Quarrel & Quandary

by Cynthia Ozick

  I put my sandwich into the drawer with the carbons and arranged my desk. First I placed Wellek-and-Warren next to the typewriter, so as to remind me of the nature of my soul. Then I plucked up three sheets of carbon paper and three sheets of blank paper, and stacked them behind one of the forms, and got ready to begin. I had a page of numbers to copy from—clusters of numbers: some had six digits, some four, some ten, and each set of digits had to be typed into an oblong box. It was hard to keep track, and I discovered in alarm that I had typed the same group of digits twice. I found a typewriter eraser (a stiff round thing, with a miniature whiskbroom at one end) and tried to erase the mistake on the form, but the eraser scraped the paper and almost tore it through; it made an unsightly translucent lozenge. Worse, I had forgotten about the carbons underneath. When I inspected them, they were hopelessly smudged. There was nothing to do but toss the whole mess into the trash and start over.

  I started over many times.

  “How’re you doing?” George Berkeley asked, passing by.

  “I’m afraid I’ve wasted some forms.”

  “Not to worry, you’ll get the hang of it,” he said. “The girl you’re replacing didn’t have a Master’s, believe me.”

  At lunchtime I walked to Bryant Park with my sandwich, and rapturously mooned through the densities of Wellek-and-Warren. Summer in the city! Pigeons preened in the grass; young women in white sandals and light skirts sauntered by; the shoulders of the great Library baked serenely in the heat; an ice-cream wagon floated out its jolly carillon.

  But by the end of that first day—it was Monday—I still had not managed to type the right numbers into the right boxes on a single form.

  “Now I don’t want you to get discouraged,” George Berkeley said. “All this is routine stuff, and I know you’ve been dealing with things a whole lot more complicated than a bunch of figures. I notice you’re doing some studying on the side, and that’s what I call desirable. I’ve been waiting a long while to get hold of someone like you, a smart girl who thinks about more than the color of her nail polish. It struck me right away that you don’t wear any nail polish, and that’s why I hired you—that and the fact that you lug that book around and keep up with your studying. I expect you to get somewhere with this firm. I give myself credit for being a pretty fair judge of people. I can spot someone who’s going to go far with us. Potential,” he said, “that’s what I’m interested in.”

  He dragged a chair over from a nearby desk, and settled himself just opposite me; he was all earnestness. We were sitting almost knee to knee, with his big milky face so close to mine that I could see the pores, large and clean, in the wings of his nostrils. Healed pockmarks ran up the sides of his cheeks. He looked scrubbed and tidy, and it came to me that he might be the kind of man who went to bed under a framed slogan, like those I had seen in landladies’ rooming houses in Columbus: BLESS THIS HOME, or GOD LOVES ME, or the pure-hearted TRUTH MAY BE BLAMED, BUT CANNOT BE SHAMED. The truth was that just then, in the middle of a peroration intended for my improvement, I was feeling considerably shamed. I had been taken into Margate, Haroulian under false colors; I had committed a lie of omission. George Berkeley, himself in a position of permanent allegiance to Margate, Haroulian, assumed I was what he termed “entry-level,” a young person in pursuit of advancement in business. I did not disabuse him.

  “Now let me tell you something about all these lists of figures,” he went on. “They may not seem very glamorous, but they are our lifeline. They are the lifeline of our country. A really intelligent person can see right through to what these lists of figures actually stand for, and just as soon as you get the gist of all that, I have every confidence you’ll be as impressed as I am with how figures like ours keep this country safe and strong. Some people may think that keeping the books the way we do it around here is the exact opposite of the sort of charge a person like you gets out of … well, let’s say poetry, a poem like ‘The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere,’ let’s say. Well, I get the same charge out of business that you get out of … that’s Henry Wordsworth Longfellow, isn’t it?”

  There was no way out. “Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,” I said weakly. “Wordsworth is a different poet.”

  “That’s fine,” he said, “that’s very good. I like it that you’re enthusiastic that way, and by this time tomorrow, watch and see, you’ll be just as expert with our figures. Now here’s my suggestion. Suppose instead of going out to lunch tomorrow, you join me in Mr. Margate’s office. I’ll order in some sandwiches and we can have a talk about books—I’m a book lover myself. I’ll bring in a couple to show you that’ve been helpful to me in my career here. You might find them just as useful as I have.”

  I said, “I didn’t know Mr. Margate had an office.”

