Heir to the Glimmering World

by Cynthia Ozick

  "Well?" he said.

  "My cousin's stopped by. He's waiting downstairs."

  "Your cousin? You have a cousin?"

  "I did mention him once. His name is Bertram. We're very close, and he needs a place to stay—"

  "Is this house a public accommodation? I have nothing to do with your relations."

  "It would only be for tonight, if you wouldn't mind, and we do have an empty bed—"

  He slammed the table with his big fist, so that the queue of tepees rocked and collapsed. "If it is my daughter's bed you are contemplating, no stranger is welcome there."

  "James was," I said meanly.

  This seemed to defeat him. The moment's store of rage was used up. He drew his shoulders inward; the whole of his great frame contracted.

  "You won't be disturbed at all," I pressed, "it's just for the one night, and he'll be gone in the morning."

  "And will you also be gone? Is this why your cousin comes, a relation out of nowhere? All at once a cousin, and he takes you away, is this what I am to expect?"

  He feared my leaving. He feared my being taken away: by Dr. Tan-doori, by a relation out of nowhere, by the claims of time. It was a confession: he had no Elsa, he had no Anneliese, he had a small child and three barbarian sons ... The house was already lawless; he feared the ambush of the vacuum that waits beyond commotion.

  "I'm not going anywhere," I assured him, and my envy of Anneliese flickered into light. Gone with a lover, gone into velvet silence. Another packet had arrived, this time unaccompanied by any note—voiceless money, silent money.

  "Then your cousin may stay," Mitwisser said, "for this one night."

  So Bertram entered Anneliese's bed, which had been James's bed, which became Bertram's bed. He did not depart in the morning. Instead, he busied himself cooking omelets—none of the Mitwisser children had ever eaten an omelet—and after that began reorganizing the kitchen, which under my distracted rule had sunk into anarchy. He had rested wonderfully well during the night, he told me; in all the days before he had been suffering from a crazed fatigue. At Charlie's he lay awake, calculating what he might say to make his case against Ninel's charges. In the end it was futile. Nothing he could argue in his defense was persuasive—they dismissed him as too soft (this was particularly painful, Ninel's old nastiness, he suspected they were quoting her). They accused him of shirking, he had avoided Spain, he had sent Ninel as his surrogate. He had turned her into a mercenary. He was heartless, he had paid her to serve in his place. He was a coward, he was unfit, he was not a proper comrade. A shirker, a lowlife, no better than a scab; he ought to have fought with the rest of them.

  By now—it was still the first afternoon—Bertram had dusted every corner in the dining room and made order of the children's things. The checkers were back in their box, the doll's petticoat was sewn and restored to its mistress (he showed me the miniature sewing kit he kept with him), the headless soldier had been given to Heinz to be glued whole. This was the tireless Bertram I remembered, the Bertram who would not let a dirty dish remain idle for five minutes, who would sprint to the sink to render it gleaming. He had washed his shirt, I scarcely knew when, and somehow he had discovered the half-lame washing machine, with its creaking wringer, that frightened Waltraut in the blackest region of our faintly sewer-smelling cellar. The rope Anneliese and I had long ago strung from end to end of the cellar was bannered by a row of boys' socks and shirts. Bertram had laundered them all. Clothespins stuck up along the crowded line like live cats' ears, mysteriously bobbing a little, though in that sooty cavern (the coalbin occupied a part of it, and a huge ogrelike furnace growled nearby) there was no wind.

  In the evening we all met in the dining room—all but Mrs. Mitwisser. The boys were wary, stealthily subdued, and Waltraut hid under the table. Mitwisser ate nibblingly, sniffing at the food. He seemed to sniff at Bertram too, who was scurrying in and out of the kitchen like a chef in an obscure restaurant attempting to make its name.

  When the boys had dispersed, I tried to account for Bertram's not having left.

  "He wanted to make the dinner," I told Mitwisser. I stood up to carry her tray to his wife.

  "Where are you taking that?" Bertram asked. He was following me, pink-faced and cheerful; yesterday's misery had been swept away, together with the dust.

  "Mrs. Mitwisser's got to eat something, she doesn't leave her room."

