Trust: A Novel Part 31

He did not move. "I blame the sinner for the sin."

"I hate religion," I said.

"Then you hate G.o.d."

"No," I said. "G.o.d hates me."

So we came to a standstill at hatred. We came to it quickly; and we stopped there. Where else could we have stopped? For William, hater of adultery, it was Christian duty. For me it was plain pagan philosophy. I hated William not because he had failed to become my father according to respectable plan; I hated my mother not because she had borne me in wildness and reared me in tame constraint; I hated my father not because secretly and fearfully I felt his alien and singing bravado in my intellect; I hated Enoch not because he addressed me always with the contempt of repudiation, as though I were a category or an opposite point of view-no, no, I was not so orderly in my hatred, I did not sniff after the weavings of the minor plots of past time. I hated my stepfather, my true father, my almost-father, my mother who had bedded with each of these, because they were the world. That was my whole, broad, and uncontaminated philosophy-scorn for everything that devoured my mind: for the world exactly as it stood; for all phenomena. In existence there is no might-have-been, though we contemplate it despairingly. G.o.d does not allow returns and beginnings-again-from-the-starting-place. What firmer sign can there be of G.o.d's cruelty? He has made the already-accomplished inexorable. We cannot go back to do it over again. There are no rehearsals. Each fresh moment is the real and final thing. Each successive breath is the single penetrable opportunity for its pitiable duration; there is no other, there is no beginning on the morrow, there is only what we have done yesterday, or what has been done to us yesterday; we live on our yesterday's leavings. To G.o.d we are inflexible facts: he does not judge us, any more than we would judge the barnward cow's round dung-tower in the field behind her. Dung is fact. Man is fact. If G.o.d were not indifferent to us, we might not be indifferent to each other.

7.

With this indifference-it is the indifference of hopelessness, the indifference of helplessness, the indifference of the badly born; go ask the cripple or the idiot how indebted he is to the world! (G.o.d so loved the world that he gave his only begotten dung)-I learned from William what he now began to recount. It was-as I have said-a father's tale, to begin with. I suppose he meant to justify those events of dereliction and death which his son had given me; but rapidly and mysteriously what had begun as the father's tale became a lover's tale. He told it so. He told it with a vocabulary of raw timidity-a lad's vocabulary. He did not own words of what is called, foolishly, mature feeling. Feeling had ended for him even before suffocating life had thrown the cloak of sentience over my unguarded and blackguarded begetting. He did not tell it as I shall tell it, with the crowding of chronology. In fact, as I remember it, the end came first, and little by little the end persuaded the appearance of its various preceding vertebrae, till at last was reached the central matter atop that story's spine; nor was it a long story. It was a story short, slight, and common; but it was not vulgar. If the story had been mine it would, I think, have been vulgar. G.o.dlessness inevitably produces vulgarity. Civilization is the product of belief. William's story-that golden lover's tale, mythic as Troilus'-was (though golden, though mythic) short, slight, common, but not vulgar. Into William's ken my mother had swum like an act of G.o.d.

8.

