Trust: A Novel Part 15

"But if there is a G.o.d, is it the same G.o.d for everywhere? I mean, the same in America as here?"

"Well, I don't see why not," she evaded me.

"All the same, I wish there were a different one for America."

"How could that possibly matter to you?" she argued, yawning enormously, her shoulders straining and her arms thrust stiffly out. "You're getting everything that's good for you anyhow, here, there, anywhere." She slumped down into her pillow and watched her feet change color in the awakening light. "Besides," she gave out-it was an educative afterthought-"there's only supposed to be one G.o.d. It's the whole idea of religion. They call it monotheism," she encouraged, vaguely stretching her knees; "I've just got to doze off for a minute"-rewarding herself: she had, with this piece of theology, done her duty by me.

After which she did not move until half-past eleven.

In the middle of the morning a prolonged hiss, misty with regret, crept up from a far part of the world, and swept away again: it was the ten o'clock train silkenly departing, repining, swis.h.i.+ng its complicated petticoats over a s.h.i.+mmer of track.

I escaped into the garden. The air tasted green and ready. Amulets of rain lay scattered in the gra.s.s-bright puddles and patches of glistening mud drying with a delicacy in the fresh warmth. The sun burned like a s.h.i.+p; it burned in the sides of the iron barrel, pursued by the growls of a confraternity of flies; it burned in the bush. A long feather-fan of light waggled in the hedge-duck's bill.

In the groove where the blue bicycle had leaned I found a limp little book, the pages all soaked and fused. It was so small, no wider than three inches, that I supposed it had slipped out of the string that had bound it with the others to the fender. Bits of wrapping paper still clung to it, but the violet dye of the covers had run off into the ground; the t.i.tle was almost watered out of legibility. I labored to decipher it; this would have been difficult for me even if the letters had not been blurred, for when I had made them out at last I did not know the word I had constructed. ENCHIRIDION, it was, and underneath: OF WOODLAND FLOWERS. I tried to force the leaves apart, but they broke off in my fingers like bunches of dough. Then suddenly while I turned it over, looking for an opening, the little book seemed to melt in two; each surprised hand came away holding the exposed part of a dampened page, with half the volume stuck behind it. On the top part of each was reproduced a colored ill.u.s.tration of a plant, in minute and literal detail. Every hair on every petal of the two drawings shone with the artist's struggle for exact.i.tude, and since the book had split open at its core, in spite of that outer drenching the pictures had been kept from ruin; even the print remained clear.

In my left hand I read: "False h.e.l.lebore; American White h.e.l.lebore. Veratrum viride. (Lily family.) The False h.e.l.lebore, a baneful but n.o.ble plant of splendid and vigorous aspect, may be seen blooming in wet woods from May to July. Its extremely poisonous thick rootstalks are used in the preparation of emetics, and its seeds can kill small creatures. The stems are stout and notably erect. Although adult beasts cleverly avoid eating its abundant foliage, young ones are sometimes fatally lured."

Above this was a drawing of some unfortunate spinach-leaves with greenish caterpillars growing out of them.

My right hand's prize was more attractive-little dangling bells of orange. The artist had not compromised with truth: the stalks stood rigid in a cardboard woodland where$$$ wind ever blew. "Jewelweed; Wild Touch-Me-Not," said the caption. " Impatiens biflora. Blooming season, July to October, near water. How like rare gems are these delightful flowers when dew dances in their little tender cups shaped like horns-of-plenty and culminating in short spurs the hue of a kitten's tongue!" Only momentarily did the legend give up science for rhapsody; briskly it recalled itself to botanical sobriety. "The name Touch-Me-Not almost certainly derives from the quick, spasmodic action of its ripe seed-pods which instantly erupt at a touch and spurt their seeds in every direction."

