The Puttermesser Papers (21 page)

“You ever done a thing like this before?” Harvey Morgenbluth asked Raya Lieberman, leaning across Puttermesser.

“I've been a bride, but not a witness. You?”

“Never done anything like this. How many times?”

“How many times what?”

“How many times you been married?” Harvey Morgenbluth urged across Puttermesser's lap.

“Once.”

“With me it's twice. This is my second rabbi we're on the way to.”

It surprised Puttermesser that Harvey Morgenbluth was a familiar apparition. She was habituated to his camel's walk and translucent flushed ears and phlegmatic oxlike forehead, well scored by parallel clef lines. It was not unusual for her to run into the math teacher on the way to the incinerator closet or the elevator, but now it dawned on Puttermesser
that the flustered-seeming man whom she had often noticed weaving among the shabby old sofas in the lobby, hauling big square cartons, was Harvey Morgenbluth. Occasionally he pushed them on a dolly. No doubt some of those cartons contained Rupert's postcards. A sourness rose in her. Four inches by six; that was their size. That Frick landscape, a spacious van Ruysdael—a bridge, the gnarled roots of a tree, dark clouds, strange light (dawn or dusk or afternoon before rain), a hunter, a fisherman, a long road, deep vista, two riders, one mounted, the other standing by, red cloak thrown over a shoulder (Rupert loved cloaks, capes, togas), black horse crosswise in the road, blocking it, blacking it, dotting it, swallowing up sky and earth—all that mastery shrunk to four inches by six. Rupert on the side of diminishment, how could it be? At the Met, that first time, hadn't she seen in him voluminous will, the will to be proxy for the punctilious reverberations of huge precursors? Was Rupert with all his amplitude always to be reduced via the technologies of Harvey Morgenbluth? He had promised on the subway to give up Harvey Morgenbluth. Rupert had never explained why a reënactment had to be a dwindling. If it was a dwindling, how could you call it a reënactment?

Puttermesser reminded herself that it was normal to be jittery on the way to one's wedding. Who knew what unhappy divinations Rupert was hurling at her in the front seat, from under his cloak?

Harvey Morgenbluth, still heavy across Puttermesser's knees, was trying to find out from the math teacher if she was available for dinner and a movie next Sunday. “We could go over to the Baronet on Third, or the Beekman on
Second. Or look, I've got
Gone With the Wind
on tape, how about it?”

Puttermesser said briskly, “Don't you do those Sunday parties anymore?”

“Winding down, haven't had one in a bunch of weeks. The kids drove everybody crazy. And you couldn't get a type like Rupert—Rupert's a pretty open guy, but he wasn't interested.”

Raya Lieberman said, “Nobody opens up nowadays. It's hard for people to be in touch. Everyone's a lonesome atom.”

Harvey Morgenbluth whistled. “A lonesome atom, my God. You
said
it.” He turned to Puttermesser. His flushed ears were all attention. “By the way, how's the roach problem? You really want to beat 'em, try sodium fluoride around the pipes.”

The rabbi's name was Stewart Sonnenfeld. He introduced Jill, his wife, and his teenage son, Seth, who was at that moment writing a report on Chaucer's “Prologue” for his English class. The four poles of the wedding canopy were held up by Harvey Morgenbluth, Raya Lieberman, Jill Sonnenfeld, and Seth Sonnenfeld. Puttermesser had retrieved her mother's wedding ring from an old felt wallet she kept inside an empty plastic margarine container at the back of the vegetable bin in the refrigerator, to foil a burglar. The rabbi had cautioned Rupert to bring along his own wine-glass for the ceremony, so that morning Puttermesser had hurried into Woolworth's to buy one. Jill Sonnenfeld wrapped it in a paper napkin inside a paper bag, and Rupert stamped on it with his galosh. It exploded
with a gratifying convulsion. In Puttermesser's apartment afterward Harvey Morgenbluth and Raya Lieberman each drank a styrofoam cup of champagne (Harvey's present) and ate a piece of wedding cake—Puttermesser made do with an Entenmann's chocolate layer from the supermarket on Third—and then the two witnesses went off together.

“Into the night,” Puttermesser said. “They've gone off into the night, imagine that. Maybe it'll take.”

Rupert was poking in the corner closet where he kept his equipment; he was dragging out his satchel. “Maybe into the night,” Rupert said. “More likely upstairs to 6-C.”

“
We
took,” Puttermesser said.

