Trust: A Novel Part 3

I swung the door wide and came face to face with William's son.

He set down the two plates of sandwiches he had been carrying and Stefanie introduced us. After the first confusion she discovered our surnames were the same.

"Say!" she e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed. "Are you cousins?"

"Us two?" I said. "No."

"You could be, you know," she pointed out, "several times removed."

"It's a long story," began William's son.

"It's a short story," I interrupted. "We're almost the same age, you see, and when we were four years old we were betrothed. It was agreed upon between our parents-the dowry was settled and everything. At five we were married. Now all we have to do before we can live together permanently is wait."

Encore un peu, the electronic voice of Jesus Christ kept insisting.

"I don't get it," said Stefanie, putting her knuckle against her incisors. "Wait for what?"

Somehow I no longer envied her comely little feet or her quick eyes the color of tea. "For p.u.b.erty," I told her.

6.

It was, I suppose, a kind of reunion, although we did not meet as old friends, and scarcely as comrades-in-arms whom an occasion has brought together. We had nothing between us, William's son and I, except the one cramped and tedious social meal, dominated by my mother's inconsequential monologue, of at least half a dozen years before. And whereas William's son at seventeen had resembled nothing so much as a young dog of honorable pedigree, he now had all the characteristics of a larger and somehow more humorous, more democratic animal-a horse, perhaps, or the buffalo as it used to appear on the nickel, neither grazing nor b.u.t.ting: nonetheless a figure of action. I immediately noted the loss of two of his former distinctions. He had given up his odd little calculated stutter and he had dropped the habit of clutching an important book for ballast. For both he now subst.i.tuted a more profane and impressive mannerism: he smoked cigars, not ordinary cigars, but a narrow, tubular, tightly-rolled dark-leafed variety, which imparted to his fingers a bronze stain of incomparable elegance. He was still very polite, to be sure, but a little cynically, I thought, although it might merely have been the shock-it was a shock-of his maturity. He had, as they say, developed. I had seen him briefly at the end of his boyhood; now he was at the high moment of young manhood. He was, as they say, riding the crest. The curious thing about this zealousness was that it could not have been predicted-at least not in the boy who had spooned up his soup with such ponderous forethought, like a pharmacist meting out a potion or a priest overseeing some libational rite, that day at my mother's table. He had developed, but not in a straight line. It was as though he had begun to form himself, and he had left himself unfinished-long ago he had abandoned himself for another idea. It occurred to me that I had been outwitted. I felt not so much deceived as maliciously but comically hoaxed. He had not even turned out handsome: his head, which then had seemed a bit undersized, but splendidly polished and poised and potent, now looked to be altogether too large for the rest of him, which was encased in black rough cloth. Even his haircut had a vaguely s.h.a.ggy air, so that he emerged, withal, a wonderful bison. That intellectuality which I had so much admired in my adolescence he had nevertheless retained (as if in spite of himself), but in a submerged and transmogrified fas.h.i.+on: he was still engrossed, still excepted from common fortune and common folly, and he still aroused in anyone who might be glimpsing him an unfamiliar Faustian recognition (in more intense shape, greed or envy) of his possibilities. Only-and this was crucial-his possibilities had changed. What they had become it was too soon to say, but watching him nudge the needle into sailing properly and restore the refrigerator plug to its socket and descry another outlet within easy reach of the phonograph wire and ply his hungry partner with sandwiches-observing all this astonis.h.i.+ng setting-to-rights, I began to perceive which of those beautiful possibilities of his beautiful boyhood he had foregone. It seemed to me very clear and very brutal and (above all) very commonplace. He had given up, as they say, his ideals.

