Trust (21 page)

He was a secret from me. And in his letter he had written "child."

So I supposed he had come for me—for a surprise; I really supposed he was a salesman of children's books, and that my mother (who could be indulgent when it suited her) believed my behavior on the homeward ship would be tolerable only if I were soundly beguiled. And the private visitor, a confident salesman, laughed, because despite his assertion the bargain was all on his side—what, in that part of the world, at that instant of history, could be rarer than a child's book in English? But they had known him before; that much, from the quality of their unfathomable talk, was plain. Perhaps they had even turned him away once or twice—I hadn't needed books when Anneke had let me have my shells—and now his price, out of malice, was even higher. His price, it seemed, was too high.

"God damn you," my mother flung out suddenly.

His price was sinister. And I did not care for books just then; I coveted his bicycle, and thought, if only they would let the books go and bargain fearlessly for the bicycle, how I would mount it and ride it home to America, round and round the ship's deck, spinning more clamorously than the gulls, and bluer than the sea. But while I was musing into the far-down garden, the little offending muscle once more twinged; and to relieve it I stopped short and arched back to stretch away the cramp, with the rain's slant salting my eyelashes: and, sloth-like, upside down, the big wide curtain-winged square of my mother's window, and inside it her room reversed—the ceiling was the floor, and the ceiling-lights a pool flashing in the middle of the floor, and the armchair all gone. But the black frame of the bureau-mirror seemed suspended all by itself, without a top or a bottom, like the oval mouth of one of those magic mirrors which can speak out who is the fairest of us all. The answer, just then, appeared in the form of a face, which marvelously emerged, just as you would expect of a magic mirror, out of a packet of clouds showing exactly the configuration of the clouds over the garden. The fact that the mouth in this face was situated a nice distance above the nose hardly made the sight less wonderful. I rose to my haunches to persuade it to come right, and recognized in the reassortment of these features the reflected portrait of my stepfather. It was a serious and deeply realistic study, not in the least astonishing: the mirror with justice had conjured the fairest of them all. It was not that his long sallow chin, already growing jowly, the blade-high nose-bridge, that triangular forehead veering back in a style my mother called Canaanitic, and all the other particularities of margins and pockets which, in spite of so many angles, suggested (for the future) bulk, even portliness—not that these marked him out for such a compliment. This wasn't the sort of fairness the mirror, taking the wizard's privilege of ambiguity, meant. If it had been merely Enoch's face that had swum up out of chaos, it would hardly have mattered, to the mirror or the moment. But it was not simply Enoch's face: it was Enoch's look. It was the dispassionate and judicious look of a man intimate with passion and injudiciousness, and all the more prepared against them. He was fair. Nothing could be clearer in his look than his unshakable. unbreakable fairness. It almost made me pity whoever might have been the object of it. "Allegra," I watched him say—for an instant his head ducked away, then reappeared; he had taken a short turn and come back to the spot where the mirror unerringly transmitted him, down to the shoulders, like a library-bust—"Never mind that, Allegra," he commanded her fury. But the words were derived from the air, and although I saw his mouth flicker, I might have been watching a crude early piece of sound-film, not quite synchronized. in which the actor has not yet discarded the rule of the broad and trustworthy gesture. Whoever it was he stared at—he
wax
staring—could not have escaped the full fanatical sense of that determined unfanaticism. Oh, he would be fair!—even I could read that, in spite of the light-splinters that now and then spoiled the portrait in the mirror. "Didn't I say what he was after? Didn't I know it?" my mother went on, sending out her quick beratements: but Enoch's eye did not waver.

"Allegra," he said again, and stopped, as though that were enough.

But for the private visitor it was not enough. The private visitor plainly valued expansion and reiteration. "I'm not 'after' anything, Mrs. Vand—except what you're after yourself. You can't call
that
villainous!"

"The soul of the noble motive," my mother murmured.

