Mirror Kingdoms: The Best of Peter S. Beagle, Page 3

  “With a little time to spare for the American Transcendentalists, I should hope,” suggested the rhinoceros. Professor Gottesman, being some distance past surprise, nodded. The rhinoceros said reflectively, “I think I should prefer to hear you on Comte and John Stuart Mill. The romantics always struck me as fundamentally unsound.”

  This position agreed so much with the Professor’s own opinion that he found himself, despite himself, gradually warming toward the rhinoceros. Still formal, he asked, “May I perhaps offer you a drink? Some coffee or tea?”

  “Tea would be very nice,” the rhinoceros answered, “if you should happen to have a bucket.” Professor Gottesman did not, and the rhinoceros told him not to worry about it. It settled back down before the fire, and the Professor drew up a rocking chair. The rhinoceros said, “I must admit, I do wish I could hear you speak on the scholastic philosophers. That’s really my period, after all.”

  “I will be giving such a course next year,” the Professor said, a little shyly. “It is to be a series of lectures on medieval Christian thought, beginning with St. Augustine and the Neoplatonists and ending with William of Occam. Possibly you could attend some of those talks.”

  The rhinoceros’s obvious pleasure at the invitation touched Professor Gottesman surprisingly deeply. Even Sally Lowry, who often dropped in on his classes unannounced, did so, as he knew, out of affection for him, and not from any serious interest in epistemology or the Milesian School. He was beginning to wonder whether there might be a way to permit the rhinoceros to sample the cream sherry he kept aside for company, when the creature added, with a wheezy chuckle, “Of course, Augustine and the rest never did quite come to terms with such pagan survivals as unicorns. The best they could do was associate us with the Virgin Mary, and to suggest that our horns somehow represented the unity of Christ and his church. Bernard of Trèves even went so far as to identify Christ directly with the unicorn, but it was never a comfortable union. Spiral peg in square hole, so to speak.”

  Professor Gottesman was no more at ease with the issue than St. Augustine had been. But he was an honest person—only among philosophers is this considered part of the job description—and so he felt it his duty to say, “While I respect your intelligence and your obvious intellectual curiosity, none of this yet persuades me that you are in fact a unicorn. I still must regard you as an exceedingly learned and well-mannered Indian rhinoceros.”

  The rhinoceros took this in good part, saying, “Well, well, we will agree to disagree on that point for the time being. Although I certainly hope that you will let me know if you should need your drinking water purified.” As before, and so often thereafter, Professor Gottesman could not be completely sure that the rhinoceros was joking. Dismissing the subject, it went on to ask, “But about the Scholastics—do you plan to discuss the later Thomist reformers at all? Saint Cajetan rather dominates the movement, to my mind; if he had any real equals, I’m afraid I can’t recall them.”

  “Ah,” said the Professor. They were up until five in the morning, and it was the rhinoceros who dozed off first. The question of the rhinoceros’s leaving Professor Gottesman’s house never came up again. It continued to sleep in the living room, for the most part, though on warm summer nights it had a fondness for the young willow tree that had been a Christmas present from Sally. Professor Gottesman never learned whether it was male or female, nor how it nourished its massive, noisy body, nor how it managed its toilet facilities—a reticent man himself, he respected reticence in others. As a houseguest, the rhinoceros’s only serious fault was a continuing predilection for hot baths (with Epsom salts, when it could get them.) But it always cleaned up after itself, and was extremely conscientious about not tracking mud into the house; and it can be safely said that none of the Professor’s visitors—even the rare ones who spent a night or two under his roof—ever remotely suspected that they were sharing living quarters with a rhinoceros. All in all, it proved to be a most discreet and modest beast.

  The Professor had few friends, apart from Sally, and none whom he would have called on in a moment of bewildering crisis, as he had called on her. He avoided whatever social or academic gatherings he could reasonably avoid; as a consequence his evenings had generally been lonely ones, though he might not have called them so. Even if he had admitted the term, he would surely have insisted that there was nothing necessarily wrong with loneliness, in and of itself. “I think,” he would have said—did often say, in fact, to Sally Lowry. “There are people, you know, for whom thinking is company, thinking is entertainment, parties, dancing even. The others, other people, they absolutely will not believe this.”

