At midnight we heard a step. Sam came in and there we lay broad to see, our crimes flush to heaven and to him. ‘Oh, oh, oh, oh, my only love,’ cried Mrs Simmons, staring and rising, half-held by a dream. She did not mean me, I know, but that other One, the great and mystical and everlasting Sam Syme, the cold, the beautiful, the brilliant, the heartless, the geonometrical, the falling Samuel Highgate Syme, where all our consolation lay. She did not mean me, I know, though, hoping, I turned to her, but her eyes were gone, fled to Sam, hidden with her face in a crook of his arm and her dim hair falling down to his elbows and all her pink-grey back hiding him from me.
But Sam’s gaze was mine and how could I answer it? I would have been thine at a word, I thought, but thy word was ‘enough’. Yet I knew then that my betrayal had cut him the crueller. Mrs Simmons he comforted with his endless gift for solace – his left arm pushed her head against his ribs. There she stood blind but full of his smell and rhythm. He looked at me.
Say ‘faithless’ to me and I may answer, My love will come to your call for faith. (You did not desire my love, though.) Even your anger would suffice me. Cry treason and lost brotherhood and forsaken friendship. Speak even of the cold bad day, our prospects buried in the gravebed of a heap of kittens, and ask me how I could turn from you at this sore pass.
You did not desire my love, though, only my faith. (I wondered which stung you more: that I saw you brought so low this bitter evening, or stole into your mistress’s bed?) Tom was blind to you, a disciple by trade. I was a scientist, with a faith worth winning; but you could not and you knew it – at least you knew it then, as I scrambled into my clothes at the foot of the bed, my rich blue coat, somewhat stained by soot and ash; my yellow breeches, lately much bedraggled; my cream cravat, bound tight to warm my neck, a dirty yellow; my scuffed and filthy shoes. I would have given you such love, a thousand faiths could not make the sum of it. You did not want it.
‘I know you‚’ said Sam, looking down at me, and, truth to tell, I cut a shabby figure. ‘I know you now – and what you will become.’
Sam, you are heartless and cruel, and turn only inwards and there is nothing there, when a world lies before thee, bowing.
‘She fed me soup‚’ I answered miserably, ‘because I was cold‚’ and left them together.
Easy was a squall of misery on my return. His nose was wet and shone and his eyes were smeared with the fat of his hand. ‘He would not talk to me‚’ he blubbed. ‘He had not a word for me.’ My own misery had got tired and slept and would wake in the morning.
‘It was only an experiment that failed.’
‘That’s it‚’ said Easy, ‘a squib‚’ and the word cheered him, ‘a damp squib.’
‘Only a very dull day‚’ I said, and thought, He is more faithful than I.
‘I gave him tea and put a rug over his knees for he was so cold and I asked him what he found. He said “dead cats”.’
‘Oh‚’ I said. ‘We forgot to bury them again.’
‘That’s what he said. Is it a little funny? I shall use that word in the morning – a squib.’
‘Yes, a squib. Not damp; quite – burned away, in fact. Burned up. Excuse me, Easy, if I talk nonsense at you. I’m for bed.’
As I lay down to sleep, I had a new image of Syme. He was like a tall tree, towering and graceful Yet everyone sought to cut their names in him. And in his shade, all kinds of unclean things were done and left their mark. So that, upon a closer look, we saw only other people’s scars and other people’s dirt. Nothing kept me there any more, certainly not my faith or my courage.
*
In two weeks I was gone. Sam was in such a low hole that he would speak to no one, certainly not myself. In the end, Easy sent for Tom and the two of them spirited him off to Tom’s own home, where Kitty I believe nursed him tenderly. In an odd turn of events, I retired to Baltimore and Sam’s father, from whence to take my journey home.
Mr Syme embraced me warmly and fussed over my things. ‘Perhaps’, he said to me on the stairs, with my bag in hand to lead me to my bed in Sam’s old room, ‘my son will come back to me now.’ He was sad and pleased.
I thought often of that long day, frightened of my own faithlessness. The steady accumulation of belief, stuck on me and hardened by habit, had been dislodged by that blow, easy as snow from a green tree. They all seemed madmen, each one. Sam with his opium theories – a hollow earth! concentric spheres! fluvia!; Ezekiel with his damp enthusiasm; even Tom, indefatigable in the cause, had something crazy and cold about him. I was no better. Now my father urged me home, by his triumph not disaster, so I left.
