Trust: A Novel Part 21

"That's what I mean. I heard you, you were talking about raising the dead."

"But that's talking like a Christian, isn't it?"

"Oh come, Enoch, stop it."

"You don't want me to talk like a Jew and you don't want me to talk like a Christian. That leaves the recitation of the Upanishads, I suppose."

"Don't, Enoch," she implored.

"Oh, it's not simply a question of don't. Believe me, it's more a question of can't. Not a single chapter. My Sanskrit's rusty, what a pity-"

Vaguely she resisted his tug. "I knew it, you always end up with ridicule. You make a joke out of everything."

"A Jewish joke?" he inquired with a twist of his tone.

"You don't think the way an Amba.s.sador ought to think," she accused.

"Well, I'm not the Amba.s.sador yet. There's time."

"You haven't recovered, that's the trouble. I'm not stupid, I can see how you've been contaminated-"

"By your not being stupid?"

"Enoch, you're not listening to me seriously."

"Yes I am. With high seriousness. It's like listening to an epic. As though you were a troubadour."

"d.a.m.n it!" she said.

"All right, if it's only an access of boredom and you don't mean it theologically. d.a.m.n what?"

"You! That old job you had ruined you. Those ledgers! Those numbers!"

"Ruined," he said with amiable melancholy.

"Your mind's ruined, your whole sensibility, I can see it. You haven't recovered. As though all of it had to be your fault to satisfy you! That's masochism, you know it is. It's perfectly obvious-you know masochism is a Jewish trait, otherwise the Jews would have disappeared long ago. It's simple ordinary psychology. They're always looking to suffer, and then they turn right around and complain when they do."

"Simple ordinary psychology," he repeated.

"Well, I'm a realist!" She thrust her chin up with so lively a movement that her turban slipped free; the little feathers of her sickened hair roamed like animate cilia in the air. "I've got my name on all those Zionist charity letterheads, haven't I? You know perfectly well how I feel. After all, I'm not an anti-Semite! I've read everything there is on the Dreyfus case!-All I'm saying is it's all over."

He looked at her dully. "What's all over?"

"Is that the Socratic method? What do you mean what's all over? The concentration camps are all over!" she almost shouted.

"Your daughter says the same," he noted languidly.

My mother was scornful. "Just as though she ever had a single political idea in her head! Well, she's right, for once."

"I wasn't thinking of politics," I said humbly.

"I told you she wasn't," my mother gave out with a click of satisfaction.

"I was only wondering about what you said," I pursued, "about how the demonstration would come about. What you were saying before, the extraordinary sign-"

But my mother scowled with annoyance. "Leave Enoch and his metaphors be, can't you?"

For an answer my stepfather merely groaned. It was an unexpected noise. "Oh my G.o.d," he finished it off.

Nevertheless I would not let go, no matter what. He had opened himself to me and he had no right, in my mother's presence, to shut the lid: not, at any rate, after having revealed the combination. "I was wondering in what sense you thought the dead could be raised," I patiently probed, ready for anything.

"In what sense! Oh Lord! What a provocation!" my mother complained. "I'm telling you, leave Enoch alone. He's not going to be Amba.s.sador to the dead, after all! It's all over and he hasn't had anything to do with it for ten years and he still isn't recovered from it, isn't that plain enough?" And she tore the vagrant Taj Mahals from her throat, where they lay fallen and bunched; furiously she shook the silk all around her.

"Put your shawl back on," Enoch reprimanded. "You'll cough again. You'll get your disease back."

"There, that's just the thing I'm driving at. It wasn't a disease you had," she argued sternly. "I mean it wasn't gangrene! It was only a job."

He appeared to be rewarding her with successive satiric nods-a nurse with a recalcitrant patient. "That's a very practical view of it. -Put your shawl on, will you?"

"It's not just practical, it's the sacred truth," she continued, but she obeyed him. "It was only a job and it got you where you are now. That's how you ought to regard it. That's how / regard it," she resumed.

"Where I am now," he echoed.

