Heir to the Glimmering World Read Online Free PDF Page A

because of my need. Or, at any rate, my father's.
    Bertram was thirty-six. He had once been married, a dozen years ago, but she—he never said "my wife"—had left him after only two years. "She didn't like me," he told me; he never said her name. "I suppose I was too short." I could not imagine not liking Bertram, or finding him unbeautiful. He was not much taller than I, but his head was large, with crescents of unshorn brown curls sticking up from around his neck and ears. "Got to get a haircut," he would say. Or else: "Beginning to look like Karl Marx or Jesus Christ, take your pick." Or else, when he was actually on his way to the barber shop, "Goddamn hospital rules. Bad enough they dress me up in a white coat, like a dogcatcher."
    Now and then he said, "Put the chain on the door, will you? Won't be home at all tonight, got a date."
    I was seventeen and stabbed by jealousy. My jealousy felt literally like a stab: it resembled the quick pain I would sometimes feel in my groin on the left side, just before my period. Bertram did not hide from me that he had a sex life (his words). Toward me he was affectionate and perfectly chaste: his kiss touched my forehead or my cheek, or, comically, my nose. But he worried about appearances. "Honor is the appearance of honor," he recited. "I read that somewhere. So look, if anyone ever asks, you tell them you're my little sister away from home to go to school. Half of it's true anyhow. But don't say cousins. Nobody believes cousins."
    When my father again neglected to send the money for my tuition on time, Bertram said, "There's no point to it, your pa's out of the picture, so never mind. From now on I'll take care of it. A dollar goes a long way these days. Trouble is," he added, "you've got to have the dollar." In my eyes Bertram seemed rich. I marveled that his apartment had a dining room with a glass breakfront and a spacious square table covered by a lace cloth. There were six carved mahogany chairs with green leather seats. All this heavy furniture, Bertram told me, had belonged to his mother. She had left him the dining set, her wedding ring, and his father's considerable life insurance. "I've got some leeway," he said. "You could even say I'm in the money, so don't worry about your pa's not coming through. It's hard times."
    Bertram often spoke of hard times. His two themes were the Depression and what he called "the reformation of society." The hospital sweepers were agitating for a union, but more than half of them were afraid to strike. Bertram went out with the strikers. "Have a look at this," he urged me one evening—he was heading for a rally—and handed me a copy of The Communist Manifesto. It was a thin little thing, with a pale pink cover.
    The next morning he asked me what I had made of it.
    "It's like a hymn. A psalm."
    "You could think of it as architecture. A blueprint."
    "Oh, I don't know," I said. It was true that I did not know; what I knew was that I had been brought up to cynicism. I was not easily inspired or moved.
    Bertram's head moved me—the brown ringlets rising straight out of his temples like a waterfall in reverse, the line of his nose with its gradual change of course, the virtuous motherly mouth. At times he caught me looking at him; this disconcerted him. "Hey, you're a kid," he would say. In my classes at the college I shut out the droning assault of lectures—Dewey, Pestalozzi, Montessori, Piaget, how to write a lesson plan—and filled the back pages of my notebook with Bertram's name, scrupulously inscribed over and over again. At night in my bed I shredded his name into mental anagrams, and the next day set them down: at, am, are, ram, mar, tram, mart, tame, rate, mate, meat, eat, beat, rare, tear, bear, mare, bet, bat, tab, rat, ream, beam, team, art, tar, rear, tare, brat, bare, tea, me, be, ear, term, berm. It struck me that some magical syllable might be hidden among the letters—a hint, an illumination.
    I wanted Bertram's kiss to