The Syme Papers (63 page)

We sat by her, then went away at noon, and came back at four and sat by her again. The next day I returned to school. Within a week, my father had taken a job in Marin County – we needed cash, he said, but he was gone two weeks and two weeks again, and I delivered and retrieved my mother to and from hospital. Sunday evenings, my father fled to the San Diego Public Library – he said a publisher was interested in the history of scaffolding; it
needed only – a few touches. ‘A final – kick‚’ he said. Mostly, I believe, he read the newspapers and fell asleep, exhausted by the prospect of the grief to come.

In January, Pitt received news of his acceptance at the University of Harvard, under a full scholarship; in February, he declined. (This was his first – flinching.) By this point Jinny was in chemo. Her thin, mousy hair became thinner, hung upon her scalp in clumps like a swimmer’s bob, exposing the awful shadowless white of the skull. (How intimate a colour
white
is, untouched by the brown of sun! How strange that the common materials of Nature, skull and skin, appear like secrets exposed, secrets of
which
mystery I need not say.)

The other trouble, of course, was her digestion. ‘She do seem to suffer hard from her Digestion‚’ Edward wrote a hundred and sixty years before, ‘which is hardly to be wondered at, and she could not keep down the last real Food we pressed upon her, though the Doctor is convinced it is sheer wilfulness.’ Now, it was my father who believed in his wife’s wilfulness. ‘She never ate‚’ he said. ‘Say what you like – but she
never
ate. How do you think she got so thin? Swallow whatever you can, my dear, as the doctor said.’ My father had enormous faith in doctors; neglected and trusted them at once, as men treat gods. That summer – one of the hottest in years, burned till the blue sky grew almost black in the sun – I mowed lawns, two a day at fifteen dollars an hour, with Brad Finkelman, who owned the lawnmower and took 60 per cent. I was saving for a second-hand car, so I could live at home and drive to campus, twenty minutes away, at UC-SD.

In the fall of my freshman year, she had her second operation. She died over spring break in my junior year. (Pitt sums up, cuts short.) A studious reader may calculate the space between diagnosis and – my mother always hated words that muddled the clarity of – death. The studious reader may form some conception of years passed, if he measures out a teaspoonful of salt for each day, until a small white hill accumulates on the kitchen table. This should take some time. Death accrued in various amounts; there were shallow days, and heaped days. None were
hopeful. By the end, the substance meted out appeared not only bitter, but basic and, in some incontrovertible fashion, necessary – not to mention, immensely desiccating. The sound of the spoon in the grains was intimate, hushed. The sift as they tipped over soft. How quickly time blent and lost itself in the past, obscuring enormous pain – lick your finger, touch the mound and dab your tongue, for a taste of it, slight and endless.

‘The first absence’, as Edward reminded me, ‘is always of our duties.’ She died just in time for me to get in on a house for senior year with some fellows majoring in G & G, as we called it – Geology and Geophysics. I had learned from my father’s absences – how to repeat them; and he saw little of me before I flew to Oxford. But lately he has enjoyed something of a modern revival in my estimation – I see less dishonour in turning away. Love matters less than the maps we change to put it in the centre. Pitt understands more than he once did about the rights of solitude and the demands of solitary pursuits.

I never wept for Jinny – until lately at a meeting of the Bluestocking Society convened upon the question of ‘Flowers’ (over Pitt’s protests) at the home of Dr Edith Karpenhammer, a low-roofed dwelling set in a rank garden choked by last year’s leaves, the porch sagging, the screen door clawed by cats. The sitting room stank of old potted plants and new varnish. Pitt held his shirt-tails to his nose, breathing, as Peggy Liebowitz (Associate Professor of Comp. Lit., visiting from Sarah Lawrence) chirped prettily these terrible lines:

And Pitt began to wheeze into the plaid hem of his L.L. Bean. That night he locked the bathroom door, and sat on the pot in his jeans, and blubbed pink and ugly, staring at his streaked face in the mirror. Then he washed his mug, and dried it; flushed; unlocked the door and stepped into the bedroom, bald head shining. Susie never guessed.

Pitt has never been ashamed of the fact that he lives his life from books. They are the only companions of the self-educated man who do not mock the accent he has acquired or the words he mispronounces. Books are the best of us, infinitely preferable to their flesh-and-blood creators. They allow, among other things, for revision. We live, as it were, in the scribe’s ink – every blot tells. We
write
on the snowy pixelated fields of a computer screen, where the least step – may be retraced – deleted. The touch of a finger accomplishes what oceans cannot – wipes slates clean. Each setting forth begins from an eternal, instantly renewable
scratch.
Small wonder Pitt prefers books to those breathing masses of indelible accretion, who compose them. Something sweetens us, as we escape time and dry up – into print.

Pitt, I must confess, stood in need of renewal. Like his father, he had made a great beginning; but there was no end in sight. Even Müller believed, as Aaron discovered, that ‘the great error of my life was not the foolish betrayal (paradoxically vengeful and affectionate) for which you dismissed me at last, but the fact that I never told you, simply this: you are wrong, you are wrong, it is all absurd, you are wrong.’ Susie for one had no intention of falling into such an error, nor suffering such regrets. She reminded me at every turn of this plain truth (as she called it), until even
my
thoughts stopped short at Syme’s absurdity, and refused to budge. A hollow earth, for God’s sake! A dead man better left buried.

