Trust: A Novel Part 11

"I'm sure that doesn't concern me," my mother said haughtily. "She charged us as much for her rat-trap as the best Paris hotel, that shrew."

"But I think she wants a tip."

"Enoch tipped her plenty. The old man, too. And the kitchen maid. -They think Americans are to squeeze white," she snapped. "My blood doesn't run dollars, you know-I like to get something in return!" She sounded positive enough; and I considered that I had done as much as could be expected in behalf of the concierge (toward whom I felt an obligation on account of what had seemed a real solicitude on the night the bra.s.s demon invaded my sleep-how disturbed she had been to find a deserted child!); and I would have said nothing further: but my mother was watching me slyly. "What made her tell you that?"

"Because of Anneke. You would never have known about Anneke without her," I repeated faithfully, although I was still uncertain of my governess' crime.

My mother resumed her fretful sc.r.a.ping. "She takes a lot of credit for herself, the old bat!"

"She sleeps with one eye open," I acknowledged in awe.

"One eye isn't worth rewarding. I give prizes for two eyes only," my mother said with a quick rough laugh. "Do you need to go down the hall?" It was her habit (an Americanism, Enoch observed) to refer obliquely to the toilets; she waited scrupulously until I a.s.sured her I had already called on them. "Because I'm going to lock your door. Enoch's afraid you may forget and run out. We don't want anyone to know you're here," she suggested suspensefully.

"The concierge knows I'm here."

"The concierge knows too much," my mother admitted. "I was thinking of the visitor."

"Maybe he isn't coming."

"He's two hours late already," she remarked, but more to herself than to me, and dipped after a large key in her pocket; a worn bit of paper was caught on the teeth. She unfurled it and gave it a surly squint. "But I was the one who set the time, after all, and that by itself's enough to persuade him to ignore it. He'll come when it suits him," she said decisively, holding the little square sheet stiffly before her.

"Is that the cablegram?" I asked, peering after a portent of William in her melancholy evasive hand-but clearly it was commerce of a different sort she just then crumpled from my glance. "No, it's not, and never mind," she charged me severely, but a moment too late: I had seen one word, ambiguous to my eyes, and a signature plain as a primer. My mother withdrew the whole with a rapid sense of error, and signified by her gasp of denial that she had permitted something to happen which ought not to have happened. She attempted to deflect me: "Are you certain you don't have to go down the hall right now?" she insisted.

But I pursued, with my finger arrowed at her fist, "What's in that?"

"Nothing," she said shortly.

"Is it a letter?"

"I told you never mind"-but consternation marred her authority.

"I know what it says anyhow," I ventured.

"Don't be too tricky with me!" she advised; her expression tacked from disbelief to fear. "It has nothing to do with you." Nevertheless she continued to hide it from me.

"Doesn't it say 'confer'?" She did not answer. "Then it says 'career'," I hastily tried again.

"Must you badger!" she blew out at me. "I've said it's nothing to do with you, isn't that enough?-It's a business letter," she went ahead with a deliberateness almost too convincing, "it's someone asking for an appointment with Enoch. I hope you don't disapprove," she finished heavily.

"I don't like that name," I observed.

"What name?"

"The name in the letter-Nick."

"You saw that!"

The long shock of her breath lingered.

"Is Nick the man who's coming to see Enoch?"

"Haven't I just explained-" She scowled and struggled palely. "Now look, a person has simply written to ask for a business appointment, is that so complicated? Really, I should slap you for this!"

"But is it the same man? The one who's coming right now?" I persisted. "The one the concierge said-"

But she would not allow herself to hear, and instead quickly gave in. "Yes," she said, "all right, yes."

"Then the concierge ought to get a tip."

"That gloating old bat gets nothing. Madame Pandarus, the go-between! I hope I'm not obliged to her for telling me what I already knew," she muttered, stuffing the ball of paper into her pocket as though it were an invidious apple from the Tree of Knowledge. "I'd like to wring her neck! Well, go sit on the bed," she commanded, "I'm going to lock your door."

"I don't like that name: Nick," I said again. "Nick. Nick." I kept trying it out, rattling the sound. "It goes too quick. Nick."

My mother blinked with each needle-p.r.i.c.k of repet.i.tion, as with a sting. "Quit that, for heaven's sake-as though it had anything to do with you! I've told you that, how many times do I have to say the same thing? No wonder Enoch decided to turn the key on you"-she brandished it-"he's absolutely right. You can't be trusted."

"That's what he said about Anneke too," I reminded her.

My mother maintained uncomfortably, "That was quite another matter."

"It must have been," I said. "You didn't lock her in."

