Trust (64 page)

"I assure you that for your mother nothing would be more humiliating than not to be the wife of the Ambassador. What she provides she provides willingly. A poor man cannot be Ambassador. An Ambassador cannot be poor."

"He can't be poor, he can't be pure," I recited. "Does that cover all the requisites?"

—He sealed his eyes.

"He can't be dour? But Enoch's thoroughly dour. I told you, he's bleak. You thought I said oblique. But oblique doesn't always fit him; only sometimes; when he wants to he can go straight to the point, I've heard him. Sometimes he goes straight to the point and he's a boor. My mother says so. She tells him he attacks his soup like a boor. He tips his plate the wrong way, that's alL Does the committee know
that?
He's an impure dour poor boor—wholl tell the committee that? I bet that's something they haven't found out! And you say they know everything. He eats his soup like an ex-Communist dupe—"

"If you persist in hysteria—"

"It isn't hysteria, it's rhymes, like Mrs. Karp. I'm accumulating character traits for the Ambassadorship. My mother's money, Enoch's brains, the President's assistant's ear—"

"—and a host country that wants him. I suggest you hear me out finally. I suggest it very seriously."

"Sure," I said, mainly because it rhymed with pure, poor, and dour.

He did not trouble himself to finish the various adornments of his frown: he simply proceeded. "The Foreign Office people over there are unmistakably after him—it's still another factor immensely in his favor that they want him, they are distinctly eager to get him. I have this from the Senator; it is undoubtedly true. And there has been, in addition, a hinting note from the Prime Minister actually, though usually he likes to keep hands off for fear of being misunderstood by the Senators. But the Senators are not fools," he brought out for the second time, in a voice burdened by an unwilling urgency that filled eerily with echoes of itself. He had said all this already. It was as though he were insisting all over again, and more ominously than before, that the committee hearings were public. He had made it intensely and perilously plain that they were public. "Not all the Senators are fools. If they are left alone they will pass over whatever needs to be passed over," he ended, but without the tone of ending.

I marveled at his repetitions. "If the Senators are left alone?" I asked. "You mean by the Prime Minister?"

"I mean by Gustave Nicholas Tilbeck," he said, and now at last I heard him carried down by the sound of ending, and he ended what he had set out to say, and gave me what I had come for.

But what I had come for was no more than what I had come with: my father's names. We were all at once cast back from the public to the private: notch by notch along the greedy wheel of things we had arrived once more at my father's names. Meanwhile I observed that the wheel was rigged, like a lottery disk at a cheating carnival, which brings the same number always to the member of the house: but the member of the house, though a conspirator, is masked like myself to represent an innocent, and summons not through luck but through artfulness.

William said: "He wants to throw it all open."

"All?"

"Absolutely everything."

I began to enumerate: "The Action Committees, New Oxford Street, Moscow—"

"That isn't quite everything."

"But if the Senators
know
everything—"

"The public doesn't. He has made detailed promises to secure that the public will. Your stepfather has had assurances from him."

"There was a letter," I said, "and Enoch wouldn't let me see it. Was that the one?"

He ignored me. "He has named three prominent newspapers in three cities. Each is a hostile and influential political force. Whatever the Senators are willing to overlook, you may be certain that figures connected with these newspapers will not What has been kept down for twenty years will emerge in an afternoon. In an hour."

A scrub of enlightenment ascended in me: "Because the committee hearings are public," I said.

"Everything will become public. Nothing will be omitted. The public will eat Mr. and Mrs. Vand alive."

"
Mrs.
Vand?" I said.

"They will lick her clean."

"Mrs. Vand doesn't have any politics."

"Neither does the public. You don't imagine the public has the remotest notion of how the Senate goes about qualifying Ambassadors? Or cares?—Politics will be the least of it."

"And what will the most be?" I said in bewilderment.

He gave a great heave. "Even the Senators are not aware of it. We have evaded scandal ingeniously. About you the assumption has been the usual one: the child of a second marriage which terminated in divorce. Don't you see," he pressed out, "we have tried to keep you free, we have done everything for your safety, we have never permitted his breath on you, we have paid him and paid him—"

"Oh," I said. "You mean Brighton. He'll tell about Brighton."

