Antiquities Read online

  In fine: I have been upbraided (I mean verbally assaulted) for the nocturnal use of my Remington, which in fact I associate most deeply with remembrance of those long-ago nights in my office. (I may have omitted to mention that the machine I own now is the very one used for many years by Miss Margaret Stimmer.) Yet I can hardly believe it is the sound of my energetic tapping that offends. Nor is it altogether envy of a skill the others do not possess. It is, instead, naked resentment: I alone appear to have progressed with my memoir, and they, or so I surmise, have been shamefully idle.

  And here it may be pertinent to note that two of my three accusers are the very gentlemen already characterized in these pages as childish; and so, more and more manifestly, they are. As for the third offender, he is, shall we say, the kind of nonentity that follows the herd.

  Same day, later. An architectural aside. I have alluded to the shutting of the Academy. The renovations that followed, in bringing about our present-day Temple House, required that four or five, and in one instance six, of these unheated cells be combined (i.e., razed) to create a single larger space to accommodate each new apartment. As a result, we now find ourselves in considerable comfort in the identical site of our early misery.

  I ought also to add a word about the above-referenced library. The remodeling work necessitated the destruction of an area that from the earliest days of the Academy has always served as the headmaster’s personal quarters, including the office to which pupils were summoned. It was in this sanctuary that Reverend Greenhill’s library was kept. That it appeared as a bequest to the Trustees in his will was, it must be admitted, troublesome. Though his predecessors were piously, or let us say outwardly, celibate, Reverend Greenhill had come to us as a widower. He prided in his library as if (so goes the saying) it had sprung from his loins. It was his great pleasure and his even greater treasure. But to speak plainly, for the Trustees, at that time twenty-five strong and mainly men of business and law, what were we to do with these scores of volumes of theology and Greek and other such scholarly exotica? Of the several curators of the various institutes to which we offered this trove, all rejected it as an amateur’s collection, hardly unique and easily duplicated, much of it uselessly outdated. Today it is stored on dozens of shelves in the kitchen pantry. Lately, I have been leafing through a few of these old things, with their curled and speckled pages, and in one, to my delight and amazement, I discovered a paragraph naming Sir Flinders Petrie! I have since removed this book (The Development of Palestine Exploration, by one Frederick Jones Bliss, dated 1906) and display it here in my study, as a suitable companion to my father’s keepsakes. I believe it would have pleased him to see it there.

  * * *

  *

  June 26, 1949. Once again I have been reviewing these reflections, only to increase my despondency. All is maundering, all is higgledy-piggledy, nowhere do I find consecutive logic. For this reason I have turned to my personal copy of the History, hoping to come under its superior influence. Unlike our present project, this far more compendious work was composed by committee, with the benefit of a number of orderly minds contributing both to substance and style. It is in the spirit of research, in fact, that I am immersed in these crisply written chapters: I have sought to learn whether the Academy in its lengthening past has ever permitted the enrollment of Jewish pupils. A certain Claude Montefiore, of the English Montefiores, did attend in 1866, but only briefly, during his father’s consular mission; but no others since, including up to my own father’s time.

  The absence of Jewish pupils, however, does not prevent the History from mentioning Jews, which it does fairly often, in general terms, with satirical or otherwise jesting comments on the Hebrew character. There is always, I believe, a kernel of truth in these commonplace disparagements. For instance, in my own Academy years I saw for myself how inbred is that notorious Israelite clannishness. Mr. Canterbury, as one would expect, held on to our traditional policy of exclusion, but with the coming of the Reverend Greenhill, some half-dozen or so Jewish boys were admitted, and I grew to know them well, if from a distance, lest I too be shunned. What was most remarkable about these unaccustomed newcomers, I observed, was not simply that they were Jews, or were said to be Jews, or acknowledged themselves (always diffidently) to be Jews. Yet in their appearance, and their ways, they were like everyone else: hardy on the football field (as I, incidentally, was not), hair dribbling over their eyes (a local fad), and in chapel yawning and restless and making faces, like the rest of us, at the departing Mr. Canterbury. Even their names were not noticeably distinctive, though one of them, Ned Greenhill, could scarcely have been related to Reverend Greenhill! This Ned, as it happens, and despite his effort to conceal it, was exceptional in Latin, becoming thereby a favorite of Reverend Greenhill, who held him up as a model. (An invidious rumor had it that Reverend Greenhill was privately tutoring him in Greek.) This alone was enough to encourage our avoidance, and anyhow these Hebrews did have the habit of clinging to their own. It has nevertheless since occurred to me that this unseemly huddling may have been the result, not the cause, of our open contempt. To speak to a Jew would be to lose one’s place in our boyish hierarchy.

