That my mother was writing to me without my father's knowledge did not disturb me. It was of a piece with her long-ago attempts to conceal our attendance at Simon's old meetings. But I felt the heat of my guilt: I had neglected Simon, I hadn't looked in on him for ... I hardly knew how many weeks it might have been. Weeks, surely; two months, three? I resented those visits; I resented the responsibility my mother had cursed me with. Simon was worse than a crank and a bore. He was remote from my youth and my life. I thought of him as a bad smell, like his icebox.
But I obediently chopped up lettuce and cucumber and green peppers, and poured a garlic-and-oil dressing over all of it. Then, with the fifty-dollar bill well wrapped in waxed paper and inserted into a folded piece of cardboard with a rubber band around it, I went to see Simon. Two flights below the landing that led to his place I could already hear the commotion vibrating out of it: an incomprehensible clamor, shreds of laughter, and a strangely broken wail that only vaguely passed for a chant. The door was open; I looked in. A mob of acolytes was swarming there—no, not swarming after all: in the tiny square of Simon's parlor, with its sofa-bed in one corner and its makeshift pantry, a pair of wooden crates, in the other, there was hardly a clear foot of space to accommodate a swarming. Yet what I saw through a swaying tangle of elbows and legs had all the buzz and teeming of a hive: a squatting, a slouching, a splaying, a leaning, a curling up, a lying down. And in the center of this fleshy oscillation, gargling forth the syllables of GNU, stood Annette. She stood like a risen tower, solid as bricks. She seemed to be cawing—croaking, crackling, chirring—though in the absence of anything intelligible, how was it possible to tell? Were these the sounds and cadences of the universal tongue? I could not admit surprise: from the start Annette had been so much my unwanted destiny. What else could she be now, having materialized here, in the very bosom of GNU? Or, if she wasn't to be my destiny, she intended to be Simon's. She was resurrecting his old meetings—it was plain from the spirit of the thing that this wasn't the first or the last. Anyhow it was flawed. No enemies lurked among these new zealots, if they were zealots at all.
At that time there were faddists of various persuasions proliferating up and down the Village, anarchists who dutifully went home every night to their mother's kitchens, a Hungarian monarchist with his own following, free-verse poets who eschewed capital letters, cultists who sat rapturously for hours in orgone boxes, cloudy Swedenborgians, and all the rest. These crazes never tempted me; my early exposure to Simon's fanatics had been vaccination enough. As for where Annette had fetched this current crew, I supposed they were picked up from the looser margins of her theater crowd. There were corroboratory instances, here and there, of black stockings and green lipstick. And no Esperantists. Zamenhof was as alien to these recruits as—well, as GNU had been two months ago. Not one of them would have been willing to knock Simon down.
Annette lifted her face from her mottled notebook. All around her the wriggling knots of torsos turned inert and watchful.
"Oh my God, it's Phyllis," she said. "What're you doing here? Can't you see we're in the middle of things, we're working?"
"I'm just bringing a green salad for my uncle—"
"Little Green Riding Hood, how sweet. She's not his actual niece," Annette explained to the mob. "She doesn't give a hoot about him. Hey, Phyl, you don't think we'd let a man like that starve? And if you want to know what a real green salad looks like, here's a green salad." She swooped to the floor and swept up a large straw basket (yet another of my mother's souvenirs) heaped with verdant dollars. "This week's dues," she told me.
I surveyed the bodies at my feet, sorting among them. "Where is he?"
"Simon? Not here. Thursday's his day away, but he gave us the new words last time, so we carry on. We do little dialogues, we're getting the hang of it. We're his pioneers," she declaimed: Katharine Cornell to the hilt.
"And then it'll spread all over," a voice called out.
"There, you see?" Annette said. "Some people understand. Poor Phyl's never figured it out. Simon's going against the Bible, he's an atheist."
"Is that what he tells you?"