To collect my things, I stopped at Pactaw one last time. I did not dare call on Mrs Simmons, but she met me at the coach station, and helped me with my box. She wore a bluejacket, bright as a butterfly’s wings against her silvered hair, and a green skirt that swept the ground like a willow. She had strong hands, as I discovered, when she clasped the iron handle above my own, and pressed my finger to the bone, setting down the trunk.
‘I heard you were going‚’ she said. ‘Tom sent me this to give to you.’ It was a letter. I took it through the carriage door, and then urged suddenly, ‘Come home with me. We have no place in this New World. I will find you a berth on my ship and in a month you will be in Germany.’
Before I could think what I had asked, she began to weep. ‘Sam sleeps like a baby now‚’ she said. ‘Before he could never endure the night. He comes to me now more often, even more than at first. So I am grateful to the cats for that at least. Sam is my only love and a great man, and I would rather be miserable with him than happy with another. He is grand and fine, and everything around him matters wonderfully – the least thing, like me. I wish Tom had been beside him that night, for Tom is such a happy fool, he would have found some trick.’
‘Then there is nothing to be said‚’ I answered, turning away. And the coachman struck his whip and the horses began to move. I watched her shrink behind me, as blue as a stone.
‘Sam will miss you‚’ she called after me, from her own heart perhaps or to leaven her hard words.
We rode past the Dewdrop Inn and I took my last look of Pactaw, before we reached the river and turned north. The two low hills burned green with spring, and even the wind had a new air. The last patches of snow had gone and the streets were ordinary brown streets and the houses were ordinary white houses. There was nothing to keep me. I tore open Tom’s letter and read.
Dear Phidy,
They tell me ‘tis decided you depart. I would have wished to make a warmer farewell, a flesh-and-blood goodbye, you know, and taken your hand; but Kitty can’t spare me now, being six months gone, and Sam won’t spare me now, certainly not, he says, to visit you. I don’t know what’s come to pass between you – Sam won’t tell me, nor breathe a word of that long day – but I can guess, having guessed, long before now, that it would. I trust this letter reaches you through Mrs Simmons.
Well, we have burned the last of the New Platonists, whatever we could lay our hands on. Sam says he couldn’t bear the thought of Harcourt reading them; and so we heaped the lot of them in the yard, rolled one up and lit it at the lantern flame, and tossed it burning on the pile. A pretty little blaze it made, too – to think how quickly words may be consumed, what take such a weight of thought and time and even iron to bring to press. Thin ash scattered to the heavens like crows at dusk, and for weeks afterwards, they say, little black feathers, as it were, of the great American geognostic journal, lay scattered about the streets of Pactaw, till some footstep trod them into dust. But we were gone by then.
You won him, Phidy, I told you, in the end. Perhaps I should not have given him over so easy; and for this I blame myself, knowing as I did that some deeds cannot be ventured without faith, a full faith, that is, which shall not crack along the line of doubt at the first touch. I shall not give him over again, I think; and Sam for one no longer has the heart to cast about him.
Your faithful, etc.
<
br /> Tom Jenkyns
Farewells are always the swiftest of occasions – how soon the day of my departure came. Reuben brought his coach to the door and lifted my trunk as light as a bundle of hay in his great hands. ‘Are you coming along, Barbara? We get on pretty well at the shop‚’ he said to me, confidentially. ‘Ain’t they fine horses?’
Edward embraced me warmly on the steps and kissed my hair. ‘I have forgotten Ezekiel‚’ I cried suddenly. ‘I borrowed Easy’s chronometer on … to mark the time on that bitter day … when the earth opened up. I pray you return it.’
‘Never mind, Phidy,’ Edward said, standing outside in his shirt-sleeves. ‘He can spare one, the fop. You must take something back with you, after all, to remember my son. There, now you’re off. You are much better out of this business, you know.’
That hurt me deeply, for it made my allegiances suddenly clear. I knew even then Sam had dry years ahead, and that we can resign ourselves to unhappiness is as much a miracle to me as faith. (The clock now lies ticking on the table where I write.)
So on that bright spring afternoon I stood with my trunks around me at the pier. Bubbles saw them on to the boat and gave me a quick kiss on either cheek. ‘I hope we have not disappointed you‚’ she said.
