Heir to the Glimmering World (31 page)

—But a juggler...

—is a philosopher of time.

—Of timing, he emended.

—No, she said, time. The instant the ball leaves the juggler's hand it descends into the past, and the next instant it's already on its way to his receiving it in the present. It's what
you
do, Rudi!

She was inventing an allegory, to please him. An allegorical portrait, why not?

—And that parchment down there, she went on, you see?

—An open scroll, yes.

—A Karaite treatise, she teased. And that white ball, like an eye let loose?

—A lost chance, he said, entering into the game.

—No! A lost history. The juggler retrieves it and restores it...

—Silly little Elsa, he said. The game was too elaborate; it was too eccentric; why was she flattering him?—Here, he told her, I've got something for you too.

He had brought her a necklace, a string of reddish stones, and for the child a magnifying glass with a pearl stem. The enforced stay in the south had allowed him the opportunity to look for such trifles. The child went peering at every small object on his desk; she was fonder of the magnifier than of the rocking horse.

The painting was not a success. His wife had hoped it would amuse him.

—We must give the governess something, he reminded her.

—I already have.

He kissed her then, with the hungry heat of their separation—he exploring a distant archive for his elusive Egyptian, she cozily at rest with the child, once or twice venturing out in her pretty boots to reconnoiter shop after shop, seeking the very thing that would gratify him. It was too odd for his taste, it was too "original," and it obliged him to interpret, as if a picture was the same as philology. His enchantingly brilliant wife and her perplexing ideas! He hung the reddish stones around her neck. His hand on her neck, the heat of his kiss—they foretold the night to come. He longed for a house filled with children; it was almost six years since the birth of Anneliese, surely they must begin to build a family? But she was reluctant. She wanted her laboratory; she wanted her notebooks with their esoteric markings.

And she thought: The juggler is a failure. The rocking horse is a failure.

And in the night she thought: Rudi's mouth is not like Erwin's mouth.

Heinrich was born in the autumn, in November, when there occurred a falling-out with Mademoiselle De Bonrepos, a clandestine quarrel that could not be repaired. Mademoiselle De Bonrepos had suffered a reprimand, and all at once a new governess for Anneliese appeared, a red-haired young widow named Madame Mercier, and a nanny for the new baby. Anneliese asked why Mademoiselle De Bonrepos had gone away; there was no explanation. Her papa looked to the side, and her mother only said it was necessary, and that there are some things not for a little girl to understand. But Anneliese understood this much: Mademoiselle De Bonrepos must have done something bad, or she would not have been sent away.

And in fact Mademoiselle De Bonrepos
had
done something bad; she had transgressed in some grave and shadowy manner, the cause of which was hidden and unrecoverable. Anneliese tried to imagine what the bad thing might have been. Mademoiselle De Bonrepos had permitted Anneliese to catch an October chill (but it was Anneliese herself who had refused to put on her coat). Mademoiselle De Bonrepos had advised the new nanny to complain about her wages (Anneliese had overheard this), and now the new nanny was petulant and discontent. Mademoiselle De Bonrepos had shouted an unacceptable word at the cook when the cook had neglected to serve her the dessert of glacéed pears (and it was the very word Mademoiselle De Bonrepos had cautioned Anneliese never to utter).

Perhaps it was one of these bad things, or all of them together, that had prompted the reprimand. Or perhaps it was something else. The reprimand was delivered by Anneliese's mother early one morning, when tiny Heinrich awoke with a raucous scream and the nanny was downstairs in the kitchen, interrogating the cook about the cook's wages. Mademoiselle De Bonrepos was stung and humiliated; she protested; the reprimand was repeated, this time more stringently, in German-accented French. And now Mademoiselle De Bonrepos was not merely stung and humiliated, she was furious. That same day she requested a private interview with Professor Mitwisser—"No, Anneliese, you may not go to your papa now, please wait outside, over there"—and whispered to him that last winter, during the holiday time, when the Institute was idle, his wife had crept away with her valise and had not crept back until after New Year's.

Anneliese stood at the door, listening.

—But she was here. With the child. Here, in this house.

—No, sir. She was not.

—If she went out at all, it was to shop for the holiday...

—She was away for ten days.

—Impossible. Ten days?

—Yes, sir. Ten.

—Where?

—Switzerland.

—Switzerland! Impossible! Alone?

—I can't say, sir. I wouldn't know.

And after that Mademoiselle De Bonrepos was made to vanish, just as suddenly as if a magician had thrown a magic cloak over her, and then the new nanny was made to vanish too, replaced by another new nanny, and Madame Mercier (whose hair was exactly the color of Anneliese's favorite red-orange fur muff) arrived, and Anneliese's papa stared at the papers on his desk, and Anneliese's mother left the house for her laboratory without speaking to anyone.

