Trust (16 page)

"But I haven't had anything to eat."

"At eleven o'clock?"

"Anneke always takes me out to breakfast."

"Very well, I'll have the concierge bring you something."

"Anneke isn't anywhere," I persisted, "not in the garden and not in the house."

My mother threw down the blouse she had been folding and confronted me. "All right, you may as well know now as later—there's no use your looking for her. She's gone. She's been dismissed."

I grew cold with disbelief.

"Enoch sent her off late last night, bag and baggage. Well, ■don't look so stricken. I knew you'd be affected, but there was nothing else to do. I paid her for a whole extra month, if that makes you feel any better—God knows she didn't deserve it! With the situation as it stands—"

I stumbled fearfully, "You sent Anneke away?"

"We had to, don't you see? Now whatever you do
don't
cry," my mother rasped. Her scorched eyes slid from me. "I can't imagine what made you so attached in the first place. She's a callous type, aside from everything else—didn't the concierge tell me how you screamed to send a chill through the devil himself? She's not responsible."

"But she'll come back?" I said in horror.

"Not on your life! I told you, she's been
dismissed.
And after she left you that way, alone—"

"Oh, I didn't mind, I didn't mind!" I wildly assured her.

"She had no conscience," said my mother; she was implacable. She pointed her foot this way and that, restlessly, almost like a horse at the barrier; her nostrils widened nervously, her tongue flashed at the edge of her mouth and flicked away. She had determined to, withstand all possible remonstrance. "You'll simply have to adjust to the idea," she told me, shifting her hands jaggedly from hair to breast, as though finding her body unfamiliar—"At your age these things are forgotten soon enough."

Still I held my ground. "I have to have Anneke," I maintained, but I was frightened at my mother's exploring instep, so like a hoof, and at the neighing of her harsh breath.

"Eventually you'll stop thinking of her. It's only reasonable," she continued, very well controlled despite these excessive movements: she was a tree assailed by storm, with confidence in nothing—yet her roots clung. "The thing is to get you out of here as fast as we can."

"I won't go."

"You can't possibly stay. It's been decided," my mother answered firmly.

"I don't care if it's been decided."

"Stubborn!" cried my mother. "You'll go and that's the end of it."

I suppressed a wail. "I'm not a refugee."

"What? What's that? What do you think you're saying?" she burst out.

Her voice was terrifying, strung and beaded with black threats. I flung myself on the floor and sobbed without interruption until a dozen of those howls and gasps summoned Enoch; he had run up the stairs and stood panting, clutching the underside of one of his list-crammed ledgers, on the threshold.

"Berserk," announced my mother angrily. "It's not a child, it's a mad-goat."

"Ah, be fair," Enoch said, surveying me.

"Fair!" She gave a fierce laugh. "All right, you predicted it! Say that you predicted exactly this!"

"I predicted exactly this," he repeated obligingly. "What's the matter?"

"She won't go. She's carrying on."

"What on earth for?"

"I'm telling you. She doesn't want to leave. It's pure defiance."

"Oh, defiance," Enoch said, as though he had never before encountered the notion. He came into the room and walked all around me, slowly and with an investigatory air. I felt like a dog there on the bit of rug; Enoch's shoes, thickly creased above the toes, sent out an agile whine close by my ear, and I smelled leather and mud. "My God, aren't you packed yet, Allegra?" he suddenly asked, catching sight of the disheveled bureau.

"I'm putting things together. As if there weren't enough tension—"

"There's no need for any of it. We'll see him and talk to him and then leave."

"And if he follows you?"

Enoch emitted what seemed to be a snort, disdainful and positive. "How's he going to manage that? I drove by his place. From the looks of it he hasn't got a sou."

"But suppose—" My mother's fingers leaped to her lips; a little twitch ticked in her cheek. "Suppose he tries," she finished.

"What, on a bicycle, with a rucksack?"

My mother looked unexpectedly alert. "Does he really have a rucksack?"

"Good God, how should I know? I'm only saying by all appearances he can't have any money."

