The Vixen

by Francine Prose

  And Simon? What about Simon? My mother’s father’s name was Shimon. The translation was imperfect. In the Old Testament, Simon was one of the brothers who tried to murder Joseph.

  I hadn’t (or maybe I had) intended to compound these misapprehensions by writing what turned out to be my Harvard admissions essay about the great Puritan sermon, Jonathan Edwards’s “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” delivered in Massachusetts, in 1741. My English teacher, Miss Singer, assigned us to write about something that moved us. Moved, I assumed, could mean frightened. I wanted to write about Dracula, but my mother paged through my American literature textbook and told me to read the Puritans if I wanted to understand our country.

  I wrote about Edwards’s faith that God wanted him to terrify his congregation by describing the vengeance that the deity planned to take on the wicked unbelieving Israelites. It seemed unnecessary to mention that I was one of the sinners whom God planned to throw into the fire. I was afraid that my personal relation to the material might appear to skew my reading of this literary masterpiece.

  I had no idea that Miss Singer would send my essay to a friend who worked in the Harvard admissions office. Did Harvard know whom they were admitting? Perhaps the committee imagined that Simon Putnam was a lost Puritan lamb, strayed from the flock and stranded in Brooklyn, a lamb they awarded a full scholarship to bring back into the fold. That Simon Putnam, the prodigal Pilgrim son, was a suit I was trying on, a skin I would stretch and struggle to fit, until I realized, with relief, that it never would.

  The Holocaust had taught us: No matter what you believed or didn’t, the Nazis knew who was Jewish. They will always find us, whoever the next they would be. It was not only pointless but wrong—a sin against the six million dead—to deny one’s heritage, though my uncle Madison had done a remarkable job of erasing his class, religious, and ethnic background. I tried not to think about the sin I was half committing as I half pretended to come from a family that was nothing like my family, from a place far from Coney Island. If someone asked me if I was Jewish, I would have said yes, but why would anyone ask Simon Putnam, with his Viking-blond hair and blue eyes? My looks were the result of some recessive gene, or, as my mother said, perhaps some Cossack who rode through a great-great-grandmother’s village.

  * * *

  When Harvard ended, in June, I’d returned to Brooklyn without having acquired one useful contact or skill my parents had hoped would be conferred on me, along with my diploma. Another lie of omission: My mother and father were astonished to learn that I had majored in Folklore and Mythology. What kind of subject was that? What had I learned in four years that could be useful to me or anyone else? How could eight semesters of fairy tales prepare me for a career?

  Freshman year, I’d taken Professor Robertson Crowley’s popular course, “Mermaids and Talking Reindeer,” because it was a funny title and it sounded easy. After a few weeks, I knew that the tales Crowley collected and his theories about them were what I wanted to study. Handed down over generations, these narratives were not only enthralling but also seemed to me to reveal something deep and mysterious about experience, about nature, about our species, about what it meant to tell a story—what it meant to be human. I wanted to know what Crowley knew, though I wasn’t brave or hardy enough to live among the reindeer herders, shamans, and cave-dwelling witches who’d been his informants. I wanted to be like Crowley more than I wanted to sit on the Supreme Court or win the Nobel Prize or do any of the things my parents dreamed I might do.

  Despite everything I have learned since, I can still remember my excitement as I listened to Crowley’s lectures. I felt that I was hearing the answer to a question that I hadn’t known enough to ask. That feeling was a little like falling in love, though, never having fallen in love, I didn’t recognize the emotions that went with it.

  By the time I took his class, Crowley was too old for adventure travel. He’d become a kind of Ivy League shaman. Later, he would become the academic guru for Timothy Leary and the LSD experimenters, and soon after that he was encouraged to retire.

  Every Thursday morning, the long-white-haired, trim-white-bearded Crowley stood at the bottom of the amphitheater and, with his eyes squeezed shut, told us folktales in the stentorian tones of an Old Testament prophet. Many of these stories have stayed with me, stories about babies cursed at birth, brides turned into foxes, children raised by forest animals. Most were tales of deception, insult, and vengeance. Crowley told story after story, barely pausing between them. I loved the wildness, the plot turns, the delicate balance between the predictable and the surprising. I took elaborate notes.

