Trust (84 page)

He loosed a trivial chord, like a shrug; down went the B flat, mute. "See? Can't be done with a dumb note. What's ancient doesn't necessarily revive. I don't go for the dipped madeleine, if you get me. Guidebook's out of date, hah? What d'you want me to do? Re-run an old movie of your mother's life? No sirree. Whatever you think I am, that's what I'm not."

"I don't know what you are," I said.

"That's the beauty of it, neither do I. Except now and then. Right now what I am is the Pied Piper. Couple of rats've left already, you noticed that? Well, if they think they'll find a preacher up there, those two, all they'll find is plaster dust. Pastor Dust," he amended, "marries nobody."

"And no beds."

"That's right. No beds up there," he agreed, grinning. "Watch. The Pied Piper—Pie-eyed Piper? Fried Piper?—what the hell, the Stewed Piper of Do-Neck-'Er lures the Affianced Couple down. —Get that!" he announced into a river of lightning; on the quickly lurid keys his stunned hands were made unready.

It came on us like a blot of swift but total seeing, turning lips electrically vivid, nearly blue with vividness, the veins x-rayed to a sudden deep visibility; the image of my father's mouth like a carved silver bar froze in my mind, part of a torso. I saw him not like a photograph—though half the vividness was in the stillness and stiffness of him registered in surprise, preserved—but solidly, thickly, one of those small haughty straight-backed Egyptian figurines, all silver, a god of the Nile reduced to a curio. It was not he who had shrunk; it was the world—that hardening shrinking world which withdraws, age by age, from its fierce little gods. My mother's fantastic lover! And now thunder was bursting out of the keys, as though something had exploded in his fingertips, producing—behold!—Stefanie herself, howling into spaciousness. "Hey, that was a close one! Did y'
see
it? Shook the Goddamn roof!"—she: hanging dewy and plaintive over the bannister.

"Thor at the clavier," my father said. "He—I, understand—he presses the note long silent, and presto, the voice of God in B flat."

"Don't give me that, that was no piano," Stefanie argued from the stairs. "That was real thunder."

"Bad thinking," Tilbeck said. "It leaves out a possible alternative. Never leave out a possible alternative. It might've been the piano
and
thunder, in conjunction. A duet. Gustave Nicholas Tilbeck and God making music together."

"Oh Christ," she threw down.

"Is Christ God?" Tilbeck asked, and began, in waltz time, Onward, Christian Soldiers. "Dance, children, dance!"

But the Purselets had, at God's great stroke, vibrated toward the front door. It was open; they clustered on the sill in admiration of the shining storm, above which my grandfather's uncommon romantic imported lintel made a kind of Gothic picture-frame. And faintly, a far growl, we heard the rain grunting against the canvas cheeks of the tents. A draft like the devil's breath seized the room.

"Shut that door!" Purse called.

"Colds! Colds! You'll all catch colds!" cried his wife; slung between her legs was a baby like a white snail; curled, porcelain, bruised.

Tilbeck asked, "Where's the lawyer's boy?"

"Looking around," said Stefanie.

"Come down," he invited.

"Come up."

"I know what's up there."

"Books. Filthy old books. Phew, dust makes me sneeze." Languidly she hooked her shoulders over the rail and dangled her bright arms loose as a monkey's. "You're not the only one, my pussyhead knows what's up there and he's never even
seen
this place before. He knows all about it just the same. He even found a part of a new wall they started to put up once."

I broke in, "You want to bet he's seen the plans? Snooped everything out of the files, even the blueprints—"

My father viewed me. "Don't hold a brief for the lawyer's boy, hah?"

"Yes she does. If you ask me she's crazy about him. Admit it!" she dared me. "I could tell the first time I ever saw you. I can always tell when somebody's jealous."

"I'm not jealous."

"Aren't you though," she mocked, and switched to what she supposed me jealous
of.
"You know where we're putting our sleeping bags tonight? We were
going
to put them in the woods—like Indians—only you don't catch me in mud up to my ears, thank you. So pussyhead said O.K., then let's spend the night in the upstairs part of a real house, just like when we're married. We're supposed to move into this
house
when we get back from our honeymoon, it's this sort of town house. Know where we're going? Venezuela. It's all arranged, it's part a business trip we have to do for Willie though. Anyhow now all we need is to pick out where. Which room I mean. There're thousands up there. You want to come help choose?"

