Trust: A Novel Part 6

9.

Early in the morning all the next week Enoch came out on the terrace to dictate to his secretary. He put his feet up on the railing and talked into the sky while I lay nearby, listening. It sounded like a military history or plan-there was mention of trenches, border-points, atomic warheads-but since the rivers were called X and Y, the towns Redplace, Whiteplace, and Greyplace, and the generals Tweedle and Twaddle, it was impossible to know what part of the globe he was describing.

By Thursday Tweedle had advanced within three miles of Twaddle's encampment behind Whiteplace, and Twaddle was beginning to think of retreating.

On Friday, however, the young man reverted to delivery boy and carried away, one by one, four great boxes full of books. "That's as much boning up as I intend to do right now," Enoch said.

"Is it for the hearings?" I inquired. "All that reading?"

"One doesn't read for a purpose. One simply reads," he told me, affecting amus.e.m.e.nt.

"And the report?"

"There was no report."

"But you've been dictating for days."

"I never dictate. It's contrary to my temperament. I merely recommend." And he went in, smiling, to join my mother.

I did not accompany him; my mother's single wish was to avoid me. She had said she had hoped I would always live freely, and without perceiving her meaning I caught the guilty regret in her voice. Left alone on the terrace, I amused myself with guessing at her visions. I supposed, first of all, that she had schemed for me to become a cosmopolitan. "Always remember that you were born in Europe," she would remind me on the backs of picture postcards mailed at whim from the vortex of those falsely outrageous and half-secret parleys, congresses, and merely meetings that sprang like self-propagating plants in the path of her travels-"it is your lost continent," she would write, "enlarge character by recoupment of Europe" (the latter was rather like the operatic journalese of parts of Marianna), and occasionally I would recognize upon those rumpled three-color reproductions of aged citadels, photographed from helicopters and machine-painted with machine-vivid unreality, not simply the dry sheddings of her acquired and too-conscious myth-the romance that America cannot be "experienced" except through its sources-but also the. vaguer significations of my mother's desire.

Her aim, I conjectured, was to re-father me. She had tried it with William, and I had acquiesced, impressed with William's substantiality. Her acknowledgment of her first husband's practical authority was the nearest my mother had ever brought me to any kind of religion, but she was not altogether mistaken in it, for William, with his sober inherited scruples, his cautious hook of jowl, and his pious distaste for all the things of this world except notes and bonds, which he somehow regarded as divine albeit negotiable instruments for good in the same way that he imagined capitalism to be the ordained church of the economic elect-this same deliberate William was one of that diminis.h.i.+ng honor-guard of armored and ceremonial knights whose Presbyterianism is st.i.tched into the orthodox width of their hat-bands, coat-lapels, and shoe-toes, and who preserve by its rites a creed which no longer exacts or enacts tenets. William was all my Protestantism; and if my mother, in atonement for my bad education and her own bad taste (I had once actually confused the Holy Ghost with a new kind of candy bar), had sent me to him for the sake of a patriarchal, as well as a paternal, judicature, poor William could hardly be blamed if in the name of that same Protestantism he had had to turn me away. Not William's own presumably more charitable bent, but rather the higher connivance of Christianity, prevented him from accepting that filial homage which my mother promoted in me: for she had always chosen to say "ask William," and "tell William," and "show William," while he withdrew in a sort of n.o.ble terror from the confidences and questionings of a child not his own-but his denial and his recoil were not wilful: they burgeoned out of the spirit of the integrity of the family (an abstraction which I quickly identified as a Protestant virtue), although it was clearly the integrity of his own family he meant (his preoccupation with owners.h.i.+p being a further example of a Calvinist probity). He believed unashamedly in the influence of private inst.i.tutions. And if he was willing, as I have observed, to have Gustave Nicholas Tilbeck pa.s.s for an evil museum or palace of crime, a kind of still-alive Madame Tussaud's, then surely he would not have been reluctant to think of himself as a temple, or, at the very least, a minor but equally sacred outer chapel. Besides, William's wife hid behind kindness her plain dislike of me. Although she had no fear or envy of her husband's earlier bride (arguing logically enough that it was William, after all, who had wished for the divorce in the first instance and in the second for a woman like herself, devoted, spiritual even, who put candles on her dinner table every evening and garden-flowers in her vases every morning), it did not please her that William on his visits should encounter me so often in corridors and corners or the dark parts of stairways, where she imagined I must lurk like a process server with a summons or a creditor with a claim. Out of the most upright reservations, then, William had refused to become my custodian or my confessor. His Lares and Penates were against it; so was his whole morality; so was his wife.

