Trust: A Novel Part 19

"Tolstoy. So as not to offend him. He knows nothing about Literature-most great writers don't: all they know is life. Now ssh, what's this about philistinism?"

"Enoch, you're mean. Leave the boy alone."

"He ought to be able to defend his opinions, Allegra."

"Well, if you'd let him get a word in."

"It's a mark of diplomacy not to. I thereby save him from himself. Watch and see, he'll tell us the East is effete."

"It is," said McGovern.

"And decadent."

"Right," said McGovern.

"And tied to outmoded forms."

"I don't deny it."

"And under the thumb of the academic critics?"

"Absolutely."

By this time McGovern was viewing my stepfather with positive enthusiasm.

"Well, don't let Mrs. Vand hear you say all that, or she'll cut you out of her will."

"Enoch!" protested my mother. "I'm the one who's the real revolutionary-you can see it just on the face of things. I never print anything that doesn't have symbols, or an objective correlative at least, or tension between images, and things like that! I just said I can't stand formalism-"

"Exactly," said Enoch. "That proves it. You're effete, decadent, outmoded, and academic."

"I am not!" She appealed to her editor: "Am I, Eddie?"

"Is she, Eddie? There's a moral choice for you! Before answering, consider carefully the benefits of literary philanthropy."

"I already have," McGovern responded promptly, entrusting to my stepfather a tone both of solidarity and admiration.

"Well, am I?" she whimpered.

"Mrs. Vand," said McGovern, "you are the most avant-garde person I have ever encountered."

My mother giggled.

"An art pioneer," Enoch recommended.

"Certainly an art pioneer," McGovern conceded.

"Then why are you always arguing about the capital letters?" she demanded.

"I won't any more," he modestly promised. "Ora et labora."

"What?"

"Pray and work," McGovern said, folding the check in tres partes like conquered Gaul. It slid with the expertness of familiar surrender into the side pocket of his jeans, which publicized a ritual poverty as fastidiously and formally as a friar's rope-belt. "It's a motto to remember me by."

"You'd better come back or you'll have it for an epitaph. No later than next week, I'm warning you."

"On the stroke of thirteen minutes after three P.M.- That's when Albert Schweitzer takes his afternoon nap, you know."

"One of the philistines?" Enoch inquired.

"The greatest of them all," McGovern answered.

"Sound chap," said Enoch, when the door had closed. "Think how lucky you are."

"He has a very original temperament," my mother remarked, gratified.

"I agree, and if it works to your advantage I doubt whether you'll ever see him again."

"I just gave him a big advance!" she exclaimed, but with plenty of confidence. "I just gave him, let me see..."

"Don't tell me. Please don't I can't bear to hear money getting counted."

"That's because you've never had any to count," my mother said aloofly; her rapid look of scorn fell unexpectedly and brutally upon me. "Don't you have anything better to do than hover?"

"I'm not hovering," I objected.

"Then what do you call what you've been doing for the last half-hour?"

So she dismissed me; and because I did not know where she expected me to go, or what-aside from my concealing an attentive curiosity behind a false patience-she expected me to do, I went quietly out to the terrace, on the theory that it was the only part of the house that was at the same time outside of the house. It gave me the sense of hanging over the city (despite the cactus and the affectation of garden furniture and the anti-suicidal design of the railing) on the thinnest of wafers. Out there I might with justification be accused of hovering; but a fog of guilt hovered with me, and I wondered why. Then I knew, or almost knew: it was a ledge like that other ledge of my unredeemed childhood, a natural platform for one who is part of the scene and is at the same time outside of the scene-the habitat, in short, of an eavesdropper. And my mother and her husband devised scenes; they invested every conversation with a Doppelganger; they seemed to speak of an absent being even when they spoke only of themselves. In their most innocent discussions I felt myself an intruder whom they wished away as smoke is wished away with the wave of an ineffectual and wandless hand; but smoke distends itself and vanishes, or else has a chimney to go up into. I had not even that. Hence they thought me less substantial than smoke or imagination, and only noticed me when I got in the way of their other, their constant, listener, the ghost of their joint aspiration (or to be still more accurate, Enoch's aspiration which my mother, convinced she knew its nature, shared), to whom they addressed everything, even when they appeared to be addressing only themselves, even when they might have been supposed merely to be attending to the claims of subordinates and servants. This romance-whatever wraith-of-the-future it was that had won Enoch's concentration and my mother's allegiance-crowned whoever stood between them: for its sake my mother had to cause even her editor to acknowledge my stepfather's elevation; for its sake she had, long ago, to wreak upon my governess the news of Enoch's grace; and to succor, for the sake of its nameless name, the private visitor's dangerous laugh of avarice. On account of this secret romance-how foolish that phrase is, yet it correctly describes their betrothal to my stepfather's destiny, another foolish yet relentless and exact phrase-they sold everything and everyone for smoke. Not myself but smoke they were sending to that homme de genie, my evil-genius father, that Tilbeck who rose from murk like a half-forgotten creature of the strait to claim his tribute (I was educated enough in myth to know that in every tale of this sort it is a daughter who is taken to feed the slime) ; and anyhow what harm could come to smoke? They trusted in my unimportance, and meant me to trust in the same. Not that I had fear: I only had surprise. Without a concrete shock, it never occurs to us that we really do not matter. And we do not.

