Trust: A Novel Part 10

"Then out of the eleventh commandment," he suggested.

She raised her wrists suspiciously. "What's that?"

"Exigency."

Carefully she shut out contempt. "There's no such thing. Not for me. I do what I please," she summed it up.

More than ever he seemed to sight her through his conceptual telescope. But he had turned it around; he reduced her altogether. "You had better be prepared for another course, Allegra," he told her. "One that favors your interests instead of your wishes,"

"My wishes are identical with my interests."

"Save me from a renegade Marxist!" he vividly came back. They stood, the husband and wife, humorless and embattled, quarreling and speculating over the visitor, the private visitor, who had not yet arrived. Yet obscurely they were allied, and had old pacts and treaties to consider, and bickered behind their common walls on strategy only, on whether longbows were suitable, or simple spears, for subtlety of defense: each feared the other's plan, but both feared the visitor more. "I don't predict," Enoch began again, "I only warn. We'll have to wait and see. The chief thing is to remove the child." He hesitated. "What time is he coming, do you know?"

"I sent word with the old mart-he took some bags to the station a while ago. -I wrote down noon."

"So early? He never used to wake before two," Enoch offered skeptically.

My mother appeared displeased by this allusion. "But the train doesn't go until three. That's plenty of time, isn't it?"

"Meanwhile I'll finish loading the car." He took up his ledger and was, on that note, ready to leave; but he came to me instead and bent somewhat and smoothed my head with a showmanlike hand that seemed, for the moment, to put me on exhibit. His touch was cool and brief, message-bearing-a signal, in fact, to show the enemy's a.r.s.enal. It was the touch of espionage. I did not like it, and sat up straight to confront my stepfather's suddenly ominous intricate eyes, unexpectedly of the most characterless blue under tawny lids. There was something of connivance in the room; the rain mumbled on the windowpanes; my mother breathed plaintively. Somehow I was included, and more and worse than that, involved. They had ringed me round with secret links and implications, those two, Enoch and my mother, and had drawn me in and made of me, despite my pa.s.sive witnessing, a deep partic.i.p.ant. It was as though (but once more with polished fingertips, casual and swift, Enoch stroked my hair: a hangnail momentarily enmeshed him, and I felt the pull of a tiny brutal twinge) they blamed me and held me accountable for their tense mysteries and ign.o.ble conversations. They did not think me free of their condition; and although I ventured not an inch beyond the fringes of the mat-this to prove that if my fate was circ.u.mscribed, I was at least its captain-and conceived of their conjoined lives as a thicket too unintelligible even to wonder at, and could not comprehend their voyages and explorations and doubted their objects, deeds, dealings, precious things (in the same way they could not believe in what I chose for toys), still they supposed me bound to their condition: and severely viewed me as locked in the world with their visitor and foe. "My G.o.d, Allegra, she's soaked through," Enoch said, pulling away his dampened hand. He dropped it limply in disgust, but in the very instant of his gesture my mother had her own, and lifted high her arms, guaranteeing everything.

"She won't be here when he is, I promise you," she vouchsafed him. "Ill put her to bed next door until her clothes are dry-they're all she's got at the moment. If they ever do dry in this weather."

"All right, but keep her out of sight," Enoch warned. "Don't let him see her."

My mother reflected. "I'll say she's gone. Ill tell him we've already sent her off," she calculated softly, and picked up the yellow cablegram which had fluttered, to the floor.

"I won't go," I broke in: it was the first time I had spoken: their two startled looks leaped out at me in tandem. "I won't go, whatever you say."

"You see?" my mother pounced. "That's what I've had to listen to all morning!"

"You should be glad to get out of Europe," my stepfather said sternly.

"It's no use lecturing," admonished my mother. "That sort of talk won't work. She's too obstinate. -You'll do as you're told," she finished.

"I'll die," I whined. "If you make me go I'll die of thirst"

"Good heavens, there's plenty to drink on the boat. What's the matter with you?" my mother inquired testily. She groaned and fixed on Enoch. "If she's getting sick again-"

He expelled an awkward sigh; it might have pa.s.sed for a type of snore.

"You know how her stomach is," my mother persisted. "Well? Does your stomach feel all right?"

"They'll shoot me," I said. "They'll shoot me in the desert."

"What?" they jointly cried.

"The sheikhs from the Wailing Wall. They'll take me out into the desert and kill me. It's what they do in Palestine."

