Bech (19 page)

Now his mother was pointing him north, into the cold. Their reflections shuddered in the black glass as the express train slammed through local stops, wan islands of light where fat colored women waited with string shopping bags. Bech was always surprised that these frozen vistas did not shatter as they pierced them; perhaps it was the multi-leveled sliding, the hurtling metal precariously switched aside from collision, more than the odors and subterranean claustrophobia, that made the boy sick on subways. He figured that he was good for eight stops before nausea began. It had just begun when she touched his arm. High, high on the West Side they emerged, into a region where cliffs and windy hilltops seemed insecurely suppressed by the asphalt grid. A boisterous shout of spring rolled upward from the river, and trolley cars clanged along Broadway. Together they walked, the boy and his mother, he in a wool knicker suit that scratched and sang between his legs, she in a tremulous hat of shining black straw, up a broad pavement bordered with cobblestones and trees whose bark was scabbed brown and white like a giraffe’s neck. His sideways glance reaped a child’s cowing impression of, beneath
the unsteady flesh of his mother’s jaw, the rose splotches that signaled excitement or anger. He had better talk. “Where are we going?”

“So,” she said, “the cat found his tongue.”

“You know I don’t like your coming into the school.”

“Mister Touch-Me-Not,” she said, “so ashamed of his mother he wants all his blue-eyed shiksas as to think he came out from under a rock, I suppose. Or better yet lives in a tree like Siegfried.”

Somewhere in the past she had wormed out of him his admiration of the German girls at school. He blushed. “Thanks to you,” he told her, “they’re all a year older than me.”

“Not in their empty golden heads, they’re not so old. Maybe in their pants, but that’ll come to you soon enough. Don’t hurry the years, soon enough they’ll hurry you.”

Homily, flattery, and humiliation: these were what his mother applied to him, day after day, like a sculptor’s pats. It deepened his blush to hear her mention Eva Hassel’s pants. Were they what would come to him soon enough? This was his mother’s style, to mock his reality and stretch his expectations.

She went on, “There’s nothing one of those fräuleins would like better than fasten herself to some smart little Jewish boy. Better that than some sausage-grinding Fritz who’ll go to beer and beating her before he’s twenty-five. You keep your nose in your books.”

“That’s where it was, before you busted into school. Where are you taking me?”

“To see something more important than where to put your you-know-what.”

“Mother, don’t be vulgar.”

“Vulgar is what I call a boy who wants to put his mother
under a rock. His mother and his people and his brain, all under a rock.”

“Now I understand. You’re taking me to look at Plymouth Rock.”

“Something like it. If you have to grow up American, at least let’s not look only at the underside. Arnie”—the Riverdale cousin—“got me two tickets from Josh Glazer, to I don’t know quite what it is. We shall see.”

The hill beneath their feet flattened; they arrived at a massive building of somehow unsullied granite, with a paradoxical look of having been here forever yet having been rarely used. Around its top ran a ribbon of carved names:
PLATO · NEWTON · AESCHYLUS · LEONARDO · AQUINAS · SHAKESPEARE · VOLTAIRE · COPERNICUS · ARISTOTLE · HOBBES · VICO · PUSHKIN · LINNAEUS · RACINE
and infinitely on, around cornices and down the receding length of the building’s two tall wings. Courtyard followed courtyard, each at a slightly higher level than the last. Conical evergreens stood silent guard; an unseen fountain played. For entrance, there was a bewildering choice of bronze doors. Bech’s mother pushed one and encountered a green-uniformed guard; she told him, “My name is Abigail Bech and this is my son Henry. These are our tickets, it says right here this is the day, they were obtained for us by a close associate of Josh Glazer’s, the playwright. I’m sure you’ve heard of him. Nobody forewarned me it would be such a climb from the subway, that’s why I’m out of breath like this.” The guard, and then another guard, for they several times got lost, directed them (his mother receiving and repeating a full set of directions each time) up a ramifying series of marble stairways into the balcony of an auditorium whose ceiling, the child’s impression was, was decorated with plaster toys—scrolls, masks, seashells, tops, and stars.

