Trust (63 page)

"You mean," I burst in, feeling odd, "he won't get it? They won't confirm?"

"Oh, in that sense his history is not at issue. In emerging from it, in fact, he has acquired a certain very recognizable subtlety of contrivance. As the Senator says (the Senator is a Californian), he knows his way around. He's a fond persuader. The Senators are not indifferent to his merits. The post is a working political post, more than (some would say less than) honorific. It may be inferred from this that they want him. They will settle for him. The President has been most pressing. The Vice-President has been most mollifying to the opposition party. Needless to say Vand will have his price domestically. But the committee as a whole will settle for him. They have settled for him already, in spite of everything, everything being his history. Nothing now remains but the assimilatory processes of the hearings themselves. The nature of these should be clear to you by now."

"I think my mother's afraid of a fuss," I said. "Will there be a fuss?"

"They will suppress. What they do not suppress they will minimize," William continued. "They intend to suppress whatever will publicly disturb, they intend to minimize whatever will publicly offend. They have anticipatorily resolved to pass over the tasteless and the ignoble. Put it that there are, metaphorically, tailors and night-watchmen among the Senators themselves: the committee is a reflection of the larger body, and the larger body as it is nowadays composed is not above the tasteless and the ignoble. They have examined, they have investigated."

"If there's a fuss he won't get it, is that what you mean? My mother wants him to get it more than anything." But I said all this repetitively and with a certain dullness. It seemed he had concluded the father's tale; the lover's tale. He had given out the usual climax, a marriage; the rest I knew. The rest was only Enoch and my mother. But I had not come for Enoch, and not for my mother. I had come for my father: and here was that middleman William leaving off in the middle, marking time with me almost as he had marked it with Mrs. Karp a while before. Perhaps he suddenly felt he had told too much. But if he had not told all (all continued to be Tilbeck, Tilbeck continued to be all) he had not told enough. "My mother wants Enoch to be Ambassador more than he wants it for himself," I took up. "It's the central point for her."

"It's the central point for us all."

"Not for me."

"Especially for you."

"It doesn't matter to me what happens," I persisted. "It doesn't count.
They're
the ones who want to grab—my mother more than Enoch, I told you.
He's
content as he is."

"He's content, yes."

"With his views, I mean. He lives on his views."

"Some would say he lives on your mother."

"He says so himself. That because his views are—I don't know—oh, bleak, I think you would call them."

"Oblique?" said William. "Perhaps. Then let
me
be direct." And would have pressed on at once with the substance of his discourse as he had pressed on with it against Euphoria's placebo, never attending to my dissent. What I might speculate just then could only hang weightless, since towards the substance itself he had a brutality of attentiveness that showed him unmoved and purposeful, as though concentrating on the ingestion of a pill so repellent of flavor, odor, and appearance that no one observing it trapped in his teeth could possibly take it for a mere placebo. He spoke of generals and senators precisely because they were real powers, and not speculative, and not oblique.

But I said: "
Be
direct."

"If you will permit me," William replied in his tethered tone.

"You don't give me what I came for," I accused.

"I give you nothing else."

"You don't. You keep on about committee hearings. What's it to me, all of that? If Enoch gets to be Ambassador or not? You began about private things, and now you keep on about public things."

"I keep on," William said, "about the things that are pertinent."

"What you mean is pertinent to the body politic. Public things," I repeated. "It's
my
body they're shipping off, isn't it? And I'm as private as Tilbeck is, and Tilbeck's been kept so private all along he's nearly a secret, and still they ship me off to him—"

"Everything has been done that could be done," he said inscrutably. "The committee hearings are public." And then: "We have been forced," he appended.

"Forced! A drifter, a piano-player, and you talk of forced, and you drag in those hearings, everything public—"

"We have been forced to come to terms in a way that was never contemplated."

"Because the committee hearings are public!" I threw across at him. But in spite of spite I wondered at his words: long ago my mother too had had to speak of "terms."

