Heir to the Glimmering World

by Cynthia Ozick

  Lena had intended my cake to be ugly and bitter. And my father had intended to mislead her boy.

  It was not strange that I could see all this: I knew my father. It came to me in a flood—the silliness and the malice, the pathos and the pettiness; a simple-minded vengeful woman, her inadequate son, my father's tiny preposterous plots; and then our household, our sterile and constricted small cosmos. A formal feeling, palpable and gossamer, fell over me like a skein. It was as if I had been caught in a fisherman's net and lifted out of a viscid sea. From then on I was able to resist my father at nearly every point.

  My resistance took the form, at first, of a furious domesticity. I was old enough to do laundry and clean house, and every afternoon after school I taught myself a repertoire of easy meals. Because my father had long ago declared that we were vegetarians, I never had to touch meat. But I began to make order; my object was to rid us of those women. I scraped an aged layer of annealed oil off the inside of the oven. I stood on a chair and painted all the kitchen shelves. I shopped cautiously and hoarded pennies. The greengrocer, who knew me by name and often gave me, gratis, a basketful of back-of-the-store vegetables that were still usable but not quite salable, one day called out, "You're growing into a shrewd little thing, Rosie!"

  I did not feel shrewd. I felt formal, even puritan. I had turned myself into a mad perfectionist. I lived by an inflexible schedule: school; homework; supper; and then, sometimes until midnight, ironing my father's shirts. My father had little to say about this change in our way of life. When I asked for grocery money, he silently handed over his wallet and let me take what I needed.

  This skin of formality covered over my mannerisms and the pitch of my voice, and even the march of my sentences. I took over my father's typewriter and practiced typing with the help of a manual and became proficient—I was enamored of the methodical rows of letters. My speech was stilted. I had at that time been reading Jane Eyre, and admired the gravity and independence of a sad orphanhood. My own try at gravity and independence was a way of escaping the wilderness of my father's imagination. My goal was utter straightforwardness: it made me prim and smug. I fought chaos and sought symmetry, routine, propriety.

  But it soon came clear that though I could make household order, I could not make order of my father's mind. One winter evening, without so much as a warning, my father's principal rang our doorbell and strode in, spraying snow.

  "Now Jack," he said, "what's this about Euclid and the Hebrews?"

  "We call the Mediterranean a sea," my father said, "which makes it sound insuperable. Better to think of it as a pond, yes?" It was his most serenely teacherly tone. "In ancient days the old sailing ships went back and forth and across, year in and year out, carrying more than goods for trade—"

  "What in God's name," the principal roared, "did you tell your eleven o'clock geometry class this morning?"

  My father continued mild. "I told them it wasn't merely goods that were traded. It was knowledge, information, education."

  "What you told them was that King Solomon invented geometry! You told them Euclid got it all from the Hebrews! From King Solomon!"

  "It's perfectly possible," my father said. He was buoyant; he was thinking well of himself; he expected admiration if not confirmation. "All sorts of ideas traveled across the pond. Of course we can't be precisely certain of the timing—"

  "Stick to the textbook! Stick to the problems in the text! Stick to the Pythagorean theorem! I tell you, Jack, pull something like this again, and you're out of a job."

  This colloquy was unfolding in what passed for my father's "office"—his desk and chair in a corner of the foyer. I hid myself in the kitchen, huddled out of sight: I was in absolute fear. What if my father were really sent away? How would we survive? It seemed to me he was growing more and more reckless.