In those days there were dances. They might have been thought of anthropologically-not that such a notion would ever occur to the dancers. Visualize the girls (women now, pitifully trans.m.u.ted, arms and necks distorted, so that nothing glimmers of what was but the very inmost light of the eye-pupil, where the self knows the self)-girls in white dresses, my mother among them, in the not-quite-white of a gull's winter-subdued breast. A tea-dance: the cakes pink, the cloths pink, the young men's noses vaguely pink from the walk in the snow from driveway to house-and all of it anthropology, an engine, to put it starkly, for mating according to caste. Even indoors there is a consciousness of the snow. It heightens the spirit, like an incongruously cold liqueur. My mother-Allegra-is perhaps fifteen: a white perpendicular forehead and a white round chin magnificently formed out of snow polished and honed to the clever ice of perfect bone. Compare if you will Stefanie Pettigrew, a rougher sketch of the model, an artist's poor copy of the hanging masterpiece, daringly embellished with up-to-date technique. Is it youth does it? All of youth is beauty if one defines beauty as that which precedes blemish: but blemish is character, and a pretty brow without the scars of character signifies only youth, and not proper beauty, which is banded with marks and acts. This explains Miss Pettigrew, whose impudence the coming decade will have sandpapered into querulousness. Allegra is impudent too, but impudence is not yet a blemish in a child of fifteen. Allegra is subtler than Stefanie perhaps. (We are, you see, laying a swathe through the generations, and setting all the forms of youth side by side, as though they were for the moment immortal. And what a charm it is which allows us to think of Stefanie and Allegra as contemporaries!) You do not agree that Allegra is the slyer one? But already Allegra values freedom. Already her manner is wild. She is just a little more reckless than, in view of her station, she ought to be. And it is not the recklessness of simply lacking judgment, which will, like impudence, wear off into some more sober, or at least commonplace, trait. Not at all. Her recklessness is perhaps her most serious characteristic. She is one of those who have alertness without talent, intelligence without form, energy without a cause. She has come into the world prepared to believe in n.o.bility. Consequently her recklessness will last. If she is disappointed by the betrayal of a dream of n.o.bility-and through what dream of n.o.bility does a traitor not move?-she will avenge the betrayal by further recklessness. Her extraordinary eyes promise swiftnesses.

And William? Very well, William. Visualize William next. He is twenty-five and at the tea-dance given by his mother for his two younger sisters he is everything he should be, though perhaps a trifle timid. Nevertheless he is aware that dynasty must be served. Unlike Allegra, he is naturally religious, hence effortlessly n.o.ble. He does not think, as she does, of personal sacrifice, though he is conscious of duty and purity, the latter far more difficult than the former while entirely dependent on it. He supposes that in three or four years, when he and Allegra marry, purity will become a thing to be easily stepped around rather than an aggression against duty. He will of course marry Allegra; it is both right and appropriate, and everyone is very pleasant about it, though no one mentions it. Only what is unsuitable is remarked, and who could be more suitable than Allegra?-if a bit too lively. It is as much a made match as any in India, but this is not the sort of idea that one contemplates for long. William's chief wish at the tea-dance is that he were not quite so afraid of talking to Allegra. He knows he ought to, and more than that, he longs to. She dances by; her quick knees flash their silk at him mockingly. But William is at this time what is generally known as "a poor chuck" in company. This implies a number of matters, all to his credit: for example, it intimates that he is as devout as his mother, whose custom it is to read aloud to her children from her collections of annotated sermons. It also bespeaks a rare wholesomeness. Consider, a propos, the influence upon William of rocks.

In past years William took it into his head that he must become a paleontologist and dig up fossils. At school he was actually secretary of the Fossil Club, which went on Sat.u.r.day tramps seeking bones. Instead the boys' shovels kicked up the clangor of endless rocks, and the young William prudently wrote in his minutes: "Sat.u.r.day. A field trip. Chip of mammoth tusk found by Beale, engendering great excitement. Arrive at Natural History Museum just before closing to present mammoth-tusk-chip to curator. Curator has already gone home. Told by guard at door that chip is sea-pebble. Much indignation. Two days later: mammoth-tusk-chip turns out to be sea-pebble of highly interesting formation. S'cy of Club presents brief paper on history of sea-pebbles, is both booed and applauded. S'cy secedes from Club, achieving schism, founds Geology Club with almost one-half of Fossil Club members." This was William's earliest triumph of deflection. In later years he was sometimes called, by disappointed lawyers fruitlessly seeking compromise, The Great Deflector. In fact it was his continuing concern with rocks which gave William the revelation that enabled him to become a lawyer at all. In the first months of the Harvard Law School he did not do well. He studied without penetration. Perhaps it was because his father had considered geology an unrefined form of nonsense and explained that it was William's duty to go to law school. His mother, on the other hand, had reminded him that to tamper with the stones of the field could scarcely be G.o.d's plan for His children.

