Trust (69 page)

But she was watching me with eager looks: "Now you see how it was! Exactly what I said. He was swallowed up right into the middle of the war. So I left him. The chronology doesn't matter. Who left who doesn't matter. The main thing is I didn't marry him. I couldn't, not with the war. Otherwise I would have. I would have, Enoch knows that. But I had to leave without him, on account of the war."

"Hear it," Enoch said, "how the maze of pride writhes around a new corner. Let it go, Allegra. Drop it. Let it stand. You don't need to try this—"

"Try what? Try what?" she appealed. "I said just exactly what happened. I
said
abandonment."

"You don't have to justify yourself," he finished hopelessly.

"I'm not justifying myself. You think I'm justifying myself to bourgeois morality, right? That's what you think? Well I'm not. I say the hell with bourgeois morality. I've always felt that way. It's been my position from the beginning."

"We're not at the beginning any more."

"Then what are we at? The end? I don't know about you,
I'm
not at the end of anything. I'm just starting! You think an Embassy is nothing? Anyhow I'm
not
justifying myself to bourgeois morality, I'm justifying myself to
her.
"

"It's all the same," he said.

"No it's not," I said.

"There!" said my mother, snatching me for sudden ally. "See? She's not as shallow as you make her out to be, at least she's capable of understanding what an Embassy means. Only when the time comes," she warned me, "you'd better change your attitude. I'm not a liberal any more, if liberal signifies I have to tolerate gossip. My business is my business, nobody else's." She hardened: "Respectable boys don't take, out running sores, they don't marry issues, remember that while you're deciding to be so liberal."

"I'm not respectable enough to
decide
to be liberal."

"Oh fine, listen to that! Enoch, you heard that. You heard it for yourself. Where's an attitude like that going to lead?"

"You are whatever your mother wants you to be," he told me: "Apparently she wants you to be respectable."

I laid the bundle of letters on the bed and said nothing.

"I don't want her to be anything," my mother remonstrated, "except free. As long as she's free," she said, but this was mechanical: it was not her thought. Her thought was something else. "
We're
free," she explained. "Free as kings."

"An Ambassador," Enoch observed, "is not exactly an absolute monarch."

"I know that," she said demurely.

"An Ambassador," Enoch observed again, "is not exactly left to do as he pleases. Neither is his wife."

"I know that."

"Then our freedom, you see, is not what you imagine."

"Yes it is," my mother said. "We're free to take the Embassy."

He said slyly, "You wouldn't trade the Embassy for Brighton?"

Her gaze floated over me.

"That was fake crying before," she gave out finally.

"I took it," Enoch said hollowly, "for grief."

But she was swift to pin him: "Is that why you called it stupid?"

"Fake is stupid," he blew back at her.

"You didn't know it was fake, it's just that you don't care what I'm feeling," she complained. "You don't take me seriously, you're always clowning."

"I am the grin," Enoch said, "in your chagrin."

"See?"

"I don't like your blasphemy," he said: "It's blasphemous to simulate despair. There's plenty of the original in the world."

"Oh, the world!" she said in the shrill consummation of her disgust.

"You weren't feeling h," he accused.

"No," she admitted.

"You didn't feel a thing."

"It's wrong not to feel a thing, isn't it? I don't feel anything at all about any of that, it's peculiar. It's all gone."

"Brighton?" he asked.

"Nick," she heard herself reply.

"Ah," Enoch said, and sealed in that enclosing syllable their unanimity, self-amazed. It drove a gate against me; wedding-glue had cemented shut the seams at last. I foresaw the Embassy, a sandstone palace in an alien nation with an iron gate coiling up its scrolled crest through shimmering queer foreign winds, and staves like spears or lances, and myself never in it. I would stay behind, I would never enter. It was Enoch's house, that Embassy, bought for him by my mother, paid for by my surrender to my father; I would never enter it. I had never entered William's houSe; I foresaw I would never enter Enoch's. Did they pity me, those counterfeit fathers, false Enoch, false William, who gave me for hostage so that my mother in her appetite might take an Embassy?

I went to pack.

