The Syme Papers (82 page)

At midnight we heard a step. Sam came in and there we lay broad
to see, our crimes flush to heaven and to him. ‘Oh, oh, oh, oh, my
only love,’ cried Mrs Simmons, staring and rising, half-held by a
dream. She did not mean me, I know, but that other One, the great
and mystical and everlasting Sam Syme, the cold, the beautiful, the
brilliant, the heartless, the geonometrical, the falling Samuel
Highgate Syme, where all our consolation lay. She did not mean me,
I know, though, hoping, I turned to her, but her eyes were gone, fled
to Sam, hidden with her face in a crook of his arm and her dim hair
falling down to his elbows and all her pink-grey back hiding him
from me.

But Sam’s gaze was mine and how could I answer it? I would
have been thine at a word, I thought, but thy word was ‘enough’.
Yet I knew then that
my
betrayal had cut him the crueller. Mrs
Simmons he comforted with his endless gift for solace
–
his left arm 
pushed her head against his ribs. There she stood blind but full of his
smell and rhythm. He looked at me.

Say ‘faithless’ to me and I may answer, My love will come to
your call for faith. (You did not desire my love, though.) Even
your anger would suffice me. Cry treason and lost brotherhood and
forsaken friendship. Speak even of the cold bad day, our prospects
buried in the gravebed of a heap of kittens, and ask me how I could
turn from you at this sore pass.

You did not desire my love, though, only my faith. (I wondered
which stung you more: that I saw you brought so low this bitter
evening, or stole into your mistress’s bed?) Tom was blind to you, a
disciple by trade. I was a scientist, with a faith worth winning; but
you could not and you knew it – at least you knew it then, as I scrambled into my clothes at the foot of the bed, my rich blue coat, some
what stained by soot and ash; my yellow breeches, lately much
bedraggled; my cream cravat, bound tight to warm my neck, a dirty
yellow; my scuffed and filthy shoes. I would have given you such love,
a thousand faiths could not make the sum of it. You did not want it.

‘I know you
‚’
said Sam, looking down at me, and, truth to tell, I
cut a shabby figure.
‘I know you now –
and what you will
become.’

Sam, you are heartless and cruel, and turn only inwards and
there is nothing there, when a world lies before thee, bowing.

‘She fed me soup‚’ I answered miserably, ‘because I was cold‚’ and
left them together.

Easy was a squall of misery on my return. His nose was wet and
shone and his eyes were smeared with the fat of his hand. ‘He would
not talk to me
‚’
he blubbed. ‘He had not a word for me.’ My own
misery had got tired and slept and would wake in the morning.

‘It was only an experiment that failed.’

‘That’s it
‚’
said Easy, ‘a squib
‚’
and the word cheered him, ‘a
damp squib.’

‘Only a very dull day‚’ I said, and thought, He is more faithful
than I.

‘I gave him tea and put a rug over his knees for he was so cold
and I asked him what he found. He said “dead cats”.’

‘Oh‚’ I said. ‘We forgot to bury them again.’

‘That’s what he said. Is it a little funny? I shall use that word in
the morning – a squib.’

‘Yes, a squib. Not damp; quite – burned away, in fact. Burned up.
Excuse me, Easy, if I talk nonsense at you. I’m for bed.’

As I lay down to sleep, I had a new image of Syme. He was like a
tall tree, towering and graceful Yet everyone sought to cut their
names in him. And in his shade, all kinds of unclean things were
done and left their mark. So that, upon a closer look, we saw only
other people’s scars and other people’s dirt. Nothing kept me there
any more, certainly not my faith or my courage.

In two weeks I was gone. Sam was in such a low hole that he would
speak to no one, certainly not myself. In the end, Easy sent for Tom
and the two of them spirited him off to Tom’s own home, where
Kitty I believe nursed him tenderly. In an odd turn of events, I
retired to Baltimore and Sam’s father, from whence to take my
journey home.

Mr Syme embraced me warmly and fussed over my things.
‘Perhaps’, he said to me on the stairs, with my bag in hand to lead
me to my bed in Sam’s old room, ‘my son will come back to me
now.’ He was sad and pleased.