  I had found my direction.

  At the start of the second lecture, Crowley told us, “The most important and overlooked difference between people and animals is the desire for revenge. Lions kill when they’re hungry, not to carry out some ancient blood feud that none of the lions can remember.”

  He kept returning to the idea that revenge was an essential part of what makes us human. Lying went along with it, rooted deep in our psyches. He ran through lists of wily tricksters—Coyote, Scorpion, Fox—and of heroes, like Odysseus, who disguise themselves and cleverly deflect the enemy’s questions.

  It was unsettling to take a course called “Mermaids and Talking Reindeer” that should have been called “Lying and Revenge.” But after a few classes we got used to all the murderous retribution: the reindeer trampling a man who’d killed a fawn, the mermaids drowning the fisherman who’d caught one of their own in his net, the feud between the Albanian sworn virgins and the rapist tribal chieftain. Crowley told so many stories that proved his theories that I began to question what I’d learned from my parents, which was that most human beings, not counting Nazis, sincerely want to be good.

  What little I knew about revenge came from noir films and Shakespeare. What would make me want to kill? No one could predict how they’d react when a loved one was threatened or hurt, a home destroyed or stolen. But why would you perpetuate a feud that would doom your great-grandchildren to a future of violence and bloodshed?

  I was more familiar with lying. How often had I told my parents that I’d spent the evening studying with my friends when the truth was that we’d ridden the Cyclone, again and again? Lying seemed unavoidable: social lies, little lies, lies of omission and misdirection. I wondered where I would draw the line, what lie I couldn’t tell, and I wondered when and how my limits would be tested.

  I wrote my final paper for Crowley’s course on a tale told by the Swamp Cree nation, about a Windigo, a monster with a sweet tooth and a skeleton made of ice. In revenge for some insult, the Windigo uproots huge trees and tosses them around, killing the animals that the Cree depend on for survival. Finally the people lure the monster to their village with the promise of a cache of honey, and the warriors kill it with copper spears, heated in the fire and thrust into the Windigo’s chest, melting its icy heart and bones.

  Lying, revenge, the story had everything. I wrote my essay in a fever heat even as I used words I would never normally use, translating myself into a foreign language, the language of academia, clotted with phrases like thus, nevertheless we see, and consequently it would seem, with words like deem, furthermore, and adjudge. The A that I received was my only one that semester, thus further strengthening my desire to study with Robertson Crowley.

  At the end of the term, students called on Crowley for individual conferences, and he advised us on what we might want to focus on, at Harvard.

  He stood to greet me as I entered his office, deep in the stacks of Widener Library. The furry hangings and snarling wooden masks with bulging eyeballs and bloody incisors reminded me of the mechanical clowns and Cyclops outside the Coney Island dark rides. I was ashamed of myself for recalling something so vulgar in that hallowed place of learning, in the office that I so wanted to be mine someday.

  Crowley said, “Mr. Putnam. Good work. While you are at college you must study ‘The Burning.’”

 
“Great idea,” I said. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome. Now will you please send in the next student?”

  I’d watched other students go into his office. Several had stayed much longer. I tried not to dwell on this or to wonder if I’d failed in some way, and if his friendly compliment and his advice were a way of rushing me out. I chose to ignore this distressing memory when, three years later, I asked Crowley for a graduate school recommendation.

  Leaving Crowley’s office, I’d had no idea what “The Burning” was. It took all my courage to ask his pretty assistant, who later became a respected anthropologist and disappeared in the Guatemalan highlands in the 1980s. I pretended to know what he could have meant, but . . .

  “Obviously,” she said, “Njal’s Saga. The only thing he could mean.”

