by Alan Isler
For the last twenty years of his life Onkel Ferri had served in the dual capacity of Compleat Mourner and Keeper of the Record. As Keeper of the Record Ferri had had in his possession a century’s collection of Kraven documents, letters, photographs, knick-knacks of all kinds. After Opa’s death the collection had become swollen with the old man’s vast hoard of Sarah Bernhardt memorabilia. Our Kraven had become the Keeper in his turn. It was an obligation that he took very seriously. The walls in his living room, bedroom, gallery and entrance hall were covered with photographs of the Divine Sarah, the earliest dating from 1869 (Le Passant) and the latest from 1920 (Daniel). There were also numerous framed prints, among them a rarity from her first American tour, Sarah Bernhardt, unimpressed, standing upon the back of a whale in Boston harbour. There were, besides, four original Mucha prints in mint condition, Lorenzacchio, La Samaritaine, Gismonda, and Tragique Histoire d’Hamlet. It was a cheap modem reproduction of this last that decorated Kraven’s Mosholu office.
Mixed in at discreet intervals among these relics of the incomparable tragédienne were photographs from the general Kraven collection. All the Kravens he had heard of or knew were represented at least once, some many times, especially Opa, who had loved to be photographed. His mother, however, appeared only twice on the walls: in one (circa 1922), in her late teens and ravishingly beautiful, Mummy was dressed in the costume of a Spanish dancer. She was striking an attitude, inspired no doubt by a moving picture of her idol, Rudolph Valentino, and biting on a rose. In the second photograph, taken after the last wave of Kraven immigration from Vienna, his mother was alone in the midst of the entire Kraven clan. The picture had been taken in the Hampstead drawing room. The focus of attention, naturally, was Opa. The rest of the family had disposed itself around him. All the grown-ups looked grim – unsurprising, in view of what they had recently fled from. Only Tillie was smiling. Marko and Nicko sat on the floor at Opa’s feet, Marko biting his nails and Nicko rubbing his eyes. Felix was not in the picture, from which fact Kraven deduced that his father had been the photographer.
This curious blanketing of the walls might well strike the unprepared visitor as weird. In Stella’s view, it was ‘creepy’; the apartment, she said, looked like ‘a mausoleum’. On those Thursday nights spent in his apartment, she preferred the illumination of candles. Candlelight softened the mood, she maintained. It was ‘sexier’; more important, it caused the offending photographs to disappear into a devouring gloom.
Over in a corner, stuck in the earth of a glazed clay pot, was Opa’s magic stick. The stick had been his first purchase in England. He was never without it. It was a long shaft of ebony with a sharp metal point at one end and a double handgrip at the other. ‘It’s a magic stick,’ said Opa. ‘It’s a shooting stick,’ said Nicko’s mother flatly, ‘that’s all it is, Nicko.’ But that was silly, thought Nicko. It couldn’t shoot anything, not possibly. Where was the hole for the bullets? ‘I wouldn’t be so vexed if he just used it outside, but he uses it indoors. Look at my floors, look at the holes and scratches! Take a good look, for heaven’s sake, at the carpets!’ ‘He’s an old man,’ said Felix, ‘he needs a stick.’ ‘But must it be that one? My father also needs a stick, but his has a sensible rubber tip.’ ‘He likes that one, that’s reason enough. Not another word, Victoria. Remember whom you’re talking about.’
Meanwhile, in the Hampstead garden, Opa demonstrated to Nicko some of the extraordinary stick’s properties. ‘Look at its point: hoopla, it’s a sword!’ He assumed a fencer’s stance and made a few passes in the air. True, he staggered a little and held his free hand to the small of his back. But in Nicko’s eyes this was a creditable performance. ‘Look at it now!’ Opa stuck the point into the earth. ‘Hipsy-pipsy, it’s a chair!’ And he opened the handle and sat down. Oh, it was magic, all right.
The phone was ringing again. Kraven went to his window and peeped out. Princip and company had gone. He must remember to get in touch with Nimuë. The phone stopped ringing. Kraven returned to the couch.