"Well, don't think we wouldn't be better off if we had. -It's only for a little while though," she told me guiltily. "Until he's gone. Just so he doesn't see you're around."

"If he doesn't have anything to do with me," I said, "I mean Nick-"

"He doesn't," she jumped in.

"-Then why can't he know I'm here?"

"Really, you're disgusting!" My mother turned on me in a sickened rigorous wrathful spasm; a blotch like a berry burst out on the side of her chin. "What's the matter with you? You don't think I care about your stupid notions, do you?" She spat and howled and rang her big key on the bedpost in a wild clatter and gong. "Why can't you keep your eyes where they belong?-And then you get insulted if it's said you can't be trusted!" She unleashed herself at me and struck my arm, but the awkward unexpected pitch of her half-closed palm flattened with surprise midway in its arc, and it was no blow at all-nothing happened: only a harmless shrill zing of skin on skin. "There, you see? It's just what you deserve! A child like you is the worst sort of danger yet!" She put a long angry s.p.a.ce between us, scratching at her throat where the collar lay back unb.u.t.toned, and rooting in that raw patch of neck with the very hand (how stiff and plain the fingers now) that had leaped out to punish; meanwhile yelling sorrowfully, bleating at my badness, until on the verge of clarity the word I had spied in the sc.r.a.p of letter, the picture of the word, renewed itself-was it "cross"? was it "church"?-and almost came to mind and life: only just rose and rose to the brim- ("Listen!" said my mother.) -and fell short.

A chug came out of the sky: and then the blurred din of whistle and strident cough and blare of bell and blast of steam; and then a kind of crash, also of steam, in resonance with the windowpanes, which vibrated delicately; and then at last across the town, far and clear, out of the station and up from the trembling platform where the alighted pa.s.sengers felt the engine's lungs shiver in their feet-soles, the eye of the sound rushed down. The eye of the sound just then rushed piercing shrieking down; and my mother said, "It's three o'clock, we've missed the train"-falling out of violence as into a furred and noiseless pit, where the pelts of commonplace animals m.u.f.fled her calls and curses.

-I wondered whether the word were "curse," but knew in a second it was not.

"There won't be another one out of here until midnight-I checked the schedule. We're stuck," my mother said, "we're stuck until twelve o'clock, and I don't intend to go dragging off like a thief in the middle of the night! All right," she said, "I suppose we're stuck until tomorrow."

The prospect did not content her.

"Ana now will we be late?" I asked.

"Late for what?"

"Getting to America."

"No," said my mother. She had ceased to founder and was in possession of herself and of me. "There are always plenty of ships in that direction. -It's never too late for America."

She looked desolately down into the bed of her open hand, where the key with all its cold big limbs and juts was laid out like a figurine: and in the moment when with small commotion she locked the door, unaccountably the lost word returned, the" picture of the word, and where it had lain, neither at the beginning nor the end, but in the very center, of the letter, like the inking of a figurine primitive and jagged in the letter to my mother (for I did not believe that Enoch claimed it), the letter from the private visitor who had not yet arrived, that Nick whose name was quicker than himself, for whose sake the train even now could be heard barking into the distant wounded hills without us: the lost word unimportantly returned and prophesied, to my disappointed curiosity, nothing. "Confer" might have promised some enlivening; and "career" surely (my mother cared for nothing of Enoch's so much as this); and "cross" and "church" some bright procession; and "curse" might signify imaginings and rich complexities. But this!-the real word was simpler and duller than any; it was not worth having been teased and tormented for; it shut off all hope for the spectacular, and failed to tantalize.

Nick had written "child" merely.

So it no longer mattered how my mother had come by that pointless paper which inexplicably she treated as dangerous and secret. It did not attract me now; no seed of event or fable could grow from that name or word. It was as she had avowed: "business," and I was all at once convinced of the justice of her slap-administered to a meddler-and forgave her. But on the same ground I could not forgive the locked door: for their business was always the same; it was barbarous; and I wanted nothing more than to avoid their dealings, and keep cleanly away, and go sailing home to America.

Meanwhile I thought, for pleasure's sake, of all the days on board, and of certain birds that nip fish out of the ship's fat wake: but very soon the locked door (wood painted white, and set in the wall like a nose) and the slow turnings of my dress in a faint moist draft took my musings from me. I felt the void of my nakedness, and the void of the rain, light and continuing, barely ticking like a wrist.w.a.tch held in concentration against the ear, a rain without voice, and sitting on the bed nearest the window (through which the garden gate and the duck in the hedge and beyond these a bit of cobblestoned road all mingled with the sway, farther still, of mist-blackened waves) I said into the empty room: "Nick Nick Nick" and then, a moment later, "Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick"-as though that could somehow rouse the stillness and the lurking void.

