Trust: A Novel Part 53

"It feels like a surprise," Mrs. Purse said. "I speak firsthand, a few of my wild oats were sown in moons.h.i.+ne. -Don't tell Purse that I'm not a cradle Friend," she explained to me. "Purse's family all are. Temperance people too. I turned myself inside out when I turned Purse. -Isn't that indolence for you? That's just the laziest baby I ever saw. Look at that, a slack Purse. George Fox, aren't you always harping on being your brother's keeper?-when you're not b.l.o.o.d.ying his nose. Henry David! You're daydreaming aggrandizement I can just see it. Carry him off, boys."

Accordingly the Mahatma was raised between them as on a palanquin. Halfway down the hill he squirmed free and waddled frantically away. They tagged him. He tagged back, screaming. They encircled him. He screamed, laughing violently. He sneaked under the fence of their arms. They overtook him. The sun oiled him with a white glaze. He was permitted to escape. Confident of his perfection and of the perfection of earthly joy, he jogged off. They pursued the burnished body of the little soulless G.o.d. Then all three were invisible. Plumes of noise chastely ascended, with no source but lungs. The G.o.d had a belly, b.u.t.tocks, a neck like one firm finger, holy genitals pathetic in miniature; the G.o.d had grandiose lungs.

"Well it stands to reason you'd be more worldly than most," Mrs. Purse chirped on, "growing up that way in an Amba.s.sador's family. Did Mr. T. say Amba.s.sador or Consul? I can't remember which-I imagine the difference in way of life is significant?"

"Not significant at all," I said rea.s.suringly.

"You are worldly. How refres.h.i.+ng that is."

"Not refres.h.i.+ng at all," I said. And: "Here's your husband back from his walk."-Purse was emerging from a wrinkle in the green curtain of wood. He scampered out with the urgency of a man shaken underfoot by the pressure of millennia striving upward against the soles of his tennis shoes like great prehistoric nudging elbow-bones. He was reminded of time by the lower geological strata and what they might hiddenly contain: it made him break into a run. He arrived with his mouth hollowly sucked in, concealing puffs. "Good Lord," said his wife, "you carry on exactly as though you'd found an old bone in there. Have you ever known any paleontologists?" she suddenly asked me.

I thought of William: William as incredible boy. And what if bones had taken him in the end after all, instead of rocks? Would he have gone in for the marrow of things or finished just the same, on the rock of the law, on the hard outside surface of feeling? "No," I said, "I've never known any."

"Well," she gave out decisively, "they're snoopers. All of them. They have this fixed idea that you never can tell where you might hit on a mastodon. You didn't find a mastodon in there?"

He sat down on, one of the kings' chairs and silently breathed.

"You didn't find anything in there?"

"Groceries," he said.

"In the woods? Now what in the world-"

"Dozens and dozens of cans."

"Oh, well, cans. It's no trick to find empty cans-"

"Not empty. Full. All rusted through and years old. Piled up right behind an old gate-house. I cracked one open just by standing on it and out came a mess of green peas." He pressed his forehead on his hands. "A real stink to it."

"Boy scouts," Mrs. Purse guessed.

"And stakes pounded deep. For tents. I counted thirty-eight, that means better than a dozen tents in and out of the trees."

"Well, there you are! Scouts."

"A funny place for scouts," Purse said, "on private property."

"Don't think about it. You don't have to bring your conscience into everything. Just pretend it's a public park," Mrs. Purse said consolingly. "Try and feel at home. Meditate on one hotel bill times nine."

