The Puttermesser Papers

by Cynthia Ozick

  Puttermesser cannot pay attention to the golem’s sprightliness. She is in a frenzy over the job of appointing Commissioners and agency heads. She implores Xanthippe to keep away from City Hall—the campaign is over, she will only distract from business. The new Mayor intends to recruit noble psyches and visionary hearts. She is searching for the antithesis of Turtelman and Marmel. For instance: she yearns after Wallace Stevens—insurance executive of probity during office hours, enraptured poet at dusk. How she would like to put Walt Whitman himself in charge of the Bureau of Summary Sessions, and have Shelley take over Water Resource Development—Shelley whose principle it is that poets are the legislators of mankind! William Blake in the Fire Department. George Eliot doing Social Services. Emily Brontë over at Police, Jane Austen in Bridges and Tunnels, Virginia Woolf and Edgar Allan Poe sharing Health. Herman Melville overseeing the Office of Single Room Occupancy Housing. “Integer vitae scelerisque purus,” the golem writes on her notepad, showing off.

  “That’s the ticket,” Puttermesser agrees, “but what am I supposed to do, chase around town like Diogenes with a lantern looking for an honest man?”

  Xanthippe writes philosophically, “The politics of Paradise is no longer politics.”

  “The politics of Paradise is no longer Paradise,” Puttermesser retorts; “don’t annoy me anyhow, I have to get somebody fast for Receipts and Disbursements.”

  “You could promote Cracow,” the golem writes.

  “I already have. I moved him over to Bronx Landfill and Pest Control. That’s two levels up. He’s got a good idea for winter, actually—wants to convert that garbage mountain out near the bay to a ski jump. And he’s stopped asking me out. Thank God he’s scared of dating the Mayor.”

  “If you would seek commissioners of integrity and rosy cleverness,” the golem writes, “fashion more of my kind.”

  Fleetingly, Puttermesser considers this; she feels tempted. The highest echelons of City management staffed by multiple members of the genus golem! Herself the creator, down to the last molecule of ear-wax, of every commissioner, deputy, bureau chief, executive director! Every mayoral assistant, subordinate, underling, a golem! She looks over at Xanthippe. Twice already Xanthippe has quarreled with the Mansion’s official cook. The cook has refused to follow the golem’s recipes. “One is enough,” Puttermesser says, and hurries down the subway and off to City Hall.

  Despite its odious language reminiscent of Turtelman and Marmel, Puttermesser repeatedly consults the

  PLAN

  FOR THE

  RESUSCITATION,

  REFORMATION,

  REINVIGORATION

  & REDEMPTION

  OF THE

  CITY OF NEW YORK

  She blames Xanthippe for such a preposterous text: only two days spent in the Bureau of Summary Session and the golem has been infected by periphrasis, pleonasm, and ambagious tautology. But behind all that there glimmers a loveliness. To Puttermesser’s speeding eye, it is like the spotted sudden flank of a deer disturbing a wood. There will be resuscitation! There will be redemption!

  And it begins. Mayor Puttermesser sends the golem out into the City. At first she tends to hang out among the open-air stalls of Delancey Street, but Puttermesser upbraids her for parochialism; she instructs the golem to take subways and buses—no taxis—out to all the neighborhoods in all the boroughs. It goes without saying that a robust reformist administration requires a spy. The golem returns with aching tales of what she has seen among the sordid and the hopeless; sometimes she even submits a recommendation on a page of her notepad. Puttermesser does not mind. Nothing the golem reports is new to Mayor Puttermesser. What is new is the discovery of the power of office. Wrongdoing and bitterness can be overturned: it is only a matter of using the power Puttermesser owns.

  Crowds of self-seeking importuners float up the steps of City Hall; Mayor Puttermesser shoos them away. She admits visionary hearts only. She tacks signs up all around her desk: NO MORE SPOILS QUOTA. MERIT IS SWEETER THAN GOLD. WHAT YOU ARE, NOT WHOM YOU KNOW.

