The World as I Found It (91 page)

Hans had a high, contralto voice that quailed and quavered around his father and grew even more stretched and anxious around his circle of male friends. Karl Wittgenstein loathed them, these wealthy idlers, these vain popinjays, as he called them, cologned and bespatted, wearing mouse-colored gloves and hats and preposterous, severely cut suits. Furtive, secretive and exclusive, Hans and his friends were always glancing around and gathering in corners, always disappearing and hastily shutting doors, where they could be heard whispering in a rush punctuated with mocking, hysterical titters that left Karl Wittgenstein fuming.

Wittgenstein could remember Hans and his circle discussing the book, and he could remember himself reading it and clearly seeing in his own nature virtually every fault that Weininger enumerated. He remembered going through a terrifying period in which it seemed he could actually
smell
his sex rising over him like gas. He could smell it issuing from Hans when he was around his friends, and he could smell it in his own smoldering glands, cooking in his own urgency. This was the period when he would climb out on the roof, seeking air yet feeling burdened by a vastness that magnified his own paltriness and rottenness. He was Jewish and he was Catholic, and he knew, without being able to admit it to himself, that he liked men, which made him an invert and sinful, part man and part woman while combining the worst features of each. He didn't go to school, didn't mix, in his strangeness, with other boys. He had only his tutors and siblings and Otto Weininger, so that it seemed that across the world people were reaching the same impasse, with no decent way back and no decent way forward but through the black egress of death in which everyone would either be cleansed and made decent or else rendered forever incapable of inflicting further evil. This was the dialogue the boy heard; this was the full range of possibilities. He was out on the roof and Weininger was now out on a limb. Weininger must have felt the pressure, with Hans and others, too, speculating whether he would follow his own moral code and cede either to celibacy or to death, the ultimate celibacy and immaculate conception, thereby making himself the second greatest Jew in the world's history and the second Christ, bearing a new and everlasting covenant of universal death.

Wittgenstein remembered this, and he remembered Hans's morbid excitement when Weininger did finally kill himself, shooting himself in the chest after having checked into the same hotel room in which Weininger's god, Beethoven, had died. Wittgenstein still had Hans's copy of
Sex and Character
with its meticulously underlined passages and his emphatic marginal notes — notes that Wittgenstein could not read now without feelings of queasiness and embarrassment:
So true! As I myself have felt! Duly observed in K.P. Can I be this way? YES! A fundamental insight that must be ACKNOWLEDGED!
In the front cover of this book Hans had glued a now brown clipping of the notice — or rather, proclamation — that Weininger's clear-thinking father had placed in the papers the morning after his son's suicide:

Even as a boy, Wittgenstein had found this notice odd and cold. It still chilled him, with its unflinching restraint. Even more peculiar was the mention of free will, as if for that the Weininger family was absolved from any blame for Otto's carefully composed suicide — this while unwittingly fostering the myth of his death as an act of moral courage in a dissembling city of men who flew between their wives and mistresses like fat bumbling bees. Surely, Weininger would have approved of the notice, Wittgenstein thought — why, he might have even written it himself, so well did it contribute to the legend of the fervent, sex-crossed young man courageously gulping the hemlock that his corrupt and moribund culture had given him to drink.

What Wittgenstein still did not understand was why, as a boy, he had felt so driven to attend Weininger's funeral. Partly homage, partly morbid curiosity, partly a desire to observe Hans — Wittgenstein supposed it was all these things. But it still did not explain the desperate sense of urgency that made him lie to his tutor, Herr Mössbauer, about a doctor's visit, then slip behind the house and change into a dark suit that he had smuggled out the night before.

