Trust: A Novel Part 25

For myself, I opened my hands and blew them dry. For myself, I could rally. For myself, horror was only surprise raised to a higher power; and surprise was itself a component of the comic. Tragedy dates quickly, and then we have to laugh at it, as at films of forty years ago, with their irrelevant voiceless anguish, their trivial voiceless fright, their blows without impact. And when bitter at the morally unexpected, we always laugh. If the rationality of deliberate comedy is worthy of laughter, so much more is the irrationality of equally deliberate fate. What is hysteria if not fate's tears, too deep for thought? It is even possible to laugh at Lear-and who shall say that Hamlet's futile lunge at the arras is not designed to be partly laughed at? So I felt relief; I felt I had come far. Pity dwindled, though not ravishment. He was put down, William's son; dismayed; shamed. He was broken. I did not care. I felt elation at the straw of pride bent and rent; it brought him down to me. He had yielded up the secret history of our equality: now my mother, famous for scandal, silliness, duplicities, seemed no worse than William, who was tutored enough in Paulinism to see how wickedness differs from folly. The lily of deceit grew in William too; it grew well in him. I was glad the deed was old, and had preceded his son's birth and mine-the older, the more susceptible of wisdom's bony laughter; it meant we had grown up together with the deed, that death; it was our brother, our sister; we were born equal with it. Had I not heard Enoch declare righteousness a joke invented for dupes by confidence-men? And William's son was his father's dupe.

Not I. I supposed myself no one's dupe. Not only because I had no decorousness to be blasted (how elegantly he vanished, his head lordly though his long hands drooped!), but rather because I thought fraud my atmosphere, deceit my premise, hoax my modest axiom. I was used to them all, and comfortable with their divisions. I knew nothing of unity; of what William's son called "family unity" still less; in the impossibility of betrayal I had no faith. I had for a long time seen how my mother teased and catnipped life as though a.s.saying a sort of acrobatic trick, and how she threw herself astride it like a circus rider, and how she bred me to her repute while, waiting for the almost-fall, that most dangerous of all tricks, I watched with suspicion, incredulous even as she righted herself with a recklessness of equilibrium dependent partly on luck and partly on wile and not at all on the spirit of the steed. What William's son suffered, I did not know how to suffer. The dissolution of balance was, for me, neither novel nor blown with fear. I preened myself on my familiarity with distrust, and recovered easily-oh, how easily, with the complacency of practised repugnance-from a mere tale of a young man's cutting his throat.

But not from the live young man who had told the tale. Once more he entered that wide inhabited room where his father stood conversing among the splendid mob of youth, while I lingered at the bottom of the dim corridor down which he had led me to deliver the chronicle of his father's fall, already thinking it little, the sweat of horror already dry in my palm, myself all unmoved by antique incident. It might have been of the death of Priam he told me; old Kings and self-slain boys were nothing to me. It was all history, and history, as Enoch and William's son had equally divined, did not touch me. It was the live boy I cared for; it was the image of the live boy that ravished me, William's son-who, making his final disgruntled turn into the crowd and out of sight, left my eye abruptly bare. -Though not so bare as his mere disappearance would have it: his head, both brutal and delicate with defense, lay like another dimension-a tissue-against my lid. It settled into my willing stare with all the immobile persistence of a thin frail photograph; like a powder of gold it acridly dusted my vision; I feared its beauty at last. All that hapless unreachable beauty!-the beauty of valor, like that of a Roman soldier surveying an English swamp for a road that would outlast Rome's very legend. And not calculating valor only: something in his contempt, once perhaps a schoolboy affectation and now too bitterly justified by actuality, wrung me: it was so like a leap into danger. It had all the stylization of bravery and innocence thrown into the fire of deceit and bad dream. I saw him as though on a frieze-one of those staunch figures in buckler and helmet, leather scutum upraised, stony calf taut beneath the military skirt-then, above, grim graven face showing a pair of arched lips so unexpectedly soft, in all that stone, so surprisingly vulnerable, that they might have been in the act of speaking a lover's line by Catullus.