  (Many years later, I would now and again lunch at the Oyster Bar with Ned Greenhill, by then a judge in the Southern District of New York. Our families, it goes without saying, never met.)

  * * *

  *

  June 28, 1949. Upon my retirement from the law, I took away with me a very few objects evocative of my days and nights in that long-familar office, where my father and his father too had toiled: Miss Margaret Stimmer’s machine, of course (with her permission), and also several small or middling items belonging originally to my grandfather, including a charming rocking-horse blotter made of green quartz, a weighty brass notary sealing device with its swan’s-neck lever, and even a little bottle of India ink with a rubber stopper, once used to append indelible signatures to official documents. All these I still have with me here in my study, and a few, like the rocking-horse blotter and the India ink, I keep within daily sight on my writing table. (This ink, by the way, has never fully evaporated, thanks to its rubber stopper, and is as fluid as it was the day the bottle was first opened.) The reader may suppose that here I echo my father and his penchant for collecting; but this is hardly the case. All these oddments are quiet emblems of nostalgic reminiscence, whereas my father’s things could mean nothing personal to him, being cryptic signals from an unknowable past. What can scratchings on the base of a beaker tell? If such an object does own a familial history, however remote, it is certainly not my father’s. It is possible, I presume, that this very beaker may carry his emotion in having once enjoyed a close association with Sir Flinders Petrie, and may stand as an expression of the altogether different life my father might have lived had he succumbed to temptation and continued in his cousin’s path. If so, out of respect for my mother’s memory, I cannot follow him there.

  Thinking back, I am much moved to recall that the day I made Miss Margaret Stimmer’s typewriter my own was the very day I permitted myself to call her Peg.

  * * *

  *

  Fourth of July, 1949. The cell opposite mine (this was still within Mr. Canterbury’s tenure), with the corridor between us, was for a long time unoccupied. The boy it belonged to had contracted tuberculosis, which for many weeks went unrecognized. There was much illness all around in those unbearably cold winter days, and our cells, as previously remarked, were unheated. Nearly everyone, the masters included, was subject to running noses and chronic coughing. Still, no one coughed with the vehemence and persistence of the pupil in the cell across from mine. I had no choice save to suffer through it; it kept me awake night after night. Mr. Canterbury was finally persuaded to inform the boy’s guardian, who came and took him away. He never returned, and all we knew further of him was that a lawsuit was somehow involved. It was then that Mr. Canterbury disappeared fro
m the Academy, and Reverend Greenhill arrived, and with him a welcome innovation: a feather quilt for each boy’s bed. At the same time, he arranged for the halls to be heated (an amenity primitive by present standards); and one morning in chapel he instructed us to keep our doors open to let in the warmth, and also, he admonished, to invite the equal warmth of pleasant social discourse. (How odd to be remembering the cold, when the temperature today approaches 100 degrees!)

  But soon another pupil lay in what had been the sick boy’s bed. His door was often closed. Either he had come too late to be apprised of the new rule, or he chose to ignore it. Since he was in the form below mine, and attended different classes, I glimpsed him only intermittently, in the refectory or in chapel. His behavior in both these circumstances was odd. I never saw him eat a normal dinner. He seemed to live on bread and milk and hard-boiled eggs, and he always sat by himself. In chapel, even when reprimanded, he never removed his cap. In fact, I never saw him without it. And while the rest of us whispered and snickered and pretended to sneeze during the reading of the Gospel and all through the sermon, he seemed rigidly attentive. He joined in the singing of a certain few hymns, but for others he was willfully silent. In appearance he was also uncommon. He was so thin as to approach the skeletal (his legs were nearer to bone than flesh), and this I attributed to his sparseness of diet. His complexion was what I believe is called olive, of the kind known to characterize the Mediterranean and Levantine peoples; but in contrast to this deficit of natural ruddiness, his hair was astoundingly red. And not the red of the Irish. As I write, I am put in mind of my father’s description of the red earth of his days with Cousin William: deeper and denser and more otherworldly than any commonplace Celtic red.

