The House of the Prophet Read online

  The reader will ask why she needed help. Perhaps she didn’t. But I can still flinch, yes, even now, when I consider how painful it might have been for her to discover that people, including Father, including the Leitners, including the maids, were simply laughing at her. That they found her a pretentious, dressed-up doll. And there had to be a kind of salvation in saving her from that, even a kind of savage joy. It was as if, to return to my Roman image, I had climbed over the railing of my arena box and leaped, my toga flying about me, into the sand below to face the stalking lions and the sudden outraged roar of the watching crowd, alone with Mother.

  But she would only say: “Felix, darling, you really are a goose. Those lions are perfectly well fed and won’t harm a hair of your head. Don’t you see the whole thing’s a pantomine?”

  I hope she died still believing that. Have I explained any part of what I felt about her? It was not so much filial love—although that, of course, was in it—as a funny sense that Mother and I belonged to a race apart, that we were different. And if she wouldn’t keep her eye on the mob and on those lions, it behooved me to do so.

  I never told Mother what I had been through to defend my costume. As I look back on her, it seems to me that she must have had considerable strength of personality. She caused those around her to act as props or stagehands or, at most, supporting members of the cast in a drama of which she was the principal, perhaps the only, star. It was thus that my grandmother’s ambition for her had been finally realized.

  My relationship with Father was altogether different. If I felt responsible for him, it was not to protect him, but to try to induce him to adhere to higher moral standards. Basically, I think I was ashamed of him. He had paid no attention to me in my childhood, and this may have been my form of revenge. When he finally began to pay me serious attention, it was too late.

  I was sixteen before he did so. Because I had always been quiet and reserved, he had not realized that I was intelligent. Perhaps, too, he had found it difficult to imagine that any child of his wife could be blessed with brains. But when he began to take in that I was above average, perhaps even unusual, he started to make plans.

  “You’re more of a Leitner than I thought,” he told me frankly once. “We’d better see what we can make of you.”

  Father, in his middle and late fifties, was that not uncommon type in American culture, the man who has played hard but aimlessly and suddenly realizes that his active years are ending and that he has wasted considerable talents without even achieving happiness. He felt, I believe, not so much despondent as foolish. He had dissipated his energies revolting against a stiff Jewish orthodox tradition without putting anything in its place.

  “I had it all,” he told Uncle Jacob when he was dying. “I had it all in the palm of my hand. And what did I do with it? I simply threw it away.”

  As he grew older he reverted, in outward form anyway, to the image of the Leitners as projected by my uncles. Portly, solid, of a dark complexion, he had a tendency to fur-collared overcoats, to jeweled rings, to walking sticks. The roue, the gambler, the atheist, the cultivator of bohemian and artistic circles, seemed to have been buried alive under the Manhattan burgher. But the curious part of this evolution was that the younger Morris Leitner seemed to have survived and to be witnessing, with an occasional outburst of sarcastic laughter, his own transformation. Father would never, for example, be angry with me when I wanted to be frank about his business. He seemed to have anticipated that, as I approached college age, I should be a bit of a radical.

  “You pore over maps of the city,” I pointed out to him once, rather loftily. “You keep abreast of proposed buildings. You try to occupy this corner or that corner because you think the city may grow toward it. What’s the difference between you and one of those hill-town robber barons of the Middle Ages who lived by exacting tolls from travelers who passed below them?”

  “Very little. Had I been born then I might have put together a chain of hill towns!”

  “But where is the social purpose, Father? So you make a fortune. But isn’t it by exacting rents from all the poor devils whom the city shoves into your lap? What have you contributed?”

  “It’s business, my boy! And when you’ve succeeded in business, that’s your contribution. Then none dare call it treason.”

  “I don’t think I’d be very proud if I’d spent my life doing that. I’d feel like a kind of highwayman.” Oh, yes, I said it. Just that way. Children have no mercy on adults. It does not occur to them that adults may need it.

