Antiquities by Cynthia Ozick (new ebook reader txt) 📕

to explain that each of the Trustees, by the terms of the Trust, and by design of the founders, must once himself have been a pupil of the Academy, and is thereby personally indebted to that past. Hence we all remember the reprehensible common showers. We all remember the sacking of the headmaster from Liverpool due to his inadequate accent and the misleading Cambridge degree that brought us those inferior vowels. (I sometimes ponder what poor Mr. Brackett-Lynn must have thought of our American vowels.) I might append here that of our seven extant Trustees, five are widowers, for whom marriage and family have compensated for early dolor, and two, having never married, are childless. I am glad to say that I am among the five, and am myself the father of a son. Eschewing the law, he long ago settled in California to pursue a career in, as he puts it, “film entertainment.” (I am no philosopher, my leanings are wholly pragmatic, but I now and then contemplate how perverse is the cycle of familial traits, the capriciousness of an earlier generation unfathomably reappearing in a later one.) Despite this, we are by no means estranged, though the sputter of the long-distance telephone lines sometimes inhibits intimate talk.

Our conference in that redolent place under the burgeoning branches was cut short, as it happened, by a sudden heavy rainstorm, which accounts for my ten days in bed, when I took advantage of my temporary (though distressing) invalidism by reviewing the little I have set down thus far. How dismaying to note the wandering digressions, the lack of proportion, too much told here, not enough there, and how different from the logical composition of a legal brief! First the circumstance, then the argument invoking precedent, and finally the conclusion, all concise and in order, unburdened by excessive rumination. And I have not yet so much as approached the subject of my memoir, which I hope before long to touch on: the presence in the Academy of a fourth-form pupil preposterously called Ben-Zion Elefantin, his Christian name (so to speak) a puzzling provocation, his surname a repeated pretext for ridicule by merciless boys.

Of those boys at that distant time (and well afterward), nearly all were in a way unwanted half-orphans. Fathers, like mine, dead too soon, or mothers, like mine, too melancholy to tend to a son at home. And now that I speak again of my father, I must revert to the notebook referred to above, given to me by my mother directly after my father’s death, together with certain other objects that I retain to this very day. The occasion was a rare holiday from school, permitted only that I might attend my father’s obsequies, which chanced also to coincide with my tenth birthday. “Here are your father’s toys,” my mother said (satirically, as I later understood), and added that such things were fit only for a boy of my temperament, who, as she claimed, preferred mooning over chess pieces to skipping with other boys in fresh air. With the vague awareness of a child, I knew that long before my birth my father had journeyed alone to some faraway land, my mother being too ill to accompany him, and that he had returned with an exquisite gift to delight her: a gold ring in the shape of a scarab. (I never saw her wear it.) He brought with him, besides, an assemblage of ancient oddities—souvenirs, it may be, that had appealed to him during his travels. These had been neglected, dusty and untouched for years, in a glass-fronted cabinet in a corner of my father’s study, until the morning following his funeral, when I was sent back to the Academy, carrying with me a bulky rattling pouch. I keep these curious treasures here, all in a row, on a shelf above my desk, just as they were, with the exception of one. (Of that one I will soon have more to say.)

As for the notebook, I hardly knew what to do with it. I made, I recall, some small attempts at reading it, but except for a cursory mention of buffaloes and elephants, there was nothing to interest a boy just turned ten, and I thrust it, along with the other things, into the pouch. Today, undeniably, and in light of my family’s past, these much-faded writings are of overriding interest. The notebook has the dimensions of a playing card, no thicker than the width of my little finger. A crowded pencilled scribble in my father’s recognizable hand, though plainly hurried. The opening pages disappointingly dull, consisting merely of a list drawn up in one lengthy column spilling over several sheets. Why my father kept this inventory I cannot tell. (It is troubling to think that perhaps he was intending to make a life of such implements, never to return to my mother.) Here I will try the reader’s patience by transcribing only a small part of these jottings, viz.:

sledgehammers

handpicks

pickaxes

shovels

hoes

ropes

crowbars

sieves

buckets

baskets

mallets

sandbags

crates

turias

measuring tapes

wheelbarrows

line levels

theodolites

plaster

tents

horses

and so forth, though of horses he would have more to observe. What most struck my father on his arrival amid the dust and debris and the volcanic heat and the ceaseless jabber of the fellahin, all of them naked to the waist, was the stench of the horses’ droppings, melting and sizzling in the baking sand; incongruous as it might be, he was all at once reminded of those long-ago riding lessons at the Academy (already well established in my father’s time) purported to be requisite among a young man’s skills. How strange, he thought, that over such a great distance, and in such disparate scenes, the smell should be exactly the same!

In view of his warm admiration for Cousin William, I fear that my father was disheartened by his first encounter with this remarkable young man, so close in age to his own (my father was then approaching his thirty-first birthday). He was not welcomed as he had hoped to be. To begin with, he was