Heir to the Glimmering World (16 page)

"And after," she finished—after what? after Switzerland?—"I become pregnant with Heinz."

She was abruptly silent.

In the little hallway outside the bedroom door—just where Anneliese had whispered to me about James—Waltraut loitered, pushing a toy car through a tunnel in a tower built of blocks. The car struck the tower and it clattered down, scattering blue and yellow cubes. Mrs.Mitwisser blinked at the noise, looked out, and turned away. Waltraut did not look in.

"The little one speaks now all the time English," Mrs. Mitwisser resumed.

"Children learn quickly," I said. But what Waltraut had learned—it had come quickly—was to keep her distance from her mother.

"And the boys, they become hooligans—"

"They're like all boys."

"Willi, he is thief."

"It doesn't matter," I said, though it did.

She was conscious of everything. Even when she slept, she was awake. She lived at the top of the house, an all-knowing goddess in a cloud: she listened, she heard. She contemplated thieves and thievery. Schrödinger, for instance: he was and was not a thief. They had worked side by side, but it was she who had bitten the egg. Yet they called it Schrödinger's equation, and in the end she was driven out! Expelled from the history of the electron. Expelled, she said (like Willi, like Anneliese, she had a neck that reddened), and said it again, in the idiom of truth, so that I should take it in:
Vertrieben! Vertrieben aus der Geschichte der Physik.

History had wronged her—not Schrödinger, not the history of the electron (this was her strange phrase, enveloped in a cascade of those unruly names, Born, Bohr, Dirac, Jordan, Verschaffelt, Kramers, Ehrenfest, Lorentz, and more, and more!). It was world-upheaval that had wronged her. She had run away from world-upheaval, and her mind, her mind, was at all costs not guaranteed to linger in one place, it was a force not a thing, a function that extended throughout space ... and therefore, even if not wholly understood, it could be, after a fashion, trusted.

I told her then that my father had killed a boy.

Only Bertram knew this; and Ninel.

Mrs. Mitwisser was indifferent to the killing of a boy. It wasn't one of her boys, and anyhow she was indifferent to her own boys too. She was indifferent to my having had a father—had she ever cared whether Mademoiselle De Bonrepos had a father, or whether the cook or the maid had a father? She pushed away her tray. There lay the jagged remains of the half-eaten egg, ridged by her pretty teeth. A gray fatigue— an interior fog—settled over her. The fevered fanatical nights of Switzerland were slipping away; they had been her glory; the memory of them agitated her even now, and wore her out. Or perhaps she was again submerged in that black limousine circling round and round Berlin.

"He crashed up a car," I persisted, "and killed a boy, and he told lies and he gambled. He gambled with James."

She was not indifferent to James. "You tell me this why?"

"It's what Willi did, he took what belonged to my father—but you heard it, you heard! You were just upstairs, and you heard—"

She said serenely, "I cut with the scissors where he puts his head."

I said, "My father
knew
James, at least he met him once—"

"Then also your father is
Parasit!
" A cry of triumph, or of sympathy.

It was as if she had made a gash in my breath. From under her blanket she drew out a tiny scissors with rounded tips: a child's scissors. I recognized it from a doll's toiletry set that lay in the tumble of Waltraut's new toys. The little scissors was, I saw, the natural corollary of Schrödinger's equation, the logical ghost that follows science—if Jane Austen can be shredded and scattered, if James's bedding can be snipped into snowflakes, it is to formulate a proof: that the lightning electrons are everywhere at once, that the particles are both cause and effect, that nothing has shape or stasis, that thought itself is merely flux, that history seeps and seeps and never sleeps; and that James, even James, can be driven out.

I marveled at how placid she had become, and how her eyes stood out like oil-darkened knots in wood. She leaned across the ruined breakfast and touched my face; it was a kind of experiment, an investigation. It was the first touch I had ever had from her. Was it because she supposed my father too was an enemy of James? But she was mistaken: my father had gambled with James and won. On the other hand, if he had been permitted to win...

"Now I will say to you," she pressed, "two beliefs. One is for silence, the other not. My husband believes that Heinz is not his son. Consequently he loves him. And this James,
dieser'Säufer!
He believes he is Karaite. Consequently he loves my husband. Now you will understand,
nicht wahr?
"

I asked which belief was for silence.

"Ach," she said, "my husband's darlings, the fireflies."

