Heir to the Glimmering World (38 page)

Bertram's Ninel-fevers were evaporating. I had supposed that the commodity he held in common with Anneliese—that operatic tragedy of a pair of dead lovers—would inflame his lamentations. Yet of late he rarely said Ninel's name, and then solely, he explained, when Anneliese probed.

"She wanted to hear how I lost her. It was a mistake to tell, it broke her up."

"Maybe they'll meet in heaven, those two—Ninel and James. James the ideal moneybags, he could've outfitted Ninel's whole brigade."

"Leave it alone, can't you? The poor kid's suffering."

"You're not. You're over it."

"Well, Ninel did walk away from the likes of me, I'll grant you that." He came close, frowning resolutely. It was a frown of earnest monition. "You ought to be thinking about getting out of here, you know? Look around, there's nothing for you. What have you got? The old man?"

He had begun to refer to Mitwisser in this way. For Bertram, Mitwisser no longer weighed in the household's scales.

"What this place needs," he went on, "is a good midwife." The frown was rapidly transmuted into Bertram's inconstant grin. "Can't you just see Ninel sticking with a midwife? It's the way the peasants do it, she'd like it. If I'd been a midwife from the start, she'd've married me."

"She didn't believe in marriage anyhow. You said so yourself."

"Meant to give her a ring once, in spite of it. Never told her. Put it away, just in case. I had my hopes."

"Ninel wouldn't dream of wearing a ring, you know that."

"I guess not. Just the sort of thing she loathed." But he said this dispassionately.

"Bertram," I pressed, "you aren't really intending to do that—"

"What? The delivery? Why not? It's not so hard. I've seen plenty. In the hospital we used to call them catchers. Not to mention that I've got two experienced assistants, Elsa and Mother Nature. Elsa's had five of 'em, and Mother Nature's had millions."

"It's not right, she's got to have a doctor, she ought to go to a hospital—"

"You're forgetting who these people are. The haute bourgeoisie. They don't admit to these things, they're not supposed to happen. If they happen they don't expose them. They're the ones that're keen on wedding rings. The old man especially."

"No one knows them here. There's no one to judge."

"They judge themselves," Bertram said.

Ninel had faded: Bertram was enlisted elsewhere. I marveled at this abrupt expulsion of Ninel's persistent ghost. Only days before she had been vivid enough—her penumbra could be made to brighten at a word; it could glimmer out of a heap of discarded shoes in a bin. But Bertram sided with the immediate. What was nearest at hand moved him—moved, pushed, repositioned. He was attracted to risk, not for himself—the hazards of life lured him. In his mild watercolor way he sniffed after causes, after crusades. Hadn't I once (how long ago it seemed) been one of his causes? Yet at heart I had no use for causes, and Bertram had no use for me; he was ready to exile me again. The spite of justice: what did this signify? Does spite bring justice, is justice always an act of spite? Whatever he meant by it, it had leached out of Ninel's ectoplasm into the living cells that were forming, by day and by night, in the secret recesses of Anneliese's flesh.

She had turned illicit. She believed she must be a criminal. Her crime was inscribed in her papa's melancholy—mutely he condemned, helplessly he mourned. Her mother—how strangely she glowed, how queerly she gloated: James was not in the house, he was routed, she had had her victory. But was her mother's victory over James, or was it over her papa? Or was it because of Heinz? A mysterious simulacrum of Heinz was budding inside Anneliese's own belly, a creature her papa would stare at sidewise, or else would glance too quickly away from, or else would praise and praise overmuch; a creature under perpetual, undying, triumphal suspicion. Oh, how jumbled it all was, they were trying to make her eat and drink inside the whirligig that dizzied and sickened her, her eyeballs were driven from side to side, and couldn't they see how her arms had become spinning knives whose points pierced whoever came near, and if one of the boys so much as looked at her she would slice him to pieces! She wanted none of them, not one, not Waltraut, never her papa; only Bertram, who had lifted her and carried her into her old bed and nursed her through the first night, and all the nights afterward. Sometimes she felt that Bertram too was growing a tiny curled worm inside his own body: how else could he know so purely, so deeply, her smallest sensations? She wanted his hand to keep close to her, and the soft translucent web-skin between his fingers to fondle; and when the engine that rotated her brain was at its fiercest, she drew his hand between her legs, like a kind-hearted cup.

