The Puttermesser Papers Read Online Free PDF Page B

polite; though she deemed herself a feminist, no ideology could succeed for her in aggrandizing force. Puttermesser was not aggressive. She disdained assertiveness. Her voice was like Cordelia’s. At home, in bed, she went on dreaming and reading. She retained a romantic view of the British Civil Service in its heyday: the Cambridge Apostles carrying the probities of G. E. Moore to the far corners of the world, Leonard Woolf doing justice in Ceylon, the shy young Forster in India. Integrity. Uprightness. And all for the sake of imperialism, colonialism! In New York, Puttermesser retained an immigrant’sdream of merit: justice, justice shalt thou pursue. Her heart beat for law, even for tax law: she saw the orderly nurturing of the democratic populace, public murals, subway windows bright as new dishes, parks with flowering borders, the bell-hung painted steeds of dizzying carousels.
    Every day, inside the wide bleak corridors of the Municipal Building, Puttermesser dreamed an ideal Civil Service: devotion to polity, the citizen’s sweet love of the citizenry, the light rule of reason and common sense, the City as a miniature country crowded with patriots—not fools and jingoists, but patriots true and serene; humorous affection for the idiosyncrasies of one’s distinctive little homeland, each borough itself another little homeland, joy in the Bronx, elation in Queens, O happy Richmond! Children on roller skates, and over the Brooklyn Bridge the long patchwork-colored line of joggers, breathing hard above the homeland-hugging green waters.

II. PUTTERMESSER ’ S FALL, AND THE HISTORY OF THE GENUS GOLEM
    T URTELMAN SENT HIS SECRETARY to fetch Puttermesser. It was a new secretary, a middle-aged bony acolyte, graying and testy, whom he had brought with him from the Department of Hygienic Maintenance: she had coarse eyebrows crawling upward. “This isn’t exactly a good time for me to do this,” Puttermesser complained. It was as if Turtelman did not trust the telephone for such a purpose. Puttermesser knew his purpose: he wanted teaching. He was puzzled, desperate. Inside his ambitiousness he was a naked boy, fearful. His office was cradled next to the threatening computer chamber, just then being installed; all along the walls the computers’ hard flanks glittered with specks and lights. Puttermesser could hear, behind a partition, the velvet din of a thousand microchips, a thin threadlike murmur, as if the software men, long-haired chaps in sneakers, were setting out lyres upon the great stone window sills of the Municipal Building. Walking behind the bony acolyte, Puttermesser pitied Turtelman: the Mayor had called for information—figures, indexes, collections, projections—and poor Turtelman, fresh from his half-education in the land of abstersion and elutriation, his frontal lobes still inclined toward repair of street-sweeping machinery, hung back bewildered. He had no answers forthe Mayor, and no idea where the answers might be hidden; alas, the questions themselves fell on Turtelman’s ears as though in a foreign tongue.
    The secretary pushed open Turtelman’s door, stood aside for Puttermesser, and went furiously away.
    Poor Turtelman, Puttermesser thought.
    Turtelman spoke: “You’re out.”
    â€œOut?” Puttermesser said. It was a bitter Tuesday morning in mid-January; at that very moment, considerably south of the Municipal Building, in Washington, D.C., they were getting ready to inaugurate the next President of the United States. High politics emblazoned the day. Bureaucracies all over the world were turning on their hinges, gates were lifting and shutting, desks emptying and filling. The tide rode upon Turtelman’s spittle; it glimmered on his teeth.
    â€œAs of this afternoon,” Turtelman said, “you are relieved of your duties. It’s nothing personal, believe me. I don’t know you. We’re restructuring. It’s too