Trust (39 page)

"I've heard of Duneacres," I said, "the name. I mean—" reflecting, while the cigar caught at last with a cone of smoke and a little flare in its tip, how I had a dozen years before encountered that word, meant for an address and curled like a salt-worm in my father's hideous hidden scrawl.

William's son showed me his disbelieving scorn by omitting even the smallest pause. "Of course. You barely know the place, and then only by name."

"It's true," I said heatedly.

"Then to oblige you I won't fail to be explicit."

"You won't oblige me if you succeed. I'm not concerned in any of it."

He bit down hard. "You think you can do without the truth?"—and would not have waited for my reply even if I had had any. "At the end," he went on steadily, "when his wife was dead and his daughter married, he was living on the estate all alone, though with one of the largest household staffs in the country. At one point, I think, there was an ancient spinster aunt in his charge. She predeceased your grandfather by a year, if I'm correct. The fact is—" He turned on me. "What?"

"My mother's great-aunt Huntingdon," I murmured thoughtfully. "She's the one I'm supposed to look like."

"I'm sure you will some day," he said with a smoke-hung scowl, "if you can get longevity to support you in it. Though I understand that your grandfather was only in his sixties at his death. He died just seven months after the marriage." He glanced up purposefully, but saw with relief that he was not required to specify which marriage. "There wasn't anyone to inherit the place usefully; it wasn't needed—your mother and my father were all newly settled in"—would he say "our house"? or "where we live now"?—delicately he avoided it and instead grew civic: "Scarsdale. Not long before he died he fastened on the idea of turning the place into some sort of museum. His son-in-law, as trustee, was supposed to carry it out. The agreement was that the trust would cover the upkeep of the estate, in perpetuity; and on that basis my father got the county to sink funds into the plan. The trust, you see, was supposed to pay for the physical renovations, the guards' salaries, all of that—but the county had to hire the personnel. So they went out and chose a whole staff of experts, scientists, an unemployed curator or two—people like that. They weren't hard to find. It was the bottom of the Depression, you know."

"Oh," I assured him, "I've heard of the Depression. Though only barely. I've heard of it by name, so to speak."

He stopped short. "All right, you've made your point."

"I have?"

"Ether you're without any knowledge at all or you're totally callous."

"If I'm allowed a choice—"

"If you knew anything about it you wouldn't laugh at it. They
have
kept it from you," he said gravely.

"Then do you think you should take it on yourself to reveal it?" I inquired.

"You want me to have scruples, is that it? When only a little while ago you were advising me to model myself after my father!" He walked away, gave me his back, and confronted the drab wall. "The whole crux of the story is that
he
didn't have any," he said, from afar. "He never went through with it. He simply let the place go to rot. The county had to renege—they were left with all those commitments of jobs, and no jobs."

I was puzzled, though not yet affected.

"William must have had a reason for it," I ventured.

"Oh, a reason!" His spine quickened with spite and repugnance. He spun and spat: "Listen, there was a bunch of letters from these men. Fifteen men all together. Grown men, and they pleaded like sheep. What do you suppose a job like that was worth to an educated man in 1933?"

"They must have got on somehow."

"Got on!" he threw back at me. "As a matter of fact fourteen of them did. They came; then they went back to where they had come from. The difficulty was that fifteen had been hired. —Though I shouldn't call it a difficulty: the arithmetic couldn't be simpler. I imagine even you can cope with it. They got on, if that's what you want to call being out of a job in those times—haven't you read, don't you have an ounce of historical imagination?—They all got on but one." He blew out a round and violent cloud: in that tiny room it had the smell of enclosure and wariness without hope. "His name was John Vermoulian. He happened to be the youngest of the lot, just out of school—it was the chance of his life." A vagrant and unsentimental snigger accompanied the last phrase; I was being treated to the iron in irony. But he went straight on: "It was a good connection, the perfect opportunity, and on the strength of it he was able to get himself engaged to a girl of a family which ordinarily wouldn't have touched him. They used to call that sort of thing a love match—in olden times," he sneered. "We don't have them any more. The girl's father was a doctor high in the community—naturally he wouldn't hear of it, it wasn't decent enough for him—the son of Armenian immigrants, after all—you see his point. Though they
did
have a little family restaurant which was hanging on nicely in spite of the times; it had seen the boy through college in fact. In a way they had their own hopes. It didn't help, by the way, that the boy had educated himself in a thoroughly impractical science—in the doctor's view of it, I mean. He was twenty-five; his own family was as practical as the doctor and their solution was to urge him to come and be a waiter in the business and forget the girl. Meanwhile on his side of it the doctor kept on resisting and warning—but when the job came through the idea of the museum won him over. It was honorable and it was
almost
a profession. And anyhow a museum has a classical sound to it." He broke off angrily, "What's the matter?"

