The Puttermesser Papers (20 page)

When she came back to him she was disappointed that he was in his own bed. Nothing was different, it was like other nights. She had imagined he would be loitering at the window, say, listening for her, watching the black spirals
the gondoliers' poles lanced into the water. She had imagined that he would wait until she hid herself—her little bride-self!—under her own coverlet, and then, hesitantly, tenderly, silently, he would set his limbs against her limbs at last. Instead he was a stiff hunch in the other bed. His trousers were folded on a chair. The small wind sent the window curtains grazing over his head.

On second thought she was charmed by this backwardness. She reminded herself that the initiative was hers, and how could it be otherwise? He was reticent, he was a boy. Perhaps she had been mistaken—possibly he had no experience at all. Below, sliding along the Grand Canal, a convoy of gondolas was flinging up laughter and voices and loud singing in an Italian remote from Dante's. Some locals on a lark, or a party of gondoliers and their wild girls. The air, bad as it was, swelled every sound into a roar. Then the line of gondolas passed and she was alone with him in the quiet. “
Bester Mann
,” she murmured, and added some syllables from Goethe—Goethe, whom Lewes had so much loved.

She sat on the bed beside him a caressed the circle of his ear. “Dearest, dearest John,” she said. He kept his back to her and did not stir. She lifted the coverlet and lay down close against him. He had not put on his nightdress; he was still in that morning's shirt. He had discarded his cravat—it was a thick serpent on the floor. She touched her naked toes to the naked bulge of his calf; with one bold arm she embraced his wide chest. His upper body was hot. The leg was cold. She was right to have discouraged a swim—was he ill? “Johnny dear,” she said. He did not answer. She was alarmed and faintly shamed: she removed her foot from his
calf, and put her hand to the thigh of the other leg. It was cold, cold. Despite the trail of wind, the night was warm. It was growing warmer and warmer. The grooves flowing from her nose to the corners of her mouth, an old woman's creases, ran with sudden sweat; her armpits were sweated. She was not doing what he wished. She was too immodest, there was some mute direction he intended which she could not interpret. “Johnny,” she pleaded, “dear boy, are you unwell? Look at me, Johnny dear, let me see your eyes.”

He turned to her then, and showed her his eyes. They were unrecognizable—the rims of the lids as raw and bloody as meat, stretched apart like an animal's freshly slaughtered throat. Only the whites were there—the eyeballs had rolled off under the skin. An old secret shot through her like an intuition: a thing she had forgotten she knew. Johnny had a mad brother who was put away somewhere; Lewes had told her this long ago. Abruptly the eyeballs fell back into place. He was not normal. He was unwell. The bitter putrid wind, the drains, the polluted canal, the open window. He was breathing with urgency; every inhalation seemed hard won. She could not get enough air for herself. They were entombed in a furnace. Down below, the fleet of gondolas was returning, the raucous party from before, or another just as noisy—she heard blasts of laughter, and common street voices, and singing, and this time a tremulous guitar. She was standing now; her brain was shuttling so rapidly that it shook her—there was a doctor in Venice, Dr. Ricchetti, whom English people consulted. She ran to the bellpull on the farther wall, a little distance from the windows, to ring the hall porter.

A tremendous swipe—the scream of a huge bullwhip or instant cyclone—cut through naked space. A projectile of some kind—she had seen the smudge of it fly past her own back. A stone—a ball, a bone—tossed up by some loutish member of the crew below. Straight through the window. But the bed was empty. Johnny was not in it. The curtain was ripped away. The projectile had flown not into but out of the window. The projectile was Johnny. She bent over the window sill and shrieked. His elbows in their shirtsleeves dipped and rose, dipped and rose, like white fins. He was having his swim in the Grand Canal. The gondoliers mocked her cry: “Gianni, Gianni!” They leaped into the night water after him, but he would not be caught. For ten minutes they chased the white fins, and fished poor Johnny out by hooking his collar on one of their poles.

VI. THE MARRIAGE

P
UTTERMESSER HAD ALWAYS HATED
that part. It was too ugly. She didn't like to think about it. Everything bright had ended with George Lewes's funeral. The rest was nothing. The rest didn't count. Johnny Cross, diagnosed as having been subject to “acute mental depression” on a single night of his life, came back to normal, never again had even a moment's worth of derangement, and died in 1924 at the age of eighty-four. But George Eliot weakened and failed. Six months after Johnny threw himself out of the window, she was dead.

