Charles Newman - In Partial Disgrace

The confidently unrealizable project of his Chronik allowed him to gather strength and move fully formed and with accord. When making an investment for a client, he could turn back twenty years and not only see the historical value of the commodity he was trading, but more importantly, judge his own frame of mind at the time, as well as what the poor dazed world was thinking. From a distance, the Chronik looked like an oriental book, each page transcribed in a different colored ink, a palimpsest strewn with ciphers and perfumed with annotations spiraling off into space. But when you put your face in it, you knew what day it was, what world you were in, and what it felt like before you were born.

In the courtroom, Felix “the Happy” learned that you can destroy any argument by taking the a priori one step backward, that the self and its opposite do not have to exist in mutual antipathy, and indeed that the day of liberation is most often the day of disappointment. Observing the inclination of human nature to crush the human spirit, he reluctantly became the advocate of the trial-and-error boys, reconciling warring factions by insisting that the other’s place does not have to be a fearful one. He often said there are only two sorts of people in this world — those who believe in the law when it promises to protect them, and those who don’t.

No graven portrait of my father’s family ever hung in our house. If there was a tradition operating here, it was that one ought to be forthright in pursuing and preserving one’s pleasures, but not be surprised if others found them repulsive. This quirky toleration always made a great impression in our fanatical part of the world, but was essentially misunderstood. For if a man had his absolute preferences, and yet could afford another’s right to take exception, this implied authority — and such authority could only imply hoarded money, dirty tricks, or a conspiracy at the highest level. An uncaused authority without political power and without money, together with an uncaused freedom without an enemy, is the most intimidating force in the modern world, and its bearers are inevitably punished for it. Felix was one of those men doomed to be more liberal than his class, and his political downfall was due to his not being as conservative as the radicals turned out to be.

Father clearly preferred the companionship of women, as he believed that everything is finally done either to impress or avoid them. “Men just walk down their own roads,” he used to say, “and talk about the things they happen to meet. How unbelievably boring! Women, for whatever reason, tend to do this less, and are therefore superior.” He also believed that the greatest gift you can give another person is self-control, and that the ability of men to hide their thoughts went largely unappreciated by women.

Life for him was clearly a beautiful woman on a beautiful horse led by a beautiful dog, and he felt the only possible justification for something as unattractive and exceptional as a grown man was that by wizardry and chivalry he might keep these unlike animals together in a parade — that gentleman’s paradise: tenderness without loyalty, violence without strife.

His male acquaintances found it strange that such an energetic man did not chafe in a house under female ownership, particularly given the airy standards of my mother, for married life was certainly nothing like a ballerina on a circus horse, but rather more a warren of untrained animals and mentally ill clowns. They also thought it imprudent for him to reinvest all of his earnings into the maintenance of a property which for all its strange beauty and uniqueness, had for a century been a wasting asset, producing less income each year. (Indeed, the whole of Cannonia would have doubled in market value had they shut down every single farm and factory.)

My father was a triple functionary — attorney, village notary, and investment counselor — with a triple soul: conservative, liberal, and left wing. He was not hard to fathom, not so much a giant of a man as three hard, distinct men who fought spiritedly among themselves. He was a worldly concrete man, adept at finance, ball games, and sex, contemptuous of politics and religion, but a spy for the spiritual, a secret agent for the sacred. He believed sincerely that his function was to play prime minister to the queen, bluff front man for the skeptical muse, to extract money from the real economy and cheerfully recirculate it into the inefficient, living part of the culture. As such, he objectively failed at everything except the high drama of marriage and as fiduciary for other people’s money. But it was in the fourth dimension of Dogmeister Supreme, Hauptzuchtwart of Semper Vero and Master of Our Floating World, where Father truly shone, and scattered the heaped-up mountains with the simplest of gestures. A man is nothing but a handful of irrational enthusiasms, and nothing in this world can be understood apart from them.

Yes, my father was an oral man, a primary type, who could not resist a smoke, a vowel, a puff, a sentence, a sweet, a scotch, a song, a smooch. Breathing, after all, was no less a project because it was involuntary, and the intervals between the breaths also required justification and refinement. This attitude, more than any gustatory prowess, accounted for Father’s eating habits, which went far beyond gourmet or even the gourmand.

Family meals in Father’s view were an especial kind of torture, a fact borne out by his observation of the dogs when they were fed in the same cell. There, the bitches inevitably lost their appetite or became more aggressive, barking out commands which fell on deaf ears, though requiring ever sharpening levels of feigned attention from the brood. The sires sat proudly, horrified to eat from the same bowl as their progeny, insensitive to the alleged thrill of watching newborns masticate, and trying pathetically to nose their own dishes into a corner where they could be defended. When they were half-grown, the dogs ate just as sloppily, gulping their food without tasting it, and reverting to the pecking order they had displayed as puppies; indeed the same dogs who shoved each other out of the way at eight weeks continued to do so at eight years.

A line seemed to be crossed at our meals, from wonder to pride to habituation to vague resentment and finally colic. There was nothing like a repast to bring out the hierarchies that everyday activities so successfully blurred and dispelled, and Father came to believe that a true family could be kept together only by avoiding meals together whenever possible. But he had also noticed that there was better behavior at kennel dinner when a guest dog was being boarded. Were the hosts being well-mannered or falsely solicitous, wondering whether the guest was going to steal their dinner? Whatever the case, their own self-conscious roles were slightly submerged; they gulped more slowly, ate a bit less, chewed a bit more thoroughly. There was even a kind of comradely charm in the air, and occasionally a note of sincere thanks was struck, bringing a tear to a hound’s eye.

So it was that we almost always had an invited guest for supper. When we did not, our table was the severest form of regimen. Mother was obviously of two minds about food. Meat in particular, in all its forms, gave her the shakes. She would walk across a muddy street to avoid passing the window display in a butcher shop. She knew this was ridiculous but couldn’t help it. It was related of course to the way my father had eaten, was eating, and was about to eat. The appetites of men seemed to her if not exactly vulgar, driven by needs far beyond nutrition. The way men left the table particularly offended her, on whatever pretext, strolling over to the fire, or to walk in the starry moonlight, there to smoke, pass wind, and put the dinner out of mind. It brought out in her conflicting feelings of servitude and superiority, particularly when they thanked her with pointless magnanimity for the meal she had in fact nothing to do with. She was convinced that Father’s love of food was his most prurient of interests.