Trust: A Novel Part 4

But they did not mind my standing there; perhaps they thought me benevolent. They entwined, at any rate, their two bright shadows, with a fuss of shoe-soles on flagstones and much sc.r.a.ping, before they settled into immobility, of sleeves and voices and thighs thickly swathed. But still I did not go. The illusion of their pleasure captivated me: they had the desirable grace of seeming not to plunder the moment but to charm it, as though it were really the moment itself which took the spoils of their long, long kiss.

But the prize of pleasure is only an imagining, for there was nothing there to be ensnared but myself-an attendant more bereft than curious-, the air swift as money and the horn's howl.

7.

Crossing the ballroom I was confronted by my mother's editor. I recognized him as the young man who had observed to his friends that Mrs. Vand's daughter was known to no one. It was at once evident, despite his smile (he smelled a great deal of beer), that I was, to be sure, not known to him.

"Stefanie!" he greeted me. "What a disgrace-where have you been?"

"Stefanie is out on the terrace."

He bowed low at his error, and inadvertently struck his ear with the broomstick. "Should you like to replace her?" he invited, indicating the broom. "The next piece will be a gavotte, and after that, watch and see, a saltarello. Allegra has the latest notions of music. At midnight we'll dance the two-step-twelve o'clock sharp, you see, because it's E.E. c.u.mmings' bedtime."

"Let him sleep," I advised. "Don't wake him."

His colorless eyes disliked me. "You have extremely negative views."

"Your ear is red," I noticed. "Did you hurt it?"

"You're very rude," he remarked, "to look so expensive."

"I'm no more expensive than you."

"Nonsense, I'm as shabby as can be."

"I wasn't speaking of your morals. I was speaking of your keep."

"I am one of the advantages of Mrs. Vand's wealth," he declaimed, turning his implement upside down and articulating into its straw face. "I am an instance of private enterprise. The Edward McGoverns of the world are luxuries which only the very rich can afford."

"You are less a luxury," I said, "than a defect of character."

"Your views," he repeated firmly, "are socialist. I was not bought for my usefulness. I am an objet d'art. I am rare and fragile"-he pointed-"like that little porcelain over there, the one with the lady and the fan. Try to understand that this broom and I are in different categories. My whole purpose," he finished, "is to give pleasure."

"How do you do that?"

"By providing an atmosphere," he said shallowly, "through the exploitation of my talents."

"Aha," I began, "when it comes to exploitation, your talents are considerable. -But I rather prefer the broom."

"You are the worst example of your cla.s.s," he resumed. "You know nothing of the great. You know nothing of Maecenas, the Medicis, or the Guggenheims. Ford was a crank until he became a Foundation. I have a friend in Salerno, a sculptor and a pederast, who does nothing but the busts of young men-a Roman family of ancient lineage supports him. He lives with his boy lover in a house under a wheat field..." He went on naming the patrons he recalled, from history and from life, and their wards and dependents, all of them in some way freakish, mad, or criminal. His talk was no more than that of a hired man defending his pride by flattering the gentlefolk who give him his bread.

My mother, it seemed, had, directly or indirectly, many such hired men-not only her staff of poets, but William and even William's son, men whose relation to her rested not upon love or duty, but squarely and simply upon the complications of wealth. It was in the nature of things that her servants should be chiefly lawyers and intellectuals of one sort or another, persons with smeared lenses and sleepless eyes beneath them, and apparently no private lives; and it was also entirely natural that these menials, superior to their mistress in taste and brains and conduct, should feel contempt for her. They were all bought, after all, as Ed McGovern had not been afraid to express it (the humiliation inherent in this was hers, not his)-even the incorruptible William, who had put her away as a wife, could take her back again as a client. And the hired role, that of family adviser, was not dissimilar from the earlier one-except, of course, that now he was bought and paid for.