I thought this a very curious thing; it was nothing but a silly guidebook to put in one's pocket while walking in the woods, if one could, after all, find a wood to walk in; and being urban, I did not believe one could. It was so innocent I thought it sinister. It could not have been left behind, even by the wind, without some inner consistency of chance; for (according to the dogma of my stepfather) what appears to be chance is in reality the last confirmation, for the pious and the ignorant, of a superior intention. Just as-Enoch liked to say, with how much atheistic irony I do not know-when t.i.tus' monument to the sacking of Jerusalem, that great arch made for eternity, crashed among the plunderers of Rome, nothing remained to speak glory but those raised representations of the Scroll and the Seven-armed Candelabrum; as though not chance but the Temple had ruled, even for mere sculpture, what was to survive the boot of history. And I did not suppose it extravagant to think of the private visitor as a sort of t.i.tus who had come to arouse my mother's vengeance and to despoil her sanctuary, remembering how piteously she had beseeched her husband to shut him up, the legionless tyrannical but mild-voiced and laughing adventurer, to bring him down, while all the while he went on probing her sanctuary, a place and time forbidden and improbable to me: a bed in a room in Brighton, an alien unsung city, for all I knew as desolate as barbarian Rome, unimaginable Brighton, where snow had once grown beyond the door like a toothache-herb. Therefore I looked on that ENCHIRIDION as on the scratching upon some tablet or reliquary or arc de triomphe set up to outlast man-a trophy which, if properly scanned, might disclose the victor's ominous d.a.m.ning flaw, his singular l.u.s.t or proclivity, his doomed miscalculation or weakness, in short the whole secret of his nature's dark rot-precisely as the Arch of t.i.tus still reveals the fateful broken sneer of the G.o.d-emperor who believed that in diminis.h.i.+ng the Temple he diminished the Law. But these ozymandian ideas, as I say, are not so much mine as Enoch's, who in those days used to take satisfaction in emphasizing his purported descent from Solomon the King-if only for the pleasure of teasing my mother into a fever of exasperation. And although I was influenced by him more than he or his wife guessed (it was true, for instance, that he taught me by example: the homely opposite of which I would faithfully resolve to follow), I never succeeded in copying that swiftly acrobatical turn of his intelligence which could all at once outrageously a.s.sociate cabbages and kings, and could even call the symbiosis, no matter how peculiar or antipathetical, by the name of common-sense. To an ordinary mind (and the child-mind is the most ordinary of all, the least capable of convincing juxtaposition), there is a difference between a conqueror's monument and a picture-book; and if I could see a profligate general in my mother's tormentor I could not, on the other hand, descry thick theories-of-character in those two moist remnants of his appearance, those painfully decent bugless pictures so perfect that they seemed to bowdlerize nature. What I saw was, as I have said, innocence, or, at worst, whimsy-the mildest sort of domesticated caprice. It exactly matched the fact of the blue bicycle; it exactly matched the little flag at its tail; it declared nothing but merriment hindered ever so charmingly by impertinence (quite like the "Rhapsody in Blue," after all, insolently performed. It was all innocent, and at the same time all admittedly queer; all admittedly baleful. It was innocence out-of-place and therefore suspect; yet innocence all the same. My mother had awaited evil in a conviction of harm, a certainty of terror, and it had come riding in upon the wrong vehicle, wearing (undoubtedly) the wrong clothes, lull of old wrong anecdotes, gus.h.i.+ng freshets of wrong laughter; and instead of leaving behind the correct imprint of its cla.s.s-an unmistakable cloven hoof eloquently delineated in slime-it had stamped in the mud, wrong again, the comfortably innocent mark of a bicycle tire. And as if this were not wonderful enough, the protocols of Beelzebub had turned out to be nothing more pernicious than the jewelweed's habits and the h.e.l.lebore's way.

Jewelweed and h.e.l.lebore! The private visitor-in spite of everything-was fond of hunting for commonplace flowers in non-existent woods: a poacher of gardens. I thought how relieved my mother would be, and scarcely able to wait for her to waken I set the little book out to dry in the sun; then lay in placid ambush.

