Trust: A Novel Part 34

He said quietly into the diminishing fire, "I don't like the life."

"Or the liberty. It's the liberty especially you don't like. All you care for is the property, what I said before."

But he cared for his fate. It was his fate he cared for.

"They've chiseled initials in your great-aunt's monument," he said.

"Stupid stone anchor! It's not her monument, it's nothing at all. Anyhow she was a loon; didn't know one season from another."

"Neither do you."

"What?"

"Know one season from another. -I have nothing against what people call idealism-"

"And you call it what?"

"Folly. Entrapment. Time-wasting. Escapism. Illusion. Illusion above all."

"But you have nothing against it!" she scoffed.

"It shows a spirited will, I don't deny it. All that's charming. Charming. But it's for children. It's for children. I say it's enough, Allegra. It's time you came away."

"Time!" she threw back at him.

"Time," he said again. "All things in their season."

"Well, am I ripe yet? Am I supposed to drop from a tree like-like I don't know, a coconut?"

"Allegra," he said.

"Don't try and sympathize, William. You're even nastier when you sympathize."

"It's enough. It's time you came with me."

"What for?"

"To stay."

"What for?"

"To be what you ought to be."

"I'm not what I ought to be?"

"You're self-indulgent. It's a fantasy you live here. You prolong it. The world is different."

"The world is different," she repeated.

"The world is not a Utopia full of reels and puddings."

"Of course not. Utopia is the house in Scarsdale."

He did not acknowledge this. "You're too old to play at Brook Farm."

"Utopia! Mecca! Brook Farm! Where do you think you are, William?"

"I like to think I am where I belong."

"I like to think I belong where I am."

"You won't come then?"

She gave a cunning smile. "Afterward. When we get out of here. Right now we're settled in."

"Afterward?" he said wonderingly.

"There's so much to do it wouldn't be fair to leave in the middle. But I'll come if you want. I'll come in October."

"You mean September. The end of August, the beginning of September," he said.

"But we're settled in, you see, and Enoch thinks he needs at least another month. It isn't easy to find headquarters large enough, especially once you're settled in."

He said gravely, "The contractors are coming in September."

"Oh put them off another month! You can do it. You can do anything of that sort, William, if you want to. You can."

"The county has hired the men already. They're arriving in the middle of September."

"Oh the men! Who cares about the men!"

"It isn't a thing to do, they're fine museum people-"

"Another month, William. What's another month? The museum will be forever, won't it? So what's one month to forever?"

Afterward, she said; forever, she said. And afterward she would come to stay with him forever.

"And meanwhile?" he asked.

"Oh, meanwhile I'll be good."

This seared him. "I didn't suggest-" he began, but wheeled from it in distaste. He had forgiven her. He was certain he had forgiven her. "What is this Enoch?" he said instead.

"A Jew."

"I mean who is he."

"Well, you said what. I thought you knew who, for goodness' sake. He's the Youth Leader."

"Is he old or young?"

"Old, like you. But you've seen him! Oh look, you don't have to be jealous of Enoch! Enoch's nothing."

"You speak as though he were everything."

"Because he is. He's a genius, I've explained it to you a hundred times: I mean at political thinking. That makes him nothing and everything at the same time."

"Is that a sample of your dialectic?" he said bitterly.

"He's everything to the Movement. To himself he's nothing. There's nothing in him that doesn't belong to the Movement, that's all. It isn't dialectic. It's the way he is."

"A prophet."

"Oh, a prophet!" Her dark mirth wooed his dismissal. "There, now you can go in peace. n.o.body can be jealous of a prophet, can they? People don't elope with prophets, do they? I told you you didn't have to be afraid of a few tents!"

He went, though not in peace: he drove onto the hooded deck of the thick-sided little ferry, glistering even at night with paint new as its franchise, an oval pink toy bobbing absurdly in the River Styx (though it was only a bay in the Sound) while Charon grumbled at his empty boat. William kept to his car, and kept to the wheel; the pilot kept to his high cab and kept to the wheel in it; but the ferryman came and put an elbow on the fender and complained, with an old green captain's eye on the tamely kicking moon-white water, that he had been cheated: "First they said they'd have the place finished by the middle of the summer; now they say fall, and meanwhile to keep my franchise I got to take her across and back at least once a week. I got to take her across and back, and nearly empty, except for a kid or two from over there, or I don't protect my franchise, and still no museum over there, and never mind gas and oil, I got to pay my pilot, don't I?" And whined against the fender. An old river man, he said he was. He had a dog called Shep that barked from beginning to end of the journey. He had h.o.a.rded up his life to put it all into the Pink Lady.

And still no museum over there. William put off the contractors; he put off the curators; he put off the county officials; and did it all for the sake of elusive afterward and risky forever, and did it because Allegra had told him she would come to him in October. And in October she came, but only to take away a bundle of sweaters and woolen skirts and to shop in the city for fifty blankets and to beg him to see about letting them have coal for the furnace.

"Coal?" he said, disbelieving.

"Well, you know, maybe try the regular people who used to deliver for us in the old days. I wouldn't know. I told Enoch you'd be able to look up a thing like that, you could fix it up for us." She opened out her hands to plead with his stupefaction. "Oh, don't be mad! It's not as though there isn't a reason. What happened was, well, we've had a turnover. The summer group was no good, they were nothing but the fun-and-games type. They never cared a hoot for ideology, and we planned for them, and they fooled us: they never cared at all, so now we have to begin all over again with the new ones. Enoch's taken it better than you'd imagine-he says it's that way in any organizing effort, you have to lose the many to discover the few. He says it isn't only the leaves that turn their coats in the fall. -Oh look, William, it's just the winter months we want! And in the spring we'll be out, the Rally's definite now for spring, and anyhow if the place isn't kept heated in winter the water-pipes freeze and crack, you know they do."

