Part 63 (2/2)

”Pettigrew,” Enoch said. ”He got it from his little girl and would have upstaged the coup with it if the Russians hadn't upstaged everything already with the Sputnik. You see?” he said. ”There's Nick again-translated to the heavens. He sails the sea of the sky in his spy-gla.s.s. Do you grieve?” he insisted, fixing me colorlessly, lazily.

”She knew him two days!” my mother shouted.

”And two nights. She knew him. Do you grieve? She grieves.” He said, ”I knew him, he didn't believe in himself.”

”Didn't he though? Arrogant as they come,” my mother said. ”He had more self-confidence than anyone alive.”

”True. What I mean is he didn't believe he was alive. Like few men, like all solipsists, he doubted his existence by declaring it Most of us declare it by doubting it. A Chinese philosopher dreamed he was a b.u.t.terfly. When he woke he said: Am I a man dreaming I am a b.u.t.terfly, or am I a b.u.t.terfly dreaming I am a man?”

”Enoch, go to h.e.l.l,” my mother said.

”That's hard, you're hard on Pettigrew. Any good Democrat would have done the same. He saw his opportunity-if you find tar on your brush you use it”

She wailed at him, ”What's going to happen?”

”Observe. For all future appointments the Administration will be asking for references from the chast.i.ty-belt manufacturers. Or else the Senate may confirm a whole row of nuns for Amba.s.sadors. The Administration,” he ended, ”is smeared.”

”And us! Us. Smeared,” my mother said.

”Freed.”

”I don't believe in freedom,” and sat herself down on Enoch's suitcase, and said nothing more. But she seemed to be listening, not to him. It was as if she was listening to the hairs of her head grow and prosper, to a.s.sure herself of life.

24.

Six stamps displaying Oriental jugs; a letter postmarked s.h.i.+karpur, Pakistan: It was your father. Purse read it out to me from the paper, which is rather expensive in the overseas edition. What a surprise! Well, my dear, even a Purse swallows the blunder, since ident.i.ty is everything in life, isn't it?-Which is why every Purse has its ident.i.ty card. (We don't like to risk losing the children in a heathen land.) Purse says it was almost like accusing you of a certain sin expressly forbidden, which I won't mention by name. We are all hoping very much that you will forgive us, the children especially hope so. Except for Gandhi they are all now quite proficient in kitchen-Urdu, also Harriet Beecher can say water-buffalo, though it's been only a little more than a month, but they want to be remembered to you in Englis.h.!.+

If we can be of any moral help to you in your deep sorrow and loss do let us know. Purse is rather busy with his bones, but he begs you to trust in the solace of the Lord, Whose ways are inscrutable. He giveth and He taketh. We are all borrowers from G.o.d's purse. Th.o.r.eau in particular sends you special regards. He asks me to tell you that he's proud of having been oarsman for an actual symbol of American Affluence. (We're now all very conscious of home values, you see.) He knew it all the time! He never mentioned a word to us, but now he keeps boasting that you told him about your mother and her great position in the world. He even quotes you verbatim as having said she is ”extraordinarily rich.” Of course he always exaggerates, and Purse has made him recognize that it's his chief vice to blow things up to make himself sound important. But in this case it wasn't hyperbole, was it? To think you're actually the daughter of Allegra Vand!

What happened in the past between her and your father (to think Mr. T. was your father all the time! may he R.I.P.), not that we believe everything in the overseas edition, it probably comes over all diluted, but surely your mother has by now compensated for anything she may once have been sorry for by acts of charity and philanthropy, which are a privilege of the affluent alone. Mr. T.'s pa.s.sing may very well have renewed old regrets in her heart, and nothing discharges remorse so much as discharging one's duty and one's purse.

We Purses hope you will not discharge us from the care of your memory, my dear, though our acquaintance was so brief. Still, our mutual reverence for Mr. T. binds us irrevocably. He was always very generous with us, and this is a land where generosity is necessary. You should see the poor pitiful cripples and orphans in the streets! Also you would be amazed at how much it costs Purse every day to get transportation out from s.h.i.+karpur to the dig. (The first group of bones, alas, has proved to be marsupial.) There are two abandoned automobiles piled up nearby, both in a condition of incomparable disrepair, and I am hoping to work out some kind of rapprochement between the engine of the one on top and the body of the (me on bottom. You would not believe the cost of spare parts here!

It is also very expensive to keep a special nurse for Gandhi, who has become utterly uncontrollable in the new environment. He likes to run around with all the wild little Mohammedans, who have unfortunately taught him to say Allah. There is a mosque nearby, and he is continually running away to it. We thank G.o.d Purse's Ford wasn't for India instead, where there are polytheists of the most primitive sort.

