Trust: A Novel Part 22

"Where'd you get a nutty idea like that?" he yelled over his shoulder. "I said Jobb, I meant about this saying I thought up. Jobb from the Bible. My club, we wanna use it, you know, like sometimes when we go collecting dues? You know, a motto, like, 'Get on the Jobb and Relieve Our Itch for Money.' You think that's any good, anybody'll get it?"

"It might be hard to get."

He pondered this lugubriously. "I mean it's kind of like a gag?" he ventured.

"Anyway," I consoled, "it's not bad."

He brightened at once. "Yeah, that's what I thought. See, I knew this guy once that itched as bad as Jobb practically. He was a leopard," he told me.

"Is that so?" I said with interest. "Where?"

"Up in New Haven."

"New Haven, Connecticut?"

"Yeah, he was in a bad way up there."

"There aren't any lepers in New Haven," I protested.

"This guy was a leopard, he was from New Haven. One night his whole jaw fell right off. He was brushing his teeth, same as anybody would, and all of a sudden-pff! the whole thing dropped bang into the sink, all them teeth and everything stuck straight in the bone, you know? All in one piece." His rear-view mirror accused me sternly, d.a.m.ning me for a skeptic. "That's a medical fact," he concluded.

At these absorbing words, full of scientific connoisseurship, a settled good will, almost an affection, pa.s.sed diffidently but wholesomely between us. He was a man of judicious parts, though young. His hair grew wispily long over his big unashamed ears, whiter than paper; his nape bore a crowd of strangely unpigmented mole-like speckles, too diminutive to be really ugly-it was as though he had been splattered with invisible ink. In someone else they would perhaps have been no more curious than freckles. I fixed on them, and they seemed to thicken; so, meanwhile, did our friendship; so, meanwhile, did the traffic. We had long talkative waits under stubborn lights, the motor slackened in expectation of the click that foretold green, and, all around us, the silver herd pressing near.

He had other acquaintances. They were all extraordinarily stricken. One-a resident of Teaneck, New Jersey-was a victim of yaws. Another, who lived in Philadelphia, suffered from trachoma, and had actually had to give up television, the flies got so much in the way. These cases were not in the least unusual. Rampant tropical diseases afflicted the East Coast of the United States, the most dangerous area in the world (he explained) for one's health. He knew of a malarial outbreak in Dobbs Ferry; he was certain of five instances, possibly six, of bubonic plague in the Consolidated Edison Company of New York. Presently, persuaded that he had plainly won both my confidence and my admiration, he invited me to join his organization, which was dedicated to stamping out yellow fever in the Bronx. Its slogan was "Don't Be Yellow-Join the Fight." He told me with a touch of conceit that he had invented this himself. "Of course you got to pay the dues," he apologized, "if you come in with us." He also offered further data on the world's hidden albinos. It developed that the following were deficient in melanin: Princess Margaret Rose, John Foster Dulles, the young Aga Khan, two television comedians whose names I never did get right, and Booker T. Washington.

"Booker T. Washington! Oh come on, now you're carrying it too far. You can't claim him."

"You ever hear of Julius Caesar?" he demanded in easy reb.u.t.tal. "This here old-time king?"

"Him too?"

The pupils of his eyes-I now examined them for the first time-were a deep red, but the irises were faint and milky and impressed the mirror so little that it scarcely gave them back. "You heard of Tommy Dorsey, right? The band leader?" he swept on, with a pink blink.

"All right," I a.s.serted readily enough. "But Booker T. Washing-"

"Listen," he said, reaching out an arm (we had arrived) to open the door nearest me, "I got a list, n.o.body's found me wrong yet."

So I decided not to find him wrong, either: and took him for a philosopher for whom the world is cleft, like the devil's hoof, in two. His Yang and Yin were no more unreasonable than anyone's. Where my mother saw the powerful and the inconsequential, William the ordained and the immortal, Enoch the guilty and the murdered, and all the rest of the world parochial versions of cowboys and Indians, he apprehended albinos and the obscurely diseased. It was an opposition-whiteness beyond imagining, a transparency of the flesh that hid not a single capillary, an openness of the soul's entelechy; and, against this, inconceivable deformity both bulbous and agonizingly minute, scales, monstrous flaking rot, hideous sc.u.m-an opposition no madder than the truth. I put him down for a visionary and began counting out dollars.

