The Puttermesser Papers

by Cynthia Ozick

  Do you encounter discrimination on the part of judges? Employers? Clients? Court personnel?

  Has your mental acuity or judgment noticeably slackened? If yes, how does this manifest itself?

  Have your earlier positions (political, moral, societal) eroded? Are you, in your opinion, capable of new ideas? Flexibility? An open mind?

  Have your earnings diminished? Increased? Are you treated with less respect? More? If more, how does your mature appearance contribute to this?

  Has the feminist movement eased your professional situation? Are you harried less? More? No difference? How many times per week do you encounter sexist or ageist remarks?

  Do you dye your hair? Use henna? Surrender to Mother Nature? If the latter, does this appear to augment or lessen your dignity among male colleagues? The public?

  Miss Kuntz was no doubt under the ground in Pleasantville, New York, together with her father. In Puttermesser’s cramped apartment in the East Seventies—a neighborhood of ophthalmologists and dermatologists—there was no room for a piano; the space near her bed could barely accommodate a modest desk. At night she could hear the high-school math teacher on the other side of the wall plunge her red pencils into an electric sharpener. Sometimes the math teacher did exercises on a plastic mat—unfolding, it whacked against the baseboard. A divorcée in her middle thirties who counted out loud with each leg stretch. She was working on her figure in the hope of attracting a lover. An announcement addressed to the math teacher had been thrust into Puttermesser’s mailbox.

  SINGLES EVENT

  ATTENTION, EDUCATED UNUSUAL SINGLES

  TEACHERS’ MIXER EVERY FRIDAY NIGHT 8:30 P.M.

  MEET YOUR PEERS WITHOUT SNEERS OR TEARS

  BRONX SCIENCE, HUNTER HIGH, STUYVESANT,

  OTHER TOP SCHOOLS WELL REPRESENTED

  $3 DONATION TO COVER PUNCH AND CHEESE

  NOTE TO MALE TEACHERS: MORE MEN WANTED!

  BRING YOUR (PROFESSIONAL) FRIENDS

  CALL GINNY (718) 555-3000 FOR DETAILS

  Puttermesser contemplated calling Ginny—she too was an educated unusual single. Instead she slid the sheet under the math teacher’s door. The building, with its dedication to anonymity (each mysterious soul invisible in its own cubicle), was subject to jitters and multiple confusions. Mixups, mishaps, misdeliveries, misnamings. To the doorman she was Miss Perlmutter. If you asked the super to send the plumber you would get the exterminator. Without warning the pipes dried up for the day. You could try to run the faucet and nothing would come out. Or the lights would fail; the refrigerator fluttered its grand lung and ceased. All the refrigerators up and down the whole row of apartments on a single corridor expired together, in one extended shudder. You could feel it under your soles right through the carpeting. The building was a nervous organism; its familiar soughings ricocheted from cranny to cranny. Puttermesser could recognize by the pitch of its motor which floor the elevator was stopping on. She knew by the thump in the hall, and by the slap of sneakers heading back to the elevator, and by the rattle of all her locks, the moment when the new telephone book landed on her doormat.

  Thump, slap, rattle. Something had landed there now; the sneakers were in flight. The chain-lock was still swinging and tinkling. Puttermesser laboriously fiddled with it, and then with the other two locks. Each required one turn followed by a quarter-turn. She worked as fast as she could. What if there were a fire? Robbery and rape or be burned alive: the New York predicament. All her neighbors had just as many locks; the math teacher had installed a steel pole that dropped into a hole in the floor.

  The locks were undone. Puttermesser stuck her head out in time to see the flash of a yellow shirt at the end of the corridor. At her feet a chimney of huge flat cardboard boxes rose up. There was a smell of noisome cheese.

  “Hey!” Puttermesser yelled. “Get back here! I didn’t order this stuff.”

  “6-C, right?” the yellow shirt yelled back. “Pizza!”

  “3-C. You want the sixth floor. I didn’t order any pizza,” Puttermesser yelled.

  “You Morgenbluth?”

  “You’ve got the wrong apartment.”

  “Listen,” the yellow shirt called, “bike’s in the street. Boss’s bike. They take my bike I’m finished. Half-dozen veggie pizzas for Morgenbluth, O.K.?”

  “I don’t know any Morgenbluth!”

  Like a piece of stage machinery, the elevator hummed the yellow shirt out of sight.