Thus William: "I have always disliked abstractions. It might be said that I understood the law from the moment I saw that it was real and tangible, as a rock is real and tangible, and that it was about real things, and not about things which stand for something beyond themselves. There is nothing symbolic in the law, I am glad to say. Unfortunately my son has taken a liking to jurisprudence, a murky and unlawyerlike subject. I trust to the influence of the firm to clarify his views. Law is not theory. Law is denatured geology, you might say. A set of facts, like a rock, is derived from the various influences that have acted on it simultaneously in the past. There is no legal situation that cannot profitably be compared to the history of the formation of rock. No legal situation can be said to be more abstract than a rock."

This is direct quotation. (Poor William! I do not mean to satirize him, only to reveal him.) It is from the newspaper text-like the Fossil Club minutes, I found it among the acc.u.mulated bundles of my mother's papers: antique, middling-old, and merely stale anomalies folded in with all those beginnings of earnest Ibsen-like plays and poemlets of her "writing period"-the text of a speech William once made before a commencement a.s.sembly of a not-very-important evening law school, where all the students were men, not boys; but they t.i.ttered like boys over his doubtful remarks about his son. "I trust to the influence of the firm to clarify his views"-William's son was then stuttering sixteen, with Justice Holmes newly in the crook of his arm and ideal notions not yet emptied from his platonic pockets. His son, at any rate, unlike the audience of graduates (who during daylight were grocery clerks and bookkeepers), would not be obliged to comb fat midtown partners' offices for a job, jurisprudential handicap or no; and if they (the night-time graduates) had any geological reflections on the law, it was the knowledge that they would have to start from rock-bottom. In this, as well as in the absence of jurisprudence from their lives and studies, they differed from William's young son.

I have already told, however, how William was called upon to speak here and there. He spoke not always brilliantly; but he spoke his mind. It is not that age demolishes shyness, by the way-it is only that power conceals it.

But (to return to that old scene, where the half-child-self of my mother dances in her white dress): confronted with duty, with his sisters, with Allegra, with his own house festooned into strangeness, with mysterious and ritual waltzes, with all those clever little cakes that said "Helen" and "Marie" amid the snow of icing-William could not speak. He supposed he was to speak. Years were to grow her before they married-surely, in between, he should emit a word?

But she spilled out his name, flying by with a blond plump gay little partner who blew her like a flake round and round-"William!" she called-"William!" a, second time, from the hub of her turnings. He felt sober, pale, clumsy; he felt old, old, old. For half a second he wished his height did not aspire to the ceiling, and that he knew how to make her catch up quickly. If the decade's gap between them were shut, he was sure she would not be so slippery. She came by again and was off again, more slippery than ever, and left her ridicule in his ears: "I told Vernon you looked exactly like a pillar of the church standing there, and Vernon said-" She was s.n.a.t.c.hed away. He had to wait for her return before he could know what-Vernon said. "-he said you're not just a pillar, you're a caryatid!" Her chin was lit with laughter-her partner's, who simpered into it.