The fireflies were the Karaites. They glittered for their little hour, and then they vanished. This she told me with so much obsessive intelligence that it was confirmed she was purely a scientist. The electrons were imagined, yet they were efficacious and plausible. The Karaites were not, so why speak of them, why give one's lifeblood to them, why depend on them? Why not drive them out?

25

A
T FIRST
the Bear Boy loved the pictures his father made. He stood behind his father's drawing board, and saw how the watercolors, pale and magical, flooded the sinews of the drawings. He watched himself slowly bloom into being: it was himself, a furry-haired boy, posed as his father had had him pose, sitting on a branch, say, or poking a stick into a puddle, or painting a face on an onion, all those curious ideas his father had about what he liked to do. He really did like to do some of them, he really did like painting a nose and a mouth on an onion with its funny topknot, and he didn't much mind the blouses his mother sewed, and he didn't care about the long bangs, he could push them away.... At first he loved the pictures, and he was interested in the strange way the stories grew out of his father's seeming to study him, though he didn't like feeling studied, and he didn't like the double buckles on his shoes, and he didn't like it that his mother rouged his knees to please his father's eye when he was sketching. His father was always sketching and always fiddling with the stories, inventing rhymes and words he would never say, never
could
say, and pretending that his mother's big old green hat could
talk,
when everyone knows a hat can't talk, even if you fold it, as his father did, into the shape of giant green lips. He didn't like being studied, and he didn't like having his knees rouged, and sometimes even his cheeks, but still something exciting was happening, that was clear, and one morning—his mother was
very
excited—his father put into his hands a pretty little book with a picture of the green hat on the cover, and himself curled inside it. "Well!" his father said. "There you are!" It wasn't an ordinary book, it was like no other book in the house or in the world, his mother explained, because it had Arrived From The Publisher and his father had Written and Illustrated it.

After that there was much more excitement, with the doorbell clanging, and people gathering at the gate and looking in the windows to see if anyone was inside, to see if
he
was inside, and new grownups everywhere, strangers, someone to Answer The Letters and someone else to Take Care Of him, though he wanted only his mother, who smelled thrillingly of cigarette, he never wanted his father, who needed him to stand still and pose, with his bangs all the way down in front of his eyes and making a blur, and suddenly there was a Gardener, and his mother said how nice it was that they now had Means, his father was Famous and he was Famous too, but what was Famous?

He was five then, and when he was six two bad things crept in: he stopped being Jimmy because all the people who were reading the stories to their children (there were thousands of them, his mother said) had begun to think of him as the A'Bair Boy, which got to be the Bear Boy, and the second bad thing was he had to go to school and learn to read, and in school everyone called him the Bear Boy, as if he was a stuffed animal you took to bed, or as if he was exactly the same as the pictures his father made, and not a real boy. Also there was a third bad thing: he did learn to read, and when he was seven—by then half a dozen of his father's storybooks had Arrived From The Publisher—he could read them himself; and he hated them, because his father
in the books
was naming him the Bear Boy, and he felt (and he was right) that he would never be Jimmy again, he would have to be the Bear Boy in buckled shoes and long bangs and flounced collars all the rest of his life, like a Raggedy Andy doll that never changed its clothes. Toys were nothing to him now, he had heaps of toys, he had trains and a dozen large and small Raggedy Andys, and trucks and cars and a wooden milk wagon with a wooden horse to pull it and a fort filled with lead soldiers in different uniforms and an Indian tent. For a little while he even had a doll house; it was the only toy he truly cared for. And he was ashamed of his knees.

But he knew he was Important; that is what Famous means. His father, who made up the stories and painted the pictures, was the Famous One really—his mother told him this—and the woman who Took Care Of him told him the same, the woman whose neck hung down all on its own and was all wrinkly, like an empty cloth bag; still, it wasn't his father they came to photograph, it was the Bear Boy. They picked out three or four of his toys (his toys were becoming public things, like swings in the park) and sat him down in the middle of these and called him the Bear Boy and tried to get him to laugh. He never laughed for them, and that seemed to increase his Importance. "A small grave face under blinding bangs," someone described him (it was in the rotogravure section of a newspaper), which was how his father now began to draw him, so that the later books showed him to be Solemn, and Solemn looked Preternaturally Wise, and Preternaturally Wise was Delightfully Whimsical. And they had to take him out of school, he was too Famous for school, he was in danger of being kidnapped (though this was kept from him), so he had to be Educated At Home, which is how
The Bear Boy from Apiary to Zedoary
arose, the eleventh of the series and the most colorful, with flower and animal decorations framing each page, and the silly green hat singing:

