Trust: A Novel Part 14

"He's gone," I said, my head down, my mouth hidden.

"What a mess! What's made you frizz up like this? A little dampness in the air, and she turns into a sort of Zulu."

"He went away," I tried again. "Nick."

"Yes, yes, he's gone," she acknowledged.

"I saw the bicycle he came on."

"He didn't come on a bicycle!"

"Yes. he did."

"Well, suppose he did," Enoch said.

The comb hesitated.

"It was all blue, even the handlebars," I said.

"Out here everyone gets around that way," she capitulated.

"But even the handlebars," I persisted.

"That only means it's second-hand and painted over," my mother murmured, stifling what might have been wonder or disgust; it was, in any case, fascination. Furiously she resumed combing and tweaked my scalp until I squealed. "You weren't supposed to be looking out the window! I told you to stay in bed. It's no concern of yours, you don't want to have anything to do with people like that. -Stand still! How do you expect me to get through the snarls?"

"The concierge took the sheets off," I said.

"Too bad, she'll just have to put new ones on for tonight. It should teach them a little cleanliness. They think dirt and thrift are the same thing. I never heard of a Paris hotel that didn't change the sheets every day! Let them learn, they're too greedy. You have to fight greed in this world," she went on authoritatively, "even if it makes you a little less comfortable. Never give in to greed. There's no telling what can come of giving in to greed."

Enoch coolly kept his gaze on my mother's lips; she had made a little tunnel of them and was blowing the uprooted tangles out of the teeth of the comb. "I thought you were going to show some sense, Allegra," he said.

"Sense! All right, I'll show some sense. Pick your head up, why are you so difficult?" she muttered at me. "You don't mean sense, you mean resignation."

"I mean keeping your mind on the highest good," he began.

"Oh, what's the use," she interrupted.

"-for the greatest number," he finished diligently.

"Philosophy!" she spat out. "As though a whole crowd were involved. As though the whole world were involved. You're always making things sound as if the universe depended on, oh I don't know, on every single private act."

"Maybe it does."

"I hate that sort of talk, you know I do. I always have and I always will. It doesn't mean anything. What's private is private and what's public is public; that's all there is to it."

"Do you know of anything more public than the universe? And yet all the private things happen inside it. In the end," he said softly, "everything private turns out to be public, if you don't take care." He pulled from his breast pocket the handkerchief my mother had folded for him earlier. It was in the shape of a triangle. With a rapid wag of its points he flashed it open and lapped corner over corner meticulously, until he had made it into a rectangle.

"Poor Enoch," said my mother, pausing to watch these maneuvers, "you have no notion of dress."

"But I have distinct ideas of design." Amiably he restored the cloth to his pocket. "That compensates, doesn't it? It was a question," he took up finally, "of choosing the most intelligent tactics"-almost as though he were referring to his adroitness with the handkerchief.

"It was a question of getting rid of him," my mother bluntly denied. She tugged at the last strand curled at my nape and put me off at arm's length. "There, you're finished. Let me see you. You know, I think she looks a little like my great-aunt Huntingdon. That was my father's aunt on the paternal side. She had very close-set eyes, not at all like mine. It's really remarkable about genes-they have such a definite idea of where they're going, only n.o.body can find out where until it's too late. -She doesn't look anything like me."

"No," Enoch agreed, "nothing like you."

"She looks like someone else."

"I suppose so," he said without interest.

"The chin. And the temples, diamond-shaped in that funny way, can't you tell? Even the nose. The nose very much."

He scarcely deigned to shrug. "I'm not competent to judge."

"What?"

"-Not having been acquainted with great-aunt Huntingdon," he explained, but he had no smile.

"All right, if you want to take that att.i.tude," she said reproachfully. "You know whom I mean." She brooded down over me. "Maybe she'll change. Although it doesn't matter to you. You don't care anything about her."

"You expect too much, Allegra."

