Heir to the Glimmering World (15 page)

This was in New York, where I am liv

I am not living exactly in New Yo

There were crowds all around, and police, and noise and yelling. I was at the Forty-second Street Library in my capacity as assistant to

I had gone to be of assistance to

October 26, 1935

Dear Bertram,

I've heard that Ninel has deserted you

I've heard that Ninel's left you, so it's a good thing, after all, that you never did actually marry

I've heard that you and Ninel have parted, and I don't know whether she and you are still in touch, despite everything, but if you are, you probably know that she

October 26, 1935

Dear Bertram,

I continue to think of you with affection. Only yesterday I referred to you as my benef

October 26, 1935

Dear Bertram,

If you are still in touch with Ninel (I understand that she is no longer with you), you may have heard that she and I met, briefly, on a New York street. But that wasn't the day's only surprise. I'm sure you remember some of the things that were in that box they sent from Croft Hall after the accident. Those shoes, for instance, practically new. You gave them to someone at the hospital. And you probably remember that children's book, one of the Bear Boy se ries, not in very good condition. You thought my father may have kept it out of some sentimental feeling he had about it, and I was almost tempted to think the same. But no, Bertram, no! He saw value in it, he saw the point of it. I mean he gambled on a chance one day to get a good return on it. I found all this out because of Willi, the youngest son of Professor Rudolf Mitwisser, whom I'm assisting at who hired me to no use no use no use at all my god I sound like Frau Doktor M

22

I
COULD NOT WRITE
to Bertram. I thought it was because I resented and disliked the new typewriter. It belonged, like the tea things and the toys, to James's regime, under which all steady rituals were discarded, and everything usual was made to seem obsolete. James had introduced both health and sickness into the house. Waltraut's whole face, even to the triangle of her chin, had grown ruddy. Her mouth was eager, showing tiny teeth. She was speaking English and forgetting German. And Anneliese: she was serene, she had lapsed into a pose of uncaring, she was almost languid. She moved with liquid slow steps. She gave up scolding the boys. They were as untamed now as a herd of ponies.

But Mrs. Mitwisser was again barefoot and in her nightgown, and would not come downstairs; and Professor Mitwisser took on his nightly mirth like a disease.

Ninel's shorn head and wide trousers. Her mockery and her stick: I felt she had beaten me with it. It was Bertram who had sent me away; he was not serious, it was all sentiment. He had kissed me on the mouth and sent me away. He had given me money and sent me away.

When I came into the house, I found them all in a kind of hush, circled around the big table in the dining room—circled there as Professor Mitwisser's enemies had been, months back, on that airless August night. A small rush of dry leaves clung to my feet and floated past me through the open door. Waltraut was in a corner, singing to herself, absorbed in twirling and somersaulting one of the new dolls: it was the Spanish doll, with its high black hair held by a comb, a flounced scarlet gown and flamenco dancer's heels. Waltraut murmured and hummed; she was rosy and happy, and her little teeth gleamed.

Around the table sat James and Anneliese and Gert and Heinz and Willi. The boys were almost ceremoniously quiet, as if in the spent aftermath of some nameless rite. When Willi saw me come in, he jumped up and ran out of the room.

Gert said, "Bill's robbed you, he's a dirty robber."

"I just wanted to show James. I didn't
take
it, she can have it back—"

"You went in there and got it out."

"Come back here, Willi," Anneliese called. "Didn't mama see you? Mama saw you, didn't she?" She slid her brown eyes from James to me. "If you had been in the house—"

"I went to the city. I met someone."

"What does it matter where you went," Anneliese said, and stopped there.

Heinz said, "You don't know anybody, so how could you meet somebody?"

What should I tell this unkind long-limbed boy? That I had met Mitwisser gazing at his hat? That I had met Ninel's mockery and her stick?

"I ran into a sorceress on Fifth Avenue," I said. There was a contagion of grimness; there was grimness all around.

James looked at me, not casually; a new way of looking.

"Where did this thing come from?" he said.

Then I saw the Bear Boy with its torn flyleaf lying open on the table.

"It was in my father's things when he died."

"Your father," he said. "Is this a joke, your father?"

"I don't know why he had it."

"But you know what it's worth, don't you."

The Bear Boy was sitting in a tree. He had long loose brown bangs. His legs were dangling from a branch. He was wearing blue socks and brown shoes with two sets of buckles, and a white blouse with a ruffled round lace collar. The collar was edged with blue piping; a bird with an orange worm in its beak was embroidered on a pocket. On the ground below—the grass was very green—stood an outsized green hat, high and broad and grand, as green as the grass. The hat might have passed for a green hillock, except for a tall peacock's tail of green feathers sticking up from it.