The criminal phrase disgraced the air.

"It might have been regularized. It might have been minimized," said William, moving in his chair. The leather writhed and bleated. "If Vand had adopted. From the start I recommended adoption. But he refused. He could not be persuaded. As a result the matter remains as it was. As it was. Yet something might have been salvaged. You would have had a name."

"I have your name."

"You have no name."

His fierceness was that of a flagellant. He hoisted himself; he rose; he stood mortified, his arc of forehead shining absurdly. A photographer would have powdered it; a painter would have made a still life of it: it seemed a purposefully barren bowl awaiting the stroke of a single leaf. Then I saw on the white flank of the temple an apparition of leaf: the fuzzy elm-like oval of a track of sweat He said: "I think there is nothing left now. We are finished. You have it all."

Seeing his fear I was afraid. "He won't take money? Tilbeck? Can't he take money? Why not money?"

"He will always take money. This time money is insufficient. He wants you."

"I know that I know, they've told me that But why there? In
that
place? Does he live there?"

"He squats there. He comes and goes, there is no one to stop him. It is an empty house. It has not been kept up. Perhaps it tumbles. He does as he likes."

"He's the one who's free," I said.

But William had pulled the chain of the lamp. The doorknob whined at the neck. "He used the place often before we learned of it The first we knew was when he directed the money to be sent there. He has the caprice of a demon." The darkness, though enlarging him, presented me with a pudding of William, wavering against a distant tiny light. The room beyond was vacant and warm and smelled spent. Paper cups lay glinting in the aisles between the desks like Viking debris in a deserted hall. The engagement party had dispersed itself: Cabbages, Onions, law clerks, all those young men who had once come down in vain from Cambridge to wish me bon voyage. "What he wants," William said dimly, "is to harass. That's all he ever wanted: to harass. To a man who has no power harassment is power. He envies power. He works on whatever the occasion offers. I hear a sound. A tick." Tick tick tick. A minuscule mammal chirp.

It was the sodden nap of the carpet, seeping.

I said in the doorway: "Someone ought to harass him back."

"Don't take it on yourself!" William answered.

"Oh, not me. I'm only barter," I said. "I'm ransom. I might as well be a sack of money."

—"Is someone there?" someone called. "Anybody left over? Who is it?"

At the mouth of a far cubicle, sharp as though inked there, a pair of tombs embraced.

"Now it's clear," I pursued. "They're sending me to save Enoch."

"I bet it's a joke. I bet it's a trick. It must be a left-over Cabbage. They hide out for a surprise. Hey! We can't see you. You a Cabbage out there?" A metal dipper came whirling like a spoke down the corridor; it missed our pioneering shadows by half an inch and fell clattering against a desk. "Go home!"

William's voice emerged from the reverberation: "To save the Ambassadorship."

"To save my mother, if it comes to that."

"Cabbages go home!" The tombs leaned apart, then joined in a single new shape: an uneven obelisk. "Privacy's wanted!"

"It has come to that. It has come to that," William said.

"Oh listen," cried Miss Pettigrew, "it's your father I think."

A noise of scrambling; overhead illumination; exposure. A vale of sandwich rinds.

"Good Lord," William said, "it's a graveyard."

"They left an awful mess," his son confirmed. "I thought you were gone. I told Mother so. She called on Connelly's line. Cletis swallowed a button."

Stefanie's tea rose was pasted to his collar.

"Oh Willie!" she exclaimed, shooting me a lofty crafty look, "see, now you've gone and embarrassed my only fiancé! And we weren't doing anything I bet
you
didn't do in your prime either!"

She had, by that easy abbreviation of his name, fulfilled her dare. He was to be her father-in-law. She reduced him to an intimacy. She claimed him.

"Oh my father in his prime!" said William's son through his neutral withholding smile; and addressed the subject of his apostrophe: "Only it turned out to be a Canadian penny. With an engraving of the Queen on it actually. Cletis
said
it was a button," and recounted how the doctor had held Cletis upside down until the coin shook itself out.

"When I was little I once ate a stock certificate," Stefanie volunteered.