The terrace was like that long-ago ledge: a wafer in the air on which one acc.u.mulates reality.

I had not had much more than a moment to consider these echoes and matters new and rehea.r.s.ed before Enoch arrived and put Anna Karenina in my lap. "I think we've had enough of this. Keep it, if you like."

"All right," I said.

"You might take it with you."

"I've read it twice. Anyhow I suppose he'll have something to read there, won't he? It's not a desert island."

"Ah, then don't expect treasure!"

"I suppose he's literate, after all."

He peered evasively over the rooftops facing us and the crowded river, showing himself to be too diverted by the bright day to reply. "Your mother won't get out of bed," he said finally. "She's being self-conscious about her hair, actually. It's a bit of a vanity, but I imagine it is a hards.h.i.+p for her."

"She didn't send you out here to apologize for that hovering business?"

"No."

"Then don't take it on yourself. I forgive her outright."

He paced for a little and then sat down. "This is an interlude for her, you know."

"You mean Bushelbasket and all of that?"

"They sustain her, these literary interests, between events."

"She isn't capable of literary interests," I said bluntly.

"She's capable of events, however."

"They're not her events. They're yours."

"But she enjoys them, so it comes to the same thing. She lives for them."

"I'd like to see that letter," I said. "Tilbeck's letter."

"I've told you what's in it."

"All the same I'd like to see it."

"I gave my word to your mother-"

"Not to let me see it?"

"Not to produce it in any case."

"That's what I said. You always state concrete things in the abstract," I complained. "Like saying 'art pioneer' for dilettante."

"Which in turn avoids something so much worse. But that's not half so bad as the young man's saying 'philistinism' and meaning hooliganism wrapped in mysticism. Though where he fits Schweitzer I can't tell. Still, I imagine your mother thought he was talking about People's Art; but she won't stand for that any more-she's given up the whole idea of it. The one certain thing about verbal obscurity and that seven-types-of-ambiguity school of hers is that they're at least unambiguously and un.o.bscurely anti-socialist."

"You're awfully tolerant," I said, "when it comes to my mother."

"I like her."

"So do I," I admitted.

He shot out a restless little smile. "I notice she persecutes you somewhat."

"You too. She's always sending you after me-like now. She keeps trying for a Relations.h.i.+p. The only thing to do is ignore it. That's how it was solved before."

"Before?"

"By William. When she was pus.h.i.+ng him at me."

"Aha," he said with a crispness I had long ago recognized as both concealing and conciliatory. "She has her notions," he defended her after i minute; but he did not again deny that my mother was responsible for his uncomfortable attendance on me now: halfheartedly he rocked his big square knees; zestlessly he dug for a toothpick and played it between two lower incisors.

"And you have yours," I said, hunting for some part of his mind. "Only n.o.body knows what they are."

"Why? Am I missing capitals and commas? In that case 111 acquire them immediately. Without punctuation no one can claim to be a gentleman. The obscurity of omission is unquestionably as insulting to the perpetrator as to the perpetratee."

The last word made me laugh: the funny official sound of it conjured up an image of his traveling bag; and anyhow his sentences seemed to have emerged, unrevised, from the sort of doc.u.ments suitable to such a traveling! bag. "With you it's just the opposite," I exclaimed. "It's not the obscurity of something missing-it's the obscurity of abundance."

"A good phrase," he said, staring at the point of his toothpick, "if you can explain it."