Her heart—her fleshly heart—was curled around itself, like a spiraled loaf of hot new bread. Inside the cavity that rocked it, this good bread was swelling. Puttermesser waited for Rupert's head to come into her arms, against her heart's loaf. She waited for his voice, his dark reading voice, with its sharp click that could cut her with happiness, like a beak. The living, plain, pitiful flesh. Sometimes, for all the uproar of his history (he had handed over every winding of his life to her; he kept nothing back), he seemed new-made—as if she had ejected him from a secret spectral egg lodged in her frontal lobe, or under her tongue where the sour saliva gave birth to desire. He was her own shadow and fingerprint. She had painted him on her retina in her sleep. She felt him to be the smothered croak in her throat, a phlegm of chaos burst out of her lung. He had lived too long in her nerves, and her nerves were all wired to the transcendent. Desire, desire! She and Rupert—both of them—were too tentative.

He had pulled out his easel, and left it on the floor with the satchel. He crossed the living room to stand at the window. A hard wind hit the glass. There he was, mooning down at the snowy street below; she wondered if he was looking to see whether Harvey Morgenbluth and Raya Lieberman had really gone off into the night. The loaf in the middle of her chest ballooned; it grew and grew. Jealousy. Rupert's head struck her as still another loaf, all brightly honeyed against the snow-streaked panes. He had been born into the world two decades after her own birth. A long, long meadow, all grassy-green, stretched before him. Under his mustache the two points of his mouth were as elastic as a child's.

She saw that he was dusted over with gloom. He unbuckled one of his galoshes. He seemed indecisive about the other, but he shook it free. The race was behind them, the dream was dreamed. They had arrived at arrival. All wedding nights taste of letdown.

Puttermesser took off her black patent-leather high heels. They had walked in the snow only a little—out of the taxi, into the lobby—but her feet were still damp. She shivered from the feet up. She went into the bedroom to fetch her furry winter slippers. The dresser mirror arrested, fleetingly, the figure of a woman. How quickly that woman fled!

When she came back into the living room, Rupert was wearing his galoshes again. He was wearing his capelike raincoat and his stately hat. He had his folded-up easel under his arm and his satchel in his hand.

There was something in his face she recognized. An indifference had seeped into the gloom. It was as if she had turned invisible. It was as if he did not recognize her:
that
was what she recognized. A snub—almost a snub. His face hurt her. His youth hurt her.

“Rupert,” she said. “What are you doing, Rupert?”

“I can't stay.”

“You have to.”

“I can't. I can't, Ruth. I can't stay.”

“Rupert, take off your coat. Please, Rupert, please.”

“No,” he said. It was not indifference. It was a burning. He was inside a furnace; he was speaking out of a furnace.

Puttermesser called after him, “Rupert! What are you
doing
?”

“I can't stay.”

In the little vestibule he set down his satchel and aimed the easel directly in front of him, clutching it like a burning beam; like a spear. He raised it high and plummeted after it back into the living room. He was running for the window. Puttermesser feared he would fling his lance straight through the glass. But he stopped. He put down the easel and with both hands lifted the window wide. A shock of wind knocked over the stack of styrofoam cups on the sill. The snow flew in, wet as a waterfall.

“Rupert, Rupert,” Puttermesser pleaded. “Take off your coat. Shut the window. For God's sake, shut the window!”

He gave her his whole look then. She was falling into the tiny black holes at the center of his clean powerful eyes. She was falling and falling, but instead of vertigo or delirium or disorder there was only the candor of her own intelligence. She understood that he was altogether sane, altogether calculating, and as jubilant as a mathematician in the act of confirming an equation.

He picked up his things and walked out the door.

At the open window, hanging over the sill to catch sight of him dwindling in the street, Puttermesser squinted into the snow. It was pointless to call down to him as George Eliot had called down into the Grand Canal, but anyhow she called and called; the snow blew into her mouth. She leaned into the wetness until her hair was all white with snow.

A copyist, a copyist!

PUTTERMESSER AND

THE MUSCOVITE COUSIN

I. HISTORY

E
VERYWHERE IT WAS A
time of collapse: powers were falling, one after another. In Canada, at the edge of a forest, two ancient oaks (saplings when Caesar was crossing the Rubicon, said the Ottawa newscaster) came heaving down, struck from crown to root by a frenzy of lightning. For days the bitter smell of charred bark and ashen leaves drifted past nearby towns, arousing the nostrils of nervous dogs. In New York, a pair of famous editors, intimidating and weighty as emperors, in a flash of the guillotine were suddenly displaced; overnight their names tumbled into blackest obscurity. The young ruled, ruled absolutely; the outmoded old were forgotten, they were diminished and dismissed, and whoever spoke of their erstwhile renown spoke of vapor.

