The Puttermesser Papers

by Cynthia Ozick

  In her own apartment Puttermesser collapsed the cart and shoved it back into the alleyway between the refrigerator and the sink. There had been, she observed, a hatching: a crowd of baby roaches milled under the ray of her flashlight, then fled with purposeful intelligence. In God’s littlest, the urge toward being and enduring; a soulless mite wills its continuity with the force and fury of our own mammoth human longing. O life, O philosophy!

  All the same, Puttermesser sprayed.

  In the morning she heard the brush of something in flight under her door:

  Dear 3-C:

  Just a note of thanx for yesterday’s delivery—Freddy Kaplow (your pal and mine) gave me the dope on this. Sorry for the trouble and sorry I missed you! I’d love to return the favor, so if you ever need a passport photo in a hurry (no charge) or anything else in that line call on me. (I’m in the phototography business, by the way.) I specialize in commercial reducing and enlarging but also in children’s portraits. If you’re interested in having a portrait done of the kids I can offer you a 25% studio discount in honor of your Good Deed!

  Yours hastily (on my way to work)

  Harvey Morgenbluth

  6-C

  P.S. Hate to mention it, but your insecticide smells all the way out here in the hall! This means the little visitors get to climb the riser pipe up to yours truly! Thanx a lot, neighbor!

  A page out of the National Geographic: a pair of civilizations adverse in temperament can live juxtaposed in identical environments. Archaeologists report, for instance, that Israelite and Canaanites inhabited the same kinds of dwellings furnished with the same kinds of artifacts, and yet history testifies to intensely disparate cultures. 6-C’s floor plan, Puttermesser reflected, was no different from 3-C’s—she had seen that with her own eyes—but Harvey Morgenbluth had room for a piano and she did not. Harvey Morgenbluth gave parties and she did not. 6-C, the palace of exuberance. Harvey Morgenbluth had a business and Puttermesser currently had nothing.

  Or, to reformulate it: despite exactly congruent apartment layouts, Harvey Morgenbluth belonged to the present decade and Puttermesser belonged to selected phantom literary flashbacks.

  The day was secretly bright behind a gray fisherman’s net about to dissolve into a full autumn rain. The coursing sidewalks, still dry, had the spotted look of rapid dark rivers clogged with fish: all those young women in sneakers, clutching Channel Thirteen totes containing their office pumps and speeding toward desks, corridors, switchboards, computers, bosses, underlings. New York—Harvey Morgenbluth included—was going to work. And Puttermesser was idle. She was not idle: it was, instead, a meditative hiatus. She had stopped in her tracks to listen, to detect; to learn something; to study. She was holding still, waiting for life to begin to happen, why not? Venturing out for air, she was compelled to invent daily destinations—most often it was the supermarket over on Third, if only for an extra package of potato chips; she hated to run out. Or she fell in with the aerobic walkers among the more populated paths of Central Park, close to the protective rim of Fifth Avenue. Or she went mooning through the Morgan Library, the Cooper-Hewitt, the Guggenheim, the Frick; or kept up with the special exhibits at the Jewish Museum—the pitiable history of poor hollow Captain Dreyfus (hair-raising posters, Europe convulsed), shadowy old chronicles of the Prague Golem. New York, crazed by mental plenitude. The brain could not take in so much as a morsel of it, even at the rate of a museum a day. Paintings, jars, ornaments, armor, manuscripts, tapestries, pillars, flutes, violas, harps, the rare, the sublime, the celestial! Forms and illuminations, how was it possible to swallow it all down?

  Hand in hand. The parallel gaze. No one knows lonely sorrow who has not arrived at fifty-plus without George Lewes.

