Trust (49 page)

"Until you could do it yourself."

"Until," he contradicted, "it had to be done." And I saw the worm of his mouth coil.

"I don't blame you," I said. "You've done it to save my mother the job."

"You were never to have been told. Your poor mother," poor William had to say again, lifting the weight of his head and mourning after some secret vision perhaps too literal for his tethered imagination to wonder at; but it was years too late for remorse. She had thrown the book of flowers, those vulnerable beauties, into the rain-barrel, she had thrown her Shelley into the tunnel of the sea, the black spray of flies flew up, the white flies of the foam flew up: ENCHIRIDION and the unbodied joy given water-burial, flowers and flower sent grotesquely down to swell; and the next day they saw her book floating just beneath the water's membrane like a cinder trapped under a finger-nail, the pages winging outward and bloated, the pages like the wavering limbs of an undersea anemone, waverings of print speckled over them as indistinct as filaments and anthers in a field. Did he think he could recall it now?—he who had nearly praised her for the loss, and chided fantasy out of existence? Did he think he could turn back the sea and its salt from the drowned wound? Did he think he could turn back her face from the undiscoverable lighthouse in the view? There is no retrieving, there is no redeeming. Her white socks left shapeless craters behind her in the sand. It was September then, and dark. The honeymoon ended.

Then the new house, built for them by both their fathers, because she would not live in that other house, all empty and receptive, where she had grown up, though William was willing enough; he was fonder of his father-in-law than of his own father, that pleasureless man of meagre desires, who looked on life as a pyramid to be raised brick by golden brick, the whole to be rewarded by an angelic sermon from its peak on the Last Day, and by the solidity of the structure in the meantime. Allegra's father was something else: scoffed at Adam if not at Eve and marched eagerly up and down his beach, swinging the keys of his mansion from a chain attached to a polished seashell. He liked to think of himself as a mariner, though all he knew of ships was Cunard saloons and waiters gliding sidle-hipped by on the incline of a scarcely-felt crest. But he wanted his daughter; the very beach, he claimed, demanded his daughter; and he promised to build a wall through the garden and give her half for her private own, and half the house, and half the staff; or, failing that, to go away himself, the old aunt with him. But she despised that place, her father's estate, which he had made in pleasurable celebration of his voyages of pleasure—it was too gaudy, it was too splendid, it was a horrid oversized peacock of a house teetering on haughty skinny legs pointlessly at the water's edge, with its shining tail foolishly upraised. A foolish place—a whim and not a house, with all the goose-faced Kings of France jutting from dark panels in the dining room, and stuffed with a multitude of leisured maids and serving-men, and the aged aunt's tremulous night-shouts out of dreams, and the big marble anchor in the garden—a fountain breathing shiny glassy sea-water up and down the anchor's immense and pointless flank hour after hour, with a sound like road-traffic. She despised her father's house; she did not like to stay where she had been a girl; rooms in which the girl has walked and stalked cannot be where walk and stalk the perils and blisses of the world; and it was the world she wanted. So they went instead to Scarsdale and the new house, all triumphant oaken Tudor. But she could not praise the new house, either; and, spiting the gift of father and father-in-law, she had lived as though it had been drilled through with secret passages. Her decorating notions were anything but conventional; she re-invented. The beds had chalky posts and purple canopies, the windows went without cloth or shades to cover domestic tableaux, dresser drawers perpetually ajar hung out their tongues of sleeves, the young wife's easels stood in doorways and had to be squatted under to pass through, telephones came by twos in every room. Often they all rang together. People called her up. Who, who? There were muffled talks. Then almost immediately the vast Arthurian table arrived from the East, and she split her shoe in the spite of punishing it. Though it was still early autumn there were no screens: she liked the sound of a buzzing hornet nosing the ceiling in the first sigh of morning. She ate heated canned asparagus, the yellow tips fragile and buttery, for a week at a time. The cook quit, and was replaced by a Moslem in a sari. William yowled at curry on his lip. She hated maids and hired an English lad to mop underneath the beds, where a crop of luscious dust-curds bloomed like rose-heads; she gave him a whole wall on which to paint a prehistoric mural—and there, at night, when the hornets returned to their eaves, a crimson pterodactyl battered a turquoise horizon filled with mastodon and tyrannosaurus rex. Though the English boy's style was true primitive, the room remained a room and not a cave; and his mistress snapped her fingers angrily and told him he was a coward to be afraid, just because it gargled, of a vacuum-cleaner. The thirty telephones—the twenty? the forty? the fifty?—rang at once. Every afternoon she hid away to write long, long letters, all benign. Answers jostled one another's thicknesses in the mailbox: "I am happy indeed that you so much liked my poem, 'Sicilian Intensities,' which was recently published in
The Toreador Review.
Rare is it, and therefore ravishing, revivifying, for a New Mexico poet like myself to receive unbridled recognition from so distant, yet so discerning, a reader; from a reader of sensibility; and I will, indeed, as you suggest, telephone you at your residence if Fortuna, that unpredictable goddess, should ever bring me to New York ... P.S. I am enclosing, for your
private
perusal, a sheaf of six as-yet-unpublished poems which comprise the early part of a cycle, Tiresias at Taos,' begun some fifteen or twenty years ago. Perhaps you recall seeing Strophe Nine, beginning (and also entitled) 'How Blind We Are to the Day of Our Death!' which was to have been printed in the November issue of
The Sweeper.
Unfortunately the magazine was only just discontinued in October. Nevertheless the poem is, I may add, explicitly antidadaist in theme and execution..."

