Heir to the Glimmering World (6 page)

And it was. I was certain that I would never see the two of them again. I shoved
Sense and Sensibility
and
Hard Times
down among my slips and underpants. I had read them both long ago, and understood that Ninel regarded the one as an affront to herself and as a reprimand to me, and the other as a stern endorsement (in sugar-pill form) of her own insurgent outlook. My small store had nearly doubled. I had kept the unwieldy compendium of seventeenth-century Dutch paintings I had won for writing the best eighth-grade composition at Thrace Elementary ("But can you add two and two?" my father had remarked on that occasion); and also the pale little
Manifesto
Bertram had pressed on me; and here were Ninel's parting shots. Besides these and a dictionary, I had only the old-fashioned children's book my father had strangely preserved.

A meager cache; and then I was engulfed by an oceanic library of negation and mutiny, volume upon esoteric volume, a limitless kingdom of books—not one of which I could penetrate. The libraries of Thrace and of Troy, the weathered Carnegie brownstone of Albany, and even the fabled library at Alexandria, burned to the ground two thousand years before, could not have imagined what lay in Professor Rudolf Mitwisser's boxes.

7

T
HE DAY OF THE MOVE
brought relentless rain. The household was up early; breakfast was scanty and cold, since the kettle had been packed and the ice for the icebox canceled. Professor Mitwisser could be heard upstairs, pleading with Mrs. Mitwisser to put on her street clothes. The plan was for all of us to go by train, while the van containing the Mitwisser possessions proceeded on its own. Anneliese was preoccupied with shouting orders to the boys, who ran upstairs and down, saying goodbye to the house. There was one last jump from the
Kleiderschrank
—shrieks from Anneliese, and "
Indianer!
" from Professor Mitwisser—and another shower of plaster chips over the parlor sofa, where I had lain sleepless most of the night, rehearsing every uncertainty I could think of. Leaving Albany, where at least there had been Bertram, felt obscurely unsafe.

The boys dashing here and there, the four wiry moving men appearing and disappearing on their route to the van and back again, the thumps and bumps of the heavier articles, the odd small cries of resistance bleated out by Mrs. Mitwisser as she came down the stairs carrying her shoes (which she was refusing to wear), had transformed mild little Waltraut into a frantic creature. She butted Anneliese like an angry goat; she ran after the boys, yowling.

"Get her out of the way," Anneliese commanded.

"But it's pouring. And all her things to play with are in the van."

"Do something this minute, or papa will come."

I caught Waltraut in the middle of a lurch and lifted her by the waist and tossed her on my sofa. She was panting furiously, like a dog after a chase. Half a chocolate bar was in my pocket; I gave it to her. Her black eyes swam with pleasure.

"There you are. Now you can be civilized again."

"
Nein,
" Waltraut said.

"I'll show you something if you're good." But I could not think what.

"
Nein
"—mechanically: she was attending to the chocolate.

"I know! I've got a nice old storybook. There might be a bear in it," and Waltraut said nothing, because when I said "bear" she heard "
Bär,
" and was all at once interested. I sat her on my lap and reached into the open suitcase on the floor and drew out the book that was my only inheritance, hoping for pictures of bears; but just then one of the boys rushed in to accuse me of malfeasance.

"You've got one left, they have to take it now! They have to take all the luggage now, they're leaving!"

"This one's coming on the train with me," I said. "They've already got the other."

"It's too big for the train."

"It's light enough. Now which one are you? Heinrich, isn't it?"

"Willi."

"
Bär,
" Waltraut reminded me.

Willi stared. "How funny you have that."

"Have what?"

"That story."

"Do you know it?"

"We used to read it all the time at home. When we were little."

"You mean over there, in Germany? You read it in German?"

"At home it's famous for little children. When we came he was our tutor. They rented him for us."

"
Bär!
" Waltraut insisted.

"Hired," I corrected, searching for some sense.

"He gave us English lessons, Gert and Heinz and me. Anneliese only a little bit, she could speak already."

"Who was it gave you lessons?"

"The boy from the story, only he wasn't anymore a boy."

