Antiquities by Cynthia Ozick (new ebook reader txt) 📕

It was that “female” that was particularly wounding: was it a barb at Miss Margaret Stimmer? Apparently our friendship had escaped not a few. And so, since the others unanimously supported the likely culprit’s deflecting hypothesis (and I am sorry to say that further discussion deteriorated into a vigorous comparison of fountain pen brands, whether the Parker is actually superior to the Montblanc, etc.), my effort to secure justice and truth came to nothing.

*

July 12, 1949. I no longer walk in the evenings (and besides, the paths are precariously littered with splintered branches), and have come to a certain understanding with myself. I will not permit the hurtful hostility of others to undermine what moves me. This was a lesson I learned in boyhood, when on account of my growing interest in Ben-Zion Elefantin I too became persona non grata. Our early initiation into a mutual liking of chess was bound to turn public, with my door always open in compliance with Reverend Greenhill’s instruction. No wonder our venture took on an aspect of the conspiratorial: whispered notions of when it was best to be free of the herd, or too abruptly quitting the refectory, first one, and then the other. On two or three weekday occasions, as I painfully recall, when we had found refuge in the vacant chapel, we were discovered and mocked, Ben-Zion Elefantin for his name and his incomprehensible origin, and I for my intimacy with so freakish a boy.

I speak too easily of intimacy; it was slow in coming, and was never wholly achieved. He was unnatural in too many ways. The abundance of his uncut hair, for instance: not only its earth-red yet unearthly color, but what I suspected might be a pair of long curls sprouting from the temples, each one hidden behind an ear and lost in the overall mass. Through his shut door (he never obeyed any principle he disliked) I would sometimes hear the rise and fall of foreign mutterings, morning and evening, as if he were quietly growling secret incantations. There were times when, both of us fatigued by too many battles of knights and bishops, he would sit silent and staring, having nothing to say, and waiting for me to signal some subject of merit. I told him of Mr. Canterbury’s terrible reign, and how he ought to be glad to have missed it, and of the visit the previous year from Pelham, a nearby town, of an elderly Mr. Emmet, one of the Temple cousins, hence also cousin to Henry James, whose portrait hung in the chapel. To have Mr. Emmet in our midst, however briefly (he spent but an hour or two), was considered a privilege: he had once enjoyed an afternoon’s colloquy with Henry James Senior, the novelist’s father, when the philosopher Emerson, who happened also to be present, shook Mr. Emmet’s hand, and asked him how he was, and made some comment on the charms of Concord, delighting Mr. Emmet with his attentions. For us, we were advised, great fame attached itself to Mr. Emmet’s very flesh: his was the hand that the philosopher’s hand had honored.

Emmet, Temple, James: all these local references, so dear to the Academy’s history, and passed fervently on to its pupils, left Ben-Zion Elefantin indifferent; but the mention of Canterbury roused him in a way I had never before witnessed, and he told me that it was one of the places he had been to school, and where he first learned to read English. Of all languages, he said, the language of English people was his favorite, and though he had been put in school in Canterbury for only a few weeks, and was soon taken away to Frankfurt and afterward Rome, he fell permanently into the sea of their stories, Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare and The Old Curiosity Shop and Ivanhoe and Robinson Crusoe and Adam Bede, books I had barely heard of and would never care to read, as he did, on his own, and have never read since. He told all this as if in confidence, as if he trusted me not to disclose it, as if to disclose it would increase what he believed to be his peril. He seemed to me pitiful then, with his unnatural hair and unnatural voice, which I all at once heard not so much as stilted but as somehow mysteriously archaic, or (I hardly know my own meaning as I tell this) uncannily ancestral. Too many cities were in his tones, and I argued that no one can come from everywhere, everyone must come from somewhere, and where specifically was he from? He thanked me again for our several tournaments and crossed the hall and again shut his door.

I was by now used to such opacities, and scarcely minded them, having other annoyances to trouble me, chiefly my lost status. I was, after all, a Petrie, and a Petrie by nature belongs to the mockers, not to the mocked. I sometimes thought of reversing my lot by joining in the ridicule of Ben-Zion Elefantin; but I quickly learned, after a single attempt, that it could not be done: once an outcast, always an outcast. And more: the humiliation I felt in my inability to recover my standing was small in comparison to the flood of shame that unexpectedly overtook me in having momentarily betrayed Ben-Zion Elefantin. As for the jibes, in time they diminished (I had observed Reverend Greenhill summon the worst of our tormentors for a talk), and in their place we were mutely snubbed like a pair of invisible wraiths. But it freed us from hiding, and since no one would speak to either of us, and Ben-Zion Elefantin had little to say to me, we were anyhow thrown together under a carapace of unwilling quiet. In the refectory I sat close to him with my full dinner plate before me as he carefully drew out