"At the brink of everything!"

"I'm to have what's known as 'a brilliant career,'" he interposed.

"Call it what you want. I know what I call it!"

"You call it Everything."

"I'm a grabber," she admitted.

"There's candor for you," he acknowledged. I almost thought it a pilgrimage of violence that trailed across his eye just then. But in a moment he had diverted it to an ambush somewhat milder. He began, as though they had been speaking of nothing else all the while (though it seemed my mother, at least, had not), "Do you think the Senate will confirm?"-which made her watchfully bristle.

"We've done what we could," she said.

"I don't deny it."

"We've done it all," she said.

"Down to the last," he agreed. He fixed on me meditatively, rubbing his blunt nose. His fingers were stiff, square-edged, short, his elbow was looped up high for defense, his mouth was incomprehensible, even invisible. Without our noticing it, night had happened. Already we were sitting in the rush of blueness before the final dark, surveying one another's heads like foreign silhouettes. "I don't deny it," Enoch said, feebly, once more: he looked, then-what I could see of him, what I could hear of him, his face and voice disguised by bleakness, and masked, and bound, and put away-he looked altogether what my mother had said of him: separate.

"It's not as though anything stood in your way," she encouraged him. "There's no risk now, after all, is there? We've taken care of the risk!"

"We've disposed of the risk," he corrected her.

"All right then! You're safe. You're absolutely safe."

Safe: it was the word she had used long ago, in flight from Europe, in flight from Nick; only then she had used it for me.

Enoch, behold, was safe. The word had been transferred to him like a quality. Did it mean that I was robbed of it?-that "safe," like some gold-plated school award, some little shiny molded Rome-muscled statuette, the only one of its honorable kind, had to pa.s.s from winner to winner, to be conferred only at the expense of someone else's having to give it up? However it was, Enoch, at least, had the coveted thing-he was safe. My mother had dubbed him safe; but also she had dubbed him separate. For if he were not altogether and actually separate he could not be altogether and actually safe: I saw him as one of those whose natures forbid them to partake of the profane, whom no persuasion and no temptation can absolve from their strict flagellations. Yet my mother made him partake and even indulge (the bird of the world lay steaming, stuffed with hierarchical dumplings, on the exquisite table of her imagination-dead but not in vain; dead but savory; she meant to have a good meal of it yet), she insisted on it, he was to be Amba.s.sador, and not to the country of the murdered. So he was neither safe nor separate, I observed, from his wife, who took his apocalyptic captivity no more seriously than she would have taken a report of his indigestion-having no trouble with the feast herself, she failed to be roiled; and being in a manner Christian, she could do what Enoch-the-Jew had no notion of: she could eat her G.o.d. Poor Enoch! He was an apostate. His G.o.d ate him.

For what could it have been other than a dybbuk which had entered him and had taken hold of his escaped Babylonian intellect and his infidel compa.s.sion?-the dybbuk of all the lost dead, the dybbuk of the martyrs, the dybbuk of the slaughtered millions, the dybbuk of cinder and smoke, the succubus Europa who lay crouched at his organ with her teeth in his bludgeoned tissue? Rapt Enoch! I comprehended him at last. I saw what he waited for, the extraordinary sign, the consecrated, demonstration, which he did not dare to name Messiah. He was waiting for the deliverance of history. I saw him: he had been formed at Creation, he had been witness at Sinai, and he went on raptly waiting as those obsessed by timelessness always wait. He kept his bare secret vigil as devotedly as the high priest of the Temple in the moment of the utterance of the Name of Names with the Holy of Holies. He awaited justice for the wicked and mercy for the destroyed. He awaited the oblivion of devouring Europe. He awaited the just estimate of the yet-to-be-born. -How else am I to put it? In the long, long, long, long memory of history (put it this way) the dead are at last resurrected: even at the price of sublime civilization. It is the exactly balanced irony of vengeance that only the wronged survive. Where now is a.s.syria? Who sleeps under the pyramids? Where has sleekbooted Caesar gone? Who afterward will recall the cathedrals of the Rhine? History (put it this way) is the Paradise of the lost. When we remember the martyrs we bring on the Messiah.

