AEgypt (10 page)

Like vast canvases by different masters using different palettes, the centuries hung separately in his mind, unmistakable for one another—except that they seemed to be labeled wrongly, or rather Pierce kept forgetting that the label to the right and not to the left referred to the picture he regarded. For the thirteenth century was red only in that designation; the fifteenth was not the beaten gold of 1500-1599 but the gray cloth of 1400-1499. So for a reason of his own Pierce had sometimes fallen into the common schoolboy error of naming his centuries wrongly; and still as an adult when he said “the eighteenth century” he could not help sensing in the term only the very last years of it, when the blue silk frock coats and white wigs of, say, 1776, were going out, being changed for the glossy top hats and black worsted of the 1800s.

He came to understand, of course, that the division of past time into centuries was artificial, that even ages which believed themselves to be altering at the century mark were in fact subject to forces far stronger than a mystical and even inaccurate numeration; but what mattered most in mastering history (as opposed to understanding it) was to have a clear hypothesis, a general picture, an
account
: a story, whose episodes flowed one from another, linked yet distinct, like chapters: the dark-golden fifteen-hundreds yielding to the marmoreal sixteens of reason and classicism, and then the seventeens come blue as Wedgwood,
douceur de vivre,
clear skies; the eighteens black with toil and piety, black as their soot and ink; lastly, the present century, tan as khaki, born from a clutch of brown eggs (1900) right on time. His color scheme in no wise clouded Pierce's mind; he had a sure sense of the confusion and heterogeneity of human acts, varicolored, colorless, unsqueezable into any box, least of all the centuries; his system was a filing system only—but one that he had not invented but had found within himself automatically, his knack, his gift.

Gifts can be frittered away. Child prodigies put aside their violins, bored or repelled. Pierce, laden with scholarships and expectations, left St. Guinefort's—his Kentucky boarding school—and went up North to prestigious, machicolated Noate to study under Frank Walker Barr, a book of whose he had first read when he was eleven or twelve (was it
Time's Body
? or
Mythos and Tyrannos
? He couldn't remember at the interview) and who would become the latest of a series of fathers Pierce would revere, whose friendship he would find awkward, whose gaze he would avoid. He drifted into aestheticism, switched to a major in Renaissance Studies, lost a semester of his junior year in a romantic adventure (suicidal girl, flight to the Coast in a Greyhound, rejection, heartbreak), and although returning chastened, never quite fitted his wheels again to the track.

He had lost, seemingly, his vocation (and felt a certain satisfaction at it, as though it had been baby fat or acne), but it was easy enough to knock around Noate in those years without one, not doing much of anything and living in town as though grown up; many of his friends, matriculated and not so matriculated, were doing it. It was not solely exculpation in Pierce that he would always think of himself as belonging to a sort of half-generation, born too late or too soon, falling continually between two stools. He had the idea that not many children had been conceived in the year of his own conception, most potential fathers being then off to war, only those with special disabilities (like Pierce's own) being left to breed. He was too young to be a beatnik; later, he would find himself too old, and too strictly reared, to be a success as a hippie. He came to consciousness in a moment of uneasy stasis, between existential and communal, psychoanalytic and psychedelic; and like many who feel themselves naked within, unfilled by notions, and without a plot, he clothed himself in a kind of puritanical dandyism, consisting mostly of an unwillingness to be pleased and black clothes of unidentifiable cut. He stood aloof in these clothes from a world he could not quite think how to criticize, and waited to see what would happen next.

In fact even this minimal pose was not quite brought off. Dandies should be small and neat. Pierce was neither. He had been a large and ill-made child, and his ugliness as a teenager had bordered on the remarkable, six feet by his sixteenth birthday, a face of unsymmetrical hugeness very like Abe Lincoln's, thick upshot hair, thick long-hanging wrists and clumsy splayed hands. Inside this frame there was someone small, even delicate, and deeply embarrassed by the ears on Pierce's head, the rug on his chest; and though (like Lincoln's) Pierce's disabilities would begin to shape up into interesting qualities by his thirties and seem to promise an old age of rugged character, even craggy good looks, Pierce would never forget how repellent the small person within had always found him.
Joli laid
, his mother called him; his uncle Sam Oliphant (whom Pierce most resembled) translated this as “pretty ugly,” and Pierce agreed. A little big and pretty ugly.