  From the express line in the supermarket (salty chips, cheese-flavored) Puttermesser headed for the Society Library, where she picked up the Yale Selections from George Eliot’s Letters (pleasantly thick but portable, as against the nine-volume complete), then gravitated—why not?—to the Metropolitan Museum: the rain had started anyhow. Among the Roman portrait busts on the main floor Puttermesser ate a clandestine potato chip. A female sculpture in a niche—hallowed serenity wearing a head shawl—who certainly ought to have been the Virgin Mary turned out to be nothing more than a regular first-century woman, non-theological. She was what the Romans had instead of Kodak; yet Puttermesser resisted this pleasing notion. She was unwilling, just now, to marvel at the objects and hangings and statuary glimmering all around—the rare, the sublime, the celestial—in this exalted castle of masterworks. Her mind was on the Letters. George Eliot’s own voice against Puttermesser’s heart. She was tired of 3-C, of reading in bed or at the kitchen table. What she wanted was a public bench; why not?

  From Rome she passed through Egypt (the little sphinx of Sesostris III, the granary official Nykure, with his tiny wife no higher than his knee and his tiny daughter, King Sahure in his headdress and beard, Queen Hatshepsut in her headdress and beard, and the great god Amun, and powerful horses, and perfect gazelles), and through polished Africa (Nigeria, Gabon, Mali), and through southern Europe, and through Flanders and Holland, and straight through the Impressionists. Immensity opened into immensity; there were benches in all those grand halls, and streams of worshipful pale tourists ascending and descending the high marble stair, but she did not come to the recognizable right bench until Socrates beckoned.

  At least his forefinger was up in the air. The ceiling lights of that place—it was French Neoclassical painting of the eighteenth century—seemed wan and overused. The room was unpopular and mostly empty—who cares about French Neoclassical? Puttermesser’s bench faced Socrates on his death bed. Even from a distance away she could see him reaching for the bowl of hemlock with a bare muscular right arm. Socrates was stocky, healthy, in his prime. Part of a toga was slung over the other arm; and there was the forefinger sticking up. He was exhorting his disciples—a whole lamenting crowd of disciples, of all ages, in various grief-struck poses, like draped Greek statues. A curly-haired boy, an anguished graybeard, a bowed figure in a clerical cap, a man in a red cloak gripping Socrates’ leg, a man weeping against a wall. Socrates himself was naked right down to below his navel. He had little red nipples and a ruddy face and a round blunt nose and a strawberry-blond beard. He looked a lot like Santa Claus, if you could imagine Santa Claus with armpit hair.

  Puttermesser settled in. It was a good bench, exactly right. There were not too many passersby, and the guard at the other end of the long hall was as indifferent as a cardboard cutout. Now and then she stole a potato chip; the cellophane bag rattled and the guard did not stir.

  Assuredly [Puttermesser read in the Letters] if there be any one subject on which I feel no levity it is that of my marriage and the relation of the sexes—if there is any one action or relation of my life which is and has always been profoundly serious, it is my relation to Mr. Lewes.

  . . .

  I do not wish to take the ground of ignoring what is unconventional in my position. I have counted the cost of the step I have taken and am prepared to bear, without irritation or bitterness, renunciation by all my friends. I am not mistaken in the person to whom I have attached myself. He is worthy of the sacrifice I have incurred, and my only anxiety is that he should be rightly judged.

  . . .

  We work hard in the morning till our heads are hot, then walk out, dine at three and, if we don’t go out, read diligently aloud in the evening. I think it is impossible for two human beings to be more happy in each other.

  Impossible for two human beings to be more happy in each other!

  A rush of movement along the far wall: a knot of starers had assembled just below “The Death of Socrates.” They stared up, and then away, still staring; then up again. They were fixed on the lifted finger. Inexplicably it was directing them to look somewhere else. The knot grew into a little circling pack. Something was being surrounded over there, under Socrates’ feet. The chips, the salt, the love adventu
res of the famous dead. Out of the blue Puttermesser fell into a wild thirst—George Eliot and George Lewes were traveling on the Continent, illicitly declaring themselves husband and wife. At home in England they were scorned and condemned, but in the enlightened Europe of the eighteen-fifties the best salons welcomed them without criticism, they were introduced to poets, artists, celebrated intellectuals; Franz Liszt played for them at breakfast, smiling in rapture with his head thrown back.

