The Puttermesser Papers (7 page)

She asked Xanthippe: “Do you eat?”

The golem wrote, “
Vivo, ergo edo
. I live, therefore I eat.”

“Don't pull that on me—my Latin is as good as yours. Can you cook?”

“I can do what I must, if my mother decrees it,” the golem wrote.

“All right,” Puttermesser said. “In that case you can stay. You can stay until I decide to get rid of you. Now make lunch. Cook something I like, only better than I could do it.”

III. THE GOLEM COOKS, CLEANS, AND SHOPS

T
HE GOLEM HURRIED OFF
to the kitchen. Puttermesser heard the smack of the refrigerator, the clatter of silver, the faucet turned on and off; sounds of chopping in a wooden bowl; plates set out, along with an eloquent tinkle of glassware; a distant whipping, a distant sizzling; mushroom fragrances; coffee. The golem appeared at the bedroom door with a smug sniff, holding out her writing pad:

“I can have uses far beyond the mere domestic.”

“If you think you're too good for kitchen work,” Puttermesser retorted, “don't call yourself Xanthippe. You're so hot on aspiration, you might as well go the whole hog and pick Socrates.”

The golem wrote: “I mean to be a critic even of the highest philosophers. Xanthippe alone had the courage to gainsay Socrates. Nay, I remain Xanthippe. Please do not allow my Swedish mushroom soufflé to sink. It is best eaten in a steaming condition.”

Puttermesser muttered, “I don't like your prose style. You write like a translation from the Middle Finnish. Improve it,” but she followed the golem into the little kitchen. The golem's step was now light and quick, and the kitchen too seemed transformed—a floating corner of buoyancy and quicksilver: it was as if the table were in the
middle of a Parisian concourse, streaming, gleaming: it had the look of a painting, both transient and eternal, a place where you sat for a minute to gossip, and also a place where the middle-aged Henry James came every day so that nothing in the large world would be lost on him. “You've set things up nicely enough,” Puttermesser said; “I forgot all about these linen placemats.” They were, in fact, part of her “trousseau”; her mother had given her things. It was expected, long ago, that Puttermesser would marry.

The golem's soufflé was excellent; she had also prepared a dessert that was part mousse, part lemon gelatin. Puttermesser, despite her periodontic troubles, took a greedy second helping. The golem's dessert was more seductive even than fudge; and fudge for Puttermesser was notoriously paradisal.

“First-rate,” Puttermesser said; the golem had been standing all the while. “Aren't you having any?”

Immediately the golem sat down and ate.

“Now I'm going for a walk,” Puttermesser announced. “Clean all this up. Make the bed. Be sure to mop under it. Look in the hamper, you'll find a heap of dirty clothes. There's a public washing machine in the basement. I'll give you quarters.”

The golem turned glum.

“Well, look,” Puttermesser argued, “I can use you for anything I please, right?”

The golem wrote, “The Great Rabbi Judah Loew's wife sent the golem of Prague to fetch water, and he fetched, and he fetched, until he flooded the house, the yard, the city, and finally the world.”

“Don't bother me with fairy tales,” Puttermesser said.

The golem wrote, “I insist I am superior to mere household use.”

“No one's superior to dirty laundry,” Puttermesser threw back, and went out into the great city. She intended to walk and brood; though she understood at last how it was that she had brought the golem to life, it disturbed her that she did not recall
making
her—emptying all the plant pots, for instance. Nor was Puttermesser wise to her own secret dictates in creating the golem. And now that the golem was actually in the house, what was to be done with her? Puttermesser worried about the landlord, a suspicious fellow. The landlord allowed no dogs or—so the lease read—“irregular relationships.” She thought of passing Xanthippe off as an adopted daughter—occasionally she would happen on an article about single parents of teenage foster children. It was not so unusual. But even that would bring its difficulty, because—to satisfy the doorman and the neighbors—such a child would have to be sent to school; and it was hardly reasonable, Puttermesser saw, to send the golem to an ordinary high school. They would ship her off to an institution for deaf-mutes, to learn sign language—and it would become evident soon enough, wouldn't it, that the golem was not the least bit deaf? There was really no place for her in any classroom; she probably knew too much already. The erratic tone of her writing, with its awful pastiche, suggested that she had read ten times more than any other tenth-grader of the same age. Besides, did the golem
have
an age? She had the shape of a certain age, yes; but the truth was she was only a few
hours old. Her public behavior was to be bound to be unpredictable.