"You are such a dope," she spat out. "The Tower of Babel's why he got to thinking about GNU in the first place, wasn't it? So that things would go back to the way they were. The way it was before."
"Before what? Before they invented lunatic asylums? Look," I said, "as far as I'm concerned Simon's not exactly right in the head, so I'm supposed to—" But I broke off shamefacedly. "I have to watch out for him, he's sort of my responsibility."
"As far as you're concerned? How far is that? How long's it been since you showed up anyhow?"
Annette, I saw, was shrewder than I could ever hope to be. She was stupid and she was earnest. The stupidity would last, the earnestness might be fleeting, but the combination ignited a volcanic purposefulness: she had succeeded in injecting a bit of living tissue into Simon's desiccated old fossil. She was a first-rate organizer. I wondered how much of that weekly green salad she took away with her. And why not? It was a commission on dues. It was business.
"Where is he?" I insisted. I was still holding the bowl of cut vegetables, and all at once discovered a tremor in my hands: from fury, from humiliation.
"He went to visit a family member. That's what he said."
"A family member? There aren't any around here, there's only me."
"He goes every Thursday, I guess to see his wife."
"His ex-wife. He's been divorced for years."
"Well, he didn't want that divorce, did he? He's a man who likes being affectionate—maybe not to you. He gives back what he's given, that's why, and believe me he doesn't need you to turn up with your smelly old veggies once in a blue moon." Behind her the mob was breaking up. It was distracted, it was annoyed, it was impatient, it was uprooted, it was stretching its limbs. It was growling, and not in the universal tongue. "Just look what you've done," Annette accused, "barging in like that. We were doing so beautifully, and now you've broken the spell."
Circumspectly, I wrote the news to my mother. I had been to Simon's flat, I said, and things were fine. They were boiling away. His old life had nicely recommenced: he had a whole new set of enthusiasts. His work was reaching the next generation; he even had an agent to help him out. I did not tell her that I hadn't in fact seen Simon, and I didn't dare hint that he might be courting Essie again: wasn't that what Annette had implied? Nor did I confess that I had unwrapped the fifty-dollar bill and kept it for myself. I had no right to it; it couldn't count as a commission. I had done nothing for Simon. I had failed my mother's charge.
My mother's reply was long in coming. In itself this was odd enough: I had expected an instant happy outcry. With lavish deception I had depicted Simon's triumphant renewal, the future of GNU assured, crowds of mesmerized and scholarly young people streaming to his lectures—several of which, I lied, were held in the Great Hall of Cooper Union, at the very lectern Lincoln himself had once sanctified.
And it was only Annette, it was only the Village revolving on its fickle wheel: soon the mob would be spinning away to the next curiosity.
But my mother was on a wheel of her own. She was whirling on its axle, and Simon was lately at the distant perimeter. Her languorously sweeping Palmer arches were giving way to crabbed speed. She was out of time, she informed me, she had no time, no time at all, it was good to hear that Simon was doing well, after all these years he was finally recovered from that fool Essie, that witch who had always kept him down, but so much was happening, happening so fast, the gallery was flooded with all these tourists crazy for crafts, the place was wild, she was exhausted, she'd had to hire help, and meanwhile, she said, your father decided to retire, it was all to the good, she needed him in the gallery, and yes, he had his little pension, that was all right, never mind that it was beside the point, there was so much stock and it sold so fast that she'd had to buy the building next door to store whatever came in, and what came in went out in a day, a
nd your father, can you imagine, was keeping the books and calling himself Comptroller, she didn't care what he called himself, they were importing like mad, all these kachina dolls from Japan, they certainly look like the real thing, the customers don't know the difference anyhow...
It seemed she was detaching herself from Simon. The kachinas had freed her. I was not sorry that I had deceived her; hadn't she taught me how to deceive? For my part, I had no desire to look after Simon. He was hokum. He was snake oil. What may have begun as a passion had descended into a con. Simon's utopia was now no more than a Village whim, and Annette its volatile priestess. But what had Essie, sewing her old eyes out in the lint-infested back room of a neighborhood haberdashery, to do with any of it—on Thursdays or any other day? She had thrown him out, and for reason. I surmised that along with Simon's infidelities she had thrown out her fidelity to GNU. How many strapping young Annettes had he cosseted over the decades?
