Trust (36 page)

"
Booker T. Washington!
Oh come on, now you're carrying it too far. You can't claim
him.
"

"You ever hear of Julius Caesar?" he demanded in easy rebuttal. "This here old-time king?"

"Him too?"

The pupils of his eyes—I now examined them for the first time—were a deep red, but the irises were faint and milky and impressed the mirror so little that it scarcely gave them back. "You heard of Tommy Dorsey, right? The band leader?" he swept on, with a pink blink.

"All
right,
" I asserted readily enough. "But Booker T. Washing—"

"Listen," he said, reaching out an arm (we had arrived) to open the door nearest me, "I got a list, nobody's found me wrong
yet.
"

So I decided not to find him wrong, either: and took him for a philosopher for whom the world is cleft, like the devil's hoof, in two. His Yang and Yin were no more unreasonable than anyone's. Where my mother saw the powerful and the inconsequential, William the ordained and the immortal, Enoch the guilty and the murdered, and all the rest of the world parochial versions of cowboys and Indians,
he
apprehended albinos and the obscurely diseased. It was an opposition—whiteness beyond imagining, a transparency of the flesh that hid not a single capillary, an openness of the soul's entelechy; and, against this, inconceivable deformity both bulbous and agonizingly minute, scales, monstrous flaking rot, hideous scum—an opposition no madder than the truth. I put him down for a visionary and began counting out dollars.

"You going to see somebody in one of them buildings there? I knew this stockbroker, see, commuted down from Mount Vernon—"

"That one."

Double glass doors gleamed like slivers of mica in the base of a concrete mountain.

"
—he
got dysentery from a water cooler in a building right around here, over on Broad Street. Worst water in the world, this district."

But this warning of his (I supposed it to be a warning) stopped short. I held out the bills; attentively he accepted them; he put them pleasurably to his lips as though I had handed him a nosegay; and, uncannily, perhaps out of pure suggestibility, produced a modest but unmistakable sneeze.

"Bless you," I said sympathetically. "You'd better watch that. Sounds like pellagra."

Thereupon—but with gravity—he smiled. "Yeah, you're pulling my leg." Not merely the smile, but its sober acquittal, seemed at once unfortunate. A formulator of any sort—by which I mean a system-maker—ought never to smile at a conclusion drawn from his system, lest we think him a contradictory fool, whereas he is only being superior and tolerant; while to smile gravely is to affirm the worst. It is as though the ghost of that old Greek Anaximander, confronting his sole surviving sentence, were to say, "Yes, but that is not what I
meant.
What I really meant is in the part that is missing." All in a moment, blasted at a stroke by the flash of this taxi-driver's good strong teeth, Yang and Yin collapsed, the ideal image of contrasting pairs of essentials collapsed. Albinism and disease, whiteness and impurity—the two pillars crumbled, and the world they supported rolled away like a severed head. An elegiac solemnity informed but denied his unceasing smile: "You can't kid me. Pellagra, they only got that in the
South.
"

His method—alas—had the occasional flaw of ordinary seeing.

In this fashion I came at last to William's office, where, to my uninstructed surprise, an engagement party was under way.

The party was for William's son.

"We've got gin and scotch and rye," said the girl at the desk. "The ginger ale's all gone. So are the paper cups. We barely had enough to go around, and now there's not one left. I watched
mine
like a hawk, but anyhow I ended up with somebody else's—look, what a
vile
shade"—she held it up to show the broad violet crescent of lipstick at the rim. "See? It must be one of the girls from the steno pool. I mean only a cow would wear a shade like that. A purple cow." She laughed, and, leaning over, spied my utensil. "A dipper! Hey, that's bright! Who sent you after it?"

"Nobody," I said. "I just came in."

"Mister Nobody and his brother. Anyhow it's just what we need around here. I
hate
these paper things—it's like drinking from a deed, you know? With sealing wax on it!" She snatched up the dipper and filled it from one of the clutter of bottles on the desk—there were signs from the abundance of fifths and quarts and forlornly soaked pretzels that it had been designated for a bar. Behind the desk an empty tray lay upside down on a chair, with a man's hat on top of it. "Hey, do you have to be a lumberjack to work this thing?"—she had the long handle by its end, and was sweeping the big square spoon up to her lips: but through some error of balance the cup unexpectedly rolled over and spilled. "Now I've done it. There goes somebody's perfectly good whiskey."

