Trust (72 page)

But he had anticipated me. "Harriet Beecher and Manny and I looked all through the cellar and couldn't find it. He might keep it on one of his other islands though. He might keep it on Crete. You know what my mother said?"

I was afraid to hear; I dreaded Purse-iflage.

"She said confidentially to my father that Mr. Tilbeck is a habitual liar."

"And they don't mind that?"

"My father says it isn't necessary to believe the word of anyone but the Lord. Mr. Tilbeck told Harriet Beecher he might buy her some new dresses before we go to Idlewild Airport. He might get Al an accordion. Al's dying for an accordion. He might get my father a brand-new traveling case."

"Maybe all that's a lie."

"We
all
saw the money," he assured me, and I had a mournful yet comical intimation of how they, in Purse-suit of the schnorrer's famous golden fleece, intended to fleece the fleecer. "Schnorrer," I must in spite of awkwardness here interrupt, was a sly gift from my stepfather, flung down in my presence for his own mischief and his wife's mystification, and chipped from a language which he had once elucidated to my mother (who hated it) as being both remarkable and homely; but equally she hated knowing that he knew it, on account of which he had sometimes slipped me a word or two of it—"di goldene medina," he taught me to call America, whether with or without irony I was then too young to estimate—and vulgarly she warned him that he might yet forget himself and use his mamaloshen in direct address before the Senators: at which he nodded with the gladness of spitefully-overlooked incongruity—"Aha! Parasites and spongers! Do-nothings! Swillers at the troughs of drunken lobbyists! Take Hundt, that schnorrer—if he leaned any farther to the right they'd have to fish him out of the Atlantic Ocean! Take MacElroy, another schnorrer classique, with an absentee record as long as the history of the, the—gypsies!—Thought I'd say Jews, did you?" he cried and crowed, and the inimitable word tumbled into my possession to await its moment of attestation—which struck, surprisingly, in this boat that crossed a bay to take me to my father. I saw then, and with perfect conviction, the simultaneity and constriction of scope of the world's schnorrers—a Senator or two nibbling at this company and that, Tilbeck nudging, grasping, gleaming, menacing, the homiletic Purses out after the smell of convenience, cash, lodging, loneliness. Did my mother's money support them all? Did the blatant swelling of her investments, like the breathing of some gigantic horn-armored but entirely mythic creature—the gryphon, perhaps—nourish on the crest of their inhalations the whole dependent universe of schnorrers, the high and the low, the whole gratuitous grating ungrateful gratuitant but above all ingratiating company?—since, at least at first meeting, schnorrers are without doubt the most charming persons in any society, and attract deliriously before they prey. Did she, unawares, sway the companies that several of the most charming of all the Senators milked in return for certain insignificant exceptions, scarcely noticeable, in certain negligible bills? Or, to take another aspect of the same radiant herd, how many courtesies and generosities and canny gifts and little girls' dresses and rings for ladies and little boys' thingamajigs had she year after year unwittingly bought to please those charmers who chanced to please Gustave Nicholas Tilbeck? Plain that Connelly's account-books were the organisms on which now even this mob of nine lean Purses fed, and meanwhile—meanwhile? O shock of happenstance—curls of water poured off the oar-blades, and the boat without loss of tremor seemed not to move on the tremulous platter that moved beneath us.

"Why did you stop rowing?"

The boy had his fists secure in his lap; the wet paddles shone high in the air, dripping grandly. And there we were in the middle of the bay—not, so far as I could-see, a matter yet of land ho.

"We're nowhere near a beach," I objected.

"How do you know there's a beach?" he caught me up. "I didn't tell you there was."

"I
assume
there is," I said. "I was thinking of the footprint in the sand. Robinson Crusoe. Don't all islands have beaches?"—but if I had assumed a beach it was because of that other shipwreck in my brain, where early early and from the start I had figmented a sandbar the color of gold, and a yellow shoal glowering with mist, and rocking there a figure tugged and secreted like a sculpture by tide, or like the raised effigy on a coin of some overrun civilization, the lineaments of its caesar's profile swathed in undersea moss, the eye a rubbed freckle, the noble nose worn to a snub, conquest sea-dyed pale dead tan. My father's body lay in my brain, and in the same sea-vessel yet elsewhere on still another beach the body of my governess spread itself flat on a fiat rock, sporting motionless; and here is the lizard of my father's tread, crouching; and Palestine burning; while beyond, in the water, as they join, a book opens wings without lungs and drowns.