"No, no, you never even try. You leave it all to me."

"You expect the impossible."

"I don!t, it's not true. I just wish you wouldn't be so detached, that's all."

He permitted a moment to go heavily by. "I'm not the child's father," he said at length; his weak eyelid stood up suspended in the aftermath of a blink. "You seem to keep forgetting that, Allegra."

"Oh no," she said at once. "You're wrong. I never forget it." Her hand flew defensively to her bosom; she searched him out, wondering after consequences, but the expression he quite readily delivered had nothing for her. She came from him empty. It appeared he had chosen to punish her-not severely; it was only that he had deprived her of his comfort She turned her head here and there like a parakeet in a frenzy of escape, not knowing where to light: she lit on me. "Look at her-look at her eyes. She's been crying," my mother charged. "You can't leave her alone for an hour without her making some sort of mess. I suppose we're in luck, it could have been the stomach-thing. You can go to the ends of the earth, there's no getting away from that. It's genes," she p.r.o.nounced, shoving the comb into the laced slit of my dress. "Oh my G.o.d, give me your handkerchief, will you?"-she s.n.a.t.c.hed it out of his coat and blew her nose into it urgently-"I'm allergic to something, it must be those d.a.m.n hedge-clippings, I can't stand cut greens in the rain-"

She exploded with a tremendous sneeze.

"There goes my last clean handkerchief," said Enoch. "Oh no, please!" as she meekly offered it to him, "do me the favor of keeping it."

"I spoiled your design," she said penitently; it was crushed in her fist.

"It doesn't matter. I can buy more."

"You won't have time. Anyhow I think there's some unopened laundry in your grip. In the tan one, I think."

"No, there are s.h.i.+rts in there. You mean that bundle with the blue wrapping paper? Just s.h.i.+rts, no handkerchiefs. I should think you'd know, you put it there."

They dallied back and forth in this manner, domestically, troubling themselves about handkerchiefs. My mother sneezed again, almost on prescription; and afterward she apologized and Enoch blessed, both in the same breath. They were all at once restored to laughing: "I really wasn't going to give it back to you. I mean I have some sense of hygiene." "You expected me to fold it up again and put it in my pocket," he accused. My mother rushed in, struck with an invention: "You know what? I've just had a thought-it's about Iago. I've never been able to understand his motive. I mean it's always seemed so wanton. But now you know what I think it was? When he picked up Desdemona's handkerchief"-she wiped her eyes and tested her nose more out of celebration than utility-"when he picked it up, well, it was just so full of snot, and his fingers-" Enoch snorted in disgust, but she played it out to the end. "It was such an unpleasant experience he had to get even. So he got Oth.e.l.lo to do her in." "Oh, oh," my stepfather said admiringly, "she has a child's faculty. Alarming Allegra." "I wish it could be Alpine Allegra. I wish I could go to Switzerland with you." "You will another time," he promised her. The vagaries of her talk for some reason failed to repel him; he would not have endured it for a moment from his a.s.sistants.

Yet it was plain that their hilarity-half secret, half capricious-had nothing at all to do with a handkerchief. -They had forgiven one another.

"I don't see why you had to cry," my mother said, dropping down to me; she was softened. "I'm taking you home, isn't that just what you want? What in the world is there for you to cry about?"

I could think of no reason. She was just then so pleasant and jolly that I felt ashamed.

"Then what's the matter?"

I had stiffened for her scent, but somehow it did not come, although she stooped so near: either it had worn off or she had forgotten to apply it. The fading welts of a pattern of hives stippled the long curve of her chin and ran down along her throat like spilled paint. Her face was close to mine and a pretty little dent in her lip, the remnant of her better mood, encouraged my reply; and because I could not think what to tell her I pointed to the bed.

"It's all dirty."

"What? What's all dirty?"

"The mattress."

"Oh, my G.o.d," she sighed, but she went to look down at it. "There's blood on it." She was examining the stains with revulsion; she had turned severe. "Enoch, come and see."

