Mrs. Alicia Schiff, with whom Daniel was now to live, was, in the considered and by no means unreproving opinion of her friend Harriet Marspan, “the nearest thing to a genius I’ve ever known.” She was also, very nearly, a hunchback, though it seemed so natural and necessary a part of her character that you could almost believe she’d come by it the way she’d come by her squint — by dint of years scrunched up over a desk copying music — the way that pines at high altitudes are shaped by titanic winds. All in all, the sorriest wreck of human flesh Daniel had ever had to become acquainted with, and custom could never quite reconcile him to the facts: the crepey, flaking skin of her hands; the face all mottled pink and lemon and olive like a spoiled Rubens; the knobby head with its strands of sparse white hair, which she sometimes was inspired to cover with a scruffy red parody of a wig. Except when she left the apartment, which was seldom now that she had Daniel to run interference with the outside world, she dressed like the vilest and most lunatic vagrant. The apartment was filled with heaps little and big of cast-off clothes — blue jeans, bathrobes, dresses, sweaters, stockings, blouses, scarves, and underwear — which she changed into and out of at any hour of the day or night, with no apparent method or motive; it was sheer nervous habit.
At first he feared he’d be expected to excavate and order the apartment’s debris. The clothes were the least of it. Interleaved with these were layers and layers of alluvial deposits, a Christmas morning desolation of wrappings, boxes, books and papers, of crockery and rattling tins, of puzzles, toys, and counters from a dozen never-to-be-reassembled games. There was also, though mostly on the upper shelves, a collection of dolls, each with its own name and personality. But Mrs. Schiff assured Daniel that he wouldn’t be expected to act as chambermaid, that on the contrary she’d be grateful if he left things where they were. “Where,” she had actually said, “they belong.”
He was expected to do her shopping, to deliver letters and scores, and to take her elderly, ginger-colored spaniel Incubus for his morning and his evening walk. Incubus, like his mistress, was an eccentric. He had a consuming interest in strangers (and none at all in other dogs), but it was an interest he did not wish to see reciprocated. He preferred people who would let him snuffle about on his own, investigating their shoes and other salient smells. However, if you ventured to talk to him, much less to pet him, he became edgy and took the first opportunity to escape from such attentions. He was neither mean nor friendly, neither frisky nor wholly torpid, and was very regular in his habits. Unless Daniel had some shopping to accomplish at the same time, the course of their walk never varied: due west to Lincoln Center, twice round the fountain, then (after Daniel had dutifully scooped up that morning’s or evening’s turd and disposed of it down a drain) home again to West 65th, just round the corner from the park, where Mrs. Schiff, no less predictable in her habits, would be hovering, anxious and undemonstrative, somewhere in the hallway of the apartment. She never condescended to Incubus, but spoke to him on the assumption that he was a precocious child, enchanted (by his own preference) into the shape of a dog. She treated Daniel no differently.
Daniel, in exchange for these services, and for providing a masculine, protective presence, received the largest of the apartment’s many rooms. The others were so many closets and cubbyholes, the legacy of the apartment’s previous existence as a residence hotel. When Mrs. Schiff had inherited the building, twenty years ago, she had never bothered to take down the plaster-board partitions, and indeed had added her own distinctive wrinkle to the maze in the form of folding screens and free-standing bookshelves (all of her own carpentering). Daniel felt awkward, at first, occupying the only humanly proportioned room in the apartment, and even when he was convinced, from her reluctance to enter his room, that Mrs. Schiff really preferred her own cozy warrens, he never stopped being grateful. It was a grand room, and with a coat of fresh paint on the walls and the floor sanded and waxed it became magnificent.
Mrs. Schiff did like to be visited, and it was soon their settled custom, when her day’s work was over and he had returned from the Metastasio and taken Incubus twice round the fountain and back home, to sit in her bedroom, with a pot of gunpowder tea between them and a packet of cookies (Daniel had never known Mrs. Schiff to eat anything but sweets), and to talk. Sometimes they might listen to a record (she had hundreds, all horribly scratched), but only by way of intermission. Daniel had known many good talkers in his time, but none of them could hold a candle to Mrs. Schiff. Wherever her fancy lighted, ideas formed, and grew, and became systems. Whatever she spoke seemed illumined, sometimes in only a whimsical way, but often seriously and even rather intensely. Or so it seemed, till, with a turn of a phrase, she’d veer off on some new tangent. Most of it, in the way of much supposed “great conversation” was mere mermaid enchantment and fool’s gold, but some of her notions did stick to the ribs of the mind, especially those ideas that derived from her ruling passion, which was opera.
