Antiquities by Cynthia Ozick (new ebook reader txt) 📕

there often, to reflect on the words I had myself composed: Margaret Gertrude Stimmer, A Companion Valorous and Pure. I had hoped that this would give me if not consolation, then the will to bear her absence; yet before long I learned to my chagrin that my repeated presence there provoked unpleasant gossip among my colleagues. (My own interment, as is fitting, will be beside Miranda in the Petrie family plot.)

*

September 25, 1949. Once again the anxieties of my present musings disrupt my focus and send my thoughts flying: what am I to do with my father’s things, where am I to go, and will I be compelled to jettison my Remington? Even so, these insecurities must not sway me from the urgency of my purpose. Then let it be noted that in the very hour of my assignation with Ben-Zion Elefantin, recess was suspended. Instead, Forms Four through Eight were required to attend a lecture, to be held in the refectory, by a respected acquaintance of Reverend Greenhill’s, whose name has disappeared from my memory, though I can still see his thin pale fingers fluttering over the buttons of his vest as if in a failing plea for our unruly attention. Gentlemen, Reverend Greenhill began (he addressed us thus in the aggregate, though otherwise he called each boy by his family name), our subject today, however geographically distant, transpires, so to say, before our very eyes, while the fires of injustice are rank in our nostrils. Our speaker, he went on, is a formidable scholar of this shameful period in the history of France. Listen carefully, because it contains lessons for us at this very moment, here in our noble Temple Academy. It is a tale of lie and libel and deceit, and there is much to glean from it even for such a privileged society as ours. The visitor, it turned out, was too short for the height of the lectern; it rose to the bottom of his chin, so that his head seemed to hover on its own, bodiless. Captain Dreyfus, he said, is an officer in the French military who in a public ceremony of deliberate humiliation has been wrongfully stripped of his epaulets, but here he was interrupted: what are epaulets, sir, are they something like underpants? Against barbs such as this the little man struggled on in what soon became an assault of chatter and titter, as by twosomes and threesomes his audience dwindled. And when I furtively gestured to Ben-Zion Elefantin to come away, he glared at me with a ferocity I did not recognize, and remained where he was.

For days afterward the rowdies made much of this event in their harryings, with taunts of you are rank in my nostril and other such inspired vituperations, stripped epaulets not least among them. And in chapel on Sunday Reverend Greenhill announced that he intended to take a week’s holiday in the Hebrides, to follow, he said, in the footsteps of Boswell and Dr. Johnson.

*

September 28, 1949. The exodus is under way. Two have already departed, one to Florida (the hammer-and-tongs fellow, and good riddance), the other ostensibly to vacation in Switzerland, where his nephew has business connections as well as a pied-à-terre in Zurich. I take vacation to be a euphemism for the final adieu: this chap, a veteran of kidney stones, can barely pump out three words without losing his breath, and who knows how he will survive a plane trip of many hours? Next week, I hear, two more of our sorry cohort are to vanish, the first to what is nowadays known as a senior residence, the second to a furnished annex, formerly a garage, directly behind his sister-in-law’s home in nearby Bronxville. (His brother is deceased.) As I earlier remarked, the Trustees are far, far from being pinched for dollars, and were never likely to be dependents, yet what else is longevity if not dependency?

We were seven, and then six, and then five, and now with the exit of four, there remains but one, and I am that one. Not that I am entirely alone. Amelia, seeing the imminent collapse of her engagement here, has gone off to Texas with her newest casanova (so says Hedda), but Hedda herself persists. I go down to the kitchen for meals; it simplifies, or else call it democratization. We sit side by side and sometimes together pull out from their shelves in the pantry two or three of Reverend Greenhill’s disorderly mélange of old books, unwanted everywhere, though Hedda thinks this inconceivable. Why not take whatever you please, I tell her, they will anyhow end in the dumpster along with the much abused chapel pews. Danke, aber nein, only this one I take, and showed me the title, Liederkreis von Heinrich Heine.

*

September 30, 1949. I had determined to carry what I knew to be my father’s foremost treasure to Ben-Zion Elefantin’s room, relying on his obstinately shut door to ensure our privacy. But I hung back: it was there, amid the floating dust particles, that we had lain leg over leg, as if trapped together in the soft maze of some spider’s web, and under the shawl of a solitude and gravity that frightened me. My instinct was to keep away, and my own room, exposed to any passerby (I was too cowardly to flout the rules), was anyhow unsuitable for my devising. My devising was, as I dimly felt it, a consecration of sorts. The chapel was bare of such sensations, and besides, we had once been discovered there. Then what of Reverend Greenhill’s sanctum? No one entered unless summoned, not even the masters, though according to his own dictum, Reverend Greenhill’s study door was never closed, either by his wish or by any key. Gentlemen, he once told us (his text that day was the serpent in Eden), I own nothing of value but my library and my reflections; my books are mere matter, my reflections are not.