Trust (38 page)

"A declaration of passion," I concluded.

He looked at me with a certain surprise. "You're a satirist, aren't you?"

"No," I said. "I'm a prude and a prig."

"I know. But besides that."

"What has she done?" I prodded.

"Oh God, plenty. Look at this." He spread open the pages of
The Good Sport.
"It's this damned ad. She badgered me into giving it to her under the firm's name. I didn't wait a minute before I suggested 'Best Wishes from a Friend,' something in that line, but no, it wouldn't do. It isn't professional enough—everyone's nasty uncle takes an ad in just those words. —Believe it or not, she's the business manager of this sheet. She multiplies on her fingers, so they elected her business manager!" he crowed—it was difficult to tell whether with affectionate pride (multiplying on the fingers being merely an adorable crotchet) or with clean contempt (the conforming masculine attitude toward the weaknesses of shining womanliness). "She was afraid 'Best Wishes from a Friend' could make them look tacky—as though they didn't
have
any friends. Amateurs hate to be taken for what they are, you know. It was the firm she wanted." His steady mutter dissolved into a confidential sigh. "Like a damned fool I gave it to her, and now my father's down on me," he complained.

The criminality in this exposition was lost on me; it had, in fact, the whimsicality of a joyously trivial, though conventionally impenetrable, mystery. Still, I was glad William's son thought me a worthy receptacle for these minutiae. It gave me a narrow opportunity to fasten on an image, theoretical though it might be, of his fiancée. The more I heard, the more I thought
her
unworthy.

"He's not down on you just for giving an ad?" I said, implying there was better reason: let him look to the girl for it.

"Isn't he though."

"Well, it isn't as if you'd gone and violated the Ten Commandments," I consoled, pleasurably detached.

"No—only Canon 27."

"I see"—though I did not.

"Of the Canons of Professional Ethics," he groaned. "My father's afraid the Bar People will be down on
him.
"

"Is there something the matter with the ad? It only says Compliments Of."

"Nothing at all the matter. It's perfectly all right. There's nothing wrong with it," he disclosed with something like a wince, "except that it's a total scandal." He gave the ceiling a glance of direct and unpretentious comradeship. "It's unethical for a law firm to advertise at all," he supplied ruefully.

"In a school paper? It's only a school paper."

"My calculation exactly. That's why I took the chance of doing it. She kept at me and kept
at
me and, well, finally I gave in because I never thought my father would get to see it in a hundred years. It's not as though I put it in
The Wall Street Journal,
after all. And I paid for it myself, so Connelly wouldn't list it."

At the mention of Connelly—the meticulous accountant—this innocuously detailed history suddenly blossomed with importance. What had to be kept from Connelly had also to be kept from William. And what was kept from William, shrine of innocence, was undoubtedly not innocent. "Then William got to see the ad. He got to see it anyway," I hazarded.

"He wouldn't have if not for this stupid story about a tennis-player at Miss Jewett's"—belligerently William's son snapped his fingers against the guilty
Sport.

"Beverly Ames Snearles Loses at Love," I recited. "Is it trUe about the marijuana?"

"What do
you
think? They all do it down there, for kicks. Anyhow it was partly Nanette's fault. She's been friendly all term with one of these girls from Miss Jewett's—"

"But Nanette goes to the Academy," I interrupted.

"—the one who wrote the story. Eleanor Bell," he pushed on aloofly. "They're going to be in the Junior Assemblies together next spring. At least Nanette will. The other girl was supposed to be in it, but she won't be eligible if she's expelled. God, I hate this gossip."

"My," said I, vaguely spiteful, "it sounds like Lowood, in
Jane Eyre.
"

He stopped long enough to rebuke me with a stare. "You have a literary reference for everything"—as- if he expected me to apologize for it. "It's proof you don't listen."

"I
am
listening. I really am," I said quickly, afraid he would go away. "
Are
they expelling her?" I inquired, as a token of my attentiveness.