  Father looked at me thoughtfully for a moment and then shrugged. “Perhaps I might answer that I’ve contributed as much to society as most of my generation. Many of the so-called best people, too. But I don’t pretend to be anything I’m not. I don’t go about shouting that I’m a philanthropist.”

  “But don’t you ever feel you could do more for people? What about some of those tenements you own? Aunt Renata calls them slums!”

  “She doesn’t object to her husband taking them as security for his mortgages!” Father exclaimed more hotly now. “But anyway, I’m getting rid of them. At the end of two years I expect to be invested entirely in commercial real estate. There’s going to be an awful outcry, sooner or later, about conditions in this city, and I don’t want our name associated with it. Your name, anyway.”

  “But just getting rid of them doesn’t help the people who live there. Shouldn’t you improve them?”

  “Where am I going to get the money for that? Besides, there are always going to be slums. The point is not to have them hung around your neck like a stinking albatross!”

  I did not argue this further. I had learned early that it was almost impossible to make a grownup change his mind about anything. And besides, getting rid of the slums was at least a step.

  Father’s occasionally smothering interest in me continued to intensify, and by the time I went off to Yale I was relieved to get away from him. I was beginning to suspect that the role that he planned for me was simply to make up to him what he had missed in life, that I was to enjoy what Morris Leitner had thrown away. That was why the real estate was being cleaned up and why a respectable fortune was being put together. Father had no desire to see me in his business. No, the money was to make me independent so that I might be free to become a politician, a statesman, an ambassador... who knows, maybe the president!

  “Your Aunt Renata collects art,” he told me. “She prefers paintings to human beings. That is quite all right. I don’t question her preference. But it’s her preference, not mine. Mine is for extraordinary men, not extraordinary art. Renata and I may agree that the mob is not worth much, but we differ about the value of the individual. She can have her gallery. I’d rather have you!”

  He glared at me almost defiantly at this, and I had the uneasy sense of being, not a beloved son, but a kind of young monster designed by a Frankenstein. And let me insert here at once that he was utterly wrong about Aunt Renata. Father insisted on seeing people in his own, not always lovable image. Aunt Renata was, if anything, his opposite.

  She was small and plain and prematurely wrinkled, but she had large beautiful eyes. Gray and green, with a touch of blue, they sparkled in a friendly, sad, reflective way. I used to think of them as her jewels, her real jewels, alive, in contrast to the big rubies and emeralds on the rings that tumbled about on her skinny brown fingers. I was the favorite nephew, and she used to take me with her to art galleries. Uncle Isidore’s taste was for objects of art: Renaissance bronzes, Byzantine ivory figures, Chinese jade, medieval reliquaries. Aunt Renata relieved the glinting heaviness of their great dark house on West Seventy-second Street with her lighted canvases, drawn from all periods, so that her collection formed a tiny history of European painting. Her eye was unerring, and it was under her influence that, in my junior year, I decided I would become an art historian. Aunt Renata’s paintings had given me the idea of writing a history of France as seen through its art. This may have seemed hardly
an original idea, but it was going to be original the way I would do it!

  Father was thoroughly disgusted with this turn of events and furious with his sister at what he deemed her interference with his plans, but he was too wise to overdo his opposition. Young people, after all, were prone to change their minds, and he contented himself with mild efforts to undermine my admiration of my collecting relatives by poking fun at Uncle Isidore and his habit of stroking the backsides of his bronze nudes. He did not realize that I drew the sharpest distinction between Uncle Isidore and Aunt Renata.

  She never encouraged my ambition in art. In fact, she ultimately exploded it. She could say anything she liked to me, because I had absolute confidence, both in her love and in her disinterestedness. In the summer after my junior year I met her and Uncle Isidore in Paris and spent some weeks with them. They were on a buying tour, so we occupied many hours at the dealers’, but Aunt Renata and I managed also to fit in several mornings at the Louvre, dedicating each visit to a different century.

