Antiquities by Cynthia Ozick (epub ebook reader .txt) 📗

I am to serve as a decoy to further his son’s ambition. I had thought better of Ned, but much like his portion of the bulk of mankind, he puts his own interest first, undeniably sugar-coated by reminiscence.

Of his recollections, and his claims, I recognize very little. I knew him from a distance; I knew him hardly at all. In those hurtful years at the Academy, he told me, there were only two persons who regarded him with decency. One was Reverend Greenhill and the other was Lloyd Petrie. You never put me down, Lloyd, you never called me Hebe, and that time when a mob of them came and tore whole pages out of my Greek grammar, you had nothing to do with it. You were among the very few who kept away. I was suffering all those years at school, Lloyd, and it’s not something a person forgets. You never went out of your way to do me harm.

I was embarrassed by all this untempered emotion. That is how these people are, their overflowing sentimentalism. Their motion picture style of exaggerated feeling. Well, I said, I do remember that awful night, they had cigarettes and burned holes in your sheets. But why, I asked, did you think I would do any of that sort of thing? Because, he said, you were a Petrie. You were one of them, you thought it was your right.

This, I must acknowledge, unsettled me. I was a Petrie then, and I am a Petrie now. It is for this very reason that Ned, through his son, offers me an advantage, is it not? I could not tell him, if he failed to discern it for himself, that I had been deprived of my right, as he put it, because I had been contaminated by Ben-Zion Elefantin. I dared not tell him how fervently I had longed to be reinstated.

Instead, I firmly declined his largesse.

It is true that I never called him Hebe; but I thought it. And sometimes, I admonish myself, I still think it.

*

October 18, 1949. There has not been a single reply to my numerous advertisements, though with some trepidation at how outlandish it was, I went so far as to place one in the Jewish Day, a local journal whose existence I have only just now come upon. I kept my anonymity, of course, and supplied only a postal box number. My language too was sparse and direct: if you, I wrote, were at any time ever associated with a children’s home known as the Elijah Foundation, please respond. A far-fetched effort. Boys of twelve seventy years ago would likely today be dead men. I am happy not to have uncovered Ben-Zion Elefantin by this means, or anyone who knew him. And better yet, it promises that he was never a boy sent over to the Academy by some shabby almshouse that has not survived. Absence itself is a kind of proof.

*

October 20, 1949. It is by now several days since that abrasive talk with Ned Greenhill. On second thought, I believe I will accept his invitation, but on a gentleman’s terms and decidedly sans his benevolence. I am a practical man, as I often say, and the hard truth is that I have nowhere else to lay my head.

As for his son: if these forlorn precincts should fall into his hands, how high will he go?

*

November 3, 1949. For the remainder of that school term I saw far too little of Ben-Zion Elefantin. Something poisonous had come between us: a remoteness beyond my understanding. When he gave me his hand that fevered winter night on the flowered carpet, it was hot and moist, as if he had combed it through dew. I had no inkling that I would never again know the slightness of his palm or the frailty of his small knuckles. And once more his door was shut against me, and again I would catch the bleats and driftings of what passed for liturgical grumbles, or else the muted wail of some secret weeping; but he was two years older than I, and thereby too old to cry. I, alone on my bed with my disordered chessboard before me, was not.

In the refectory he sat at a distance, and I saw that he spoke to no one, and no one spoke to him. But at certain unaware moments I would feel his look. It was, I thought, altogether washed clean of the meek and the humble. In chapel too he kept apart, and was intent, as always, on the sermon, though of late Reverend Greenhill’s homiletics had departed from the biblical, and for several Sundays in a row he chose as his theme his recent adventures in the Hebrides. His holiday there, he said, had been inspired by Samuel Johnson, a famous Englishman of virtue and wisdom who lived two hundred years ago; and also by James Boswell, a Scotsman equally famous and virtuous. The loyalty to each other of these two friends, he told us, was such that Boswell gave his life to recording the life of Johnson, particularly during a journey to the Hebrides the two of them together undertook.

It was clear that he meant us to seize the meaning of this lesson: friendship and loyalty and attentiveness and decorum. (To illustrate the latter, he read out a paragraph of Boswell’s prose.) All this, I saw, was aimed at the rowdies; but they kept their heads down and were quiet. Or else were drawn in by his tale of crags and abysses, and of ships broken on rocks in the waters that skirt the islands, and especially of a frightening fall from a mossy cliff. (Here, in a sort of purposeful drama, Reverend Greenhill held up his elbow, fractured and healing, he said, but painful still.) And I thought: I have been loyal to Ben-Zion Elefantin, how unfair that he is disloyal to me.

Today as I write (in one of these formless