"Precisely," William concluded. "Hearings of this sort are entirely public. They are self-righteously public. In public the committee represents a formalism, though not quite a formality. That is because political decisions are arrived at neither formally nor publicly. The witnesses will have been selected with a view toward the presentation of the most favorable impression. Put it that the witnesses will lean, they will have a particular tendency. They will argue a long and admirable record, which exists. Which exists: don't mistake me. Undeniably such a record exists."

"You tell everything," I taunted. "You tell everything but what I came for."

But he did not pause. "The other matters they will pass over. They will pass over whatever in the record is less favorable, because privately and informally the Senators will already have passed over it beforehand. Before, you understand, the public hearings."

"Then there
won't
be a fuss," I gave out, irritated with his surface mood. "How nice for my mother, how nice for Enoch, how lovely, how delicious, I mean for the two of
them:
but what difference does it make to me? They've
got
the Ambassadorship: say they've got it, William. The President wants it, the committee hands it over, and isn't that enough for them? To run half the Western world? You'd think that would be enough even for
her!
But on top of it they've got to ship me off, and nobody'll tell me why.
They
won't tell me why."

To my surprise I discovered he had been staring at me all the while. "The plan dismays you that much? You dislike going that much?"

It seemed it was the first time he had thought of me.

"Oh, I don't care."

"You don't care? Please, you contradict yourself now."

"What else would I be doing anyhow?" I said limply. "Sitting perfectly still. Reading the papers."

"How sullen you are," William reflected, as though capitulating, and dropped his hand flat. "You are not like your mother. At your age she had enthusiasms."

"All the Action Committees, and being a revolutionary. Ho," I said. "Hum. New Oxford Street and Adam Gruenhorn."

But he was unexpectedly stirred: "Undoubtedly she was carried away, and I will not say I could ever approve it, yet it's to her credit in a way. I acknowledge that. It speaks well of her intent."

"It's all so silly, it seems so dated. —My mother especially. She comes out of it a bore."

"The opposite. The opposite. It gave her a spiritual vividness. To be mistaken out of hopefulness hardly mitigates the wrong, yet unlike so many others of no background she was not mistaken out of malice. The rest wanted to avenge themselves on the privileged, as though any position of privilege in society has not been well-earned. But through it all your mother had a sense of herself, she had the self-esteem of numerous industrious generations that is not egotism but is inbred, she had a fancy in favor of engaging herself to the significant act. She had a willingness for good, in spite of a tragic definition of good, and you see all the tragedy that came of it. She has that same willingness today, she will engage herself vitally, she is capable of trying on diverse forms of life—" He stopped, and relieved himself, by means of a destroying blink, of the long attachment of my amazement. He had fallen through surface into whirlpools. He was loyal still. He said: "That is why she wants the Ambassadorship." He examined me. "You are not like your mother."

"Am I like my father?"

"See for yourself."

"Go without a peep, you mean. Get shipped."

"If you value your stepfather you have no choice."

"Oh, value," I said—but this was merely filler, and I might just as well have muttered "Oh, choice," and been as meaningful.

"If you value him as Ambassador."

"That's the way
she
values him. Don't expect the same of me, I'm not like my mother," I reminded him, "you've told me so twice."

"How rude you are. Rude and sullen. You will go if you. value your mother."

"And should I value, my father too?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"He's the only one who seems to value
me.
"

"Yes, he has always established a price on you." He all at once evaded the contents of my face. "Understand me. I don't purpose to make a wound, but here as with most things of the world we are confronted by a business exchange which requires the business mind. You should demonstrate an attitude in accordance with that"

"Gustave Nicholas Tilbeck doesn't have a business mind," I intervened, inexplicably defensive. "He's no good for business. It sounds like he was good for the Action Committees before he got tired of them. Maybe he was good for New Oxford Street and all those parades and Moscow and Sweden. That's all he was good for then, and now I guess there's nothing he's good for." I considered. "Do the Senators know about New Oxford Street and the Action Committees? And Adam Gruenhorn? And my mother? And Gustave Nicholas Tilbeck? And everything years and years ago?"