7.

He came finally. It might have been in an hour, or less, or more-I had no clock to tell me how long. Worn out by idleness, I had fallen, without seeming really to sleep, into a sort of density, where a long row of torches went round and round a black stone; and the stone itself was a vast nostril from whose edge a great stabbing jewel menaced, clinging by means of a clip: and the fires, which kept going out, were brought in darkness to be rekindled in its phosph.o.r.escent heart. Behind all, in all, a knocking and a rattling, as though the torches (but there were no bearers) jostled one against the other, clanking their wide hollow flanks in a sound so gnawingly familiar that without delay I awoke and ran to the window and saw, leaning against the hedge, an old blue bicycle. It stood tilted and twisted, with its front wheel doubled back on itself, like a stork preening its tail, and the handle bars thrust almost into the rear spokes: and tied to the back fender, under a newspaper tent which the wind shortly ripped away, was a sharp-cornered bundle very much in the shape of three or four books. It looked harmless enough, this vehicle, and inconsequential, quite as though it belonged to some student lad or (except for the books) to a younger laborer, to anyone but the private visitor whom my mother feared. For plainly my mother feared the private visitor, and suspected in him influences and powers, and regarded him as an enemy, and supposed him to be formidable and dire and sly: hardly the sort to come jangling up on an old blue bicycle, with a missing front fender, and a searchlight clamped to the tubing, and a pile of books strapped and wrapped against the rain in thin green paper, and every metal part, frame and chain and hidden rusted screw, bouncing like a rope of bells. Nevertheless I heard behind the wall the sudden peopling of my mother's room, and steps both confident and leisurely (not my mother's walk, for she unhesitantly hopped and sped, nor Enoch's, uncertain, slow, rhythmically unpredictable), and the brief shriek of a chair pulled across wood, and the closing of a door-and then, at that moment after the settling and confrontation when voices always rise to frequent a first meeting: nothing, no noise or sound of any kind. I leaped to the other bed, and listened close to the wall, and still nothing, not a whisper. And I wondered whether the three of them were somehow stunned and could only sit and gape, or whether no one had come after all, and the bicycle, like the torches, were part of some dread viscosity of imagination. But there it was; I saw it in the garden, embedded now by the force of its own weight deep in the hedge; and just next to its rear reflector, from the protruding point of a little stick, hung a fragment of cloth. It fluttered wetly, then sagged, then once more was blown full, and I thought it was perhaps a handkerchief the wind had mistakenly impaled there, or else a bit of wayward rag, until I looked again, and recognized it for what it was meant to be: an adornment, a declaration, a tr.i.m.m.i.n.g, a boast even. A tiny American flag stuck up, waving fitfully-the kind seen at carnivals, and growing out of houseplants, and in the clutch of celebrants-a mean, wild, alien, homeless and comical little flag, heralding not so much nationality as temperament. And I fancied how on downward grades it unfurled and showed all its petulant shabbiness-but workingmen and serious scholars pedaled unbedecked; and gay students went in for squirrel-tail plumes or colored ribbon-streamers rippling from the hub-nut, and then only if they followed the United States trends-and so I took it (not just then, but afterward, when I learned about the categories into which certain persons w.i.l.l.y-nilly throw their lives) for a badge of Bohemia. It gave notice, at least, of. an irregular ident.i.ty, not energetic, not enterprising (American virtues which these particular stars and stripes, faded but dripping-dark, half-folded, limply dangling from a casual stick, denied-no, scorned), but rather calmly wistful, even hopeful, even optimistic. It put a favorable construction on things (with reservations), antic.i.p.ated a favorable outcome, flapped in the most favorable, of all possible breezes. And again turning from it to listen (face down in the bare crotch-and-armpit-smelling mattress) to the doubtful silence in the next room, I tried to see Nick astride that loosely-jointed self-spanking metal ganglion, all spinning teeth and rim and wheel, fife-and-drumming down some narrow street with sparrow-rump of flag upright behind him, part-gypsy, part-scout, his shoulders bundled into the very rucksack my mother claimed to remember from some undisclosed long-ago; but it did not work; the picture had too much of the jolly vagabond, in spite of all I had overheard, and sputtered and failed. My vision persisted in producing a sombre dark stark fear-figure, one who would more likely deliver himself out of the black maw of a government-sleek Rolls-Royce-but no, he was poor, they had said he was poor, Nick was poor, and nothing I dreamed would do. nothing would account for the perverse uncanny absurdity, the stupidity, the sinister out-of-placeness, of an American flag sticking straight out of a soaked French hedge.