He glared at me as though the dishonest suggestion-conversion of the private to the public-had been mine. He was not unlike William. Perhaps all paleontologists, the proto- as well as the perfected, have the drive toward stern moralities uncontradicted by frequent (though impersonal) sp.a.w.ning. One remembers those mediaeval scholars who kept skulls on their tables to speak of the disintegration of the flesh and the eternal glory of the spirit. There is something of the ascetic in men who deal in tangible human parts. (Was he Purse's son, the splendid savage child tagging on the nether slope of the hill?-Ecstatic howls still flew, like the caw of a bird. -Or had Circe coupled with a hero while Purse lay bound in the snores of an aging athlete?) A faintly celibate odor-like snuff-came from Purse: the smell of the bossy Inner Light? unbelievably moving fragrance of the prehistoric, which can survive only in the pitiable thinginess of fossil?-Enoch had dealt in smoke merely, which escapes us; therefore he could remain engaged and engrossed in the world. Not so Purse, who pondered a concrete mystery. "Someone died in there," Purse said. "Did your father tell you that? There was a death in there."

"Was it those bones you were looking for?"-gently.

"Ghastly," Mrs. Purse clattered; it was the tone she kept for "Charming." "Really you shouldn't joke about it. It upsets Purse considerably."

"We're living in a cemetery," Purse said.

"Not living, just visiting. Think of it that way. And day after tomorrow we'll be gone."

"Some of us will," he said; he took me in with swift covert accusation.

"There'll be a poor showing," she agreed, "without Purses. You don't think the boy scouts did it?"

"Did what?" said Purse. "What boy scouts?"

"Killed someone in the woods. Though it'd be against their oath. It wouldn't be a good deed. Maybe," she speculated comfortably, "Mr. T. did it. You see that's what Purse really believes, though he won't come out and say so to Mr. T.'s face. Now if Mr. T. did it, he wouldn't've told us about it in the first place, would he? It stands to reason he wouldn't. Unless you're thinking of the Reverse Psychology of the Boastful Criminal."

"Bah," said Purse, and leaned down to pull Dee's spade out of the ground. "The fact is he didn't tell us. Polygon's j.a.panese did, and when I put it to Tilbeck he couldn't deny it. You can't deny what's public knowledge "

Mrs. Purse clasped her hands like an opera singer, signifying pleasure. "It's just that Purse suspects your father of romantic things in general. -And a murder would be so lovely and hilarious. -Oh look, now you've gone and yanked off the handle, Dee will be wild. Give it here, I'll glue it back-I've got some glue in my box. Well. Let it wait then-I'm afraid my box is still down on the beach. Did you see it down there last night? My tool-box?"

"No," I said.

"I left it right down there in the middle of everything. Father and daughter," she explained to Purse, "they were down on the beach last night together. I knew it wouldn't rain with the moon up like that, so I just never went to bring up my tools. Just left them out. I wonder how you missed them."

"There was a mirror-"

"Yes, yes, then you didn't miss a thing. -She didn't miss a thing down there. -Do you imagine your father's capable of anything like that?"

"Like what?" I said coldly.

"Oh, you know, what the boy scouts did in the woods. Though I feel perfectly safe with him, no matter what Purse insinuates. -You don't mind this sort of talk? It's all in fun."

"All in fun," Purse echoed. "Fee fie foe fun."

"Now don't be spooky with Miss Tilbeck. That's all very well with Harriet-"

"Miss Tilbeck," he said with slow invoking care. "Do you answer to that?"

"Purse," said Mrs. Purse.

"Miss Tilbeck. You jumped last night."

"Purse."

"Now never mind. Did you or did you not jump last night?" Grimly he invigilated me. "I said good night to you with perfect cordiality and in return for it got a jump like a shot."

"I'm afraid that's right," said Mrs. Purse. "You did jump a little. Now that it's been brought up we might as well look right at it. I wouldn't explore this at all if Mr. T. were here, you understand that. We don't like to embarra.s.s him-he's been so good to us. -I wish you'd remember that," she hinted at her husband. "There's no profit in embarra.s.sing a Samaritan, you've said it yourself often enough."

The appeal to restraint was without effect. " 'Good night, Miss Tilbeck'-that's just what I said, no more, no less. And you jumped. You don't deny you jumped? You're never called that? It's unfamiliar to hear yourself called that? Taken by surprise? Not used to it?-Well, don't go!"

