The Executor Page 8

  “I would look on that as a mark of skill,” she said. “Rare is the writer who can bring his reader to the threshold of death.”

  In response, I reached into the duffel and pulled out half-Nietzsche.

  “Oh, Mr. Geist. Oh, how marvelous. I know just the place for it.”

  In the library, she cleared space in the center of the mantel.

  “Naturally, I shan’t presume. Perhaps you would prefer to keep it nearby.”

  “It looks better here.”

  “We are decided, then.” She stepped back and together we admired the bookend. “You have impeccable taste. It is hideous.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Tomorrow I shall give you keys so that you may make copies for yourself. Now, if you will please excuse me, my programs are about to begin.” She paused. “Unless you would care to join me.”

  We went upstairs. I counted five doors off the landing, all closed except the last. It was there that we went. I took a rocking chair, and Alma switched on the television set.

  Theme music swelled. A title filled the screen.

  ONE LIFE TO LIVE

  She settled into her own chair, and, in a very dry voice, said, “Suspend judgment, Mr. Geist.”

  I smiled, sat back, made myself at home.

  9

  Soon after I arrived at number forty-nine, the snow began to melt and the house warmed a few degrees, allowing me to walk around without my parka on. I ended up using my space heater sparingly. It worked almost too well, and if I slept with it on, I had to crack the window a few inches to compensate.

  Our schedule was simple. An early riser, Alma was always up before me, and by the time I bathed and dressed I would find her sitting at the kitchen table with toast and tea, the radio on softly, tuned to WCRB, Handel or Bizet. We would discuss the headlines or do the crossword together. Games and puzzles, she said, kept her sharp. Her favorites were cryptics, which I’d never done before but took to quickly.

  Following breakfast I would head to the library and read for several hours. Some books for the first time and some for the dozenth. Many of them were too fragile to use—she had dozens of first editions, including Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nausea, and Being and

  Time—but merely being surrounded by them gave me a sense of peace. This is why I will never own an e-reader: because a row of books is more than a compendium of information. It’s a map of all the places your mind has been, a group of friends standing silently by to comfort you. Cocooned in books, protected by them, I felt safe, and all that had been plaguing me began to fade, my mind sloughing off the clutter of years. I read for the pleasure of reading, rather than to strip-mine for facts. People sometimes describe meditation as “relaxed wakefulness,” which phrase captures the feeling exactly. More often than not I stretched out across the carpet; that I could lie there without nodding off is proof of the quality of the holdings as well as the strength of Alma’s tea.

  The one book I could not find was her thesis. I was disappointed, but I had to remember that I’d hidden my own dissertation from her; and with so many other wonderful options, it felt ungrateful to ask for anything more.

  At noon I fixed us a simple lunch. Alma would quarter a chocolate bar and speak to me in German, to her the only medium suitable for capturing her youth. Prior to my moving in, we’d done plenty of talking, but always about philosophy, and I savored these pieces of biography, which over time I assembled into a coherent whole.

  Born into a family of instrument makers, she had grown up in Vienna’s ninth district, Alsergrund, a ten-minute walk from Freud’s house. Every day her father would bicycle to Ottakring, near the Gürtel, where he oversaw thirty craftsmen in the making of pianos, harps, and harpsichords. Vividly she recalled for me her visits to his workshop: the close, heady smell of varnish; tools percussing; muscular men in shirtsleeves. Her father liked to tinker, and was constantly trying out designs that had nothing to do with his primary business. “The violin in the music room he made for me when I was born,” she said. “He and my mother were both very capable makers and appreciators of things, and theirs was a materialistic romance, highly sensuous in its own way. Accordingly, I distanced myself. It was my nature to be contrary. I suppose that I still am.... Well, the violin came to me freighted with expectations. I think they hoped I would grow up to become a soloist. I never had the talent. Diligence, yes. But my teachers always said that I was excessively technical. I had to get old before I understood what they meant. My sister was far superior.”

