It is through these commandments and ordinances that we have been made to disappear. And so we live on as apparitions, fearful of mockery. And I, Ben-Zion Elefantin, am just such an apparition, am I not?
* * *
*
August 3, 1949. Oh my feelings, my feelings! How they drive me, not since the passing of my darling, my Peg, my own sweet Peg, never since then, and I scarcely know why. My father’s box here on my desk a veritable oven, the words within burn and burn, indeed they smell of clinging smoke, I begin to fear they are counterfeit, contraband of my own making, my brain is dizzied, I am not myself, we are under a violent tropical heat breathing fire, 103 degrees on this the second brutal day of it, the fans vanquished, a cosmic furnace where sanity wants nothing more than ice water, and this foolish woman chooses to cook her Saftgoulasch! She comes to me panting, with a red face and the sweat flooding her neck, to give me news of that feckless pair of kitchen defectors, and to complain yet again how doubly hard the work is for her without the men to do the heavy labor, is she expected to lift barrels? And das Flittchen Amelia, she is for spite schtum (when excited Hedda loses hold of her English), she knows three days already where they go, ein hochnäsige restaurant making bigger its business where are so many trains and in this bitter house so much work and Mäuse in the pantry and that old man sick in his head crying crying stinking of his own kacken, wie lang müssen wir noch auf diese verehrte Finanziere und ihre blöden Papiere warten?
And so forth. I told her that the mills of the bankers grind slowly, and what leads her to think that in such miserable heat any normal man could get that greasy damn stew down his gullet, and as for the mainstay of the staff going off to wait tables in the city, no wonder the rats are leaving the sinking ship, so why not the Oyster Bar in preference to this waning mice-ridden edifice?
Hedda is a respectable woman. I have never before quarreled with her. I have never thought to offend her.
* * *
*
August 5, 1949. Relief. After four detestable days, that hellish heat wave has broken. Hedda has begun to speak to me again, though I never did eat her stew. As for the Oyster Bar’s coming to mind, I believe it must have been some considerable time before my retirement that Ned Greenhill and I last lunched there. It was convenient for both of us, my office just around the corner from Grand Central, and the Courthouse downtown, ten minutes by subway. In homage to the name, Ned habitually ordered oysters, while I, mindful of my nervous digestion, kept to milder flounder. The place in those days had its own confidential dimness. A couple of fellows could sit with their drinks in a semblance of seclusion, while up and down the ramp the plebs ran for their trains. I remember how the tables vibrated with the underground scrapings of wheels on rails. A pity, all this remodeling and refurbishing and hiring of new staff. Nowadays every comfortable old space submits to this fad of architectural vastness, every public room a modernist boast. Happily the Academy escaped this destiny when it was metamorphosed into Temple House, though perhaps too many of the original Oxonian genuflections were retained. (I mean those fortresslike gray turrets that some of the upper-form rowdies claimed were in need of condoms.) Casual reminiscences such as these began our infrequent meetings, but after several glasses of wine we ventured, on the occasion I allude to, into more personal exchanges. I might insert here that Ned is careful never to speak of his son, I suspect out of consideration of me, since I have so little to say of mine. Unlike many of his kind, he is no braggart, especially in view of his own success. (I see in the Times that he is currently being sought after for an appellate appointment.) At Harvard he studied philosophy with one Harry Wolfson, a luminary unfamiliar to me, but well known, Ned made clear, to Reverend Greenhill—at least to his library, as I lately saw for myself. (I regret to say that I also saw rodent droppings all along the shelves.) Ned’s memories of our long-ago headmaster have often dominated our conversations: Reverend Greenhill’s amusement at the similarity of their family names coexisting with the dissimilarity of their ancestry, his eagerness to introduce Ned to the understanding of Greek, and his general favoritism toward Ned, unluckily making him the butt of his classmates.
At his mention of this word, I asked whether he recalled an undersized and taciturn fourth-form boy with a farcical pachyderm name, which everyone ridiculed. I said this jokingly, and almost dismissively, so as not to reveal my ardent interest in what he might tell me. Oh yes, he said, who could forget such an oddity, myself in particular, since I too was mocked, and worse than mocked, along with the other Jewish boys, but in my case all the more so because Reverend Greenhill had singled me out. It was not only for the pleasure he took in my being drawn to the classical languages, rare enough in the Academy, he told me, but also because he had observed my restraint when bullied, and believed I might understand this boy’s irregular situation, and would be willing to befriend him. No former headmaster had agreed to take in a pupil sent over from the Elijah Foundation, and Canterbury his predecessor had insisted on its improbability on grounds of proper religion. I was curious to know what was the nature of such a Foundation? No one today, he said, speaks of orphans and orphanages, these terms are thankfully obsolete, but one can only suppose that a circumstance of this kind might account for the peculiarity of so untypical a boy. When I learned that at the Foundation the chief praisesong of their worship is cantillated in the language spoken by Our Lord, I invited him to have the run of my library, where he might find volumes of theological and historical appeal. He brightened at this, but only fleetingly. Unhappily his diffidence was such that he shrank from entering my study. Yet what Reverend Greenhill asked of me, Ned said, was impossible. To be seen in the company of a leper with a leper’s name? I was myself too much the target of nasty cracks.
