Heir to the Glimmering World Read online

  "You've got one left, they have to take it now! They have to take all the luggage now, they're leaving!"

  "This one's coming on the train with me," I said. "They've already got the other."

  "It's too big for the train."

  "It's light enough. Now which one are you? Heinrich, isn't it?"

  "Willi."

  "Bär," Waltraut reminded me.

  Willi stared. "How funny you have that."

  "Have what?"

  "That story."

  "Do you know it?"

  "We used to read it all the time at home. When we were little."

  "You mean over there, in Germany? You read it in German?"

  "At home it's famous for little children. When we came he was our tutor. They rented him for us."

  "Bär!" Waltraut insisted.

  "Hired," I corrected, searching for some sense.

  "He gave us English lessons, Gert and Heinz and me. Anneliese only a little bit, she could speak already."

  "Who was it gave you lessons?"

  "The boy from the story, only he wasn't anymore a boy."

  "Willi!" Anneliese called. "Where are you? Papa wants you." She came into the parlor; her face was very red. "What are you doing here? You have to help look for mama's shoes, she hid them someplace." To me she said, "What have you done to Waltraut? She puts mud in her hair. And her hands!"

  "It's chocolate," I said.

  "Lieber Gott. Clean her up, please. The taxi is here, if we don't go now we miss the train."

  8

  THE NEW YORK we came to was hardly the New York I had expected. I was disappointed and astonished. I knew the city only from picture postcards and the movies, and in the movies (no one ever said "film" in those years) the opening scenes of airy skyscrapers and streaming crowds were always accompanied by syncopations of ascending horns and jazzy excitements. To me, and to all the world, New York was the peopled channels of Manhattan, and tall skies where no birds flew. And hadn't Mrs. Mitwisser, in that distracted attempt at an interview, hinted that the very point of the move to New York was her husband's wish to be near "the big library"? The big library of New York was on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, fronted by two stone lions, like some Venetian palace. I had seen photographs of it.

  The place we settled in had no big library. It had no library at all; it had nothing. Compared to Albany—or Troy, or even Thrace—it was an obscure little village in a remote corner of the sparse and weedy northeast Bronx. Strictly speaking, the Bronx was New York, or at least an official part of it; but I felt deceived. The subway line had only recently crawled to this huddle of small houses hemmed in by swamp and creek—and yet there was, despite the name, no subway either: rather, a raucous elevated track that further darkened the fly-specked stores below, and finally nosed its way underground toward Manhattan only after what seemed scores of miles. The true New York was far away. Infrequent trains—toys high up on a trestle—were our only conduit to the promised city. Where were we really? A modest bay flowing in from Long Island Sound, with a ragged fringe of mud and sand and seaweed-mantled rock, defined a neighborhood ringed by open fields: beyond the city's caring, and out of its sight. Here were uncombed meadows purpled and gilded by violets and dandelions, and the drooping heads, with their insectlike antlers, of wild tiger lilies.

  Our house—rented and furnished—was one of a row of similar houses, with this difference: the others had two stories, ours had three. With a poor relation's imitation of suburban gratification, someone had added on a third floor, which stuck up absurdly, like a craning neck. Otherwise the house was identical to the few others on our street: stucco flanks, a stoop, a green front door leading directly into a sun parlor no bigger than a cube (where no sun could penetrate), cramped rooms. But the rooms were plentiful, thanks to the third floor, and within our first hour one of them—the largest, on the second floor and at the back—was designated as Professor Mitwisser's study, although it was clearly a bedroom. A wide bed stood against one wall. On the third floor, the three boys were distributed between two rooms; Gerhardt and Wilhelm took one, and Heinrich, the oldest, was put in with Waltraut. Anneliese had her own room on the second floor, across a narrow hall from her father. And on the third—she was still unfit for her husband's bed—I was made to join Mrs. Mitwisser.

  By now I understood that the Mitwisser household held a secret: I thought it was Mrs. Mitwisser. She had sunk into an ongoing strangeness, something deeper than lethargy, and more perplexing. She was unwilling to be touched by anyone—she pushed Waltraut away from her like a contaminant. Waltraut had grown used to these rebuffs, and would shrink at the first sound of her mother's footsteps. At night, alone with Mrs. Mitwisser, I would listen to her whimper; she murmured and hissed in her own language, the choked gurgle of a dammed-up river.

