Trust (14 page)

It was the reason they got on.

All the next day the Dutchwoman continued to keep to the garden. She had moved away from the cooler shadow of the eaves, where hour after hour Enoch's cruel syllables dropped with the sadness of rain, stifled sometimes by little jokes—we could not always hear them—and now and again by the distinct quick din of the young men's laughter.

"He had his mother cremated," one of them said. "He thought it was rather a nice idea."

"Come off it, will you? Go blow."

"No, it's a fact. I read it. It's in a letter to Mrs. Patrick Campbell."

"What do you expect? Shaw, that nut. He didn't eat meat."

"All the more reason not to cook his own mother."

They tittered and sneered: but the Dutchwoman sat on a wooden kitchen chair under a roseless rosebush and ground her feet vengefully in the fallen petals.

"Ah, those." She waved contemptuously up at the napes of their pale heads in the window. "If your stepfather had room for those, certainly there was a place for my brother. My brother speaks seven languages, he carries bedpans in a hospital, they pay him nothing..." She stared at me severely and held up a triumvirate of fingers like flags. "My brother has one, two, three babies. Mr. Vand has no care for that." One by one, counting, she lowered her angry masts, and strained after the clatter of a bicycle invisible beyond the garden gate. "He has no care for
you,
" she spat out finally.

The concierge's husband stood on a ladder clipping the overgrown stalks of a tall hedge. He worked very slowly, calling down to us bits of his biography: his old man's veins swelled in Ms wrist each time the shears snapped. He twitched his mustache and talked about his wife. She was a fine woman, he said, industrious and strong; she was not even bad-looking. When they were married he had been a bachelor of sixty-three—the property, of course, was his, and although his wife was nearly twenty years younger than he, she had not a thing to complain of. Meanwhile the hedge took on the shape of an eagle or an angel: the wings hunted up the sunlight, and he went on snipping away at the head. He was a plain soul, he said, his tastes were very plain, he didn't ask for much out of life (and sure enough, it turned out to be only a duck), he had always lived in the country, he did not like running a pension, there were too many worries, the boarders seemed to think clean towels grew on trees—this was not to deny that his wife was very capable, always on the watch for the benefit of all—still, the town had decayed, it wasn't what it used to be before the war. There were too many bad characters.

The Dutchwoman took out a pair of little scissors from her pocket and began to peck at her nails with it. She spread out her mole-dappled hands and methodically manicured each one, stopping to watch the arch of each brittle sliver of nail as it clicked off into the air. Nearby on his ladder the concierge's husband copied her: first he cut and then he meditated on the uncertain descent of each severed stalk.

"Bad characters," he repeated, scowling as though he knew a secret; he scattered green tail-feathers and pared the leafy bill of his fowl, wielding his slow shining blades until the garden hissed with their iterated bite.

"Old ox!" muttered my governess. "Close your teeth, dotard!" For a moment she winked up at the sun-crowded figure of the duck, which was now riding a freshly-scalloped crest, and was reassured by the sculptor's delighted nod that at this distance he really was deaf enough.

"They ruin the town and empty the pensions," said the concierge's husband in an excessively loud voice.

"May the birds leave dung in your white hairs," replied the Dutchwoman, going at her thumb with fervor.

"No one will come where there is a bad reputation," shouted the concierge's husband.

"May your nights be as sweet as what you make in your pants!" the Dutchwoman shrieked back. "May your parts shrivel seven times in every week!"

And they went on clipping companionably away, the two of them, my governess and the old man, so intently that neither heard my mother's high heels on the cobblestones behind the hedge.

"The arrogance of that station driver!" she cried, thrusting open the gate. "He left me at the bottom of the hill, bag and all. The road wasn't good enough for him because they ration his tires! Lord knows I paid him enough, and the worst of it is he's right, there isn't a decent road from here to ... The Garden of Atropos!" she broke off, wheeling round to confront me. "Put that thing down. She shouldn't be allowed to play with that, Anneke, she'll slice herself in two."

I had found a sickle under the rosebush and was swiping at the grass with it.

"Put it down," said the Dutchwoman obediently, "you will behead someone. Was the accident very bad, madam?"

"Well, the chauffeur had a concussion, but the trip back on the train was worse. I don't know which was thicker, the soot or the mob. There must have been a dozen people in the one compartment—half of them were Algerians. It was like riding in the coal car. I'm dirty as an Arab myself. How I hate these French trains! They're worse now—if you can imagine it—than before the war."

"And Armand?" inquired my governess.

"I went with him in the ambulance. They had me filling out forms all the way to the hospital. I didn't have a scratch on me, but it didn't matter—they have a form for everything, you know—and all the witnesses had to sign too. But they might almost have questioned Armand as me—believe it or not, he was conscious all the way!"

The Dutchwoman slipped the little scissors back into the pocket of her smock. "How strange," she murmured.