  "I'll bring it to her if you like—"

  "No," I said quickly, "a man she doesn't know, she'll think..." But Mitwisser was near, and I did not say what his wife might think.

  He thought it himself. "The gentleman is not to intrude on my wife!"

  Bertram examined the toast, the cold boiled egg. "I don't frighten people, do I, Rosie? Look, I can do better than that," he said, and seized Mrs. Mitwisser's dry meal and disappeared with it.

  After a time a warm fragrance drifted out of the kitchen.

  "Bread pudding," Bertram announced: a heap of it lay steaming in a bowl. "Come out from under there, little girl," he called, "and you can have some."

  Waltraut peered out. "I don't know what it is."

  "Try it tonight and I'll tell you tomorrow."

  Mitwisser said grimly, "The gentleman will not be here tomorrow, will he?"

  "Then I'll have to tell you now," Bertram said. "It's a pudding bird.

  Its wings are made of pudding. First you trap it, and after that you roll it in bread crumbs."

  "Don't come up with me," I warned him.

  I had expected to find Mrs. Mitwisser lying with her hand over her eyes, courting a doze. But she was erect and vigilant in her nightgown, as straight-backed as a caryatid.

  "What is that? Who is there? Is it that one? That one?" She gripped my arm: her fingers were strong, but I felt the tremor that shivered through the deep pinch.

  "It's only my cousin—on a visit. He made this for you."

  I watched her eat. She ate as one emerging from a long fast. The bowl was rapidly emptied. She held it out to me. "More," she commanded, in the style she might once have used with her cook.

  Bertram did not leave the next morning, or the next, or the next. It was understood that it was his intention to go, but he never spoke of it; I did not speak of it. Once or twice, at night, leaning over the typewriter, Mitwisser would rasp, "The gentleman abides," with a satiric clip to the words, or else he would say only, "Ah, the cousin," as if there was meaning enough in this. But an unexpected calm was settling over the house: things that had been helter-skelter fell unobtrusively into place. Mitwisser's bedclothes were meticulously smoothed each morning; an unseen hand kept his fountain pen filled. Holes in socks were instantly stitched. The kitchen rang with a clash of pans, and suddenly a row of boys and a small girl sat docilely munching cake.

  "Let me," Bertram urged, seeing me ascend, day after day, with Mrs. Mitwisser's tray.

  But I answered as I always answered. "She's too nervous, you'll only set her off—"

  "I can handle it."

  He came down smiling. "She sure likes that pudding bird. You know what's the matter with that woman? She's hungry, that's all."

  He had yet to learn of Mrs. Mitwisser's cavernous hungers, I thought—hungers not of the flesh, which no sweetmeat could satisfy. But from then on it was Bertram who took up Mrs. Mitwisser's tray. Waltraut trailed behind him, carefully transporting a napkin and spoon.

  One afternoon he went to inquire at the pharmacy under the trestle. "A nice change from Albany, I could've been Trotsky for all they cared. But no luck, they aren't hiring. So there it is," he said, "hard times."

  Domesticity pleased Bertram. The fastidiousness I had noticed so long ago was, I fancied, a kind of obeisance to his being a short man: it brought his scrutiny so much closer to dirty floors and sticky table tops. He wanted to undo confusion, to placate things—to clear them up, to sort them out, to draw out a peaceable kingdom from hubbub and jumble. He wanted to appease. He made sure to avoid being found in Mitwisser's path, th
ough his study ("the Professor's bedroom," Bertram called it) was no more than a few yards across the hall from Anneliese's old bed. They seldom met, except at dinner, when Bertram in his new capacity as self-appointed chef lingered in the kitchen, mostly out of sight. When they happened to pass, it was usually on the stairs, and Bertram would murmur respectfully, "Good morning, Professor," or "Good evening, Professor." Sometimes Mitwisser nodded; often he did not respond at all. But when our nightly session began, he would drum his fingers musingly on the back of my chair (faltering in his dictation, as he did more and more at this time), and grunt "The gentleman, your cousin," as if reporting on an apparition he was scarcely certain he had seen. Whenever I thought Bertram too exaggeratedly propitiatory, I remembered that he, like me, had nowhere to go.