At noon the honeymooners arose with a clamor, and began throwing their shoes out of the window. "Therese!" "Paul!" "Irene!" "Guy!" they cried as the shoes came flying down; but a bit of rusty scrollwork in the railing caught the tall red heel of one of them and held it fast. "Guy!" shouted the girls; "Paul!" shouted Guy, and after a minute a furtive young man crawled out upon the ledge in a loincloth made out of a towel, with a scared face nearly as red as the shoe (which he saved), and big intricate ears that somehow seemed far more naked than the rest of him. "Paul!" they applauded as he climbed back in; and immediately the shoe, wrapped in the towel, went soaring away. In midair the bundle separated: the towel fell here, the shoe there. After the shoes they tossed out a pair of blankets; next someone's eyegla.s.ses, which landed safely; and finally the girls' underwear. Garters and bra.s.sieres gracefully descended, ballooning, pants were briefly inhabited by the breeze of flight-but there were not enough of these to content the throwers, so they cut open a pillow and beat it on the frame of the window and sent out ten thousand eddying feathers. A white storm stirred in the sky, until little by little its center floated away, disperSed, and wandered downward to nest in the gra.s.s. A feather fluttered over the drawing of the h.e.l.lebore, then settled. I blew it away. "Guy, Guy, Guy," they endlessly praised. The whole yard looked full of snow.

I called out, "Come and see," for my mother just then appeared on the porch with the concierge, arguing bitterly. Meanwhile the concierge wrung her ap.r.o.n, clutched at her hair, put a finger up her nose, another in her ear, wiggled a loose back tooth, and finally as a last vain resort, crossed herself. "I do not understand," she was saying over and over again, although it was in a version of French that my mother scolded: "please to proceed more slowly, I have the difficulty..." But my mother went on complaining hoa.r.s.ely: she had not been allowed to sleep, she had been forced to oversleep, she had missed the ten o'clock train, the taxis would not come up the hill. "Madame Vand," the concierge began, and from the half-conciliatory, even obsequious style of her rapid peasant's hands I concluded that my mother had been intimidated into giving her a tip after all-which made her contempt so much the bolder, since she had in effect paid for the felicity of exercising it. "Madame," the concierge once more attempted, but my mother, incensed, broke into violent English: "Madam! Look here, don't you call me such a name! 1 know who's the Madam around here! I know what sort of a place you're running!" and to display her vehemence she almost waved her arms, but luckily at the last instant happened to remember that this was one of those disgusting practises, typical of Mediterranean peoples, which she was always deploring, since she regarded it as a habit nourished only in the blood of inferior races-and just in time she pulled her uplifted hands to her head and pinned her hat down tight, quite as if this had been her intention from the beginning.

"Come and see," I said impatiently. "Look what I've found."

"Found where," she answered, continuing to glare at the concierge, although she knew perfectly well that scarcely a word was comprehensible to her. Neither was French, however; her French was almost never comprehensible to a Frenchman; and as long as they weren't going to understand her anyhow, she had long ago decided not to be understood in the world's only truly easy language-through sheer good fortune her own. "Found what," she said carelessly, returning to the attack. "The taxis won't come up the hill, there's a racket going on. all night-and look here, when it comes to rackets I'm not that naive, don't tell me you're not in cahoots with every driver in town!" ("Ca-hoot, Ca-hoot," said the concierge, who was apparently eager not to miss an opportunity for adding a new word to her foreign vocubulary. Perhaps she thought it useful for tourists. "Ca-hoot," she repeated willingly.) "A brothel!" my mother was saying, "and outright, and with a child next door!"

Since she plainly meant me, I hoped I could now get her attention. "Look," I called again, "look what I found near the hedge."

