Heir to the Glimmering World Read online

  "Go work on your Chaucer," he would say. This was a bit of comradely mockery. Chaucer had no place in my misshapen little college; literature, except for the pedagogical kind, was hardly wanted there. I had dreamt of Gothic arches and the worn flagstones of old libraries—where such a grand yearning came from, I hardly knew. Unaccountably, my heart was set on Smith or Vassar or Bryn Mawr; I imagined afternoon teas, and white gloves, and burning lips (mine, perhaps) murmuring out of a book. But all that was wistfulness—there was no money for such romantic hopes, and my patchy record in high school, my father warned, would never have won me a scholarship. I was only an average girl from Thrace Central, what was I thinking of? The right spot for me, he said, if I expected to earn my way, if he was ever going to get me off his hands, was Albany Teachers' College. He couldn't afford to keep me in the dorms, and anyhow they were famous for resembling dungeons. With luck he might manage to talk cousin Bertram into putting me up. "Makes sense, doesn't it?" he said.

  I hated that college. There were classes in pedagogy and psychology and "early childhood and adolescence": these were taught like the tenets of a cult. I did not believe in any of them. I had no interest in becoming a teacher. I had observed enough of my father's predicaments to want to flee any reminder of schools. What I cared about was reading novels.

  Bertram lived on the ninth floor of a modern apartment building, with fire escapes jutting from the window ledges. I discovered that if I climbed out and stood on our own fire escape—a kind of latticed metal balcony—I could just see the roof of the State House. This was impressive; it was a glimpse of history, of law; there was gravity in it. Sometimes, when Bertram was away, I sat on the windowsill, with my legs stretched along the cool slats of the fire escape, and smelled the rain. Albany rain was different. It smelled of excitement.

  Bertram was away much of the time. Hospital shifts went halfway around the clock, and pharmacy hours conformed. Often he came home when I was already asleep. And once I was not asleep—I lay dozing, vaguely dazed: how had I arrived in this bed, in this room, in Bertram's big flat? I had a bedroom to myself, with a dressing alcove (Bertram had put a desk and a typewriter in there, and turned it into a tiny study), and my own bathroom. When my father forgot to pay my first quarter's tuition, Bertram instantly sent a check to the college bursar. I was certain my father had not forgotten; Saratoga, or poker with Wilson, had cleaned him out.

  Bertram was quietly loitering at the partly open door of my room. I heard him breathing, and wondered whether he was listening for my own breathing. There was something maternal about his standing there, and I wanted to call out; I wanted to ask, out of the darkness, whether it was true that my mother had died in childbirth. But I held back. Bertram was my mother's cousin, though not as my father had made me understand this: he was not a cousin by blood. Instead he was a cousin to my mother's first cousin; it was a tenuous in-law connection. Laughing, Bertram had worked it out for me—he was the son of my mother's aunt's husband's sister. He was not really a relation. He had never known my mother. He had no stories to tell. But when, some days afterward, I confided my phantom memory—my mother lying on a couch and holding a rag doll—Bertram said, "That's what you should trust."

  "My father says it's a hallucination. A wish-dream."

  "That's why you should trust it. The world doesn't get better without wishes."

  "My father doesn't care about the world." I thought of him crouching behind a closed door at Croft Hall, clandestinely gambling with his pupils.

  Bertram said mildly, "Well, maybe you'll make up for him."

  It was not only his work at the hospital that occupied Bertram's nights. He went to weekly meetings and occasionally to what he called "rallies," after which he was hoarse for days; sometimes he stood on picket lines. He was thinking, he said, of joining the Party, but he was still unsure. "It takes your whole life," he explained, "and I may not be able to give it the time. Got to pay the landlord. But they're on the right track, those people." I asked what the right track was; this made him smile. I had seen the half-turn of that smile before. It meant that he thought me as innocent as a savage.

  "First we're going to abolish rent," he said, "and after that tuition. Shelter and education for everyone." Again the twist of a smile: Bertram was not above self-parody. "To each according to his need. That's how the poet puts it."

  At that instant I discovered why he had let me come and live with him. It was because of my need. Or, at any rate, my father's.