Well, how else am I to put it? What ate Enoch was no metaphor, in spite of what he claimed for it. And he did not believe in his own aphorisms. Why? Because he took them for mere prayer.

It was, as I have said, night. My stepfather stood up and stretched and opened Anna Karenina and read out the first sentence: "All happy families are alike," he said, crashing it into triviality. It was trivial, trivial. He took his wife firmly by the arm and went into the house.

And she, my mother, freshly fed on the bird of the world?

My mother was waiting for the Messiah too-only she thought he would come dressed as an Amba.s.sador named Enoch Vand.

2.

The next day I determined to see William.

This was not easy to arrange. I could not telephone him, in the regular way, for an appointment at his office; it was my mother who was his client and not, by any stretch, myself; and anyhow it was not on a matter of law that I had need of him. Whether I had need of him at all was itself a question, but, like my mother, I suddenly found myself valuing his sanity. Enoch, who was on all things reasonable, was at the same time not precisely "sane," since it was his habit to avoid a discussion by having a vision. If a part of his mind, exposed too long to the curious, began after awhile to feel the chill of too much airing, he merely shut it off and opened another part; he was as full of valves of this sort as a trumpet-as, in fact, the Last Trump, of which it may without offense to anyone be a.s.sumed that the notes are many and odd.

By William's sanity I meant, I suppose, his detachment, his aloof and cautious respectability, and even, in a way, his ordinariness. It was William's auspicious lacks, his being without any of the gildings of a seer, that gave him his solidity. He had an excellent intelligence; his son, who had inherited it, was, if nothing else, its genetic proof. But his sensibility was more thorough than imaginative, and this of course was what made him useful and kept him intact. Without ever intending it, William had gained a certain limited fame, even beyond that which the coveted obscurity of his caste unavoidably brought on him. This fame was something more and something less than the simple "fame" of old family: it was reputation, and it threw over him a celebrity radiating not from who he was but from what he had done, though plainly he could not have done what he had done had he not been what he was. It was often enough made patent to me that I could not be expected to understand this hushed machinery of William's "clubs" and William's "cla.s.smates," who were usually not law cla.s.smates at all, but ex-boys from Dr. Peabody's school, or simply men of a particular breed, accent, and cut of nose, immediately acceptable and "right." I could not be expected to understand this because my grandfather was dead and because I had no uncles and because, as my mother pointed out, I had not grown up in sight of it-she meant to say, but did not, that I had no "instincts" (which the clubs and the cla.s.smates in reality were) because I had no father, or at least not the father my grandfather had arranged for me. But even without such instincts and near examples for these great but silent workings, I felt their vast motions, and knew that what William had done, without spectacle or outcry, was mountainous, thick, purposeful, immense, and had nothing to do with courts. For William, it appeared, never went to court: his whole power was struck just in that distance from trials and judges and newspapers, which he left to the lesser firms, the three-partner sort, energetic and aspiring, composed of an Irishman and a pair of Russian Jews. Without spectacle and without courts-but I knew what he had done: he had saved a railroad from the common wolves, he had effected the merger of two gigantic banks, he had consolidated and cleft and amalgamated and dispersed fabled monoliths-and all of it durably, quietly, without spectacle, without courts, without clamor, all of it murmurrous, and in aspect somehow luxurious and even benign.

