The Puttermesser Papers
Page 4
Mr. Mayor, I wish to submit several urgent questions to you; I will be grateful for your prompt views on these matters of political friendships, connections, and power.
1. Are you aware of this inequitable treatment of professional staff in the Bureau of Summary Sessions of the Department of Receipts and Disbursements?
2. If so, is this the nature of the Administration you are content to be represented by?
3. Is it truly your desire to erode and undermine the professional Civil Service—one of democratic government’s most just, most equitable, devices?
4. Does Commissioner Alvin Turtelman’s peremptory action really reflect your own sensibility, with all its fairness and exuberant humaneness?
In City, State, and World life, Mr. Mayor (I have observed this over many years), power and connections are never called power and connections. They are called principle. They are called democracy. They are called judgment. They are called doing good. They are called restructuring. They are called exigency. They are called improvement. They are called functioning. They are called the common need. They are called government. They are called running the Bureau, the Department, the City, the State, the World, looking out for the interests of the people.
Mr. Mayor, getting the spoils is called anything but getting the spoils!
Puttermesser did not know whether Malachy (“Matt”) Mavett’s sensibility was really fair and exuberantly humane; she had only put that in to flatter him. She had glimpsed the Mayor in the flesh only once or twice, at a meeting, from a distance. She had also seen him on Sunday morning television, at a press conference, but then he was exceptionally cautious and sober; before the cameras he was neuter, he had no sensibility at all; he was nearly translucent. His white mustache looked tangled; his white hair twirled in strings over his temples.
Puttermesser’s letter struck her as gripping, impressive; copying it over on the typewriter at home that night, she felt how the Mayor would be stabbed through by such fevered eloquence. How remorseful he would be, how moved!
Still another salary check arrived. It was not for the usual amount; Puttermesser’s pay had been cut. The bony acolyte appeared with a memo from Turtelman: Puttermesser was to leave her barren cubicle and go to an office with a view of the Woolworth Building, and there she was to take up the sad life of her demotion.
Turtelman had shoved her into the lowliest ranks of Taxation. It was an unlikely post for a mind superfetate with Idea; Puttermesser felt the malignancy behind this shift. Her successor had wished her out of sight. “I do not consort with failure,” she heard Adam Marmel tell one of the auditors. She lived now surrounded by auditors—literal-minded men. They read best-sellers; their fingers were smudged from the morning papers, which they clutched in their car pools or on the subway from Queens. One of them, Leon Cracow, a bachelor from Forest Hills who wore bow ties and saddle shoes, was engaged in a tedious litigation: he had once read a novel and fancied himself its hero. The protagonist wore bow ties and saddle shoes. Cracow was suing for defamation. “My whole love life’s maligned in there,” he complained to Puttermesser. He kept the novel on his desk—it was an obscure book no one had ever heard of, published by a shadowy California press. Cracow had bought it remaindered for eighty-nine cents and ruminated over it every day. Turning the pages, he wet two of his fingers repeatedly. The novel was called Pyke’s Pique; a tax auditor named John McCracken Pyke was its chief character. “McCracken,” Cracow said, “that’s practically Cracow. It sounds practically identical. Listen, in the book this guy goes to prostitutes. I don’t go to prostitutes! The skunk’s got me all wrong. He’s destroying my good name.” Sometimes Cracow asked Puttermesser for her opinion of his lawyer’s last move. Puttermesser urged him on. She believed in the uses of fantasy. “A person should see himself or herself everywhere,” she said. “All things manifest us.”
The secret source of this motto was, in fact, her old building on the Grand Concourse. Incised in a stone arch over the broad front door, and also in Puttermesser’s loyal brain, were these Roman-style tracings: LONGWOOD ARMS, No. 26. GREENDALE HALL, No. 28. ALL THINGS MANIFEST US. The builder had thought deep thoughts, and Cracow was satisfied. “Ruth,” he said, “you take the cake.” As usual, he attempted to date her. “Any concert, any show, you name it,” he said; “I’m a film buff.”