"—Wait a minute, will you?" She stopped me on the way; fatigue narrowed the bone of her nose; her nostrils seemed to waver independent of structure. "Now listen here, I never told you any lies at all, you follow? I mean look—suppose I'd married Nick, you think I could
stay
married? To a vagrant, a bum? An out-and-out crook? I would've divorced him in the end anyway, you follow? It comes to the same thing, you see my point?"

But there was power in the room: Enoch exultant under its plume, a crease of elation in either cheek, his forehead heavy, white, shining with relief. He had her now. She had sloughed off not Brighton (and what was Brighton after all?), but Nick. He had never feared Brighton, he had never feared me: only Nick. And be had her now, and was, as she said, free as a king. He had her. She reminisced for him; she was telling how, the very day she married him under William's high jealous shadow, in the flesh-gleam of William's wife's scorning glovelessness, all the while she was missing Nick. The fractional cut of diffidence she had earlier opened to me left no stitch or ridge or fissure: she was whole, he had her whole.

She missed no one.

To me she said: "Of course it was a fib—Enoch's saying he didn't have any ambition. He said it the first night we were married, it turned out it was his way of covering up. He always has to cover things up, he's terribly complicated. It's right in his temperament, being negative about things. Negative and proud. The more negative and proud he is the more he's craving something. I ought to
know
him by now! Take my word for it: he's got a hollow craving in him, more than anyone, more than I have. That's why he's the only person I could have married, logically speaking."

My stepfather responded to this with an uncommon glimmer of smile. "Logically speaking," he began, in a voice so given over to mastery that I was sure he was about to disclose a conspiracy of advice for me to take with me, "there are neither lies nor fibs. Lies and fibs contradict the truth, and contradictions don't exist in logic"—it was only another conundrum, one of his jokes; he had nothing to tell me. "And you," he told my mother, "crave nothing at all," which, while never touching himself, penetrated her exactly. She missed no one, she missed nothing.

In that place there was a short tree crouched over its short trunk, not much higher than a bush, and with a full misty mane like a bush, and all its comb of yellow leaf stained through by sunlight, the wide wash of day narrowed gunlike and spat out in points of magnetic shimmer on each tremulous lamina, the whole blown head of it coruscating like a transparent great net of caught fishes: the little caught tree wriggling, and with every wriggle enmeshing itself still more inescapably in its bag of light; every breath it dared to take sluicing it in a supernal flash—tossing itself there, on the edge of the swamp, back and forth, dazzling, darting.

My mother's chauffeur said, "This looks like it, miss. A bit of dock left here. I was told a bit of old dock," and put my suitcase—I had taken only one—on a nailed-together pattern of soaked colorless faintly noiseful planks. "Must've been deeper here once—deep water—if a ferry ran. They must've cut in deep here, for a ferry."

"It was long ago," I said, looking out at the long grasses up to their knees in water.

"We been out of the Bronx only ten minutes, that's the amazing thing. All new roads up around here that didn't use to be. Don't know the neighborhood, miss, or we wouldn't've got so lost. Sorry about that, miss."

"It's all right."

"You want me to wait with you, miss?"

"No, it's all right."

"Perfectly fine with me, miss, whatever Mrs. Vand said. Maybe Mrs. Vand didn't realize what it was out here, swamp—"

"You'd better go, if she told you that."

"Trouble is maybe they come by to pick you up and left, us being so late and nobody here," he said, changing the position of Jus sweated cap and worrying over my mother's story. It was, of course, a bucolic; a false bauble; one of her fancies of what my life might be, if only I were free, if only I could have been what she called "normal"—a squad of school friends coming down a sparkling little stream in a chartered excursion boat heavy with its party of incredibly eligible boys handsome as lords and loyal steadfast girls in butterfly skirts hanging over the rail, shouting steering directions at the patient cheery captain, crowing out my name when they spotted me signalling with both arms aloft on a painted toy pier, surrounded by valises. "You know maybe a boat couldn't get through any more, what with all them weeds growing around, or we got the wrong place could be." He drew from his breast pocket a scrap of inky map, which Enoch had made for him the day before, based on a gasoline-station highway guide and obscure sources of his own. "Up there's the throughway, and we left the car
here,
up near the clover-leaf, which by the way we might get ticketed for, I
told
Mrs. Vand, and here's ¿lis little road we just come by ... it looks right, miss. What with the dock, it looks like what they said. You sure you don't want me to wait a while, miss? Till they get you safe on that boat?"