  Bertram was thirty-six. He had once been married, a dozen years ago, but she—he never said "my wife"—had left him after only two years. "She didn't like me," he told me; he never said her name. "I suppose I was too short." I could not imagine not liking Bertram, or finding him unbeautiful. He was not much taller than I, but his head was large, with crescents of unshorn brown curls sticking up from around his neck and ears. "Got to get a haircut," he would say. Or else: "Beginning to look like Karl Marx or Jesus Christ, take your pick." Or else, when he was actually on his way to the barber shop, "Goddamn hospital rules. Bad enough they dress me up in a white coat, like a dogcatcher."

  Now and then he said, "Put the chain on the door, will you? Won't be home at all tonight, got a date."

  I was seventeen and stabbed by jealousy. My jealousy felt literally like a stab: it resembled the quick pain I would sometimes feel in my groin on the left side, just before my period. Bertram did not hide from me that he had a sex life (his words). Toward me he was affectionate and perfectly chaste: his kiss touched my forehead or my cheek, or, comically, my nose. But he worried about appearances. "Honor is the appearance of honor," he recited. "I read that somewhere. So look, if anyone ever asks, you tell them you're my little sister away from home to go to school. Half of it's true anyhow. But don't say cousins. Nobody believes cousins."

  When my father again neglected to send the money for my tuition on time, Bertram said, "There's no point to it, your pa's out of the picture, so never mind. From now on I'll take care of it. A dollar goes a long way these days. Trouble is," he added, "you've got to have the dollar." In my eyes Bertram seemed rich. I marveled that his apartment had a dining room with a glass breakfront and a spacious square table covered by a lace cloth. There were six carved mahogany chairs with green leather seats. All this heavy furniture, Bertram told me, had belonged to his mother. She had left him the dining set, her wedding ring, and his father's considerable life insurance. "I've got some leeway," he said. "You could even say I'm in the money, so don't worry about your pa's not coming through. It's hard times."

  Bertram often spoke of hard times. His two themes were the Depression and what he called "the reformation of society." The hospital sweepers were agitating for a union, but more than half of them were afraid to strike. Bertram went out with the strikers. "Have a look at this," he urged me one evening—he was heading for a rally—and handed me a copy of The Communist Manifesto. It was a thin little thing, with a pale pink cover.

  The next morning he asked me what I had made of it.

  "It's like a hymn. A psalm."

  "You could think of it as architecture. A blueprint."

  "Oh, I don't know," I said. It was true that I did not know; what I knew was that I had been brought up to cynicism. I was not easily inspired or moved.

  Bertram's head moved me—the brown ringlets rising straight out of his temples like a waterfall in reverse, the line of his nose with its gradual change of course, the virtuous motherly mouth. At times he caught me looking at him; this disconcerted him. "Hey, you're a kid," he would say. In my classes at the college I shut out the droning assault of lectures—Dewey, Pestalozzi, Montessori, Piaget, how to write a lesson plan—and filled the back pages of my notebook with Bertram's name, scrupulously inscribed over and over again. At night in my bed I shredded his name into mental anagrams, and the next day set them down: at, am, are, ram, mar, tram, mart, tame, rate, mate, meat, eat, beat, rare, tear, bear, mare, bet, bat, tab, rat, ream, beam, team, art, tar, r
ear, tare, brat, bare, tea, me, be, ear, term, berm. It struck me that some magical syllable might be hidden among the letters—a hint, an illumination.

  I wanted Bertram's kiss to land just once, even if unintentionally, on my lips.

  "What's this?" he said. He had found the paper with the anagrams. I had left it on the dining room table. "Berm? Tare? Is this some sort of test? Something from your psych class?"

  "It's everything that comes out of Bertram," I said. "All the words."

  "How about that. Rosie, I told you, to me you're a kid."

  After that he began bringing his girlfriends home to supper. Sometimes all three of us would walk over to a nearby movie house, I feeling sullen and stifled, Bertram with his arm around whoever his date happened to be. Later he and the woman would march me back, right to the door of Bertram's flat, where the two of them would leave me. Once again I was alone for the night. "Remember to put the chain on," Bertram would remind me. He had a fear of break-ins. It was hard times, he said, not human nature, that promoted thievery.

