The Puttermesser Papers Read online

  Rappoport did not see. He withdrew his hand from Puttermesser’s belly. “What’s the big idea, Ruth?” he said.

  “That’s right,” Puttermesser said.

  “What?”

  “That’s just what Socrates is after: the big idea.”

  “You’re too old for this kind of thing,” Rappoport said. He had a medium-sized, rather square, reddish mustache over perfect teeth. His teeth were more demanding to Puttermesser’s gaze than his eyes, which were so diffidently pigmented that they seemed whited out, like the naked eyes on a Roman bust. His nose, however, was dominant, eloquent, with large deep nostrils that appeared to meditate. “Cut it out, Ruth. You’re behaving like an adolescent,” Rappoport said.

  “You’ll never fall down a well,” Puttermesser said. “You never look up.” She felt diminished; those philosophical nostrils had misled her.

  “Ruth, Ruth,” Rappoport pleaded, “what did I do?”

  “It’s what you didn’t do. You didn’t figure out what powers and properties distinguish human nature from any other,” Puttermesser said bitterly; as a feminist, she was careful never to speak of “man’s” nature. She always said “humankind” instead of “mankind.” She always wrote “he or she” instead of just “he.”

  Rappoport was putting on his pants. “You’re too old for sex,” he said meanly.

  Puttermesser’s reply was instantly Socratic: “Then I’m not behaving like an adolescent.”

  “If you know I have a plane to catch, how come you want to read in bed?”

  “It’s more comfortable than the kitchen table.”

  “Ruth, I came to make love to you!”

  “All I wanted was to finish the Theaetetus first.”

  Now he had his coat on, and was crossing his scarf carefully at his throat, so as not to let in the cold. It was a winter night, but Puttermesser saw in this gesture that Rappoport, at the age of fifty-two, still obeyed his mother’s doctrines, no matter that they were five decades old. “You wanted to finish!” he yelled. He grabbed the book from her lap. “It goes from page 847 to 879, that’s thirty-three pages—”

  “I read fast,” Puttermesser said.

  In the morning she understood that Rappoport would never come back. His feelings were hurt. In the end he would have deserted her anyway—she had observed that, sooner or later, he told all his feelings to his wife. And not only to his wife. He was the sort of man who babbles.

  The loss of Rappoport was not Puttermesser’s only trouble. She had developed periodontal disease; her dentist reported—with a touch of pleasure in disaster—a sixty-percent bone loss. Loss of bone, loss of Rappoport, loss of home! “Uncontrollable pockets,” the dentist said. He gave her the name of a periodontist to consult. It was an emergency, he warned. Her gums were puffy, her teeth in peril of uprooting. It was as if, in the dread underworld below the visible gums, a volcano lay, watching for its moment of release. She spat blood into the sink.

  The sink was a garish fake marble. Little blue fish-tiles swam around the walls. The toilet seat cover had a large blue mermaid painted on it. Puttermesser hated this bathroom. She hated her new “luxury” apartment, with its windowless slot of a kitchen and two tiny cramped rooms, the bathroom without a bathtub, the shower stall the size of a thimble, the toilet’s flush handle made of light-blue plastic. Her majestic apartment on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, with its Alhambra spaciousness, had been ravaged by arsonists. Even before that, the old tenants had been dying off or moving away, one by one; junkies stole in, filling empty corridors with bloodstained newspapers, smashed bottles, dead matches in random rows like beetle tracks. On a summer evening Puttermesser arrived home from her office without possessions: her shoes were ash, her piano was ash, her piano teacher’s penciled “Excellent,” written in fine large letters at the top of “Humoresque” and right across the opening phrase of “Für Elise,” had vanished among the cinders. Puttermesser’s childhood, burned away. How prescient her mother had been to take all of Puttermesser’s school compositions with her to Florida! Otherwise every evidence of Puttermesser’s early mental growth might have gone under in that criminal conflagration.