Wittgenstein was certainly the youngest of the many uninvited onlookers who came to Matzleindorf Cemetery that day to pay homage to the now famous — or at least notorious — young doctor. There must have been a hundred or more of them, but they had none of the cohesiveness of a crowd. Scattered over the cemetery grounds, they came alone and they stood alone, dubiously loitering at a barely respectful distance among the packed stones and the tangled black trees whose leaves were just beginning to turn at the edges. It was an old Jewish cemetery that was cluttered with the generations, a babble of stones. Down a hill that might have been a vineyard rose a forest of stout mausoleums with worn stars on their eaves and ancient plots where families lay interred — whole generations stretching from massive black marble monuments down to sunken and listing tablets, some barely the size of cobbles and washed clean of any earthly identity. It was not the boy's first funeral but it was his first suicide, and it was several minutes before it dawned on him that all of the uninvited onlookers were men. Later, he would learn that, just as there are those who make a practice of attending weddings and trials, there are those who do the same for suicides. They were all there: shabbily dressed students and intellectuals, unhappy bachelors or lowly civil servants wearing sloven cravats, idlers and drunks and even wealthy-looking scions like Hans and his friends, whom he could see to his left, darkly and carefully dressed and clasping bunches of closed white roses with drooping heads.

The boy was standing — or half hiding — beside a large tree, leaning out imperceptibly to get another glimpse of Hans, then leaning back again to watch the funeral on the little hillside below. On the red gravel drive was a train of carriages and several motorcars led by a black, glass-encased hearse drawn by six blinkered black horses. Wittgenstein could remember the horses shaking their silver harnesses and the white pine coffin like a loaf of unbaked bread as the pallbearers slid it out. Up the hill climbed the procession; up the hill after the cortege bearing the slowly rocking coffin, the bunched mourners clambered behind the rabbi in his black robes and white shawl. Wittgenstein especially remembered how, before beginning the service, the old rabbi looked hard at them, the uninvited, as if to say they should either disperse or come down. But no one moved. They all just stood there, too shameless to leave and too furtive or hostile to join in the Jewish service. And by then even more men were drifting down the hillside, emerging through the clotted trees. Everywhere he looked he would see another solitary face, another somber stranger holding his hat over his privates, as if to conceal a grievously spreading stain.

Of that day, Wittgenstein also remembered the rabbi's singing, wrenching utterance, ancient, mournful, guttural — spoiled when a heavy, unshaven man nearby snorted in disgust, then held his nose for all to see. The next thing Wittgenstein remembered was a man to his left pointing to a sturdy, petulant man with hawklike features in the funeral below and telling his companion that this was Herr Weininger,
der Vater
. The boy thought the man must be mistaken. Dressed all in black with an improbable little black yarmulke on his large head, the man looked so fierce and irritable that the boy thought he was a bad-tempered undertaker, not the grieving father. But then he saw the rabbi grasp him filially by the arm, saw his weeping wife and daughters, and his more inert sons, standing desolately beside him. Wails were heard as the gravediggers lowered the coffin with thick leather straps. He saw a chair being hastily brought forward for an old woman who had collapsed. Someone else was being led away. All around Leopold Weininger, people were weeping, yet he never flinched or faltered, never betrayed the slightest sign of ordinary grief. Even when the rabbi handed him the shovel and motioned toward the mound of freshly turned earth, he didn't flag. Leopold Weininger didn't merely sift a few ceremonial grains of dirt over the coffin. Resolutely, he stoked the shovel deep and cast a full burden down, the thin pine booming like a drum as he thrust the shovel at his son and turned away.

As the boy stood watching Leopold Weininger that day, he was also watching Hans. Hans seemed to be dreaming, his long adenoidal neck stretching out of his celluloid collar, stretching, it would seem later, to see his own destruction in the face of this father who displayed about as much remorse as his own father would a little more than a year later when they placed Hans's own ashes in the family crypt. Naturally, Hans's funeral was not as well publicized or attended as Weininger's, but that day the boy would see some of these same curious figures watching in the distance among the jagged stones and trees, all as lost as Hans or Weininger had been in those thorny and inexplicable thickets of character.

As it turned out, in fact, there were two ceremonies for Weininger that evening, the second closely following the first, once the mourners had gone and the diggers had hurriedly filled in the grave. The sun was down and darkness was falling, but Hans was there until the end, waiting. Without quite knowing why, the boy was also waiting, watching as Hans and his friends carried the larval white roses down to the gravesite where several dozen others had gathered like solitary chessmen among the glowing stones, staring at the freshly tamped dirt and going through their obscure devotions.