I did not go back to Simon's place. I did what I could to chuck him out of my thoughts—but there were reminders and impediments. My mother in her galloping prosperity had taken to sending large checks. The money was no longer for Simon, she assured me; I had satisfied her that he was launched on what, in my telling, was a belated yet flowering career. The money was for me: for tuition and rent and textbooks, of course, but also for new dresses and shoes, for the movies, for treats. With each check—they were coming now in scrappy but frequent maternal rushes—Simon poked a finger in my eye. He invaded, he abraded, he gnawed. I began to see that I would never be rid of him. Annette and her mob would drop him. He would fall from her eagle's claws directly into my unwilling hands. And still I would not go back.
Instead I went down into the subway at Astor Place (where, across a broad stretch of intersection, loomed my lie: the venerable red brick of Cooper Union), and headed for the Bronx and Essie. I found her where time had left her, in apartment 2-C on the second floor of the old walkup. It was not surprising that she did not recognize me. We had last met when I was twelve and a half; emulating my mother, I had been reliably rude.
"You're who?" She peered warily through the peephole. On my side I saw a sad brown eye startled under its drooping hood.
"It's Phyllis," I said. "Ruby and Dan's daughter. From down the block."
"They left the neighborhood years ago. I don't know where they went. Ask somebody else."
"Essie, it's Phyllis," I repeated. "My mother used to take me to hear Uncle Simon."
She let me in then, and at the same time let out the heavy quick familiar sigh I instantly recognized: as if some internal calipers had pinched her lung. She kept her look on me fixedly yet passively, like someone sitting in a movie house, waiting for the horses on the screen to rear up.
"How about that, Simon's cousin's kid," she said. "Your mother never liked me."
"Oh no, I remember how she admired your singing—"
"She admired Simon. She thought he was the cat's pajamas. Like every other female he ever got near, the younger the better. I wouldn't put it past him if he had some girlie in his bed right now, wherever he is."
"But he comes to see you, and he wouldn't if he didn't want to be"—I struggled for the plainest word—"together. Reconciled, I mean. At his age. Now that he's ... older."
"He comes to see me? Simon?" The horses reared up in her eyes. "Why would he want to do that after all this time?"
I had no answer for this. It was what I had endured an hour or more in the subway to find out. If Simon could be restored to Essie, then—as Annette had pronounced—things would go back to the way they once were. The Tower of Babel had nothing to do with it; it was rather a case of Damocles' sword, Simon's future dangling threateningly over mine. I wanted him back in the Bronx. I wanted him reinstalled in 2-C. I wanted Essie to claim him.
Her rooms had the airless smell of the elderly. They were hugely overfurnished—massive, darkly oiled pieces, china figurines on every surface. A credenza was littered with empty bobbins and crumpled-up tissue paper. An ancient sewing machine with a wrought-iron treadle filled half a wall; the peeling bust of a mannequin was propped against it. In the bedroom a radio was playing; through spasms of static I heard fragments of opera. Though it was a mild Sunday afternoon in early May, all the windows were shut—despite which, squads of flies were licking their feet along the flanks of the sugar bowl. The kitchen table (Essie had led me there) was covered with blue-flowered oilcloth, cracked in places, so that the canvas lining showed through. I waved the flies away. They circled just below the ceiling for an idling minute, then hurled themselves against the panes like black raindrops. The smell was the smell of stale changelessness.
Essie persisted, "Simon hasn't been here since never mind how long it is. Since the divorce. He never comes."
"Not on Thursdays?" The question hung in all its foolishness. "I heard he goes to visit family, so I thought—"
"I'm not Simon's family, not anymore. I told you, I haven't seen him in years. Where would you get an idea like that?"
