The Puttermesser Papers (24 page)

“What did that woman at the agency
say,”
Puttermesser pursued, “that made you explode like that?”

“She say make Lenin go in trash.”

“Lenin? You weren't discussing Soviet history, for God's sake, were you?”

“Medals. I bring much medals.”

Lidia spilled them out then: a whole rattling green plastic bag of little tin effigies of a small boy. The bag had a word printed on it:
Ф
OTO
Г
pa
ФИЯ
.

“Lenin when child, you see? Komsomol prize for children. Junk! Nobody want! I buy hundred for kopeck.” The mocking laugh. “Woman say not allowed do business, big law for tax. Commissar!”

VIII. ENTREPRENEURS

E
VERY MORNING
L
IDIA ATE
black bread and sour cream—she had chosen these herself from the neighborhood exhibition—followed by strong tea with plenty of sugar. Then she disappeared. She was always back in time to go up to 5-D to clean for Varvara. She confessed that she had grown to hate Varvara's children. They were selfish, wild, indulged; they knew too much, and still they were common—this is what people used to say about Khrushchev.

Puttermesser made no inquiries about Lidia's absences. The scene at the agency had shown what questions could lead to. But she noticed that Lidia never went out without carrying one or two of her many bundles.

At eleven o'clock, when Lidia was gone, Varvara came down to see Puttermesser.

She glanced into the living room: “Mess! Looks like
my
digs! And you don't even have kids.”

“Is there a problem?” Puttermesser said. “You don't have to be embarrassed, I mean if things aren't working out with my cousin—”

“Oh, Lidia's a jewel! I wouldn't
dream
of losing her. She's enriched our
lives
,” Varvara said. “She just
fascinates
the kids. She tells them Russian fairy stories—they're
pretty grisly, the wolf always gets to eat somebody, but the kids love it. And Bill and I don't mind. It's not really mayhem like the stuff they feed them on TV. It's just imagination, it's harmless.”

And Puttermesser, in the bloody theater of her own imagination, saw her cousin dissecting the limbs of Varvara's children via the surrogacy of wolverine fangs.

Varvara peered past the kitchen. “Is Lidia home?”

“She's out for a while.”

“Taking in the Big Apple? That's nice. Hey,” Varvara said, “I just want to get the two of you to come to a very special party. A private fund-raiser for
SHEKHINA
. You know
SHEKHINA
?”

“It's that magazine. The one that advertises itself as having nothing in common with
MOTHERWIT
,” Puttermesser said.

“I told Sky about your cousin, and he said she'd be a terrific draw. Sky's a good friend of mine. We worked on the Neighborhood Visionary Project together years ago, when we all lived out in California. And before that we were both on the board of the All-University Free Expression Process, but that was before I met Bill. And before Sky had that nasty second divorce—basically she kicked him out. Bill
hates
Free Expression, he thinks it starts you on the road to violence. Bill's a
real
pacifist.”

Puttermesser recalled the Free Expression Process, a fad of two decades ago: it had flourished in the age of streaking, when a naked student—a rosy blur of frontal flesh—would fly down the aisle of a lecture hall and dash across the stage. The Process specialized in “demonstrations” in which a
forbidden word was chanted without pause for exactly two hours (fuck and asshole were the natural favorites); this was known as “neutering,” and the goal of the Process People, as the press termed them, was to neuter all the naughty words.

Varvara said, “I guess
you
were never a Process Person. Wrong generation, after your time, right?”

But Puttermesser didn't believe in generations; such a notion was not in her philosophy. She supposed that what distinguished human beings, whatever their age, was temperament, proclivity, character. Until someone reminded her of it, she often forgot she was old. “I remember their slogan,” she said. “‘Everything Comes Up Crystal.'”

“Right! Wasn't that beautiful? And the other one, the one on the T-shirts? ‘Dirt Busters.' Cute! Once we did a double-Process on turd. Four hours of it. Turd, turd, turd, turd. Well, all that's long ago—B.K., before kids! We take baths with the kids, though. The whole family, two by two, cross-gender.”