Somehow, she did not know why, Anneliese believed that the trouble between her papa and her mother—there
was
a kind of trouble—had come about because of Heinrich. Heinrich was behind all of it. Or if it wasn't Heinrich really, it might have been the painting of the juggler. How queer it was that her papa had such a distaste for the juggler! He liked all their other paintings well enough, why did he look the other way when he passed this one? It was on the wall alongside the others, why did he look away? On second thought (Anneliese decided), Heinrich couldn't be the reason for the trouble: her papa liked him too much. He liked Heinrich, he liked all the other paintings (not that he took any particular notice of any of them), and it was only the juggler that made him bend his head as if one of the flying spheres had been catapulted out of the painting to bloody him between the eyes. Her papa liked Heinrich. He liked Anneliese. He liked his children, and after a while the trouble went away, or hid itself, and Gerhardt was born, and then Wilhelm, and then Waltraut. Her papa liked all of them, but sometimes it seemed to Anneliese that he liked Heinrich best of all. Heinrich, when he got bigger, could fix almost anything on her papa's desk that her papa's thick clumsy hands happened to break. Once, too vigorously blotting his great splash of a signature on a document with the University seal at the top, her papa broke off the blotter's ivory handle (the horse-handle), and Heinrich mended it so artfully that the seam of the rupture couldn't be detected. And another time he found two discarded old luggage straps and out of them contrived a pair of reins for the Gräfin's rocking horse. By then it was Wilhelm who rode it.

But every so often—so Anneliese imagined—her papa would bend his head away from Heinrich as he bent his head from the juggler, almost as though Heinrich was wounding him in the same unsettling way.

"Anneliese, when she is a little child," Mrs. Mitwisser told me, "she knows. Already she knows."

Proudly she caressed the long scar on her breast, raised like a row of miniature berries.

I asked, "What became of the painting?"

Her heated look wheeled up to the ceiling.

"Fritz," she said finally. But her voice was flat. "He is thief," she said in this flat mindless voice. Swarms of thieves; she was engulfed. Her eyes turned muddy and glintless. Then, inexplicably, she let out a quick laugh. Who knew if Fritz had taken the juggler? This oafish Fritz, an oaf, a lout, he could not tell the difference between sterling and plate, she had fooled him about the picture frame, perhaps he had left the others hanging there, the landscapes, the portrait of her grandfather, a small Renoir, suppose he had left the precious Renoir and carried away the juggler, and what was the juggler if not some insignificant imitation Surrealist kitsch? She had bought it to please Rudi; to tease him a little, too, because he cared for nothing but his Karaites, these fireflies that winked out their little lights and were given over to the dark of the world. And after a while the juggler (whose painted irises were as fiercely blue as Rudi's) did not please her husband at all, thanks to Madame De Bonrepos's tale-telling—oh, good riddance to the woman! Rudi was indifferent to art anyhow, Rudi was narrow, narrow, it was always the fireflies, but Erwin was replete, Erwin was copious, he spilled over
(ein sehr gebildeter Mann!),
he loved Goethe, as she did, and he loved botany, as she did (he had a habit of mooning over plants, reflecting on their phylogeny), he was hypnotized by art, yes, yes, Italian painting especially! And when they threw him out, when they threw out Erwin Schrödinger just a month after she herself was thrown out, after Rudi was thrown out of the University, where do you think Erwin ran to? To Italy! To the paintings!

Erwin was luckier than her poor Rudi. Rudi was saved—"saved," what was that?—by a Quaker college in provincial Albany in barren America, what sort of rescue was that? Now he is nothing, he is
Parasit,
her poor Rudi. But Erwin was summoned to Oxford.

"He is there in 1933 one week, and what comes? They give to him the Nobel! Together with Paul Dirac, the little Englishman with the crooked teeth!"

She was becoming excited. Waltraut, playing in the hallway just within sight—dressing and undressing the Spanish doll with the high comb in its black hair—felt the danger of it, and began to shriek.

On the floor below a door slapped open in wild anger. Professor Mitwisser called up: "You! Fräulein! What is this chaos you are making? Take care of my wife! Take care of the child!"

From under her pillow, with shaking fingers, Mrs. Mitwisser drew out a pencil (a dirty stub escaped from a boy's schoolbag) and a shred of paper. It was a corner of a page from the torn-up
Sense and Sensibility.
Weeks ago it had evaded my broom. On this scrap she wrote, slowly, patiently, gleefully, with all her fragile force pounding downward, as if carving on cold stone:

3.2983.10
^-24
cal./°C. log D

I asked what it meant; what was "D"?