Underneath was this rhyme:

I don't like me
partic'larly,
but when I see
the other boys,
ruffians in their filth and noise,
oh! I—like—me!

"That hat," James said, "was bought in 1911 by J. P. Morgan for sixty thousand dollars."

"But it's only a picture," Gert said.

"A picture copied from a real hat."

"Why would anyone pay so much for a silly hat?"

"Because of the Bear Boy. Anything the Bear Boy touched turned into money. His shirts, his eyeglasses. The Bear Boy," James said, "was the King Midas of his day."

"I know that story," Willi said. "Whatever King Midas touched stopped being alive."

"It's a baby story," Gert said. "And this whole Bear Boy's a baby story. We used to have it at home, only it was called
Bürknabe—
"

"
I
know that," Willi said.

"You don't remember, you were too little."

"Yes I do. I do so remember, I even told
her.
" Like an accuser, he pointed a finger at me. And as if I had been rightly accused, I felt a flare of guilt, though I could not tell for what.

"And this thing," James said, "is worth piles more than that hat."

"But the front of it's ripped and it's got spots all over—"

"The Bear Boy's spots. His spots are worth plenty. His butter, his jam. The book his father gave him when he was five, he wore it out until he hated it.... What a joke."

Anneliese stiffened. "You should see about mama," she broke in. "To go off that way and leave her alone—"

"She was asleep. She was perfectly safe," I protested, "and the boys would be coming home—"

"She sleeps too much." She turned to Heinz: "When you brought up mama's tray, was she still sleeping?"

"They were playing handball after school, and Gert wanted to stay, so we sent Willi home to do it."

"I made the toast and got the milk," Willi said; but his neck had begun to redden. I had seen Anneliese's neck redden in just that way. "Mama wasn't in her bed, so that's when I went and got the Bear Boy. Because no one was watching, but it was just to show James—"

"Mama wasn't in her bed?" Anneliese said.

"No."

"Where was she?"

The redness spread to his forehead; his ears flamed, his head flamed. "I looked all over the house—"

"Tell where mama was," Anneliese said.

"In James's bed. With a scissors, cutting up his pillow."

To me Anneliese muttered, "And this is what we pay you for?" There was more rote than fervor in it; she was grim and dry.

But I thought: it's James who pays me, not you!

"What a joke," James said again. He slapped the Bear Boy shut, and I understood my guilt. It was not because I had deserted Mrs. Mitwisser. It was, as always, on account of my father's vice.

23

T
HE NEXT MORNING,
after the boys had left for school, Professor Mitwisser took up his briefcase as usual, put on his hat, and called me to him. He looked vaguely unkempt, and I saw that he had not troubled to shave. A thin white frost misted his chin.

"You must never again do such a thing. You must never again go out from the house in that way. My sons are only children, they are not responsible, you must rely on them for nothing. You must never again leave my poor wife by herself. Is this understood?"

His head was low, his shoulders high; his shoulders were a cave. He made his way into the street too cautiously, like a man in hiding.

"You'll be in charge of Waltraut today," Anneliese told me. "James needs me to go with him."

"You're not taking her with you?"

"Your job is to look after Waltraut and mama. Please remember that."

"My job is to assist Professor Mitwisser."

It was easy now to be defiant; Anneliese no longer had influence over me. She had grown lenient. It was as if she no longer had influence over herself.

"Papa has to be away all day for his work, you know that. And his nights belong to James." An egg was boiling in a pot. She was preparing Mrs. Mitwisser's morning tray—but her look flickered upward, to Mitwisser's study, where James sat with his teacup in Mitwisser's chair. "You shouldn't mind about Willi. Now go and get Waltraut."

"Mrs. Mitwisser won't let me come near her," I complained.

"Oh, just do your job, won't you?" An unfamiliar idleness purred in her throat. "I told you, papa and James are exactly the same, nothing else counts."

Waltraut lay in James's lap, playing with a string.

"Teaching old Wally cat's cradle," James said.

I said, "That's not tea you've got in there—"

"The real stuff, right. Braces a man for the day. Saves his soul from yesterday." He gave a small push; Waltraut, fists entangled in webs, slid off his knees. "I suppose you've got an inkling about your dad liking his dice," he said.

