Trust (89 page)

She was hearing her thoughts very clearly, why was that? The sun was flat and clear on the water. Everything was still and clear, and when she looked over again at the brownish-yellow trees on the shore, they kept very still and never even fluttered. Why was that? Damn damn damn, Nick said, and she heard him because there was no motor.

William's son had resumed his cigar. The men on the beach were listening silently. The doctor slapped at an insect on his neck. "Motor failed," the Coast Guard officer said, and the men with the notebooks took it down.

It isn't the fuel, we had plenty of fuel, damn that woman, it's gone foul again. Who, Mrs. Purse? It's no good. He pulled on the string. The motor had no lung. It's dead, he said, not a spark, nothing. He pulled on the string. Nothing. Damn her, she fixed it with a shoelace, nothing. That's all right, we can
row
up, I like rowboats, I don't mind. We're going back, he said. Back where? Where we came from, it's the shortest, I'm not going to get stuck in the middle of the Sound with nothing but a pair of posts, get down, will you?

As he rowed he spat. His arms went up and shuddered downward. He seemed to be making a frame for the tall sun. He rolled around the sun and contained it, then it rolled off, then he contained it again.

She did not know what was the matter. His face was perfectly closed. His forehead was smooth. She was afraid to speak. He rowed as though the water was an altar. The oars spooned up bubbles. He continued to spit. Foam flew down into foam. The oars came up like terrifying candlesticks.

He went on spitting. She did not know what was the matter.

Something shimmered past. At the side of the boat a stick slipped into the water. It ran off toward the sun. He had lost one of the oars. The other was pulled tight against him like a chinning bar. He was exercising against it in midair; his head was stiff over it; his eyelids were stiff. His squeezed eyes shot a dozen scallops of skin across his face. Webs were emitted from his nose. The bridge of his nose contorted vertically. It was very strange. She did not like to see him pinch his eyes, it made his chin unpleasant, the jowl of a toad. It ruined him, he was ruined. He exercised against the oar. She was certain he would drop it, they were in the near middle of the bay, she bawled at him not to drop the oar. He did not drop it, but it was suddenly as flexible as a finger, it turned alive, it insinuated itself under his chin and then stretched off like an impudent wrist, it seized itself from him and dived in at the paddle-end, fiat on the water, so that the splash washed them both. Then he began to retch. Matter fell from him.

The Coast Guard officer said, "Loss of sculls due to illness," and the men with the notebooks took it down.

A brilliant skein flowed over the top of the water. He leaned after it. He braced a leg on the rim of the hüll. He accommodated the hinge of his back to the flux. He hung howling. His issue escaped him, and unwillingly he followed it over.

Like any of Miss Jewett's girls, she had no physical fear and went after him at once, and for a long time they danced together in the sour water, but in the end he took a turn she did not know and he lost her. The skein had clotted into islands of tender putrid greenish flowers, and his falsely bright head was covered.

When I came home my mother was deep in grief which had no signs. She seemed just the same—she ranted, rambled, bellowed that my hem hung wrong, criticized the cut of the collar of my blouse (though it was her own choice and gift), documented by a line at my nose how I was sure to age early, and showed me that my quick return was in every way an offense to her: she was objective.

But all the same I saw, in certain absences, vacancies, distractions, omissions, in all that she had formerly professed and now failed to perform (for example, her eyes were perfectly tearless), the truth of her grief. She was stricken. Her grief was dark and genuine and contained a quietness. Behind the plain misery of our confrontation her little quiet lurked. She had already had the neWS for some hours. She told me it had come out of the radio—Nanette's radio. "She locks herself up in her room to follow all the stage tunes, they don't allow it, and well, to make a long story short, Mrs. William passed by and heard the name. The name of shame. The name of blame. She hasn't been that excited since she got herself jilted. Well, about that, she asked for it absolutely—piety begets jilting. So behold, she permitted the name of shame and blame to leap from the purity of her lips, never mind excited, call it exalted, I've always thought she'd make a good priestess or vestal virgin. I don't suppose they were really virgins you know. More likely a convention, a way of speaking. —And reports."