"What has Palestine to do with you?" my mother demanded, stunned and growling with bewilderment.

I thought her more stupid than ever. "It's on account of my father. Because he's a Jew."

"Enoch's not your father. You know that surely," she burst out. "I tell you, the child hasn't got a mind, really!"

"No," I plunged on in a pa.s.sion of opposition. "Not Enoch. My father. Anneke told me. And if she doesn't come back they'll put me in a camp. I won't go to Palestine no matter what. I won't," I sobbed, "you can't send me. It's not my fault-not if I'm not a refugee, is it?"

"No," Enoch said, "you're not a refugee."

"Nor a Jew," my mother put in quickly. "Tell her she's not a Jew either."

"She couldn't be trusted," Enoch said, grown fervid with a kind of rage-chastened pity I had never before seen in him. He was plainly sorry for me, and did not hear his wife. "Where did you find that girl?"

"Her qualifications were very good," my mother said. "The University of Leyden and all. She used to be a medical student"

"She couldn't be trusted," he said again.

"She's a refugee, that Dutchwoman," my mother said. "They're all no good. I mean they've been corrupted. The victims of oppression are always corrupt" she added with a grave philosophical frown that stood like a mockery in her ravaged face.

I went on solemnly weeping. "I'm not a refugee," I gave out, stifled.

But Enoch had drawn up the heavy ledger with its black cardboard covers vaguely glimmering, bordered with the black tape of an obituary-rectangle. It tipped slightly, and to save it from sliding out of his grasp he supported it against his chest, flattening it close to him as though it contained life. It shone on his breast like plates of armor and he clung to it in the fancy that it had powers still untried, and might, if he lowered his head in just such a way and showed himself preoccupied and possessed and willing to dare, then and there call out the Shechina in a blazing presence too terrible to remember afterward, as the excruciations of giving birth yield their own forgettings; and he wore on his body that book of woe as he might have worn Urim and Thummim, to deliver up manifestations and to court the unmanifestable and dazzle it into disclosing its faceless face, the way a woman dumb with grief will cradle in her bosom her dead baby, pretending it is alive and cuddling it in the ordinary way, hoping to Woo it back to life by the subterfuge of the familiar-but the familiar has changed irrevocably into the extraordinary, and her arms hold carrion.

My stepfather said deliberately, "You're an idiot to talk that way, Allegra, you have no right," while she trailed after him with a stare so literal and wondering it almost moved him.

"I only meant there must be something wrong with a person in the first place," she began, shoveling after excuses, "to make him end up a refugee. There's logic in-that, isn't there? And morality too," she dug deeper yet, "because there's no such thing as gratuitous harm. I mean who would chase or murder someone for no reason at all?" She was all worry and concern, and congratulated herself on that account. "You believe in progress, don't you? The human race has advanced since Cain and Abel, I should hope."

She missed him entirely; was blind to his furious erupted breastplates (saw instead only his thick foolish ledger, one of many, all the same, each spiffed uselessly with the incinerated, each heavy as a brick or cinderblock, product of that impractical drudgery-not art or work-of-mind: unless brick-kilns are inspirational ateliers-which shut him away from the favor and influence of his superiors: saw that dismal ledger, in fact, in the shape of a blotched black wall-it had the size and harsh squareness and bulk of a wall-cruelly built, brick by brick, between herself and the ornate celestially-radiant emba.s.sy-house in the shrine-city of some historic, preferably anciently monarchic, land, a house whirling with footmen-attended b.a.l.l.s at which innumerable high personages beg to waltz with Allegra Vand-whom'd you say? ah! lucky fellow!-the Amba.s.sador's Lady); and, for all she felt him out in the minute that he stood, zealously a.s.sessing her and me, for all she descried his ardor in that long and violent minute, she might have been emptying bureau drawers in another room on another continent. She stuck to her position, antic.i.p.ated discourse (which did not come), and was oblivious-while she looked for signs and symbols-of the palpable. And there it was, the palpable, right-angled and hard, as articulate and unanswerable as a coffin-box, pressed against (what could satisfy the literal-nosed more?) his actual and living heart-the black covers of the ledger held on that priestly spot like a tablet of the Law: not G.o.d's but Europe's.

He was engrossed; did penance; kissed the arch-cup of the splendid feet of his baal, the Lady Moloch, nude as ice but for her diadem of human teeth and her ankle-ring of human hair; until it was at last enough.

My mother did not brush against this piety, and saw nothing and knew nothing.