He leisurely crossed to her. He was pretending it was a joke-the same joke she had made up for him. "If it's Desdemona's bed-"

"No, look. Really there's blood."

He laughed outright, as though she were still recounting witticisms. "What do you expect, in Europe?-Is it fresh?"

"Fresh? Of course not, it's old, it's all dried up."

"Then there's no point in contemplating it. Stale murders don't interest me."

"Oh, if it were only as decent as a murder-more likely it's shaving blood."

"Or virgin's blood."

"Ah, don't," she objected, "what a way to talk, she's only ten"-snapping up a mouthful of air: it was difficult for her to simulate shock. "I don't care what it is, they don't have the simplest idea of cleanliness. They have no standards. It doesn't matter to them what they let you sleep on." She scratched a fingernail across one of the black spots, and jumped away with a little cry as though she had struck a spark. "Ugh, the slime of it. Something's wet."

She had come upon my tears.

"Rain," said Enoch promptly. "All the windows are stuck open. I don't doubt it's rained in on this bed the whole summer."

"You blame everything on the rain."

"Only wetness," he teased, "is that so bad? I like to contend with facts."

"And don't I?" asked my mother, smarting at this, "I always think of facts. I give a lot of thought to facts."

"If you did you wouldn't have brought her here in the first place."

"But I'm taking her back. It's not as though I weren't taking her back."

They began to bicker over me, but without intensity. I left them and went to the toilet and came back and found them sitting on the bed, separated by the glistering stains, looking at one another in a silence so piteous that I briefly mistook it for fastidiousness. But then I saw that my mother's hand lay directly in the golden urinous outline of a tear-furred stomach-sac. "We're going now," she told me, scowling. "You had better say goodbye to Enoch."

"Goodbye."

He put his forefinger below my chin and raised my face; it was a parody of what he had done with my mother. The arc of his wrist, lifting, was ironically exact: he required me to understand that his intention was sardonic-that I must not expect anything from him, that he was incapable of any gesture not a husband's, that not in the slightest would he crook a knuckle to fatherhood. He had a wife, no more; and deliberately affecting an archaism-a trick of his when he wished to make plain, by indirection, his aloofness-he patted his chest after a cigarette and sedately uttered "Farewell."

My mother was altogether fooled. "How pretty that was," she said as we sped down the hill in the car; we were squeezed all three in the front seat. Behind us, riding the floor, a pile of boxes rose to the middle of the windows, bristling with hairy rope: it was as though my stepfather had feared some sorcerous violence lay lurking in his ledgers, ready, if he did not noose them, to leap out and away. "How pretty to say farewell! There," my mother told me, "that means he wishes you luck."

He deposited us on the boulevard, in front of a canopied restaurant I had sometimes pa.s.sed while walking with my governess. But it was not the Palatin, although, while my mother zealously cut into her steak and I gnawed lamb chop bones, a piano-player sidled brown machinist's fingers languidly across the surface of a s.h.i.+ning claw-footed instrument. He was dressed as an Arab in a long striped skirt, but he had the pressed nose and extraordinarily opened nostrils of a Negro, and somnolent pale eyes. "P'teechka, maya p'teechka," he sang in what my mother readily observed (on the strength of having once been in-Moscow, which, for the effect, she just then called Moskva), was a seriously bad American accent. He performed thinly, in an impure, very high woman's voice, and when he finished a group of travelers not far from us put down their knives and forks and applauded. My mother went on eating-"I don't like countertenors," she muttered at her potato, "they're too eery," but I supposed she was thinking still of the piano-player at the Palatin: she looked remarkably cross. Hie seeming Arab, without stopping to acknowledge his audience, began another song, again in his inscrutable Russian: "Volga, Volga, mat rodnaya," he piped, "Volga, russki reka," but the travelers were dissatisfied. "P'teechka, p'teechka!" they yelled, giggling (the men behind their napkins, the women openly across their dinners), but he did not blink at them and would not play it again. A man in a white waistcoat, short and brisk, flew across the floor, in and out of the tables, with his toes pointed out and his full b.u.t.tocks vaguely jellying, to whisper in the pianist's ear; after which he struck a petulant chord and undertook to execute, with more vigor in his angry mouth (his lips drawn flat became purple petals) than in his hands, the "Rhapsody in Blue." The travelers at once turned reverent, chewing with the solemnity of superannuated conductors: every bite a baton. But my mother said without patience, "You're finished, aren't you?"-although I had barely started my pudding.

