Trust: A Novel Part 27

"Oh-yes, I see," Connelly said again, but weakly. "How amusing."

"Euphoria is a very amusing manipulator," Karp grumbled-was it out of self-defense?-"of wit."

"Yes indeed," his wife confessed. "I'm a po-wit in fact"

"Specializing in witty lines on Poe?" I wondered coa.r.s.ely.

She turned on me in delight. "I never thought of that! How charming of you; I must use it somehow. You know I adore puns. And more than that I adore puns on puns-they're even rarer. I do so appreciate people who have a sensitivity to humor. They're so few. But I really ought to be able to make something of that-" Her active clever eyes with their faint tendency to bulge, exaggerated this proclivity; she plainly strained: her moment was upon her, and loudly, rapidly, precisely, and without a single intake of breath she rattled out the following: Edgar Allan Poe

Died of drink, you know.

He lived his life in squalor

And never had a dollar,

Which news by word of mouth

Reached the Deepest South

Where they maintained it wasn't gin

That did him in-

"He sho'ly daid

Cuz he war po'," they said.

"Good Christ!" Connelly pealed out in an access of amazement.

"Don't let it bother you, she does it all the time," Karp said, embarra.s.sed. "It's really nothing to be perturbed about. She can't help it. She just happens to have that sort of brain."

"But it's not good," Mrs. Karp said peevishly. "I don't like it. It's not worth writing down; it's not funny enough, is it, 'Rome? I mean it's too tritely philosophical: it only makes that silly old point about character being fate, did you catch that, William? And then all that build-up just for the play-on-words at the end."

"I'm afraid I can never understand dialect," he apologized; his ears were vaguely pink, and I pitied him.

"You mean you disapprove of it," said Mrs. Karp. "I believe you're a liberal after all, William."

"Now, now, no name-calling," Connelly said; this was his little joke, and he indulged himself in a marginal laugh, like the creasing of tinfoil, which no one shared, though Mrs. Karp looked ready to put her tongue out at him.

Nevertheless she refrained, and instead wagged it for another purpose: "Tell me, do you help out with Bushelbasket?" she asked me. "No? What a shame, I've got a revision of the placebo thing in my bag-that's the one I've already sent to your mother's editor, you see; I thought you might take the new version with you, to hand over to him. It's ever so much better now, you know."

"It's twice as long," Karp sighed.

"Which logically makes it twice as good," Mrs. Karp took up stoutheartedly. "Would you mind delivering it?"

"Not at all," I said, "except that he's in San Francisco."

"Who do you say is in San Francisco?" William demanded, suddenly attentive.

"Ed McGovern. My mother's editor. She gave him a check and he went."

"What the devil for?"

"I don't know. To spend it, I guess."

"To freshen his point of view, you might put it," Mrs. Karp said helpfully.

"Wastrel," Connelly muttered, with a quick peep at William. "Parasite."

"Printing costs are so high," Mrs. Karp added; she was, on principle, admirably pumping up the conversation. "I hear your mother saves on capital letters."

"She leaves them out," I admitted. "Commas too."

"How economical!" Mrs. Karp marveled. "Though I hope it won't harm the placebo," and reached into her big deep pocketbook, thick with sc.r.a.ps of paper, wherefrom, as though it were a pickle, she unerringly picked her poem.

I took it and saw that it was very narrow and very long. "My mother's favorite shape in a poem," I remarked out of politeness.

"Oh, 'Rome, you hear that, isn't that fine? It's Mrs. Vand's favorite poem! In that case she's sure to care for the new version, don't you think?"

"That McGovern fellow," Connelly interrupted crossly, brooding. "She pays plenty for him. Well, look at it this way: it's one of her questionable investments, same as Michigan Laminated. That's the only way to look at it."

"It's one of her pleasures," William corrected: which startled Connelly, who at once began to cast around for a qualification that would not sound directly like an apology.

"There's no money in pleasure," was all he came up with on short notice.