They came and stood with him, and talked of Sh.e.l.ley. Allegra had written a poem. Vernon said it was as good as Percy Bysshe's-"symbolic images," he explained. Vernon was the protege of a certain headmaster. Put it boldly: he was a teacher. It shocked his father, who was the grandson of a merchant, and did nothing himself, though now and then he put on his suspenders and went to a board meeting. Meanwhile Allegra, very serious (and who could be graver than the laughing Allegra?), darted: from poetry to philosophy. She liked Vernon; Vernon was a rebel. "I mean to live!" she told him, and gave her back, a lovely wall but still a wall, to William. "I don't mean just see the world, or die in a storm, or have my heart s.n.a.t.c.hed from the pyre, or anything like that. I mean really live." "The Spanish Main is out-of-date," Vernon teased. "No, no, I mean it. You know my father's gone round the world." "Your father's old." "So's the world." "It doesn't count. It only counts to go round the world when you're young." "Oh, I'll do that!" said Allegra. "You know "To A Skylark'?" "Certainly," said Vernon, as though he had written it himself only day before yesterday-"Sh.e.l.ley's or Wordsworth's?" "Well, we're talking about Sh.e.l.ley, for goodness' sake. It's Sh.e.l.ley we're talking about, isn't it? Anyhow that's how I feel. Just like that, that's what I mean. William wouldn't know what I mean," she threw out with a little mound of mockery bloating her lip. William agonized, knew he should answer, but could not. He supposed it was because he was only intellectual, but she was clever. Since he could not combat her, he forgave her instead; he told himself she was a child still. Vernon, on the other hand, was not; he was twenty-three. Vernon taught English grammar in a boys' school, however: so it did not matter about Vernon. "William must think skylarks are illegal," Vernon ventured; "perhaps they trespa.s.s"-still smarting over her having turned his erudition ("Sh.e.l.ley's or Wordsworth's?") back upon him. "William's coming to work for my father," said the skylark-emulator with sudden practicality. "He's going to have a little brown office all to himself with a picture of an American Bald Eagle in it." Vernon thought this remarkably funny, and patted his vest with hilarity. "Really. That's a bird of a different color. I mean how foul, f-o-w-1. What are you doing now?" "Clerking," William said, his ears blooming like carnations. "In Woolworth's, do you mean?" "Stupid," said Allegra, "for a judge. It means he doesn't do anything. He climbs out from behind his desk and says just-a-minute-please to people who've come to bribe the judge." "That's not-" William began. "Yes it is. That's just the way it is. And then you say, 'I'm sorry, but this is Righteous Wednesday. We don't take bribes today.'" "There," said Vernon, "it's a perfectly human fox trot for a change. Come and do it, will you?" "Pooh. I like marches," said Allegra. "Then you like the General." "Not the Attorney General"-sticking her tongue out at William. "I meant General Nuisance. Hurry up, it'll end before we get to the floor." "When I come out it'll be all marches." "Then they'll send you in again, miss." "No, I mean it. I hate this sort of stuff. It'll be marches." "Good heavens," said prissy Vernon, "not the Wedding March too?" and danced away with William's bride.

Afterward William looked up "caryatid" in the dictionary. Until then it had not been part of his vocabulary; thereafter it never left it. He did not really see the joke, but it did not prevent him from marrying her after all, and they honeymooned conventionally, though of course they did not know it. They were the newest honeymooners in the world, and they naturally supposed the business that occupied them had begun only with themselves. Cape Ann in September was agreeably deserted. They sat side by side in the shade of a rock (William identified it as calcareous) and Allegra read aloud, rather more brightly than William cared for; he was secretly bored by her favorites-they had been her favorites so long-and she read with a kind of abandon that puzzled and even shocked him. Why did her voice travel up and down so unashamedly? It was as though she sang without music. One sang only in church, and then there was an organ to keep one from making a fool of oneself. But he did not think he would be going to church as often as before; Allegra hated it, and called herself an atheist. Of course she was not. He would not have been permitted to marry an atheist. In the crescent of noon-twilight below the rock he heard his young wife's ardent soaring: "Like an unbodied joy whose race is

just begun"

-self-captivated.

It had a n.o.ble sound, but he fell asleep; beneath them the sand was warm as a cradle. And then quickly he awoke: his young wife stood barefoot in the margins of the sea. A fan of little bubbles was shutting itself not far beyond/her encircled ankles. She had thrown her Sh.e.l.ley in the water, and was watching him drown. "You drifted off, you know," she told the husband; long years afterward he remembered how her mildness at that moment deceived him. He scarcely knew it was the bitterest accusation of her life. "But it was the only book you brought along," he protested, now that it was sinking. "It's all right. I've just decided I hate poetry anyhow." "Fantasy has a limited usefulness in our lives," he a.s.sented in his gentle but decisive way; it was his thirtieth birthday. Then he stretched over the water for her hand and led her plas.h.i.+ng out. She sat in the sand and drew on her white socks and s.h.i.+vered. In their room she lay staring with her head turned from him-she pretended to search for the lighthouse that was the most elusive note in the view. "Turn," he said. "Dear, I want your face. Turn to me. Turn." But she could not. He supposed it was some impulse of her innocence. The race had just begun, but his joy remained unbodied. She let him perform the duty which permits a man to step around purity in order not to soil it. But she could not give her face.

