The Puttermesser Papers

by Cynthia Ozick

  Venice! “What stillness! What beauty!” George Eliot whispered. (Rupert, reading from George Eliot’s journal, was whispering too.) “Looking out from the high window of our hotel on the Grand Canal, I felt that it was a pity to go to bed. Venice was more beautiful than romances had feigned. And that was the impression that remained and even deepened during our stay of eight days.” But that was long ago, with Lewes. Their room was dizzily distant above the glistering water. In the afternoons the two Georges meandered through the basilica of San Marco, thinking it resplendent but barbaric. In the Scuola di San Rocco they were transfixed by the homely Mary of Tintoretto’s “Annunciation.” They bought lace and glass and jewelry, and floated around the lagoon in a gondola decked out with colored lanterns. Under the Rialto bridge the gondoliers rested their poles and warbled their lungs out, to bring up an echo out of the waves. (“O sole mio,” Rupert sang. “Now watch-a-John-nee,” he sang.) Johnny Cross and George Eliot reached Venice a month after their wedding. It was fragrant early June. Sunlight and speckled cream palaces with ancient cracks running down their walls, and darkling shadows under the bridges—they intended to linger for an indefinite stretch of summer.

  Instead they quit Venice in the second week.

  “Panic,” said Rupert. “The honeymoon’s secret shock. Its mystery, its enigma.”

  “All right,” Puttermesser said. “Get it over with. You don’t have to milk it.”

  V. THE HONEYMOON

  THEY TOOK A HOTEL directly on the Grand Canal and had all their meals brought to their room. Much of George Eliot’s new wardrobe had come with them in trunks. She was cunningly and handsomely dressed, the elderly erupting collarbones covered by the lightest of wraps, the youthful waist disclosed. Lewes’s death had left her ailing and frail; now she was marvelously restored. She was robust, she was tireless. She marched Johnny out to churches and galleries, and lectured him on architecture, painting, sculpture, history. He followed her ardently. He was proud of her, he was proud of himself. It was achieved. It was all exactly as it had been with Lewes. They stood before the same ugly Tintoretto Madonna and circled the gaudy bowels of San Marco. The June heat thickened; it began to feel tropical, though inside the old stone churches it was cool enough.

  But there was something amiss with the air; the air was strange, and bad; there was something amiss with the drains. The view (though not so high up) from the windows of the Hôtel de l’Europe was just what it had been for that earlier pair, the two Georges—the Grand Canal knife-bright in the morning, blood-streaked at sundown, glowering at dusk. The canal below was itself no better than a drain. The air that rose from it was a sick cloud, a pustule of spew, a fume. The air was very bad. Their open windows gulped it in, especially at night when there was a flicker of wind. At night the stillness, the beauty: a pity to go to bed. Day after day they searched out gonging campaniles, out-of-the-way chapels, glazed portraits of holy babes and saints and bishops and doges, and when the heat ebbed slightly they rode round and round in gondolas, dazed by the blinding white cheeks of the palazzi. The beauty, the beauty!

  In the evenings they settled in for supper at the snug oval table in their room. The napery was always blue, though the cloth, sweetened by some herbal soap, was changed daily, and a bowl of flowers, cut every afternoon, was set down on it to obscure the drifting smells of the canal. When the porter came to remove the trays—they ate simply, bread and fish and tea—Johnny and George Eliot were already sunk back into the Inferno. They had returned to Dante because it was clear that Johnny needed to brush up on his Italian now more than ever. Again she was lavishly attentive, especially to the difficulties of the syntax. She saw a kind of phrenological sturdiness in the coronal arch as his head lowered to the discipline of the page, a dolichocephalic head belonging to a long-boned six-footer. She was glad that he was as different in appearance from Lewes as could be—nothing about him was a reminder. Lewes had been little and vivacious—occasionally too quick—and brilliant and versatile. Johnny wasn’t quick, but he was worldly enough; he was a banker who could tell when a man was bluffing. “Thou dost not know,” she teased him once, “anything of verbs in Hiphil or Hophal or the history of metaphysics or the position of Kepler in science, but thou knowest best things of another sort, such as belong to the manly heart—secrets of lovingness and rectitude.”