9.

We lay that night on fresh sheets, which the concierge angrily spread. "I could easily have given both these rooms out," she complained, her little nose wriggling like a caterpillar, in one place, without getting anywhere, "to two very nice honeymoon pairs, a double wedding only last week, on their way home from a visit to the capital. Such charming children, such good friends! They would not be separated, they asked for two rooms side by side, they had to be next door to one another, as at the nuptial moment! Bien entendu, I mean the priestly nuptial moment, nothing more, I don't poke into people's bedroom affairs. But then Madame Vand insists she will stay another night in this very room, no matter that I've already prepared it for newcomers, and gone to the trouble of laundering every sc.r.a.p of linen, not excepting the dresser-scarf, which, I a.s.sure you, was abused like a desk-blotter in a post office, but I don't say a word, I let it all go without a word, I'm famous for my good nature, although I a.s.sure you there's not a landlady in this vicinity who wouldn't charge for it, that hawk Berthe especially; and on top of that didn't I give her the privilege of conducting a conference without extra charge, and haven't I myself seen to every courtesy that in those so-called marble palaces she is used to in Paris they are too cold-hearted to think of? Well, thanks to her I've lost not two but four for tonight, and it's well known that new lyweds tip like kings-it's the wives' influence in my opinion, it has to do with their easing themselves after twenty years of continence: still, I've lost a room, they couldn't be satisfied, both chambers had to be free, you don't imagine I would give two couples one room? I keep up standards here, after all I keep up my own moral feelings, I didn't dare to suggest it. Cependant, they looked capable of it, those four, they might have made a riot, they smelled a little bit of something stronger than water. Still your mother might have told me earlier she was staying, at least before I took off the sheets. I suppose they went across to Berthe, in fact I know it, didn't my spying old man tell me so? I don't doubt she'll accommodate them, but don't worry, she's not a compet.i.tion, she's always empty, may the Lord bless her vermin. To tell the truth she grows her c.o.c.kroaches as big as dogs and they eat her out of customers and kitchen. Nevertheless won't she rake the francs out of those poor foolish honeymooners!-much good may it do them to be bitten in the act of love, that's a consoling thought. Not that the little wives looked without experience, I don't mean on week's worth, and neither one an hour older than seventeen. And rings bigger than their heads: the rich pamper their sons nowadays to let them give like that. What do you think, if a bunch of this sort ever dared to lodge in my house I a.s.sure you I wouldn't fail in my duty to stand in the pa.s.sage the whole night, if necessary I would give up my dear rest of which I never get enough, if only to make certain the bashful brides didn't skip from one husband to another! Berthe may not, but in this house I have my moral feelings to keep up. And why else would it have to be two rooms side by side if it weren't for the purpose of sampling one another's goods-you think I don't know what these sentimental friends.h.i.+ps are? It's not for nothing that I sleep with one eye open!-Here! J'ai tant de travail a faire! Tell Madame Vand I don't spread counterpanes this late in the day," she departed in a fury of self-satisfaction, "not when I know there's no appreciation for everything I have done for her, and I a.s.sure you I don't mind the sort of appreciation that feels the same as air when you try to get it in your hand!"

