Antiquities by Cynthia Ozick (new ebook reader txt) 📕

these commonplace disparagements. For instance, in my own Academy years I saw for myself how inbred is that notorious Israelite clannishness. Mr. Canterbury, as one would expect, held on to our traditional policy of exclusion, but with the coming of the Reverend Greenhill, some half-dozen or so Jewish boys were admitted, and I grew to know them well, if from a distance, lest I too be shunned. What was most remarkable about these unaccustomed newcomers, I observed, was not simply that they were Jews, or were said to be Jews, or acknowledged themselves (always diffidently) to be Jews. Yet in their appearance, and their ways, they were like everyone else: hardy on the football field (as I, incidentally, was not), hair dribbling over their eyes (a local fad), and in chapel yawning and restless and making faces, like the rest of us, at the departing Mr. Canterbury. Even their names were not noticeably distinctive, though one of them, Ned Greenhill, could scarcely have been related to Reverend Greenhill! This Ned, as it happens, and despite his effort to conceal it, was exceptional in Latin, becoming thereby a favorite of Reverend Greenhill, who held him up as a model. (An invidious rumor had it that Reverend Greenhill was privately tutoring him in Greek.) This alone was enough to encourage our avoidance, and anyhow these Hebrews did have the habit of clinging to their own. It has nevertheless since occurred to me that this unseemly huddling may have been the result, not the cause, of our open contempt. To speak to a Jew would be to lose one’s place in our boyish hierarchy.

(Many years later, I would now and again lunch at the Oyster Bar with Ned Greenhill, by then a judge in the Southern District of New York. Our families, it goes without saying, never met.)

*

June 28, 1949. Upon my retirement from the law, I took away with me a very few objects evocative of my days and nights in that long-familar office, where my father and his father too had toiled: Miss Margaret Stimmer’s machine, of course (with her permission), and also several small or middling items belonging originally to my grandfather, including a charming rocking-horse blotter made of green quartz, a weighty brass notary sealing device with its swan’s-neck lever, and even a little bottle of India ink with a rubber stopper, once used to append indelible signatures to official documents. All these I still have with me here in my study, and a few, like the rocking-horse blotter and the India ink, I keep within daily sight on my writing table. (This ink, by the way, has never fully evaporated, thanks to its rubber stopper, and is as fluid as it was the day the bottle was first opened.) The reader may suppose that here I echo my father and his penchant for collecting; but this is hardly the case. All these oddments are quiet emblems of nostalgic reminiscence, whereas my father’s things could mean nothing personal to him, being cryptic signals from an unknowable past. What can scratchings on the base of a beaker tell? If such an object does own a familial history, however remote, it is certainly not my father’s. It is possible, I presume, that this very beaker may carry his emotion in having once enjoyed a close association with Sir Flinders Petrie, and may stand as an expression of the altogether different life my father might have lived had he succumbed to temptation and continued in his cousin’s path. If so, out of respect for my mother’s memory, I cannot follow him there.

Thinking back, I am much moved to recall that the day I made Miss Margaret Stimmer’s typewriter my own was the very day I permitted myself to call her Peg.

*

Fourth of July, 1949. The cell opposite mine (this was still within Mr. Canterbury’s tenure), with the corridor between us, was for a long time unoccupied. The boy it belonged to had contracted tuberculosis, which for many weeks went unrecognized. There was much illness all around in those unbearably cold winter days, and our cells, as previously remarked, were unheated. Nearly everyone, the masters included, was subject to running noses and chronic coughing. Still, no one coughed with the vehemence and persistence of the pupil in the cell across from mine. I had no choice save to suffer through it; it kept me awake night after night. Mr. Canterbury was finally persuaded to inform the boy’s guardian, who came and took him away. He never returned, and all we knew further of him was that a lawsuit was somehow involved. It was then that Mr. Canterbury disappeared from the Academy, and Reverend Greenhill arrived, and with him a welcome innovation: a feather quilt for each boy’s bed. At the same time, he arranged for the halls to be heated (an amenity primitive by present standards); and one morning in chapel he instructed us to keep our doors open to let in the warmth, and also, he admonished, to invite the equal warmth of pleasant social discourse. (How odd to be remembering the cold, when the temperature today approaches 100 degrees!)

But soon another pupil lay in what had been the sick boy’s bed. His door was often closed. Either he had come too late to be apprised of the new rule, or he chose to ignore it. Since he was in the form below mine, and attended different classes, I glimpsed him only intermittently, in the refectory or in chapel. His behavior in both these circumstances was odd. I never saw him eat a normal dinner. He seemed to live on bread and milk and hard-boiled eggs, and he always sat by himself. In chapel, even when reprimanded, he never removed his cap. In fact, I never saw him without it. And while the rest of us whispered and snickered and pretended to sneeze during the reading of the Gospel and all through the sermon, he seemed rigidly attentive. He joined