Three decades afterward he thought of Miss Pettigrew, and prolonged his melancholy. "Miss Pettigrew and my son," he took up his minor theme (for the major I had to wait), while I observed how a parsley-curl of white hair sprang sentry-like from each blood-darkened ear. He was on the years'-edge of giving way to these sad signs of acc.u.mulation. In that glowing little office where he opened history to himself and to me he nursed his back against his chair like an old cavalry-man imitating his early self, but some part of the seat betrayed him by an unexpected bray of the springs: rider and steed were aging together. "Not that I expect you to be anxious for an inst.i.tution of which you long ago chose not to be an alumna," he persisted. "Nevertheless you may know (I will trust you to allow me to continue in the dimension of complete frankness) that among Miss Pettigrew's cla.s.smates there has been-something of a-" I saw him finally skirt the word "scandal," though his lips had stretched to accommodate it -"situation, relating to the, the taking of, I won't conceal it from you, drugs, by inhalation as it were-" I confirmed that I had heard of it, and headlong would have volunteered more, but he was too much in pursuit of the present as a distraction and a relief from whatever old images were staining his sight to allow me anything beyond a tentative a.s.sent. "Jt is serious, it is of course very serious. Luckily Miss Pettigrew is among the innocent. My son a.s.sures me she is among the innocent. Nevertheless one must always take precautions, one must always forestall even unlikelihoods, one must be prepared to intercept. In this connection-" his ready little cough punctuated briefly, and I had the sense that he would go on mercilessly talking of Miss Pettigrew quite as though she were Cletis, and for the same reasons-"I have seen to it that she will not be expelled. It would be intolerable if she were to be expelled."

"Particularly," I said sourly, "if she's as innocent as your son says she is."

"You speak as though you suppose her not to be."

"When really it's you who thinks she's not."

"Not innocent? Ah," he gave out, motionless with unease, "all this has made a very bad impression. Very bad. Her father-"

"Miss Pettigrew's father? The Democrat?"-but he did not know I mocked him.

"Exactly. I regret to say that though he had a hand in an Administration I was never able to regard as Const.i.tutionally answerable, at the same time it put him in a position to do me a favor once with respect to your mother, a favor abroad some years back. Years ago, you see. I never imagined a reciprocal opportunity would arise. Of course it is a debt I had always hoped to wipe out, and now in this very special and very delicate matter it has become possible to correct a certain unfortunate impression-"

But with lawyers it is always necessary to translate. Perhaps because the stuff of their commerce is so hideous, they must overdress it in periphrasis. "A very delicate matter" is the jargon applied only to whatever is notably indelicate; and the continuous use of "nevertheless" is like the progression of staves along a rail: the fence of argument will not stand unless rooted in alibi. "I know that old story," I said promptly. "Your son was discussing it only a little while ago. You mean what happened that time in Paris. Pettigrew. He handed out bribes right and left. I don't mean only the little bribes to the doctors and the police that my mother gave. I suppose he even bribed the magistrates for you, never mind the Chamber of Deputies. He must have gone straight up into the Government."

William looked at me unwilling to receive my irony; perhaps, though unaware, I had blundered into what was not irony. "My son told you this?"

"I knew it before. I was there, you know."

"There?"

"When the chauffeur-"

"You were a child. A small child."

"But I was there."

"-and still a child. Your judgment remains childish. A negotiation is not a bribe," William said.

"A negotiation is not a bribe. Then it couldn't have been by negotiation," I concluded, "that you talked the school into keeping Miss Pettigrew?"