A ceremony was already in progress. Their discussions with the guards had consumed time. The bright stage far below them supported a magical tableau. On a curved dais composed of six or seven rows a hundred persons, mostly men, were seated. Though some of the men could be seen to move—one turned his head, another scratched his knee—their appearance in sum had an iron unity; they looked engraved. Each face, even at the distance of the balcony, displayed the stamp of extra precision that devout attention and frequent photography etch upon a visage; each had suffered the crystallization of fame. Young Henry saw that there were other types of Heaven, less agitated and more elevated than the school, more compact and less tragic than Yankee Stadium, where the scattered players, fragile in white, seemed about to be devoured by the dragon-shaped crowd. He knew, even before his mother, with the aid of a diagram provided on her program, began to name names, that under his eyes was assembled the flower of the arts in America, its rabbis and chieftains, souls who while still breathing enjoyed their immortality.

The surface of their collective glory undulated as one or another would stand, shuffle outward from his row, seize the glowing lectern, and speak. Some rose to award prizes; others rose to accept them. They applauded one another with a polite rustle eagerly echoed and thunderously amplified by the anonymous, perishable crowd on the other side of the veil, a docile cloudy multitude stretching backwards from front rows of corsaged loved ones into the dim regions of the balcony where mere spectators sat, where little Bech stared dazzled while his mother busily bent above the identifying diagram. She located, and pointed out to him, with that ardor for navigational detail that had delayed their arrival here,
Emil Nordquist, the Bard of the Prairie, the beetle-browed celebrant in irresistible
vers libre
of shocked corn and Swedish dairymaids; John Kingsgrant Forbes, New England’s dapper novelist of manners; Fenella Anne Collins, the wispy, mystical poet of impacted passion from Alabama, the most piquant voice in American verse since the passing of the Amherst recluse; the massive Jason Honeygale, Tennessee’s fabled word-torrent; hawk-eyed Torquemada Langguth, lover and singer of California’s sheer cliffs and sere unpopulated places; and Manhattan’s own Josh Glazer, Broadway wit, comedy-wright, lyricist, and Romeo. And there were squat bald sculptors with great curved thumbs; red-bearded painters like bespattered prophets; petite, gleaming philosophers who piped Greek catchwords into the microphone; stooped and drawling historians from the border states; avowed Communists with faces as dry as paper and black ribbons dangling from their
pinces-nez;
atonal composers delicately exchanging awards and reminiscences of Paris, the phrases in French nasally cutting across their speech like accented trombones; sibylline old women with bronze faces—all of them unified, in the eyes of the boy Bech, by not only the clothy dark mass of their clothes and the brilliance of the stage but by their transcendence of time: they had attained the fixity of lasting accomplishment and exempted themselves from the nagging nuisance of growth and its twin (which he precociously felt in himself even then, especially in his teeth), decay. He childishly assumed that, though unveiled every May, they sat like this eternally, in the same iron arrangement, beneath this domed ceiling of scrolls and stars.

At last the final congratulation was offered, and the final modest acceptance enunciated. Bech and his mother turned to re-navigate the maze of staircases. They were both shy of
speaking, but she sensed, in the abstracted way he clung to her side, neither welcoming nor cringing from her touch when she reached to reassure him in the crowd, that his attention had been successfully turned. His ears were red, showing that an inner flame had been lit. She had set him on a track, a track that must be—Abigail Bech ignored a sudden qualm, like a rude jostling from behind—the right one.

Bech never dared hope to join that pantheon. Those faces of the Thirties, like the books he began to read, putting aside baseball statistics forever, formed a world impossibly high and apart, an immutable text graven on the stone brow—his confused impression was—of Manhattan. In middle age, it would startle him to realize that Louis Bromfield, say, was no longer considered a sage, that van Vechten, Cabell, and John Erskine had become as obscure as the famous gangsters of the same period, and that an entire generation had grown to wisdom without once chuckling over a verse by Arthur Guiterman or Franklin P. Adams. When Bech received, in an envelope not so unlike those containing solicitations to join the Erotica Book Club or the Associated Friends of Apache Education, notice of his election to a society whose title suggested that of a merged church, with an invitation to its May ceremonial, he did not connect the honor with his truant afternoon of over three decades ago. He accepted, because in his fallow middle years he hesitated to decline any invitation, whether it was to travel to Communist Europe or to smoke marijuana. His working day was brief, his living day was long, and there always lurked the hope that around the corner of some impromptu acquiescence he would encounter, in a flurry of apologies and excitedly mis-aimed kisses, his long-lost
mistress, Inspiration. He took a taxi north on the appointed day. By chance he was let off at a side entrance in no way reminiscent of the august frontal approach he had once ventured within the shadow of his mother. Inside the bronze door, Bech was greeted by a mini-skirted administrative assistant who, licking her lips and perhaps unintentionally bringing her pelvis to within an inch of his, pinned his name in plastic to his lapel and, as a tantalizing afterthought (the tip of her tongue exposed in playful concentration), adjusted the knot of his necktie. Other such considerate houris were supervising arrivals, separating antique
belle-lettrists
from their overcoats with philatelic care, steering querulously nodding poetesses toward the elevator, administering the distribution of gaudy heaps of name tags, admission cards, and coded numerals.

