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“P.S. 166,” Loretta said, just to prove that she had gone over the application.

“It’s a good school for the early grades, but after that… ”

“Of course. Democracy can be carried too far.”

“It can,” Alexa conceded.

They had reached the shambles, which was neither an office nor a bedroom nor yet a restaurant altogether. Loretta rearranged the upper part of her person inside a maroon sweater and tucked the lower, grosser half of herself out of sight behind an oak desk. Alexa at once felt herself more friendly disposed to her.

“I hope you don’t think I’m being too pokey?”

“Not at all.”

“And Mr. Miller? What does he do?”

“He’s in heat-retrieval systems.”

“Oh.”

(G. would always add, at this point, “I fight entropy for a living.” Should she?)

“Well. Most of our parents, you know, come from the humanities. Like us. If Tancred should come to the Lowen School, it’s not likely that he’ll ever follow in his father’s technological footsteps. Does Mr. Miller realize that?”

“We’ve discussed it. It’s funny—” in evidence she laughed, once, meagerly, through her nose “—but it’s actually G. who’s been more in favor of Tank coming here. Whereas my first thought was to enroll him at Stuyvesant.”

“Did you apply there?”

“Yes. I’m still waiting to hear if he’s been accepted.”

“It would be cheaper, of course.”

“We’ve tried not to let that be a consideration. G. went to Stuyvesant, but he doesn’t have good feelings about it. And while I enjoyed my education well enough, I can’t see that it’s enriched my life so awfully much more than G.’s that I can feel justified in my uselessness.”

“Are you useless?”

“Yes, relative to an engineer. The humanities! What good has it done for either of us, practically? I’m a caseworker and you’re teaching kids the same things we learned so that they can grow up to do what? At best, they’ll be caseworkers and teachers.”

Loretta nodded her head consideringly. She seemed to be trying to keep from smiling. “But your husband disagrees?”

“Oh, he feels his life has been wasted too.” This time her laughter was genuine.

Loretta, after only a moment more of noncommittal silence, joined her. Then they had coffee, from actual beans that Loretta ground herself, and small hard cookies covered with pignoli. They were imported from South America.

Towards the end of his campaign against the Marcomanni, the Emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote: “Consider the past: such great changes of political supremacies. One may foresee as well the things which will be. For they will certainly take the same form. Accordingly, to have contemplated human life for forty years is the same as to have contemplated it for ten thousand years. For what more will you see than you have seen already?”

Dear Ruth—

Alexa wrote in ballpoint (it was after eleven, G. was asleep) in the empty back pages of Tank’s fifth-grade project about the moon. She remembered to stick in the date: April 12, 2025. Now the page balanced. She tried the sounds of various openings in her head but they were all stiff with civility. Her usual Introibo, an apology for being late to reply, was this once not so. (What would Bernie have said? He’d have said, “Clear the air—say what you’re really feeling!”)

First, to clear the air…

The pen moved slowly, forming large upright letters.

… I must say that your p.s. about Tank pissed me off more than somewhat. You and your tone of I Speak for the Human Spirit! You always are so ready to trounce on my values.

It was peanut butter, the very thickest. But she slogged on through it.

As for Tank, his fate still hangs in the balance. Ideally we’d like to send him somewhere (cheap) to be fed orts and crumbs of every art, science, craft, and…

She waited for the last term of the series.

The new Monsanto commercial came roaring through the wall: YOU LOOK SO PRETTY IN SHOES! YOU LOOK SO NICE IN—

“Turn that down!” she called in to her son, and wrote:

… fashion until he was old enough to decide for himself what he “liked.” But I might as well fill in his Modicum application right now as doom him with that kind of education. I’ll say this much for the Lowen School—it doesn’t graduate a lot of useless Renaissance nincompoops! I know too many of that sort professionally, and the best sweep streets—illegally!