And on the earth's far-off other cheek, beyond the Pripet Marshes, beyond the Dnieper and the Volga, in the very eye of Moscow, where the cold cellar walls of Lubyanka Prison were wont to break out into pustules of bloody mold, like executioner's mushrooms, Communism was cracking, failing. The Soviet Union was on its way out, impaired, impaled, stumbling, exhausted, moribund—though who, in the ninth decade of the twentieth century, dared to suspect the death of the Kremlin?

Yet there were signs: fascism was pressing through the fissures. In Red Square, a mocking phalanx of blackshirts openly paraded. Thugs invaded the Writers' Union, yelling insults to Jews. Fossil Cossacks, old Czarist pogromchiks, renewed, restored!

Ruth Puttermesser, white-haired, in her sixties—retired, unmarried, cranky in the way of a woman alone—had no premonition about the demise of the Soviet Union; yet she believed in collapse. The skin on the inside of her elbows drooped into pleats; her jowl was loose and bunched, as if governed by a drawstring; the pockets under her eyes hung, and the ophthalmologist, attempting to dilate her pupils, had to lift the lids with deliberate fingers. All things fallen, elasticity gone. Age had turned Puttermesser on its terrible hinge.

She was as old now as her long-dead father: her father who, fleeing the brutish Russia of the Czars, had left behind parents, sisters, brothers—Puttermesser's rumored Moscow relations, aunts, cousins, a schoolboy uncle, all swallowed up in the Bolshevik silence, dwindled now into their archaic names and brittle cardboard-framed photographs. Puttermesser's Moscow grandmother, a blotched brown blur in a drawer: wrinkled Tatarish forehead, sunken toothless mouth; a broken crone, dim as legend. “Do not write anymore,” Puttermesser's grandmother pleaded as the thirties wore on: “My eyes are gone. I am old and blind. I cannot read.” This was the last letter from Moscow; it lay under the old Russian photos in an envelope blanketed by coarsely printed stamps. Each stamp displayed the identical profile of a man with a considerable mustache. Stalin. Puttermesser knew that the poet Osip Mandelstam had likened that
mustache to a cockroach: whereupon Stalin ordered him murdered. Isaac Babel was murdered after months of torture and a phony trial. Mikhoels the Yiddish actor was murdered. All the Russian Yiddish poets were murdered on a single August night in 1952. Shot in the cellars of the Lubyanka.

And between Moscow and New York, a steady mute fright. The hidden warning in Puttermesser's grandmother's plaint was clear.
Stop! We are afraid of a letter from America! They will take us for spies, you endanger us! Keep away!
The old woman was famous among her children for eyesight so sharp and precise that she could see the alertly raised ears of a squirrel on a high branch in a faraway clump of trees. Puttermesser's father too had owned such a pair of eyes. Blue, pale as watery ink. Her poor orphaned papa, cut off forever from the ties of his youth: from his little brother Velvl, ten years old, his head in the photo shaved in the old Russian style, his school uniform high-collared and belted, with a row of metal buttons marching down his short chest. A family sundered for seventy years—the Great War, the Revolution, Stalin's furies, the Second World War, the Cold War: all had intervened. Puttermesser's papa, dying old of stroke, longed for his mother, for Velvl, for his sisters Fanya, Sonya, Reyzl, for his brothers Aaron and Mordecai. Alone in America with no kin. Never again to hear his father's thin fevered voice. Continents and seas lay between Moscow and New York, and a silence so dense and veiling that in the three decades since her papa's death Puttermesser had almost forgotten she had Russian relations. They were remote in every sense. She never thought of them.

II. A JOKE OUT OF MOSCOW

I
N THE MIDST OF
that unstable period known as perestroika, when strange acts were beginning to flicker outward from a shadowy Soviet Union into the world at large, Puttermesser received a telephone call from Moscow. Half a century without a letter; not a syllable, not a breath; and now, out of the blue, out of the void, out (it felt) of
time
, the telephone rings (prosaically, unmiraculously) in an ordinary New York apartment in the East Seventies—Moscow! Forbidden, locked, sullen Moscow. Unearthly Moscow! A woman, panting, high-pitched, overwrought, is speaking in German, and Puttermesser is able to follow most of it; hadn't she, after all, read Schiller's
Maria Stuart
in college? Also Goethe's
Hermann und Dorothea
? The panicky electric voice belongs to Zhenya, the daughter of the late Sonya—Sonya, the younger sister of Puttermesser's papa. Zhenya is Puttermesser's own first cousin! Tremulous, as if distance were composed of vibrating particles, Zhenya explains that she has no English, that she assumes Puttermesser has no Russian, that Zhenya herself, though now a pensioner, has been a teacher of German, but oh, the danger cannot be named, everything must be understood! “
Rette mein Kind!
” Zhenya wails, and Puttermesser hears, in the static of these Moscow sobs, her papa's blood crying up from the ground.