Trust: A Novel Part 23

"Of course," I agreed.

"My father would have reminded me of it. Especially with all these fellows down from school. It's practically the same bunch I dug up for your send-off, you know."

"It was awfully good of you to do it," I said. "I'm sorry it was all for nothing."

"Well, I know, but my father insisted on it. To please Mrs. Vand. I guess she thought there'd be something in it for you." He must have felt how these words put him in the wrong light, for quite suddenly his high alert manner faltered, and his eye trailed consciously across the room.

"There wasn't," I said candidly. "It really doesn't matter, though."

"No? I heard you don't date much."

"Because I don't want to."

It was his turn to cover disbelief, and though his doubt was justified, I resented it. He took up again with a renewed effort: "It must have been a let-down for you, though. I mean not to get to go after all."

"I've been to Europe," I said: but with a certain sharpness.

"When you were a kid," he observed.

"Right after the war."

"It doesn't mean you shouldn't go again."

"I guess I will," I a.s.serted, but hesitated to state what I did not credit. "Later on. Maybe when my mother's better."

This blinked him swiftly to attention. "Yes, how is she, by the way?"-but his curiosity was not so overwhelming that he troubled to leave a gap for my satisfying it. "You don't remember anything about what it was like over there?" he concluded without a pause. "I suppose you were too young."

"I remember a lot. But I don't think about it much," I said.

"Then do you happen to recollect a man named Pettigrew?"

"Pettigrew."

"Your stepfather used to run into him now and then. They were in different sectors but they came to know each other after your mother got into some sort of legal trouble over an automobile."

"Oh, marvelous," I applauded. "Now you've learned her file by heart."

"You don't have to be mad about it, it's not really all my fault. I've been working in the Vs all summer-Venue, Validation, Vacantia Bona, Valuation, Vand."

"Perfect. I like the way you do your job-the only thing missing is Virtue."

"In your mother's file? You're too hard on her. And after I had the good grace not to mention Venality!" He bit on his unlit cigar and grinned on either side of it. "Pettigrew settled some sort of threatened suit for her, do you recall? It cost plenty. They had to buy the whole Paris police force. Not to speak of a complete hospital staff. It's quite a story."

"Is that the way your father does business?" I sardonically inquired.

"Oh, well, I've stopped thinking my father so all-holy. He put Pettigrew on it, that's all I know. Maybe it's the way Pettigrew does business. Or your mother." He shrugged. "The times weren't normal anyhow."

His whole tone was so slippery it was useless to accuse him. "You've had a profitable summer," I merely noted.

"Not bad, not bad. Educational." But he looked around with distaste. "Unless you regard today as its culmination. I don't care for all this crawling around. -You don't recollect him?" he persisted.

I condescended to reflect. "What sort of work did he do?"

"For a while he was Special a.s.sistant under Marshall. That's when he knew your stepfather. When the Republicans took over they threw him out."

"He's a Democrat?"

"Pettigrew? Oh my G.o.d. A Roosevelt New Dealer actually." His smile was speculative and almost genuine. "You can imagine how my father feels about it."

"I think I've heard of him," I said, barely recalling it. "At least the name. He's the one who went to that dancing school, isn't he?-with your father and my mother, when they were little?"

"And my mother," he added. "He's been stepping on their toes ever since. Politically speaking."

"I don't know him," I admitted.

"He's going to be my father-in-law," said William's son.

This interested me mightily: within the propriety of the match, then, there lay a hint of discord. Curiously, this possibility appeared to amuse William's son; through his posture of vexation I saw his excitement in the promise of conflict. He obviously thought it something to enjoy.

"Will that be an obstacle?" I put it.

"To what?"

"Oh, I don't know. Family unity."

He laughed out his scorn at me. "Family unity! What a prude you are-I don't care beans about family unity or anything like it. I've grown up on it, you haven't. It's only a contrivance, believe me." He offered me his derisive eye. "You can't tell me anything about family unity that I haven't already seen in the raw. What else do you think they have between them," he asked, "my father and my mother?"-and answered himself with a harsh nip of his cigar: "Family unity, that's what."

