“Jealousy! He used to be yours.”
“You’re stirring up a scandal.”
“He brings me presents.”
“If you keep this up, you’ll spoil everything.”
“My mother has purified the City.”
“Then don’t foul it.”
“I am in contemplation of my future.”
“Start contemplating the present! Look out the window! Fruitfulness! Civic peace! You saw it happening. You caused it.”
“I can tear it all down.”
“You were made to serve and you know it.”
“I want a life of my own. My blood is hot.”
The Mansion thickens with erotic airs. Heavy perfumes float. Has Rappoport journeyed to mysterious islands to offer the golem these lethargic scents, these attars of weighty drooping petals? The golem has discarded her sewn-together sheets and looms with gemlike eyes in darkling passageways, wrapped in silks, vast saris that skim the carpets as she goes; each leg is a pillar wound in a bolt of woven flowers.
The summer deepens. A dry dust settles on the leaves in the Bronx Botanical Gardens, and far away the painted carousels of Brooklyn cry their jollities.
The Mayor: “I notice Rappoport hasn’t been around lately.”
Xanthippe writes: “He left.”
“Where?”
“He clouded over his destination. Vienna. Rome. Jerusalem. Winnipeg. What do I care? A man of low position. Factotum of refugee philanthropy, twelve bosses over him.”
“What happened?”
“I wore him out.”
“I need you right away,” Puttermesser urges. “We’re putting in new tiles on the subway line out toward Jamaica Avenue. With two-color portraits baked right into the glaze—Thoreau, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Emerson, so far. You can decide who else.”
“No.”
“You haven’t been anywhere in months.”
“My mother speaks the truth. I thirst for the higher world. Office and rank. Illustrious men.”
Puttermesser is blighted with melancholy. She fears. She foresees. In spite of fruitfulness and civic peace (rather, on their account), it is beginning to be revealed to her what her proper mayoral duty directs.
She does nothing.
In pity, she waits. Sometimes she forgets. How long did the Great Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague wait, how often did he forget? There are so many distinguished visitors. The Emperor of Japan takes the elevator to the top of the Empire State Building. Puttermesser gives an astronaut a medal on the steps of City Hall; he has looked into the bosom of Venus. The mayors of Dublin, San Juan, and Tel Aviv arrive. In the Blue Room, Puttermesser holds a news conference about interest rates. She explains into the television cameras that the City of New York, in its abundance, will extend interest-free loans to the Federal government in Washington.
Now and then Xanthippe disappears. She does not return to the Mansion at night. Frequently her fourposter stands empty.
Early one morning, the golem, her eyes too polished, her cheeks too red, her silk windings torn, the tiny letters on her forehead jutting like raw scars, thumps home.
“Four days gone without a word!” Puttermesser scolds.
Xanthippe writes impatiently: “Been down to Florida.”
“Florida!”
“Been to visit ex-Mayor Malachy (‘Matt’) Mavett.”
“What for?”
“Remember Marmel?”
“What’s this about?”
“Been out West to visit him. Him and Turtelman.”
“What is this?”
But Puttermesser knows.
There are curious absences, reports of exhaustion, unexplained hospitalizations. The new Commissioner of Receipts and Disbursements whispers to Puttermesser, in confidence, that he will divorce his wife. His eyeballs seem sunken, his lips drop back into a hollow face. He has lost weight overnight. He will not say what the trouble is. He resigns. The Executive Director of the Board of Education resigns. It is divulged that he suffers from catarrh and is too faint to stand. The Commissioner of the Department of Cultural Affairs has been struck stone-deaf by a horrible sound, a kind of exultant hiss; he will not say what it was. The City’s managers and executives all appear to sicken together: commissioner after commissioner, department after department. Puttermesser’s finest appointments—felled; depleted. There is news of an abortion in Queens. A pimp sets himself up in business on Times Square again, in spite of the cherry trees the Department of Sanitation has planted there; the Commissioner of Sanitation himself stalks under the hanging cherries, distracted, with a twisted spine and the start of a hunch. Two or three of the proud young men of the dancing clubs defect and return to mugging in the subways. The City’s peace is unraveling. The Commissioners blow their noses into bloody tissues, drive their little fingers into their ears, develop odd stammers, instigate backbiting among underlings.
