Trust (42 page)

"Oh—yes, I see," Connelly said again, but weakly. "How amusing."

"Euphoria is a very amusing manipulator," Karp grumbled—was it out of self-defense?—"of wit."

"Yes indeed," his wife confessed. "I'm a po-wit in fact"

"Specializing in witty lines on Poe?" I wondered coarsely.

She turned on me in delight. "I never thought of that! How charming of you; I must use it somehow. You know I adore puns. And more than that I adore puns on puns—they're even rarer. I do so appreciate people who have a sensitivity to humor. They're so few. But I really ought to be able to make something of that—" Her active clever eyes with their faint tendency to bulge, exaggerated this proclivity; she plainly strained: her moment was upon her, and loudly, rapidly, precisely, and without a single intake of breath she rattled out the following:

Edgar Allan Poe
Died of drink, you know.
He lived his life in squalor
And never had a dollar,
Which news by word of mouth
Reached the Deepest South
Where they maintained it wasn't gin
That did him in—
"He sho'ly daid
Cuz he war
po
'," they said.

"Good Christ!" Connelly pealed out in an access of amazement.

"Don't let it bother you, she does it all the time," Karp said, embarrassed. "It's really nothing to be perturbed about. She can't help it. She just happens to have that sort of brain."

"But it's not
good,
" Mrs. Karp said peevishly. "I don't like it. It's not worth writing down; it's not funny enough, is it, 'Rome? I mean it's too tritely philosophical: it only makes that silly old point about character being fate, did you catch that, William? And then all that build-up just for the play-on-words at the end."

"I'm afraid I can never understand dialect," he apologized; his ears were vaguely pink, and I pitied him.

"You mean you disapprove of it," said Mrs. Karp. "I believe you're a liberal after all, William."

"Now, now, no name-calling," Connelly said; this was
his
little joke, and he indulged himself in a marginal laugh, like the creasing of tinfoil, which no one shared, though Mrs. Karp looked ready to put her tongue out at him.

Nevertheless she refrained, and instead wagged it for another purpose: "Tell me, do you help out with
Bushelbasket?
" she asked me. "No? What a shame, I've got a revision of the placebo thing in my bag—that's the one I've already sent to your mother's editor, you see; I thought you might take the new version with you, to hand over to him. It's ever so much better now, you know."

"It's twice as long," Karp sighed.

"Which logically makes it twice as good," Mrs. Karp took up stoutheartedly. "Would you mind delivering it?"

"Not at all," I said, "except that he's in San Francisco."

"Who do you say is in San Francisco?" William demanded, suddenly attentive.

"Ed McGovern. My mother's editor. She gave him a check and he went."

"What the devil for?"

"I don't know. To spend it, I guess."

"To freshen his point of view, you might put it," Mrs. Karp said helpfully.

"Wastrel," Connelly muttered, with a quick peep at William. "Parasite."

"Printing costs are so high," Mrs. Karp added; she was, on principle, admirably pumping up the conversation. "I hear your mother saves on capital letters."

"She leaves them out," I admitted. "Commas too."

"How economical!" Mrs. Karp marveled. "Though I hope it won't harm the placebo," and reached into her big deep pocketbook, thick with scraps of paper, wherefrom, as though it were a pickle, she unerringly picked her poem.

I took it and saw that it was very narrow and very long. "My mother's favorite shape in a poem," I remarked out of politeness.

"Oh, 'Rome, you hear that, isn't that fine? It's Mrs. Vand's favorite poem! In that case she's sure to care for the new version, don't you think?"

"That McGovern fellow," Connelly interrupted crossly, brooding. "She pays plenty for him. Well, look at it this way: it's one of her questionable investments, same as Michigan Laminated. That's the only way to look at it."

"It's one of her pleasures," William corrected: which startled Connelly, who at once began to cast around for a qualification that would not sound directly like an apology.

"There's no money in pleasure," was all he came up with on short notice.

Mrs. Karp could not permit so manifest an opportunity to go by unpounced-upon. "But there's lots of pleasure in money!" she cried, and looked to me to join her in her gratification. "That's what wit
is,
" she explained civilly; somehow she had taken me for her partner in metaphysics. "You have to seize on every chance. You have to
listen.
You know most people don't listen, not even to themselves. It's what leaves them wide open to becoming someone else's butt. That's why I always make a point of listening to myself."