  On the one that we devoted to the seventeenth we spent a full half hour before the great portrait of Cardinal Richelieu by Philippe de Champaigne. Aunt Renata particularly admired Champaigne.

  “He did so many of Richelieu,” she said. “I keep hoping I’ll find one. There was a portrait for sale in Lisbon, but a poor example. None of them is anything like as good as this. Don’t you love that cold stare? Brr!”

  In this great portrait the cardinal seems to have been moving from right to left and to have paused, as if he had just noticed you. The right hand, holding the hat, is lowered; the left arm is bent; and the fingers of the left hand, whose palm is upturned, are twisted in what seems a kind of incipient grasp. The cold gray eyes fix you—just for a moment—and then the mighty minister will proceed on to the king, to a cabinet meeting, to some weighty council. But that glance has been instantly articulate. “Oh, it’s you,” it seems to say. “You’re back? Your mission’s accomplished, I trust?” It had better be!

  Aunt Renata was contrasting the portrait now to a postcard that she had taken from her purse, representing the Champaigne portrait of Richelieu in the British National Gallery.

  “You see how static the London picture is. I am convinced that Champaigne must have painted it first. Richelieu is frozen on the spot, rather awkwardly holding a hat for which he has no apparent use. But now see what our artist does! He drops the hand with the hat, raises the other and lets the robes flow.” She traced in the air the movement of the robes in the picture before us. “Richelieu may not be moving, but he just has been, and he will be again in a second. Champaigne was the poet of pause.”

  “I should say he was the poet of robes,” I observed, taking in the multiple scarlet folds so richly painted.

  “You know why, don’t you? He was a Jansenist and wasn’t permitted to paint the nude. He was limited to painting priests and nuns who were so covered up you couldn’t even see their outlines. So what did he do? He made the robes organic! They fit the heads. In almost any other portrait, that marvelous robe of Richelieu’s would dominate the wearer—dominate the whole canvas, in fact. But it doesn’t because it’s the body, and the body is dominated by the head. That head, anyway. Why, the whole picture centers in the command of those eyes. Look at them!”

  “I am looking at them,” I said. “It’s impossible not to. They are the eyes of power. There is no threat in them. No anger. No praise. No approval, even. To him it’s only a question of getting the job done. And to get it done he must use the individuals to hand. It may be necessary to reward this one by making him a duke. It may be necessary to punish another by cutting his head off. It doesn’t really matter. The thing is that France must predominate. Oh, yes, I see it! Champaigne was not the poet of pause, or even of robes. He was the poet of power!”

  I thought that my aunt looked at me rather curiously for a moment, but then we rose, and soon we were looking at the great Rigauds and pursuing the glorious effects of Richelieu’s policy into the reign of his sovereign’s son, Louis XIV. After that it was time to go back to the hotel and get ready for a performance of Hernani at the Comédie Française. Poor Aunt Ren! When she traveled with me, every breathing moment was given over to culture and history. Uncle Isidore would stay at the hotel or at a dealer’s and wave us away. Chateaux, museums, art galleries, theaters—there was no end to it. She was always the best of sports. My enthusiasm seemed to sustain her in the inevitable moments when her own flagged.

  One morning, at a dealer’s, we sat before a picture that she was thinking of buying. It was a Greuze portrait of the young Napoleon. I objected that it did not seem a good likeness.

  “Does it matter?” Aunt Renata returned. “All Nattier’s princesses look alike, and they’re all beautiful.”

  “But Greuze couldn’t bear to reproduce hardness of character. He was too kind-hearted. Take his Robespierre. Who would dream the man was a monster? One would have said a clever, prosy, rather decent little lawyer from the provinces. And Napoleon! Would you ever see a despot, a world conqueror—would you ever see power —in that tense, sullen, romantic youth?”

  “Let me tell you something, my dear.” Aunt Renata turned away suddenly now from the portrait. “I’ve been thinking about your future career. Being an art historian may not be the right thing for you. Oh, now, don’t look insulted. I don’t mean that you couldn’t be one. Of course, you could! But I’m beginning to wonder if your father isn’t right. That perhaps you’re meant for something... well... I don’t know if bigger is the word. Perhaps more ‘engaged.’”