Keeping out of the army played its part in drawing Pierce into graduate school at Noate, and avoiding the more arduous heights of scholarship occupied him there. Later on, when preparing himself to set out upon some standard tome as onto an arid sierra, Pierce would remember with chagrin how clever he had been, at Noate, in circumventing such work, in maintaining everyone's good opinion of him without exactly justifying it, and in giving the impression of having acquired learning he had in fact only fingered lightly. Frank Barr hoped Pierce would do a thesis under his direction, perhaps taking up a theme Barr himself had wanted to pursue but had never been able to—he suggested the spread of Nestorian Christian churches in the Dark Ages, to India, China, black Africa: Marco Polo had come upon surviving congregations in Cathay, and myths of Issa, Jesus, could still be heard by astonished missionaries in the Sudan in the nineteenth century. What had they made out of the Christian story they carried so far, isolated through the centuries from Rome, from Byzantium? Fascinating. But Pierce, though intrigued (Barr could intrigue anyone), quailed before the labor involved, primary sources in six or eight languages, untrodden ground, expeditions in pith helmet and Land Rover for all he knew. He stayed with Renaissance Studies, though always sensing Barr's never-expressed judgment; he discovered a collection of Elizabethan confessional literature at the Noate library
(Seven Sobbes of a Sorrowful Soule for Sinne)
and planned a brief, elegant thesis on these and their relation to certain themes in Shakespeare, particularly
Measure for Measure,
in his proposal making austerity a virtue ("In restricting myself to this seemingly narrow compass,” etc., etc., as though to do so had been a hard choice) and getting it accepted by a tolerant old fart in the English department. He also acquired a parrot. Teaching the parrot to talk
(De mortuis nil nisi bunkum
was what he got it to say) took up more of his time than the thesis.

When his course work was completed, he made application, but no junior faculty position was offered to him at Noate.

Taken by surprise—not because he had labored to be hired, for he had not, but he had taken it for granted that this future would be offered him as a matter of course and had never seriously considered the possibility of any other—Pierce packed his books and his black suits and the notes for his thesis with an unsettling sense that his luck had, for the moment, run out, that perhaps nothing, nothing at all, would happen next. The parrot was sent to live with Pierce's father, Axel, in Brooklyn until Pierce settled down, and there it remained, year after year, in the south-facing window of Axel's apartment, whistling, staring, disparaging. Pierce took temporary jobs at private schools, worked summers at a bookstore; he plugged, occasionally, at the damned thesis; and at the annual mass meetings of the academic association to which he retained membership he continued, along with hundreds (so it seemed) of fresher faces, to present himself to be looked over by the varsity scouts for whatever faculty positions were available. He felt caught out—lost sweetheart discovered at a slave market—when once in the midst of an immense ballroom “reception” Frank Walker Barr put a hand on his shoulder, and invited him for a drink.

"Specialization,” Barr said when they had seated themselves on the cracked leather banquette of a paneled hotel bar, the professor's choice. “That's the great problem for scholars now. More and more about less and less."

"Hm,” Pierce said. Barr before him was a series of rough ellipses, slope-shouldered torso, round bald head split by his wide grin, small almost browless eyes behind oval glasses. His hands encircled the pale cone of a dry martini, with an olive in it, which he had ordered with ritual care and was drinking with slow relish.

"Understandable, of course,” he went on. “Even inevitable, when so much new material continually surfaces, new methods of investigation are worked out. Computers. Amazing how the past continually enlarges, instead of shrinking with distance.” He lifted the glass. There was a gold wedding band imbedded deep in the flesh of his ring finger. “Still,” tiny sip completed, “little room now for the generalist. Unfortunate, if that's where your talents lie."

"As yours do,” Pierce said, lifting his nearly drained scotch to Barr.

"So,” Barr said. “Any nibbles? Offers you're considering?"

Pierce shrugged, raised eyebrows, shook head. “You know,” he said, “when I was a kid I sort of thought that when I became a historian, what I would do, what historians did, was practice history—the way a doctor practices medicine. Maybe because the uncle I grew up with was a doctor. Have an office, or a shop..."

"'Keep thy shop,'” Barr said, “'and thy shop will keep thee.'” He made in his throat the famous Barr chuckle, plummy, chocolaty. “Ben Franklin."