But I was already yards away. Behind me a dialogue floated up clearly and slowly, as though written on those pinkish, tissue-like, airy and undulating ribbons dirigibles used to trail from their whalish rears: the picture of the Zeppelin, the famed von Hindenburg, which burst in the sky while my mother sat enunciating Kant in Adam Gruenhorn's hole, carrying after it a sign like a cloud of light or blazing afflatus, Heil Amerika or something just as glorious-more seriously than surrealistically the idea of this slow, clear, speaking and pursuing great balloon had ladled itself inexorably out of the jargony nonsensical lingua franca of Ralph Waldo Emerson's badinage (Emerson the humorist), and though I made a rush downhill for the saving edge of the horizon, the terrible banners of the monstrous Zeppelin-a vast navel creating the sky-flapped close and sent their subtle winds slapping and dipping after me: "He lied about everything," said the wind that came from Mrs. Purse, "you ought to've seen her face. Contradicted every word. She's no daughter-nothing to him." And Purse's wind said, "There's a resemblance still and all," and Mrs. Purse's wind said, "Yes, they both have the usual number of arms and legs. Doubtless made use of them too, last night on the beach," and I hurtled out of the path of the talk freighted dirigible listing with surmise, and ran beyond the caress of its awful ribbons (bearing a heraldic crest marked Purse-stare et Price-stare), and flung myself among the tag-players under the hill.

The little hypocrites would not have me. They had been friendly enough with Tilbeek there, but alone they would not have me. I lay flat and motionless on a rock, as years before Anneke had lain, and saw what she had seen over Europe: the sky, blue only in imagination, full of whiteness rather, the tone and color suggested by those plentiful textures white can a.s.sume-here a sort of grainy mat, like clean new sensuous water-color paper, elsewhere swirled like the top of a bucket of cream, and sometimes flas.h.i.+ng and hard, enamel of an immense tooth: square bold incisor turned on its back; and sometimes the white of an eye so large that iris and pupil and upper lid were too far to be descried, and fine red branches, not blood-vessels so much as a whimsical embroidery, spread across its oddly animal s.h.i.+ne. Meanwhile the children wove their games on the beach and would not have me. It was hide-and-seek, and squatting and squealing among the motors, but they would not have me; it was catch with a tan tennis-ball and, though I importuned, they would not have me. And mysteriously it seemed that Henry David Th.o.r.eau, who had, after all, piloted me there and confessed the life of that family on the way, was leading them against me: once when the ball came by and I threw it back into the pale garland of players, he let no one s.n.a.t.c.h it from my shy aim. They had decided against me. Throw had told them I had been to all the islands of the world, including Staten, Ellis, and Crete: they disliked islands and lovers of islands. They disliked this island. It bored them. They ran back and forth on the beach like bright-maned lions on the floor of their cage. They knew every sh.e.l.l and every track and every tuft. They wanted out. The tide moved up toward my mossy rock and Mrs. Purse moved down to us. She brushed glue on the little spade's handle; then she reached again into her wide box for a hammer and a nail. The dirigible's banner had escaped; the metaphysical Zeppelin had blown up in the very air of its birth. She hardly spoke. Tapping the nail had her attention. "Purse has gone up to the second floor," she murmured, "to see Mr. Tilbeck's books. There's a library up there, you know," and tried to wiggle the handle. It was rigid and satisfactory. She tossed the spade on the sand near my feet, and at once, like a dog to a bone, Dee came, a flopping merman. The others called him away from me. "Ah," Mrs. Purse reproached with a crucial deliberateness, "don't you take Miss Tilbeck into it?"-and reluctantly and formally the ball was submitted to me, like a letter. Then it was Dodge Ball again. No one explained the rules, and a tan sphere pounded with a wicked suddenness into my thigh. "Oh fie!" cried Mrs. Purse, not minding; her eyes were on the hill, and Purse racing glumly down it. "Fie," he said, "fee foe fum. A sailor's books up there. What you would expect. What a sailor would read. Pseudo-science-self-educated. Fish books." "Fish? He knows literature," Mrs. Purse said, frowning, and by means of two strong bare arms hoisted Dee above the fracas: he hung there, s.h.i.+mmering like an old copper fountain-at any moment an arc of colored water would spurt from his inflated cheeks. She took him into the great wide legs of her lap with the superior calm of a madonna: "He knows all the poets, all the novelists. Is Moby d.i.c.k up there?" "There aren't any poets and novelists up there," Purse said. The idyll was beginning to pall. The tide was getting into Purse's shoes. Then the ball was lost to the sea. Waders ventured after it, but another tide commanded it farther and farther away. Some distant magnetizing tug was contending with the waves' certainty. The deeper bay, well out beyond the waders, seemed inhabited; there was a swell, as if from below; as if down, down, underneath, Neptune stirred his huge teacup; or stroked with immense strokes, in front of an undersea microphone, the back of a purring sea-mammal. The dark purring amplified. The water vibrated. The whole surface of the water swung, as though someone had suddenly given the globe a twirl; the sun did not swing-only shrank back into its own stubborn blaze, staring. "What is it-that noise?" I said; the Purse? had leaped up to look across the bay. A white froth of Purselets stood vaguely rocking-beating time with the sea-in the white froth of the sh.o.r.e. "Motorboat," Purse said. "He's back."

