Trust: A Novel Part 13

"It was a hall on New Oxford Street. And they did take someone in. It was Sparrs."

"Sparrs! I forgot about Sparrs, you're absolutely right. He'd cut jigsaw puzzles out of a gross and a half of cardboard portraits on the Royal Children and hawked them in the lobby. He had them in cotton string-bags, all in pieces."

"It wasn't for that they arrested him. It was for stealing. He made off with one of the chairs."

"It wasn't a chair," my mother said finally, nettled into speech by the plain error of it. "It was a stool, the one he was using to yell from. He stood on top of this high stool, it was a kind of ladder, and bawled "The Little Princesses Dismembered! Elizabeth Quartered Limb from Limb! Margaret's Torso Sawed in Two!" --And when the police came he simply ran off with the stool. I don't think he meant to take it."

The private visitor praised indulgently, "I've always admired that sort of retention. With a memory like that you can't lose the past no matter how hard you try, can you? Poor Sparrs, I'd forgotten all about him. -G.o.d, how we used to hate royalty in those days! But he was Old Philadelphia; his mother made him come home. I bet he hasn't been out of Philadelphia since."

"They won't let him out of the country," Enoch said. "He's an Esperantist, one of their big men by now, but he isn't allowed to go to their overseas meetings. They won't give him a pa.s.sport."

"On account of his hating royalty?" my mother said. "What could please the State Department more? It's how they got started!-hating royalty."

"If you'll change R to L," Enoch said. "-AH those old members.h.i.+ps..."

"Not the Chopin Freed Poland Society!"

"Conceivably even that."

The private visitor whistled. "Loyalty, that's very interesting; you can see I'm out of touch." He went on shrewdly, "You know all that sort of thing, don't you? I suppose it's your business to know. -In your position."

"Oh! my position," Enoch vaguely answered. "I don't get near politics."

"Well, if they won't let you out ... But they can't keep you from coming in again, can they?"

"No," Enoch said, "they can't."

"In that case I might go back."

"To America? You wouldn't!" my mother gasped.

"To keep in touch, why not? I like to go where I'm comfortable-"

"You were comfortable in Germany," Enoch remarked.

"Ah, you've heard about that! But I had to get out-that was '38 or so. They said I was spying for the Communists. So I went to Prague."

"Where somehow they got the notion you were spying for the Germans?"

"You are remarkably political."

"They were none of them mistaken, I suppose."

"A man has to make a living," the visitor said mildly. "You make yours; I make mine."

"Certainly," Enoch agreed. "There's not a spot in Europe that couldn't use a piano-player during the war."

"Clever mind, cold nature, that's an old story. Annie told me how unsympathetic you were."

"Enoch had no room on his staff for her brother, and even if he'd had, they're centralized appointments," my mother began to protest, "Enoch doesn't have any say in them. These people ought to stay in their home countries anyway. Wherever you go you find all the wrong people in the wrong places. Europe's become a scramble."

"True enough. From that point of view alone you owe me something," the visitor pointed out. "I'm a Displaced Person, after all, just like all the others. I wouldn't be surprised if your husband's got me somewhere in his books. I'm registered everywhere, they catalogue everything; just let him look in his lists-"

"You are not in my lists," Enoch said.

(And faintly, from my mother: "If only he were!") "You've got bad lists then."

"Yes. Very bad."

But the visitor did not see, did not shudder, did not know; and only said, "When it's your business to have all that sort of information? When you've kept your finger on where I've been-"

"I've kept my finger on nothing," Enoch said.

"Haven't you?"

Enoch tightened: "I don't see that it's reasonable to go on. If it's all talk, and no conclusion ... It's too late for talk."

"It's too late not to talk. Look at it that way," the other said, seeming to cajole. "I can't say you're very hospitable."

"You're not exactly in the situation of a guest. At any rate our tenure here was over at noon-hospitality isn't ours to give."

"Oh, let's not have a dismissal! Not quite like that; don't think of it. Throwing me out's not the thing. It's against conscience, especially against an Oriental conscience-a tooth for a tooth! I'm speaking of, well, you remember, that time after the parade-you know which parade: I mean the one in Brighton, you had that whole side of the face swollen, big as a balloon, it was a Sunday and no dentists-we didn't throw you out, did we? And we had only the one little room, cramped enough for two, all full of that greasy bed, and only a hotplate, and that nasty puking-"

"Oh, shut him up, Enoch, can't you!" my mother shrieked.

