Trust (45 page)

"I don't know. I thought"—I wavered and wandered, searching for what I really
had
thought—"I thought you were not like them."

It was so. I had thought William not like Mr. and Mrs. Vand. I had supposed him incapable of betrayal. I had believed him to be—oh, what I had believed him to be!—it was simple, simple, single and simple, and the multifold word stuck to my tongue, a stale pearl of honey: it was only that I had believed William to be trustworthy. Trustworthy!—that sculptured notion which his son had intervened to sully, like a boy daubing the blank eye-ovals of a stone god with an obscene leer painted all distastefully in the corners of the proud smooth
sockets; or like time, rightly named inexorable, which cracks not men's works (for what that grows from the hand and not the mind is so perdurable that we can truly call it "works"? what is not waxen under the life's-breath of breeding time?) but their beliefs and wears them out and sends them down into decay. Time struck at William, and a dead boy, and hope died too: past time beat at him; an Armenian name, old though alien (alien though accustomed, used, relentlessly encountered), shuddered against his unmoved lips. The dead boy dead at the age of William's son, a spiteful age, dead in the defiled moment of the marriage-hope where now William's son stood hissing scorn and spite. What was William now? I looked at him and saw what his son saw, the terrible trader in kind who had exchanged trustworthiness for mean treachery, and had given over conscience for—what? for cynical neglect: the turning of his back. He bartered everything, this new despoiled William. He had bartered my mother and all her swift feeling for this calm wife who watched him with the grey assured eyes of a solemnly dangerous, household deity. He gave everything away for the sake of new shipments. And even Enoch, dealer in unnameable shipments, recorder of unrecordable goods, numerator, broker, collector and connoisseur of atrocity, in those days of his briskest commerce over the body of Europe had given •nothing in return and took his loads as they were settled on him, and required nothing. So it was no longer sensible to hope for truth in William; even in William. He would give truth if he got something valuable for it, if he owed it as a payment: and now I suddenly believed his son, now I had unconsolable evidence, now I saw in him what his son saw, though with disillusionment less frail and without the pain of a noble loss: not having had a father, unlike William's son I had no father to lose. And yet, after all, I had William to lose (William, trampled grotto, violated shrine), and wondered whether I had already lost him (as when the spoliation of the lovely thing is still a rumor, though accepted and credited, and one hurries to the place to see the substantiation of one's hideous imaginings, by now as certain and believing as if the act had been one's own); and whether, since I supposed I had nothing to offer in exchange, he would give me what I had come for. It was the truth I had come for, though his own boy had ceased to hope for truth from him, though his own boy had told how he had murdered a boy, though he was capable of filicide, having murdered not only the long-dead boy but also his son's illusions, and (but it did not matter, it did not matter) mine.

So William tumbled down—a collapse (the collapse of trust, the collapse of time) I had come too late to witness. I had come an hour too late. Consider: a single hour earlier and I might in the unlucky labyrinth of that place have missed his son and his son's intervention and his son's tale of suicide, of filicide, and of the old old contrivance of a knife: but now, too late—the inconceivable hour of revelation had already descended into pest time, like the suicide itself, and I found that in reality it was not only this unkind hour which separated me from the chance of having escaped the crucial flick of the son's tongue, toppling the massive trustworthiness of the father. I had come not an hour but a whole generation too late. For it had all happened long before.

Everything had happened long before.

"No one likes to dredge things up," William said. "I can't condemn your mother if she doesn't want to."

"You don't want to either."

"I don't want to either."

"You're sorry to see me here."

"Sorry."

"And surprised," I persisted.

But this stopped him. "Surprised? Oh no no no no, not surprised." Wearily he put his fingers across his lids, contemplating me through them as through the bars of a jail. "The fact is"—and now slowly, very slowly, wearily and slowly, phrase by phrase he brought it out—"I've been expecting you on this very errand for twenty years."

For twenty years. So I was right: everything had happened long before. And perhaps I was predictable to William only because in some way my movements had been predetermined. The notion amazed me, and I waited to hear if he would confirm it.