"You'd better not eat any around here, they're mostly Mrs. Vand's," said William's son. "That's why her daughter turned up today—on business for Mrs. Vand. That means she's checking her mother's files for teeth-marks. Show your incisors. Stef; let her see if they match."

"They match yours," I told him.

"Or my father's in his prime," he muttered.

But William was retrieving the carol of his daughter-in-làw's laughter from the whorled air as though he could hear in it the beating of his prime; he did not attend. The nictitation of his slow lid seemed underwater, like that of a diver oscillating in a still pool: his reaching fingers widen to comb the sea in hope of catching the snarl of an eddy he remembers, in which something, he does not know what, falls and falls.

Meanwhile his son wheedled a bonfire into the snout of a new black cigar. The act was a drawstring that teased his pupils along a comical slide toward their mutual confrontation; then he lifted his martial head, freed, for a mocking even view of me. "Talk of teeth-marks! Has he been chewing you over? He has to give advice, you know; it's his living," he observed. "No! And still you've come out of there looking martyred?"

"What's martyred?" said Stefanie.

"What they do to saints," William's son supplied, "when they're ignorant and illiterate and have impoverished vocabularies."

"Then it won't ever happen to me!" she crowed. "Will it Willie?"

William glared at his wristwatch, then at his son.

"St. Stefanie," said the latter, "martyred
circa
1957 A.D. for the improper severance of a proper noun."

Beneath his imaginary helmet I seemed to see the lost flower breathe into bloom.

"I would never do a thing like that, would I Willie?" shrieked William's daughter-in-law-to-be, entwining us all in her joy.

It is only the secret reasons which really account for a marriage.

Why did my mother marry Enoch Vand? Not for the reason William held—that public and plausible justification of an unjustifiable suddenness which, like the rest of my mother's fabrications drawn up to satisfy William's respectability, William gave out to me as conservatively as if he believed her lie. It was to himself he lied. Without having to be persuaded, and after so long resisting persuasion, my mother married Enoch Vand: but she married him not for me. In name or act he would not feign fatherhood. He thought me an impediment—not to freedom, but to honesty—and my mother knew it; also William knew it; I dimly knew it, feeling behind Enoch's self-conscious indifference to me a more encompassing indifference. He had the disregard and detachment of one who has given up, yet perversely retains a metaphysical interest in the motions and motives not of the abandoned thing, but of renunciation itself.

This brought my mother to him. A marriage can be a sacrament of despair, and a seal on loss. Or say: it is possible to get used to a revised sense of the self.

My mother (it was remarkable) revised herself and chose Enoch. The war slammed down like a guillotine between America and Europe: she revised, if not her vision, her commitment, and fell almost comfortably into a defense of bad marriages. "If I don't like it," she told William's wife, who after the ceremony stood with her peeled-looking pink hands like the narrow bony heads of carnivorous hawks, "I can always lump it. Following William's example, you know. What the law hath joined together any old divorce court can put asunder." Sarah Jean was heavily pregnant, and in a conscientious voice of meritorious accomplishment reminded the bride of the claims of Divine Law. "Well," said the bride, with a smug tug at the virginal coil of her turban, "if Divine Law doesn't recognize divorce then it's got to recognize polygamy, that's only logical: ask the Heavenly Judge when you get there. What William's done with you he's done with me, don't forget it; and did it like a stick, I don't know how he is with you, but I've had better than that, I've had living blood"—this unholy phrase being the last Sarah Jean was ever willing to receive from Allegra. She turned the arc of her belly like a reproof flourished within a parenthesis, and presently sent a servant to the door to accept Allegra's gift at the birth of William's son; but it was a servant who brought it.

My mother married Enoch, and in the end without having to be persuaded, Because she had given up expectation of renewal. The war slammed down like a guillotine; like an electrified gate; like an oven door. Europe was inaccessible. Nick was irretrievable. He could never be found, he would never come back. Who would find him? He was lost, he could never be found, Gustave Nicholas Tilbeck, in all that tangle of time and armies. She felt time on her. Brighton was devoured. And if it was a Hundred Years' War? What would that bring her? She mourned Brighton, but felt time; and married Enoch.