Apiary's bees.
Aviary's birds.
Zedoary's petals.
Those are words
To make you sneeze
Among the golden kettles,

and here was the Bear Boy kneeling beside the green hat on his rosy knees, with a miniature golden kettle nearby, and another one dangling from a tree. An owl perched on his left shoulder, while overhead a big orange sun, petals all around its face, was being showered with bees. The Bear Boy knew that the kettles had been inspired by teapots (altered to kettles for the rhyme), because the Bear Boy's mother—now that they had Means—had acquired several lavish tea sets, china with gold rims, and sugar bowls and creamers and fat round gold-rimmed pots for tea leaves. Oh, they had Means!

It was all right until he was ten, and endurable when he was eleven, but at twelve he had glimmers of a certain oddness, not the usual oddness, he recognized (how could he not?) that his life was different from the lives of other boys, that only he was Important, the others plainly weren't, and he knew that he was bound to be stared at, though the photographers had gone away and his wrist bones were beginning to stretch the sleeves of his blouses. At fourteen he grew an Adam's apple, and the glimmer of oddness darkened into a dread. It was a dread of everything; it was a dread of living. He understood that there would be no escape, he would always carry the mark of the Bear Boy, he would have to carry it into old age; when he was forty they would say of him, "Look at that fellow, he's the Bear Boy all grown up," and when he was seventy they would say, "
That
was the Bear Boy, can you imagine?"

In January of the year he was sixteen, his mother went out of doors with her cigarette and caught cold, and the cold invaded her lungs; she coughed wildly for a month and of course began to get better, she seemed well enough, but then all at once succumbed. He was alone with his father and his father's drawing board. He was no use to his father, he was too tall, his father sketched from photographs, the stories were coaxed out of the air, they were woven of air, they turned more and more Whimsical, and the boy in the pictures was still five years old, and meanwhile the Bear Boy was enameled, he was immortal, though his author was not—so that one day, three years after his mother's death, the Boston
Herald
ran a half-page notice with this headline:

JAMES PHILIP A'BAIR, SR., 68,
AUTHOR-ARTIST,
CREATOR OF TALES BELOVED
BY CHILDREN WORLD-WIDE

But the Bear Boy did not go under the earth with his creator. The Bear Boy could not perish, he had voyaged into too many languages, he went on and on, furry-haired and solemn-eyed, Preternaturally Wise and Whimsical, equipped with his Jellydrop spell and his bouncing multisyllabic verses. In Germany he was second in sales only to
Emil und die Detektive,
in Great Britain and all its colonies he vied with Beatrix Potter. He turned up in Italy and France and the Low Countries, and even (clandestinely) in the newly founded Soviet Union, where his dress was vilified and he was denounced as an idle aristocrat.

The Bear Boy wrote bitterly in the margin of the notice in the
Herald:

APIARY
AVIARY
ZEDOARY
MORTUARY!

—or else he did not actually write this in the margin, though he had intended to, instead he sang it meanly to himself in the green hat's voice, meanly, because now all the Means, the plentiful horns of plenty, were spilling over him, the Bear Boy had become an Estate (royalties unending, royalties into the far, far future!), and he was its Inheritor. He was the possessor of everything he loathed; he was the possessor of what his father had made of him. Whatever he had been in the purity-time of his birth, whatever he was meant to become, his father had overlaid with embellishment: with lie and impurity. He did not speak in verses. The games his father devised were not his games. The Jellydrop spell was a fabrication. Even his clothing, the blouses, the socks as high as his knees, the double-buckled shoes, the
rouge
—all a romantic imagining. Even his hair! And when it developed that he was somewhat shortsighted and in need of eyeglasses (the woman who Took Care Of him had discovered this), he was certainly supplied with the glasses, but denied the relief of wearing them too often: the pale oval of the Bear Boy's small face, as innocent as an empty plate, was not to be cluttered; so he lived with blur, the blur of the long bangs tickling his eyelids, and the blur of mild myopia. He knew himself to be an appurtenance: the offspring of the impostor who animated his father's books. He was not a normal boy, he was his father's drawing, his father's discourse, his father's exegesis of a boy. His father had created a parallel boy; his father had interpreted him for the world. The Bear Boy was never himself. He was his father's commentary on his body and brain.