  “What does she play?”

  “Did. The cello. My father built it for her, as well. It was never to be, as whatever small degree of ambition she possessed was quashed when she married.”

  From an early age both girls had studied English and French. Alma, showing a gift for languages, had also received instruction in classics, leading to an early fascination with philosophy. In lush detail she described the Gymnasium where she took her qualifying exams, the Kaffeehaus where she went for pastry and conversation. It was a good time to be young and curious in Vienna. You knew everyone, provided that you came from a certain class and had certain social credentials; the cast of characters she described read like roll call in nerd heaven.

  “Have I told you about the time I met Wittgenstein?”

  I shook my head.

  “His brother Paul—he was a pianist, you know—well, after losing his arm in the War, he commissioned my father to make him a keyboard that would better cater to his impairment. That was the way they were, the Wittgensteins; they bought their way out of problems. He also had Ravel and Strauss write him left-handed concertos.

  “Now, this keyboard was supposed to be bi-level, with the higher half of the register here, and the bass below, like so. I don’t believe it was ever built. I do, however, remember Paul visiting our house to discuss the design. The first time he came, my father had me fetch them schnapps, and when I did, Paul pinched me on the cheek.

  “On one of these occasions he brought a second man along with him. I was quite struck by this stranger, with his hair sticking up and his eyes spinning in his head. All throughout the meeting he kept getting up and leaving the study to walk around the foyer in circles, rubbing his temples, muttering to himself as though in a trance. I sat at the top of the steps, watching him. He did not seem to see me at all; then, suddenly, he looked in my direction and asked what I was learning in school. You may recall that Wittgenstein once worked as a country schoolmaster. He held rather strong opinions on education, and when I described my curriculum to him, he began to berate me for its incompleteness, as though I had chosen it.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Oh, no more than five or six. I thought him barbarous. He had no notion of how to talk to people. That was clear to me even then. His brother heard the commotion and came out of the study. ‘Damn it, Ludi,’ he shouted. ‘Leave the poor child alone.’ Well, that did it. Wittgenstein gave me a look—I’d never seen a look of such hate—and he slunk off to the kitchen, where he stayed for the duration of his visit.”

  My jaw was hanging open. “My God.”

  “Yes,” said Alma. “He was a queer man.”

  “That’s unbelievable.”

  “Oh, it was quite real, I assure you.”

  “No, I mean—I know people who would kill to experience that.”

  “Then they are stupid. Among the few things worth killing for, let us not count the right to be harassed by an arrogant madman.”

  She told me frankly, and without regret, that she had never married, ignoring the pleas of relatives and suitors and setting out to see the world, traveling by boat and propeller plane, jouncing along in decommissioned jeeps driven by toothless, tattooed, rifle-toting men. China, Russia, Egypt ... all places a single woman traveling alone would have a difficult time these days. Back in the fifties? I could scarcely imagine it. She had been shot at in Afghanistan. She had survived a derailment in Punjab. She had been threatened with imprisonment in Burma. She
had been in Ghana on the day Nkrumah declared independence, missing the festivities due to a monthlong bout of malaria. “Should you go,” she said, “I urge you, in the strongest possible terms, to bring a mosquito net.”

  Her journeys brought her, finally, to the United States, which she spent four years exploring. Among other adventures, she had ridden from New York to San Francisco on a motorcycle. Rarely did she stop in one place long enough to make friends. “This is a country more interesting for what one fails to find than what one does find,” she said. In 1963 she came to Cambridge, taking a job teaching German at a private school. Though she had intended to stay no more than a year, somehow—she faltered when she said this—somehow, this place had become her home.