  His character was solid, well-tried, he was steady and affectionate. It hurt her that she was so old, though he never thought of it. In Venice, despite all their happiness, she was consumed by it. Nothing could make her young again for Johnny: she knew it whenever she combed through the gray in her hair, or held the mirror to her eyes, with their bruised fleshiness run wild in the caverns beneath. Johnny was already well into balding, but the hair around his ears was dark and bunched with curls. His beard was frizzy. Behind it (his lovely mouth lost in the frizz) there perspired a striving boy with a nervous look. She noticed the look and understood. It was five weeks—almost six—since the wedding. They went to their beds every night as friends—he was her noble companion, her squire, her loyal pupil. How hard he tried! But he faltered over the Dante; she pointed with her finger, and he corrected himself. He was beginning to languish a little. The more she bloomed, the sounder she grew, the more he drooped. They had not yet lain as husband and wife.

  It was exercise he was missing. He was, after all, a man of the outdoors, he played tennis and soccer and rowed and swam. Venice, all that water, and no rowing—it was only the sunburned gondoliers and their indolent poles, it was only the dreamy floating, it was churches and galleries and pictures and history. Endless, endless history. Endless art. Endless beauty. He wanted some clean air, he wanted something strenuous.

  (“Pretty strenuous,” Rupert intervened, “to keep on walking every minute in Lewes’s shoes!”)

  He needed, he said, a swim. The Grand Canal was a cesspool; it was right at their doorstep, just under their windows, but you couldn’t swim in the canal. The Lido wasn’t far. They ought to get over to the Lido, the other side of it, where there was a good sandy beach. On the other side of the Lido they sat sedately on a bench, among ladies and their parasols, and watched the line of tidal waves. Johnny said he longed for a sea bath. The bath houses were nearby, and he had brought along his swimming costume. He would dash into the sea, have a decent splash, loosen up his limbs, and dash out again; it wouldn’t occupy more than a quarter of an hour. She thought the weather wasn’t suitable for such a venture: see, she said, raising the pedagogic finger that had so often guided him through the Inferno, you can feel the wind. I’m dying for a bathe, he said, it’s the middle of June and hot as Hades. “Though the temperature is agreeable,” she argued pleasantly, in that even, courteous contralto cherished by Lewes, and now cherished again by Johnny, “it has not the sort of heat that makes a plunge in cold water”—here she struggled to uncover a just simile—“as good as a drink to the thirsty.”

  They went back to their hotel. Johnny ordered an elaborate supper of lamb and tomatoes and pudding. The sommelier followed behind the porter with two small ruby bottles. She drank a glassful. Johnny drank several. He seemed roused, alert. She caught the thirst in his eye, and knew it was a shy celebration. The time had come. Over the last days she had observed his inwardness, his delicacy, his brooding. He had stood despondently before the very shapes and pictures that Lewes had looked on years before with so much brio and worshipful wit. Johnny was distracted. She was not surprised when, after the porter returned to clear the table, Johnny wiped his fingers with his blue napkin and declined to take up the Dante. She thought to tempt him with Comte—a diversion—but he turned away. She was discreet. The diffidence between them was natural. Until a month ago he had been a bachelor, doubtless no more celibate than any other handsome young fellow. But unlike herself—she had gone to bed with George Lewes for twenty-five years—he was new to the dignified rituals of conjugal intimacy. She made out some fresh tentativeness in him, a drawing away. It was restraint, it was m
indfulness: he was whipping down animal nature until she was ready to give him a signal. She was a little frightened that he put the responsibility on her; but also excited. She, who was accustomed to leaning on a husband!

  She retired into her dressing closet, a mirrored nook set apart, and chose a nightgown she had never worn before. She shut the door so that he would not see her too soon, and let down her hair. The nightgown feathered her bony shoulders with masses of concealing lace. In the looking glass it all at once struck her that, with her pleasant figure and loosened hair, she had the sweetness of a bride of twenty-two: she did not feel old at all.

  When she came back to him she was disappointed that he was in his own bed. Nothing was different, it was like other nights. She had imagined he would be loitering at the window, say, listening for her, watching the black spirals the gondoliers’ poles lanced into the water. She had imagined that he would wait until she hid herself—her little bride-self!—under her own coverlet, and then, hesitantly, tenderly, silently, he would set his limbs against her limbs at last. Instead he was a stiff hunch in the other bed. His trousers were folded on a chair. The small wind sent the window curtains grazing over his head.