"Well, why not? Only nowadays," the private visitor amiably developed, "you can't get somebody to vanish by mere intention. I mean you can't simply yell abracadabra and have it happen. Try it and see." The face in the looking-glass only very slightly frowned at this—the frown of an efficient administrator who discovers his underlings in the act of folding paper airplanes. But it was without effect. "Listen," began the private visitor experimentally—"Abracadabra. I've said it. You see? Nothing. I'm still here. It isn't as easy as- all that, Mrs. Vand! It isn't in accord with modern business practise. In today's market you have to secure your intention."

"Oh, get on with it," Enoch said. "Let's finish it up."

"Yes, let's finish it up," my mother joined in. "There's no point in dragging on this way, when the fact is I have all the security I need."

"I know, Mrs. Vand, I know! But it's not a finish I have in mind, it's really only a beginning, don't you see? Because I understand you exactly, Mrs. Vand—oh, trust me to understand you! You take care of your interests, isn't that right? You watch out for them."

"If I didn't they wouldn't have stayed so unsoiled."

"
Are
they"—he gave a doubtful little crooning chuckle at the word—"unsoiled?"

"Perfectly. It's how I intend to keep them."

"I was confident you would. It's the reason I came. —Only you make them sound terribly psychological!"

"I make them sound what they are. My interests," affirmed my mother, "are identical with my wishes." But this gaudy bloom of a notion, left over from her argument, with my stepfather, of hours before, fell from her stale and shrivelled; it would not yield twice in a day, and had all the juicelessness of a quip forced to make do as a credo, decked out above its station and beyond its powers. The stare the mirror gravely emanated must have met and deflected her bravado: as quickly as possible she amended it. "Oh, more than that even!" she put out—"you'll find my wishes identical with my intention," she explained, as though this would set the matter straight, "and as far as
that's
concerned—well! My intention is—absolutely—my security."

"But the matter, encouraged by her pushing hopeful tone, had turned crookeder than ever. It was too ludicrous—Enoch's view, almost fiercely detached, showed just how ludicrous it was. His left eyelid drooped—it was an old weakness, the consequence of the barest touch of strabismus—and in contrast to it the other eye seemed more than humanly open, a whole wide observing sky only briefly and accidentally limited by an aperture. It gave him—it was not inoffensive—the disinterest of an ideal judge taking in horrendous testimony. Meanwhile the other's laughter rammed like a shock wave—"Put 'security' in the plural and you have it!" The private visitor opportunely whooped. "Maybe I'd care about psychological interest if it
accrued
—which is where stocks and bonds have all the advantage!" He submitted to being wrung out by his joke and even allowed it to suck his breath away; he did not appear to mind that Enoch's half-shut scanning marked it all out, down to the last whimsical tremor, as evidence.

"Have we come to it then?" said Enoch.

"Come to what?"

"The point of your being here. I can't wait all day."

"Oh, you mean my proposal," the private visitor swallowed it up, in a voice faintly cracked from rubbing his joke in his throat.

"Do you
have
a proposal? I thought you didn't bother with 'em," my mother offered.

"All right, call it a proposition then—if you're thinking of poor Annie! But don't let's hurry, I have all the time in the world. If I didn't have the time I wouldn't be here. Blame yourself for it—it's only because you sent her packing that I've
got
the time. A liaison, after all—that's your word y'know, not mine—but anyway they're terribly occupying, did you ever happen to notice that?"

"No," my mother said shortly.

"And with your good memory!"

Her cry fell softly, softly against him. It had something of his laughter in it, not so much an echo as the laughter itself turned inside out and showing its hasty ugly seams. She was all at once subdued. "God damn," she gave out, but it was too vague to intend efficacy; it was the merest wisp of a sigh, an exhalation voiced for want of something less striking than silence. She was, anyway, no good at conventional imprecation—it might well have been the legacy of William's stiff proprieties. Still, looking into herself for a glimmer of savagery, she tried hard: "Damn you, Nick, God
damn
you" sprang from her once more, and whether the malediction required the usual three chantings to set it going, or whether she had at last, by an utterance of perfect hatred, unwittingly charged and unleashed its magic, her quiet deep curse nevertheless brought forth a marvel. I started at her achievement—she had blotted out the mirror. It hung empty, filling up slowly with the impalpable images of clouds—the glass turned grey, breathed-over. Enoch was gone. It was as though, by an unspeakable error of the spoken, she had misdirected her damnation and eradicated her husband, when it was the other man who had challenged her to make him disappear.

