The Puttermesser Papers (11 page)

“Hey, you've got some pretty tough security around here. I had a hell of a time getting let in,” Rappoport complained.

“Last time I saw you,” Puttermesser said, “you had no trouble letting yourself out.”

“How about we just consider that water under the bridge, Ruth, what do you say?”

“You walked out on me. In the middle of the night.”

“You were liking Socrates better than me,” Rappoport said.

“Then why are you back?”

“My God, Ruth, look who you've become! I can't pass through New York without seeing the Mayor, can I? Ruth,” he said, spreading his impressive nostrils, “I've thought about you a lot since the election. We read all about you up in Toronto.”

“You and Mrs. Rappoport?”

“Oh come on, let's give it another try. Not that I don't understand you have to be like Caesar's wife. Above susp—”

“I have to be Caesar,” Puttermesser broke in.

“Well, even Caesar gives things another try.”

“You're no Cleopatra,” Puttermesser said.

There was a distant howl; it was the cook. She was fighting with the golem again. In a moment Xanthippe stood in the doorway, huge and red, weeping.

“Leave that woman alone. She'll cook what she'll cook, you can't tell her anything different,” Puttermesser scolded. “She runs a strictly kosher kitchen and that's enough. Go and wash your face.”

“Plump,” Rappoport said, staring after Xanthippe in her toga. “Rubenesque.”

“A growing girl. She wears what she pleases.”

“Who is she?”

“I adopted her.”

“I like a big girl like that.” Rappoport stood up. “The town looks terrific. I came to congratulate you, Ruth.”

“Is that why you came?”

“It turns out. Only I figured if you could bring a whole city back to life—”

“There are some things, Morris, that even the Mayor can't revive.”

Rappoport, his briefcase under his arm, wheeled and hesitated. “It didn't make it through the move? My avocado tree that I grew from a pit in Toronto? It was doing fine in your old apartment.”

“I don't have it any more.”

“Aha, you wanted to dispose of me lock, stock, and barrel. You got rid of every symptom and sign. The least bit of green leaf—”

“All my plants are gone.”

“No kidding. What happened?”

“I took their earth and made a golem.”

Rappoport, flaunting his perfect teeth under his mustache, laughed out loud. In the middle of his laughter his head suddenly fell into the kind of leaning charm Puttermesser recalled from long ago, when they had first become lovers; it almost made her relent.

“Goodbye, Ruth. I really do congratulate you on civic improvement.” Rappoport held out his hand. “It's one terrific town, I mean it. Utopia. Garden of Eden. In Toronto they run articles on you every day.”

“You can stay for dinner if you like,” Puttermesser offered. “Though I've got a meeting right after—municipal bonds. Myself, it's eat and get on down to City Hall.”

Someone had seized Rappoport's outstretched hand and was shaking it; it was not Puttermesser. Xanthippe, practiced politician, her wide cheeks refreshed and soap-fragrant, had sped forward out of nowhere. Rappoport looked stunned; he looked interested. He slipped his fingers out of the golem's grasp and moved them upward against her chest, to catch hold of the card that twirled there:
DEAF-MUTE
.

“That's awfully generous of you, Ruth, adopting someone like that. You're a wonderful person. We really ought to get together again. I
will
stay for a bite, if you don't mind.”

The golem did not bring her ballpoint to the table. She dealt with her soup spoon as if it were her enemy, the cook. Disgruntled, she heaped a fourth helping of mashed potatoes onto her plate. But her eye was on Rappoport, and her mouth was round with responsiveness: was it his teeth? was it his reddish mustache, turning gray? was it his wide welcoming nostrils? was it his briefcase bulging with worldly troubles?

Rappoport was talkative. His posture was straight-backed and heroic: he told of his last clandestine trip to Moscow, and of the turmoil of the oppressed.

When Puttermesser returned at midnight from the meeting on municipal bonds, the golem was asleep in her four-poster bed, her heels thrust outward in their pink socks over the footboard, and Rappoport was snoring beside her.

Eros had entered Gracie Mansion.

