The God in Flight

by Laura Argiri

  “The, ah…how shall one say it, my boy? The ostentation? Would Mr. Lincoln have liked you to spend his money on a riding coach?”

  “I don’t think he would have minded,” said Simion, a nervous captive summoned to tea. “He knew that I loved horses. And, coming from my part of the world, I never had proper riding lessons, I just learned to ride like a savage, as people do there. I have to make up for lost time. To be ready for the station in life for which my work here at Yale will qualify me,” he added meaningly.

  “Sometimes it seems to me,” said Porter, stroking his chin, “that you dedicate most of your energies to defying that, ah…accident of birth.” In fact, this boy had been crashing the gates of class from the moment of his arrival. It was as if that was what he had come here to do.

  “Yes,” Simion replied. “I do. One can’t allow oneself to be limited by such accidents.”

  “One can’t?”

  “This is America, after all,” said Simion, smiling. He took the concept of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness—or at least the Happiness of Pursuit—very seriously.

  Porter decided to change the subject. “Why not a truly comradely sport, like fencing? Or running?”

  Comradely sports made Simion shudder, though he knew better than to say so, or to laud the formality and perfectionism of dressage, the solitary and gallant risks of the cross-country chase, the elegance and competitiveness of horsemanship. Even he knew not to voice such sentiments, so he said, “I don’t like fighting of any kind, so I wouldn’t care to fence. Dr. Karseth says I’d make a good runner but for the damage to my lungs from all the times I had pneumonia as a child, so I don’t do that. Why should it matter to anyone which sport I choose, sir?”

  “Well, I suppose it doesn’t, only must you consort with those racing touts? They are disreputable-looking fellows. Why not just use an ordinary riding master?”

  “Racing touts know more about horses. Really fine horses. When I’m set up in life, I plan to invest in some.”

  “Some…?”

  “Racehorses,” Simion explained patiently.

  “Do you think your father, Reverend Satterwhite, would like that?”

  “No, I’m sure not. Then again, my father doesn’t like anything I do. He also knows nothing about investments. And he doesn’t pay any of my expenses, so I don’t worry greatly about what he likes.”

  Porter said dutifully: “You owe him respect, Simion.” Though even Porter had trouble with this. Every term he seemed to get at least one raving letter from John Ezra, adjuring him to oversee his profligate son with appropriate rigor. The Reverend’s rabid handwriting was quite a contrast with the small but flowing hand in which Simion wrote his scandalous essays and stellar exams.

  “No, sir,” Simion replied firmly. “That’s part of a rather complicated set of personal circumstances that you wouldn’t understand, but I don’t owe him anything. I haven’t broken any rules, have I, sir? I don’t seem to remember anything in the catalogue against taking riding lessons and talking with ex-jockeys.”

  Porter looked the boy over and considered some of the rumors that had reached his ears. Simion, sharply turned out in tweeds, looked as healthy and handsome as a boy could, even though one might object to some of the over-smart details of his costume, such as his fawn topaz cuff links and the cabretta kid gloves he’d removed, now lying like obedient hands on the sofa beside him. Nothing one could really call blameworthy, unless, of course, Klionarios had bought him the jewels, an even more unsettling thought. Simion’s rather too long hair was artfully cut, not hacked off at the jaw by his own hand as in his waif days. He was pale, but he’d always been pale—a natural pallor, not that of ill health, or the leaden and pimpled countenance ascribed to Vice.

  “And I haven’t fallen down in my studies, have I, sir?”

  “No, that is not the issue at all,” said Noah Porter.

  “If you’re worried about my inheritance and whether I’m wasting it, sir, please allow me to reassure you. I have paid for good investment advice and made some stock purchases that are performing handsomely—Brassert Steelworks of Chicago and Du Pont de Nemours, among others. I don’t think that by the time I’m thirty, anyone will think that I’ve been foolish or reckless.”