"-and still we put you in the bed and got you through it-how we figured out about that icebag!-and finally snow from the window-sill wrapped in my only pair of sound socks-"

"G.o.d Almighty, shut him up! He's got no right to bring up Brighton, has he?" The raindrops tottered against, the high sob of her lamentation; she groaned helplessly. "You don't have to bring up Brighton!"

"My dear Mrs. Vand"-he barely hesitated-"I expect I have to bring up everything."

No one answered him, so I thought it was all over then, the meeting, my mother's pleas and growls, all. A thread of rage, already too much used, dangled briefly in her throat without effect, until a sudden click of quiet cut it off. Were they afraid to answer him? Or were they even now surrendering with who knows what terrible mute sign? Someone walked across the room, walked pickingly and windingly: I recognized the croquet-tapping twitter of my mother's steep Parisian heels. Would she for an answer leave him planted there, the private visitor, abandoned where he sat among probable mounds of discarded stockings, and not a word to cry him down? "The wind," I heard her say, all quickly meek, "how strong the wind's become, it's blowing half my things"; she was coming to the window. In the dusk of rain I felt safe enough, and wondered whether to retreat: but when her l.u.s.trous reaching arm slid out to pluck the curtain from the air, like a coward I slumped back and struggled to fold myself away at every inconvenient hinge. The curtain went on flapping dizzily, long yards of peac.o.c.ks and vines, while up and up she leaned after it. so that once, for a moment only, I saw the side of her cheek: it was raw and pressed with markings, as though she had squeezed her fingers brutally against it (meanwhile I remembered Anneke's cheek, furrowed at dawn); and then the peac.o.c.ks descended like a brown mask and covered her. She had caught hold at last, and began to pull the folds of cloth in to the sill almost too impatiently, her hands grasping at plumage while the wind worked and my mother worked, tugging with a Rapunzelian eagerness, as if a live reward would clamber in at the end, clinging to the curtain's tail; but at the end, when she had gathered it all into the room, there was only a fringe of cheap thick ta.s.sels. I heard a sound of rings drawn on a bar, and then the peac.o.c.ks fell against the panes as noiselessly as some gross dark membrane dropping downward. The mirror was all at once shut off; and the ceiling, and the ticking bulbs. I could see nothing now; my bit of ledge grew black; my mother had fastened the fabric across the window. It was a seal; it was distinctly a seal. Or perhaps, more simply, it was merely time she wanted, a delay, knowing what would follow. But the lid was drawn down and hooked, and the clouds driven from the room and made to swim in their own night, and every snooping stir of air defied. She was out for privacy. It was not time she wanted then, time being of no possible use. On my blackened ledge, in the stinging slant of rain, I felt the uselessness of time. Time was tedium, time was talk. They talked like dancers in a figure seen too close: the pattern was obscured by approaches and digressions, by chase and retreat: by plain dead repet.i.tious goalless tedium. And so once more my mother's step went drumming over the floorboards: windingly and pickingly. She had drawn the curtain and sealed in time, although, knowing what would follow, it could do her no good. Nevertheless she delivered herself of the gesture, and immediately afterward delivered herself up to Enoch.

To Enoch; to Enoch only; for who but my stepfather might understand that language of her pantomime, the drawing of the curtain? She drew it not against spies or witnesses-who could she sensibly suppose might crouch watching on the ledge beneath her, what sinister fool would ride the sky to hear? But she drew it anyhow, simultaneously leas.h.i.+ng the peac.o.c.ks printed on the fabric and her bewildered image of the bird of the world; she leashed them both. The curtain strained from hook to hook, an inviolable tissue. It was quite as though she had pulled her crescent eyelids down, standing in the middle of that ambushed room with ruthless fingers daggering her cheek; the stigma of her rings stood in her flesh. Her husband was there; and the stranger who was no stranger; and at their feet the bird of the world, slaughtered.

And at last: "Give him what he wants," my mother said.

But the other man demurred, "You don't have to be ashamed."

"The wind," she said, "blowing all my things-"

"You don't need to hide," he comforted without pity.

"It was the wind," she said again, "and the curtain went wild."

And Enoch then: "There's nothing else to do, don't you see, Allegra, there's nothing else to do; let's go ahead," he said, but it was not the voice that spoke his lists, "we'll go ahead and get it over with," he said, "there's nothing else to do."

I did not like his voice. It was full of judgment, thick with formal disposition, embroidered with the breathings of unsuspected cruelties. "Give him what he wants," my mother yielded once more; and I plainly knew it was not the private visitor he was sentencing without mercy, but Allegra Vand. "How much does he want?" she murmured, "he talks and talks of price, but he doesn't say how much-"

"We'll give him what he wants," Enoch said.