  “What on earth has happened in the past week to make you suddenly think that?”

  “The fact that you’re more interested in portraits than other pictures. Oh, much more interested. And portraits of statesmen. Politicians. Even sovereigns. People who govern. It seems to be power that fascinates you, rather than art.”

  “You think I want to be powerful?”

  “Not necessarily. Though you might. What’s wrong with that, if you want power for the right reason? But at the moment it seems to be the effect of power that concerns you. As seen in the holder’s face. Perhaps you were meant for a career closer to public life.”

  “You mean politics?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. Or law? Or journalism? It’s hard to say, because you do things so well. You’ve got a brilliant mind and a lively imagination, but you’re a doer, too.”

  “Auntie! You flatterer!”

  “No, no, dear. I’m totally serious. I have to be, because I don’t think you get all the help from your parents you need. Your ma... well, you know how your ma is. She’s a darling, but she lives in a world of her own. And your father is too ambitious for you. Maybe that’s why you took up art history in the first place. In reaction to him.”

  “You mean to irritate him?”

  “Well, yes, I suppose so. In part. All children like to irritate and disappoint their parents. It’s a way of growing up, of sharpening their teeth. But even though it may be great fun to irritate Morris—I enjoy it myself at times—you mustn’t give up the right career to do it.”

  I thought deeply about what Aunt Renata had said. I had been having doubts about a career in art, myself. At Yale I had become something of a radical. I should like to think that the wider knowledge of human suffering that came to me with my college reading was the true origin of my new concern for the welfare of my fellow beings. I had read all of Das Kapital, and The Theory of the Leisure Class had become my bible. But there are two types of reformers: those who wish to pull the world apart to remake it into something better, and those who simply wish to pull the world apart. The latter are apt to be motivated by hate, or at least animosity, toward the principal beneficiaries of the old world. I am afraid that I wanted to undermine the system that enabled my father and Uncle Jacob and even my beloved Aunt Renata’s husband to live out their pompous philistine existences at the expense of the lower orders.

  Once again, Mother may have had somethi
ng to do with it. I saw her big hats and elaborate gowns, I saw the whole cluttered house on Riverside Drive with its profusion of bibelots and draperies, as the beads and feathers with which savage chiefs, according to Veblen, adorned their squaws to prove their prowess and virility. Did I even hark back to the Fauntleroy suit at school as further proof that Mother and I were simply part of the costly practice of “conspicuous consumption” for the greater glorification of the Leitners? It might seem that Mother was more responsible for all these items than Father, who was rarely at home and never cared what I wore, but what was this to my angry id? Father had made Mother his puppet and now sought to make me the same.

  At the time, of course, there were no such underthoughts. I was convinced that I had been given my brains and health and youth to work for the benighted. The plight of the poor in crowded huddled cities, the misery of the blacks and poor whites in southern states, the helplessness of nonunionized workers, deeply affected me. And now it seemed to me that Aunt Renata had put her finger on the first sacrifice that I should have to make for the cause.

  “You’re right, Auntie,” I told her the very next day. “I was not cut out to be an art historian. That ivory tower is simply evasion. But don’t tell Father. Not yet, anyway.”

  “Because it would give him too much pleasure?”

  I did not answer this. I did not even want to consider if it might be true. But whatever my reason, I did not tell Father, when I returned from Europe, that I was reconsidering my choice of career. I intended to do so, but I postponed it, and then all desire to do so vanished with my discovery that Father was still in the slum business. This I learned from Uncle Jacob when he came up to visit me in New Haven to be taken on a tour of Yale. Uncle Jacob was the driest, most factual kind of lawyer I have ever known. He was possessed of none of the romance in Aunt Renata or even, submerged though it might have been, in Father. He assessed the grounds and buildings of Yale as if it had been a future client.