  “You’re right,” Sally said. “One thing about you, Gus, when you’re right you’re really right.”

  Now, however, the Professor could hardly wait for the time of day when, after a cursory dinner (he was an indifferent, impatient eater, and truly tasted little difference between a frozen dish and one that had taken half a day to prepare), he would pour himself a glass of wine and sit down in the living room to debate philosophy with a huge mortar-colored beast that always smelled vaguely incontinent, no matter how many baths it had taken that afternoon. Looking eagerly forward all day to anything was a new experience for him. It appeared to be the same for the rhinoceros.

  As the animal had foretold, there was never the slightest suggestion in the papers or on television that the local zoo was missing one of its larger odd-toed ungulates. The Professor went there once or twice in great trepidation, convinced that he would be recognized and accused immediately of conspiracy in the rhinoceros’s escape. But nothing of the sort happened. The yard where the rhinoceros had been kept was now occupied by a pair of despondent-looking African elephants; when Professor Gottesman made a timid inquiry of a guard, he was curtly informed that the zoo had never possessed a rhinoceros of any species. “Endangered species,” the guard told him. “Too much red tape you have to go through to get one these days. Just not worth the trouble, mean as they are.”

  Professor Gottesman grew placidly old with the rhinoceros—that is to say, the Professor grew old, while the rhinoceros never changed in any way that he could observe. Granted, he was not the most observant of men, nor the most sensitive to change, except when threatened by it. Nor was he in the least ambitious: promotions and pay raises happened, when they happened, somewhere in the same cloudily benign middle distance as did those departmental meetings that he actually had to sit through. The companionship of the rhinoceros, while increasingly his truest delight, also became as much of a cozily reassuring habit as his classes, his office hours, the occasional dinner and movie or museum excursion with Sally Lowry, and the books on French and German philosophy that he occasionally published through the university press over the years. They were indifferently reviewed, and sold poorly.

  “Which is undoubtedly as it should be,” Professor Gottesman frequently told Sally when dropping her off at her house, well across town from his own. “I think I am a good teacher—that, yes—but I am decidedly not an original thinker, and I was never much of a writer even in German. It does no harm to say that I am not an exceptional man, Sally. It does not hurt me.”

  “I don’t know what exceptional means to you or anyone else,” Sally would answer stubbornly. “To me it means being unique, one of a kind, and that’s definitely you, old Gus. I never thought you belonged in this town, or this university, or probably this century. But I’m surely glad you’ve been here.”

  Once in a while she might ask him casually how his unicorn was getting on these days. The Professor, who had long since accepted the fact that no one ever saw the rhinoceros unless it chose to be seen, invariably rose to the bait, saying, “It is no more a unicorn than it ever was, Sally, you know that.” He would sip his latte in mild indignation, and eventually add, “Well, we will clearly never see eye to eye on the Vienna Circle, or the logical positivists in general—it is a very conservative creature, in some ways. But we did come to a tentative agreemen
t about Bergson, last Thursday it was, so I would have to say that we are going along quite amiably.”

  Sally rarely pressed him further. Sharp-tongued, solitary, and profoundly irreverent, only with Professor Gottesman did she bother to know when to leave things alone. Most often, she would take out her battered harmonica and play one or another of his favorite tunes—“Sweet Georgia Brown” or “Hurry on Down.” He never sang along, but he always hummed and grunted and thumped his bony knees. Once he mentioned diffidently that the rhinoceros appeared to have a peculiar fondness for “Slow Boat to China.” Sally pretended not to hear him.