Well, look! I knew well enough what zeroes these romantic and perilous fantasies held for me. It was perverseness that drew me to the bliss of fancying myself in love just when that bliss was most inaccessible. He was engaged; and, even if he had not been bound by this not-quite-awesome compact, he would not have been less inaccessible. It was a robbed bliss and a robbed beauty I contemplated then-it seemed all the more impenetrable, all the more puissant, all the more richly luring, for its plain implausibility. He did not like me, William's son; he blamed me for being the daughter of Allegra Vand. His look denunciated; his look scathed; his look was full of taunting. And his voice was severe. His voice was savage. He was all savagery. He was not kind to me. It did not matter. I expected nothing. When he was gone I stood and blinked after him, warmed by his disciplined and purposive confidence, though preferring to take it for savage and wild.

If he had spoken to me kindly he would have diminished my adoration. I leaned just on that scorn in him that reduced and denied his father. It made us, in a way, both fatherless. It leveled us. Now all freely I spun out the strand of love.

And tangled it curiously, a moment afterward, in the bright quick feet of the girl whose snare of kisses I had seen him ravel while I stood as witness in my dress of gold and silver, like a measure of those kisses' cost, in that midnight on the terrace.

She came running toward me down the hall; her shoes were not the same, no longer blue, and no blue strap went as isthmus across her instep now: instead an ordinary brown ribbon-bow bestrode the brown point of each darting toe. She halted, not certain of me-her berry-mouth was swelled like a pouch, full Of cake; and then, when she had swallowed that obstruction down, recognizing me, it turned out it was full of a message too. "Hey!" she began. "Come on, you're wanted inside. You weren't supposed, to be here, you know; but now he's heard you are-some little clerk told him-so of course he has to say he wants you."

"Well, thanks," I said, with a certain dryness, in no hurry now to present myself to William, no matter whether he summoned or not. His son had metamorphosed him into a stark criminality and the confrontation all at once seemed a prospect more complicated than half an hour before, when I had thought him a blameless adviser, my mother's lawyer, confidant, and even, in a blanched but lingering sense, husband.

But meanwhile William's messenger, grown suddenly lazy (or perhaps in imitation of those heroic messengers of Greek drama who, having arrived choking, breathe out the vital scene, and then collapse and die), leaned against the wall-or, rather, stood interestingly propped by a long papery tube which she thrust as a kind of supporting rod or flying b.u.t.tress between her round flowered hip and the nearest vertical surface. The device, I saw in a moment, was only a rolled-up magazine; and with a childlike maneuver that was still more charming than the first, she lifted it to her eye like a telescope, let herself fall with the grace of a vivid stem against the wall, and squinted out at me. It was more startling than any open gaze she might have tried. "You don't have to tail it to him right away," she informed me while I watched her peer through her improvised hole. "He's not doing anything anyhow-just talking to a couple of men."

"I know," I said. "I saw."

"One's Connelly and one's Karp. I've been introduced to eVerybody!" she told me with a snicker of triumph-she clearly meant everybody important. "I might get Karp to put an ad for the Harvard Law School in the Sport, you know that? Anyhow I could try. That wouldn't be unethical, at least-for the next issue, if they don't tan it. You know they're thinking of banning the next issue?" she pressed, brisk with indignation, just as though events at Miss Jewett's occupied the universe, school facts being the world's facts. She even expected me to show my contempt for the censors, which I did, by means of the unwitting wince I gave while avoiding getting struck by her jutting scroll. "You know who Karp is? He's a professor up there," she went on. "So actually it wouldn't be unethical for them to advertise, would it?"

"But it might be unprofitable," I said mildly. "For the Law School, I mean. You don't think anyone from Miss Jewett's would apply?"

The rolled-up tube came slowly down and both her eyes looked frankly across at me. "Law's for boys," she told me unequivocally.

"What about Portia?"

"Who's that?"

"A famous woman lawyer," I admitted lamely.

"Look," she expostulated, "it takes brains." She was all reasonable patience. "In England they even have to wear wigs-they're all supposed to look like George Washington, don't ask me why. It's just wild! I know, I looked into the books once-half the stuff's in Spanish."