After some time my mother ceased to summon William, and at last erased in me any look of claim. She gave up her hope of Puritanism with the shrewdness of a seer; she saw, in her politic way, that a temple can never supplant a museum: history has it the other way around-the friezes of the Parthenon turning up in Bloomsbury, bits of Scottish-Norman churches with ice-cream carts at the door. But no barbarian relic-gallery (even supposing there were such a thing, collected by some rich odd old Visigothic Rome-lover) has ever been replaced, within its own walls, by ecclesiastical paraphernalia, altars and elders and the rest-how then, in that singular time of Protestant rebuff, when William's costive integrities were shutting me out, how could my mother have dreamed that spires might sprout from the iron museum roof? or that Tilbeck's halberds might change into bishops' crosiers? She dreamed it mistakenly and therefore only briefly, and gave me Enoch instead. What Holiness might not undertake, said Enoch, Worldliness would.

Part Two.

EUROPE.

1.

And upon what Holiness cannot build, Worldliness is founded. Now when Holiness essays introspection and ends with self-deception, it gives birth to Worldliness. That moment when Holiness, with whatsoever good will, enters the museum hall-in the guise, oh, of the quaint artifact, grail shown under gla.s.s, for instance, or miracle-working saint's toe-bone displayed as remarkable (for new reasons, in a newer sense)-in that moment exactly Holiness dies, and in that moment exactly Worldliness inhales its expirations and lives.

-These aphorisms (for all their windiness I don't hesitate to call them that, for they were less than parables and more than mere turns of phrase) were Enoch's long ago, when my mother attempted to compensate me for the inaccessibility of Puritanism with its opposite, cosmopolitanism, which (I have already mentioned it) she liked to term the recoupment of Europe. And she equated Enoch with Europe, and carried me to France the very year the war ended, together with the refugee from Holland whom she had taken on as my governess, and stood with us at the border of Germany, a place where too many roads met, each infested with a line of abandoned tanks like enormous vermin-and there, while I writhed and vomited close by one of those great dusty tractor-wheels, full in the sight of a handful of unamazed c.o.c.kney infantrymen (afterward my mother learned that the country cow whose milk I had been given to drink had a disease), the Dutchwoman said, "I shall not go across there." And my mother complained, "But I'm married to a Jew, and I don't mind going across." We did not go across, but wandered southward instead, pleasure-seekers among the displaced, hence more displaced than anyone-"I feel like a survivor," my mother said now and again, "I don't mean from the war of course," while the Dutchwoman reached out for me with strong freckled arms and, fiercely and privately, trusting I would not betray her, whispered, "a survivor from the age of governesses!"-before Hitler she had been a medical student at the University of Leyden. ("Yet she didn't even ask whether the milk was pasteurized!" my mother fumed. "She could have asked to have them boil it at least! I don't approve of refugees, they have no sense of responsibility.") So I was sick against a tank, and in the pit of that sickness, while the pad of dust on the tank's steel belt swam spasmodically under my rain of filth, I heard my mother rail against the unsanitary survivors of a war not yet three months dissolved into history.