  On second thought she was charmed by this backwardness. She reminded herself that the initiative was hers, and how could it be otherwise? He was reticent, he was a boy. Perhaps she had been mistaken—possibly he had no experience at all. Below, sliding along the Grand Canal, a convoy of gondolas was flinging up laughter and voices and loud singing in an Italian remote from Dante’s. Some locals on a lark, or a party of gondoliers and their wild girls. The air, bad as it was, swelled every sound into a roar. Then the line of gondolas passed and she was alone with him in the quiet. “Bester Mann,” she murmured, and added some syllables from Goethe—Goethe, whom Lewes had so much loved.

  She sat on the bed beside him a caressed the circle of his ear. “Dearest, dearest John,” she said. He kept his back to her and did not stir. She lifted the coverlet and lay down close against him. He had not put on his nightdress; he was still in that morning’s shirt. He had discarded his cravat—it was a thick serpent on the floor. She touched her naked toes to the naked bulge of his calf; with one bold arm she embraced his wide chest. His upper body was hot. The leg was cold. She was right to have discouraged a swim—was he ill? “Johnny dear,” she said. He did not answer. She was alarmed and faintly shamed: she removed her foot from his calf, and put her hand to the thigh of the other leg. It was cold, cold. Despite the trail of wind, the night was warm. It was growing warmer and warmer. The grooves flowing from her nose to the corners of her mouth, an old woman’s creases, ran with sudden sweat; her armpits were sweated. She was not doing what he wished. She was too immodest, there was some mute direction he intended which she could not interpret. “Johnny,” she pleaded, “dear boy, are you unwell? Look at me, Johnny dear, let me see your eyes.”

  He turned to her then, and showed her his eyes. They were unrecognizable—the rims of the lids as raw and bloody as meat, stretched apart like an animal’s freshly slaughtered throat. Only the whites were there—the eyeballs had rolled off under the skin. An old secret shot through her like an intuition: a thing she had forgotten she knew. Johnny had a mad brother who was put away somewhere; Lewes had told her this long ago. Abruptly the eyeballs fell back into place. He was not normal. He was unwell. The bitter putrid wind, the drains, the polluted canal, the open window. He was breathing with urgency; every inhalation seemed hard won. She could not get enough air for herself. They were entombed in a furnace. Down below, the fleet of gondolas was returning, the raucous party from before, or another just as noisy—she heard blasts of laughter, and common street voices, and singing, and this time a tremulous guitar. She was standing now; her brain was shuttling so rapidly that it shook her—there was a doctor in Venice, Dr. Ricchetti, whom English people consulted. She ran to the bellpull on the farther wall, a little distance from the windows, to ring the hall porter.

  A tremendous swipe—the scream of a huge bullwhip or instant cyclone—cut through naked space. A projectile of some kind—she had seen the smudge of it fly past her own back. A stone—a ball, a bone—tossed up by some loutish member of the crew below. Straight through the window. But the bed was empty. Johnny was not in it. The curtain was ripped away. The projectile had flown not into but out of the window. The projectile was Johnny. She bent over the window sill and shrieked. His elbows in their shirtsleeves dipped and rose, dipped and rose, like white fins. He was having his swim in the Grand Canal. The gondoliers mocked her cry: “Gianni, Gianni!” They leaped into the night water after him, but he would not be caught. For ten minutes they chased the white fins, and fished poor Johnny out by hooking his collar on one of their poles.

  VI. THE MARRIAGE

  PUTTERMESSER HAD ALWAYS HATED that part. It was too ugly. She didn’t like to think about it. Everything bright had ended with George Lewes’s funeral. The rest was nothing. The rest didn’t count. Johnny Cross, diagnosed as having been subject to “acute mental depression” on a single night of his life, came back to normal, never again had even a moment’s worth of derangement, and died in 1924 at the age of eighty-four. But George Eliot weakened and failed. Six months after Johnny threw himself out of the window, she was dead.