"Willi!" Anneliese called. "Where are you? Papa wants you." She came into the parlor; her face was very red. "What are you doing here? You have to help look for mama's shoes, she hid them someplace." To me she said, "What have you done to Waltraut? She puts mud in her hair. And her hands!"

"It's chocolate," I said.

"
Lieber Gott.
Clean her up, please. The taxi is here, if we don't go now we miss the train."

8

T
HE NEW YORK
we came to was hardly the New York I had expected. I was disappointed and astonished. I knew the city only from picture postcards and the movies, and in the movies (no one ever said "film" in those years) the opening scenes of airy skyscrapers and streaming crowds were always accompanied by syncopations of ascending horns and jazzy excitements. To me, and to all the world, New York was the peopled channels of Manhattan, and tall skies where no birds flew. And hadn't Mrs. Mitwisser, in that distracted attempt at an interview, hinted that the very point of the move to New York was her husband's wish to be near "the big library"? The big library of New York was on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, fronted by two stone lions, like some Venetian palace. I had seen photographs of it.

The place we settled in had no big library. It had no library at all; it had nothing. Compared to Albany—or Troy, or even Thrace—it was an obscure little village in a remote corner of the sparse and weedy northeast Bronx. Strictly speaking, the Bronx was New York, or at least an official part of it; but I felt deceived. The subway line had only recently crawled to this huddle of small houses hemmed in by swamp and creek—and yet there was, despite the name, no subway either: rather, a raucous elevated track that further darkened the fly-specked stores below, and finally nosed its way underground toward Manhattan only after what seemed scores of miles. The true New York was far away. Infrequent trains—toys high up on a trestle—were our only conduit to the promised city. Where were we really? A modest bay flowing in from Long Island Sound, with a ragged fringe of mud and sand and seaweed-mantled rock, defined a neighborhood ringed by open fields: beyond the city's caring, and out of its sight. Here were uncombed meadows purpled and gilded by violets and dandelions, and the drooping heads, with their insectlike antlers, of wild tiger lilies.

Our house—rented and furnished—was one of a row of similar houses, with this difference: the others had two stories, ours had three. With a poor relation's imitation of suburban gratification, someone had added on a third floor, which stuck up absurdly, like a craning neck. Otherwise the house was identical to the few others on our street: stucco flanks, a stoop, a green front door leading directly into a sun parlor no bigger than a cube (where no sun could penetrate), cramped rooms. But the rooms were plentiful, thanks to the third floor, and within our first hour one of them—the largest, on the second floor and at the back—was designated as Professor Mitwisser's study, although it was clearly a bedroom. A wide bed stood against one wall. On the third floor, the three boys were distributed between two rooms; Gerhardt and Wilhelm took one, and Heinrich, the oldest, was put in with Waltraut. Anneliese had her own room on the second floor, across a narrow hall from her father. And on the third—she was still unfit for her husband's bed—I was made to join Mrs. Mitwisser.

By now I understood that the Mitwisser household held a secret: I thought it was Mrs. Mitwisser. She had sunk into an ongoing strangeness, something deeper than lethargy, and more perplexing. She was unwilling to be touched by anyone—she pushed Waltraut away from her like a contaminant. Waltraut had grown used to these rebuffs, and would shrink at the first sound of her mother's footsteps. At night, alone with Mrs. Mitwisser, I would listen to her whimper; she murmured and hissed in her own language, the choked gurgle of a dammed-up river.

"Did mama sleep at all last night?" Anneliese asked. "Papa wants to know."

Professor Mitwisser himself never approached with this question or any other. It seemed he had forgotten about me, or else he was lost in the repetitive clangor that now surrounded us: hammering, sawing, the slangy shouts of workmen. A trio of carpenters were building bookshelves: the bare boards covered every wall of Professor Mitwisser's study, and had begun to line the hallway.

During all this racket, Mrs. Mitwisser lay on her bed in her nightgown. Sometimes she pulled out a pack of cards from under her pillow and idly shuffled them; or else she would lay them out in curiously unequal rows.

One afternoon I heard her singing:

Röslein, Röslein, Röslein rot,
Röslein auf der Heide—

She broke off and called me to her side.

"Röslein," she said, "that is your name, no?"

