In that family of long bones—bone of forearm, bone of thigh—only Mrs. Mitwisser was different. She was a little woman with whom a giant had seen fit to couple. Mitwisser, the progenitor of all those long bones, stalked and circled like some great mobile statue quarried out of a mountainside; he was obliged to dip his head down when he entered a room, so as not to strike the lintel. And Anneliese, flying from one household task to another, seemed to rise and rise into loftiness, her elastic neck evolving out of the long level bone of her clavicle. Mitwisser and his daughter, a pair of colossi; and next to them—though she was rarely next to them, and was more often sequestered—Elsa Mitwisser, short-necked, narrow-shouldered, small-fingered. It was as if she had designed this narrowness, this smallness: all her children had been formed on some scientific plan within the confines of her littleness. She was a scientist and a naturalist, and both science and nature are in pursuit of efficacy and economy. Both science and nature rebel against disorder and fracture; and yet disorder and fracture had vanquished and desolated her. They had overturned the governance of her mind.
But I wondered still whether she was truly mad, or whether her madness had itself come into being on some scientific plan. World-upheaval had capsized and stupefied her. Then she must answer! Answer disorder with disorder, fracture with fracture; she must refuse and refuse. Once or twice, having refused, she recanted. She had refused her shoes—but now she wore them. She had refused the language of exile—but now she was in thrall to a narrative wherein mind was governance, and a nation was stable, and disorder and fracture were tamely domesticated. She spoke of "Chane Osten" with an ardor that only anger had been able to ignite, and when she got to the end she began again, though she complained of the smell. She did not protest the language of exile; she was immersed in it, captivated. True madness, I thought, does not reverse itself. True madness will not recant. Was she Hamlet, for whom madness is ruse and defense and trap, or was she Ophelia, whom true madness submerges? And her smallness: she had schemed it to set herself apart from those Mitwisser giants—to escape them by curling into hidden corners. Now she curled with her book. Privy to magickings and delusions denied to others, she shrank herself at will. She was a little woman with unknowable powers. She had no love for her children. Waltraut longed for her and feared her.
Her idea of James was mad. I was sure of it as soon as he came through the green front door with a dirty wet knapsack on his back and a scarred suitcase, running with water, in one hand; the other was pulling off a dripping knit cap. It was raining, pelting, the drops heaving horizontally like bullets in a barrage, a lead curtain of waterfall blown sideways. It was the kind of rain that made me obscurely anxious, in the way of some remembered alarm, or warning, or turning point. We had left Albany in the rain—but that was an ordinary downpour, a thing of chance. Through the open door as he lumbered in, weighed down and soaked through, I smelled that half-metallic smell of earth and concrete, the mixture of contradictory elements that sometimes swelled in my nostrils when I saw, in my dreams, my father's car crumpled in the road, under a hammering screen of murderous rain. I feared those dreams. They swarmed like reenactments of something foretold.
He was not young; neither was he old. He was a ragged sort of fellow. If I had met him in the street I would have taken him for a vagrant and given him a wide berth; I would have dreaded the accidental touch of his sleeve. He wore rubbers over his shoes, but no socks. When his cap was off a heap of black hair went tumbling over the streaming lenses of his glasses: impossible to see his eyes behind all that water. A vagrant; a vagabond; a man with a knapsack and no socks. This was James, James the deliverer, the James who was to deliver my wages, the James who had supplied this house, and the pretty little cakes, and the puzzles and kites, and the lavish apartment in the city that had been relinquished on account of Mrs. Mitwisser's waywardness; this was the James who had made them Parasiten, the James whose messianic coming, Anneliese had predicted (was she as mad as her mother?), would shower them all with plenty of money.
The boys were all over him, an onslaught of boys, climbing and slapping and screeching and punching and squeezing; they were squeezing him dry, his feet spurted puddles, a geyser of laughter splashed up. Laughter! Mitwisser was in it, inside the laughter, afloat in the rowdiness, gurgling like the others, like his own unbridled boys. I had never before seen him laugh. It altered him. Hidden creases, bursting into folds, corrugated the long slab of his jowl, and there, behind the contorted lips, like secret things exposed, were his big ruined teeth. Folds and contortions: the twistings of his mouth were hideously recognizable. Mitwisser in his melancholic ambassadorial coat and vest, Mitwisser laughing, exactly resembled the Mitwisser I had witnessed in the great glut of his weeping.