"That's just what I'm afraid of," my mother said, and wandered off a little. "What that can lead to." She sank down on the edge of the bed—the mattress whushed air like a pneumatic valve—and worriedly jumped her ankle, narrow as a mare's, up and down. "He used to have a rucksack," she vaguely added.

"If you don't want to see him—" Enoch began, and put his ledger beside her on the bed. But he himself did not come near her. "I'll handle it alone if you prefer."

"Then you think it needs 'handling'?" my mother wondered, throwing him her fullest gaze.

"You want to see him," said her husband. He waited, but my mother did not speak; he felt in the pocket of his shirt. "Here's a cable for you from New York. They gave it to me at the station. The car's practically loaded—I had the boys do it this morning," he went on briskly; mechanically he brought up his watch. "I'm putting in the last stack now. You'd better get on with sorting your things."

"All right." She rubbed her rings and hesitated, as though anticipating a djinn. None came—no apparition of any sort. She asked, "How did you happen to be at the station?"

"I sent Hank and Joe on ahead, to get started with the work."

"You put them on the train? They're not driving?"

"I thought the fewer ears in this place this afternoon"—his wave had only a pretense of generality; it swept over me directly—"the better."

"Ah." Gravely my mother took the cablegram from him. "I'm not the only one who's afraid. You think he's too disreputable to deal with safely."

"It's the disruption, not the disreputability, I mind. I'm used to the other. There's nothing so disreputable as a corpse."

"Or so safe. I wish
he
were a corpse," my mother muttered savagely.

"It would simplify," Enoch admitted. Unaccountably their two glances converged on me, difficult and incomprehensibly unspontaneous, as by some exterior agreement of which they were hardly aware. But they did not divulge their queer collusion, even to themselves. "Up till now he's been as good as a corpse," Enoch mildly pointed out.

"That damned Dutchwoman," my mother grumbled. "Obscene troublemaker."

"There's no sense in putting the blame
there,
" advised my stepfather in his practical tone.

"Then whose fault
is
it? I hope you don't think it's mine;
I
never intended to set foot out of Paris—I assure you I wouldn't have come to this ragged place on my own," my mother protested, contorting her mouth. "And in Paris he would never have found us. He would never have known we were there."

"Never?" Enoch repeated. "With the illustrated papers full of the peccadilloes of Allegra Vand? No," he agreed mockingly. "he would never have known you were in Paris."

"Well, he wouldn't have found us so easily," my mother resumed weakly.

"It was an accident that he found you at all. The fact is, he didn't find
you;
he found
her.
"

"Her?" murmured my mother irresolutely, although it was plain she understood him exactly. "You don't seriously mean Anneke?"

"Anneke," Enoch reiterated. "Precisely Anneke."

"It wasn't Anneke he was interested in." Apprehensively my mother watched her husband indulge in one of his leisurely dictatorial shrugs. "Well, you don't think he would bother with her for her own sake? His taste used to be better than that!" she asserted after a moment. "He knew she was the child's governess—he took up with her only to get near us," my mother said with a soft and wavering emphasis.

"Just as you please then." Enoch's tumid cheeks drew his under-eyes down as though by concealed weights; it made his face look sharper than it was, and older. "But it isn't in character for him to have schemes, you know."

"You're not excusing him!" my mother exclaimed.

"I only say that he's too unstable to be relied on."

"No, I wouldn't rely on him," my mother said coldly.

"He never
was
one of the schemers," Enoch declared. "It was the feel of it he cared for, not the dialectics, do you remember? I used to think it awfully ignoble of him. He would always go off on his own hook—he had that sort of flair. When everyone else was bankrupt he could always think of things to do on the spur of the moment. He knew how to make them turn around in those days!" he reflected serenely.

"I don't remember," my mother replied, without the note of truth.

But Enoch seemed not to expect truth just then. "He wasn't consistent. He had the imagination of disaster."

"That's just a phrase," my mother said scornfully.

"But you see the schemers have it to their credit that they're consistent. They can be trusted, in their own terms. I mean the stages in their campaigns can be anticipated—at least one can rely on there
being
stages. It's possible to comprehend and distinguish their aims. The point is they have motives," he concluded.