The curious element in this commerce was that n.o.body pitied her. It is not usual, admittedly, for the rich to be pitied, except in crude jokes and bathetic tales, and Allegra Vand, to be sure, enjoyed her status excessively. She enjoyed it, moreover, with confidence enough to believe that she scorned it, and pointed to her fellow-traveling as proof-but the most stupid reader could perceive at once that Marianna Harlow's pa.s.sion for the workers was not unlike a former generation's devotion to tatting or playing the piano: it was an "accomplishment" Still, I thought it odd that no one ever saw my mother, in her maturity, flying about the world in aluminum airplanes without her husband, boring into one city after another in search of an ideal Vatican or Jerusalem of cities, as a kind of victim. She was like one of those G.o.d-kings chosen by lot among certain tribes, raised from infancy in fantastic luxury, emblazoned gorgeously in feathers and jewels, magnificently feasted and fattened at innumerable jubilations and sacred festivals, worshipped and called holy, ail his whims elaborately encouraged, looked-after, desired and fulfilled, his person made strangely autocratic, empowered to command every happiness but one, that of being left to live and to die in his own time-and led at last to the greatest celebration of all, his brutal and unbeautiful death by pounding of sacrificial clubs at the hands of those kind uncle's, the priests who had fed him splendor. My mother was as innocent as this, and as ambitious and arrogant; and in the same way she did not suspect that she was hated for her glories. It is true that money attracts; but much money repels. My mother was pillaged, looted, ravished and ravaged: men crept at her pockets like so many mice; she was cynically robbed by her superior servants, footmen, and beggars a hundred times over, and was cursed with every burglary. Hence her wildness and her pranks-like everyone else, she longed for the sensation of robbing Allegra Vand.

I felt like one of those plunderers, going up the stairs in my jingling dress, noisy with my father's avarice, and sickened by McGovern's hackneyed exchanges. I could scarcely teli the two of them apart-McGovern and Gustave Nicholas Tilbeck; they were two birds of the same species perched upon my mother's shoulders talon-deep, one a fledgling of thirty years, no longer an amateur but not yet dangerous, the other invisible but shockingly present, a great sleek cruelly churlish falcon notched into her flesh for eternity: two terrible hawks. And William's son fluttering also, with his knowledgeable questions and his knowledgeable answers, pecking and probing into the money's secrets, as covetous as the rest-for a trust fund is labyrinthine as a cave, and as difficult to comprehend, and has room for the beatings of many bats. And the little blue-shod beauty too, kisses springing from her mouth high above the black dead river; and the dancers and musicians and maids laying waste the ballroom below-all of them chattering rapaciously on their little hanging chains in my mother's aviary, smelling up her money.

In my room I tore off my dress-tore it off literally-and did not care that twenty tiny b.u.t.tons glittered like scattered coins everywhere, or that the floorboards ran with silver and gold.

I sat in the dark and tried to remember Europe. I remembered the freckled thumbs of my Dutch governess, and her little pink birdlike nostrils, and how she had fed me a queer sh.e.l.lfish they called oursin, which made me sick. To be sick at my stomach was to take after my father ... And I thought of Geneva, an unknown city, and Enoch negotiating with the Bulgarian whose cheek he had kissed above a false brown beard.

Enoch, my mother's darling, buyer of spies, up to that moment had not been bought.

And then it seemed I heard him, as always before I had heard him-"There's nothing else to do," he said, "it can't be helped," he said, "we'll go ahead and do it." It was all a murmuring, low and dim, from my mother's room; but the violins were rising like smoke up the stairwell, and now and then the horn shrieked with the mad vacuity of a parrot: it was impossible to listen. I was sorry for her, stung with fever, moaning in her bed alone, while her party raged against her: she knew her guests, she had herself asked them one by one, she knew the terror of them all. And she lay talking to her ghosts, saying her piece, and saying Enoch's piece, and pouring a burden of gold and silver upon my back, and gold and silver into the hands of Gustave Nicholas Tilbeck, and softly gnashing her lamentations in Enoch's voice, a voice so very like his that I went down the hall, the better to hear it-"There's nothing else to do," I heard, "we'll go ahead and do it," I heard, "is there anything left for us to do but this?"