For some reason-perhaps it was the laughter of the soldiers, guiding and advising me: "Puke on, darlin', lots of muck oh the Jerry barstid, 'ere naow 'aven't yuh missed a bit of its bluddy foot?"-my mother felt compelled to explain herself: she was a survivor, she made out, not of bomb and blaze-one could always get over a war, and if one didn't one was dead anyway and it didn't matter-in short she had survived not mere catastrophe but a whole set of wrong ideas. She had outlasted her moment and outlived her time. All the ideals of her girlhood had betrayed her by unpredictably diminis.h.i.+ng; "see," she said, and pointed down one of those many roads at a one-legged giant who had hobbled out of the horizon, "that is what has become of the social consciousness of my generation." The Dutchwoman frowned so horribly at this that I had another fit of retching. "I don't pay you thirty-five dollars a week to poison my child," my mother promptly admonished her, but she did not have her mind on it: the maimed fellow had come into view and all of us-my mother, the Dutch governess, the three c.o.c.kney infantrymen, and I-looked on in fearful admiration as he swung himself forward on a staff the thickness of a young tree. He was burly and dark, and, for that place and season, not at all haggard; he thrust a paper at the soldiers and propelled himself over the border. "'E'd got a pa.s.s from up back," said one of the c.o.c.kneys. "Big for an I-talian," replied the second. "They'd ought to get back where they cyme from, them blowkes," observed the third, and then turned back to me with a whistle: "'Aven't yuh myde a job of't, girlie! It's all the shype of the Mediterr-y-nian Ows.h.i.+n yuh've give up!"

And it was a kind of map I had spewed over the hem of the German tank-a map made of vomit, with viscous seas and amorphous continents, a Mediterranean of bad milk in the heart of this known and yellowish world-not simply known but precisely known, exactly and profoundly known (although land and lake were joined and parted indistinguishably by a lava of wakened dust), known, memorized, and understood, unmistakably and perilously known by its terrific stink. My mother covered her face in disgust-"G.o.d knows what was wrong with that d.a.m.ned cow," she mumbled, half stifled, into her glove, "it's like her to be sick and make a stench," and pulled me back to the car. Although she was not fond of me, the Dutchwoman, who during the final eruption had been obliged to support my head, took my hand almost kindly. The map had begun to drip off the tread, hung with nuggets of mud. And then Africa succ.u.mbed, and then the shadow of Asia, and then the vague Americas, and lastly Europe gave way, split open by sudden rivers; the yellow Mediterranean of milk overran them all, sucking up ma.s.s after ma.s.s and sending out those reeking fetid familiar airs, so that even the hardy c.o.c.kneys swore and moved away. "It is not her fault," my governess quietly snarled; she had her foot on the clutch. "It is the stink of Europe." One of the soldiers pressed his nose in a music-hall gesture: the b.u.t.ton on his sleeve caught the sunlight and danced it up and down:-his arm snapped up with a start. The bit of wire that marked the border was all at once murmuring with tremor. "What is it?" my mother cried hoa.r.s.ely-"Did you hear?" "The bluddy devil!" screeched the soldier, letting go his nose. It came at us again just then-a sting of noise grave and quick. The Dutchwoman had started the motor and was slowly turning us, creeping off the gravel into the edges of a blighted field, silent; our wheels grew m.u.f.fled in gra.s.s. The echo of the discharge lay embedded in the morning light as punctiliously as a surgeon's gash. "Is it backfire?" said my mother. "What is it?" She fretted at her fingernail as the car righted itself in the road, and looked out behind her through a small side window: "There it is again!" she exclaimed; the precise little roar stuttered in the sky; the k.n.o.bs on the dashboard chattered. "Ah, they've gone over," she said, "look." I looked, and in a queer detachment of motion seemed to see the three c.o.c.kneys dangling like marionettes or hanged men over Germany; beneath the three arcs of their simultaneous leaps the border-wire dimly strummed. They struck the ground a second afterward like felled game, all in a crouch; we watched them spring erect. "I think," said my mother in surprise, "it was a shot. It must have been a shot," she repeated, craning backward. The Dutchwoman did not stir. My mother swung open the door of the car and jumped decisively out. I followed her-suddenly I felt immensely better, not sick at all. The three infantrymen were running down one of those roads that fingered out like a candelabrum on the other side of the border. "They're chasing someone," my mother shouted excitedly. "Can you see him? It's that man without the leg." "No," said my governess from inside the car-resolutely her eyes shunned Germany; she kept her speckled hands on the wheel and would not move-"they are not chasing him. He has shot himself." But we saw him then, and the soldiers flying toward him, whipping dust but never coming nearer, as in a dream; he had gone far, that giant, farther than it appeared, for it took half a mile to diminish him, and when the soldiers had run themselves into midgets, still racing and yet no nearer, his big shadowy head continued to loom, and his staff seemed no less a leafless tree-it was as though they pursued the irreducible moon, or a G.o.d. He was fixed in the middle of the road, and the legless thigh rocked fitfully, kicking. "She's crazy," my mother sneered, "I see him now, I can see his stick in the air"-it swept the sky and seemed to writhe from his grasp and slipped like a straw to the ground, and the giant, with the shudder of cut-down tower or sail of s.h.i.+p, sank after it.