He marveled at her new proletarian enterprise. His imagination, heartless, pointed out the daughters of plumbers naked in their tents. Dully he said: "It's impossible. I've postponed them twice already."

"Then a third time will be easier, you'll be used to it."

"It can't be done."

"Yes it can."

"No," he said. "I won't do it."

"A few heaps of coal!-As though coal were gold!"

"Impossible. You have to get out. I'm in too deep, I'm obligated too far. I'm committed."

"Oh committed! Committed to what?"

"To the trust," he said reluctantly: the word hissed between them like an old practised familiar spite.

"To fish-bones! To bones and bones. To my father's bones. But never to flesh and blood."

"The contractors are flesh and blood," he said. "The curators are flesh and blood."

"And me," she said. "Me, William! What am I?-At least not a bone like you, available for any public gnawing! You're willing enough to feed the flesh of contractors and curators and ... curates-"

The literary consciousness of the last did not escape him: the innocence of this affectation, in the heart of her savagery, made him distrait But he missed its cruelty. He thought it an honorable, though mistaken, accusation. It recognized, though it did not reckon with, the moral position in his strictures. "You don't see," he said. "You don't see. Here's a letter-a letter, it arrived this morning-from one of these people, midwesterner this one is, an ichthyologist, young fellow-he's waiting, he's been waiting, he has no other employment-"

"Yes," she jeered, "I know how good you are at doc.u.menting feelings. And then you mark each one with an asterisk, See Attached Sheet, only when somebody looks it turns out to be only another instructive Bible text. I know! It's pieces of paper you feel obligated to. -And when I've told you we'll be out of there by spring, we can't stay beyond April: we'll be in Moscow the early part of May-look, do you want me to write it down for you in a sworn statement and sign it? Is that what you need?"

Her mouth radiated contempt; afterward and forever dissolved there. He saw; he saw and grieved.

"Do as you please," he said.

But she was bolder than that. "You won't interfere?"

"I'll put them off. I'll put them off," he said.

"Ah, you won't regret it!" she told him joyfully, and swept up her notebooks. "The one with the red cover? Did you see it? I've got the whole outline for the middle part in it, it has a sort of red cover: William?-Oh, here it is. All the dust made it look brown. But even if it did get lost it wouldn't really matter, because I've got lots of new ideas now. I had plenty of plot before, but I felt ideationally empty-that's why I quit. Now it's going to be a Thesis Novel: political and economic, instead of amateur sociological. Did you ever read Jews without Money? Neither did I; Enoch says I ought to. Do you know there's almost nothing to read in that whole place, except what Enoch's lugged with him all the way from Chicago? William, my father's library is a shame. It's full of absurd things on the Merchant Marine, and sailing ships, and all sorts of piscatorial debris. One of the new people actually found a volume of memoirs called The Fish, My Finny Forbear. That's the one who's set me going on the novel again. He's changed the whole tone of the camp. He pokes around corners in ways n.o.body else would think of."

"A thief, I'm sure," said William. "He'll burglarize the walls."

"Well let him then!" she said indignantly. "What I mean is he stimulates, don't you see?"

"Isn't that the job of your Youth Leader?"

"Enoch's all brain. He invents. But he's too difficult, and he talks too complicatedly; and sometimes he bores, he really does. He's amused but he doesn't amuse. That's why half the camp left as soon as they woke and found all that slippery ice on the tent-poles after a night rain. n.o.body wants to freeze for intellect. But they will for a good show. Enoch says that's why there are more Christians than Jews. He's a terrible chauvinist that way. He says that's the reason G.o.d sent Moses, a writer, after all-he wrote the Tablets-to the Jews, but sent an illiterate fisherman to the Gentiles. And if Paul didn't always keep on writing those letters, the illiterates might have made him the Christ, which he was sort of angling for anyway."

"A corrupt, impious, sacrilegious, impertinent rascal."

"Saint Paul?" said Allegra, her cheeks drawn in with pleasure.

"Your Enoch."

"Well, he's not mine. I don't own him!"

"Exactly, exactly. He owns you. He owns your mind."

"He does not. 'Die Gedanken sind frei.' Hugh taught me that. 'Nothing human is alien to me.' You know who said that? Karl Marx! 'My mind to me a kingdom is.' That's Sir Edward Dyer. Nick does that one; he does it very well. He does lots of poems and songs and things, not that he's literary himself, but he penetrates. He penetrates right into Literary Theory without the bias one gets from practising it oneself. He always knows exactly what feelings to have; most people don't, did you ever think about that?"

"No," William said.

"According to Nick they don't. I didn't realize myself how vague I was about even my opinions. I quit writing because I didn't know how to feel implausibly. I was too logical; it made me tentative. I became certain only when I gave up certainty. It's all Literary Theory, William! And just what I needed-I had to be prodded out of obstinacy, because it led to self-mystification; I had all the wrong att.i.tudes."

"And now you have all the right ones?"

"Well, I'm speaking of literature."

"I'm speaking of reality."

"Reality's nothing but att.i.tudes too."

"According to Nick?"

"According to Enoch."

William faintly groaned.