by Laura Argiri
This he seldom failed to do; it was part of what his mother had bequeathed him, though he did not know it. That silent woman had loved to watch the sunset and the dawn and had marked time by the flowering of lilacs or foxgloves, the shade on snow, the seasons of light and leaves. The noticing of such things had been an unconscious sacrament for her. As John Ezra had not noticed it in her, he had not noticed it in Simion. Both mother and son had their separate reasons for sheltering this private happiness from him.
Now the west was alight, as if some friendly god who despised the village had set flame to the tallow of its inbred corruption in a sunset as violent as fireworks. John Ezra, emerging from the darkening woods, saw the pale child hunched at the window with his nose against the glass, his face painted with the fire-red and fire-violet of the rays. He had a fey thought, barely a thought at all: “Annie’s child…” The wind carried it away. The wind had dropped but now commenced to whistle again.
John Ezra was warm in every vein and in a humor of dreadful good cheer, with a pint of lightning under his belt. Lurching only a little, he mounted the stairs and headed for his son’s old room. Simion’s stomach turned over, and his whole body tightened in on itself as the footsteps, approaching, grew louder. Eloquence was gone from his mouth, replaced only by a sudden and terrible physical dread. Something in the fall of boot on planked floor spoke to him of violence and danger even though he had not had to read such signs for two years; there were things one did not forget. “Eh…imp!” the old man greeted him.
“How do you do, Father… I hope I’ve come at a good time for you. I came about my wages.”
“I didn’t think you came to inquire about my health. Your wages, eh?”
“It’s time for me to go up to New Haven and take my tests, and I have to pay my tuition and fees.”
“So…what amount of wages do I owe you? Which, if I don’t pay you, I’m sure Vickers will fall all over himself to report to the Charlottesville authorities.”
Simion refused to be drawn. “Two hundred and thirty-three dollars and eighty-nine cents.”
“Naturally, the creature knows down to the halfpenny,” said John Ezra, as if someone else were in the room. Then he returned his attention to his son. “Stand there. Don’t follow me and try to find out where I keep my funds, or you’ll get nothing but the good clout you deserve.”
Simion nodded. He slipped his catalogue back into the mattress, as if it were a person whose sensibilities he hoped to shield from a scene. John Ezra went into his study and came back. To his son’s shock, he proffered a roll of notes from his pants pocket and began counting them out onto the coverlet. Fives, tens, twenties, all dirty and hoarded, with the musty smell of a leather case beneath a floorboard. The most cash Simion had ever looked upon at one time.
“Well…hic. What do you say to me now?”
“Thank you, Father,” Simion managed, still very much alarmed in spite of the amazement he felt. “I’ll make it worth your while, and it’ll all be for the b-”
He did not get to say that it would all be for the best because John Ezra suddenly wound up and slapped him, with no warning and yet with ferocious deliberation, and certainly with ferocious force. The shock drove Simion’s front teeth into his lower lip. After a second’s numbness, his nose poured blood. Simion felt himself begin to go down as John Ezra—shocked sober by consummated violence—jerked him around trying to keep him from fainting. He passed out.
John Ezra howled down the stairs for Jewel. When she finally wheezed up to the second story, she was not about to come into the room with that little ghost from Macbeth. But John Ezra jerked her over the threshold and made her hold Simion’s head up while he tried to find a towel and cold water. “Why dontjer decide if yer want ter kill ’im?” demanded Jewel, with unwonted logic.
Simion surfaced briefly and saw above him Jewel’s sucked-in mouth and small nasty eyes. Her smell, a rich and seasoned filth he had never smelled on any human but her, mingled with the smell and taste of blood and gagged him. “You let go of me, you old buzzard!” he cried. She did, and fled the room as if she felt the shadow of evil wings. She hid down cellar, fearing the incursion of her sister Eumenides or any other creature, with metal feathers and more than the usual quota of heads, which might descend. As usual with these numinal fears, nothing happened, and Jewel crept upstairs to the kitchen and rinsed the blood from her hands in a pan of gray dishwater, to which she subsequently added the dishes. Then, as though she’d been doing so all the while, she began to scoop ashes from the range.