"It's not Spanish," I said. "It's Latin."

"Latin?"

"Yes."

She meditated briefly. "Ovum and Virgin," she said.

"What?"

"Ovum and Virgin," she daintily repeated. "Those are two Latin writers. We learned about them last term in Social Studies Past and Present. We had Past before gym and Present afterward."

"What about Future?" I inquired.

She answered me gravely, worried about the deficiency. "We don't have anything like that at Miss Jewett's," said she. "We have everything else, though. Maybe they give that at the Academy. They're awful sticklers there-poor Nanette even had to take algebra, you know that? I'd've died if my father'd made me go there, wouldn't you?-I mean your stepfather," she corrected.

"My stepfather doesn't make me do anything," I said.

She emitted a half-envious cluck. "Lucky you-I don't get away with peanuts. They treat me like the Prisoner of Zenda, especially since all the fuss at school-you know. That's why I can't wait to get married, so I can do just as I please. When you're married no one can stop you from doing anything." But this seemed to remind her of something else: she picked at the cloth blossoms that grew out of her b.u.t.tons and with an innocence almost clever fashioned her transition-"How come you showed up here, by the way?"

"I thought it a proper thing to congratulate William," I invented with a try at dignity.

"Why, what's he done?"

The straightforward orderliness of this question charged me with a secret mischief: what had William done! I could not get out of my head what William had done-it was all a new and horrendous gospel-it made me delay and delay. Nevertheless I was obligated to reply only to her meaning, and not to mine. "It's what his son's done," I explained. "What the party's for."

"Oh," she said dubiously, "I didn't realize you'd heard about it."

"The party? I hadn't," I confessed.

"I mean the engagement," she emphasized. "They said William would leak it to Mrs. Vand before anyone wanted him to-they're supposed to be very thick, he tells her everything, it's a shame-" She stopped herself guiltily. "Anyway they all thought you ought to be asked for today, but I couldn't see it. It's not as though you were related, or even friends. So then they didn't. I hope you don't mind," she ended civilly.

"I don't mind," I a.s.sured her.

"It's sort of my fault."

"It's really all right," I said, thinking her not so bad-mannered after all. Still, it was hard to forgive her; the pink flowers in her dress seemed to dance around her throat and multiplied in garlands at her knees-she swiveled her little neck and I discovered in astonishment a live tea rose dangling from a dip of hair behind her ear. "Did you help plan this? I thought the office people did it."

"Oh no," she protested, "it was my idea, the whole thing! They paid for it and all, but I'm the one who thought it up. It was my idea to bring down the Cabbages, anyway. The whole lot of them came down." She laughed at my incomprehension. "That's what we call our team, isn't it awful? The opposite team's Onions. And when we have a game it's called a Stew-that's all Miss Jewett's thing, it's the way it's done in England. Do you play volleyball?"

"Not much," I said.

"Really?" she exclaimed pityingly. "Don't you play anything?

"I used to."

"What?"

"The violin."

But her grimace showed how unfair this was. "What corn. I'd die if I had to. Nanette's got to take piano, William makes her."

"Maybe she likes it."

"She doesn't like anything but doing plays," my companion observed with a hoot of scorn. "That's why William didn't want her here today, on account of Euphoria Karp-she bosses some sort of theatre up at Cambridge, and that Nanette! She'd badger anybody to death for a part. Tears and all. You honestly wouldn't imagine a girl like that could have a halfway human brother, would you?"

"You approve of her brother," I interpreted.

"Well, why wouldn't I?" she wondered. "Ask the Cabbages! They're all disgustingly in love with him. He's not even handsome, you know that?"

I wretchedly obliged her: "You don't think so?"

"Oh, I think he's a brute, absolutely!" she flung at me with an enthusiasm so radiantly possessive it both puzzled and alarmed me. "Everybody does; don't you?"

"I agree he's halfway human," I echoed her.