  “Mr. Margate passed away eight years ago. It’s my office now, but we still call it Mr. Margate’s office. Mr. Margate was the founder of this firm, and even though he got to be very old, he was remarkable to the end. He could carry columns and columns of figures in his head. One look at a column of figures and Mr. Margate had them. Mr. Haroulian is certainly a brilliant man, but Mr. Margate was a genius. He was married to an authoress—she passed on right after he did. It was Mr. Margate who gave me these books I’m going to lend you, and believe me they had an effect on my whole attitude and behavior in the office. One of them was written by Mrs. Margate herself.”

  I was reluctant to give up my Bryant Park lunch hour to sit in Mr. Margate’s office with George Berkeley. Besides, I was discovering that my lie had a living pulse in it, and was likely to go on ticking: it appeared to be leading me to a future in accounting. That future was visible in George Berkeley, but it was still more visible in Mr. Haroulian, even though Mr. Haroulian was a kind of apparition. His door was always shut; whatever he did behind it was secret, significant, worldly. But several times a day a small bony man with copper-penny eyes and a domelike head would glide by, expressionlessly, monarchically, caressing his mustache and speaking to no one. Once or twice he halted in front of my wastebasket and stared down into the crumpled heap of my discards and sad mistakes.

  On Tuesday at twelve-thirty, a delivery boy carried in a cardboard tray with two lettuce-and-tomato sandwiches on it, and two paper cups filled with a urine-yellow liquid, which proved to be apple juice. George Berkeley, it developed, was a vegetarian and a health theorist.

  He asked where I had eaten lunch the day before.

  “On a bench in the park,” I said.

  “Not in the sun?” he said. “You should keep out of the sun. It affects the nerves. And I hope you didn’t have meat or cheese. My rule is, if it comes from anything that has a head on it, don’t eat it.”

  He reached into Mr. Margate’s desk drawer and brought out two well-worn books. It was plain that they had been zealously read and reread. One was How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie. The full title of the other, by Bertha N. Margate, was Changing Losses into Bosses: A Handbook for Talented and Ambitious Young People Who Feel They Have Come to a Dead End Yet Wish to Succeed in the Business World.

  “Mrs. Margate knew whereof she wrote. According to what she says here, when she met Mr. Margate he was making fifteen dollars a week, but with her on board to inspire him he ended up on top. Look at this! Solid mahogany!” He slapped the ruddy flanks of Mr. Margate’s glossy desk. “You just take these couple of books and look them through, and you’ll feel the difference they make. But whatever you do, don’t skip Mrs. Margate’s Chapter Six, the one called ‘Inspiration Increaseth Potential.’ You’ll notice she uses Biblical language all through. Now tell me,” he finished, “how did it go this morning? How’re you doing?”

  “A little better,” I fibbed, and opened to Mrs. Margate’s Table of Contents.

  “That’s fine, that’s just fine,” George Berkeley said in his flat way. I wondered whether he was putting to instant use Mrs. Margate’s Chapter Twelve: “A Cheerful Word Encourageth Subordinates.” He wrapped his sandwich cr
umbs in a paper napkin, made a little wad of it, and threw the wad into Mr. Margate’s otherwise pristine wastebasket with a force that startled me. Under all that restraint and hollow optimism, something boiled; behind those nondescript syllables what unknown yet colorful life lay in passionate ambush? Perhaps the god of figures did not suffice. I wanted to romanticize George Berkeley, but all at once he romanticized himself: he turned inquisitive, peering over the bow of Margate, Haroulian into the uncharted sea beyond. “I’m interested in that kick,” he said. “What’s that name again, the fellow who kicked the stone?”

  “Dr. Johnson? Who refuted Bishop Berkeley?”

  “That’s the one. Well, I don’t see it. How did that settle anything?”

  “Berkeley insisted that matter wasn’t real, only mind was real. So Dr. Johnson kicked the stone to prove the reality of matter. Or you could say to prove the falsity of the invisible.”

  “Lost his temper and let go, I can understand a thing like that. Whose side are you on?”

  I was astonished. It was a question no graduate student would think to ask; I had never before considered it. But wasn’t A Theory of Literature on the side of the invisible?

  “I guess I’m with Berkeley,” I said.

  “Well, I’m the Berkeley who’s with the fellow who did the kicking. Is that what that book you’re studying’s about?”