Simion woke up alone, the throb in his nostril recalling for him what had gone on. He was bone-cold; his head had a light and floating feel. His shirtfront was plastered to him—a perfect circle of events, his mind said, in some sort of delirious irony; it isn’t dust to dust or ashes to ashes, but blood to blood!
But he saw on his night table an abandoned white handkerchief, like a flag of surrender, and the money weighted down under a glass of water. He extended a cold hand for it and counted it again. $233.89. The rest was his to pull out of empty air. Yet it was enough to leave on.
The entrance examination was to start on June 27. On the sixth, Simion left. He had bought himself an old handcart, which he had repaired over the last few days. Passing the school that hot blue morning, John Ezra saw his son preparing to depart. He had propped his cart on a stump and was dragging out everything he owned by armloads. The cart was loaded up with books, a splintered trunk of clothing, a bedroll, a sack of potatoes, and a basket of brown eggs. Someone other than John Ezra might have seen this little picture as emblematic of everything in the boy—his own peculiar kind of romanticism, his precocious pragmatism, and a determination so powerful as to constitute a talent right in itself. Simion paused, wiped his damp forehead, then laid hold of the handles and set off—walking to Charlottesville. John Ezra followed. He pulled the buggy up alongside Simion about half a mile down the road.
“I’ll drive you to the depot,” he said. Simion looked at him with startled suspicion, as a stranger might if offered such a favor out of the blue. John Ezra would remember that pale and speculative face, narrowing its eyes at him through the sun-shot green shade.
“It’s too far to walk. Get in,” he said.
“No, thanks,” said Simion, who hoped to meet up with someone driving a farm wagon and negotiate a ride for some small payment. If not, he’d walk.
“Well, I don’t insist,” said the old man. That Simion made him no reply did not startle him, though he rather wondered why Simion should watch him out of sight and, seeing that he was headed home, shrug and turn and appear to dismiss some thought or other.
In fact, Simion had just recalled the catalogue that he had left in his mattress; as he walked, he had mulled over whether to go back and get the thing or eschew the symbolic action. He decided to leave it there, buried, safe like a doll in an Inca tomb, symbol of a youth that had barely existed or existed, perhaps, in flashes and snatches, like reflections on a swiftly-running stream. He took hold of the cart handles, started walking, and did not look back.
II. Even a disturbance…
In 1877, Moses Karseth was Professor of Surgery and Materia Medica at Yale. He lived with Helmut Kneitel at 120 Temple Street, an ordinary little town house with lush gardens that set it off from its neighbors. There was a living fence of tulip-magnolias, flowering cherries, and wisteria between the yard and the world, and a wall of white lilac trees between the porch and the yard. Inside, the house was all Morris chintzes, gleaming blond wood, and crammed bookcases; it had an abiding aroma of thyme and rising loaves. Its overstuffed sofas and chairs accepted your weight with a motherly acquiescence, and everything there seemed to live its kindly insentient life to feed you, comfort you, please your eye, give you rest. It was a soft house, but its owner was not a soft man.
A surgeon of genius, an athlete, and an atheist, Karseth was the possessor of a terrible tongue and a dirty temper. He had suffered a sub-Dickensian childhood in
a filthy, sunless mews of London’s East End and gotten intimations of the difficulties in his future from an early reading of Oliver Twist. This popular work of fiction implied that those of Karseth’s race ran orphanages for thieves and suffered from inborn moral turpitude. Karseth would find this stance to be a staple of English opinion in which British slum-dweller and British lord stood cozily united despite the most heroic evidence to the contrary. With Oxford and Cambridge closed to him, he had fought his way to and through Heidelberg by his wits, his brains, his capacity for work, and an endless and ferocious will to succeed. His experiences had left him humorless about juvenile foolishness and the antics of spoilt eighteen year olds; at Yale, his severity became legend. His lean, sardonic looks were of the most virile kind, and if he had been alone, his atheism would have been all he had to hide.
