Trust (60 page)

He could, he must, tell her everything about poor Allegra; it would help him to tell it all, and then, as convenient by-product, it would help
her:
from it she would learn exactly what she must not do to stain his hope in her. For example: one day he had praised her punctuality; and she, fiercely fearlessly direct, all bravery and therapeutic theory, inquired whether Allegra had not ever been punctual. Curious how he blushed! She had to prod: "Was she? You must
not
evade. It's better for you to air old annoyances, dearest, no matter how trivial. Haven't I told you again and again how awful it was for me the day I got that telegram from Alan from out West?
That
was trivial, too—adding another girl I didn't even know to the list of wedding-guests. And then"—but Sarah Jean's humor was of the too-conscious kind—"marrying her instead of me! There, you see how I've purged all that? You must do the same.
Say
it: Allegra wasn't punctual." "She wasn't—very," he concurred feebly. "You seel There now! Don't you feel better already?" said Sarah Jean, and punctually conceived the germ of his son to show him she would do for him whatever Allegra had not done, as well as vice versa. The point of things was to give right names. God was God, and had a Son, who was Our Lord and Saviour; the past was the past, which meant not that one never thought of it, but—on the contrary—that one owed it something, probably reformation; and (finally) bad behavior was bad behavior and had to be accepted for what it was if redemption were to be properly understood as a real process in God's scheme. What this signified practically was that William was not to think it necessary, on Sarah Jean's account, to sever his acquaintanceship with poor wretched Allegra: oh, by no means! One day soon Allegra would come home, and then, of course, she must be treated as a Christian would treat anyone. She must be seen, interviewed, aided: the bundle of pitiful baby as well. Above all, William must not
avoid
Allegra on the gentlemanly supposition that a confrontation might enliven something like jealousy in his wife—
she,
after all, was his
wife:
how humiliating for her if by such a delicacy he implied, however obliquely, that he thought them
the same
—equals who could be compared one to the other! Instead let there be, for decency's sake, an open trafficking of Christian mercy between William and poor mistaken Allegra. Did she assail him with wearisome demands in every mail? (A guess. Sarah Jean was a sorceress at guessing.) He ought to answer her, of course, and
personally:
only contemplate her situation! Alone, abandoned, alien to all the world's ways! William's wife, still riding the majesty of her newly-bought bed, gave the fullness of her sincerity to William's tie, which he was knotting. "What? No, I didn't say
Mary
Magdalene, what made you think of that? I said Magdalene—did you know Peter was on their crew?"—referring to some obscure younger cousin who had been sent abroad to breathe in a Church-of-England education. "You know what they called him over there? Peetah. He came home with it and now all the time he pronounces it
Saint
Pee-tah. It's one of the names on my list. We've used it a lot." "Names?" said William with heated nape. "Dearest, for the child. You must start a list too"—how tractable, yet how confident, she seemed in the new bed!—"and then we'll see where we match." "If we don't match at all?—I don't care for Peter." "We'll match somehow, wait and see. We're bound to overlap. One always does overlap with lists of names." "I thought of William," he said shyly. "Dearest, whatever you like. Though
we
never did go in for Juniors. They've simply clambered down. It's the kind of thing the Irish do nowadays. But never mind, it's to be whatever you like, William. Still—" she spaced them out: elegant smile, yawn, elegant smile—"isn't your office man, that Connelly, isn't
he
a Junior? I mean just to prove my little point?" He nodded; in him something shuddered open like a bleakness, a chasm. "Well then! Whatever you like," she beamed. Whatever he liked: it jumped, half-wooed, half-repelled, a live tendril round his neck, the suddenly recognized thing garlanding him—the anti-sermon her docile eagerness aroused and then suppressed. She removed herself from the throne of bed in her stately way, and came and put her face upon the knot in his tie. She was taller than Allegra; her eyes were too close to his. "We're to make up for everything, I mean disappointments in the past; I intend to manage that we will; and we will, if we plan and pray," she said into the place where his voice coiled in hiding. He could not uncoil it; it resisted with a gasp. He had not heard his wife, though she heard him, and wondered. The unbodied joy had him by the throat. Its race had never begun. He had drowned it, he had dashed it into a wave. And now it had him by the throat. "What's the matter?" said Sarah Jean. "Do you think it's wicked to put it that way? All right, let's pray first and
then
plan," she reversed herself submissively, releasing the piety, like a blue milk, into her propinquant eyes. She was twenty-seven and nearly happy. Already a strict little duet of lines like linked semaphores lauded the indivisibility of marriage in her high bridal brow.

