Trust (44 page)

("Did your mother's hair really fall out? All of it?" Euphoria, though enraptured, allowed herself to break in.

"A lot of it did," I answered.

"Poor woman! Suffering from one of the ills that mortals fall hair to. Ho ho!" said Euphoria. "Don't stop, don't stop. There's more to read. Ho ho!") I read grimly on.

There are pills which are drugs which have plenty of power
But when you eat them, alas, their taste is sour,
They give you a frown and a scowl and a glower.
But the sweet placebo makes nobody cower!
Of invisible strength it's a veritable tower!
How sly the placebo, how subtly deceiving:
It only pretends, but succeeds, in relieving,
For its recondite force, whether medical or dental,
Lies just in this fact: that it's nothing but mental.
If we hadn't the placebo for the hypochondriacal
The whole world would soon go quickly maniacal!
So you patients who are found to be fit as a fiddle,
You patients whose ailment's an insoluble riddle,
You patients neurotic, sulky, and cranky,
Give thanks for this medical hanky-panky!
And sing hoo, sing ray,
Sing night, sing day—

There was more, much more, and a whole column of even more ingenious rhymes, but here I not so much rebelled as faltered, having observed William in the act of unleashing his locked hands.

He spoke.

"Goodbye." he said to Euphoria Karp.

"Goodbye?"

"It was good of you to bring Jerome up here in the middle of all this. In spite of everything it's been fruitful, fruitful."

"It's been peachy," winked Euphoria.

Professor Karp led her away like a hangman dedicated to his work.

And William spoke again.

"Your mother's all right?"

Apparently he had forgotten that he had already asked this. "She coughs now and then," I said.

"But she
is
much better."

I nodded. "She even comes out on the terrace now."

"I'm glad to hear it. Though she mustn't be careless, you know. I hope she isn't planning to go down to Washington for that hearing?" I admitted I knew of no such scheme. "Those hearings can be nasty," he continued. "It won't do her any good down there."

"I thought it was open and shut. I thought all they had to dp was confirm Enoch's appointment."

William's eyelid flickered for me, as it had not for Karp. "That's right," he said.

"Then why do you say nasty?"

"It's in the nature of politics," was all he would yield, and offered nothing more. His look hardened, quite as if not biological tears but a sort of chemical lacquer brushed his stare, and he listened once more to the voice of his daughter-in-law.

This reminded me of the duty of civility. "I've just learned about your son and Miss Pettigrew. How wonderful."

"Thank you, yes, wonderful," he lugubriously acknowledged it. "A charming child. Vivacious."

But he did not wish to be drawn into talk of his son. He was silent, and simply waited.

He waited: for me. And so, because I could think of nothing further to delay the moment of confrontation, I had to begin. "I came to see you," I finally undertook it.

"Obviously"—but he did not mock.

"I hope you don't mind. It's not a terribly convenient time—"

William did not palliate these excuses by dismissing them.

"—but I had no idea there was a celebration."

He answered with a mutter.

"What?" I said, straining.

"Your mother," he said again, in so low a tone I scarcely heard, "doesn't know you're here."

"No."

He appeared neither angry nor not-angry. He was controlled; more, he was indifferent. "I thought not," he said merely.

"I'm going away in two days."

"I suppose you are."

"To a place—it's a house, I don't know, Duneacres it's called. It's a place on an island."

"Yes," he said patiently.

"My father is there—it's where my father is. They're sending me to my father," I burst out. "My mother and Enoch."

"I see." He took me by the elbow. It was a spontaneous motion. In all my life before, except in a formal clasp. I had never felt William's hand.

"It's to see my father," I explained. "And they tell me nothing. They won't speak of it."

"Come," William said.

"I want to understand," I pressed on; "and they won't speak of it."

"Oh: understand"—as though understanding were nothing.

"I mean"—I half-pleaded and half-insisted—"I mean I need to
know.
"

"Come," William repeated, exactly as his son had done earlier, expecting me to follow. In this they were alike, equally imperious, and each had a stride (William's less vigorous, a little elderly, not from physical weariness so much as from the moral fatigue of continuous authority)—a condescending stride dedicated to isolating an intention. I walked obediently after him along the periphery of the wide and tumbled room where already the dark purplish-gold of a late-summer late-afternoon was wearing down the flung energies of gaiety, and the noise as we passed through it seemed, though less abundant, shriller, blade grating on blade, until we came to a shadowed corner and a door.

