Trust (37 page)

I learned this not—as it might be presumed—long afterward, but then and there, from
The Good Sport.
This—it turned out to be the school newspaper—had been left lying on one of the desks in that wide bright desk-huddled room, and when I flurried it open a photograph of a girl in a tennis costume jumped out at me, side by side with a half-page advertisement taken (I guessed in resignation) by William's firm: "Compliments Of" set in a sea of white margin like a craft fit for darker waters. "Beverly Ames Snearles Loses at Love," said the caption in twelve-point Bodoni Bold, "Wins Match." A tragically romantic notice: and here is Beverly in her white shorts and white thighs, laughing into the saucy camera and measuring her racket like an oversized salmon. "I've been smoking the weed for relaxation," she explains, "and it's definitely improved my serve." "Do you recommend it for other sports?" inquires the interviewer, identified in the by-line as Eleanor Bell. "I don't know about other sports," says Beverly to Eleanor; "tennis is my game. But for tennis I definitely recommend Mary-Jane." Mary-Jane—the sweet weed itself—at Miss Jewett's! Still, I had seen pictures of my mother in this very pose, and if experimentation with the slow taste of Mary-Jane had replaced experimentation with the class-structure, the essentials were the same: the throbbing bosom, the clear chin-line, and an overwhelming belief in the omnipotence of the present over the future. Oh, the girls of Miss Jewett's! They had, if nothing else, a perfect self-possession; and this—not talk, not bookishness, least of all character—drew William's son. He wanted the womanly child, the childlike woman—in short, exactly what his father had married in my mother.

This perception entered me like a cloud; and under the weight and flavor of it I suddenly spied William himself, although I had already given up looking for him. His hands were hooked by their thumbs across his grey back, and his big waxy distinguished skull, disconcertingly like the heavy-chinned head of Henry James or. Edmund Wilson (without their aura, which illuminates even the solemn photographs, of amazement at the world's incongruities—for William was too pious for wonder), cautiously wheeled toward his two companions. I was left with a quick vision of that broad serious middle-aged brow, obscured now half by the shadow of his retreat, an out-of-the-way corner, and half by the flourished arm of the taller of the attendant pair, a narrow dark man with unhurrying eyes close to the surface of a rather Tartarish face (though grossly and even mediaevally lidded and lashed), Wherein courtesy hid covetousness. The shorter and squarer one was plainly an Irishman, but not the ebullient sort; he was more pale than any monk, though he seemed as silently self-absorbed as a Trappist. Neither man had the proper look or tone which might be construed as habitually environmental for William, he was not casual with them, and I supposed they had not emerged from the special air of his clubs, or, going back still farther, of his class. It was not only that they had the wrong faces. Even from a distance I could tell they had the wrong point of view. The Irishman was too detached, and the other, with his hand nervously slapping at his thick-haired temples to emphasize a phrase, was too actively attached: he had a rapid joyless smile which, with no warning of expression, he uncovered now as weapon and now as semicolon. The Irishman merely listened—but dependably. It seemed a conference of elders, dense as a thicket, and I might have taken one or the other of them for the bride's father had either remotely struck me as Protestant.

While I stood considering,
The Good Sport
was snatched from my hand.

"Here, I've been looking for that, damn it."

The rough grab startled me. I turned, and subsided into a gradual absorption of a subdued artistocratic sneer, as certain and imperious as a head on a coin; a diminutive cigar, grandly squeezed; and the proud breast of an arrogant buffalo: it was William's son.

Without pleasure he took in the fact of my presence.

"This is a surprise."

"Your engagement?" I said. "Yes, it is. I hadn't heard anything about it. I really am surprised."

He rewarded me with a quick impatient artificial scowl. "I meant finding you here."

"I came to see your father."

"On business?"

"My mother's," I said facilely.

"I'm afraid business is suspended for the rest of the day."

He brought this out so gloomily that I was constrained to remark politely, "Of course. It's an extraordinary occasion."

"Well, it was a surprise to me too."

"Your engagement?" I said again.