The three soldiers carried him back, each one bearing a single member. From the border-wire where we waited it was a strange triangle-first they took the head and the two arms, then they tried one of the arms, the good leg and the head, and after that the leg, the head, and the stump. But is was no use, the fellow was too heavy and big, they could not divide his weight properly in this fas.h.i.+on; the man who had the head was always at a disadvantage. At last they each took one of the three good limbs, and let the two shorter appendages, the stump and the head, hang down out of the way, with equal freedom and equal unimportance; and in this manner they struggled back to their station at the border.

"Ah," my mother muttered resentfully, "I didn't come to Europe for this." The body lay where the soldiers had heaped it; one was shouting into a walkie-talkie, and the two others stood sweating and sighing, fumbling with their trousers, rubbing their damp palms on their damp s.h.i.+rts. "On the far side of the line," the shouter shouted, "in the groin, the cryzy blowke. In the groin, darlin', I said groin," he went on yelling, "not spine, groin." We got back into the car and the Dutchwoman drove as though whipping a horse; we cantered into the white sun of noon. "You've dirtied your blouse," said my mother, picking at my collar-"that putrid smell." She opened her nostrils over the yellow stain, but her nose in meditation was as alien to me as the look of my own vomit. I did not feel responsible. "Leave her be," said my governess in her brutal accent, "when you are so near Germany there are worse things to smell." My mother frowned warily-"What?" "Corpses," said the Dutchwoman, kicking the flanks of the gas pedal. "Well, well," said my mother, "you people like to turn every stink into a moral issue. Can't you go any faster, Anneke?" she demanded, unlocking her brows, although the landscape flew. "The way you step on that pedal you'd think you were a corpse yourself."

But it was, in a way, corpses which had brought us to that place at that unlikely time, it was on account of corpses that we were there at all: corpses and Enoch, who had been appointed an adviser to corpses, an amicus curiae with respect to corpses, a judge, jury, witness, committeeman, representative, and confidant of corpses. He had no office, but went wandering from boundary to boundary sorting out corpses, collecting new sources of more corpses, overseeing and administering armies of corpses. Some he yielded to their claimants for burial, and some he had dug up and re-buried for no plain reason, and some he let lie where they had been thrown: he was a liaison between the dead and the living, and between the dead and the dead, and between the soon-dead and the too-soon dead. And he was a liaison among the dead of all the nations. "In Europe" (in one hotel-room after another his ironic growl would wake me between nightmares) "there is only one united country, only one with unanimous voters, a single party, an uncontradicted ideology, an egalitarian unhierarchical church, an awesome police-power..." "Go to sleep, Enoch," I would hear my mother's whine, reprimanding out of the dark. "The country of the dead," he gave out at last, and gave in, and fell asleep, and snored, gravely, like a hawk over carrion-until, in the morning (for he hated to get up), "Wake up, Enoch"-this from my mother-and then, "Wormy, wormy, wormy, early in the mourning our curse shall rise to Thee"-this from Enoch, hymn-singing.