But no, their lush nest had been feathered by Helmut, who officially lived with Karseth in the capacity of a manservant but was in fact mistress of the house and, in the way of excellent wives, master of its master. And this they strenuously concealed. Moses, alone on his first trip to New Haven, had come away quite certain that the connection between them, which had caused no great problems at Heidelberg, would stand out here like a bloody rose in a field of January snow, delineated by the merciless light and moral obsessiveness of the region; they would pay for his appointment with disguise, with lies, with sleepless vigilance. And they did.
People in Heidelberg had known how to take Helmut, and he’d been a wildly popular teacher, a continual source of reassurance, biscuits, hot chocolate, and sound advice. There seemed no abrasiveness in him; his voice was a sweet cello, soothing even to hostile ears. He would not have been an exceptionally good-looking man but for one feature; the bones of his face needed something sharper and harsher in their modeling, and he tended to put on weight, had even become soft and chunky in his enforced seclusion in New Haven. But his unexceptional face framed a pair of remarkably lovely and changeful eyes, blue and accurate soul-mirrors, which could reflect any color between the dawn-blue of cornflowers and the dusk-blue of anemones. “Madonna eyes,” said Dr. Karseth, who had cooled his hot head and hands on Helmut’s gentleness for a decade by the time he was hired at Yale. Indeed, men of the lavender persuasion had come up to Moses when the connection was new, laid their hands on his arm, and uttered the kind of congratulations usually accorded a man who has just taken to wife a woman of extraordinary beauty and sweet disposition. One of them, particularly blunt, had said, “You’ve got a prize. Now, don’t you be an ass and spoil things!” And indeed Moses expended most of the gentleness he possessed on Helmut and was most richly rewarded for his efforts.
If anything spoiled things between them, Moses thought, it would be New Haven and the angry anxiety it roused in him. New Haven was a place in which Helmut was both dangerous and endangered. The charm that had shielded them in Heidelberg might expose them here, where people were suspicious of charm. In Heidelberg, Moses had taken pride and pleasure in Helmut’s sociability and social grace and enjoyed the parties where Helmut played the pianoforte and talked to the people who lingered around the instrument. How he managed to play and talk at the same time, Karseth could never fathom. “That’s the damnedest trick,” Karseth would think. But in New Haven, music was reckoned an amateur frivolity for ladies, and there was no niche that Helmut could unobtrusively fill. So, here he was with his conservatory certificates, masquerading as a manservant.
As time went on in New Haven, it seemed they quarreled more, and over sillier things: stupid fights of the sort that people have in isolated summer houses, ship cabins, and other places in which they have been closed in alone together for too long, as the two of them had been in the shut-box insularity of their household and their secret lives. Helmut turned a wounded but stoic face to his mate’s imprecations, but he did not grow accustomed to being yelled at as often as it happened these days. At best it left him with a day-long mood of rain in the heart and at worst made him cry, not manipulatively or punitively, but simply because it outraged his nerves and he could not help it.
This Friday night, late that cold spring, had been sullied by such a fight. Helmut had taken the train into New York and bought them a pair of opera tickets, the costliest and best. He set great store by weekends in New York, during which he dressed as the gentleman he was and dined and attended concerts with Moses. But Moses had become chary of these little escapes.
“I told you last time,” Moses had said, already feeling his temper straining its leash, “if you want tickets in the dress circle, that’s fine, but don’t get them together. We can’t sit in the dress circle together, in evening dress, for all the world to remark upon. If you don’t mind sitting with the hoi polloi, we can dress like the hoi polloi and sit together, and no one’ll notice us. But it’s one thing or the other. Either way, you have to go and exchange these tickets, and if you don’t enjoy wasting your afternoon that way, you can’t say you haven’t been told.”