I thought of Tom’s greetings, on that colder, more hopeful day just over a year before: ‘You’re almost too late. Have you brought fifty cents? Oh, never mind, come in. We’ll see about that later. Come on!’ I cried into the spray as they rowed me to the ship.
I dreamed a strange dream the first night on board, which has come to me often since. It was born perhaps out of my shifting bed and the clank and hiss of water and wind, and my uneasy sleep. There is something comic to it, though it troubled me sorely and I woke weeping. I dreamed that I spotted Sam on some crowded street, I could not say where. I saw him clearly among all the people, for he was a head above them, and when I found him he looked down on me, though I am taller. There was some great fear in his face, but I could not reach him and the dream shifted. A few weeks had passed and again I saw him in a crowd, and now he had to stoop for we were in a room. What I first thought was fear was sadness now, and I knew, without a word said, that he was growing and could not help himself, unfit for company, taller and thinner and more remote. It was the certainty that appalled me. He knew what would happen and could not stop. When I saw him again, a month later, he had reached such a height I could no longer make out his face.
•Epilogue•
THE GREAT TRICK, IT SEEMS TO ME, in teaching high school lies in becoming characteristic – of oneself, it goes without saying, though it does not always go without acting. ‘And me so deeply me‚’ good Dr Karpenhammer warbled at us at one particularly drunken convocation of the Blue-stocking Society … oh, many years ago now I am sure. (We have come upon the final revision of my professional ambitions.) Children believe, naturally, in the power of personality: the broad gestures, declaring, here am I and this is what I’m like. Hier steh ich, as Luther cried, ich kann nicht anders. Though we proclaim instead, Here stand I, and I can and will repeat myself – and continue to repeat, that is, until you understand me, and through such understanding, the world – or whatever particular chapter of its history we hope to sell to a rabble of eleventh graders, on a dark Thursday morning in November, when the electric lights flicker in their wire cages against the stippled ceiling-tiles, unless it is only the teacher’s hangover blinking. In short, characteristically, I have begun to affect a pipe.
You can see me, if you wish – and since I have begun with a blank, dripping day in November, I may as well continue – huddled in the half-cold in the wet parking lot, at the exit ramp, standing by Ralph, the security guard. Chatting occasionally, as I stuff the pipe-bowl with Old Virginia, and try to set the flicker a-glow – while the seniors amble ‘down the hill’ towards the subway joint, or the pizza parlour, or the tattoo parlour, for all I care, or the Irish bar hidden behind the iron stairs and stanchions of the number 9 train, on 242nd Street. Where the bums sleep over the road on the benches by the park – that flat green stretch of drizzling nowhere on which the eye lingers and for which the heart yearns from the corner window of the history office on the third floor, between the copy machine and the stack of empty water-butt jugs, unreplaced.
Of course, it takes more than a pipe to run the History Department. A pinch of gravitas, lightly sprinkled, as the salt in the pepper of my new beard; a tongue sharp or sweet as the occasion demands. And a clear access, free pipeline, to our enthusiasm – that fuel undiminished with age, by which we light the world, kindle and rise to Her, when she feeds us a fresh intimation of her nature; while keeping a sufficiency of old ardour in reserve, which (like the oil of Judas Macabee) burns brightly between these rare replenishings. (I have become a Jew, you see, at last; finally persuaded by Susie’s insistence ‘that most of us live by faiths we don’t believe in’ – quite happily, as it happens, she neglected to add, and to the benefit of our children.) A certain clutter helps, too. A dishevelment of the classroom and the person, the rumour of a mind on higher things, bruited through frequent inattentions, slips of the tongue and ‘soft, abstracted airs’ – not to mention the irremediable rummage of books, confusion of papers, curious objets d’art, ornaments, heirlooms, keepsakes, cartographical records and obsolete instruments, upon desk and shelf. To this end, if no other, Syme has proved a great resource. A copy of Phidy’s manuscript lies under a heavy round stone (painted over with ships) within my office cubicle. The magnesium flu’, that magic lantern Joe constructed, hangs from a hook in the ceiling. And the last and final proof of his genius lies in the small, wooden, glass-panelled box Tom Jenkyns built for him, before he died – which sits, under a pot of dried heather, on the top shelf of my classroom bookcase, next to the dusty and unused VCR. But I outrun myself, as ever.