This was so unexpected and perilous and fragile a subject that I did not know how to reply. "Your mother is an admirable woman," I ventured.

"I admit it. So does my father. I guess he isn't inspired by admirable women," William's son gave out; and, because I had plainly failed to catch the sharp purport of his tone he softened it to a confidence: "That's why Mrs. Vand is unforgivable."

"You always say that and it's not fair," I maintained. "You forget who wanted the divorce."

"You don't have to remind me. My father is a selfish man and your mother is as wild as Borneo. He was out to save his hide. She would have run him to tatters."

"William can take care of himself," I announced.

"Do you really think so?"-It was half a jeer.

"He's a mountain."

"With a geologic fault. Or maybe it's simply a fault of character. The point is he'd do anything for Mrs. Vand."

"No more than for the other client."

"Maybe not. But certainly more than for my mother." He saw my alarm and came back quickly, "Not that he's negligent, of course. In fact I suppose he's what's called a born family man. He's very good at being head of the house. He presides over us beautifully."

"Then you can safely take him for your model," I remarked, afraid to say more yet unwilling to withdraw.

"Sure." He raised his chin sedately, an illusory movement so very like William's habitual manner that it aged him thirty years. "If I should ever decide to run after what I'd already run from."

"William doesn't run after my mother!" I cried, tantalized.

"Do you think it's necessary for him to deliver her installment by hand? The firm could just as easily deposit it in her account and leave it at that. It's the routine thing."

"Then I suppose he likes to avoid the routine thing. He has a ceremonious nature."

"Exactly. And in ordinary matters it's the ceremony of the routine thing that he lives by."

"Then he does it as a simple courtesy."

"A courtesy, but his motives aren't simple.-Oh, I don't deny he's gallant!" he conceded.

I said severely, "There's nothing improper in being gallant."

"I told you you're a prude."

"I'm only precise."

"Precision isn't the same as truth. The truth is he's never attached himself to anyone else. He does his duty, but it's not duty that brings him out to look at your mother every other month."

"He likes to hear her talk," I admitted. Then I had a thought which made me lower my head before I could dare to speak it out. "But when you think of you and Nanette and Jack and w.i.l.l.y-and, well, Cletis is only two-" But my intrepidness embarra.s.sed me; worse, it scared me. I felt as though I probed a sanctuary with a vulgar and broken broom. "I mean it wasn't duty which brought you all into the world," I threw out.

"Oh, what you don't know about family unity!" said William's son.

This high and prescient a.s.sertion, delivered with a not unfriendly insolence-and prescient because it seemed to point to a vision of my interlocutor's own marital future, as orderly is his father's-provoked me to surpa.s.s myself in pluck. 'Don't you want to get married?" I neatly wondered.

He remembered to resume his patronizing smile just in time. "What kind of comment is that?"

"It's not a comment It's a question."

"Prig," he observed. "What do you think I bothered to get engaged for? You wouldn't expect me to cohabit without"-up went his mocking chin-"the sanction of the law?"

"No," I confessed. "It's only that you seem so cross about it."

"I'm mad as hops," he agreed. "I could wring her neck. I could hang her from the yardarm."

"A declaration of pa.s.sion," I concluded.

He looked at me with a certain surprise. "You're a satirist, aren't you?"

"No," I said. "I'm a prude and a prig."

"I know. But besides that."

"What has she done?" I prodded.

"Oh G.o.d, plenty. Look at this." He spread open the pages of The Good Sport. "It's this d.a.m.ned ad. She badgered me into giving it to her under the firm's name. I didn't wait a minute before I suggested 'Best Wishes from a Friend,' something in that line, but no, it wouldn't do. It isn't professional enough-everyone's nasty uncle takes an ad in just those words. -Believe it or not, she's the business manager of this sheet. She multiplies on her fingers, so they elected her business manager!" he crowed-it was difficult to tell whether with affectionate pride (multiplying on the fingers being merely an adorable crotchet) or with clean contempt (the conforming masculine att.i.tude toward the weaknesses of shining womanliness). "She was afraid 'Best Wishes from a Friend' could make them look tacky-as though they didn't have any friends. Amateurs hate to be taken for what they are, you know. It was the firm she wanted." His steady mutter dissolved into a confidential sigh. "Like a d.a.m.ned fool I gave it to her, and now my father's down on me," he complained.