In Ned’s tone, I should add, there was nothing of complaint or grievance. He spoke with simple matter-of-factness, whether improvised or not. And somehow I could not resist asking if he recalled that it was I who had dared to befriend Ben-Zion Elefantin: did he remember that? Oh, he said, passing your open door on my way for my hour with Reverend Greenhill, I once saw the two of you bent over some sort of board game, and of course like everyone else I knew the rowdies had you in their sights, as they had me, but I put it out of my mind. The truth is it gave me a twinge of guilt. I did badly that day with my Xenophon.
After this, I turned rather self-consciously away from this subject to a blander one, and when we shook hands and parted and I was back in my office, I requested one of the clerks to look up a certain Elijah Foundation and make a note of the results. In the end he found nothing; such an entity no longer exists, and why should it, after so many decades? And why is it plausible that Ned Greenhill’s recollection of words uttered a lifetime ago to a vulnerable child of ten should hold water? And besides, is it not likely that it was a different boy Reverend Greenhill spoke of all those years before? And not Ben-Zion Elefantin?
But for the rest of that day I was unaccountably thrown into an unusual dejection, and if not for the kind concern of my own good Peg (Miss Margaret Stimmer as she was then), I might not have recovered my spirits. Nor have I since met with Ned Greenhill.
* * *
*
August 9, 1949. For the last several hours I have been ruminating over what I have come more and more to think of as Ben-Zion Elefantin’s entreaty. How fragile it is, and yet how persuasive! My transcription, so called, of Ben-Zion Elefantin’s history continues to occupy my father’s cigar box, forbidden to any eye but my own. It will be plain to the excluded reader that here he will find himself at a disadvantage. And for good reason: my growing apprehension. Is Ben-Zion Elefantin’s testimony, if I may take it to be that, a wizardly act of my own deceit? His pleadings are the very marrow, and may I say the soul, of my memoir, and when I lift them out of their shelter (as I must shamelessly admit I am too often tempted to do) I am made heartsick, as by the hovering of a revenant. And sometimes, in t
hese sluggish midafternoons when I am seized by an overpowering stupor, I seem to see my father’s cigar box elide into the pretty china dish where my mother kept the scarab ring she never wore.
* * *
*
August 13, 1949. Hideous. Horrible and hideous. I cannot cleanse my eyes of it. Hedda’s shriek, and then Amelia running through the corridors shouting for me to come, come, come! That thing, barely a man, dangling in the night from the lit chandelier with its head horribly loosened, the tongue bulging, the necktie and its yellow butterflies twisted tight around the throat, the glass beads and teardrops swaying and tinkling like harps
* * *
*
August 14, 1949. At three o’clock this afternoon, mindful of the time gap, I telephoned my son. Noon in Los Angeles. He was still asleep, I could not help myself, I have no one dear to me, how alone I am, I feel strangled by my own vagrant fears. I despised this man, I thought him infantile in his attachment, the close companion of a vandal, if not himself a vandal, the two of them a cabal of criminality. But to take his own life because he could not bear the grieving, what am I to make of this? My son is indifferent to all of it, the suicide of a stranger, but what of my own hurt, how can he not see it, the fickleness of life, the cryptic trail of the past (my father’s desertion of my mother), and what of his own futility? I often feel that my son grudges me his time, yet today he took me by surprise, showing no impatience, assuring me there was no intrusion and that anyhow he had lately been sleeping lightly, buoyed up by what was almost certain to become his breakthrough, and do I know who William Wyler is? Wyler himself, he said, not his assistant, promises to get to my treatment early next week, likes the basic idea, seems excited by it, and so forth and so on, and how many times have I been apprised of this mirage by my deluded son? The oasis is always over the next hill. And the next hill is always more of the same desert.
I am not a jealous man. As a person of lineage, and as the heir and partner of a highly reputable law firm, I have never had a reason to envy. Rather, throughout my career, others have envied me. My father, had he lived to know of it, would have been pleased by at least the outward course of my life, my early achievements (e.g., editor in chief, Yale Law Journal), my marriage into a family similar in standing to our own, and whatever considerable esteem I have earned in the civic area. Despite the recklessness of his youth, my father was for the entirety of his remaining days a wholly conventional man, with conventional expectations. I believe I have met them. That my son has not met mine is a lasting and festering bruise. Every month or so I read of yet another landmark acquisition by Edwin Jacobs Greenhill, Jr., the most recent being the Algonquin, a hotel famous thirty years ago for its literary cachet, and by my count his fourth such midtown purchase.