"Oh, but a brain concussion doesn't necessarily knock you
out,
you know," my mother declared with the authority of one who knew no more of medicine than to daub iodine on a skin-scrape.

"No: I meant about Armand. He is always so cautious."

"I know, and it's a nuisance when you're in a hurry. The roads south were full of military traffic, and he
wouldn't
pass—"

"They will keep him in the hospital for long?"

"I didn't have time to inquire—I had to find out about the insurance, it's all so complicated over here. It kept me dashing from one end of Paris to the other, and I couldn't make head or tail of it anyway, so I wired William—my lawyer, you see, in New York. He'll work it out somehow. As it is, I'm two days late getting back, and all on that chauffeur's account. I didn't want to miss driving to Zürich with Enoch. He hasn't left yet?" she finished anxiously.

"No." My governess shook her head gravely. "Mr. Vand is here. He is in the house."

"I can't say how glad I am. I need to talk to someone sensible. I've been harassed—actually harassed. That man lay there on that stretcher and just kept glaring and glaring up at me from out of those bandages they'd wound him in. It was terrible. He couldn't get out a word of course, but it was an accusation all the same. And afterward he blamed me right to the doctor's face."

"I have never seen a better driver," said Anneke, affecting deep interest. It appeared she very much wished to please my mother; she had put away all her insolence. "He sits behind the wheel with great confidence. I had often noticed it."

"He had no confidence to speak of just before we crashed, let me tell you! He was jittery, and that made
me
jittery—"

The Dutchwoman wondered. "You?"

"Well, at the rate we were going it was plain we'd never get back in time"—my mother seemed to hesitate—"so I made him shove over and I took the wheel myself."

"But madam has not a license!" the Dutchwoman exclaimed.

"That doesn't mean I can't
drive,
does it?" my mother retorted. "The fact is, that chauffeur did everything he could to get me in trouble."

"But if it was
you
who was driving," began my governess.

"Exactly. If it was I who was driving it was all my own affair. Especially since it was I who had hired him, and since he was hired to do what I told him. It was my own affair entirely. That's precisely what I told the police."

"The police!" screeched Anneke.

My mother indulged in a sly silent smile of triumph. "They insisted on arresting me," she continued proudly, cleaning the smudge on her chin with her glove, "although I carefully explained that I supposed I had plenty of insurance. They weren't interested in any of
that,
you can imagine. The issues didn't concern them."

"The issues?" my governess echoed. She stood up, genuinely agitated. "But Armand with his head cracked, and you without a license, and the auto in what condition—"

"Disintegrated," said my mother promptly. "You talk just like them, Anneke, I believe all you people over here suffer from the authoritarian personality. It's because you've tolerated kings for so many centuries. You don't have the revolutionary spirit. You're colonials in your own back yard. The American and Soviet Revolutions changed everything for everybody at the two ends of the world, but I can't see that the French Revolution made any difference at all for Europe—the police still act just as though they're secret agents for Louis the Sixteenth. Which is exactly how I treated them."

"The American interpretation of history," the Dutchwoman noted stiffly.

"The American interpretation of the European character," responded my mother. "When they got me to the police station I gave three thousand francs to every uniform in sight, including the sweeper—they certainly believe in
égalité
and
fraternité
when it comes to distributing francs!"

"Ah, madam has the true revolutionary spirit. Madam buys her
liberté,
" said Anneke, turning her caustic eyes on the concierge's husband, who was climbing down his ladder.

My mother laughed resentfully. "I certainly didn't intend to get stuck in a foreign jail. I doubt whether Enoch or William could have done anything to get me out, once I was in, and poor William hates his clients to become involved in scandals, even overseas, it's so bad for his office." Her mouth grew tangled with intrigue and pleasure. "Even so," she pursued, "there were stories in all the Paris papers yesterday morning. French reporters are very gay, I'll say that for them. They have the virtue of exaggerating the worst—it
is
a virtue, you see, because then the truth is always such a relief afterward. Half of them said Armand had a broken neck and was already more than dead, and the other half described me as a big American social criminal, whatever that means. It's an awfully good joke, I think, especially if they meant
socialist
criminal—I'm never sure about French adjectives. You know," she said, looking round for a chair and finding me in it, "there was a French edition of
Marianna Harlow
—it sold rather well. Anyhow it's true socialism is still popular over here, although it's poison at home. —Get up, dear, and let me have that seat, I'm exhausted. Here, I'll show you my picture in the paper..."