Susie, as they say, doesn’t work here any more. She stopped, when Kitty (named to please me) came along, now five years old. That’s when we moved to Astoria (so Na-na could help with the baby girl), in a sweet, brick-fronted, child’s sketch of a row-house on 34th Street, with half a back garden – now flowering over, after the tireless application of Susie’s sturdy green thumb, with roses, primroses, daffodils, pinks and even a small chunky patch of potato plants and cabbages. Not to mention two bicycles, belonging to the boys, and Kitty’s tiny two-wheeler with safety wheels still screwed on, leaning awkwardly together against the fence, on good days, and spinning among the flowers, on bad. And Susie’s pine shed in the corner, looking over the garden through a broad single pane of glass, flecked with colours from the spattering of her palette – her studio.
She took up painting again when Kitty was born – idly, at first, between bouts of damp exhaustion, simply to dabble her fingers in colour again, delightful in itself – especially with her sense and flesh keened to such a pitch, the lightest touch could set her quivering. But then, as the girl grew (and began to sleep, upon occasion), the old passion consumed her – for precision, that intricate abundance of lines and angles that composes our vaguest shapes, sights and insights. We lived, still, cramped in a railroad flat on 89th and 2nd, just above a bar – a shady‚ ramshackle watering-hole, with high windows opening on to the dusty street in summer, and broken-footed chaise-longues, brocaded settees and unstuffed vermilion armchairs, cluttering the wood floors. Susie looked out the kitchen window and she painted fire-escapes, in reds that rusted like the iron ladders, and greens and coppers where the mildew caught, and shining browns where the rust and paint scabbed and scraped away. Clever and plain escapes, some with loose straggles from plant-pots clambering over and through the ironwork; occasional pieces of washing (rare); occasional misfits sitting and smoking on the steps into their opened windows; occasionally joined by company (rarer still).
I would like, from sheer romance, to say that Susie was discovered ‘by accident’ – coming home, as may be, after a long afternoon on a neighbouring side-street (further west perhaps, towards Park Av
enue), where she painted the ornate escapes of single, stony family homes, covered in plants. By the barman, perhaps, who saw her clutching a wet canvas in the entryway, and offered to buy it for the long, exposed brick wall above the fireplace. The truth is, Father and Mother Pitt in the hot summer nights used to ‘retire below’, as we told the boys, permitted for once to watch TV while they kept an eye on Baby-Kitty. While we, of course, drank lemony gins and tonics in the opened window of the bar, talking amid the tap-tap, tap-tap-tap of an evening rain, which spat dusty drops on the sidewalk between the trees. It was I, in fact, who approached the barman, over Susie’s blushing, anxious protestations, somewhat puckered by the lemon rind she twisted in her mouth, and persuaded him to hang a series of oils, by a local artist, recording the ‘quiet facades of neighbourhood life’.
In truth, she needed little discovery, possessing as she did a mother in the trade. As Susie declared to me, her early shyness overcome, plugging the corner of her mouth with an imaginary cigar, ‘I got my peoples here about me.’ So she did. And made a quiet, unsteady income, on top of my promotion to ‘Department Head’ (a strange, unflattering title, I maintain), sufficient to support the purchase of a house in Queens, on another, more permanent, mortgage of our loves and lives. (If I tell you that we now drive ‘the family car’, finely tuned, as the family insisted, and riding sweetly on four ‘perfectly acceptable’ tyres, I believe you will understand that I have said all I need to say upon the subject of our settling in and dawn)
Then, two years ago, my father died. On the quiet, as usual. Or, rather, in such characteristic solitude that nobody could have heard him had he shouted. The maid, Florinda, who came on Tuesdays, found him in the bathroom, slumped back against the cistern with his head on one side. He was one of those old men who got thin against the grain, skinny as he never was in youth. (Pitt, like his son, was born plump.) His neck lay curiously exposed, bristling slightly, fine enough for a single hand to curl about it, as they lifted him from the spot. Florinda, of course, never touched him; but a career spent among the dirty corners of people’s lives had prepared her for the corner in which she found him dead. She called me first, and – since sweet summer had come, greening and thickening and dusting the city – caught me at home, in a dressing-gown at one in the afternoon, watching cartoons with Kitty. ‘There was nothing in the pot‚’ she said, ‘Dr Pitt. He did not even go.’
The Syme Papers Page 63