"What, what, what," she acknowledged, and stepped off the porch, the concierge pursuing, all the while imploring "Ca-hoot," as though this were some singularly efficacious American term denoting great courtesy; she must have supposed from my mother's emphatic tone (had not my mother politely-albeit excitedly-addressed her as "Madame" again and again?) that it was a very important word indeed, suitably all-serving, a possible sesame to good will (it had chronologically followed the really good tip my mother had certainly produced-the poor woman could not count in francs, and always overestimated-far larger than the concierge had dreamed). "In cahoots with each and every one of them," my mother was still insisting, dipping an unsuspecting foot into a carpet of feathers. The word sounded unusually businesslike, firm, yet not unfriendly. "Ca-hoots," the concierge mouthed it, adding a highly audible "s" to give the syllables a native sophistication; it seemed she intended to memorize them then and there. But "Oooowah!" she suddenly wound up; and "Ooooh!" my mother joined her; for a moment they spoke an identical language of animal surprise. Overhead a second and a third pillow were being emptied-it snowed convulsively in their faces. The two of them stood howling. "Ah, the little beasts!" screamed the concierge. " C'est se moquer du monde! I'll get them! Nothing is surprising nowadays! I'll show them! I'm not a moralist, even Our Blessed Lord forgave the woman ... Little beasts! No wonder Berthe wouldn't have them, this is her revenge on me-stop! Stop! You are destroying property, what do you think, par le temps qui court rien n'est surprenant! Murder! Murder!" A cloud of feathers-this was the fourth pillow-drowned her arms, whitened her hair, coated her lips. She spat and caught a feather on her tongue and spat again, while the honeymooners deliriously celebrated their hero-"Guy! Guy! Guy!" "Guy is it! I'll show you Guy!" yelled the concierge. She stooped quickly to grab a shoe and aimed straight for the open window; my mother picked up another and did the same. The girls, retreating, squealed and swelled with the pleasure of warfare, but the young men hung over the ledge, feigning gallantry with a diffidence that seemed to plead for fig-leaves, and posed like sheepish shortstops, elbows out against the missiles; and the shoes sailed past their heads. "That's not the way," said my mother, who sometimes liked to boast of how good she had been at volleyball (under the auspices of Miss Jewett's Cla.s.ses, circa 1928, in the bas.e.m.e.nt gymnasium of Saints-Cecilia-and-Elisheva-of-Haworth's); she reached for another shoe, a man's big brogan, but it only struck the side of the house and chipped a s.h.i.+ngle and came swiftly down again. "Bad shot," my mother called out with a teamcaptain's groan of dismay. "Now they will show themselves naked, will they?" screamed the concierge. "It does not matter that I slave night and day for the sake of honor and a good name, they will come and stand on the roofs with all the machinery of their sin open for the world! In, go in, hide yourselves! Like cats on a fence! Since the war the fathers don't whip the sons, and the sins of the fathers set the teeth of the sons on edge-believe me, if they had me in the Government-cats, go back in, what do you imagine G.o.d made trousers for?-shame is worse than poverty, and better than gold is a golden reputation, don't think I don't know the words of our Holy Saints," she went on wildly, running back and forth in the mud and punching air. In response Paul and Guy merely grew braver and whistled through their teeth to demonstrate exactly how divine doctrine had set them on edge, and behind them Therese and Irene tinkled and sneered. "Now watch this," my mother promised, weighing in her hand the red pump with the long sharp heel: shrewdly and expertly she balanced it behind her ear and heaved it. The concierge watched its trajectory with a loosened jaw, spewing alarm; the boys ducked, the girls shrieked, there was a distant indoors crash. "The window!" said my mother looking up; but the window was intact. "Oh oh! Then it's the mirror!" she gave out. She was enjoying it all. "The mirror over the dresser. There's seven years bad luck for you! Sept ans-" she tried it, but abandoned it in a suffocation of laughter. The concierge fled in the direction of the destroyers of property, encountering her husband on the way, his mouth full of complaints and bread. Half a narrow loaf stuck up from his pocket. "Eat the profits, you!" she stormed. "Go upstairs and throw them out! But for you I would never have consented to admit them, rooster! Grandson of an a.s.s! Wastrel! Old monkey, see that they scat before I send you with them!"

