Antiquities by Cynthia Ozick (new ebook reader txt) 📕

me, with no eruption of daughter-in-law or grandchild or so much as a willing cousin (the latter-day Petries and Wilkinsons have hardly been fruitful), yet I too have a son, have I not? Some days ago I informed him of our enforced exodus. He did not beseech me to fly at once to Los Angeles for a new life in the California sunshine. Oh Dad, he said, you know you wouldn’t fit in here, it’s not your milieu, you wouldn’t be happy, and anyhow it’s not a generational thing, it’s a personality difference: and more demurrals on the same theme. He claims to be studying a freeing philosophy, Oriental in origin, called Zen, as well as the writings of one Martin Buber. (All this astonished me. I am alarmed by these inconstant dilettantisms.) I explained that to lighten the burden of my imminent move, I am about to dispose of much of my material possessions, as well as of certain keepsakes, one of which he had at one time expressed a strong desire to get hold of. I regret my untoward obstinacy in refusing you, I told him, and would be glad to assist in whatever motion picture project you are currently engaged in. I speak not only of financing, though we can surely discuss such an eventuality. Are you, I asked, still interested in making some use of my father’s notes on his Egyptian travels, and his inscrutable desertion of my mother, and his unusual friendship with Sir Flinders Petrie? Oh no Dad, he said, it’s past time for that sort of thing, not another one of these Near Eastern Westerns with the weeping abandoned bride, thanks all the same. And he made no further mention of William Wyler.

There is no way I can win back my son: not by bribery, not by appeasement. Not by a love I cannot feel. I have loved only twice. Once my glorious Peg. And once, long ago, Ben-Zion Elefantin.

*

September 22, 1949. How many hours we lay there entwined I cannot say, nor can I recall whether either of us had surrendered, as I now suppose, to what must have been a kind of half-sleep. For myself, I know that the sun crept from one corner of the ceiling to another, and that I tracked its slow progress with indolent eyes. Nor can I say that I was fully awake, though the murmurings that swirled around me were remnants of Ben-Zion Elefantin’s small low catlike growlings, rising and ebbing, so that here and there I took him to be invoking a foreign tongue, even as I apprehended his meaning. By now the far-off football shouts had diminished, and a commotion in the corridors signaled that the dinner hour had arrived, and that our classmates had begun their raucous rush to the refectory. This reminded me that I was parched; my palate was no better than a dry ribbed plain, and while Ben-Zion Elefantin, with his curious patience, peeled away the shell of his boiled egg, I drank innumerable cups of water, as if my thirst could consume some bottomless Niagara. I had no hunger at all. We sat, he and I, in a quiet made more dense by the clamor all around, and said nothing, until he pushed his chair back from the table and left me. This time I did not follow.

If only lost minutes could be reconstructed (minutes, I mean, in a boy’s mind seventy years ago), I would today perhaps understand what I understood only faintly then. He was throwing me off, he had no wish for me to pursue him. Something there was in me that had made him ashamed. It was my pity he felt; he recoiled from it. Pity, he knew, was no more than blatant disbelief. Or else it was belief: that I thought him crazed. It may be that I did think him crazed, as a fabricator is crazed by the dazzle of his fabrication. And indeed I was dazzled, as I am even now, by the ingenuity of his fable, if that is what it was, and by the labyrinth of his boyish brain. And by the piteous loneliness of his thin legs. He had abandoned me once before, when I had misunderstood his words; but his words were like no other boy’s words, so how was I to blame? And am I not myself the son of a crazed father, so how am I to blame?

The reader will conclude that I am mistaking pity for love.

Conclude however you please.

And for a second time (this was in chapel the next morning, when Reverend Greenhill’s text was Jonah’s refusal to preach to Nineveh), I saw yet again how humbly Ben-Zion Elefantin could sink into his shoulder blades as if to hide from himself. I am sorry, he said, that I made you so thirsty. You didn’t make me thirsty, I said, I just was. But I did make you thirsty, he said. Look, I said, come to my room at recess, there’s something I want to show you. I never want anyone else to see it, you’re the only one. All right, he said, I will come. Or maybe, I said, I’ll bring it to your room because you always keep your door shut. And then Reverend Greenhill began to describe the big fish, which he explained wasn’t necessarily an actual whale, and to my surprise I found myself listening with some interest.

*

September 24, 1949. It was on this day seven years ago that my poor Peg passed on. I have visited her burial site only on three particular occasions (I think of these as our small private anniversaries), and never since the last. Like me, she had no siblings, and her parents were long gone, so it was I who arranged for her spare marble gravestone in St. Mark’s Episcopal Cemetery, a short drive not far from Temple House. (Her origins were midwest Methodist, but no matter.) I had intended to go