He sorted the morning’s mail on his coffee table, bills, advertisements, and – what was this? – a letter from England, from Aunt Cicely, no less. What could have prompted her to break silence? He felt a vague, inexplicable disquiet. It seemed an ill-omened thing. His hunger returned with increased force. He would have something to eat, and then, thus strengthened, he would see what the old girl wanted. It was lack of food, surely, that caused the hand carrying the letter into the kitchen to tremble.
Aunt Cicely was his mother’s younger sister. Dry and cold, there was no juice in her. As a young woman she had not wanted for beaux, but she had never much wanted them either. They came and went, evanescent. She had never married.
Still, she had nursed her mother, her sister, and her father through their last illnesses with commendable skill. She was good at plumping pillows and changing bedpans, at administering pills and charting temperatures. In the sickroom she displayed a brisk and bracing manner, a cheerful no-nonsense determination. She thrived on the ill-health of others.
Cicely lived frugally, rattling around in the damp house in Hendon, once her father’s, now hers. In winter she confined herself to the kitchen, where she set up a bunk bed, considerably reducing thereby her fuel bill. She made all her own clothes and ate, in her own phrase, ‘not enough to keep a squirrel alive’. Certainly she had the hoarding instincts of a squirrel, for Aunt Cicely was undeniably rich. Not only had she her own fat savings and shrewd investments over many years but also Grandfather Blum’s, the fruit of a long lifetime of parsimony and thrift. There was even Kraven’s old house in Hampstead, which he had sold her for a piddling sum before leaving England, eager to be rid of it and, a Kraven to the end, unwilling to haggle over price. She must by now be receiving a handsome rent on that.
He had no expectation of inheriting her wealth. Aunt Cicely would know that a Kraven could be relied on only to fritter away the money.
She was his only living relative. They had never cared much for one another. Infrequently, very infrequently, they exchanged cards. But now this letter. Kraven had finished his sandwich, had drunk down the last drop of his coffee. Gingerly he picked up the envelope, slit it open, and took out the letter.
Dear Nicholas,
I imagine you’re very surprised to hear from me after so long a time. The truth is, I’ve been thinking about you a lot lately, and a very good friend of mine said, go on, write to him, for heaven’s sake, get it off your chest, he won’t bite you, and hence this letter. I have discovered that I can always rely on the advice given me by this particular friend.
Do you think your affairs might bring you to England in the near future? Many’s the time I remember the jolly romps we had together, Nicko, years ago, when you were a little boy. Such fun! Wouldn’t it be nice to sit over a cup of tea and a digestive biscuit and chat about those days?
I have certain, private family matters that I want to discuss with you, matters that it would be unwise to commit to paper! Better have a chinwag with him, says my friend, whom you do not know as yet!
Do try and come soon, my dearest Nicko.
Your loving
Aunt Cicely
The letter took Kraven somewhat aback. He scarcely recognized his aunt in its sentimental tones. In her old age, she had rewritten their past. Jolly romps, indeed! And who was this mysterious friend? Some old hag, no doubt, who had latched on to Aunt Cicely as on to a good thing. As for the private family matters, Kraven knew well enough what they were. She had obviously decided to tell him at long last about the cloud hanging over his birth.
One dark day in childhood Marko had come to him with a postcard found by rummaging through drawers forbidden to him. It was written by Grandfather Blum and posted from Blankenberg on 18 August 1935, eleven months after Nicko’s birth. It was addressed not to Mrs Felix Kraven but to Miss Victoria Blum:
Dear Victoria,
Beg to inform you weather good. Prices somewhat higher than anticipated. Will
make holiday bookings henceforth with ‘Seaview’ in Margate, as always hitherto. Please note address hereinunder indicated.
Trust ‘all goes well’ with you.
Greetings,
Dad
‘Seems you’re a bastard, Nicko.’
‘It’s not true at all! You rotter, Marko, you beastly rotter!’
‘Bah-stud! Bah-stud!’
‘It’s not true, I tell you!’ Nicko began to cry. ‘I’m telling Onkel Koko what you said.’
‘Bah-stud! Look at the stinking bah-stud!’