From the imprisonment of his spread hands he said, "We live with possibilities, but mostly we live with consequences"; and confirmed it.

But it was not what Enoch would have said. Enoch, wizard-like, would have seen consequences
as
possibilities. My stepfather was a magician however. William was more practical; and was it not just for his practicality that I had sought him out?

So in the same vein, practical and sober, I put it to him: "But all the while I've been in the dark, and when you're in the dark it's nothing but a question of grasping at straws. It all comes down to that. And
you,
" I told him, "are the last one left"

"Your last straw?" he echoed reflectively.

"When you don't know what's happened—when you're in the dark and you can't tell the difference," I pursued, "between a possibility and a consequence."

He was thoughtful. "You're intelligent," he said, "you're acute," and let it momentarily hang. I wished, in the interval, that instead of these he had merely called me innocent, but his hesitation had ended. "So you won't be distressed to remember that the last straw is exactly the one reputed to have broken the camel's back. And if I'm your last straw"—he looked at me shrewdly, lowering his protective fingers—"are you altogether prepared for that?"

I felt the involuntary rip of shock. "What do you mean?"—though I saw his deliberation.

"Yes," he said in a low hard formal tone, "if you have come here, if you have come to me, that is what you have come for."

"If I've come—" I began, but William did not allow me either crescendo or conclusion, and whatever my cry was to have been, protest or exhortation or plea, it fell away like a flake of cinder into that past time where truth was interned side by side with betrayal and death.

He cut me off—"Never mind"—and undertook to murder possibility with consequence. I mean by this that (like a missionary) he explained his intention and robbed my life of its axioms. "And now," he said, without haste, oratorically (like a missionary he was about to convert me, and did), "at your own request, if you please—at your own request"—he strangely emphasized this, as if to show how he abhorred forcible conversion, showing me instead the whole pale force of his round bright pupils, "I am going to break your back."

He did as he said. He did what every trader or missionary will do for a customer or convert when he expects to be well paid for it. In my cognition of William at that queer moment, trader and missionary appeared to coalesce theatrically—a twinning of vision unremarkable when you think of those altogether respectable Societies for the Propagation Of this or that faith which, behind the counters of their sleek and tidy shops on fashionable streets, will sell you religious articles or scriptural keys out of zeal for your eternal soul, but always collecting a good sum for the privilege of bringing you to the truth, as though their particularized and immediately vendable truth had, like pistols, a cash value. It was, in my mother's lawyer, an unexpected savagery. But had not his son, an hour before, been equally savage?—and then I had marveled at it, it had fallen across my perception with all the turbulence of a rough beauty, a sort of fantasy of manner, an intricate secret elegance, like the incalculable path of a spring happened upon in an otherwise orderly countryside by a party of unsuspecting tourists. It was nothing I could ever have guessed at; it was something to stumble over, both in the father and in the son—in the father especially, the countryside of whose face had always raised its contours in fine ruddy hillocks more melancholy and quiescent, as in a pastoral, than violent. But in the father I did not like that startling streak and rush. It oppressed, it cut through the design of his voice as though it wished to persecute; it hurt. Against the unreality of the masked dusk-light William ministerially raised a hand; the blazing translucence of the little webs of skin linking the roots of finger to finger frightened me: I was vulnerable even to that terrible vulnerability and delicacy of his thinnest flesh. —A breeze jangled the metal slats of the blind, and lifted it away; and through the triangle of window suddenly revealed I saw the sky shining like a polished copper gong. Immensely and hopelessly it seemed to toll in the far commanding firmament, a high clear signal of the marketplace, and below it William and I, tented in that silken room, tugged for a bargain in our inevitable exchange. He had received me into that privacy knowing me for what I was, a suppliant after truth; and he intended to give it to me—for a price. He did not mean to outwit me, only to exact from me his price. I looked: it was posted on his brow, plain to see—he meant'it to be plain, he meant to have me see him in the guise of merciless collector. The cost of truth was my surrender. I would be indentured now to exile—I had to barter my freedom for the truth, and yield without a word. And I took in these lucid implications soon enough; they were familiar, they were close. It was the same surrender of myself which had bought for my mother, in all the ceremony of mystery, my stepfather's safety. —But now (just as the father had been annihilated by the son's tale) the mystery would be annihilated by the father's tale.