  That fuss around Socrates. Puttermesser got up to see—anyhow she was in need of a water fountain. Some fellow had set up an easel. She inched her way into the starers and stared. The canvas on the easel was almost entirely covered: here were the mourning disciples, here was that prison staircase through a darkened archway, here were the visitors departing, here on the stone floor under Socrates’ couch were the chain and manacle. That suffering youth hiding his eyes as he proffers the hemlock. All of it minutely identical to the painting on the wall: it was only that on the easel Socrates still had no face—the fellow in front of the easel was stippling out the strawberry-blond beard where it starts to curl over Socrates’ clavicle. Puttermesser stared up at the painting and back down at the copy. One was the same as the other. You could not tell the difference. She stood at the rim of the crowd and through a kind of porthole watched the shadow of the lower lip gradually bloom into being; she had a better view of the easel than of the copyist. A bit of shoulder, a sleeve pushed up, a narrow hand manipulating the brush—that was all. The hand was horrifically meticulous; patient; slow; horrifically precise. It worked like some unearthly twinning machine. A machine for uncanny displacement. The brush licked and drew back, licked and drew back. The ancient strokes reappeared purely. Puttermesser took in the legend on the brass plate—1787, Jacques-Louis David—and saw how after two centuries Socrates’ nose was freshly forming, lick by lick, all over again. She licked her own lip; she had never been thirstier.

  The drinking fountain was on another floor. She was gone ten minutes and came back to disappointment: the show was over. The room was nearly deserted. The fellow with the easel was dropping things into a satchel—he had already loaded his canvas onto some sort of dolly. He stopped to wipe a brush with a rag; then he rolled down his shirtsleeves and buttoned them. His shoes were beautifully polished.

  Puttermesser’s old neglected worldliness woke. She had not always been a loafer. Until only a little while ago she had moved among power-brokers, deputies, opportunists, spoliators, the puffed-up. Commissioners and chiefs. She had not always felt so meek. It is enervating to contemplate your fate too steadily, over too protracted a time: the uses of inquisitiveness begin to be forgotten. She thought of what she would ask the copyist—something about the mysteries of replication: what the point of it was. Plainly it wasn’t a student exercise—not only because, though he was fairly young, he could hardly have been a student. He was well into the thirties, unless that modest orderly mustache was meant to deceive. And anyhow the will to repetition—Puttermesser knew she had glimpsed absolute will—was too big, too indecently ambitious, for a simple exercise. It looked to be a kind of passion. The drive to reproduce what was already there, what did it hint, what could hang from it?

  She asked instead, “Did you get to finish the face?”

  The young man held up an index finger in the direction of “The Death of Socrates.” On the wall Socrates mimicked him. “It’s finished, see for yourself.”

  “I mean in your version.”

  “What I do isn’t a version. It’s a different thing altogether.”

  An elbow-poke of enchantment—aha, metaphysics! “I saw you do it. It comes out exactly the same. It’s the same thing exactly. It’s amazingly the same,” Puttermesser said.

  “It only looks the same.”

  “But you’re copying!”

  “I don’t copy. That’s not what I do.”

  Now he was being too metaphysical; she was confused. She was confused by delight. He stood there folding things up—first the rag, then the easel. Above the mustache his nostrils gaped in a doubling victory of their own: George Eliot’s observation of Liszt—when the music was triumphant the nostrils dilated. “If you don’t want to call it copying,” Puttermesser almost began—it was going to be an argument—but instantly quit. The syllables stopped in her mouth. Thin cheeks. Those bright hairs under such a tidy nose. Without his hat it was hard to be sure. Nevertheless she was sure. The Victorian gentleman in the vestibule of 6-C. The dandy who had snubbed her because a young man is incapable of noticing a woman of fifty-plus. He was noticing her now. She felt how she had coerced it. She had made him look right at her.