Bech asked his assistant, “Am I supposed to do anything?”

She said, “When your name is announced, stand.”

“Do I take the elevator?”

She patted his shoulders and tugged one of his earlobes. “I think you’re a young enough body,” she judged, “to use the stairs.”

He obediently ascended a thronged marble stairway and found himself amid a cloud of murmuring presences; a few of the faces were familiar—Tory Ingersoll, a tireless old huckster, his androgynous features rigid in their carapace of orangish foundation, who had in recent years plugged himself into hipsterism and become a copious puffist and anthologist for the “new” poetry, whether concrete, non-associative, neogita, or plain protest; Irving Stern, a swarthy, ruminative critic of Bech’s age and background, who for all his strenuous protests of McLuhanite openness had never stopped squinting through the dour goggles of Leninist aesthetics, and whose
own prose style tasted like aspirin tablets being chewed; Mildred Belloussovsky-Dommergues, her name as polyglot as her marriages, her weight-lifter’s shoulders and generous slash of a wise whore’s mouth perversely dwindled in print to a trickle of elliptic dimeters; Char Ecktin, the revolutionary young dramatist whose foolish smile and high-pitched chortle consorted oddly with the facile bitterness of his dénouements—but many more were half-familiar, faces dimly known, like those of bit actors in B movies, or like those faces which emerge from obscurity to cap a surprisingly enthusiastic obituary, or those names which figure small on title pages, as translator, co-editor, or “as told to,” faces whose air of recognizability might have been a matter of ghostly family resemblance, or of a cocktail party ten years ago, or a P.E.N. meeting, or of a moment in a bookstore, an inside flap hastily examined and then resealed into the tight bright row of the unpurchased. In this throng Bech heard his name softly called, and felt his sleeve lightly plucked. But he did not lift his eyes for fear of shattering the spell, of disturbing the penumbral decorum and rustle around him. They came to the end of their labyrinthine climb, and were ushered down a dubiously narrow corridor. Bech hesitated, as even the dullest steer hesitates in the slaughterer’s chute, but the pressure behind moved him on, outward, into a spotlit tangle of groping men and scraping chairs. He was on a stage. Chairs were arranged in curved tiers. Mildred Belloussovsky-Dommergues waved an alabaster, muscular arm: “Yoo-hoo, Henry, over here. Come be a B with me.” She even spoke now—so thoroughly does art corrupt the artist—in dimeters. Willingly he made his way upwards toward her. Always, in his life, no matter how underfurnished in other respects, there had been a woman to shelter beside. The chair beside her bore his name.
On the seat of the chair was a folded program. On the back of the program was a diagram. The diagram fitted a memory, and looking outward, into the populated darkness that reached backwards into a balcony, beneath a ceiling dimly decorated with toylike protrusions of plaster, Bech suspected, at last, where he was. With the instincts of a literary man he turned to printed matter for confirmation; he bent over the diagram and, yes, found his name, his number, his chair. He was here. He had joined that luminous, immutable tableau. He had crossed to the other side.

Now that forgotten expedition with his mother returned to him, and their climb through those ramifications of marble, a climb that mirrored, but profanely, the one he had just taken within sacred precincts; and he deduced that this building was vast twice over, an arch-like interior meeting in this domed auditorium where the mortal and the immortal could behold one another, through a veil that blurred and darkened the one and gave to the other a supernatural visibility, the glow and precision of Platonic forms. He studied his left hand—his partner in numerous humble crimes, his delegate in many furtive investigations—and saw it partaking, behind the flame-blue radiance of his cuff, joint by joint, to the quicks of his fingernails, in the fine articulation found less in reality than in the Promethean anatomical studies of Leonardo and Raphael.