So my mother was condemned. It seemed it was not the private visitor who had crushed her, but Enoch himself, with his ease of anger and his clarity and his practical wary judicial voice. "Oh well then, what he wants," she trailed off, and long afterward, when I had buried that day and all its tokens, there remained the broken sigh of her acquiescence like a primitive hut built upon an old, lost, artful, and infinitely aristocratic city of gold.

I crept back then, clinging to the wall beneath the eave, while Enoch briskly settled and administered-"No, no, nothing now, you spoke of being businesslike. Checks; checks only, that's fair enough; well all right, there's got to be a record; think of our side! There's the trustee to consider, if he won't allow it-" ("Oh, William, I can handle William," my mother sadly interjected.) "Checks then," Enoch repeated, "but you'll have to write, how will we know-" ("It isn't as if we could help it," my mother said.) And then, jumping out of meditation, "Don't let him write!" she cried, "there's nothing worse than letters with that one! Invisible ink's no good with that one! Burning's no good! What's the point, if you let him write? You don't know that one, such a pair of eyes!" "They won't be letters, Allegra; don't be stupid. He'll send a figure and an address, how else are we to know where he is?"-but all the while they were mumbling out their quarrel I was sc.r.a.ping and scrambling to get away. For the first time I saw the untrustworthy deep rust in the railing; the ledge looked shockingly narrow. My absorption had split in two-I was all at once terrified of falling. But "Sssh," my mother said in the middle of my fright, "there's something, don't you hear? Out there, a funny sort of noise." "It's the rain." "No. no," she persisted, "besides that, listen." "A cat," clucked Enoch, "the concierge must have a cat." "A cat? I never saw a cat." "Look, you'd better pay attention," he said impatiently, "it's your money, isn't it?" and by the time I heard her answering moan of "money, there's no way out, give him what he wants and get it over with," I had climbed down to the floor of my own safe room. "How I hate money," I thought I heard her say, but the words came m.u.f.fled through the wall; she might have said something altogether different, after all.

8.

I began to dress myself. I put on first my socks and shoes and then, mildly s.h.i.+vering, my underwear. The hanger had become entangled in the light-cord; I twisted and twisted but could not dislodge it, so I pulled at my dress until the collar and sleeves slipped free and the dress flew down like a wing. Unexpectedly the light jumped on. This was pleasant: until then I had not noticed that die ceiling had grown darker than the sky.

From the next room came no hint or scratch.

I went to sit on the bed and for some reason-hunger, perhaps-decided to cry. Seriously and neatly I willed the tears. I was able to bring them up without resorting to contortions of eyes or mouth, for my mother had often maintained that for each pair of tears an ineradicable wrinkle sprang up; at that time I occasionally still believed her. The proof, moreover, was that she herself never wept. She had only two small lines, shallow but strictly parallel, across her forehead, and these were usually obscured by the dark fringing crownpoints of her hair. I calculated that in all her life she had dropped only four tears. It seemed to me very few; I had already, in a single minute, sent down many more than that. Nevertheless I knew that the scarcity of her tears did not signify my mother was happy, just as the descending parade of my own did not testify to any abundant sadness. I was not sad. It was my theory-I was unaware that I held it-that sadness is a deliberate sentiment, similar to my mother's exclamations over, say, art. The pictures she continually bought did not overwhelm her; she overwhelmed them. Sometimes, after carrying a painting under her arm for part of an afternoon, she would all at once become unusually melancholy and would set it up on a chair and stand away from it to survey it with discontent eyes. And then I would know that the picture had not induced this dissatisfaction; she herself had imposed it on the picture by her terrible reflections. Once a salesman brought her a woodcut. It showed a hill speckled with flowers and in the distance a house with a smokeless chimney. It was indisputably cheerful and pretty and commonplace, but the salesman-a small, thin, very blond young Austrian with no teeth at all-insisted there were only seven such inkings in the world: the d.u.c.h.ess of Windsor had purchased one and the other five were owned by the Hartford, Connecticut Munic.i.p.al Library. My mother hesitated-Hartford cancelled the d.u.c.h.ess-and insisted that she could see no value in such a subject: it was too ordinary, it offered nothing, it represented itself entirely in a single glance, it belonged on a calendar, it failed to challenge, and so forth. But the salesman put out his fine slight fingers audaciously to pluck her sleeve, and led her to the mirror and made her look into it: and there, astonis.h.i.+ngly, while he held the vulgar little scene up before it, the hundred tiny flower-dots turned into Gothic letters, and the house was transformed into an axe, and the hill into the line of a burly shoulder over which the axe was slung: and the petal-letters read, "Kein Gott ist." "It's a trick," my mother said, "it's only one of those optical tricks," but she paid for it immediately. And shrewdly, knowledgeably, she asked, "And the original woodblock? What's become of that?" THe salesman rubbed his knuckles and smiled. "Burned, madam, burned. The whole house burned down." "And the artist? Where is the artist?" "He was in the house, madam." "How awful!" she exclaimed. "Where could such a thing have happened?" "On a hill," said the young man, showing the healthy orange-pink of his gums, "near a meadow full of flowers. It was a great tragedy for that time of year: not a spark in the chimney. Thank G.o.d for flowers-that is the best philosophy, nicht wahr?" And he went away. Forever afterward my mother, as an act of will, hated the picture, although it was so mild and so commonplace. She never again looked at it in reverse. And finally she left it behind in the wardrobe of a hotel in Westminster; but I knew, anyhow, that she had not really been horrified. She had only chosen to seem to be, for the sake of accommodating mysterious circ.u.mstance. In the same way my own evidence of sadness opened out to me with bland artificiality: it did not come persuasively, it had to be persuaded; it could not be evoked, it had to be provoked; it was not on the face of things, but rather st.i.tched on the underside in some backwards occult style. I believed, with that inchoate mysticism which characterizes the stark tenets of the very young, in spells. No feeling was real which did not cast one into the pit of the extraordinary; and even as the tears fell, I was conscious of my equanimity.