He hurtled forward and embraced the vagrant and kissed his two cheeks. "Welcome, welcome," he cried.
"Whoa, I'm being throttled here. Hank, get off my neck, dammit! Bill! Hey! Unhand these primates, Rudi, can't you?" He was thrashing like a wild man, roaring; he had called Mitwisser Rudi, which was unimaginable. In this house of rules, he had no rules.
Only Anneliese stood back. She had restored the snail-like coils over her ears. Her tiny earrings glinted. She faced the wet wild man with his wild forelock and wild roar and said formally, "This"—her palm outward toward me—"is my brothers' tutor. From when we first came." But it was I, not James, who was being explained—he was as self-evident, for all of them, as the rain; so I did what was expected, and held out my hand, and said my name.
"Rosie," he repeated, and Anneliese said, "She types for papa." I watched her take the man's things—the knapsack, the suitcase, the knit cap, the jacket frayed at the collar, everything sodden and leaking rain—and saw how he handed them over, not troubling to look at her, crowing and beaming at the boys, his arm solidly around Mitwisser. She disappeared with his belongings, and in a jubilant parade he led the rest of them in; he was a Pied Piper, he was jolly with all of them. "Hey you! You Rosie!" he called. "Where's the little one? Fetch me that Wally, I've got to see that old Wally!"
At the head of the stairs I came on Mrs. Mitwisser, barefoot and again in her nightgown—an hour ago she had been fully dressed. The top step was littered with bits of paper.
"He is here," she said.
I picked up a handful of the paper fragments. "What's this?"
"He has come. Now he has come."
Jane Austen lay dismembered, page after page torn to pieces and strewn like confetti in a path that ended, or began, at the foot of Mrs. Mitwisser's bed. How Ninel would have been pleased!
18
THE NEW SLEEPING arrangements had to be gotten used to. The three boys were jammed together in a single room, the room that had been Gert and Willi's. But now Heinz was with them, an intruder mimicking Anneliese and ordering them to do this and that; they protested with shrieks and howls and flying missiles—pencil cases, pillows, hard thick balls of knotted socks. Anneliese's small store of possessions was heaped in a corner near Waltraut's crib. Cots were carried from floor to floor. All these displacements were for James's sake; for the sake of the immensity of his coming. He had come, he was here. Anneliese's bed was his bed, where Anneliese had slept he now slept, close to Mitwisser's lair. Only Professor Mitwisser was left undisturbed. And though I kept my place with Mrs. Mitwisser, the walls of our common cubicle, trembling from the boys' pummelings yards away, were electrified by a change larger than the refiguration of the rigid chessboard of our little house. We had been eight; or, rather, they had been seven, and I a hireling, never an intimate. Now we were nine, and the ninth was more than an intimate. He was a power. There was power in his laughter, and the laughter crept into the walls.
Mrs. Mitwisser could not be made to go downstairs; she ate from trays in her bed. It was like Albany again: the tray with its leftovers waiting to be taken away. But she was quiet. She returned to her cards, laying them out on the top of the wooden chest while noiseless wisps of angry breathing burst from her. Anne
liese's nightly lessons had stopped; it was James who sat with Mitwisser. The door was wide open. It was as if an eyelid had lifted. Talk swarmed out, talk and the rusted vibrations of Mitwisser's estranged hilarity, sudden high bleats erupting out of his heavy dark bass. James's voice was thin and light. His eyes behind their lenses were small inspecting devices; his glasses flashed, and the flashes swept into crannies, searching. He was a kind of detective. How long would he stay? There was no hint of his leaving. In the mornings, when Mitwisser departed for the Library and the boys were off to school (reluctantly now, crowding around James, teasing and pushing), he plucked up Waltraut and swung her between his legs and told her she was a little mouse and he a big lion, and then he told her she was the lion and he the mouse, and she ran circling and hiding, screaming with pleasure. But there were times when Mitwisser did not put on his hat and pick up his briefcase and walk with that rapid giant's gait into the street and toward the train. Instead he would take James by the arm and lead him into his study. They murmured together in the sunlight that came shooting through the high window. Even the light seemed new; I had never before noticed how it stamped a white rectangle on the carpet. No one summoned me. Anneliese gave me few instructions. She brought her mother's meals to her and came down again. The blue veins in her translucent temples faintly beat; for the first time I saw how she resembled Willi. The days were different now. The nights were different.