"Sometimes you're the only one who does," said her husband.

Meanwhile I occupied myself with an investigation of William. The presence of the Karps, teasing around him like a school of carnivorous fish (only afterward did I suppose that, the name had supplied the image: watching them, I simply derived it from the way they kept him cornered at the bottom of their part of the ocean, a place unfamiliar—too warm, perhaps—to his cool kind), rejoiced him so little that he had no disposition to feel anger at me. Though earlier I might have counted myself lucky in this, it struck me now that he was not merely -"behaving well," as I had expected of him: he was hardly aware that I was there. He looked at me, and thought all the while of my mother—but not because I had come as a reminder. On the contrary, my mother was the substance of the Karps' surveillance. "About this Russian business," he said abruptly to Professor Karp, cutting Euphoria off without realizing he was doing it. She stood with her long, meagre-gummed teeth glistening, eager to oblige him by withdrawing—as some fish swim backwards momentarily before darting out for a bite of their victim's side. "
About
this Russian business," he began, and Connelly pressed in, making the circle tight against women and children: they talked of visas, and officials, and then of "prospects" which Connelly said were unfavorable until William said well, it couldn't be predicted in advance—"oh," said Connelly then, "I don't predict, I go by what's been the case for the last two decades," while Karp worked the two parallel ditches between his eyes. William had endured trivialities long enough, apparently; he was after the issue, and could not bear the boredom of the dance on either side of it and all around it. It
was
of my mother they were talking, it developed in fact—of her unpaid Russian royalties. I was surprised, though Stefanie had warned me of it. "Out-and-out thieves," Connelly put it without extenuation: but William listened steadfastly to Karp. They spoke of the formation of a Commission. "Five of us," Karp said. "In a quiet way. The lot that went over last year made too much noise. You can't have an ex-candidate for the Presidency, lawyer or no lawyer, do this sort of thing. It's got to be quiet and obscure, no known names, nothing political, just plain lawyerlike negotiation—" Connelly asked what the money would be, in the aggregate. "Well, we'd have to see what their terms are, after all. What percentage they'd be willing to agree to. I wouldn't expect it to correspond with their domestic practise." William said he thought not. "Though I didn't get you down here for details," he murmured; "only for the general question. Pity it had to be just today, in the middle of all this—" He waved a hand of despair and censure into limitless fields of light overgrown with Cabbages: the despair was for these, but the disapproval was for Karps. "The young people," he said, somewhat more loudly, noticing me as though I were a footnote authenticating this explanation.

But Karp loftily disagreed. "I'm afraid Mrs. Vand
is
a detail. You don't want to expect anything special. In a thing like this there can't be special cases. All we can hope for is to soften them a bit; to get them to acknowledge that we
have
a moral case. We can't even begin to expect them to acknowledge the International Copyright Convention, God knows. They translate everything and pay for nothing," he said, directing this at Connelly, who looked first miffed and then puffed with an interior monologue which the eager twitch of his nose betrayed—he was only an accountant, and in the presence of lawyers he always felt patronized; all of this his damp nostrils seemed to signal, opening and shutting like flexible quotation marks. His nostrils, in short (though they were long), quoted his thoughts, and his thoughts were envious and scornful: lawyers believe in money and credit the way boys believe in kites—not as the very pillars of the world upon which the angels of Christ rest their elbows. Widening pridefully, narrowing aristocratically, those twin Celtic holes enclosed their final musing. "Talk to pirates about moral cases!" he said aloud, though his nose, rising as his large skull dispiritedly ascended, insisted he needed no elucidations—they might talk of copyrights if they wished, or of morality:
he
knew they were talking of cash.

So did shrewd Mrs. Karp. "And if you're not going for Mrs. Vand, what
are
you going for?"

"The principle," Karp said.

"Oh, the principle! The principle's nothing!" she contributed smugly. "William didn't ask you to come down for the principle, did you, William?" But she was too hurried to wait to hear. "And if we'd come down yesterday—it's
my
fault we're a day late; I admit to it; I made 'Rome stay for last night though he whimpered all through it—a regular cry of pain," she joked. "We put on a perfectly marvelous comedy at the Verse Theatre, all in quatrains, half of them composed by yours truly, you see; that's why. It was the premiere, if that isn't a misnomer for a one-night stand. The setting was a spaceship headed for another solar system—a sort of up-to-date
Everyman
; at any rate if we'd come down yesterday I never would have gotten my revision of the placebo into properly appreciative hands. You're just clutching it," she admonished me, looking to see whether my hands
were
properly appreciative; "aren't you going to
read
it?"