She had a theory, for instance, that the Victorian Age had been a time of massive and systematic repression on a scale more awful than was ever to be achieved again on the stage of history, even at Auschwitz, that all of Europe, from Waterloo to World War Two, was one colossal police state, and that it was the function of Romantic Art, but especially of opera, to train and inspire the rising younger generation of robber barons and aristocrats to be heroes in the Byronic mold; that is, to be intelligent, bold, and murderous enough to be able to defend their wealth and privilege against all comers. How she’d come to this theory was by listening to Verdi’s I Masnadieri, based on a play of Schiller about an idealistic young man whom circumstance requires to become the head of a band of outlaws and who ends up killing his fiancee sheerly on principle. Daniel thought the whole thing ridiculous until Mrs. Schiff, peeved at his obstinacy, got down her copy of Schiller and read The Robbers aloud, and then, the next evening, made him listen to the opera. Daniel admitted there might be something to it.
“I’m right. Say it — say that I’m right.”
“Okay, you’re right.”
“Not only am I right, Daniel, but what’s true of Schiller’s apprentice mafiosi is true of all the heroic criminals from that day to this, all the cowboys and gangsters and rebels without causes. They’re all businessmen in disguise. Indeed, the gangsters even dispensed with the disguise. I should know — my father was one.”
“Your father was a gangster?”
“He was one of the city’s leading labor racketeers in his day. I was an heiress in my gilded youth, no less.”
“Then what happened?”
“A bigger fish gobbled him up. He had a number of so-called residence hotels like this one. The government decided to eliminate the middleman. Just when he thought he’d become respectable.”
She said it without rancor. Indeed, he’d never known her to be fazed at anything. She seemed content to understand the hell she lived in (for such she insisted it was) with her best clarity of apprehension, and then to pass on to the next apprensible horror, as though all existence were a museum of more or less malefic exhibits: instruments of torture and the bones of martyrs side by side with jeweled chalices and the portraits of merciless children in beautiful clothes.
Not that she was callous herself, but rather that she had no hope. The world dismayed her, and she turned from it to her own snug burrow, which the wolves and foxes had somehow not yet discovered. There she lived in the inviolate privacy of her work and her contemplations, seldom venturing out except to the opera or to one or another of her favorite restaurants, where she would hold forth to other musician friends and dine on a succession of desserts. She had surrendered long since to the traditional vices of a recluse: she didn’t bathe, or cook meals, or wash dishes; she kept strange hours, preferring night to day; she never let sunlight or fresh air into her own rooms, which came to smell, most intensely, of Incubus. She talked to herself constantly, or rather to Incubus and the dolls, inventing long wandering whimsical tales for them about the Honeybunny twins, Bunny Honeybunny and his sister Honey Honeybunny, tales from which all possibility of pain or conflict was debarred. Daniel suspected that she slept with Incubus as well, but what of that? Was anyone harmed by her dirtiness or dottiness? If there was such a thing as the life of the mind then Mrs. Schiff was one of its champions, and Daniel’s hat was off to her.
So, for that matter, was hers, for she was beset, like so many who live apart from the world, with a naive self-conceit that was at once ludicrous and deserved. Indeed, she was aware of this, and prone to discussing it with Daniel, who had rapidly been elevated to the status of confessor.
“My problem has always been,” she confided one evening, a month after he’d moved in, “that I have a hyperkinetic intelligence. But it’s also been my salvation. When I was a girl, they wouldn’t keep me in any of the schools my father bundled me off to, as part of his program of redeeming the family name. My problem was I took my education seriously, which would have been forgiveable in itself, except that I tended to be evangelical in my enthusiasms. I was labeled a disruptive influence, and treated as such, which I resented. Soon I made it my business to be a disruptive influence, and found ways to make my teachers look like fools. Lord, how I hated school! My daydream has always been to go back, as a celebrity, and give a speech at the graduation exercises, a speech denouncing them all. Which is perfectly unfair of me, I know. Did you like school?”
“Well enough, up to the point where I was sent off to prison. I did well enough, and kids seemed to like me. What are the alternatives at that age?”
“You weren’t just deathly bored?”
“Sometimes. Sometimes I still am. It’s the human condition.”
“If I thought that were the case, I’d kill myself. Truly.”
“You mean to say you’re never bored?”
“Not since I’ve been able to help it. I don’t believe in boredom. It’s a euphemism for laziness. People do nothing, and then complain they’re bored. Harriet does, and it drives me up the wall. She actually supposes it would betray a lack of breeding to take an active interest in her own life. But, poor dear, it’s not her fault, is it?”
This question seemed to be addressed less to Daniel than to Incubus, where he lay in his mistress’s rumpled sheets. The spaniel, sensing this, lifted his head from its dozing position to one of alert consideration.
“No,” Mrs. Schiff went on, answering her own question, “it’s the way she was brought up. We none of us can help the way our twigs are bent.”
The question having been answered, Incubus lowered his head back to the pillow.
She knew the Metastasio’s operas by heart and would cross-examine him minutely about every performance he worked at: who had sung, how well or poorly, whether a tricky piece of stage business had come off. She knew them so well not from having seen them that often but because, in many cases, she’d written them herself. Officially she was no more than the Metastasio’s chief copyist, though sometimes, when a text was well-known to be so corrupt as scarcely to exist, the program would include a small credit: “Edited and arranged by A. Schiff.” Even then, she got no royalties. She worked, she declared, for love and the greater glory of Art, but that, Daniel decided, was only half the truth. She also worked, like other people, for money. If the fees she received were small, they were frequent, and enough, when you added them to the rents from the buildings, to keep her supplied with such essential luxuries as dogfood, books, rare records, and her monthly chits at Lieto Fino and La Didone, where, rather than at home, she chose to entertain.