For at that time my mother still went everywhere with her husband. Sometimes we would all travel in a body-Enoch, my mother, the Dutchwoman, and I in the lead-car, and two cars full of Enoch's a.s.sistants following after-but more often I would be left behind with my governess to play on some littered and sorrowful beach, where I would amuse myself by searching for sh.e.l.ls-not seash.e.l.ls: for the Dutchwoman had taught me how to dig after empty cartridges nesting just below the wet sand, like clams, at the margin of the water.

"Can't they explode?" my mother objected, handling my collection of sh.e.l.ls at the end of a day's harvest. "If she happened to drop one? She shouldn't be allowed to keep them."

"They are empty and harmless," remarked my governess without interest.

"But there might be a good one mixed in with the others," my mother said, tying a veil over her hat; she was preparing to take a night train with Enoch to a city in the north, where a fresh s.h.i.+pment of corpses waited.

"They are all of them already exploded," repeated the Dutchwoman. "They have been used," she observed almost angrily.

"Oh, but you really can't be sure!" my mother reproved. It seemed she was angry too, and not at the cartridges. She sheathed her forefinger with one of them, tapping it like a thimble. "How can you be sure?"

"Because there has been a war, madam; there has been shooting," said the Dutchwoman.

"As though she owned the war!" my mother announced to the ceiling. "What a nuisance you are, Anneke-you aren't the only one who has had to take hards.h.i.+ps, you know."

"Yes," said the Dutchwoman tonelessly, "we were told that in America the sugar was rationed. How bitter your tea must have tasted."

My mother pretended to laugh; her mouth drew wrathfully back. "You don't like Americans, Anneke."

"I don't like you, madam."

"I pay you for your duties, not for your approval." But my mother's mirth had turned inexplicably genuine: she was amused, up to a point, by aggressiveness in servants.-"After all," she used to say, "if they go too far one can always fire them."

The Dutchwoman was careful not to go too far; she valued her position, since she had so little to do. While I ran about in the foam, she would doze on the mossy rocks, and did not care what I did, or whom I found for a playmate. A little country boy, whose hair had been shaved off altogether and whose red scalp shook out scales, gave me the ringworm; patches round as pennies emerged on my hands and on my chin, and my armpits itched intolerably. But the Dutchwoman declared that I had touched poison-ivy leaves against her warning, and I never contradicted her to my mother. Often she took me to eat in dim restaurants black with flies where there were no tablecloths or menus, and the food was so unfamiliar that I felt ill at the sight of it-brown and green sauces under which chunks of white fat lay folded in a bath of grease. All the while my mother believed that we dined on the boulevard, and made alarmed noises over the restaurant bills my governess used mysteriously to produce. But still the Dutchwoman was careful, very careful. "If you say one word," she would threaten me, "Mrs. Vand will send me away, and you will be left alone. Soon you will lose your way in the roads, and they will mistake you for a refugee child, they will put you in a camp for refugee children. Then you will contract a disease among all the sick little Jewesses. Afterward they will send you far away to Palestine where you will die in the desert of thirst."

"But I'm not Jewish," I protested. "And I'm not afraid of being thirsty, Anneke; I hate milk anyhow since it made me sick."

"Milk! You'll beg for water the way you begged for fake Coca-Cola on the boulevard today. Or else," she went on menacingly, "you will be shot before the Wailing Wall by a firing-squad from Arabia. Why not, since your father is Jewish?"

"Enoch isn't my father!" I cried, exuberant with relief. "He hasn't even been married to my mother very long-that makes him only my stepfather, you see, Anneke?"

The Dutchwoman chortled scornfully. "Did you think I'm so stupid not to understand that? But still you do not kno-who your real father is. What makes you sure he isn't a Jew? Do you think they will spare you when they find out that? No, I warn you, confide to your mother how you rubbed Jean Francois' contagion and off you go to Palestine."