  “Aren’t you a friend of Harvey Morgenbluth’s? We met at his door,” Puttermesser said. “In the middle of that party.”

  “I don’t go to Harvey’s parties. I go on business.”

  “Well, I live right under him. Three floors down.” Fraudulent. It would be right to admit that she had never set eyes on Harvey Morgenbluth. “Was that a painting you had with you? In that big package?”

  Clearly he did not remember her at all.

  “Harvey photographs my things,” he said.

  “He copies your copies.”

  “They’re not copies. I’ve explained that.”

  “But the result is just the same,” Puttermesser insisted.

  “I can’t help the result. It’s the act I care about. I don’t copy. I reënact. And I do it my own way. I start from scratch and do it. How do I know if Socrates’ face got finished first or last? You think I care about that? You think I care about what some dead painter feels? Or what anyone with a brush in his hand thought about a couple of hundred years ago? I do it my way.”

  Puttermesser’s terrible thirst all at once rushed back; she believed it might be the turning of her actual heart. Her organs were drinking her up and leaving her dry. She had abandoned all her acquaintance for the sake of the arrival of intellectual surprise. Mama, she called back to her mother through the dried-up marshes of so many lost decades, look, Mama, the brain is the seat of the emotions, I always told you so!

  In her mother’s voice Puttermesser said, “It’s used goods, isn’t it? Shouldn’t you begin with a new idea? With your own idea?”

  “This is my idea. It’s always my own idea. Nobody tells me what to do.”

  “But you don’t make anything up—some new combination, something that never existed before,” she urged.

  “Whatever I do is original. Until I’ve done them my things don’t exist.”

  “You can’t say it’s original to duplicate somebody else!”

  “I don’t duplicate.” He was hitching his satchel onto his shoulder by its strap. “I reproduce. Can’t you understand that? Babies get born all the time, don’t they? And every baby’s new and never existed before.”

  “No baby looks like any other,” she protested.

  “Unless they’re twins.” The canvas went onto the dolly. “And then they lead separate lives from the first breath.”

  “A painting isn’t alive,” she nearly shouted.

  “Well, I am—that’s the point. Whatever I do is happening for the first time. Anything I make was never made before.” He gave her a suddenly speculative look; she was startled to catch a shade of jubilation in it. Did he talk like this every day of his life? She saw straight into the black zeroes of his pupils, bright islands washed round by faint ink. He poked one end of the folded easel toward her—it was all contraption, with wing-nuts everywhere. “What would you think,” he said, “of helping me with some of this stuff?”

  They walked with the contraption between them. The Letters were squeezed under Puttermesser’s arm. Again immensity opened into immensity, hall into hall. They passed through majesties of civilizations, maneuvering around columns like a pair of workmen, drilling aisles through clusters of mooners and gapers. Precariously they wobbled down the great staircase. It was evident he could have managed all that equipment on his own; he was used to it. She was an
attachment trailing along—an impediment—but it seemed to Puttermesser there was another purpose in this clumsy caravan. A kind of mental heat ran through the rod that linked them. He had decided to clip the two of them together for a little time. She understood that she had happened on an original. A mimic with a philosophy! A philosophy that denied mimicry! And he wasn’t mistaken, he wasn’t a lunatic. He was, just as he said, someone with a new idea. He had a claim on legitimacy. He was guilty with an explanation; or he wasn’t guilty at all. The thing jerking and bobbing between them, with its sticks and screws, was an excitement—it made her keep her distance, but it led her. It was a sort of leash. She followed him, like an aging dog, sidelong.

  Puddles on the pavement; she had missed the rain altogether. The street was silted with afternoon light. Puttermesser surrendered her end of the easel—she hated to give it up. Found! George Lewes, George Lewes in New York! He had a kind of thesis, a life’s argument. He had nerve. “I’ll come by,” he said. “I’ll drop in. The next time I have to be at Harvey’s place. Here, take one of these. It tells all.”