The question of his legitimacy had haunted Kraven’s childhood. Had he been born out of wedlock? Was the diabolic Marko right? He looked at his mother with different eyes. He felt a nauseating insecurity, as if he walked on ground shifting from a seismic shock. Perhaps his mother had eloped with Felix, had married his father secretly, unknown to Grandfather Blum. No, she could scarcely have concealed her pregnancy, to say nothing of his own arrival and his continuing existence for eleven months before the damning postcard had come. Besides, it had been addressed to the Kraven house in Hampstead. Nicko had agonized for years.
And now Aunt Cicely was prepared to tell him all about it. Her mysterious friend had perhaps warned her of the psychological damage she had unwittingly done him. Kraven crushed the letter in his hand and tossed it into the wastepaper basket. Well, she was a quarter-century too late. At the age of fifteen he had betaken himself to Somerset House, and there with relatively little trouble had found the evidence of his parents’ marriage.
Kraven, in need of cheering up, decided he would without delay phone his budding poetess, his Nimuë.
* * *
NIMUE’S POEM SAT UNDER THE TELEPHONE, her number exposed. Kraven dialled, heard the ringing in the Bronx, cleared his throat, and waited.
‘Yeah?’ Heavy breathing, slightly catarrhal.
‘Er, yes. May I speak with Nimuë, please?’
‘Who?’
‘Nimuë. Miss Berkowitz.’
‘I get it, sure, you mean Naomi, right? Hang on a second, fella.’ The voice was a gravelled monotone. It receded into the near distance, began to bellow.
There followed a grunt, a tiny shriek, a pause, then: ‘Yeah?’ It was her own darling voice.
‘Nicholas Kraven here.’
‘Gee.’ The darling voice became suddenly sharp: ‘Just a minute.’ A gentle hand now on the receiver: ‘What you grinning at? Like this is a private conversation. If you don’t mind. Yeah, that’s what I said, private. Why-n’t you get lost?’ The hand was removed. ‘Sorry about that.’ Here was his sweet Nimuë.
‘I’m phoning about your poetry tutorial. Bit of bad luck there, I’m afraid. Not a free hour anywhere on my appointments calendar, booked solid through the rest of the semester.’
‘O gee.’
‘Couldn’t agree more, but there it is. What’s to be done? I’ve taken another look at your poem, Nimuë. In fact, I’ve got it here in my hand. Yours is a talent to be carefully nurtured, a new and exciting voice in American letters.’
‘O wow, when you say things like that, it makes me, you know, I kinda get all, I dunno, like gooey all over.’
Kraven’s heart felt a tremor. ‘Perhaps if I referred you to a colleague? I’d hate to do it, but the week, alas, has only five days.’
‘Well, maybe … Hey, I wouldn’t wanna use up your free time, but y’know the weekend, well, maybe sometimes… the week, y’know, it’s got seven days, not five, and hey.’
‘Good heavens! The weekend, of course! I should have thought of it myself.’
‘O wow!’
‘Now next weekend’s no good, I’ve been asked to give a paper in LA, “Whither American Poetry?’ Hmm, that involves a delay, at least a fortnight. Of course, there’s always tomorrow, Sunday. But perhaps you have other plans?’
‘Tomorrow’s great! What time?’
Such eagerness in the pursuit of learning was all too rare in today’s young. ‘Two o’clock? We can have a late lunch and get right to work.’
‘All right!’
He gave her his address. ‘You think you’ll be able to find it?’
‘I got friends.’
‘Two o’clock, then. Remember to bring your other poems.’
‘Far out!’ She hung up.
Kraven picked up Nimuë’s poem and read it through. The purple words danced on the page. His voice, it seemed, made her gooey all over. Far out! But what could she have meant that she had friends? People familiar with the bus and subway system, probably. When he got up tomorrow, he would change the sheets on the bed.
* * *
OVER THE YEARS KRAVEN HAD PRODUCED the requisite scholarly articles. ‘The Brothel and the Paradise Garden: Shakespeare’s Pericles Revisited’; ‘Below the Salt: Plebeian Resentment in Coriolanus’; ‘Desdemona’s Wedding Sheets: A New Interpretation.’ These were but to scrape the surface. He had, moreover, published a book, well received, as such things go: The Womb, the Tomb and the Loom in Shakespeare’s Major Tragedies. One might even say that early in his career he had written with enthusiasm, certainly with enjoyment.