I was able to take all this in bit by bit, as we moved from the picnic in the kitchen out across the ballroom to the damp terrace. The strides of the butlers, the groans of the debaters, the hesitations of the dancers, the martial obedience of the musicians had all grown desultory. Aimlessly the girls leaned their chairs back against the wall and examined the wrinkles in their dresses. One of the poets had gone down to buy beer for his colleagues and now they were all wearily tilting the cans up to their mouths. There was a pile of broken champagne gla.s.ses, fallen from a tray, at the foot of the buffet table; a bewildered maid, whose orders came directly from the head-butler-a former waiter well-known for his Germanic tyranny-stood weeping because the broom had disappeared. And meanwhile William's son was leading us in and out of these melancholy tableaux with the detachment of a guide ushering visitor? through an Egyptological gallery, gripping his thin cigar between his excellent lips as though he were well used to walking in the midst of things that did not matter and which did not at any rate affect him. I paced behind him, queerly charmed, and saw that halfway through the room he dropped his partner's arm, tusk-white and tusk-arched, on the pretext of having to re-light his smoke; but after that he did not reach out for her again and let her follow alone. As if to make it plain it was she who had asked for release, Stefanie stepped back reluctantly to my side; and the two of us trailed after him as deliberately and intently as rival valets or polygamous wives making the best of things.

The awning was dry enough by now so that the canvas Chinese birds with their upturned wings had begun, gradually and effectively, to show their dark b.r.e.a.s.t.s; but the aluminum rods which parasoled them into flight were still dripping, spout-like, with Oriental patience.

"Encore un peu," Stefanie murmured, coaxing the plummeting drops into the core of her palm-"encore un peu." Her ridiculous accent suddenly seemed plausible, there on the terrace: she tucked her little heels, sharp as sermons, into the new cactus, and when some of the nested leaves snapped in two and spoiled her footing, she scolded them-"Little pigs!"-vexedly and chopped at them with a delicate but forcible movement of her admirable instep.

"Watch it," I said, not really caring any more; "they're not footstools."

"Maybe they're toadstools," offered William's son, far away.

"Plants are such a bother," Stefanie lazily held out, "they die so quickly if you forget to water them." With the thoroughness of a radar-antenna she slowly pivoted her neck in search of William's son, who stood with his elbows over the railing, looking down at the river. "Your dress is fabulous," she told me, fixed on his back.

"It's from Paris," I said, embarra.s.sed; she had not asked me where it was from; she was hardly listening anyway. "My mother got it on her last trip there."

But this roused William's son; he came and tested the wetness of the chair next to Stefanie's and settled instead for the one at my right. "I hear Mrs. Vand is ill," he said gravely, but idly.

"She's in bed with a cold." I wondered what he thought of me. If I did not know him, at least I had always known of him, for William on his gilt-envelope visits had endlessly supplied me: I could name all his son's schools, and the collections he had kept at different periods, and how he had spent his holidays every year since he was seventeen. All this had to be circ.u.mspectly sorted out from William's accounts, for there were two younger sons and a daughter, and lately even a baby, and William's conversation (rather mechanically and dismally dispensed while he waited in Enoch's study for my mother to come down) included all his children. William was a little afraid of me: I believe the circ.u.mstance that I bore his name, old issue that it was, made him uncomfortable with me, as though I might somehow construe this isolated fact filially, or at least emotionally; hence he always sat with his great pink hands on his flannel knees, talking slowly but continuously-as if he thought I might at any moment spit up a "scene." Perhaps he more than half expected me to throw myself into his formidable lap, crying real tears. The barrier his egotistical family-talk put between us was defensive: he knew as well as I that I did not care what role Nanette was to take in her school play, but if we did not speak of Nanette we might have had to speak of my mother, which would have been dreadful, or, worse yet, of me, which would have been intolerable. Staunch as a mountain, poor William grew nervous when confronted with me-I was one of my mother's doings which he not only could not approve, but which he in fact entirely deplored and silently bewailed, like Chapter Twelve of the reprehensible Marianna Harlow. He regarded me as a serious and damaging mistake, and he feared I would ask him for rectification. He was always apprehensive lest I somehow exploit his obsolete relation with my mother, and this made me speculate whether it was really so obsolete, on his own part, as he imagined it: and so I was sorry for him and really liked him. All in all, it was hardly credible that he should have carried home to his boy information about his first wife's daughter-he never once asked for an anecdote, or even so much as inquired how I did at school-even if his boy had declared himself interested, an impossible notion; and I concluded that William's son was in a state of ignorance-half imposed, half preferential-concerning my mother and me. Half a minute later, however, I was doubtful:-from our" eyrie on the terrace we could catch, now and again, the furtive exceptional seaweedish fragrance, almost a taste, of the river, which usually smelled of electricity and dirty oil; and when, licking up a wisp of it, I began to tell how at certain seasons a ladder of scents mounted as high as the seventeenth story (enmeshed-I did not say this-with the spoils of briny triremes, and irrigated valleys, and the proconsular image of William's son, helmeted) he cut me off with a cluck and asked about my mother's trust fund.