"You going to see somebody in one of them buildings there? I knew this stockbroker, see, commuted down from Mount Vernon-"

"That one."

Double gla.s.s doors gleamed like slivers of mica in the base of a concrete mountain.

"-he got dysentery from a water cooler in a building right around here, over on Broad Street. Worst water in the world, this district."

But this warning of his (I supposed it to be a warning) stopped short. I held out the bills; attentively he accepted them; he put them pleasurably to his lips as though I had handed him a nosegay; and, uncannily, perhaps out of pure suggestibility, produced a modest but unmistakable sneeze.

"Bless you," I said sympathetically. "You'd better watch that. Sounds like pellagra."

Thereupon-but with gravity-he smiled. "Yeah, you're pulling my leg." Not merely the smile, but its sober acquittal, seemed at once unfortunate. A formulator of any sort-by which I mean a system-maker-ought never to smile at a conclusion drawn from his system, lest we think him a contradictory fool, whereas he is only being superior and tolerant; while to smile gravely is to affirm the worst. It is as though the ghost of that old Greek Anaximander, confronting his sole surviving sentence, were to say, "Yes, but that is not what I meant. What I really meant is in the part that is missing." All in a moment, blasted at a stroke by the flash of this taxi-driver's good strong teeth, Yang and Yin collapsed, the ideal image of contrasting pairs of essentials collapsed. Albinism and disease, whiteness and impurity-the two pillars crumbled, and the world they supported rolled away like a severed head. An elegiac solemnity informed but denied his unceasing smile: "You can't kid me. Pellagra, they only got that in the South."

His method-alas-had the occasional flaw of ordinary seeing.

In this fashion I came at last to William's office, where, to my uninstructed surprise, an engagement party was under way.

3.

The party was for William's son.

"We've got gin and scotch and rye," said the girl at the desk. "The ginger ale's all gone. So are the paper cups. We barely had enough to go around, and now there's not one left. I watched mine like a hawk, but anyhow I ended up with somebody else's-look, what a vile shade"-she held it up to show the broad violet crescent of lipstick at the rim. "See? It must be one of the girls from the steno pool. I mean only a cow would wear a shade like that. A purple cow." She laughed, and, leaning over, spied my utensil. "A dipper! Hey, that's bright! Who sent you after it?"

"n.o.body," I said. "I just came in."

"Mister n.o.body and his brother. Anyhow it's just what we need around here. I hate these paper things-it's like drinking from a deed, you know? With sealing wax on it!" She s.n.a.t.c.hed up the dipper and filled it from one of the clutter of bottles on the desk-there were signs from the abundance of fifths and quarts and forlornly soaked pretzels that it had been designated for a bar. Behind the desk an empty tray lay upside down on a chair, with a man's hat on top of it. "Hey, do you have to be a lumberjack to work this thing?"-she had the long handle by its end, and was sweeping the big square spoon up to her lips: but through some error of balance the cup unexpectedly rolled over and spilled. "Now I've done it. There goes somebody's perfectly good whiskey."

"There goes somebody's perfectly good hat," I amended. A swimming puddle filled the dip in the crown.

"Flora Fedora," said the girl, "they used to call me in them thar days. Well, oops. It'll smell better than hair oil, look at it that way. Hey, if you just came in how did you know we were all out of cups?"

"As a matter of fact I didn't know you were all in them," I could not resist saying, looking around, but it was a shot too high for her. "You can keep it."

"Keep what?"

"The dipper. It's brand new. You can have it for a present. You can't ever get lost with it because it keeps pointing to the North Star."

"Look, are you one of these cruds from Miss Putrid's?"

It was my turn for bafflement.

"That school," she explained.

"No, I've come on business."

This made her hesitate. "I think we're closed."

"Then you're not the regular receptionist?" I inquired, and did not trouble to cover the gibe.

"An hour ago she left, old Prisshead. Hates office parties. Hey, I've got the hang of it!" Out went the length of the handle, gripped by a row of knuckles; up rode the cup. She drained it with aplomb. "I'm in filing. I could say you're here," she told me doubtfully, "only it wouldn't do any good."

"There's no one to say it to?"