The formula for entropy, she told me; for disorder; for (and here she amazed me by enunciating these syllables in English, with unmistakable clarity) "thermodynamical equilibrium." The "D," she said, stood for Death—what else did I think it could be?

48

Dear Rose,

The postmark will say Batavia, but we are not in that place anymore. We have been to see Niagara Falls! James does everything for me, he takes me everywhere. In an auto! James bought it, it is a black Ford. Riding in the buses made me so tired. I wish papa did not mind so much. I know that papa minds. When I say to James, I wish papa did not mind so much, then he becomes quite sad. He cares so much for papa. He is sad so often.

If the boys are having holes in their socks, you must mend them. But also you may buy new socks from the dry goods shop. Waltraut likes to go there too. You may buy her a pink ribbon. I hope mama is well.

Anneliese

When this second letter arrived, many-stamped and heavy with its packet, I thought I could no longer delay informing Professor Mitwisser.

I began: "The money for the house is here."

His white face was a barricade. He said nothing.

"There was another letter a while ago, with more money. Though not as much as now."

I handed him both letters. He glanced at them too rapidly—but I knew he had taken them in—and returned them.

"An accident, her mother bleeds, and my daughter is not in the house."

"She couldn't know—"

"Exactly. Because she is not in the house."

I said dimly, helplessly, "But look how happy she seems—"

"What is this folly? Happy! The man buys my daughter, I myself sold the man my daughter! For the money!"

I had never before heard Professor Mitwisser speak of money. He held up two roughened fists, like a pugilist, but aimlessly. There was nothing to strike—only the soft ocean of his manuscripts.

"It wasn't for the money she went with him," I said.

"Ignorance! My daughter is ignorant and the man is godless."

I did not believe Anneliese was ignorant. What I believed was that she had set out for the secret place where the rocking horses were, like her mother long ago.

49

A
T FIRST
he could not tell what to make of her. She was a child like the others—a silent child, a child who had been trained to reticence. A hush wound itself around this family like a vapor, or like a floating veil. They
were
a family, unmistakably: in the breakfast parlor at the William Penn he had recognized it instantly—not so much a huddling as a separate-ness, even a hauteur. The father, the weak mother, the phalanx of children. The tall silent aloof girl. The boys, the small child—these in time might be weaned from the orderly silence of that foreign house. Refugees. A house under the spell of exile. Those minuscule glintings in the girl's ears—were they fake (he didn't think so), or had they escaped being torn from the tender flesh? Pale round ears, sweetly visible under the two coiled braids.

When he came to them—when Mitwisser let him in—the girl was just under fourteen, long-legged and watchful. She sat close to him, hugging her dictionary; her ears were secret labyrinths. Her eyes too were secretive: she knew what no child could know. She knew things, she had seen things. He imagined himself weightless, treading phantomlike on the velvety lobe lit by that tiny jewel, and leaping from this soft perch into the dusky corridor of her ear, tunneling deeper and deeper, until he sank into the darkness of her mind. She was watchful; she was suspicious. It seemed to him—modestly compliant though she was—that she perceived him to be a sham: not a teacher, not a tutor, not anything like that, and it was plain she didn't mind. Instead she took him for a kind of wizard—erupting out of the blue, transforming her brothers into suddenly untamed creatures, free as they never would have been at home, as her papa would never have permitted them to be at home—but here everything was different, looser, stranger. There was an uncanniness even in the Albany light, as if another sun could reign in another part of the world. She watched him with a cautious gladness, how he was so inquisitive about her papa, how he was drawn to her papa; what was it that drew him? Her papa's people belonged to her papa's domain; no one but her papa had studied so much about them; at home he was bowed to and fussed over for having studied so much about them. At home they compared him to the man who had uncovered the ruins of Troy: his name was Heinrich Schliemann, he was in her history book, and her papa had named
their
Heinrich after him. But here her papa was hardly noticed at all, no one had ever heard of Rudolf Mitwisser, or even of Heinrich Schliemann. Everything was different here: Troy was a place not far from Albany! She was certain that the tutor—he said to call him James—had never heard of the real Troy, or Heinrich Schliemann, or her papa's people. All she knew of her papa's people was that they believed in God. She wasn't sure if anyone in her family believed in God. Perhaps her papa did, but her mother scoffed and said that the universe was made of tiny atoms, tinier than the tiniest seeds, and that God had nothing to do with how they behaved. Her mother understood how they behaved. She kept notebooks about them, and went every day to the Kaiser Wilhelm to do experiments about them. Her papa didn't care so much about the atoms—her papa cared only for his long-ago people. It was impossible to think that James would care about papa's people, they were so old and long-ago; but one day he took off his glasses and rubbed the lenses with his thumb and said that sometimes he nearly felt like one of them.