Hans was still there when, through the trees, Wittgenstein saw a yellow ball of light from an oil lantern carried by a bearded watchman, an old Orthodox Jew wearing a long and tattered greatcoat that nearly reached his heavy boots. Bellowing, hoisting the lantern aloft like a censer as he slogged down the hill, the watchman exorcised them like sullen ghosts, then stood defiantly by the grave as they vanished into the pooling darkness. The boy left then. The ground was broken with treacherous roots. Like glowing keyholes, the blanched white stones loomed out at angles. He was walking fast, hopelessly late, when a man who smelled of tobacco blocked his path, his hand outstretched and his face obscured by hat. The stranger asked a hushed question. For a second, the boy thought he had misheard him, but then he recoiled and started running, tearing through the gabled oaks and over the conjoined bones of the dead with this, the first time ever he had been propositioned.

F
OR DAYS
Wittgenstein thought about these matters in his past. And then one night Moore received an urgent telephone call from him, saying that he wanted to come over immediately and make a confession.

Sitting in the parlor, ensconced in his big overstuffed chair with his vest askew, Moore was looking agitated when Dorothy Moore asked who had called.

Moore roused himself and said, That was Wittgenstein. He says he is coming over to
confess
. You heard me correctly. Well, what was I to say to
that
? Moore shifted around uncomfortably, then added, He specifically asked that you be present.

Me? Dorothy leaned against the doorway. What on earth would Wittgenstein want to confess to
me?

Moore dropped his arms in urgent mystification. He picked up his pipe and started rummaging through his vest pockets for a match, his voice rising, slightly gargly, like a boiling kettle, as he said half in protest, Well, I don't know. It was all so sudden. I suppose I could have told him you were out or something, but he caught me off guard. With a huff, Moore stopped going through his vest pockets and reached into his trousers, saying, Don't ask me what on earth it's about. He'll be here any time. Damn it!

Here, said Dorothy, producing a box of matches.
Here
—

Plumping down on the leather hassock before him, Dorothy Moore girlishly wrapped her fleshy arms around her skirted legs, thinking. It took her a minute, but then she, too, got the itch, scowling,
Owwww
, I don't like this — She jumped up and started straightening. Should I make a pot of tea, do you think?

Moore struggled out of his chair, the sucking chair with ash-strewn arms and clutter all about, the chair that held him more powerfully in its grasp with each passing year. Stiffly standing, he blustered, No, no — don't bother with tea. And quit your fussing.

I'm not fussing, she insisted, whisking out of the room with a glass and some stray magazines. Just wait here for his knock. And I'm making tea.

And I promise you, he called back, your tea will just sit there.

You sit, she said, misunderstanding him. I'll be out in a second.

The
tea
! trumpeted Moore. I said the
tea
will sit! He's coming here to
confess
, not to drink tea!

But Dorothy put the kettle on anyway, and they waited. It was raining, a Thursday night, a good two weeks since they had seen Wittgenstein. In fact, they had been wondering what had happened to him. In the year since Moore had retired and Wittgenstein had assumed his chair as professor of philosophy, it had become customary for Wittgenstein to visit Moore on Tuesday evenings, and not just to confer a kindness on an old colleague. Wittgenstein valued Moore's curiosity and civilization, and he still relied on his forthrightness, never having found anyone who could so gently, almost naively, probe and criticize his germinal thoughts or find the precise way to express a tricky concept. Besides discussing philosophy, Moore and Wittgenstein read and discussed Freud, St. Paul, the writings of the Desert Fathers and Spengler's
Decline of the West
. Knowing how Wittgenstein hated the “gesticulations” of Schoenberg and Stravinsky, and how deeply he distrusted modernism, with all its rashness and obstreperousness (If only modernism, like Luther, could have waited!), Moore even took the devil's role one night and played Wittgenstein some of his son's jazz records. Quizzically perking his head and scowling at the splayed notes, Wittgenstein played Louis Armstrong's “Potato Head Blues” five times in a row before admitting that, while it definitely had
something
, he could not presume to judge it: the experience behind it was simply too foreign.