My mother was sitting up in bed, rigid, her hair like needles or rays or cobras' tongues slowly stabbing toward the ceiling. She moved vaguely but jaggedly, in a stirring too stiff to be called rocking, too brief for swaying-it was almost infantile. The lamp was lit-it stood on her dresser, on the far side of the room near the bathroom door, and I wondered whether she had left her bed to turn it on. But she was still tightly wound in the coverlet, and when I came near to touch it I felt the fever-heat in every fold.

She heaved-I followed the crest and trough of her wide back-and her head came over, unpropelled, and she saw me. "You're in your slip!" she croaked, with the quick awareness of the sick; "why do you come in here like that? Go down, do you think I give parties for nothing? Go down," she raved, and I thought at first she was much worse, for her skin had the slipperiness of certain deep illnesses which drive out personality.

I told her that my dress had torn in the dancing, and I had come upstairs to don another.

"It was the train," she concluded hoa.r.s.ely. "Somebody stepped on that d.a.m.n train. I knew the moment you tried it on it was no good. It was a cheat, in spite of that built-in bra.s.siere, a cheat absolutely, I don't caret I could shoot that old woman, Baroness only maybe, I wish they had shot her with her whole family together, even supposing she's not real-those gangsters, those thieves! Twenty-one years of open robbery! What does she know about dressing a young girl, I told her I had always protected you from politics and sinning-they're the same, don't you think I know that by now? It's not as though I left out telling her-my young girl, I said, in America they are younger ... how old are you?" she broke off suddenly, and I said my age in the interval she offered me, and then again she called out across the room, "She's old enough to take care of herself, you see? It's all right then, sh.e.l.l take care of herself'-nevertheless it was nothing like delirium. Manifestly it was a calculated recitation for an audience: it had the ring of the concert hall. "Eight hundred dollars, and torn-to shreds, did you say?" she descended finally, mumbling, "I knew from the first moment, believe me, a run of sheet metal, pieces of eight, the U.S. Mint, In G.o.d We Trust..."

Underneath it all there were irony and the distortions of some unimaginable and overwhelming anger. Her eyes were at the same time receded and protuberant, like out-of-the-way b.u.t.tons or switches purposely removed from the anterior on account of their terrible potential; they controlled a machine at once subtle and fearful. And it was as though someone had indeed come and charged those awful round swellings, her unhappy eyes, and set off the perilous machine: my mother's pale arms emerged from the windings of her sheets and flailed the air; her mouth chattered like a motor. It soon came to me that her ragings, which" shook her still, were not those of sickness or fever. She was claimed by something else. A wilderness of tears complicated her already laborious face; her thin nose narrowed. It was a weeping that a.s.saulted her, no access of mere fever and sickness. She ailed with an extraordinary bitterness. It was strange to see. I had been witness, all my life, to my mother's good humor: her laughter was both captivating and abashing-it sometimes shamed me But now I heard those shrill and abstract bawlings, wordless as a child's, and I felt deceived to have fallen upon this questionable anguish-questionable because there was no way of telling on what it was founded; it might have been some small moroseness urged upon her by the solitude of her bed and the reminiscent music in her ears all that summer's night And yet it was not: clearly she was diseased with sorrow "Get away," she muttered, and resumed her wail, and next took up her innumerable complaints, alternating between inarticulate sobs and a rush of verbose invective-against her corsetiere the dubious Baroness, myself, the musicians who were now launched into the newest song of the season, the pervasive sanctimonious smell of beer; and none of it seemed relevant to the figure of my mother in her violent bed, greenish in the lamplight, none of it was connected, the words and moans ran everywhere and did not meet: she railed not against these designated offenses and offenders, but against some hard impa.s.sable wall behind and around them. "There's nothing for you in Europe," she cried, "and there won't be any Europe, it's all quite clear, no Europe any more. The thing to do is go down-go down, I'll tell you what to do, you know that banner hanging there, the one for bon voyage? tear it down, that's the thing to do, rip it right off if you please; your gown is ripped, then rip again! since there's no more bon voyage," she scowled, "it makes no difference," now whispering and now breaking into a harsh sore scream, glaring at me as though I had intruded at an ungainly hour, like some ill-trained maid, and had caught her in the act of love.