Varvara looked to be in her forties. Her face was both large and small. Her cheeks and forehead were very wide, her chin was broad and long, but bunched in the middle of all that unused space were the crowded-together eyes, round little nose, round little mouth. A family of features snug in a big tub. You could not tell from such a visage—it was, in fact, a “visage,” a bit Dickensian, a touch archaic—that it belonged to an idealist.

Schuyler Hartstein, by contrast—Varvara's old friend—had exactly the sort of head one would expect of a social visionary. Puttermesser had happened on it
now and again on television panel shows, a long-skulled baldish rectangle dangling a blond ponytail from its rear and (actually) a curly-ribboned monocle from its front. On such panels—they were not infrequent—Schuyler Hartstein always took the idealist position. He was called Sky not as an abbreviation but as a metaphoric allusion: the cloudlessly vivid cerulean of his poet's orbs. (Not at all the color of Puttermesser's papa's eyes, a wan blue diluted by the sad gray wash of memory and remorse.) In Schuyler Hartstein there were no hesitations, reservations, qualifications, impediments. He had a sunny blond face and all the social thinker's certainties. Around his neck hung a gold chain, at the end of which swung the Hebrew letters that spelled “life.” He was well-known for piety, and on Sabbath mornings could be seen in a white velvet skullcap, jammed down by means of a bobby pin over the upper hump of his ponytail.

Though a loyal socialist, Sky Hartstein was a ferocious entrepreneur. The periodical he had founded was by now almost two years old. Its name, familiar to Blake, Milton, the Swedenborgians and the theosophists, originated in Jewish mysticism: it referred to the radiance of the Divine Presence, and, kabbalistically, to its female aspect. It worked for the cutting-edge feminists; the Catholics liked it (it reminded them of Mary), the Buddhists had no quarrel with it, and the Hare Krishnas were enthralled.
Shekhina!
You could even find it in the dictionary. Still, the magazine was more celebrated for the manner of its launching than for its contents, a mixture of global utopianism and strenuous self-gratulation (they seemed to be the same thing). Sky Hartstein published
his own poetry in his own pages. The famous advertising campaign at the start of
SHEKHINA
had been devised by Hartstein himself: its headline was
POLITICS AGAINST MOTHERWIT
—
MOTHERWIT
being a sober old periodical devoted to rationalist traditions, cautious liberalism, and an impatience with ponytails. But the war between
SHEKHINA
and
MOTHERWIT
was one-sided:
MOTHERWIT
remained aloof. It was only a story that
MOTHERWIT
had consistently rejected Sky Hartstein's poetry;
MOTHERWIT
published no verse at all. The vengefulness of Sky and his
SHEKHINA
was rooted in something worldlier, and more urgent, than the neglect of contemporary poetry. Sky Hartstein believed that, politically speaking, there were no enemies anywhere, except in one's own bosom.
ENMITY IS ILLUSION
, emblazoned on a dove's wing, appeared on the masthead.
ONLY PLOWSHARES
! cried out from the subscription blank.

Puttermesser knew all this because she had subscribed to
SHEKHINA
for its first year and then quit. She was addicted to magazines. She read
TLS, NYRB, THE New YorkER, ATLANTIC, MOTHERWIT, HARPER
'
S, COMMENTARY, SALMAGUNDI, SOUTHWEST REVIEW, PARTISAN REVIEW
, and
THE NEW CRITERION
. She did not read
THE NATION
; there was no reason to—it was more than a century since Henry James had written for it. She dropped
SHEKHINA
partly because she was indifferent to Sky Hartstein's verse—tiny uplifting telegrams consisting of very short lines—but mainly because the radiance of the Divine Presence, insistently beamed out month after month, had begun to dim. Also, she couldn't help noticing that not all the swords had been beaten into plowshares. Sky Hartstein had the habit of taking wish for
fact, and even the wish struck Puttermesser as improbable. He advertised in his own Personals columns for a wife, and meanwhile
SHEKHINA
'
S
editorial positions were mist, fog, vapor, all passed off as “spirit,” and sometimes as “rage.” You knew beforehand that when you opened the magazine you would find the nasty anger of the pure-hearted.

The only surprise for Puttermesser was that Lidia's employer had turned out to be one of Sky Hartstein's old comrades.

“Wait'll you meet him!” Varvara crowed. “He's got this
mind
.”

