Trust (50 page)

Yet Allegra mourned him, and complimented the Unitarian who had complimented her father who had complimented her mother for loving Emerson; in the end perhaps it was simply her mother whom she mourned. For a servant came upon a box of letters from her mother to her father (they had to clear out the top of the house for the first crew of renovators), in envelopes addressed to Eastern ports: letters which had never been mailed. And the bookish weak semi-paralyzed unhappy lover of Emerson wrote accusation after accusation—"fraud," cried the greenish-become ink in ancient penmanship, "fraud and bigamist; fraud and polygamist: Solomon not as to wisdom but to wives: how many sons, offspring, progeny, boys, children, babies half-Asiatic, half-Arab, half-Mongol, half-black, half-brown, half-yellow, from those far-ranging loins?"—and every bitter violent letter sealed into its envelope and stamped and ready to be posted and never sent. Of course it was all a fantasy; and perhaps her mother had even known it was a fantasy; but was it a fantasy less plausible than her father's quixotry of a museum of the waters? Her mother's mouth was twisted, and her womb grown dry. The eyes of her remorse saw sons, none hers. "You don't want to mind it, dear; don't mind it," William said of the letters, concealing his horror and his scorn. Meanwhile they watched the servants dig into niches and make small notes on where the stairs whined, and whisper to the masons how the cellar ran with long-antenna'd silverfish, quick-footed scum like insect-mice; and Allegra said, "I don't mind. What if he did? What if he did? After she died didn't he go sailing on someone's yacht with a black flag up for grief? Didn't he go out to the Indies wearing a black armband all the way? And anyhow love is for the taking—it's nourishment, like wheat, and ought to be generally available." But William in the shock of that began to wonder whose taking love was for. Never, never had she given her white face to him, and she kept, besides, a careful calendar of when in the month's length he lay with her; and she went habitually to dangerous lectures, and told him afterward what the speaker had declared, that love bound by the chains of duty was not free. "The chains of duty?" he echoed her—he whose Sunday lesson had always taught that the truest freedom of all was doing what one must. But she would not say more, and instead battled with him about what was being made of her father's house. "It's evil, evil," she said, "all that effort and all that money for something that won't do a bit of practical good in the world! If he wanted to do good why didn't he at least pension off the servants? The
kitchen
people at least—after all those years! I want to give them pensions. Fix it so I can give them pensions, William. That's the whole point of Social Security!—then the Government would do it, and it wouldn't have to be just charity and being at the mercy of the capitalist conscience. In the Soviet Union
all
the workers get pensions, it's only fair," and while William listened without hope, she told of strikes and scabs, and riots against management, and employers with iron rods: all that drab lexicon of her tedious clubs. He knew about those clubs; even at Miss Jewett's she had gone to Social Justice Teas, but he had always regarded these as more than innocent, even as exhilarating—she wore a jumper and held high a banner with bare fists and wrists and arms so delectable to the very nerve of his eye, that, contemplating her, he felt a breath from his cautious lung could disperse her, she hung like a spider from an insubstantiality, the sun provoked her wandering sign into silk. It said "Colonialism is Napoleonism Made New" or "The Amalgamated Peoples of the Earth Decry Mississippi Miscegenation Laws," or "The Aspiring Negro is Our Brother," or "Honest Labor is the True Aristocracy of America's Future" or "Greed for Profits is the Workers' Loss: The Bosses' Gain is Labor's Cross" or "What Shall it Profit the Prophets of Management?" or "PEACE PEACE WORK WORK." The words pirouetted like Pavlovas; the poles spun; the band-aid signs purported to heal what William's God had not healed in all the centuries of obeisance; the band-aid signs rose and descended, aspired and denied themselves; William's breathing rose and descended, aspired and denied itself, and he pitied her error