  Lost wallets are daily being returned to their owners. Now it is really beginning—the money and credit cards are always intact. The golem ascends from the subway at Sixty-eight and Lexington (this is the very corner where Puttermesser’s alma mater, Hunter High, used to stand), looking slightly larger than the day before, but also irradiated. The subways have been struck by beauty. Lustrous tunnels unfold, mile after mile. Gangs of youths have invaded the subway yards at night and have washed the cars clean. The wheels and windows have been scrubbed by combinations of chemicals; the long seats have been fitted with velour cushions of tan and blue. Each car shines like a bullet. The tiles that line the stations are lakes of white; the passengers can cherish their own reflections in the walls. Every Thursday afternoon the youths who used to terrorize the subways put on fresh shirts and walk out into Central Park, reconnoitering after a green space; then they dance. They have formed themselves into dancing clubs, and crown one another’s heads with clover pulled up from the sweet ground. Foliage is browning, Thursday afternoons grow cold and dusky. But the youths who used to terrorize the subways are whirling in rings over darkening lawns.

  The streets are altered into garden rows: along the curbs, between sidewalk and road, privet hedges shake their little leaves. The open sanitation carts are bright, like a string of scarlet chariots. They are drawn by silent horses who sniff among the new hedges. Flutes and clarinets announce the coming of the cart procession every day at noon, and children scramble to pick up every nub of cigarette or scrap of peel or paper wrapper, pressing with fistfuls toward the singing flutes and gravely marching horses, whose pairs of high nostrils flare outward like trumpets.

  The great cargo trucks still spill into the intersections, carrying bolts of cloth, oranges, fowl, refrigerators, lamps, pianos, cards of buttons, lettuces, boxes of cereal, jigsaw puzzles, baby carriages, pillowcases with peacocks imprinted on them; some deliver uptown, others downtown; they pant and rumble freely, unimpeded; buses and taxis overtake them effortlessly. Except for fire engines and ambulances, there are no other motored vehicles. Little girls dare, between buses, to jump rope in the middle of the street. Some roads, though, have been lushly planted, so that lovers seek them out to hide in one another’s breast. The tall grasses and young maples of the planted roads are haunted by pretzel sellers, hot-chestnut peddlers, hawkers of books in wheelbarrows. The children are often indoors after school, carpentering bookshelves. The libraries are lit all night, and the schools are thronged in the evenings by administrative assistants from the great companies, learning Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Hebrew, Korean, and Japanese. There are many gardeners now, and a hundred urban gardening academies. There is unemployment among correction officers; numbers of them take gardening jobs. No one bothers to drag the steel shutters down over storefronts after closing. The Civil Service hums. Intellect and courtliness are in the ascendancy. Mayor Puttermesser has staffed the Department of Receipts and Disbursements with intelligent lawyers, both women and men, who honor due process. Turtelman and Marmel are replaced by visionary hearts. Never again will an accuser take the job of the accused, as Marmel did with Puttermesser! There is no more rapaciousness in the Bureau of Summary Sessions.

  A little-known poet who specializes in terza rima is put in charge of Potter’s Field. For each sad burial there, she composes a laudatory ode; even the obscure dead are not expendable or forlorn. The parks, their arbors and fields, are speckled with wide-mouthed terracotta urns; no one injures them. Far away in the Bronx, the grape-wreathed heads of wine gods are restored to the white stelae of the Soldiers’ Monument, and the bronze angel on top of the Monument’s great stone needle glistens. Nothing is broken, nothing is despoiled. No harm comes to anything or anyone. The burnt-out ruins of Brownsville and the South Bronx burst forth with spinneys of pines and thorny locusts. In their high secret pride, the slums undo themselves: stoops sparkle, new factories and stores buzz, children gaze down in glad
ness at shoes newly bought, still unscratched; the shoe stores give away balloons, and the balloons escape to the sky. Everywhere former louts and loiterers, muggers and thieves, addicts and cardsharps are doing the work of the world, absorbed, transformed. The biggest City agency is what used to be called Welfare; now it is the Department of Day Play, and delivers colored pencils and finger paints and tambourines to nurseries clamorous as bee-loud glades, where pianos shake the floors, and storytellers dangle toddlers in suspense from morning to late afternoon, when their parents fetch them home to supper. Everyone is at work. Lovers apply to the City Clerk for marriage licenses. The Bureau of Venereal Disease Control has closed down. The ex-pimps are learning computer skills.

