The Puttermesser Papers (8 page)

Puttermesser said nothing. Cracow thought women ought to keep their place; he took open satisfaction in Puttermesser's flight downward. He nagged her to tell him what Turtelman's special project was. “You'd rather do special projects for the higher-ups than date a nice guy like me,” he complained. “At least let's have lunch.” But Puttermesser sent the golem out to a delicatessen for sandwiches; it was a kosher delicatessen—Puttermesser thought the golem would care about a thing like that. By the middle of the afternoon the golem's typed sheets were a tall stack.

At a quarter to five Turtelman's bony acolyte came puffing in. “Mr. Turtelman lent me to Mr. Marmel just to give you this. I hope you appreciate I'm not normally anyone's delivery boy. You're never at your desk. You can't be reached by phone. You're not important enough to be incommunicado, believe me. Mr. Marmel wants you to prepare a portfolio for him on these topics toot sweet.”

Marmel' s memo:

Dear Ms. Puttermesser:

Please be good enough to supply me with the following at your earliest convenience. A list of the City's bank depositories. Average balance in each account for the last three years. List of contact people at banks—names, titles, telephone numbers. List of contacts for Department of Receipts and
Disbursements (referred to below as “we,” “our,” and “us”) in Office of Mayor, Department of Budget, relevant City Council committees, Office of Comptroller. Copies of all evaluation reports published during past year. Current organization chart showing incumbent, title, and salary for each of our Office Heads. Why do we not have any window poles? Where have all the window poles gone? How to get toilet paper and soap regularly replaced in executive washroom? What kind of Management Information System files do we have on the assessed value of City real estate? How effective was our last Investors' Tour? Old notes disclose visit to sewage disposal plant, helicopter ride, fireboat demonstration, lunch and fashion show for the ladies—how to win goodwill this year from these heavy pockets? What hot litigation should I know about in re our Quasi-Judicial Division?

It was the old story: the floundering new official perplexed and beleaguered. Puttermesser felt a touch of malicious pleasure in Marmel's memo; she had known it would come to this—Turtelman, having thrown her out, now discovered he could not clear a space for himself without the stirring of Puttermesser's little finger. Marmel, spurred by Turtelman (too high-and-mighty to ask on his own), had set out to pick Puttermesser's brain. He was appealing to Puttermesser to diaper him. Each item in Marmel's memo would take hours and hours to answer! Except for the window poles. Puttermesser could explain about the window poles in half a second.

“Stand by,” she said to the bony acolyte. And to Xanthippe: “Take a letter!”

Mr. Adam Marmel

First Bursary Officer

Bureau of Summary Sessions

Department of Receipts and Disbursements

Municipal Building

Dear Mr. Marmel:

Window poles are swiped by the hottest and sweatiest secretaries. The ones located directly above the furnace room, for instance. Though lately the ones who jog at lunchtime are just as likely to pinch poles. When they get them they hide them. Check out the second-floor ladies' room.

The fresh air of candor is always needed whenever the oxygen of honest admission has been withdrawn. Precisely
WHY
[“Make that all capitals,” Puttermesser said, dictating] have I been relieved of my position? Precisely
WHY
have you stepped into my job? Let us have some fresh air!

Yours sincerely,

R. Puttermesser, Esq.

The bony acolyte snatched the sheet directly from the golem's typewriter. “There's a lot more he wants answers to. You've left out practically everything.”

“Window poles are everything,” Puttermesser said. “The fresh air of candor is all.” She observed—it was a small shock—that the golem's style had infected her.

The bony acolyte warned, “Fresh is right. You better answer the rest of what he wants answered.”

“Go home,” Puttermesser told the golem. “Home!”

During dinner in the little kitchen Puttermesser was nearly as silent as the golem. Injustice rankled. She paid no attention to the golem's scribblings. The nerve! The nerve! To throw her out and then come and pick her brain! “No more Swedish soufflé,” she growled. “Cook something else for a change. And I'm getting tired of seeing you in my old sweater. I'll give you money, tomorrow go buy yourself some decent clothes.”

“Tomorrow,” the golem wrote, “I will again serve you at your place of employment.”