I thought often of that long day, frightened of my own faithless
ness. The steady accumulation of belief, stuck on me and hardened
by habit, had been dislodged by that blow, easy as snow from a
green tree. They all seemed madmen, each one. Sam with his
opium theories – a hollow earth! concentric spheres! fluvia!;
Ezekiel with his damp enthusiasm; even Tom, indefatigable in the
cause, had something crazy and cold about him. I was no better.
Now my father urged me home, by his triumph not disaster, so I
left.

To collect my things, I stopped at Pactaw one last time. I did not
dare call on Mrs Simmons, but she met me at the coach station, and
helped me with my box. She wore a bluejacket, bright as a butter
fly’s wings against her silvered hair, and a green skirt that swept
the ground like a willow. She had strong hands, as I discovered,
when she clasped the iron handle above my own, and pressed my
finger to the bone, setting down the trunk.

‘I heard you were going
‚’
she said. ‘Tom sent me this to give to
you.’ It was a letter. I took it through the carriage door, and then
urged suddenly, ‘Come home with me. We have no place in this
New World. I will find you a berth on my ship and in a month you
will be in Germany.’

Before I could think what I had asked, she began to weep. ‘Sam
sleeps like a baby now
‚
’ she said. ‘Before he could never endure the
night. He comes to me now more often, even more than at first. So I
am grateful to the cats for that at least. Sam is my only love and a great man, and I would rather be miserable with him than happy with another. He is grand and fine, and everything around him matters wonderfully – the least thing, like me. I wish Tom had been beside him that night, for Tom is such a happy fool, he would have found some trick.’

‘Then there is nothing to be said‚’ I answered, turning away. And
the coachman struck his whip and the horses began to move. I
watched her shrink behind me, as blue as a stone.

‘Sam will miss you
‚’
she called after me, from her own heart perhaps or to leaven her hard words.

We rode past the Dewdrop Inn and I took my last look of Pactaw,
before we reached the river and turned north. The two low hills
burned green with spring, and even the wind had a new air. The
last patches of snow had gone and the streets were ordinary brown
streets and the houses were ordinary white houses. There was noth
ing to keep me. I tore open Tom’s letter and read.
 

Farewells are always the swiftest of occasions – how soon the day of
my departure came. Reuben brought his coach to the door and lifted
my trunk as light as a bundle of hay in his great hands. ‘Are you
coming along, Barbara? We get on pretty well at the shop‚’ he said
to me, confidentially. ‘Ain’t they fine horses?’

Edward embraced me warmly on the steps and kissed my hair. ‘I
have forgotten Ezekiel‚’ I cried suddenly. ‘I borrowed Easy’s
chronometer on
…
to
mark the time on that bitter day … when the
earth opened up. I pray you return it.’

‘Never mind, Phidy,’ Edward said, standing outside in his shirt-
sleeves. ‘He can spare one, the fop. You must take something back 
with you, after all, to remember my son. There, now you’re off. You
are much better out of this business, you know.’

That hurt me deeply, for it made my allegiances suddenly clear. I
knew even then Sam had dry years ahead, and that we can resign
ourselves to unhappiness is as much a miracle to me as faith. (The
clock now lies ticking on the table where I write.)

So on that bright spring afternoon I stood with my trunks around
me at the pier. Bubbles saw them on to the boat and gave me a quick
kiss on either cheek. ‘I hope we have not disappointed you‚’ she said.

I thought of Tom’s greetings, on that colder, more hopeful day
just over a year before:
‘You’re almost too late. Have you brought fifty cents? Oh, never mind, come in. We’ll see about that later. Come on!’
I cried into the spray as they rowed me to the
ship.

I dreamed a strange dream the first night on board, which has
come to me often since. It was born perhaps out of my shifting bed
and the clank and hiss of water and wind, and my uneasy sleep.
There is something comic to it, though it troubled me sorely and I
woke weeping. I dreamed that I spotted Sam on some crowded
street, I could not say where. I saw him clearly among all the peo
ple, for he was a head above them, and when I found him he looked
down on me, though I am taller. There was some great fear in his
face, but I could not reach him and the dream shifted. A few weeks
had passed and again I saw him in a crowd, and now he had to
stoop for we were in a room. What I first thought was fear was
sadness now, and I knew, without a word said, that he was grow
ing and could not help himself, unfit for company, taller and thin
ner and more remote. It was the certainty that appalled me. He
knew what would happen and could not stop. When I saw him
again, a month later, he had reached such a height I could no
longer make out his face.