Maybe Stuyvesant is as bad as you say, a kind of institutional Moriah, an altar specially put up for the sacrifice of my only begotten. I sometimes think so. But I also believe—the other half of the time—that some such sacrifice is required. You don’t like G, but it’s G. and those like him who are holding our technological world together. If her son could be trained to be either an actor or a soldier, what choice do you think a Roman matron would have made? That’s a bit overmuch but you know what I mean.

(Don’t you?)

She realized that, probably, Ruth wouldn’t know what she meant. And she wasn’t entirely sure she meant it.

At the very beginning of the First World War, as the Germans advanced towards the Marne and the Austrians pressed northward into Poland, a thirty-four-year-old ex-high school teacher living in a Munich rooming house had just completed the first draft of what was going to be the best-selling book of 1919 throughout Germany. In his introduction he wrote:

We are a civilized people: to us both the springtime pleasures of the 12th Century and the harvests of the 18th have been denied. We must deal with the cold facts of a winter existence, to which the parallel is to be found not in the Athens of Pericles but in the Rome of Augustus. Greatness in painting, in music, in architecture are no longer, for the West, possibilities. For a young man coming of age in late Roman times, a student abubble with all the helter-skelter enthusiasms of youth, it needn’t have been too brutal a disappointment to learn that some of his hopes would, necessarily, come to nothing. And if the hopes that had been blasted were those he held most dear, well, any lad worth his salt will make do, undismayed, with what is possible, and necessary. Say that there is a bridge to be built at Alcantara: then he will build it—and with a Roman’s pride. A lesson can be drawn from this that would be of benefit to coming generations, as showing them what can, and therefore must, be, as well as what is excluded from the spiritual possibilities of their own time. I can only hope that men of the next generation may be moved by this book to devote themselves to engineering instead of poetry, to the sea instead of the paintbrush, to politics instead of epistemology. Better than this they could not do.

Dear Ruth,

she began again, on a fresh sheet.

Each time I write you I’m convinced you don’t understand a word. (In fact, often as not, I don’t even send my finished letter.) It’s not just that I think you’re stupid, though I suppose I do, but that you have so well trained yourself in that difficult form of dishonesty that you call “faith ” that you can’t any longer see the world the way it is.

And yet… (with you there is always that redeeming “and yet”)… I do continue to invite your misunderstanding, just as I keep on inviting Merriam to the villa. Merriam—have I introduced her yet?—is my latest transfigure of “you.” A highly Christian, terribly sexy Jewess who follows heresy the way other women follow the arena. At her worst she can be as sententious as you at yours, but there are other moments when I’m convinced she really does experience… whatever it is … in a different way than I do. Call it her spirituality, though the word makes me squirm. We will be out in the garden, watching hummingbirds or some such, and Merriam will sink into her own thoughts, and they seem to glow inside her like the flame in an alabaster lamp.

Yet I wonder if this isn’t, after all, an illusion. Every lout learns at some point in his life to make his silences seem weighty with unspoken meaning. A single word can extinguish the flame in the lamp. It is, this spirituality of yours and hers, so humorless! “Getting into baskets,” indeed!

And yet… I would—and this is a confession—love to pack a bag and fly out to Idaho and learn to sit still and make baskets or any other dumb thing, so long as I could throw off the weight of my life here. To learn to breathe! Sometimes New York terrifies me and usually it appalls me, and the moments of High Civilization that should compensate for the danger and the pain of living here are less and less frequent as I grow older. Yes, I would love to surrender myself to your way of life (I fancy it would be something like being raped by a huge, mute, and ultimately gentle Nigger), though I know I never will, It’s important to me, therefore, that you are out there in the wilderness, redeeming my urban sins. Like a stylite.

Meanwhile I’ll go on doing what I think is my duty. (We are the daughters, after all, of an Admiral!) The city is sinking, but then the city has always been sinking. The miracle is that it works at all, that it doesn’t just…

The second page of the second letter was filled. Reading it over she realized it could never be mailed to her sister. Their relationship, already rickety, would never support the weight of this much honesty. But she finished the sentence anyhow:

… collapse.