"What? What did she say?" demanded my mother, coming into the room a second afterward. She had gone downstairs to the parlor to telephone for a taxi to take us to the train the following morning. "I suspect it's a racket," she declared, not caring for my reply, which I soon abandoned, "they want two hundred francs more to come up the hill! I called four drivers, and every one of the four talked about broken cobblestones and insisted he's afraid of blow-outs-well, it's not logical all four should have the same story, unless the old bat gets to keep half of it. I'd swear she does. She probably sent that deaf old man out with a pickaxe to ruin the road in the first place, if I know her type. They prey on genteel people, you know, but I won't have it. I walked up that hill and I'd just as soon walk down it as get taken advantage of because I'm a genteel American." "Genteel" was her sneering subst.i.tution for "rich," left over half-consciously from her proletarian period. But, not so secretly, she really did think of herself as possessing instinctively distinguis.h.i.+ng airs. She did not fail to exhibit them now. "Well, answer me! I asked you a question at least three minutes ago. What was the concierge saying to you behind my back?"

"She still wants some money, I guess," I doubtfully summed up, for this time the woman had not spoken directly of a tip.

"Oh, is that all!" my mother breathed out, but hesitated, and would not permit herself relief. "She didn't speak of this afternoon? Did she say anything about the man who was here?"

I reflected. "I think something about its not costing you anything to see him."

"Oh, just because she let us use the room, the pig. If she knew how much it really cost she'd probably make a deal to get half of it," she mumbled to herself, and sniffed for comfort into Enoch's handkerchief. "All right, I'll give her a few francs then. She didn't interfere, I suppose that's something to be grateful for with such a snooper." Thoughtfully she twisted the handkerchief like a bracelet around her forearm. "I wish Enoch were here to tell me how much. He always knows just what to do in these situations, I mean when it's a choice between practicality and spite. He senses European people, you know. It's something that's inborn, it's part of having a political mentality," she said; clearly she was not addressing me, or even herself, but rather some imaginary adversary before whom she saw herself as her husband's advocate: perhaps the "people from Was.h.i.+ngton" whom he had gone to meet in Zurich. "Born diplomats shouldn't be wasted in obscurity," she concluded, and ordered me to bed sighing.

We slept until midnight, my mother deeply but irregularly; now and then she released an exhausted snore, so shrill that she frightened herself awake. Meanwhile I was propped watchfully on an elbow. "Look, it's clearing," I said one of these times when I saw her eyeS snap open, "maybe the sun will come out tomorrow." I was thinking how the roofs of farmhouses and the handles of wheelbarrows would throw their quick glints into the train-windows. "This isn't an hour to gape at the sky. Go to sleep, we have to get an early start, sun or no sun," die grumbled, and stumbled into her backless slippers and her hall-coat, groping for the doork.n.o.b. I heard her steps in the corridor, slapping towards the toilets, and then an interval, and then, far off, shouts, thumps, laughter, spinning nearer every moment, and the night-time slide of my mother's slippers seeming to draw it all behind her, a chariot of noise reined to her hurrying heels. The parrot-clicking voice of the concierge's husband whistled in the pa.s.sage: "It will come to no good, it will come to no good, it will come to no good." "Shut up, you f.e.c.kless rooster," his wife consoled, "no one else would take them, not even Berthe, that sloven, that paragon, who is so cautious she would investigate the good-conduct references of her own grandmother before selling her a pillow. Would you let them spend the night out under the moon? They won't leave any francs with the moon, believe me." "They have left them all with the bottle, you idiot. You don't imagine that just because I'm a tiny bit deaf my nose has stopped working? I tell you you are too liberal, it will come to no good." "You don't need to boast to me of the keenness of your nose, pantaloon, don't I know it already to my sorrow? Scarecrow! That banana of yours doesn't have to go far to sniff the stuff, no farther than its own end, which is often enough left to soak in alcohol overnight. I'm not easily fooled, you crackbrain, watch out whom you call idiot!" "Ha? Ha? What do you say?" "You hear when you want to well enough. Here, take the keys, let them into the corner room where the American international fonctionnaire compared techniques all afternoon with the Hollander's lover. As if he hadn't had a sample of her himself along the journey!"