"You go far," William said. "See that you don't go too far."

"As far as you take me."

"I take you nowhere."

"That's a place too," I acknowledged.

"I am uninterested in psychological remarks," William said. "It diffuses. We lose hold of the issue."

"Illegitimate issue," I said. "-That's not a psychological remark."

"It is a very rude one. It is unworthy of your breeding, I think."

"I know how I was bred. Tell me how I was born."

"You've come here looking for a circus."

"Bred and circuses; but I want more than that."

"You want a show."

"A show of bravery," I said.

"Exactly," William said. "This is extremely distasteful, no doubt for you as well as for me."

"No doubt," I said.

"I am altogether aware of it. In consideration of your position, perhaps then it would be more useful on your part to display courage rather than defiance."

"I didn't mean on my part. I meant on your part. I'm brave enough. I am. I don't care what you tell me. But you-" His face held nothing for me, neither menace nor prod. "You're indecent about my mother. You're not brave enough to be decent about her."

"What your mother did was I am afraid indefensible."

"What you did was indefensible. You gave her the opportunity."

"Let us agree," William said, "that here at least your judgment is inadmissible. In this case you cannot claim to have been there."

"But didn't the trouble begin just because I was there? Eventually, I mean. Because if not for me she would have gotten away with it. I suppose she got away with it lots of times before I was bora. Unfortunately I const.i.tute solid evidence, don't I?-what in the movies the district attorney calls Exhibit A. -Embroidered in scarlet."

"I commend you for your allusion," William said heavily.

"Your son doesn't like literary references either. It's a good thing Miss Pettigrew doesn't know any."

"Undoubtedly she has other gifts equally abstruse."

"She adores Euphoria Karp-is that one?"

"I leave it to my son's ingenuity," William said, and he opened his hand out wearily, "to expose whatever qualities are to be found in his fiancee."

"If he exposes any, it won't be to you. He doesn't let you in on things."

"You are treading, I may say, in alien fields. I have never had any reason to believe that I do not have my son's full confidence."

"Is that why you thought it worthwhile to intervene with Miss Jewett?-I mean," I covertly mimicked him, "even after your son had a.s.sured you Miss Pettigrew was among the innocent?"

"I don't see what relation this incident has to my son. The simple fact is that my wife has a certain influence with the younger Miss Jewett which the Pettigrew family could not possibly have. Mrs. Pettigrew is a quite unextraordinary woman-she was schooled somewhere in California, if I am not mistaken, whereas my wife is of course an alumna of Miss Jewett's. I am afraid the atmosphere of the school has perhaps in general declined-Nanette, you see, goes to the Academy precisely because it is my wife's conviction that the atmosphere at Miss Jewett's has certainly declined; besides, there are far fewer theatricals at the Academy. Nevertheless there is such a thing as a standard of loyalty to be maintained, and Miss Jewett is just now campaigning for funds among the alumnae, I think it is for a swimming pool. Mrs. Pettigrew is not an alumna, and it is not to her that Miss Jewett would normally go-"

"A swimming pool in exchange for the Chamber of Deputies," I interrupted. "No one can say you haven't evened it out with Pettigrew."

"-a series of facts, in short, which bears no relation whatsoever to my son's veracity. I repeat, I have never had any reason to suppose my son avoids the truth with me."

"You have a reason now."

"I take it you are an authority on my son?"

"It's just that he's an authority on you. He doesn't trust you. He's stopped trusting you."

"I see," William said, and contemplated this. "Then he has been corrupted."

"By finding things out."

"I promise you he remains ignorant of everything I have told you here today. Neither he nor anyone has had access to any information about your, let us call it your origins. Your mother has been s.h.i.+elded from any shadow. We have always done everything in this connection that your mother wished. We have acted," he said, leaning away, grieving into the leather cry of his chair, "with as much circ.u.mspection as our position has required, and perhaps with more. We have acted with providence. It is not too much to say that we have acted intensely and perpetually for your protection. My son knows nothing of this business. The world knows nothing."