"From ... his assistant. He has an assistant now. A kind of manager. She sets up his meetings."
"His manager, his assistant, that's what he calls them. Then he goes out and diddles them. And how come he's still having those so-called meetings? Who's paying the bills?" She coughed out a disordered laugh that was half a viscous sigh. "Those famous Park Avenue moneybags?"
The laugh was too big for her body. Her bones had contracted, leaving useless folds of puckered fallen skin. Her hands were horribly veined.
"Listen, girlie," she said, "Simon doesn't come, nobody comes. I do a fitting for a neighbor, I sew up a hem, I put in a pocket, that's who comes. A bunch of the old Esperantists used to show up, this was when Simon left, but then it stopped. By now they're probably dead. The whole thing is dead. It's a wonder Simon isn't dead."
The flies had settled back on the sugar bowl. I stood up to leave. Nothing could be clearer: there would be no reconciliation. 2-C would not see Simon again.
But Essie was pulling at my sleeve. "Don't think I don't know where he goes anyhow. Maybe not Thursdays, who could figure Thursdays, but every week he goes there. He always goes there, it never stops."
"Where?"
I asked it reluctantly. Was she about to plummet me into a recitation of Simon's history of diddlings? Did she think me an opportune receptacle for an elderly divorcée's sour old grievances?
"Why should I tell you where? What have you got to do with any of it? Simon never told your mother, he never told anyone, so why should I tell you? Sit down," she commanded. "You want something to drink? I've got Coca-Cola."
The bottle had been opened long ago. The glass was smudged. I felt myself ensnared by a desolate hospitality. Having got what I came for—or not having got it—I wanted to hear nothing more.
But she had my arm in her grip. "At my time of life I'm not still squatting down there in the back room of somebody's pants store, you understand? I've got my own little business, I do my fittings right here in my own dining room. The point is I'm someone who can make a living. I could always make a living. My God, your mother was gullible! What wouldn't she believe, she swallowed it all."
My mother gullible? She who was at that very hour gulling her tourists into buying Pueblo artifacts factory-made in Japan?
"If you mean she believed in Simon—"
"She believed everything." She released me then, and sank into a deflecting whisper. "She believed what happened to the baby."
So it was not simple grievance that I took from Essie that afternoon. It was broader and deeper and wilder and stranger. And what she was deflecting—what she was repudiating as trivia and trifle, as pettiness and quibble—was Simon and his diddlings. He had his girlies—his assistants, his managers—and for all she cared, staring me down, wasn't I one of them? No, he wouldn't go so far as his cousin's kid, and even if he did, so what? It hardly interested her anyhow that I was his cousin's kid, the offspring of a simple-minded woman, an imbecile who would
believe anything, who swallowed it all, a chump for any hocus-pocus...
"Ruby had her kid," she said—torpidly, as though reciting an algebraic equation—"she had you, and by then what did I have? An empty crib, and then nothing, nothing, empty—"
When I left Essie four hours later, I knew what had happened to the baby. At Astor Place I ascended, parched and hungry, from the subway's dark into the dark of nine o'clock: she had offered me nothing but that stale inch of Coke. Instead she had talked and talked, loud and low, in her mouselike whisper, too often broken into by her big coarse bitter croak of a laugh. It was a joke, she assured me, it was a joke and a trick, and now I would know what a gullible woman my mother was, how easy it was to deceive her; how easy it was to trick the whole world. She clutched at me, she made me her muse, she gave me her life. She made me see, and why? Because her child was dead and I was not, or because my mother was a gullible woman, or because there were flies in the room? Who could really tell why? I had fallen in on her out of the blue, out of the ether, out of the past (it wasn't my past, I hadn't come to be anyone's muse, I had only come to dispose of Simon): I was as good, for giving out her life, as a fly on the wall. And did I want her to sing? She could still sing some stanzas in GNU, she hadn't forgotten how.
Dictation Page 14