  “Foolish or reckless…no, certainly not,” said the college president, thinking: “Investment advice. Stocks. Such a grasping creature, and such cold, systematic greed.” He half realized his own unfairness in so thinking: The behavior that would have shown commendable maturity in a young man of thirty seemed preternatural and coldly calculating in a boy of twenty. In a way, it offended him worse than the spurious idea that Simion might overspend on foolishness. Also, just as unfairly, he hadn’t resented Simion’s striving aspirations when the boy arrived at Yale in mended clothes and broken shoes, but he found himself nettled by the near-realization of those aspirations. An un-American and unegalitarian sentiment, but his own. He was annoyed with Simion for making him annoyed with himself. “What do you do for Professor Klionarios these days?” asked Porter suddenly, not sidling into the topic as he usually did.

  “Why, what I always did, sir. I manage the business side of his household and write his letters.” Which, in the narrowest interpretation, was perfectly true.

  Doriskos overheard Simion, over afternoon tea in his room during the spring term, telling some friends of his about the deterioration of his relations with Dr. Porter. For these relations had edged downhill as Porter continued to call Simion in to reproach him in an ill-defined fashion about, it seemed, everything and nothing. Simion had realized that he was actually being censured as much for his success as anything else, and that had sharpened his tongue, with predictable results. “At first it was my boy. Then it was young man. Then young sir. Today it was you rascal. I predict you scoundrel, you infernal young hound, maybe even you little cur. I can’t wait till he gives way to profanity!”

  Porter already had given way in the privacy of his locked office, all but jigging with vexation at the antics of the boy who seemed inevitably positioned as the valedictorian of the Yale College Class of 1882. A Yale valedictorian should be a young man of good family, a young man on a firm and precocious course as a future clergyman or professor. A strong bent as a mathematician and scientist had made Simion conspicuously unconventional, even discounting his antecedents. When he decided as a junior to have a social life, he made himself not only unconventional, but unclassifiable. In his serious pursuits, he could be as dogged and confrontive as he was in his studies; in his frivolous pursuits, without half trying, he was outrageous.

  Keeping his grades as annoyingly high as ever, Simion had joined an underground student society for atheists—he gave the club fifty dollars for a party on John Ezra’s birthday. He seemed to delight in taking the female roles in Andy’s new thespian club, the Heathcliffs—he’d created quite a stir as Iphigenia—and he made a pretty girl. A convincing girl. In a more serious vein, he’d also developed into an aggressive and controversial debater. Upon one recent occasion, when a debate-club meeting came perilously near to degenerating into a verbal brawl, Simion found himself saying what he meant, what he planned, what he must have been planning for years on that same nerve-cell level where Dori conceived The God in Flight. His opponent was an older boy, an uneven character prone to intense social snobbery and verbal hatchet attacks—Larchmont Stearns’s younger brother Parrish. He asked Simion what he intended to do with his fancy education and atheism and various pretensions, and Simion found himself saying that he intended to be a scientist and a man of fortune, to lead an intellectually and sensually replete life, and to found an American ducal family.

  “I intend to drag the human race forward by its hair to its own freedom—to be part of the progress, not part of the problem!” he said, drawing a roar of approval from one side of the room and a hail of crumpled paper from the other. “Someday this country’s going to have laws that let one sue people for prejudicial actions that stem from class con
tempt—just like for libel,” he added, unconsolingly for the paper-throwing half of the assembly. “And when those laws come, I’ll sue the pants off anyone who shoves his pedigreed rudeness under my nose for that reason, or bankroll a suit for anyone else who wants to.”

  “Provided you have the means,” supplied Parrish Stearns.

  “Oh, I’ll have them. Don’t you worry about that.”

  “I didn’t go out of that with tears in my eyes,” Simion realized, once the rehash in the White Wave had begun, perhaps recalling himself cringing before Parrish’s older brother. “No, I damn near incited a riot.” When Noah Porter importuned him, Simion said brightly, “I have decided that it’s one of my many missions in life to unsettle the petty aristocracy.”

