Antiquities by Cynthia Ozick (new ebook reader txt) 📕

even if of papyri and temples, may be of some personal interest to his son, but is hardly more generally useful. More frequently than not, what is brought to our attention is meaningless detritus, or worse, inept forgeries.

It disappointed me that despite my insistence on the authenticity of Sir Flinders Petrie’s signature, he declined so much as to glance at my father’s notebook. His dismissal persuades me also to destroy it. If for the expert it holds no scientific or historical value, it must carry the same peril as my memoir. And should after my demise those oddments of my Wilkinson cousins (they are included in my will) come upon either notebook or memoir, their ill-natured suspicions of my father’s madness will be confirmed.

My father, then, was an enthusiast. That he anointed his Cousin William, that he was besotted with Cousin William for all of his days, was that mad?

*

February 12, 1950. Lincoln’s Birthday. The question of the deposition, as I hereafter will term it, secreted in this faintly odorous antiquated box: I must finally call it a deposition, as if it were somehow rendered under oath, never mind that its authorship is ambiguous. Or if it is instead an apologia pro vita sua, then whose entrails is it exposing, whose disordered will?

I am today taken by surprise by a parcel sent to me here from Morgan Bank. John Theory writes that though the late Reverend Henry McLeod Greenhill’s library had suffered constant serious deterioration due to the unfortunate location of its place of storage, in addition to the ravages of insect infestation, and could not be preserved, it seemed prudent to draw up an inventory of its holdings as a supplement to the History of the Temple Academy for Boys by Many Hands (1915), kept here in the vault containing other pertinent Academy materials for which Morgan is now responsible, including an unattributed Sargent portrait of the author Henry James, Jr. And since you, his letter continues, as the sole remaining Trustee whose present address is known, and in view of your ongoing interest in the Academy, a copy of said inventory is herewith enclosed. With kind regards, JT.

These multitudinous lists consist of scores and scores of esoteric titles, some in German and French, a cluster of Greek and Latin grammars, a threadbare copy of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, whole shelves of theological studies (Augustine, Origen, Tertullian, and so forth), a History of the Jews (translated from the German, with pencilled notes), and an abundance of volumes related to the early Levant: Development of Epigraphy; Tells of Mesopotamia, Babylon, Nimrud, and Nineveh; Yahweh and the Gods of Canaan, and on and on.

One title among the last catapults me, if I may put it so, into wild surmise. I give it below, as it appears in the inventory:

The Israelite Temple on Elephantine Island, Volume II. Reconstructive diagrams. Maps, including surrounding area. History of tripartite temples. The Khnumian cultic niche. Author: Douglas C. Hesse, Ph.D. Oriental Press, 1912. [Volume I missing.]

Volume I missing? How? Where? Into whose fancies did it go? And what is it that unnerves me so?

*

February 17, 1950. The building is being rapidly populated. When I go down for my walk, I am no longer alone in the elevator. Three or four times a week a young Japanese woman and her little son join me there. Her face is flawless porcelain, and I think of Miranda’s favorite vase (the willowy maiden on the bridge) and its pride of place on that mahogany console I so much disliked. In our companionable two-minute descent I learn that her husband is second in rank at the Japanese consulate. At half-past three, when school is out, the lobby, with its hideous spider-legged Saarinen chairs (so I am told they are called), is clamorous with the squeals of a flock of children, nearly all of them accompanied by white-shoed nannies. I have yet to see here the silver heads of widows and widowers: am I the only aged occupant? My own silver head is thoroughly overlooked, my name unrecognized: all these ripe and pulsing lives making their way, climbing their rungs, bedding their beloveds, have no use for a retired Trustee of a forgotten patrician academy.

I am no one’s decoy. I live here on the strength of another boy’s honest gratitude. And for what? That a Petrie never called him Hebe?

*

February 18, 1950. When I am at times too fatigued for my afternoon walk, I sit in the lobby on these comfortless chairs to watch the children come home from school. They put me in mind of birds, always flitting, always chirping, and their quick eyes dart like the eyes of birds, and their cheeks are round and their little brown shoes are buckled and their satchels are of many colors, and when they shout, as they often do, they make a tangled soprano chorus. Strange to find myself among children after years of mouldering in the company of old men. I have picked out one or two of my favorites, the small Japanese boy, always with his mother, and an older girl whose unaware breasts, as I imagine, are already budding. Now and then I catch sight of a child of perhaps eleven or twelve who seems to hold himself apart, and never romps as the others do, but hurries away, though I never see where, and before I can steal a glance at his face. What marks him for me is his blood-red hair.

*

March 12, 1950. For the last few weeks I have not been entirely myself, and while the weather is bright and I am exacting in my dress even when confined, I am never tempted to walk. I am content enough with the services offered here, despite the incompetence of the laundress who delivers my personal things: time after time, this annoyance of mismatched socks carelessly returned to their drawer where I habitually find them. Luckily, among the promised amenities is