So it would not come right; the look of the invaded garden would not come right: even the silence, humming out of my mother's room, did not seem a proper silence, and breathed with mysterious interior exchanges. Whatever their business was, it kept them mute, it seemed; it kept them dumb. But in a moment, while I lay on the bed close to the damply flowered wall, the hush on the other side gave out a motion of expanding, opening; it revealed latent murmurs, loudening distinctly into troughs of conversation, like a distant iron ship ploughing nearer: the strain and creak and hollow rumble come groaning through the sea, and bobbing like a bell afloat it dongs and calls; yet until it is upon us we think it soundless and do not perceive those light circ.u.mspect signs of its approach (a rush of cawing fowl, a running hump among the foremost waves, and certain busy warnings in the ocean-quiet) which expectation might have detected-while all the time, for miles of audibility, in creak and strain and rumble the iron ship has been crying out its coming; and we would have heard had we believed in its existence. In the same way I listened for the vigorous wrestle of a bargain made, or a blatant quarrel, and could conjecture no other relation behind the wall; and expecting this (as who, in a day of steel, would guess at an iron ship?) I did not know how my mother might ceremonially change, face to face with the private visitor, and how her voice might grow thin and high and stiff, like telephone speech accidentally filtered over a crossed wire. It rose and narrowly hung, a thread of something spectral, difficult, to recognize as hers or anyone's; wordless yet glutted with words; a line of sound glimmering with unintelligibility, like the line of sound that the oscilloscope converts to a cruel fence of notched and palpitating light. It was strung, quivering, over the bed: a voice made of wires: and I thought of the tremor in the border-wire when the killing shot sprang out of Germany, and the one-legged giant broke; and how at his huge fall the pulse ran halfway round a country in that slender girdling fence, strummed like a guitar-string by the feet of leaping soldiers: and how I had stained the dust with bilious contours, surfaces, realms.

Realms and a map: it was another map beneath me now, in the shallow place where so many transient bodies had warmed themselves. I found that groove easily; it rolled me down, and took my bare belly comfortably and naturally, as an old bed will, and when I stirred on the mattress a private odor crept from it-a public sort of privacy, intruded on by a public change of sheets, and a public pair of hands smoothing out the marks of night. Shapes and configurations gleamed there, though not of nations and still less of continents-it was not that sort of map: rather, it resembled strewn human features, and now and then an anatomical drawing-the curved sac of a human stomach, a section of a leg with tracing of the circulatory tree, the channel of a nostril all finely haired, a large, bold, wide-open eye-and all of it cleverly and indelibly delineated An old blotches, streaks, soiled islands. Water, wine, urine and blood (the essential liquids) had made that map. The water left only outlines, flat airy pancreases; the urine flamed and faded; the wine bit deep, and ate the fabric (it was the wine, wild and sour, that sent out that secret visceral scent); but the blood had dried to clean black spots. All shone like crenulated scars and entrails.

Meanwhile the negotiations continued-led mainly by my mother's slender unusual wail, and often cut off, still trembling, by a laugh. It was a laugh of confidence (unlike my mother's familiar laughs of self-delusion) and I thought for a moment it was Enoch's, but when it flew out to claim the room, the window, the yard, I caught the a.s.sault hidden in it and knew it was not. And immediately after its intrusion my mother began to speak again, so the laugh had no victory. Her tone was new and perplexing-it was a kind of plea that streamed from her. She was alone against the laughter. Enoch did not support her, although he was not far-a series of small noises revealed how he moved in halting circles, a habit of his when he went punching his pockets for the feel of cigarettes: his step approached and diminished regularly. And still the laughter hung and wafted, while my mother demurred, waiting for it to pa.s.s (how remorseful that little gap in the rhythm of her voice!), and then again took up her tireless whirr, yielding it like the yawn of a wind through the wall. Now and then it was almost provoked into meaning-the semblance of a word rose and faintly beat, then shrank back as though whipped-and even at the window, where I went to pull a finger through the drops acc.u.mulated on the wide dusty sill, they were still phantom notes she sent murmuring out. I drew a calligraphic "Nick" in the dirt, and extended an arm far over to measure the sill-it was wider than my whole arm from the shoulder, so with considerable care (for the garden looked strangely miniature below) I lifted out first one knee and then the other; and found myself on a long stone block, edged with a spiked railing, which ran like an abbreviated balcony beneath a row of shining windows. I turned myself around, clumsy with caution, and crept a little way out; my kneecaps were pitted with granules of lime, and the rain licked gauzily down my back-until suddenly it was lifted away: I looked up and saw the upper eave overhead, cozy as an umbrella, and the gutter spilling beyond reach of me, and all unexpectedly I had a view of my mother's room.