She took this as she had given it-as the most sweeping praise imaginable. "Oh, I know! I adore him!" she rejoiced, letting her magazine snap down like a sprung window-shade in plain celebration. "Sometimes he can be pretty nasty, though-it might bother some people, but it doesn't bother me. You have to be that way if you're going into politics, like the Senate and the Board of Estimate and things. You know he might go into politics? William doesn't want him to-they never have in that family, except for one teeny alderman away back who doesn't count-but he'd be awfully good at it, he's got just the perfect voice for it, don't you think? And anyhow campaigning's terrific!"

And so was she; I drew back in awe. "You shouldn't call his father 'William.' You keep saying that," I objected with all the resentfulness of an outcast whose last feeble privilege has been violated by a parody.

She stared. "What do you call him?"

"William," I said weakly.

"There! And you're nothing to him!-Even though everybody thinks you are."

"That doesn't justify you," I said.

"Oh, don't be so strict-what do you expect?" she struck back. "It's not as if he isn't practically my father-in-law already!" She indulged herself in a broad but modest preening; she peeped down the front of her dress, as though hunting for a dare. "I can call him what I please. And if I want to I'll even call him Willie!"

So I was left, after the disclosure, after, rather, the trans.m.u.tation-it was quite like watching the cygnet turn into its true ident.i.ty of princess-with nothing to p.r.o.nounce but the blessing. "You're not the Pettigrew he's marrying," I p.r.o.nounced instead, half-m.u.f.fled by somber envy; "you're not the fiancee?"-not sparing myself, though sparing her: what else could the descending language of my startled melancholy be if not: Is it you? Are you the one? Not you!-still, even in my milder spoken version, showing no more than delayed perception, I felt a bungler, and overwhelmed. She had in fact moved the mountain: she was a sprite, all in flowers, all unexpectedly loosing her not-to-be-guessed-at influences, and whatever those ma.s.sed circlets were in which she gleamed, lilies or pansies or some bland designer's abstract notion of a bloom, just the same she stood sheathed in them as if in instruments and magnets formidable, glancing out her fragile might.

"Well, who'd you think I was?" she demanded. "Didn't I just tell you I was getting married?"

"I didn't know you meant immediately. -Then the party's really yours," I concluded.

"Sure," she said. "It's t.i.t for tat. Last time it was yours."

"This one seems more of a success," I said ruefully.

"It's because of the Cabbages-they're a riot! A while ago a bunch of 'em was trying to empty the water cooler so's to fill it with gin, did you see?"

I acknowledged that I had unfortunately missed this.

"It didn't work, though-they only got the whole back part of the floor flooded; I nearly died laughing! Did you ever see this really antique Clark Gable movie where they fill a gin bottle with water from the water cooler? You ought to, honestly, it's a scream-it's where the Cabbages got the idea, only in reverse. In the movie Clark Gable gets drunk just from thinking it's gin!" she shot out gloriously, and then in a darker voice, which, it struck me after a moment, was fashioned to console, began again, "Say, you want to know what was the matter with that bon voyage thing you had?"

"For one thing, there wasn't any voyage."

"Well I heard you weren't going, but that's not what I mean. It was the creepy music, right out of the Dark Ages, you know? The band wasn't bad, just the music. n.o.body wants to dance to that stuff. That's how come it fizzled," she earnestly advised.

"I'm sorry about that," I said.

"Oh, I didn't mind, honestly! Because that's the night I found out," she told me suspensefully, dangling the statement for me to probe.

I went right after it, just as she wished, though wearily. "Found out what?"

"About getting married, silly! Till then I was just hoping. You saw how crazy he was about me, didn't you? I guess that nutty editor of your mother's, you know who, got him jealous, because driving home he all of a sudden said O.K., let's get married, for G.o.d's sake. And all I did was have one conversation with that Ed McGovern! I love to see boys get jealous," she said contentedly. "So for me that night wasn't really a fizzle, if that makes you feel any better about it. Oh come on, that's not being fair, don't look at my finger!" she cried, although I had all the while kept my eyes on my own sad wrists, one crossed over the other, "-because I don't have the ring to show yet, it's still on order. But it's absolutely fantastic-it'll kill the Onions!"

"Are any of them here?" I wondered.

"Any of who?"

"The Onions."