"Have children," Allegra's father said; "have sons quickly." It was now too cold to stand for long on the beach. He rambled instead in those gigantic rooms, moving from window to window to survey the mutating color of the sea. His own skin was altering; it was rather too falsely ruddy a sailor's hide. He was tired. Corporations were corpses to him now; he left his affairs to William, who had a talent for them. "Have sons," he only seemed to joke, "then you needn't depend on the alien nature of a son-in-law to take things over. Because consider: if not for that brother of yours, not that I'm saying anything against Helen and Marie, they're both nice girls, if not for Max where would I be now? You don't think your father would've handed you over to me, just like that, if he hadn't had another to keep for himself—and who would I have at this stage of the game to watch out for my interests? Dynasty is destiny, keep that in mind! And tell it to Allegra. It's bloody threats from her if I say it. Some people grow sterile waiting for a good philosophical reason for progeny. There isn't any. Tell it to Allegra! She's an eccentric, you know. That's not the same as a Bohemian, though it may seem so to you. I've seen them all over the world, including the East—eccentrics, I mean. Bohemianism is the product of a society of wealth—meat to protest against: it's no use being a Utopian vegetarian among the Hindus, say—but even the poorest have their oddities, that's a fact. I'll tell you what makes an oddity." He liked to talk to William. He thought him a wary young man, he knew his daughter was a fool, and he was pleased and even excited by the possibilities in combining elements. The irregularity of it, when outwardly it had all the appearance of propriety, teased his fancy. He waited for them to mate. Curiosity made him long for grandchildren; he supposed they would be fools and prigs, though he hoped, provided there were enough of them, for a canny one in the lot. "An oddity is stuffed," he explained, leading his son-in-law into a tall downstairs cavern he had without humor named his Marine Room, "with wishing. It's wish, wish, wish from the day they're born. Look, you understand sin. Then I tell you it's a sin to be an oddity. It's to commit the Sin of Vicarious Living. It's wish, wish, wish—and for what? For a picture in the heart. There's no cure but distraction. Don't be modern, you hear?—have sons quickly." Table followed table: and on each an uncanny clutter of green bottles, fetid, murky, filled with round eyes and fog and dark blue smear—oh, vile, and like a laboratory-heart kept alive with all its robot valves exposed and dimly working. "Nice, see? Pickled fish," he said, "not that I have the things classified, though I wish I did. I wouldn't know how. You're a geologist, right?—but I'm only a beachcomber. It's not a
system
I am showing you, mind you—it's simply the occupation of my senile years. The poor old woman hates the smell—I tell her it's not the sea-things themselves, only the solution they're in. The pickle they're in, ha ha. My wife wasn't fussy—she didn't only tolerate, she admired. A good woman—my only friend, so to speak, I mean when you get down to it—she was sick for maybe fifteen years before she went. I meandered around the world without her now and then. 'She went'—I once heard a captain speak that way of a ship gone down. I suppose that's why Allegra grew up all fads and no religion: an oddity, my daughter, drowned in wishing. People are wrong, you know, when they talk of Mother Earth. It's Father Neptune who takes us in our last days. Not dust unto dust—never mind the Bible. Offended, boy? But blood is salt water, like the sea, which never left us though we left it They say the dolphin has an intelligence equal to, if not better than, man's. All right—at least the dolphin had the sense not to throw up his sacred home for the ash of land. All of mankind's wrung with drunkard's thirst for the sea. In my view that's the explanation for religion. Would Sinai have been possible if it hadn't been preceded by the Red Sea? And all those fishermen, and water-walking and all of that, and loaves and fishes at Galilee! Did you ever look hard at the backbone of a fish? There's a crucifix hidden in the skeleton; make of that what you want. And Tao, where they say the Way is like water—it's there too, reality, I mean. Why does a man salivate? Why does he bleed? You're on the wrong track with those rocks of yours. Who cares how old the earth is? It's all iron anyhow: a fleck of iron. Nothing reproduces unless it has sap in it: chew a weed for proof if you like, or smash a bug. Your rocks are tellurian ash. Sterile; sterile. What's wrong with my daughter? Have sons! I've given this place a secret name, you see. Duneacres because it sits at the seaside—that's only picturesque. But intimately between me and me it's Doomacres. I've built on silt. The sea will come up, the tide will come and pull it down. I give it twenty sound years—that's more than long enough for a sand castle, and the anchor won't tie it down, the anchor won't do it any good—the anchor's stone. Stone is ash; wishes are ash. Have sons, have sons!"