He looked at me with open annoyance. "This party. It was sprung on me. I had no idea." But he gathered himself up, recovered, and gently lowered
The Good Sport.
"I hope you don't mind not being asked," he pursued, all at once summoning up an exquisite courtesy which, if it had been less acid and had more successfully concealed a contrary inspiration, might have resembled his father's. "Of course there'll be the official engagement thing later on, and of course we'll expect you and Mr. and Mrs. Vand. I'm told it'll be a supper party at the Burgundy. Mother was very careful to put you at the top of the list."

I hid my skepticism and thanked him.

But he had not finished. "I imagine you were simply overlooked, for today."

"Look, I didn't come for the party," I said, feeling warm. "You don't have to apologize."

"The boys here simply got together about it behind my back. Naturally they'd ask just who was most obvious. I mean they wouldn't think of you."

"I'm anything but obvious," I conceded.

"If I'd known about it I would have thought of you myself."

"Of course," I agreed.

"My father would have reminded me of it. Especially with all these fellows down from school. It's practically the same bunch I dug up for your send-off, you know."

"It was awfully good of you to do it," I said. "I'm sorry it was all for nothing."

"Well, I know, but my father insisted on it. To please Mrs. Vand. I guess she thought there'd be something in it for you." He must have felt how these words put him in the wrong light, for quite suddenly his high alert manner faltered, and his eye trailed consciously across the room.

"There wasn't," I said candidly. "It really doesn't matter, though."

"No? I heard you don't date much."

"Because I don't want to."

It was his turn to cover disbelief, and though his doubt was justified, I resented it. He took up again with a renewed effort: "It must have been a let-down for you, though. I mean not to get to go after all."

"I've
been
to Europe," I said: but with a certain sharpness.

"When you were a kid," he observed.

"Right after the war."

"It doesn't mean you shouldn't go again."

"I guess I will," I asserted, but hesitated to state what I did not credit. "Later on. Maybe when my mother's better."

This blinked him swiftly to attention. "Yes, how
is
she, by the way?"—but his curiosity was not so overwhelming that he troubled to leave a gap for my satisfying it. "You don't remember anything about what it was like over there?" he concluded without a pause. "I suppose you were too young."

"I remember a lot. But I don't think about it much," I said.

"Then do you happen to recollect a man named Pettigrew?"

"Pettigrew."

"Your stepfather used to run into him now and then. They were in different sectors but they came to know each other after your mother got into some sort of legal trouble over an automobile."

"Oh, marvelous," I applauded. "Now you've learned her file by heart."

"You don't have to be mad about it, it's not really all my fault. I've been working in the Vs all summer—Venue, Validation, Vacantia Bona, Valuation, Vand."

"Perfect. I like the way you do your job—the only thing missing is Virtue."

"In your mother's file? You're too hard on her. And after I had the good grace not to mention Venality!" He bit on his unlit cigar and grinned on either side of it. "Pettigrew settled some sort of threatened suit for her, do you recall? It cost plenty. They had to buy the whole Paris police force. Not to speak of a complete hospital staff. It's quite a story."

"Is that the way your father does business?" I sardonically inquired.

"Oh, well, I've stopped thinking my father so all-holy. He put Pettigrew on it, that's all I know. Maybe it's the way Pettigrew does business. Or your mother." He shrugged. "The times weren't normal anyhow."

His whole tone was so slippery it was useless to accuse him. "You've had a profitable summer," I merely noted.

"Not bad, not bad. Educational." But he looked around with distaste. "Unless you regard today as its culmination. I don't care for all this crawling around. —You don't recollect him?" he persisted.

I condescended to reflect. "What sort of work did he do?"

"For a while he was Special Assistant under Marshall. That's when he knew your stepfather. When the Republicans took over they threw him out."

"He's a Democrat?"

"Pettigrew? Oh my God. A Roosevelt New Dealer actually." His smile was speculative and almost genuine. "You can imagine how my father feels about it."

"I
think
I've heard of him," I said, barely recalling it. "At least the name. He's the one who went to that dancing school, isn't he?—with your father and my mother, when they were little?"