A quarter of a millennium after the Meditations and fifteen hundred years before The Decline of the West, Salvian, a priest of Marseilles, described the process whereby the free citizens of Rome were gradually reduced to a condition of serfdom. The upper classes had arranged the tax laws to their own convenience and then administered them crookedly to their further convenience. The entire burden of supporting the army—Rome’s army, of course, was vast, a nation within a nation—fell on the shoulders of the poor. The poor grew poorer. Finally, reduced to utter destitution, some fled from their villages to live among the barbarians, even though (as Salvian notes) they did give off a dreadful odor. Others, living far from the frontiers, became bagaudae, or homemade vandals. The majority, however, rooted to the land by their property and families, had to accept the terms of the rich potentiores, to whom they made over their houses, their lands, their possessions, and at last the freedom of their children. The birth rate declined. All Italy became a wasteland. Repeatedly the Emperors were obliged to invite the politer barbarians across the borders to “colonize” the abandoned farms.

The condition of the cities at this time was even less agreeable than that of the countryside. Burned and pillaged by barbarians and then by the troops (themselves mostly recruits from lands bordering the Danube) that had been sent in to dispel these invaders, the cities existed, if at all, in ruins. “Though doubtless no one wished to die,” Salvian writes, “still no one did anything to avoid death,” and he welcomes the advent of the Goths into Gaul and Spain as being a release from the despotism of a totally corrupt government.

My dear Gargilius,

Alexa wrote.

It’s one of those days and has been for weeks. Rain, mud, and rumors of Radiguesis north of the city, west of the city, east of the city, everywhere at once. The slaves fret and dither but so far only two have run off to enlist among our would-be conquerors. On the whole we’ve done better than our neighbors. Arcadius has nothing left now but that cook of his who has such a mistaken notion of garlic (the one person who should have joined the barbarians!) and the Egyptian girl Merriam brought with her. The poor thing speaks no known language and probably hasn’t been told the world is coming to an end. As for the two we lost, Patrobas always was a troublemaker and so good riddance. I’m sorry to tell you the other one was Timarchus, whom you had had such hopes for. He went into one of his snits and shattered the left arm of the wrestler down by the pool. Then he had no choice but to leave. Or perhaps it was the other way round—he smashed up the statue as a gesture of farewell. Anyhow, Sylvan says it can be repaired, though the damage will always be visible.

My own confidence in the Army is undiminished, darling, but I think it wisest that I close the villa till the rumors have abated somewhat. I shall get Sylvan—whom else can I trust now?—to help me bury the plate and the bedposts and the three remaining jugs of Falernian somewhere quite secret (as we discussed the last time). The books, those that matter, I’ll bring with me. I wish there were even a morsel of good news. Except for being lonely, I am in good health and good spirits. I do wish you were not so many miles …

She crossed out “miles” and wrote “stadia.”

… stadia away.

For a moment in the mirror of art, for the blinking of an iris, Alex a witnessed her life the wrong way round. Instead of a modern house-wife fantasying herself in classical poses, the past stiffened and became actual and she thought she could see clearly, across the span of years, the other Alexa, the sad contemporary self she usually managed to avoid, a shrill woman in a silly dress who had been equal to the small demands neither of her marriage nor of her career. A failure or (which was possibly worse) a mediocrity.

“And yet,” she told herself.

And yet: didn’t the world, to keep on going, need just such people as she was? It had only been a moment. The question had restored a comfortable perspective, and she would end her epistle to Gargilius with some chilly, true-to-life endearment. She would write—

But her pen had disappeared. It was not on the desk, it was not on the rug, it was not in her pocket.

The upstairs noise had begun.

Two minutes to twelve. She might reasonably complain, but she didn’t know who lived in the apartment above, or even for certain that that was where the sound came from.
“Cheng-cheng,”
and then, after a pause,
“Cheng-cheng.”

“Alexa?” She could not place the voice (a woman’s?) summoning her. There was no one in the room.

“Alexa.”

Tancred stood in the doorway, looking a perfect cupid with an old silky shawl knotted at his hips, lemon on chocolate.