Then we saw the boat-a crazy far fleck, violent and random. It shot stupidly to the right and to the left-stupidly and ignorantly. It could not find the land. "Is he drunk?" Purse said angrily. "Look at that." A muteness had taken the children. They grew out of the shoal like surprised marbles. "Look at that," Purse said again. The boat was circling the broad, wild rim of its own wake. "Ah well," Mrs. Purse said, "let's wave him in, the sun's in his eyes no doubt." They all waved. "Does he see?" They waved in long languorous sweeps. But this only seemed to frighten the boat-it roared straight away, multiplying parallels of scallops and sending rough ebbing kinks to wobble against the waders' white ankles. "What the deuce," Purse said, "is he going off again? Can't the idiot see?"-but no sooner was the imprecation loosed than the boat knowledgeably turned, powerful with direction. Someone had changed his mind. "There," Mrs. Purse said, "he's coming straight in now. Wave, dears There. He sees tis all right. Coming straight in. Do you see something white? Like a flag?-" "A corner of a dress-why doesn't the child sit down? It's Harriet Beecher's dress-" "She left wearing pink," Mrs. Purse said in a voice of triumph-"he did just as he promised, bought her something new. It is a dress? A white dress?" "Why doesn't the child sit down? She'll fall into the motor, does she want to get caught in the motor?" "Queer," Mrs. Purse said, "I can hear it all right but I can't see it." "See what?" "The motor. There's no outboard on that boat-look, a sort of open cabin I think-" "It's not him," Purse said sharply. "It's someone else," Mrs. Purse said.