"There goes somebody's perfectly good hat," I amended. A swimming puddle filled the dip in the crown.

"Flora Fedora," said the girl, "they used to call me in them thar days. Well, oops. It'll smell better than hair oil, look at it that way. Hey, if you just came in how did you know we were all out of cups?"

"As a matter of fact I didn't know you were all
in
them," I could not resist saying, looking around, but it was a shot too high for her. "You can keep it."

"Keep what?"

"The dipper. It's brand new. You can have it for a present. You can't ever get lost with it because it keeps pointing to the North Star."

"Look, are you one of these cruds from Miss Putrid's?"

It was my turn for bafflement.

"That
school,
" she explained.

"No, I've come on business."

This made her hesitate. "I think we're closed."

"Then you're not the regular receptionist?" I inquired, and did not trouble to cover the gibe.

"An
hour
ago she left, old Prisshead.
Hates
office parties. Hey, I've got the hang of it!" Out went the length of the handle, gripped by a row of knuckles; up rode the cup. She drained it with aplomb. "I'm in filing. I could say you're here," she told me doubtfully, "only it wouldn't do any good."

"There's no one to say it to?"

"Well, they're
around,
but it's sort of a celebration. I mean they've announced it already and the whole staff's applauded and all of that—" She studied me speculatively. "Some of the lawyers, the young ones, thought up the idea and then we all had to chip in fifty cents. It matters to
them
because he might get to be their boss, like a sort of partner, but if you ask me it's pretty silly. He didn't even
graduate
yet."

Plainly she was speaking of William's son.

"Do you like her?" she suddenly asked.

"Who?"

"His
girl.
The one he just got engaged to."

I faltered, "I haven't met her."

"Lucky you, what a crud. Came down here this afternoon with this whole pack of snots from Miss Putrid's—you know what that place
is?
A
finishing
school, for God's sake! Pack of putrid snots,
I'd
finished them for free."

"Maybe you'd better say I'm here."

She hoisted the dipper over her shoulder like a rifle and saluted obligingly. "Okay. I'll tell them," and began pacing off. But in a moment she had to dart back: "What am I supposed to say?"

"That there's someone here."

"No, I mean what am I supposed to
say?
Miss What?" She plucked a squat flask from the cluster on the desk and clutched it in her armpit, and despite the encumbrances of bottle and dipper, which made her seem as many-armed as Vishnu, all at once turned aggressively businesslike: "I didn't catch the name," said she, a rather too positive imitation of a movie secretary. "Miss Who?"

"I didn't give it," I said, and gave it.

"Wow!" said she.

"Go ahead," I urged.

"But she stood without moving and whistled instead. "You're not the
daughter?
"

"No," I said.

She had taken me, in the usual way, for Nanette.

"Go ahead," I repeated, with a sigh. "It's only a case of mistaken identity."

"Niece?" she insisted.

"No."

She stared. "But he's the Partner!"

"Right," said I. "That's the one I want to see."

"You don't expect me to go right
up
to him? I don't even know what he looks like!" She took furtive steps away. "I told you," she reproved me, "I'm in
filing.
" I had begun, she implied, with the wrong end of the hierarchy: a thing clearly as offensive as speaking deferentially to a servant in an English novel. The girl had a sense of fitness. She had, moreover, a sense of "place," and—shifting her accoutrements for comfort, the dipper hooked around her neck, the bottle grasped in front of her with both hands—she fled to occupy it.

Left to myself and unattended, I went peering after William on my own, but with a certain caution. Plainly I had turned up at the worst possible moment—a moment which, though vastly and ostensibly public (there might have been eighty or ninety guests), was nevertheless a private occasion. An engagement party, it did not matter who sponsored it, had the odor of a family event, an I believed that the sight of me, without warning, even in such a crush, could do no less than nettle William. Embarrassment and a sort of angry shame would redden him acutely. In this kind of situation I could expect nothing of him: he wouldn't be likely to tell me, without resorting to the coarseness of uttering it, that I had not been invited and had no business being there. He was severely conscious of protocol, but on my mother's account, as always, he would hold his reluctant peace. Under any condition he would have been sorry to receive me, but in the hour of his son's engagement I supposed he would be positively unwilling. He would regard me not so much as an intruder as a violator. It was an ugly notion—myself coming in the guise of an aggressor to disrupt the first unfolding of a filial joy. Anyhow William could never look at me, I imagined, without seeing me as an admonition. He would suspect in me nothing but bad omens. I represented for him a failed marriage—his own, undertaken with all the trust of youth. If I cared to do him a service I would go home immediately.