"Gosh no! We don't go to theirs and they don't come to ours. Anyway," she went on with a pleased sniff, "we're three engagements ahead of them this term-mine's the third. Didn't you see the signs? They've got Form 7 on them; that includes the Onions, which practically peels them anyhow."

"Those lapel things, do you mean? I did, but they all said Fannie, and I didn't think-"

"It's for short, like a nickname; we all have nicknames. I hate mine, but that's the idea, you're supposed to have a nickname that you hate. Fannie's not so bad really, it's only the end part of Stefanie. You know what the Onions call Beverly Snearles, even though she's an Onion?-They call her Reveille, isn't that wild? I mean the reason it's so funny is because she's always late in the morning, she can't get up. And you "know poor Eleanor, who got kicked out of the a.s.semblies? They used to just call her El's Bells, but now since all the fuss they call her Little Knell-with a K, like for doom and all that!" she happily informed me.

"You all seem to have a sense of humor," I essayed.

"I know, we're a howl sometimes. Especially the Cabbages. I mean some days we can laugh and laugh for hours."

This took from me no more than a lugubrious nod. Here was fate arrayed and laughing, and here was fortune all smiling, quite as common speech depicts them: behold, in flutes and flowers, William's son's lissome lot. Of myself, meanwhile, what could I gloomily think but "infelix Dido"?-out of that poet known as Virgin to Miss Jewett's unconscious mediaevalists. (For the Roman literati spelled it Vergil: wasn't it the cabalistic monks who, in pious deference to their Lady, echoed it into Virgil?) Oh, well, there-now parenthetically I've shown what Stefanie Pettigrew believed of me. Not that I stood mumbling to myself in a dead language! I only mean that I knew acutely what she saw, that blithe girl, and felt the soaring scorn of her half-justified a.s.sessment: myself a mopish moralist,' drab and yawning and pocked interiorly with the mold of pedantry-while she, in contrast, petalled all over like a paper flower-cart, or real daffodils in a trance, leaned against that dark legal wall and lit it. The more I suspected her of holding this shrivelled image of me, the more I pitied my standing there, starched by wonder, fixed on the single tea rose that sprang down to touch her flower-ear where William's son had kissed. I gave myself out, then, as futility coming before the judgment of a gleaming garden bent on no verdict but beauty and vitality, and let down in resignation the long, long vine of my self-grieving; I twined it all around me, sad because I had none of that life of chatter and charm and lyrical frivolity that splattered the corridor with ascending joyous shrieks. She was all undeliberate liquescence, a wind on a pond, Miss Jewett's pretty Artemis, her arrow-point nothing but the green stem of a water lily magicked into power. "Well, if you want to hear about sense of humor," she interposed, "you ought to come and meet Mrs. Karp-she's a riot! I mean she writes the funniest poems-not anything like Ed McGovern's- you know, just funny, about people's being sick and things. I just can't be bothered with poems," she brought out with the smile of a restless conquistador, "unless they're weird: you want to see?"

I did not; I wanted, rather, to go, but the pa.s.sage was suddenly full of the flutter of the scroll's unfurling-the cover flashed by so quickly I could not tell whether it was Harper's, or Harper's Bazaar, or merely Harps, "the magazine for angels," the celestials being, of course, those glorious hosts of housewives who bought it. Whichever it was, the ill.u.s.trious Euphoria Karp wrote for it, and in a moment, while Stefanie simpered beside me, I was staring at the wit of the wife of the Professor of Copyright: OPERATION CYST.

A GYNECOLOGICAL GARLAND OF VISCERAL VERSES.

"Read it!" insisted Stefanie, and put the page firmly in my grasp. "You'll absolutely die. All the Cabbages did," and, so as not to survive alone in a Cabbageless world, I complied. The poem was in two parts. I read them both: I.

My life isn't as interesting as Madame Bovary's.

My trouble isn't lovers-just ovaries.

The Doctor said to Madame Bovary, "I'll kiss and squeeze ya."

The Doctor said to me, "111 give ya anaesthesia."

Madame Bovary had a lover's tryst.

But I only had a cyst.