Heir to the Glimmering World (14 page)

There was nothing I could do for Mrs. Mitwisser. I was no longer permitted to bring her food. She would not accept it from me—I stood accused of having James's money in my pocket. Once again I had no duties; yet two weeks after my conversation with James, Anneliese silently put into my hands a twenty-dollar bill, a ten-dollar bill, a five-dollar bill, and four silver quarters. All but the ten and the coins I hid away together with Bertram's blue envelope—not in the dresser drawer under the Bear Boy, as before, but in a new hiding place. In the back yard I had stumbled over one of Willi's discarded sneakers, torn and drenched and half covered with mud. It seemed an impregnable cache, immune to theft. I let it dry and cleaned it as well as I could, and stuffed into it Bertram's money and much of the money Anneliese had given me. The sneaker lay locked in my suitcase, and the suitcase itself was safely stored under Mrs. Mitwisser's bed.

I was idle; I was free. There were whole days when James would summon Anneliese out for still another excursion. "The kid needs to get out," he said. "You can't keep a little thing caged up like that." Taxis came and went, while I wandered through the empty house, myself caged, listening to Mrs. Mitwisser's steady sighs and groans. Private mutterings and garbles had replaced the coarse singing; she was invoking secret spells and maledictions. I took to looking out the windows, this one and that one, but there was little to see, only the gray curbs, the row of small houses with their low evergreen shrubs, the patch of muddy yard where, under the single tree, I had found Willi's sodden sneaker. Here and there a triangle of sky. From the window of the boys' room the sky was largest of all, and against it, in the distance, a dark horizontal blur: the high trestle, several streets away, on which lay the streaming tracks that led to the true city, and to the great Library where Mitwisser toiled day after day.

When the boys clattered in after school, it was Heinz who carried up Mrs. Mitwisser's afternoon tray. Early that morning the taxi had swept away Waltraut and her pair of escorts. This time it was a puppet show that lured them; it seemed there were more puppet shows in the world than anyone knew, and more toy shops and carousels, and more unexplored far-away playgrounds. Mrs. Mitwisser in her nightgown sat upright with a red glare that swelled her eyelids; she chewed her toast with angry lethargy. Nearby, in the little hall outside her door, sprawled on their bellies, her sons were howling over a game of Monopoly. A present from James, a prize brought back from Waltraut's last outing. The dice rattled, there were shrieks of hilarity. A gambler's game; I heard Mrs. Mitwisser's mumbled "
Er soll zum El Dorado gehen
" (the El Dorado had turned into one of her spells), and thought of my father throwing dice for shoes at Croft Hall, and put on my coat and left the house.

The ride into the city was long. The train began in the air, at first level with roofs and treetops, and then increasingly shadowed by the upper stories of lofts and factories, until it shook with the shock of the blink through the tunnel's blackness. When I came up from the subway at Forty-second Street, it was into a flowing gully of striders, gray fedoras like a field of dandelions gone to seed, hurrying women stuttering on Chinese heels. A denatured autumn wind smelled of trolley ozone. Under the dusty towers of Manhattan dusk was quickening.

At the corner of Fifth Avenue, turning south in that human river, I saw through the falling dark a pair of lions—stoic flanks, steady manes—and behind them the Library's broad stone steps, where hoboes squatted with their bundles. Past the doors, marble—marble up and marble down: a kingly hall, polished corridors hung with manuscripts and old prints, a lofty marble stair, and then the cavernous Reading Room, elongated, measureless, its far ceiling carved and painted gold, its walls running with oaken catalogues (their thousand drawers, their million cards), the immense tables wide and gleaming, spotted with green-shaded lamps, the hundred men and women hunched or half-reclining, books lying open like flocks of dormant wings, the whir of pages fingered. A misty veil-like absence stirred in the spacious emptiness above all those bent necks, as if ghosts were playing in the nowhere: invisibles humming the noise of noiselessness.