Mrs. Karp could not permit so manifest an opportunity to go by unpounced-upon. "But there's lots of pleasure in money!" she cried, and looked to me to join her in her gratification. "That's what wit is," she explained civilly; somehow she had taken me for her partner in metaphysics. "You have to seize on every chance. You have to listen. You know most people don't listen, not even to themselves. It's what leaves them wide open to becoming someone else's b.u.t.t. That's why I always make a point of listening to myself."

"Sometimes you're the only one who does," said her husband.

Meanwhile I occupied myself with an investigation of William. The presence of the Karps, teasing around him like a school of carnivorous fish (only afterward did I suppose that, the name had supplied the image: watching them, I simply derived it from the way they kept him cornered at the bottom of their part of the ocean, a place unfamiliar-too warm, perhaps-to his cool kind), rejoiced him so little that he had no disposition to feel anger at me. Though earlier I might have counted myself lucky in this, it struck me now that he was not merely -"behaving well," as I had expected of him: he was hardly aware that I was there. He looked at me, and thought all the while of my mother-but not because I had come as a reminder. On the contrary, my mother was the substance of the Karps' surveillance. "About this Russian business," he said abruptly to Professor Karp, cutting Euphoria off without realizing he was doing it. She stood with her long, meagre-gummed teeth glistening, eager to oblige him by withdrawing-as some fish swim backwards momentarily before darting out for a bite of their victim's side. " About this Russian business," he began, and Connelly pressed in, making the circle tight against women and children: they talked of visas, and officials, and then of "prospects" which Connelly said were unfavorable until William said well, it couldn't be predicted in advance-"oh," said Connelly then, "I don't predict, I go by what's been the case for the last two decades," while Karp worked the two parallel ditches between his eyes. William had endured trivialities long enough, apparently; he was after the issue, and could not bear the boredom of the dance on either side of it and all around it. It was of my mother they were talking, it developed in fact-of her unpaid Russian royalties. I was surprised, though Stefanie had warned me of it. "Out-and-out thieves," Connelly put it without extenuation: but William listened steadfastly to Karp. They spoke of the formation of a Commission. "Five of us," Karp said. "In a quiet way. The lot that went over last year made too much noise. You can't have an ex-candidate for the Presidency, lawyer or no lawyer, do this sort of thing. It's got to be quiet and obscure, no known names, nothing political, just plain lawyerlike negotiation-" Connelly asked what the money would be, in the aggregate. "Well, we'd have to see what their terms are, after all. What percentage they'd be willing to agree to. I wouldn't expect it to correspond with their domestic practise." William said he thought not. "Though I didn't get you down here for details," he murmured; "only for the general question. Pity it had to be just today, in the middle of all this-" He waved a hand of despair and censure into limitless fields of light overgrown with Cabbages: the despair was for these, but the disapproval was for Karps. "The young people," he said, somewhat more loudly, noticing me as though I were a footnote authenticating this explanation.

But Karp loftily disagreed. "I'm afraid Mrs. Vand is a detail. You don't want to expect anything special. In a thing like this there can't be special cases. All we can hope for is to soften them a bit; to get them to acknowledge that we have a moral case. We can't even begin to expect them to acknowledge the International Copyright Convention, G.o.d knows. They translate everything and pay for nothing," he said, directing this at Connelly, who looked first miffed and then puffed with an interior monologue which the eager twitch of his nose betrayed-he was only an accountant, and in the presence of lawyers he always felt patronized; all of this his damp nostrils seemed to signal, opening and shutting like flexible quotation marks. His nostrils, in short (though they were long), quoted his thoughts, and his thoughts were envious and scornful: lawyers believe in money and credit the way boys believe in kites-not as the very pillars of the world upon which the angels of Christ rest their elbows. Widening pridefully, narrowing aristocratically, those twin Celtic holes enclosed their final musing. "Talk to pirates about moral cases!" he said aloud, though his nose, rising as his large skull dispiritedly ascended, insisted he needed no elucidations-they might talk of copyrights if they wished, or of morality: he knew they were talking of cash.

So did shrewd Mrs. Karp. "And if you're not going for Mrs. Vand, what are you going for?"

"The principle," Karp said.