I became gradually aware of these unpleasant certainties, moving from cubicle to cubicle, each rather spartan and prudently secretarial, though vaguely airless and perfumed, and I avoided the large noisy interior room where I would be liable to attract notice. Twice I passed its door, and inside glimpsed a long wall of windows opening the glare of a dizzying daylight in giant patches to a multitude of blotter-brightened desks and torsos animated and stretched by the gestures of clever shouts and amused faces which the steady cooling of hidden machinery (now and then I encountered a vent overhead and felt a blast) had not kept from going generally pink with a more internal heat. The nearly hundred arms reached upward—a forest of paper cups—and, like a long birch in a pine-wood, a single aluminum dipper; someone was reciting a toast. Round plates of little colored cakes lay here and there on the desk-tops. There was a dish or two of thick cheese-yellow sandwiches. I was all at once sensible of being famished, and although I had already persuaded myself to start straightway for the door and down the elevator, I suddenly hesitated. I began to reconsider. If finding me there were to discomfit William, why should I care? I had after all
not
come to a party; I was after all
not
a deliberate invader; I had come solely for information and it was my last chance to get it. In two days I would be with Tilbeck. The day after tomorrow I would be with him; he would have me; it was frighteningly close. I thought of it and it seemed unreal; and then once again bitterly actual, bitterly imminent; and then again false, a fantasy. Nevertheless I would stay. I had come for William and I did not mean to go simply to oblige circumstance. I helped myself to a sandwich and a cake and stood devouring them both. The cheese had gone dry, but the cake was good and I took another, wandering at my ease through the crowd. There were a great many young people and I recognized some classmates of William's son: they were the dancing partners he had brought down with him from law school several weeks before, as a favor for my mother. A pair of them, walking together, passed me with a faint acknowledgment, puzzled; but one in fact stopped and said, "You're not still
here!
Smokestack have a hole in it?" A fourth was civil:

"That was a nice party. I don't usually like charity balls but this one wasn't half bad." "What do you mean?" I asked in horror—"It wasn't a charity ball, it was for bon voyage." He was a little drunk but his laugh was kind, even respectful. "That's what you call it when they drag out the stags for an act of mercy. A charity ball," he explained through a watery mouth; "it's only an expression." The rest did not know me, or if they did they concealed it. I was not distressed; I was not indifferent, but I was relieved; if they had spoken to me I would have felt ashamed, not for myself but for my mother. I had no doubt they thought of her as an admirable manager. Her champagne was undeniably decent though it had not inspired conviviality. Perhaps they said the same of me.