It was the first time I had ever heard William speak of the world.

"You sound like Enoch now," I said. "And Enoch knows, doesn't he? Enoch; and-counting today-myself; and you; and my mother. That makes four. Four's not the world; though maybe five is. If your son knew, then the world would know.'

"You think little of my son's discretion. But he knows nothing. He knows no more than the general impression: simply that your mother was married to this person-"

"To Gustave Nicholas Tilbeck. Those are his names. I know my father's names," I said.

"-and divorced. The impression stands. We have done everything possible to allow it to stand without hindrance. We have particularly contrived to foster this illusion in you. There was no intention ever to embarra.s.s you by informing you of your actual status. Until recently there was no necessity to inform you of it. Your mother and I"-how easily this flowered in the soil of his cold and arid talk! "Your mother and I"-the unwittingly but unremittingly paternal phrase; at once he noticed it himself, and self-consciously divided the autonomous graft-"your mother, as you know, has desired all along to keep you clear of this disclosure, and I, as her agent, have closely acquiesced. We have sought silence. We have arranged for silence. We have nurtured silence. For a dozen years we have bought and paid for silence."

And in the silence William withdrew, and creaked the inglorious screw of bis chair around to see now the crevices of the Venetian slats were startled into rods of wine: "Late, late, it gets late sooner these days," he muttered at timeless Cletis' morning-handed watch, remonstrating with his wife, who appeared to accuse the absent sun of having fled its post under fire; and reaching up to the plain lamp over the photograph he turned the switch and turned his Up: in the blast of quick light it s.h.i.+fted like a worm. "We have paid and we have paid and we have paid. It's nothing you or anyone could feel the way your mother has. Though in the early days your stepfather was known to tot it up now and then-to see what was left for himself, one supposes. At any rate we have paid. Up to last month we were still paying. We have paid and paid"-how cautiously he released this into the fan of brightness that came tilting over our twenty flattened fingers, and hesitated, and resumed, "and paid. And we never knew if it would do-the money-he wouldn't say how much, he left it all to us. In the beginning he would specify. He always sent a figure-that was in the beginning. He would say what it was for. Sometimes what he asked for was absurd-enough to buy a bottle of champagne if that was what he had a whim for, or a pair of shoes: whatever struck him at the moment. Or else he'd go out and rent a flat and fill it up with luxuries and send the bill. And once-on a postcard-I won't withhold even this-he wrote: Two dollars for Swiss tart.' I don't withhold even that. Torment and torment. Imagine how it was. Your mother had me write and tell him to name his sum and let it go at that. So he stopped saying how much and made us guess what he wanted. Spite. He wouldn't settle for a regular figure-I was ready to set up a monthly thing in a bank over there: he wouldn't settle for it. His reply!-if he had a steady income it would give the illusion of a steady job. He wouldn't join the bourgeoisie. I won't repeat all that madness, however. It suffices that he left it all to us: he wrote and asked and never named his sum, and we had to respond with conjecture. And we never knew whether it would do. Sometimes a little would do; at other times a very great deal wasn't enough for him. Torment! It was part of his whimsy. Your poor mother," William said, lowering his great naked brow under the lamp, "she never felt safe over you. There was no way of trusting him not to break through and show himself."

"And if he did?" I murmured, thinking of the locked room and the ledge where I had crept to hear the private visitor's terms. "I remember when he came that time. He had a blue bicycle, with bells. He laughed and laughed, and had books strapped to his bicycle in the rain. And one of them was full of flowers, and my mother threw it in a barrel. He was like a court jester. She asked Enoch if he had a knapsack."

"You were to have been kept free of him. Your mother paid him so that you would be kept free of him. She meant you to be safe."

"She locked me up. I never saw him."

"Or put it more pertinently: he never saw you."

"He never wanted to."

"Extortion isn't for the thing itself. It's for the use of the thing."

"Is that another of my father's names?"

"I beg your pardon?"