Well, let us hear from you, my dear. If your very kind mother in her present reevaluations feels the moral need to express herself in good works, and/or should you be desirous of following in the very lovely tradition of generosity your memorable father established toward us, you may trust to our most profound and exuberant grat.i.tude. (On the enclosed sheet please find all the children's clothing sizes, including underwear. They like bright colors, except George Fox, though Purse doesn't approve. However I must ask you to ignore the notations for Gandhi. Since our arrival in the East we cannot get him to keep a st.i.tch on. We've never had a nude child before-Purse of course is very upset-and we are prayerful that it is only the sudden change in the drinking water. As you will understand, under the circ.u.mstances his nurse had to be a male one, unusual for these parts, but the young man himself is unusual and quite good-looking in spite of dark skin.) Hoping to hear from you, With best wishes,

(Mrs.) Ethel Purse

25.

Postcard displaying head of an American President, postmarked San Francisco, California: Dear Mme. Karenina, I quit.

Love,

Vronsky

26.

Telegram, Western Union, collect:.

ALLEGRA DID YOU GET MY POSTCARD HAVE MOVED IN WITH GREATAUNT OF MY MOTHERS I RAN INTO OUT HERE SHE WAS TWENTY THREE LAST MAY SORRY TO LEAVE YOU IN EDITORIAL LURCH PLEASE FEEL FREE TO USE MY THREE RECENT HAIKUS IN BUSHEL BASKET WITHOUT CHARGE AS SINCERE TOKEN OF MY REGRET FAITHFULLY YOURS EDWARD MCGOVERN FORMER EDITOR IN CHIEF BUSHEL BASKET PEE YES NEVER SELL OUT TO COMMAS.

27.

My mother was right. Enoch stayed in bed until four o'clock in the afternoon for three months. Meanwhile my mother traveled. The first day of the fourth month my stepfather rose up and announced he was going to read the Bible. And he did. He read the King James all the way through. Then he began taking lessons in Hebrew from a refugee my mother imported from Oslo. She had met him in the art museum there on one of her trips. The number tattooed on Enoch's teacher's forearm was daily covered by phylacteries. He had a beard, like a spy. Under the refugee's tutelage Enoch read the Bible all the way through in Hebrew. It took him three years. The refugee shaved off his beard, having by then gotten the hang of America; he did not wish to be mistaken for a bohemian. He was a serious and lyrical man. He abandoned his phylacteries. At the end of that time Enoch began the study of the Ethics of the Fathers. It was an easy book and took two months. Then he asked for the whole Talmud.

Where I was and what I did during that period I will not tell; I went to weddings. But my mother traveled. Once she flew to the country where she was to have been chatelaine of the Emba.s.sy. Even from the outside the Emba.s.sy was glorious. Its pillars were resplendent. All the same she thought little of that place: she did not like the tune of its official language.

Pelham Bay, The Bronx, 1957-Echo Bay, New Roch.e.l.le, 1963.

Afterword.

On November 22, 1963, the day President John Kennedy was a.s.sa.s.sinated, I wrote the last words of Trust, my first novel. I had begun it while still in my twenties, and finished it seven years later. In actuality there had been two ”first” novels before then-the earlier one never completed, though it had already acc.u.mulated three hundred thousand words. I had planned it as a ”philosophical” fiction; in graduate school I had come under the influence of Eliseo Vivas, at the time a well-known professor of philosophy, and with his character and views in mind, I named my protagonist Rafael Caritas. His antagonist, as I conceived it (the metaphysical versus the pragmatic), was a man of the type of Sidney Hook, a legendary figure in my undergraduate days at New York University: in my aborted novel he was called Seymour Karp. It never occurred to me-I learned it painfully years afterward-that it might be perilous to import real persons into fiction. My idea was to confront Pa.s.sion with Reason. Of course I sided with Pa.s.sion (I was twenty-two), which explained why a stanza from one of William Blake's ”Songs of Innocence” supplied the t.i.tle: Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love. (”For Mercy has a human heart, / Pity a human face, / And Love, the human form divine, / And Peace, the human dress.”) Rafael Caritas consumed years before he, or I, ran out of philosophical steam. Vivas's devotion to what he termed Neo-Thomism had befuddled me; so did his lectures on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. What was even more confounding, though, was his fury at the Nuremberg trials. The men in the dock were wicked beyond wicked, he raged-but the Allied tribunal was wicked too: it stood for victors' justice. Then what should be done with these murderous miscreants? Punish them, Vivas said, according to a practice not unknown in certain parts of his native South America: bury each man up to his neck in earth, and send riders at a gallop to trample the exposed heads. It was an argument worthy of Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor. Vivas, even when he was jovially avuncular, as he sometimes was, intimidated me: his black hair, slicked back, gleamed like shoe polish; his foreign rasp had a demonic twist; his cla.s.sroom manner was a roar. Rafael Caritas was far tamer.

Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love was slowly proceeding (though without the hors.e.m.e.n), pullulating with new characters I could hardly fathom or control. No resolution was anywhere in sight when I came, one afternoon, on a seductive announcement in one of the little magazines (as the plethora of serious quarterly journals was then styled). A publisher was soliciting short novels. Short! The word-the idea-captivated. Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love was winding on and on, like a Mobius strip: where was its end? As a kind of interim project, I set out to write a short novel. It turned out to be a long one. It turned out to be Trust.

But Trust too wound on and on. All around me writers of my generation were publis.h.i.+ng; I was not. I held it as an article of faith that if you had not attained print by twenty-five, you were inexorably marked by a scarlet F-for Folly, for Futility, for Failure. It was a wretched and envious time. I knew a writer my own age, as confident as he was industrious, who had recently completed a novel in six weeks. I was determined to emulate his feat. I threw the already ma.s.sive Trust into a drawer and started a fresh ma.n.u.script-my second ”first” novel; in a month and a half it was done. It had exhausted me, but I was also relieved and elated: I had finally finished a novel. It disappeared decades ago-lost, I believe, in the dust of a London publisher's cellar. A carbon copy (how obsolete these words are!) may be languis.h.i.+ng in my own cellar, but I have never troubled to look for it; dead is dead. And the speedy writer I was mimicking-or hoping to rival-never published that or any other novel.

Three years elapsed between the completion of Trust and its appearance in print. I filled the void by writing short stories and teaching freshman composition to engineering students; but mainly I was waiting. The editor who had accepted my ma.n.u.script explained that he would soon supply ”suggestions.” Secretly I dreaded these-I had labored over every syllable for all those seven years-but I was wedded to diffidence and grat.i.tude, and clearly my unpublished condition was subordinate to the editor's will, and certainly to his more pressing preoccupations. As it happened, I had acquired an agent along the way-an agent just starting out, living obscurely in a Manhattan bas.e.m.e.nt. He had read a poem of mine in a literary quarterly, had discovered that a novel was ”in progress,” and offered to represent me. It was in a letter to him, after six months had pa.s.sed and no suggestions were forthcoming, that I complained of the editor's silence. ”I see you have clay feet,” the agent wrote back, reprimanding me for untoward impatience. Another twelve months followed, and still no word from the editor. At last I made an anguished appeal, and was rewarded with a reply. He was working, the editor said, on an important book by a professor at Harvard (his name was Henry Kissinger); nevertheless he would set aside half an hour for me. He hadn't been neglectful of my ma.n.u.script, he a.s.sured me-on the contrary, for an entire year he had been compiling a long list of notes for the improvement of my novel.

The publisher's offices struck me as industrial-so many elevators, so many corridors, so many mazes and cubicles. I found the cubicle I had been directed to and looked in. There sat the editor, with a typewriter on an open leaf beside him; there on a big littered desk lay the familiar box containing my ma.n.u.script. I watched him insert a sheet of yellow paper into the machine and begin to type. ”Come in,” he said, seeing me hesitant in the doorway. I continued to watch him type, and all at once understood that there was no long list of notes; there had never been any notes at all; he was at that moment conjuring a handful of impromptu comments out of the air. For this I had been kept in a vise of anxiety for a year and a half.

Not long afterward, the editor, a young man still in his thirties, fell dead of a heart attack on the tennis court. Another editor took his place, and quickly put before me the first hundred pages of Trust, scribbled all over in red pencil. The famous suggestions! A meek pet.i.tioner facing power, I knew by now that I must succ.u.mb-I must please the new editor, or lose the chance of publication. My decision was instant. I declined every stroke of his red pencil. I believed in Art; I believed, above all, in the autonomy of Art; and for the sake of this sacral conviction I chose my novel's oblivion. Better oblivion than an alien fingerprint! To my astonishment, the new editor agreed to publish Trust exactly as I had written it. His name was David Segal, and like the editor who had hoodwinked me, he too died young. As for the hoodwinker, I long refused the ameliorative de mortuis nil nisi bonum: of the dead let nothing bad be said. Yet David Segal, as long as he lived, was wont to dismiss the good I repeatedly said of him: ”You think I'm a great editor,” he accused me, ”because I never edited you.”

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