So it was enough. "We're all refugees from something or other," he surrendered. This was weak and irrelevant. My mother shared his sadness without exactly sensing why (her nostrils partook of the smell of fire and of horses, and were clogged with the spittle of fleet hot horses, sweating and slowly salivating, on whose sleek brown backs in ebony saddles, with razor-spurs, stinging with thumb-thick whips, murderers rode) and turned to me and quite competently explained how my governess had gulled me: they did not send American children to the Jewish desert, or to any camp, or anywhere. So I understood it was a made-up story invented by the Dutchwoman to induce me to keep her horrid secrets. Had she often directed me not to tell this or that? (my mother asked, all naivete, all unaffected casualness); did she sometimes converse with men and stroll away? Did anyone come to see us on the beach in the middle of the day? And did we ever take walks into the bad quarter, where all the houses sprouted in out-of-breath bunches, with colored tiled roofs, the sounds of water leaking, grey flash of rat and gruesome cognizance of public fart? She named other malodors, and suggested to my memory types of insects-flies, too-and of men.

"But that's where we used to eat every day," I supplied.

"But the bills!" she uttered in astonishment. "At the end of every week the bills that woman presented me with-from the Restaurant Palatin, on the boulevard." (I had never heard of the place; we had dined on the boulevard only once, in a cafe.) "She kept the monly for herself, and fed the child on nothing," my mother gruffly established. "What a cheat!-How did she ever get hold of so many bills?"

"Pilfered," Enoch stated without hesitation. "He got them for her."

"I don't see-"

"Don't you remember?-she let it slip last night that he had a little job there occasionally."

"I thought he had no job at all."

"It seems he plays the piano in these places now and then."

"I didn't believe it, it sounded so unlikely-when he used to drill through Chopin like a robot!-He can't live on it though."

Enoch muttered steadily, "It couldn't have been much of a trick to pick up a fistful of blank additions."

"Blank?" she bleated, catching his tone. "Then Anneke filled them in very nicely!"

"A swindle," Enoch agreed. He paused on the threshold and seemed to meditate. "Well, at least tell the child where you're sending her!"

"The whole world is a fraud," my mother said tragically.

Once more, very cautiously, he carpentered his sarcastic smile. He saw her face to "face, and as she was in relative truth, with no alien lens disfiguring her for him now, only that eternal double-mirror which hangs between husbands and wives when they undertake to judge one another: that they may in fact judge the image of themselves. "The human race advances," he reminded her, but did not stop: "Golgotha with it." He viewed me from the doorway without interest or immediacy. "The best thing is for you to go away," he announced, continuing to look at me in a detached mood of pity and anger.

It seemed altogether settled between them. They were prepared to manipulate all-Anneke whose brother hungered in seven tongues, the imminent private visitor rich with betrayals, myself chained to their condition and without a fate, for the time, except for theirs. Yet Anneke was a liar; no Wailing Wall existed (what vasty rock so brute and serpentine it could wind round the valley of swindles and bones or shut up all wailings?) and there was nothing to depend on but contrivance. But there was no one on the planet who did not depend on contrivance, and if not on contrivance on fraud, and if not on fraud on deceit, and if not on deceit on hoax, bluff, or manipulation, whichever came easiest to hand. -Between them, my mother and her husband devised and contrived.

"I'm taking you back to America," my mother said.

So she had failed, it seemed-or instead perhaps reneged a little. In any event she had not succeeded in recouping for me either Europe or a father. Enoch would not be enlisted in one game or the other. I did not care for earth or sky of those old places she had too much praised, but concerning Enoch I was more sorry than bitter, for I suspected even then how hard it is to re-father the fatherless, and how much harder yet to re-father the wrongly fathered-the badly, mistakenly, regrettably fathered. What was there then for us to do (my mother asked) but the clean, the brave, thing-plainly to declare ourselves victims and ride the sea for home again? She considered, anyhow, that Europe was a ruin. It smelled of machinery and strained like a winch. It ran on gears. The motors in the belfries snarled; the bells spit lubricating oil. Meanwhile Enoch burrowed; scarcely offered an ear to her or me; kept his eyes for those dense and obscene ledgers. But my mother thought them the blemish and bad guests of her journeyings, and shunned them as though they would defile her: they did Enoch no good and spited her hopes. It was the fault of those ledgers, she insisted, that Europe was a ruin-and not the n.o.ble ruin of a burned-into-rust-and-filigree abbey, the sort of ruin that time has brought to its knees not cruelly, but in the manner of a sacerdotal genuflection, and graces, and eventually condones-but a twisted machine-ruin instead: those giant slabs and piles of scoriae, stumps, b.u.t.ts, s.m.u.t, slag and sc.u.m thrown off by a derailed and raggedy-holed, gear-gone, slime-seeping, steel-pounded wreck of wild-flung fuses, grotesque and braided pulleys and generators, pipes like dead-end tunnels, all those mutilated heaps of scratched bits still luridly s.h.i.+ning among multiple deformities. My mother simpered with shock and defilement, and wiped her tight mouth. She had come for an elegy and found, where the country churchyard used to be, a mechanized and howling abattoir. It was on account of the ledgers ... what else was to blame, if not those silent black-taped books, for the burial of spectacle, dominion, energy and honor in a hill of skulls?