  The new apartment was crowded with plants: Puttermesser, who was once afflicted with what she called a black thumb, and who had hitherto killed every green thing she put her hand to, determined now to be responsible for life. She dragged in great clay urns and sacks of vitamin-rich soil bought at Woolworth’s and emptied dark earth into red pots. She seeded and conscientiously watered. Rappoport himself had lugged in, on a plastic-wheeled dolly, a tall stalk like a ladder of green bear’s ears: he claimed it was an avocado tree he had grown from a pit in Toronto. It reminded Puttermesser of her mother’s towering rubber plants on the Grand Concourse, in their ceiling-sweeping prime. Every window sill of Puttermesser’s new apartment was fringed with fronds, foliage, soaring or drooping leaf-tips. The tough petals of blood-veined coleus strained the bedroom sunset. Puttermesser, astonished, discovered that if she remained attentive enough, she had the power to stimulate green bursts. All along the bosky walls vegetation burgeoned.

  Yet Puttermesser’s days were arid. Her office life was not peaceable; nothing bloomed for her. She had fallen. Out of the blue, the Mayor ousted the old Commissioner—Puttermesser’s boss, the chief of the Department of Receipts and Disbursements—and replaced him with a new man, seven years younger than Puttermesser. He looked like a large-eared boy; he wore his tie pulled loose, and his neck stretched forward out of his collar; it gave him the posture of a vertical turtle. His eyes, too, were unblinkingly turtlish. It was possible, Puttermesser conceded to herself, that despite his slowly reaching neck and flattish head, the new man did not really resemble a turtle at all; it was only that his name—Alvin Turtelman—suggested the bare lidless deliberation of that immobile creature of the road. Turtelman did not preen. Puttermesser saw at once, in all that meditated motionlessness, that he was more ambitious than the last Commissioner, who had been satisfied with mere prestige, and had used his office like a silken tent decorated with viziers and hookahs. But Turtelman was patient; his steady ogle took in the whole wide trail ahead. He spoke of “restructuring,” of “functioning,” of “goals” and “gradations,” of “levels of purpose” and “versus equations.” He was infinitely abstract. “None of this is personal,” he liked to say, but his voice was a surprise; it was more pliable than you would expect from the stillness of his stare. He stretched out his vowels like any New Yorker. He had brought with him a score of underlings for what he called “mapping out.” They began the day late and ended early, moving from cubicle to cubicle and collecting résumés. They were all bad spellers, and their memos, alive with solecisms, made Puttermesser grieve, because they were lawyers, and Puttermesser loved the law and its language. She caressed its meticulousness. She thought of law as Apollo’s chariot; she had read all the letters of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., to Harold Laski (three volumes) and to Sir Frederick Pollock (two). In her dream once she stood before a ship captain and became the fifth wife of Justice William O. Douglas; they honeymooned on the pampas of Argentina. It was difficult to tell whether Turtelman’s bad spellers represented the Mayor himself, or only the new Commissioner; but clearly they were scouts and spies. They reported on lateness and laxness, on backlogs and postponements, on insufficiencies and excesses, on waste and error. They issued warnings and sounded alarms; they brought pressure to bear and threatened and cautioned and gave tips. They were watchful and envious. It soon became plain that they did not understand the work.

  They did not understand the work because they were, it turned out, political appointees shipped over from the Department of Hygienic Maintenance; a handful were from the Fire Department. They had already had careers as oligarchs of street-sweeping, sewers and drains, gutters, the perils of sleet, ice, rainslant, gas, vermin, fumigation, disinfection, snow removal, water supply, potholes, steam cleaning, deodorization, ventilation, abstersion, elutriation; those from
the Fire Department had formerly wielded the scepter over matters of arson, hydrants, pumps, hose (measured by weight, in kilograms), incendiary bombs, rubber boots, wax polish, red paint, false alarms, sappers, marshals. They had ruled over all these corporealities, but without comprehension; they asked for frequent memos; they were “administrators.” This meant they were good at arrest; not only at making arrests (the fire marshals, for instance), but at bringing everything to a standstill, like the spindle-prick in Sleeping Beauty. In their presence the work instantly held its breath and came to a halt, as if it were a horse reined in for examination. They walked round and round the work, ruminating, speculating. They could not judge it; they did not understand it.