Puttermesser was walking northward. Her long introspective stride had taken her as far as Eighty-sixth Street. She left Madison and veered up Lexington. She had forgotten her gloves; her fingers were frozen. February's flying newspapers scuttled over broken bottles and yogurt cups squashed in the gutter. A bag lady slept in a blue-black doorway, wrapped in a pile of ragged coats. Dusk was coming down; all the store windows, without exception, were barred or shuttered against the late-afternoon Sunday emptiness. Burglars, addicts, marauders, the diverse criminal pestilences of uptown and downtown, would have to find other ways of entry: breaking through a roof; a blowtorch on a steel bar; a back toilet window with a loose grill. Ingenuity. Puttermesser peered around behind her for the mugger who, in all logic, should have been stalking her; no one was there. But she was ready: she had left her wallet at home on purpose; a police whistle dangled on a cord around her neck; she fondled the little knife in her pocket. New York! All the prisons in the metropolitan area were reputed to be hopelessly overcrowded.

At Ninety-second Street she swung through the revolving doors of the Y to warm up. The lobby was mostly uninhabited; a short line straggled toward the ticket office. Puttermesser read the poster: a piano concert at eight o'clock. She headed downtown. It was fully dark now. She reflected that it would be easy enough to undo, to reverse, the golem; there was really no point in keeping her on.
For one thing, how would the golem be occupied all day while Puttermesser was at work? And Puttermesser was nervous: she had her demotion to think about. Stripped. Demoralized. That pest Cracow. Turtelman and Marmel. The Civil Service, founded to eradicate patronage, nepotism, favoritism, spoils, payoffs, injustice, corruption! Lost, all lost. The Mayor had no intention of answering Puttermesser's urgent letter.

Taking off her coat, Puttermesser called to the golem, “What's going on in there?” An unexpected brilliance spilled out of the bedroom: a lamp in the form of the Statue of Liberty stood on the teak desk. “What's this?”

“I bought it,” the golem wrote. “I did everything my mother instructed. I cleaned up the kitchen, made the bed”—a new blue bedspread, with pictures of baseball mitts, covered it—“mopped the whole house, did the laundry, ironed everything, hung my mother's blouses and put my mother's panty-hose into the drawer—”

Puttermesser grabbed the sheet of paper right off the golem's pad and tore it up without reading the rest of it. “What do you mean you bought it? What kind of junk is this? I don't want the Statue of Liberty! I don't want baseball mitts!”

“It was all I could find,” the golem wrote on a fresh page. “All the stores around here are closed on Sunday. I had to do down to Delancey Street on the Lower East Side. I took a taxi.”

“Taxi! You'll shop when I tell you to shop!” Puttermesser yelled. “Otherwise you stay home!”

“I need a wider world,” the golem wrote. “Take me with you to your place of employment tomorrow.”

“My foot I will,” Puttermesser said. “I've had enough of you. I've been thinking”—she looked for a euphemism—“about sending you back.”

“Back?” the golem wrote; her mouth had opened all the way.

“You've got a crooked tooth. Come here,” Puttermesser said, “I'll fix it.”

The golem wrote, “You can no longer alter my being or any part of my being. The speaking of the Name fulfills; it precludes alteration. But I am pleasant to look on, am I not? I will not again gape so that my crooked tooth can offend my mother's eye. Only use me.”

“You've got rotten taste.”

The golem wrote, “It was my task to choose between baseball mitts and small raccoons intermingled with blue-eyed panda bears. The baseball mitts struck me as the lesser evil.”

“I never
wanted
a bedspread,” Puttermesser objected. “When I said to make the bed I just meant to straighten the blankets, that's all. And my God, the Statue of Liberty!”

The golem wrote, “A three-way bulb, 150 watts. I thought it so very clever that the bulb goes right into the torch.”

“Kitsch. And where'd you get the money?”

“Out of your wallet. But see how pleasantly bright,” the golem wrote. “I fear the dark. The dark is where preexistence abides. It is not possible to think of pre-existence, but one dreads its facsimile: post-existence. Do not erase,
obliterate, or annihilate me. Mother, my mother. I will serve you. Use me in the wide world.”