  Xanthippe’s heels have begun to hang over the foot of her fourposter bed in Gracie Mansion. The golem is worn out. She lumbers from one end of the City to the other every day, getting ideas. Mayor Puttermesser is not disappointed that the golem’s ideas are mainly unexciting. The City is at peace. It is in the nature of tranquility—it is in the nature of Paradise—to be pacific; tame; halcyon. Oh, there is more to relate of how Mayor Puttermesser, inspired by the golem, has resuscitated, reformed, reinvigorated and redeemed the City of New York! But this too must be left to dozing and skipping. It is essential to record only two reflections that especially engage Mayor Puttermesser. The first is that she notices how the City, tranquil, turns toward the conventional and the orderly. It is as if tradition, continuity, propriety blossom of themselves: old courtesies, door-holding, hat-tipping, a thousand pleases and pardons and thank-yous. Something in the grain of Paradise is on the side of the expected. Sweet custom rules. The City in its redeemed state wishes to conserve itself. It is a rational daylight place; it has shut the portals of night.

  Puttermesser’s second reflection is about the golem. The coming of the golem animated the salvation of the City, yes—but who, Puttermesser sometimes wonders, is the true golem? Is it Xanthippe or is it Puttermesser? Puttermesser made Xanthippe; Xanthippe did not exist before Puttermesser made her: that is clear enough. But Xanthippe made Puttermesser Mayor, and Mayor Puttermesser too did not exist before. And that is just as clear. Puttermesser sees that she is the golem’s golem.

  In the newborn peaceable City, Xanthippe is restless. She is growing larger. Her growth is frightening. She can no longer fit into her overalls. She begins to sew together pairs of sheets for a toga.

  VII. RAPPOPORT’S RETURN

  ON A LATE SPRING afternoon about halfway through her mayoral term, and immediately after a particularly depressing visit to the periodontist (she who had abolished crime in the subways was unable to stem gum disease in the hollow of her jaw), Puttermesser came home to Gracie Mansion to find Rappoport waiting in her private sitting room.

  “Hey, you’ve got some pretty tough security around here. I had a hell of a time getting let in,” Rappoport complained.

  “Last time I saw you,” Puttermesser said, “you had no trouble letting yourself out.”

  “How about we just consider that water under the bridge, Ruth, what do you say?”

  “You walked out on me. In the middle of the night.”

  “You were liking Socrates better than me,” Rappoport said.

  “Then why are you back?”

  “My God, Ruth, look who you’ve become! I can’t pass through New York without seeing the Mayor, can I? Ruth,” he said, spreading his impressive nostrils, “I’ve thought about you a lot since the election. We read all about you up in Toronto.”

  “You and Mrs. Rappoport?”

  “Oh come on, let’s give it another try. Not that I don’t understand you have to be like Caesar’s wife. Above susp—”

  “I have to be Caesar,” Puttermesser broke in.

  “Well, even Caesar gives things another try.”

  “You’re no Cleopatra,” Puttermesser said.

  There was a distant howl; it was the cook. She was fighting with the golem again. In a moment Xanthippe stood in the doorway, huge and red, weeping.

  “Leave that woman alone. She’ll cook what she’ll cook, you can’t tell her anything different,” Puttermesser scolded. “She runs a strictly kosher kitchen and that’s enough. Go and wash your face.”

  “Plump,” Rappoport said, staring after Xanthippe in her toga. “Rubenesque.”

  “A growing girl. She wears what she pleases.”

  “Who is she?”

  “I adopted her.”

  “I like a big girl like that.” Rappoport stood up. “The town looks terrific. I came to congratulate you, Ruth.”

  “Is that why you came?”

  “It turns out. Only I figured if you could bring a whole city back to life—”

  “There are some things, Morris, that even the Mayor can’t revive.”

  Rappoport, his briefcase under his arm, wheeled and hesitated. “It didn’t make it through the move? My avocado tree that I grew from a pit in Toronto? It was doing fine in your old apartment.”

  “I don’t have it any more.”

  “Aha, you wanted to dispose of me lock, stock, and barrel. You got rid of every symptom and sign. The least bit of green leaf—”

  “All my plants are gone.”

  “No kidding. What happened?”

  “I took their earth and made a golem.”

  Rappoport, flaunting his perfect teeth under his mustache, laughed out loud. In the middle of his laughter his head suddenly fell into the kind of leaning charm Puttermesser recalled from long ago, when they had first become lovers; it almost made her relent.