VIII. XANTHIPPE LOVESICK

C
ONSIDER NOW
P
UTTERMESSER
'
S SITUATION
. What happens to an intensely private mind when great celebrity unexpectedly invades it? Absorbed in the golem's
PLAN
and its consequences—consequences beyond the marveling at, so gradual, plausible, concrete, and sensible are they, grounded in a policy of civic sympathy and urban reasonableness—Puttermesser does not readily understand that she induces curiosity and applause. She has, in fact, no expectations; only desires as strong and as strange as powers. Her desires are pristine, therefore acute; clarity is immanent. Before this inward illumination of her desires (rather, of the
PLAN's
desires), everything else—the clash of interests that parties, races, classes, are said to give rise to—falls away into purposelessness. Another way of explaining all this is to say that Mayor Puttermesser finds virtue to be intelligible. Still another way of explaining it is to say that every morning she profoundly rejoices. There is fruitfulness everywhere. Into the chaos of the void (defeat, deception, demoralization, loss) she has cast a divinely clarifying light. Out of a dunghill she has charmed a verdant citadel. The applause that reaches her is like a sea-sound at the farthest edge of her brain; she both hears it and does not hear it. Her angelic fame—the fame of a purifying
angel—is virtue's second face. Fame makes Puttermesser happy, and at the same time it brings a forceful sense of the penultimate, the tentative, the imperiled.

It is as if she is waiting for something else: for some conclusion, or resolution, or unfolding.

The golem is lovesick. She refuses to leave the Mansion. No more for her the daily voyage into the broad green City as the Mayor's ambassador and spy. She removes the
DEAF-MUTE
card and substitutes another:
CONTEMPLATIVE
. Puttermesser does not smile at this: she is not sure whether it is meant to be a joke. There is too much gloom. There are hints of conspiracy. Anyhow the golem soon takes off the new sign. In the intervals between Rappoport's appearances Xanthippe languishes. Rappoport comes often—sometimes as often as three or four times a week. Xanthippe, moping, thumps out to greet him, trailing a loose white tail of her toga; she escorts him straight into her bedroom. She turns on the record player that Rappoport has brought her as a birthday gift. She is two years old and insatiable. God knows what age she tells her lover.

Rappoport steals out of the golem's bedroom with the dazzled inward gaze of a space traveler.

The Mayor upbraids Xanthippe: “It's enough. I don't want to see him around here. Get rid of him.”

Xanthippe writes: “Jealousy!”

“I'm tired of hearing complaints from the cook. This is Gracie Mansion, it's not another kind of house.”

“Jealousy! He used to be yours.”

“You're stirring up a scandal.”

“He brings me presents.”

“If you keep this up, you'll spoil everything.”

“My mother has purified the City.”

“Then don't foul it.”

“I am in contemplation of my future.”

“Start contemplating the present! Look out the window! Fruitfulness! Civic peace! You saw it happening. You caused it.”

“I can tear it all down.”

“You were made to serve and you know it.”

“I want a life of my own. My blood is hot.”

The Mansion thickens with erotic airs. Heavy perfumes float. Has Rappoport journeyed to mysterious islands to offer the golem these lethargic scents, these attars of weighty drooping petals? The golem has discarded her sewn-together sheets and looms with gemlike eyes in darkling passageways, wrapped in silks, vast saris that skim the carpets as she goes; each leg is a pillar wound in a bolt of woven flowers.

The summer deepens. A dry dust settles on the leaves in the Bronx Botanical Gardens, and far away the painted carousels of Brooklyn cry their jollities.

The Mayor: “I notice Rappoport hasn't been around lately.”

Xanthippe writes: “He left.”

“Where?”

“He clouded over his destination. Vienna. Rome. Jerusalem. Winnipeg. What do I care? A man of low position. Factotum of refugee philanthropy, twelve bosses over him.”

“What happened?”

“I wore him out.”

“I need you right away,” Puttermesser urges. “We're putting in new tiles on the subway line out toward Jamaica Avenue. With two-color portraits baked right into the glaze—Thoreau, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Emerson, so far. You can decide who else.”

“No.”

“You haven't been anywhere in months.”

“My mother speaks the truth. I thirst for the higher world. Office and rank. Illustrious men.”