Rupert remained cheerful. He didn't miss George Eliot; he had never admired her. Puttermesser too, under Rupert's influence, had begun to withdraw a little. Possibly George Eliot
was
a prig. She shouldn't have kept Johnny from bathing at the Lido; it was preposterous. She knew he was no good at foreign languages—he couldn't master Hebrew, and mixed up
hiphil
and
hophal
. Then why did she terrorize him with Dante? But Rupert was still harping on his idea—Johnny impersonating Lewes. After Venice, Rupert persisted, in the little time left to their marriage, George Eliot and Johnny Cross went back to the very
same house
Johnny had once helped Lewes buy. “The identical four walls!” he said. “Proof! What more do you want?”

Puttermesser was impatient. She was getting sick of Rupert's idea.

“George Lewes didn't jump into the Grand Canal, did he?” She pushed away the last volume of George Eliot's journal. “Johnny just couldn't face sex,” she accused.

She looked around her bedroom. A flood of disorder. Heaps of those biographies and maps and memoirs and diaries. An engulfing crust on desk and dresser and floor. Miniature skyscrapers on the window sills. It was enough. She wanted all those books out. Out, out! Back to the Society Library! The only tidy corner was over near her bed, where Rupert had stored several stacks of his postcards, straight as dominoes.

Puttermesser felt routed. It was as if they had come through a riot. Something tumultuous had happened; she was exhausted, as after intoxication or trance. Rupert had made it happen: this shivering precariousness, this tumult. He had cast out George Lewes, bright-souled George Lewes, and hauled Johnny Cross in. Rupert's impersonation of Johnny Cross impersonating Lewes! It was too alive. It jarred, it aroused. All through his telling it—his telling the honeymoon—she fidgeted, she kindled, she smarted. Rupert was a wizard. He made the honeymoon happen under her fingernails, at the root of her spine. She suffered. It was Lewes she wanted, only Lewes. Didn't the two of them—herself and Rupert—put their heads together under the lamp? Didn't they ignite every passage between them? Yet Rupert took Lewes from her and gave her Cross. Done! The honeymoon was done. Ugly, ugly. She hated it. She had always hated the honeymoon. Rupert
pressed it under her fingernails, he pierced it like a pole to her spine.

Rupert said, “I finished up that Frick thing. Vegetarian tomato, all right?”

Puttermesser said she wasn't hungry for soup.

“Finished up yesterday. A nice Dutch landscape. I have to see Harvey about it when it dries—I'll ask him then. What's wrong with vegetarian tomato?”

“Ask Harvey what?”

“Well, it takes two witnesses. I'll get Harvey next time I'm up there. You figure out who else.”

Puttermesser concentrated. “Two witnesses?”

“That's how many you need to get married.”

So he meant it. She saw that he meant it. He had been serious about it before. He was serious about it now. Lewes! Lewes after all! Lewes had inspired him to it. Lewes had seduced him to it. Johnny Cross had gotten in the way, but the victory belonged to Lewes. Ideal friendship!

“I don't know anybody to ask,” Puttermesser said.

“You know a lot of people.”

“Not lately. Not this year.”

“What about all those politicos in the Municipal Building?”

“I don't work there anymore and I'll never work there again. It was stupid to think I'd ever go back.” She reflected on the webwork of her life. Her aunts and uncles were dead. The cousins, once a numerous and jolly gang, were scattered and aging. Half of them had been swallowed up by California—San Diego, Berkeley, Santa Monica, Lake Tahoe. By now most were senior citizens. And the receding
gallery of all her old society: there they were, page after page in her little Woolworth address book, those ghosts of classrooms past and half-remembered offices, the detritus of her ascent to fifty-plus. Superannuated fellowship of gossip. Movie companions of yesteryear. They were all distant: either they were wrangling toward divorce, or they lived for their jobs, or they were tanning in the Caribbean, or they were absorbed in their children and their children's babies. Their children: the great genetic tide—the torrent—that separates those with offspring from those without. Three or four of Puttermesser's friends had already died in the lottery of early disease. In the roster of the living, there was not a soul she might want as witness to her wedding. Everyone was obsolete. She was clearing the way. A new life. Clean, pristine.