“Nothing happened last time,” Helmut pointed out. “You got the shivering horrors, but nothing actually happened. No one from here saw us, no one gave us strange looks. I think you were simply overtired and nervous and—”
“Stop it, Helmut, don’t bother patting my head! Just make up your mind to exchange those tickets!”
“Suppose I decline to waste my afternoon that way? Suppose I get bored of being hidden like a dirty secret and of catering to your foolishness, and your exaggerated ideas of how much the Americans notice?”
“You can either exchange those tickets or go alone,” said Karseth, with an ugly look in his eye. “I’m not going to get myself into a war of words with you about the matter. Make up your mind about it one way or another, I don’t want to hear any more about it.”
And he heard no more about it; his techniques for getting his way worked. Only, as happened so often these days, he paid for his victory by making a grown man cry.
Around nine the morning after that charming exchange, Moses woke, shivering, and crossed the hall to Helmut’s room. It had turned much colder in the night. He opened the door that had closed him out, pulled the windows down, and looked at Helmut, curled up under a light summer comforter like a cold, mistreated small child. Karseth was not good at formulating intimate thoughts in words; if he could have, he would have thought, “Oh, if only you could defend yourself against me.” He shook a heavier quilt out of its neat fold on the blanket chest and laid it over Helmut, then crouched before the hearth and lit a handful of sticks and newsprint. After putting wood in, he dressed and went downstairs feeling nostalgic for the comfortable and pleasant desolation of the rooms of his university years, where there was nothing gentle to be harmed by the razor-sharp stones in his character, nothing he was beholden to. In such moods, he neither wanted nor felt he deserved soft beds and chairs of caramel-colored leather and plenty of tea and muffins and a yard full of flowering trees, he wanted—oh, what?
Usually nothing at all comes into the vacuum of such moods; whatever you want, you don’t get it, and that’s that. “A change, that’s what I want,” thought Karseth—in spite of his guilt at wanting to improve on safety with excitement. “A disturbance, even.” Active aggravation, something to tussle with, was easier on the nerves than mutinous mannerliness and the endless hair shirt of the conscience. He went out on his porch, now screened from the street by lilacs in full potent flower. It was a cold white-skied day, with the stern beauty that spring can have in New England between gales and late storms of heavy wet snow—weather that is like a grave young girl, an unsmiling fine-boned creature in an impermanent dress of pastel tissue. The scent of lilac on this cold still air was incredibly concentrated and powerful. He looked through a gap in the white and green sprays and saw that someone was moving into the vacant house two doors down, number 113, and a whole household had been piled out in the middle of the street. He might have watched, but the cold erected every hair on his body. He was starting up the kitchen fire when, early though it
was, someone knocked on his door—and his wish for change, a disturbance even, was promptly granted.
At the door, framed with white lilacs, was a stranger. And Karseth, who was not easily discountenanced, was momentarily wordless and confused. The man before him was entirely unfamiliar, of stunning good looks, and tall enough at six feet and two or three inches to make his handsomeness a bit of a threat at first sight. Moses placed him in his late twenties, a decade younger than Helmut and fifteen years younger than himself. He had a marvelous build, long-legged and broad-shouldered, but it was the face that knocked you stupid. You needed hyperbole to describe it, which Karseth didn’t have, but he could have said that his hair and eyes were black beyond all ordinary blackness, his face a thing of golden darkness. The hair, longish, formed beguiling natural waves that hid the tips of his brows. He had sleepless shadows under his eyes.
“You’re Dr. Moses Karseth, are you not?” The accent was English of the upperest crust, titles and fox hunts, the accent Moses himself had learned like a foreign language—and hearing the genuine thing always reminded him of his own origins. The manner was a sort of skitty boldness, shyness forcing itself forward.
“I am…” Moses admitted.
“My father was a patient of yours at Bad Gastein. I believe you stopped his headaches. I’m Doriskos Klionarios. He said he was going to write to you about me, I’m here to teach at the college.” He offered, dutifully, a fawn-gloved hand.