"Oh, the principle! The principle's nothing!" she contributed smugly. "William didn't ask you to come down for the principle, did you, William?" But she was too hurried to wait to hear. "And if we'd come down yesterday-it's my fault we're a day late; I admit to it; I made 'Rome stay for last night though he whimpered all through it-a regular cry of pain," she joked. "We put on a perfectly marvelous comedy at the Verse Theatre, all in quatrains, half of them composed by yours truly, you see; that's why. It was the premiere, if that isn't a misnomer for a one-night stand. The setting was a s.p.a.ceship headed for another solar system-a sort of up-to-date Everyman; at any rate if we'd come down yesterday I never would have gotten my revision of the placebo into properly appreciative hands. You're just clutching it," she admonished me, looking to see whether my hands were properly appreciative; "aren't you going to read it?"

"Oh yes," I said weakly, d.a.m.ning her for her interruption; I was interested in Karp. He had quick unusual gestures; he liked to pat down his bold hair, and now and then he put a narrow forefinger to the side of his head, as though listening to the pulse there, or the machinery of his brain. It was easy to see that he respected that machinery, and ran it at its highest efficiency, without taxing it or abusing a single notch of its gears; also he respected it the way a man on a ladder respects the rungs that separate him from the hard ground; and in spite of his wife, he took one rung, or one notch, at a time. "I'll enter Mrs. Vand on our book-list, certainly," he a.s.sured William; this was as far as he could carry the favor, he implied. Though he gave himself out as acting only out of principle, his manner contradicted him. His moving hands responding to himself, even his captious but cautious face with its slowly sliding eyes, seemed to expose something else in him-principle, to be sure, but smaller principle, a sly sharp private principle that he kept for himself, for his own advancement. I all at once remembered my mother's remark-they had dropped Karp from Who's Who. He was now merely in the Index of Former Biographees, or however it was designated, though when I looked it up afterward I discovered that fleshly red book both too polite and too brutal for such an Index: instead they had tacked near Karp's bare name a circle-within-a-circle, ominously reminiscent of Dante-in this way, hushed, clean-handed, they consigned Karp to the h.e.l.l of the No Longer Prominent. He had ceased to be important, and in order to be re-included had to build again. So he was once more impatiently building, went down to Yale for luncheon with the dean while Euphoria set herself up for the afternoon like an influential icon among the drama aspirants and the homely playwrights, and all in all collected his bricks from the best quarries. The going-to-Russia Committee was very good, very fine, a bit obscure, but he had already made a virtue of that: he had the obscurity, he had the machinery, the problem was entirely within his expertise; membership in die Committee was excellent, they were all five of them enterprising and scholarly. I sensed Karp's opportunistic calculation, against William's solid beating, that he regarded William as his veritable keystone. William in conjunction with the Committee!-I saw him feel for his high dark hair with a nervous claw of knuckle, conscious already of laurel. Though he did not cosset, like that sad dog Connelly, still he was justified in thinking of William as a sort of trophy-it was William who had come to Karp, and not the other way around. And it gilded his power that, distinctly as it was worth his while to undertake a favor for William, it was all really out of his hands performing the favor was not equivalent to granting the boon, which lay, abstractly and only in conjecture, with some mustached, burly-cheeked board of officials in Moscow. He might be the most vigorous advocate ever to bombard that board; still, if on political grounds they were beyond persuasion, he was helpless-the caprice, or call it policy, of unknown men governed all. This was delightful; it put Karp in the delicious position of disappointing William while seeming with all his might to be working to satisfy him: it was very like the sympathetic pride of the court physician who must tell the king he is incurable-the diagnostician wears the purple then. For the man whom glory nurtures, when alas for him he is born alien to the ruling blood of the province, a c.h.i.n.k into the throne-room can be found: if he would have his elbows rub n.o.bler elbows, let him, half by imitation and intuition, and half by bribery, become a courtier. Clearly this was Karp's way. He coveted William-I mean he coveted him socially: a dinner party at the house in Scarsdale with William's Groton intimates and their unimaginable wives (how Karp longed to see whether Euphoria approximated these!-he had chosen her because he thought she/did, but surely they did not commit verses-or, if she did not approximate them, he hoped to learn how, with a little coaching and no coaxing, she, a willing mimic, might be transformed)-this discouraging commonplace was Karp's Eden. If William knew, he had no call to practise, the democracy of, say, a university circle (wherein Karp hobn.o.bbed with a high administrator descended from Jonathan Edwards and a bright teaching a.s.sistant three years past twenty who was great-grandnephew to Woodrow Wilson); and this exactly, that he denied his cozier self, was William's allure, for Karp held that democracy cheap. He craved no entry where entry was generous, and it was plain in his tone that all the fraternal liberties and splendors of Harvard and Yale and even recalcitrant Princeton moved him not so much as a single tremor of approval in the eyelid of caste-iron William.