The packet from Thrace arrived, shockingly thick, stuffed with hundred-dollar bills. It was bloodied by a long row of reddish stamps.

"I told you, didn't I?" Bertram crowed. "You see? We're in the money again." He licked his thumb and, one by one, counted out five bills. "Here," he said, "I guess I owe you this."

I protested, "It's not yours to give."

"Why not? Have a look, there's a fortune here. And plenty left over."

"I don't want it, Bertram, and you can't do this, the money's for the house. It isn't yours."

"This much is yours anyhow, so take it. You'll need it when you go."

"It's for the house," I insisted, and shoved the bills back into their packet.

He twisted up his mouth, half thoughtful, half beaming. "And aren't I the house nowadays?"

60

Fullerton, Brooks, & Winberry
One Wall Street
New York, N.Y.
March 19, 1937

Professor Rudolf Mitwisser
328 St. Peter's Street
The Bronx, N.Y.

Dear Professor Mitwisser:

This office has been belatedly notified, by Detective Martin Corrie of the Police Department of Thrace, N.Y., of the untimely death of my client, James Philip A'Bair. It is my duty to inform you that in a letter addressed here on June 12, 1936, my client has designated you as his sole heir. Pursuant to this matter, the relevant documentation will follow in due course. You should be aware that Mr. A'Bair's estate, denominated in part as "Bear Boy Royalties and Rights," is in possession of assets of considerable value.

Very truly yours,
George C. Brooks, Esq.

61

T
HE MONEY FROM
Bear Boy Royalties and Rights was delayed by several months. There were, to begin with, certain obligatory inquiries and investigations; there were reports and many more letters; there was a whisper concerning Surrogate's Court; there were dozens of discussions and ruminations and speculations—how rattled the landlady must have been, coming home that night to find the dinner heating in the double boiler untouched, and the body of her tenant already cold in the Ford. The shrieks, the excitement, the police, the identification: a passing notoriety in dusty Thrace; the town boys swarmed round to stare. A drunkard, hardly ever out of that stuffy room, and the stuck-up girl with the ugly accent and the long hair, who could figure what those two were up to? At least they'd been good for the money.

And the Ford, was it rusting now in her garden, red-browning into a surreal sculpture, sparrows nesting in the seats, the windshield knocked out? She was not so wasteful. The weathered pair of old wicker chairs that had once been in the garden, where they were beginning to rot in the sun, had been hauled upstairs to furnish her room-to-let. She was eager to sell the Ford. It would make up for the rent that henceforth would always be missing: a suicide's ghost is restless, everyone knows it returns to its last habitation, who would pay to sleep in a suicide's bed? And since Bear Boy Royalties and Rights, in the person of Mr. Brooks, made no claim against her for the return of the Ford, or for the equivalent of its value (he thought it a worthless detail), she was free to enjoy the dead man's bounty. It was almost as if he had left it to her.

Inquiries, reports, speculations; and finally Mr. Brooks himself, who came to us on a warm Sunday afternoon toward the end of October. Though the air still smelled of summer—a drift of seaweed up from the bay—he wore a gray tweed vest under a camel's hair overcoat. He was a widower who had the dryness of a man who has been long married to his firm. His purpose, he told us, was to make the acquaintance of his late client's chosen legatee. His visit would be brief; he had instructed his chauffeur to return in an hour. Bertram led him into the dining room, where he placed his hat on the table and declined to take off his coat. He had a freckled bald head; the lobes of his ears were scarcely formed, and grew directly back into the sides of his neck, and the wings of his nose—the nostrils' lobes—did exactly the same: flat and only faintly indented, they retreated into the surrounding pink flesh. Power and plenitude lived in that flesh. The careful nostrils took us in like an extra pair of eyes. They warned that just below them lurked a cold moral force: a mouth accustomed to speechifying.

His business here, he began, had a personal aspect.

It was Bertram he was addressing. His look dismissed whatever struck him as unnecessary. Waltraut and the boys had been standing gawking in the doorway—with the arrow of his elbow Bertram pointed them away and out of sight, into the silence they were pledged to. He had explained the lawyer's arrival as a momentous thing: it would disclose their future; but their future depended on their decorum, and their decorum depended on their silence. He herded them into the kitchen, where he had set out a row of baked apples, as a bribe. The sweet autumnal fragrance eddied through the house. Mr. Brooks had been announced, awaited, prepared for. James's gold-rimmed teacups were out, and the china teapot, and the rosebud-frosted little cakes that had not been seen since that August night long ago, when Mitwisser's doubters had come to assail him. They had believed him to be godless, and I, a novice at his feet, had believed the same.