But he was moving energetically onward. "You bet they are. Not that those girls haven't been smoking it down there for the last seven months. Especially during the summer make-up term. Everybody knows it. It isn't a crime to know about it or to do it—it's only a crime if you print it. Anyhow"—he took a breath, and I somehow wondered whether he did hate gossip after all—"the girl's father—that's Bell, the broker—intends to sue the school for breaching its contract to educate his daughter, the tuition having been the consideration, although ... It's a long story." He maundered off into meditation and when he came back to me again it was with an explosion. "Well, look! The upshot of it is he got my father to handle the thing. Legally it's pretty tricky. My father didn't want to touch it. He was horrified."

"It's a difficult case?"

"Not on account of the law! He's not afraid of the law. It was on account of Nanette—her being chummy with this Bell girl, though he wouldn't stoop to mentioning her by name. He didn't even have the decency to say 'addict,' which would have been silly enough. He simply came out and called the girl à dope fiend."

"Not to her poor father's face!" I exclaimed.

"I haven't any idea of what he said to Bell. I just know what he said afterward, to Nanette. She cried and cried—but she always does that, she likes to cry. And in the end he had to agree to his taking the case anyhow—because of me really."

"Because of you?"

"If they expel Eleanor, you see, they're liable to expel others—they're liable to expel all of them."

I marveled at the burden of this revelation. "Including your fiancée," I said. "The Disgrace of the Prospective Daughter-in-Law."

His unexpected half-smile, agitating only a part of his affirming lip, carefully neglected to answer me. "At any rate it was through Bell that he got a copy of the paper."

"And saw the ad," I summed it up.

"Oh, he didn't see it then. He overlooked it while Bell was with him. But when he came home that same night—this was only day before yesterday, you know—he found Nanette pretty stirred up. She'd heard that Eleanor would be dropped from the Assemblies. My father said he couldn't approve of it more; he thought the contamination ought to be removed. That made Nanette cry, of course; she's full of histrionics. I suppose he regretted having started her off: he usually does. Anyhow that's when he came upon the ad—turning over the pages while Nanette cried. My father hates tears."

"It's part of his code," I defended him.

"I'm sick of hearing about my father's code," he said dully. "As far as I'm concerned it's the code of the lion and the Christian. Everyone seems to think my father is the Christian."

"He gives every impression of being one," I said.

"When actually he's the lion salivating in the arena, if you want to know the truth. He had it in for me, all right."

"It doesn't seem such a serious thing," I said doubtfully. "One little ad."

"It does to the ethics committee. The worst of it is my father is a senior member of it. It's pretty embarrassing. And now you can't get a copy of the
Sport
for love or money. This one's practically irreplaceable," he said, folding it up and digging it into his pocket. "It's the file copy. He wanted to know whether I intended to get him disbarred and then to cap it by marrying a dope fiend."

"And the tennis player in the white shorts?" I asked. "Will they expel her too?"

"No danger of it. She won a cup for the school."

"Ah."

"And more to the point, Snearles has already promised to build them a new gymnasium if they keep her. That's Snearles Contracting, you know."

"Maybe Bell will build a gymnasium too. Maybe that's what-your father will advise."

"I've already told you I've stopped regarding my father as a holy of holies."

"What does that mean?"

"You know exactly what it means. He's not so virtuous as he appears. That Town Island business, for one thing."

I let this pass, or tried to. "And for another thing?"

"Isn't that enough?"

"One act doesn't imply habit," I said.

"If he can do something once he can do it again."

I felt myself on uncertain ground, and lowered my eyes.

"I told you I found out about my father's part in those expenditures of your mother's. The money that goes to the caretaker down there. I meant it when I said I always thought he'd kept his nose clean."

"That's a disgusting expression."

"Don't be so tender.
He's
not, believe me." He had put aside his cigar and was addressing me with the flattering earnestness I had always imagined possible between us, though I had never before seen it. It was like the conversation, I thought, of distant cousins at a rare family occasion—a funeral, perhaps. We had in common certain asymmetrical relationships.

In response to this mood in him I was soft. "I don't think your father's implicated in anything," I said steadily.

"Up to his ears."

"Did he tell you that?"

"We've been over this ground, haven't we? You know what he told me."