The back of a metal office chair was jammed tightly under the knob.

"Good Lord," William said, growing redder, "what the devil is it now? There's no limit to it," and briefly tugged. The two rear legs of the angled chair screeched along the floor, fighting tautly for release, and toppled free with a high metallic clatter, like an armored knight clumsily unhorsed and clanging in a forest. A sharp corner, breaking the air, struck William; he bent with a wince over his stunned knee. Meanwhile all around the outer room those startled celebrants surrendered to a hush of watching, and shook themselves down into a staring assembly rooted on the mysterious doorknob; it slowly turned this way and that, tentatively, almost in resonance with the resentful rubbing poor William gave his pounded skin. Of its own will, it seemed, the door began to travel open, at first cautiously, but then with a furious push that slapped it against the wall; and without a word and trailing tears from a ghastly bitten lip, a small plump girl, full of fright and daring, rushed recklessly out.

Behind us the Cabbages whooped.

"It's old Silverpants!" And they all moaned together.

"William's let her out," Stefanie Pettigrew (unmistakably she) announced in disgust. "And bawling like a babe."

This was true. Old Silverpants, the captive Onion, had stopped in her tracks and was standing white as a real onion and as intimately concerned with the business of weeping. The drops paused on the little pale bulb of her nose before leaping off it to mustachio her scared and wretched mouth; for half a second she glanced without expression at William and at me, and threw a look back into her hour's prison; and then, more hopeful than cunning, she assessed the crowd and made a run for it.

"Get her! Get her!" screamed the erubescent Cabbages. "She's getting away! She's heading for the elevators! Stop her, get her!"

But the nervy Onion had escaped.

And William ruefully went on rubbing his knee. "There's no limit to it," he said. "Turned over the water coolers. Locked up a child. And probably broke my leg."

"The taxi-driver I came down with said he thought all the water coolers on Wall Street were polluted. He said you could get diseases from them," I told him, wondering whether he would smile.

But "Wrecked my office," he only grumbled; he had not been listening, and loomed on the threshold with a vague stoop, peering in. My grandfather Huntingdon's unbenign portrait scowled upon his erstwhile son-in-law from the far wall—my mother's father, one of the firm's great men, whose name was kept on the letterhead still. In spite of this piety the gold frame was black with neglect. The shades were down, and the remainder of the sunlight filtered through greenly: William's private office looked undersea, a lonesome submarine lost from the world of action and plotting against it. It was a place for conspirators—a soft and resplendent hideout. The fine gloomy oak desk with its leather rectangle squatted on elegant claw feet, aging moment by moment, lowing with polish, like a beautiful shining saddled lioness. Its back was smooth and almost naked, except for a standing photograph and a big clumsy crystal ashtray, wherein five cellophane caramel wrappers lay crumpled: the Onion, though a whimperer, had not been without the resources of nourishment under siege.

"She's got everything sticky," said William with distaste; "well, come in; come in and close the door."

In the greenish light the brown cushion of carpet and the brown squares of paneling met imperceptibly. It was a room which had a sense of generations: the portrait of my grandfather with his large English-style mustache stuffed in the narrow space between nose and lip like an extra handful of the carpet which no one had known how to dispose of, and downy brown thick wisps of it crawling up his nostrils; and a yard behind William's splendid old chair (he creaked down it with a sigh) the far-off true entrance to this confidential place, a tall door carved all over with strange leaves, rubbed and gleaming and as dependable-looking as a discreetly turned back, through which who can dream what great characters daily walked; and here now in spare isolation on the surface of the desk the image of tiny Cletis sucking on a fat watch docilely in her mother's lap, the unoblivious heiress of all the whispered moneyed intrigues of this citadel and treasure-room. Meanwhile I came face to face with William's wife. Her serious eyes did not accommodate the photograph; they evaded it as though an obscure religious scruple, so that she appeared intensely in a "pose," holding high the sort of carefully unfashionable head one describes by the faint-hearted word "distinguished';—this meant her hard will toward orderliness showed, somewhat perilously, in the uncongenial serenity of her long oval forehead. She was austere; she was not so much her husband's guardian as his guard.