  How she missed Vienna, though. The culture, the learning, the life. Everywhere you looked, there was music and art. It was all impossibly Romantic. She had once gone to a party at the home of a man who owned a dozen Klimts, one of which he kept in his kitchen, on the door to his icebox. During ball season the parties never stopped, orgies of booze and waltz that ran till five in the morning, when the dancehalls burst open, spilling everyone out, men staggering into lampposts and women running barefoot in their gowns. Those with sufficient strength and foresight would pick themselves up and go for Katerftühstück, the morning-after breakfast, consisting of pickled herring and strong black coffee, guaranteed to stop a hangover dead.

  All that was gone now. She hadn’t been back since the eighties, finding it too depressing. Her Vienna—the real Vienna—existed only in her memories, and I understood that my job was to provide her a canvas on which to re-create them. I did my best. I listened with enthusiasm; I tried to ask intelligent questions. When she mentioned the impossibility of finding a decent Sachertorte in Boston, I went to the Science Center and downloaded several recipes, baking up one a day, every day for two weeks, until at last I managed to produce something she winkingly deemed “an impressive fraud.” From then on I made it fresh every Monday.

  Following lunch, we watched the soaps. Even in this she revealed herself as discriminating. Aside from One Life to Live, she enjoyed As the World Turns and Guiding Light. General Hospital she abhorred as “inelegant”; The Young and the Restless and The Bold and the Beautiful were both “implausible.” When she said that, I couldn’t hold back a laugh. She started laughing, too. “One must never abandon one’s critical faculties,” she said.

  If there was nothing on, I ran errands or read some more. At three o’clock she joined me in the library for our official conversation, and before dinner—which she ordered from the market, prepared in tins, and which we ate in the kitchen, never at the formal dining table—I went out for a long walk, my mind digesting everything it had taken in that day.

  It was a wonderful way to live, at once relaxing and invigorating. If I had anything at all to complain about, it was the maid, a stout

  Romanian with loaf-like breasts and a three-dimensional birthmark on her upper lip. Once a week she pulled up at dawn in a blue Subaru station wagon, its headlights held on with duct tape. Letting herself in through the service porch, she undertook to wake me with her racket, galumphing around the house, humming to herself in a minor key as she dusted and swept, pausing only to shoot me spiteful glances as I stumbled out to brush my teeth. Her dislike for me was understandable (although no more pleasant for that). I added to her workload, and as I later learned, Alma paid her a flat fee, rather than by the hour. Before I showed up, she must have been making a killing. Now she had to contend with extra laundry—extra male laundry—and three extra rooms. She therefore went out of her way to disturb me, following me around the house, treading heavily, breathing heavily, and always humming. Everything she sang sounded like a funeral march. The Eastern Bloc must have been a sad place to grow up.

  I don’t think she knew my name, referring to me in the third person or, less often, as “sir,” pronounced seer and dripping with sarcasm. I wonder who she thought I was. A young lover? A grandson? I decided to kill her with kindness. I thanked her for small favors. I complimented her voice. She started to make eye contact with me, and I thought I’d begun to bridge the gap, until the following week, when she barged into my bedroom at six A.M., vacuum roaring. I groggily ordered her to leave.

  “Sorry, seer,” she said, slamming the door as she went.

  Giving up, I began spending those mornings out of the house, using them to catch up on e-mail. That I could go a week at a stretch without withdrawal proved that I needed the outside world a lot less than I’d thought. It’s amazing how much of what passes for communication is garbage. No phone, no Internet—and no worse off. Other than Alma, there were few people I wanted to talk to, and doubtless Yasmina had been spreading propaganda, telling our friends her side of the story. I ignored Evites; I grew addicted to the DELETE button. My world was shrinking, and that suited me fine.

  WE EACH LIVE to a rhythm, one that dictates the way we speak, move, and interact with our environment. Some people like to leave their mark. Enter a room after they’ve been in it and find the furniture displaced, the lampshades askew. Others, like me, live in the background. Throughout my adult life I’d had roommates, and in every case my rhythm clashed with that of those around me, Yasmina being the one exception. I had come to miss that kind of easy syncopation, and it was a joy to feel it once again. With Alma I felt both unalone and uncrowded. She gave off such quiet, steady vitality that I could sense her across the house. We kept in constant communication, trading witticisms from adjacent rooms, reassuring each other with our footsteps.