  He had come to us shortly after that influx of Jews, but he hardly seemed one of them, and they too, as we all did, were wary of everything about him, particularly his outlandish names, both the first and the last, which were all it was possible to know of him. There were some, playing on his surname, who joked that he was undoubtedly a Jew, given the elephantine length of his nose. To these jibes he said nothing, and merely turned away. And others (the more rowdy among us) claimed that only a Jew would flaunt Zion so brazenly, forgetting that the Psalms recited in chapel, which so frequently invoked Zion, were part and parcel of our Christian worship. I was particularly alert to this error, since on the Wilkinson side there can be found (too many, my father said) evangelical pietists who cling ardently to Zion, a few of whom are bizarrely devoted to speaking in tongues. And in the Petrie line too there have been numerous Old Testament appellations; we were once a sober crew of Abrahams and Nathans and Samuels, all of them proper Christians.

  But there was more than Ben-Zion Elefantin’s unusual name to irritate conventional expectations. Though rarely heard, his voice was perplexing. It had in it a pale echo of Mr. Canterbury’s admirable vowels, but also an alien turn of the consonants, suggesting a combination of foreignisms—where exactly was he from? And why was he a full semester behind, in the form below mine, despite the fact, as I later learned, that at nearly twelve he was two years older than I? And was he mad, or merely a liar? I came, in time, to think the latter, though I was, I confess, something of a liar myself, feigning injuries of every variety in order to evade the football field. Mr. Canterbury had been inclined to expose me, and for punishment doubled my obligations to football and riding (like my father before me, I was greatly averse to horses); but Reverend Greenhill’s view was that one’s duty to God did not necessarily include kicking and galloping, and he sent me off to do as I pleased, as long as it harmed neither man nor beast.

  What it pleased me to do during those football afternoons when the halls were deserted, and the shouting was distant and muffled, was to sit on my bed with my chessboard before me, while hoping to outwit a phantom opponent. On the memorable day I will now record, my door, according to protocol, was ajar, and when I looked up from my wooden troops, I saw Ben-Zion Elefantin standing there. Without speaking a word, he hopped on the bed to face me, and began maneuvering first a knight, and then a rook, and finally a queen, and I heard him say, very quietly, indeed humbly, If you don’t mind, checkmate. I asked him then whether he, like me at that hour, had explicit permission to exempt himself from the field. He seemed to consider this for a moment, and said, with unhurried directness, I have no interest in that. I thought it was natural to inquire, since he was new to the Academy, in what other activity he did take interest. Chapel, he said. I found this unlikely; no boy I knew regarded chapel as anything other than a morning of aching tedium. Are you religious, I asked. The word does not apply, he said, at least not in the sense you intend. It was a strange way of speaking; no normal boy spoke like a book. I asked where he had been to school before coming to us. Oh, he said, many schools, in many places, but I never stay long, and until now was never taught fractions. Is that why, I asked, they’ve put you in fourth? Oh, he said, it hardly matters where I am put, before long they will call me away. Thank you, he said, for the pleasure of the game. And then he left me and went back to his room and shut the door.