"To you?" I said.

"To me. Direct address. Telephonic communication."

"Sarah Jean?" I said. "She called you up?"

"
Talked
to me. I'm trying to tell you. She hasn't talked to me since the day I married Enoch, nineteen years almost. But gave way for the sake of the name of shame and blame. She
recognized it,
imagine that. 'Allegra, is that you?' 'No,' says Janet. 'Allegra,' she says finally, 'I've been trying to get William, but all the lines are busy, Connelly's line too. It's something your lawyer should break to you after all. It's a thing really a minister should tell you, but you don't
have
a minister. Bread cast on the waters, when you need one you don't have one.' And then she pronounces the name of blame and shame that came out of Nanette's loudspeaker. Contraband. They think they'll keep that girl off the stage but they won't, you know, it won't work. How did you get back, in the police launch?"

"No. They took Stefanie in it."

"Aha. They'll want to question her at headquarters. That's how they like to do it."

"No," I said again, "they finished all that, it's just that she was upset, she wouldn't come with us. They might put her in a hospital for a while. The doctor said that."

"Us? Who's us?"

"William's son and me. I came back with him. In that boat they have."

"Not a thing on the radio about that boy. The papers may or may not go into that kind of detail, why should they? Local news, a nonentity gets drowned. Typical summertime reporting, it's not what you'd call a story with a
name
in it. 'Allegra,' she says, 'a shocking thing. The name came out at me.' She wouldn't've opened up after nineteen years if that
boy's
name came out. Poor William. Mrs. William can take it, but William! Maybe they'll leave out the boy and concentrate on the heroine angle. 'Debutante Ducked in Derelict Drowning,' I know the style they use. My God. A crowd on that place, it sounded like."

"There was a family."

"You'd think William would do something about the squatters. He treats that place exactly as though it wasn't there. A family! What was he doing with a family? Never mind. Milking and bilking I suppose. I always" knew he'd drown. It was a fantasy I had about him. Full fathom five. Listen to me in life everything comes out exactly the way you always thought it would, that's the first rule of being. What did you talk about?"

In a fit of fatigue I threw myself on the carpet. It was after midnight. The boat's lights on the water had printed black points on my vision. I said resentfully, "You. We talked about you from morning to night. All he ever talked about was you."

"William's
boy?
" she marveled; she had not even thought of Nick. "In the boat? Coming back I mean. The two of you alone. He wasn't embarrassed?"

I turned over on my belly and moaned. "Why should he be embarrassed?"

"Well they didn't go up there to picnic, did they? Did he ask you not to tell William?"

I was startled; she had come near to the truth. "Tell William what?"

"What went on up there."

"He asked me not to tell
you.
On the principle that telling you would be the same as telling William." But I did not say what it was I must not tell. A commonplace. First crack at the bride's crack would never any more belong to William's son.

"Birds of a feather, that's William all over. Indirect, everything through Connelly. I think it's sound. Premarital trial run. If I'd done it with William we wouldn't have gotten married in the first place."

I said, "You don't just call off a wedding—"

"Oh don't you?" she sneered. "Where'd you get
that?
"

"William's son wouldn't."

"You mean it wasn't satisfactory? A failure? It didn't work out? He didn't"—she seized it—"tell you the
details?
"

"No," I said.

My mother was thoughtful but avid. "Of course he's younger, not that that's an obstacle—"

"He's not younger, he's lots older than she is."

"Who's talking about that Pettigrew girl? You I mean. I had you before Sarah Jean ever came into the picture, well didn't I? I used to think it would be such a funny ironic thing if he fell in love with you. William's boy. It would make everything respectable again, not that I gave a damn about that sort of thing. But he never did."

"He never did," I agreed.

"And you, you never fall in love with anybody," she accused. "Well go to bed if you're that tired, you
look
like an old maid dumped there. I'm staying up, Enoch's flying in. I wish you could wear clothes. You can't wear clothes, that's only part of the trouble. What
about
that family?"

"They're gone."