They vanished, the two of them, angrily breaking the long loaf between them and brandis.h.i.+ng the pieces at one another like a pair of caveman's clubs, while my mother in her toga of feathers crossed the white-strewn gra.s.s. "Here, help me get this stuff off," she commanded cheerfully-"how it sticks!" With rounded cheeks like a caricature of Aeolus she peered down her bosom and blew and blew. The feathers clung to her as poignantly as blossoms; one by one I flicked them away. "Don't pick at me," she objected, "just brush me off, can't you? If Enoch were here I bet he'd die laughing-my G.o.d, look how I'm shedding, what a nuisance! But I don't mind, it was worth it, I feel absolutely avenged." She lowered her head so I could sweep the feathers from her nape. Her shoulders and neck were pink with exhilaration. "The fact is she deserves it all, that woman-I wish I'd smashed the window too. What a cheat! She pretends she's the concierge in order to get tips, and she's really the landlady, she owns everything"-this seemed a plausible revelation-"don't think I didn't see through her from the first"-this was certainly false-"but listen, they're all cheats, they've gall enough for anything, it wouldn't surprise me a bit if that chauffeur goes ahead and sues. -Enoch thinks he will, you know. It'll just be spite if he does. Are they all out of my hair, those d.a.m.n feathers?" She shook herself delightedly and looked around her. I almost thought she was in search of another shoe to throw, but instead her quickly darkening eye lit on the ENCHIRIDION. "What's that filthy little book you're fooling with?"

"I'm not fooling with it, I'm drying it."

"You're always fooling with something filthy," she said, staring.

"It's what I found. See, the pages are all stuck."

"Oh for goodness' sake! Found where? I've already asked you half a dozen times, haven't I?" she complained, picking up both pieces between two fingers and dangling the bunched leaves.

"In the gra.s.s. Where the bicycle was. It fell off."

"What?"

"It fell off his bike. There were a whole lot of books strapped on. Nick's bike, I mean."

"Don't say that!" she cried.

"Say what?" I wondered, undistressed.

"That name, Nick."

"Isn't that his name? I thought you said it was his name."

"It doesn't matter. As far as you're concerned he has no name."

"But what can I call him?"

"He's nothing to you," she said fiercely. "You don't have to call him anything."

"He isn't coming back?"

"You can bet he isn't!" Spitefully she let the halves of the little book drop to the ground.

"Not even to get his book? I mean after he sees it's missing.

"To get his book!" she sneered; all her good humor was gone. Angrily she slapped away a feather caught in her sleeve. "That's how you catch germs, haven't I told you often enough?-grabbing at every dirty thing you see. First those bullet-things, now this."

"It's not a dirty thing," I objected. "It's a real book-it's got pictures of flowers. Look, it's full of flowers." I handed it up to her, insisting. "What's that word mean?"

She absorbed it for the first time. "Enchiridion? I don't know, a manual, I think. I think that's what it means. Like a handbook. I had something called Enchiridion once-" But she trailed off purposelessly. "Let me see it." She took the limp pages and began to read out words here and there, elliptically: "Touch-Me-Not. False American-What a sneak. Oh. what a sneak."

"One of those you read is poisonous," I said enthusiastically. "You chew it and it kills you."

But my mother's look was rooted in print. "False American h.e.l.lebore," she repeated. "Touch-Me-Not. Ah, that sneak! That petty sneak! He'd try anything!"

"Is he a gardener?" I asked.

"Who?"-She lifted her head suddenly.

I blew out a recklessly defiant, but soft, sigh. "Nick," I p.r.o.nounced it.

"A gardener? Who said he's a gardener?"

"Because of the flowers," I said, "a whole book full of flowers."

"Well, what of it?"

I turned briefly silent at the uncalculating oddity of her reprimand: hadn't I expected her to be pleased by the private visitor's artless droppings? But she did not think them artless. She rubbed her foot in the feathered lawn and speculated; now and then her blouse grew vast With agitation, although she tried to s.h.i.+eld her big bold breathing with an arm flung across her chest-but I was not so much curious as disappointed.

