Trust: A Novel Part 24

"Because of you?"

"If they expel Eleanor, you see, they're liable to expel others-they're liable to expel all of them."

I marveled at the burden of this revelation. "Including your fiancee," I said. "The Disgrace of the Prospective Daughter-in-Law."

His unexpected half-smile, agitating only a part of his affirming lip, carefully neglected to answer me. "At any rate it was through Bell that he got a copy of the paper."

"And saw the ad," I summed it up.

"Oh, he didn't see it then. He overlooked it while Bell was with him. But when he came home that same night-this was only day before yesterday, you know-he found Nanette pretty stirred up. She'd heard that Eleanor would be dropped from the a.s.semblies. My father said he couldn't approve of it more; he thought the contamination ought to be removed. That made Nanette cry, of course; she's full of histrionics. I suppose he regretted having started her off: he usually does. Anyhow that's when he came upon the ad-turning over the pages while Nanette cried. My father hates tears."

"It's part of his code," I defended him.

"I'm sick of hearing about my father's code," he said dully. "As far as I'm concerned it's the code of the lion and the Christian. Everyone seems to think my father is the Christian."

"He gives every impression of being one," I said.

"When actually he's the lion salivating in the arena, if you want to know the truth. He had it in for me, all right."

"It doesn't seem such a serious thing," I said doubtfully. "One little ad."

"It does to the ethics committee. The worst of it is my father is a senior member of it. It's pretty embarra.s.sing. And now you can't get a copy of the Sport for love or money. This one's practically irreplaceable," he said, folding it up and digging it into his pocket. "It's the file copy. He wanted to know whether I intended to get him disbarred and then to cap it by marrying a dope fiend."

"And the tennis player in the white shorts?" I asked. "Will they expel her too?"

"No danger of it. She won a cup for the school."

"Ah."

"And more to the point, Snearles has already promised to build them a new gymnasium if they keep her. That's Snearles Contracting, you know."

"Maybe Bell will build a gymnasium too. Maybe that's what-your father will advise."

"I've already told you I've stopped regarding my father as a holy of holies."

"What does that mean?"

"You know exactly what it means. He's not so virtuous as he appears. That Town Island business, for one thing."

I let this pa.s.s, or tried to. "And for another thing?"

"Isn't that enough?"

"One act doesn't imply habit," I said.

"If he can do something once he can do it again."

I felt myself on uncertain ground, and lowered my eyes.

"I told you I found out about my father's part in those expenditures of your mother's. The money that goes to the caretaker down there. I meant it when I said I always thought he'd kept his nose clean."

"That's a disgusting expression."

"Don't be so tender. He's not, believe me." He had put aside his cigar and was addressing me with the flattering earnestness I had always imagined possible between us, though I had never before seen it. It was like the conversation, I thought, of distant cousins at a rare family occasion-a funeral, perhaps. We had in common certain asymmetrical relations.h.i.+ps.

In response to this mood in him I was soft. "I don't think your father's implicated in anything," I said steadily.

"Up to his ears."

"Did he tell you that?"

"We've been over this ground, haven't we? You know what he told me."

"No I don't."

"You know all about it."

"No."

"When he asked me if I was trying to get him disbarred with this d.a.m.ned ad I said he deserved it for another cause anyhow."

"You said that to William?" I cried.

"And when he asked me if I intended marrying a-a 'dope fiend'-good G.o.d!-I asked him whether his reputation was any better."

"You didn't speak to your father that way!"

"How else was I to speak to him? You think it was easy going through that?" His head twisted away from me, obscurely b.u.t.ting the misty room: a wounded bison in torment. His voice was a blade. "It killed me to find out about him. It killed me."

"Your father hasn't done anything. It's all on account of my mother-"

"You do know about it."

"No," I said fearfully.

"You told me yourself-on the telephone. You said there was a museum there. A marine museum."

"I was-only guessing," I faltered.

"You knew about the estate. Your grandfather's property-where your mother grew up; You knew about it," he insisted.

"Only after you told me. I thought it had been sold long ago." I hesitated before I brought out a sudden lump of rage: "You're the one who knows everything! You're the one who reads my mother's file. You're the son of the trustee!"

He said slowly, "What my father did isn't in the file." And then, while resolutely I sought out his look: "The vital things never are."

I stiffened.

"Even the divorce papers aren't there," he said.

"Neither of them?"

"What do you mean, neither-neither party's?"

"No," I said. "Neither divorce."

"Nothing," he quietly affirmed.

A pa.s.sage of pity, unsure of itself and useless, uninvited yet unmistakable, intervened curiously between us: pity one upon the other.

He said, "This is no place to talk. Come on out," and I followed him through a sunless corridor, blind-dark after the brilliant and busy inner room, lit by those long daystruck panes, where we had conversed unnoticed under the weaving crowd's negligent eye, into one of the windowless cubicles I had earlier observed.

He shut the door and without delay told me a story.

