Trust (34 page)

By William's sanity I meant, I suppose, his detachment, his aloof and cautious respectability, and even, in a way, his ordinariness. It was William's auspicious lacks, his being without any of the gildings of a seer, that gave him his solidity. He had an excellent intelligence; his son, who had inherited it, was, if nothing else, its genetic proof. But his sensibility was more thorough than imaginative, and this of course was what made him useful and kept him intact. Without ever intending it, William had gained a certain limited fame, even beyond that which the coveted obscurity of his caste unavoidably brought on him. This fame was something more and something less than the simple "fame" of old family: it was reputation, and it threw over him a celebrity radiating not from who he was but from what he had done, though plainly he could not have done what he had done had he not been what he was. It was often enough made patent to me that I could not be expected to understand this hushed machinery of William's "clubs" and William's "classmates," who were usually not law classmates at all, but ex-boys from Dr. Peabody's school, or simply men of a particular breed, accent, and cut of nose, immediately acceptable and "right." I could not be expected to understand this because my grandfather was dead and because I had no uncles and because, as my mother pointed out, I had not grown up in sight of it—she meant to say, but did not, that I had no "instincts" (which the clubs and the classmates in reality were) because I had no father, or at least not the father my grandfather had arranged for me. But even without such instincts and near examples for these great but silent workings, I felt their vast motions, and knew that what William had done, without spectacle or outcry, was mountainous, thick, purposeful, immense, and had nothing to do with courts. For William, it appeared, never went to court: his whole power was struck just in that distance from trials and judges and newspapers, which he left to the lesser firms, the three-partner sort, energetic and aspiring, composed of an Irishman and a pair of Russian Jews. Without spectacle and without courts—but I knew what he had done: he had saved a railroad from the common wolves, he had effected the merger of two gigantic banks, he had consolidated and cleft and amalgamated and dispersed fabled monoliths—and all of it durably, quietly, without spectacle, without courts, without clamor, all of it murmurrous, and in aspect somehow luxurious and even benign.

William had, then, on this account, accumulated a moderate renown—accumulated, because it came to him bit by bit; he would turn up in a footnote in, say, the
Vanderbilt Law Review,
or his name would emerge, in passing, in a long article entitled "The Secret Royalty Behind American Capital" in
Business Week,
and now and then he would actually be mentioned in an undergraduate class in journalism as one too fastidious to allow
Fortune's
interviewers to exploit him. Very gradually his reputation had penetrated the academies of law: they did not exactly call him a lawyer's lawyer, a term they jealously reserved for one another, but they showed their awe by inviting him, spring and fall, to this Forum and that Assembly. I had seen for myself in the
Times
how he had declared Harold Laski to be a marxist scoundrel and a nationalizing thief (this was at a Books for the Bar meeting at the Law Center), which, however, expecting no better, he hardly minded—the real affront being that the fellow had
exaggerated
in his letters, and pulled the wool even over shrewd old Holmes' eyes by telling funny anecdotes that could never have happened at all. —For all these reasons William was transmuted for me into a Personage, unlike Enoch, whom my mother liked sometimes to call Nobody's Boy, although his name had already carried farther than her first husband's. The difference was that William
acted
like a Personage; he could not help it, he was hardly aware of it—it was only that rectitude sat on his shoulders all darkly visible, like a lidless bird on a bust. It was for the sake not of his reputation but of his rectitude that I had need of him, though here again he might not have had the former had he not been known for the latter. If asked, he would answer. His answer would be unambiguous, non-allegorical, serviceable—not a philosopher's but a lawyer's view, open to an admittedly faceted but solvable actuality. If he invoked at all, it would be merely a precedent, and not the gods. I had this confidence in William: he would not lie to me about Gustave Nicholas Tilbeck.

He would not lie to me, William, my not-father, though he had lied to his son, presumably on the principle that it is by their ignorance of the devil we can be certain of the elect. That William himself might be barred from salvation as a consequence of this knightly act—was it not to conceal from his son the folly of my mother's unseemly obligations that he had denied the existence, the very possibility, of a Tilbeck?—he had no doubt considered worthy of the risk. But there was no necessity to close the door of heaven on my account; I was the devil's own seed and, alien and odd as it might sound, Tilbeck's very daughter. No lack of devil-knowledge could turn away that predestined bleakness; no answer William withheld could erase that unpromising daughtership. If asked, William would reply.