Ned, I am aware, has grandchildren. My son is two years older than Ned’s. Both are middle-aged men. Can a treatment, so called, be said to possess literary cachet?
And I cannot, cannot, cannot cleanse my eyes of that horrific hanging thing.
* * *
*
August 19, 1949. Hedda has come to me with a substantial bundle of clothing, all of finest quality, just look here the linings and here also the stitches, and so many rich ties, this poor sickinthehead Mann dünn wie eine Krähe im Winter, she is sending these nice things to a charity, would I like to keep two or three of the neckties?
I told her I would not.
In describing my father as conventional some days ago, I meant it as a praiseworthy trait, perhaps as much for myself as for him. But nothing of that can be true. My God, how I falsify! There were certain times in my childhood, well before I was sent to the Academy, and when my mother was preoccupied elsewhere (she often spent evenings at one or another event at her Women’s Club), I would see my father settle into a chair in his study with his newspaper, and angrily toss it away, and sit and stare at the glass door of the cabinet that held his collection. For long minutes he would open that door and stare, or he would stare through the glass with the door shut. He never took out any of these objects. I was always a little afraid of him during these motionless scenes, when he seemed as wooden and lifeless as one of my toy soldiers. I would be crouched on the carpet nearby watching for his breath to resume, hoping my mother would come home and this silent and wooden starer would turn back into the father I knew.
It is because of these distant impressions that now and then assault me in unheralded snatches of panic that I believe my father harbored somewhere in his ribs an untamed creature. Unlike him, I am no dissembler, I am subject to no fantastic imaginings. And yet I feel all at sea, my memoir is of no more import than some wild pestilential growth, and what idiocy it was to think that it could be chained, as originally proposed, by ten typewritten sheets!
* * *
*
September 2, 1949. 4 pm. It is now nearly two weeks since with some urgency I advised Mr. John Theory, my current liaison at Morgan, of the need for the transfer of one of the Trustees here to a nursing facility. This morning there came from him what I expected to be confirmation, however delayed, of the completed arrangements, while meanwhile the disrepute brought upon this house by the disgrace of suicide has erased all such necessity; so it may be that what is merely moot is finally the father of the ironical. I have since learned that John’s communication, disturbing in the extreme, has been received by all five remaining Trustees. We are informed that the present situation at Temple House has long been unsustainable, that after private surveillance by the bank it was determined that the physical and financial condition of the premises continues to deteriorate (vermin, easy access by intruders, insufficient outdoors safety for the residents, understaffing, fragile old books a flammable hazard in the kitchen area, etc.), that the ill-considered renovations of so many years ago are inappropriate for the residents (dangerously weighty ceiling lighting fixtures, the attractive nuisance of a dimly lit chapel no longer in use), and so forth. In brief: we are required to vacate Temple House by no later than December 15, 1949.
By this hour (7:30 pm) the letters have been read in, it must be said, a flurry of consternation. My colleagues, uninvited, invaded my study shortly after the lunch trays were removed (Hedda has not yet been told of this new calamity), chiefly to bemoan the disruption, as if I, because of my prior interaction with John Theory, were the cause of it. Once again I find I am accused, not surprisingly by one of my earlier accusers, the nonentity who came together with that pernicious twosome to charge me with disturbing the peace. I will not forget that ignominious hammer and tongs, his sole utterance, nor will I give his name. Let him and the others be expunged from my consciousness.
Note how consistent I have been in omitting all names but that of Ned Greenhill, of whom I suspect no ill intent. (For obvious reasons, he was never regarded as eligible to serve as Trustee, yet to this day he has never shown resentment or rancor.) My honorable colleagues, it goes without saying, spare no opportunity to denigrate me. I blame this on that insidious Amelia, who coming one evening to pick up my dinner tray (once again that vile stew), observed me in an idle moment of contemplation. Randomly dispersed on my table, close to my father’s cigar box (with its hidden burden), were a few of his cherished arcana. I say randomly; I should perhaps say dreamily, as when some unforgotten presence presses as palpably as if it were as near and true as living pulse. It seemed to me that I was again on the floor with my wooden brigade, my father was again staring through the glass door, while meanwhile in the cup of my hand lay the bulbous female contours of one of those grotesque figurines, no more than three inches in height, that are prominent among his findings. And here was Amelia spewing out her lascivious giggle and going off, as I soon understood, to spread an infamous aspersion: that I am in the grip of an obscene habit of some kind. Since then, I have been subject to muted but sly hints and taunts, implying that I am given to caress the stone breasts and vulvae of these innocent objects. My worthy pe
ers, elderly widowers all, display the spiteful conduct of a pack of kindergartners!
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