"And
my
mother," he added. "He's been stepping on their toes ever since. Politically speaking."

"I don't know him," I admitted.

"He's going to be my father-in-law," said William's son.

This interested me mightily: within the propriety of the match, then, there lay a hint of discord. Curiously, this possibility appeared to amuse William's son; through his posture of vexation I saw his excitement in the promise of conflict. He obviously thought it something to enjoy.

"Will that be an obstacle?" I put it.

"To what?"

"Oh, I don't know. Family unity."

He laughed out his scorn at me. "Family unity! What a prude you are—I don't care beans about family unity or anything like it. I've grown up on it, you haven't. It's only a contrivance, believe me." He offered me his derisive eye. "You can't tell me anything about family unity that I haven't already seen in the raw. What else do you think they have between them," he asked, "my father and my mother?"—and answered himself with a harsh nip of his cigar: "Family unity, that's what."

This was so unexpected and perilous and fragile a subject that I did not know how to reply. "Your mother is an admirable woman," I ventured.

"I admit it. So does my father. I guess he isn't inspired by admirable women," William's son gave out; and, because I had plainly failed to catch the sharp purport of his tone he softened it to a confidence: "That's why Mrs. Vand is unforgivable."

"You always say that and it's not fair," I maintained. "You forget who wanted the divorce."

"You don't have to remind me. My father is a selfish man and your mother is as wild as Borneo. He was out to save his hide. She would have run him to tatters."

"William can take care of himself," I announced.

"Do you really think so?"—It was half a jeer.

"He's a mountain."

"With a geologic fault. Or maybe it's simply a fault of character. The point is he'd do anything for Mrs. Vand."

"No more than for the other client."

"Maybe not. But certainly more than for my mother." He saw my alarm and came back quickly, "Not that he's negligent, of course. In fact I suppose he's what's called a born family man. He's very good at being head of the house. He presides over us beautifully."

"Then you can safely take him for your model," I remarked, afraid to say more yet unwilling to withdraw.

"Sure." He raised his chin sedately, an illusory movement so very like William's habitual manner that it aged him thirty years. "If I should ever decide to run after what I'd already run
from.
"

"William doesn't run after my mother!" I cried, tantalized.

"Do you think it's necessary for him to deliver her installment by hand? The firm could just as easily deposit it in her account and leave it at that. It's the routine thing."

"Then I suppose he likes to avoid the routine thing. He has a ceremonious nature."

"Exactly. And in ordinary matters it's the ceremony of the routine thing that he lives by."

"Then he does it as a simple courtesy."

"A courtesy, but his motives aren't simple.—Oh, I don't deny he's gallant!" he conceded.

I said severely, "There's nothing improper in being gallant."

"I told you you're a prude."

"I'm only precise."

"Precision isn't the same as truth. The truth is he's never attached himself to anyone else. He does his duty, but it's not duty that brings him out to look at your mother every other month."

"He likes to hear her talk," I admitted. Then I had a thought which made me lower my head before I could dare to speak it out. "But when you think of you and Nanette and Jack and Willy—and, well, Cletis is only
two
—" But my intrepidness embarrassed me; worse, it scared me. I felt as though I probed a sanctuary with a vulgar and broken broom. "I mean it wasn't duty which brought you all into the world," I threw out.

"Oh, what you don't know about family unity!" said William's son.

This high and prescient assertion, delivered with a not unfriendly insolence—and prescient because it seemed to point to a vision of my interlocutor's own marital future, as orderly is his father's—provoked me to surpass myself in pluck. 'Don't you
want
to get married?" I neatly wondered.

He remembered to resume his patronizing smile just in time. "What kind of comment is that?"

"It's not a comment It's a question."

"Prig," he observed. "What do you think I bothered to get engaged for? You wouldn't expect me to cohabit without"—up went his mocking chin—"the sanction of the law?"

"No," I confessed. "It's only that you seem so cross about it."

"I'm mad as hops," he agreed. "I could wring her neck. I could hang her from the yardarm."