Trust (43 page)

Caste-iron: how Euphoria Karp would have rejoiced in this equivoque!—which, for I do not wish to plagiarize, I had, even while I said it to myself, to credit to a gravely Utopian page in
Marianna Harlow.
In Russian, I observed, the pun must have been lost together with the royalties, and so I turned to ask in a voice that—since it sounded briskly to-the-point while not being on the point at all—might almost have been Mrs. Karp's: "It's not for literature you're going?"

"Well yes; why not for literature?" Karp said, taken by surprise. "It isn't just Mrs. Vand. It's Faulkner and Hemingway too. It's everyoñe."

But so far William's hallowed eyelid remained unblinkingly rigid. "What has literature got to do with it? I hope you're not thinking of going all the way to Russia for the sake of a frivolity," he said sternly. Each conscientious sentence emerged as cautiously and absolutely as a chess move; it was not the Castle (wherein gaudy sinners pursued their own amusement) William put forward, but rather the somber-visaged Bishop (the Bishop, it might be noted, on the Right). "If the Administration were paying for the trip I assure you I wouldn't expect better—only last month they sent some foolish pieces on tour abroad, full of holes and deformities, sculpture, they call it—a quarter-of-a-million-dollars' worth of exhibiting to the world how we make monkeys of ourselves. All right, but if we're putting up the money privately, it's not to finance a depravity, it's for results, it's not for the flowers that bloom in the spring. It's for the royalties they've cheated her of."

"They've cheated all the others too," Karp said, downed by discontent and deprivation—he had not expected he would be called upon to argue. "The list we've prepared shows some very distinguished authors."

"Don't talk to me about your list. Your list means nothing to me. The point is there's no one on it who has her sales over there."

"She goes like hotcakes over there," Connelly morosely supplied.

"Russian hotcakes?" quipped Mrs. Karp, brightly blazing, and paying strict attention once again. "You mean Mrs. Vand's novel sells like
blini?
That's Russian for—"

But no one seemed entertained by this demonstration of the resources of linguistic humor—so, out of charity, before she had it all out I gave her a smile, for which I imagined I would have to pay sooner or later. From fellowship Mrs. Karp exacted more fellowship. "—for hotcakes," she finished doggedly.

Still, all this was behind the scenes, as it were; for meanwhile William had not paused. "I ought to say that the book itself is not at issue. I never thought anything of it. I can't claim that I've ever read it. I was never an admirer of its political tone," he said tautly; "but I haven't read your Faulkner and Hemingway either, and I don't intend to. When I want a taste of fiction I go to the newspapers and look at the editorials. Your 'distinguished authors' may be better writers than poor Allegra—though candidly and logically I don't believe there can be better or worse in nonsense and vice—but they can't have better sales. The fact is it's her sales I'm concerned with, not her book. She's been at the very top over there for a generation. The book itself is a puerile outrage. Which says something for the Russian public."

"Well, people tend to forget," Connelly embroidered with a pugnacious scowl of irrelevant wisdom. "They forget how Rosy-velt tried to pack the Court."

This counterpoint did not perturb Karp; he kept his gaze on William. He was not essentially interested in literature, or in royalties, or in Connelly. He was interested in what interested William. He saw that Connelly, who was generally flexible but not noteworthily intelligent, and who was in his more primitive fashion what Karp was himself—a fawner—did not interest William, whereas Mrs. Vand did. "The political tone?" he asked, though he was not essentially interested in politics either.

"They read her like a sentimental tract," William confirmed. "I'm told they read her in the high schools. She's the Soviet
Uncle Tom's Cabin
—it can't be helped, though it's a terrible pity. I admit to feeling a patriotic shame over it. I happen to regard it as an immense scandal, but it doesn't change the fact that she's entitled to her royalties."

"She's not a sympathizer?"

"She grew out of it," William said curtly.

"The country didn't," Connelly complained. "Bolshevik ideas even in the Republican Party, right today. They put the New Dealers out of office but kept the New Deal, so what's the gain?"

"I'm talking about Allegra," William said angrily. "I always knew she would grow out of that stupidity. She never had anything in common with it."