  But they knew what it was for. It was for the spoils quota. The work, impenetrable though it was to its suzerains, proliferated with jobs; jobs blossomed with salaries; salaries were money; money was spoils. The current Mayor, Malachy (“Matt”) Mavett, like all the mayors before him, was a dispenser of spoils, though publicly, of course, he declared himself morally opposed to political payoffs. He had long ago distributed the plums, the high patronage slots. All the Commissioners were political friends of the Mayor. Sometimes a mayor would have more friends than there were jobs, and then this or that commissioner would suddenly be called upon to devise a whole new management level: a many-pegged perch just between the heights of direct mayoral appointment and the loftier rungs of the Civil Service. When that happened, Puttermesser would all at once discover a fresh crew of intermediate bosses appointed to loiter between herself and the Commissioner. Week after week, she would have to explain the work to them: the appointed intermediate bosses of the Department of Receipts and Disbursements did not usually know what the Department of Receipts and Disbursements did. By the time they found out, they vanished; they were always on the move, like minor bedouin sheikhs, to the next oasis. And when a new commissioner arrived right after an election (or, now and then, after what was officially described as “internal reorganization”—demoralization, upheaval, bloodbath), Puttermesser would once again be standing in the sanctuary of the Commissioner’s deep inner office, the one with the mottled carpeting and the private toilet, earnestly explaining his rich domain to its new overlord.

  Puttermesser was now an old hand, both at the work and at the landscape of the bureaucracy. She was intimate with every folly and every fall. (Ah, but she did not expect her own fall.) She was a witness to every succession. (Ah, but she did not expect to be succeeded herself.) The bureaucracy was a faded feudal world of territory and authority and hierarchy, mainly dusty, except at those high moments of dagger and toppling. Through it all, Puttermesser was seen to be useful: this accounted for her climb. She had stuck her little finger into every cranny of every permutation of the pertinent law. Precedents sped through her brain. Her titles, movable and fictitious, traveled upward: from Assistant Corporation Counsel she became Administrative Tax Law Associate, and after that Vice Chief of Financial Affairs, and after that First Bursary Officer. All the while she felt like Alice, swallowing the potion and growing compact, nibbling the mushroom and swelling: each title was a swallow or a nibble, and not one of them signified anything but the degree of her convenience to whoever was in command. Her titles were the poetry of the bureaucracy.

  The truth was that Puttermesser was now a fathomer; she had come to understand the recondite, dim, and secret journey of the City’s money, the tunnels it rolled through, the transmutations, investments, multiplications, squeezings, fattenings and battenings it underwent. She knew where the money landed and where it was headed for. She knew the habits, names, and even the hot-tempered wives of three dozen bank executives on various levels. She had acquired half a dozen underlings of her own—with these she was diffident, polite; though she deemed herself a feminist, no ideology could succeed for her in aggrandizing force. Puttermesser was not aggressive. She disdained assertiveness. Her voice was like Cordelia’s. At home, in bed, she went on dreaming and reading. She retained a romantic view of the British Civil Service in its heyday: the Cambridge Apostles carrying the probities of G. E. Moore to the far corners of the world, Leonard Woolf doing justice in Ceylon, the shy young Forster in India. Integrity. Uprightness. And all for the sake of imperialism, colonialism! In New York, Puttermesser retained an immigrant’s dream of merit: justice, justice shalt thou pursue. Her heart beat for law, even for tax law: she saw the orderly nurturing of the democratic populace, public murals, subway windows bright as new dishes, parks with flowering borders, the bell-hung painted steeds of dizzying carousels.

  Every day, inside the wide bleak corridors of the Municipal Building, Puttermesser dreamed an ideal Civil Service: devotion to polity, the citizen’s sweet love of the citizenry, the light rule of reason and common sense, the City as a miniature country crowded with patriots—not fools and jingoists, but patriots true and serene; humorous affection for the idiosyncrasies of one’s distinctive little homeland, each borough itself another little homeland, joy in the Bronx, elation in Queens, O happy Richmond! Children on roller skates, and over the Brooklyn Bridge the long patchwork-colored line of joggers, breathing hard above the homeland-hugging green waters.