  I read the saga that summer. When I got to the end, I reread it. The world it portrayed was merciless and violent, but beautiful, like a film or a dream, a world of cold fog rising off the ice, of mists that engulfed you and separated you from your companions. I read other sagas, but I kept going back to that one. Why did I like it best? I wrote my senior thesis about it, as if the answer would emerge if I only read the text more closely and wrote about it at greater length and depth.

  Running through the thirteenth-century saga is a long and vicious dispute between Njal and a man named Flosi. This kinsman kills that kinsman; one soldier kills another. Each death is payback, brutal death repaid by brutal death. Under attack, Njal takes refuge with his clan, in the family longhouse. Flosi’s men surround them. They let the women and children go, but when one of Njal’s sons tries to sneak out, disguised as a woman, he is recognized and beheaded. Flosi’s men set the building on fire. Eleven people die. Near the end, Njal’s surviving son kills a man for mocking his brother’s failed escape.

  I wrote about revenge. I had to. Crowley was on my committee. I wrote about truth and honor, about masculinity, and how even sworn enemies knew that it was evil to slander the innocent dead. I had a scholar’s curiosity, a deep love for my subject. I loved research. I loved the way that one text led me to another, the way that each book suggested the next I needed to read.

  After my thesis was accepted with high honors, I passed Crowley in the hall, and he said, “Congratulations.”

  Later I went to see him after I’d been rejected by the University of Chicago. I thought he might know why. I knew it was pathetic to ask, but I couldn’t help it.

  He seemed not to remember me. He nodded as he listened to my story, which took two sentences to tell.

  He said, “I’m sorry. Good luck.”

  * * *

  Back home that summer, I slept a lot. My parents said: He’s catching up on sleep. He worked so hard for four years. I liked napping on the love seat with the television on. I woke to the strident voice of a Belgian chef teaching American housewives how to prepare frangipane tarts and veal stews, dishes that, she clearly believed, American women were incapable of making. During the commercial breaks, my mother sighed so theatrically that I couldn’t pretend to nap. The advertisements were her signal to say, Cheer up, Simon, have patience. There’s so much to live for. Life is full of surprises.

  It would have been cruel to point out that not all surprises were good. Last year—surprise!—Mom’s migraines had forced her to quit teaching. Now she spent her days on the couch, an ice pack on her forehead. Once, during an ad for a bathtub cleanser, she said, “Simon, your mother predicts: Everything you learned in college will come in handy. Your life will get better and better.” Across the room, cartoon soap bubbles costumed as Vikings chanted a threatening baritone jingle as they swirled down the drain.

  My mother said, “You know so much about the Vikings. Maybe they could use someone like you in the advertising business.”

  I longed to share her faith, her sweet optimism. I got up and left the house.

  * * *

  The only time I felt awake was during my daily walk to Coney Island. I craved the noise, the crowds, the salt air, the sideshows on the midway.

  Rain or shine, I stood in line to ride the Cyclone with the giggling couples looking for an excuse to grope each other, the kids gearing up to cry and vomit. As the train chugged up the incline, I felt the husk of my life drop back to earth, like the stages of a rocket. After that first plunge, all that remained was the bright kernel of soul—authentic, pure, fully alive—exploding inside my head. I wanted to feel my hair blown back, my skin stretched over my bones. I wanted to think I might die, that death might solve my problems. I wanted to feel my brain pressed against my skull. Mostly, I wanted to feel grateful and happy to be alive when the train leveled and slowed. The Cyclone was my prayer, my meditation.

  In July my father timidly suggested that he could find me a job at the sporting goods store. My mother and I wheeled on him, horrified by the thought of me spending my life comparing tennis rackets. Our distress made my father seem to shrink, and I too felt smaller, reduced by my own ingratitude. I wanted my father normal-sized again. I wanted him to know that my love and respect for him didn’t mean that I wanted to work where he worked.

  All that time, in secret, my mother was also working hard, working on her brother-in-law, my uncle, the influential literary critic and public intellectual Madison Putnam, who—through his prolific writings, relentless social climbing, strong opinions, quotable bons mots, and eagerness to enter the fray of every literary controversy—had risen above his working-class origins. By the fall, my uncle had secured an entry-level position for me at Landry, Landry and Bartlett.