"Like your briefcase-all those numbers on the combination lock. Too many numbers and too much significance," I continued. "Who'd know where to begin?"

"You'd prefer a lock with a single key? Like your mother; one easy pattern throws open the whole woman. Well," he said, "the fact is after plenty of years I'm done with that Pandora's box. I only mean my briefcase; don't construe that as a metaphor for your mother. Though I don't deny she's capable of letting loose mischief of her own on the world." Once more, and before I had quite caught up with what he weakly meant to be taken for wit, he suddenly unfolded the diffident fan of his smile, behind which he hid himself as shyly as a stage geisha. "You can have the lock as a souvenir if you want. It's a pretty good one-it was given to me by J. Edgar Hoover Himself, so it ought to be reliable. You might need it some day, for old love letters. -Unless, of course, the Senate doesn't confirm."

"You're not worried about that?" I said in surprise.

"No one likes to be raked over publicly." He drew his look from the sun-gauzed haze over the river to my unexpectedly conscious hands. "Or privately either, for that matter."

I supposed this to be a reproof: so I subsided, and let him be. "You don't want me to find the combination," I ended, with the sort of joke that always means what it says.

"Next thing I know you'll be taking up criminal psychology. Or lock-picking. Your mother's right," he p.r.o.nounced. "You've been educated into ordinary inquisitiveness. It's a sort of intellectual burglary."

"I want to know things," I confessed.

"But I'm not the one to tell things. Especially when they're not entirely my affair."

"I only want to know why he wants me all of a sudden-it doesn't make sense. He never wanted me before, did he?"

"That again. You'd better ask your mother about that."

"I know he never wanted me before. He always wanted money."

"Everyone wants money."

"You don't," I pointed out.

"Only because I want something else that doesn't happen to have anything to do with money."

"What?" I challenged. "Doesn't everything have to do with money?"

He gave out a curious little whistle that drilled the air: the hole it left, empty of light and dark, clean of happiness and unhappiness, neutral as another planet's moon, took our common stare. What my stepfather saw or felt lay unspeaking, although enlarged, behind the trap and fence of his face, which he wore like wickets-through them watching perpetually for the luminous, final, and victorious toss and advent of a ball. But I, unaccountably, in the aftermath of the solemnity of that high sound (for which he at once apologized by putting a finger in his ear, in order to show a couple of his bad habits one after the other, and the second offense even worse than the first, both derived from boyhood in Chicago, where he had been, presumably, indifferently bred-all of this he meant me to note), I sc.r.a.ped a foot across the flag-stoned floor and thought how I had paced just here alongside the parapet not long ago in the vigil-light twinging from the point of the narrow cigar William's son now and then brought up to wreathe the air; and how against the bored flat-soled tap of the girl's blue shoe (now always afterward blue seems the bare color of impatience, the color of the thing deferred), he tapped out those imperious questions freighted with money and suspicion; and there was nothing then that did not have to do with money-myself, the waiting girl, the tight cylinder of cigar glinting. And it was the same now, though daylight: the river muddled with brightness like a woman's scarf thrown s.h.i.+ning down, the railing three horizontal spears of gold: all of it a place and means for talking money.

And Enoch, whom my mother had not (so far) bought, talking money too: "Perhaps it's that I'm cold-hearted-I've been accused of that, you know-but money is an emotion that I lack," he said, willing enough now to settle himself into conversation. "I can't feel through it; that's the test, since everything has to do with money only if you're equipped for it from birth-by having it or wanting it, either one. The same with religion. If you have the capacity for G.o.d you see him everywhere; if you don't, you never miss him."

"I don't know about G.o.d," I said with mild experimental spite, "but at least it's true you don't get much chance to miss money."

"Only because of my circ.u.mstance as a man who in the traditional way has married an heiress with a very large trust fund. I don't go unaccused on that account either," he conceded. "In fact, by an uncomplicated a.n.a.logy, it might be taken as a proof for the existence of G.o.d."

"What, the heiress' trust fund?"

"Don't look surprised. It's what pervades, after all-it's your mother's most obvious perfume, attar of cash. It's there, it can't be denied, it's all very nice and fragrant, there's nothing wrong with it, it's interesting enough-only it fails to move me. Which however doesn't mean it's not all around us, do you see?-in spite of its being ineffectual. The commonest argument," he concluded, "for the Divine Presence."