And William asked Connelly, "Is it do you find a very common custom among Roman Catholics of Irish extraction?" Connelly stared, expecting anger and the violent dropping, all eery noiseless click, of William's white lids: the letters lay arranged and revealed. His employer did not look down. "Naming the son for the father, I mean." "I'm Jim," said Connelly, "my old dad was Jim. I don't know about the rest." "I see," said William—and attached: "these. I see these are surviving. A tedious collection, I've told you. What am I to do with bulging envelopes? Why haven't you torn them up? Look at the dates—have you kept them in a crypt? You've at least taken care of their insides?" Connelly assented: he had done it all, read, reviewed, considered, administered, replied to what required reply. "Then discard," said William; "discard; I say discard them, I don't want them, get them out of here." And kept his look wide, wide: with his hand curled on his chest, as though he were about to cough up a lodged bone.

And Connelly? Authority weighed; but authority sighed at its loss. Connelly, meticulous, could not, by his own hand, destroy paper. In hell the accountants will be made to tear all the letters they have ever written, and all the letters they have ever received; and the howls of the accountants will exceed the bleats of those who for their sins the God of Dante condemned to roll throttled in the river of excrement. Still, Connelly was not technically disobedient. To get rid of a thing is to discard it. The letters came at last into the keeping of the English bank, which is to say they came into no-one-in-particular's keeping, which is to say they were, at last, nowhere. And if they were nowhere, how could they be said to exist? And if they did not exist, how could they fill the devil's dossier? And
if
the devil himself has no evidence, who then has?

The question is not rhetorical. The answer is Enoch. He was not what we mean when we say idealist, and preferred Job's shard to Plato's absolute. Perhaps this is the explanation for why he chose a smoky August day in 1939 to move my mother out of England. He himself drove the hired car (in those days he would never ride behind a chauffeur) to the queen-ship, a tower dimly speckling the fog with flags limp round her smokestacks, steaming with the cautious breathing of the refugee rich. He shook hands with Mrs. Mealie only because her stern Welsh wrist jutted like a log at him; but he refused to kiss the baby, which was held out for goodbye. "Farewell," he told the baby. "Go home," he told Allegra. "I've left a mess," she complained, "nobody knows what a mess I've left, all sorts of stuff, Siegfried still packing the littler trunks, God knows what he'll steal for his wife. And papers and papers of one sort or another at the bank mixed up with William I guess or that Connelly, I haven't the slightest notion, all the money-arrangements and things, after all I never go there, I tell them to send me the money and they do. You're just pushing me out, you know that." "Out of the way." "What, I'm in your way? And who's come practically every day and read that idiot Kant to you in that idiot hole of a room so you could listen with your eyes shut? I can't understand it, if you're so mad at the Germans, and you go right on reading that idiot German—" Like a troubling echo in a deep deep cave, the. ship's whistle boomed. There was a rustle among the passengers. "Well, it's not
cannon,
" said Mrs. Mealie, disapproving of the stir; there was fear in it. "Me-me-me," mouthed the baby, switching its small ugly eyes upward toward the marbled ceiling of the cabin. The cabin was indistinguishable from an English parlor; there was even a fringe on the lampshade. Mrs. Mealie moved from table to table, patting things admiringly. She had never seen the inside of a ship before, and she was not yet certain whether it was really moral for a ship to seem exactly like a parlor. "What am I going to do about the
bank?