"Cletis is older than that now, you know," William said, interrupting my gaze. "We're grateful that she's stopped sucking at everything in sight. She's learned to discriminate—we like to say she's acquiring tastes." Suddenly it was his old tone, the one that idled over bits of news of his boys and girls on those occasions when he was perforce thrown together with me, awaiting my mother's step and in terror of what I might choose to bring up. Instead he brought everything up himself, thinking to stave off with Cletis whatever indignity and shame might line my silenced tongue. But here, in this retreat, under the cool aware watchfulness of the picture of his wife viewing him with all the somber power of a talisman, he could rely on no rescue by Allegra Vand; and I understood that he spoke of baby Cletis now not to save himself from what I might remind him of but to save his wife from my long scrutiny, stubborn with curiosity over this surrogate for my mother and redolent with obscure intimacies. It was the suggestion of intimacy—of intimate visualization—which dismayed William: he did not like me to look closely at his wife, and so he talked of Cletis. Perhaps he naively feared that I might require him to discuss whatever my eye fell wonderingly upon; and of the two, his wife and his child, Cletis was the safer subject.

Then while (to give him ease) I tried not to consider that brittle, glazed, and civilized madonna armed with offspring, I heard him say the terrible name.

"Tilbeck," he began: and so it was I who was startled and dismayed by the crudity of an intimacy. For he spoke it not as an allusion but quite as though he were horribly addressing me.

"You're here just for Tilbeck then," he said.

"Well, not for Cletis," I had to answer, alert and partly insolent with melancholy. "And not for your son either."

"They didn't ask you, the young people," he acknowledged; he was glad of tangents and digressions.

"I don't care. I told your son I don't care. I told Miss Pettigrew too. Really it doesn't matter. It's only on account of my mother that they would have asked me anyway."

"Your mother likes you to meet young people—you don't want to blame her for that. I recall you made a great fuss about not intending to come out. It was stubbornness, I told your mother that. I'm happy to say Nanette doesn't give us that trouble." He tried on a reluctant smile. "She gives us other trouble, I'm afraid. She has the Thespian call. She wants to be an actress."

"Perhaps Mrs. Karp—"

"Yes, Mrs. Karp might swing it. I do awfully dread Mrs. Karp."

I sat down opposite him and felt him survey me across the long space of desk.

"I hate a clever woman," he finished.

"So does your son."

"Ah, Miss Pettigrew," he said. "She has an able father. I don't care for his ideas. His ideas are irresponsible, but he's able enough. He used to have a job very like the one your stepfather is just giving up. Of course it was under the old Administration."

"She's very pretty."

"Yes, a pretty girl. Full of life. It doesn't surprise me that he's chosen a good-looking girl, though Lord knows"—his regret only pretended to be a pretense—"I didn't expect a Democrat."

I came out directly, "Then what
did
you expect?"

But he only shook his head. "No, it won't do, one must never expect things for one's children."

"My mother does," I said vividly. "She expects everything."

"For you?" He swung forward. "But she can't help it. Circumstances plan for her. She does what she's obliged to do. She wants you to be free."

"She's told me that," I bit off. "Is that why she's obliged to send me where she pleases?"

"She's not free to have you be free. I suppose you understand that."

"Oh—understand!" it was my turn to exclaim. "They don't tell me anything."

"And if
they
don't," he said rationally, "why do you expect it of me?"

I had to think. I was conscious of a flood of courage. An hour before I would have known how to reply to this. An hour before William had represented himself in my imagination as a distantly familiar marble certainty: a statue signifying nobility, which one has ceased to notice because its physical and moral nature is as reliable and unchanging as the lamppost. I had come seeking that monument like a native of a place bent on rediscovering old civic landmarks he has never before had the openness of wit really to
see:
but what I found was rubble. I had come too late. A disorderly affliction had razed that grandeur. I saw now what his son saw: the broken pile.