  "Did mama sleep at all last night?" Anneliese asked. "Papa wants to know."

  Professor Mitwisser himself never approached with this question or any other. It seemed he had forgotten about me, or else he was lost in the repetitive clangor that now surrounded us: hammering, sawing, the slangy shouts of workmen. A trio of carpenters were building bookshelves: the bare boards covered every wall of Professor Mitwisser's study, and had begun to line the hallway.

  During all this racket, Mrs. Mitwisser lay on her bed in her nightgown. Sometimes she pulled out a pack of cards from under her pillow and idly shuffled them; or else she would lay them out in curiously unequal rows.

  One afternoon I heard her singing:

  Röslein, Röslein, Röslein rot,

  Röslein auf der Heide—

  She broke off and called me to her side.

  "Röslein," she said, "that is your name, no?"

  I said it was something like that, though in fact I could hear no resemblance.

  "My husband told to me we have in this place a garden."

  "There's a little back yard." There were only weeds behind the house, and one unidentifiable tree.

  "Then we go there."

  But she would not get out of her nightgown or put on her shoes, and Anneliese would not allow her to walk past the workmen as she was; so she went back to her bed, sullen.

  "Mama's very bad this time, but at home it was worse. When they threw her out of the Institute she was very bad."

  It was even more serious, Anneliese recounted, when they had to leave Berlin, they had to run away practically, it was a miracle they could ship out Professor Mitwisser's books, first to Stockholm, where they stayed for a month with a great-uncle, and then, when the Quakers intervened to save them, to Albany. In Albany their mother was almost all better, and Waltraut was happy, and the boys behaved themselves, and got funny new American names from their tutor, and everything was nice for a while; but when the move to New York was decided on, little by little she worsened. And now she was very bad. That was how it was with their mother, she had a sickness, a private sickness—"Papa doesn't let us talk about it to anyone, only to our own family, and the nurse we had at home after they threw her out of the Institute, and then the law came that no German could live with us, so the nurse had to go away. And so did Waltraut's nanny, even though she was French."

  "But you haven't moved to New York," I pointed out.

  They almost had. A spacious apartment, prepared and accoutered, with a real study for their father (they wouldn't have had to suffer the clatter of all these carpenters!), an easy walk to the Reading Room of the great Library in Manhattan. But at the last minute their father had determined it would not be feasible, not with their mother so sick: what she needed was healing air, strolls, greenery. Sunlight and breezes. A quiet neighborhood, a backwater, a touch of salubrious scenery, no city swarms or city noises: it would be a kind of spa. And Professor Mitwisser could ride the subway to the Reading Room.

  All this reminded me of money. I had not yet been paid my salary; I did not know what my salary would be.

  "That apartment in the city," I said, "that would have been much more expensive than livin
g out here, wouldn't it?"

  Anneliese seemed offended; she turned aloof. Her cold eye told me I had transgressed. But my education in such matters had come from Ninel. Remembering Mrs. Mitwisser's melancholy warning about bed and board, I added, "I thought you could barely afford me."

  The familiar redness flooded her forehead and ears. "At home we had things. At home we were all right."

  It disturbed me that the Mitwisser children spoke of home. They were as homeless as I was. But I felt stealthily rich: the hot blue fact of Bertram's envelope warmed me. I had put it away, swathed in a sweater, in the bottom drawer of the dresser next to my bed.

  "Here we have nothing. Papa's books we got out to Stockholm just in time, because of Uncle Sigmund. So now we have nothing if nobody helps."

  "The Quakers—"

  "Papa left his position. It's finished."

  And so was our discussion; Anneliese made this plain. Her mouth tightened into a flat line, like an oscilloscope shut down. The Mitwissers' money arrangements were a subject closed to me: they did big things—Manhattan secured, Manhattan surrendered, this odd house in this odd neighborhood—but not little things; they didn't think of paying me.