  “No, it isn’t,” I said. Here was an embarrassment: how to explain Wellek-and-Warren to the man who bore the name of a classical idealist, yet was deaf to the cry of eternals and universals? “It’s about a way of reading and analyzing what you read. It’s called the New Criticism. You’re supposed to read without being influenced by history or biography or psychology. As if the words were immutable. You’re supposed to … well, you just concentrate on the language, and leave out everything to do with … I don’t know, external entanglements. Human relations.”

  “The New Criticism,” George Berkeley repeated. The white tract of his forehead slowly flooded pink. “Seems to me they’re teaching the wrong things in the colleges nowadays. You’ll never get ahead based on that kind of idea. You’d do a lot better, believe me, with Dale Carnegie and Mrs. Margate.”

  Though I was careful to set Dale Carnegie and Mrs. Margate on top of Wellek-and-Warren on the corner of my desk next to the typewriter, I did not do well the rest of that day.

  Wednesday was the same. And again Mr. Haroulian slid silently out, circling and circling the narrow space in which I toiled and failed, toiled and failed. Again he looked into my wastebasket—that wild surf, all those ruined and wrinkled forms, those smudged and spoiled and torn tropisms of my despair.

  At noon I left Wellek-and-Warren behind and took Mrs. Margate, along with my salami sandwich, to Bryant Park. The midtown heat sizzled in the path. Even the pigeons confined their pecking to random blots of shade eked out by a few dangling dry leaves, or the edge of a bench, or a knot of men with briefcases standing fixed in conversation, sweltering in their puckered seersucker jackets. The brightness dazzled and dazed; pinpoints of painful light glanced out of the necklaces and wristwatches of passers-by. George Berkeley had warned that the sun would trouble my nerves; or perhaps it was Mrs. Margate who was endangering the motionless sticky air. A dread fell over me. I could never live up to her ardor:

  Chapter Nine

  WHAT IS EXPECTED OF YOUNG WOMEN IN BUSINESS

  When the Psalmist saith, “Judge me, O Lord, for I have walked in my integrity,” surely he is looking ahead to the conduct of young women in business offices today. When we speak of integrity in this connection, we must always remember that it behooves young women to be accommodating, never condescending; to accept the meanest drudgery of paperwork with humble mien, for this is the instrument of your future ascent; and to treat with superintendents and superiors as with representatives of the power of aspiration. I well recall the case of Miss M.W., an attractive girl of twenty, who considered herself “spunky,” and who consistently contradicted her employers, until one day she learned to her dismay that what she regarded as “courageous” was viewed by others as “impudent.” Woe to the pert young woman in a busy office! (Young men, do not suppose that this advice does not apply to YOU!)

  I noticed that Mrs. Margate’s handbook was dated 1933, and was self-published. Probably Mr. Margate himself had footed the bill.

  On Thursday morning George Berkeley approached my desk. The shallow cheeriness was drained out of him. It was as if the engines of Margate, Haroulian had without warning changed course; he looked like a man dizzied by a wheeling horizon. Two thin streams of sweat voyaged down the immaculate gullies that lay between his little tight nostrils and the flat string that was his mouth. I saw the throb of his throat. On the broad windowsills a pair of electric fans turned sluggishly against an overcast cityscape; it was going to rain.

  “Mr. Haroulian wants to see you right away,” he said. He did not ask me how I was doing; he did not egg me on to loftier achievement.

  “I’ll just finish this sheet,” I said. I was close to the bottom of the page, and was afraid of losing my place in the march of numbers.

  “Right away! Get into Mr. Haroulian’s office this minute, will you? I’ve had enough chewing out from Mr. Haroulian over the likes of you.”

  Mr. Haroulian began at once to tell me about Lillian, his daughter. Since I had never heard him speak, his voice was a surprise: it ran loud and fast, like a motorcycle. Lillian, he boomed, was twenty-two; a student at Juilliard; a superlative violinist. When Lillian wasn’t at school she was practicing—she hardly had a minute, not even to pick up her music. All her time was admirably occupied.

  “Schirmer’s on East Forty-third Street. Shake a leg and get over there,” Mr. Haroulian growled. He handed me his daughter’s shopping list; fleetingly, I took in flashes of Mozart, Beethoven, Sibelius. Lillian’s photograph was on Mr. Haroulian’s desk. A bony royal snippet, heir to the throne, eyes as round as coins—just like Mr. Haroulian himself. All that was missing was Mr. Haroulian’s gray imperious mustache, which at that moment appeared to be sweeping me out of his sight like a diminutive but efficient broom. I understood that in Mr. Haroulian’s opinion, my time was not so admirably occupied.