That side of her life Daniel was not privy to in these first months, and it was only gradually, from hints dropped by Mr. Ormund and yellowed clippings discovered among the debris of the apartment, that he learned that Mrs. Schiff had once been a celebrity of no small degree in the beau monde of bel canto, having fallen in love, eloped with, and married the greatest of modern-day castrati, Ernesto Rey. The marriage had subsequently been annulled, but Rey had continued to be faithful in his fashion. He was the only one of her friends she allowed to visit her at home, and so Daniel developed a nodding acquaintance with the man who was generally considered the greatest singer of his day (albeit that day was waning).
Offstage the great Ernesto was the least likely candidate for prima donna that ever was — a thin, twitchy wisp of a man whose smooth pale face seemed frozen in an expression of wide-eyed alarm, the consequence (it was said) of too many face-lifts. He was untypical of other castrati in being white (he was born in Naples), diffident (he assumed, among strangers, a flat, nasal monotone an octave below his natural voice), and guilt-ridden (he attended Mass every Sunday), and untypical of anyone else in being a castrato. He had recorded Norma five times, and each recording was better than the last. Of the first recording, a critic old enough to have heard her in performance, said that Rey’s Norma was superior to Rosa Ponselle’s.
Mrs. Schiff was as much in love with him now as on the day they’d eloped, and Rey (by her account, and everyone else’s) still took that love as painfully for granted. She flattered him; he drank it in. She worked like a troup of acrobats to keep him amused; he tolerated her efforts but made none himself, though he was not otherwise a witless lump. In all matters concerning interpretation and general esthetic strategy she acted as his coach, and served as spokesman with those conductors and recording engineers who would not at once bend to his will. She devised, and continually revised, all his supposedly ad libitum passages of fioratura, keeping them safely within his ever-diminishing range without apparent loss of brillance. She even vetted his contracts and wrote press releases — or rather, rewrote the tasteless tosh produced by his own salaried agent, Irwin Tauber. For all these services she received no fee and small thanks. She wasn’t insensible to such slights and seemed, indeed, to take a bittersweet satisfaction in complaining of them to Daniel, who could be counted on to respond with sympathetic indignation.
“But why do you keep putting up with it?” he asked at last. “If you know he’s like that and he’s not going to change?”
“The answer is obvious: I must.”
“That’s not an answer. Why must you?”
“Because Ernesto is a great artist.”
“Great artist or not, no one’s got the right to shit on you.”
“Ah, but there’s where you’re wrong, Daniel. In saying that, you show you don’t understand the nature of great artistry.”
This was a direct assault on Daniel’s sore point, as Mrs. Schiff well knew. The matter was dropped.
She soon knew everything about him, the whole story of his messed-up life. With Boa installed in Daniel’s room there was no point in reticence, and not much possibility of it. In any case, after twelve years of living under an alias the opportunity to tell all was too tempting to resist. There were times, as when she’d delivered the low blow just mentioned, that he thought she took unfair advantage of his revelations, but even then her home truths had no sting of malice. Her skin was just very thick, and she expected yours to be too. All in all, as a mother confessor she beat Renata Semple hollow. Renata, for all her Reichian jargon and weekly plumbing of the depths, had handled Daniel’s ego with too tender a regard. Small wonder if his therapy had never done him any good.
In short, Daniel was once again a member of a family. Viewed from without they were a strange enough family: a rattling, hunchbacked old woman, a spoiled senile cocker spaniel, and a eunuch with a punctured career (for though Rey didn’t live with them, his off-stage presence was as abiding and palpable as that of any paterfamilias away every day at the office). And Daniel himself. But better to be strange together than strange apart. He was glad to have found such a haven at last, and he hoped that most familial and doomed of hopes, that nothing would change.
But already there was news on the radio: a freak cold spell had done extensive damage to crops in Minnesota and the Dakotas, and a calamitous blight was attacking the roots of wheat plants throughout the Farm Belt. It was rumored that this blight had been laboratory-produced and was being propagated by terrorists, though none of the known organizations had come forward to claim credit. The commodities market was already in turmoil, and the new Secretary of Agriculture had made a public announcement that strict rationing might become necessary in the fall. For the present though, food prices were holding steady, for the good reason that they were already higher than most people could afford. All through that spring and summer there were food riots in such usual trouble spots as Detroit and Philadelphia. Mrs. Schiff, whose imagination was always excited by headlines, began stockpiling bags of dry dogfood. In the last such crisis, four years before, pet food had been the first thing to disappear from the shelves, and she had had to feed Incubus from her own limited ration. Soon an entire closet was packed solid with ten-pound bags of Pet Bricquettes, Incubus’s brand of choice. For themselves they did not worry: the Government would provide, somehow.