Now I felt his power: the power that clutched at the house, the power of health and sickness, the power that drew Mrs. Mitwisser to her scissors. A tramp, a vagabond, an idler, an invader!
Dieser'Säufer.
But he divined things; he knew things.

"He won it off me," James said. "I would've given it to him, I'm always looking to get rid of all that sort of trash. Those goddamn fancy
shirts
ended up in London, in some museum over there." The stretched-out laugh. "But that fella wanted to play the odds. He was hard up, and still he wanted the odds."

Then, in the whirligig of incoherence I already suspected the world to be, it was confirmed that the Bear Boy had gambled with my father, and my father had won, or had slyly been permitted to win, the Bear Boy's own relic, spotted with the Bear Boy's own jam. The relic could be turned into gold, and I was its heir.

Anneliese was standing in the doorway. "Here's mama's breakfast. No cereal, she's tired of cereal, she leaves it in the dish. Take it up, please, I don't have time." To James she said, "I'm ready."

"I want to come too," Waltraut squealed in her high lamblike voice. She looked up at James with her round stare—the Mitwisser eye, but with this difference: it had grown used to a cornucopia of puppet shows and carousels.

"No, you don't," James whispered. "Today the mouse doesn't want to come out of the house"—and I caught, vibrating under the cajoling words, an electric burr that seemed to say: you have served your purpose.

24

M
RS. MITWISSER
was again begging my forgiveness. She confessed to a crude offense, an insult, she was all contrition, she had done me an injustice, an injury, not once but twice: first she had taken my money, and then she had blamed me for taking James's money. The first was theft, the second was ... she did not know what to call the second. I was a servant in the house—wasn't that what I was, a kind of servant? and as such I deserved to be paid, and since
they
("we," she said, with the loftiness of an empress) were incapable of paying me themselves ... At home the servants—the maid, the cook—were always promptly paid, every Friday morning, except for the governess, Mademoiselle De Bonrepos, who received her salary on the first of the month in a little silken drawstring sack, along with some small gift, so that it should appear the gift was what was being handed over, rather than money, it would not do to be too overt, too bald, a governess is not a maid...

I forgave her many times. I watched her take a deep bite out of her boiled egg. Her teeth were as orderly and unspoiled as Waltraut's. "You see?" she said, and displayed the bitten egg: the crescent left by its absent crown. "My first papers, they are from this bite." She copied its curve with her finger in the air. "I go with Herr Doktor Schrödinger to Switzerland, to Arosa, the bite is not there, but anyhow we can know where goes the shape, you see?..." They called it, she explained, Schrödinger's equation, a wave function that extended throughout space, just as the missing outline of the bitten egg extended in principle beyond the existing body of the egg. They had spent the December holidays of 1925 in Arosa, she and Erwin, at a fine hotel. Anneliese, a child of six, was at home in the care of Mademoiselle De Bonrepos, and of course it was in those days not proper, but her husband knew nothing of it, nothing, he was the whole time in Spain, in an archive there, searching after one of his beloved Egyptians, ibn Saghir was it? They were not lovers, she and Erwin, never, in fact they were competitors, rivals, they slept in separate rooms but worked much of the night in his, and it was in his room, past midnight, when they had ordered some refreshment to carry them through, that she had bitten into the boiled egg, and there it was, the explosion of
seeing,
the possibility that had until that instant eluded them, the idea that the object of their passion, like a wave of the sea, was after all not guaranteed to linger in one place, it was a force not a thing, their wild-hearted wandering fickle electron!—oh, they were elated, and the laughter, the comedy, the absurdity, the thrill of that egg! Together they struggled to formulate the equation, it occupied many nights, by day they walked, arguing, along the mountain paths, the lobby had a great Tannenbaum hung with colored-glass globes sheltering candles, yes, they were suspected of being lovers, the Swiss are eternally suspicious.... Schrödinger, that arrogant tall young Austrian with his tall forehead and his eyelids moistly quivering, like wet lips, with the excitement of it, and she his designated assistant, a married woman and a mother.... At the Institute they accepted her reluctantly, she was fully a colleague yet they took her to be Schrödinger's subordinate, they could see no woman as their equal, but her papers could not be resisted, they could not be denied, she was there on the strength of her papers, they were as much hers as Schrödinger's, and it was
she
who had bitten the egg.... What times those were! Pauli, Heisenberg, they were all in their twenties, Fermi was just twenty-three, herself twenty-eight, only Erwin Schrödinger was older a little, they all had different theories, they were like a band of mystics pursuing imagined angels: waves and particles!