Heir to the Glimmering World (39 page)

"Then why do you come here?" Mitwisser muttered from the depths of his chair; he kept me in the vise of his fist.

But Mr. Brooks's look was on Bertram. "What's done is done. The fool threw it all away. I came to see for myself where it landed. You, sir," he told Bertram, "are the beneficiary of a fool."

Bertram drew out the angle of his smile. "Not me. It's the old man you want. What I am," he said, "is the son-in-law."

How he loved to pronounce these words!
Son-in-law, son-in-law:
they were still new in his mouth, not three months old. They were newer than the crib, the mattress for the crib, the tiny baby things, the baby bottles, the diaper pins—and anyhow these were not strictly new.

Bertram had found them all at the Salvation Army store under the trestle, a train stop away. The birth itself had gone well, with Elsa knowledgeably at hand and Mother Nature, as Bertram liked to say, in charge of the rest. Mother Nature was now a vivid presence among us. It was Mother Nature who brought on Anneliese's pains, and Mother Nature who accounted for her frights. Mother Nature allowed Heinz and Gert to watch the baby's head pulse itself out, and to see the umbilical cord severed; but Mother Nature in her wisdom kept Willi and Waltraut away. Mitwisser had shut himself up in a corner of his study (no more a study), as if hoping to hide in some dark crevice. But it was three in the afternoon, and the window was awash in thick light. The light had become entangled in Mitwisser's beard, bleaching it whiter yet, when Mother Nature gave her final signal; and then the birth wail rang out.

The child was called Miriam. Mrs. Mitwisser was gratified. "My mother's name," she said. Her fingers rubbed the place under her blouse where the scars had begun to fade. It was nearly a year since she had left the house. She squeezed into her blue pumps: "We go now," she insisted happily. She had never before set eyes on the great city; though they had docked at New York, the Quakers had sent a van—it was a kind of autobus—to carry them straight from the ship to Albany. Such buildings, such a city! They rode (she, and Anneliese, and Bertram) on something like the'S-bahn, at first up high, curtains dangling over windowsills, and then even higher, flat tenement rooftops, and then a narrow curving river, and then, suddenly, the blinking tunnel. When they came out on Chambers Street, it was not at all like Berlin (the dear Berlin that had been
theirs,
before those insect-leg flags infested the storefronts), but also not unlike it. The morning whirl, the young women hurrying to their offices, the busyness, the streetcars, the traffic—only here the policeman had no wooden platform to stand on, and the churches were merely copies of real churches: they pretended to be old. She almost thought the three of them would run into Hermannplatz around the corner, and the big Karstadt with its escalators and floorwalkers—and how was this square, and that patch of green, different from Königsplatz? The Municipal Building, a gray wall rising from shadowy elephantine arches, might just as well have been the Staatsoper! Her heartbeat was loud in her ears, her toes throbbed in the blue pumps. The City Clerk's office was not very clean, chewing-gum wrappers in the seats, disinfectant in the air. Twenty-four hours between the license and the ceremony: they had all been here the morning before, the same hour's ride in the'S-bahn, the same mock-cathedrals, the same halfvision of Hermannplatz and Königsplatz; and again these darkened elephantine portals. A voice summoned her forward: she must identify herself as the witness. She had no wedding ring of her own, Fritz had taken it from her, there was nothing to put on Anneliese's bridal finger—but look! Bertram was ready with a ring, it had come to him from his mother long ago, he had meant it for someone else, it was too large for Anneliese, but never mind, it would do for the little ceremony, which was no ceremony at all, only a fleeting transaction in a bureaucrat's tedious day. The dusty artificial flowers on the City Clerk's desk made their obeisance, and Bertram and Anneliese were man and wife.

Mr. Brooks was irritated. He had not come to be duped further. It was more than enough that James Philip A'Bair, Sr., a gentleman if there ever was one, world-renowned, an acclaimed virtuoso (insofar as Mr. Brooks understood these things, the main point being that after all these years the royalties never ceased, in fact they grew, they accelerated, it was almost too much for a single firm)...wasn't it deception enough that so industrious a father, call him an artist but never a bohemian, should have the fruit of a lifetime's toil fall into the hands of some crackpot refugee? Mr. Brooks was chagrined, resentful: why hadn't he recognized right away that this ingratiating little man wasn't the one, he spoke without an accent, and all the rest of them ... not that he could tell anything about the old fellow's caretaker, that girl holding on to him as if he'd tumble out of his chair if she ever let go...