  In the appointed fullness of time, the university retired Professor Gottesman in a formal ceremony, attended by, among others, Sally Lowry, his sister Edith, all the way from Zurich, and the rhinoceros—the latter having spent all that day in the bathtub, in anxious preparation. Each of them assured him that he looked immensely distinguished as he was invested with the rank of emeritus, which allowed him to lecture as many as four times a year, and to be available to counsel promising graduate students when he chose. In addition, a special chair with his name on it was reserved exclusively for his use at the Faculty Club. He was quite proud of never once having sat in it.

  “Strange, I am like a movie star now,” he said to the rhinoceros. “You should see. Now I walk across the campus and the students line up, they line up to watch me totter past. I can hear their whispers—‘Here he comes!’ ‘There he goes!’ Exactly the same ones they are who used to cut my classes because I bored them so. Completely absurd.”

  “Enjoy it as your due,” the rhinoceros proposed. “You were entitled to their respect then—take pleasure in it now, however misplaced it may seem to you.” But the Professor shook his head, smiling wryly.

  “Do you know what kind of star I am really like?” he asked. “I am like the old, old star that died so long ago, so far away, that its last light is only reaching our eyes today. They fall in on themselves, you know, those dead stars, they go cold and invisible, even though we think we are seeing them in the night sky. That is just how I would be, if not for you. And for Sally, of course.”

  In fact, Professor Gottesman found little difficulty in making his peace with age and retirement. His needs were simple, his pension and savings adequate to meet them, and his health as sturdy as generations of Swiss peasant ancestors could make it. For the most part he continued to live as he always had, the one difference being that he now had more time for study, and could stay up as late as he chose arguing about structuralism with the rhinoceros, or listening to Sally Lowry reading her new translation of Calvalcanti or Frescobaldi. At first he attended every conference of philosophers to which he was invited, feeling a certain vague obligation to keep abreast of new thought in his field. This compulsion passed quickly, however, leaving him perfectly satisfied to have as little as possible to do with academic life, except when he needed to use the library. Sally once met him there for lunch to find him feverishly rifling the ten Loeb Classic volumes of Philo Judaeus. “We were debating the concept of the logos last night,” he explained to her, “and then the impossible beast rampaged off on a tangent involving Philo’s locating the roots of Greek philosophy in the Torah: forgive me, Sally, but I may be here for a while.” Sally lunched alone that day.

  The Professor’s sister Edith died younger than she should have. He grieved for her, and took much comfort in the fact that Nathalie never failed to visit him when she came to America. The last few times, she had brought a husband and two children with her—the youngest hugging a ragged but indomitable tiger named Charles under his arm. They most often swept him off for the evening; and it was on one such occasion, just after they had brought him home and said their good-byes, and their rented car had rounded the corner, that the mugging occurred.

  Professor Gottesman was never quite sure himself about what actually took place. He remembered a light scuffle of footfalls, remembered a savage blow on the side of his head, then another impact as his cheek and forehead hit the ground. There were hands clawing through his pockets, low voices so distorted by obscene viciousness that he lost English completely, became for the first time in fifty years a terrified immigrant, once more unable to cry out for help in this new and dreadful country. A faceless figure billowed over him, grabbing his collar, pulling him close, mouthing words he could not understand. It was brandishing something menacingly in its free hand.

  Then it vanished abruptly, as though blasted away by the sidewalk-shaking bellow of rage that was Professor Gottesman’s last clear memory until he woke in a strange bed, with Sally Lowry, Nathalie, and several policemen bending over him. The next day’s newspapers ran the marvelous story of a retired philosophy professor, properly frail and elderly, not only fighting off a pair of brutal muggers but beating them so badly that they had to be hospitalized themselves before they could be arraigned. Sally impishly kept the incident on the front pages for some days by confiding to reporters that Professor Gottesman was a practitioner of a long-forgotten martial-arts discipline, practiced only in ancient Sumer and Babylonia. “Plain childishness,” she said apologetically, after the fuss had died down. “Pure self-indulgence. I’m sorry, Gus.”

  “Do not be,” the Professor replied. “If we were to tell them the truth, I would immediately be placed in an institution.” He looked sideways at his friend, who smiled and said, “What, about the rhinoceros rescuing you? I’ll never tell, I swear. They could pull out my fingernails.”