In a nook protruding from a wall and framed by shelves standing at right angles to each other—a small secret chamber in that vastness—I discovered the Hotel El Dorado. It was listed, together with photographs, in a brittle old manual called
Grand Inns of Europe: The Modern Tourist's Guide.
I pulled it out from where it was wedged, among tall bound maps (nations that were no longer nations) and crumbling city directories (Turin, Munich, Glasgow, Rheims, Aarhus, those brightly named Old World settlements with their hidden storied streets), and read:
Berlin's most illustrious hotel. 55 suites, with parlor and bath. Three resplendent dining rooms, vintage wines, celebrated orchestras, evening parties welcome, uniforms permitted.
A photograph showed a fringed canopy, a doorman in operatic epaulets, a pretty young woman with bobbed hair smiling under a cloche. Uniforms permitted; the Kaiser's officers; an obsolete regime. Was this one of the hotels into which the Mitwisser family had grimly paraded, wearing their best clothes, pretending to own the rights of legitimate guests, in order to use the toilet in the lobby? On the next page, two more photos, the first displaying the El Dorado's facade: it resembled a cathedral, with gargoyles and spires. The other was of a huge bed heaped with ruffled satin cushions, captioned
REST PEACEFULLY IN GERMANY'S MOST WELCOMING CITY.

I shoved the
Modern Tourist's Guide
back into its niche; with a tiny rasp the fragile canvas binding tore. A gash. On either side fragments of maps trickled down.

All the bent necks. Notebooks and fountain pens. Pyramids of reference volumes. Histories. Lost languages. Men in shirtsleeves and vests, their pens zigzagging; here a woman ferociously recording numbers under a magnifying glass. Restless slidings of feet, a hand stretched up against the light from a bronze-based green-shaded lamp. The movements of elbows. Bent necks; more stretches; yawns.

Far away, across the length of the Reading Room, an infinity away, Professor Mitwisser sat. I saw his giant's back, with its monumental shoulders; I saw a hump on the table before him: his hat. All around, the rustling of gathered papers, chairs scraping, books slapping shut like so many gunshots. It was half past five; the great hall was thinning out. I looped my way through emptying aisles until I was as close to Mitwisser as I dared. His briefcase was propped, limp and unopened, on the seat next to him. The limitless plain of that enormous table spread itself perfectly bare from end to end; its lamps went suddenly dark. "Closing, we're closing," a voice warned: a distant tiny female voice, vibrating out of a void. Mitwisser was motionless. His head, a heavy fallen thing. His long arms in their well-used woolen sleeves. His eyes, terrifying blue starers. This was the man whose nights were newly given over to laughter; to the comedy of James. He looked to me now like a mummy exposed—a mummy whose wrappings had been stolen away.

20

I
SAW HIM THERE
the next day, and some days after that. It was easy for me to leave the house. No one minded, no one noticed. I chose only those times when Anneliese had gone off with James and Waltraut on some daylong excursion; there were more and more of these excursions. At first I made sure to wait until the boys came home from school, at half past three, when Heinz would take up Mrs. Mitwisser's tray—the meal that either Anneliese or I had prepared that morning. But after a while it seemed useless to wait. Mrs. Mitwisser was anyhow asleep. It was her habit to fall into an early afternoon doze—she woke only when her sons flooded the hall with their clamor.

At one o'clock I was already on the train into the deep city. Was it wicked to abandon Mrs. Mitwisser to an empty house? I was on my way to a greater wickedness: I meant to spy on Professor Mitwisser yet again. That had not been my first intention. My plan had been to accost him—how he would be startled!—and to explain that I was eager to assist him: hadn't I been hired for that? I was ready to fetch books, even to transcribe pages, as long as they were in a familiar alphabet that, however laboriously, I could copy. My plan was to offer myself for work. But there was no work. He was punctual; he believed in regularity. He was driven by a scholar's obligation. He came every day with his hat and his briefcase.

I found a seat at a table somewhat to the side and behind him and watched him. He was not always idle. Sometimes he drew out a paper from a pocket and a pen from his vest and set one beside the other. Then he would pick up the pen, scratch out a word or two, and drop it again. Or he would push back his chair and wander toward the great central desk to collect a thick volume he had ordered. Under that immense ceiling his shoulders were drained of power, his big frame was dwarfed. The daily journey, the punctuality, the regularity—all pretense. As long as James was in the house the Royal would remain shut up and mute. He was a man without a place in the world. I felt I was spying on disgrace. There was excitement in it: would he look up and around, would he recognize me in such unexpected surroundings? And if he did, what would I say, what would happen? To tempt the possibility, I moved to the table directly in front of his, squarely in his line of sight. But his eyes were fixed on his hat.