  Rupert remained cheerful. He didn’t miss George Eliot; he had never admired her. Puttermesser too, under Rupert’s influence, had begun to withdraw a little. Possibly George Eliot was a prig. She shouldn’t have kept Johnny from bathing at the Lido; it was preposterous. She knew he was no good at foreign languages—he couldn’t master Hebrew, and mixed up hiphil and hophal. Then why did she terrorize him with Dante? But Rupert was still harping on his idea—Johnny impersonating Lewes. After Venice, Rupert persisted, in the little time left to their marriage, George Eliot and Johnny Cross went back to the very same house Johnny had once helped Lewes buy. “The identical four walls!” he said. “Proof! What more do you want?”

  Puttermesser was impatient. She was getting sick of Rupert’s idea.

  “George Lewes didn’t jump into the Grand Canal, did he?” She pushed away the last volume of George Eliot’s journal. “Johnny just couldn’t face sex,” she accused.

  She looked around her bedroom. A flood of disorder. Heaps of those biographies and maps and memoirs and diaries. An engulfing crust on desk and dresser and floor. Miniature skyscrapers on the window sills. It was enough. She wanted all those books out. Out, out! Back to the Society Library! The only tidy corner was over near her bed, where Rupert had stored several stacks of his postcards, straight as dominoes.

  Puttermesser felt routed. It was as if they had come through a riot. Something tumultuous had happened; she was exhausted, as after intoxication or trance. Rupert had made it happen: this shivering precariousness, this tumult. He had cast out George Lewes, bright-souled George Lewes, and hauled Johnny Cross in. Rupert’s impersonation of Johnny Cross impersonating Lewes! It was too alive. It jarred, it aroused. All through his telling it—his telling the honeymoon—she fidgeted, she kindled, she smarted. Rupert was a wizard. He made the honeymoon happen under her fingernails, at the root of her spine. She suffered. It was Lewes she wanted, only Lewes. Didn’t the two of them—herself and Rupert—put their heads together under the lamp? Didn’t they ignite every passage between them? Yet Rupert took Lewes from her and gave her Cross. Done! The honeymoon was done. Ugly, ugly. She hated it. She had always hated the honeymoon. Rupert pressed it under her fingernails, he pierced it like a pole to her spine.

  Rupert said, “I finished up that Frick thing. Vegetarian tomato, all right?”

  Puttermesser said she wasn’t hungry for soup.

  “Finished up yesterday. A nice Dutch landscape. I have to see Harvey about it when it dries—I’ll ask him then. What’s wrong with vegetarian tomato?”

  “Ask Harvey what?”

  “Well, it takes two witnesses. I’ll get Harvey next time I’m up there. You figure out who else.”

  Puttermess
er concentrated. “Two witnesses?”

  “That’s how many you need to get married.”

  So he meant it. She saw that he meant it. He had been serious about it before. He was serious about it now. Lewes! Lewes after all! Lewes had inspired him to it. Lewes had seduced him to it. Johnny Cross had gotten in the way, but the victory belonged to Lewes. Ideal friendship!

  “I don’t know anybody to ask,” Puttermesser said.

  “You know a lot of people.”

  “Not lately. Not this year.”

  “What about all those politicos in the Municipal Building?”

  “I don’t work there anymore and I’ll never work there again. It was stupid to think I’d ever go back.” She reflected on the webwork of her life. Her aunts and uncles were dead. The cousins, once a numerous and jolly gang, were scattered and aging. Half of them had been swallowed up by California—San Diego, Berkeley, Santa Monica, Lake Tahoe. By now most were senior citizens. And the receding gallery of all her old society: there they were, page after page in her little Woolworth address book, those ghosts of classrooms past and half-remembered offices, the detritus of her ascent to fifty-plus. Superannuated fellowship of gossip. Movie companions of yesteryear. They were all distant: either they were wrangling toward divorce, or they lived for their jobs, or they were tanning in the Caribbean, or they were absorbed in their children and their children’s babies. Their children: the great genetic tide—the torrent—that separates those with offspring from those without. Three or four of Puttermesser’s friends had already died in the lottery of early disease. In the roster of the living, there was not a soul she might want as witness to her wedding. Everyone was obsolete. She was clearing the way. A new life. Clean, pristine.