Boxes began to arrive. They were large and heavy. One was brown and very large, carried in on the shoulders of two men: a bed for Waltraut. Another box held half a dozen dolls, each in native costume—a Spanish doll, a Polish doll, a Swedish doll, a Tyrolean doll, all petticoats and colored headdresses and silk boleros, and a Scottish boy doll in tartan and kilt, with tiny bagpipes sewed on, and another boy doll with a painted face, dressed like a clown in a white ruff. And after that, though I never knew how it happened, Waltraut's crib disappeared. There was a box for Heinz: an Erector set and a square electric clock without hands—big numbers dropped out of nowhere and clicked into place. And for Gert a scooter with blue handlebars and a harmonica and a fleet of three biplanes with rubberband engines. And for Willi roller skates and a balsawood birdcage with a yellow canary inside, made out of calico, which sang when its beak was twisted.
There was nothing for Anneliese.
When Mitwisser was away James sat in his study—that sacrosanct cavern no one dared enter. Sometimes, on one of their chases, Waltraut pursued him there, the two of them whirling from corner to corner, Waltraut half wild with hilarity, and James shouting "Mouse! Mouse!" And then Anneliese would come and lure Waltraut away. Waltraut had turned lively. It was as if she had awakened from melancholia to become a normal child again.
But the house was not normal. The door to Mitwisser's study was always open. Passing by, I saw James in Mitwisser's chair, handling Mitwisser's mysterious volumes. He held them doglike, inquisitive yet uncomprehending. "You, Rosie," he called. "I need you to tell me something."
It was eleven o'clock in the morning. The boys were at school, and Anneliese had taken Waltraut with her. They walked out to the dusky shops under the train trestle, Waltraut's little hand in Anneliese's. This too was new. Waltraut had abandoned her old Berlin doll with its straw-stuffed legs. It had vanished together with her crib; she never looked for it. She forgot her deep infantile afternoon sleep. The smells of autumn were all around, the smell of reddening and browning leaves; the heat ebbed out of the sidewalks. Our summer walks seemed distant and unreal.
Mrs. Mitwisser was aware of everything below—even two flights below. She cocked her head, listening. I was certain she was cocking it this minute. Her hearing was keen. Her ears were avid and angry.
"All this stuff is Greek to me," James said. "Can't figure if I've got the alphabet upside down or sideways."
"I think some of it really is Greek," I said.
"I suppose you can't get into it either."
"No," I said, "I can't."
"How about this?" He put his thumb on the page to show me.
I had lately learned the look of those marks. "I guess it's Hebrew, though it might be Aramaic. So far Professor Mitwisser won't let me touch those books, he says I'm not ready. Anneliese's the only one."
"Why poke your nose in something if you don't know what you're poking it in, is that the idea?" Under the glint of his glasses he gave out a thin satiric whistle. "Myself, I don't hold with that. How about the German? Can you read the German? There's a whole lot of German in here. What's this, Arabic?—Arabic, sure, I can tell Arabic, I lived out there."
"I can't read any of it."
He had made himself at home in this room. He had brought his teacup in.
"So what do you do for Rudi? Annie says you type things up—"
"Professor Mitwisser dictates and I type."
"On that derelict thing over there? That pile of old bones?"
There it lay, pushed aside: the typewriter with the split in the double-u. I was nervous standing in the square of morning sunlight. The glare was in my eyes. I thought of Mrs. Mitwisser upstairs, fingering her grimy playing cards; I thought of money.
"Professor Mitwisser hired me back in Albany," I said.
"He hired you? You were hired?"
"He put an ad in an Albany paper and I answered it."