Caste-iron: how Euphoria Karp would have rejoiced in this equivoque!-which, for I do not wish to plagiarize, I had, even while I said it to myself, to credit to a gravely Utopian page in Marianna Harlow. In Russian, I observed, the pun must have been lost together with the royalties, and so I turned to ask in a voice that-since it sounded briskly to-the-point while not being on the point at all-might almost have been Mrs. Karp's: "It's not for literature you're going?"

"Well yes; why not for literature?" Karp said, taken by surprise. "It isn't just Mrs. Vand. It's Faulkner and Hemingway too. It's everyone."

But so far William's hallowed eyelid remained unblinkingly rigid. "What has literature got to do with it? I hope you're not thinking of going all the way to Russia for the sake of a frivolity," he said sternly. Each conscientious sentence emerged as cautiously and absolutely as a chess move; it was not the Castle (wherein gaudy sinners pursued their own amus.e.m.e.nt) William put forward, but rather the somber-visaged Bishop (the Bishop, it might be noted, on the Right). "If the Administration were paying for the trip I a.s.sure you I wouldn't expect better-only last month they sent some foolish pieces on tour abroad, full of holes and deformities, sculpture, they call it-a quarter-of-a-million-dollars' worth of exhibiting to the world how we make monkeys of ourselves. All right, but if we're putting up the money privately, it's not to finance a depravity, it's for results, it's not for the flowers that bloom in the spring. It's for the royalties they've cheated her of."

"They've cheated all the others too," Karp said, downed by discontent and deprivation-he had not expected he would be called upon to argue. "The list we've prepared shows some very distinguished authors."

"Don't talk to me about your list. Your list means nothing to me. The point is there's no one on it who has her sales over there."

"She goes like hotcakes over there," Connelly morosely supplied.

"Russian hotcakes?" quipped Mrs. Karp, brightly blazing, and paying strict attention once again. "You mean Mrs. Vand's novel sells like blini? That's Russian for-"

But no one seemed entertained by this demonstration of the resources of linguistic humor-so, out of charity, before she had it all out I gave her a smile, for which I imagined I would have to pay sooner or later. From fellowship Mrs. Karp exacted more fellowship. "-for hotcakes," she finished doggedly.

Still, all this was behind the scenes, as it were; for meanwhile William had not paused. "I ought to say that the book itself is not at issue. I never thought anything of it. I can't claim that I've ever read it. I was never an admirer of its political tone," he said tautly; "but I haven't read your Faulkner and Hemingway either, and I don't intend to. When I want a taste of fiction I go to the newspapers and look at the editorials. Your 'distinguished authors' may be better writers than poor Allegra-though candidly and logically I don't believe there can be better or worse in nonsense and vice-but they can't have better sales. The fact is it's her sales I'm concerned with, not her book. She's been at the very top over there for a generation. The book itself is a puerile outrage. Which says something for the Russian public."

"Well, people tend to forget," Connelly embroidered with a pugnacious scowl of irrelevant wisdom. "They forget how Rosy-velt tried to pack the Court."

This counterpoint did not perturb Karp; he kept his gaze on William. He was not essentially interested in literature, or in royalties, or in Connelly. He was interested in what interested William. He saw that Connelly, who was generally flexible but not noteworthily intelligent, and who was in his more primitive fashion what Karp was himself-a fawner-did not interest William, whereas Mrs. Vand did. "The political tone?" he asked, though he was not essentially interested in politics either.

