Antiquities

by Cynthia Ozick

  Hedda herself often remarks on these juvenile provocations in similar vein, having, as she recently confided, until 1932 taught at Vienna’s most respected fortschrittliche Grundschule. I think of her as a mundane intelligence, and never presumed she could be formally equipped with what she calls a Masterstudium. And with her dark looks she is certainly not a native Austrian. I have so far had little interest in her bizarre wanderings, though it bemuses me to learn that she was obliged to spend years in some woebegone Caribbean village, where, she insists, the thuggish Trujillo was more open to persons like herself than the American president. (Miranda and I, to tell the truth, naturally cast our votes four times against Roosevelt’s socialist schemes, even as we were compelled to overcome our dislike of that near-socialist Wendell Willkie.)

  But already today the plans for decampment have begun. The Trustees, to say it outright, are wealthy men: relocation ought not to be a difficulty. But where is one to go?

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  September 3, 1949. When this morning I was finally able to reach John Theory (he is rarely at his desk), he replied with a disconcerting testiness, though his telephone manner has in the past never been anything but respectful. Three generations of Petries, I told him, have been with Morgan, and out of the blue you have the gall to put me out on the street? Now listen to me, Lloyd, he said, there is nothing sudden or abrupt here, three months ago I sent you, I mean you personally as designated spokesman for the residents of Temple House, to which position you will recall you readily agreed some four years ago, an official notice stating that an investigation of the condition of the property was soon to begin. You cannot claim, he said, to be surprised. I am acutely surprised, I said, and as for the safety of our environment here, ought that not to be the Trustees’ own consideration without extraneous intrusion? Read the Charter, Lloyd, he said (with a good deal of asperity), why don’t you just read the Charter, and in fact I returned to it some twenty minutes ago and to my embarrassment located the clause in question. On its face it appears to contradict the earlier in-perpetuity clause, but on further examination I see that some clever Shylock’s statutory legerdemain obviates this conflict.

  More to the point, I have also found the letter of prior notification John speaks of. It troubles me that I had entirely forgotten it. I believe it must be my immersion in my memoir at the time of its arrival that distracted me, but what is still more vexing is that I discovered this letter in my father’s cigar box interleaved among the transcription papers, and have no memory of inserting it there. What could I have been thinking, or was I thinking at all? I have never been subject to carelessness, and surely not to willful negligence. Nevertheless it does not escape me that this new crop of rash young bankers is wanting in both decorum and deference.

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  September 5, 1949. Labor Day. Apparently hoping to compensate for Amelia’s recent barbarism, Hedda has come with a page torn out from Life magazine: a large photo of Sigmund Freud’s desk in his Vienna study. Parading over its surface are innumerable antiquities similar to my father’s, though certainly surpassing his in quantity. See now, Hedda said, one of the greatest thinkers of the century, and no one dares to accuse such a man of Lüsternheit! Clearly she means to flatter (or is it comfort?) me, as if I ought to be impressed by a comparison with this charlatan Jew and his preposterous notions. It can easily be seen throughout my memoir that I have no regard for such absurd posturings; it is the conscious mind I value, not its allegedly secret underworld. So here is this ragged bit of paper (she leaves it on my table and runs off), with all these phantasmagoric pharaonic remnants, bellies and horns, faceless heads, and why do these unfathomable things lead me to remember the heat of Ben-Zion Elefantin’s bony shins against my own?

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  September 18, 1949. An unexpected public affliction, this buzzing and swarming of sons and sons-in-law and daughters and daughters-in-law and grandsons and granddaughters, and who knows whatever other likely kin never before known to have been seen on these premises, soon to be razed and replaced by what faddish excrescence? I continue to follow in the Times how that predatory clique of New York developers are sniffing opportunities here in Westchester, with Temple House and its considerable grounds as prime prey. Undoubtedly the maples will give way to asphalt, though today they are all gold, gold at their crowns, gold on the paths, gold gilding the old benches. Our last fall here. The fall of Temple House. And the visitors, the half-forgotten relations, the would-be heirs and successors, coming, as they say, to the rescue, the plans for departure, the summonings, the offerings, the temptings, the resolutions, the invitations, the reassurances: this unwonted outbreak of the fevers of hospitality. Old men’s bones will be ash before long; inconceivable that wealthy old men should languish unhoused.