  Bertram thought well of human nature. The women he brought home did not. These were always women he met at rallies, or on picket lines; they all had short black or brown hair and fiery tongues given to malice. Most wore thick lisle stockings stuffed, whatever the weather, into thonged sandals. One dangled long earrings made of shells that clattered; another had nearly identical earrings, but arrived in work shoes and men's trousers. They were like no women I had ever known. They were zealots; they argued and theorized and wept with enthusiasm. I did not understand their talk, wave after wave of Bukharin, Lenin, Trotsky, Budenny, Stalin, Ehrenburg. They disputed over skirmishes, kulaks, trials, solidarity, scabs. I could not tell one alien phrase from another. It was not how Bertram talked or thought. In his dreamy water-color way, Bertram spoke of poverty abolished, the lion lying down with the lamb, the hopes of mankind: it was like a painting on the wall. You could contemplate it or you could ignore it. But these fierce political women spoke of men, living men, whom they despised and would gladly have torn to pieces. Bertram admired their rages and excitements, but I was afraid of them—of their clipped hair, the forwardness of their dress, their hot familiarity with far-away crises, their blurting passion. They were angry and omniscient. It seemed to me that they were in command of the age.

  The woman who wore the shell earrings and dressed like a man (occasionally she turned up in overalls) was called Ninel. It was not her real name; it was a Party name, in honor of Lenin. "Just try spelling it backward," Bertram told me, grinning. Ninel enchanted him; the play of her name enchanted him, and I was stung: he had disliked my search for a secret signal in the letters of his own name. Yet Ninel had done the same, and it pleased him. Even Ninel's big work shoes and clumsy worsted pants with the zipper in front pleased and amused him.

  Ninel disapproved of Bertram's flat. If she saw that I had already set the dishes out on the dining room table, it made no difference, we had to move back into the kitchen to eat. Bertram's mother's furniture sickened her: that china-closet thing with the glass doors, she said, whatever it had cost, could feed a famine. She asked Bertram how he could stand to live with it. With Ninel we never went to the movies. She was scornful of stories told by shadows. She maintained that movies were the new church, a diversion for the masses; she was too serious; she was combative. Whenever Ninel came, I ate quickly and ran to hide in my little study with my book: Emma and Mr. Knightly were soon to unite. "Don't you see the point, Bert?" I would hear Ninel growl. I had chosen Bertram to be my own Mr. Knightly; instead he was being led away from his proper Emma by a woman who was conducting a revolution in his kitchen. "It's all about exploitation, however you want to look at it."

  It turned out that they were arguing about Croft Hall. "You got the kid's father a job at a place like that? What were you thinking?"

  "The man was out of work, and I knew this fellow at the hospital who had a connection over there. It seemed the right thing. Her father's a math teacher, where else could he go?"

  "In this system he could go out and dig ditches, that's what. A decent government would provide something."

  "Ninel, the fellow was in trouble, and he had the girl—"

  "To keep a place like that in business! It's just a contamination. Posh kids, offspring of the oligarchy. They're being trained to exploit, that's all. A cadet corps for the banks. Schools like that should be burned to the ground."

  Gradually the other women Bertram had been bringing home vanished. Now it was only Ninel. One night during our meal I asked her what her real name was. She hooked her thumbs into the loops of her woven-straw belt and blew out a sigh of disgust. "Miriam," she told me, "but don't you ever dare use it." This was hardly likely; we rarely had anything to say to each other. Her eye went ferociously to my book. "Jane Austen, wouldn't you know. Now that's what I call a provocation. Do you realize," she demanded, "how the servants in those big houses lived? The hours they had to put in, the paltry wages they got? Chicken-feed! And where the money to keep up those mansions came from? From plantations in the Caribbean run on the broken backs of Negro slaves!" It was as if she was leading a meeting.

  "Mr. Knightly doesn't have a plantation," I said.

  "What do you think the British Empire is? The whole thing's a plantation! The whole kit and caboodle!"

  Bertram said quietly, "You should listen to Ninel, Rosie. She's right about that."