" said Allegra: "I mean if they keep on sending the money, and there's no one in the flat but that Siegfried—oh, I forgot to tell you, Enoch, I'm letting him stay there; after all, the rent's paid for months. I don't see why
you
didn't want it instead of that hole. I told him he could bring his wife if he wanted to, and the whole Viennese ghetto if it suited him. He was pretty obsequious, it was disgusting, they don't understand about democracy. I don't like them when they're grateful and I don't like them when they're ungrateful. Well, look, you're not going to tell me they're
all
like King Solomon or King David or somebody—" But the whistle had begun again, a long sharp groan, as though a very large creature had been wounded. Under the wine-colored carpeting vibrations faintly beat. "Goodbye," Enoch said, "it's all ashore that's going ashore." "Well, dash away," said Allegra—"abandon me to the sea's bowels. You made up the whole war scare just to get me out of your room." "Get you out of Europe," Enoch said. "London isn't Europe, not a soul ever thought it was. Anyhow it isn't as if I didn't read aloud
perfectly
satisfactorily!" "I don't quarrel with your elocution," Enoch said, "but it's not the sort of war you're meant for. You'll be better off at home." "Oh, better off, better off! What do you know about better off?" she wailed at him while the cabin shook. "I know
I'd
better be off," said Enoch, and ducked out the low door. ("There's the engine!" cried Mrs. Mealie; privately she was noting that no decent parlor in her experience had ever had floorboards that wobbled.) "But the bank," said Allegra; "can't you do something about the bank, Enoch?" She had followed him into the corridor. "Shall I blow it up?" he offered, showing her his patient genial ordinary scowl. "I mean," she explained, "I've neglected everything,
such
a mess, I didn't even telephone them to say I'm leaving, it's
just
the sort of inefficiency William hates—" "Ah, if you're out to please William, that's another matter," he concluded nicely: "I like that. It's touching, a loyal spurt of conjugality-after-the-fact. You make a model wife—provided the precaution has been taken of divorcing you first." A steward came through, pressing himself past them against the tube-like walls of the passageway: "Gangplank's coming up, sir. Gangplank's coming up. Last call." "Go home," Enoch said, "America needs you." "Oh, I know. America craves me." "Go home, prove by your presence it's still the land of the spree and the home of the idle rich. Have a good time. Let us leftovers here have our little European war to ourselves. Go home and be an heiress." "It's nothing but a silly fight over refugees from perfectly awful ghettos. Nobody's going to fight over that. Only," she said with a gloomy absent look, "if there's a war I'll never find Nick. Never, never. Therefore there won't
be
a war. And if there isn't a war the bank will think I'm acting like a damn fool for running out. William will, anyhow." "So let's have the war to save your face," Enoch said. "But take care of the bank, will you?" I'll settle it all, 111 see to everything," he told her mildly. "You'll settle it all, really?" "Yes." "You'll see to everything?" she insisted. "I said I would." "But you only mean the bank, don't you?" "What else could I mean? I'll settle the Nazis, I'll see to Hitler? Bank on it, I meant the bank. The bank, the bank, the bank. Bank on it." "You didn't mean Nick." "Oh hell, you bet I didn't mean Nick." "Then 111 never marry," she said in furtive despair; Mrs. Mealie stood righteously at the curtained porthole, shrugging the baby to the inconvenient rhythm of the swarming engines underfoot. It was plain from the tilt of her shoulder she had determined it was
not
moral for a ship to seem exactly like a parlor. Luckily she had not been informed that the baby she held was societally amiss (a phrase the baby would have enjoyed had the One been uttered and the other been awake to hear; for, already human, it was beginning to like to imitate sounds and to create semblances of word-noises, some rather complex), or she would have regarded the baby as she now regarded the ship: tolerable for the length of the journey, since there was no avoiding it, but not to be personally acknowledged, since it was an impostor. The baby in particular was an impostor: Mrs. Mealie had been told (it was Enoch's idea to tell her) that it was the child of divorced parents; she thought it was being taken to America to be seen by its father. The baby had a passport all to itself: in this and in the ship's register it was already passing under William's name, the first of innumerable similar impostures. This too was Enoch's plan; incalculably, Enoch believed in respectability. Nevertheless his departing words to Allegra were irritable and not respectable: "Oh go home; what do I care if you marry or you don't marry?" But this woke her into a gleeful sneer—"As long as you settle me, as long as you see to me! I'm banking on you!" she shouted after him while the returning steward, come to give the last alarm of all, stared.