And still clutching her wrapper, my mother threw herself on the bed. Her slitted eyes signalled anger. She dangled her ankles and the slippers fell off. "Thank the Lord we're getting out of here! They've actually let in a horde of drunken hooligans, two by two. I saw Mr. and Mrs. Noah in the hall, collecting in advance. This isn't a place for decent people. If you ask me I think they're running a bro-oh never mind, go to sleep!"

But the shouts and the thumps and the laughter rattled the house till morning. They called to one another all night in the wild sharp syllables of an aviary, exhausting the hours: "Irene!" "Paul!" "Therese!" "Guy!"-each call unaturally sibilant and gross and not unlike its neighbor. Eventually it was possible to recognize which name matched which shriek. My mother turned wretchedly in her bed; her backward-reaching arms encircled the pillow, the silhouette of her chin stabbed upward. "Ah, that pig, what a piece of spite-work, because I wouldn't tip her"-but she was listening conscientiously. Her lids beat alertly in the dark. "Paul!" "Alors, Therese!" "Guy! Guy! Guy! Guy!" "Irene, ca va?"-as though each screamed-at-the-ceiling name were some wondrous, drunken, wholly obscene joke. The names flew out of the big central double-bed where the four were cl.u.s.tered and pecked exuberantly at everyth i ng, like tethered birds-escaping so far and no farther. Sometimes only two were let loose at once: as when Paul exhorted Therese, and she did not answer; as when Irene stuttered "Guy Guy Guy Guy Guy Guy" to no avail. And then all four would rise up again with a clamorous swish of wing-tips and falsetto laughing astonished chirps: "Paul!" called Therese; Irene!" honked Guy; and Paul hissed back "Therese!"; but Irene, bird-of-paradise or merely pigeon, notched the night with "Guy Guy Guy Guy Guy Guy" a hundred times over, until I found myself wondering whether the barcarolle of all the names sung into that room, Enoch's ledgered names and these, and the names of those wanderers sans ident.i.ty or talisman who left behind their tracings of blood and waste and wine, and the names of my governess and the private visitor and the boy with the ringwormed scalp and the Negro in his Oriental skirts, and my own name and my mother's, would climb the wind at last to some great collection-place, some chief bank or storage-house of names, a nursery-bursary spot designed to nurture and preserve all the names of the world, the living and the dead together: so that immortality might consist merely in one's name having been uttered even a single time, by anyone at all. It would not matter if a king addressed you, or a garbage-man. Up, up your name would flutter, to be gathered in and pinned to the roster of all who had ever breathed; up, up it would fly, an a.s.surance of one's doubtful existence. (Hadn't I heard my stepfather protest "I am called Enoch, therefore I am," on those stubborn days when my mother scolded him for "blanking out," as she put it, because he would not hear her shout him awake-"Get up, Enoch; Enoch; Enoch!"-and because he willed his return into the self-extinguis.h.i.+ng nirvanic deeps of his morning sleep? For there is no proof of being, outside of one's own mind, Enoch claimed-housed by then-except for the solidly indisputable fact that one's friends call one by name. How can you be said to exist if you have no name? Who could prove a fly was there, if he could not call it a fly?) The sky began to whiten. One by one the cries and hoots next door died out, the squawks dropped down, the names came in to roost.

Paul, Guy, Therese, Irene. They slept.

I said: "Are you awake?"

"No," said my mother.

"I was wondering-"

"Don't wonder, it's bad for your digestion, you'll start throwing up. Am I awake! What else could I be?"

"I was wondering if there's a G.o.d."

"Oh my G.o.d," she groaned with unexpected relevance, "not that again. I thought Enoch settled all that with you."

"But is there?"

"I don't know, how should I know?"