Antiquities by Cynthia Ozick (new ebook reader txt) 📕

me that I was again on the floor with my wooden brigade, my father was again staring through the glass door, while meanwhile in the cup of my hand lay the bulbous female contours of one of those grotesque figurines, no more than three inches in height, that are prominent among his findings. And here was Amelia spewing out her lascivious giggle and going off, as I soon understood, to spread an infamous aspersion: that I am in the grip of an obscene habit of some kind. Since then, I have been subject to muted but sly hints and taunts, implying that I am given to caress the stone breasts and vulvae of these innocent objects. My worthy peers, elderly widowers all, display the spiteful conduct of a pack of kindergartners!

Hedda herself often remarks on these juvenile provocations in similar vein, having, as she recently confided, until 1932 taught at Vienna’s most respected fortschrittliche Grundschule. I think of her as a mundane intelligence, and never presumed she could be formally equipped with what she calls a Masterstudium. And with her dark looks she is certainly not a native Austrian. I have so far had little interest in her bizarre wanderings, though it bemuses me to learn that she was obliged to spend years in some woebegone Caribbean village, where, she insists, the thuggish Trujillo was more open to persons like herself than the American president. (Miranda and I, to tell the truth, naturally cast our votes four times against Roosevelt’s socialist schemes, even as we were compelled to overcome our dislike of that near-socialist Wendell Willkie.)

But already today the plans for decampment have begun. The Trustees, to say it outright, are wealthy men: relocation ought not to be a difficulty. But where is one to go?

*

September 3, 1949. When this morning I was finally able to reach John Theory (he is rarely at his desk), he replied with a disconcerting testiness, though his telephone manner has in the past never been anything but respectful. Three generations of Petries, I told him, have been with Morgan, and out of the blue you have the gall to put me out on the street? Now listen to me, Lloyd, he said, there is nothing sudden or abrupt here, three months ago I sent you, I mean you personally as designated spokesman for the residents of Temple House, to which position you will recall you readily agreed some four years ago, an official notice stating that an investigation of the condition of the property was soon to begin. You cannot claim, he said, to be surprised. I am acutely surprised, I said, and as for the safety of our environment here, ought that not to be the Trustees’ own consideration without extraneous intrusion? Read the Charter, Lloyd, he said (with a good deal of asperity), why don’t you just read the Charter, and in fact I returned to it some twenty minutes ago and to my embarrassment located the clause in question. On its face it appears to contradict the earlier in-perpetuity clause, but on further examination I see that some clever Shylock’s statutory legerdemain obviates this conflict.

More to the point, I have also found the letter of prior notification John speaks of. It troubles me that I had entirely forgotten it. I believe it must be my immersion in my memoir at the time of its arrival that distracted me, but what is still more vexing is that I discovered this letter in my father’s cigar box interleaved among the transcription papers, and have no memory of inserting it there. What could I have been thinking, or was I thinking at all? I have never been subject to carelessness, and surely not to willful negligence. Nevertheless it does not escape me that this new crop of rash young bankers is wanting in both decorum and deference.

*

September 5, 1949. Labor Day. Apparently hoping to compensate for Amelia’s recent barbarism, Hedda has come with a page torn out from Life magazine: a large photo of Sigmund Freud’s desk in his Vienna study. Parading over its surface are innumerable antiquities similar to my father’s, though certainly surpassing his in quantity. See now, Hedda said, one of the greatest thinkers of the century, and no one dares to accuse such a man of Lüsternheit! Clearly she means to flatter (or is it comfort?) me, as if I ought to be impressed by a comparison with this charlatan Jew and his preposterous notions. It can easily be seen throughout my memoir that I have no regard for such absurd posturings; it is the conscious mind I value, not its allegedly secret underworld. So here is this ragged bit of paper (she leaves it on my table and runs off), with all these phantasmagoric pharaonic remnants, bellies and horns, faceless heads, and why do these unfathomable things lead me to remember the heat of Ben-Zion Elefantin’s bony shins against my own?

*

September 18, 1949. An unexpected public affliction, this buzzing and swarming of sons and sons-in-law and daughters and daughters-in-law and grandsons and granddaughters, and who knows whatever other likely kin never before known to have been seen on these premises, soon to be razed and replaced by what faddish excrescence? I continue to follow in the Times how that predatory clique of New York developers are sniffing opportunities here in Westchester, with Temple House and its considerable grounds as prime prey. Undoubtedly the maples will give way to asphalt, though today they are all gold, gold at their crowns, gold on the paths, gold gilding the old benches. Our last fall here. The fall of Temple House. And the visitors, the half-forgotten relations, the would-be heirs and successors, coming, as they say, to the rescue, the plans for departure, the summonings, the offerings, the temptings, the resolutions, the invitations, the reassurances: this unwonted outbreak of the fevers of hospitality. Old men’s bones will be ash before long; inconceivable that wealthy old men should languish unhoused.

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