PRAYER AGAINST THE TYRANNY OF ANOTHER’S THINGS (LOGICAL REFUTATION)
Paul Maliszewski
In 1973, Philip Christophé Harold Graumlich, eldest son and heir to the recently-assassinated king and exile of the small, landlocked principality of Rhomasegro, happened quite by chance on an articulation for the sometimes violent sensations of physical and non-physical revulsion he felt since moving to the United States. As I first argued, albeit provisionally, in my 1996 presentation, such a singular discovery came about as a result of his emigration. To introduce, refresh, or reacquaint readers: in the winter of 1972, Graumlich regretfully renounced his title before an unimpressed customs official at J.F. Kennedy’s airport and swore before a judge a week later to make it official, thereafter retiring his royal lineage to memory and an attic full of archival-quality boxes. After several unproductive weeks of what his American journals refer to in page after heart-wrenching page of terse, single-line entries as “dilly-dally,” “dillydallying,” and “more dilly-dallying,” the heir to no throne came into his own.
As his surname implies in a dying dialect of Hungarian, he “beg[a]n anew.” He accepted an honorary position on the board of the local United Way and devoted himself to his autodidactic studies of experimental human behaviorism, picking up subjects first suggested by the work of a certain wellknown uncle of his and renewing interests he himself had abandoned as a teen when war threatened and the royal family fled like migrants or nomads to live, if it can be called that, for more than a dozen years in royal safehouses, immense, airy coastal homes in cities he never saw during daylight, and a degrading number of Western European hotel rooms without character.
Graumlich, we know, finally installed himself, his beautiful wife Irena, his two male Russian hunting hounds, a library of 60,000 volumes smelly and swollen by rain damage acquired somewhere between Paris and Seville, some sticks of rented furniture, a few miraculously unbroken pieces of the family china, and a juvenile prince’s stamp collection aborted by threat of popular insurrection on a vast birch-lined estate in White Plains, New York that he purchased with cash from the family’s sorely depleted accounts. Graumlich, it should be noted, did not much like people, as, again, his American journals make abundantly clear. While he was thankful for this nation of immigrants, it galled him that he shared in common with them even as little as he did: “I’m bothered that when I speak, I speak with their English,” he wrote on April 19, 1972. Nor did Graumlich care much for other people’s things, “things” and its neighbor “stuff” being among what he observed Tocqueville-like to be American preoccupations.
On February 3, 1973, Graumlich received an enveloped invitation addressed to “Phil Graumlich,” asking him, for ostensibly he was this so-called “Phil,” to attend a theatrical event “in the city” with a group composed of several highly-placed elected officials from the local neighborhood homeowners association. With fountain pen and creamy stationery, Graumlich respondevoued his interest in “coming along.” In Graumlich: A Life, the popular though still privately-printed book by John Lisle, Graumlich’s official biographer, hand-plucked out of the ranks of N.Y.U. A.B.D.s in European history, we read of two surprises that fateful day: that the subject was invited to begin with and moreover that subject instantly began making actual preparations to attend said event, including hopping a bus (surely to prepare himself for the longer, more arduous bus trip to the theatrical event) and availing himself of the local big and tall shop (Graumlich was more tall than big, really) and ordering up a new suit of clothes.
While Lisle, pace soulful biographer, prefers to see the decision to attend as one of Graumlich’s life’s turning points, a moment when subject first began to shed princely skin for less princely entertainment, the following passage from a later American journal presented for the first time and long suppressed by the beautiful Irena for reasons unknown and not investigated and quite possibly ignored in a bout of sustained passive complicity by the good biographer, belies any suggestion that Graumlich had turned around on any point.*
Down on stage there is a play going on. My neighbor, whom I don’t and can’t know from Adam, leans way over toward me—too close—and speaks into my ear. “Hey,” he says, “why don’t you put yourself in my shoes?”
I look down at the floor. His shoes are unlaced. His feet are resting on top of them. He’s flexing his toes in his socks. One with a hole.
I look back at the stage. This play’s been going on for some time. I think, sure, why not. So I move to drag his shoes toward me.
“Wait,” he says. “Put yourself in my seat before you put yourself in my shoes.”
“You want to trade seats, too?” I ask.
My neighbor nods and then he’s talking to the person to his immediate right. Finally he looks back at me.
“Who’s that lady beside you?” he asks.
I look to my left. I turn back to my neighbor. “I don’t know,” I say.
My neighbor says, “You got to talk to her.”
“Why?” I ask.