"All right," I said, but it was not I she was appealing to.

"That's the way," Tilbeck said. "Bed 'em down. Watch 'em at it."

"You've got your nerve," Stefanie clucked, but she had no indignation. "You I mean. You coming up? The two of you."

"The two of us?" Tilbeck said acutely.

"
We
like to do-everything together," she explained.

"Is that why you're downstairs and pussyhead's upstairs?" I said.

"Smarty." She blew out a loud breath. "Well it's
such
a bore. All that oceany stuff, I can't be bothered with that stuff. There's a whole moldy old shelf full of maritime law or whatever you call it and he's all squatted over it with one of those flashlights. First he says come look around and then next thing you know he's drowning in some stupid moldy old book."

I said sympathetically, "Maybe they won't have any books in Venezuela."

This somehow struck her. "Say! Isn't that where your stepfather's going to be Ambassador?"

"No," I said. "Not Venezuela."

"Venice was it? Vienna?"

"No."

"Well I give up. It's such a bother remembering those countries with those
names.
I don't know how anybody who doesn't live in America remembers where they live."

Tilbeck was delighted. "They have special propaganda for it. They write it on billboards. You'll notice this when you get to Venezuela, watch for it especially up around the rain forests where the natives are more primitive and can't read. In other countries they have to actually tattoo the babies at birth. You take a place like Czechoslovakia, if the baby's foot's too short to hold it, they tattoo it right down the shin for easy reference when it gets to be an adult—"

She said suspiciously, "If you ask me that sounds Fascist."

"No," he denied, "it's just fair and equal. Reduces capital punishment in fact. I knew a fellow once had 'Bermuda' in red, white, and blue, right across the palm of his right hand, and there he was, standing in front of a firing squad in the noonday sun, they were going to shoot him for spying for Luxemburg. He puts up his right hand to get the sun out of his eyes and then they see he was born in Bermuda. So they abandoned the whole project. He's alive today."

"I don't believe any of that," Stefanie said. "Luxemburg might've
paid
him to be a spy. Maybe it didn't have anything to do with patriotism or anything like that, he might've been doing it for the money."

Tilbeck gleamed. "She's O.K. Don't kid yourself, she's got the world figured out."

"I never heard about any of that," she was insisting. "That tattooing business."

"Look, you don't learn Realpolitik in finishing schools. If you don't trust
me,
ask the Ambassador."

"He's going to
be
Ambassador," I bit off.

"To Bermuda?" Stefanie cried. "You mean your stepfather?"

"Well who said no?"—My father blinked bluntly at another stitch of lightning. But each time there was a lengthening interval before the catarrh.

"Enoch's going to get that job," I said, "whatever you do."

"That's right," he obliged.

"No, it's true, whatever you do. It doesn't matter about you. It's too late."

"It's always too late. That's philosophy," he said mildly.

"He's probably already got it They had the hearings this morning. By now he's got it. It doesn't matter about you. It doesn't matter about any newspapers either."

"You get this from the lawyer's boy?"

"
I
told her," Stefanie said, in the voice of Realpolitik.

I finished: "The main thing is it doesn't matter about me."

"It never did, girlie. I thought we settled that. I thought we talked all that out."

Stefanie noted coolly, "They probably ask her advice on every little thing down in Washington.
You
know. They probably do."

"That's right," my father said. "That's the way. —She's O.K., this little looker, she's got the world figured out."

"They get her advice on every little
thing,
" Stefanie repeated. "That's how come she thinks she matters so much."

Tilbeck said happily, egging her on, "That's it. You've got it. You tell her."

"
He
doesn't think you matter either," Stefanie pronounced, swinging the weight of her wet darkling hair. "And he should know, shouldn't he? I mean if
he
doesn't know—"

"He does know."

"Know
what,
for goodness' sake. Now I've lost it You two keep making me lose track—"

"Why I came," I said gravely.

"Oh that! I know that. Everybody knows that"

Tilbeck was pleased. "A public issue, hah?"