for being not error, but fleeting, and he pitied his own love for its brief captivity in the fleeting sheeny skein of her error. He pitied and he loved: the banner-mobbed moment belonged to her youth, it would not come again, the sublime error of her upraised arm would never come again. The rasp of aberration scraped on his regret: Allegra dared, and he had never dared at all. She pulled down propriety: father, mother, right and rite. Her arm lifted like a spear, and her father's fury and her mother's pique, punishing, forbade her the white dress of coming-out. William sorrowed for her, remembering his sisters' coming-out: the crest of the nubile hour. Lucky Helen, lucky Marie! Unlucky Allegra! She got herself (in retaliation) engaged to Vernon: it was the stamping of her foot. William looked on, ambushed by terror; but Vernon was too fat and too pedantic: he criticized the position of the commas and semicolons in her poems, so that she asserted she would prefer to marry even
William, who never criticized her at all. True, true, all bewilderingly true: William did not criticize her even now, though he despised her clubs and had no taste for the visitors who came an hour short of midnight without hats or coats or neckties, slouching and laughing and eating dripping fruit in the living room, where the hearthrug was a real polar bear, though dead. Some of them were midwesterners, unmannerly; worse, he suspected among them a Jew or two. Why had the signs and banners not vanished, like the young wife's jumpers, like the girls of Miss Jewett's? Why had they not melted away into the ache of an old mischance which one recalls with a perversity of yearning? The signs and banners of the mind: the alternative which is not really an alternative, the zealous error which is not zealously pursued, the playing at piracy by children—he was puzzled, puzzled. There was a queer knot in the young wife: the thread did not pull smoothly through, as it ought. She was clinging too long to resistance, too stubbornly tediously long to error; she was playing pirate in grown-up's clothes. Vaguely but patiently he wondered who was to blame, and saw again the bulbous pages swaying like fleshy blades under the water, turning in the water, diving and rising in the water-rings around her ankles. He had fallen asleep. She had thrown her Shelley in the water. He was wronged, he was innocent: he could not love and pity error unless it swam up refracted through the wave of an olden time: the way his sight quickened in spite of itself at a mediaeval spire, pin-thin at the top, though he knew it belonged to the Dark Ages of superstitious faith and lacked the homely cleanliness of Bible-things. The long-ago existed for the sake of pity and love; one was young in order some day to forgive oneself for it. Willingly, wittingly, as an act of cherishing, he forgave Allegra her parading years. But she did not forgive herself, she did not relinquish herself, she did not defy herself. She continued, she continued. Still he did not criticize; but fifteen holding companies inextricably entangled with one another intervened, and drew him away like Theseus in the cave, unraveling. The polar bear's head ran with pear juice, and afterward Allegra, poking at the last log of April, confronted him with prongs and defenses: "the subject," said she, "is bears," and laughed until he laughed too, and then said "forebears," and defended her dead mother against her dead father because her mother was right and her father was a fraud; and defended her dead father against her dead mother because love is not a cage; and defended the working classes against the leisure classes because the members of the meeting had proved their case; and said to the young husband (who longed to kiss her hair, close and valorous as a helmet in the log's glint), "Who do you think can go to museums? And on an island, an out-of-the-way place like that! They'll have to run a ferry, the train stops two towns away, he didn't think of that! And not even pensions for the kitchen people! And all for the sake of whales and things! What good is a whale to the workers? The workers don't go to museums! It's only a scheme to set up a capitalist monument to unreasonable profits, that's what the members said tonight; we talked it all out tonight. Who do you think can
go
to museums? It won't be the workers, it'll be the rich!"

