Trust (53 page)

"Coal?" he said, disbelieving.

"Well, you know, maybe try the regular people who used to deliver for us in the old days. I wouldn't know. I told Enoch you'd be able to look
up
a thing like that, you could fix it up for us." She opened out her hands to plead with his stupefaction. "Oh, don't be mad! It's not as though there isn't a
reason.
What happened was, well, we've had a turnover. The summer group was no good, they were nothing but the fun-and-games type. They never cared a hoot for ideology, and we planned for them, and they fooled us: they never cared at all, so now we have to begin all over again with the new ones. Enoch's taken it better than you'd imagine—he says it's that way in any organizing effort, you have to lose the many to discover the few. He says it isn't only the leaves that turn their coats in the fall. —Oh look, William, it's just the winter months we want! And in the spring we'll be out, the Rally's definite now for spring, and anyhow if the place isn't kept heated in winter the water-pipes freeze and crack, you know they do."

He marveled at her new proletarian enterprise. His imagination, heartless, pointed out the daughters of plumbers naked in their tents. Dully he said: "It's impossible. I've postponed them twice already."

"Then a third time will be easier, you'll be used to it."

"It can't be done."

"Yes it can."

"No," he said. "I won't do it."

"A few heaps of coal!—As though coal were gold!"

"Impossible. You have to get out. I'm in too deep, I'm obligated too far. I'm committed."

"Oh committed! Committed to what?"

"To the trust," he said reluctantly: the word hissed between them like an old practised familiar spite.

"To fish-bones! To bones and bones. To my father's bones. But never to flesh and blood."

"The contractors are flesh and blood," he said. "The curators are flesh and blood."

"And me," she said. "Me, William! What am I?—At least not a bone like you, available for any public gnawing! You're willing enough to feed the flesh of contractors and curators and ...
curates—
"

The literary consciousness of the last did not escape him: the innocence of this affectation, in the heart of her savagery, made him distrait But he missed its cruelty. He thought it an honorable, though mistaken, accusation. It recognized, though it did not reckon with, the moral position in his strictures. "You don't see," he said. "You don't see. Here's a letter—a letter, it arrived this morning—from one of these people, midwesterner this one is, an ichthyologist, young fellow—he's waiting, he's
been
waiting, he has no other employment—"

"Yes," she jeered, "I know how good you are at documenting feelings. And then you mark each one with an asterisk, See Attached Sheet, only when somebody looks it turns out to be only another instructive Bible text. I know! It's pieces of paper you feel obligated to. —And when I've
told
you we'll be out of there by spring, we
can't
stay beyond April: we'll be in Moscow the early part of May—look, do you want me to write it down for you in a sworn statement and sign it? Is that what you need?"

Her mouth radiated contempt; afterward and forever dissolved there. He saw; he saw and grieved.

"Do as you please," he said.

But she was bolder than that. "You won't interfere?"

"I'll put them off. I'll put them off," he said.

"Ah, you won't regret it!" she told him joyfully, and swept up her notebooks. "The one with the red cover? Did you see it? I've got the
whole
outline for the middle part in it, it has a sort of red cover: William?—Oh, here it is. All the dust made it look brown. But even if it
did
get lost it wouldn't really matter, because I've got lots of new ideas now. I had plenty of plot before, but I felt ideationally empty—that's why I quit. Now it's going to be a Thesis Novel: political and economic, instead of amateur sociological. Did you ever read
Jews without Money?
Neither did I; Enoch says I ought to. Do you know there's almost nothing to read in that whole place, except what Enoch's lugged with him all the way from Chicago? William, my father's library is a
shame.
It's full of absurd things on the Merchant Marine, and sailing ships, and all sorts of piscatorial debris. One of the new people actually found a volume of memoirs called
The Fish, My Finny Forbear.
That's the one who's set me going on the novel again. He's changed the whole tone of the camp. He pokes around corners in ways nobody else would think of."

"A thief, I'm sure," said William. "He'll burglarize the walls."

"Well let him then!" she said indignantly. "What I mean is he
stimulates,
don't you see?"