"Oh pooh, I'm not shy about it, believe me—anyhow I know why
I
came. And you," she bellowed down at me (mistress of games once more), "you came for the same reason! I would've known it even if the fat lady hadn't said so. Plain as day if you ask me."

"Plain?" said Tilbeck: with a honeyed look.

"Sex," Stefanie yelled against the acoustical cherubim. "Sex sex sex. That's the reason."

A stifled wheeze flew out of the region of the sofa. The Zeppelin halted horrendously in midair; then began to fall, slowly, slowly, its filmy banner twirling like a braid, hissing. Someone had stuck a pin in it.

"My God," soughed Purse.

"Now, now," said Mrs. Purse. "All that shouting down those stairs. Young lady, you don't care who hears what Now look, you've scared Dee right out of his nap."

The baby glared, it seemed, at nothing; then released a virtuoso aromatic helch.

"Good boy," said Mrs. Purse, and permitted the Mahatma to slither out of the grip of her thighs. "The secret of life, and he's hit on it."

Wretched Purse sniffed. "They haven't been loading him with spirits again, have they?"

"What happened yesterday, dear, was he loaded
himself,
" his wife demurred.

"Sex," sang the games mistress, drumming on the rail.

My father's great laughter mounted high and brilliant; he piled chord on chord out of huge and huger lung, and hawked up another thunder that pounced on all the ceiling host—on angels in narcotic bliss, on those bundles of bobby-pins that put themselves out for harps, and his head reared wonderfully back, like some sky-white horse, Job's horse, who saith among the trumpets, ha ha!

And what my mother knew once I knew then.

Stefanie softened; I saw her marveling at modifying, multiplying, mystifying circumstance; she marveled and she mulled: how queer it was that things never turn out as expected; and whether the secret of life is truly nothing more than a belch; or (because her mind was more original than most people guessed) the equivalent of a belch. "And you know what?"—She tackled the riddle. "Back at your bon voyage thing I thought you'd never even been
kissed.
Hey! It's getting to be shreds of daylight again. You two coming up or aren't you coming up, well?"

My father spoke. "That's a good reason. That's a fine reason. I told you that's what you came for, girlie," he said. "A taste of it."

"Come
on,
anybody traveling around up there with us, yes or no?" demanded the mistress of games.

"No," said my father, reaching out to pluck the baby from the hollow of the room; lo, the godlet, wrested from its niche, meandered, stony dust of pedestal powdered on its naked heels; it carried the acrid holy odor of the grove.

"I will. All right," I said, and went by the Purses, who were, I observed, still there. Goosepimples bristled in the central draft. Behind them Tilbeck had dumped Mohandas K. Gandhi on the piano keys and was feeding him black fudge-babies out of his pockets. Mouth pushed out and open for more, the sacred Mahatma knelt and stretched savagely after chocolate babies to chew, and all the while his scraped prayerful knees were inventing merciless discords, scrape on scrape, friction on friction.

But the Purses were still there. In spite of everything they were there. No lovers' moment had so far wiped them out. They were there.

And then they were not.

But I will tell about that later. First I must tell how we wandered, we three: the lovers and I. We wandered, we three, through the upper tracts of that ruin, and for no plain reason and in no real direction. We went—that is my impression of it now—round and round and round; I have an underwater sense of it a flailing against veils and weight, a viscous floating memory, as of sailing somehow with limp limbs through some queer thick medium, a lake of honey, yellow, mellow, rich, heavy, yielding but reluctant repentant, slow; and in it we slowly revolve, we let ourselves be turned this way, that way, our heavy legs in their heavy motions seem both to swim and to be retarded, as in dreams of perversely languid urgency, or with the dumb violations of some disbelieving slow-motion camera, unreeling strangeness and remorse.

That is how I remember it now; but often I think it is not this scene I am remembering, but something less certain, unlikely, intuitive, perhaps even occult, yet all the same real: that birth fluid in which I swung and turned, my mother just then throwing a dart at a tree and I just then crouching in my vast amniotic pool before the god of my habitation, whatever it might be: the braided totem of the umbilical cord perhaps: the thing or spirit, whatever it might be, that connects us to the certainty of life.