  Fecal trail of stable—that cheese; some unfathomable sauce. Puttermesser kept her distance from ethnic foods. She had never tasted souvlaki; she had never tasted sushi. With the exception of chocolate fudge and Tootsie Rolls (her molars were ruined and crowned), gastronomy did not draw her. What she was concentrating on was marriage: the marriage of true minds. Reciprocal transcendence—she was not thinking of sinew, synapse, hormone-fired spasm. Those couples who saunter by with arms like serpents wrapped around each other, stopping in the middle of the sidewalk to plug mouth on mouth: biological robots, twitches powered by pitiless instinct. Puttermesser, despite everything, was not beyond idealism; she believed (admittedly the proposition wouldn’t stand up under rigorous questioning) she had a soul. She dreamed—why not dream?—of a wedding of like souls.

  Only the day before yesterday Puttermesser had taken out of the Society Library on East Seventy-ninth Street—an amiable walk from her apartment—a biography of George Eliot. A woman with a soul, born Mary Ann Evans, who had named herself George in sympathy with her sympathetic mate. George Eliot and George Lewes, penmen both, sat side by side every evening reading aloud to each other. They read science, philosophy, history, poetry. Once they traveled up to Oxford to see a brain dissected. Another time they invited Charles Dickens to lunch; he enthralled them with an eerie anecdote about Lincoln’s death. They undertook feverishly cultural journeys to Spain and Italy and Germany, sightseeing with earnest thoroughness, visiting cathedrals and museums, going diligently night after night to the theater and opera. On steamers, for relaxation, they read Walter Scott. They were strenuous naturalists, pursuing riverbanks and hillsides for shells and fungi. Their house was called the Priory; nothing not high-minded or morally or artistically serious ever happened there. The people who came on Sunday afternoons—George Eliot presided over a salon—were almost all uniformly distinguished, the cream of English intellectual life: they were learned in Chaldaic, Aramaic, Amharic, Phoenician, or Sanskrit; or else they were orators, or else had invented the clinical thermometer; or were aristocrats, or Americans. The young Henry James made a pilgrimage to George Eliot’s footstool, and so did Virginia Woolf’s father. George Lewes was always present, small, thin, blond, quick, an impresario steering an awed room around the long-nosed sibyl in her chair. She depended on him; he protected her from slights, hurts, cruelty, shame, and from the critical doubts of John Blackwood, her publisher, who took her at first for a clergyman. It was a marriage of brain with brain, weightiness with weightiness. Dignity with dignity. And of course there was no marriage at all—not legally or officially. Lewes’s wife, Agnes, was an adulteress who went on giving birth to another man’s children; but it was an age of no divorce. George Lewes and George Eliot, husband and wife, a marriage of true minds admitting no impediment, were, perforce, a scandal.

  All this Puttermesser knew inside out: it was her third or fourth, or perhaps fifth or sixth, George Eliot biography. She had, moreover, arrived at that season of life—its “autumn,” in the language of one of these respectful old volumes—when rereading gratifies more than discovery, and there were certain habituated passages that she had assimilated word for word. “And yet brilliance conquered impropriety” gave her a shiver whenever she came on it; and also “Consider how a homely female intellectual, no longer young, falls into a happy fate.” O happy fate! Somewhere on the East Side of New York, from, say, Fifty-third to Eighty-ninth, or possibly on West End Avenue between Sixty-sixth and Ninety-eighth, a latter-day George Lewes lurked: Puttermesser’s own, sans scandal.
It was now, after all, an age of divorce.

  The shopping cart was squeezed between the refrigerator and the sink, folded up to fit into the little valley where the roaches frolicked. Wrestling it out, Puttermesser recalled her mother’s phrase for a divorced man: used goods. Yet what else was there for her in the world but used goods? Puttermesser was used goods herself, in her mother’s manner of speaking: she had once had a lover. But lovers are transients; they have a way of moving on—they are subject to panicked reconsiderations, sudden depressions, cold feet. Lovers are notorious for cowardice, for returning to their wives.

  Puttermesser wedged the cart against the door jamb and bent to heave into it each big flat box. When all the pizzas were piled up inside the wire frame, she double-locked her top lock and triple-locked her bottom lock and trundled the cart down the corridor to the elevator. It was like pushing a wheelbarrow filled with slag. The elevator smelled partly of urine and partly of pine-scented disinfectant; with the cart in it there was barely enough room to stand. She poked the button marked “6,” but instead of grinding her upward, the thing headed for the lobby, now and then scraping against the shaft.

  Two very tall young women were waiting down there. One of them was carrying a bottle of wine without a wrapper.

  “You getting out?”

  “I was on my way up,” Puttermesser said. “You brought me down.”

