Heir to the Glimmering World Read online

  It was Bertram's idea that I should compose a phrase or two for a headstone. On Bertram's typewriter I wrote:

  JACOB NEHEMIAH MEADOWS

  l887–1935

  LOVING FATHER

  FRIEND TO YOUTH

  Words as conventionally sentimental as these ought to have scandalized me as I set them down, but the irony of their falseness did not touch me. It seemed right to attribute plain virtue to a man whose miniature vices could no longer do harm. I thought of my father's small life, and of Lena and the birthday cake, and the Tricolor, and my father's gambling. Most of all I thought of his lies. His lies took aim but had no point; they seduced risk; they were theatrical, though enacted on a tiny stage for a tiny audience. My father had been a kind of daylight robber. He robbed dailiness of predictability, so that my childhood's every breath hung on a contingency. Living with him had never felt safe.

  In another three months my first year at the college would be over. In the classroom I sat self-enclosed, in a mist of indifference. Or else I recoiled. All those theories of pedagogy, I told myself, were no better than a shrine streaming with phantasmagoria. An alien faith, like Ninel's Jupiter. Its liturgy and rites were abhorrent, and whatever was declared to be truth was fakery.... But I knew I was only bored.

  I was afraid to confide any of this in Bertram. My private wish was to abandon the college altogether. I had already seen Bertram send off my third quarter's tuition: I was obligated to him. I was, in a sense, his ward, as in those old English novels I was reading night after night, Dickens and Trollope and George Eliot, one after another.

  Bertram picked up Middlemarch and opened to an illustration of Dorothea and Casaubon. Casaubon sat cramped with his candle, ringed by a heap of fly-specked books. Dorothea's finely molded neck arched backward. "Dorothea resists Casaubon," the caption read.

  "Tell you what," Bertram began, "how would you like to move into the dorms for the rest of the term?"

  "The dorms? You mean live at the college?"

  "Sure. It's not that much extra, I can swing it. Then you wouldn't be alone so much of the time. You'd be with people your own age."

  "My father said they're like dungeons."

  "Oh come on," Ninel said, "from what Bert's told me your father never so much as set foot over there. He never even saw those dorms, he just didn't want to pay the fees."

  Then I understood that Ninel meant to drive me out of Bertram's life.

  This made me brazen. It made me rough. "Did you decide?" I asked Bertram. "About the Party, about joining?"

  He twisted up his little smile; he hardly minded. But the smile was for Ninel. "Well, you can't hang around Ninel and not end up committed."

  "But Ninel isn't committed to you. She won't marry you."

  "Oh for Pete's sake," Ninel said.

  "It's only an empty figment, Rosie. A piece of paper."

  "Mumbo jumbo," Ninel said.

  "Look," Bertram said, "we've got to figure out some sort of new arrangement—"

  "It's already figured out," Ninel broke in. "Bert's selling the furniture and moving in with me. It doesn't make sense these days to keep up a big place like this, all full of monstrosities."

  That night I answered Professor Rudolf Mitwisser's advertisement in the Albany Star.

  And that same night—as a reward, I thought, for my promised departure—Bertram came into my bedroom, put his knee on my bed, and kissed me, for the first time, fully on the mouth. The pressure on my lower lip was heavy, painful, voluptuous. I felt I was being bitten.

  In this way I was expelled from Albany's obscure and diminutive radical pocket.

  5

  EVEN AFTER two entire weeks, my position in the Mitwisser household remained amorphous. I could not fathom what my obligations were, and if I attempted to ask, the answer was dissolved in chaos. "Just fill those boxes with papa's books," the oldest child ordered. Her name was Anneliese; she spoke good English—she spoke it casually, familiarly—though with a distinct accent. Except for the youngest, all the children had been enrolled, for some months now, in the Albany public schools, and (so Mrs. Mitwisser had intimated that first day) they had had a tutor besides. They had already acquired a patina of the local vernacular. It was several days before I could arrive at exactly how many Mitwisser children there were. They rushed around on this or that mission (the whole house was packing for the move to New York); it was like trying to identify the number of fish swimming in a pond. At first I counted six, then four—the actual total was five. Their names were so many bird-chirps whirling around me: Anneliese, Heinrich, Gerhardt, Wilhelm, Waltraut. Waltraut was the easiest to remember, a round-eyed, curly-haired girl of three, who would cling to whoever happened to be passing by. Mrs. Mitwisser (I tried on occasion to call her Frau Mitwisser) was not often seen. She was hidden in a bedroom upstairs and appeared to have little to do with the fierce activity all around.