One end, however, stood in full view: the meeting of the tenure committee, set for 15 March, a date that would decide my academic future, if nothing else.

Susie had already threatened to ‘up tents’, as she said – she had a muddling way with metaphor – and return to New York, should I fail. I answered only that one
folded
tents,
cut
anchor; possibly upped
sticks
… And she looked at me, quite unhappily, and said I took nothing seriously, out of temperament, nothing that mattered, and she had almost given up. I should
listen
to her, and hear how unhappy she was.

I said I
did
listen. I knew nothing to say – to unhappiness. I wish I did.

‘Well‚’ she sighed, ‘I suppose it’s much easier, and more interesting, to prove that the earth is hollow.’

‘Be fair‚’ I said.

‘No.’

I thought, but did not say: It is no
easier
at least, believe me, to prove that the earth is hollow.

It was books, in the end, that gave me ‘a kick’, in my father’s phrase. Specificially, another meeting of the Blue-stocking Society, convened upon the question of ‘Failure’. We met at the house of Bill Robinson – a law professor, who lived at the edge of the hill-country, in a deep-echoing bungalow built of cement and glass. We sat and bit olives and commented on the new art in the long living room – walled on one side by windows overlooking a gorge, which fell away from the house in a tangle of vines and live-oak. Ben called him always ‘Bill Robinson’ in a single flowing phrase, never Mister, or Bill – a faintly ironic, more broadly affectionate term, for the ginger-moustached man who used to come round bearing books of verse for the boy, marking a page with his thick thumb for a recitation on greeting.

Spring had come early to Texas; and the crickets creaked through the February evening, spread broad and deep over the hill-country. But there was just enough nip in the air to justify a fire. And Bill Robinson laid one over his stainless-steel hearth, indulging himself in a brief lecture, on the atavistic tendencies of modern man, while he lit the balled newspaper under the log. Then he straightened up, pressed his palms against the butt of his back – he used to be a ball-player of sorts, and suffered for it now – and called the session to order. He picked a slim volume from the pocket of his tweed, held it away from his eyes, squinted far-sighted while rolling an olive pit on his tongue.

‘A Grammarian’s Funeral‚’ he announced. Bill was no faintheart in the matter of stress. He gave the big words their weight; and declared in a light, resonant voice, rising to the corners of his sitting room:

A shiver tightened my temple, my forehead, ran along the crooks of my elbows, the heft of my back, my balls, fattened the goose-bumps on my thighs. Pitt knows it well.
That
is Syme, I thought.

I should say now that Bill Robinson keeps an excellent bottle of champagne in the fridge, knowing Pitt’s fancy for the tipple; and I had got drunk exceedingly by the time Dr Edith Karpenhammer, blessed and beautiful woman, rose to speak, in her slow-burning drawl. (It would light the old fire under Pitt, again.) She looked like nothing so much as a sheaf of wheat, running sparse. Her ‘yaller’ hair, as she would say, poked out of her head at all angles; a smudge of fat crimson replaced her puckered lips. Specs as big as moon-eyes perched heavy on her nose, leaving a pink pinch against the bridge. Her husband had run off with a student when she was fifty-five. That was twenty-odd years ago, and she hadn’t changed since – a tough, skinny Texan of the old school, with several bones to pick; and she would pick them clean. She was too dry foraging; lacked the moisture Time needed to ferment.

‘Come, let me read the oft-read tale again!’ she said, in a voice smoked in decades of Gauloise, spitting out the verse as she might a newspaper article:

She reached over and lifted from the glass table a glass of water, squeaking in the ring of its condensation. She drank loudly, set it down with a bang, and began to address the marvellous gipsy scholar, a Symist after my own heart.

The spark from heaven. And just as I began to mourn its absence in my life, steel struck flint and the tinder caught. A flame no greater than a match’s burned in my head, illuminating the clutter. I had compiled a record of Syme’s life: taped together the scraps he left behind him, collected the memories of his associates, tracked his influence through the disparate generations, traced him even as far as Alfred Wegener, lost in arctic snows. But I had never lifted a single foot in his steps, never followed him an inch along the course he set himself. The time had come for Pitt to experiment: with burning globes – fluvia – double-compression pistons. And I, Pitt thought, the secret of Syme’s art, when fully learned, will to the world impart; but it needs heaven-sent moments for this skill.

Dr Edith Karpenhammer read on, interminably dry, while the rest of us picked at the olives and stared at the fire, carefully arranged in the hearth, and the art, carefully arranged upon the walls. Pitt could have kissed her quiet on her powdery mouth.

I talked to a guy I knew in the History Department, Joe Schapiro, a natural Texan, with a pate as bald as Pitt’s, and the hands of a football player. He sidelined in what he called ‘construction art’, and exhibited from time to time in a Tex-Mex café out in Terrytown. Joe was a fellow of infinite and various sneezes; they rolled around his head like thunder in the Colorado mountains (where, incidentally, he kept a cabin) and split from time to time the echoing air. His great hands were never far from his face, kneading cheek and jaw, brow and nose, temple and cortex, to loosen the next fit. Other
than that, he was a soft-spoken gentleman, who liked to sculpt things out of rusty scrap.