ALSO BY CYNTHIA OZICK
Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays
Foreign Bodies
Dictation
The Din in the Head
Heir to the Glimmering World
Trust
Quarrel & Quandary
The Puttermesser Papers
Fame & Folly
What Henry James Knew and Other Essays on Writers
The Shawl
Metaphor & Memory
The Messiah of Stockholm
Art & Ardor
The Cannibal Galaxy
Levitation
Bloodshed and Three Novellas
Cousin William
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2021 by Cynthia Ozick
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Ozick, Cynthia, author.
Title: Antiquities / Cynthia Ozick.
Description: First edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, [2021] |
Identifiers: lccn 2020025778 (print) | lccn 2020025779 (ebook) | isbn 9780593318829 (hardcover) | isbn 9780593318836 (ebook)
Classification: lcc ps3565.z5 a85 2021 (print) | lcc ps3565.z5 (ebook) | ddc 813/.54—dc23
lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020025778
lc ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020025779
Ebook ISBN 9780593318836
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Frontispiece © UCL, The Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology
Cover images: (details, clockwise) (beetle) Rashad Aliyev / Getty Images; (lotus) Elena Kazanskaya / Shutterstock; (stork) A-Digit / Getty Images; (center, palm) Aratehortua / Shutterstock; (frame) ZU_09 /Getty Images; (ornaments) rawpixel
Cover design by Abby Weintraub
ep_prh_5.7.0_c0_r0
Contents
Cover
Also by Cynthia Ozick
Frontispiece
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Antiquities
Acknowledgments
A Note About the Author
to
Melanie Jackson
who makes things happen
My name is Lloyd Wilkinson Petrie, and I write on the 30th of April, 1949, at the behest of the Trustees of the Temple Academy for Boys, an institution that saw its last pupil thirty-four years ago. I must unfortunately report that of the remaining Trustees, only seven (of twenty-five) survive. Though well advanced in age myself, I am the youngest, and the least infirm but for a tremor of the left hand, yet capable enough at my Remington despite long years of dependence on my secretary, Miss Margaret Stimmer (now deceased). In our continuing capacity as Trustees, we meet irregularly, contingent on health, here in my study, with its mullioned windows looking out on our old maples newly in leaf.
I call it my study, and why not? My father too kept a sequestered space by this name; his tone in speaking of it signaled a preference for solitude, much like my own. The others, who also have tenure here in Temple House, are pleased to designate their present apartments by those old classroom plaques: Fourth Form Alpha, Fifth Form Beta, and so forth. In this way the nomenclature of the Academy lives on, its various buildings having been converted for use in perpetuity as living quarters for the Trustees. It is notable that certain enhancing decorative efforts have been introduced to the interior of the structure, such as ornamental crown moldings, as well as the installation of an imposing crystal chandelier in each apartment. I believe my late wife would have approved of elaborate appointments of this kind, but the constant swaying and tinkling of these dangling beads and teardrops, at the lightest footstep or wafting of air, is in truth more annoyance than comfort.
The former staff are of course long gone, but we are well attended by a pair of robust young men and (lately) merely two matrons, one of foreign origin, and the refectory has been updated (as they term it) with a modern kitchen, including a sizable pantry. In addition, it is especially needful to recall that the common toilets and showers exclusively for the pupils’ use, a disagreeable relic of the Academy’s early years, were torn down some time ago. Only the chapel has been left as it was, unheated.
It was determined by consensus at our penultimate meeting that what we are about to undertake shall not be a history of the Academy. It is true that the existing History, composed in 1915 at the moment of the Academy’s demise, contains certain expressions that would not be considered acceptable today. The local public library, which gladly received this heartfelt work at the time, will no longer permit it to stand on open shelves. Each Trustee, however, owns a leather-bound copy, and may for our immediate purpose consult it if needed, most likely to retrieve a forgotten name.
Our agreed intent, then, is to produce an album of remembrance, a collection of small memoirs meant to stand out from the welter of the past—seven chapters of, if I may borrow an old catchphrase, emotion recollected in tranquility. When completed, it is to be placed in the Academy vault at J. P. Morgan & Co., together with the History and other mementos already deposited therein, including the invaluable portrait of Henry James that once adorned the chapel. It has always been a matter of pride for us that the Academy’s physical plant was constructed on what had been the property (a goodly acreage) of the Temple family, cousins to Henry James; it was from these reputable Temples that the Academy gleaned its name. Unhappily, as recorded in the History, this circumstance has led to misunderstanding. That we were on occasion taken for a Mormon edifice, though risible, was difficulty enough. Most unfortunate was the too common suspicion that “Temple” signified something unpleasantly synagogical, so that on many a Sunday morning the chapel’s windows (those precious panels of stained glass depicting the Jerusalem of Jesus’s time) were discovered to have been smashed overnight. The youngest forms were regularly enlisted to sweep up the shards and stones.