  I could not distinguish Heinrich from Wilhelm, or Gerhardt from Heinrich. This was made all the more difficult because now and then they addressed one another as Hank, Bill, and Jerry, and then would rapidly switch back to Heinz, Willi, and Gert. "Papa doesn't like it when they do that," Anneliese instructed me. "Papa is a purist." Anneliese was sixteen, and regal. It came to me that it could not have been Anneliese who had jumped from the Kleiderschrank and loosened the ceiling plaster down below. She was tall, an inheritance from her father, and like him she gave out a formal strictness. She was hardly like a child at all; her hair was wound in braids on either side of her head, revealing tidy pink ears. In each lobe a bright dot glittered. Braided and earringed, she looked authoritative and amazingly foreign. She was almost formidable, and the three boys seemed more afraid of her than of their mother. They obeyed Professor Mitwisser, and they obeyed Anneliese. But when Mrs. Mitwisser appealed to them—usually it was to beg them to take charge of Waltraut—they laughed and ran away. "American savages!" Professor Mitwisser roared at them. "Rote Indianer!"

  I too was careful to obey Anneliese. I felt my fate was in her hands: she alone, so far, had troubled to acknowledge my status as more than an intruder. The three boys never spoke to me, nor I to them. They flew past me, heaving bundles into the vestibule, where a growing mound of objects awaited the movers. But my dependence on Anneliese went beyond her occasional command. She was the sole source of my understanding, incomplete as it was, of the annals of her family. I was startled to learn that timid Mrs. Mitwisser, whose eyelids were so red, and whose thin nostrils trembled like a rabbit's, had held a senior fellowship at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin.

  "They threw her out," Anneliese explained, "and they threw papa out of the University. The Quakers brought us over, that's why we're here. Mama says they saved us. Papa says sometimes mama acts as if she doesn't like being saved. But anyhow there was a mistake."

  The mistake was comical. In their good-hearted intent to rescue a family of refugees, the Board of the Hudson Valley Friends College had requested its provost to invite Professor Rudolf Mitwisser, the well-known German specialist in the history of religion, to teach several seminars on the Charismites, a sixteenth-century mystical Christian sect, an offshoot of the Pneuma Brethren of northeastern Bavaria. The Board, businessmen mainly, had confused the Charismites—famous for their emphasis on the Spirit Within, akin to the Friends' Inner Light—with the Karaites.

  I asked Anneliese who the Karaites were.

  "Oh, they're just papa's people. But it didn't matter about the mistake, the Board got us out and gave papa the job. He didn't mind about the Charismites. And they rented this house for us. Here, look, I sent Gerhardt for the rope you're going to need."

  She handed me a scissors and a rough hairy coil. I had been packing books all that day, as she had directed me to do. There were thirty-two boxes filled with Professor Mitwisser's strange indecipherable volumes, and in order to cram as many books as possible into each container I had arranged them in rows and towers, meticulously, according to their sizes and shapes. The
rope scored and burned my palms as I tied the boxes shut.

  Half an hour later Anneliese informed me that her father was not pleased, and after a moment he arrived to tell me so himself. His hands, with their great workman's thumbs, were soot-blackened. He had been sorting papers stored in the coal bin, he said; his eyebrows stood up furiously, like a forest of sooty straws.

  "Why am I interrupted by such nonsense? Anneliese! This is how an intelligent creature organizes scholarship? By how tall and how short?"

  I protested, "I had to make the books fit in the boxes."

  "They must fit by idea, by logic. Ach, what cataclysm, what foolishness. You disrupt an entire library, Fräulein! And you, Anneliese, you permitted this?"

  I was helpless: the books were in German and in what I supposed was Hebrew. There were other languages I could not recognize. I saw then that it would not always be safe to take orders from Anneliese; she was not above falling into error and disgrace.