The cabin's winds.h.i.+eld, divided by a rod in the middle, shot across our view with the precision of a slide under a microscope, but hid its microbes: the sun stood doubly on the gla.s.s, then blurred off. Under this hot film of glitter two tiny beings rode. Foam rushed from the prow. The creatures hurried near on spitting suds-now obscured, now raised to a tiny eminence. Behind them a scroll of wake opened out, splas.h.i.+ng serifs. The level focus of our concentration magnified two tiny faces above the fleet thing's flanks; it cantered on the water; it had a cabin streamlined and syrup-colored; the water under its solid sides seemed frail as crumpled tin. Bay and sun and sight yielded before it. It came like the dolphin whom my mother's sea-crazed father revered as the equal of humankind; confident and lovely as the dolphin it came, smooth and skimming as the dolphin that grazes its breast on the water's breast, as rich and well-formed, choosing the straight way with arrow-calculation, elegantly rolling out shavings thin and curled from the sea's lathe, carpenter, astronomer (so keen is the reputed intelligence of the dolphin), dolphin, but with a throat full of exploding bullets, and serious as the hilarious dolphin is not. It had almost decided not to come at all. It had changed its mind. Something the island did not fulfil for it. Still it came, as though it had forgotten to arrange an alternative destination; it had failed to reason out another path if the first happened to be obliterated. The dolphin does not provide itself against every eventuality-in this too it is like us, but not from choice, for in the sea there are no paths; not for nothing has the poet called it trackless. In the sea there is no road not taken. All roads are one. Down the one road came the brilliant boat. It grew as it came, enlarging according to a movie-sense I knew well, so that with the abruptness of a cut in the film it revealed, without visual or kinesthetic preparation, its exquisite figurehead: not on the prow, but within it, contained by it-a laughing girl. Her face led to her form. Each was a perfect flake, individuated in grace. The girl's form was delivered up to the boat's form; inevitably her waist gave way to rootedness. Only her arms were free in s.p.a.ce: and these were fixed in an eternal woman's resignation: she recognized, she made do. She adapted with a gesture, laughing. The boat's intent had suffered the wild awe of broken expectation. Yet land is land. Sh.o.r.e is sh.o.r.e. The needle-bow snorted into the shallows and insinuated its tip into the halting pools that whinnied at the margin of the sand. Agitated whorls struck at the waders' pale ankles-they glimmered like crystals in a sudden berylline maze. Docile, dockless, the boat permitted itself to be moored. Intelligence fied it as it put its will under the yoke. Tamely it discharged whomever it carried. The Purses watched. Sweat fell from them. Heat rose from their blazing armpits. A young man stepped from the boat. He pulled after him a burden of rolled-up wool. He turned, and at his turn the figurehead in a white suit descended. Her thighs moved, alive, banded by a surface of cloth that barely moved at all, so near and taut upon her trunk was it stretched, and therefore her clothing seemed for the moment alive too: with both thighs tense she stood on the rim of the boat, and the current of tenseness entered her slick niveous skirt, and she jumped, like a cat in its catskin, to the bubbling sand. Her voice began.

"Well in that case I don't see why we bothered to bring the sleeping bags, all that fuss for nothing-I thought this was going to be an uninhabited island," Stefanie Pettigrew complained, "don't you ever keep a promise?-Well for sweet Pete's ugly sake!"

She had recognized me. So had William's son. His face looked oddly vulnerable. Then I knew why. Something was missing-the helmet of power. He had come to this place because he had uncovered evidence of its putative emptiness. He had come furtively. An old notion s.h.i.+fted in me: loss. I felt that I had once loved him, but no more. Still the p.r.o.ng of love picked in me. Whom else then did I love?

11.

The Purses. They never were part of this story (this ostensible father's tale), and here they take leave of it. But no. Both statements are wrong. Charon the ferryman is part of every story; a Purse had crossed me over. Nor do I mean that the Purses will now vanish out of the event. Physically, they remain. Physically, here stands Purse himself inside his rubbery athlete's bag, always faintly panting, always faintly purifying. Four nights in a row his wife, abetted by his own healthy sleep, has betrayed him. If Mrs. Purse should conceive an eighth child, perhaps it will be halfblood to me; perhaps not. The question is of no moment. The Purses will last, as Purses, forever. Occasionally they will throw up a little G.o.d who will intuit that the Inner Light must never be covered over with matter. The Purses love matter only. Purse loves money and bones. Mrs. Purse loves money and flesh: flesh of her flesh, and that other indwelling flesh that is necessary to incite and begin flesh of her flesh. The Purses are, as we say nowadays, monomaniacs. Mrs. Purse has her one deathly joke. Purse has his one deathly bargain-hunt: that the cost of nine should equal the cost of one. Neither of these consistencies is what makes them monomaniacal. Mrs. Purse, after all, though a bit of a fool, is admittedly an ex-prodigy, a genius, an uncanny machinist and inventor. She has invented more than that automatic stair-climbing wheelchair for her aged mother. I learned, but have not the wit to describe, the impressive nature of many more of her inventions, all practical, homelike, essential, enduring; all duly lodged with the United States Patent Office. And Purse, as his son affirmed, is not very obscure, at least not to other paleontologists. Though not a genius like his wife, unlike most men he is intimate with Hyracotherium (the little eohippus, whom Harriet Beecher Stowe Purse would have delighted to ride, had it only survived into our Cenozoic Era); he is one of the few persons alive privileged to have looked upon beauty bare in the remains, like a suggestion of necklace, of the Eocene Coryphodon; he can infer a quality of brain from a quant.i.ty of skull insides; he can identify a whole huge remote fossil animal from one small bone of one of its most casual toes. Plainly, the Purses count, and must be taken seriously. Therein lies their monomania: they take themselves seriously. But they must not expect that we will.

