Antiquities by Cynthia Ozick (new ebook reader txt) 📕

were styled masters. Our pupils wore blazers embroidered with inspirational insignia, and caps to match. Football (on the British model) was hygienically encouraged. French, Latin, attendance at chapel, and horsemanship were all mandatory, and indeed our earliest headmaster was brought over, at a considerable wage, from Liverpool. And all that in the familiar greenery of Westchester County!

Yet I have thus far engaged in this overly hasty prologue without having spoken of my own lineage. I am, as stated above, a Petrie. We have had among us men distinguished in jurisprudence, and I retain in their original folders a selection of my grandfather’s briefs, uncommonly impressive in that old copperplate hand, together with early letterheads, on fine linen paper, of the family firm, founded by his father. My own father in his youth left the firm briefly to pursue other interests, but was persuaded to return, and I have in my possession a sampling of his estimable contractual instruments, as well as a small private notebook crackling with grains of sand trapped in its worn and brittle spine. (Of this, more anon.) I am told that I have myself a certain prowess in the writing of prose, at least in the idiom appropriate to the law. And while these bloodline emblems of civic dedication hold pride of place in my heart, they do not reach the stratum of distinction, let alone of renown, of yet another Petrie.

Here I speak of William Matthew Flinders Petrie, knighted by the Queen, and more broadly known as the illustrious archaeologist Sir Flinders Petrie, who passed away in his home in a turbulent Jerusalem a scant seven years ago, and is partially interred in the Protestant Cemetery on Mount Zion. (I am obliged to say partially: his head he donated to the Royal College of Surgeons in London.) My father, in addition to his nearly lifelong devotion to the law (though that life was too brief), was enamored of ancient times, and of esoteric maps, and also of genealogy, and thereby successfully traced the degrees of our relationship to this extraordinary man. It is difficult, of course, to judge when a cousin of a certain distance becomes rather more of a stranger than a relation, but in my father’s view there were reasons for his feelings of closeness.

I have intimated that my father impulsively broke away from the firm, to the shock of his parents, and more particularly the consternation of his young wife. (Among his papers I have found a browning newspaper clipping of this event, distressingly reported as a scandal.) He did in fact disappear in the blazingly hot summer of 1880, having gone in search of Cousin William (not yet Sir Flinders). At that time the press was infatuated with the spectacular excavations in Egypt, particularly the Great Pyramid of Giza, under the supervision of Cousin William, who was then a youthful prodigy of twenty-eight. My young father, newly married and destined for a vice-presidency, informing no one beforehand, had abruptly departed by steamship through Cadiz to Alexandria, after which he endured a miserable journey overland to the site of the excavations. It must be admitted that he did not go with empty pockets (he took with him money aplenty, privately arranging for further sums from a Spanish bank); nor could he be charged with absconding of funds. To a family firm such as ours, he was, after all, the heir.

It is from my discreet and quietly dispirited mother, in a burst of confession in her seventieth year, and seriously ailing, that I know something of the effects of this perfunctory escapade. With no inkling of its cause, my mother was left bewildered and distraught, and as week after week passed with no letter of explanation, and no notion of my father’s destination, she believed herself in some inscrutable way to be the instigator of his flight, finding reason upon reason for blame. How could this be? Three months after a glorious winter wedding, all glittering whiteness without and within, the fresh snow still silken and unblemished, the nave lined with overflowing stands of white roses, rows of white pearls sewn into her dress, the groom glowing with ardor (and the paternal promise of an instant increase in earnings), how could this be? The Wilkinsons, indignant and fearful, took her away to weep alone in her childhood bedroom; her inchoate cries of guilt, and her unthinkable pleas for divorce, however confused and pitiful, had become too alarmingly public. They enrolled her for a time, she told me, in a well-appointed nursing home, to assure her calm, and to conceal their embarrassment, until the wayward husband should return. And at length he did return, “brown as any darkie,” as my mother described him, admirably resuming his place in the firm and at her side. Following my birth, and until the last hours of my mother’s life, my father’s unaccountable absence in the summer of 1880 was never again to be spoken of.

*

May 26, 1949. I have been compelled to leave off after a period of unexpected illness brought on by a sunny but uncharacteristically cold Spring, when it was decided to hold the most recent meeting of the Trustees outdoors, under the maples, on those ancient yet sturdy wooden benches originally situated there by the Temple family some eighty years before. There was to be a final consensual understanding of the nature of each Trustee’s memoir: first, that it not exceed in length more than ten pages; second, that it be confined to an explicit happening lingering in memory and mood, and perhaps in influence, until this day; third, that it concern childhood only, and nothing beyond; fourth, that an implacably immovable date be set for completion, lest the indolence of some turn into general abandonment; and fifth, that it reflect accurately the atmosphere and principles of the Academy at the time in which the incident to be recounted had occurred. Ah, what callings-out of the past beneath those venerable trees!

I have failed