  “Well, we can’t all fit,” said the tall young woman with the wine.

  “Just try,” said the other tall young woman. “If you could just move your laundry—”

  The tall young woman with the wine looked into the cart. “It isn’t laundry. Smells like throw-up.”

  Puttermesser’s spine pressed against the back wall of the elevator. The buttons were beyond her reach. A large black plastic triangle—an earring—swung into her face; the bottle of wine drove into her side.

  “What floor?”

  “Six,” Puttermesser said.

  “How about that. Is this stuff for Harvey’s party? You going where we’re going, Harvey’s party?”

  “No,” Puttermesser said.

  “Harvey Morgenbluth? On the sixth floor?”

  “That’s where I’m going,” Puttermesser said.

  The door to 6-C was propped open; all its chains were dangling free. A row of spidery plants in tiger-striped pots lined the foyer—a tropical motif. It was the sort of party, Puttermesser saw, where children run through shrieking, and no one complains. Ducks in police uniforms were shooting at evil-visaged porcupines in burglars’ caps on a big color television in a corner of the living room, next to a white piano, but the children were paying no attention at all. A mob of them were chasing three little boys in overalls, two of whom seemed, as they sped by, to be identical twins. They raced through the living room and out into what Puttermesser knew had to be the kitchen (6-C’s layout was the same as 3-C’s) and back again. “No we don’t, no we don’t,” all three were yowling. The two very tall young women from the elevator instantly made a place for themselves on the beige tweed carpet in front of the sofa, kneeling at the coffee table and pouring wine into paper cups, instantly hilarious; it was as if they had been dawdling there for hours. The sofa itself held a tangle of five or six human forms, each with its legs in one extraordinary position or another, and each devoted to a paper cup. Behind the children’s screeches, a steady sea-noise burbled: the sound of a party that has been long underway, and has already secretly been defined, by the earliest arrivals, as a success or a failure.

  This one was a failure: all ruined parties are alike. They pump themselves up, they are too boisterous, too frenetic, they pretend raucous pleasure. And this is true even of cousins and young aunts, of families. The Morgenbluth apartment looked to be all family—husbands, wives, untamed offspring. Sisters-in-law, like the pair from the elevator. A birthday for one of the little boys, probably—but there was too much wine, and no balloons; besides, the children were being ignored. Puttermesser wheeled the cart straight toward the white piano and began lifting the boxes out onto the top of it. Cracker crumbs were scattered over the keys; a cigarette, with its snout still burning, lay directly on middle C. The boxes climbed upward in precarious steps.

  “Leaning tower of pizza,” someone quipped, and from the tight little turn she caught in the tone of it, Puttermesser was certain that she was mistaken after all, that the noise all around was anything but domestic, that except for the children no one here belonged to anybody: no husbands, wives, cousins, aunts. It was the usual collection of the unattached. Roomful of the divorced on a Sunday afternoon in mild middle November. A “singles event”: the math teacher, puffing on her mat three floors below, strained her torso in ignorance of the paradise of opportunity just overhead.

  “It’s about time we got some real food in here. You can’t feed kids indefinitely on peanuts. Pretzels, maybe. Takes a grownup woman to remember nutrition. Any of these little sons of bitches yours?”

  “I’d have to be their grandmother,” Puttermesser said. It was the kind of remark she despised, and this stranger—a bearded man in his fifties, with a surgically squashed nose and oversized naive eyes, gray and on guard, more suitable to a kitten—had forced her to it.

  He was pecking at the peanuts in his palm. “Well, you don’t look it—they say it’s all in the chin line. Twins are mine, but only on alternate weekends. With me it’s always a double felony. Not to mention a couple of breakups. Marital. The way you spell that is m-a-r-t-i-a-l.” He put out his hand, greasy from the peanuts. “Freddy Kaplow. How long’ve you known Harvey?”

  The New York patter. Mechanical spew of the middle-aged flirt; he was practiced enough. And too stale for such young sons. Already finished with the second wife, the mother of the twins. No doubt a grown daughter from the first marriage. The daughter and the second wife were, as usual, nearly the same age.

  “Tell Mr. Morgenbluth his pizza was delivered to the wrong apartment,” Puttermesser said. “Tell him 3-C corrected the error.”

  “3-C corrected the error. No kidding, that’s how come you got here? Cute, I like that. Boy-meets-girl cute.”

  Puttermesser took hold of her cart and began to wheel it away.

  “There goes Mother Courage,” Freddy Kaplow called after her. “Hey! No guts!”