There was a swarm of servants everywhere, idling, idling: schools of servants paddling by on elaborate non-errands. He was lonesome, the old man. His skin darkened to grape, and he laughed it off, diagnosing his dying: "I'm marooned"—and spread his hands to show himself the fat incredible maroon veins. But the aunt died first, complaining how the place smelled of fish and disinfectant, wailing that the summer storms (it was January) frightened her—the crackle of lightning on the water so close it started static in her gold bridges. So he raised the anchor and lowered it, in between burying her beneath it—the ground opened, and the vaguely delightful stench of marsh weed rose up and hung. Hoar-frost and miasma tickled in his shoes. He thought how the house would be, death-abandoned, and the woodland around it and the beach and the dock below it. "There's only one good reason for children, and the reason's not philosophical. It's to fill the bedrooms. I married too late for it, my wife was old, then sick, maybe only the sickness of being too old to fill the bedrooms, but still, we had one daughter, an oddity, and
she
doesn't fill the bedrooms of her own house, except with telephones. Things being what they are, 111 give the place to the sea. Every room to be a mansion for Neptune—sea-nymphs everywhere. Thetis and all the Nereides—I forget their idiotic names. Go and get me scientists: experts, I mean, on sea-nymphs. Men with an idea of the majesty of wetness. Salt! Get brains with plenty of salt. Finny fellows, ha ha! Offices upstairs, galleries downstairs, or vice-versa. I don't know—get an architect who does. I want the outside intact though—the lines of the place intact, widow's walk and all, the garden stays as it is, no little city starting up on the beach, the wood left alone. I don't want the sand castle tumbled, you see? It's got to look as though the ocean could lap it up any time it felt like it. Which it can. Hours of talk between you and me, this means. A long story, vast plan, deep blueprints. The more I think, the more devoted I get to this magnificence. I mean it to be magnificent, you understand me? Big tanks, living things, but not just an aquarium, mind you. Let it be a History of the Origin of Life. You understand me? Don't you? A rock can't comprehend the wash of the tide. Then convert yourself. Right away. Salt and sap, that's what I'm after. Go ahead, draft the deed of trust. The will has it all to Allegra; but
she
doesn't want it; anyhow it's time I did something public. A public thing, this will be. A museum."

And died; died, the old man, hurrying after the anchored aunt. Of him were ashes made; and Allegra, multiplying the tear-salt sea, stood on the dock and at a sign from the minister—a Unitarian—threw into the water whitish earth of her father. "No one could say of him," said the minister, saying what no one
would
say, "that he was not a visionary." A pretty remark, suitable, but like all grave-side summaries only wishful. A visionary? That selfish old man who could not bear to see the circlets of spittle on his wife's half-paralyzed lip, and went out year after year to watch instead the spume of liners? But a man who foists on posterity a monstrous piece of real estate with the intention of compelling a hundred people to produce out of it what no one had remotely thought necessary, whether for public education or edification or elevation or enervation—what else shall he be called if not a visionary?—short of philanthropist, a word saved only for the really wicked. He had pretended, Allegra's father, to be one of those old buccaneers of business: he fattened his speech with fake coarse riches, and toughened his stride, and praised his bookish weak unhappy wife for loving Emerson, and did all those eager rough vulgar things one expects of a money-pirate in America, quite as though he had swiped all the money himself, starting from the plain scratch of ambitious poverty. He was as bold as any ruffian of the nouveau riche, and all to smother the fact that he had (like William's father) been born into seven generations of Hudson Valley railroad-padded burgher-pride; and he spoke of the old feeble spinster-aunt (who sweated in winter) as though she had been in early days a barmaid he had pinched away to a palace for the protection of her honor.