The lawyer said formally, "Then I take it you are not Rudolf Mitwisser?"

"The son-in-law," Bertram repeated, and Mr. Brooks, who knew how to read the fine print, heard in that defining "the" a certain calm proprietorship.

"As I say, we have here a fait accompli," Mr. Brooks resumed, "yet I doubt he'd think of it on his own. I have in mind that my client was influenced—"

"Not by me."

"But you reside in this household—"

"When I got here he was gone."

Mr. Brooks stared all around. His client was capricious, willful, with the easy susceptibility of the willful, attracted to this and that. That recurrent fixation on Sweden, for instance, how he'd tried to get up to Scandinavia from Algiers, of all places, and during the war! Would that have been the next round of nonsense? After this present mania? Mr. Brooks remembered the freakish theater interlude, the costly refurbishment of a marginal troupe.... Someone in this house had infected him. Not the woman in the silly shoes—not clever enough, or she wouldn't have made herself so obvious an antagonist. So this old fellow was the one who was named in the letter, but good Lord, debilitated, powerless! He couldn't influence a flea, and the mute girl behind his chair was there only for what? To catch the old man's drool?

This house! This whim! Narrow and tall, three stories high—it had the configuration of a doll house. Mr. Brooks had gone through three brokers to accommodate his client's obstinacy. A quiet neighborhood. Nearby greenery. Reasonable access to the Library on Forty-second Street, what a stipulation! Everything a whim, every whim a crisis. He was under a spell; he was influenced. And he drank—don't forget that. He drank, he was open to influence, he was nothing in himself, what a descent from the distinguished father, what a squandering of a fortune!

The woman in the Cinderella shoes pivoted her hot victorious eyes upward, attending to a scarcely audible harmony of squeals. A girl carrying a blanket was coming down the stairs. She appeared to be still in her teens. Earrings glimmering through a long cloak of very dark hair. Wedding ring on the appropriate finger, a loose bad fit. This girl, Mr. Brooks quickly saw, was anything but secondary; she was the lodestar of the house. Even the quiescent old fellow—Lord help us, the heir himself!—raised his sorrowful head. The kitchen door opened a crack, pouring out a path of light into the dimness at the base of the stairs, where the girl had paused to rearrange the blanket. The blanket squirmed, kicked, squealed: an infant was inside it. Standing in that suddenly bright alley, the girl shone from head to foot, as if her figure had been hammered out in bronze. She gazed into the infant's face, as round as a half-dollar. The forum at the set table in the nearby dining room hardly earned her glance. Mr. Brooks was conscious that he was being moved, in spite of himself, by this unaccountable apparition, this tall young madonna whose skin seemed coated in light. He was not here to have his feelings touched. He was here out of indignation, out of disgust for his client's stupidity. To have entangled himself with a swarm of penniless refugees! To have given everything away, all of it, for the sake of a forgotten Jewish sect! (This being the language of the letter: "a forgotten Jewish sect.")

The startling vision—the young madonna had struck him with an inexplicable tenderness—did not last. A deluge of yammering boys, dammed up until now, churned out of the kitchen and made for the blanket. The baby was abducted from its mother and passed, uncomplaining, from hand to hand; clearly it was used to being fondled by these ruffians. It ended in the lap of a small girl, who sat herself down on the bottom step and pulled at the tiny thing's socks, exposing the little naked toes. To Mr. Brooks the sight of these toes, as creaturely as some animal's paws, was all at once obscene.

But it was decided; he understood. Forgotten Jewish sect, my eye! Surely it was this refugee madonna who had finagled a fortune out of his client, it had to be ... yet the instant Mr. Brooks was persuaded of this possibility, he discarded it. Too young; married anyhow, the baby and that ring. Lord only knows why the good-for-nothing did himself in. Crazed. The letter was crazed. Promote Rudolf Mitwisser's studies of, and so forth and so on. Was it the drink that did it? That going off to the Levant, did it turn his head? People get religious delusions of the brain in places like that, it wasn't a Cook's tour, after all. More's the pity, good New England stock twisted out of recognition. The father never dreamed of such an outcome.