"Isn't that the job of your Youth Leader?"

"Enoch's all brain. He invents. But he's too difficult, and he talks too complicatedly; and sometimes he bores, he really does. He's amused but he doesn't amuse. That's why half the camp left as soon as they woke and found all that slippery ice on the tent-poles after a night rain. Nobody wants to freeze for intellect. But they will for a good show. Enoch says that's why there are more Christians than Jews. He's a terrible chauvinist that way. He says that's the reason God sent Moses, a writer, after all—he wrote the Tablets—to the Jews, but sent an illiterate fisherman to the Gentiles. And if Paul didn't always keep on writing those letters, the illiterates might have made
him
the Christ, which he was sort of angling for anyway."

"A corrupt, impious, sacrilegious, impertinent rascal."

"Saint Paul?" said Allegra, her cheeks drawn in with pleasure.

"Your Enoch."

"Well, he's not
mine.
I don't own him!"

"Exactly, exactly. He owns you. He owns your mind."

"He does
not.
'Die Gedanken sind frei.' Hugh taught me that. 'Nothing human is alien to me.' You know who said that? Karl Marx! 'My mind to me a kingdom is.' That's Sir Edward Dyer. Nick does that one; he does it very well. He does lots of poems and songs and things, not that he's literary
himself,
but he penetrates. He penetrates right into Literary Theory without the bias one gets from practising it oneself. He always knows exactly what feelings to have; most people don't, did you ever think about that?"

"No," William said.

"According to Nick they don't. I didn't realize myself how vague I was about even my
opinions.
I quit writing because I didn't know how to feel implausibly. I was too logical; it made me tentative. I became certain only when I gave up certainty. It's all Literary Theory, William! And just what I needed—I had to be prodded out of obstinacy, because it led to self-mystification; I had all the wrong attitudes."

"And now you have all the right ones?"

"Well, I'm speaking of literature."

"
I'm
speaking of reality."

"Reality's nothing but attitudes too."

"According to Nick?"

"According to Enoch."

William faintly groaned.

"Nick thinks writing a novel is simply a matter of burning to do it. But not for sensible reasons, like wanting to get famous; it has to be a burning you can't imagine the cause of. Like a mysterious heartburn, and you haven't eaten anything bad."

"If it's only a question of burning—"

"It's only a question of burning," she vividly assented.

"Burn here," he said.

"Oh, don't start that again! I'm going back, I thought we settled it." Her laughter judged him ludicrous; in its minutest vibration he felt the current of his own despair. "The point is Nick means to read all the bits and pieces so far, and help me get perspective. I couldn't do it without him, don't you see? If I tried to do it here, I'd burn all right!—I'd burn the manuscript!" she bleated, high-frequencied and absolute and all at once in earnest: "Because he sees how to utilize the given—that's not just myself saying it, it's how Enoch characterizes him: he embroiders axioms and pragmatizes artistry—isn't that interesting? He distributes, he popularizes. Also he makes merry."

"I suppose you mean by that that he drinks."

"He drinks
in.
Oh look, he knows how to experience things! You can tell just by die turn of his eye: a sort of lazy but discreet eye. And the fact is nobody thought he'd stay when Hugh brought him up. Anyway Enoch didn't. Enoch said he was just a looker, he'd look and go. Which is what happened," she insisted, "in spite of his being a friend of Hugh's. Enoch said he didn't have Hugh's motivations. —Enoch's always talking about the motivations of the American Negro; it's one of his
topics.
But the second time he stayed."

"Having acquired motivation," William intervened.

"Call it what you want,
I
don't care. You never
used
to be so cynical, William. The whole point is he got to asking a lot of questions, about how the Movement got hold of the estate and so on, and he ended up interested."

"In the Movement or in the estate?"

"Well, in me! In
Marianna Harlow.
Because I told him about all the notebooks I left behind in order to come up there. I told him I had to come anyhow, out of socialist principle, even though the whole place used to depress me when I lived there before. I never meant to go back to it for anything in the world. The way it used to throw me in a
mood—
"

"You told him a lot," William observed.