"They know it alL They are familiar with everything."

"And it's all right? They don't object?"

"The business mind never objects when its own advantage is at stake. Not all the Senators are tailors and watchmen, even metaphorically: which is to say that not all the Senators are fools. They have recognized these items as topically inflammatory but topically worthless. They pass over New Oxford Street because it is too tangential to count, and too dangerous to bring up. The public is interested in the worthless and the inflammatory, but the Senators are interested in what is useful. They will not take it on themselves to bring the worthless and the inflammatory to th§ notice of the public. They are not ignoble. They regard Vand as a proper candidate not for his biography but for his usefulness. They regard him as sound—sounder than most He's been through the mill, as Tassel says: knows the other political philosophy firsthand. If he doesn't like it it's not because the Government tells him not to. He knows why he doesn't like it because he has been in it He has been in it and recanted. Moreover he recanted years before it was the fashion to recant—
that's
in his favor. He has been through all the blandishments, and come out on the other side. Not clean: to my mind nobody can come out of that philosophy cleaner than one who has never been attracted to it: but of course the Senators are not interested in lifelong purity; they are interested in usefulness. The pure and the useful are not always identical. Sang-froid is an acquisition to be earned by a journey through dirt, so to speak, and the dirt has clung. An Ambassador, like steel, should be an alloy."

"Ill tell that to Enoch. Good alloys make good allies, hell say."

"You're laughing," William observed.

"Because you're not. A minute ago you were complaining he wasn't typical enough, and now you praise him just
for
that. And you don't see the joke."

"The necessities of politics praise him: I don't. He has talent, he has merit. And his talent and his merit are wonderfully attuned to the necessities. If they were at odds with the necessities it would be a comedy perhaps. But there is nothing absurd or comic in the congruent. Furthermore there is another vitally congruent element: he has money available to him. There is no joke in money. There never will be. In this case the money is part of the merit—they wouldn't have him without the money. The post is one of the more expensive ones—surely that's plain on the face of things. It couldn't be run on talent alone. Merit can't staff an embassy building. Luckily he is as well-known abroad for the availability of the money as he is for having had, all these months, the ear of the man who has the ear of the President. In the past he has made both those ears ring. No doubt you have followed that for yourself. But you continue to laugh. I believe I am offended by it. I amuse you?"

"No. The money does. There's a joke in the money after all." A shrewd intimation, an inward scar of awe, lifted me beyond the lamp, and I saw not William's but my grandfather's mouth, sea-obsessed. Had it been live flesh and not oil—sailor's lore that oil and water do not mix—it would have watered at my thought. I said: "She's buying him the Ambassadorship."

"You offend. You offend very much."

"Now there's nobody she hasn't bought."

"Vand was bought—'bought,' if you will—to be a father, as I have said, for you. An unsuccessful transaction. As I have said. The locution is vulgar and I don't accede to it. But she has bought, in that sense, no one else."

"You," I said. "She pays you."

"She pays her attorney. I am her attorney."

"Well? But she pays."

"In my capacity as trustee of a difficult estate I encounter and disburse your mother's money," he answered, but with an anger too small to arouse him. Or perhaps, since the subject was business, he kept himself businesslike: "In spite of that the nature of my relationship to your mother is wholly fiducial."

"Financial?"

"Fiducial. A matter of faith."

"Of commerce, you mean. Every word you say to her she has to pay for. You get your cut out of everything. And now if she has to buy the Ambassadorship for Enoch there's nothing to choose between you and him. She just goes ahead and pays everybody. Up to now I didn't think Enoch had to be paid for; and now it's even Enoch. She pays for everyone. She pays the whole world. She has to pay to keep alive. She has to bribe the air to let her breathe. She has to pay for what other people get for free. It's better to be poor. It's better to be poor and be a blackmailer. It's less humiliating."