"Well, they're around, but it's sort of a celebration. I mean they've announced it already and the whole staff's applauded and all of that-" She studied me speculatively. "Some of the lawyers, the young ones, thought up the idea and then we all had to chip in fifty cents. It matters to them because he might get to be their boss, like a sort of partner, but if you ask me it's pretty silly. He didn't even graduate yet."

Plainly she was speaking of William's son.

"Do you like her?" she suddenly asked.

"Who?"

"His girl. The one he just got engaged to."

I faltered, "I haven't met her."

"Lucky you, what a crud. Came down here this afternoon with this whole pack of snots from Miss Putrid's-you know what that place is? A finishing school, for G.o.d's sake! Pack of putrid snots, I'd finished them for free."

"Maybe you'd better say I'm here."

She hoisted the dipper over her shoulder like a rifle and saluted obligingly. "Okay. I'll tell them," and began pacing off. But in a moment she had to dart back: "What am I supposed to say?"

"That there's someone here."

"No, I mean what am I supposed to say? Miss What?" She plucked a squat flask from the cl.u.s.ter on the desk and clutched it in her armpit, and despite the enc.u.mbrances of bottle and dipper, which made her seem as many-armed as Vishnu, all at once turned aggressively businesslike: "I didn't catch the name," said she, a rather too positive imitation of a movie secretary. "Miss Who?"

"I didn't give it," I said, and gave it.

"Wow!" said she.

"Go ahead," I urged.

"But she stood without moving and whistled instead. "You're not the daughter?"

"No," I said.

She had taken me, in the usual way, for Nanette.

"Go ahead," I repeated, with a sigh. "It's only a case of mistaken ident.i.ty."

"Niece?" she insisted.

"No."

She stared. "But he's the Partner!"

"Right," said I. "That's the one I want to see."

"You don't expect me to go right up to him? I don't even know what he looks like!" She took furtive steps away. "I told you," she reproved me, "I'm in filing." I had begun, she implied, with the wrong end of the hierarchy: a thing clearly as offensive as speaking deferentially to a servant in an English novel. The girl had a sense of fitness. She had, moreover, a sense of "place," and-shifting her accoutrements for comfort, the dipper hooked around her neck, the bottle grasped in front of her with both hands-she fled to occupy it.

Left to myself and unattended, I went peering after William on my own, but with a certain caution. Plainly I had turned up at the worst possible moment-a moment which, though vastly and ostensibly public (there might have been eighty or ninety guests), was nevertheless a private occasion. An engagement party, it did not matter who sponsored it, had the odor of a family event, an I believed that the sight of me, without warning, even in such a crush, could do no less than nettle William. Embarra.s.sment and a sort of angry shame would redden him acutely. In this kind of situation I could expect nothing of him: he wouldn't be likely to tell me, without resorting to the coa.r.s.eness of uttering it, that I had not been invited and had no business being there. He was severely conscious of protocol, but on my mother's account, as always, he would hold his reluctant peace. Under any condition he would have been sorry to receive me, but in the hour of his son's engagement I supposed he would be positively unwilling. He would regard me not so much as an intruder as a violator. It was an ugly notion-myself coming in the guise of an aggressor to disrupt the first unfolding of a filial joy. Anyhow William could never look at me, I imagined, without seeing me as an admonition. He would suspect in me nothing but bad omens. I represented for him a failed marriage-his own, undertaken with all the trust of youth. If I cared to do him a service I would go home immediately.