The Purse children. Of these it can most profitably be said that they are children. Let me explain. (Hold. Are you impatient for knowledge of my love? Unlike you, I have infinite leisure. A paradox: for "you" can mean only myself; I am my only reader. Then let me explain.) Children, though they are always becoming older, hence always becoming someone else, someone other, do not know this truth about themselves. They think themselves static, they think themselves eternal exactly as they are. This indeed is the real, not the imagined, condition of elves, and is why we fear them. (Do we believe in elves? No. In the concept of elves? a.s.suredly.) The static is what we fear in life. Stasis is itself a monomania, and children, who believe that they are and hold themselves altogether apart from becoming, are therefore natural monomaniacs. The Purse children must be repudiated even more decisively than their parents. Moreover they are uncommonly verbal, in the manner of children and elves; they adore words, but not for their uses-rather, as magic-in-themselves. (C/. Rumpelstiltskin. Vide lyre and lute for liar and loot, where music, and rogues are indistinguishable; or derisible-dirigible, wherein the subst.i.tution of a single letter can produce a flying machine out of mere mockery.) Magic is inanity, is imbecile, and exists for its own sake; so do children; so do elves. And we fear them all equally. And equally they all despise us when they know we fear them. Even in setting it down I have trembled at the terrifying chatter (word-love) of the Purse children. Stasis. They do not progress. What they say leads endlessly, leads nowhere. I have ground my teeth to hear them speak. Charon plying his pole talks all the way. Beware. The Purse children, who would not have me (as elves keep from us the secret of their arcane lives), torment me. I fear the quotation-marks that come like signs out of their mouths to warn me they will speak. Seeing those two small tongues curled in air I crave escape: deafness, blindness, only let me not be obliged to put down a magic as obvious as Purselets' speech; I dread and despise these Purselets. They are repudiated out of the tale. I am glad to see them go.

I see them go. Purse takes them away, herds them up the hill. They are not talkative now but queerly dumb, dumbstruck. Purse takes them away because ("Look who's on the welcoming committee!" Stefanie says) he senses an impropriety in the amazed confrontation on the beach. We all sense the same: Stefanie and William's son, in search of a desert island, have arrived on this populous one to sleep together, in bags or otherwise. Purse shuns adultery. On the other hand, being "liberal," he resolves not to take note of it. He snores through his wife's. He shuts his eyes to his host's. But here it is, raw and open. Too much is too much. The children must be removed from this animal heat. He guides them slanting upward along the slope, sand metamorphosing into gra.s.s; he guides them into the house where it is cooler than the bottom of the sea. Here they will be safe from the animal heat of the sun. They file through the pompous door. And immediately a strange mushroom-like smell tenses and teases, bitter but obscurely pleasurable, so tantalizingly vague that it is nearly inaccessible to their struggle for it: it shudders on the bare threshold of acuteness, and will not disclose itself. Mold. Minutely it gauzes and grazes the refrigerator's, the sofas', the piano's backs and legs and undersides. The first day-heat has inflamed it; its bluish velvety steam is like the licking path of a tongue. Now it grows remote, too withdrawn for the coa.r.s.eness of a fingertip. They cannot recapture the paradisal smell, and regret consciousness.