We sported motionless; the boy, the boat. "Bring down the oars. Let's go on," I commanded.

But he had stopped to look me over.

"What does he want you for?"

A question that knows its own answer is a lie. "Who?" I lied.

"Mr. Tilbeck. You didn't just go and invite yourself? He asked you, didn't he?"

"Well, not exactly," I said. "I asked myself. It's a story. You see I have this very rich mother. Not as rich as Mr. Tilbeck maybe, but still very rich. Extraordinarily rich. If you put all the people who live on her in a spaceship the earth would be left a bare skull. And one of the things about my mother is this: she wants me to be free. —You care to hear this story?"

"Is it true?"

"Quakers don't lie."

"You're not a Quaker," he said.

"No," I said. "I'm a coxswain. Some coxswains lie and some don't. You want to know what my mother means when she says she wants me to be free? Bring down the oars or I won't tell."

"Tell or I won't bring them down."

"You're taking advantage," I warned. "I won't just sit here."

"Will you get seasick if you do?"

"I never get seasick."

He thought this over. "Mr. Tilbeck does. I told you. But not when he's got a motor. It's on account of this Ménière's Syndrome he has. He says it might be a psychological disease or else he was born with it. It makes him throw up after he's rowed awhile. He thinks it's the way your arms have to keep doing these circles sort of. You get a steadier ride with a motor. —I like to sit still in a boat, don't you? I like the way it goes up and down, don't you?"

"It's antithetical to progress," I said. "Bring down those oars. You've got them sticking through the sky. Suppose you dropped them? And lost them? Then what? We'd go up and down forever."

He wondered at me. "Are you feeling sick? You won't throw up?"

"Not me. Look, don't annoy. I'm not Tilbeck," and discovered in the act of pronouncing it yet another he.

"I think you look like him," he said, and a demon lurched in the boat—it was my suitcase falling flat with a bang.

"He sent you to row for him? Then row," I yelled. "Everybody looks like everybody. Mankind is one."

Beautifully, he brought the oars down. "Pity this busy monster, manunkind, not."

"Where'd you get
that?
"

"Mr. Tilbeck sings it."

"You mean recites it."

"Sings it. Pit-eee," he sang, "this biz-ee mon-STER," he sang, "man-UN-kind," he sang, "NOT. That's the way he does it."

"To do anything you want to in the whole world," I said, my half of the bargain having been to tell my mother's meaning: "That's free."

He slapped the gregarious blades on either elbow-side—they cleft the water, churning spittoons of whirlpools. We skimmed, we fled. "Is that what you do? Anything you want to?" he asked.

"For instance," I said, "this summer all I wanted to do in the whole world was read newspapers, so I did it. And my mother said is
that
all you want to do? You call that being free? So I said all right what
should
I do? And then I said all right I'll visit all the islands in the world, so my stepfather got out his atlas, and I went to Majorca, Minorca, Iviza, For-mentera, Sicily, Rhodes, Cyprus, Formosa—"

"Crete?"

"—Crete being among the first I went to, then Buru, then Santa Cruz, Samoa, Guadelupe, Ellis, Staten, and plenty of others. And after all that there was nothing left in the atlas but Town Island. It's the only island in the world I haven't seen. Duneacres is the only house on the only island I haven't seen. Mr. Tilbeck is the only man in the only house on the only island—"

He intervened: "It's a joke, isn't it?"

"—I haven't seen. And since I'm the only person in the world who's visited every island in the world but one, Mr. Tilbeck—encountering me one day on Ellis Island, which, you know, is absolutely empty, a genuine desert island right off the East Coast of the United States—Mr. Tilbeck, you see, walked up to me with his coffee pot in his arms and invited me to live in a tent on his great decaying island estate—"

"I know about Ellis Island. It used to be for immigrants. We studied it in American History. You couldn't've been on Ellis Island. It
is
a joke," he said.

"You mean a lie?"

"Mr. Tilbeck
said
who you are. He told my father."