"He hired you?" he said again. "That means a salary, doesn't it? All right. Fifteen—no, eighteen dollars a week. Will that do?" The sly whistle. "You must be worth something to Rudi, or you wouldn't be here."
"I help out a little," I said.
"I hear you're trying to get the Frau Doktor to start talking the king's English. Rudi would like that. You'd do him a service if you accomplished that. Some people need to change their lives if they want to live at all. But not Rudi, Rudi's got to keep at it. Rudi's a great man, Rudi's tremendous—I hope you understand that." He took a sip of his tea, looked hard at me over the crescent of the cup, and swallowed the rest down. "What were you doing up in Albany?"
"I was at the teachers' college."
"Annie tells me you quit."
Why did he ask what he already knew? I said, "The cousin I was living with got married, so I had to leave." For a reason I hardly fathomed, I added, "His wife is a Communist."
This made him fall into a long laugh. I recognized it; it had passed like a wave through the children, it had passed through Mitwisser. I had heard it at night, mingled with the shock of Mitwisser's broken crowing.
"A Communist? No fooling, if your cousin ever takes over, my goose is cooked. She'd do me in. I'm a goddamn genuine plutocrat, that's why."
Plutocrat was one of Ninel's words. I wanted to explain that Ninel was not really my cousin, that Ninel and Bertram were not really married, but just then, over our heads, like some monumental coin flung down, a gonglike crash shook the ceiling.
"Mrs. Mitwisser!" I said, and ran upstairs to see.
She had hurled her breakfast tray into the hall beyond the bedroom—the little narrow hall where Anneliese had whispered to me of James's coming.
"He pulls you, he pulls you to his side! He buys you, he gives money! With this money let him go to live in the El Dorado, not here!"
Some days after that, late in the afternoon, another box, compact and weighty, was delivered to the green front door. The boys gathered in a circle around Anneliese as she opened it. Inside was a shining black Royal typewriter, redolent of new metal and fresh oil. The old machine, the fossil, was gone.
"Look how good James is to you," Anneliese told me. "A stranger like yourself. When papa comes home it will be such a surprise."
"No it won't," Gert and Heinz and Willi all called out together.
"No it won't," Waltraut said. These were her first English words.
Not long afterward I learned that the El Dorado was the name of Berlin's most luxurious hotel.
19
THE NEW TYPEWRITER was lodged in a closet. Professor Mitwisser had no use for it now; he had no use for me. Each n
ight he took tea with James in his study. Anneliese carried in the tea things on a tray—it was different from the dented tin platters that went upstairs to Mrs. Mitwisser. This one was made of china, with a pattern of yellow roses all over it, and matching cups and saucers, and a creamer and a sugar bowl and a fat round pot. The cups were rimmed with gold. Like the new typewriter and the toys and Waltraut's bed, the tea things had just been introduced into the house. The "tea things"—this was James's name for them. "My mother was fond of tea things," he said, "she owned dozens"—and because of that "dozens," I suspected him of parody.
He poured the tea for Mitwisser. Into his own cup he spilled something else; I saw a tall amber bottle standing near his foot. And it occurred to me that when he lingered here in the mornings with his teacup, there was whiskey in it.
"That one and his schnapps," Mrs. Mitwisser threw out at me from her pillow. "He sits with my husband and makes the ha-ha-ha, dieser'Säufer!"
The language project was abandoned. Neither inducement nor seduction could draw Mrs. Mitwisser. "Chane Osten," rent, was dismissed and abolished. Mrs. Mitwisser kept to her bed and fidgeted with her cards. She would not look at a book in English. She would not look at any book. She gave a small scream—a scream more than a whimper—when I attempted to read aloud to her. Instead I began to read to Waltraut (a carton of picture books had suddenly materialized), but often enough Anneliese would snatch her from me: James, she explained, had requested a romp with old Wally, and the three of them, Anneliese and Waltraut and James, would set out for one of the weedy meadows, haylike and autumnal now, that ringed the neighborhood. One morning a taxi appeared. "It's off to the Bronx Zoo with old Wally," James announced. Anneliese said, "Take care of mama," and then she and James lifted Waltraut onto the seat between them and shut the door, and the taxi rumbled away.
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