  "Go see about mama, please. If she puts on her shoes she can watch Willi. He's out in the back with Waltraut, planting seeds."

  It came to me then that the Mitwisser family was an impregnable fiefdom, with guards at the borders. No one could be admitted. Yet how did they live? Professor Mitwisser went away every morning. Though it was late June, he wore his heavy black suit and his red-and-black-striped tie and his black fedora. He climbed the high stairs to the tracks; the train's screech bore him away to the Reading Room in the unimaginable city. Anneliese ran the household much as I had in my Thrace childhood; the difference was that my father had given me money out of his wallet. Among the Mitwissers, money was invisible.

  The boys had discovered a pebbly patch of beach and disappeared for hours every afternoon. They returned salt-whitened, draped in strands of seaweed, smelling of low tide. Sometimes they took Waltraut with them on these excursions, and then, while Anneliese murmured at her mother's bedside, the house would feel deserted, desolate. The door to the room where Mrs. Mitwisser lived out her days, and where I slept at night, was shut against my intrusion; but I could hear fragments of these exchanges, partly in German, and often enough in Anneliese's high-pitched, persistent, irritable English.

  "—they don't go to school now, it's summer—"

  "Wo sind sie dann?"

  "—gone down to the water. It's not far, it's only a little way. Come out and have a look."

  "—müde. Ich bin zu müde—"

  "—try, you can, papa wants you to."

  "Vielleicht morgen, ja? Wo ist der Vater?"

  "You know where"—exasperated. "In the city. At the Library."

  "—so heiss, ich bin so müde, ich muss ruhen," and it would end, Anneliese emerging with bright ears and flat angry mouth, her braid undone, as if someone had clawed at it.

  "Go in there and get her out," she ordered.

  "If you can't, how can I?" I retorted. It was the first time I had ever dared to contradict Anneliese.

  But one morning I was able to persuade Mrs. Mitwisser to put on her shoes. No one else was in the house—the boys and Waltraut at the beach, their father in the city, Anneliese gone to the greengrocer's.

  From her bed Mrs. Mitwisser resumed her mournful singing: "Röslein, Röslein, Röslein rot. .."

  I said, "Is it a lullaby?"

  She did not reply; the singing went on. "Röslein auf der Heide . .."

  "Do you ever sing it to Waltraut?"—though I knew that lately Waltraut would not come near her.

  She was all at once fiercely alert. "Natürlich, the child must not make a noise. When we go with the chauffeur in the auto. We go in the streets around and around. Gert and Heinz and Willi, my husband gives to them Spielkarten—" She released a sly brown look and reached under her pillow. Out came the pack of cards. "Will you like a little to play?"

  I despised cards; I remembered my father's gambling.

  "I don't know how," I said.

  "I teach you." A marvel: Mrs. Mitwisser rising out of her solitude.

  I pressed my chance. "We would need a table. There's one in the yard behind the house—Anneliese put it out there for Waltraut. To draw on with her crayons."

  Mrs. Mitwisser was indifferent to Waltraut and her crayons.

  "Your shoes," I urged.

  "No, no. No shoes!"

  "Frau Mitwisser, please. You can't walk out barefoot."

  "I put on my shoes, they become no good. They become holes, no? And I have not any more shoes, only these."

  "When they wear out you can buy a new pair."

  But now there was danger: fury assaulted her nostrils; they panted wide as a mare's. "We have no money, the money is not our money, like beggars we take! I do not agree to be a beggar for money!"

  It struck me that it was only the family madwoman who would mention money.

  Thrust over the side of her bed, her white legs trembled; she was relieved, spent; her eyes were grimly sane. She let me push her feet, swollen from disuse, into her shoes. When Anneliese came back, Mrs. Mitwisser was sitting under the single tree in the tiny back yard, instructing me in the rules of patience. To Anneliese she said, "What a pity the Fräulein cannot when she hears him recognize Goethe."

  That night I asked about the chauffeured car.

