Antiquities by Cynthia Ozick (new ebook reader txt) 📕

self-possession, and to such a degree, in the presence of the kitchen help! And that Hedda should have seen me so disheveled, with my shirt collar wet, and these shaming infantile tears, how am I different from that forsaken miscreant whom in my private mind I call the Childish One? What is it to me that he mourns his misbegotten accomplice? And what is it Hedda must think? Two old men weeping, two old men grieving? I myself hardly know why I grieve, and for whom? For my unhappy boyhood, for my sweet Peg, for my unlucky and frivolous son? And to find me so undone, and yet to have come with her own lament! Two of the staff have departed, she told me, without a word of warning, and how was she to cope, she and that slattern Amelia, das Flittchen, only the two of them, diese Schlümpfe lazy and useless, left in charge of six broken old men, each more zerbrechlich than the next, the frailest of all starving himself night and day on his dirty sofa with his head down, refusing to eat a crumb of bread or sip a drop of tea, a sick man who ought to be in the hospital? And who was to get him there? Did he have a wife, a daughter, a son? What was she to do with him? What was I, in my capacity as Trustee, to do with him, has he no family, no friend, no heir?

I replied that I would review the Charter of the Trust to determine a suitable course, and then, unable to look her in the eye, I dismissed her.

*

July 22, 1949. Further to the Charter. The original, of course, is in the Academy vault at J. P. Morgan, but I retain a copy here in my study, where I keep it together with my personal volume of the History, though I have rarely consulted it since the establishment of Temple House, when additional clauses were necessarily incorporated. And indeed there is provision for such a contingency as care for the seriously moribund, the funding for which to come under the bank’s jurisdiction. Setting all this in motion, alas, falls to me. It cannot escape my judgment that this childless miscreant’s predicament is no better than that of a vagrant found dying in the street; yet I who have a son, will my own fate differ when I too inevitably succumb?

It has now been several weeks, in fact I count two months, since I have had any word from my son. In light of the length of this period of silence, I will confess to having broken a wary and unacknowledged vow (unacknowledged by him, wary on my side). I mean by this that rather than wait for his own action in this respect, I undertook to telephone him, in part because I believe his resources are, as usual, low, and in the hope of sparing him the expense of a long-distance call. The result was unfortunate, and I am largely, if unintentionally, to blame. Though I have not spoken of it outright, I presume it is fully evident that given my retirement, and with no further Petrie to carry the firm on into the future (my son having preferred a less onerous path), the venerable Petrie partnership is now lamentably defunct. On this occasion, despite my long-held familiarity with time-zone vagaries—a mere one-hour difference from Chicago, three from Los Angeles, and what law office can function without such instinctive knowledge—my memory abandoned me and caused an unforgivable intrusion: I reached my son in the middle of his California night. He was, I admit, startled, and reminded me that this unexpected disruption was not my first such malfeasance; it had happened twice before. I felt constrained to apologize, which only brought on a kind of confusion, or rather anger, on his part: he explained that he and a collaborator were working through the night on content (his strange jargon) which may have already interested a producer. I believe this is what he told me. Or was it that the producer was at that very moment at his side? Certainly he was not alone; I heard what I took to be a nearby voice, a murmur that was kin to laughter.

These increasing forgettings greatly distress me, and perhaps the ingenious inventors of our modern era, who have already brought us the television sets that are beginning to proliferate even beyond the barroom, will one day devise a telephone that allows one to know the identity of the caller before responding. Such a development would surely inhibit my son’s growing coolness, and my embarrassment at discovering him in flagrante delicto.

*

July 25, 1949. What has become of me? Excess emotion has made me shameless, and my tongue (I mean my prose) is paralyzed by coarse legalisms. A memoir ought not to be a deposition, and how I wish it were, with all its conciseness and clarity. Instead, I write, indeed I speak, in turbulence, captive of these helpless tears that terrify me, as if I am already blundering in the haze and corrosions of a dying brain. Was it some crackpot seizure of dream and dementia that took hold of me four days ago when I could not summon Ben-Zion Elefantin’s deposition, if that is what he meant it to be, his pleading a case for his curious existence, his pitiful defense? How can I find my way out of this wilderness of hesitation? Or dare I say shame?

—

5:21 am. Dawn. My wrists, my very ribs, ache from the keys. Longhand no better. A spilled vessel. Drowned. As if strangled by trance. The voice is not mine. Then whose? And how?

*

July 26, 1949. Here I must explain a change I am introducing in the organization of the admittedly chaotic document presently under my hand. It will be recalled that as these pages accumulated, I at one time stored them in a rectangular box