I became gradually aware of these unpleasant certainties, moving from cubicle to cubicle, each rather spartan and prudently secretarial, though vaguely airless and perfumed, and I avoided the large noisy interior room where I would be liable to attract notice. Twice I pa.s.sed its door, and inside glimpsed a long wall of windows opening the glare of a dizzying daylight in giant patches to a mult.i.tude of blotter-brightened desks and torsos animated and stretched by the gestures of clever shouts and amused faces which the steady cooling of hidden machinery (now and then I encountered a vent overhead and felt a blast) had not kept from going generally pink with a more internal heat. The nearly hundred arms reached upward-a forest of paper cups-and, like a long birch in a pine-wood, a single aluminum dipper; someone was reciting a toast. Round plates of little colored cakes lay here and there on the desk-tops. There was a dish or two of thick cheese-yellow sandwiches. I was all at once sensible of being famished, and although I had already persuaded myself to start straightway for the door and down the elevator, I suddenly hesitated. I began to reconsider. If finding me there were to discomfit William, why should I care? I had after all not come to a party; I was after all not a deliberate invader; I had come solely for information and it was my last chance to get it. In two days I would be with Tilbeck. The day after tomorrow I would be with him; he would have me; it was frighteningly close. I thought of it and it seemed unreal; and then once again bitterly actual, bitterly imminent; and then again false, a fantasy. Nevertheless I would stay. I had come for William and I did not mean to go simply to oblige circ.u.mstance. I helped myself to a sandwich and a cake and stood devouring them both. The cheese had gone dry, but the cake was good and I took another, wandering at my ease through the crowd. There were a great many young people and I recognized some cla.s.smates of William's son: they were the dancing partners he had brought down with him from law school several weeks before, as a favor for my mother. A pair of them, walking together, pa.s.sed me with a faint acknowledgment, puzzled; but one in fact stopped and said, "You're not still here! Smokestack have a hole in it?" A fourth was civil: "That was a nice party. I don't usually like charity b.a.l.l.s but this one wasn't half bad." "What do you mean?" I asked in horror-"It wasn't a charity ball, it was for bon voyage." He was a little drunk but his laugh was kind, even respectful. "That's what you call it when they drag out the stags for an act of mercy. A charity ball," he explained through a watery mouth; "it's only an expression." The rest did not know me, or if they did they concealed it. I was not distressed; I was not indifferent, but I was relieved; if they had spoken to me I would have felt ashamed, not for myself but for my mother. I had no doubt they thought of her as an admirable manager. Her champagne was undeniably decent though it had not inspired conviviality. Perhaps they said the same of me.

