Trust (48 page)

Three decades afterward he thought of Miss Pettigrew, and prolonged his melancholy. "Miss Pettigrew and my son," he took up his minor theme (for the major I had to wait), while I observed how a parsley-curl of white hair sprang sentry-like from each blood-darkened ear. He was on the years'-edge of giving way to these sad signs of accumulation. In that glowing little office where he opened history to himself and to me he nursed his back against his chair like an old cavalry-man imitating his early self, but some part of the seat betrayed him by an unexpected bray of the springs: rider and steed were aging together. "Not that I expect you to be anxious for an institution of which you long ago chose not to be an alumna," he persisted. "Nevertheless you may know (I will trust you to allow me to continue in the dimension of complete frankness) that among Miss Pettigrew's classmates there has been—something of a—" I saw him finally skirt the word "scandal," though his lips had stretched to accommodate it
—"situation,
relating to the, the taking of, I won't conceal it from you, drugs, by inhalation as it were—" I confirmed that I had heard of it, and headlong would have volunteered more, but he was too much in pursuit of the present as a distraction and a relief from whatever old images were staining his sight to allow me anything beyond a tentative assent. "Jt is serious, it is of course very serious. Luckily Miss Pettigrew is among the innocent. My son assures me she is among the innocent. Nevertheless one must always take precautions, one must always forestall even unlikelihoods, one must be prepared to intercept. In this connection—" his ready little cough punctuated briefly, and I had the sense that he would go on mercilessly talking of Miss Pettigrew quite as though she were Cletis, and for the same reasons—"I have seen to it that she will not be expelled. It would be intolerable if she were to be expelled."

"Particularly," I said sourly, "if she's as innocent as your son says she is."

"You speak as though you suppose her not to be."

"When really it's you who thinks she's not."

"Not innocent? Ah," he gave out, motionless with unease, "all this has made a very bad impression. Very bad. Her father—"

"Miss Pettigrew's father? The Democrat?"—but he did not know I mocked him.

"Exactly. I regret to say that though he had a hand in an Administration I was never able to regard as Constitutionally answerable, at the same time it put him in a position to do me a favor once with respect to your mother, a favor abroad some years back. Years ago, you see. I never imagined a reciprocal opportunity would arise. Of course it is a debt I had always hoped to wipe out, and now in this very special and very delicate matter it has become possible to correct a certain unfortunate impression—"

But with lawyers it is always necessary to translate. Perhaps because the stuff of their commerce is so hideous, they must overdress it in periphrasis. "A very delicate matter" is the jargon applied only to whatever is notably indelicate; and the continuous use of "nevertheless" is like the progression of staves along a rail: the fence of argument will not stand unless rooted in alibi. "I know that old story," I said promptly. "Your son was discussing it only a little while ago. You mean what happened that time in Paris. Pettigrew. He handed out bribes right and left. I don't mean only the little bribes to the doctors and the police that my mother gave. I suppose he even bribed the magistrates for you, never mind the Chamber of Deputies. He must have gone straight up into the Government."

William looked at me unwilling to receive my irony; perhaps, though unaware, I had blundered into what was not irony. "My son told you this?"

"I knew it before. I was there, you know."

"There?"

"When the chauffeur—"

"You were a child. A small child."

"But I was there."

"—and still a child. Your judgment remains childish. A negotiation is not a bribe," William said.

"A negotiation is not a bribe. Then it couldn't have been by negotiation," I concluded, "that you talked the school into keeping Miss Pettigrew?"

"You go far," William said. "See that you don't go too far."

"As far as you take me."

"I take you nowhere."

"That's a place too," I acknowledged.

"I am uninterested in psychological remarks," William said. "It diffuses. We lose hold of the issue."

"Illegitimate issue," I said. "—That's not a psychological remark."

"It is a very rude one. It is unworthy of your breeding, I think."

"I know how I was bred. Tell me how I was born."

"You've come here looking for a circus."

"Bred and circuses; but I want more than that."

"You want a show."