The criminality in this exposition was lost on me; it had, in fact, the whimsicality of a joyously trivial, though conventionally impenetrable, mystery. Still, I was glad William's son thought me a worthy receptacle for these minutiae. It gave me a narrow opportunity to fasten on an image, theoretical though it might be, of his fiancee. The more I heard, the more I thought her unworthy.

"He's not down on you just for giving an ad?" I said, implying there was better reason: let him look to the girl for it.

"Isn't he though."

"Well, it isn't as if you'd gone and violated the Ten Commandments," I consoled, pleasurably detached.

"No-only Canon 27."

"I see"-though I did not.

"Of the Canons of Professional Ethics," he groaned. "My father's afraid the Bar People will be down on him."

"Is there something the matter with the ad? It only says Compliments Of."

"Nothing at all the matter. It's perfectly all right. There's nothing wrong with it," he disclosed with something like a wince, "except that it's a total scandal." He gave the ceiling a glance of direct and unpretentious comradeship. "It's unethical for a law firm to advertise at all," he supplied ruefully.

"In a school paper? It's only a school paper."

"My calculation exactly. That's why I took the chance of doing it. She kept at me and kept at me and, well, finally I gave in because I never thought my father would get to see it in a hundred years. It's not as though I put it in The Wall Street Journal, after all. And I paid for it myself, so Connelly wouldn't list it."

At the mention of Connelly-the meticulous accountant-this innocuously detailed history suddenly blossomed with importance. What had to be kept from Connelly had also to be kept from William. And what was kept from William, shrine of innocence, was undoubtedly not innocent. "Then William got to see the ad. He got to see it anyway," I hazarded.

"He wouldn't have if not for this stupid story about a tennis-player at Miss Jewett's"-belligerently William's son snapped his fingers against the guilty Sport.

"Beverly Ames Snearles Loses at Love," I recited. "Is it trUe about the marijuana?"

"What do you think? They all do it down there, for kicks. Anyhow it was partly Nanette's fault. She's been friendly all term with one of these girls from Miss Jewett's-"

"But Nanette goes to the Academy," I interrupted.

"-the one who wrote the story. Eleanor Bell," he pushed on aloofly. "They're going to be in the Junior a.s.semblies together next spring. At least Nanette will. The other girl was supposed to be in it, but she won't be eligible if she's expelled. G.o.d, I hate this gossip."

"My," said I, vaguely spiteful, "it sounds like Lowood, in Jane Eyre."

He stopped long enough to rebuke me with a stare. "You have a literary reference for everything"-as- if he expected me to apologize for it. "It's proof you don't listen."

"I am listening. I really am," I said quickly, afraid he would go away. "Are they expelling her?" I inquired, as a token of my attentiveness.

But he was moving energetically onward. "You bet they are. Not that those girls haven't been smoking it down there for the last seven months. Especially during the summer make-up term. Everybody knows it. It isn't a crime to know about it or to do it-it's only a crime if you print it. Anyhow"-he took a breath, and I somehow wondered whether he did hate gossip after all-"the girl's father-that's Bell, the broker-intends to sue the school for breaching its contract to educate his daughter, the tuition having been the consideration, although ... It's a long story." He maundered off into meditation and when he came back to me again it was with an explosion. "Well, look! The upshot of it is he got my father to handle the thing. Legally it's pretty tricky. My father didn't want to touch it. He was horrified."

"It's a difficult case?"

"Not on account of the law! He's not afraid of the law. It was on account of Nanette-her being chummy with this Bell girl, though he wouldn't stoop to mentioning her by name. He didn't even have the decency to say 'addict,' which would have been silly enough. He simply came out and called the girl a dope fiend."

"Not to her poor father's face!" I exclaimed.

"I haven't any idea of what he said to Bell. I just know what he said afterward, to Nanette. She cried and cried-but she always does that, she likes to cry. And in the end he had to agree to his taking the case anyhow-because of me really."