But in the morning Puttermesser was lackadaisical; ambition had trickled away. What, after so much indignity, was there to be ambitious
for
? For the first time in a decade she came to the office late. “What's the special project, Ruth?” Cracow wanted to know right away. “The kid was burning up the typewriter yesterday. What is she anyhow, an illegal alien? She don't look like your ordinary person. Yemenite Israeli type? What is this, already she don't show up, it's only the second day on the job? The phone calls you missed! Memos piled up! That gal from Personnel back and forth two, three times! They're after you today, Ruth! The higher-ups! What's the special project, hah? And the kid leaves you high and dry!”

“She'll turn up.” Puttermesser had given the golem a hundred and twenty dollars and sent her to Alexander's. “No taxis or else,” Puttermesser said; but she knew the golem would head downtown to Delancey Street. The thronged Caribbean faces and tongues of the Lower East Side drew her; Xanthippe, a kind of foreigner herself, as even Cracow could see, was attracted to immigrant
populations. Their taste and adorations were hers. She returned with red and purple blouses, narrow skirts and flared pants of parrot-green and cantaloupe-orange, multicolored high-heeled plastic shoes, a sunflower-yellow plastic shoulder bag with six double sets of zippers, a pocket mirror, and a transparent plastic comb in its own peach tattersall plastic case.

“Hispanic absolutely,” Cracow confirmed—Cracow the bigot—watching Xanthippe lay open boxes and bags.

But Puttermesser was occupied with a trio of memos. They appeared to originate with Marmel but were expressed through Polly, the Atropos of Personnel, she who had put aside her shears for the flurry of a thousand Forms, she who brooded like Shiva the Destroyer on a world of the lopped.

Memo One:

You are reported as having refused to respond to requests for information relating to Bureau business. You now are subject to conduct inquiry. Please obtain and fill out Form 10V, Q17, with particular reference to Paragraph L, and leave it
immediately
with Polly in Personnel.

Memo Two:

In consideration of your seniority, Commissioner Alvin Turtelman, having relieved you of Level Eleven status in the Bureau of Summary Sessions, Department of Receipts and Disbursements, due to insufficient control of bursary materials, weak administrative supervision as well as output insufficiency, has retained you at Level Four.
However, your work shows continued decline. Lateness reported as of
A.M
. today. Fill out Below-Level-Eight Lateness Form I4TG. (Submit Form to Polly in Personnel.)

Memo Three:

As a result of a determination taken by Commissioner Alvin Turtelman in conjunction and in consultation with First Bursary Officer Adam Marmel, your Level Four appointment in the Department of Receipts and Disbursements is herewith terminated. Please submit Below-Level-Six Severance Form A97, Section 6, with particular reference to Paragraph 14b, to Polly in Personnel.

Severed! Sacked! Dismissed! Let go! Fired! And all in the space of three hours! “Output insufficiency,” a lie! “Decline,” a fiction! “Conduct inquiry”—like some insignificant clerk or window-pole thief! Late once in ten years and Cracow, litigious would-be lover, snitches to Polly, the Atropos, the Shiva, of Personnel! Who else but Cracow? Lies. Fabrications. Accusations. Marmel the hollow accuser. Absence of due process!

The Honorable Malachy Mavett

Mayor, City of New York

City Hall

Dear Mayor Mavett:

Where is your pride, to appoint such men? Men who accuse without foundation? An accuser who seizes the job of the accused? Suspect! Turtelman wanted me out in order to get
Marmel in! I stand for Intellect and Knowledge, they stand for Politics and Loyal Cunning. Hart Crane, poet of New York, his harp the Brooklyn Bridge, does that harp mean nothing to you? Is Walt Whitman dead in your kidneys? Walt Whitman who cried out “numberless crowded streets, high growths of iron, slender, strong, light, splendidly uprising toward clear skies,” who embraced “a million people—manners free and superb—open voices—hospitality . . .” Oh, Mayor Mavett, it is Injustice you embrace! You have given power to men for whom Walt Whitman is dead in their kidneys! This city of masts and spires opens its breast for Walt Whitman, and you feed it with a Turtelman and a Marmel! Ruth Puttermesser is despised, demoted, thrown away at last! Destroyed. Without work. Doer of nought, maker of nothing.

