The Syme Papers (69 page)

‘Yes?’ Pitt asked.

‘No‚’ she sighed.

She drank the rest of the mug, and set it on the television. ‘It doesn’t matter so much, Doug.’

‘I suppose you’re pleased?’

Susie considered, holding her mouth in the palm of her hand. ‘At this point, I’m relieved. The way you were going. I’ll be glad of a – change of pace. We can go home now; no reason not to; in the summer.’

‘It was Bunyon, you know‚’ Pitt said. ‘I got done.’

‘Among other things. Boys!’ she called out. ‘It’s almost time.’ Then ‘No, no, no‚’ she cut in quieter, squeezing her eyes shut and shaking her head, ‘I’m not a bit pleased or relieved, only miserable that you have suffered disappointment, which I would keep from you for all the world, though I can’t.’

Pitt, in the sweet dew of his wife’s pity, began to revive. ‘Only a temporary disappointment‚’ he said, scratching his nose, pinching it, sniffing, in the restless flow of thought. ‘A step – or, rather, a stumble – along the way. Syme had dozens like it – and kept going. Worse, indeed: a mother’s death; a friend’s betrayal; a lover’s faithlessness. There are always Bunyons and Ben Sillimans in the path of – well, there’s no harm in saying it – of
inspiration.
That’s how we know her when she comes: a breath of sharp air that makes us suddenly feel
that everyone else is wrong.
Naturally, the
uninspired
put a kink in the works when they can. But it’s our job, to –’

‘When is it my turn to do what I want?’ Susie said, in a voice as flat as counting to ten. She has round cheeks, my wife, flushed slightly in the heat of her insistence; a strong, short nose, blue eyes, and these she turned on me, sharp as broken glass.

‘What do you want?’

‘I want you to give up‚’ she said.

‘That isn’t in the power of your wanting.’

‘I want to go home‚’ she answered.
‘That
is. I want – no, there is too much wanting –
I would like
to move back to Yorkville, to a long flat on a side-street with a tree in the window and leaves on
the fire-escape, not far from Carl Schurz Park; to catch the yellow school-bus to the Bronx again, every morning with the boys.
And
you – at a proper job – that doesn’t swallow your life –
our
lives. (Somewhere you haven’t failed.) They’ll take us back, you know. They said as much when we left. I would like in time to take time out: for a girl, perhaps, or for me, painting again. Both, perhaps; and leave her at Na-na’s while I set up an easel in the kitchen; and on sunny days in the Socrates Gardens. You have had your years now: five at NYU, three in Texas, one in London. You’ve used them up. I – would like mine.’

‘I don’t think you understand‚’ Pitt said. ‘There is an – evolution. No, let me finish. There is a kind of evolution at work, and I’m a part of it. In the long view, this is all that matters, the only thing. Above the common run of the generations, there is another, much rarer, accumulation: of
knowledge.’
(‘Don’t talk to me like this‚’ Susie said, shaking her head. ‘In this
manner.’
Pitt continued,
declaring,
showing his hand at last.) ‘A higher natural selection, if you like, survival of what’s true at the expense of what isn’t. You have no idea how little of what we do proves … collectable, afterwards.’

‘I’m not
a little girl‚’
she said, in the pink of fury.

‘Syme had a single idea, just one, that – slipped past the censors, the judges of oblivion.
That the shell of the earth was full of cracks, and
the continents split along them.
This thought, the echoes of it, inspired a young German scientist invalided from the war to a true picture of the world. A
first-edition
true picture of the world – very rare. Pitt, in his small way, hopes –’

‘Pitt‚’ she said, ‘always Pitt.’

‘Hopes to add his pinch of truth to the history of the universe, by proving Syme’s part in Wegener’s discovery; hopes, in his small way, to take his place in the great evolution, the only thing that matters in the end.’

She stared at me, her great eyes wide, as if I were mad; and, worse still, unfamiliar to her in my madness, a strange, unpleasant creature that had scuttled through the door of her home. ‘I suppose’, she said at last, ‘that I have no part in this evolution?’

There was nothing I could answer.

We heard the clatter of the boys in their room, the intimate babble of their brotherhood, such as I never knew. Something fell over, a chair perhaps, with a jacket round it. It could not be lifted again, it seemed, without a great discussion, a settlement of fault, restitution to the injured party. Yet only the injured party seemed concerned; and Ben’s voice rose shrill above his brother’s. I thought of cutting in but kept quiet; then they fell quiet, too. A cat scratched at the screen door outside, began to pick at the thin wires, tearing them wider. ‘Go away‚’ Susie said. ‘Go away.’ It did not. Susie opened the door and looked at the long-starved tabby, stretching itself, arching up the screen, and plucking. Suddenly she hissed at it, and the cat scrambled yowling into the yard and slunk away along the low kerb of the street.