"Not if my mother told you not to."

He frowned at this, and walked for a step or two, and then took off his cap and let the line of wet dammed by it descend; he was an old man, and had an old man's chicken-neck, each crowded fold a limp ring of heat "What if you're stranded, miss?"

"Ill be all right, really."

"You're late now? Mrs. Vand said one o'clock positively?"

"You'd better go," I told him, unwilling to accede to that tentative kindliness of his which, like much of the kindliness of people who find themselves servants of the old sort in a democratic republic, was subversive. He meant to enlist me against my mother's recklessness. He thought it wrong to leave a girl alone in a swamp, and the tender backward-twisting glimpse he snatched of his boots scalloped with mud up to the heel was intended to entice me to conspire with him against my mother's idiocies. I watched him go up the thread of path, surprised there
was
a path at all; he vanished between spears of man-tall weed, and then re-appeared in parts, sometimes only a slice of pink neck meandering like a fly. He was circling to avoid the sudden ponds that sprang into reflections as soon as the ground was pressed. He was vain of his boots. Now and again he bent to wipe them with his handkerchief: I could see him dip and rise, dip and rise, the cloth sliding like a white face between the green high bars, and from the top hairs of the embankment heard him call down: "There's a police 'phone up on the highway, miss, about a quarter-of-a-mile down aways, in case you get stranded in there—all right, miss?"

"Right," I said—this leaped up briefly in the stillness like an animal bark and shamed me. He stood awhile, looking toward the water, squinting down under the awning of his cap. My mother had told him one o'clock because Tilbeck had told her two. She plotted to give me over unobserved by anyone, even by her driver, who was less than anyone. Her driver lingered, not daring to call again, though his shadow less noon figure, the sun a bright blot in the middle of his chin, continued to grow curiously out of the hill into the sky. Finally he trod away without crackle or splinter; up there he had clean clover under his feet.

I arranged my suitcase flat side up and sat on it. The dock stirred with an indoor creak like a rocking-chair, and I thought of the Pink Lady, salmon-shining, clicking its vigorous optimistic engine, arriving to meet the landing with a proud and caressing exactitude, and William—an aggrieved William already not very young, made patient by hopefulness, and neither patience nor hopefulness the natural properties of his mind—that early sorrowing William driving right off her back onto a once-upon-a-time road as buried now as Caesar's, "the paving worn to pebbles and woven over by an irreversible plait of reeds and rushes and mud and years. Years, years, covered that place. The quiet was tumultuous with insect chatter: the works of a perpetual-motion machine which had been going on forever and ever, from beginnings no one remembered or believed in: the grasses had sung out their riots for my girl-mother on this spot while she waited to cross the water home to Duneacres. My lique-maniacal grandfather had kept motor-launches for that purpose, each maneuvered by a butler of its own: and, after that stupefying climax of abundance, came the practical puritanical Pink Lady stuttering back and forth to serve my grandfather's museum, which never was or would be. There were two waters: the far and the near. The far was a streak of white brilliance; the far was a shawl of lightning pinned down. The near was fecund, a black skin pinched and mottled by barnacles of glitter, tranquil except when something—a frog? a grasshopper?—jumped. The near was teased by leggy eels half an inch long, and gauze flies like fragile volant tubes of grass, with green wings like grass, and just-visible green feet like separate airy grass, beings.

In the middle of this the tree blazed. Lens upon lens burned in the leaves with a luminosity just short of glass and nearer to vapor; the veins were isinglass ducts swarming with light, running knife-bright into stems, and the stems pursuing twigs, and the twigs branches, and the branches hurtling into the bole like rays recaptured, undoing refraction: the whole short powerful trunk a prism in remorse gathering in its tribes of beams, all imaginable exiled light flowing and flowing home to the mother-light.