It startled me to hear from William so public a private declaration. Embarrassment had wrung it from him, and I discerned that, for the sake of regaining Allegra Vand's lost royalties, he was in the process of negotiating much more than it seemed on the surface; he was exposing himself, and bartering his exposure. His very negotiation seemed to support what he abhorred, even in memory—my mother's wild long-ago days; yet the more he expressed his abhorrence—so as not to appear to have partaken in her shame—the more he propelled himself into the unchivalrous appearance of proclaiming that shame. Conceit for his soul's condition and loyalty to my undeserving mother puffed his clean jaw with unendurable contradictions, and I recognized in poor proud William his old, sad, foolish affliction regarding Allegra Vand:
odi et amo
—or, if that is too classically burning for such a disciplined heart as William's, say instead that he suffered from a wound which had been suppurating for an eternity, only because he would let no one (not himself, not even, with all her fastidiousness and love of gardens, his wife) bandage it.

His avowal made me meditate. "If you always knew it," I said slowly, astonished to hear myself speak it out, "why didn't you wait?"

"Wait for what?" Connelly asked, more callous than inquisitive.

"For the stupidity to end."

William closed his eyes.

"For her to grow out of it," I persisted, conscious of my daring.

He opened them again, but not at me. His narrow look pursued detachment. "You can tell your mother," he coolly directed me, "that the Russian business is underway. It's going to be taken care of."

"That's right, tell her William's hooked Karp," said Euphoria, demonstrating her special wink.

But William's hook dangled nakedly. It wa§ not Karp he was after. "Tell your mother," he said again, setting his bait, "that the Commission will do much more than merely put her at the top of its booklist."

"We'll do what we can, you know," Karp said.

"Tell her," William said, "that she's going to get a quite distinct recognition. Professor Karp will acknowledge that she
is
a special case," he said, "hell insist on it, you see," he said, turning to me at last, but only to avoid Karp. "So you can tell her it's more or less settled. I'll be coming up to see her myself in the next week or two—no, later: after your stepfather's hearing. I'd rather not thrust this Russian business at her just now when she's concerned with the other—it's an issue that's always gotten her I think disproportionately excited. Well, and no wonder," he expanded while Karp watched him with the contempt of a man who when rebuffed grows suddenly cruel, "she's keen on justice, she's always been keen on justice. Then you'll get it for her, Jerome?" he plainly commanded.

Not Karp but his wife answered—like a jester, she saw her task as requiring her to jump in with praise for her lord in the very moment of his humiliation. What she chose to praise was his cruelty. "Oh you don't have to worry about 'Rome, believe me! They had their chance once before to say no over there; they won't say it again though, I can promise you that—'Rome never gives anyone a second chance! Never, never. He always attains justice because he never bothers with mercy—as a policy it's incredibly efficient. Imagine," she laughed, "how many lives of freshmen he's blighted just on account of being keen on justice himself! Freshmen
and
their wives—freshmen in law school
all
have wives nowadays, they're absolutely rampant, they even have to have them organized in clubs," she gratuitously informed us, valuing all fact equally, "but you see what to Mrs. Vand is only an emotion is to 'Rome a working system, there's the difference. So if his system can break the heads of freshmen, just think what it'll do to the Kremlin! 'Rome never gives
anyone
a second chance," she finished with a shake of her ruffles.

Professor Karp tried to look modest through this discourse, quite as though he did not wish to appear really as vainglorious as Euphoria described him; or perhaps he only thought his wife talked too much. He had, nevertheless, nothing more to say; and neither, it turned out, did William, who was at that moment unexpectedly distracted by a particular screech, higher and wilder than its companion-cries, which flew soaring across the room out of the throat of his daughter-in-law-to-be. He bent his head with melancholy. "Your poor mother," he murmured, and I thought it irrelevant to anything but the contents of his own mind until it came to me that this radiant halloo (it had to do, apparently, with the continuing political strategy of victorious Cabbages versus captive Onion) which had no intellectual meaning but was instead an open and joyous ringleader call of judgment on the world that a bird in its simplicity might make upon the crimson cherry-bough—Stefanie's bright voice—reminded him not of his son's misfortune but of his own youth.

