The Puttermesser Papers (13 page)

Rappoport babbled. He followed after Puttermesser like a dog. He had performed exactly as she had instructed, it
seemed, but then her instructions became contradictory. First he was to circle. Then he was not to circle. Rather, he was to scrape with his penknife. There he was, all at once a satrap with a title; the title was as palpable as a mantle, and as sumptuous; overhead drooped the four-poster's white velvet canopy with its voluptuous folds and snowy crevices—how thickly warm his title, how powerful his office! Alone, enclosed in the authority of his rank, Rappoport awaited the visitation of the golem. Without a stitch, not a shred of sari remaining, her burnished gaze on fire with thirst for his grandeur, she burst in, redolent of beaches, noisy with a fiery hiss; Rappoport tore the white velvet from the tester and threw it over burning Xanthippe.

Rappoport babbled. He told all the rest: how they had contended; how he had endured her size and force and the horror of her immodesty and the awful sea of her sweat and the sirocco of her summer breath; and how he—or was it she?—had chanted out the hundred proud duties of his new jurisdiction: the protocol and potency of the City's money, where it is engendered, where it is headed, where it lands: it could be said that she was teaching him his job. And then the Mayor, speaking through the door, explaining the depth of tranquility after potency that is deeper than any sleep or drug or anesthesia, directing him to remove Xanthippe in all her deadweight mass from the fourposter down to the bare floor, and to wind her in the canopy.

Rappoport babbled: how he had lifted Xanthippe in her trance, the torpor that succeeds ravishment, down to the bare floor; how he had wound her in white velvet; how pale Puttermesser, her reading lenses glimmering into an old
green book, directed him with sharpened voice to crowd his mind with impurity—with everything earthly, soiled, spoiled, wormy; finally how Puttermesser directed him to trail her as she weaved round Xanthippe on the floor, as if circling her own shadow.

Round and round Puttermesser went. In the instant of giving the golem life, the just, the comely, the cleanly, the Edenic, had, all unwittingly, consummated Puttermesser's aspiring reflections—even the radiant
PLAN
itself! Now all must be consciously reversed. She must think of violent-eyed loiterers who lurk in elevators with springblades at the ready, of spray cans gashing red marks of civilization-hate, of civic monuments with their heads knocked off, of City filth, of mugging, robbery, arson, assault, even murder. Murder! If, for life, she had dreamed Paradise, now she must feel the burning lance of hell. If, for life, she had walked seven times clockwise round a hillock of clay, now she must walk seven times counterclockwise round captive Xanthippe. If, for life, she had pronounced the Name, now she must on no account speak or imagine it or lend it any draught or flame or breath; she must erase the Name utterly.

And what of Rappoport, Rappoport the golem's lure and snare, Rappoport who had played himself out in the capture of Xanthippe? He too must walk counterclockwise, behind Puttermesser, just as the Great Rabbi Judah Loew had walked counterclockwise with his disciples when the time came for the golem of Prague to be undone. The golem of Prague, city-savior, had also run amok!—terrorizing the very citizens it had been created to succor. And all the rites
the Great Rabbi Judah Loew had pondered in the making of the golem, he ultimately dissolved in the unmaking of it. All the permutations and combinations of the alphabet he had recited with profound and holy concentration in the golem's creation, he afterward declaimed backward, for the sake of the golem's discomposition. Instead of meditating on the building up, he meditated on the breaking down. Whatever he had early spiraled, he late unraveled: he smashed the magnetic links that formed the chain of being between the atoms.

Puttermesser, circling round the torpid Xanthippe in her shroud of white velvet, could not help glancing down into the golem's face. It was a child's face still. Ah, Leah, Leah! Xanthippe's lids flickered. Xanthippe's lips stirred. She looked with her terrible eyes—how they pulsed—up at Puttermesser.

“My mother.”

A voice!

“O my mother,” Xanthippe said, still looking upward at Puttermesser, “why are you walking around me like that?”

She spoke! Her voice ascended!—a child's voice, pitched like the pure cry of a bird.

Puttermesser did not halt. “Keep moving,” she told Rappoport.

“O my mother,” Xanthippe said in her bird-quick voice, “why are you walking around me like that?”

Beginning the fifth circle, Rappoport gasping behind her, Puttermesser said, “You created and you destroyed.”

“No,” the golem cried—the power of speech released!—“it was you who created me, it is you who will destroy me! Life! Love! Mercy! Love! Life!”