"Can I take it with me, to look at on the s.h.i.+p?"

"No," said my mother.

In reaction I began to negotiate. "But when it dries the pages will come all unstuck, won't they? And there'll be more flowers."

"You can do without flowers," said my mother.

"I only want to look at the pictures."

"No. You'll be sick anyway. You've never once not been sick on a boat."

"I won't be if I have something to do. I mean something to look at."

"Not this." She glared. "What do you want this for?"

"I don't know. I just want it." I really did not know, so I said what sounded to me the most reasonable. "I want it for a souvenir."

She broke out wrathfully, "A souvenir! A souvenir actually! If I thought you knew what you were talking about I'd dap you-I did it before and I can do it again, / don't mind. If Enoch hadn't had to leave, he'd know what to do with you!" she exclaimed in her illusion of her husband's a.s.sured competence with me-if only he had been willing to extend himself. She spun out a little thread of suspicion. "Just what do you imagine it's a souvenir of?"

I was afraid, a.s.sessing her predictable ire, to say the truth-that I had coveted the blue bicycle, and would have liked to think of h.e.l.lebore and jewelweed riding it-and said instead, "Of-him" because I did not dare just then to brave his name.

A fever blossomed in her face. "I told you he's nothing to do with you! It's that Dutchwoman," she informed herself, "she filled you with things. How I'd like to get my hands on her!"

"I can feed her poison flowers," I politely offered, "if you want," disposing on my mother's palely clenched knuckles a smile of peace grown out of imagined vengeance: here was the villainous Anneke on the beach, she who had threatened to send me among the fearsome Arabs, sucking on a stem of h.e.l.lebore; she sucked, and sucked again, and fell delightfully dead.

"Where did you get this?" persisted my mother.

"I told you. In the gra.s.s."

"When?"

"Before. While you were still asleep."

But she was not satisfied. "She didn't give it to you? Anneke?"

"It fell off his bike and I found it," I said again. "If he doesn't come back for it it's mine, isn't it?"

"He won't come back," my mother said grimly.

"Then it's mine," I said. "Losers weepers."

"It's n.o.body's," she said, and marched across the lawn of feathers to where the iron rain-barrel stood under a black halo of flies; with an arced and lifted arm long-sleeved as a judge's she let fall the little ENCHIRIDION. h.e.l.lebore and jewelweed splashed down; up charged the flies in broken battalions. "There," said my mother, returning, stirring up around her heels as she walked a white downy dust: "I know what to do with his little props-he came with the tools of his trade, all right! It just surprises me he didn't bring along a black silk hat to pull them out of. You didn't happen to find a black silk hat too?"

"You threw it in the barrel," I said bitterly.

"Well, where else? It's as good a place as any to toss a dead rat."

"It wasn't a dead rat It was flowers."

"Literal mind! All right, withered leaves then. I got rid of a few withered leaves."

"But it's mine, I wanted to take it with me." I regarded her with dull shock. "You threw it away."

"Why not? I can't think of a better fate for the rose of yesteryear. -Never mind, what's the matter? Don't stand there pop-eyed! What did you expect me to do?" she demanded; her scowl was creased with guilt. "It's a dead rat, believe me. Dead rats have to be disposed of, otherwise they bring the plague."

"It was mine," I accused.

"You're mistaken. Anyhow we're going now. Come on."

"But I wanted it for the s.h.i.+p, it belonged to me."

"To you!" But though she exclaimed, her face was stolid. "Don't tell me who it belonged to!"

"I found it."

She strained between not-speaking and speech.

"I bought it," she sent out at last "Or a copy just like it, it doesn't matter. The point is it's mine, and it's nothing I'd forget easily. I don't forget things! I bought it from one of those stalls in the Southampton station, pa.s.sing through, and used it the whole winter Afterward. You don't think I'd forget a thing like that, do you?"

Just that moment it was almost as though she were talking to Enoch.

"In the winter?" I wondered, interested at once. "In the woods?"