  "Anneliese," Mitwisser growled, "you must undo the boxes and begin again. Give to Fräulein Meadows a simpler task, one that she will not make into a wilderness."

  This was how Waltraut came into my care; I was to be a nanny, after all. She was a compliant and affectionate child, and quickly grew attached to me. She chattered in her infantile German and seemed to think I comprehended; at the same time she showed signs of absorbing whatever I said to her. I had little feeling for her, though I was captivated by the interplay of our two languages, both expressed in the most primitive argot. Waltraut had her small charms—her frequent smile disclosed tiny square teeth shining with baby-spittle, and if she ever refused any direction from me, she would squeal out a soprano "Nein!" with a teasing slanted look that signaled eventual consent. I spent my days—these were the few days left before the move to New York—feeding and entertaining her and putting her to bed at night. I took her for neighborhood walks, and discovered a nearby playground, long deserted, behind an abandoned garage. The metal swings were rusty and the slides were filthy and impassable, clogged with mud and leaves and, inexplicably, several pairs of badly torn men's socks stiffened by weather. I assumed this place was a tramps' lair; there was an iron barrel lying on its side, with scarred evidences of old fires. Waltraut scampered here and there, poking in the weeds with a stick and swatting at the creaky swings to set them going, while I suffered from the tedium of observing her. It was a familiar tedium: this was the "early childhood" knowledge promised by all those chapters on Pestalozzi and Montessori. Waltraut was the future I had run from—she was what the Albany Teachers' College might have made of me. I was relieved to bring her home to her supper and her bath; but I dreaded the strained ritual of her mother's bedroom.

  Waltraut slept in a low crib several feet from Mrs. Mitwisser's narrow couch. The crib would soon be hauled into a van, but the couch (it was not a bed) belonged to the house, like nearly all the furniture, and would remain behind. What I saw each evening when I carried Waltraut, already half asleep, into her crib, was Mrs. Mitwisser hunched on her couch, in the shape of a crescent, with a tray of partly eaten food on the floor beside her.

  "Frau Mitwisser? Here's Waltraut to say goodnight."

  She sucked in a wisp of breath, as if sipping some noxious fume, and raised a dismissive hand, drifting it like a curled leaf to a spot under her chin. Her gaze was inward. I thought she might be looking into the past. And I wondered whether, when the move was accomplished and we were finally settled in New York, she would resume sleeping in her husband's bed.

  6

  AT NIGHT I had a couch of my own: the dilapidated sofa in the parlor. The little side-table next to it was now bare—the old photograph in its silver frame had been taken away. Each day another domestic item joined the massive heap in the vestibule: the scenes that had seemed indelible to me at first sight—the arrangements of this dim cramped room especially—were being, particle by particle, erased. But the emptied table was useful: on it I set one of my two suitcases. The second, out of which I daily drew what I needed—it was clothes closet and toiletries shelf combined—I kept open on the thin carpet. Everything I owned was in those suitcases, and I did not own much. Before leaving Bertram I had disposed of all my school papers. Ninel took the fifteen or twenty textbooks Bertram had paid for and gave them to the Salvation Army, which struck even Bertram as perverse—but Ninel said they would be shredded and pulped and turned into something worthier than the psychological trash they were to begin with. (And for once I agreed with her.)

  My suitcases held only the sparest handful of the books I valued, since it had always been my habit—privately I felt it to be an ecstasy—to enter, as into a mysterious vault, any public library. I was drawn to books that had been read before, novels that girls like myself (only their mothers would not have died) had cradled and cherished. In my mind—I suppose in my isolation—I seized on all those previous readers, and everyone who would read after me, as phantom companions and secret friends. The unprepossessing library in Thrace had itself been secretive, the habitat of frosty ghosts: there were darkened passages between the stacks, unaccountably cool, even cold, in summer. Troy's library loomed far larger, a white-columned Roman-style limestone edifice, brazenly civic; I had hardly lived there long enough to become intimate with it. And during my life with Bertram we had often passed, on our way to the movies, and before the reign of Ninel, the old brown Carnegie library that was a two-block walk from Bertram's apartment—but by now, I surmised, he was no longer there, and the library, like Bertram, was lost to me.