  As for me, with no eruption of daughter-in-law or grandchild or so much as a willing cousin (the latter-day Petries and Wilkinsons have hardly been fruitful), yet I too have a son, have I not? Some days ago I informed him of our enforced exodus. He did not beseech me to fly at once to Los Angeles for a new life in the California sunshine. Oh Dad, he said, you know you wouldn’t fit in here, it’s not your milieu, you wouldn’t be happy, and anyhow it’s not a generational thing, it’s a personality difference: and more demurrals on the same theme. He claims to be studying a freeing philosophy, Oriental in origin, called Zen, as well as the writings of one Martin Buber. (All this astonished me. I am alarmed by these inconstant dilettantisms.) I explained that to lighten the burden of my imminent move, I am about to dispose of much of my material possessions, as well as of certain keepsakes, one of which he had at one time expressed a strong desire to get hold of. I regret my untoward obstinacy in refusing you, I told him, and would be glad to assist in whatever motion picture project you are currently engaged in. I speak not only of financing, though we can surely discuss such an eventuality. Are you, I asked, still interested in making some use of my father’s notes on his Egyptian travels, and his inscrutable desertion of my mother, and his unusual friendship with Sir Flinders Petrie? Oh no Dad, he said, it’s past time for that sort of thing, not another one of these Near Eastern Westerns with the weeping abandoned bride, thanks all the same. And he made no further mention of William Wyler.

  There is no way I can win back my son: not by bribery, not by appeasement. Not by a love I cannot feel. I have loved only twice. Once my glorious Peg. And once, long ago, Ben-Zion Elefantin.

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  September 22, 1949. How many hours we lay there entwined I cannot say, nor can I recall whether either of us had surrendered, as I now suppose, to what must have been a kind of half-sleep. For myself, I know that the sun crept from one corner of the ceiling to another, and that I tracked its slow progress with indolent eyes. Nor can I say that I was fully awake, though the murmurings that swirled around me were remnants of Ben-Zion Elefantin’s small low catlike growlings, rising and ebbing, so that here and there I took him to be invoking a foreign tongue, even as I apprehended his meaning. By now the far-off football shouts had diminished, and a commotion in the corridors signaled that the dinner hour had arrived, and that our classmates had begun their raucous rush to the refectory. This reminded me that I was parched; my palate was no better than a dry ribbed plain, and while Ben-Zion Elefantin, with his curious patience, peeled away the shell of his boiled egg, I drank innumerable cups of water, as if my thirst could consume some bottomless Niagara. I had no hunger at all. We sat, he and I, in a quiet made more dense by the clamor all around, and said nothing, until he pushed his chair back from the table and left me. This time I did not follow.

  If only lost minutes could be reconstructed (minutes, I mean, in a boy’s mind seventy years ago), I would today perhaps understand what I understood only faintly then. He was throwing me off, he had no wish for me to pursue him. Something there was in me that had made him ashamed. It
was my pity he felt; he recoiled from it. Pity, he knew, was no more than blatant disbelief. Or else it was belief: that I thought him crazed. It may be that I did think him crazed, as a fabricator is crazed by the dazzle of his fabrication. And indeed I was dazzled, as I am even now, by the ingenuity of his fable, if that is what it was, and by the labyrinth of his boyish brain. And by the piteous loneliness of his thin legs. He had abandoned me once before, when I had misunderstood his words; but his words were like no other boy’s words, so how was I to blame? And am I not myself the son of a crazed father, so how am I to blame?