T
HE
GREAT
TRICK,
IT
SEEMS
TO
ME,
in teaching high school lies in becoming
characteristic
– of oneself, it goes without saying, though it does not always go without
acting.
‘And me so deeply
me
‚’
good Dr Karpenhammer warbled at us at one particularly drunken convocation of the Blue-stocking Society … oh, many years ago now I am sure. (We have come upon the final revision of my professional ambitions.) Children believe, naturally, in the power of personality: the broad gestures, declaring,
here
am
I
and
this
is
what
I’m
like.
Hier steh ich, as Luther cried, ich kann nicht anders. Though we proclaim instead, Here stand I, and I can and will
repeat
myself
 – and continue to repeat, that is, until you understand
me,
and through such understanding, the world – or whatever particular chapter of its history we hope to sell to a rabble of eleventh graders, on a dark Thursday morning in November, when the electric lights flicker in their wire cages against the stippled ceiling-tiles, unless it is only the teacher’s hangover
blinking.
In short, characteristically, I have begun to affect a pipe.

You can see me, if you wish – and since I have begun with a blank, dripping day in November, I may as well continue – huddled in the half-cold in the wet parking lot, at the exit ramp, standing by Ralph, the security guard. Chatting occasionally, as I stuff the pipe-bowl with Old Virginia, and try to set the flicker a-glow – while the seniors amble ‘down the hill’ towards the subway joint, or the pizza parlour, or the tattoo parlour, for all I care, or the Irish bar hidden behind the iron stairs and stanchions of the number 9 train, on 242nd Street. Where the bums sleep over the road on the benches by the park – that flat green stretch of drizzling nowhere on which the eye lingers and for which the heart yearns from the corner window of the history office on the third floor, between the copy machine and the stack of empty water-butt jugs, unreplaced.

Of course, it takes more than a pipe to run the History Department. A pinch of gravitas, lightly sprinkled, as the salt in the pepper of my new beard; a tongue sharp or sweet as the occasion demands. And a clear access, free pipeline, to our enthusiasm – that
fuel
undiminished with age, by which
we
light the world, kindle and rise to Her, when she feeds us a fresh intimation of her nature; while keeping a sufficiency of old ardour in reserve, which (like the oil of Judas Macabee) burns brightly between these rare replenishings. (I have become a Jew, you see, at last; finally persuaded by Susie’s insistence ‘that most of us live by faiths we don’t believe in’ – quite happily, as it happens, she neglected to add, and to the benefit of our children.) A certain clutter helps, too. A dishevelment of the classroom and the person, the rumour of a mind on higher things, bruited through frequent inattentions, slips of the tongue and ‘soft, abstracted airs’ – not to mention the irremediable
rummage
of books, confusion of papers, curious objets d’art, ornaments, heirlooms, keepsakes, cartographical records and obsolete instruments, upon desk and shelf. To this end, if no other, Syme has proved a great resource. A copy of Phidy’s manuscript lies under a heavy round stone (painted over with ships) within my office cubicle. The magnesium flu’, that magic lantern Joe constructed, hangs from a hook in the ceiling. And the last and final proof of his genius lies in the small, wooden, glass-panelled box Tom Jenkyns built for him, before he died – which sits, under a pot of dried heather, on the top shelf of my classroom bookcase, next to the dusty and unused VCR. But I outrun myself, as ever.

Susie, as they say, doesn’t work here any more. She stopped, when Kitty (named to please me) came along, now five years old. That’s when we moved to Astoria (so Na-na could help with the baby girl), in a sweet, brick-fronted, child’s sketch of a row-house on 34th Street, with half a back garden – now flowering over, after the tireless application of Susie’s sturdy green thumb, with roses, primroses, daffodils, pinks and even a small chunky patch of potato plants and cabbages. Not to mention two bicycles, belonging to the boys, and Kitty’s tiny two-wheeler with safety wheels
still screwed on, leaning awkwardly together against the fence, on good days, and spinning among the flowers, on bad. And Susie’s pine shed in the corner, looking over the garden through a broad single pane of glass, flecked with colours from the spattering of her palette – her studio.