"My father is its trustee, isn't he?"

I said I believed this to be true, although I did not understand its meaning exactly.

"He controls the amount your mother gets, for one thing."

"Oh, no-she can have as much as she wants."

"Not if my father doesn't approve," he pursued mildly. "It's in the terms of the trust. If she does something foolish with it he can withhold it."

"No one superintends my mother," I protested. "Not even William. She runs her own affairs."

"It's in the terms of the trust," he said positively.

"Nevertheless she does as she pleases."

"I'm afraid she's not permitted to-except as an indulgence. It's all in the trustee's discretion. But you see my father is very indulgent," he countered, and smiled, withdrawing his cigar, with half his face.

"I'm certain she gets as much as she wants," I maintained once again. "Nothing has ever been withheld. She spends her money just as she pleases," I repeated haughtily. "William has no right to discuss these matters with you."

"I haven't said he ever did," he a.s.serted. "You know I'm clerking in my father's firm this summer."

"What does that mean?"

"I've a job in his office-for the experience. It's rather nice. We have a coffee hour every afternoon at four. I expect I'll be taken into the firm when I graduate," he explained. "Right now I'm getting to handle doc.u.ments and things. It's very instructive."

I had to look away. "You've been snooping through my mother's papers."

"Oh, don't accuse-it's too stupid," he objected without heat. "Your mother's been giving away batches of dollars."

"How do you know that?" I cried.

"Not all at once, you see. I mean it adds up-over the years. That's why I say batches. It's really a tremendous sum all together. I suppose you think it's odd," he finished.

"It's not at all odd. My mother is always nurturing one project or another. And sometimes when she's abroad sh.e.l.l buy a picture."

"I can't tolerate Old Masters, especially on slides," Stefanie put in boldly, trying not to acknowledge how the talk was fatiguing her; "it's such a bother to keep gaping at the same old Madonnas. Anyway, abstract art is so much more expressive, don't you think?"

"My mother's interests are very wide," I said, with severity. "She has many charities."

"I'm not speaking of Bushelbasket," observed William's son.

"Is it eleven o'clock?" asked Stefanie, jumping up with pique. "I'm supposed to dance with Ed McGovern at eleven sharp." She turned hopefully to William's son. "You know why eleven? Because it's T.S. Eliot's bedtime."

"It's nearly twelve," I told her, and regretted it at once, for she pulled her chair closer to William's son and sat down again. "Perhaps it's your bedtime," I added conspicuously.

"Hoot," said Stefanie. "Hoot, I'm an owl."

"There's this fellow Connelly in the firm," continued William's son with an a.s.surance of conspiracy that suggested lights going off everywhere; "he's the accountant-very sharp, they don't come any sharper-not a thing gets by him. He's done Mrs. Vand's income tax for twenty years or more; I guess he knows her checkbook like the back of his own right hand."

"Why not like the ca.n.a.ls of Mars?" Stefanie inquired delicately.

"Oh, better than that-much better," said William's son.