He looks at me blankly. “We’re all moving to the right. She’s going to have to put herself in your shoes. Now, go,” he says. “Make arrangements.”
And so I do.
By the fourth act I’m sliding around in my neighbor’s wingtips. My neighbor is wedged into a pair of sequined pumps. His skin, his sock, the fat of his foot, droop over the top of the pump like a muffin. Everywhere I look: incongruity. The woman in the off-the-shoulder gown, in cowboy boots; the man in the tweed jacket, in espadrilles; the boy in his father’s shoes; the husband in his wife’s; his wife now in two-tone tasseled loafers.
After the play there’s a dance for all of us and our new shoes. I find the woman who relinquished her zip-up half-boots for my black dress shoes (bought for a funeral, distant relative) and ask her to dance. I take her by the hand to right out in front of the band. This is not a learning experience, I can’t ignore that. We all want to like each other’s shoes and we all want to fit in and play along and go with the flow, but none of us can ignore the discomfort. I started out thinking, What a great idea! How simply whimsical! When the play ended, however, and I still didn’t have my shoes back I thought, What a story this will make. Now the dancing has reached its tenth hour. There are rumors circulating that we’ll be trading again before the night’s out, to try yet one more person’s shoes. It’s hard not to be disgusted.
I am uncomfortable. I can’t keep my mind off that.
Where does this discomfort go? Up toward the ceiling, with the music? Into our drinks? When we excuse ourselves to the rest room are we hoping to lose it in the plumbing or rinse it from our mouths? Me, I solemnly try to dance this discomfort away. I am not alone in my endeavor; many of us take to the floor. We ignore the person who has our shoes or whose shoes we wear and dance, dance, dance. We dance in the modern style, we look down at the floor, at our feet, and watch ourselves move.
But there is more, or at least a little more. For shortly after recording the above passage in the later journals, Graumlich stopped leaving the black, squiggling trails of his days on the blank pages of his books. The remaining entries are without distinction and rarely more elaborate than a series of phrases joined by the several distracted dots of ellipsis. Though he lived until 1995, when he died, at the age of seventy-three, the journals leave off in 1973. His life separates from the page nearly twenty-two years to the day. Twenty-two years without benefit of record, a frustrating gap for Lisle and every later commentator on Graumlich’s life. At moments it seems to me that the life is an airplane and the journal the ground, and that the airplane pulls up and away from the ground, and that the ground closes or shuts or dies because there is no more airplane to give the ground purpose.
This fanciful turn of thought does have a point, which I’m coming to. Graumlich died, apparently of coronary thrombosis. A couple of doctors had some ultimately not resolvable questions about that diagnosis, but not any suggesting any foul play, and so nothing worth hesitating the eye over and raising the eyebrow at. Irena (beautiful) found Graumlich in his 1986 Buick Skylark, with the engine running, his right hand on that thin, protruding shifter thing that puts the car into drive or park or reverse according to the direction of the driver’s wish, and his right foot rigorously and solidly and, until she came along, endlessly depressing the brake nearly through the floorboards.
One wonders—I wonder, in any case—what Graumlich did and thought in the days or weeks before dying. I have not been able to divine an answer with any degree of sophistication or certainty, so have and will elect to defer the question endlessly. I do have a rudimentary timeline courtesy of Irena, written in her beautiful hand, but very few direct observations of his daily dillies and dallies. The Graumlich household servants, hailing from best-forsaken places somewhere well south of the United States, I’m not sure where, have proved fiercely resistant and wooden-faced to all my questioning. I’m not sure they understand quite what I’m up to. If they do they betray no hint. Perhaps they talk amongst themselves in their animated gibberish. I suspect they might. You can tell. Anyway, the servants most assuredly do understand that I’m offering them money. They grasp that when I do, apparently having no qualms and offering no apologies about relieving me of the stuff. However often and many times I ask, still nobody has come forward with the final impressions of Graumlich that I seek. Do I seek in vain, reader? I do not believe that I do. I look for pieces of paper, jottings, doodles, what have you, because I choose to, frankly. I would settle even for the shallow impressions of words scored into the top page of some notepad that has fallen—fallen or shoved hastily?— behind some desk drawer, but I do not seek in vain. I simply do not. I cannot believe that even if I do.
*Graumlich’s sister, who is, incidentally, also beautiful, has her own explanation for the origins of the excerpt at hand, attributing it to the free, public citizenship course they attended together, an experience her brother never failed to characterize after class over “thin slices of something sweet and perhaps a dessert wine” with a “tirade of pejorative adjectives” usually modified by “horrifyingly” (personal conversation with author).