The errant window-shade, maneuvered by a contrary sheet of air, fell back aslant, and covered the gleam of sky. Between its bottom slat and the sill the round space of gong reduced itself to a golden hoop—the whole diffuse brilliance of that sky was concentrated into an intense circle spinning against the panes: it was the coin of sun, suspended in the valley of skyscrapers, about to drop away, as into a slot. And I, counting up the two clean sea-stained dimes fixed in William's seizing eyes, wished to slide down into that dark shaft with the vanishing afternoon, to roll with my humiliation out of sight: I was stunned by coins, coldly felt them all around me, in the unendurable disc of the hanged sun and in William's burning face and in the round round moons of my fingernails, and remembering my lewdly clinking dress (that dress which had made me ashamed to look with innocence upon William's son), jingling like a peddler's pockets, full of money, full of Tilbeck, full of noisy contemptible actuality—oh then, then, then, even before William (despoiled, my almost-father) spoke it out to me I knew what I was, what unspeakable mint had made me, and how like a piece of unclean money I could be passed from hand to hand, one day to pay for this, and the next for that, and to be bitten between cruel cynical teeth testing for the counterfeit.

So the transaction in that office was concluded. William gave me the truth, and I paid for it.

He said: "Now I am going to talk to you of your legal status and I will be obliged to use a set of legal terms. They will seem brutal,' but they are what they mean. I trust you will accept them without commotion. They are what you will have to face. Afterward, if you wish—I suppose you will—we'll talk of their history. But first you will have to face what you have come for. You ask me about your father. But you ought also to ask about your mother. Your poor mother," he repeated, and it was wondrous that he did not falter—"the fact is that in the eyes of the law—and I am please understand a lawyer talking about the law" (but at this small point he faltered at last, and allowed a low phlegm-noise to be juggled in his throat, and then took up again) "—you are what is called illegitimate issue. You are," he finished, driving in with all unmistakable clarity his deep and iron nail, "a bastard."

The father's tale.

Once, long ago, on an occasion I have by now forgotten, Enoch said to my mother: "Hell is truth seen too late," and without giving it any thought I assumed he was speaking for himself. But my mother, shrewd and shrewish that day, said petulantly: "And what about truth seen too soon? You're not going to tell me that's heaven?"—And afterward I came up on my stepfather's remark in a book: it was a sentence from an English philosopher. He had been reading Hobbes. But his reply to his wife was characteristic only of himself—he answered not with a logical corollary but with a fresh tangent. "Oh no," he told her, propelled into one of his placid satiric moods, "Heaven is never to see the truth at all." And then, to mollify her—she had taken it roughly against the shield of her frown—he threw out, "if you see the truth too soon you naturally accommodate yourself to what you see; and by the act of accommodating yourself you change whatever the circumstance was when you originally saw it; and by changing the circumstance you alter the ground from which the truth springs, and then it can no longer grow out that same truth which you foresaw: it has become something different. So you see it is impossible to see the truth too soon, for when its moment of commitment arrives, it has changed its nature and it is already too late. The truth is always seen too late. That is why hell is always with us," he insisted on finishing, although my mother had long ago covered her ears and was shouting with vigor, "Stop! Stop! I can't stand it, I
won't
stand it!" And they ended laughing together, enigmatically, as though not the English philosopher, and not Enoch, but Allegra Vand herself had innocently convulsed them.

I think of this now, when I have come finally to the father's tale, though not
my
father's: a tale told by my almost-father about my "true" father, signifying anything but fatherhood. For if, in my stepfather's phrase, it was for me a truth seen too late, that story which William eventually related, then let it stand that on a certain afternoon in the first days of September, in William's darkly glazed private office, under the painted eye of his brief father-in-law and the paper eye of his determinedly permanent wife, I entered hell.