The tears fell. One by one they pounced upon my dress. Clearly I was unbewitched by woe, and even strangeness could not move me; yet they came falling, round dark blots teasing the blue cross-st.i.tch along my hem. My dress felt cold and smelled of an unclean, unprivate moisture, oddly like the concierge's breath. The tears left frayed circlets in my lap: wreath after wreath sprang down, and antic.i.p.ating my mother's orderly inspection I turned aside to save my skirt and watched while the naked mattress drank up the stains. All around the mattress-b.u.t.tons those timeless marks gleamed in a frieze; and meanwhile new arteries seeped out of old organs, luminous anatomies proliferated, cleverly the map adjusted its topography. Under my tears the essential stains swelled-I continued to suppose they had been grooved in that place by so many acc.u.mulations of urine, so many cardinal smears of blood, so many night-thirsts for water, so many bloated spillings of wine, of those so many sleeping travelers: belonging to travelers, they were the essential blotches, blights, and streams of humanity: the wanderer does not carry what is superfluous, what pa.s.ses for luxury at home shows for spurious in an inn. -This last maxim belonged, of course, to Enoch, chiding my mother for her elaborate packing of a dozen pairs of shoes. Their door opened, they came out talking in ordinary voices. "Well, I can't go down to a s.h.i.+p's dinner barefoot," my mother was protesting without a sign of her ordeal; her tone was usual, she was not overtly chastened. Enoch had forced her to recover. "Here, give me that key," he said imperiously, and then, "control yourself, Allegra, don't act like a fool." The key's big teeth clamored furiously this way and that, and took hold with a ringing bite. At the same moment up from the garden came another jangling, as irregular as though someone danced in a cap of bells; it was irresistibly familiar, a roily clacketing sound, like the clinking and rolling of a giant coin over the cobblestones, and I ran to the window to see what Anneke had looked out upon in the early morning light and beheld, while behind me the lock obeyed and the two of them, Enoch and my mother, stopped short of the threshold like conspirators-beheld nothing. Nothing, nothing, only the gra.s.sy place below the hedge where the blue bicycle had leaned. It was gone. The scar of a wheel lay pressed in the ground. I listened and wondered at that jubilant rattling-was it the chain swinging like a now-and-then carillon, was it the tongue of the book-strap sweeping a zither of spokes?-It lasted for a s.p.a.ce and mingled with the rain, until it was impossible to know whether I pursued the distant spin of the bicycle or a near Splash on the sill.

"I can see you had the sense to put your clothes on," my mother began; she had stepped into the room as through an invisible noxious element thicker than air. "Well, look, don't hang out the window with the rain slapping at you that way! You'll only get wet all over again." She took the key from Enoch and tossed it on the dresser-it landed with an angry bounce-and stood for an instant looking back to see if he would follow. But he had no intention of coming after, and only arranged his shoulders against the doorjamb with a movement not so much of impatience as of simple weariness. "You and I are going out to dinner. Enoch's got to start out right away-I told you he has a very important conference with some Government people"-she had not told me; on the contrary this was her usual way of imparting to me my stepfather's business: by hinting that it was no use going into what I already knew-"people from Was.h.i.+ngton, and he's dead tired and has to drive all the way to Zurich by himself! It's not going to make a very good impression," she turned to him, "coming in that way without a chauffeur. They won't think you're anybody. No one's ever going to know how valuable you are as long as you go on dealing with, with-"

But she did not wish to say the word, and winced when Enoch offered her one of his perplexing and infrequent little grins. "A silent client is less of a handicap Sometimes than a talking one. Ask William," he said slyly.