"'The ca.n.a.ls of Mars' sounds more poetic"; and I recognized in this a tribute to the tutoring of Ed McGovern.

"But no one can account for them: they're only a theory. Connelly is far too sharp for theories-he has to account for everything. He's a.n.a.lyzed Mrs. Vand's expenditures and he knows them precisely."

"And then I suppose he confides them to you." I rose and took several turns among the cacti; the music, suffocated by the scarves of sweet wind which slapped against the terrace railing, came out to us funereally. We might have been in the vestibule of a chapel, wondering how much to press on the widow for the sake of her orphans. There was the sick breath of money all upon us; it rushed out dirtily, as from a beggar's foul mouth (that beggar who always waits in the vestibule), full of waste, clogged with sores and boils; and suddenly the chapel s.h.i.+vered with tiny sounds, obscure meek little noises, the cries of small coins-c.h.i.n.k, c.h.i.n.k-trivial and tedious.

The bow of my sash had come untied (pulled loose, I thought, by a finger of cactus) and a long silken train dragged ign.o.bly behind me, rustling its silver voice.

c.h.i.n.k, c.h.i.n.k, it slyly chimed.

"Listen to your dress," said Stefanie; and listened; and William's son listened; and at last I too was compelled to listen; and I heard the smothered call of greed.

William's son was not indifferent to it. "And Connelly is so meticulous," he went on, in his tone of thieves a-plotting in the dark night, "meticulous, you know how accountants are, and now and again this check would turn up, a certain check made out to no one-no cause, mind you, no charge, no invoice, no broker's statement, no charity, no bill of any kind, no reason on earth for it-money for no one in the world. And Connelly went to my father to find out who it was for, to name a category for it at least. He had to account for it, you see-he hates theories, and he has none of his own. But my father wouldn't reply. I was there, you see-I saw it all. 'Never mind,' my father said, and a terrible look came over his face. 'Go ahead and post it anywhere,' I heard him say, 'and never mind.'"

"What sort of terrible look?" Stefanie demanded, leaning close.

"Angry, but more ashamed than angry. My father is never ashamed. He was angry because he was ashamed."

"Ah," our companion murmured, "he's ashamed of Mrs. Vand."

"He's fond of Mrs. Vand," William's son amended, staring over her head at me. "He's engrossed in her affairs."

"I should expect so," I retorted. "Her attorney ought to be."

"But he doesn't think her responsible. I suppose he never thought so-not even long ago. Nevertheless he's fond of Mrs. Vand," he a.s.serted. "I imagine he's forgiven her."

"There was nothing to forgive."

"True: it was all unforgivable," he said.

"They did each other no harm," I declared.

"I'm in the dark!" cried Stefanie. "Were they in love?" she marveled, searching out my reply, "your mother and his father?"

"No," I gave out. "They were married."

"How absolutely crazy!"

"We," William's son supplied rapidly, "were born after the divorce-both of us. Don't get the idea that we're related."

"But in a way-" she began doubtfully.

"Not at all," he vouchsafed her.

"Not at all," I conceded, and reflected how I had once claimed him for a brother.

We sat for a while in the ambiguous air-after rain a mid-August night breaks the heart-and no one cared or dared to speak. The little orchestra worn down by the clamor (or my mother's program worn out beyond its last Valse Militaire), was playing a samba too quickly, in somewhat clandestine style, as though trying to get through each bar as un.o.btrusively (although contrariwise as loudly) as possible. The saxophonist had rid himself of his instrument and was now plying a s.h.i.+ning bra.s.s horn. Perhaps it was our distance from the dancers that charged them uncannily, like charmed snakes emerging from baskets: from afar they seemed miniature but dangerous: if too clever for snakes, then clever enough for leaping swords. They thrust toward one another and away, dueling, while the horn, choked off by the wind in our ears, rose and rose. It towered finally, and I thought of the bugle that did not sound again while I waited for it in the washed gra.s.s; but it was not the same. The horn was no more holy than the workaday lips, pressed to the tongue of the bra.s.s, of its shallow-jowled master-it did its duty merely, and screamed as well as it could, and promised nothing. The stiff high note broke off eventually, and the ball-room sent out applause like ululations of the leaves of countless paper forests; it was, as celebration, counterfeit and sad. Nothing in the world can be sustained, neither bugles nor hope nor woe nor desire nor common well-being nor horns, and even redemption, that suspect covenant, can be revised by the bitter and loveless Christ to whom alone nothing, not even life, is irretrievable. Relief is our reward for recognizing this truth, that the note cannot be sustained forever and the irretrievable can never be returned to us; and there is no alternative but to go on with the facts exactly as they are.