I did not see William. For some minutes I struggled through the mazy aisles among the changeable chattering groups, diligently watchful; and now and again I took to my toes to squint through the deepening smoke that swam in eddies from shoulder to shoulder. I did not see him. I felt as though I were pushing my way through a busy school-yard: the room was overrun with girls in their teens, each one sailing an ice-cube in a paper cup and drawing on a short cigarette as if it were a soda-straw. They smoked their cigarettes to the b.u.t.t and at once lit fresh ones; they tapped their ashes to the floor with elegant little flicks, and drank roughly, in gulps. They wore their hair in extremes-either very, very short or very, very long, but in either case energetically burnished-and they all p.r.o.nounced "o" as though it had an umlaut over it. Most of them were moderately tall-long, rather-with charming figures, though the mode just then was, I observed, the stringently flattened breast-and over this region of their anatomies they each had pinned a little typewritten card: GOOD LUCK FANNIE FROM FORM 7, MISS JEWETT'S. This interested me immensely; it was my mother's old school, a limited but reasonably venerable inst.i.tution, fashionably small, but so absolutely "correct" that its reputation for getting its graduates into college was justifiably meagre. It was, moreover, a place I had clamored to be excused from attending after breaking my ankle as early as the first form. One did not usually break one's ankle until the third form (and then one spoke of it, airily, as only "cracked"); my precocity shocked me into defection, and startled even my mother, who, though in theory she always applauded rebellion, did not question the necessity of going to Miss Jewett's. Going to Miss Jewett's was, in fact, a family convention- her mother had been tutored (in ice hockey) by the original Miss Jewett (not the mere pastel niece), the genuine Miss Jewett, the aged and astonishingly agile Miss Jewett who was from the beginning Mistress of Fencing and whose second highest attribute appeared to have been simply that, in an adulatory era which celebrated anything even foggily English, she was a Londoner-what part of London remained a mystery. It was rumored that she was no more than an enterprising c.o.c.kney, a story which her muscular graduates, with unperturbed smiles, used neither to affirm nor deny. If Miss Jewett had been a c.o.c.kney, she had at any rate known the difference between a c.o.c.kney and a lady; and they were ladies. In my grandmother's time Miss Jewett, by then already very grand and elderly, had begun to walk with a cane, which she would raise without warning to bat a ball flying out of bounds. Her talent as a batter was exceeded only by her genius as a pitcher. She wore high collars of blue lace, culottes, and bifocals so strong they enlarged her eyes to the size of rather worn grey golf b.a.l.l.s. When she died she left behind her a flourishing school. Her gymnasia had overflowed into the bas.e.m.e.nt of the neighboring Episcopal church, and she would have rented a nearby Presbyterian cellar as well, had the minister not been a Scotsman. Her library was poor, though perhaps merely eccentric: it was filled with old copies of The London Ill.u.s.trated News, to which she had never allowed her subscription to lapse, and seven complete, and completely uncut, sets of d.i.c.kens, but little else. Her gym closet held fifty-four volleyb.a.l.l.s. Her last lecture had been on the purity of the temple of the body, and against sweat. She had designed her educational philosophy to foster athletics and motherhood among her girls; and it did, in that order. She used to say that while her fencing stars had the healthiest babies of all her girls, the baseball players had the most intelligent. It all had to do with the tension of the pelvic structure and the stroke of the pectoral muscle. "A Sound Mind in a Sound Body" was conspicuous on her letterhead, but if she was attracted to the first half of this slogan, it was only because of the sound. The motto she preferred was "Play is Work." For Miss Jewett's graduates a university was a vulgar place. To go to one was a confession of moral, social, and muscular defeat; it was a capitulation, and no one but the failures in volleyball ever committed themselves to this ignominy: Her most notorious case had been a girl who had made herself ridiculous by getting into Barnard, and afterward pa.s.sing; this creature as a consequence was regarded not only as contemptibly disloyal, but worse, as unwomanly. The girls of Miss Jewett's were trained for womanliness. They came out, as a rule, in the fifth form, were engaged in the seventh or shortly afterward (though "shortly afterward" carried with it a certain mild disgrace), and married themselves directly into the Junior League, where for a few months they quibbled over dates for charitable theatre parties until the arrival of their predeterminedly vigorous first babies. My mother had gone to Miss Jewett's; William's present wife had gone to Miss Jewett's; and I thought it an orderly and proper thing that William's daughter-in-law should shortly be an alumna of the same school. It gave me, this propriety, nevertheless a moment's pity for William's son; he had so readily surrendered. He had chosen a schoolgirl; he had chosen womanliness; he had chosen the very right thing. I felt despairing: he had chosen only what his father might have chosen for him. Yet it seemed he might have wanted something other than the very right thing; it seemed he might have wanted talk and even bookishness and even character. Oh, it seemed he might have wanted-not me (not even my secret musings dared this direction), and not even someone very like me (though I had frequently, and not without smoldering irony, contemplated such a turn: it was a kind of self-indulgent daydream, half-vengeful, half-vicarious), but, at least, not one of Miss Jewett's girls! Not one of them! They were all of them replicas of Allegra Vand; and it was useless to suppose, just because it was inconceivable they should, like her, leap at working-cla.s.s causes, that they were not replicas. If it had been in the style of my mother's generation to have no ideals, to be sick of ideals, she would have had none, she would have been sick of them. If it had been in the style to go abroad not for world-improvement wobbly rallies but for self-improvement, she would have gone for that instead. Miss Jewett's girls were all alike, they were up-to-date; they were inhabited, though not inhibited, by the Zeitgeist. And if the Jewett-trained daughters quarreled with the Jewett-trained mothers, it was simply the Zeitgeist, and not Miss Jewett's muscular influences, which had altered. "Woman's physiology stays the same," Miss Jewett herself used to say; "it's only the times which are different." This was her argument, in my grandmother's day, against tobacco. It was the same argument which the girls of Miss Jewett's used to produce when my mother went there-only in favor. Now it is the young Miss Jewett, the original's seventy-year-old niece, they must answer to: but it is strange how they have come around to the old Miss Jewett's way of thinking. Today they do not much like tobacco. They smoke marijuana instead.