  Walking uptown to Schirmer’s in the thick late-June air, with big raindrops darkening the pavement, I thought of “The Changeling,” a story by Mary Lamb that I remembered from childhood. A nurse, ambitious for her offspring, switches two infants in their cradles. One is her own; the other is the daughter of her aristocratic employers. The nurse’s natural child, dull and with no talent at all, is lovingly reared by the cultivated aristocratic family, though they are quietly disappointed in the undistinguished girl. Meanwhile their real child, brought up by the nurse, is deprived for years of the development of her innate musical gifts. When the ruse is discovered and the musical daughter is at last restored to her rightful parents, she is showered with music lessons and flourishes. Mr. Haroulian, I felt, in sending me on this humiliating errand, could not recognize that his daughter—exactly my age, after all—might be the inauthentic one, while I, plodding onward in rain-soaked shoes in service to her, might secretly be the genuine article. It hardly lessened my bitterness that Wellek-and-Warren was a thousand times more to me than any violin.

  That was Thursday. On Friday morning my work on the forms unexpectedly improved. As George Berkeley had promised—before the great wave of his disappointment in the New Criticism—I was starting to get the hang of it, and the rows of digits were finally jumping into their proper boxes. Not all of them, to be sure; for every form I struggled to complete, two or three ruined ones went into the wastebasket. Yet even this minor accomplishment depended on my mastery of the typewriter eraser; I had learned, for example, to erase each carbon separately.

  Ten minutes before the lunch hour George Berkeley came to collect Dale Carnegie and Mrs. Margate. “You won’t be needing these,” he said, and swooped them away. That left Wellek-and-Warren exposed on the corner of my desk; he
rested his palm on it. “Dale Carnegie may be a bit more famous, but he doesn’t hold a candle to Mrs. Margate. I don’t suppose you’ve even looked into her.”

  “Yes, I have,” I said.

  “And what did you think?”

  I hesitated: my “spunky” might just turn out to be his “pert.” The best answer, I speculated, would be to return diligently to the typewriter.

  “Well, never mind. No one here cares what you think. Stop typing,” he ordered.

  I stopped.

  “I’ve always had Mr. Haroulian’s perfect confidence—I’ve had it right along. It’s your sort of thinking that’s put me in trouble with him. I’ve been on the telephone with Mr. Haroulian, and we’ve both decided that you ought to spend the rest of the afternoon just as you please. And you don’t need to come back on Monday. Mr. Haroulian’s attending his daughter’s concert today, or he would be telling you this himself.”

  I knew he felt betrayed; he had put his trust in higher education.

  Then, as if he were handling an unfamiliar and possibly harmful small animal, George Berkeley picked up Wellek-and-Warren and carefully placed it on the floor. He loosened his tie, something I had never seen him do. His damp neck glowed. “And by the way,” he said politely, “here’s what we here at Margate, Haroulian think of the New Criticism.”

  With one crisp thwack of his foot he sent A Theory of Literature hurtling against the wall.

  I crossed the room, retrieved the sacred text, and escaped into the somnolent molasses sunlight of a New York summer afternoon—a failure and an incompetent, and not a changeling at all.

  The Synthetic Sublime

  1.

  More than any other metropolis of the Western world, New York disappears. It disappears and then it disappears again; or say that it metamorphoses between disappearances, so that every seventy-five years or so another city bursts out, as if against nature—new shapes, new pursuits, new immigrants with their unfamiliar tongues and worried uneasy bustle. In nature, the daffodil blooms, withers, vanishes, and in the spring returns—always a daffodil, always indistinguishable from its precursor. Not so New York, preternatural New York! Go to Twenty-third Street and Eighth Avenue: where is the Grand Opera House, with its statuary and carvings, its awnings and Roman-style cornices? Or reconnoiter Thirteenth Street and Broadway: who can find Wallack’s Theatre, where the acclaimed Mrs. Jennings, Miss Plessy Mordaunt, and Mr. J. H. Stoddart once starred, and where, it was said, “even a mean play will be a success”? One hundred years ago, no one imagined the dissolution of these dazzling landmarks; they seemed as inevitable, and as permanent, as our Lincoln Center, with its opera and concerts and plays, and its lively streaming crowds.