  II. PUTTERMESSER’S FALL, AND THE HISTORY OF THE GENUS GOLEM

  TURTELMAN SENT HIS SECRETARY to fetch Puttermesser. It was a new secretary, a middle-aged bony acolyte, graying and testy, whom he had brought with him from the Department of Hygienic Maintenance: she had coarse eyebrows crawling upward. “This isn’t exactly a good time for me to do this,” Puttermesser complained. It was as if Turtelman did not trust the telephone for such a purpose. Puttermesser knew his purpose: he wanted teaching. He was puzzled, desperate. Inside his ambitiousness he was a naked boy, fearful. His office was cradled next to the threatening computer chamber, just then being installed; all along the walls the computers’ hard flanks glittered with specks and lights. Puttermesser could hear, behind a partition, the velvet din of a thousand microchips, a thin threadlike murmur, as if the software men, long-haired chaps in sneakers, were setting out lyres upon the great stone window sills of the Municipal Building. Walking behind the bony acolyte, Puttermesser pitied Turtelman: the Mayor had called for information—figures, indexes, collections, projections—and poor Turtelman, fresh from his half-education in the land of abstersion and elutriation, his frontal lobes still inclined toward repair of street-sweeping machinery, hung back bewildered. He had no answers for the Mayor, and no idea where the answers might be hidden; alas, the questions themselves fell on Turtelman’s ears as though in a foreign tongue.

  The secretary pushed open Turtelman’s door, stood aside for Puttermesser, and went furiously away.

  Poor Turtelman, Puttermesser thought.

  Turtelman spoke: “You’re out.”

  “Out?” Puttermesser said. It was a bitter Tuesday morning in mid-January; at that very moment, considerably south of the Municipal Building, in Washington, D.C., they were getting ready to inaugurate the next President of the United States. High politics emblazoned the day. Bureaucracies all over the world were turning on their hinges, gates were lifting and shutting, desks emptying and filling. The tide rode upon Turtelman’s spittle; it glimmered on his teeth.

  “As of this afternoon,” Turtelman said, “you are relieved of your duties. It’s nothing personal, believe me. I don’t know you. We’re restructuring. It’s too bad you’re not a bit older. You can’t retire at only forty-six.” He had read her résumé, then; at least that.

  “I’m old enough,” Puttermesser said.

  “Not for collecting your pension. You people have a valuable retirement system here. I envy you. It drains the rest of us dry.” The clack of his teeth showed that he was about to deliver a sting: “We ordinary folk who aren’t lucky enough to be in the Civil Service can’t afford you.”

  Puttermesser announced proudly, “I earn my way. I scored highest in the entire city on the First-Level Management Examination. I was editor-in-chief of Law Review at Yale Law School.
I graduated from Barnard with honors in history, summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa—”

  Turtelman broke in: “Give me two or three weeks, I’ll find a little spot for you somewhere. You’ll hear from me.”

  Thus the manner of Puttermesser’s fall. Ignoble. She did not dream there was worse to come. She spilled the papers out of her drawers and carried them to a windowless cubicle down the hall from her old office. For a day or so her ex-staff averted their eyes; then they ceased to notice her; her replacement had arrived. He was Adam Marmel, late of the Bureau of Emergencies, an old classmate of Turtelman’s at NYU, where both had majored in film arts. This interested Puttermesser: the Department of Receipts and Disbursements was now in the hands of young men who had been trained to pursue illusion, to fly with a gossamer net after fleeting shadows. They were attracted to the dark, where fraudulent emotions raged. They were, moreover, close friends, often together. The Mayor had appointed Turtelman; Turtelman had appointed Marmel; Marmel had succeeded Puttermesser, who now sat with the Times, deprived of light, isolated, stripped, forgotten. An outcast. On the next Friday her salary check came as usual. But no one called her out of her cubicle.

  Right in the middle of business hours—she no longer had any business, she was perfectly idle—Puttermesser wrote a letter to the Mayor:

  The Honorable Malachy Mavett

  Mayor, City of New York

  City Hall

  Dear Mayor Mavett:

  Your new appointee in the Department of Receipts and Disbursements, Commissioner Alvin Turtelman, has forced a fine civil servant of honorable temperament, with experience both wide and impassioned, out of her job. I am that civil servant. Without a hearing, without due process, without a hope of appeal or redress (except, Mr. Mayor, by you!), Commissioner Turtelman has destroyed a career in full flower. Employing an affectless vocabulary by means of which, in a single instant, he abruptly ousted a civil servant of high standing, Commissioner Turtelman has politicized a job long held immune to outside preferment. In a single instant, honor, dignity, and continuity have been snatched away! I have been professionally injured and personally humiliated. I have been rendered useless. As of this writing I am costing the City’s taxpayers the price of my entire salary, while I sit here working a crossword puzzle; while I hold this very pen. No one looks at me. They are embarrassed and ashamed. At first a few ex-colleagues came into this little abandoned office (where I do nothing) to offer condolences, but that was only at first. It is like being at my own funeral, Mr. Mayor, only imagine it!