I learned this not-as it might be presumed-long afterward, but then and there, from The Good Sport. This-it turned out to be the school newspaper-had been left lying on one of the desks in that wide bright desk-huddled room, and when I flurried it open a photograph of a girl in a tennis costume jumped out at me, side by side with a half-page advertis.e.m.e.nt taken (I guessed in resignation) by William's firm: "Compliments Of" set in a sea of white margin like a craft fit for darker waters. "Beverly Ames Snearles Loses at Love," said the caption in twelve-point Bodoni Bold, "Wins Match." A tragically romantic notice: and here is Beverly in her white shorts and white thighs, laughing into the saucy camera and measuring her racket like an oversized salmon. "I've been smoking the weed for relaxation," she explains, "and it's definitely improved my serve." "Do you recommend it for other sports?" inquires the interviewer, identified in the by-line as Eleanor Bell. "I don't know about other sports," says Beverly to Eleanor; "tennis is my game. But for tennis I definitely recommend Mary-Jane." Mary-Jane-the sweet weed itself-at Miss Jewett's! Still, I had seen pictures of my mother in this very pose, and if experimentation with the slow taste of Mary-Jane had replaced experimentation with the cla.s.s-structure, the essentials were the same: the throbbing bosom, the clear chin-line, and an overwhelming belief in the omnipotence of the present over the future. Oh, the girls of Miss Jewett's! They had, if nothing else, a perfect self-possession; and this-not talk, not bookishness, least of all character-drew William's son. He wanted the womanly child, the childlike woman-in short, exactly what his father had married in my mother.

This perception entered me like a cloud; and under the weight and flavor of it I suddenly spied William himself, although I had already given up looking for him. His hands were hooked by their thumbs across his grey back, and his big waxy distinguished skull, disconcertingly like the heavy-chinned head of Henry James or. Edmund Wilson (without their aura, which illuminates even the solemn photographs, of amazement at the world's incongruities-for William was too pious for wonder), cautiously wheeled toward his two companions. I was left with a quick vision of that broad serious middle-aged brow, obscured now half by the shadow of his retreat, an out-of-the-way corner, and half by the flourished arm of the taller of the attendant pair, a narrow dark man with unhurrying eyes close to the surface of a rather Tartarish face (though grossly and even mediaevally lidded and lashed), Wherein courtesy hid covetousness. The shorter and squarer one was plainly an Irishman, but not the ebullient sort; he was more pale than any monk, though he seemed as silently self-absorbed as a Trappist. Neither man had the proper look or tone which might be construed as habitually environmental for William, he was not casual with them, and I supposed they had not emerged from the special air of his clubs, or, going back still farther, of his cla.s.s. It was not only that they had the wrong faces. Even from a distance I could tell they had the wrong point of view. The Irishman was too detached, and the other, with his hand nervously slapping at his thick-haired temples to emphasize a phrase, was too actively attached: he had a rapid joyless smile which, with no warning of expression, he uncovered now as weapon and now as semicolon. The Irishman merely listened-but dependably. It seemed a conference of elders, dense as a thicket, and I might have taken one or the other of them for the bride's father had either remotely struck me as Protestant.

While I stood considering, The Good Sport was s.n.a.t.c.hed from my hand.

"Here, I've been looking for that, d.a.m.n it."

The rough grab startled me. I turned, and subsided into a gradual absorption of a subdued artistocratic sneer, as certain and imperious as a head on a coin; a diminutive cigar, grandly squeezed; and the proud breast of an arrogant buffalo: it was William's son.

Without pleasure he took in the fact of my presence.

"This is a surprise."

"Your engagement?" I said. "Yes, it is. I hadn't heard anything about it. I really am surprised."

He rewarded me with a quick impatient artificial scowl. "I meant finding you here."

"I came to see your father."

"On business?"

"My mother's," I said facilely.

"I'm afraid business is suspended for the rest of the day."

He brought this out so gloomily that I was constrained to remark politely, "Of course. It's an extraordinary occasion."

"Well, it was a surprise to me too."

"Your engagement?" I said again.

He looked at me with open annoyance. "This party. It was sprung on me. I had no idea." But he gathered himself up, recovered, and gently lowered The Good Sport. "I hope you don't mind not being asked," he pursued, all at once summoning up an exquisite courtesy which, if it had been less acid and had more successfully concealed a contrary inspiration, might have resembled his father's. "Of course there'll be the official engagement thing later on, and of course we'll expect you and Mr. and Mrs. Vand. I'm told it'll be a supper party at the Burgundy. Mother was very careful to put you at the top of the list."

I hid my skepticism and thanked him.

But he had not finished. "I imagine you were simply overlooked, for today."

"Look, I didn't come for the party," I said, feeling warm. "You don't have to apologize."

"The boys here simply got together about it behind my back. Naturally they'd ask just who was most obvious. I mean they wouldn't think of you."

"I'm anything but obvious," I conceded.

"If I'd known about it I would have thought of you myself."