  The morning of my departure, as I was filling my suitcases, Bertram quietly put into a corner of one of them a long blue envelope. He squashed it in beside the tattered storybook I had discovered in the carton they had sent from Croft Hall; the hospital bill and my mother's death certificate were still inside its torn covers.

  "This was going to take care of next year's tuition," Bertram explained, "so it's yours anyhow."

  I opened the blue envelope and looked in: he had given me five hundred dollars. It was clear that Ninel was not to know.

  "And these are from Ninel. She picked them up from the Salvation Army last time she was down there. It's where she gets her clothes." He screwed up the wistful torque of his half-smile and handed me two books; they smelled of cellar. "She says she's read the Dickens, and it's not half bad, but she wouldn't touch the other with a ten-foot pole. Says it might as well be called Vanity and Inanity." Bertram was pleased with Ninel's joke; I saw that he believed the war between Ninel and me was over.

  And it was. I was certain that I would never see the two of them again. I shoved Sense and Sensibility and Hard Times down among my slips and underpants. I had read them both long ago, and understood that Ninel regarded the one as an affront to herself and as a reprimand to me, and the other as a stern endorsement (in sugar-pill form) of her own insurgent outlook. My small store had nearly doubled. I had kept the unwieldy compendium of seventeenth-century Dutch paintings I had won for writing the best eighth-grade composition at Thrace Elementary ("But can you add two and two?" my father had remarked on that occasion); and also the pale little Manifesto Bertram had pressed on me; and here were Ninel's parting shots. Besides these and a dictionary, I had only the old-fashioned children's book my father had strangely preserved.

  A meager cache; and then I was engulfed by an oceanic library of negation and mutiny, volume upon esoteric volume, a limitless kingdom of books—not one of which I could penetrate. The libraries of Thrace and of Troy, the weathered Carnegie brownstone of Albany, and even the fabled library at Alexandria, burned to the ground two thousand years before, could not have imagined what lay in Professor Rudolf Mitwisser's boxes.

  7

  THE DAY OF THE MOVE brought relentless rain. The household was up early; breakfast was scanty and cold, since the kettle had been packed and the ice for the icebox canceled. Professor Mitwisser could be heard upstairs, pleading with Mrs. Mitwisser to put on her street clothes. The plan was for all of us to go by
train, while the van containing the Mitwisser possessions proceeded on its own. Anneliese was preoccupied with shouting orders to the boys, who ran upstairs and down, saying goodbye to the house. There was one last jump from the Kleiderschrank —shrieks from Anneliese, and "Indianer!" from Professor Mitwisser—and another shower of plaster chips over the parlor sofa, where I had lain sleepless most of the night, rehearsing every uncertainty I could think of. Leaving Albany, where at least there had been Bertram, felt obscurely unsafe.

  The boys dashing here and there, the four wiry moving men appearing and disappearing on their route to the van and back again, the thumps and bumps of the heavier articles, the odd small cries of resistance bleated out by Mrs. Mitwisser as she came down the stairs carrying her shoes (which she was refusing to wear), had transformed mild little Waltraut into a frantic creature. She butted Anneliese like an angry goat; she ran after the boys, yowling.

  "Get her out of the way," Anneliese commanded.

  "But it's pouring. And all her things to play with are in the van."

  "Do something this minute, or papa will come."

  I caught Waltraut in the middle of a lurch and lifted her by the waist and tossed her on my sofa. She was panting furiously, like a dog after a chase. Half a chocolate bar was in my pocket; I gave it to her. Her black eyes swam with pleasure.

  "There you are. Now you can be civilized again."

  "Nein," Waltraut said.

  "I'll show you something if you're good." But I could not think what.

  "Nein"—mechanically: she was attending to the chocolate.

  "I know! I've got a nice old storybook. There might be a bear in it," and Waltraut said nothing, because when I said "bear" she heard "Bär," and was all at once interested. I sat her on my lap and reached into the open suitcase on the floor and drew out the book that was my only inheritance, hoping for pictures of bears; but just then one of the boys rushed in to accuse me of malfeasance.