I did not see William. For some minutes I struggled through the mazy aisles among the changeable chattering groups, diligently watchful; and now and again I took to my toes to squint through the deepening smoke that swam in eddies from shoulder to shoulder. I did not see him. I felt as though I were pushing my way through a busy school-yard: the room was overrun with girls in their teens, each one sailing an ice-cube in a paper cup and drawing on a short cigarette as if it were a soda-straw. They smoked their cigarettes to the butt and at once lit fresh ones; they tapped their ashes to the floor with elegant little flicks, and drank roughly, in gulps. They wore their hair in extremes—either very, very short or very, very long, but in either case energetically burnished—and they all pronounced "o" as though it had an umlaut over it. Most of them were moderately tall—long, rather—with charming figures, though the mode just then was, I observed, the stringently flattened breast—and over this region of their anatomies they each had pinned a little typewritten card: GOOD LUCK FANNIE FROM FORM 7, MISS JEWETT'S. This interested me immensely; it was my mother's old school, a limited but reasonably venerable institution, fashionably small, but so absolutely "correct" that its reputation for getting its graduates into college was justifiably meagre. It was, moreover, a place I had clamored to be excused from attending after breaking my ankle as early as the first form. One did not usually break one's ankle until the third form (and then one spoke of it, airily, as only "cracked"); my precocity shocked me into defection, and startled even my mother, who, though in theory she always applauded rebellion, did not question the necessity of going to Miss Jewett's. Going to Miss Jewett's was, in fact, a family convention—
her
mother had been tutored (in ice hockey) by the original Miss Jewett (not the mere pastel niece), the genuine Miss Jewett, the aged and astonishingly agile Miss Jewett who was from the beginning Mistress of Fencing and whose second highest attribute appeared to have been simply that, in an adulatory era which celebrated anything even foggily English, she was a Londoner—what part of London remained a mystery. It was rumored that she was no more than an enterprising Cockney, a story which her muscular graduates, with unperturbed smiles, used neither to affirm nor deny. If Miss Jewett had been a Cockney, she had at any rate known the difference between a Cockney and a lady; and
they
were ladies. In my grandmother's time Miss Jewett, by then already very grand and elderly, had begun to walk with a cane, which she would raise without warning to bat a ball flying out of bounds. Her talent as a batter was exceeded only by her genius as a pitcher. She wore high collars of blue lace, culottes, and bifocals so strong they enlarged her eyes to the size of rather worn grey golf balls. When she died she left behind her a flourishing school. Her gymnasia had overflowed into the basement of the neighboring Episcopal church, and she would have rented a nearby Presbyterian cellar as well, had the minister not been a Scotsman. Her library was poor, though perhaps merely eccentric: it was filled with old copies of
The London Illustrated News,
to which she had never allowed her subscription to lapse, and seven complete, and completely uncut, sets of Dickens, but little else. Her gym closet held fifty-four volleyballs. Her last lecture had been on the purity of the temple of the body, and against sweat. She had designed her educational philosophy to foster athletics and motherhood among her girls; and it did, in that order. She used to say that while her fencing stars had the healthiest babies of all her girls, the baseball players had the most intelligent. It all had to do with the tension of the pelvic structure and the stroke of the pectoral muscle. "A Sound Mind in a Sound Body" was conspicuous on her letterhead, but if she was attracted to the first half of this slogan, it was only because of the sound. The motto she preferred was "Play is Work." For Miss Jewett's graduates a university was a vulgar place. To go to one was a confession of moral, social, and muscular defeat; it was a capitulation, and no one but the failures in volleyball ever committed themselves to this ignominy: Her most notorious case had been a girl who had made herself ridiculous by getting into Barnard, and afterward passing; this creature as a consequence was regarded not only as contemptibly disloyal, but worse, as unwomanly. The girls of Miss Jewett's were trained for womanliness. They came out, as a rule, in the fifth form, were engaged in the seventh or shortly afterward (though "shortly afterward" carried with it a certain mild disgrace), and married themselves directly into the Junior League, where for a few months they quibbled over dates for charitable theatre parties until the arrival of their predeterminedly vigorous first babies. My mother had gone to Miss Jewett's; William's present wife had gone to Miss Jewett's; and I thought it an orderly and proper thing that William's daughter-in-law should shortly be an alumna of the same school. It gave me, this propriety, nevertheless a moment's pity for William's son; he had so readily surrendered. He had chosen a schoolgirl; he had chosen womanliness; he had chosen the very right thing. I felt despairing: he had chosen only what his father might have chosen for him. Yet it seemed he might have wanted something other than the very right thing; it seemed he might have wanted talk and even bookishness and even character. Oh, it seemed he might have wanted—not me (not even my secret musings dared this direction), and not even someone very like me (though I had frequently, and not without smoldering irony, contemplated such a turn: it was a kind of self-indulgent daydream, half-vengeful, half-vicarious), but, at least, not one of Miss Jewett's girls! Not one of them! They were all of them replicas of Allegra Vand; and it was useless to suppose, just because it was inconceivable they should, like her, leap at working-claSs causes, that they were not replicas. If it had been in the style of my mother's generation to have no ideals, to be sick of ideals, she would have had none, she would have been sick of them. If it had been in the style to go abroad not for world-improvement wobbly rallies but for self-improvement, she would have gone for that instead. Miss Jewett's girls were all alike, they were up-to-date; they were inhabited, though not inhibited, by the Zeitgeist. And if the Jewett-trained daughters quarreled with the Jewett-trained mothers, it was simply the Zeitgeist, and not Miss Jewett's muscular influences, which had altered. "Woman's physiology stays the same," Miss Jewett herself used to say; "it's only the times which are different." This was her argument, in my grandmother's day, against tobacco. It was the same argument which the girls of Miss Jewett's used to produce when my mother went there—only in favor. Now it is the young Miss Jewett, the original's seventy-year-old niece, they must answer to: but it is strange how they have come around to the old Miss Jewett's way of thinking. Today they do not much like tobacco. They smoke marijuana instead.