"Ah, you're gruesome!"

He quietly rubbed his back on a protruding hinge. "You've never complained of that before."

"After today I'll complain of everything. It was horrible, horrible."

"It was no more," he reminded her, "than what you expected."

"I didn't expect he'd look like that!" she burst out.

"He looked harmless enough."

"Harmless, yes. Like a python. -I don't care if it is a Freudian image," she yelled.

"Well, don't abuse me for it," he said mildly. His face was all at once full of ironic compa.s.sionate affection. "He was perfectly all right. He did what he came to do and he went away. -Oh, he drew it out, I admit, just for the pleasure of the thing, but the point is it's done; there's no use thinking about it any more."

"But the way he looked-"

"As ordinary as possible. I noticed nothing in particular."

"There wasn't anything in particular. That's just what I mean. He looks the same, just the same." She clasped her hands in quick anxious awe. "He looks like a boy."

"A boy. I suppose you're right."

"But it's ten years at least. And the war!"

"The war didn't bother him. He told you that plainly. For some people," Enoch said, "war is a fountain to drink from."

"The Fountain of Youth," she answered wryly.

"Call it that, if you want."

"There isn't any other sort of fountain that matters."

He said tiredly, "I sometimes forget how sophisticated you can be, Allegra."

But she did not catch his satire. "Sophisticated. That means old. When people start calling you sophisticated there's nothing left but death and decay."

"For a decaying woman you have a great deal of ambition," he observed.

"Well, why not? I don't see why you can't get promoted into a nice clean job."

"I have a nice clean job."

This was beneath her scorn. "I mean something higher up. All you do is-I don't know, coordinate the sectors. I mean something diplomatic. You won't get anywhere just supervising channels."

"Bravo." Once again his smile flickered. "You've mastered a foreign tongue."

"You should make them give you something dignified."

"There's nothing more dignified than death," he said, smiling still.

"No, I'm serious. You should make them give you what Pettigrew does," she insisted.

"Pettigrew's a Democrat."

"Then you be one too!" said my mother, trotting out her funny clown's voice in order to toy with the inconceivable. The idea of anyone's becoming a Democrat, even for political advantage, always convulsed her; except for the time she had been a Communist, my mother was a hereditary Republican.

She considered Enoch with a swift intimate glance and suddenly, for the first time that day, together they fell into laughter. Brief as it was, it brought my stepfather from the doorpost and pulled them side by side. "Well," my mother said into his ear, "there must be something you can do short of that."

"Oh, I'd hang myself short of that," he obliged her.

"There's no rope short enough to be short of that," she giggled. They were enclosed, it seemed, behind a scaffolding which the disclosure of their alliance abruptly threw up around them: I peered in at them easily enough, but saw the adumbrations of a wall, and knew, as surely as though the bricks were there, that trespa.s.sing was forbidden. This was their obscure goodbye: my stepfather put a finger below my mother's chin to lift it and withdrew his touch in an instant. It was their goodbye. What came afterward would be form only. It had been settled long ago that they would not correspond. My mother's letters skipped in pursuit from place to place, acc.u.mulating new forwarding addresses with each increasingly blackened postal mark; besides, they were interminable, fattened by trivia; when at last they overtook him he found them an insufferable affliction; he called them the single Egyptian plague unimaginable even by G.o.d and begged her to send no more. They communicated by cables: this restricted my mother to the necessary.

Yet somehow I had intruded. Enoch's eye discovered me and turned indifferent; whatever he had kindled there died out at sight of me. They separated reluctantly. I felt my mother's anger; she opened her nostrils and accused me in silence. It was on my account she could not join the race to Zurich; instead she had to buy me my supper. "Enoch's going to drive us to the restaurant," she stated sourly. "He's just got time, if you don't hold us up. Though you'd better go down the hall first. -Good G.o.d, what's the matter with her hair?"

She took up my wrist like a handle and pinched me toward her.

"Where's your comb? I put a comb in there." She was nimbly investigating my pocket. "Can't you for once not lose what I give you? I told you," she threw out at Enoch-but immediately I spied the little white comb on the floor where it had fallen and s.n.a.t.c.hed it up-"I told you she'd be the one to hold us up!"

Without mercy she tore through my hair.