  Three years later he was dismissed. King Solomon had nothing to do with it. I was then fourteen ("Fourteen years since my Jenny's gone"), and had almost finished my sophomore term in high school; the ignominy descended on both of us. Our school—Thrace Central High—was small. It served only our town, and a few students from the failed farms nearby, where old abandoned barns decayed on weedy miles of neglected land. Most of the farm people had long ago departed. Syracuse was to the north of us, Troy to the east, Carthage to the west. Our shabby Thrace, with its depressed Main Street, was the poorest of these nobly named upstate places. The others were more fortunate: Syracuse had its university, Troy its shirtmaking, Carthage its candy factory. Thrace had nothing of value—men out of work, or discouraged families on their way to Albany, looking for work. Most of the town boys tolerated no more than two years of high school; the girls went further. This annoyed my father. Girls, he said, though they were born to multiply, were incapable of doing mathematics; I was his prime example.

  Thrace Central High employed only one other math teacher, a man who wore pocket handkerchiefs as if they were flags and flaunted three names: Austin Cockerill Doherty. He was unmarried and much younger than my father. The principal was impressed with him and thought him a superior teacher; my father took this as a preference and a slight and smarted over it. "I've got twice the brains," he said. He had chosen Austin Cockerill Doherty for an enemy, and dubbed him "the Tricolor," because of the bright handkerchiefs and the three names; and also because Doherty had inherited money and every year summered in the south of France. "That fellow's free as a bird," my father would mutter.

  For some reason—my father believed the principal was behind it—all the available boys were assigned to Doherty's classes, while my father was left with the girls. This meant that his "load," as he called it (though sometimes this was transmuted into "my toad," which led to "my frog," and then "my hog," and finally "my pigs"), was three times heavier than Doherty's, and also, he claimed, three times stupider. His stupid pigs were all girls.

  My father plotted his revenge and made me his accomplice. Now that I was in his school, we would—too often—run into each other during the day, which embarrassed us both. Usually, when I spotted my father heading in my direction, I would instantly change course and dart away. I hated it that my classmates might think me overprivileged, dangerous, in the camp of the enemy, because my father was a teacher. As for my father, he simply did not like to see me there.

  But on this occasion, when we happened to pass in the corridor—it was late June, the last day of the semester—he whipped me aside and put a hand on my shoulder. His grip was hard. "Rosie," he said, "do me a favor, will you? I've got a curriculum meeting late this afternoon—got to sit in the same pew with the goddamn Tricolor, can't be helped. What I need you to do is go into the office and pull out the grade sheets for Doherty's Algebra 2-B. You'll find 'em right there in the file."

  "You mean after school? Go in the office after school? But nobody's there, by then they've all gone home, it's all locked up."

  "I'll give you the key. Just go in and get the stuff and take it home for me."

  "If you've got the key, can't you get it yourself?"

  "It has to be done while I'm in the meeting. So I won't be held responsible. Look here, Rosie," my father said, "it's important."

  That night my father sat at his desk for two hours, comparing lists: his girls and the Tricolor's boys.

  "You're not fiddling with Mr. Doherty's grades, are you?" I asked.

  "Fiddling? What's fiddling? Of course I'm fiddling, can't you see? If those cretins in the office did what they're supposed to do, I wouldn't have to put in all this extra time, would I?"

  "I mean tampering."

  "Where'd you get an idea like that? I could get thrown out for that."

  "Then what are you doing?"

  "Improving my students, that's all. Giving the pigs their due."

  It was my job to return Doherty's sheets to the file, again after the office staff had left; and then the term was over. Doherty sailed away for the summer, and I still did not know what my father had done.

  What he had
done (I learned this long afterward) was a cheater's dream. Whatever grades Doherty had set down for his boys, my father made sure his girls surpassed. He elevated every mark of every girl he taught. His aim was to mock the Tricolor and admonish the principal—to prove that a really fine teacher could take a roomful of sows' ears and turn them into silk purses. Despite stealth and theft, it was a harmless scheme. It pleased the girls, who thought they had performed better than they knew, and my father was certain there was no way he could be found out.

  He was not found out. His dismissal came about because he had given passing grades in algebra and geometry—both of them necessary for graduation—to a student who had never set foot in either class.

  I was that student.