  “Do you likewise go out of your way to unsettle Professor Klionarios?” asked Noah Porter, who still believed the story Stratton-Truro had written to him—that Doriskos was the orphaned son of an impoverished Greek princess.

  “Professor Klionarios is not a petty aristocrat, sir, he is a very great artist.”

  “I suppose your time writing his letters has qualified you to make that determination?” Porter was still trying for a tone of mild mockery, not the outright hostility he was beginning to feel in these encounters.

  “The world will know it soon,” said Simion.

  His adolescent combativeness brought him more friends than he’d ever had, most of them like-minded but less outspoken: people who thrilled to hear him say what they only dared to think. Those who liked him thought of him, already, as a person with a high and important destiny; those who did not fantasized about killing him slowly and luxuriously. He and Andrew grew particularly tight with Leander Hogan and Francis Finch, a pair of Heathcliff confrères who were inseparable friends. Leander, six feet four and as tongue-tied as Dori at his worst, was especially delighted by Simion’s salvos. The person who was not delighted with them was Moses, who once took his protégé by his slender shoulders and hissed, “Well, if you want to be Voltaire, be Voltaire and survive! Monsieur Voltaire lived, rather than being killed and eaten by either the administration or the other students at the university! Do something about that mouth so that you can live to do something about the rest!”

  But this cadenced hysteria had little effect. In fact, Simion’s next enormity, late in the month of March, was committed in Karseth’s defense. Simion was not a young man of highly developed prejudice, except for his justifiable queasiness about Christian fundamentalism. He knew only one Jew, the man who had saved his life. Moses, at this time, was involved in a patent dispute over a buffered ether he had developed, a formulation suitable for dentistry or minor surgery; the local apothecary with whom he’d entrusted his formula had taken to selling it as his own innovation. This made a stir around the Sheff, then the dispute made the local papers, and in the Yale Daily Voice, there was eventually a blazing editorial on the subject of Hebraic commercial greed—incidentally penned by one Harley Fellowes, a young man who’d twice tried, unsuccessfully, for entrance to the Medical Institute. He began by suggesting that the literary portrait so amply developed by Mr. Dickens in Oliver Twist contained no exaggeration. If anyone had doubts along this line, Fellowes elaborated, he need only consider certain members of the faculty hired under the good graces of this over-liberal administration because they were supposed to be Christian converts. People, foreigners, so obviously alight with commercial greed had no place on the medical faculty of a righteous American institution such as Yale.

  This bilge was promptly answered by the creature whom Moses addressed as boy dear, at least when pleased with him. Simion cited the whole winter in which Moses had cared for him with no mention of a bill. He also suggested that the writer’s problem with Jews was that they, sagacious race, were brighter than the editorialist—and that if he had a problem with this, he probably had one with most of humankind, including the Albanians, the Pygmies, and the Heathen Chinee. He pointed out that Moses had made his buffered ether available before his patent application was granted simply to spare danger to debilitated patients, who were often overwhelmed by ether in its usual potent form. He pointed out that the writer was a contemptible swine, kin under the skin to the louse-ridden Russian peasants who staged pogroms as recreational alternatives to alcoholic coma and rape. He suggested that Yale, contrary to the writer’s allegations, was for scholars and gentlemen and hence was no place for admitted anti-Semites.

  Moses had not been in the best of moods since this broil began, and when he came home on the day that Simion’s response was printed and sighted Simion in Helmut’s kitchen, he pointed to his surgery and said—no boy dear—“Get in here!”

  Hands in pockets, projecting a nonchalance he was far from feeling, Simion got in there. Moses flung down into his desk chair, not inviting him to sit.

  “Damn you, Simion!”

  “Huh?”

  “Do you know there’s never been another human born who could confuse me as you do? I should turn you up and spank you—for your indiscretions, your temper, the incredible noise you make over indignities you should be learning to swallow. I’ve told you about this kind of thing!”

  “You didn’t say a word about countenancing anti-Semitism.”