Thereafter I could be relied on absolutely.

"She's loyal to you," my mother stated firmly, in frequent recognition of my governess' success with me. "The child is devoted, although she seems so cold. But she's cold even to me, without showing half so much loyalty, so what am I to expect? If not for that, I should have dismissed you long ago. Ill be frank with you, I can't bear a surly temperament. Of course you're not paid to like me, I don't say that. But at least you ought to conceal your bigotry."

"Bigotry?" the Dutchwoman sneered innocently. "I do not know that word."

"Don't you? It comes of being so conceited. It's a good thing you didn't finish at that medical school. You would have made a very bad doctor. You would have cared more for your own prestige than for anything," my mother noted with the acuteness of complacency.

"I had already chosen my field," the Dutchwoman said abruptly. "It was chemical research-I should not have liked to practise. But then haven't I told you how the German soldiers were billeted in our laboratories? They closed the school, and it did not matter what I liked." She shrugged and eyed my mother's pocketbook. "When is madam coming back?"

"Not for a week at least. It depends on the size of the job my husband finds up there. We're going to Normandy for some sort of ceremony afterward. It's to commemorate the invasion. You know it will all be as boring as the grave, full of speeches in atrocious English by foreign generals, but c'est la guerre, it can't be helped."

"The war has made many new positions," the Dutchwoman remarked quietly.

"You mean in relief work? Enoch is not in relief work. Unless you count burial as relief. I suppose it is, for the dead."

"No, I was thinking of my own position," said the Dutchwoman, looking first at me and then again at the pocketbook.

"My husband regards his corpses as displaced persons. He's very sympathetic toward them. His aim, you know, is to have the murderer lie down with the murdered. It's a kind of prophetic view. But in almost every case it can't be done. All the murderers are still alive, it seems."

"Mr. Vand is full of sayings," the Dutchwoman said slyly.

"He's a clever man," my mother agreed. "I just wish he'd exert himself a little with the child. I brought her out here expressly for that, but he won't take the trouble."

"Perhaps he is too busy," said the Dutchwoman accommodatingly.

"He holds a very high post," my mother persisted. "He is devoted to his work."

"Yes," the Dutchwoman affirmed in a very soft voice, smiling fixedly, "grave-digging nowadays leaves time for nothing else."

"That doesn't sit right with me, Anneke, you are too arrogant," my mother warned.

"But it is all meant in good faith, madam. The Americans have bureaucratized even grave-digging. It will be done much faster by the Americans. Your husband will see to it."

"My husband has great administrative capacity," my mother petulantly defended herself. "He has a kind of political genius. In fact," she concluded proudly, "he's often mistaken for a European on that account."

"What a shame," observed the Dutchwoman, slyer now than before, "that his present job is not political."

"There is no job today that is not political," my mother said. "It's only the dead who can afford to have no politics."

"That is another of Mr. Vand's sayings, isn't it? He is so clever it is a shame really," my governess repeated, "that he has no political influence. Perhaps that is why he is thought to be a European."

My mother blazed. "He has influence enough."

"He would do nothing for my brother. My brother was deported for underground activities. He has three children and speaks seven languages. Now he is an orderly in a hospital in Amsterdam. Mr. Vand would do nothing for him."

"There are already too many interpreters."

"Last month there was a position open. I heard Mr. Vand speak of it to you. But it came to nothing."

"Perhaps your brother did not qualify."

"No," said the Dutchwoman, "he did not qualify. They would take only an American. So many of the refugees are Polish, and the American did not know Polish. In spite of it they chose him."

"You don't understand, Anneke," my mother protested. "My husband's organization is merely an arm of the Government. It isn't in his hands to make policy."

"Of course," the Dutchwoman concurred, still steadily smiling. "That is precisely what I said. He has no political importance whatever."

"You cannot belittle Enoch Vand," my mother retorted. "Perhaps you should measure his importance by the number of people he has it in his power to dismiss. I have some importance myself in that respect. Be careful, Anneke, or I'll decide to show my importance in a way you would not like."