William had, then, on this account, acc.u.mulated a moderate renown-acc.u.mulated, because it came to him bit by bit; he would turn up in a footnote in, say, the Vanderbilt Law Review, or his name would emerge, in pa.s.sing, in a long article ent.i.tled "The Secret Royalty Behind American Capital" in Business Week, and now and then he would actually be mentioned in an undergraduate cla.s.s in journalism as one too fastidious to allow Fortune's interviewers to exploit him. Very gradually his reputation had penetrated the academies of law: they did not exactly call him a lawyer's lawyer, a term they jealously reserved for one another, but they showed their awe by inviting him, spring and fall, to this Forum and that a.s.sembly. I had seen for myself in the Times how he had declared Harold Laski to be a marxist scoundrel and a nationalizing thief (this was at a Books for the Bar meeting at the Law Center), which, however, expecting no better, he hardly minded-the real affront being that the fellow had exaggerated in his letters, and pulled the wool even over shrewd old Holmes' eyes by telling funny anecdotes that could never have happened at all. -For all these reasons William was trans.m.u.ted for me into a Personage, unlike Enoch, whom my mother liked sometimes to call n.o.body's Boy, although his name had already carried farther than her first husband's. The difference was that William acted like a Personage; he could not help it, he was hardly aware of it-it was only that rect.i.tude sat on his shoulders all darkly visible, like a lidless bird on a bust. It was for the sake not of his reputation but of his rect.i.tude that I had need of him, though here again he might not have had the former had he not been known for the latter. If asked, he would answer. His answer would be unambiguous, non-allegorical, serviceable-not a philosopher's but a lawyer's view, open to an admittedly faceted but solvable actuality. If he invoked at all, it would be merely a precedent, and not the G.o.ds. I had this confidence in William: he would not lie to me about Gustave Nicholas Tilbeck.

He would not lie to me, William, my not-father, though he had lied to his son, presumably on the principle that it is by their ignorance of the devil we can be certain of the elect. That William himself might be barred from salvation as a consequence of this knightly act-was it not to conceal from his son the folly of my mother's unseemly obligations that he had denied the existence, the very possibility, of a Tilbeck?-he had no doubt considered worthy of the risk. But there was no necessity to close the door of heaven on my account; I was the devil's own seed and, alien and odd as it might sound, Tilbeck's very daughter. No lack of devil-knowledge could turn away that predestined bleakness; no answer William withheld could erase that unpromising daughtership. If asked, William would reply.