"Letters—you said there were letters."

"Damn it, aren't you following me?"

"You didn't
see
the letters," I said uneasily. There was an alarming tangibility in this account. Though William had suppressed as figment the fact of the impious Tilbeck, reducing him negligibly and namelessly to hobbling caretaker, and now-and-then guardian of a weedy ruin, the drift of the tale showed it no longer likely that a simple figment stood in Tilbeck's place.

"It wasn't necessary to look them
up,
" William's son proposed, "even if I had known where to look. My father admitted to them readily enough. He went and got them and threw them on the table and called them Exhibit A." I heard; I took my breath slowly; I credited it all. "After he had begun he admitted to every part of the thing. He didn't try to duck any of it, I'll give him that. What would have been the use? Foul is foul. And if he didn't withhold the end, what else could he have thought worth hiding?"

Tilbeck. But though I knew the answer I seized on the question. "The end?" I repeated, sharply wondering.

"There
was
an end. When this boy found there wasn't going to be a job after all, he went out into the woods behind the house and slit his throat with a fish-cleaning knife."

The sweat froze in my fist. I could think of no word to speak.

But William's son was narrow and quick and permitted no gap. He finished hoarsely, "My father had lost interest in the project. You ask for a reason. That was the reason."

Thickly I tried it: "Maybe it was my mother's fault. It was her inheritance, after all," I conjectured. "Maybe
she
lost interest."

He shook his head. "No. It made no difference. He was the trustee. It was his legal responsibility."

"He wasn't expected to be responsible for a man's suicide," I said without effect: and added the familiar, perilous, useful, baleful phrase of escape—"according to the terms of the trust."

But it was an unwitting mockery and whipped his face.

"No," said William's son. "It was only that he was responsible for a murder." Then abruptly he threw open the door and by a lift of his burning cigar he commanded me out "That's what I know about my father," he said, and went off like the last of a dying species, his buffalo-head low, his buffalo-back sorrowful and unforgiving, leaving me standing there alone.

Or, if my metaphor is unreal (but is it? think how stoic is he, genus bison americanus, early victim of genocide, the remnant of a race that opened nostrils once wherever there were grasses, and now to please a mere remorseful Government must populate tame tufted showpiece fields, subdued, without hope of animal pride, enslaved in showpiece herds, labeled "extant" though marveled at as near-extinct, a thrown-out plains prince mourning his old genius)—if, then, staring after him as after a debauched buddha, I indulged William's son in an image too unlikely, inferior to his sadness, construable as insult to his reversed state, spite upon his blighted fortunateness, bad thread shaming the perfect plait of his elegance—whatever the cheap sigh of rhetoric is over-quick in its whim to call that disfigurement-by-disillusion which stood plain in the face of fury William's son took with him—if I had chosen too ornamentally I changed and was simple. I watched him round a corner in the swagger of compunction with his pocket bulging and his smoke-trail thinning out and knew that I saw—simply—a proud dandy come down in the world: a moral dandy betrayed by the shock of dirt: a pretend-cynic wounded by the falling-short of pale and sickly virtue.