But I was sharp and quick: "He told your father
what?
"

"Who you are."

With my whole mind I considered it. And finally: "Who
am I?
"

"His daughter."

"He told your father that?"

"And my father told my mother."

Wondrous! Everything that Mr. and Mrs. Vand had striven to conceal from me all my life Tilbeck yielded in a word, and to anyone at all. What the Senators were never to discover the Purses already knew. What the trustee had paid and paid to bury, Tilbeck lightly disinterred to laugh at. What jeopardized the Ambassadorship—my mother's great lustrous prize—fell like a glossy scrap—a bus transfer, say, a snappy shiny ticket, of no more worth than that—into the Purses' casual pouch. He belittled the private not by making it gloatingly and efficiently public but by scattering it among those for whom it had no significance. If a tribe has not known gold, it will kick it underfoot. He was less blackmailer than all-around charlatan. He was a tremendous clown, and monstrous: he was audience for himself. Oh, he loved himself! He was amused!

"And did they," I lengthened my breath, "believe that?"

"Well, why should they?"

"You mean because he's what your mother called him? A habitual liar?"

"He
can't
have a daughter. He's a bachelor. He hasn't got a wife."

"He might have had," I said, "once."

"You don't understand. He doesn't
get
married." He looked at me oddly—as though, that is, I were someone odd. "I know what they mean but I can't say it to you."

"Can't you?"

"Not to you."

"But didn't you just tell me I looked like him? A daughter might."

"Everybody," he came back, "looks like everybody."

"You don't think I'm his daughter?" I pressed, amazed.

"Oh no no," he said, dropping his head toward a creak in the oarlock, "I know you're not. We
all
know it. But it doesn't matter to us. We're very liberal. My father says always be especially indulgent toward those who are most self-indulgent. My mother said it wouldn't be the decent thing to treat you like a Purse-ona Non Grata. So you see you don't have to worry about
them.
Some people you would have to worry about, but not them. I know what they mean. My mother said it was Over My Years, but I know what they mean. He only
says
daughter."

"But it's true," I said tentatively, afraid of what was true. "I am."

This pumped into him a sudden jollity, half shy, half aggrieved, as though an embarrassingly easy puzzle had just then come out absurdly right; our bow bounced on the huge triumphant splashes of his thrusts. "They
said
you'd be in on it! They said you'd corroborate the whole thing! They said he probably does it
all
the time, tells people daughter when he means—"

He stopped dead.

"Means what?"

"I can't say it to you."

"Can I say it to you?"

"What you are? You wouldn't!"

"If it's Over Your Years maybe I shouldn't."

"I know it anyhow!" he shouted. "They said it confidentially but I know it anyhow!—Hey! There's the beach, see it?" There it was; I saw it—a faded string before the green began, like one of those sacred threads Brahmin boys are given to wear across their chests until they die; the beach was initiation. A woman knelt there. She seemed to knead with her hands. Objects littered the sand, some mobile, some not From afar, it was a view of the pristine and the not-yet-corrupted: Eve in Paradise on the world's sixth day, surrounded by the forms of nature.

Then the mobile objects began to dance and wave.

"There's Sonny," said Throw. "There's Manny. Look at Al! The other one's Foxy. See Dee? Dee's the one that's digging. The one with the bangs, that's Harriet Beecher."

"I can't see bangs at this distance," I said.

"But you can see her waving, can't you?"

"I can see them all waving."

"Except Dee. Dee's digging to China. Dee doesn't know anything anyhow, he's too little. But Harriet Beecher and Foxy and Al and Sonny and Manny,
they've
all been waiting. They're practically purple from waiting."

"Waiting for you? They feel the pinch of an absent Purse?" I dared him.

"Waiting for
you.
It's what you are," he said apologetically.

"Whatever I am I'm nothing to turn purple for."

"What you are to
him,
" he amended.

"The most unlikely people have daughters," I assured him coolly. "Daughters turn up everywhere."

"Sonny said we ought to call you the missing link," he reported; his voice fled falteringly upward, but he strained to keep his look down, as though an earnest appreciation of respectability had to be centered in nether parts only. "Sonny's a sort of humorist. He's supposed to take after my mother."