This letter remained locked inside Puttermesser's head. Cracow was trying hard not to look her way. He had already read Marmel's memos manifested through Polly the Destroyer; he had surely read them. He stood behind the golem's chair, attentive to her fingers galloping over the typewriter keys— including the newly lengthened one; how glad Puttermesser was that she had fixed it! “Hey Ruth, take a gander at this stuff. What's this kid
doing
? That's some so-called special project for Turtelman.”

“The special project for Turtelman,” Puttermesser said coldly, “is my vanquishment. My vanishing. My send-off and diminishment. So long, Leon. May you win your case against the mediocre universality of the human imagination.”

“You been canned?”

“You know that.”

“Well, when Polly walks in you figure what's up. You figure who's out.”

“Beware of
Schadenfreude
, Leon. You could be next.”

“Not me. I don't look for trouble. You look for trouble. I knew right away this whole setup with the kid was phony. She's typing up a craziness—whatever it is, Bureau business it isn't. You let in the crazies, you get what you expect.”

At that moment—as Cracow's moist smile with its brown teeth turned and turned inside Cracow's dark mouth—a clarification came upon Puttermesser: no: a clarity. She was shut of a mystery. She understood; she saw.

“Home!” Puttermesser ordered the golem. Xanthippe gathered up her clothes and shoved the typewritten sheets into one of the blouse bags.

V. WHY THE GOLEM WAS CREATED
;
PUTTERMESSER
'
S PURPOSE

T
HAT NIGHT THE GOLEM
cooked spaghetti. She worked barefoot. The fragrance of hot buttered tomato sauce and peppers rushed over a mound of shining porcelain strands. “What are you doing?” Puttermesser demanded; she saw the golem heaping up a second great batch. “Why are you so hungry?”

The golem looked a little larger today than she had yesterday. Then Puttermesser remembered that it was in the nature of a golem to grow and grow. The golem's appetite was nevertheless worrisome—how long would it take for Xanthippe to grow out of over one hundred dollars' worth of clothes? Could only a Rothschild afford a golem? And what would the rate of growth be? Would the golem eventually have to be kept outdoors, so as not to crash through the ceiling? Was the golem of Prague finally reversed into lifelessness on account of its excessive size, or because the civic reforms it was created for had been accomplished?

Ah, how this idea glowed for Puttermesser! The civic reforms of Prague—the broad crannied city of Prague, Prague distinguished by numberless crowded streets, high growth of iron masts and spires! The clock-tower of the Jewish Community House, the lofty peaked and chimneyed root of the Altneuschul! Not to mention Kafka's Castle. All
that manifold urban shimmer choked off by evil, corruption, the blood libel, the strong dampened hearts of wicked politicos. The Great Rabbi Judah Loew had undertaken to create his golem in an unenlightened year, the dream of America just unfolding, far away, in all its spacious ardor; but already the seed of New York was preparing in Europe's earth: inspiration of city-joy, love for the comely, the cleanly, the free and the new, mobs transmuted into troops of the blessed, citizens bursting into angelness, sidewalks of alabaster, buses filled with thrones. Old delicate Prague, swept and swept of sin, giving birth to the purified daylight, the lucent genius, of New York!

By now Puttermesser knew what she knew.

“Bring me my books,” she ordered the golem. And read:

A vision of Paradise must accompany the signs. The sacred formulae are insufficient without the trance of ecstasy in which are seen the brilliance of cities and their salvation through exile of heartlessness, disorder, and the desolation of sadness.

A city washed pure. New York, city (perhaps) of seraphim. Wings had passed over her eyes. Her arms around Rappoport's heavy
Times
, Puttermesser held to her breast heartlessness, disorder, the desolation of sadness, ten thousand knives, hatred painted in the subways, explosions of handguns, bombs in the cathedrals of transportation and industry, Pennsylvania Station, Grand Central, Rockefeller Center, terror in the broadcasting booths with their bustling equipment and seductive provincial voices, all the metropolitan airports assaulted, the decline of the
Civil Service, maggots in high management. Rappoport's
Times
, repository of a dread freight! All the same, carrying Rappoport's
Times
back to bed, Puttermesser had seen Paradise.

New York washed, reformed, restored.

“Xanthippe!”

The golem, who had been scrubbing spaghetti sauce off the dishes in a little cascade of water-thunder under the kitchen faucet, wiped her hands on her new purple blouse, snatched up ballpoint pen and notepad, and ran to Puttermesser.