“You stole my money right out of my wallet, spent a fortune on a taxi, and brought home the cheapest sort of junk. If you pull this kind of thing in the house, don't talk to me about the wide world!”

IV. XANTHIPPE AT WORK

B
UT THE NEXT MORNING
the golem was in Puttermesser's office.

“Who's the kid?” Cracow asked.

“Marmel's letting me have a typist,” Puttermesser said.

“Marmel? That don't make sense. After demoting you?”

“I was reassigned,” Puttermesser said; but her cheeks stung.

“Them's the breaks,” Cracow said. “So how come the royal treatment? You could use the typing pool like the rest of us.”

“Turtelman's put me on a special project.”

“Turtelman? Turtelman kicked you in the head. What special project?”

“I'm supposed to check out any employee who broods about lawsuits on City time,” Puttermesser said.

“Oh come on, Ruth, can the corn. You know damn well I've been maligned. My lawyer says I have a case. I damn well have a case. What's the kid's name?”

“Leah.”

“Leah.” Cracow pushed his face right into the golem's. “Do they hire 'em that young? What are you, Leah, a high-school dropout?”

“She's smart enough as is,” Puttermesser said.

“Whyn't you let the kid answer for herself?”

Puttermesser took Cracow by the elbow and whispered, “They cut out her throat. Malignancy of the voicebox.”

“Whew,” Cracow said.

“Get going,” Puttermesser ordered the golem, and led her to the ladies' room. “I told you not to come! I'm in enough hot water around here, I don't need you to make trouble.”

The golem plucked a paper towel from the wall, fetched Puttermesser's ballpoint pen from the pocket of Puttermesser's cardigan (the golem was still wearing it), and wrote: “I will ameliorate your woe.”

“I didn't say woe, I said hot water.
Trouble
. First kitsch, now rococo. Observe reality, can't you? Look, you're going to sit in front of that typewriter and that's it. If you can type half as well as you cook, fine. I don't care
what
you type. Stay out of my way. Write letters, it doesn't matter, but stay out of my way.”

The golem wrote, “I hear and obey.”

All day the golem, a model of diligence, sat at the typewriter and typed. Puttermesser, passing en route from one fruitless meeting to another, saw the sheets accumulating on the floor. Was Xanthippe writing a novel? a memoir? To whom, after all, did she owe a letter? The golem looked abstracted, rapt. Puttermesser was hoping to patch together, bit by bit, her bad fortune. The gossips ran from cubicle to cubicle, collecting the news: Turtelman's niece, an actress—she had most recently played a medieval leper, with a little bell, in a television costume drama—was engaged to the Mayor's cousin. Marmel's aunt had once stayed in the same hotel in Florida with Mrs. Minnie
Mavett, the Mayor's elderly widowed adoptive mother. (The Mayor had been an adopted child, and campaigned with his wife and four natural children as a “lucky orphan.”) Marmel and Turtelman were said to have married twin sisters; surely this was a symbolic way of marrying each other? Or else Marmel was married to a Boston blueblood, Turtelman to a climber from Great Neck. On the other hand, only Marmel was married; Turtelman was an austere bachelor. One of the secretaries in the Administrative Assistant's office had observed that Marmel, Turtelman, and the Mayor all wore identical rings; she denied they were school rings. Turtelman's “restructuring,” moreover, had begun (according to Polly in Personnel) to assume telltale forms. He was becoming bolder and bolder. He was like some crazed plantation owner at harvest time, who, instead of cutting down the standing grain, cuts down the conscientious reapers. Or he was like a raving chessmaster who throws all the winning pieces in the fire. Or he was like a general who leads a massacre against his own best troops. All these images failed. Turtelman was destroying the Department of Receipts and Disbursements. What he looked for was not performance but loyalty. He was a mayoral appointee of rapacious nature conniving at the usual outrages of patronage; he was doing the Mayor's will. He did not love the democratic polity as much as he feared the Mayor. Ah, Walt Whitman was not in his kidneys. Plunder was.

Cracow, meanwhile, reported that several times Adam Marmel had telephoned for Puttermesser. It was urgent. “That new girl's no good, Ruth. I'm all in favor of hiring
the handicapped, but when it comes to answering the telephone what's definitely needed is a larynx. I had to pick up every damn time. You think Marmel wants to put you back up there in the stratosphere?”