Heir to the Glimmering World Read Online Free Page A

worked in a hospital. Beyond these paltry items my father knew nothing about him; Bertram was a stranger. "But he might have some ideas," my father said, licking the stamp on his letter. "And he's a cousin, he owes it to me." I protested: how could a pharmacist get my father a job teaching math? As it turned out, Bertram knew a doctor in his hospital whose brother-in-law was the dean of Croft Hall, a boys' preparatory academy just outside Troy. It was nothing more than a private high school run on British mimicry; it was set among green lawns, with an artificial castle at its center.
    No one at Croft Hall cared about my father's old transgressions; no one asked; what was needed—and right away—was a math teacher to replace a malcontent who had fled in the middle of the term. Overnight my father became a "master." He was delighted with his new status. The pay was low, considerably less than his salary in Thrace, but the boys were rich. They had vast allowances and were accustomed to tip the masters; on weekends they went off to Saratoga to bet on the horses. They concentrated on the crease in their trousers and were particular about the shape of their collars. My father acquired a second-hand car and drove every day to the castle and its lawns; after a time he began to drive some of the younger boys to Saratoga on Saturday afternoons. One evening he came home jubilating, clutching a roll of bills. It was three hundred dollars; I assumed he had won it at the track. "Nah," he said, "I got it off an upper-form kid. Wilson. A poker fiend, his mother's married to that German, Von Something, some kind of baron."
    Bertram, our cousin in Albany, had saved us.
    Toward the end of my last semester of high school—we had been in Troy nearly twenty-one months—my father divulged a new plan: "I'm getting out of this Yid place—just you watch me skedaddle." The headmaster, he said, had ruled against masters who commuted: there was too much disorder, more men were required to be on the spot, especially at night, to keep an eye out for mischief. There were rumors of boys gambling right on the property.
    "Inviting the fox in to guard the chicken coop," my father chuckled.
    "You'd better be careful," I said.
    "It's high society over there," he said. "What do you know about it?"
    In the fall my father was designated housemaster of Croft Hall's third form, and went to live in the fake castle; and I departed for Albany, where I moved in with my cousin Bertram.

4
    F OR A LONG WHILE it was not clear to me why Bertram had taken me in. Sometimes I thought my father had reverted to his old habits and had arranged for a barter: housekeeping in exchange for lodging. Unlike my father, though, Bertram was orderly and self-sufficient; he kept a handkerchief in his breast pocket and wore dandyish suspenders. He was almost too fastidious, and never left a dish on the table for more than five minutes before he got up to wash it. His shirts were picked up by a laundry van, and the neighborhood storekeepers delivered bread and milk and vegetables and cheese. Bertram was skilled at making omelets. There was almost nothing for me to do, and if there was, Bertram would not allow me to do it.
    "Go work on your Chaucer," he would say. This was a bit of comradely mockery. Chaucer had no place in my misshapen little college; literature, except for the pedagogical kind, was hardly wanted there. I had dreamt of Gothic arches and the worn flagstones of old libraries—where such a grand yearning came from, I hardly knew. Unaccountably, my heart was set on Smith or Vassar or Bryn Mawr; I imagined afternoon teas, and white gloves, and burning lips (mine, perhaps) murmuring out of a book. But all that was wistfulness—there was no money for such romantic hopes, and my patchy record in high school, my father warned, would never have won me a scholarship. I was only an average girl from Thrace Central, what was I thinking of? The right spot for me, he said, if I expected