"Oh yes," I said weakly, damning her for her interruption; I was interested in Karp. He had quick unusual gestures; he liked to pat down his bold hair, and now and then he put a narrow forefinger to the side of his head, as though listening to the pulse there, or the machinery of his brain. It was easy to see that he respected that machinery, and ran it at its highest efficiency, without taxing it or abusing a single notch of its gears; also he respected it the way a man on a ladder respects the rungs that separate him from the hard ground; and in spite of his wife, he took one rung, or one notch, at a time. "I'll enter Mrs. Vand on our book-list, certainly," he assured William; this was as far as he could carry the favor, he implied. Though he gave himself out as acting only out of principle, his manner contradicted him. His moving hands responding to himself, even his captious but cautious face with its slowly sliding eyes, seemed to expose something else in him—principle, to be sure, but smaller principle, a sly sharp private principle that he kept for himself, for his own advancement. I all at once remembered my mother's remark—they had dropped Karp from
Who's Who.
He was now merely in the Index of Former Biographees, or however it was designated, though when I looked it up afterward I discovered that fleshly red book both too polite and too brutal for such an Index: instead they had tacked near Karp's bare name a circle-within-a-circle, ominously reminiscent of Dante—in this way, hushed, clean-handed, they consigned Karp to the hell of the No Longer Prominent. He had ceased to be important, and in order to be re-included had to build again. So he was once more impatiently building, went down to Yale for luncheon with the dean while Euphoria set herself up for the afternoon like an influential icon among the drama aspirants and the homely playwrights, and all in all collected his bricks from the best quarries. The going-to-Russia Committee was very good, very fine, a bit obscure, but he had already made a virtue of that: he had the obscurity, he had the machinery, the problem was entirely within his expertise; membership in die Committee was excellent, they were all five of them enterprising and scholarly. I sensed Karp's opportunistic calculation, against William's solid beating, that he regarded William as his veritable keystone. William in conjunction with the Committee!—I saw him feel for his high dark hair with a nervous claw of knuckle, conscious already of laurel. Though he did not cosset, like that sad dog Connelly, still he was justified in thinking of William as a sort of trophy—it was William who had come to Karp, and not the other way around. And it gilded his power that, distinctly as it was worth his while to undertake a favor for William, it was all really out of his hands ¡ performing the favor was not equivalent to granting the boon, which lay, abstractly and only in conjecture, with some mustached, burly-cheeked board of officials in Moscow. He might be the most vigorous advocate ever to bombard that board; still, if on political grounds they were beyond persuasion, he was helpless—the caprice, or call it policy, of unknown men governed all. This was delightful; it put Karp in the delicious position of disappointing William while seeming with all his might to be working to satisfy him: it was very like the sympathetic pride of the court physician who must tell the king he is incurable—the diagnostician wears the purple then. For the man whom glory nurtures, when alas for him he is born alien to the ruling blood of the province, a chink into the throne-room can be found: if he would have his elbows rub nobler elbows, let him, half by imitation and intuition, and half by bribery, become a courtier. Clearly this was Karp's way. He coveted William—I mean he coveted him socially: a dinner party at the house in Scarsdale with William's Groton intimates and their unimaginable wives (how Karp longed to see whether Euphoria approximated these!—he had chosen her because he thought she/did, but surely
they
did not commit verses—or, if she did not approximate them, he hoped to learn how, with a little coaching and no coaxing, she, a willing mimic, might be transformed)—this discouraging commonplace was Karp's Eden. If William knew, he had no call to practise, the democracy of, say, a university circle (wherein Karp hobnobbed with a high administrator descended from Jonathan Edwards and a bright teaching assistant three years past twenty who was great-grandnephew to Woodrow Wilson); and this exactly, that he denied his cozier self, was William's allure, for Karp held that democracy cheap. He craved no entry where entry was generous, and it was plain in his tone that all the fraternal liberties and splendors of Harvard and Yale and even recalcitrant Princeton moved him not so much as a single tremor of approval in the eyelid of caste-iron William.