  Bertram's pacifications, his quickness to serve, were an embarrassment. I saw how the boys were muddled by all this self-effacement. He was not so tall as Heinz, and no taller than Gert; even so, he rattled them. Once, when a fight was storming around him—Willi had swiped Heinz's earphones and was running off to hide them—a rush of panic bloomed uncontrollably all over Bertram's curly head. "What bullies you kids are," he said; his breath came hard. It was not a rebuke; it was a plea, spoken in a voice of sorrowing humility. It shocked them—it may have shamed them—and after that they took their quarrels and their fisticuffs out of his hearing. It made no sense to them that Bertram was in the house; it made no sense that their father had permitted it. At home, no cook or maid or nanny had ever resembled Bertram; it made no sense that Bertram was cook and maid and nanny all at once. And anyhow the quarrels and the fisticuffs weren't really out of his hearing—he only pretended they were, and they knew he was pretending. It was Bertram's dogma that if you behaved as if there was peace, then peace would accommodate you by turning genuine. Occasionally this doctrine bore fruit: Gert or Heinz would catch in Bertram's face a wistful look of hope, and the slaps and punches stopped altogether.

  During one of these bewildered truces Willi asked whether Bertram was going to be my husband someday.

  "You don't marry cousins," I said.

  "Was Dr. Tandoori your cousin too?"

  "Of course not."

  "But you weren't going to marry him either—"

  This annoyed me; there was cunning in it, an unripe cleverness. "I told you," I said, "I'm not marrying anybody."

  It was not only Willi who was unsettling me in those raw days when Bertram was occupying Anneliese's bed and taking my place (or so it felt) with Mrs. Mitwisser. It was easy for Bertram to make himself invisible to Professor Mitwisser—he was upstairs whole afternoons, tending the invalid. He had enlisted Waltraut in the rite of carrying up Mrs. Mitwisser's tray—Waltraut following as usual with napkin and spoon, and lately with a small cup of something sweet-smelling, Bertram bearing his own warmly redolent concoction, and also, I noted, a glass of wine—but this newly encumbered ceremony was becoming mysteriously prolonged. When the boys were at school, and Bertram and the child were hidden away with Mrs. Mitwisser, the house was uncommonly still. It felt uninhabited, abandoned. I had nothing to do but wait for the night and Mitwisser's sharp call.

  Ninel, I began to recognize, had all along been right: Bertram was too soft. He could be turned this way and that way; he was too obliging. This obligingness had its underside; it robbed Peter to pay Paul. Out of goodness, and to oblige my father's rough importuning, he had taken me in; but to please Ninel he had expelled me. He had lavished on me the blue envelope with its fat fortune, and then he had allowed it to be usurped. Bertram's goodness was treacherous. His softness was treacherous: a soft compliance was his unresisting means of setting the world to rights. With maternal guile, he could persuade the lion to lie down with the lamb—only, when this was accomplished, it was the lion who prevailed.

  Wine had never before entered the house. Yet here it was, the glass that went up to Mrs. Mitwisser, and the glass that was set down at Professor Mitwisser's plate, and at mine. I had never tasted wine, and knew nothing of its subtlety, if it had any—but when Mitwisser put his glass first to his nostrils and then to his lips with a distracted, almost dreaming, concentration, it was as if some familiar wind was passing over, or even through, him: a wind from a great distance, from the past, from the time before they had thrown him out, from that Europe I had come to think of as a dense volcanic mass concealed under a disintegrating black veil. I knew nothing of Europe, I knew nothing of wine; I dimly believed that it was somehow noble, "aristocratic," the elixir of priests and kings. But I did not like this wine that Bertram had brought us—it was too tart, and too dark, like venous blood, and it smelled of seduction, of ingratiation. Bertram had quickly seen whose hand held the household scepter. I was merely the sentry who had let him in. Professor Mitwisser was the majesty who might keep or eject him, and to gratify this inconstant sovereign it was needful to nurse the curious invalid on the uppermost floor. Bertram was an excellent nurse. In ten minutes he could supply a poultice for an itchy scar, or a savory dish for a slothful appetite. The wine gladdened both the sovereign and his wife. It honored the sovereign, it calmed the wife.

  "In Albany," I reminded Bertram, "we never had wine." I rarely spoke to him of those sheltering months when he had been my rescuer and comforter. But now I felt sullen.

