The Puttermesser Papers by Cynthia Ozick

Author:Cynthia Ozick [Ozick, Cynthia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FICTION, Art, General
ISBN: 9780857899804
Google: _mFVBQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Atlantic Books, Limited
Published: 2014-12-04T20:49:00+00:00

Puttermesser, who had not laughed in a month, laughed: she was ready to be happy. “Do people know what this means when you hand it out?”

“It’s self-explanatory.”

She was still laughing; it made her as bold as an old politician. “Why would you drop in?”

“To explain the card.” He bent to pick up easel, satchel, dolly. “Don’t you want me to? Would you rather I didn’t?”

“Come right now,” she said. “I’m dying of thirst. I’ll make some tea.”

II. THE NIGHT READERS

PUTTERMESSER’S FAVORITE TEA WAS Celestial Seasonings Swiss Mint—each tea bag had attached to it an instructive or uplifting quotation. Henry Ward Beecher: “Compassion will cure more sins than condemnation.” Victor Hugo: “Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human face.” Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you.”

The box too was imprinted with wisdom. Rupert Rabeeno read aloud, “‘I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts.’ John Locke,” and twisted the box around. “This next one’s Nietzsche. ‘He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how.’ ”

Reading from the tea bag tags was only a joke, a diversion. What they were really reading from was Middlemarch. This was the beginning of a project: they were going to do all of George Eliot’s novels—out loud, taking turns. The early chapters galloped, but after a while talk always seemed to intervene; they forgot what had happened at the start of a chapter, and had to repeat it. Sometimes they skipped the reading altogether. Rupert Rabeeno was not one of those people who allow their lives to be obscured by the vapor of the merely inferential. He was amazingly explicit: he made Puttermesser see things. In a month or so she had been led through all the particulars of his childhood. She knew the contents of his mother’s dusty jewel tray—her high-school class ring, four pairs of screw-on celluloid earrings, one necklace of five-and-dime pearls, one broken watch in the shape of a violin—and exactly where his father used to keep the key to the store safe (in the toe of an out-of-style Buster Brown Mary Jane). His father had run a shoe store in a town outside of Atlanta. Rupert’s two married sisters, much older, grandmothers several times over, were settled in Tampa and Dallas. He claimed, besides, two mothers. The first had died when he was only nine: it became his habit to dream over the sad remnants of her few poor trinkets. He thought he could catch a reminiscent sniff of her dress fuming out of the tray in her old chifforobe. His father had put it down in the cellar of the shoe store. His father’s second wife—strong and rosy—worked in the shoe store just as Rupert’s mother had, and to woo his affection rushed home to give him milk and chocolate graham crackers after school, just as his mother had. But he threw over his milk glass on purpose,

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