How ironic were these ugly events, given that the Academy’s spirit was premised on English religious and scholarly principles. Our teachers, vetted for probity and suitable church affiliation, were styled masters. Our pupils wore blazers embroidered with inspirational insignia, and caps to match. Football (on the British model) was hygienically encouraged. French, Latin, attendance at chapel, and horsemanship were all mandatory, and indeed our earliest headmaster was brought over, at a considerable wage, from Liverpool. And all that in the familiar greenery of Westchester County!
Yet I have thus far engaged in this overly hasty prologue without having spoken of my own lineage. I am, as stated above, a Petrie. We have had among us men distinguished in jurisprudence, and I retain in their original folders a selection of my grandfather’s briefs, uncommonly impressive in that old copperplate hand, together with early letterheads, on fine linen paper, of the family firm, founded by his father. My own father in his youth left the firm briefly to pursue other interests, but was persuaded to return, and I have in my possession a sampling of his estimable contractual instruments, as well as a small private notebook crackling with grains of san
d trapped in its worn and brittle spine. (Of this, more anon.) I am told that I have myself a certain prowess in the writing of prose, at least in the idiom appropriate to the law. And while these bloodline emblems of civic dedication hold pride of place in my heart, they do not reach the stratum of distinction, let alone of renown, of yet another Petrie.
Here I speak of William Matthew Flinders Petrie, knighted by the Queen, and more broadly known as the illustrious archaeologist Sir Flinders Petrie, who passed away in his home in a turbulent Jerusalem a scant seven years ago, and is partially interred in the Protestant Cemetery on Mount Zion. (I am obliged to say partially: his head he donated to the Royal College of Surgeons in London.) My father, in addition to his nearly lifelong devotion to the law (though that life was too brief), was enamored of ancient times, and of esoteric maps, and also of genealogy, and thereby successfully traced the degrees of our relationship to this extraordinary man. It is difficult, of course, to judge when a cousin of a certain distance becomes rather more of a stranger than a relation, but in my father’s view there were reasons for his feelings of closeness.
I have intimated that my father impulsively broke away from the firm, to the shock of his parents, and more particularly the consternation of his young wife. (Among his papers I have found a browning newspaper clipping of this event, distressingly reported as a scandal.) He did in fact disappear in the blazingly hot summer of 1880, having gone in search of Cousin William (not yet Sir Flinders). At that time the press was infatuated with the spectacular excavations in Egypt, particularly the Great Pyramid of Giza, under the supervision of Cousin William, who was then a youthful prodigy of twenty-eight. My young father, newly married and destined for a vice-presidency, informing no one beforehand, had abruptly departed by steamship through Cadiz to Alexandria, after which he endured a miserable journey overland to the site of the excavations. It must be admitted that he did not go with empty pockets (he took with him money aplenty, privately arranging for further sums from a Spanish bank); nor could he be charged with absconding of funds. To a family firm such as ours, he was, after all, the heir.
It is from my discreet and quietly dispirited mother, in a burst of confession in her seventieth year, and seriously ailing, that I know something of the effects of this perfunctory escapade. With no inkling of its cause, my mother was left bewildered and distraught, and as week after week passed with no letter of explanation, and no notion of my father’s destination, she believed herself in some inscrutable way to be the instigator of his flight, finding reason upon reason for blame. How could this be? Three months after a glorious winter wedding, all glittering whiteness without and within, the fresh snow still silken and unblemished, the nave lined with overflowing stands of white roses, rows of white pearls sewn into her dress, the groom glowing with ardor (and the paternal promise of an instant increase in earnings), how could this be? The Wilkinsons, indignant and fearful, took her away to weep alone in her childhood bedroom; her inchoate cries of guilt, and her unthinkable pleas for divorce, however confused and pitiful, had become too alarmingly public. They enrolled her for a time, she told me, in a well-appointed nursing home, to assure her calm, and to conceal their embarrassment, until the wayward husband should return. And at length he did return, “brown as any darkie,” as my mother described him, admirably resuming his place in the firm and at her side. Following my birth, and until the last hours of my mother’s life, my father’s unaccountable absence in the summer of 1880 was never again to be spoken of.
* * *
*
May 26, 1949. I have been compelled to leave off after a period of unexpected illness brought on by a sunny but uncharacteristically cold Spring, when it was decided to hold the most recent meeting of the Trustees outdoors, under the maples, on those ancient yet sturdy wooden benches originally situated there by the Temple family some eighty years before. There was to be a final consensual understanding of the nature of each Trustee’s memoir: first, that it not exceed in length more than ten pages; second, that it be confined to an explicit happening lingering in memory and mood, and perhaps in influence, until this day; third, that it concern childhood only, and nothing beyond; fourth, that an implacably immovable date be set for completion, lest the indolence of some turn into general abandonment; and fifth, that it reflect accurately the atmosphere and principles of the Academy at the time in which the incident to be recounted had occurred. Ah, what callings-out of the past beneath those venerable trees!