Pierce drank. In the dark of the bar, his old mentor was unreadable. Pierce was fairly sure that Barr's kindly but justly lukewarm
descriptio
(couldn't call it a recommendation) was chiefly what had kept Pierce from moving automatically into a slot at Noate, and thrown him on the open market. “How,” he said, something—not the drink—warming his cheeks suddenly, “would
you
do it? Practice history. If there weren't Noate."

Barr considered this a long time. The drink before him seemed to glow faintly, like a votive lamp before a Buddha. “I think,” he said, “that I would take some job, some job I was suited for—my father was a tailor, I worked for him—and I would listen, and discover what questions people asked, that history might answer, or help to answer, even if at first they didn't seem to be historical questions; and I'd try to answer them. In a book, I suppose, probably, or maybe not."

"Questions like..."

"Questions that come up. I remember there was an old woman who lived over my father's shop. She read cards, told fortunes. She was a Gypsy, my father said, and that's why people went to her. But why, I asked him, do people think Gypsies can tell fortunes? History could answer that. Give an
account
, you see.” He set down his finished drink; his grin had begun again to grow, his chuckle to rumble in his throat. “The only trouble would be that damn tendency to generalism. I suppose that the first question I tried to answer would lead me to others, and those to others, and so on; and there being no publish-or-perish sort of pressure, no impetus to stop asking and start answering, I might go on forever. End up with the History of the World. Or
a
history, anyway.” He took, with plump fingers, the olive from his glass, and chewed it thoughtfully. “Incomplete, probably, in the end. Unfinished. Oh, yes. But still I think I would consider myself to have been practicing history."

A life of useful labor, a thousand relined overcoats, and yet all history in your heart, an endless dimension, a past as real as if it had been the case, and chock-full of answered questions; an account, added up but unpaid. A large dissatisfaction had sprung up in Pierce, or a nameless desire. He ordered a second drink.

"In any case,” Barr said, spreading his hands on the table as Pierce always remembered him doing toward a lecture's end, “it's neither here nor there, is it? Teachers are what we are. Now who did you say you've been talking to?"

The warmth in Pierce's cheeks heated to a blush. “Well,” he said. “Barnabas College. Here in the city.” As though it were one, an unimportant one, of many. “Looks possible."

"Barnabas,” said Barr, mulling. “Barnabas. I know the dean there. A Dr. Sacrobosco. I could write."

"Thank you,” Pierce said, only for the tiniest instant thinking that perhaps Barr would blackball him, queer his deal, would harry him now throughout Academe forever for not taking on those damn Nestorian churches. “Thank you."

"We'll talk,” Barr said, looking at a large gold wristwatch. “You'll fill me in on what you've been doing. How that thesis is coming. Now.” He rose, short legs making him a smaller man standing than he seemed sitting.

"So, by the way,” Pierce said, helping Barr into his crumpled mackintosh, “why
do
people think Gypsies can tell fortunes?"

"Oh,” Barr said, “the answer's simple enough. Simple enough.” He glanced up at Pierce, twinkling donnishly, as he had used to do when he announced that blue books must now be closed, and passed to the front. “There's more than one History of the World, you know,” he said. “Isn't there? More than one. One for each of us, maybe. Wouldn't you say so?"

Why do people think that Gypsies can tell fortunes?

The dissatisfaction, or the desire, or the puzzlement, that had awakened somehow in Pierce did not pass. He felt annoyed, nettled, continually; landing the Barnabas job did not end it, did not even seem relevant to it. He found himself waking at dawn with the sense that an answer to some question had to be found, a sense that would diffuse into the day's business and leave him restless at bedtime, a taste in his mind like the taste of too many anxious cigarettes.

What, did Barr own his soul or something, that he could set him off like this? It was unfair, he was a grown-up, a Ph.D. or nearly, he had a job (Barr's doing, all right, Barr's doing), and the whole great city lay before him for his delight, bars, women, entertainments all laid on. He began spending the evenings when he was not grading papers in reading, a habit he had almost broken himself of at Noate. He looked for Barr's books, most of which he knew only by report or review; several of them were out of print, and had to be hunted for in libraries or secondhand bookstores. A simple answer: something to stopper up whatever it was that seemed to be coming unstoppered within him, a last trick question to be disposed of, clear the field finally and for good.