"A show of bravery," I said.

"Exactly," William said. "This is extremely distasteful, no doubt for you as well as for me."

"No doubt," I said.

"I am altogether aware of it. In consideration of your position, perhaps then it would be more useful on your part to display courage rather than defiance."

"I didn't mean on my part. I meant on your part. I'm brave enough. I am. I don't care what you tell me. But you—" His face held nothing for me, neither menace nor prod. "You're indecent about my mother. You're not brave enough to be decent about her."

"What your mother did was I am afraid indefensible."

"What you did was indefensible. You gave her the opportunity."

"Let us agree," William said, "that here at least your judgment is inadmissible. In this case you cannot claim to have been there."

"But didn't the trouble begin just because I
was
there? Eventually, I mean. Because if not for me she would have gotten away with it. I suppose she got away with it lots of times before I was bora. Unfortunately I constitute solid evidence, don't I?—what in the movies the district attorney calls Exhibit A. —Embroidered in scarlet."

"I commend you for your allusion," William said heavily.

"Your son doesn't like literary references either. It's a good thing Miss Pettigrew doesn't know any."

"Undoubtedly she has other gifts equally abstruse."

"She adores Euphoria Karp—is that one?"

"I leave it to my son's ingenuity," William said, and he opened his hand out wearily, "to expose whatever qualities are to be found in his fiancée."

"If he exposes any, it won't be to you. He doesn't let you in on things."

"You are treading, I may say, in alien fields. I have never had any reason to believe that I do not have my son's full confidence."

"Is that why you thought it worthwhile to intervene with Miss Jewett?—I mean," I covertly mimicked him, "even after your son had assured you Miss Pettigrew was among the innocent?"

"I don't see what relation this incident has to my son. The simple fact is that my wife has a certain influence with the younger Miss Jewett which the Pettigrew family could not possibly have. Mrs. Pettigrew is a quite unextraordinary woman—she was schooled somewhere in California, if I am not mistaken, whereas my wife is of course an alumna of Miss Jewett's. I am afraid the atmosphere of the school has perhaps in general declined—Nanette, you see, goes to the Academy precisely because it is my wife's conviction that the atmosphere at Miss Jewett's has certainly declined; besides, there are far fewer theatricals at the Academy. Nevertheless there is such a thing as a standard of loyalty to be maintained, and Miss Jewett is just now campaigning for funds among the alumnae, I think it is for a swimming pool. Mrs. Pettigrew is not an alumna, and it is not to her that Miss Jewett would normally go—"

"A swimming pool in exchange for the Chamber of Deputies," I interrupted. "No one can say you haven't evened it out with Pettigrew."

"—a series of facts, in short, which bears no relation whatsoever to my son's veracity. I repeat, I have never had any reason to suppose my son avoids the truth with me."

"You have a reason now."

"I take it you are an authority on my son?"

"It's just that he's an authority on you. He doesn't trust you. He's stopped trusting you."

"I see," William said, and contemplated this. "Then he has been corrupted."

"By finding things out."

"I promise you he remains ignorant of everything I have told you here today. Neither he nor anyone has had access to any information about your, let us call it your origins. Your mother has been shielded from any shadow. We have always done everything in this connection that your mother wished. We have acted," he said, leaning away, grieving into the leather cry of his chair, "with as much circumspection as our position has required, and perhaps with more. We have acted with providence. It is not too much to say that we have acted intensely and perpetually for your protection. My son knows nothing of this business. The world knows nothing."

It was the first time I had ever heard William speak of the world.

"You sound like Enoch now," I said. "And Enoch knows, doesn't he? Enoch; and—counting today—myself; and you; and my mother. That makes four. Four's not the world; though maybe five is. If your son knew, then the world would know.'

"You think little of my son's discretion. But he knows nothing. He knows no more than the general impression: simply that your mother was married to this person—"

"To Gustave Nicholas Tilbeck. Those are his names. I know my father's names," I said.