So I resolved to ask: and went to see him the next afternoon. I went, in fact, to his office, without telephoning beforehand-I was afraid, I suppose, that he might dodge any appointment that looked like an appeal. I descended (it was a descent, somehow, under a bronze September sun that stood between the angles of those greyish towers like a weighty funeral urn, menacingly brilliant, too acutely polished for the eye to endure, in which the scorched limbs of antique great undreamed-of lizards lay)-I descended into Wall Street in an orange taxi, hired-bribed-on Main Street in New Roch.e.l.le earlier that day. For my first thought had been northward to Westchester and the lawn-quickened lands where pretense-Tudor houses had their seats, among them William's house in swan-girt Scarsdale. For my mother and even for me that dale was scarred indeed: it was the house my grandfather and my would-be grandfather, the two heads-together, rejoicing fathers of the newlyweds, William and my mother, had built in joint celebration of the pairing of their prosperous lines, and in which the young attorney and his bride had officially lived, without the comfort of quarrels, until their divorce. It was the house my mother, who had already begun her novel and her travels, had had to persuade William to keep, though it embarra.s.sed him by making the settlement look ungentlemanly. He kept it: my mother, scorning the green-treed lanes of Scarsdale, declared herself urban, and worse, cosmopolitan, and promptly went off to Moscow for a youth rally against the cosmopolitan bourgeoisie. So he kept it, poor practical William, and let his new wife redesign the interior, and replace her predecessor's triangular ha.s.socks and Ugandan salad-implements and black sofas and (especially) her light-violet bedstead with soft gold, and soft blue, and incorruptible ochre, and vases, vases, vases everywhere all radiant with flowers. (My mother had hated gardening.) This was the house I had never seen and knew everything about: how my grandfather had insisted on a ball-room, how my would-be grandfather (William's father, the editor of the civic doc.u.ments of an obscure ancestral Hudson Valley alderman, the author of "Autumn Gleanings," a book of spiritual verses, who three times had gone tiger-hunting and had sold his little railroad-spur out of boredom with trains) had insisted on an elevator, and how prudent William had vetoed both. In this somehow familiar house, this hearsay house, I had cautiously placed the plan of my unfamiliar scene-William apprehended in the act of presiding over his breakfast egg, and his wife, whom in vain I tried to banish from my construction, impersonally beside him, taking my measure with the rule of her thoughtfully-apportioned, slow, penetrating, hostile smile below a slim fair nose as tight-pored and youthful as a college-girl's. Upon this astonished and unprepared William I meant to force the indecent whole of what was being done to me-how in two days' time the "arrangements" (whatever they were- he knew, having himself brought them into being) would fructify, and the long-suppressed daughtership begin in all its legendary horror. What he would be obliged to answer me my diffident imagination had so far failed to supply: I merely saw myself in a tall-backed chair at the round breakfast-table, a cloth-covered boulder made of inlaid teak with four carved Sphinx-like paws opened in sinister fashion upon the carpet, and little hinged gates which at a touch could snap into vertically to make a fence all around the edge. It had been ordered for the captain's cabin of an immense and palatial steamship (hence the barrier, the captain's own invention, to keep the dinner plates from sliding off when the Pacific frowned), but the captain had suddenly died before it could come aboard, and my grandfather on his mourning-tour (undertaken to console him for the loss of his wife, my grandmother Huntingdon, who, older than himself, had fevered and withered), just then pa.s.sing through Jakarta, where he came upon the table standing in a woodyard, about to be crated, bought it and sent it on to Scarsdale for his daughter's house. So particular a gift was it that it was in fact the only furniture which had gone unreplaced: my mother had broken the sole of her Shoe with the kick of disgust she gave it when it came, all foreignly labeled and stamped and smelling of the freighter's dank hold, and, she a.s.sured me, the mark of her disapproval was there yet, a gash on one of the hideous stretched paws; but afterward it altogether ravished William's new wife, who took it to her heart as her own, and Joked that with its sides up it would do nicely for a crib. How my mother had scowled when William told her this, William who was still so innocent in his contentment that he confided it to his newly-become client! Not out of any pique of jealousy did she scowl, but rather because this was the very joke the giver, her father, had made, and she had thought it a poor joke the first time-a table for a crib! (and she not married three weeks, and anyhow a believer in Margaret Sanger)-when, tossing a man-to-man wink at his son-in-law, my grandfather had explained "To keep the babe from slipping down," and then, "though what's to keep it from slipping out in nine months' time I don't know"-a statement which had reddened William's two cheeks so thoroughly that it seemed they never again reversed their color. Still, my would-be grandfather had laughed at it-whether out of charity for my mother's chagrin or perhaps simply to affirm his shy son's virility was not apparent: the tiger-hunter in him clashed with the Christian poetaster.

At this breakfast-table, then, which was my birthright though lightfingered from me before my birth and given instead to the children of William's second wife so that at it daily they all might eat their mess of breakfast-pottage, I expected to confront William with my grievances, though what I was after I hardly knew myself. Perhaps it was only the opportunity to put the horrendous question: why? and why now? But when I thought how the thing would be-the children ranged all around, Cletis in her pinafore, and Jack, and w.i.l.l.y Cornelius, and Nanette who as Sir Toby Belch had won the school prize, and on the far side, behind the rose-vase, William's wife with her round clear forehead tilted upward to observe the descent upon the stair of the eldest son of the house, languid but sharp, tying his tie with immaculate fingers and parrying his mother's unspoken disapproval with the unspoken dicta of the law school dormitories; when I imagined them all there together in this way, and myself a stranger in that place where I was to have been bom but was not, and William as paterfamilias and administrator of all their fates but not of mine, and his wife with the delta-crease of suspicion now vivid in her tall brow turning from her eldest son to accuse the blue-bells and pansies at her plate, and, worse, the son himself trying on the shut-up smile of an omniscient satirist, avoiding any probable tangency of our eyes by a gaze driven straight across the legendary table into the strawberry-spot on Cletis' bib-oh, when I day-dreamed them all, how inviolable they seemed! how like a guilty dauphin I felt, leaping out of exile to usurp!-and the train-wheels rattled with a private confusion in my teeth, and I dared not go.

I dared not go, and in the heat of a rush of cowardice came out dazed upon an empty platform. There was no sign to tell the name of the place. The train left me behind without caring, though angry somehow. Momentarily it stamped like a wrathful fist on a lectern, then swept away. I watched it for a time, charging northward along a rusted track, as though out to civilize some remote and savage village with the example of its faintly-swaying silver sides, carrying its cars of pews filled with penitents, its conductors walking up and down and waving their punches like Sunday-school directors, ministering to each little orange ticket with the sobriety of missionaries attending to certificates of baptism. But in all the fury of my stupid dash I had forgotten to take my ticket: it was still in the crack of the seat in front, where the conductor had tucked it, and where I had conscientiously been reading and re-reading it, all along its margins: New York to Scarsdale, Scarsdale to New York, One Round Trip. It was a kind of liturgy, and a minute afterward, standing on that unpeopled platform at eight o'clock in the morning at some nameless spot of which I knew nothing except that the divine order had laid it between New York and Scarsdale, between, that is to say, major and minor, torrent and rivulet, William-as-lawyer and William-as-father, I suddenly saw myself for what the train thought me, a sort of heretic, a kind of outcast, too paganly frail of spirit to be worthy of a Christian breakfast. It made me sigh and count the money in my purse and the people on the other side. There-on the other side-they were bunched together under the plank of roof as though it rained; but the sun already blazed. It came up between us, that impartial orb, motionless above the central tracks, dividing northbound from southbound with a leaded glare, resting and panting. Under their eave the nomad crowd stared back at me with what insolent righteousness I could conjecture-they were a tribe sure of their destination, while just then the New York train slid in like a long adroit tongue to vindicate their certainty and lick the platform dry. It was empty there, and empty here, and I climbed the steps to read a street-sign printed Huguenot. So I supposed it was New Roch.e.l.le, and, glad enough not to find myself in Larchmont or White Plains or other place of that sort, I walked out to see the town.

The town. I wished just then to be touched by the town-to see it burnished, tender, as accessible as anything imaginary. It ought to have made me weep, since it was (that morning) Camelot I was after; an odd remorse, balf-consolatory, half-accusing, teased me down the street. I felt clogged with mean failures, quite as though I had fallen short of some expectation not my own, yet was, on that account, not altogether to blame. A new town, or square, or even bit of unknown wall, should tell us what we were meant to be: when where-we-are is strange, the self is all at once familiar. Then-according to this redoubtable traveler's notion (an ancient remark of my stepfather's set upside down: in his more metaphysical version, the self first feels the alien singularity of its ident.i.ty among old scenes and long-apprehended things)-every new place is Camelot, cold, far, polished, secretive and shut-up, full of the happiness of others. The happiness of others!-the possible, the probable, the likely, and then at length, since there is no test for it but belief, the certain. If in my progress through Main Street I fell short of happiness, it was just the measure of that distance between New and Old Roch.e.l.le the French pilgrims, in christening their town, had upheld in sad celebration: a necessary distance separating the haven which is fact from the coveted impossible. And we in the same way feel toward the happiness of others as though already a dozen dozen times we had sent out a lamentation, Oh, here is my old home, and I am banished from it; and even though we may never have been there before, we long to return. All facts are aloof; still Camelot lures: the happiness of others, behind a wall. And when we suppose that what we were meant to be is at last revealed to us-look! it is so ingenuous as to be pitiable: only to be happy. Who believes he was ever fated for anything else? Who does not invoke justice to save him from the haven where reluctantly he counts his despondent comforts? Who does not curse the single unreachable moment in his past when an ogreish craft wizened and despoiled his proper destiny? And who does not remember the untried exaltation at the crest of life, when he knew himself to be extraordinary, when he believed in the power of purity and thought beauty a commonplace? Happiness always has the texture of memory, even when it is the happiness of others. What never was is irrevocable. Well, and if on that early walk past shops as still as windless flags, where no one stood in doorways, I seemed to quote Enoch to myself too much, the fault was not all mine. Perhaps if he had been willing to be, as my mother wished, the father-surrogate and deputy of my course, I might have thrown him over, as one does throw over fathers and regents, saws and sceptres and all. And William too: would I have cared to fly to his consultive closet if he had not shut the door? But this was all theory-and, to make it appear even more suspect, my mother's theory withal. It had a touch of Freud.

As for myself, I ran clear of theories, and merely wandered this way and that, thinking where I might go. I went out like an explorer-not to find a destination, but a route. The difference is sly but imperative. So I voyaged past the silly little City Hall, a squat adobe like a whitewashed toy with a cupola and window-frames painted a whimsically brilliant blue, and submitted at length to the big blank stores. They took me in as though I were no more than a lozenge for their raw taste-first the yellow-paneled Grant's and then the red-and-gold Woolworth's and finally the wide bright tunnel of Bloomingdale's bas.e.m.e.nt, full of foreign crockery. These places rocked and sucked me; I swam round and round the counters, touring housewares, now and then darting in and out of the road after vanishing taxis. The slothful advance of morning, moving enc.u.mbered by heat and an ungainly heaviness of atmosphere toward noon, pushed me in the way of my intention. I meant to have my confrontation after all, but in isolation, behind a part.i.tion, in a box, in the dark, in an eyeless place untrafficked by any witness: William trapped, in short, by the insularity of my demand. Insularity: it was an island I was headed for; they would have me be Robinson Crusoe without any of the skills or imaginings of civilization, and worse, without a memory of how I came to be swept to that sh.o.r.e. But I was bent on learning that mariner's tale, and purposed to have it from William, and s.p.a.ciously-and not from the protected domestic grateful William, rescued and' relieved by his wife's commanding dip-of-head telegraphing confidence and support and, so refined her sense of the appropriate, abhorrence of whatever vulgar intimations intrusion might trick itself out in, but instead from the severe and n.o.ble William, the grand monarch of those Wall Street treasure-houses connecting partner with partner: from that William who came discreetly to my mother's table, rubbing his mouth with an embossed napkin as though wine-sauce were an evil ointment, and waiting with all the simplicity of a privately taciturn spirit for the moment that justified his dinner-the yielding up of the gilt-edged envelope. And once my mother had spoiled the ceremonious transmittal with a disconsolate joke-"guilt-edged," said she, spelling it softly and with mock earnestness. "Oh, I don't see why you feel that, Allegra," he responded; he drew his gloves up over his fine wrists; she had, by that, reflected on his dignity, perhaps even on his charitableness. He had in her presence always the bearing of a wounded man. Long ago she had wounded him. He was still afraid of her jokes. He continued to think of her as a radical, and never heard her laugh without listening to the high sound of ridicule. "It's not that I mind being a capitalist," she amended it, to please him with a kinder fancy, and took from him the thickness of the prodigious envelope: "Only it's almost obscene, the way the thing reproduces itself." She always spoke of her trust fund as "the thing," as though it were somehow too unreal to deserve cla.s.sification or a name. "I mean I never do anything about it; n.o.body does. It's like a virgin birth," she gave out, in spite of herself, and was so struck by her image that she failed to look regretful at having brought it off. "Parthenogenesis! It happens only with bees and money." William-exemplary even when disconcerted-regarded his clothed palms with a secret distress. "Ah," said he, "but you can't rely on the bees," and hurried into his overcoat like a man of daring. William the man of daring! Exemplary William! William the abashed crypto-adorer of my mother! And-this chiefly-dragon William, guardian of the moat, keeper of the riddle of the castle, warder of the lightly-laden envelopes with their dazzling seals and golden margins, castellan of their ark, governor of the place where the money bred, invisibly, overnight, like bacteria in a jar, at dusk, at closing-time, at three o'clock, in the hour of the market's hush, in the holy moment of the maturation of a bond: this inflexible, serious and sincere, altogether upright and responsible man of business, this William, William as trustee, William as inmost bursar of the treasure-house where the treasure was unseen and intangible though rigidly codified, William at the source: this William I meant to see.

At ten I drank a chocolate ice-cream soda; it seemed meal enough. At two I bought, for no reason at all, a small square aluminum dipper with a long handle. The lip said Detroit. It would not fit in my coat pocket, so I threw away the paper bag it was wrapped in and swung it. I told myself its use would be to remind myself of the heavens-of the North Star, which the Dipper admonishes. But all day long the taxi-drivers could not be persuaded to venture out. They came to the curb, listened, and ground away with shakes of their dwarfish, dull, droll heads. "Wall Street? Wall Street?" they echoed, and slammed their doors against my pleas. "Sooner kick myself alia way downa Canarsie," they reproved me. And they said, "No than' kew!" And they said, "That's where they send you Judgment Day, put you up 'gainst it and shoot you"-gesturing with dirty cuffs and denying me, though I wheedled repeatedly. "Well, look, I'll pay the empty fare back," I urged, holding up the sidereal token like a wand of hope. But afterward I put it to better purpose, and reached out with the handle and tapped insistently on the cab-windows. It brought none of them back. It brought a curse. Under the colorless sun I felt parched and fruitlessly rich.

Nevertheless twenty-five dollars at length bought my pa.s.sage.

"Why not?" said the driver, glancing downward with a mild show of acquiescence. Curiously pleased with the translucence of his pink knuckles as they lay, delicate, without vitality, like sh.e.l.ls picked off a beach, over the halted wheel, he lowered a n.o.ble neck and the pale stretched cheekbones of the heir of some wondrous lost kingdom, aware, though not haughtily, of his sovereignty: he was a stark albino. "I don't mind," he told me cheerily. "Once I took a guy to Albany, he was suffering from nalmutrition."

"From what?" said I.

"Nalmutrition."

"Oh," I said, and leaned back. "I'm very grateful, though."

"Sure, that's all right. Listen, you know the name of that guy in the Bible that itched?"

"Itched?"

"Yeah, itched himself on this piece of old flowerpot. You know."

I did know. "You mean Job?" This was the harvest of the College Survey of English Literature.

"Yeah, that's the one, Jobb. Only you gotta announce it the right way for this saying I thought up." He felt my inquisitive stare rooted in his back and challenged it in his mirror. "Don't be embarra.s.sed. Everybody looks at me, I don't mind. I got white hair like an old man, I'm only thirty-three. My grandmother's eighty-two, she got practically no white hair yet. I don't mind-I figure it's like everybody's gotta be famous for something, right?"

I agreed, but lacked zeal.

"Anthony Eden is an albino," he confided.

"Oh, I don't think so-"

"So was Mussolini. Anybody can tell you that, don't take my word for it."

It was plain that I had better resign myself to the fact of his conversation, and I reluctantly did. There are cultists who take the view that everything is Experience, no matter how mean, absurd, or inane, and that Experience has value for its own sake. I did not hold with this, being metaphysically flaccid; but, being flaccid, had no choice just then beyond gaping out the window and thinking how odd the world was.

"You know the Supreme Court of the United States?" my pilot demanded.

I admitted to it.

"Three of them judges."

"Really?"

"Albino. Take my word for it," he a.s.sured me, reversing his rhetoric.

"Well, they don't look it."

"Don't look it!" he mimicked darkly. "I'll say they don't." Though we were crossing a bridge, he glared around at me and I nodded earnestly to get him to turn frontward again. "They-dye-themselves," he p.r.o.nounced with priestly scorn. "Eyebrows. Eyelashes. The works."

He was so severe that I had to inquire, "Job too?"

"Hah?"

"You mentioned something about Job-"

"Jobb!" he corrected me impatiently. "I didn't say nothing like that about Jobb."

"He wasn't an albino?"