“You fit right in with Turtelman and Marmel,” Puttermesser said.
“Not me,” Cracow retorted, “with me it’s nostalgia only. My favorite movie is Deanna Durbin, Leopold Stokowski, and Adolphe Menjou in One Hundred Men and a Girl. Wholesome, sweet, not like they make today. Light classical. Come on, Ruth, it’s at the Museum of Modern Art, in the cellar.”
Puttermesser turned him down. She knew she would never marry, but she was not yet reconciled to childlessness. Sometimes the thought that she would never give birth tore her heart.
She imagined daughters. It was self-love: all these daughters were Puttermesser as a child. She imagined a daughter in fourth grade, then in seventh grade, then in second-year high school. Puttermesser herself had gone to Hunter College High School and studied Latin. At Barnard she had not renounced Catullus and Vergil. O infelix Dido, chanted the imaginary daughter, doing her Latin homework at Puttermesser’s new Danish desk in the dark corner of the little bedroom. It was a teak rectangle; Puttermesser still had not bought a lamp for it. She hated it that all her furniture was new.
No reply came from the Mayor: not even a postcard of acknowledgment from an underling. Malachy (“Matt”) Mavett was ignoring Puttermesser.
Rappoport had abandoned the Sunday Times, purchased Saturday night at the airport; he had left it, unopened, on the Danish desk. Puttermesser swung barefoot out of bed, stepped over Plato, and reached for Rappoport’s Times. She brooded over his furry chest hair, yellowing from red. Now the daughter, still in high school, was memorizing Goethe’s Erlkönig:
Dem Vater grausets, er reitet geschwind,
Er hält in Armen das ächzende Kind,
Erreicht den Hof mit Mühe und Not;
In seinen Armen das Kind war tot.
The words made Puttermesser want to sob. The child was dead. In its father’s arms the child was dead. She came back to bed, carrying Rappoport’s Times. It was as heavy as if she carried a dead child. The Magazine Section alone was of a preternatural weight. Advertising. Consumerism. Capitalism. Page after page of cars, delicately imprinted chocolates, necklaces, golden whiskey. Affluence while the poor lurked and mugged, hid in elevators, shot drugs into their veins, stuck guns into old grandmothers’ tremulous and brittle spines, in covert pools of blackness released the springs of their bright-flanked switchblades, in shafts, in alleys, behind walls, in ditches.
A naked girl lay in Puttermesser’s bed. She looked dead—she was all white, bloodless. It was as if she had just undergone an epileptic fit: her tongue hung out of her mouth. Her eyelids were rigidly ajar; they had no lashes, and the skin was so taut and thin that the eyeballs bulged through. Her palms had fallen open; they were a clear white. Her arm were cold rods. A small white square was visible on the tongue. The girl did not resemble Puttermesser at all; she was certainly not one of the imaginary daughters. Puttermesser moved to one side of the bed, then circled back around the foot to the other side. She put on her slippers; summoning reason, she continued to move around and around the bed. There was no doubt that a real body was in it. Puttermesser reached out and touched the right shoulder—a reddish powder coated her fingers. The body seemed filmed with sand, or earth, or grit; some kind of light clay. Filth. A filthy junkie or prostitute; both. Sickness and filth. Rappoport, stalking away in the middle of the night, had been careless about closing the apartment door. God only knew where the creature had concealed herself, what had been stolen or damaged. When Puttermesser’s back was turned, the filthy thing had slid into her bed. Such a civilized bed, the home of Plato and other high-minded readings. The body had a look of perpetuity about it, as if it had always been reclining there, i
n Puttermesser’s own bed; yet it was a child’s body, the limbs stretched into laxity and languor. She was a little thing, no more than fifteen: Puttermesser saw how the pubic hair was curiously sparse; but the breasts were nearly not there at all. Puttermesser went on calculating and circling: should she call the super, or else telephone for an ambulance? New York! What was the good of living in a tiny squat box, with low ceilings, on East Seventy-first Street, a grudging landlord, a doorman in an admiral’s uniform, if there were infiltrators, addicts, invaders, just the same as on the fallen Grand Concourse?