So I resolved to ask: and went to see him the next afternoon. I went, in fact, to his office, without telephoning beforehand—I was afraid, I suppose, that he might dodge any appointment that looked like an appeal. I descended (it
was
a descent, somehow, under a bronze September sun that stood between the angles of those greyish towers like a weighty funeral urn, menacingly brilliant, too acutely polished for the eye to endure, in which the scorched limbs of antique great undreamed-of lizards lay)—I descended into Wall Street in an orange taxi, hired—bribed—on Main Street in New Rochelle earlier that day. For my first thought had been northward to Westchester and the lawn-quickened lands where pretense-Tudor houses had their seats, among them William's house in swan-girt Scarsdale. For my mother and even for me that dale was scarred indeed: it was the house my grandfather and my would-be grandfather, the two heads-together, rejoicing fathers of the newlyweds, William and my mother, had built in joint celebration of the pairing of their prosperous lines, and in which the young attorney and his bride had officially lived, without the comfort of quarrels, until their divorce. It was the house my mother, who had already begun her novel and her travels, had had to persuade William to keep, though it embarrassed him by making the settlement look ungentlemanly. He kept it: my mother, scorning the green-treed lanes of Scarsdale, declared herself urban, and worse, cosmopolitan, and promptly went off to Moscow for a youth rally against the cosmopolitan bourgeoisie. So he kept it, poor practical William, and let his new wife redesign the interior, and replace her predecessor's triangular hassocks and Ugandan salad-implements and black sofas and (especially) her light-violet bedstead with soft gold, and soft blue, and incorruptible ochre, and vases, vases, vases everywhere all radiant with flowers. (My mother had hated gardening.) This was the house I had never seen and knew everything about: how my grandfather had insisted on a ball-room, how my would-be grandfather (William's father, the editor of the civic documents of an obscure ancestral Hudson Valley alderman, the author of "Autumn Gleanings," a book of spiritual verses, who three times had gone tiger-hunting and had sold his little railroad-spur out of boredom with trains) had insisted on an elevator, and how prudent William had vetoed both. In this somehow familiar house, this hearsay house, I had cautiously placed the plan of my unfamiliar scene—William apprehended in the act of presiding over his breakfast egg, and his wife, whom in vain I tried to banish from my construction, impersonally beside him, taking my measure with the rule of her thoughtfully-apportioned, slow, penetrating, hostile smile below a slim fair nose as tight-pored and youthful as a college-girl's. Upon this astonished and unprepared William I meant to force the indecent whole of what was being done to me—how in two days' time the "arrangements" (whatever they were—
he
knew, having himself brought them into being) would fructify, and the long-suppressed daughtership begin in all its legendary horror. What he would be obliged to answer me my diffident imagination had so far failed to supply: I merely saw myself in a tall-backed chair at the round breakfast-table, a cloth-covered boulder made of inlaid teak with four carved Sphinx-like paws opened in sinister fashion upon the carpet, and little hinged gates which at a touch could snap into vertically to make a fence all around the edge. It had been ordered for the captain's cabin of an immense and palatial steamship (hence the barrier, the captain's own invention, to keep the dinner plates from sliding off when the Pacific frowned), but the captain had suddenly died before it could come aboard, and my grandfather on his mourning-tour (undertaken to console him for the loss of his wife, my grandmother Huntingdon, who, older than himself, had fevered and withered), just then passing through Jakarta, where he came upon the table standing in a woodyard, about to be crated, bought it and sent it on to Scarsdale for his daughter's house. So particular a gift was it that it was in fact the only furniture which had gone unreplaced: my mother had broken the sole of her Shoe with the kick of disgust she gave it when it came, all foreignly labeled and stamped and smelling of the freighter's dank hold, and, she assured me, the mark of her disapproval was there yet, a gash on one of the hideous stretched paws; but afterward it altogether ravished William's new wife, who took it to her heart as her own, and Joked that with its sides up it would do nicely for a crib. How my mother had scowled when William told her this, William who was still so innocent in his contentment that he confided it to his newly-become client! Not out of any pique of jealousy did she scowl, but rather because this was the very joke the giver, her father, had made, and she had thought it a poor joke the first time—a table for a crib! (and she not married three weeks, and anyhow a believer in Margaret Sanger)—when, tossing a man-to-man wink at his son-in-law, my grandfather had explained "To keep the babe from slipping down," and then, "though what's to keep it from slipping
out
in nine months' time I don't know"—a statement which had reddened William's two cheeks so thoroughly that it seemed they never again reversed their color. Still, my would-be grandfather had laughed at it—whether out of charity for my mother's chagrin or perhaps simply to affirm his shy son's virility was not apparent: the tiger-hunter in him clashed with the Christian poetaster.