  "You can't go with the Tricolor," my father had announced early on. "Not in his class, no siree. I wouldn't give him the satisfaction. I've got a kid who can't do math? None of his business. And it's too goddamn awkward to have you in with me. Tell you what," he said. "I'll fix up the paperwork, no one'll ever know the difference. I'll slip you through the cracks, what d'you say?"

  "But then I'll never know how to do algebra. Or geometry either."

  "You'll never know how to do 'em anyhow, I guarantee you," my father said. "You can spend the time in study hall. You're big on reading, so you can go read in study hall. Don't worry about it. It's all bureaucracy, it's nothing but filling in the blanks. I'll take care of it." I must have looked wildly troubled—my whole head heated up—because he added, "I won't have you in with Doherty, and I can't have you in with me. So that's that, you understand?"

  In this way I came to the end of my sophomore semester with a hole in my education. As he had predicted, it was simple enough for my father's deception to go undiscovered; and on my part, I was anyhow insulated from much of the life of the school. After classes, when the others went off to clubs or sports, I was on my way to the grocery store. I was mainly a watcher and a listener. No one invited me, and I invited no one. I felt apart; I felt the weight of the house and the mercurial weight of my father. For nearly two years, his fabricated records concerning my nonexistent math provoked no questions.

  Yet finally he was brought down by an informer. It was my father's conviction that the informer was Austin Cockerill Doherty. With the friendliest smile, Doherty, to whom I had never spoken a word—and he had certainly never before addressed me—approached one morning and asked, "Aren't you one of those female math whizzes your dad manages to churn out?" My father took this to be a telling hint or a revengeful probe: it signaled that Doherty suspected I was not among my father's students; and since I was not among Doherty's, where could I be? But Doherty as informer seemed to me implausible. In my mind a more feasible candidate was Timmy's younger brother, who had grown out of his corduroy knickers and into a football uniform. He was—nominally—in my history class, always late, always inattentive. Sometimes he would get up out of his seat and swagger around the room, and on one of these excursions he stopped at my desk and whispered, "Come on, Rosie, how's about another birthday cake? I could get my ma to do you one in a minute." I thought his conspiratorial sneer less horrible than Doherty's ripened smile.

  But these were speculations. We did not really know who had uncovered my father's crime; or how. The outcome was quick and not without mercy: my father was allowed to resign—but this, of course, was merely the language of dismissal. It was also the language of our humiliation. Soon afterward, my father sold our little house and moved us to Troy.

  3

  TROY IN 1930 was larger and more attractive than Thrace. It had earned its thimbleful of fame through the manufacture of the detachable shirt collar; and because Ossip Gabrilowitsch, who was married to Mark Twain's daughter, had once conducted at the music hall, with Mark Twain himself in the audience. It was an excitable place, much given to religious stimulation: preachers came and went, sometimes performing miracles. A certain downtown street corner was admired as the site of an outdoor revival where, in 1903, a wooden pulpit had, all of its own accord, split in two, knocking the preacher unconscious. When he woke (according to the story, a fellow pietist spilled a bucket of ice water over his head), he claimed to have been "slain of the Lord," after which Troy had its portion of ecstatic fainters. The miraculously severed pulpit was kept on display in a local church.

  Troy had its Jews, too—mainly immigrants who were brought straight from Castle Garden to work in the shirt factory. Newcomers summoned other freshly arrived relations; an uncle drew a nephew, a sister a sister-in-law. My father and I found ourselves living on the top floor, converted into an apartment, of a frame house abutting a rundown little building in what appeared to be an immigrant neighborhood. The building next door was a makeshift synagogue; it had once been a store. On Saturday mornings I stood at the window and watched the thin parade of worshipers heading there, mostly worn-looking young men in gray fedoras. Sometimes I could hear the singing, in a language I took to be Hebrew. Though I knew my father could read a little Hebrew, falteringly, and (he once admitted) had even gone through the bar mitzvah rite, he was indifferent. "I don't hold with it," he said. "I've got bigger troubles than worrying about who runs the universe." He was a stubborn atheist.