In this way Purse leaves the tale. He is spiritually fastidious: and the lovers have arrived. Hence the tale (a lovers' tale) repudiates him.

Hereafter the Purses are present, but accessible to matter only: though spirit may rule the island.

12.

"You always seem to turn up," Stefanie rushed on at me without a second's gap, "first that office party thing, and now, when a person wants privacy-"

Mrs, Purse intervened by sticking out her manly hand. "Ethel Purse. Hostess-surrogate for the island's boss. So far as I've observed he doesn't turn anyone away. Stay for a meal, dears, whoever you are."

"Well for goodness' sake we've come to stay. For days. We certainly didn't expect to find a whole mob."

"The mob are Purses. By their myriads shall you know them. This is private property, dears."

"For goodness' sake we know that. We weren't looking for Yellowstone Park. We weren't looking for a place that's advertised in the National Geographic. It's your fault," she told William's son. "You said if there was anybody at all it'd be some seedy old caretaker who maybe wouldn't even be here, and if he was we could pay him to get out-"

"Ah well," Mrs. Purse said gaily, "I'm afraid bribery won't work with us Purses! The catch is we're not due to leave here for another day or so-you know all Purses have their catches, and we keep ours tight shut against monetary temptation. And when we go that'll still leave Miss Tilbeck, and heaven knows when her father'll decide he's had enough, I suppose not until the cool weather sets in-"

"You mean there're more?" Stefanie said, staring up the hill.

"Yes dear. The Tilbecks, I said the Tilbecks. And one more Purse, not included in the recently departed pack-Harriet Beecher, who at this moment is writing a letter to Eternity upon the faceless deep. Bottle with a note in it," she explained, all good humor.

"Well isn't this really ridiculous. Till what? I mean," Stefanie lectured, "Anybody who's on this place is really trespa.s.sing. That's law. I hope you all realize that."

Mrs. Purse's radiance paled before this plain hostility. "That's gall, dear. We were invited."

"We know the owner."

"He appears to know mult.i.tudes," Mrs. Purse noted.

"It's not a he, it's a she." It was clear that the girl had recently acc.u.mulated certain limited facts. Outside the world of Miss Jewett's long rows of file cabinets suddenly loomed and fled, and at their end William's son, a steadfast centurion, dangled his doffed helmet. "Unless you mean the trustee?"

"Oh shut up, Stef," William's son ordered. "How'd you get here?" This was aimed, enveloped in a furious growl, at me.

I borrowed from the nearest Purse. "I was invited."

"Bully for you," Stefanie said, and kicked at a pebble like an egg. "You usually show up even when you're not."

"Not what?" Mrs. Purse wondered.

"Invited."

"Ah but she's the guest of her father-there's such an attachment between those two. Very touching, considering they're strangers. When he gets back be sure to watch for it. Loyalty and so on."

"Look, she doesn't have a father," Stefanie corrected.

Mrs. Purse said. "Hm."-A syllable of indication leading to vindication.

"Well she doesn't. Unless you mean her stepfather. And he's in Was.h.i.+ngton."

I demurred quickly, "He isn't. Not yet"

"For goodness' sake my own fiance told me, you think he'd lie? Your stepfather had to beat it down there early this morning because this country he's supposed to go to's in trouble or something."

"But the hearings aren't till-" I broke off and looked at William's son, who at once looked angrily at the sand.

"Till, till," Stefanie parroted. "Till what, I keep asking."

"Til beck," Mrs. Purse provided craftily. "You're gazing right at one, dear. If you don't mind my saying so I should think you'd know this young lady's name. You certainly seem to know her."

"Sure, we go to parties together all the time. Though that's not her name, what you said. 'Sfunny, she's got the same name he has"-and arched an immaculate thumbnail backward toward William's son. He stood glumly; a mouse of violence ran in his eye.

Mrs. Purse repeated loudly, "Tilbeck?"

"That's not their name, I just told you."

"Mm." Vindication Number Two.

"All the same they're not relations, it's sort of funny."

"Ah, they're not," Mrs. Purse murmured.