.) ‘A higher natural selection, if you like, survival of what’s true at the expense of what isn’t. You have no idea how little of what we do proves … collectable, afterwards.’
‘I’m not a little girl‚’ she said, in the pink of fury.
‘Syme had a single idea, just one, that – slipped past the censors, the judges of oblivion. That the shell of the earth was full of cracks, and the continents split along them. This thought, the echoes of it, inspired a young German scientist invalided from the war to a true picture of the world. A first-edition true picture of the world – very rare. Pitt, in his small way, hopes –’
‘Pitt‚’ she said, ‘always Pitt.’
‘Hopes to add his pinch of truth to the history of the universe, by proving Syme’s part in Wegener’s discovery; hopes, in his small way, to take his place in the great evolution, the only thing that matters in the end.’
She stared at me, her great eyes wide, as if I were mad; and, worse still, unfamiliar to her in my madness, a strange, unpleasant creature that had scuttled through the door of her home. ‘I suppose’, she said at last, ‘that I have no part in this evolution?’
There was nothing I could answer.
We heard the clatter of the boys in their room, the intimate babble of their brotherhood, such as I never knew. Something fell over, a chair perhaps, with a jacket round it. It could not be lifted again, it seemed, without a great discussion, a settlement of fault, restitution to the injured party. Yet only the injured party seemed concerned; and Ben’s voice rose shrill above his brother’s. I thought of cutting in but kept quiet; then they fell quiet, too. A cat scratched at the screen door outside, began to pick at the thin wires, tearing them wider. ‘Go away‚’ Susie said. ‘Go away.’ It did not. Susie opened the door and looked at the long-starved tabby, stretching itself, arching up the screen, and plucking. Suddenly she hissed at it, and the cat scrambled yowling into the yard and slunk away along the low kerb of the street.
‘Well, regardless‚’ Susie began, turning round – quite calm, in fact. ‘This summer the boys and I are going back to New York. You can do what you like.’
‘I thought you loved me for my – arrogance, uncompromising arrogance‚’ Pitt answered at last her earlier question. ‘I thought you loved me for that.’
‘I thought you were funny‚’ she said. ‘At first, if you must know. A funny failure. Not so funny any more.’
‘Don’t you see’, Pitt urged, in gentle undertone, ‘that nothing is settled yet? They voted –’
‘Twenty-five to three, against.’
‘Against granting me tenure; well and good. But I might be able to stick around another year, as an assistant. Bunyon stepped over the line – he knows that. There are complaints to be made, through a variety of channels. The charge of plagiarism, for example – here, let me show you what he wrote –’
‘Hush, now‚’ she said, softening; the more I talked, the less she listened. ‘Hush.’ And squeezed me in her rounded arms, so that’ my elbows pressed against my ribs. (How unhappy I suddenly felt in her comfort!)
‘I have evidence‚’ Pitt insisted, his voice rising, ‘evidence that Bunyon poisoned my chances from the start. I’d confront him – if he hadn’t run away. Quite apart from the fact that the final proof of Syme’s genius is only a piece of good luck away. An experiment, a discovery, that will make good my name. Sitting in Joe Schapiro’s garage as we speak is a wonderful contraption, invented by Syme himself, to test the cooling of the earth in its first creation. A kind of bicycle with a spinning head attached – a clay globe, pricked with openings, and full of coal, which, once set alight, will melt the shavings of iron and nickel scattered among them, and approximate the formation of the planet itself. Whereupon –’
‘For God’s sake, Doug‚’ she said, pressing harder, ‘don’t make yourself ridiculous.’
Pitt loosened himself from her grasp. He wasn’t a coward much – as Dr Edith Karpenhammer once declared – ‘but stuck, while things like pity were thinning.’ Susie breathed deep, hiding her mouth, holding her nose between thumb and forefinger, at her wit’s end; sat down. Pitt walked into the kitchen, stooped and took a bucket from under the sink. Then he opened the freezer and lifted the ice-tray, crackling with cold, and began to bang it loose into the bucket. Some cubes skittled across the linoleum floor, and he bent on hands and knees to gather them up. After that, his fingers crawled among the stuck ice to pick off the last ones; before he pushed the tray in place, and raised the bucket to the sink. The ice clicked and cracked in the cold water as it rose between the gaps. Then the bucket swayed as he lowered it and set it on the lino tiles.