She took up painting again when Kitty was born – idly, at first, between bouts of damp exhaustion, simply to dabble her fingers in colour again, delightful in itself – especially with her sense and flesh keened to such a pitch, the lightest touch could set her quivering. But then, as the girl grew (and began to sleep, upon occasion), the old passion consumed her – for precision, that intricate
abundance
of lines and angles that composes our vaguest shapes, sights and insights. We lived, still, cramped in a railroad flat on 89th and 2nd, just above a bar – a shady‚ ramshackle watering-hole, with high windows opening on to the dusty street in summer, and broken-footed chaise-longues, brocaded settees and unstuffed vermilion armchairs, cluttering the wood floors. Susie looked out the kitchen window and she painted fire-escapes, in reds that rusted like the iron ladders, and greens and coppers where the mildew caught, and shining browns where the rust and paint scabbed and scraped away. Clever and plain escapes, some with loose straggles from plant-pots clambering over and through the ironwork; occasional pieces of washing (rare); occasional misfits sitting and smoking on the steps into their opened windows; occasionally joined by company (rarer still).

I would like, from sheer romance, to say that Susie was discovered ‘by accident’ – coming home, as may be, after a long afternoon on a neighbouring side-street (further west perhaps, towards Park Avenue), where she painted the ornate escapes of single, stony family homes, covered in plants. By the barman, perhaps, who saw her clutching a wet canvas in the entryway, and offered to buy it for the long, exposed brick wall above the fireplace. The truth is, Father and Mother Pitt in the hot summer nights used to ‘retire below’, as we told the boys, permitted for once to watch TV while they kept an eye on Baby-Kitty. While we, of course, drank lemony gins and tonics in the opened window of the bar, talking amid the
tap-tap, tap-tap-tap of an evening rain, which spat dusty drops on the sidewalk between the trees. It was I, in fact, who approached the barman, over Susie’s blushing, anxious protestations, somewhat puckered by the lemon rind she twisted in her mouth, and persuaded him to hang a series of oils, by a local artist, recording the ‘quiet facades of neighbourhood life’.

In truth, she needed little discovery, possessing as she did
a
mother
in
the
trade.
As Susie declared to me, her early shyness overcome, plugging the corner of her mouth with an imaginary cigar, ‘I got my peoples here about me.’ So she did. And made a quiet, unsteady income, on top of my promotion to ‘Department Head’ (a strange, unflattering title, I maintain), sufficient to support the purchase of a house in Queens, on another, more permanent, mortgage of our loves and lives. (If I tell you that we now drive ‘the family car’,
finely
tuned,
as the family insisted, and riding sweetly on four ‘perfectly acceptable’ tyres, I believe you will understand that I have said all I need to say upon the subject of our settling
in
and
dawn)

Then, two years ago, my father died. On the quiet, as usual. Or, rather, in such characteristic solitude that nobody could have heard him had he shouted. The maid, Florinda, who came on Tuesdays, found him in the bathroom, slumped back against the cistern with his head on one side. He was one of those old men who got thin against the grain, skinny as he never was in youth. (Pitt, like his son, was born plump.) His neck lay curiously exposed, bristling slightly, fine enough for a single hand to curl about it, as they lifted him from the spot. Florinda, of course, never touched him; but a career spent among the dirty corners of people’s lives had prepared her for the corner in which she found him dead. She called me first, and – since sweet summer had come, greening and thickening and dusting the city – caught me at home, in a dressing-gown at one in the afternoon, watching cartoons with Kitty. ‘There was nothing in the pot‚’ she said, ‘Dr Pitt. He did not even go.’

By some sleight of grief, I thought at first only of my own long dallying in that smallest room, where I keep a stash of books
above the cistern on a shelf and bring the papers on Saturday morning, to hide from the swell and clamour of my family rousing and breakfasting outside. Inside, the world crumples and spreads out at my unclipped toes. Outside, it chatters along without me. And I thought, He probably wanted a minute’s quiet to himself, retiring as he had without a particular urge in that direction, before I recalled the old house hushed and empty beyond that little room.

I decided to drive to the funeral, fixed for the Wednesday following; and set off the next morning, under a cloud of Susie’s sympathies and tender reproaches – for shrinking from her just when she wished to comfort me, and barring her company on what she called my ‘trip’. But this seemed to me a matter of family business; and the family business, as we know, was Islands – and they are not easy to … desert. Besides, I had other duties to attend to, as an only child; and expected to be gone several weeks, clearing up my boyhood home and keeping what I liked, and selling the rest. My children did not know their grandfather well; and perhaps I desired as much, from a cause split two ways. Partly, he shamed me, in his brisk, misplaced enthusiasms and well-meaning ill manners; there was something low class about him, I could not deny, and he brought it out in me as well. ‘Ask and you’ll get on; that’s what I do; always asking, me. But make a name for yourself, my boy – stick out a little, unlike your old man – a name that lasts is the only thing that counts.’ Partly, I desired some respite from the world I had joined – Susie’s world, it seemed, to which our children belonged. I desired a familiar refuge
from
the life I had made,
out
of
reach
of the life I had made, untouched and undiminished by it.