  The reader will conclude that I am mistaking pity for love.

  Conclude however you please.

  And for a second time (this was in chapel the next morning, when Reverend Greenhill’s text was Jonah’s refusal to preach to Nineveh), I saw yet again how humbly Ben-Zion Elefantin could sink into his shoulder blades as if to hide from himself. I am sorry, he said, that I made you so thirsty. You didn’t make me thirsty, I said, I just was. But I did make you thirsty, he said. Look, I said, come to my room at recess, there’s something I want to show you. I never want anyone else to see it, you’re the only one. All right, he said, I will come. Or maybe, I said, I’ll bring it to your room because you always keep your door shut. And then Reverend Greenhill began to describe the big fish, which he explained wasn’t necessarily an actual whale, and to my surprise I found myself listening with some interest.

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  September 24, 1949. It was on this day seven years ago that my poor Peg passed on. I have visited her burial site only on three particular occasions (I think of these as our small private anniversaries), and never since the last. Like me, she had no siblings, and her parents were long gone, so it was I who arranged for her spare marble gravestone in St. Mark’s Episcopal Cemetery, a short drive not far from Temple House. (Her origins were midwest Methodist, but no matter.) I had intended to go there often, to reflect on the words I had myself composed: Margaret Gertrude Stimmer, A Companion Valorous and Pure. I had hoped that this would give me if not consolation, then the will to bear her absence; yet before long I learned to my chagrin that my repeated presence there provoked unpleasant gossip among my colleagues. (My own interment, as is fitting, will be beside Miranda in the Petrie family plot.)

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  September 25, 1949. Once again the anxieties of my present musings disrupt my focus and send my thoughts flying: what am I to do with my father’s things, where am I to go, and will I be compelled to jettison my Remington? Even so, these insecurities must not sway me from the urgency of my purpose. Then let it be noted that in the very hour of my assignation with Ben-Zion Elefantin, recess was suspended. Instead, Forms Four through Eight were required to attend a lecture, to be held in the refectory, by a respected acquaintance of Reverend Greenhill’s, whose name has disappeared from my memory, though I can still see his thin pale fingers fluttering over the buttons of his vest as if in a failing plea for our unruly attention. Gentlemen, Reverend Greenhill began (he addressed us thus in the aggregate, though otherwise he called each boy by his family name), our subject today, however geographically distant, transpires, so to say, before our very eyes, while the fires of injustice are rank in our nostrils. Our speaker, he went on, is a formidable scholar of this shameful period in the history of France. Listen carefully, because it contains lessons for us at this very moment, here in our noble Temple Academy. It is a tale of lie and libel and deceit, and there is much to glean from it even for such a privileged society as ours. The visitor, it turned out, was too short for the height of the lectern; it rose to the bottom of his chin, so that his head seemed to hover on its own, bodiless. Captain Dreyfus, he said, is an officer in the French military who in a public ceremony of deliberate humiliation has been wrongfully stripped of his epaulets, but here he was interrupted: what are epaulets, sir, are they something like underpants? Against barbs such as this the little man struggled on in what soon became an assault of chatter and titter, as by twosomes and threesomes his audience dwindled. And when I furtively gestured to Ben-Zion Elefantin to come away, he glared at me with a ferocity I did not recognize, and remained where he was.

  For days afterward the rowdies made much of this event in their harryings, with taunts of you are rank in my nostril and other such inspired vituperations, stripped epaulets not least among them. And in chapel on Sunday Reverend Greenhill announced that he intended to take a week’s holiday in the Hebrides, to follow, he said, in the footsteps of Boswell and Dr. Johnson.