"No I don't."

"You know all about it."

"No."

"When he asked me if I was trying to get him disbarred with this damned ad I said he deserved it for another cause anyhow."

"You said that to William?" I cried.

"And when he asked me if I intended marrying a—a 'dope fiend'—good God!—I asked him whether his reputation was any better."

"You didn't speak to your father that way!"

"How else was I to speak to him? You think it was easy going through that?" His head twisted away from me, obscurely butting the misty room: a wounded bison in torment. His voice was a blade. "It killed me to find out about him. It killed me."

"Your father hasn't done anything. It's all on account of my mother—"

"You
do
know about it."

"No," I said fearfully.

"You told me yourself—on the telephone. You said there was a museum there. A marine museum."

"I was—only guessing," I faltered.

"You knew about the estate. Your grandfather's property—where your mother grew up; You
knew
about it," he insisted.

"Only after you told me. I thought it had been sold long ago." I hesitated before I brought out a sudden lump of rage: "You're the one who knows everything! You're the one who reads my mother's file. You're the son of the trustee!"

He said slowly, "What my father did isn't in the file." And then, while resolutely I sought out his look: "The vital things never are."

I stiffened.

"Even the divorce papers aren't there," he said.

"Neither of them?"

"What do you mean, neither—neither party's?"

"No," I said. "Neither divorce."

"Nothing," he quietly affirmed.

A passage of pity, unsure of itself and useless, uninvited yet unmistakable, intervened curiously between us: pity one upon the other.

He said, "This is no place to talk. Come on out," and I followed him through a sunless corridor, blind-dark after the brilliant and busy inner room, lit by those long daystruck panes, where we had conversed unnoticed under the weaving crowd's negligent eye, into one of the windowless cubicles I had earlier observed.

He shut the door and without delay told me a story.

I heard it and did not recognize it and half believed it and half knew it to be false and a fabrication, though thinking William ingenious still: continuing to suppose the tale a shield set out to deflect any suspicion of Tilbeck's presence in that place, and at the same moment wondering at the lifelike quality of the lie, a lie too like truth to be a true lie; a lie beyond the limits of an imagination as dry as William's, perhaps; or else a lie so extravagantly like a novice liar's notion of what a model lie should be as to be anything but a lie. For it was very strange that William, so unpractised, should be so ingenious; it was contradictory that he should have invented, to avoid the sordidness of one confession, another even more sordid. If, as I supposed, it was part of his recognizable code (to which his son had just yielded the obeisance of contempt) that to spare my mother the stain of Tilbeck he should by other means stain himself, then the dye he had chosen was unnecessarily melodramatic and dangerously crimson. It was a barrister's diversionary trick in a man who put far more trust in documentation than in oratory. Perhaps I could rationally expect him to have shown, for charity's sake, a moderate duplicity: but of theatrical art William had none; not from him had Nanette inherited her player's bent—his capacity for wholesale pretense of the passions so far went undemonstrated. In short, I thought him honest, without deviation, after all; and, very reluctantly, still doubting my conclusion, I began to think the lie false. There was too much blood in it for make-believe—though by the same logic was there not too much blood in it for truth?

I did not know what to believe. I pressed my hands together until the sweat ran along the channel of the palms in broken pellets.

William's son, indulging himself in the rhetoric of precision, began from the beginning. "My father told me this: your grandfather died with an obsession, maybe only an enthusiasm, about the property. He had supervised the building of the house from the first—badgered the architects, had the porticos copied from the cathedral at Ferrara, and went abroad to select the marble himself—he was a nautical sort all his life. When it was finished he had a fountain built around an anchor in the gardens and called the place Duneacres." Without hurry my narrator let down his straightened and narrowed fingers for a search in his pockets: on the way
The Good Sport
in one of them crackled so loudly it startled me. He came up with a book of matches and muttered through his teeth as he lit his cigar, "I'm trying to reproduce this in an orderly way"—he puffed futilely, working up the light—"since that's how it was given to me. You see I'm taking your word for your ignorance," he accused, "though it's perfectly plain you've heard of everything I'm saying."