“But no, Rupert, you're the only one. It's only you. I don't have anybody else.”

“I'm in lieu of the world,” Rupert said.

She looked to see the mask of flippancy. But there was none.

“Oh no,” she protested, and let his tidy head come into her arms. “You're not in lieu of anything.”

Late on a Monday afternoon they took the subway all the way downtown to the Brooklyn Bridge station and went up to the second floor of the Municipal Building. The familiar corridors were wide, battered, gritty; it was as if the walls repelled light. To Puttermesser's surprise, the Marriage License Bureau was no longer there. It had crossed the road to Chambers Street and settled in a former bank the color of an elderly cat's scarred hide. On their way out, Puttermesser
surveyed her old territory; inside what had been her own office only months ago, motes hung languidly on smuggled beads of illicit sun. Somewhere a toilet was running. It was relieving that no one recognized her. She was now among the generations of the politically vanished. Estrangement narrowed her throat; her eyes stung in the dimness. She marveled that she had once disgorged her lawyerly brain into this moribund organism, with its system of secretaries, clerks, assistants, its iron arteries shuffling with underlings.

On the trip back on the Number 6 line in the rush-hour crush, enveloped by the tunnel's grinding thunder, Puttermesser found herself smashed up against Rupert. The car swung like a cradle inside a concussion. Sunk into Rupert's warm shoulder, she felt herself without a past.

“A tomb,” she told Rupert. “That place is a tomb.”

“What?” he yelled out of the thunder.

“I'm thinking,” Puttermesser shouted back, “that my savings are going down. I'll have to start again somewhere pretty soon. You too, Rupert.”

“I don't
have
any savings.”

The car screeched around a turn. “You can't do postcards forever,” Puttermesser yelled. “Your talent's too big.”

“It's just the right size to fit on a postcard. You should see the nice job Harvey's done on the Frick thing,” he yelled back. “Harvey says O.K., did I tell you? About being a witness. And he knows two rabbis—one on the West Side who married him the first time, and one on the East Side who married him the second time. On Second Avenue, in fact,” Rupert hollered.

“You should give up the postcards. You should give up Harvey.”

The train, arriving at a station, came to a violent stop. Puttermesser was catapulted away. A river of bodies rushed for the door. A forest of bodies sprang up between herself and Rupert.

“All right,” Rupert mouthed from across the car, “I'll give up Harvey.”

The wedding day was Wednesday—the rabbi on Second Avenue was free that night—and by then they had found the second witness.

Puttermesser said, “There used to be a thumping sound, remember? No, it was before you got here.”

“Thumping sound?”

“Well, it's gone. It's been gone for weeks. She's quit doing it. I bet she wouldn't refuse us. She's the one,” Puttermesser said. “She's right next
door
.”

The math teacher explained that she had folded up her exercise mat for good. It was hard work, and didn't do the job. Anyhow it was too lonely. She was enrolled nowadays in one of those new health clubs for singles over on Madison. Her name was Raya Lieberman; she wouldn't at all mind, she said, helping out at a wedding, as long as it was after school. It was true she had Math Club on Wednesdays, but she was perfectly happy to skip it for once. “I've got as good an extracurric supervisory attendance record as anybody,” she assured Puttermesser. “The best, considering what comes down the pike these days.”

The rabbi's study was on East Ninetieth, in his apartment. On the telephone he had inquired whether a modest
ceremony at 9:30 p.m. in his study at home would be satisfactory, given that it was such a small wedding party and given also—he had a homiletic inflection—that the congregational sanctuary couldn't in any case be secured in the evening on such short notice; and Rupert had agreed. It was beginning to snow again, so the four of them went by taxi—the bride and groom, and the two witnesses. Puttermesser sat in the back seat between the math teacher and Harvey Morgenbluth. Rupert, straight-spined in his stately hat and capelike raincoat, was up front with the driver. Puttermesser had on her best black patent-leather high heels. Rupert and the two witnesses were all wearing their galoshes.