I have failed to explain that each of the Trustees, by the terms of the Trust, and by design of the founders, must once himself have been a pupil of the Academy, and is thereby personally indebted to that past. Hence we all remember the reprehensible common showers. We all remember the sacking of the headmaster from Liverpool due to his inadequate accent and the misleading Cambridge degree that brought us those inferior vowels. (I sometimes ponder what poor Mr. Brackett-Lynn must have thought of our American vowels.) I might append here that of our seven extant Trustees, five are widowers, for whom marriage and family have compensated for early dolor, and two, having never married, are childless. I am glad to say that I am among the five, and am myself the father of a son. Eschewing the law, he long ago settled in California to pursue a career in, as he puts it, “film entertainment.” (I am no philosopher, my leanings are wholly pragmatic, but I now and then contemplate how perverse is the cycle of familial traits, the capriciousness of an earlier generation unfathomably reappearing in a later one.) Despite this, we are by no means estranged, though the sputter of the long-distance telephone lines sometimes inhibits intimate talk.
Our conference in that redolent place under the burgeoning branches was cut short, as it happened, by a sudden heavy rainstorm, which accounts for my ten days in bed, when I took advantage of my temporary (though distressing) invalidism by reviewing the little I have set down thus far. How dismaying to note the wandering digressions, the lack of proportion, too much told here, not enough there, and how different from the logical composition of a legal brief! First the circumstance, then the argument invoking precedent, and finally the conclusion, all concise and in order, unburdened by excessive rumination. And I have not yet so much as approached the subject of my memoir, which I hope before long to touch on: the presence in the Academy of a fourth-form pupil preposterously called Ben-Zion Elefantin, his Christian name (so to speak) a puzzling provocation, his surname a repeated pretext for ridicule by merciless boys.
Of those boys at that distant time (and well afterward), nearly all were in a way unwanted half-orphans. Fathers, like mine, dead too soon, or mothers, like mine, too melancholy to tend to a son at home. And now that I speak again of my father, I must revert to the notebook referred to above, given to me by my mother directly after my father’s death, together with certain other objects that I retain to this very day. The occasion was a rare holiday from school, permitted only that I might attend my father’s obsequies, which chanced also to coincide with my tenth birthday. “Here are your father’s toys,” my mother said (satirically, as I later understood), and added that such things were fit only for a boy of my temperament, who, as she claimed, preferred mooning over chess pieces to skipping with other boys in fresh air. With the vague awareness of a child, I knew that long before my birth my father had journeyed alone to some faraway land, my mother being too ill to accompany him, and that he had returned with an exquisite gift to delight her: a gold ring in the shape of a scarab. (I never saw her wear it.) He brought with him, besides, an assemblage of ancient oddities—souvenirs, it may be, that had appealed to him during his travels. These had been neglected, dusty and untouched for years, in a glass-fronted cabinet in a corner of my father’s study, until the morning following his funeral, when I was sent back to the Academy, carrying with me a bulky rattling pouch. I keep these curious treasures here, all in a row, on a shelf above my desk, just as they were, with the exception of one. (Of that one I will soon have more to say.)
> As for the notebook, I hardly knew what to do with it. I made, I recall, some small attempts at reading it, but except for a cursory mention of buffaloes and elephants, there was nothing to interest a boy just turned ten, and I thrust it, along with the other things, into the pouch. Today, undeniably, and in light of my family’s past, these much-faded writings are of overriding interest. The notebook has the dimensions of a playing card, no thicker than the width of my little finger. A crowded pencilled scribble in my father’s recognizable hand, though plainly hurried. The opening pages disappointingly dull, consisting merely of a list drawn up in one lengthy column spilling over several sheets. Why my father kept this inventory I cannot tell. (It is troubling to think that perhaps he was intending to make a life of such implements, never to return to my mother.) Here I will try the reader’s patience by transcribing only a small part of these jottings, viz.:
sledgehammers
handpicks
pickaxes
shovels
hoes
ropes
crowbars
sieves
buckets
baskets
mallets
sandbags
crates
turias
measuring tapes
wheelbarrows
line levels
theodolites
plaster
tents
horses
and so forth, though of horses he would have more to observe. What most struck my father on his arrival amid the dust and debris and the volcanic heat and the ceaseless jabber of the fellahin, all of them naked to the waist, was the stench of the horses’ droppings, melting and sizzling in the baking sand; incongruous as it might be, he was all at once reminded of those long-ago riding lessons at the Academy (already well established in my father’s time) purported to be requisite among a young man’s skills. How strange, he thought, that over such a great distance, and in such disparate scenes, the smell should be exactly the same!
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