The next day two things happened: a pair of mustached men (one lip wore an inkblot, the other a bear's elbow) settled it all and saw to everything—Europe, that is—and named the myth they had made between them a Pact, to keep the cynical peace; and Enoch walked into a certain grey structure of the kind that is usually called "imposing" and presented himself to a spectacled person grown up to be like an asparagus—limp, lean, vaguely pale in a mottled and moldy way, and his fingertips just moist. "Mr. Ian Makin?" "Quite," said the asparagus, but was imperfectly cordial as though he suspected a daylight robbery, until his caller explained that he had come in behalf of the American lady of whom Mr. Makin would know a very great deal; and would Mr. Makin kindly take effective cognizance of the fact that the lady had gone home to America? "A pity," said the asparagus, who had regarded Allegra as one of his most profitable international "arrangements"; he had very generous terms from William, and almost no service at all to render, beyond the mailing of a check and the maintenance of a vault. The vault was a bit of a nuisance; he had instructions to see to it that none of its contents (of a certain nature) was ever permitted to travel back again to the New World's inhospitable shores. The patroness herself, of course, he had never seen. For more than a year she had kept aloof; she seemed to look on every communication from the bank as an insult. Now and then a paper came from New York imploring her signature; the paper entered the London mails, received the lady's chill child-like scribble, re-entered the London mails, and was quickly posted back to New York. But this was rare. Still, Mr. Makin had observed from these operations that New York appeared to wish to deal with the lady as impersonally as possible; and this was exactly what outraged her. She blamed the bank for allowing itself to be put in the middle, and for behaving rudely. Mr. Makin felt a particular kind of moral discomfort, as though he were a keyhole peeper, whenever he entered the vault and with his own hand placed in their assigned compartment a new batch of envelopes which an accompanying note from a certain Connelly had described as unreturnable under any circumstance. Being a banker, he was a suspicious man, and it seemed to him that the lady's own letters were flocking ungallantly back to her. Luckily or unluckily she had never called for them—perhaps because the bank had failed to mention in any specific sense that they were there. The bank said merely, "Here are some new papers that have come for you," and the lady said, "Do I have to sign?" and when the bank said no, the lady did not reply further. But now here was this gentleman (who somehow did not look
quite
a gentleman: perhaps it was that his shoes were not brushed enough) telling him that the lady would not return to London at all, that everything was to be severed; certainly they would have to wait for a confirmation from New York, but meanwhile it would do no harm to withhold the checks, as the ungentlemanly gentleman was suggesting. Doubtless there was going to be some difficulty over the vault—did the lady desire everything to be transferred to New York? "
She
doesn't desire anything," Enoch answered, thinking how, after a whole year, she still desired Nick. "Ah?" said Mr. Makin, and turned over a wan hand; "then we're to wait on word from Mr. Connelly?" "I don't know any Connelly," said Enoch, who had more than once encountered this name emitted in wrath; "I suppose you'll be hearing from the trustee as soon as she docks. He doesn't know she's coming." Mr. Makin thought this odd, even uncouth, and very American; it made him more uncomfortable than ever. "What do you make of the news, sir?" he said in a thin voice, deflecting a discussion which puzzled as much as it embarrassed him—"I suppose if she'd known it was coming, she wouldn't have been so quick to escape poor old England, eh? There won't be a war now, you know, and in my opinion we're