I was no longer at his feet. He was sunk into his chair. I hovered behind him, as if tending a child in a pram. His big hand crept upward to feel for mine; he gripped it and would not let go. The months since Anneliese's return had aged him horribly. It had become his habit to shut his eyes when we walked out together—there was nothing he wished to see. We often went on walks, he and I, and always he sought out my hand. By now I was used to the map of his broad coarse palm, and those great hard knuckles bulging. When he spoke—he spoke little—it was usually of his wife. "My wife," he said, "is well. I observe how very well she is." But his eyes were half shut, and he stepped cautiously beside me, like a blind man. "You see for yourself," he said, "how well she is. My wife has come back to her life, is this not so?"

Mrs. Mitwisser had put on her blue pumps, to please Mr. Brooks. Her teeth gleamed contentedly: her smile was meant to adorn the hour. I saw how robust she had become. The middle of her small frame had widened—her stomach had grown a mildly protruding hillock—and her breasts and arms were roundly thick. Bertram cooked; Mrs. Mitwisser ate, always with fresh appetite. She was fat and strong and glad. Her gladness appealed to Mr. Brooks to notice her importance; to attend to the new importance of the house.

He ignored her. She was secondary and therefore unnecessary. He hadn't had Felix drive him back-of-beyond into the Bronx sticks to trifle with the secondary. He hadn't expected to be maneuvered into a place with so many chairs, at a table set for a party, what was the matter with these people? There were too many of them pressing all around, he wasn't their guest; he had come on his own steam. And he wasn't a peddler out to display his wares. First that mob of ogling children—finally it had dawned on someone, evidently the beneficiary himself, to pack them off, though even now there was an annoying clatter of spoons behind the door. And this bold overeager woman with her foolish twinkling beribboned ball slippers! Did she imagine herself a middle-aged Cinderella, about to be carried off to the palace? And over there the old fellow, mentally out of it probably, hanging on to his caretaker, why did they bring that one into it, what was the point? It was the heir he had come to survey, not this gaggle of gapers.

"I will admit," he told Bertram, "that my late client took me by surprise, though not for the first time. He has been, what shall I say, difficult, difficult since his teens. That such a cherub of a child should turn ... but it's not for me to judge. He was very young when the father died. Gifted man. Worldwide reputation. The firm made every attempt to stand
in loco parentis,
and I can't say it's been easy. A young man of whims. A maverick all his life, you could never depend on him to settle down. I'll tell you frankly, sir, this legacy is merely the latest of innumerable whims—unfortunately there's no remedy for it."

"You mean it can't be undone," Bertram said. He too had dressed for the lawyer. He had borrowed Mitwisser's jacket and tie. Traces of a lost regnancy clung to the creases in those elongated sleeves; they swallowed up Bertram's short arms, encasing him in their worn authority.

"I regret to say no. We've been through probate, it's all in order. I believe if my partner Fullerton were alive he'd have found some way around it, he was good at that sort of thing. Mental incompetence, the boy was never stable. There's no responsibility in it, from start to finish. Sends a letter, does himself in. All these years the firm pleaded for a will, something respectable. He wouldn't hear of it, everything loose, he had to have his way. I thank the good Lord his mother and father didn't live to grieve over what became of him. A wild man. A savage."

"
Wahrheit!
" Mrs. Mitwisser burst out. "
Barbarisch!
"

The vestigial earlobes paled. "My dear woman, what I say of my client is not for you to say. Let me remind you that you people are being enriched by this savage. The assets he leaves are immense, and none of his doing. His father's labors created him, he was nothing in himself. To my mind, it all goes down in dishonor." He turned back to Bertram. "If you ask me, the letter was mad. I'm all for learning, I've got nothing against learning. A library, a museum, a university, normal philanthropy! Something public and understandable. I wouldn't have cared if he gave it to the church, not that he'd ever do the decent thing. But this foreign parochial rot no one's ever heard of, no point or purpose in the real world, a private hole-in-the-wall hobbyhorse, a uselessness, a foolishness ... well, my hands are tied. I won't conceal from you that I regret it. I regret it deeply."