The fifth circle was completed; still the golem went on bleating in her little bird's cry. “Life! Life! More!”

“More,” Puttermesser said bitterly, beginning the sixth circle. “More. You wanted more and more. It's more that brought us here. More!”

“You wanted Paradise!”

“Too much Paradise is greed. Eden disintegrates from too much Eden. Eden sinks from a surfeit of itself.”

“O my mother! I made you Mayor!”

Completing the sixth circle, Puttermessor said, “You pulled the City down.”

“O my mother! Do not cool my heat!”

Beginning the seventh circle, Puttermesser said, “This is the last. Now go home.”

“O my mother! Do not send me to the elements!”

The seventh circle was completed; the golem's small voice piped on. Xanthippe lay stretched at Puttermesser's feet like Puttermesser's own shadow.

“Trouble,” Puttermesser muttered. “Somehow this isn't working, Morris. Maybe because you're not a priest or a Levite.”

Rappoport swallowed a tremulous breath. “If she gets to stand, if she decides to haul herself up—”

“Morris,” Puttermesser said, “do you have a pocket knife?”

Rappoport took one out.

“O my mother, mother of my life!” the golem bleated. “Only think how for your sake I undid Turtelman, Marmel, Mavett!”

Huge sly Xanthippe, gargantuan wily Xanthippe, grown up out of the little seed of a dream of Leah!

Rappoport, obeying Puttermesser, blew aside the golem's bangs and with his small blade erased from Xanthippe's forehead what appeared to be no more than an old scar—the first on the right of three such scars—queerly in the shape of a sort of letter K.

Instantly the golem shut her lips and eyes.

The
aleph
was gone.

“Dead,” Rappoport said.

“Returned,” Puttermesser said. “Carry her up to the attic.”

“The attic?
Here?
In Gracie Mansion? Ruth, think!”

“The Great Rabbi Judah Loew undid the golem of Prague in the attic of the Altneuschul. A venerable public structure, Morris, no less estimable than Gracie Mansion.”

Rappoport laughed out loud. Then he let his tongue slide out, back and forth, from right to left, along the corners of his mouth.

“Bend down, Morris.”

Rappoport bent down.

“Pick up her left hand. By the wrist, that's the way.”

Between Rappoport's forefinger and thumb the golem's left hand broke into four clods.

“No, it won't do. This wasn't well planned, Morris, I admit it. If we try to get her up the attic stairs—well, you can see what's happening. Never mind, I'll call the Parks Commissioner. Maybe City Hall Park—”

Then began the babbling of Rappoport.

XII. UNDER THE FLOWER BEDS

G
ARBAGE TRUCKS ARE BACK
on the streets. Their ferocious grinders gnash the City's spew. Traffic fumes, half a hundred cars immobile in a single intersection, demoralization in the ladies' lavatories of the Municipal Building, computers down, Albany at war with City Hall, a drop in fifth-grade reading scores—the City is choking. It cannot be governed. It cannot be controlled. There is a rumor up from Florida that ex-Mayor Malachy (“Matt”) Mavett is scheming to recapture City Hall. As for current patronage, there is the egregious case of the newly appointed Commissioner of Receipts and Disbursements, said to be the Mayor's old lover; he resigns for health reasons even before taking office. His wife fetches him home to Toronto. Mayor Puttermesser undergoes periodontal surgery. When it is over, the roots of her teeth are exposed. Inside the secret hollow of her head, just below the eye sockets, on the lingual side, she is unendingly conscious of her own skeleton.

The
Soho News
is the only journal to note the Mayor's order, in the middle of a summer night, for an extra load of dirt to be shoveled under the red geraniums of City Hall Park. Parks Department diggers have planted a small wooden marker among the flower beds:
DO NOT TOUCH OR PICK
. With wanton contempt for civic decorum, passersby
often flout the modest sign. Yet whoever touches or picks those stems of blood-colored blossoms soon sickens with flu virus, or sore throat, or stuffed nose accompanied by nausea—or, sometimes, a particularly vicious attack of bursitis.

And all the while Puttermesser calls in the heart: O lost New York! And she calls: O lost Xanthippe!