  “I said plenty about not drawing adverse attention to yourself.”

  “There are things more important than not drawing attention. And I don’t think the attention I’ll get for defending my friend could be called adverse attention, do you?”

  “Wait and see,” said Moses, but he’d tilted his head down to his palm, and Simion could already hear weariness and yielding in his tone. Moses found Simion, in his way, as hard to argue with as Doriskos was. “I should strip you down…somebody’s got to get the facts of life under your hide, but…”

  “Butt, butt, my arse,” sassed Simion amiably. “Obviously you’re far too tired for such a strenuous endeavor…or is there some sentimental reason behind your clemency?” Grinning, he seated himself familiarly on Karseth’s desk. He was shocked at the loudness and urgency of Moses’s voice when he replied.

  “Fagin!” he cried. “Damned…Oliver Twist! I might have wrung your neck but for Oliver Twist!”

  Simion was rewarded with a piece of history he mightn’t have ever heard otherwise, or might have heard while sitting by Karseth’s deathbed—something that Helmut had not learned until he’d shared Moses’s bed and board for several years. Moses, at ten years of age, had done well at the charity school he attended. The few books he’d read there had stirred his appetite for more, and he’d fallen into the habit of reading in bookshops and at booksellers’ stalls until bidden to move on. On one such occasion, one bright and early morning, he’d been leafing through a novel at a stall in Cheapside, too absorbed to notice the proprietor’s hostile mien. Finally the man’s gaze rested on the skullcap on this small nonpaying customer’s head, and he queried, “You intend to buy that book, little sheeny-boy?” He took a couple of threatening steps toward small Moses, who might indeed have bought it under other circumstances. However, slapped by the epithet and alarmed by the predatory man, then closing in on him with clenched fists the size of small hams, he panicked and ran—without putting the book down. He still remembered the yells of enraged grown people giving chase. By the time he’d outrun them, he was in an unfamiliar locale—leaning on a wall in a slimy alley, shaking in every limb. Once he found his way home, he went up into a chill but sunny attic of the tenement in which he lived, an apartment unoccupied because of its broken windows—a place where he liked to study or play. Only there did he dare take the book out from under his jacket. He hadn’t even looked at its title before the fray began. He looked then and found that it was called Oliver Twist, and he figured that he might as well read it.

  He read and didn’t raise his eyes until the pain in them got his attention; then he looked into the smogged-out London sunset. Reading from mid-morning until dusk, he’d just got past the chapter in which little Oliver, near Moses’s own age, was t
aken to see Fagin on the eve of his hanging. There was a picture of the old man, rigid with dread, sitting on the edge of his bed in the death house. The mild author, so tender of all the other characters—even the housebreakers and streetwalkers—had no pity for this one, and for particular reasons beyond the fact that he ran an orphanage for thieves. Fagin!

  Moses had come up those stairs changed from the boy who had sauntered out of the house that morning, and he went down them changed again. Even asleep, he’d never again quite rest. He never had quite rested, ever since. The arts master at the charity school told him quite unapologetically that if he thought Mr. Dickens was cruel, he should have a look at Shakespeare’s Shylock.

  Simion, having been told all this, reached over and laid his palm over Karseth’s taut hand. “Well, in that case, I’m doubly glad I answered that editorial,” he said. “Come, I’m too skinny to beat him up, and if I tried, you’d only have to splint my broken nose. The best I can do is to lambaste him with words. Anyhow, the pen’s supposed to be mightier than the fist—is that how that poppycock runs?—and I’ve taken up mine for you against both Mr. Dickens and Harley Fellowes.” Upon noting Karseth’s continued silence: “Are you still incensed with me?”

  “I ought to be.”

  “That’s not the same thing.”

  “No. Go down cellar and get me a glass of port. It seems one of those moments that alcoholic spirits were made for.”

  Simion brought it, concerned about Karseth’s shaken silence and sallow face. Moses took it from him and motioned to him to go, then said: “Boy dear.”