"Then it's settled," he repeated to Karp; "you'll let me know the date you fly," and Karp knew he would never see the inside of the Scarsdale house, or the wives of the grown Groton lads: William had summoned him not for himself, but only for his usefulness; only for the blade of his brain, and for the clever sheath of vanity that covered his mercilessness, though both had been honed in competition with men better-born than he, men who were named for the dales and fields and rills of a
place,
and not for the homeless landless scavenger fish; William esteemed nothing in Karp, nothing, only what was exploitable and at the same time execrable, as though Karp were a mediaeval money-lender: only what would bring about the satisfaction of the whim of Allegra Vand, which he desired—why?

Because he remembered still the curious gathered-up laughter of her girlhood—my mother's cry: that rod of white fire with which she had struck him when she fled the house in Scarsdale: which Karp was never to enter.

So Karp and I had
that
in common, though a negative, and for reasons not different. Karp, however respectable his origins, had been in William's view born to the wrong father; and so had I. In spite of it I sided with William against him, and not only out of habit. I did not like him. I did not like his wife. These two were proud. They were proud that Karp had no compassion; that he oppressed the hearts and sped and bled the years of young men and their brides; that like fate he spited hope; that he used authority not for order, but for a whip, to assure himself of his importance. They were proud, they thought themselves important; pride and importance swelled and swaggered in their unextraordinary faces; and strangely I felt a sorrow for their sorrow and their delusion. How hopeless to yearn after William's tea-table!—William who by inheritance and conviction was, hence never troubled to denote himself, "important." How like a pair of
voyeurs
they seemed! And so they stood mutely pealing wanting and woe, while William looked past them, stiff as a figure on a bow with wooden arms posed behind his back, thinking out toward the horizon, himself wormy with impossible longings, and these two below him not understanding that he had ceased to see them. Whereas Connelly, the practised-perfect acolyte, was already moving off, intuiting without having been directly told when his duty was over. He showed, as he drifted away, a sense of ceremony; his very physiognomy displayed it; ritually his retreating little ears continued to wait, segregated like very pale mushrooms a decent distance to the sides of his wide wet eyes. The meticulous accountant meandered, then stopped a far but fealty-filled space from his master, a lonesome squat man who crumpled his big square forehead and would not drink: odd duck, Irish teetotaler, who had given up liquor perhaps in imitation of William, perhaps for some private tragic cause he kept to himself, a sort of atonement—his sister was a nun.

Meanwhile Euphoria Karp. Her husband brooded, imagining Moscovite revenge. Not she. "Aren't you going to read the placebo?" Her mouth jagged with charm, she pressed me for my promise. "Read it. Don't keep it from William—I mean read it aloud!"

And because I hardly knew whom to pity more in that company—the silenced Karp or this voluble Karp; the meticulous accountant divided between practical worship of Protestant success and romantic musing reverence for the other older success of the Eternal City; or William my almost-father, who would gladly have unstitched his central organ from his unhappy ribs to appease my mother for his having solemnly determined, after many and bitter trials, that she would not Do—wretched for their wretchedness I fell into an earnest confusion and obeying thin Euphoria I read aloud her Revised Version with as much incomprehension as I would have felt had I been adjured, then and there, to recite from Koheleth the Preacher. As I have said, this poem of hers was shaped like a tube, through which bravely I began to blow.

OWED TO THE PLACEBO

("Ho ho," said Mrs. Karp. "Tell them how it's spelled! O-w-e-d, not o-d-e. And don't go calling it doggerel, William—it's too frisky. If you must, call it pupperel. Ho ho, ho ho.")

And I said into the air what I saw:
All hail to the placebo,
The mild, delightful, effective placebo!
Sing hoo, sing ray,
Sing night, sing day,
Sing while sitting in the latticed gazebo,
Sing while with alpenstock upon Mount Nebo;
Laurels and praise to the wondrous placebo!
Though the placebo is a pill
For the not-so-ill,
It must never occasion your mirth.
Small is its girth
Yet what on earth
From desert to firth
Can boast the worth
Of this radiant pill
For the not-so-ill?
This homely, familiar, not in the
least
exotic
Device for the not-very-sick-but-somewhat-neurotic—