It was stung with light; the panes gleamed with double reflections; the ceiling was a lake of light. A brown curtain came winging out of the window, and behind it lapped a vague seepage of voices. The curtain stirred, and blew back into the bright room: its film of shadow swam across the ceiling like a cloud or wash of fog. My mother was remonstrating-"No," I heard her bleat into the wool of the other's derision, m.u.f.fled by his fresh and stupendous roar-"Oh, no."

I could see the corner of the high bureau, and the worn nape of an armchair, and the bulbs blinking with uneven current, and I dared myself to crawl out a foot farther along the ledge, and then another longer s.p.a.ce, until the flat grey sky swung obliquely into sight in the big oval mirror on the bureau.

"Don't talk to me about terms," my mother moaned. I was astonished: her words had leaped into clarity. "What do terms have to do-"

"With you and me?" the visitor asked pleasantly.

My mother rasped. I heard the coa.r.s.e congregation of spittle in her throat-she might have been breathing in my ear, so close and wounding was her cry. "You said you were coming to talk at arm's length."

"All right, then say I have a short arm." The visitor sent out one of his rattling laughs, and the sound of cold rain running from the gutter went gurgling through it. It seemed to chill his mirth. He resumed, a trifle spitefully, "Still, I only reach for what I can get. The world won't blame me for that, will it?"

"I'm not the world."

"But you run it-it comes to the same thing. It's all in the literature of social protest-anyone who can pay off the gendarmes runs the world."

"Then you saw in the papers we were here!" my mother exclaimed. "You saw all about it!" she said with the thickening note of satisfaction.

"In the papers? I'm afraid I gave up the papers months ago. They're no good without a war."

"But how-"

"They're getting stupidly political, haven't you noticed? Or else they're full of blown-up International Society news-it's part of the trend toward world Americanization. All the editors are becoming surly as a result. Every time you read a column you feel someone's picking an argument with you. I'm a man of peace, I hate to be disturbed. A regular war's more sensible-the news worries you, and when you're worried about a thing of that scale you feel important, and when you think you're important you feel flattered. -And I really like flattery, you know,"

"I gave you credit." my mother began weakly.

"Oh, look, that's not flattery!" He waited a moment before flushing the room with his laughter. "Not when it's cash I've come for!"

Inadvertently she abandoned the tone of entreaty. "I did give you credit. I really thought you might have some vestige left of-"

"Vestige!" crowed the visitor. "Vestige! If I've got anything. it's got to be a vestige!"

"Self-perception," my mother finished.

"Oh, good, that's much better. I thought you were going to say decency. Human decency, in fact-that usually runs in vestiges."

"I didn't believe it was an ordinary liaison. A simple ordinary liaison," my mother went on with unexpected scorn.

"Annie, you mean? You want to call it a liaison, you go ahead and call it that. They call it something else in Dutch." He gave an artificial half-sneeze, a sardonic noise just between humor and malice, which seemed to emerge from the flooring; he might have been squatting or bending in some imitative or satiric motion. Whatever the gesture, it could not, according to his satisfied snort, have been obeisant. "The poor girl really did get in Dutch with you, didn't she? I suppose you've already fired her?"

"Of course. She went last night."

"Expeditious! I congratulate you, M13. Vand."

"The child can do without that sort of influence."

"At all costs?"

"At no cost," my mother spit out.

"Oh, you're very determined, I can see that. But it's all to the good-it shows you administer a good bringing-up. According to all the rules of pedigree-the horse code. No vestiges."

"None," my mother agreed sharply.

"Then I'm glad I came. I really had misgivings-I didn't think we'd be on the same side! I'm very, very glad. That's from the heart, you know."

"I wish you'd state your business and keep your heart out of it."

"It bothers you, my speaking from the heart? You don't like me to be sincere?"

"You talk about sincerity!" My mother gave an automatic cough, for poise; I heard it very clearly. "Don't be obscene."

"If I can't be sincere I've got to be something. It isn't enough to be vestigial, after all. You think it's pleasant to come here and find I'm looked on as a sort of refurbished fossil-"

"Oh, you don't have to worry about that-you can't be a fossil if you were never alive to begin with," she a.s.sured him.

"That's the tone to take!"

"I'm not taking any 'tone'."

"I beg your pardon, wasn't that Mrs. Vand's tone? The high and mighty tone of the high and mighty Mrs. Vand?-I've heard about it."

"You've heard a great deal-your friend didn't keep back a thing. Apparently there was nothing she denied you."

"Very few people deny me what I ask for, Mrs. Vand."