I heard it and did not recognize it and half believed it and half knew it to be false and a fabrication, though thinking William ingenious still: continuing to suppose the tale a s.h.i.+eld set out to deflect any suspicion of Tilbeck's presence in that place, and at the same moment wondering at the lifelike quality of the lie, a lie too like truth to be a true lie; a lie beyond the limits of an imagination as dry as William's, perhaps; or else a lie so extravagantly like a novice liar's notion of what a model lie should be as to be anything but a lie. For it was very strange that William, so unpractised, should be so ingenious; it was contradictory that he should have invented, to avoid the sordidness of one confession, another even more sordid. If, as I supposed, it was part of his recognizable code (to which his son had just yielded the obeisance of contempt) that to spare my mother the stain of Tilbeck he should by other means stain himself, then the dye he had chosen was unnecessarily melodramatic and dangerously crimson. It was a barrister's diversionary trick in a man who put far more trust in doc.u.mentation than in oratory. Perhaps I could rationally expect him to have shown, for charity's sake, a moderate duplicity: but of theatrical art William had none; not from him had Nanette inherited her player's bent-his capacity for wholesale pretense of the pa.s.sions so far went undemonstrated. In short, I thought him honest, without deviation, after all; and, very reluctantly, still doubting my conclusion, I began to think the lie false. There was too much blood in it for make-believe-though by the same logic was there not too much blood in it for truth?

I did not know what to believe. I pressed my hands together until the sweat ran along the channel of the palms in broken pellets.

William's son, indulging himself in the rhetoric of precision, began from the beginning. "My father told me this: your grandfather died with an obsession, maybe only an enthusiasm, about the property. He had supervised the building of the house from the first-badgered the architects, had the porticos copied from the cathedral at Ferrara, and went abroad to select the marble himself-he was a nautical sort all his life. When it was finished he had a fountain built around an anchor in the gardens and called the place Duneacres." Without hurry my narrator let down his straightened and narrowed fingers for a search in his pockets: on the way The Good Sport in one of them crackled so loudly it startled me. He came up with a book of matches and muttered through his teeth as he lit his cigar, "I'm trying to reproduce this in an orderly way"-he puffed futilely, working up the light-"since that's how it was given to me. You see I'm taking your word for your ignorance," he accused, "though it's perfectly plain you've heard of everything I'm saying."

"I've heard of Duneacres," I said, "the name. I mean-" reflecting, while the cigar caught at last with a cone of smoke and a little flare in its tip, how I had a dozen years before encountered that word, meant for an address and curled like a salt-worm in my father's hideous hidden scrawl.

William's son showed me his disbelieving scorn by omitting even the smallest pause. "Of course. You barely know the place, and then only by name."

"It's true," I said heatedly.

"Then to oblige you I won't fail to be explicit."

"You won't oblige me if you succeed. I'm not concerned in any of it."

He bit down hard. "You think you can do without the truth?"-and would not have waited for my reply even if I had had any. "At the end," he went on steadily, "when his wife was dead and his daughter married, he was living on the estate all alone, though with one of the largest household staffs in the country. At one point, I think, there was an ancient spinster aunt in his charge. She predeceased your grandfather by a year, if I'm correct. The fact is-" He turned on me. "What?"

"My mother's great-aunt Huntingdon," I murmured thoughtfully. "She's the one I'm supposed to look like."

"I'm sure you will some day," he said with a smoke-hung scowl, "if you can get longevity to support you in it. Though I understand that your grandfather was only in his sixties at his death. He died just seven months after the marriage." He glanced up purposefully, but saw with relief that he was not required to specify which marriage. "There wasn't anyone to inherit the place usefully; it wasn't needed-your mother and my father were all newly settled in"-would he say "our house"? or "where we live now"?-delicately he avoided it and instead grew civic: "Scarsdale. Not long before he died he fastened on the idea of turning the place into some sort of museum. His son-in-law, as trustee, was supposed to carry it out. The agreement was that the trust would cover the upkeep of the estate, in perpetuity; and on that basis my father got the county to sink funds into the plan. The trust, you see, was supposed to pay for the physical renovations, the guards' salaries, all of that-but the county had to hire the personnel. So they went out and chose a whole staff of experts, scientists, an unemployed curator or two-people like that. They weren't hard to find. It was the bottom of the Depression, you know."

"Oh," I a.s.sured him, "I've heard of the Depression. Though only barely. I've heard of it by name, so to speak."

He stopped short. "All right, you've made your point."

"I have?"

"Ether you're without any knowledge at all or you're totally callous."

"If I'm allowed a choice-"

"If you knew anything about it you wouldn't laugh at it. They have kept it from you," he said gravely.

"Then do you think you should take it on yourself to reveal it?" I inquired.

"You want me to have scruples, is that it? When only a little while ago you were advising me to model myself after my father!" He walked away, gave me his back, and confronted the drab wall. "The whole crux of the story is that he didn't have any," he said, from afar. "He never went through with it. He simply let the place go to rot. The county had to renege-they were left with all those commitments of jobs, and no jobs."

I was puzzled, though not yet affected.

"William must have had a reason for it," I ventured.