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  September 28, 1949. The exodus is under way. Two have already departed, one to Florida (the hammer-and-tongs fellow, and good riddance), the other ostensibly to vacation in Switzerland, where his nephew has business connections as well as a pied-à-terre in Zurich. I take vacation to be a euphemism for the final adieu: this chap, a veteran of kidney stones, can barely pump out three words without losing his breath, and who knows how he will survive a plane trip of many hours? Next week, I hear, two more of our sorry cohort are to vanish, the first to what is nowadays known as a senior residence, the second to a furnished annex, formerly a garage, directly behind his sister-in-law’s home in nearby Bronxville. (His brother is deceased.) As I earlier remarked, the Trustees are far, far from being pinched for dollars, and were never likely to be dependents, yet what else is longevity if not dependency?

  We were seven, and then six, and then five, and now with the exit of four, there remains but one, and I am that one. Not that I am entirely alone. Amelia, seeing the imminent collapse of her engagement here, has gone off to Texas with her newest casanova (so says Hedda), but Hedda herself persists. I go down to the kitchen for meals; it simplifies, or else call it democratization. We sit side by side and sometimes together pull out from their shelves in the pantry two or three of Reverend Greenhill’s disorderly mélange of old books, unwanted everywhere, though Hedda thinks this inconceivable. Why not take whatever you please, I tell her, they will anyhow end in the dumpster along with the much abused chapel pews. Danke, aber nein, only this one I take, and showed me the title, Liederkreis von Heinrich Heine.

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  September 30, 1949. I had determined to carry what I knew to be my father’s foremost treasure to Ben-Zion Elefantin’s room, relying on his obstinately shut door to ensure our privacy. But I hung back: it was there, amid the floating dust particles, that we had lain leg over leg, as if trapped together in the soft maze of some spider’s web, and under the shawl of a solitude and gravity that frightened me. My instinct was to keep away, and my own room, exposed to any passerby (I was too cowardly to flout the rules), was anyhow unsuitable for my devising. My devising was, as I dimly felt it, a consecration of sorts. The chapel was bare of such sensations, and besides, we had once been discovered there. Then what of Reverend Greenhill’s sanctum? No one entered unless summoned, not even the masters, though according to his own dictum, Reverend Greenhill’s study door was never closed, either by his wish or by any key. Gentlemen, he once told us (his text that day was the serpent in Eden), I own nothing of value but my library and my reflections; my books are mere matter, my reflections are not. It was off-putting to think (no doubt a derisive invention of the rowdies) that he kept on his table a photograph of his dead wife, or was it his dead child, with a wilting lily before it. But no pupil who was called to stand at that table had ever reported seeing anything like this. It was the carpet that surprised, a meadowlike flourish of purple flowers and curled fronds; it appeared to be Reverend Greenhill’s sole indulgence. We who remembered Mr. Canterbury’s introduction of this luxury knew better. And anyhow Reverend Greenhill had requested before his departure that every middle- and upper-form boy study his Geography of Great Britain and put a green mark, if he could find them, on the Hebrides.

  As for the carpet: I have since come to believe that monastic zeal conceals a
sybarite.

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  *

  October 4, 1949. It was on this carpet that we settled in our customary chess posture, I uneasily on one side, he on the other, with my shoebox between us. I had fixed the hour at eleven that night, when both masters and boys were safely asleep, while in some distant valley Reverend Greenhill, as I supposed, was stalking the spoor of those venerated names I had already forgotten. I am sorry, Ben-Zion Elefantin said, that I declined to come away when you asked. That stupid lecture, what a bore, I said, why would you want to stay? Oh, he said, this man they shamed, he is loyal and they say he is disloyal, it is as if he is Elefantin, but you are my friend and once more I have disappointed you. You haven’t, it’s just the way you are, I said, and got up to pull aside the curtains at the big paneled windows to let in the light. It was no more than pale misty moonlight, but it was enough; it wouldn’t do to switch on the lamp on Reverend Greenhill’s table. Even as late as it was, some lone boy on his way to the toilet might see the brightness under the doorsill and spy on us. Look, I said, I’ve brought you something important. It’s only for you, no one else would understand.