But the world around him, alas, had changed. For whom, Kraven wondered, was he keeping alive the lamp of learning? For a Princip? True, a Dillinger might alter the world’s view of the Middle Ages. Perhaps that mattered. But a Kraven? Yet another arcane article to be read only by other drudges like himself? No, that was finished, done. Kraven’s ‘light verse’ parodies, usually of poems, sometimes of songs, provided him now with a luxury, a private entertainment divorced from any practical goal. His stuff was unpublishable, he knew, but that fact bothered him not at all. What mattered was that writing it gave him pleasure.
He removed Tickety-Boo from its hiding place and leafed through its pages. Here, for example, was a lyric he had written one morning shortly after Stella had left him to return to Poore-Moody:
To Stella,
On a Friday Morning
In nought but panties thou art clearly fairer
Than Botticelli’s pallid Primavera,
And Trojan Helen, reft of all her clothes,
Cannot assume a more enticing pose.
Salt Cleopatra, nude, is second best
To thee, beloved, who art scarcely dressed.
Why then delay, why cause me so much anguish,
Why leave me on our mutual couch to languish?
Come, Stella, come, for Venus’ laws condone
The revelation of thy fragrant zone.
To see, to touch, to sniff, to taste – egad!
The thought alone doth drive me raving mad!
Thou knowst that pecker in the morning’s light
Far stronger is than pecker in the night.
Why poinst thou at the clock, thou timid mouse?
A fig I give thee for thy wretched spouse!
Remove thy panties, leap into the bed,
Forget this once that thou art elsewhere wed.
Thou art my love! There can be nought amiss
If thou and I once more achieve our bliss.
Alas, alas, our pleasures thou wouldst mar:
Why put’st thou on thy breast-concealing bra?
What’s this? Thy pantyhose? O, evil chance
That I should be tormented with thy dance!
Thy blouse, thy skirt, and now thy jacket too –
What use my plaints, what though my lot I rue?
To think my dame her duties thus should shirk:
Her duties owed to me, not to that jerk!
Kraven refiled the poem. No, publication clearly was impossible. Tickety-Boo amused him, and that was enough.
SIX
BY ONE O’CLOCK on Sunday afternoon Kraven had readied his apartment to receive Nimuë. The light layer of dust, accumulated since Early’s Friday whisking, had vanished. In the bedroom the window blinds were drawn together and the resulting gloom dissipated in the area of the great bed itself by the soft warm light of a bedside lamp. In the kitchen the coffee pot, primed,
had only to be plugged in; while on the dining table in the living room was spread a tempting selection of Zabar’s delicacies: cream cheese and chives, smoked salmon, chopped herring, Greek salad, various cheeses, Danish crackers, pumpernickel, bagels – not the food of poetry perhaps, but food conducive, in Kraven’s experience, to feelings of well-being. Casually placed on the coffee table was The Enthusiast’s Guide to Sexual Fulfillment, a volume boasting ‘more than 100 full-color photographs and many easy-to-follow diagrams’.
By two o’clock Kraven had brushed his teeth for the third time since arising. He had also emboldened the after-shave splash of Dunhill, whose strength was by then disappearing, with a liberal douche of Zizanie. By two-fifteen he had determined, this time with assurance, to favour an open-necked sports shirt without benefit of silk scarf, whose dash, he now saw, was rather too affected. By 2:35 he was wondering whether some of the more easily perishable of Zabar’s offerings should be returned to the refrigerator. His anxiety was mixed with a scruple of irritation.
But at 2:55 the house phone rang. The voice of Clarence, rendered sepulchral in its journey along the wire, announced the imminent ascension of a visitor. It could only be she, his Nimuë. A knock at the door, and there she stood, enchanting, clutching a sheaf of papers to her bosom.
‘Gee, I guess I’m late, huh?’
‘Not to worry.’
‘First it was my old man, wouldn’t let me out. Where my going? Who lie be with? And like that.’
‘But here you are. That’s what counts.’
‘Like I’m over eighteen, hey.’
‘Ah.’
‘Then we have this accident, in the Heights, y’know?’
‘Your father brought you?’
‘No, Gabe. He was going to this Anti-Nuke Puke-in in Washington Square, see.’
‘You mean Gabriel Princip? You came with him?’