"Oh, a reason!" His spine quickened with spite and repugnance. He spun and spat: "Listen, there was a bunch of letters from these men. Fifteen men all together. Grown men, and they pleaded like sheep. What do you suppose a job like that was worth to an educated man in 1933?"

"They must have got on somehow."

"Got on!" he threw back at me. "As a matter of fact fourteen of them did. They came; then they went back to where they had come from. The difficulty was that fifteen had been hired. -Though I shouldn't call it a difficulty: the arithmetic couldn't be simpler. I imagine even you can cope with it. They got on, if that's what you want to call being out of a job in those times-haven't you read, don't you have an ounce of historical imagination?-They all got on but one." He blew out a round and violent cloud: in that tiny room it had the smell of enclosure and wariness without hope. "His name was John Vermoulian. He happened to be the youngest of the lot, just out of school-it was the chance of his life." A vagrant and unsentimental sn.i.g.g.e.r accompanied the last phrase; I was being treated to the iron in irony. But he went straight on: "It was a good connection, the perfect opportunity, and on the strength of it he was able to get himself engaged to a girl of a family which ordinarily wouldn't have touched him. They used to call that sort of thing a love match-in olden times," he sneered. "We don't have them any more. The girl's father was a doctor high in the community-naturally he wouldn't hear of it, it wasn't decent enough for him-the son of Armenian immigrants, after all-you see his point. Though they did have a little family restaurant which was hanging on nicely in spite of the times; it had seen the boy through college in fact. In a way they had their own hopes. It didn't help, by the way, that the boy had educated himself in a thoroughly impractical science-in the doctor's view of it, I mean. He was twenty-five; his own family was as practical as the doctor and their solution was to urge him to come and be a waiter in the business and forget the girl. Meanwhile on his side of it the doctor kept on resisting and warning-but when the job came through the idea of the museum won him over. It was honorable and it was almost a profession. And anyhow a museum has a cla.s.sical sound to it." He broke off angrily, "What's the matter?"

"Letters-you said there were letters."

"d.a.m.n it, aren't you following me?"

"You didn't see the letters," I said uneasily. There was an alarming tangibility in this account. Though William had suppressed as figment the fact of the impious Tilbeck, reducing him negligibly and namelessly to hobbling caretaker, and now-and-then guardian of a weedy ruin, the drift of the tale showed it no longer likely that a simple figment stood in Tilbeck's place.

"It wasn't necessary to look them up," William's son proposed, "even if I had known where to look. My father admitted to them readily enough. He went and got them and threw them on the table and called them Exhibit A." I heard; I took my breath slowly; I credited it all. "After he had begun he admitted to every part of the thing. He didn't try to duck any of it, I'll give him that. What would have been the use? Foul is foul. And if he didn't withhold the end, what else could he have thought worth hiding?"

Tilbeck. But though I knew the answer I seized on the question. "The end?" I repeated, sharply wondering.

"There was an end. When this boy found there wasn't going to be a job after all, he went out into the woods behind the house and slit his throat with a fish-cleaning knife."

The sweat froze in my fist. I could think of no word to speak.

But William's son was narrow and quick and permitted no gap. He finished hoa.r.s.ely, "My father had lost interest in the project. You ask for a reason. That was the reason."

Thickly I tried it: "Maybe it was my mother's fault. It was her inheritance, after all," I conjectured. "Maybe she lost interest."

He shook his head. "No. It made no difference. He was the trustee. It was his legal responsibility."

"He wasn't expected to be responsible for a man's suicide," I said without effect: and added the familiar, perilous, useful, baleful phrase of escape-"according to the terms of the trust."

But it was an unwitting mockery and whipped his face.

"No," said William's son. "It was only that he was responsible for a murder." Then abruptly he threw open the door and by a lift of his burning cigar he commanded me out "That's what I know about my father," he said, and went off like the last of a dying species, his buffalo-head low, his buffalo-back sorrowful and unforgiving, leaving me standing there alone.

4.

Or, if my metaphor is unreal (but is it? think how stoic is he, genus bison america.n.u.s, early victim of genocide, the remnant of a race that opened nostrils once wherever there were gra.s.ses, and now to please a mere remorseful Government must populate tame tufted showpiece fields, subdued, without hope of animal pride, enslaved in showpiece herds, labeled "extant" though marveled at as near-extinct, a thrown-out plains prince mourning his old genius)-if, then, staring after him as after a debauched buddha, I indulged William's son in an image too unlikely, inferior to his sadness, construable as insult to his reversed state, spite upon his blighted fortunateness, bad thread shaming the perfect plait of his elegance-whatever the cheap sigh of rhetoric is over-quick in its whim to call that disfigurement-by-disillusion which stood plain in the face of fury William's son took with him-if I had chosen too ornamentally I changed and was simple. I watched him round a corner in the swagger of compunction with his pocket bulging and his smoke-trail thinning out and knew that I saw-simply-a proud dandy come down in the world: a moral dandy betrayed by the shock of dirt: a pretend-cynic wounded by the falling-short of pale and sickly virtue.