  The two young women from the elevator, still curled on the carpet, were being even more hilarious than before; on the sofa the row of tangled legs had become attentive. Three pairs of trousers (two corduroy, one blue denim), two of panty-hose. One of the men on the sofa—not the one in jeans—wore his hair in a ponytail, but was mainly bald in front.

  Puttermesser tugged cautiously on the cart handle. “Excuse me, if you wouldn’t mind, if I could just slide through here—”

  “Hello there, pizza person, when do we eat?”

  The balding man with the ponytail said, “I saw a bag lady the other day with one of those. She had it filled up to the top with piles of old shoes. All mixed up, no pairs.”

  “What’d she think she was going to do with them?”

  “God only knows. Sell ’em.”

  “Eat ’em.”

  “Boil ’em in the bowels of Grand Central Station, then eat ’em.”

  “That’s not funny,” said a woman on the sofa. “I work with the homeless.”

  Puttermesser stopped. Pity for the ravaged municipality—reverberations from her days in officialdom—could still beat in her.

  “In our program—it’s a volunteer thing—what we try to do is get them to keep diaries. We read poetry, we do E. E. Cummings. You have to make them see that we’re all the same. They feel it when you’re spiritually with them.”

  Another version of the New York patter. The wisecrack version and the earnest version, and all of it ego and self-regard. All of it conceit. Where was virtue, where was knowledge? Puttermesser was conscious of inward heavings and longings. She thought of mutuality, of meaning. So many indolent strutters, so much babble battering at the ceiling. That
white piano with the crumbs. In no more than a quarter of an hour the windows behind the piano had begun to darken to blue dusk. Harvey Morgenbluth’s beige tweed carpet, his paper cups, the hysteria of those hungry half-orphaned children running loose. Oh for a time machine! London in the grave twilight of a hundred years ago, Sunday evenings at the Priory. Cornices, massive draperies in heavy folds, ponderous tables and cupboards with carved gryphons’ claws or lions’ feet, old enameled landscapes hanging on tasseled cords from high roseate ceilings. A keyboard left open for the sublime and resolute hands. And in a great stuffed armchair in a shadowed corner, away from the lamp, the noble sibyl, receiving. Lives of courtliness, distinction; clarified lives, without tumble or blur. In George Eliot’s parlor, a manner, or an idea, was purely itself. Ah, to leave careless New York behind, to be restored to glad golden Victoria, when the electric light was new and poetry unashamed!

  In the foyer several of the tiger-striped pots had been overturned into puddles of wine; Puttermesser drew her cart through a patch of country mud. The spidery plants sprawled. A child’s shoe lay flattened under one of the pots. A child’s sock had become a glove for the doorknob.

  And there, at the littered entrance of 6-C, stood a Victorian gentleman. He was not very tall; his cheeks and wrists looked thin. He was distractingly young, with a blond mustache, and he was actually wearing a hat—a formal hat, not exactly a fedora, but something more stately than a mere cap. He had on a cape-like raincoat—partially unfurled at each shoulder, cola-brown, and grandly punctuated by big varnished metal buttons as shockingly bright as cymbals. Sherlock Holmes? Oscar Wilde? A dandy, in any case, self-consciously on display. One arm was held high, the other low, and in between rode a large flat rectangle wrapped in pale yellow paper and tied with a white string.

  Puttermesser humbly backed her cart into mud to let the dandy pass. He slipped by her without taking any notice. She saw how she was invisible to him, of less moment than the tiger-striped pots displaced in his path. She had given way; the pots demanded his circumspection, and obliged him to go around them. It was worse than the Women Attorneys could imagine: the humiliating equation of a counselor of mature appearance with the walls and ceiling of 6-C’s desolated vestibule. A doorknob is more engaging than a woman of fifty-plus. The man’s face hurt Puttermesser; its youth hurt her. For an instant his head was perilously near hers—picking through the uprooted greenery, he tilted so close that she caught sight of the separate tender hairs of his mustache. His eyes were small and serious. Puttermesser thought with a pang how such a head, with such a dignified hat, and such snubbing colorless irises, and such an unfamiliar gravity of intent, would be out of place in Harvey Morgenbluth’s living room, among the New York flirts. And that big flat package: a map? A map of the city, the world? An astronomical map. Andromeda. Ursa Major and Minor. Or a graph. A business graph. He was only a salesman, so never mind. Anyhow it was an illicit hurt: youth is for youth. An aesthetic error, a thin-skinned moral grotesquerie, to yearn after such a head, hat, cape; that nose, that mouth, those intimate hairs.