‘Well, regardless‚’ Susie began, turning round – quite calm, in fact. ‘This summer the boys and I are going back to New York. You can do what you like.’

‘I thought you loved me for my – arrogance,
uncompromising
arrogance‚’ Pitt answered at last her earlier question. ‘I thought you loved me for that.’

‘I thought you were funny‚’ she said. ‘At first, if you must know. A funny failure. Not so funny any more.’

‘Don’t you see’, Pitt urged, in gentle undertone, ‘that nothing is settled yet? They voted –’

‘Twenty-five to three, against.’

‘Against granting me tenure; well and good. But I might be able to stick around another year, as an assistant. Bunyon stepped over the line – he knows that. There are complaints to be made, through a variety of channels. The charge of plagiarism, for example – here, let me show you what he wrote –’

‘Hush, now‚’ she said, softening; the more I talked, the less she listened. ‘Hush.’ And squeezed me in her rounded arms, so that’ my elbows pressed against my ribs. (How unhappy I suddenly felt in her comfort!)

‘I have
evidence‚’
Pitt insisted, his voice rising, ‘evidence that Bunyon poisoned my chances from the start. I’d confront him – if
he hadn’t run away. Quite apart from the fact that the final proof of Syme’s genius is only a piece of good luck away. An experiment, a discovery, that will make good my name. Sitting in Joe Schapiro’s garage as we speak is a wonderful contraption, invented by Syme himself, to test the cooling of the earth in its first creation. A kind of bicycle with a spinning head attached – a clay globe, pricked with openings, and full of coal, which, once set alight, will melt the shavings of iron and nickel scattered among them, and approximate the formation of the planet itself. Whereupon –’

‘For God’s sake, Doug‚’ she said, pressing harder, ‘don’t make yourself ridiculous.’

Pitt loosened himself from her grasp. He wasn’t a coward much – as Dr Edith Karpenhammer once declared – ‘but
stuck,
while things like pity were thinning.’ Susie breathed deep, hiding her mouth, holding her nose between thumb and forefinger, at her wit’s end; sat down. Pitt walked into the kitchen, stooped and took a bucket from under the sink. Then he opened the freezer and lifted the ice-tray, crackling with cold, and began to bang it loose into the bucket. Some cubes skittled across the linoleum floor, and he bent on hands and knees to gather them up. After that, his fingers crawled among the stuck ice to pick off the last ones; before he pushed the tray in place, and raised the bucket to the sink. The ice clicked and cracked in the cold water as it rose between the gaps. Then the bucket swayed as he lowered it and set it on the lino tiles.

Ben came in, wearing a green jacket and a green tie tied much too long and hanging below his belt. ‘Are we freezing things now, Dad?’ he said, seeing his father bent over the ice. ‘What are we freezing?’

‘Let me do that‚’ Susie said, rough-handling her boy, and loosening the knot at his neck. ‘Aaron!’ she called through the closed door. ‘Betty and Mrs Liebowitz are on the way. It’s time.’

‘What goddamned dance?’ Pitt asked at last, rising, a piece of his thought clicking in place as the wheel of his family turned round and round.

‘Purim Prom‚’ Ben said. ‘For little Jews.’

‘I’m not going!’ Aaron cried, mysteriously muffled, through the bedroom door.

‘For God’s sake, Susan.’

‘I like getting dressed up‚’ Ben confided in a stage-whisper to his father. ‘I want to go.’

‘I’ve sprained my neck.’ (Aaron again.)

A car-horn tooted in the dark of the neighbourhood, and a door slammed shut.

‘The Liebowitzes are here!’ Susan cried to no one in particular, some imagined clerk recording all household facts in tireless shorthand, for future reference.

Pitt, in sudden inspiration, an irresistible overflow of revived spirits, declared, ‘He’s not going. He’s coming with me. Aaron!’ (Louder.) ‘You’re not going! You’re coming with me!’

‘Doug!’ Susie, vexed, her hands akimbo on her sweet plump hips. And then, in shadowy signification, speaking in capitals. ‘We Have Things To Talk About.’

The doorbell tinkled, twice, as if a thick thumb pressed it, and stuck, then fell away.

