Antiquities by Cynthia Ozick (new ebook reader txt) 📕

He left me behind then, as one would abandon a person infected by plague. I somehow understood, for a reason I cannot unravel, that this was not the first time he had come to this place in the night.

*

October 7, 1949. My evenings with Hedda in the kitchen are quite pleasant. Only yesterday she confided that she has begun to look for employment elsewhere, but is willing to stay on until I know where I am to go. To my relief, she has agreed to substitute lighter fare for those dense stews, and my digestion is much the better for it. In addition, we have fallen into a practice entirely alien to my experience. I was at first acutely embarrassed. Her idea struck me as a foolish game, and under normal circumstances I believe it would surely be so. She had removed from the pantry shelves (at my urging, it may be recalled) the work of some foreign poet, and not long ago showed me, on facing pages, an English version. She would read aloud from the German, she proposed, and I was to do the same for the translation. I dislike the sounds of that distasteful language, but when I see how at home she is in those growly syllables, and how they transform her from an inconsequential domestic to a woman who thinks, I am, I admit, carried away. I can still remember verbatim all four lines of the verse that uncannily fell to me:

At first I almost despaired,

And thought I would never be able to bear it;

Yet even so, I have borne it—

But do not ask me how.

My lost and dearest Peg, Valorous and Pure. It is as if this long-dead Jew (so Hedda tells me he is), of whom I know nothing, mourns in my own voice.

And here, in the helter-skelter of Reverend Greenhill’s books, many with their leaves gnarled by the steam of kettles and stewpots over the years, you have only to put in your hand and pull out a plum: my son’s current idée fixe, so to say, unless he has already fled off to other fantasies. I and Thou, a little thing, no thicker than a pamphlet, by this Buber he spoke of. Yet another Jew. I have looked into it: impenetrable.

Hedda’s anxious perusal of the help-wanted columns puts me in mind of a public resource I have never before contemplated using. My immediate intention is to place brief advertisements in various newspapers, not excluding the tabloids, in the hope of relieving me of the dread that too often worries my nights. If this small scheme should reveal nothing, well and good. And if a reply should come, what am I to think?

*

October 12, 1949. This morning an extraordinary telephone call from Ned Greenhill. I regret being out of touch, he said, how long has it been since that fine afternoon at the Oyster Bar? I hear they are tearing the place apart and redoing it from scratch, dozens of new hires and so forth, it seems the world doesn’t stand still. And how are you in general, Lloyd? Comfortably suspended in lassitude, I told him; but I dislike these obligatory maunderings that conceal an as yet unspoken purpose. Oh yes, he said, everything up in the air, what’s to become of the old mausoleum in the woods? That thicket of antediluvian maples always gave me a feeling, especially at night, of wolves prowling there, it wouldn’t be a loss to have them come down, roots and all. The real estate section in last week’s Tribune, if you happened to see it, was full of probable buyers. Yes, I said, I saw that, and isn’t your son one of them? Well Lloyd, he said, it’s problematic, the place has a history, not altogether unsavory, and typical of its era after all, so there’s some vestige of nostalgia, don’t you think, at least for the likes of us elderly fellows. I’ve told Edwin, keep it low, don’t go too high, but this new generation’s got no use for such ideas, it’s nothing but taller and taller, so how would you feel, Lloyd, about relocating to the fifteenth floor over on East Seventy-sixth? Used to be the old Winthrop Court, Edwin’s converting it into a live-in hotel, all the amenities, maid service and so on. And an actual courtyard, a little private garden of shrubs and paths, all hidden from any casual pedestrian eye. Very fine restaurants in the vicinity, as I can personally testify. I know you’ve all had to get out of that moth-eaten wreck, I heard this only last week from John Theory, turns out he’s a classmate of Edwin’s at Amherst. It would do you good to get away from the grasshoppers and back into the life of the city, so what do you say? And understand me, Lloyd, except for taxes and suchlike this would be something I hope you’d accept as a tribute from me.

Our conversation went on for more than two hours. He explained that his son planned for the initial tenants to be of a certain standing, in order to lure others of similar status. A prestige building, they call it. And because of our old connection, Ned said, for you, Lloyd, and solely for you, the fifteenth-floor suite has been set aside, if you would accept it, as a lifetime gift from me, though who knows which of us will go graveward first. So Lloyd, he said, you’ll think about it, won’t you?

Of course I pressed him to tell what could possibly have motivated this inconceivable gesture. His response was at bottom offensive, and on three counts. First, I am a man of dignified wealth in my own right, not to be regarded as a recipient of another man’s benefaction. Second, wittingly or not, he flaunts his son’s prosperity when he is fully aware of my own paternal disappointment. Third, lurking below this seeming generosity of heart, is its price: