Trust: A Novel Part 17

"He keeps lists," I answered, thinking how curious it was that my mother was also impelled, at that very moment, to keep lists. But then, while the colonel scratched the hair on the back of one hand with the straight clean nails of the other, quite as though the inadequacy of my reply had set him itching, I tentatively offered him one of Enoch's sardonic phrases: "He reclaims relatives, I think."

"Oh," said the colonel, "he brings 'em back alive?"

"I don't think alive."

"Dead?"

"I guess dead," I acknowledged, gnawing my lip with shame. I knew from my mother how ignominious Enoch's obligations were; she feared the corpses had made him taboo.

And now it seemed she was right. The colonel took off his green gla.s.ses and examined me through the mole-splattered creases ringing his light-stung eyes, damp with distaste. "Well, well," he said, "I see what you mean, the Riddle of Death. So you're Vand's daughter probably?"

"Stepdaughter," I corrected, but my head stayed down.

"Rotten job, could turn the stomach of the best of 'em. Well, it's made his name, that's the point-I suppose that's why he does it. I run into him now and again, you know." His heavy clench gripped my shoulder and then abruptly opened-I felt on me the seal of his contempt "Can't see why they brought you over."

I said humbly, "I came with my mother."

"Made the Paris papers, didn't she? Crashed up her chauffeur?"

"He only had a concussion."

"Only?"

"He didn't get killed," I said defensively.

"That's a riddle too," the colonel remarked without a blink. "Half a mind to take back my fifty cents."

"I bet you've killed a hundred people," I accused him, "on account of being in the Army."

"A hundred thousand's more like it. But it wasn't the Army's fault It was the war's." I could think of nothing to say to this, so he explained, "The Army doesn't make the war, the Government does. The Army only does what the Government tells it to," and looked at me as though he thought I should understand. "That's what they're saying in Nuremberg; that's the defense, and I can't say I don't think they have a point. You take that Russian kid over there-" I turned to follow his nod: the baby was drooling. "Some sort of U.N. connection," the colonel went on, "but I'll tell you something: I'm more scared of that kid over there than I am of all the generals in the Nuremberg dock put together, you know why?"

I could not imagine why. The baby, reaching up for an almost-empty spool of yellow thread its mother was swinging just beyond its grasp, seemed harmless enough, if not especially intelligent; for when it captured the spool it only put it into its mouth. But I did not see why the colonel should be afraid of it.

"I heard an Arab sing a Russian song last week," I told him, thinking how my mother, with equal inexplicability, had been afraid of the singer's voice. "It was in a restaurant, but he wasn't really from Arabia."

Unimpressed, the colonel returned his big dark spectacles to his face, shutting me out of the green world there; but I could see my reflection, distorted against a background of sea, on their curved surfaces. "It's that kid we've got to watch out for, that's the generation of the real enemy. The lawyers are wasting their time. So's Vand and all the other post-war bureaucrats. What's done is done. We can't waste time going back, we've got to prepare for that kid over there." It was plain to me that he was no longer addressing me; he had grown unforeseeably formidable, and seemed incapable of riddle-making.

To placate him I recited, "They haven't paid my mother royalties since 1939."

"Who?" he sternly asked.

"The Russians."

"Royalties on what?"

I bit my fingertip doubtfully.

"I see what you mean," he conceded, although I had not spoken. "You know what royalties are?"

"No," I said.

"You're a nice little girl," the colonel said. "I like you."

"Do you want to play checkers?" I inquired at once, to take advantage of his sudden amiability.

His strong public laugh blared. "I always win against civilians, that's fair warning. It's part of my battle-plan." Between us we dared the tilt of his chair-arm, balancing the board. His furred tidy fingers lined up the checkers until he had his black squadron at attention. Methodically he charged my troops, piling the losses in a neat round red tower at his side, and shortly won. "A field situation," he described it, "it's over your head, it's not for you. You haven't learned how to calculate your advance." The pieces fell in at his command for the next game; democratically, we exchanged colors. "I've got the Red Army now, have I?" he muttered, and without conscience decimated my forces once more. "You've got to be able to see the other side's advantages, you've got to be able to antic.i.p.ate them. No, I don't like the way you play-you take foolish chances, you're a wild patriot: now look, don't love your side so much you won't let yourself think about mine! Too much patriotism always loses," he concluded, and gave me a sharp smile that was not really humorous. "They shouldn't have brought you over there. Not now, not in the middle of everything."

"The middle of everything," I repeated, wondering where that was and watching, as he rose, the flash of the half dollar representing the sea-swallowed piece: it came and went in his left lens like a frantic semaph.o.r.e.

"Europe," he said firmly, and by the consciously severe rasp he entrusted to his tone I was immediately reminded of Enoch. "It's no place to bring a kid any more. You tell 'em I said so." He waited until he drew from me what he imagined was consent. Then: "Europe's for the scavengers now, and for the lawyers," he told me, going off.

I did not know what he meant by scavengers-he seemed to dip in and out of conversation with himself, generally in my mother's fashion-but when, after a yard's hesitation, he stopped to call to me to be grateful for America and to listen to my teachers (he did not again mention Enoch or my mother), I thought he must be right about the lawyers. Europe made work for lawyers: for my mother's lawyer Europe made work. In the middle of violence, in the middle in fact of everything (the colonel's phrase came clear), had she not had to send after William's strange tools of peace? Insurance would heal the chauffeur's wound, checks would surfeit the private visitor's greed; and, for both, William's techniques were as ample as my mother's trust fund. Lawyers were a cult, the colonel implied, his voice not liking them.

His walk across the deck dispelled the moment's similarity to Enoch which that vocal scorn of his had conjured-unlike my stepfather he had the military gait, the chin low, the belly inconspicuous, the flat ears subtly on guard, the utilitarian shoulders jutting at either side as sparely as rifle-racks, and soldier's legs stiff half from habit, half from some perhaps secret ailment. His whole movement signified departure-not the casual leavetaking of ordinary men who might soon come together again (as we might, and did, meet in the dining room half an hour afterward), but the hailed, paraded, pitied, and applauded embarkation, at the dock's mobbed edge, of the sacrificial armored few. He proceeded, in brief, like a man who of all things knew least whether he would return. And with just such a swerve to the side of his clipped and visored head as one would expect of a man of fate, he bent to nuzzle out the alien baby's dalliance. There against the brown rail, while the white-st.i.tched ocean bounced beyond, he squatted face to face with his enemy. And while he talked at it, sending out curling sounds between the varied jackets, foils, and crowns of his c.r.a.pulent teeth, his enemy warily re-connoitred-sucked its fingers, then swiftly, a blitzkrieg, with small fierce fists s.n.a.t.c.hed the sunshades from his nose. "Volodya!" cried its mother; and "Nyet, nyet," chided the colonel, struggling to open his enemy's moist positive grip. But too late and in vain-in and out of the baby's mouth went the ear-pieces; it licked with relish, and tried its tongue up and down the smooth green lenses, and bit hard little gums, red as strawberries, joyously on the colonel's intervening hairy forefinger. "Nyet," said the colonel, and "nope," said the colonel, persuading, entreating. The woman lowered her bright braided and ribboned head into the skirmish, slapping the baby's hands to free its prize-of-war. Cautiously she squeezed its cheeks until its small tongue-tip pushed out and relinquished the colonel's nibbled finger. Then she handed him his gla.s.ses, ruefully framing signs, inserting her own fingers into her mouth and pressing her gums. "Teething," the colonel translated. "You should give him something to work on." The woman grimaced to show how well she had understood-"You see yes quite," she stated in a voice pitched too low for English, and displayed tiny mysterious notches on the wooden spool. At once the baby grabbed it away and took it to its mouth. The colonel smiled at the mother of his enemy. "Nice little boy, nice fellow," he said, wiping his smeared sungla.s.ses across his breast with a sweep of complicity. Meanwhile the baby gnawed on the spool, then suddenly laughed aloud. It was a shriek of open satisfaction. Its mother patted her thickly banded circle of braid, embarra.s.sed by pleasure and pride. "Female," said the mother of the colonel's enemy.

I was astonished into bravery and out of politeness. "You played with the baby," I burst out when, not merely with the air of a man who has had an afterthought, but as something of a hero chewing the cud of his self-esteem, the colonel restored himself to the march and came to stand by the chair where I was dropping the checkers one by one into their black box. I a.s.sumed he was one of those people, easily recognized by children and almost certainly childless, who congratulate themselves on being especially attuned to the mentalities of all the inferior races. I sensed by now that it was his custom to speak to children as though he were accosting a tribe of amicable bushmen, and (supposing he had ever encountered a bushman) vice-versa: in either case he could leap from the simple to what he hoped was the profound without expecting to offend. In this, as I had already observed, he somewhat resembled my mother; but she, at least, had the virtue of not concealing, from herself or her subjects, her plain dislike. "You said you were afraid of it," I pointed out, "and then you played with it."

"It's the future I'm afraid of." But this was too cryptic. "I don't like to think of the future," he finished.

"I do," I said quickly, and thought of the future then and there-I saw a great white ring of light, and myself in the heart of it, elevating a snow-encrusted violin. For in one of her lists marked Things After Getting Home: Winter Preparation, my mother, under the ba.n.a.lity of "school clothes," had written "music lessons."

"Well, you," the colonel said, "you are the future." This sounded so much like another riddle that he had to scratch his small upper lip. "Which reminds me, let's see: some boy scouts are out on a hike," he plunged on so earnestly I almost forgave him, "and after a while come to a forest. Now-how far into it can they go?"

I considered. "Are there trees?"

"Of course. I said it's a forest."

"And wolves?"

"Plenty of wolves, but it doesn't matter."

"Then I give up," I said.

"Knew you would," said the colonel, pleased by his triumph. "Answer's halfway in."

"Halfway?" I wondered.

"Well, because after that they're not going into the forest, they're coming out. It's the same as now," he commented, lifting a vague salute to the sea. "We're halfway to America."

But though it might have been the truth, I did not think this a witticism. If we were halfway to America, then we were halfway to Europe too: it was only a question of reversing the engines; it was only a question of point of view. "I don't see how anybody can be afraid of a baby," I told him with more uneasiness than spite; and looked toward that part of the sky, littered with shards of clouds like broken white teacups turned upside down, under which Europe invisibly lay.

11.

When we came home a cable from Enoch was waiting. My mother read it jubilantly. "They've given him a promotion! I can hardly believe it!" Her tongue moved skilfully past the exact governmental phrase. "They told him about it right after he finished outlining his report at Zurich!" She threw herself onto a ha.s.sock beside the foyer table and began to laugh. Her eyes were brilliant. "I never expected it so soon! But it's astonishing!"

"Does it mean he'll come and stay with us now?" I inquired.

"Oh no, he'll only get home now and then to see all these new Washington people. He's got to go all over Europe," she crowed, sniffing the cablegram as though it were somehow perfumed with her desire.

"Then how is it different from the job he's got now?"

But she was exultant. "Different! Oh, it's marvelously different; it's clean. In the first place it's with the State Department-look, don't bother me now," she broke off, "I've got to send an answer right away." She pulled off her gloves and tossed them at the maid, who had only just returned from the family-visit to Toronto which my mother's absence had enforced. "Paper, paper! Get me some paper, Janet. You should have managed to get back yesterday, I wrote you the ship was due today-look at the dust on that bannister! Oh, I knew they'd give it to him, they couldn't let him rot in that horror forever"-she sipped a breath of innocence, of detachment, of turning-from-evil-"I could feel how morbid it was making me..."

She wrote, under the heading of DARLING, as though this too were a sort of list: THE AIR IS CLEAR AT LAST CONGRATULATIONS GLORIOUS FUTURE AHEAD NO MORE CORPSES And when I said, "I don't want to study piano, I want the violin," she pressed with zeal upon her pencil point and added: SAFE Nor did she again question my safety in the world until a dozen years later, when Enoch stood at the doorway of his amba.s.sadorship and when, as its price, I was sent to my father's unknown doorway, the yellow, dank, and unknown doorway of Gustave Nicholas Tilbeck.

Part Three.

Brighton.

1.

I was sent, but not immediately. They delayed, my stepfather and his wife, they reposed, they h.o.a.rded quiet days. The crisis had secured my consent: I had said I would go: and this seemed enough for them. They settled into old-fashioned domestic scenes and sounds; rather too purposefully they "relaxed," and the long conspiratorial drone behind the closed door of my mother's room one morning turned out to contain nothing more of intrigue or cabal than Enoch reading aloud the haying chapter from Anna Karenina. "How wonderful!" my mother exclaimed now and then. "I'd like to do something like that, something oh, you know, just thoroughly physical."

"Why not start with getting out of bed?" Enoch said.

"Oh you," she mildly scolded. "I don't feel like it yet. It's too soon."

"Leverheim told you to get out of there last week."

"Leverheim. What a fool. If he has any license at all it's a plumber's. Him and his pills, they'd choke a whale. They made my hair fall out. Look, it's coming out in chunks."

"He told you not to worry."

"It may take months to grow back thick again! Even he admits that. You don't expect me to walk around this way, do you?"

"I don't expect you to stay in bed either."

"Why not? I like it here."

"It's neurotic."

"Good. I'm glad. It's a compliment to be called neurotic, especially by you. You never say anything psychoa.n.a.lytical."

"But I'm always listening psychoa.n.a.lytically, and that's even better."

"Well, it may be better for you, but it's not better for me. I can't stand not knowing what you think of me."

"All right, I think you're neurotic. Now get out of bed."

"Not until I look human."

"It's not important to look it, it's important to be it."

"Don't start talking that funny way again. You're starting again."

"I only said-"

"An epigram. It's disgusting. I hate it. You said I'm not human. You think I'm a dog in the manger or something. You have an Aesop complex, you know that, Enoch?"

"Look," he said, "I thought you wanted to be read to."

"I do, I'm listening. Go on. I love this scene, don't you? It makes me want to jump right out of bed and mow alongside some peasants."

He sighed, but he went on. His voice briefly lifted before descending into murmur again, and soon my mother was regularly interrupting with little moans of joy and protest. They were full of play, she and he; they were full of peace and gossip and mutual disobedience and delight. Neither one of them had a thought beyond the other.

Nevertheless I was sometimes allowed to visit with them, since my mother no longer had the excuse of sedation to keep me away. Her head was turbaned grotesquely in a gold-and-white shawl patterned with the Taj Mahal. She was lively and restored. Though her cough was rare, her talk was not, and its familiar disconnected patter continued for long periods (but plainly not meant for me), and reached and roused even Enoch's stingy smile. He shone with uncomplicated good humor almost all the while: my mother was exaggeratedly querulous, therefore unconsciously witty-but not so clever as Enoch's response measured her. Perhaps he laughed-he, committed at least superficially to the utilitarian-because there was, for the moment, nothing more useful for him to do. The fact was that we were waiting.

For what? Tilbeck had specified that I was to come alone. This was the paternal command. I was not to be chauffeured or chaperoned into my father's mysteriously tardy jurisdiction: quite the opposite, he meant me to deliver myself up to him unaccompanied and free of home-snares, in the manner of Beauty returning, unguided and unguarded, to the terrible Beast. That is to say, I supposed this to be the manner he had in mind; what he had actually written, and more especially his way of writing it, was promptly made inaccessible. The letter had been briskly hidden: Enoch had locked it up in his desk almost at once, as though it were a sort of dangerous animal he was afraid to have roam within sight of its prey. And strangely, it was his wife, not me, whom he regarded as its prey.

So I loafed in my mother's room and, against their jokes and teasings, waited. After several days it somehow came clear that a dispute had thickened about the time they were to surrender me to Tilbeck. Our side appeared to want to put it off another month-until nearly October-until, I surmised, the Senate hearings had safely ended. "It doesn't matter to me," I told them once, although they had not asked me whether it did. "After twenty-two years," Enoch answered, "he can afford another few weeks' delay. It doesn't matter that it doesn't matter," he obscurely finished, "to you." And my mother, who had wept because she had meant me to be always free, listened to the joyous haying scene, thought jealously of the Emba.s.sy, and was quickly reconciled. But the final date was so nearly a compromise-in-the-middle that it was difficult to tell who had won-that is, who had had to give way. For no reason at all-or perhaps because at that time he was growing fatter every day-I a.s.sumed that Enoch had not troubled to resist the other's proposals: had not troubled over anything at all, in fact, and was simply ready to hand me over and be done with it. Now and again the book smacked shut in his lap and he fell back into his chair with his palms slapped down upon his two spread-apart thick thighs, absorbed in adoration of my mother's foolishness, looking like a sultan or grand vizier; and my mother's wildly-wrapped turban with its print of queer Indian scribbles over her suddenly balding head, leaking hank and scraggle, side by side with his neat damp ruddy crown, threw over the room an Oriental comic chaotic cast that startled them both into self-satisfaction. They had settled me; they had smoothed me away like a snag; they had negotiated me, for a time, out of their existence. Who had done the real negotiating, however, was soon apparent: twice in one week the letterhead of William's firm had pa.s.sed across my mother's knee-humped sheet, after which she spoke: "Is the tenth of September all right with you?"-and did not stop for my reply. She fingered her forehead indifferently; she saved her pa.s.sion for herself. "Now how am I supposed to know?" she counter-questioned when I wondered how long my banishment would be: "Ask Enoch."

But Enoch, who had no idea, mumbled: "A week maybe?"

"A day or so," my mother amended.

"A month or so?" I interpreted.

"Well, take a full suitcase, you never can tell," she acknowledged ominously.

In short they would reveal nothing. They kept to themselves, and pitied one another for their predicament, whatever it might be: with nothing left over, neither wonder nor regard, for the fact of my exile: only, I suspected, relief. They were saved; I had saved them. They had put me between themselves and Tilbeck; this time money was not enough, money would not do, money was not what he wanted; he wanted me.

I decided to speak to William.

But first this happened: Ed McGovern telephoned and asked to see my mother.

"Good," she said. "Tell him to come. I want his opinion on Vronsky." For two days she had been arguing with my stepfather about the characters in Anna Karenina: she was angry that Tolstoy had made Anna's lover feel ennui. "It isn't sensible," she said, all vague and pouting, "it's rude. It's insolent."

"You mean it's real," Enoch said.

"Iall wouldn't have done it. First those silly asterisks"-my mother believed in literary "frankness"; she owned an unexpurgated copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover, of course, a smuggler's copy, and had modeled her foreman's love scenes with Marianna after the gamekeeper's-"and then, practically right after the consummation, he's bored to death with her!"