The golem thirsts.
“Stay home,” the Mayor pleads. “Stay out of the City.”
The golem will no longer obey. She cannot be contained. “My blood is hot,” Xanthippe writes; she writes for the last time. She tosses her ballpoint pen into the East River, back behind the Mansion.
IX. THE GOLEM DESTROYS HER MAKER
MAYOR PUTTERMESSER’S REPUTATION IS ebbing. The cost of municipal borrowing ascends. A jungle of graffiti springs up on the white flanks of marble sculptures inside museums; Attic urns are smashed. Barbarians cruise the streets. O New York! O lost New York!
Deputy Commissioners and their secretaries blanch at the sound of a heavy footstep. Morning and afternoon the golem lumbers from office to office, searching for high-level managers. In her ragged sari brilliant with woven flowers, her great head garlanded, drenched in a density of musky oils, Xanthippe ravishes prestigious trustees, committee chairmen, council members, borough presidents, the Second Deputy Comptroller’s three assistants, the Director of the Transit Authority, the Coordinator of Criminal Justice, the Chief of the Office of Computer Plans and Controls, the Head of Intergovernmental Relations, the Chancellor of the City University, the Rector of the Art Commission, even the President of the Stock Exchange! The City is diseased with the golem’s urge. The City sweats and coughs in her terrifying embrace. The City is in the pincer of the golem’s love, because Xanthippe thirsts, she thirsts, she ravishes and ravages, she ambushes management level after management level. There is no Supervising Accountant or Secretary to the Minority Leader who can escape her electric gaze.
Sex! Sex! The golem wants sex! Men in high politics! Lofty officials! Elevated bureaucrats!
Mayor Puttermesser is finished. She can never be re-elected. She is a disgrace; her Administration is wrecked. Distrust. Desolation. It is all over for Mayor Puttermesser and the life of high politics. The prisons are open again. The press howls. Mayor Puttermesser is crushed. The golem has destroyed her utterly.
X. THE GOLEM SNARED
PUTTERMESSER BLAMED HERSELF. SHE had not forestalled this devastation. She had not prepared for it; she had not acted. She had seen what had to be done, and put it off and put it off. Dilatory. She could not say to herself that she was ignorant; hadn’t she read in her books, a thousand times, that a golem will at length undo its creator? The turning against the creator is an attribute of a golem, comparable to its speechlessness, its incapacity for procreation, its soullessness. A golem has no soul, therefore cannot die—rather, it is returned to the elements of its making.
Xanthippe without a soul! Tears came to Puttermesser, her heart in secret shook. She was ready to disbelieve. A golem cannot procreate? Ah, but its blood is as hot as human blood. Hotter! A golem lusts tremendously, as if it would wrest the flame of further being from its own being. A golem, an earthen thing of packed mud, having laid hold of life against all logic and natural expectation, yearns hugely after the generative, the fructuous. Earth is the germ of all fertility: how then would a golem not dream itself a double? It is like a panting furnace that cries out for more and more fuel, that
spews its own firebrands to ignite a successor-fire. A golem cannot procreate! But it has the will to; the despairing will; the violent will. Offspring! Progeny! The rampaging energies of Xanthippe’s eruptions, the furious bolts and convulsions of her visitations—Xanthippe, like Puttermesser herself, longs for daughters! Daughters that can never be!
Shall the one be condemned by the other, who is no different?
Yet Puttermesser weeps. The golem is running over the City. She never comes home at all now. A ferry on its way from the Battery to Staten Island is terrorized; some large creature, bat or succubus, assaults the captain and causes him to succumb. Is it Xanthippe? Stories about “a madwoman on the loose, venomous against authority” (“unverifiable,” writes the City Hall Bureau of the Times) wash daily over Mayor Puttermesser’s desk. The secret chamber where sleeps the President of the Chase Manhattan Bank has had its windows brutally smashed; a bit of flowered silk clings to the jagged glass.
Xanthippe! Xanthippe! Puttermesser calls in her heart.
Every night pickets parade in front of Gracie Mansion, with torches and placards:
MAYOR PUTTERMESSER WHAT HAS HAPPENED
TO THE SUBWAYS?
HIGH HOPES THE HIGH ROAD TO HELL.
SHE WHO SPARKED SNUFFED.