I looked up from my sh.e.l.ls in alarm, but my mother's speech did not appear to have frightened my governess. "Certainly," she resumed amicably, "nowadays you Americans decide everything. But the child would not like you to send me away. It would not be good for the child."

"Nevertheless," said my mother, but there was no real menace in her voice any more. She opened her pocketbook and took out a wallet. "Do you want your wages now or when I come back?"

"Now," said Anneke without hesitation.

"You had better get rid of those sh.e.l.ls."

"Yes, madam."

"See that you obey your governess," my mother admonished me.-Outdoors the chauffeur's horn called.-"Good-bye."

I did not answer. "Goodbye," said the Dutchwoman generously, pus.h.i.+ng me forward to be kissed.

My mother bent to me quickly; I saw her tense stretched nostrils. She steamed with toilet-water. "My husband will be Amba.s.sador some day," she stated, and went out without rancor to her car.

The Dutchwoman was counting bills and folding them one by one into a little purse. "That will be a great jump from the burial committee. Here," she said, and threw me a five-franc piece.

"Anneke, I want to keep my sh.e.l.ls."

She was at once serious. "I'll show you where to find more," she offered promptly, "if you promise to stay in the room by yourself tonight."

"You know I'm not supposed to be left alone," I reminded her.

"If I swear not to tell Mrs. Vand?"

She gave me another coin, light and smooth as a wafer, and we shook hands on the bargain.

In the evening she went away wearing a blue dress and a yellow band in her hair, and did not come back until morning.

"Were you afraid?"

"No," I said bravely, "but there were noises."

"When you sleep there are no noises. Tonight you must be sure to sleep."

"Are you going away again?"

"I have to spend the night with a friend. Come," she urged, "I know a new place near the sea wall where there are cartridges."

But I had a dream, and saw a thing with ochre eyes and a bra.s.s tail which ended in a dagger; monster-like it leaped through the window and rattled its metal forelock on the metal bedpost: and I screamed in my sleep and woke the concierge's husband, although he was somewhat deaf.

All the keys trembled on his great steel ring, and his teeth were ridged with gold, and his tongue churned the spittle in the forest of his lip-hairs. But I understood nothing. And so the concierge came down the corridor in her coffee-smelling robe, rubbing her gla.s.ses with the vigor of suspicion; and very slowly and loudly, as though I were the one who was deaf, she questioned me. "Ou'est Madame Vand?" "Elle est partie pour le nord," I said in the French I had learned from the children on the beach. "Et ta soeur?" "Je n'ai pas de soeur." "Ah! Une gouvernante!" "Oui," I replied. "Ou est-ce qu'elle est?" "Je ne sais pas." "Est-ce que ta gouvernante est sortie de la maison?" "Oui." At this information the concierge a.s.sessed her husband's considerable mustache with a look of disgust. "Ah, nous y viola!" she shrieked. "Quand estxe qu'elle va venir?" "Je ne sais pas," I said again; "la nuit pa.s.see elle est venue a...a six heures du matin." "C'est ca!" mumbled the husband, "pas de chance," as though it were all up to his wife, and while the key-ring dangled and jangled from the crook of his knuckle they went on conferring sibilantly. Finally the concierge prodded my pillow with her fat squat fingers; it was the motion of a judge with his gavel. "Qu'est-ce que ton pere fait?" she demanded with a terrifying solemnity; and because I did not know the word for stepfather, I answered as though Enoch were really what she thought him: "Mon pere est fonctionnaire," I said in the phrase I had often heard Anneke use on the boulevard. "Americain," the concierge conceded in triumph, and waggled the ta.s.sel of her belt at her husband: "Le grand malheur! Alors, de quoi te plains-tu?" And I saw from the swagger of their departing backs that they were satisfied: Monsieur Vand was good for the rent-money; an abandoned child had not been left on their hands after all.