"Don't be a fool-woods, what do you mean woods?" Immediately she was restored and conscious only of addressing me, and not another. "I had to have realism, I had to have everything right, I couldn't make botanical errors, I didn't dare. I'm not that sort of person, slipshod. I had to have it for the picnic," she emphasized.

But I only asked again, "In the middle of the winter?"

She hissed at my stupidity. "For Marianna Harlow," she clarified with scorn.

Then I remembered about the flower-eating scene. My mother had once or twice recounted this to me: she regarded it as her legacy from Poe. "It's the horror part," she reminded me, this being the reason she would never again attempt another novel. On account of this scene alone, she maintained, she had used herself up. It had taken her three months to write, and had exhausted her gift. "When it comes to invention, I'm an empty mine. I show evidences of former deposits, and once in a while I cough up a few crystals, but there's not enough ore left for commercial exploitation." This, Enoch liked to interpret, meant merely that she was lazy; he was always suggesting subjects, usually historical. "I can just imagine your mother's treatment of Genghis Khan! Ivan the Terrible! b.l.o.o.d.y Mary! Oedipus Rex with dripping eyesockets! G.o.d giving the tablets to Moses with the mountain suddenly blowing up underfoot!" For he knew that she had a weakness for volcanoes.

"What chapter was that?" I inquired.

"The picnic? Thirteen," she said ominously.

"Then you weren't married to William any more?"

"I was working on Thirteen just before you were born." She stood with her head drooping, thickened by melancholy. From the windows of the house came the savage noises of a freshly-declared war. The bridal pairs were being driven out. The voice of the concierge's deaf husband cawed like an iron hinge. "It snowed all the time," my mother reminisced, but it was not clear whose birth this sign had marked-the difficult and remarkable chapter's, or mine. "It may have been trite, but I had to have the thunder and lightning," she admitted, "for the effect."

"In the snow?"-although, recalling her plot, I knew better.

"Don't be silly. In the chapter. Marianna invites all the factory folk"-"factory folk" was a phrase which appeared often in my mother's egalitarian fiction-"for an outing in her father's gardens-she's naturally against privately-owned pleasure domes. Of course the foreman comes too, and then an electric storm breaks out-"

My mother slung her long hands around the back of her neck, tilting her head upward to catch the sunlight in her uncertain nostrils; she put one foot behind another, and rooted her toes for story-telling. Recollecting, she trans.m.u.ted sadness to vanity there and then, despite the absurdity, despite the disparity of tale and auditor. Enough that she had an auditor, even if it were only I; nothing seemed unlikely, not the hour, not that hostile spot, not even myself listening, and since she did not think herself strange, I did not question my own impression; I only flinched at having to hear her tiresomely recite. She charmed herself; she plumbed her plot; she paled at her own ingenuity.

"-and Marianna and Deirdre and the foreman all run for shelter into the factory-owner's greenhouse, where he grows thousands of flowers, exotic and poisonous types, because he always wanted to be a doctor and develop a new drug-" She interrupted herself pleasurably, glad to sustain the telling. "His father wouldn't hear of it-his father insisted on his becoming vice-president of the factory. And Enoch said"-she laughed aloud-"Enoch said that's what made him anti-labor, an autocratic temperament derived from a lifelong frustration. It was a rebellion against the father-figure, with the pattern repeating itself in his own att.i.tude toward labor, which he regarded as a type of rebellious offspring..."I had no idea of her meaning; did she intend to go on standing there the whole afternoon, marooning me on an island of boredom? "Enoch thinks Marianne's psychoa.n.a.lytical! So maybe I owe more to Freud than to anybody. -Well, come on, let's get out of here," she finished suddenly.

She caressed her lips with her tongue in imitation of a movie-star's slowly burgeoning emotion, lowered her hands, and looked at me almost hopefully, as though I might unexpectedly blink out encouragement.

But I only clung to my resentment all the harder. "Anyway I don't see what you needed that flower book for."