  “Goodbye, Ruth. I really do congratulate you on civic improvement.” Rappoport held out his hand. “It’s one terrific town, I mean it. Utopia. Garden of Eden. In Toronto they run articles on you every day.”

  “You can stay for dinner if you like,” Puttermesser offered. “Though I’ve got a meeting right after—municipal bonds. Myself, it’s eat and get on down to City Hall.”

  Someone had seized Rappoport’s outstretched hand and was shaking it; it was not Puttermesser. Xanthippe, practiced politician, her wide cheeks refreshed and soap-fragrant, had sped forward out of nowhere. Rappoport looked stunned; he looked interested. He slipped his fingers out of the golem’s grasp and moved them upward against her chest, to catch hold of the card that twirled there: DEAF-MUTE.

  “That’s awfully generous of you, Ruth, adopting someone like that. You’re a wonderful person. We really ought to get together again. I will stay for a bite, if you don’t mind.”

  The golem did not bring her ballpoint to the table. She dealt with her soup spoon as if it were her enemy, the cook. Disgruntled, she heaped a fourth helping of mashed potatoes onto her plate. But her eye was on Rappoport, and her mouth was round with responsiveness: was it his teeth? was it his reddish mustache, turning gray? was it his wide welcoming nostrils? was it his briefcase bulging with worldly troubles?

  Rappoport was talkative. His posture was straight-backed and heroic: he told of his last clandestine trip to Moscow, and of the turmoil of the oppressed.

  When Puttermesser returned at midnight from the meeting on municipal bonds, the golem was asleep in her four-poster bed, her heels thrust outward in their pink socks over the footboard, and Rappoport was snoring beside her.

  Eros had entered Gracie Mansion.

  VIII. XANTHIPPE LOVESICK

  CONSIDER NOW PUTTERMESSER’S SITUATION. What happens to an intensely private mind when great celebrity unexpectedly invades it? Absorbed in the golem’s PLAN and its consequences—consequences beyond the marveling at, so gradual, plausible, concrete, and sensible are they, grounded in a policy of civic sympathy and urban reasonableness—Puttermesser does not readily understand that she induces curiosity and applause. She has, in fact, no expectations; only desires as strong and as strange as powers. Her desires are pristine, therefore acute; clarity is immanent. Before this inward illumination of her desires (rather, of the PLAN’s desires), everything else—the clash of interests that parties, races, classes, are
said to give rise to—falls away into purposelessness. Another way of explaining all this is to say that Mayor Puttermesser finds virtue to be intelligible. Still another way of explaining it is to say that every morning she profoundly rejoices. There is fruitfulness everywhere. Into the chaos of the void (defeat, deception, demoralization, loss) she has cast a divinely clarifying light. Out of a dunghill she has charmed a verdant citadel. The applause that reaches her is like a sea-sound at the farthest edge of her brain; she both hears it and does not hear it. Her angelic fame—the fame of a purifying angel—is virtue’s second face. Fame makes Puttermesser happy, and at the same time it brings a forceful sense of the penultimate, the tentative, the imperiled.

  It is as if she is waiting for something else: for some conclusion, or resolution, or unfolding.

  The golem is lovesick. She refuses to leave the Mansion. No more for her the daily voyage into the broad green City as the Mayor’s ambassador and spy. She removes the DEAF-MUTE card and substitutes another: CONTEMPLATIVE. Puttermesser does not smile at this: she is not sure whether it is meant to be a joke. There is too much gloom. There are hints of conspiracy. Anyhow the golem soon takes off the new sign. In the intervals between Rappoport’s appearances Xanthippe languishes. Rappoport comes often—sometimes as often as three or four times a week. Xanthippe, moping, thumps out to greet him, trailing a loose white tail of her toga; she escorts him straight into her bedroom. She turns on the record player that Rappoport has brought her as a birthday gift. She is two years old and insatiable. God knows what age she tells her lover.

  Rappoport steals out of the golem’s bedroom with the dazzled inward gaze of a space traveler.

  The Mayor upbraids Xanthippe: “It’s enough. I don’t want to see him around here. Get rid of him.”

  Xanthippe writes: “Jealousy!”

  “I’m tired of hearing complaints from the cook. This is Gracie Mansion, it’s not another kind of house.”