There were two photographs, one the familiar portrait with its wavy points of hair fringing her brow, which occasionally appeared on the third page of the New York tabloids—her favorite likeness, taken soon after her marriage to Enoch, displaying what she liked to call her "autobiographical eyes," the lids very thin, the pupils round and wild as thrown dinner-plates, belladonna-big and brimming with notoriety, the lower cheeks with their sweep of hollow too general to pass any more for mere girlish dimples—my mother the in-her-thirties debutante, adventure-broker, scandal-seeker. "That's the one I
gave
them, because I was practically invisible in the other," she maintained, "and it was only fair." She measured out her image complacently between two forefingers. "Look, you'd hardly know there was anyone sitting inside the cab, it's so shadowy. And here, all around, are their motorcycles." It appeared to be a photograph of her arrest: Anneke and I vied to see the dot of my mother's face at the rolled-up window, blurred and light-blinded through the glass, peaked at the chin under a blunt excited snout, and four gendarmes, two severe, the third grinning, the last sucking his lips like the ideaman for a prairie posse, the thicknesses of their thighs slammed against the mass and maze of their trembling motors.

I asked if there had been sirens.

"Ah, no, they don't have any," my mother told me sadly. "But there was plenty of other noise to make up for it. A crowd of adolescents kept yelling 'meurtrière' at me all the way."

The Dutchwoman, bewildered, was still studying the photograph. "They took you to the commissariat like this, in a taxicab?—"

"Oh, no, this wasn't when they arrested me, it was when they let me go. I had to catch the train at Saint-Lazare, you see, and so they gave me a motorcycle escort from the commissariat."

"For only three thousand francs each!"

"That's not why," my mother protested. "It was all their own idea. I believe they think it's the custom in America, for celebrities."

"Celebrities," my governess repeated blankly.

"People of reputation. Oh, not me," said my mother, gratified, "after all they don't know me here. It must have been on my husband's account. And you supposed he had no importance!" she brightly charged. "The truth is his recent work has made him moderately famous—at least in Paris, where they read the papers. You see they managed to get Enoch's name into it too"—she pointed to two long columns, grim with italics—"it's very amusing. They call him the American Saviour who raises the dead without reviving them."

My mother lengthened her neck with a quick little twist and released, upon the margins of her smile, one of those high plumed cries of hers that occasionally passed for an extreme of mirth or token of a private journey into some unbelievably comic and raucous netherworld: it was not laughter, certainly, but rather a Dante of laughter, a guide to ghosts and goblins too funny to contemplate with ease. Out of sorts, the Dutchwoman nevertheless imitated her—it was quite outside of her intention, for her pink face coarsened with displeasure. She stood fawning in the grass, a little bent with the habit of covering scorn, rigid as mahogany and as redly brown, like a newly-set telephone pole bristling with invisible electrical signals. But my mother continued remote—"What a lovely smell," she said, "like fire, or the smell of the sides of horses": it was the pile of hedge cuttings, not sweet but joined by the sweetness of the roses rotted underfoot, and still green-thick and glistening with syrup. My mother's wide and sybaritic Chinese sleeve, hung from the chairback, at last disclosed her arm, gliding out cautiously as a white eel slipping downward; she lowered it until the fingertips barely discoursed in the grass. A crest of little hairs lay beaded with pellets of grey soot. She sat resting and immobile, an exile from the palace of event: she looked all terra cotta, the knuckles and creases grainy; this vaguely-haired pale dirt-fleeced limb dangling languid and long, almost like another neck, upside down, for the face secreted in her palm and the medusa-scalp of her wavering fingers; the hidings of her gape-mouthed sleeve bundled and tumbled with loose-flung folds and skews; every part captive and quiescent, stunned by unknown charms, dipped and spilled, leaning, invaded anyhow by vitality, a liquefaction above all fixed. She sat and was shape: an abstraction, theory, and ideation of shape. And the Dutchwoman also, duplicating her through duplicity—so that side by side, the standing figure ankleted by grass, the seated figure with fingers dabbling in grass, the two of them grew like old vases out of the ground. Their lips were stained; my mother's with illusion, Anneke's (I fancy now) with the opposite—she was intent on getting on my mother's good side, and traded smile for smile and look for look with comfortable cynicism. "There's Enoch," began my mother, listening, but she made no move to rise. "That's Joe and Hank too," she said; "have they gone on like that all day?" "Yes, since morning," my governess replied. And they wove their glances through conflicting breezes toward the house. My mother's rings blazed. "They called me 'meurtrière'—that's jumping to conclusions!" she exclaimed, and reached out to tap me with a jewel-freighted hand—"it means murderess, you know. As if I'd managed to kill the fellow!" she told me in her clearest voice. Still it was not so clear as those other voices, if one chose to hear them, gnawing in the garden—like flocks of pigeons they raised a rustling and could be noticed, or could not. It was by now a matter of will. I could not tell if my mother heard. The laughter was still bright in her remembering face, and the thick breathing of the cut boughs below the hedge seemed to cage her. "I'll go and tell Enoch you're here," I said, starting to run—but no, she stretched and caught me and swept me with her rapt eyes: "No, no, I'll simply sit and wait awhile. It's a smell like horses, or like Are. Someone's trampled the petals, they're brown as grease."