safe as houses, just as long as those great fellows keep things down between themselves and leave the rest of us out of it, eh?" But Enoch had only just awakened from a sleep begun late that morning; he had read—i.e., had not read—all night, in an anguish of insomnia; between leaves the objectionable baby jiggled in his brain as it had jiggled on its nurse's shoulder in the ship's cabin. He thought he despised it because it could not talk philosophy, which was true enough, though he did not suppose that was the real reason. The real reason was that it was Nick's. But that was not the real reason either. He did not care that it was Nick's. He cared that it was Allegra's, and fettered her. Meanwhile this silly asparagus was wanting to know whether he had read the newspapers. Of course he had not read them; he had not even read his Wittgenstein. "Peace is all, sir, made it all right between them, those two," elucidated the asparagus, "who'd believe it only this morning, eh, the surprise of the century! Hitler and Stalin in bed together? Well, give an inch to the Reds and they want to pull everything down, but I've never had any quarrel with Mr. Hitler myself, and now here's the evidence just today that Mr. Chamberlain's been right all along, in spite of the way some quarters show themselves partial to slander. I don't say there's any soul can do no wrong in politics, but he never said worse than that Hitler wouldn't go to war, and I say the proof of the eating is in the pudding—" But here Mr. Makin had to pause. He was now certain that his visitor was not a gentleman: he had not smiled at his wit in turning round the proverb about the pudding, and, worse, Mr. Makin half believed he had heard the fellow enunciate a phrase popular only in the gutter. "I daresay you're one of these leftist warmongers," Mr. Makin did in fact not dare to say; instead he thanked Enoch for stopping by, and said how very sorry the bank was to lose one of its valued American patrons. Having brought this out—it was a clear dismissal—Mr. Makin paused again. He was remembering the difficult envelopes. If the profitable "arrangements" had indeed been terminated, as his caller claimed (and Mr. Makin admitted to himself that the man seemed remarkably well-informed about everything relating to the American lady), then the unchivalrous vault would have to be vacated. Plainly the bank could no longer keep watch over property no longer entrusted to it. Banks, after all, whatever they may be morally, are legally rigorous. But neither did the bank—in a pinch Mr. Makin often interchanged his own mind with one belonging presumably to that grey height of stone—neither did the bank care to send the interdicted letters back to New York. Not the bank but Mr. Makin had received certain warnings from Connelly, whose position over there was unascertainable: he was possibly a person of influence, from whom might flow further opportunities for equally profitable international "arrangements." Mr. Makin slightly flexed the asparagus-tips which were his ears. "Mr. Vand, may I ask," he asked, with all the shrewdness of a country person (he
was
a country person, though he did not know it; even while their genes roar in us we seem not to remember our great-grandparents), "may I ask your relationship to our erstwhile patroness?" Apparently this was precisely the right question. A look of absolute attentiveness stiffened the visitor's rather plump face. Mr. Makin noted to himself that he was not mistaken in his formulation of what could logically be expected of human nature, including his own. "There
is
a little matter," he continued, "which we should find just a bit sticky to dispose of at long distance. We here deal in cablegrams, you see, and cablegrams—heh heh—tend to confuse absolutely, as Lord Acton didn't—heh heh—quite put it. We of the bank so much wish the dear divorced lady had called on us before her departure. It would have simplified indeed. Not the least thing against these war scares is the way they, ah,
scatter
people.