"—and divorced. The impression stands. We have done everything possible to allow it to stand without hindrance. We have particularly contrived to foster this illusion in you. There was no intention ever to embarrass you by informing you of your actual status. Until recently there was no necessity to inform you of it. Your mother and I"—how easily this flowered in the soil of his cold and arid talk! "Your mother and I"—the unwittingly but unremittingly paternal phrase; at once he noticed it himself, and self-consciously divided the autonomous graft—"your mother, as you know, has desired all along to keep you clear of this disclosure, and I, as her agent, have closely acquiesced. We have sought silence. We have arranged for silence. We have nurtured silence. For a dozen years we have bought and paid for silence."

And in the silence William withdrew, and creaked the inglorious screw of bis chair around to see now the crevices of the Venetian slats were startled into rods of wine: "Late, late, it gets late sooner these days," he muttered at timeless Cletis' morning-handed watch, remonstrating with his wife, who appeared to accuse the absent sun of having fled its post under fire; and reaching up to the plain lamp over the photograph he turned the switch and turned his Up: in the blast of quick light it shifted like a worm. "We have paid and we have paid and we have paid. It's nothing you or anyone could feel the way your mother has. Though in the early days your stepfather was known to tot it up now and then—to see what was left for himself, one supposes. At any rate we have paid. Up to last month we were still paying. We have paid and paid"—how cautiously he released this into the fan of brightness that came tilting over our twenty flattened fingers, and hesitated, and resumed, "and paid. And we never knew if it would do—the money—he wouldn't say how much, he left it all to us. In the beginning he would specify. He always sent a figure—that was in the beginning. He would say what it was for. Sometimes what he asked for was absurd—enough to buy a bottle of champagne if that was what he had a whim for, or a pair of shoes: whatever struck him at the moment. Or else he'd go out and rent a flat and fill it up with luxuries and send the bill. And once—on a postcard—I won't withhold even this—he wrote: Two dollars for Swiss tart.' I don't withhold even that. Torment and torment. Imagine how it was. Your mother had me write and tell him to name his sum and let it go at that. So he stopped saying how much and made us guess what he wanted. Spite. He wouldn't settle for a regular figure—I was ready to set up a monthly thing in a bank over there: he wouldn't settle for it. His reply!—if he had a steady income it would give the illusion of a steady job. He wouldn't join the bourgeoisie. I won't repeat all that madness, however. It suffices that he left it all to us: he wrote and asked and never named his sum, and we had to respond with conjecture. And we never knew whether it would do. Sometimes a little would do; at other times a very great deal wasn't enough for him. Torment! It was part of his whimsy. Your poor mother," William said, lowering his great naked brow under the lamp, "she never felt safe over you. There was no way of trusting him not to break through and show himself."

"And if he did?" I murmured, thinking of the locked room and the ledge where I had crept to hear the private visitor's terms. "I remember when he came that time. He had a blue bicycle, with bells. He laughed and laughed, and had books strapped to his bicycle in the rain. And one of them was full of flowers, and my mother threw it in a barrel. He was like a court jester. She asked Enoch if he had a knapsack."

"You were to have been kept free of him. Your mother paid him so that you would be kept free of him. She meant you to be safe."

"She locked me up. I never saw him."

"Or put it more pertinently: he never saw you."

"He never wanted to."

"Extortion isn't for the thing itself. It's for the use of the thing."

"Is that another of my father's names?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"Extortioner."

"Call him what you please," William said. Now the window had gone black. "Seven o'clock, and dark. September. But don't call him a court jester. He was never amusing. Your mother and I never found him amusing," he said. "Though your mother did. Then never again. Never again. She suffered. Under another set of chances she might have thrown it all off. Under a different star, so to speak."

"You mean if not for me," I offered once again.

"If not for you," he acknowledged finally. "She had to live it through. She has thought always how you must be kept safe from him. It has been her preoccupation. It has been her obsession. It has been her cross. He would have told you what you were."

I said, "What I am."

"It would have been unspeakable to do. It would have been hideous to do. It could never have been allowed."