His hat was surrounded by empty teacups. They had never been filled. He picked up the hat.

"Well," Mr. Brooks said, "so much for that."

Mrs. Mitwisser seized him by the sleeve of his coat. "Not to go!"

"I beg your pardon?"

"You must see first our baby! My daughter's child, black eyes!"

"Madam," he said coldly, "my driver is waiting."

"You don't look! You don't see!"

He looked. He saw. The tall young madonna, a tower of beauty.

"Bad, you do bad mistake!" The woman was accusing him; she was pleading with him. She importuned him not to misjudge them. He was in error, he was misjudging them all. His client had been a barbarian, he was not to assume that
they
were barbarians! Here was her proper son-in-law; here was her proper daughter. His client had brought them disorder, but now all was in order, only look, see, the pretty baby, the mother, the mother's husband, a proper family! His client's contaminations had been swept away at last.

What was the woman carrying on about? She held on to his sleeve.

"Elsa," Mitwisser called—a mumbling, a weakness—"why do you make this commotion?"

"This man, he will not see what we are!"

Mr. Brooks shook her off. "I see that well enough. Now if you please, I've got poor Felix circling out there."

Mitwisser unfolded his long bones inch by inch, laboring out of his chair. He went to stand between his wife and the lawyer.

"My daughter's child," he said, "is the child of James."

Mrs. Mitwisser instantly appealed to her son-in-law. "Ach, why must Rudi say this? Bertram, tell how everything is in order, he must not say this—"

But Bertram only gave her a little push. "Go away," he told the boys. "Get upstairs, scram! Heinz, take the baby from Waltraut. Waltraut, go with them. Willi, didn't I say not to poke your nose in here?"

Mr. Brooks took off his hat and again placed it on the table. Then he walked all around, cutting a furrow of silence behind him.

"Come here," he said finally.

The young madonna obliged him.

"Rudolf Mitwisser is your father?"

She nodded sleepily; her hands were absent-mindedly cupping her breasts. They were heavy with milk.

"And your child is the child of my late client? Will you swear to this?"

Anneliese nodded.

"No, no, my son-in-law, he is now the proper father," Mrs. Mitwisser broke in.

"Be quiet, Elsa," Bertram said.

"Then you must understand that Rudolf Mitwisser cannot be the legatee. In case of issue, issue inherits."

"So the old man can't get the money," Bertram said, "is that it?"

The lawyer scowled. "My client's child is my client's heir. What came before is abrogated. Null and void. There exists a child. The child takes legal precedence. The infant will require a guardian, customarily the mother—"

The colloquy continued. Bertram filled the gold-rimmed teacups and passed round the little frosted cakes; no one took any. But he himself bit into one of the cakes. In this instance, he explained, it was impractical for the infant's mother to assume the responsibility of guardianship. She was still too much an outsider, too untried. Too bewildered and unknowing. She lacked the necessary competence, she barely comprehended the custom of the country—imagine, only a little while ago she thought she needed a passport to cross from New York to Massachusetts! She was in crucial ways still a child herself.

"Your client had no scruples," Bertram said.

"
Barbarisch,
" said Mrs. Mitwisser.

"Nevertheless," Mitwisser said into his beard, "he is the father of my grandchild."

Mr. Brooks retrieved his hat. "There we have it. It seems my client has been cheated of his wish, and I can't say that I mind. I don't suppose the infant'll go chasing after dead old sects, hah? Though you can never predict."

From somewhere overhead a pulsating howl began, growing wilder by the second. Anneliese looked frightened.

"Hungry!" she cried, and fled.

"Then who will be the guardian?" the lawyer asked.

"Now that you've seen the lay of the land out here," Bertram said, "isn't it obvious?"

62

A
RIVER OF PAPERS:
first, the waiver—Mitwisser must acknowledge and renounce his invalid status as beneficiary; the legacy will be ceded to the valid heir, a minor. Anneliese must attest to the identity of the natural father. Bertram must be appointed legal guardian to the heir until she should reach her majority.

After which, the house would be free of the lawyer—except if or when Bertram might wish to consult with the firm, for which there would be the usual fee.

"Well, Rosie," he said, "what d'you think of that? We're knee-deep in capitalism, the kid's a goddamn tycoon."