PUTTERMESSER PAIRED

I. AN AGE OF DIVORCE

A
T THE UNSATISFYING AGE
of fifty-plus, Ruth Puttermesser, lawyer, rationalist, ex-public official, took a year off to live on her savings and think through her fate. In the second week of her freedom—no slavery of paperwork, no office to go to (a wide tract of her life already bled out in the corridors of the Municipal Building, enough!)—it came to her that what she ought to do was marry. This was not a new idea: it had been her mother's refrain as far back as three decades ago or more, ever since Puttermesser's first year in law school.

Ruth, Ruth [her mother wrote from Miami, Florida], there's nothing wrong with having a husband along with brains, it's not a contradiction. For God's sake pull your head out of the clouds! If you don't get married where will you be, what will happen? Alone is a stone as they say and believe me Ruthie Papa agrees with me on this issue not only double but triple, we didn't come down here to live in the heat with Papa's bursitis only in order to break his heart from you and your brains.

This innocently anti-feminist letter was now brown at the edges, brittle; in the fresh tedium of her leisure Puttermesser was sorting out the boxes stored under her
bed. She was throwing things out. Her mother was dead. Her father was dead. There would be no more reports of the Florida weather and no grandchildren to inherit these interesting out-of-date postage stamps and wrinkled complaints. Puttermesser was an elderly orphan. For the first time it struck her that her mother was right: it was possible for brains to break the heart.

She bought a copy of the
New York Review of Books
and looked through the Personals. Brains, brains everywhere.

Fit, handsome, ambitious writer / editor, non-smoker, witty, imaginative, irreverent, seeks lasting relationship with nonsmoking female. Must be brilliant, unpretentious, passionate, creative. Prefer Ph.D. in Milton, Shakespeare, or Beowulf.

University professor, anthropologist, 50, gentle, intellectual, youthful, author of three volumes on native Aleutian Islanders, cherishes the examined life, welcomes marriage or long-term attachment to loyal accomplished professional woman, well-analyzed (Jung only, no Freud or Reich please). Sense of humor and love of outdoors a must.

Among dozens of these condensed portraits Puttermesser could not recognize herself. She was hostile to the outdoors; the country air left her moody and squeamish—the peril of so many uneasy encounters with unidentifiable rodents, loud birds, monstrous insects, mud after fearsome Sag Harbor storms. She was no good at getting the point of jokes. Never mind that she didn't smoke; she was a committed liberal and regarded the persecution of smokers as a civil liberties issue. As for the
examined life—enough! She was sick of examining her own and hardly needed to hear an Eskimo expert examine his. It was all fiction anyhow—those columns and columns of ads. “Vibrant, appealing, attractive, likable”—that meant divorced. Leftovers and mistakes. “Unconventional, earthy, nurturing, fascinated by Zen, Sufism, music of the spheres”—a crackpot still in sandals. “Successful achiever looking for strong woman”—watch out, probably a porn nut. Every self-indulgent type in the book turned up in these ads. Literature was no better. The great novels, rife with weirdos leading to misalliance—Isabel Archer entangled with the sinister Gilbert Osmond, Gwendolyn Harleth's troubles with Grandcourt. Anna Karenina. Worst of all, poor Dorothea Brooke and the deadly Mr. Casaubon. All these bad characters—the men in the case absolutely, and many of the women—were brainy. Think of Shaw, a logician, refusing to allow Professor Higgins to wed Eliza, in open dread of foreordained rotten consequences. And Jane Austen: with one hand she marries Elizabeth to Darcy, clever with clever, and with the other she goes and saddles Mr. Bennet with a silly wife. People get stuck. Brains are no guarantee. Hope is slim.

The truth was this: Puttermesser had entered a new zone of being. From the Women Attorneys Association she received a questionnaire:
Aging and the Female Counselor
. Aging! Puttermesser! How could this be, when she had yet to satisfy Miss Charlotte Kuntz, her piano teacher? At Puttermesser's last lesson forty-five years ago, Miss Kuntz had warned her sharply that such-and-such a sonatina needed work. It was just before summer vacation.
Puttermesser promised to toil over the Tempo di Minuetto section all during July and August (the Andante was easier), but she put it off and put it off. Instead she wandered in a trance in and out of the children's room of the public library; the rule was you could take out only two books at a time. Frequently Puttermesser appeared at the library twice in one day, to return two and to borrow two more. She read far into the rosy shadows of the summer twilight. The lower half of the sky was daubed with a streak of blood. “A beautiful day tomorrow,” Puttermesser's mild father said; “that's what a red sunset means.”