"They read her like a sentimental tract," William confirmed. "I'm told they read her in the high schools. She's the Soviet Uncle Tom's Cabin-it can't be helped, though it's a terrible pity. I admit to feeling a patriotic shame over it. I happen to regard it as an immense scandal, but it doesn't change the fact that she's ent.i.tled to her royalties."

"She's not a sympathizer?"

"She grew out of it," William said curtly.

"The country didn't," Connelly complained. "Bolshevik ideas even in the Republican Party, right today. They put the New Dealers out of office but kept the New Deal, so what's the gain?"

"I'm talking about Allegra," William said angrily. "I always knew she would grow out of that stupidity. She never had anything in common with it."

It startled me to hear from William so public a private declaration. Embarra.s.sment had wrung it from him, and I discerned that, for the sake of regaining Allegra Vand's lost royalties, he was in the process of negotiating much more than it seemed on the surface; he was exposing himself, and bartering his exposure. His very negotiation seemed to support what he abhorred, even in memory-my mother's wild long-ago days; yet the more he expressed his abhorrence-so as not to appear to have partaken in her shame-the more he propelled himself into the unchivalrous appearance of proclaiming that shame. Conceit for his soul's condition and loyalty to my undeserving mother puffed his clean jaw with unendurable contradictions, and I recognized in poor proud William his old, sad, foolish affliction regarding Allegra Vand: odi et amo-or, if that is too cla.s.sically burning for such a disciplined heart as William's, say instead that he suffered from a wound which had been suppurating for an eternity, only because he would let no one (not himself, not even, with all her fastidiousness and love of gardens, his wife) bandage it.

His avowal made me meditate. "If you always knew it," I said slowly, astonished to hear myself speak it out, "why didn't you wait?"

"Wait for what?" Connelly asked, more callous than inquisitive.

"For the stupidity to end."

William closed his eyes.

"For her to grow out of it," I persisted, conscious of my daring.

He opened them again, but not at me. His narrow look pursued detachment. "You can tell your mother," he coolly directed me, "that the Russian business is underway. It's going to be taken care of."

"That's right, tell her William's hooked Karp," said Euphoria, demonstrating her special wink.

But William's hook dangled nakedly. It wa not Karp he was after. "Tell your mother," he said again, setting his bait, "that the Commission will do much more than merely put her at the top of its booklist."

"We'll do what we can, you know," Karp said.

"Tell her," William said, "that she's going to get a quite distinct recognition. Professor Karp will acknowledge that she is a special case," he said, "h.e.l.l insist on it, you see," he said, turning to me at last, but only to avoid Karp. "So you can tell her it's more or less settled. I'll be coming up to see her myself in the next week or two-no, later: after your stepfather's hearing. I'd rather not thrust this Russian business at her just now when she's concerned with the other-it's an issue that's always gotten her I think disproportionately excited. Well, and no wonder," he expanded while Karp watched him with the contempt of a man who when rebuffed grows suddenly cruel, "she's keen on justice, she's always been keen on justice. Then you'll get it for her, Jerome?" he plainly commanded.

Not Karp but his wife answered-like a jester, she saw her task as requiring her to jump in with praise for her lord in the very moment of his humiliation. What she chose to praise was his cruelty. "Oh you don't have to worry about 'Rome, believe me! They had their chance once before to say no over there; they won't say it again though, I can promise you that-'Rome never gives anyone a second chance! Never, never. He always attains justice because he never bothers with mercy-as a policy it's incredibly efficient. Imagine," she laughed, "how many lives of freshmen he's blighted just on account of being keen on justice himself! Freshmen and their wives-freshmen in law school all have wives nowadays, they're absolutely rampant, they even have to have them organized in clubs," she gratuitously informed us, valuing all fact equally, "but you see what to Mrs. Vand is only an emotion is to 'Rome a working system, there's the difference. So if his system can break the heads of freshmen, just think what it'll do to the Kremlin! 'Rome never gives anyone a second chance," she finished with a shake of her ruffles.