It was past three o'clock. Now his head had fallen. I saw the creases in his neck, and thought of Mrs. Mitwisser marooned in a trance of desolation. The late autumn sun, masked by granite, was bringing charcoal shadows to the feet of the Lions. As I came down the terraced stone steps toward Fifth Avenue, a rhythmic shouting, like the repeated barks of dozens of coxswains, flew up in ragged spurts from the street. A straggle of marchers carrying banners and placards was beginning to disband. The fringe of onlookers was already dissolved into chaos; all that remained were a few remnant disputants. A bearded man in a gypsy bandanna darted up to one of the Lions with a dripping paintbrush, splashed a red streak across its paw, and ran up the stairs. A policeman on horseback let out a yell and clattered away. A woman with a cropped head wearing men's trousers sank onto the bottom step, smacked down the stick of her placard, and looked up at me.

"Well, well, well," she said—her voice was hoarse, she was one of the coxswains—"if it isn't the little bookworm herself, the one Bert threw out, right where you'd expect her to be—"

"Bertram didn't throw me out," I said.

"—right in front of the robber baron's monument, look at that—"

I said again, "Bertram didn't throw me out. You did."

"You can't say you're not better off. You can thank me for getting you out of Albany—I heard you got out," Ninel said. "Albany's a dead end. I
told
Bert I wasn't going to get buried there." She held up the stick of her sign: it read, in large purple letters, NCDPP, and below that, in smaller black letters,
NATIONAL COMMITTEE FOR THE DEFENSE OF POLITICAL PRISONERS.
"I'm down in the Village now. There's plenty activity in the Village."

It struck me that she had said "I," not "we," so I asked where Bertram was.

"Back there where I left him. He moved out of my old place, so who knows. A faker, he wasn't serious. It was all sentiment for him—as if there's a difference between sentiment and slobber. Slobber doesn't get anything
done.
"

Over her head the Lion's paw was bleeding paint.

"See that? That's how things get done." She nodded her stick upward toward the Library's great doors. "Know who built this thing?"

"It's free," I said, "anybody can use it—"

"Sure, and the poor broken backs who hauled the stones, it was free for
them,
wasn't it? That's right, go ahead, love your benefactor—"

It was the same as it had been: Ninel bewildered and frightened me. Her talk was no different from the sign on her stick.

"My benefactor," I said, "was Bertram."

"I'll bet. He gave you money."

"How do you know that—"

"That Little Orphan Annie look you used to put on? I wormed it out of him. He gave you money that should've gone to the movement. The last straw."

"Ninel!" someone yelled.

"Hey, Charlie—Charlie!" She stood up and waved: the bearded man in the bandanna was bounding down the Library steps.

"Took a leak in John Jacob Astor's very own latrine," he said. "Improved it a bit, too. Swabbed a big bloody A right in front of where it said
MEN.
Ran out of paint, shoved the brush down the toilet.—Who's this?"

"Some parasite down from Albany. Her papa rubbed noses with the swells. Here," Ninel said, handing me the long pole of her placard, "stick this up your benefactor," and walked off with the man in the red bandanna.

Parasite. Mrs. Mitwisser's very word.

21

328 St. Peter's Street
The Bronx, New York
October 26, 1935

Dear Bertram,

I tried to write you once before, on a sick old typewriter, but I didn't know where to send a letter, and I still don't. As you can see, this is a nice fresh ribbon, and the machine is brand-new. I'm the first to use it, though it isn't mine. I pulled it out of the closet where it's been stored—it was bought for my employer, Professor Rudolf Mitwisser, who

October 26, 1935

Dear Bertram,

How I wish I knew where you were, so I could send you this letter! I suppose I could write care of Albany General, if you're still working in the pharmacy, but somehow I feel it isn't somehow I feel it wouldn't

October 26, 1935

Dear Bertram,

You will be amazed to hear that I've seen Ninel! She came out of a march just as it was breaking up. She had a banner and her hair was shorter than I remembered but otherwise she looked just the same. It was some sort of protest, and she was with a man who was throwing paint. This was in New York, on Fifth Avenue