My mother almost sneered. "And
he
doesn't have motives? I'd like to believe that! If he didn't have motives he wouldn't be coming here today," she stated, springing up from the bed.

"All right, but there's a difference."

"I don't see any difference. He's coming for a purpose."

"Oh, I'm certain of it."

"Then how can you say he's not a schemer?" said my mother, exasperated.

"Because a schemer begins with motives, and his motives produce a situation. But with him, it's the situation that produces the motive—"

"How I hate when you talk abstractions!" my mother wailed. "I don't know what you're saying, not a single word."

Enoch smiled slightly. "If you like I'll put it ... nakedly. Take that as a pun if you want—he saw this girl and he made up to her. Nothing more. It was a question of one night's need."

My mother flushed, but not with delicacy. Her nose turned dangerously rosy, pinched by anger. "He's, not so cheap as all that!"

"Then say he's not. Say it's she who is. But it wasn't an intrigue, I'll swear to that. He had no more idea, to begin with, of her being in your employ than the man in the moon. It wasn't a case of machination-—does that distress you?" he asked, but it was rhetoric merely; he went straight on, still with his small, hinting, ironic smile. "He didn't invite her to his room simply in order to pick up news, that's clear!"

"Nevertheless he picked up quite a bit."

"I don't deny it. He's an opportunist. More than that, he's an improviser—that's the main thing. He plays by ear, according to whom he finds next to him in bed on any given morning."

"Ah, don't." It was unmistakably a moan. She came slowly round, sick with distaste, visibly detaching herself from his words. Her glance fell on me and automatically stiffened—"How can you, with the child listening," she developed it, but she was not thinking of me and had seized on my presence there as she would that moment have grasped for any convention or piece of etiquette. Nothing tempers suffering so much as ritual, and it was altogether according to some ceremonial of purity that she rubbed her knuckles along her lip-line, frowning at her husband.

"That's only by way of illustration," Enoch pursued, unwilling to admit to any transgression: he gave me a long, elaborate look, as though I were a set of sums. Sprawled there on the square of carpet I felt transparent, easily susceptible of solution. "All I mean to say is that he doesn't dream things up—not out of the air, anyway. He wakes up into a situation, and the situation dictates the motive: it's what I've already described. He could have, right now, any number of possible intentions toward you."

She echoed, unconvinced, "Any number?"

"He's not singleminded, if you follow me."

"He's a crook," my mother said flatly.

"Oh, well. For that matter—" Enoch renewed his clinical, almost scholarly posture; his head strained forward after some dangling omniscient lens, telescopic: his manner brought all far moons near. "None of us is singleminded," he stated, peering for confirmation through his invisible hanging glass as though he had my mother's agitation quite in perspective.

She succumbed to a startled diminutive shudder, quick as a blink. "You're not thinking of giving in!" she cried.

"How can we talk of giving in till we know what he wants?" he said reasonably.

"Whatever he wants he won't get it."

"He may want one thing now, and another thing later," Enoch observed.

"I don't see," said my mother, going to her bureau. "He can't want anything but money."

"It's what he wants it
for
that counts. That's the danger. It's what I say, he's not consistent."

"It doesn't matter—he won't get it in any case."

"Not in any case," Enoch experimentally repeated. "And if he tells you he's starving?"

My mother's arms, thrust in the drawers, whipped derisively through a foam of silk. "Let him starve!"

"Ah, the Christian temperament," he noted.

"I don't care. He won't get a penny out of me."

"Not as mere largess, no."

"Not as mere anything," she retorted. "It's my habit to sympathize with organized charities only. On that principle you don't, get taken in."

"Oh, I agree the fellow's disorganized." He gave a mournful little laugh. "I suppose it's his nature."

"Never mind his nature," my mother bit off.

"Still, it's not a question of sympathy."

She swooped up a pile of underwear and tossed it into an open valise waiting in the corner. "If I don't give alms out of sympathy I don't give it at all."

"Then out of the eleventh commandment," he suggested.

She raised her wrists suspiciously. "What's that?"