  "Papa hired it. It had smoked-glass windows, no one could see inside. Only important people would ride in an auto like that, big and black, and the driver had a black cap with a shiny beak, like a policeman." And so for a week they were—precariously—safe. All over Berlin, Anneliese said, there were impromptu raids; people were being arrested right out of their own apartments, or the apartments of relatives or friends, wherever they tried to hide. You could be picked up at any hour, you never knew when or where, and there were still seven days before the ship to Sweden, they had their papers all ready, but where could they go in the meantime? Not home, not anywhere. "Papa gave this man, his name was Fritz, he owned the limousine, papa gave him the key to our apartment and told him he could take away anything he wanted, anything at all, if he would drive us around the city for a few days. Waltraut was so little then, she cried all the time, and mama had to sing to her, and the boys played cards, and we went up and down the streets day after day, and no one stopped us because the auto looked so important and official and dark. Fritz brought us food to eat in the auto, and when we needed to use the toilet we would hold our heads up and walk into any fine hotel. It made us nervous to do that, even though we were wearing our best clothes on purpose, and Fritz would get angry when Waltraut's diapers smelled bad, so we were afraid of him."

  Anneliese spread her clean fingers into the shape of a fan and stared into the empty spaces between them. "He didn't trust papa about the key. Once he parked right in front of our own building and locked us all in the auto and went into the elevator and upstairs to make sure that it was really the key to our apartment. And when he came back down he told us that just next door he'd heard terrible screams, and when he looked in he saw some men beating an old woman and dragging her across the floor. Mama said 'Frau Blumenthal!' and papa said to keep quiet, and then Fritz said, 'Your place has paintings on the walls, what right do you people have to live like that?'"

  She doubled up the fingers of her right hand into a fist.

  "So we kept on driving round and round Berlin, until the last day before the ship to Sweden was due in Hamburg—it took six hours, that part, getting to Hamburg, and halfway there, when it was all country villages and little towns, Fritz stopped the auto and said he wouldn't take us any farther unless mama gave him her wedding ring, and he made the boys and me turn out our pockets to see if we were hiding anything, and he tore off Waltraut's diaper. Mama was carrying her mother's picture in her bag, an old photo in a silver frame, and Fritz grabbed it, but mama lied and said the fram
e was only plate, so he threw it down. At the pier in Hamburg he asked papa for some more marks, and then he told us to get out finally, and that was that. Whether there was anything left in our apartment when he got back there with papa's key we never knew.—Waltraut will want some water, won't she, before she falls asleep, so take care of it now, please. I'm going up to papa's study to tell him how much better mama was today."

  And after that Anneliese never again disclosed any part of her family's travail.

  9

  SOME PEOPLE THINK the Bear Boy is the most famous boy in the world—famous the way, in those early years of movie cartoons, Mickey Mouse was famous, or, to choose a more elevated example, the metaphysical Alice. These comparisons do not exaggerate. I suppose that nowadays there would be replicas of the Bear Boy in every imaginable manifestation: stuffed dolls, of course, and toys that move on their own, and songs and animated films, and all the rest of the detritus meant to attract the modern child. The Bear Boy was not a modern child. He did not look like a modern child; he did not speak like a modern child. He spoke, in fact, mainly in verse, sometimes rhymed, sometimes bounced into a clever beat of his own. He was called the Bear Boy not because he lived among bears, as Mowgli lived among wolves, and not because he was whimsically accompanied by a battered plush bear, like Christopher Robin. The Bear Boy may have resembled a small bear, as many old-fashioned children do: his ears were round and his eyes were black buttons with artistic wedges of light in their corners, and his too-long-on-purpose bangs suggested fuzzy velvet when it is rubbed into a furious furriness.

  That, at any rate, was his author's conception of him; and his author was also his illustrator. His author's name was James Philip A'Bair: hence the 'Bair Boy, popularly transmuted into the Bear Boy, and ultimately surrendered to by the author himself. I was interested in that apostrophe; I was interested in everything the Bear Boy might reveal. It was he who lay among my father's miscellaneous belongings in the box shipped from Croft Hall. It was he who had delivered to me my mother's death certificate, and the news and nature of her last illness. A few days after the arrival of my father's things—and soon after Bertram had disposed of those London-made shoes—I ran down the street to the brown facade of the Carnegie library, to learn what I could about the Bear Boy.