The Puttermesser Papers Read Online Free Page A

mouth. Her parents have no ancestry. Therefore Puttermesser rejoices in the cadences of Uncle Zindel’s voice above the Cuban grocery. Uncle Zindel, when alive, distrusted the building of Tel Aviv because he was practical, Messiah was not imminent. But now, in the scene that did not occur, how naturally he supposes Puttermesser will journey to a sliver of earth in the Middle East, surrounded by knives, missiles, bazookas!
    The scene with Uncle Zindel did not occur. It could not occur because, though Puttermesser dares to posit her ancestry, we may not. Puttermesser is not to be examined as an artifact but as an essence. Who made her? No one cares. Puttermesser is henceforth to be presented as given. Put her back into Receipts and Disbursements, among office Jews and patronage collectors. While winter dusk blackens the Brooklyn Bridge, let us hear her opinion about the taxation of exempt properties. The bridge is not the harp Hart Crane said it was in his poem. Its staves are prison bars. The women clerks, Yefimova, Korolova, Akulova, Arkhipova, Izrailova, are on Kolpachni Street, but the vainglorious General Viryein is not. He is on Ogaryova Street. Joel Zaretsky’s ex-wife is barren. TheCommissioner puts on his tennis sneakers. He telephones. Mr. Fiore, the courtly secret mayor behind the Mayor, also telephones. Hey! Puttermesser’s biographer! What will you do with her now?

PUTTERMESSER AND XANTHIPPE

I. PUTTERMESSER ’ S BRIEF LOVE LIFE , HER TROUBLES, HER TITLES
    P UTTERMESSER FELT ATTACKED ON all sides. The night before, her lover, Morris Rappoport, a married fund-raiser from Toronto, had walked out on her. His mysterious job included settling Soviet Jewish refugees away from the big metropolitan centers; he claimed to have fresh news of the oppressed everywhere, as well as intimate acquaintance with malcontents in numerous cities in both the Eastern and Western hemispheres. Puttermesser, already forty-six, suspected him of instability and overdependency: a future madman. His gripe was that she read in bed too much; last night she had read aloud from Plato’s Theaetetus :
    THEODORUS : What do you mean, Socrates?
    SOCRATES : The same thing as the story about the Thracian maidservant who exercised her wit at the expense of Thales, when he was looking up to study the stars and tumbled down a well. She scoffed at him for being so eager to know what was happening in the sky that he could not see what lay at his feet. Anyone who gives his life to philosophy is open to such mockery. It is true that he is unaware what his next-door neighbor is doing, hardly knows, indeed, whether the creature is a man at all; he spends all his pains on the question,what man is, and what powers and properties distinguish such a nature from any other. You see what I mean, Theodorus?
    Rappoport did not see. He withdrew his hand from Puttermesser’s belly. “What’s the big idea, Ruth?” he said.
    â€œThat’s right,” Puttermesser said.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œThat’s just what Socrates is after: the big idea.”
    â€œYou’re too old for this kind of thing,” Rappoport said. He had a medium-sized, rather square, reddish mustache over perfect teeth. His teeth were more demanding to Puttermesser’s gaze than his eyes, which were so diffidently pigmented that they seemed whited out, like the naked eyes on a Roman bust. His nose, however, was dominant, eloquent, with large deep nostrils that appeared to meditate. “Cut it out, Ruth. You’re behaving like an adolescent,” Rappoport said.
    â€œ You’ll never fall down a well,” Puttermesser said. “You never look up.” She felt diminished; those philosophical nostrils had misled her.
    â€œRuth, Ruth,” Rappoport pleaded, “what did I do?”
    â€œIt’s what you didn’t do. You didn’t figure out what powers and properties distinguish human nature from any other,” Puttermesser