  "Ninel put me onto it."

  I said acidly, "I didn't think the Party approved of wine."

  "Well, Ninel did, why not? Italian peasants, French workers, wine is what the masses quaff. You know, the masses." He half grinned, in the winning self-parody I remembered.

  A moment later the grin undid itself; it folded into a hangdog mouth. Whenever Ninel's name erupted between us, Bertram lapsed into somberness. At times I would mention Ninel solely for the sake of watching the gloom creep over him—these flushed openings into Bertram's buried suffering revenged me. I wanted to undermine his softness. It was not because of Ninel; Ninel was dead. In this house Bertram was, at least for me, a bad angel: that all-around usefulness, that stringent plea for harmony, for pleasing everyone, for sweeping us all clean of blemish—he was too liquidly noble, like the wine. Only the thought of Ninel made him seem solid.

  He had begun to do the marketing. This had been Anneliese's task, and afterward mine. Bertram liked to poke among the vegetables, and in the dusky crannies of the shops under the trestle: it gave him ideas, he said. Waltraut went with him, pushing a little wicker doll's pram. It had been rediscovered in a heap of twisted and neglected toys—there were so many toys, a jungle of toys! The wicker pram was vital: he stooped to fill it with grocery bags. The bottle of wine—two bottles, in fact—he stuffed into his pockets, to free his arms for the bigger bundles.

  He did not ask where the money for these provisions came from. But when I doled out the bills he said, "Cash ... I never see anybody write a check around here. Or go to the bank. All right, none of my business—"

  It was a kind of bravado. This small tactile transaction, his palm flattened before me as I counted out dollars, stung him. It shamed him; it shamed me. We were standing close, Bertram's face too close to mine (we were nearly the same height), shrouded by the intimacy of money dropping from hand to hand—the naked smell of public paper, its weightless burdensome rustle, its worn creases, like the skin of an aged woman.

  "You don't understand, Rosie," he lamented. "You never saw her fired up, she had the spite of justice in her, and if I'd done things differently, if I hadn't let her take that money—"

  It was his old chant. "You wouldn't be you," I said. But this bland-ness—I meant it only as evasion—fell on him unkindly.

  "Soft!" he cried. "She called me soft!"

  The spite of justice. It seemed to me he was enshrining Ninel in a hard shell of sainthood.

  There had been three sporadic packets since the last—the last that had arrived without a letter—and these also were bare of any word from Anneliese. They were bulging, crammed with more dollars than before, as if in compensation for their muteness. Ea
ch packet was stamped with a different postmark. I had given up informing Professor Mitwisser of their appearance: he did not welcome it. A silent ukase was in force: silence answering silence. His children sensed it; even Waltraut understood that one must not speak of Anneliese, one must not speak of James—not to papa, not to anyone, not to the new stranger in the house.

  But Mrs. Mitwisser was bound by nothing.

  At midnight, in my bed across from hers, I said, "What do you and my cousin talk about all afternoon?"

  She did not reply. She was asleep. She slept deeply and long. The empty wine glass had been left behind. It lay on its side next to her hairbrush. She had taken to brushing her hair, which had grown, in her self-confinement, down to her breasts. In the mornings she arranged it in a round braid at the back of her neck, with a few hairpins to secure it. Her hair was as brown and thick as Anneliese's.

  "When you're upstairs with mama and Bertram," I asked Waltraut the next day, "what do they talk about?"

  Waltraut looked at me with her small Mitwisser eyes. She had none of Willi's beauty.

  "Mama talks about Heinz," she said.

  51

  IT WAS FORGIVENESS they talked of: the bitter, bitter withholding of it. Professor Mitwisser had never forgiven his wife for the secret journey to Arosa. Bertram could not forgive himself for Ninel's journey to Spain. So they talked and talked, while Waltraut busied herself with a wooden puzzle in the shape of a line of goslings, or fed make-believe pudding bird to her dolls.

  They talked of how they were not forgiven, how they would never be forgiven, how Mitwisser would not forgive his wife, how he would not forgive his daughter. They talked of spite.

  Mrs. Mitwisser did not know that the woman who spited Bertram by dying in Spain was the man who had forced his way into the house and frightened her into her old black tunnel of fright.