  Ninel was angry at Jane Austen not only on account of the British Empire—she was angry at all novels. Novels, like movies, were pretend-shadows; they failed to diagnose the world as it was in reality. "Crutches," she said, "distractions. And meanwhile the moneybags and the corporate dogs eat up the poor." For Ninel, the only invention worse than novels and movies was religion. She hated her given name because it came out of the Bible. She railed against all varieties of worship. "If you want to get the real lowdown on, okay, let's take Christianity," she urged, "try this out. You're a believing Christian of the twentieth century and you're transported by time machine back into ancient Rome. You're walking around the main squares and it's all pretty impressive. Big marble cathedrals with columns. Huge statues all over the place, and folks crowding into the temples, genuflecting and bringing offerings. Plenty of priests and acolytes in fancy dress, the whole society rests on this spectacular stuff. And then you ask what's behind it, what's it all about. You sit down with a couple of these ancient Romans and they start telling you it's Jupiter, the god who lives up in the sky and runs the world. And you think, Jupiter? Jupiter? What's Jupiter? There isn't any Jupiter, it's all imagination, it's all some made-up idea. You know damn well that this sacred Jupiter that everyone's so devoted to, that everyone's dependent on, that everyone praises and carries on about, and writes epics and treatises and holy books about, and mutters prayers to ... you know damn well that their Jupiter is air, their Jupiter is a phantom, there isn't any Jupiter, no Jupiter of any kind, the whole religion's a sham and a fake and a delusion, no matter how many poets and intellectuals adhere to it, no matter how many thrills and epiphanies people get out of it. Then you come back to the twentieth century, and what you've seen and understood doesn't mean a thing, you're blind as a bat, you figure you've got the goods on Jupiter but Jesus is different, Jesus is for real, Jupiter is a vast communal lie but Jesus is a vast transcendent truth...."

  Bertram was standing at the stove, heating up the kettle for tea. He gave a pleasurable little chirp and poured the water into our cups. "Well, now you've heard one of Ninel's flights. You don't run into talk like that every day, it doesn't grow on trees."

  Bertram, I was beginning to see, was intending to marry Ninel.

  In the morning he denied it. "Not possible."

  "But you want to," I said.

  "What I want doesn't count. Ninel doesn't believe in marriage. She's against it on principle."

  Ninel was with us on a night in early March when Bertram opened the door to a seedy fellow in uniform and cap. Bertram gave him a quart
er, and the man handed him a yellow envelope. It was a telegram from the dean at Croft Hall. My father had broken the rules: he had taken a group of four third-formers to Saratoga in his car. One boy sat in the front seat next to my father. The other three were in the rear. It was dusk when they headed back to school. A hard rain, propelled by a hard wind, hastened the dark and pelted the road. They drove through swiftly forming lakes, one of which concealed the heavy branch of a middle-sized fallen tree. The wheels, spinning through the black water, struck the branch; the car was brutally flung on its side. The windshield splashed out a fountain of glass splinters and two of the doors were crushed. The three boys in the back seat survived. My father and the boy nearest him were dead.

  There was no funeral. My father was in posthumous disgrace; the dead child's parents called him a murderer. Bertram arranged for the burial with an undertaker in Troy, and with no ceremony at all my father's remains were dispatched. A week later the mail brought a package from Croft Hall: it was a box containing my father's papers. In it I found my mother's death certificate and a hospital bill dated February 15,1921—they were folded into the pages of a ragged children's book. Now there was proof: my mother had not died in childbirth. She had succumbed to blood cancer when I was three years old. Lena's disclosure, and my memory of the sofa and the rag doll, were vindicated.

  I kept almost none of these papers. They were impersonal and faintly shaming—old grade books, wrinkled lottery tickets, racetrack stubs, a dirty pack of cards, two pairs of scratched dice. Not a single item hinted at my existence. I did not recognize the children's book as mine, though I knew its fame; it was the first of a well-known series. A pair of nearly new shoes was in the box; I wondered when my father had acquired these. They were not the kind of shoes he usually wore. An inscription on the inside of the heel read HAND-MADE IN LONDONQ. I imagined something horrible: had he thrown dice for them, had he won them from one of the bigger boys, had he taken them in lieu of cash? I was relieved when Bertram carried them away and gave them to an orderly.