And so, because there was nothing else she could do, my mother sentenced herself and me to America.

And Enoch? It might have been that he, on his part, felt himself a victim. Perhaps he believed he was a failed Ezekiel. Thigh-deep in all those names and designations-crumbled, a million times over, into ash, and the ash of ash-he could not recall them into flesh and sinew (what would renewal bring but smoke?); and even if he had been able, who would summon in them the wind of life?

I started to ask him how long we would live on the s.h.i.+p-but when I stood up to speak the door had closed and he was gone.

4.

In half a minute it opened again, and the head and neck of my stepfather reappeared in the crevice. "Allegra-"

My mother jumped urgently out of contemplation. "What, is he here already? What is it?" she said in alarm.

"No, I was only wondering-" Enoch's head came a little farther into the room. "What does William say?"

They had, all that while, forgotten the cablegram.

My mother slit the envelope and began to read quickly. "'Heard accident report on radio'-didn't he get my cable?" she interrupted herself. "Oh!-yes he did-'before receiving wire; glad no injury to you.' That means he's furious," she noted crisply, "I mean about the publicity and fuss and all!" She Crackled the paper and went vigorously on with it. "Well, thank goodness, he's getting someone who's over here anyhow to take care of it, the insurance and everything-and oh G.o.d, if Armand should really sue-that would be nerve!-but isn't it lucky! it's a man who happens to be on a commission in Paris right now!-His name's Pettigrew, do you know him?"

"You might have killed that chauffeur," Enoch said.

"But I didn't, so it's all right, isn't it?" she countered. "Are you sure you don't know a Pettigrew? He's in your area, sort of, I mean he's in Europe to see what the war did-" she consulted the cablegram-"he's a Special a.s.sistant to the State Department: doesn't that sound like a wonderful appointment?-Only he's a Democrat," she added. "How I wish you'd get a job like that, practically a stepping-stone-"

"If you don't finish packing before he gets here you'll have to do it afterward," Enoch said, "and you'll miss your train."

"Well, the Democrats can't always be in power..." My mother grew thoughtful. "There was a Pettigrew who went to Miss Lamb's with William and me when we were little, and afterward married a girl from the West, if it's the same Pettigrew-only I didn't think he'd grow up to be a Democrat.-Miss Lamb's?" she repeated, picking up Enoch's look. "Oh, that's a dancing school."

"Then I don't know him," Enoch observed shortly, and drew his head behind the door and bitingly shut it.

5.

In the room which had lately been Anneke's and mine I took off all my clothes down to my underwear and put them on a hanger to dry, and let the hanger dangle on its hook from the light-chain in the center of the ceiling. And then, because I was damp to the skin, I stripped off my underwear too, and spread it out on one of the two empty beds.