I came away from the cactus plants and stood against the railing, as in a s.h.i.+p on the high seas, and because William's son had done so before, I looked down into the meditative river. But there was little to see, only a moon-shaped excursion boat with its hundred lights and its hidden cargo of contraband lovers, and I moved instead to the other side of the terrace to watch the city churn inaccessibly below. The wind was strong in that corner; I turned my back against it and clasped my arms and felt the little hairs spring up on b.a.l.l.s of flesh; and the wind blew through my dress, and caught up the silver of its loosened train and flew it like a s.h.i.+p's standard, freely, over the city. It was a banner of presence and ident.i.ty, a sign to Gustave Nicholas Tilbeck that I knew him to be not far; it was a money-flag, and the c.h.i.n.k of money went rattling through it.

It made me reckless as a pirate. "William needn't wear his terrible look," I burst out. "It's impertinent of him to be ashamed for my mother."

"No; no," he murmured, smiling and smiling, "you don't follow. It's simply a question of where the money goes. It's simply a question," he repeated steadily, "of the terms of the trust." He bent forward, vivid with interest. "He's got to know everything."

"I suppose it isn't the function of a trustee to trust anyone."

"It's his job to protect the fund. And Mrs. Vand."

"Mrs. Vand protects herself," I countered, growing tired of it all.

"By giving away her money?"

"There must be some left over, isn't there?" Stefanie consoled.

"Connelly had to post the check under Miscellaneous Expenses," William's son informed me ominously.

"Poor chap," I said. "What a blow."

"Who d'you suppose it's for?" Stefanie wondered. "I mean the check."

"I don't know," I said.

"Don't you want to find out?"

"I'm not a spy."

"But you must think about it sometimes," she pressed. "Don't you have any ideas? You know-theories."

"I'm like Connelly," I revealed. "I'm too meticulous for theories."

"She doesn't need any," William's son confidently perceived. "She knows."

"She knows and won't tell," Stefanie improved. She stretched appealingly; she yawned. "Maybe the money's for something wicked."

"Or something good," William's son suggested. "A poor but respectable family, hoping someday to repay the bountiful lady, wishes to receive its disburs.e.m.e.nts anonymously."

"But then your father would approve," she promptly recollected. "No, it's for something wicked. What can you think of that's bad?"

They went on teasing and speculating in this fas.h.i.+on for some minutes. It soon became plain that it had nothing to do with me. All along it had had nothing to do with me. It was a flirtation, and I their plaything; and now, at its climax, I was in fact quickly excluded, and occupied myself with retrieving my sash and tying it behind me. It was difficult to do; it rustled and slipped away and tinkled and whispered; and for a time my hands were entangled in silver and gold. At last I contrived to finish the knot, and drew the ends before me in two full loops; and through the circle of silk I held in the air just then-it might have been the gesture of a panhandler who puts out his hat with both hands-I saw the two of them leaning across the little s.p.a.ce between their chairs, susurrant, kissing.

They laughed because I had glimpsed them.

"Encore un peu," William's son demanded flawlessly, and grasped her small bare complaisant wrists.

She admonished him remotely: "Is that all you can think of that's bad?"-kissing him.