Professor Karp tried to look modest through this discourse, quite as though he did not wish to appear really as vainglorious as Euphoria described him; or perhaps he only thought his wife talked too much. He had, nevertheless, nothing more to say; and neither, it turned out, did William, who was at that moment unexpectedly distracted by a particular screech, higher and wilder than its companion-cries, which flew soaring across the room out of the throat of his daughter-in-law-to-be. He bent his head with melancholy. "Your poor mother," he murmured, and I thought it irrelevant to anything but the contents of his own mind until it came to me that this radiant halloo (it had to do, apparently, with the continuing political strategy of victorious Cabbages versus captive Onion) which had no intellectual meaning but was instead an open and joyous ringleader call of judgment on the world that a bird in its simplicity might make upon the crimson cherry-bough-Stefanie's bright voice-reminded him not of his son's misfortune but of his own youth.

"Then it's settled," he repeated to Karp; "you'll let me know the date you fly," and Karp knew he would never see the inside of the Scarsdale house, or the wives of the grown Groton lads: William had summoned him not for himself, but only for his usefulness; only for the blade of his brain, and for the clever sheath of vanity that covered his mercilessness, though both had been honed in compet.i.tion with men better-born than he, men who were named for the dales and fields and rills of a place, and not for the homeless landless scavenger fish; William esteemed nothing in Karp, nothing, only what was exploitable and at the same time execrable, as though Karp were a mediaeval money-lender: only what would bring about the satisfaction of the whim of Allegra Vand, which he desired-why?

Because he remembered still the curious gathered-up laughter of her girlhood-my mother's cry: that rod of white fire with which she had struck him when she fled the house in Scarsdale: which Karp was never to enter.

So Karp and I had that in common, though a negative, and for reasons not different. Karp, however respectable his origins, had been in William's view born to the wrong father; and so had I. In spite of it I sided with William against him, and not only out of habit. I did not like him. I did not like his wife. These two were proud. They were proud that Karp had no compa.s.sion; that he oppressed the hearts and sped and bled the years of young men and their brides; that like fate he spited hope; that he used authority not for order, but for a whip, to a.s.sure himself of his importance. They were proud, they thought themselves important; pride and importance swelled and swaggered in their unextraordinary faces; and strangely I felt a sorrow for their sorrow and their delusion. How hopeless to yearn after William's tea-table!-William who by inheritance and conviction was, hence never troubled to denote himself, "important." How like a pair of voyeurs they seemed! And so they stood mutely pealing wanting and woe, while William looked past them, stiff as a figure on a bow with wooden arms posed behind his back, thinking out toward the horizon, himself wormy with impossible longings, and these two below him not understanding that he had ceased to see them. Whereas Connelly, the practised-perfect acolyte, was already moving off, intuiting without having been directly told when his duty was over. He showed, as he drifted away, a sense of ceremony; his very physiognomy displayed it; ritually his retreating little ears continued to wait, segregated like very pale mushrooms a decent distance to the sides of his wide wet eyes. The meticulous accountant meandered, then stopped a far but fealty-filled s.p.a.ce from his master, a lonesome squat man who crumpled his big square forehead and would not drink: odd duck, Irish teetotaler, who had given up liquor perhaps in imitation of William, perhaps for some private tragic cause he kept to himself, a sort of atonement-his sister was a nun.

Meanwhile Euphoria Karp. Her husband brooded, imagining Moscovite revenge. Not she. "Aren't you going to read the placebo?" Her mouth jagged with charm, she pressed me for my promise. "Read it. Don't keep it from William-I mean read it aloud!"

And because I hardly knew whom to pity more in that company-the silenced Karp or this voluble Karp; the meticulous accountant divided between practical worship of Protestant success and romantic musing reverence for the other older success of the Eternal City; or William my almost-father, who would gladly have unst.i.tched his central organ from his unhappy ribs to appease my mother for his having solemnly determined, after many and bitter trials, that she would not Do-wretched for their wretchedness I fell into an earnest confusion and obeying thin Euphoria I read aloud her Revised Version with as much incomprehension as I would have felt had I been adjured, then and there, to recite from Koheleth the Preacher. As I have said, this poem of hers was shaped like a tube, through which bravely I began to blow.