  Professor Gottesman said, “Sally, those boys had been trampled, practically stamped flat. One of them had been gored, I saw him. Do you really think I could have done all that?”

  “Remember, I’ve seen you in your wrath,” Sally answered lightly and untruthfully. What she had in fact seen was one of the ace-of-clubs footprints she remembered in crusted mud on the Professor’s front steps long ago. She said, “Gus. How old am I?”

  The Professor’s response was off by a number of years, as it always was. Sally said, “You’ve frozen me at a certain age, because you don’t want me getting any older. Fine, I happen to be the same way about that rhinoceros of yours. There are one or two things I just don’t want to know about that damn rhinoceros, Gus. If that’s all right with you.”

  “Yes, Sally,” Professor Gottesman answered. “That is all right.”

  The rhinoceros itself had very little to say about the whole incident. “I chanced to be awake, watching a lecture about Bulgarian icons on the Learning Channel. I heard the noise outside.” Beyond that, it sidestepped all questions, pointedly concerning itself only with the Professor’s recuperation from his injuries and shock. In fact, he recovered much faster than might reasonably have been expected from a gentleman of his years. The doctor commented on it.

  The occurrence made Professor Gottesman even more of an icon himself on campus; as a direct consequence, he spent even less time there than before, except when the rhinoceros requested a particular book. Nathalie, writing from Zurich, never stopped urging him to take in a housemate, for company and safety, but she would have been utterly dumbfounded if he had accepted her suggestion. “Something looks out for him,” she said to her husband. “I always knew that, I couldn’t tell you why. Uncle Gustave is somebody’s dear stuffed Charles.”

  Sally Lowry did grow old, despite Professor Gottesman’s best efforts. The university gave her a retirement ceremony too, but she never showed up for it. “Too damn depressing,” she told Professor Gottesman, as he helped her into her coat for their regular Wednesday walk “It’s all right for you, Gus, you’ll be around forever. Me, I drink, I still smoke, I still eat all kinds of stuff they tell me not to eat—I don’t even floss, for God’s sake. My circulation works like the post office, and even my cholesterol has arthritis. Only reason I’ve lasted this long is I had this stupid job teaching beautiful, useless stuff to idiots. Now that’s it. Now I’m a goner.”

  “Nonsense, nonsense, Sally,” Professor Gottesman assured her vigorously. “You have always
told me you are too mean and spiteful to die. I am holding you to this.”

  “Pickled in vinegar only lasts just so long,” Sally said. “One cheery note, anyway—it’ll be the heart that goes. Always is, in my family. That’s good, I couldn’t hack cancer. I’d be a shameless, screaming disgrace, absolutely no dignity at all. I’m really grateful it’ll be the heart.”

  The Professor was very quiet while they walked all the way down to the little local park, and back again. They had reached the apartment complex where she lived, when he suddenly gripped her by the arms, looked straight into her face, and said loudly, “That is the best heart I ever knew, yours. I will not let anything happen to that heart.”

  “Go home, Gus,” Sally told him harshly. “Get out of here, go home. Christ, the only sentimental Switzer in the whole world, and I get him. Wouldn’t you just know?”

  Professor Gottesman actually awoke just before the telephone call came, as sometimes happens. He had dozed off in his favorite chair during a minor intellectual skirmish with the rhinoceros over Spinoza’s ethics. The rhinoceros itself was sprawled in its accustomed spot, snoring authoritatively, and the kitchen clock was still striking three when the phone rang. He picked it up slowly. Sally’s barely audible voice whispered, “Gus. The heart. Told you.” He heard the receiver fall from her hand.

  Professor Gottesman had no memory of stumbling coatless out of the house, let alone finding his car parked on the street—he was just suddenly standing by it, his hands trembling so badly as he tried to unlock the door that he dropped his keys into the gutter. How long his frantic fumbling in the darkness went on, he could never say; but at some point he became aware of a deeper darkness over him, and looked up on hands and knees to see the rhinoceros.