Puttermesser peered down at the creature’s face. Ugly. The nose and mouth were clumsily formed, as if by some coarse hand that had given them a negligent tweak. The vomerine divider was off-center, the nostrils unpleasantly far apart. The mouth was in even worse condition—also off-center, but somehow more carelessly made, with lips that failed to match, the lower one no better than a line, the upper one amazingly fat, swollen, and the narrow tongue protruding with its white patch. Puttermesser reached out a correcting hand, and then withdrew it. Once again the dust left deep red ovals on her fingertips. But it was clear that the nostrils needed pinching to bring them closer together, so Puttermesser tentatively pinched. The improvement was impressive. She blew into the left nostril to get rid of a tuft of dust; it solidified and rolled out like a clay bead. With squeamish deliberation she pushed the nose in line with the middle space where the eyebrows ought to have been. There were no eyebrows, no eyelashes, no fingernails, no toenails. The thing was defective, unfinished. The mouth above all required finishing. Forming and re-forming the savage upper lip, getting into the mood of it now, Puttermesser wished she were an artist or sculptor: she centered the mouth, thickened the lower lip with a quick turn, smoothed out the hunch of the upper one—the tongue was in the way. She peeled off the white square and, pressing hard, shoved the tongue back down into the mouth.
The bit of white lay glimmering in Puttermesser’s palm. It seemed to be nothing more than an ordinary slip of paper, but she thought she ought to put it aside to look it over more carefully after a while, so she left the bed and set it down on the corner of the teak desk. Then she came back and glanced up and down the body, to see whether there was anything else that called for correction. A forefinger needed lengthening, so Puttermesser tugged at it. It slid as if boneless, like taffy, cold but not sticky, and thrillingly pliable. Still, without its nail a finger can shock; Puttermesser recoiled. Though the face was now normal enough, there was more to be done. Something had flashed upward from that tongue-paper—the white patch was blank; yet it was not only blank. Puttermesser carried it in her palm to the window, for the sake of the light. But on the sill and under the sill every pot was cracked, every green plant sprawled. The roots, skeletal and hairy, had been torn from their embracing soil—or, rather, the earth had been scooped away. The plain earth, stolen. Puttermesser, holding the white scrap, wandered from window to window. There was no pot that had not been vandalized in the same way—Rappoport’s big clay urn was in shards, the avocado tree broken. A few sparse grains of soil powdered the floor. Not a plant anywhere had been left unmolested—all the earth in Puttermesser’s apartment was gone; taken away; robbed.
In the bedroom the girl’s form continued its lethal sleep. Puttermesser lifted the tiny paper to the bright panes. Out of the whiteness of the white patch another whiteness flickered, as though a second version of absence were struggling to swim up out of the aboriginal absence. For Puttermesser, it was as if the white of her own eye could suddenly see what the purposeful retina had shunned. It was in fact not so much a seeing as the sharpness of a reading, and what Puttermesser read—she whose intellectual passions were pledged to every alphabet—was a single primeval Hebrew word, shimmering with its lightning holiness, the Name of Names, that which one dare not take in vain. Aloud she uttered it:
whereupon the inert creature, as if drilled through by electricity, as if struck by some principle of instantaneous vitality, leaped straight from the bed; Puttermesser watched the fingernails grow rapidly into place, and the toenails, and the eyebrows and lashes: complete. A configuration of freckles appeared on the forehead. The hair of the head and of the mons Veneris thickened, curled, glistened dark red, the color of clay; the creature had risen to walk. She did it badly, knocking down the desk-chair and bumping into the dresser. Sick, drugged, drunk; vandal; thief of earth!