So
unnecessary. The bank, you see, is in possession of a
particular
group of papers—" "Oh, that's all right," Enoch said, "I'll take them if you want." "
Personal
papers, I should perhaps add? Though it's only a perhaps unwarranted suspicion on the bank's part. These are the bank's suppositions, you understand. As a matter of fact the bank would have no way of knowing—" "Perfectly all right," intervened the visitor, whom Allegra had been consistently refusing for fifteen months, "the dear divorced lady in question is planning to become my wife." But they had never found the town where the May Dancers were supposed to weave. Instead she made the chauffeur drive into an opening in a yellow meadow (it was the last time Enoch ever consented to go with a chauffeur), and left him to swelter in the brilliant black limousine near a nodule of incurious cows while the two of them went to sit on a wall. It was low, in the ancient fashion of that landscape, and made of round and flat and angled rocks ingeniously fitted together, and all without mortar. They marveled at the decency of a pair of shady trees, and at the long-ago stone-maker's dogged eye and hand; then unexpectedly Enoch declared himself to be not a stone wall. "Nobody ever said you were," said Allegra. "And even if I am a wall don't think I have any objections to mortar," he retorted. Whereupon his companion reasonably complained that he ought first to decide whether he was or wasn't a wall, and then she would see, if he persisted in metaphor, what "mortar" signified. "Anything that sticks," he said at once and nastily: "I have in mind wedding-glue." "Blood's plenty stickier than that," she told him. She said she meant the child. She owed it its proper father. She would never marry—oh, never again!—unless she married Nick; it was simply a question of learning where he was, only no one would help her, not Enoch, not William, not that fool Connelly, certainly not the bank, which she regarded as no better than the parakeet house at the zoo. (Their architectural styles were undeniably similar.) In spite of all William's practicality, concerning the bank she was wiser than he; she knew perfectly well the bank wasn't responsible. It had written to her insultingly: "It is not in our province to conduct a missing persons' service, particularly in today's Europe, with its shifting populations." As though a man were a population! As though Nick were a refugee! As though she could go and marry anyone, when she had Nick's own child to think of! As though Enoch could even
dream
of getting her for a wife! She chided his effrontery with regularity. Meanwhile he had to live, and went to work grubbing for a freshly-organized encyclopaedia company, which hoped to prey on the respectability-urge of poor people, and assigned Enoch the article on Metaphysics, History Of. He felt his eyes deteriorating when night after night he dug into his library load. So Allegra came to Adam Gruenhorn's hole and read to him; he saw the light on her hair, and tried to be amused by the mechanical spate of her mispronunciations. When she went away he had to study all over again what she had sung out to him. She was bored, and he pitied her boredom, but kept her motives alive: she supposed she was a Samaritan nobly assisting him, and gloriously yielded everything up in a garble of non-comprehension. But in the matter of wedding-glue she was steadfast, and refused him all the way from the pre-Socratics through David Hume. Hope of Nick had made her puritan and body-shy: in Adam Gruenhorn's room Allegra read, and Enoch pretended to take notes while her voice swayed among the sentences it knew how to turn into mysteries. They never touched fingers. She refused him and refused him. In Adam Gruenhorn's room she refused him; she refused him through Hegel and Kant; she refused him on the ship in the last hour, while Mrs. Mealie jiggled Nick's daughter, for whose sake alone she said she hoped in Nick. She commanded him not to dreamland refused him again. Despite her strictures he had his dream, though at first sight a bank may not seem a likely place to speak one out. At first sight only—for articulated dreams are lies, and lies have been uttered before in banks. "Oh, very good indeed! Splendid for the bank!" lied Mr. Makin, hearing Enoch's dream (he meant splendid for himself, seeing he was to avoid a predicament with Connelly), and led his caller into the vault—"of course if you are affianced to the lady, in that case, sir, though I confess it's a trifle irregular, I can entrust these entirely to your discretion? Actually, these days most things aren't being played exactly according to Hoyle, are they though? We jolly well wouldn't have believed it this morning about the Reds and the Germans, would we now? In the same bed? Still, the main thing is keeping the peace, isn't it?"