I said it was something like that, though in fact I could hear no resemblance.

"My husband told to me we have in this place a garden."

"There's a little back yard." There were only weeds behind the house, and one unidentifiable tree.

"Then we go there."

But she would not get out of her nightgown or put on her shoes, and Anneliese would not allow her to walk past the workmen as she was; so she went back to her bed, sullen.

"Mama's very bad this time, but at home it was worse. When they threw her out of the Institute she was
very
bad."

It was even more serious, Anneliese recounted, when they had to leave Berlin, they had to run away practically, it was a miracle they could ship out Professor Mitwisser's books, first to Stockholm, where they stayed for a month with a great-uncle, and then, when the Quakers intervened to save them, to Albany. In Albany their mother was almost all better, and Waltraut was happy, and the boys behaved themselves, and got funny new American names from their tutor, and everything was nice for a while; but when the move to New York was decided on, little by little she worsened. And now she was very bad. That was how it was with their mother, she had a sickness, a private sickness—"Papa doesn't let us talk about it to anyone, only to our own family, and the nurse we had at home after they threw her out of the Institute, and then the law came that no German could live with us, so the nurse had to go away. And so did Waltraut's nanny, even though she was French."

"But you
haven't
moved to New York," I pointed out.

They almost had. A spacious apartment, prepared and accoutered, with a real study for their father (they wouldn't have had to suffer the clatter of all these carpenters!), an easy walk to the Reading Room of the great Library in Manhattan. But at the last minute their father had determined it would not be feasible, not with their mother so sick: what she needed was healing air, strolls, greenery. Sunlight and breezes. A quiet neighborhood, a backwater, a touch of salubrious scenery, no city swarms or city noises: it would be a kind of spa. And Professor Mitwisser could ride the subway to the Reading Room.

All this reminded me of money. I had not yet been paid my salary; I did not know what my salary would be.

"That apartment in the city," I said, "that would have been much more expensive than living out here, wouldn't it?"

Anneliese seemed offended; she turned aloof. Her cold eye told me I had transgressed. But my education in such matters had come from Ninel. Remembering Mrs. Mitwisser's melancholy warning about bed and board, I added, "I thought you could barely afford
me.
"

The familiar redness flooded her forehead and ears. "At home we had things. At home we were all right."

It disturbed me that the Mitwisser children spoke of home. They were as homeless as I was. But I felt stealthily rich: the hot blue fact of Bertram's envelope warmed me. I had put it away, swathed in a sweater, in the bottom drawer of the dresser next to my bed.

"Here we have nothing. Papa's books we got out to Stockholm just in time, because of Uncle Sigmund. So now we have nothing if nobody helps."

"The Quakers—"

"Papa left his position. It's finished."

And so was our discussion; Anneliese made this plain. Her mouth tightened into a flat line, like an oscilloscope shut down. The Mitwissers' money arrangements were a subject closed to me: they did big things—Manhattan secured, Manhattan surrendered, this odd house in this odd neighborhood—but not little things; they didn't think of paying me.

"Go see about mama, please. If she puts on her shoes she can watch Willi. He's out in the back with Waltraut, planting seeds."

It came to me then that the Mitwisser family was an impregnable fiefdom, with guards at the borders. No one could be admitted. Yet how did they live? Professor Mitwisser went away every morning. Though it was late June, he wore his heavy black suit and his red-and-black-striped tie and his black fedora. He climbed the high stairs to the tracks; the train's screech bore him away to the Reading Room in the unimaginable city. Anneliese ran the household much as I had in my Thrace childhood; the difference was that my father had given me money out of his wallet. Among the Mitwissers, money was invisible.

The boys had discovered a pebbly patch of beach and disappeared for hours every afternoon. They returned salt-whitened, draped in strands of seaweed, smelling of low tide. Sometimes they took Waltraut with them on these excursions, and then, while Anneliese murmured at her mother's bedside, the house would feel deserted, desolate. The door to the room where Mrs. Mitwisser lived out her days, and where I slept at night, was shut against my intrusion; but I could hear fragments of these exchanges, partly in German, and often enough in Anneliese's high-pitched, persistent, irritable English.