Hers
was the only cloud I struck until New Mexico – a blissful scorching run of summer days. The sun stripped layer upon layer of blue from the shimmering skies, peeling the old paint to get to the first wash. The nights rang clear as a bell, and that bell was the moon – trembling in the heat and bright as brass. I stopped whenever I could off the highways. The towns, even those slight clusters around a church or a park or an outlet mall, in Pennsylvania, Indiana, Missouri, Oklahoma, oppressed me with a sense of lives
lived. Only the solace of Nowhere, off the interstate, offered such suspension of accustomed laws as I desired. I swam in the lit pools before going to bed, and lay, it seemed, always in the same sheets, watching the same box, eating the same pancakes in the morning, and growing fat and spotty as a boy again.

In New Mexico the storms began. Lightning split, suggesting a run of cracks in the delicate, invisible shell of the sky – flaws briefly illuminated, before our eyes lost the trace of them again and thankfully forgot such evidence of the hollow, imperfect spheres in which we lived. God sifted sugar of light between cloudy hands. The heat thickened, grew heavy. Even the plants, such as they were, started to sweat. The land began to grow familiar as I entered the littered deserts of Arizona – scrub and dirt and nothing to look at except for the nothing to look at, mile after mile, and the glitter of low towns in the distance before the road passed them by. At last, the vistas grew green again, under the tireless sprinklers, as I turned on to the ‘happy highways’ of my youth on a low-muttering Tuesday afternoon. And drove through the hot dusk into San Diego – ‘land of my birth‚’ as I once wrote, ‘under that synthetic sky, a creation of God’s akin to an architect’s model, clean, unchipped, constructed for tiny men’ – coming home to bury my father.

The funeral itself passed easily enough. Time is wonderful in its persistence; and I knew at the Eternal Home Crematorium (EHC Ltd) it was only a matter of time before the service finished, and the few mourners, dressed in khaki (the Californian black) or flowered prints, muttered at me and departed. My father was the kind of man who had a friend at the garage, and a friend at the deli, and a friend at the library, and the hardware store, and – yes, even at the hospital where my mother lay dying, at the front desk, where he delayed his visits. At work, he boasted a number of buddies’, but no one by name. He used to know ‘a couple kids’ in reception, and acknowledged several ‘friends’ in the secretary pool at admin. Few of them survived his retirement. He thrived at … passing compliments; and so passed ordinary, enduring friendships by. There were always a few
‘gangs’ on the go, in my childhood, for
evenings
on
the
town,
as he said – groups large enough, that is, to get by without intimacy. My father loved games – these also kept acquaintances at arm’s length. I believe he prompted several fads himself. But then the passion for the particular game – bowling, Scrabbling, charades – died out, and the gang died with it, and its members dispersed. A few were left over for the funeral, and I knew them vaguely, and they made things worse.

In the end, I took only Florinda for a cup of coffee afterwards, at a diner whose air conditioner proved to be on the fritz. A hot, fussy day about to break in clouds above us. We settled accounts, and she wept slightly and tenderly into a paper napkin unwrapped from an unused fork and knife as I paid the bill. Our bottoms sweated and stuck to the vinyl seats when we stood up to go.

I used to dream of his death, from time to time, before it happened, you see – sob in my sleep, sharp sucking breaths that woke Susie, who woke me, who woke weeping. And then a day or two might pass before the muddling misery dried up again, and the shadows of mourning faded into ordinary day. I was prepared, you see – that’s what I mean to say. And the great resource of dreams did not diminish after his death; and he died to me, again, again, years afterwards, only now I woke curiously comforted, by the freshness of his image in my heart. And there I consigned him, to these shadows, where I knew he would keep long and well, untouchable by time as well as me. The funeral itself mattered less; like my father, I have no stomach for the details of decay, the blood and ash. I prefer the leftovers – the letters, books, clutter our lives leave behind us – to the evidence and etiquette of death.