“But why does he want to meet Lidia?”

“Oh come
on
,” Varvara said. “Isn't it obvious?”

When Lidia returned some hours later, she was not alone: she was pulling along behind her a tall young man.

“Pyotr,” Lidia pronounced.

“Hiya,” the young man said. He held out his hand. “I'm Pete. Peter Robinson, ma'am. I manage the Albemarle Sports Shop, d'you know us? Over on Third? Third and Ninety-fourth?”

“Pyotr,” Lidia repeated. “Have
clean
eyes.”

It was true: Lidia had hit on it exactly. Those were innocent eyes, guileless and unsoiled by wit. Pete Robinson—Pyotr—explained that he was from North Dakota, and was better acquainted with woods and farms than with the New York pavement. He had been in the city—had been transferred from the Seattle branch—less than three months, and the people! The variety! Back home, and even in a place like Seattle, you wouldn't ever get to run into someone like Lidia!

The three of them settled around the kitchen table. Pyotr wore a sweater with a V-neck and under it a plaid wool shirt. He had a big pale slab of a brow with a lick of shiny hair bouncing down over it like a busy tongue. He seemed as clarified and classified—as simplified—as a figure on a billboard. And Robinson! Puttermesser thought of the resourceful Crusoe; she thought of that radio series of her childhood:
JACK ARMSTRONG, THE ALL-AMERICAN BOY
! As quick as you could say Jack Robinson, her cousin had landed his prototype.

Lidia was joyful. “Pyotr help,” she said.

And once again she turned the green plastic bag upside down—the one with
Ф
OTO
Г
pa
ФИЯ
printed on it. This time not a single medal depicting the child Lenin fell out. Instead, a stream of green bills: all-American money.

“What's going on?” Puttermesser said. “Where'd you get all this?”

“Ma'am?” said Pyotr. “This gal's been working in my store all day. I've got to get back there myself pretty soon. She lured me out with that smile.”

Puttermesser gave her cousin a skeptical look. “What is it, another job?”

“Ma'am,” said Pyotr, “we're getting ready for Christmas, never too soon for that, so we're clearing out tennis rackets and ski poles from the middle of the floor. Nice big space, it's where we're putting the
tree
, y'know. Well, we get the tree up, and in comes this little lady with this funny way of talking, and next thing you know she sets herself up and she's in business. Right in the biggest traffic area we've got.”

“Traffic area?” Puttermesser wondered.

Pyotr nodded. “You bet. It's our busiest season. If you don't mind my saying so, what you've got right here in this little gal is free enterprise, the real thing. They don't have it where she's from, y'know?”

Sitting at a card table he had found for her, under a Christmas tree decorated with colored light bulbs in the shape of miniature sneakers and footballs, the Muscovite cousin had sold—in a single morning—her whole stock of Lenin medals. For three dollars each. What lay strewn on Puttermesser's kitchen table were three hundred American dollars. And her cousin still had, in inventory, plenty of scarves and spoons and limbless hollow dolls.

Not to mention an all-American boyfriend.

IX. THE IDEALISTS

T
HE SHEKHINA FUND-RAISER WAS
held in one of those mazy Upper West Side apartments where it is impossible to find the bathroom. You wander from corridor to corridor, tentatively entering bedrooms still redolent of their night odors, where the bedspreads have lain folded and unused on chairs for months. Sometimes on these journeys there will be a bewildered young child standing fearfully in your path, or else an unexpected small animal, but mostly you will encounter nothing but the stale mixed smells of an aging building. Such apartments are like demoralized old women shrouded in wrinkles, who, mourning their lost complexions, assert the dignity and importance of their prime. The bathroom sink, if you should happen to locate it in the dark (the light switch will be permanently hidden), is embroidered with the brown grime of its ancient cracks, like the lines of an astrological map; the base of the toilet, when you flush it, will trickle out a niggardly rusty stream. And then you will know how privileged you are: you have been touched by History. Artur Rubinstein once actually lived here; Einstein attended a meeting in what is now the back pantry; Maria Callas sang, privately, on a summer night, with her palm pressed down hard on that very window sill; Uta Hagen paid a visit to the famous tenant, whoever it was, before the present tenant.