Puttermesser is blighted with melancholy. She fears. She foresees. In spite of fruitfulness and civic peace (rather, on their account), it is beginning to be revealed to her what her proper mayoral duty directs.

She does nothing.

In pity, she waits. Sometimes she forgets. How long did the Great Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague wait, how often did he forget? There are so many distinguished visitors. The Emperor of Japan takes the elevator to the top of the Empire State Building. Puttermesser gives an astronaut a medal on the steps of City Hall; he has looked into the bosom of Venus. The mayors of Dublin, San Juan, and Tel Aviv arrive. In the Blue Room, Puttermesser holds a news conference about interest rates. She explains into the television cameras that the City of New York, in its abundance, will extend interest-free loans to the Federal government in Washington.

Now and then Xanthippe disappears. She does not return to the Mansion at night. Frequently her fourposter stands empty.

Early one morning, the golem, her eyes too polished, her cheeks too red, her silk windings torn, the tiny letters on her forehead jutting like raw scars, thumps home.

“Four days gone without a word!” Puttermesser scolds.

Xanthippe writes impatiently: “Been down to Florida.”

“Florida!”

“Been to visit ex-Mayor Malachy (‘Matt') Mavett.”

“What for?”

“Remember Marmel?”

“What's this about?”

“Been out West to visit him. Him and Turtelman.”

“What
is
this?”

But Puttermesser knows.

There are curious absences, reports of exhaustion, unexplained hospitalizations. The new Commissioner of Receipts and Disbursements whispers to Puttermesser, in confidence, that he will divorce his wife. His eyeballs seem sunken, his lips drop back into a hollow face. He has lost weight overnight. He will not say what the trouble is. He resigns. The Executive Director of the Board of Education resigns. It is divulged that he suffers from catarrh and is too faint to stand. The Commissioner of the Department of Cultural Affairs has been struck stone-deaf by a horrible sound, a kind of exultant hiss; he will not say what it was. The City's managers and executives all appear to sicken together: commissioner after commissioner, department after department. Puttermesser's finest appointments—felled; depleted. There is news of an abortion in Queens. A pimp sets himself up in business on Times Square again, in spite of the cherry
trees the Department of Sanitation has planted there; the Commissioner of Sanitation himself stalks under the hanging cherries, distracted, with a twisted spine and the start of a hunch. Two or three of the proud young men of the dancing clubs defect and return to mugging in the subways. The City's peace is unraveling. The Commissioners blow their noses into bloody tissues, drive their little fingers into their ears, develop odd stammers, instigate backbiting among underlings.

The golem thirsts.

“Stay home,” the Mayor pleads. “Stay out of the City.”

The golem will no longer obey. She cannot be contained. “My blood is hot,” Xanthippe writes; she writes for the last time. She tosses her ballpoint pen into the East River, back behind the Mansion.

IX. THE GOLEM DESTROYS HER MAKER

M
AYOR
P
UTTERMESSER
'
S REPUTATION IS
ebbing. The cost of municipal borrowing ascends. A jungle of graffiti springs up on the white flanks of marble sculptures inside museums; Attic urns are smashed. Barbarians cruise the streets. O New York! O lost New York!

Deputy Commissioners and their secretaries blanch at the sound of a heavy footstep. Morning and afternoon the golem lumbers from office to office, searching for high-level managers. In her ragged sari brilliant with woven flowers, her great head garlanded, drenched in a density of musky oils, Xanthippe ravishes prestigious trustees, committee chairmen, council members, borough presidents, the Second Deputy Comptroller's three assistants, the Director of the Transit Authority, the Coordinator of Criminal Justice, the Chief of the Office of Computer Plans and Controls, the Head of Intergovernmental Relations, the Chancellor of the City University, the Rector of the Art Commission, even the President of the Stock Exchange! The City is diseased with the golem's urge. The City sweats and coughs in her terrifying embrace. The City is in the pincer of the golem's love, because Xanthippe thirsts, she thirsts, she ravishes and ravages, she ambushes management level after management level. There is no Supervising
Accountant or Secretary to the Minority Leader who can escape her electric gaze.

Sex! Sex! The golem wants sex! Men in high politics! Lofty officials! Elevated bureaucrats!