For myself, I opened my hands and blew them dry. For myself, I could rally. For myself, horror was only surprise raised to a higher power; and surprise was itself a component of the comic. Tragedy dates quickly, and then we have to laugh at it, as at films of forty years ago, with their irrelevant voiceless anguish, their trivial voiceless fright, their blows without impact. And when bitter at the morally unexpected, we always laugh. If the rationality of deliberate comedy is worthy of laughter, so much more is the irrationality of equally deliberate fate. What is hysteria if not fate's tears, too deep for thought? It is even possible to laugh at Lear—and who shall say that Hamlet's futile lunge at the arras is not designed to be partly laughed at? So I felt relief; I felt I had come far. Pity dwindled, though not ravishment. He was put down, William's son; dismayed; shamed. He was broken. I did not care. I felt elation at the straw of pride bent and rent; it brought him down to me. He had yielded up the secret history of our equality: now my mother, famous for scandal, silliness, duplicities, seemed no worse than William, who was tutored enough in Paulinism to see how wickedness differs from folly. The lily of deceit grew in William too; it grew well in him. I was glad the deed was old, and had preceded his son's birth and mine—the older, the more susceptible of wisdom's bony laughter; it meant we had grown up together with the deed, that death; it was our brother, our sister; we were born equal with it. Had I not heard Enoch declare righteousness a joke invented for dupes by confidence-men? And William's son was his father's dupe.

Not I. I supposed myself no one's dupe. Not only because I had no decorousness to be blasted (how elegantly he vanished, his head lordly though his long hands drooped!), but rather because I thought fraud my atmosphere, deceit my premise, hoax my modest axiom. I was used to them all, and comfortable with their divisions. I knew nothing of unity; of what William's son called "family unity" still less; in the impossibility of betrayal I had no faith. I had for a long time seen how my mother teased and catnipped life as though assaying a sort of acrobatic trick, and how she threw herself astride it like a circus rider, and how she bred me to her repute while, waiting for the almost-fall, that most dangerous of all tricks, I watched with suspicion, incredulous even as she righted herself with a recklessness of equilibrium dependent partly on luck and partly on wile and not at all on the spirit of the steed. What William's son suffered, I did not know how to suffer. The dissolution of balance was, for me, neither novel nor blown with fear. I preened myself on my familiarity with distrust, and recovered easily—oh, how easily, with the complacency of practised repugnance—from a mere tale of a young man's cutting his throat.

But not from the live young man who had told the tale. Once more he entered that wide inhabited room where his father stood conversing among the splendid mob of youth, while I lingered at the bottom of the dim corridor down which he had led me to deliver the chronicle of his father's fall, already thinking it little, the sweat of horror already dry in my palm, myself all unmoved by antique incident. It might have been of the death of Priam he told me; old Kings and self-slain boys were nothing to me. It was all history, and history, as Enoch and William's son had equally divined, did not touch me. It was the live boy I cared for; it was the image of the live boy that ravished me, William's son—who, making his final disgruntled turn into the crowd and out of sight, left my eye abruptly bare. —Though not so bare as his mere disappearance would have it: his head, both brutal and delicate with defense, lay like another dimension—a tissue—against my lid. It settled into my willing stare with all the immobile persistence of a thin frail photograph; like a powder of gold it acridly dusted my vision; I feared its beauty at last. All that hapless unreachable beauty!—the beauty of valor, like that of a Roman soldier surveying an English swamp for a road that would outlast Rome's very legend. And not calculating valor only: something in his contempt, once perhaps a schoolboy affectation and now too bitterly justified by actuality, wrung me: it was so like a leap into danger. It had all the stylization of bravery and innocence thrown into the fire of deceit and bad dream. I saw him as though on a frieze—one of those staunch figures in buckler and helmet, leather scutum upraised, stony calf taut beneath the military skirt—then, above, grim graven face showing a pair of arched lips so unexpectedly soft, in all that stone, so surprisingly vulnerable, that they might have been in the act of speaking a lover's line by Catullus.

Well, look! I knew well enough what zeroes these romantic and perilous fantasies held for me. It was perverseness that drew me to the bliss of fancying myself in love just when that bliss was most inaccessible. He was engaged; and, even if he had not been bound by this not-quite-awesome compact, he would not have been less inaccessible. It was a robbed bliss and a robbed beauty I contemplated then—it seemed all the more impenetrable, all the more puissant, all the more richly luring, for its plain implausibility. He did not like me, William's son; he blamed me for being the daughter of Allegra Vand. His look denunciated; his look scathed; his look was full of taunting. And his voice was severe. His voice was savage. He was all savagery. He was not kind to me. It did not matter. I expected nothing. When he was gone I stood and blinked after him, warmed by his disciplined and purposive confidence, though preferring to take it for savage and wild.