‘Just a sec, Betty‚’ Susie cried. ‘They’re coming.’

Aaron emerged, a jacket hung loose from his forehead, a tie vaguely noosed about his neck; shirt-buttons buttoned awry along his ribbed chest; sleeves rolled up to the elbow, in manly show of disinterest at his sartorial dismay.

‘I sprained my neck‚’ he said, quietly. ‘And I can’t go.’

‘You’re coining with me. I need you – a little experiment – creation of the world.’

‘Doug! Not now. Not like this.’

Perhaps Pitt did shame himself a little, to fight for his son in such a fashion, and split the boys between father and mother. But the battle – thank God! – was back in his blood, and nothing could quell it. There is no ‘serpent’, Phidy well knew, as insidious as our own high spirits, so seeming-innocent a tempter.

‘OK‚’ Aaron said, turning to the door. ‘So long as you know, Dad, this is only to get out of the Purim Prom.’ Pitt took the bucket of ice in hand.

‘Say,
Hello, Betty‚’
he told his son, as they passed in the doorway a girl in pink, bobbing up and down on unaccustomed high heels.

‘Hello, Dr Pitt!’ Betty cried, scratching awkwardly at a run in her tights.

‘Say,
Goodbye, Betty‚’
Pitt said, as they strode into the cool of the spring night.

‘Aaron?’ the girl said, lifting a corner of her mouth into a corner of a smile.

‘Goodbye, Betty‚’ Aaron dutifully replied.

A blinking, pink and longing look followed the boy as he followed his father, into the Volvo. Then more scratching.

‘Doug!’ A last, forsaken cry from the doorway.

Pitt honked, a little tootle, in answer to his wife; then waved goodbye to Liebowitzes, Peggy and Betty both; backed into the quiet of the road, and turned into the tree-spanned peace of the neighbourhood side-streets. They drove past the lit blue of the public pools and crossed towards Guadalupe; approached the green wire-fenced expanse of the Home for the Blind, and turned left, on to the strip mall, in a glitter of lights. He said nothing to his son till they slipped on to the bright smooth of the highway, driving west.

‘Where are we going?’ Aaron enquired at last. ‘Where are we going?’ he said again.

‘To finish an experiment‚’ his father answered.

Joe was out when they rolled on to the pebbles – engine in neutral, drifting quiet – of his drive. Joe and the
Fräulein
both. At least the house stood curtained and dark; and no one stirred when Pitt muddled with the garage key, clicked and rumbled the iron shutters into the roof at last.

‘Should we be doing this?’ Aaron asked, brave enough in his way, but naturally respectful of property and propriety.

Pitt stopped short, considered the question. ‘What do you think?’

‘I don’t think we should be doing this.’

(Pitt should disabuse his son of such conventions. Though, I must confess, he felt like a thief in the night himself – from a different
guilt, however, obscure to him then, but growing clearer by the minute.)

‘No, probably not‚’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’

He set the tub of ice – a fine sluggish slush now, slow to sway in the sway of the bucket, tinkling and crunching lightly – in the shadow of the Headless Bicycle cast by the street-lamp. Then he rummaged for the light-switch, found it, and blinked in the sudden illumination that filled the garage.

‘What the –’ Aaron muttered, ‘what the –’ as the full wonder of ‘the fantastical device’ struck his gaze. He stared at it, sucking the knuckle of his thumb between pressed lips (a family gesture), emitting faint windy squeaks of perplexity. ‘You know what‚’ he declared at last, his mind made up. ‘I think I’ll stop asking questions.’

‘Syme made it‚’ his father answered, somewhat hurt – that particular guilt from which he suffered now welling up, growing clearer all the time. ‘Two hundred years ago, nearly. To test how the world was made. Don’t you see, Son?
He tried to make the world
himself.
Such splendid –’

‘Delusion.’

‘Ambition, I would have said. Come on; help me get the fire going.’

Aaron found the matches at last under a brow-stained baseball cap, which also covered a sandwich bag full of dry and wrinkled grass. The boy kept mum – a child can learn too much at once about how a father lives. Pitt opened the lid of the world, struck the matches on the rough clay side, and dropped them burning in. The crumbled white sticks caught first, glowing furtively along their shiny edges – a low, faint flame like the bright shadow of true fire. Strange how great, how various, the degrees of conflagration are! Burning is never burning simply. The act must always be qualified by the
heat
involved: like the human passions (like inspiration), brightest when forcibly compressed, over time. He shut the lid; and waited for the glow to swell.