Antiquities by Cynthia Ozick (new ebook reader txt) 📕

father, had he lived to know of it, would have been pleased by at least the outward course of my life, my early achievements (e.g., editor in chief, Yale Law Journal), my marriage into a family similar in standing to our own, and whatever considerable esteem I have earned in the civic area. Despite the recklessness of his youth, my father was for the entirety of his remaining days a wholly conventional man, with conventional expectations. I believe I have met them. That my son has not met mine is a lasting and festering bruise. Every month or so I read of yet another landmark acquisition by Edwin Jacobs Greenhill, Jr., the most recent being the Algonquin, a hotel famous thirty years ago for its literary cachet, and by my count his fourth such midtown purchase.

Ned, I am aware, has grandchildren. My son is two years older than Ned’s. Both are middle-aged men. Can a treatment, so called, be said to possess literary cachet?

And I cannot, cannot, cannot cleanse my eyes of that horrific hanging thing.

*

August 19, 1949. Hedda has come to me with a substantial bundle of clothing, all of finest quality, just look here the linings and here also the stitches, and so many rich ties, this poor sickinthehead Mann dünn wie eine Krähe im Winter, she is sending these nice things to a charity, would I like to keep two or three of the neckties?

I told her I would not.

In describing my father as conventional some days ago, I meant it as a praiseworthy trait, perhaps as much for myself as for him. But nothing of that can be true. My God, how I falsify! There were certain times in my childhood, well before I was sent to the Academy, and when my mother was preoccupied elsewhere (she often spent evenings at one or another event at her Women’s Club), I would see my father settle into a chair in his study with his newspaper, and angrily toss it away, and sit and stare at the glass door of the cabinet that held his collection. For long minutes he would open that door and stare, or he would stare through the glass with the door shut. He never took out any of these objects. I was always a little afraid of him during these motionless scenes, when he seemed as wooden and lifeless as one of my toy soldiers. I would be crouched on the carpet nearby watching for his breath to resume, hoping my mother would come home and this silent and wooden starer would turn back into the father I knew.

It is because of these distant impressions that now and then assault me in unheralded snatches of panic that I believe my father harbored somewhere in his ribs an untamed creature. Unlike him, I am no dissembler, I am subject to no fantastic imaginings. And yet I feel all at sea, my memoir is of no more import than some wild pestilential growth, and what idiocy it was to think that it could be chained, as originally proposed, by ten typewritten sheets!

*

September 2, 1949. 4 pm. It is now nearly two weeks since with some urgency I advised Mr. John Theory, my current liaison at Morgan, of the need for the transfer of one of the Trustees here to a nursing facility. This morning there came from him what I expected to be confirmation, however delayed, of the completed arrangements, while meanwhile the disrepute brought upon this house by the disgrace of suicide has erased all such necessity; so it may be that what is merely moot is finally the father of the ironical. I have since learned that John’s communication, disturbing in the extreme, has been received by all five remaining Trustees. We are informed that the present situation at Temple House has long been unsustainable, that after private surveillance by the bank it was determined that the physical and financial condition of the premises continues to deteriorate (vermin, easy access by intruders, insufficient outdoors safety for the residents, understaffing, fragile old books a flammable hazard in the kitchen area, etc.), that the ill-considered renovations of so many years ago are inappropriate for the residents (dangerously weighty ceiling lighting fixtures, the attractive nuisance of a dimly lit chapel no longer in use), and so forth. In brief: we are required to vacate Temple House by no later than December 15, 1949.

By this hour (7:30 pm) the letters have been read in, it must be said, a flurry of consternation. My colleagues, uninvited, invaded my study shortly after the lunch trays were removed (Hedda has not yet been told of this new calamity), chiefly to bemoan the disruption, as if I, because of my prior interaction with John Theory, were the cause of it. Once again I find I am accused, not surprisingly by one of my earlier accusers, the nonentity who came together with that pernicious twosome to charge me with disturbing the peace. I will not forget that ignominious hammer and tongs, his sole utterance, nor will I give his name. Let him and the others be expunged from my consciousness.

Note how consistent I have been in omitting all names but that of Ned Greenhill, of whom I suspect no ill intent. (For obvious reasons, he was never regarded as eligible to serve as Trustee, yet to this day he has never shown resentment or rancor.) My honorable colleagues, it goes without saying, spare no opportunity to denigrate me. I blame this on that insidious Amelia, who coming one evening to pick up my dinner tray (once again that vile stew), observed me in an idle moment of contemplation. Randomly dispersed on my table, close to my father’s cigar box (with its hidden burden), were a few of his cherished arcana. I say randomly; I should perhaps say dreamily, as when some unforgotten presence presses as palpably as if it were as near and true as living pulse. It seemed to