And William's reply?

He took the poker from her and sat her on the polar bear (a peach-pit in its muzzle) and touched the slidings of her hair with a single courteous finger (how tentative, how jocose, his finger on the margins of her skull): "We," he said, "are the rich."

"I"—the young wife began mysteriously to weep (was it that she felt how he feared to strain beyond courtesy, she felt how tentative, how jocose, the finger of his hope?)—"am mankind," Allegra said. And meant to leap from him and stand; but she had called herself mankind, and him a capitalist, so he kept her down; he kept her down and would not permit her to break free. He oppressed her then, tasting salt in her eyes. "Allegra, Allegra," he said, exploring her name for consequence, for motion; and she turned, and for the first time gave him her face (always afterward he thought of its look then as gilt, bronze-poured, religious), and said, "I think I'm pregnant, William." Power held him holding her; he gave a shrug of ecstasy. She licked herself, her arms, like a long cat, licking tears: "I hate it, I hate it. It could be you, I think. It could be." Was she honest? Ought he to doubt her doubt? She mumbled, muttered, murmured, wept. "It could be," she said once more, licking, and fell away from him the way a petal falls when some rough hand has made the stem shudder: a hand, not the uncaring wind.

("She was mistaken," William bluntly announced twenty-five years later: to me in his office. "Luckily. Luckily. I thanked my stars and still do. It was not my ambiton to be the father of a child whose father I was not. I meant to rear my own. I thanked my stars.")

But it was confession, revelation: she was not safe: he could not trust "Trust, trust," she moaned back at him (often they argued it), "what does the trust matter? I mean if you let it go just one summer? You take everything so seriously, William, just because it's written down. Everything's the Divine Word to you. And just one summer! There's nothing in it that says you have to start it right away, is there?"

The document lived in his mind, like all documents. "As soon as feasible from the date of execution," he quoted; it was already halfway through May. She was asking for a single summer. "He meant to see it go up in his lifetime. We've already got an oceanographer coming to look things over," he objected, staring.

"But just this one summer! After all, the property's
there,
nobody's going to use it, and they all say it's ideal. The house for meetings, the nucleus group indoors, the overflow in tents in the woods—"

"Tents in the woods," William said. She was not safe, he could not trust, she was lost to him. He saw her bent over her notebook. It was the first version of
Marianna Harlow.
She no longer wrote those queer little poems that never rhymed: she told him that art without immediate relevance to society was wicked. What a moralist she was! He asked, "What's it about?" and put on his straw hat, though the band was too tight and pressed his brow and stained it with a red thong-mark.

"The revolution of the workers."

"Yes," he said. "And will he be here today?"

"Who?" But she knew.

"The one from Pittsburgh."

"He's not from Pittsburgh, he's from Chicago. I don't know, I can't telephone. The telephone company took out all the telephones this morning—I made them. I can't concentrate with all that racket I don't want anything ringing in my head but these voices: the sisters, the foreman, the workers. Wait till I read it to you, William!"

He waited, and went in a ferry up the Hudson to a reunion of graduates. He wandered across the quadrangle under ancient eaves in the greenyear time of the newest grass-tips and squandered his eyes on the horror of all those boys' faces grown rigid with maturity. In his clubs in the city he never saw how those same young men had brutally grown less young: but here the travesty of dark scooping line and dim steady frown shook him with the gloom—was this Henderson, was that Blackfield? What a secret cuckold time was! He walked and talked—but even their talk was different from the usual maundering of the clubs: here they all seemed conscious of the danger of making themselves out for fools, they talked almost innocently—and heard a speech from the new headmaster and left a promise for a check and came home again at dusk. The young wife sat as before.

"I've got as far as Chapter Three," she cried out. "All in one day! It's only a draft, though. —Was it all right up there?"

Thirstily she emptied the last of a bottle of milk while he watched. How white the milk was! He had never before noticed the density of its color: it was thick as the moon. "I shouldn't have gone—it was a bore. It's always a bore. Same thing as the last time. It's only to ask for money. They're going to build again." He was dizzy with too much fresh air. He said, "I saw Manning. They've just made him a major. He's balding. Imagine, he's almost bald, and he's a year younger than I am."

"Listen!" said Allegra, not listening.

She read what she had written. It was a long lying account. It was non-event, non-fact; it was even anti-fact. None of it had ever happened; it was grotesque. It was false, false, false. It was full of false principles. He thought of Henderson and Blackfield as they had looked nineteen years ago; he remembered them in their football uniforms. He remembered their teeth. "What's that Chicago man do?" he asked.

"A journalist"—but her answer was a hiss of rancor. Why, why? She was bitter. He had nothing to say about her chapters. He did not comprehend them. They were either absurd or insane. At best they were trivial. "You can't feel it, you can't identify. You hate what I think! You hate my
mind,
" she charged him crossly.

"A journalist? Is that all? I thought he was a professional organizer. He gives that impression."

"Well, why not? He's Youth Leader."