Ben came in, wearing a green jacket and a green tie tied much too long and hanging below his belt. ‘Are we freezing things now, Dad?’ he said, seeing his father bent over the ice. ‘What are we freezing?’
‘Let me do that‚’ Susie said, rough-handling her boy, and loosening the knot at his neck. ‘Aaron!’ she called through the closed door. ‘Betty and Mrs Liebowitz are on the way. It’s time.’
‘What goddamned dance?’ Pitt asked at last, rising, a piece of his thought clicking in place as the wheel of his family turned round and round.
‘Purim Prom‚’ Ben said. ‘For little Jews.’
‘I’m not going!’ Aaron cried, mysteriously muffled, through the bedroom door.
‘For God’s sake, Susan.’
‘I like getting dressed up‚’ Ben confided in a stage-whisper to his father. ‘I want to go.’
‘I’ve sprained my neck.’ (Aaron again.)
A car-horn tooted in the dark of the neighbourhood, and a door slammed shut.
‘The Liebowitzes are here!’ Susan cried to no one in particular, some imagined clerk recording all household facts in tireless shorthand, for future reference.
Pitt, in sudden inspiration, an irresistible overflow of revived spirits, declared, ‘He’s not going. He’s coming with me. Aaron!’ (Louder.) ‘You’re not going! You’re coming with me!’
‘Doug!’ Susie, vexed, her hands akimbo on her sweet plump hips. And then, in shadowy signification, speaking in capitals. ‘We Have Things To Talk About.’
The doorbell tinkled, twice, as if a thick thumb pressed it, and stuck, then fell away.
‘Just a sec, Betty‚’ Susie cried. ‘They’re coming.’
Aaron emerged, a jacket hung loose from his forehead, a tie vaguely noosed about his neck; shirt-buttons buttoned awry along his ribbed chest; sleeves rolled up to the elbow, in manly show of disinterest at his sartorial dismay.
‘I sprained my neck‚’ he said, quietly. ‘And I can’t go.’
‘You’re coining with me. I need you – a little experiment – creation of the world.’
Perhaps Pitt did shame himself a little, to fight for his son in such a fashion, and split the boys between father and mother. But the battle – thank God! – was back in his blood, and nothing could quell it. There is no ‘serpent’, Phidy well knew, as insidious as our own high spirits, so seeming-innocent a tempter.
‘OK‚’ Aaron said, turning to the door. ‘So long as you know, Dad, this is only to get out of the Purim Prom.’ Pitt took the bucket of ice in hand.
‘Say, Hello, Betty‚’ he told his son, as they passed in the doorway a girl in pink, bobbing up and down on unaccustomed high heels.
‘Hello, Dr Pitt!’ Betty cried, scratching awkwardly at a run in her tights.
‘Say, Goodbye, Betty‚’ Pitt said, as they strode into the cool of the spring night.
‘Aaron?’ the girl said, lifting a corner of her mouth into a corner of a smile.
‘Goodbye, Betty‚’ Aaron dutifully replied.
A blinking, pink and longing look followed the boy as he followed his father, into the Volvo. Then more scratching.
‘Doug!’ A last, forsaken cry from the doorway.
Pitt honked, a little tootle, in answer to his wife; then waved goodbye to Liebowitzes, Peggy and Betty both; backed into the quiet of the road, and turned into the tree-spanned peace of the neighbourhood side-streets. They drove past the lit blue of the public pools and crossed towards Guadalupe; approached the green wire-fenced expanse of the Home for the Blind, and turned left, on to the strip mall, in a glitter of lights. He said nothing to his son till they slipped on to the bright smooth of the highway, driving west.
The Syme Papers Page 53