PUTTERMESSER’S BITTER MESSES.
RUTHIE WITH SUCH A DOWN WE NEEDED YOUR UP?
FROM SMASH HIT TO SMASH.
KAPUT-TERMESSER!
Every day there are speakers on the steps of City Hall, haranguing; when the police chase them, they vanish for ten minutes and reappear. Mobs bubble, hobble, guffaw.
Puttermesser composes a letter to ex-Mayor Malachy (“Matt”) Mavett:
Gracie Mansion
City of New York
Dear Matt [she permits herself this liberty]:
My campaign manager’s recent Florida visit may have caused you some distress. I did not authorize it. Your defeat via the ballot box, which eliminated the wrongdoers Turtelman and Marmel from City officialdom, was satisfaction enough. Please excuse any personal indignities my campaign manager (who is now on my personal staff) may have inflicted. She expresses her nature but cannot assume responsibility for it.
Dilatory! Procrastinator! Imaginary letters! Puttermesser’s tears go on falling.
Gracie Mansion
City of New York
Dear Morris:
Please come.
In friendship
Ruth
She hands this to one of the window-pole thieves to mail. In a few days it brings Rappoport, out of breath, his once-pouting briefcase hollow, caved in; Rappoport himself is hollow, his stout throat caved in, as if he had ejected his Adam’s apple. His nose and chin, and the furless place between his eyebrows, have a papery cast. His beautiful teeth are nicked. His mustache looks squirrelly, gray.
“Xanthippe’s left home,” Puttermesser announces.
“You’re the Mayor. Call the Missing Persons Bureau.”
“Morris. Please.”
“What do you want?”
“Bring her back.”
“Me?”
“You can do it.”
“How?”
“Move in.”
“What? Here? In Gracie Mansion?”
“In Xanthippe’s bed. Morris. Please. She likes you. You’re the one who started her off.”
“She got too big for her britches. In more than a manner of speaking, if you don’t mind my saying so. What d’you mean, started her off?”
“You excited her.”
“That’s not my fault.”
“You created desire. Morris, bring her back. You can do it.”
“What for? I’ve had enough. No more. Drained. Drained, believe me, Ruth.”
“Lie in her bed. Just once.”
“What’s in it for me? I didn’t come back to this rotten town for the sake of a night’s sleep in Gracie Mansion. The novelty’s worn off. The bloom is no longer on the rose, you follow? Besides, you’ve gone downhill, Ruth, did you see those pickets out there?” He shows her his sleeve—two buttons ripped off.
“They treated me like a scab, walking in here—”
“Just lie down in her bed, Morris. That’s all I’m asking.”
“No.”
“I’ll make it worth your while.”
“What’re you getting at? You’re getting at something.”
“You’re a fund-raiser by profession,” Puttermesser says meditatively; a strangeness rises in her. A noxious taste.
“Something like that. There’s a lot of different things I do.”
“That’s right. Plenty of experience. You’re qualified for all sorts of fine spots.”
“I’m qualified for what?”
“The truth is,” Puttermesser says slowly, “I’m in possession of a heap of resignations. Several of my Commissioners,” Puttermesser says slowly, “have fallen ill.”
“I hear there’s typhoid in some of those buildings along Bruckner Boulevard. What’ve you got, an epidemic? I heard cholera in Forest Hills.”
“Rumors,” Puttermesser spits out. “People love to bad-mouth. That’s what makes the City go down. The banks are leaving, nobody worries about that. I’m talking resignations. Openings, Morris. You can take your pick, in fact. How about the Department of Investigation? Run the Inspectors General. Or I can appoint you judge. How about Judge of the Criminal Court? Good spot, good pay. Prestige, God knows. Look, if you like you can take over Receipts and Disbursements.”
Rappoport stared. “Commissioner of Receipts and Disbursements?”
“I can go higher if you want. Fancier. Board of Water Supply’s a dandy. Nice remuneration, practically no show.”
“Ruth, Ruth, what is this?”
Justice, justice shalt thou pursue!
It is Mayor Puttermesser’s first political deal.
“Stay a night in Xanthippe’s bed and any job you want is yours. The orchard’s dropping into your lap, Morris, I’m serious. Plums.”
“A spot in your Administration actually?”