“Get your clothes on and get out,” Puttermesser said. Where were the thing’s clothes? She had none; she seemed less pale moment by moment; she was lurching about in her skin. She was becoming rosy. A lively color was in her cheeks and hands. The mouth, Puttermesser’s own handiwork, was vivid. Puttermesser ran to her closet and pulled out a shirt, a skirt, a belt, a cardigan. From her drawers she swept up bra, panty-hose, slip. There was only the question of shoes. “Here,” she said, “summer sandals, that’s all I can spare. Open toes, open heels, they’ll fit. Get dressed. I can give you an old coat—go ahead. Sit down on the bed. Put this stuff on. You’re lucky I’m not calling the police.”
The creature staggered away from the bed, toward the teak desk.
“Do what I say!”
The creature had seized a notepad and a ballpoint pen, and was scribbling with shocking speed. Her fingers, even the newly lengthened one, were rhythmically coordinated. She clenched the pen, Puttermesser saw, like an experienced writer: as if the pen itself were a lick of the tongue, or an extension of the thinking digits. It surprised Puttermesser to learn that this thief of earth was literate. In what language? And would she then again try to swallow what she wrote, leaving one untouchable word behind?
The thing ripped away the alphabet-speckled page, tottered back with the pad, and laid the free sheet on the pillow.
“What’s the matter? Can’t you walk?” Puttermesser asked; she thought of afflicted children she had known, struck by melancholy witherings and dodderings.
But the answer was already on the paper. Puttermesser read: “I have not yet been long up upon my fresh-made limbs. Soon my gait will come to me. Consider the newborn colt. I am like unto that. All tongues are mine, especially that of my mother. Only speech is forbidden me.”
A lunatic! Cracked! Alone in the house with a maniac; a deaf-mute to boot. “Get dressed,” Puttermesser again commanded.
The thing wrote: “I hear and obey the one who made me.”
“What the hell is this,” Puttermesser said flatly.
The thing wrote: “My mother,” and rapidly began to jerk herself into Puttermesser’s clothes, but with uneven sequences of the body—the more vitality the creature gained, the more thing-like she seemed.
Puttermesser was impatient; she longed to drive the creature out. “Put on those shoes,” she ordered.
The thing wrote: “No.”
“Shoes!” Puttermesser shouted. She made a signpost fist and flung it in the direction of the door. “Go out the way you came in!”
The thing wrote: “No shoes. This is a holy place. I did not enter. I was formed. Here you spoke the Name of the Giver of Life. You blew in my nostril and encouraged my soul. You circled my clay seven times. You enveloped me with your spirit. Your pronounced the Name and brought me to myself. Therefore I call you mother.”
Puttermesser’s lungs began to roil. It was true she had circled the creature on the bed. Was it seven times around? It was true she had blown some foreign matter out of the nose. Had she blown some uncanny energy into an entrance of the dormant body? It was true she had said aloud one of the Names of the Creator.
The thing wrote again: “Mother. Mother.”
“Go away!”
The thing wrote: “You made me.”
“I didn’t give birth to you.” She would never give birth. Yet she had formed this mouth—the creature’s mute mouth. She looked at the mouth: she saw what she had made.
The thing wrote: “Earth is my flesh. For the sake of my flesh you carried earth to this high place. What will you call me?”
“No,” the creature wrote. “Leah is my name, but I want to be Xanthippe.”
Puttermesser said, “Xanthippe was a shrew. Xanthippe was Socrates’ wife.”
“I want to be Xanthippe,” the thing wrote. “I know everything you know. I am made of earth but also I am made out of your mind. Now watch me walk.”
The thing walked, firmly, with a solid thump of a step and no stumbling. She wrote on the pad: “I am becoming stronger. You made me. I will be of use to you. Don’t send me away. Call me what I prefer, Xanthippe.”
“Xanthippe,” Puttermesser said.
She succumbed; her throat panted. It came to her that the creature was certainly not lying: Puttermesser’s fingernails were crowded with grains of earth. In some unknown hour after Rappoport’s departure in the night, Puttermesser had shaped an apparition. She had awakened it to life in the conventional way. Xanthippe was a golem, and what had polymathic Puttermesser not read about the genus golem?