  And by now I understood him to be a trickster. I saw that he was volatile and dangerously open to gratuitous impulse. He was, besides, innocent of cause and effect: he had believed that our move to a different town would mean an unblemished new beginning. Inevitably, the old events followed him. Because of his deception in Thrace, he was anathema in Troy. Teaching jobs were rare enough, and no principal would take him on. As for me, I was even more wretched in Troy than I had been in Thrace: again and again I was made to explain why, starting the junior year of high school, I was ineligible for trigonometry, having never been taught geometry. This led to a cumulative complication: while I was catching up on math, I was missing out on French. Consequently I was a year or two behind in one course or another, and was tossed into classes with students younger than myself. To me they seemed like little children; they had no fears. I watched the laughter and the horseplay with a melancholy so ingrained that it crept downward into my hands: often my palms were damp. I was afraid day and night. My father had joined the terrifying company of the unemployed.

  He appealed finally to the man he called "our cousin Bertram," a name I had never heard him speak. Bertram, my father told me, was my mother's first cousin. He lived in Albany. He was a bachelor and a pharmacist; he worked in a hospital. Beyond these paltry items my father knew nothing about him; Bertram was a stranger. "But he might have some ideas," my father said, licking the stamp on his letter. "And he's a cousin, he owes it to me." I protested: how could a pharmacist get my father a job teaching math? As it turned out, Bertram knew a doctor in his hospital whose brother-in-law was the dean of Croft Hall, a boys' preparatory academy just outside Troy. It was nothing more than a private high school run on British mimicry; it was set among green lawns, with an artificial castle at its center.

  No one at Croft Hall cared about my father's old transgressions; no one asked; what was needed—and right away—was a math teacher to replace a malcontent who had fled in the middle of the term. Overnight my father became a "master." He was delighted with his new status. The pay was low, considerably less than his salary in Thrace, but the boys were rich. They had vast allowances and were accustomed to tip the masters; on weekends they went off to Saratoga to bet on the horses. They concentrated on the crease in their trousers and were particular about the shape of their collars. My father acquired a second-hand car and drove every day to the castle and its lawns; after a time he began to drive some of the younger boys to Saratoga on Saturday afternoons. One evening he came home jubilating, clutching a roll of bills. It was three hundred dollars; I assumed he had won it at the track. "Nah," he said, "I got it off an upper-form kid. Wilson. A poker fiend, his mother's married to that German, Von Something, some kind of baron."

  Bertram, our cousin in Albany, had saved us.<
br />
  Toward the end of my last semester of high school—we had been in Troy nearly twenty-one months—my father divulged a new plan: "I'm getting out of this Yid place—just you watch me skedaddle." The headmaster, he said, had ruled against masters who commuted: there was too much disorder, more men were required to be on the spot, especially at night, to keep an eye out for mischief. There were rumors of boys gambling right on the property.

  "Inviting the fox in to guard the chicken coop," my father chuckled.

  "You'd better be careful," I said.

  "It's high society over there," he said. "What do you know about it?"

  In the fall my father was designated housemaster of Croft Hall's third form, and went to live in the fake castle; and I departed for Albany, where I moved in with my cousin Bertram.

  4

  FOR A LONG WHILE it was not clear to me why Bertram had taken me in. Sometimes I thought my father had reverted to his old habits and had arranged for a barter: housekeeping in exchange for lodging. Unlike my father, though, Bertram was orderly and self-sufficient; he kept a handkerchief in his breast pocket and wore dandyish suspenders. He was almost too fastidious, and never left a dish on the table for more than five minutes before he got up to wash it. His shirts were picked up by a laundry van, and the neighborhood storekeepers delivered bread and milk and vegetables and cheese. Bertram was skilled at making omelets. There was almost nothing for me to do, and if there was, Bertram would not allow me to do it.