"Thank God for small favors. It's a nice empty island again, maybe I'll go and live there." The little quiet lay under her face. "The house?" she asked. "How did it look?"

"Big."

"Big, that's right. Big as an Embassy. I really ought to go and live there. That'll be a solution. Oh, sit up, sit on a chair like a person."

"He burned all the chairs," I said.

"Who?"

"Except the ones with the kings' heads. Nick. And the piano stool."

"Don't talk to me about Nick will you? I have to figure out my whole life. I have to
re-
figure it out. What do I care about kings' heads? They go rolling in the end, that's, exactly the point. That's where you just don't seem to follow. You don't know a thing, not one thing. You think just because we're rid of a threat there's nothing more in the world to worry about, all the rest comes easy."

I said, "He wasn't really a threat."

"Look, are you going to go on and on about Nick? Is that what you're here for? To go on and on? He wasn't
really
a threat, oh that's very nice, I expected that. You've always been on his side. I realize that. The reason you were born was for him to have somebody on his side. Celestial design. Look, he's dead, what's the use of going on and on about a dead blackmailer? He sweettalked you, I realize that. That's his
way.
You can't see that. He convinced you, right? Well he was
out
to convince you. That's why he wanted you over there."

"He didn't want me."

"That's right, he's got you now. You swallowed it and he's got you. The Man of No Desires. I know the whole thing, I've got it all by heart, please don't bother me with it. There's not a thing he wants, he doesn't want a thing. Just like the Buddha after nirvana. A holy man. What I want to know is how come these holy men always want to sit in a temple full of virgins? He
told
you he wasn't a blackmailer? 'Me? I'm no blackmailer, right? Is that what he told you?"

"No."

"No. So?"

"I could see it. He wasn't that way."

"He wasn't that way! She could see it! He sweettalked you and you believed every damn stale word. Don't tell me how he looked while he was doing it, I don't want to know, I'm not interested. Eyes like blueberries, nose like on a statue et cetera et cetera. Don't start on me with that. Then you'll say it wasn't just his looks, it was his soul. Well there is
no
immortal soul. Some people don't know a horsethief when they're in the middle of smelling the manure." Her look was maimed by anger. She was insulted. Then it came to me that her tone was formal, traditional, a fiction: she spoke not of a man but of a legend, a theory, an ancient familiar crotchet. "I don't say it isn't pitiful. I mean even if it was a complete stranger and I read the report in tiny type somewhere that a complete stranger got drowned somewhere I would think it was pitiful just the same. Even for a crook to die. I'm against capital punishment, you know that. I think all death is pitiful. I'm against Death."

With this proclamation she told her grievance. She still believed in her own duration, her ascendancy, even her perpetuity; she still meant to snatch a coruscating feather from the breast of the world. She was against Death; her grievance was against Nick; but her grief skirted both. Her grief was not for Nick. Nick was as little to her as Death. Nick and Death were the same. To my stepfather she had whimpered the very truth: she felt nothing. It was not grief then when she had mourned my impossibilities and what I was issue of and how I would not be freed: not grief but fabrication, grievance, pique. Fake, fake, every tear a fake, a theatricality, a fraud, hoax, and profane replica of loss. Her hysteria was only an expert indifference: she had never cared whether I was free or how I was made or where I must go. What she cared for was the Embassy. She was not in pursuit of my freedom but of a palace. I knew this, and from the beginning; therefore wondered why now behind the clamor of her grievance she hoisted the terrible small silence of disaster.

She said: "The Senate has confirmed."

Her voice had a certain lapidary uncompromisingness, like an epitaph.

"When did it happen?"

"The minute Enoch got there.
Before
he got there. They called him up and told him to fly out right away, and when the plane came down it was practically all over Washington. They met him and they told him."

"Fast," I said.

"Oh, fast, you bet. They rushed it through. The fastest confirmation in Senate history. It's made him a laughingstock. A figure of fun, it took no time at all. They didn't ask him a single question. He did all that reading up on rainfall and cows and all their juntas"—she said the j of jugular for this word—"and it all went for nothing. A clown, a Punch-and-Judy show, they practically banged him on the nose with it—"