After a while the concierge brought a pair of flat buns, a lick of jelly, and a cup of pale tea, in which the narrowly rolled leaves quivered like bits of hair. "Beurre?" I inquired feebly, but she seemed offended at this and pointed to the jelly as though even that were a luxury beyond reasonable expectation. "Madame Vand asks me to oblige her, so I oblige her; it's a great concession," she said in the deafening French she reserved for simpletons, foreigners, and the dull ears of her husband (but he was in the first category anyhow); she stared and stared at the madness of my mid-afternoon nakedness. "I don't run around every day carrying trays-I have plenty to do without it! I hope she knows I expect her to pay for it-she's rich enough, she'd better not think she can fool me. I sleep with one eye open! I'm not so gullible as my old rooster, you may tell her, who's so played out he can't see the difference between a pauper and a millionaire ... What! One would suppose she could afford another dress for you," she broke off. "You don't expect anything to dry in such weather?" I maneuvered my cold b.u.t.tocks onto a chair and carefully ap.r.o.ned the tray across my knees to hide myself from her inflexible scrutiny; but she did not leave off her looking. "What age do you have, ha? You don't even begin to show your little b.u.mps? Not a shred of hair between the legs yet, ha? In the armpits?" She grabbed my arm, lifted it, and let it fall in triumph. "Nothing! I've always heard they come late to these things in America," she confided. "A cousin of my old rooster, on the mother's side, gave birth at eleven years-she started having her courses at seven! But that was an unusual case," she admitted loudly. "One would think that at least in matters of this kind the nations would all be alike, but by no means. I've heard that in England the women don't take lovers! And in Holland it's only the women who do-the lowland vapors make them especially fit for it. If you don't believe me just consider your own governess!"

She went on zealously babbling, and, since I understood not half of that gossip and roily patter, and could only sit s.h.i.+vering in my p.r.i.c.kled hide, dumb and with scarcely a glimmer of her meaning, it seemed clear it was not for my sake that she whirred her nasal rhetoric through those gaps and bits of yellow bone (her teeth were shocking) where her in-and-out tongue tumbled: for now and then she waited, and appeared to listen, and plainly intended her monologue, which was more than audible and altogether public, to be received next door.

But it was already one o'clock; the private visitor had not yet arrived; and my mother had been out of her room for some time.

"I know those Hollanders, believe me-they're always in need of a finger in the dike!" the concierge bellowed hopefully at the wall. "Didn't I say I sleep with one eye open? There's little that goes by me! Madame Vand would have known nothing of it if not for me-she owes me something besides a thank-you, I may tell you, for putting her wise. Oh, I don't say much, only a small tip..." But the wall neither affirmed nor protested. "Who do you think gave the alarm? And who do you think sniffed out the fellow's ident.i.ty?-There's not a single occupant of any room in town I can't catch news of-especially the paupers and foreigners! I don't believe in compet.i.tion. I'm with all the landladies like this" -she interlocked the fingers of both hands and gripped them suspiciously. "Well? Where is she? Your mother's not in her chamber?" she demanded finally.

"I think she went to sit on the porch," I murmured.

"If it's to watch for the rain to finish she'll be sitting a long time," the concierge said resentfully, and stamped over to the beds and began pulling off the sheets. "Here-take your bloomers, they're in the way. You think I have time to waste? I have to prepare for the next occupant-Madame Vand paid only until noon, all the rest is unofficial. But I'm goodhearted, I allow it. In the busy season, on the other hand, I wouldn't be so good-hearted." She charged toward me under a s...o...b..nk of linens and offered me her crinkled frown. "Listen, it's nothing I can say to her face: so be sure you tell your mother afterward how you thought I could use a little tip for my trouble-little, I don't say cheap. She's well rid of that girl, you know, it wasn't such a cheap favor I did her. It's one thing to deceive a husband-I've done it myself in my time and prime, and without discovery-but it's going too far to deceive an employer!" She clucked and cackled close to my ear, feeding me her breath of boiled farina, until my defensive wince a.s.sured her she had delivered her point. "Aha, you're an intelligent child after all, although if one were to go only on looks one wouldn't think so. The brain isn't as backward as the glands, that's lucky. -Be sure to tell your mother what I said!" she reminded me at the door. -"But it always rains on laundry day," I heard her sigh into her bundle as she lumbered into the corridor: "tant pis!"

6.

At two o'clock the private visitor still had not come.

I finished my little meal very slowly, to make it last, for my mother had warned me we should not eat again until we were safely on the train.

But at half-past two she suddenly reappeared. "No, your things aren't still wet!" she marveled hoa.r.s.ely.

Suspended from the ceiling and vaguely sweating, my dress turned and turned in the humid air.

"Well, never mind, we'll have to wait anyhow," my mother said. "It's too much to hope for that he's had a change of heart and won't turn up! But he will, he will," she miserably intoned. She went rubbing and scratching at her neck. "Enoch won't let me near him any more, I'm that nervous-he shooed me off the porch actually. I wish I could hang myself!" She ripped away the collar of her traveling-dress to clutch the peevish spot-and sure enough, her uneasy relentless nails had marked out a sort of rope-burn there.

"The concierge wants some money," I informed her.