At this breakfast-table, then, which was my birthright though lightfingered from me before my birth and given instead to the children of William's second wife so that at it daily they all might eat their mess of breakfast-pottage, I expected to confront William with my grievances, though what I was after I hardly knew myself. Perhaps it was only the opportunity to put the horrendous question: why? and why now? But when I thought how the thing would be—the children ranged all around, Cletis in her pinafore, and Jack, and Willy Cornelius, and Nanette who as Sir Toby Belch had won the school prize, and on the far side, behind the rose-vase, William's wife with her round clear forehead tilted upward to observe the descent upon the stair of the eldest son of the house, languid but sharp, tying his tie with immaculate fingers and parrying his mother's unspoken disapproval with the unspoken dicta of the law school dormitories; when I imagined them all there together in this way, and myself a stranger in that place where I was to have been bom but was not, and William as paterfamilias and administrator of all their fates but not of mine, and his wife with the delta-crease of suspicion now vivid in her tall brow turning from her eldest son to accuse the blue-bells and pansies at her plate, and, worse, the son himself trying on the shut-up smile of an omniscient satirist, avoiding any probable tangency of our eyes by a gaze driven straight across the legendary table into the strawberry-spot on Cletis' bib—oh, when I day-dreamed them all, how inviolable they seemed! how like a guilty dauphin I felt, leaping out of exile to usurp!—and the train-wheels rattled with a private confusion in my teeth, and I dared not go.

I dared not go, and in the heat of a rush of cowardice came out dazed upon an empty platform. There was no sign to tell the name of the place. The train left me behind without caring, though angry somehow. Momentarily it stamped like a wrathful fist on a lectern, then swept away. I watched it for a time, charging northward along a rusted track, as though out to civilize some remote and savage village with the example of its faintly-swaying silver sides, carrying its cars of pews filled with penitents, its conductors walking up and down and waving their punches like Sunday-school directors, ministering to each little orange ticket with the sobriety of missionaries attending to certificates of baptism. But in all the fury of my stupid dash I had forgotten to take my ticket: it was still in the crack of the seat in front, where the conductor had tucked it, and where I had conscientiously been reading and re-reading it, all along its margins: New York to Scarsdale, Scarsdale to New York, One Round Trip. It was a kind of liturgy, and a minute afterward, standing on that unpeopled platform at eight o'clock in the morning at some nameless spot of which I knew nothing except that the divine order had laid it between New York and Scarsdale, between, that is to say, major and minor, torrent and rivulet, William-as-lawyer and William-as-father, I suddenly saw myself for what the train thought me, a sort of heretic, a kind of outcast, too paganly frail of spirit to be worthy of a Christian breakfast. It made me sigh and count the money in my purse and the people on the other side. There—on the other side—they were bunched together under the plank of roof as though it rained; but the sun already blazed. It came up between us, that impartial orb, motionless above the central tracks, dividing northbound from southbound with a leaded glare, resting and panting. Under their eave the nomad crowd stared back at me with what insolent righteousness I could conjecture—they were a tribe sure of their destination, while just then the New York train slid in like a long adroit tongue to vindicate their certainty and lick the platform dry. It was empty there, and empty here, and I climbed the steps to read a street-sign printed Huguenot. So I supposed it was New Rochelle, and, glad enough not to find myself in Larchmont or White Plains or other place of that sort, I walked out to see the town.