  * * *

  *

  July 5, 1949. Aside from yesterday’s stifling weather (continuing at 97 degrees today), which compelled my breaking off my narrative too abruptly, the Fourth of July could not have been more disagreeable. A group of unruly youths from a neighboring town notorious for its shabbiness invaded our grounds, overturned the handsome old benches under the maples, and, targeting our windows, tossed deafening volleys of firecrackers while shouting obscenities. To such depths has patriotism fallen. Those warlike fumes have seeped into my study, where they hover still, stirred by useless electrical fans (I have two, and they do nothing to alleviate the abominable heat). One of the household staff, a half-incomprehensible native of Vienna, I suppose intending to please, made a pitiful attempt to celebrate the holiday by presenting us with what she calls a Sacher torte, an absurdly irrelevant cake of some kind, overly sugared; but one can expect nothing comfortably familiar from this postwar flotsam and jetsam. As for the disastrous war itself, our hard-won victory on two fronts is by now four years gone, yet there are some who even today decline to forgive President Roosevelt for, as they say, putting Americans at risk for the sake of saving the Jews. There may be, as always, the usual kernel of truth in this; but that the Jews weren’t saved in any event (nor many others, for that matter) is proof of the overall purposelessness of that war. Hitler and Stalin, Tweedledum and Tweedledee. The newspapers are rife with grotesque tales of camps and ovens; one hardly knows what to believe, and I am nowadays drawn far less to these public contentions than to my own reflections. This is not to say that I am not proud of my son’s participation in the war, though it lacked a certain manliness, I mean of exposure to danger, since he was never on the battlefield, but rather in a printing office—something to do with a publication for soldiers and sailors.

  In connection with which, the reader will have observed that save for her passing, I have had little to say of my late dear wife, an avid lover, as I earlier indicated, of the decorative arts; I hope to correct this here. Yet Miranda’s influence on our son was perhaps too pressing, and may have led him to his current frivolous preoccupations in California. Miranda herself was fond of such fanciful trivia, in the form of heading the flower committee of her Women’s Club and numerous like pursuits, e.g., her accumulation of painted bowls and porcelain figurines in the Japanese style: a man in a flat hat drawing a bucket out of a well, a sloe-eyed woman posed on a bridge. More to the point, she was much interested in the lives of Carole Lombard and Myrna Loy, those so-called “stars” of cinema. She liked to joke that I had married her only because of her clear resemblance to Myrna Loy, which was certainly not the case; at the time I scarcely knew the name. Miranda was indeed very pretty, but the reason for our marriage, of which our son was the premature consequence, remains entirely private. Nor can I deny that her parents insisted on it.

 
I see that I have again digressed, and though I mean to enlighten the reader further with regard to Ben-Zion Elefantin, I detect at this moment a relieving breath of a breeze beyond the sultry movements of the fans. The evening cool has begun, and I am off to walk in its respite. Yet first I must secure this manuscript before leaving my study. Until its completion I keep it for privacy in an unidentifiable box with a lid. It once held my father’s cigars, and their old aroma lingers still.

  * * *

  *

  July 6, 1949. A calamity, an outburst of childish spite. An inconceivable act of vengeance. It could not have been spontaneous; it had to have been carefully plotted, my habits noted, my comings and goings spied on. My colleagues have long been aware that at the close of these brutal equatorial days, I have taken to tracing the paths circling the maples, where wisps of evening airs rustle in their leaves. (Early this morning the staff, I am relieved to say, righted the benches and disposed of the debris, including a considerable scattering of beer bottles.)

  At such times it is good to walk and think, walk and think. How am I to tell more of Ben-Zion Elefantin? I cannot reveal him in the way of dialogue (a practice my son puts his trust in, he informs me, as an aspiring screenwriter). I have not that gift or inclination. Nor am I certain it will finally be possible to reveal Ben-Zion Elefantin by any narrative device. It may be that all I knew of him was fabrication or delusion.

  I wandered thusly, mulling these enigmas, for half an hour or so, and then returned to my study refreshed, intending despite the late hour to set down my thoughts. What I saw before me—saw in one hideous instant—was a scene of ghastly vandalism. On the surface of my writing table stood my little bottle of India ink, uncorked, with its rubber stopper prone beside it. Someone—someone!—had spilled its contents over the body of my Remington, obliterating the letters on its keys and wetting the roller so repulsively that it gleamed like some slithering black slime. Miss Margaret Stimmer’s Remington violated, the very machine, now mine, once touched by her prancing fingers, and all I have left to remind me of my sweet Peg.