  Comforting as it was to be near her, it was proportionally upsetting when she took ill. In my first five weeks of residence, she had four attacks. I’d know something was up the instant I exited the library to find a certain stillness hanging in the air, our rhythms decoupled. These episodes were unbearably random. One lasted an hour; another, all afternoon; and though she continued to insist that she was in no real danger—recovering by the next day—I had serious difficulty sitting on my hands. It was to my great relief that she told me her doctor was due for a visit. I came home from my walk on the designated afternoon and saw a green BMW parked in the driveway, a gaunt woman half into the driver’s seat.

  “You must be Joseph. Paulette Cargill.”

  We shook hands. “I didn’t realize doctors still made housecalls.”

  “I don’t. Alma is exceptional.”

  “That she is. I hope everything’s okay?”

  The doctor made a slightly helpless gesture. “It’s the same,” she said. She then gave me a mini-lecture on trigeminal neuralgia and the difficulties of case management. “Surgery helped for a little while, that was back in oh-two, but the pain started to come back about eighteen months ago. We’ve discussed trying again, although in my opinion—and she agrees—it’s the wrong choice. At her age, every additional year brings greater risk of complications. We could do more harm than good. The goal at this point is to get the pain to a more bearable level, not to cure it. I’m afraid that’s simply not realistic.”

  “She keeps saying she isn’t in danger.”

  “She’s not. Actually, she made a point of telling me to reassure you. She says you’re worrying yourself to death.”

  “Yes, well, it’s worrying.”

  “In your position I’d feel the same way. Aside from the discomfort, though, she’s in perfect health. With her bloodwork, she could live to be a hundred.”

  A silence, as we both considered the implications of that statement.

  “Will it get worse?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “But it won’t get better.”

  Another silence.

  “We’re all doing the best we can,” she said.

  I said nothing.

  “That goes for you, too,” she said.

  “I haven’t done anything,” I said.

  “But you have. Her mood is excellent.”

  “I guess so.”

  “Trust me. I’v
e been caring for her for fifteen years. This is as good as it gets.”

  I tried not to think about how bad it could get.

  “Just keep doing exactly what you’re doing. I’ve been bugging her for years to find someone to talk to. What she needs is to make the most of moments when she’s pain-free.”

  I nodded.

  “Like I said, I don’t make housecalls. Alma is ...” The doctor touched her heart. “Call me anytime.”

  Inside, Alma was at the kitchen table, two plates and two forks and the remainder of that week’s Sachertorte set out before her. She looked up when I entered, smiling her enigmatic smile. I saw it now as an expression of impenetrability, a hard veneer of sadness. Pain has long been a source of interest to philosophers as an experience that is both universal and incommunicable. There’s a sense in which it’s harder to watch someone else in pain than it is to endure that same pain yourself: we have no more potent reminder of our alone-ness. It is pain that sets limits on empathy, drawing a bright line around what we can ever hope to know about another. At that moment I wanted badly to stand in Alma’s place, and knowing that I could not made me ache twice over.

  She picked up the cake knife, made to cut herself a largish piece. “A little extra for me today. I believe I deserve it.”

  We ate in silence. Or rather, I did; she in fact ate nothing at all, eroding the cake with her fork, prodding the little sachet of whipped cream until it deflated. I got up to rinse the plates and behind me heard her chair scrape the floor.

  “I am very tired and should like to lie down. If I am not up for dinner, I assume you can fend for yourself.”

  “Is there anything I can do?” I said.

  Her face then passed through many phases, all of them obscure to me. “I only hope that you shan’t pity me.”

  “Never,” I said. “Never in a million years.”

  She nodded, turned, disappeared.