“Why not? Choose.”
“Receipts and Disbursements,” Rappoport instantly replies.
Puttermesser says sourly, “You’re at least as qualified as Turtelman.”
“What about my wife?”
“Keep her in Toronto.”
Standing in solitude in the night fragrance behind Gracie Mansion, Puttermesser catches river-gleams: the Circle Line yacht with its chandelier decks; a neon sign pulsing; the distant caps of little waves glinting in moonwake, in neonwake. White bread baking on the night shift casts its faintly animal aroma on the waters: rich fumes more savory than any blossom. It is so dark in the back garden that Puttermesser imagines she can almost descry Orion’s belt buckle. One big moving star twins as it sails: the headlights of an airliner nosing out toward Europe. Plane after plane rises, as if out of the black river. Puttermesser counts them, each with its sharp beams like rays scattered from the brow of Moses, arching upward into the fathomless universe. She counts planes; she counts neon blinks; she counts the silhouettes of creeping scows; she counts all the mayors who have preceded her in the City of New York. Thomas Willett, Thomas Delavall . . . William Dervall, Nicholas De Meyer, Stephanus Van Cortlandt . . . Francis Rombouts . . . Isaac de Reimer, Thomas Noell, Philip French, William Peartree, Ebenezer Wilson . . . DeWitt Clinton . . . Gideon Lee . . . Smith Ely . . . Jimmy Walker . . . John P. O’Brien, Fiorello H. LaGuardia . . . Robert F. Wagner, John V. Lindsay, Abraham D. Beame, Edward I. Koch! She counts and waits. She is waiting for the golem to be lured homeward, to be ensnared, to lumber groaning with desire into her fourposter bed.
In the golem’s fourposter, Commissioner Morris Rappoport, newly appointed chief of the Department of Receipts and Disbursements, lies in sheets saturated with a certain known pungency. He has been here before. He recoils from the familiar scented pillows.
Indoors and out, odors of what has been and what is about to be: the cook’s worn eggplant au gratin,
river smells, the garden beating its tiny wings of so many fresh hedge-leaves, airplane exhaust spiraling downward, the fine keen breath of the bread ovens, the golem’s perfumed pillows—all these drifting smokes and combinations stir and turn and braid themselves into a rope of awesome incense, drawing Xanthippe to her bed. Incense? Fetor and charged decay! The acrid signal of dissolution! Intimations of the tellurian elements! Xanthippe, from wherever she has hurtled to in the savage City (savage once again), is pulled nearer and nearer the Mansion, where the portraits of dead mayors hang. Scepter and status, all the enchantments of influence and command, lead her to her undoing: in her bed lies the extremely important official whose job it is to call the tune that makes the City’s money dance. She will burst on him her giant love. On the newly appointed Commissioner of Receipts and Disbursements the golem will spend her terrible ardor. Then she will fall back to rest, among the awful perfumes of her cleft bed.
Whereupon Mayor Puttermesser, her term of office blighted, her comely PLAN betrayed, will dismantle the golem, according to the rite.
XI. THE GOLEM UNDONE, AND THE BABBLING OF RAPPOPORT
THE CITY WAS UNGOVERNABLE; the City was out of control; it was no different now for Mayor Puttermesser than it had ever been for any mayor. In confusion and hypocrisy, Puttermesser finished out what was left of her sovereign days.
One thing was different: a certain tumulus of earth introduced by the Parks Commissioner in the mournful latter half of Mayor Puttermesser’s Administration.
Across the street from City Hall lies a little park, crisscrossed by paths and patches of lawn fenced off by black iron staves. There are benches set down here and there with a scattered generosity. There is even an upward-flying fountain. Perhaps because the little park is in the shadow of City Hall and, so to speak, under its surveillance, the benches have not been seriously vandalized, and the lawns not much trampled on. Best of all, and most alluring, are the flower beds, vivid rectangles of red geraniums disposed, it must be admitted, in the design of a miniature graveyard. Civil servants peering down from high windows of the elephant-gray Municipal Building can see the crimson slash that with wild brilliance cuts across the concrete bitterness below. Some distance behind the flower beds rise those great Stonehenge slabs of the Twin Towers; eastward, the standing zither that is Brooklyn Bridge.
The Puttermesser Papers Page 9