Antiquities by Cynthia Ozick (new ebook reader txt) 📕

those regrettable papers would lead me to reflect on the future of the firm: if, say, we were to fall on hard times and were forced to retrench? and if such an eventuality might one day compel me to do without a secretary? A practical man must be resourceful, so that now and then in those quiet nights, at a late and lonely hour, I would—delicately and hesitantly—remove from the lower drawer of Miss Margaret Stimmer’s desk that well-worn manual, according to whose guidance I studied and practiced, studied and practiced, repeating difficult combinations again and again. And then I would restore the manual to its drawer, lingering over whatever else might be therein: Miss Margaret Stimmer’s fresh daily handkerchiefs, with their particular fragrance, and (somewhat to my disappointment), a compact of rouge, with its little round mirror, and a forgotten pair of lemon-colored chamois gloves. It was pleasant then to picture those nimble white fingers sliding easily into their five clinging tunnels—and once I myself attempted to fit my far thicker and clumsier fingers into Miss Margaret Stimmer’s gloves. But it could not be done.

Then let it be noted once more: it is solely because of Miss Margaret Stimmer’s fortuitous presence and my consequent expertise at the typewriter, that my colleagues are able to ascertain my progress in the composition of this memoir, while I am entirely in the dark about theirs.

*

June 22, 1949. I have at long last decided to offer a description, as far as I am able, of my father’s collection. To my knowledge, it has never been properly appraised, as it ought to have been, by any reputable scholar; but for the purpose of this memoir I scarcely think this remiss. Each piece, or so I speculate, was selected chiefly to gratify my father’s interest and adoration, and if the utility of each remained a mystery, so much the better. Many of these pieces, and pieces they are, are instantly identifiable: clay lamps, jugs with handles like ears and spouts like the mouth of a fish, amulets, female figurines, and the like, but many are baffling. All are in a way miniature, either because they are parts broken off from a whole, or were conceived on this small scale. I had carried them to the Academy, as I earlier mentioned, with no notion of where I could keep them. Not on display in my cold little Fifth Form cell, like the foolish feminine bric-a-brac we had at home: this would surely invite jeers. Happily, my writing table had beneath it a small cabinet with wooden doors, with its own lock and key, in which I stored my modest necessities, and I installed them there, still in their pouch—all but one artifact, taller than the others, and untypically intact, only because the bits had been almost seamlessly sealed in place by some master restorer’s unknown hand. Its storkish height prevented my concealing it with the others; the height of the shelves was too low. Instead, I deposited it under my bed in a shoebox that had no lid and covered it with a pair of woolen socks.

What am I to call this object? It was a jug like other jugs (I mean a container), but more striking: it was made in the shape of a stork. Its breast was the breast of a stork, high and arched. Its spout was a stork’s long tapering bill that flowed from a head with an emerald eye. By emerald I intend not merely the color, but the veritable gem itself, yet only on one side of the head. The other showed an empty socket. The legs were folded at the knee, as if kneeling in water, and it was these knees, showing minute specks of their original red, that formed the object’s base. Under the base, when I turned it over, were odd scratchings, grooves worn shallow by some forgotten alphabet.

In the days following my father’s burial, or, rather, in the half-dark of the nights when the Academy slept and my door was shut, it became my clandestine habit to pluck this object from its cradle and contemplate its meaning for my father. Why had it attracted him, and why had he brought it from that faraway land? Did he imagine it to be a welcome if exotic ornament for domestic display, certain to please my mother? But I saw that my mother scorned it—she who was otherwise partial to polished decorative vases on this and that decorative little table; and at last my father hid it away. It belonged, she said, to his “mad episode,” an episode rarely alluded to and never defined. Or perhaps it was only that she judged it too crude and broken, with its missing eye.

In the dim corridor light that seeped under my door the emerald eye glittered, while the blind eye seemed to vanish away. For a reason I could not say then, and still cannot say now, an uncommon image came to me: I thought of a chalice. But a stork cannot be a chalice. So I called this curious thing by the name its birdlike spirit evoked: I called it a beaker. And because of the solitary nature of my cell I had little fear of its discovery.

*

June 23, 1949. It was considered one of the Academy’s attractions that each pupil should have his own room, to be fully in his charge, and also to compel him to undergo the discipline of cleaning it daily and changing his personal bedsheets every Saturday morning. (At a later date, when as Trustee it became my duty to assess expenses, I saw how these youthful responsibilities conveniently lessened the need for house maids.) The reader will have seen that I speak of my cell. This term was introduced to us with the arrival of Mr. Canterbury, the new headmaster recruited to replace poor Mr. Brackett-Lynn. Mr. Canterbury had pursued divinity studies at Oxford; his accent was pronounced satisfactory. He was expected