"Well?"—She waited belligerently.

"You ought to show some reserve, Allegra."

"Oh reserve! Federal Reserve! You think I'm some sort of bank, I ought to be kept locked up all the time. I'm not a bank! I told you, I'm flesh and blood!"

"Flesh and blood," he repeated obediently, like a litany.

"Well yes, flesh and blood," she sing-songed back at him, to press her mockery. "—Like most people."

"You are not like most people," William said.

But she would not let him go on. She was afraid he would talk of the trust. "I am, I am! Yes I am. I'm exactly like everyone else up there, all that heiress business doesn't make any difference to them. Not to them!"

"Not to Enoch? Not to Nick?"

"Not to anyone." But she was evasive. "Anyhow not to Nick. He
asked
me was it different up there—I said different than it used to be, and better; and Nick said he didn't think he'd mind it without the mob, all that space and the feel of the bigness of everything; so then I told him why I came, I said the mob was the reason I came—"

"I thought it was socialist principle," William reminded her. "Or is that the same as saying mob?"

But she missed him conveniently. "Without the mob it's a haunted house, that's all it is. I told Nick that. So of course he wanted to know haunted by what, but I didn't feel like saying, so all I said was capitalist greed, which is perfectly true anyway. Every brick someone else's underpaid sweat—"

"And the real ghost who does the real haunting?" he wondered blandly.

She hesitated; she fingered her collar. "I don't know. An old copy of Ralph Waldo Emerson maybe. Maybe that." She apprehended his puzzlement but purposefully ignored it; perhaps she was as puzzled herself. "You know what Nick asked me?—Whether what I was writing was autobiographical or only about a sort of random fate, and if I was putting my father into it, and what my father was like, and where I lived before the camp got started; but he never asked about mama, though I told him she was the one who died first—"

"And what else? What else?"

"What do you mean, what else?" she said angrily.

"Did he ask how much you get a year?"

"Oh, fine, fine! You think he was smelling money, you're always suspicious without cause—but you see how wrong you are, William? He didn't even ask about you! It never entered his mind: who you are or what you are. Not even where you are, so you see? He isn't petty, he's
large!
Which is why he didn't want to stay. He told Enoch he despised
all
cells—molecular or political. Do you know that made Enoch like him right away?—I mean Nick doesn't go swallowing everything whole, like some of the ones we get. Some of them you can make believe
anything.
Tell them Friedrich Engels is a Chinaman, and they'll believe you; and afterward they're the first ones to beat it when you're getting together a floor-mop committee, or you have to send some pickets down to New York. First in the vanguard, last in the homeguard—that's what Enoch's always saying; he hates enthusiasm. He says it's the clearest sign of the gullible, and political revolution is no business for the gullible."

"It certainly doesn't seem to interest anyone else," William said.

"It interests
me,
" she assured him stoutly. "And Enoch is the least gullible person ever created. You know what he told Nick? He said if he didn't like cells he'd better devise a way to get out of the Milky Way, since the whole
planet
is just a cell of the galaxy we're in. Then Nick said it wasn't the galaxy that bothered him, it was the rhythm of the surf—it got into his stomach and made it queasy. But Enoch told him that was perfectly all right and no obstacle, he could assign him to the scullery where he couldn't hear it over the pot-scraping. (We have an idiot who always burns the pots.) So then poor Nick looked cornered, and laughed, and said he didn't have a vocation for the Movement anyhow, and was against the workers because he was against work, and if he stayed at all it would be on account of the Empress of Russia."

"Merciful Lord," said surly William.

"He meant met" she jubilantly declared.

"Take it to heart, take it to heart. When the Czarina was surrounded by Marxists she was shot."

"You twist everything. He simply offered to be my Rasputin, don't you see?—And help with
Marianna!
He was
interested,
don't you see? You know who Rasputin was? He helped the Empress with everything. If she'd had to do a novel he would have helped with that too. Don't you
know
about Rasputin, William?"

"A sorcerer," he obliged. "And the Czarina was his dupe."