But the other man was still there.

He said: "I'm interested in that, the idea of damnation"—it was easy to suppose that here he smiled—"
my
damnation, not no-one-in-particular's," and out of the smooth dim murmur of his pleasure I just then lucidly took the truth. It was brilliantly clear to me, all at once, whom he had come for.
Why
did not matter, for some reason: I could not divine what he wanted; I did not comprehend it until years afterward, when William told it to me one strange evening on Wall Street; but I knew whom he had come for, for whose sake he spread his legs invisible to me on the bed in my mother's room, booming out his subtle commands, weaving mockeries, inventing new notes for laughter, supplanting Enoch with a big untamed authority. He was not, at any rate, the peddler my ingenuity had churned up out of the garden—not a peddler of books or bicycles or anything. My mother's first "God damn" had done away with whatever might be made of the observed facts; her second had obliterated even theories. I was wrong, wrong—gently and with a dismayed fist I beat my concrete floor. He had not come for me. He had not come for Enoch. He had not come for my mother. He had not come for corpses. He had not even come for Anneke, although now and then it almost seemed he was there to fetch her back to nurse him through perhaps another night's perplexing illness. —Oh, he had not come for any of us. The advantage, whatever it was, was all his. He had simply come for himself.

He said: "In case I
am
damned 111 let you know what the road to hell is really paved with—it won't be with intentions, believe me!—I seem to see a long highway surfaced with checks"—now it was merely a snicker, quick and short, that waited on his vision—"miles and
miles
of pink checks—"

"Then we've come to it," said Enoch. Now only the clouds were the fairest of them all—dirty bags of wetwash wringing out their corners: the mirror had given up its witness, and since seeing was no help I embraced my head between my knees in a circle of self-wondering and listened. It was quite as though the trial were over, and the moment for sentencing had come. Enoch could be as vindictive as he felt like being now, as long as he kept to the law; and the law, from his changed voice, harsh, partisan, strict, was a bitter one. "If that's what you've been thinking of why didn't you come before?"

"Before? When before? You mean before Annie?"

"Years before."

"It's a pity I didn't. Blame it on the war."

"Yes, blame it on the war," my mother mocked him.

"But actually it wasn't the war," he said, almost apologetic. "I really have no complaints about the war. In my position it doesn't matter, war or peace—"

And Enoch: "In your position? What is your position?"

"Well, I don't see the point in taking sides, you know. I don't care about countries," he told them, and thinking of the colored shred that badged his wheel I marveled at his lie—who but the profoundest patriot would travel always with a flag?

But my mother insisted, "What is your position?"

"I am a piano-player, Mrs. Vand," he said in a dark voice. "I mean by that I'm more of an international person. It's in the nature of playing the piano not to care about countries."

"Chopin didn't mind being a Pole," my mother retorted.

"You remember about that, hah? But I don't play him any more. Nowadays it's only the American things that go over. I always have to do 'Rhapsody in Blue'—they don't hire you if you can't do 'Rhapsody in Blue,' they won't even audition you. But I told you you had a good memory, Mrs. Vand!—You remember that hall off Trafalgar Square, somebody'd let in the goons, and I got to the black keys—they'd ripped out half the white ones—just when the constabulary popped in, and instead of a riot they found the Chopin Freed Poland Society? They couldn't take in a single man, not with the Polonaise going—it had all the signs of Polish respectability—what a noise! My God, you couldn't do a thing like that with 'Rhapsody in Blue'; it just isn't possible!" He spoke like a man hinting at a delightful reminiscence common to all the company: he does not need to give the whole story, even a small grimace is enough, for they have all been there together, and together have lived the anecdote through in all its hilarious rococo (the past is always rococo) rich little quaint little details, bumps, and crevices; and together they are now all expected to roar at each suggestively funny word. But no happily remembering sound came from my mother, although it was. certainly, just the sort of adventure she liked best, with its incitements, eludings, dupings of the police (of whatever country), and its titillating threats of arrest; so I could easily believe she had been a part of such an imbroglio, and waited to hear her remark on it.