  * * *

  By the time I was assigned to edit The Vixen, the Patriot, and the Fanatic, I had been at Landry, Landry and Bartlett for six months, much of which I’d spent trying to figure out what I was doing there. Officially, my job as a junior assistant editor involved going through the “slush pile” of unsolicited manuscripts, rejecting hopeful first-time authors and waiting to be fired. The sense that every day could be my last made me feel like the medieval monks who kept skulls on their desks to remind them of their final end.

  I liked some things about my job. I liked the free books I could steal from the carts in the hall and from people’s offices. I liked reading the modern poets and novelists we published, writers who hadn’t been taught at Harvard, many of them European, nearly all of them alive.

  I liked the smell of coffee that greeted me in the morning, unlike my coworkers, who ignored me and who seemed to think I wouldn’t be there long enough to bother getting to know. After I’d been there for months, they treated me like someone whose name they were embarrassed to have forgotten. They looked past me, or through me, as if I were a ghost, and I began to feel like one, haunting the office. I imagined that my colleagues closed their doors as I walked past them along the labyrinthine corridors, but that would have meant that they were acknowledging my presence.

  Only the mailroom guys and the messenger called out, “Hey, Simon!” If my fellow editors were present, they looked surprised, as if they’d seen someone warmly greeting an apparition. Sometimes I imagined that my colleagues were hiding something from me, and later, when my work required hiding something from them, I was grateful for my cloak of invisibility.

  I felt lucky to have the job, though it wasn’t what I’d planned. I still longed for the library carrel smelling of dust and mold, for the warm dark cave where I could spend my life reading sagas about honor killings, about women with thieves’ eyes bringing disaster down on the men who ignored the warnings. Somewhere my authentic self was being acclaimed for his original research, even as my counterfeit self was stuffing envelopes with rejected novels about Elizabethan wenches, aristocratic Southern families with incestuous pasts, the plucky founders of small-town newspapers, and inferior imitations of The Wall, John Hersey’s bestselling novel about the Warsaw Ghetto.

  On my first day at work, a young woman named Julia, who’d had my job and was leaving because she was pregnant, showed me how to log in submissions and wr
ite a two-sentence comment—if, and only if, a stamped self-addressed envelope was enclosed. I was supposed to return each manuscript, gently marred by coffee stains to prove that I had read it, together with the form rejection letter, retyped with a personalized salutation and, if I felt moved, a brief handwritten note at the bottom of the page.

  In her soon-to-be-former office, Julia opened the desk drawers and slammed them shut. Then she snapped her hand at the tower of manuscripts stacked against the wall. She hadn’t looked at me once. I was sorry that she resented me and sorry for feeling irritated that she didn’t try to hide it. It wasn’t my fault that she’d been fired. If they hadn’t hired me, it would have been someone else.

  Under the circumstances, I kept thinking that it was wrong to notice how pretty she was, wrong to be attracted to her haunted, dissatisfied air—to some brave, reckless spirit that I thought I saw in her. I sensed there was something she wanted to say, that she almost said, then decided not to say, something weightier than suggesting I compile a list of adjectives—positive but not too positive—to use and reuse in those scrawled postscripts on the manuscripts I returned.

  I assumed that Julia’s secret had to do with the rounded belly clearly visible under her tight black dress, a daring choice at a time when pregnant women were expected to wear flowered smocks suitable for the babies they were about to have. Her outfit was even more defiant because, as I soon learned, Julia wasn’t married.

  Julia shrugged, miming boredom as she glanced at the toppling stacks of folders and envelopes, the mountains of unsolicited manuscripts. I felt like a combination of a clerk in Dickens, the girl in “Rumpelstiltskin” forced to spin straw into gold, and Hercules facing his thirteenth labor: Kill the lion and the Hydra. Capture the dog that guards the underworld. Muck out the Augean stables—and oh, when you’re done, read the slush pile at Landry, Landry and Bartlett.