And then, abruptly and noticeably, the sound of steadily running water stopped-a faucet turned with a tiny squeak behind the bathroom door, and I was all at once conscious of having heard, without really hearing it, the bounce of water all that while.

Out stepped Enoch, gravely rubbing his face with a towel.

We stood and took each other in-I in my long petticoat, Enoch in his undershirt, patting the back of his neck.

"I had no idea you were having a party," he said.

"It's for going abroad."

My mother sent out a wrenched sob-half sigh, half whine.

"I had no idea," he said again, aimlessly.

I moved to switch on a second lamp, and there, on my mother's dresser, lay Enoch's attache case, shut up, dangling its round combination lock thick with numbers. "Did you come straight from the airport?" I asked, reaching up to pull the chain-my elbow tapped the lock; it was open.

"It's all right-it's absolutely empty," he a.s.sured me quickly. "There's nothing in it. -No, I've come from Washington."

"It changes everything," my mother said briefly. She lowered herself to the pillow, blew her nose, and breathed as if to prevent another spasm.

"Washington?" I said, puzzled by my mother's quick control.

"Nothing will be the same," Enoch affirmed. "Did that doctor leave you any pills, Allegra?"

"They're a sedative. I don't want a sedative. Go ahead and tell her."

"Perhaps after the party," Enoch said. "When they all go home. How did you catch this cold?"

"Tell her now," my mother said.

"She stood out in the rain," I announced.

"I think we had better get rid of the musicians," said Enoch.

"They're contracted till one o'clock," I recalled. "Does it have anything to do with Geneva?"

"Geneva," my mother echoed senselessly.

"No, no, not with Geneva," he said, "Geneva was the last of that sort of thing. I've emptied my briefcase once and for all. I'm to have another job."

My mother was now soundlessly crying; her hands held her throat. "It wasn't a Bulgarian," she murmured.

"No," said Enoch, "it wasn't."

"What kind of job?" I pressed.

"Well, a bit better. Less exciting, but more standing to it."

"You had better hurry up," my mother warned, snapping off the switches of her eyes-her lids fell to, her arms halted on the coverlet, her tears dripped as languidly as oil-"Tell her."

"In a couple of weeks the committee hearings begin. There'll be plenty of opposition, you know," Enoch commented.

"There usually is."

"And then it has still to be weighed by the Senate."

"Not weighed," my mother interrupted-her voice scratched like chalk-"confirmed."

"It all depends," said Enoch.

"Tell her," my mother commanded bitterly.

But Enoch went back to the bathroom to hang his towel. "It's about Europe," he called out to me; "it won't be possible for you to go. It won't work," he said behind the door-"at least not now."

I stared down at my white pumps, the ones I had saved from the June mud. "Is there something the matter with my pa.s.sport? It came without any trouble."

"It's not the pa.s.sport. The pa.s.sport's all right, you know."

"I've had a smallpox vaccination and two polio shots. Dr. Leverheim told me tonight he'd give me a flu shot before I leave. And the ticket's already paid for," I argued. "Nothing could be safer."

He came back wearing his shirt and b.u.t.toning the cuffs. He looked older than middle-aged; he looked like a reasonable man, that Active "reasonable man" of whom William spoke perpetually and whose judgment was a legal touchstone; I thought he must face his spies with just this impeccable omniscient gesture of his tidy chin, daubed with tiny razor-cuts and the hazy smell of after-shave. "Oh, it's not your safety that's in question," he informed me. "Still, it won't do, not right now. We can't contemplate your going."

"Why not?" I pursued.

"It won't work," he said again. "Your mother and I have decided."

"It's out of the question," my mother dolefully a.s.sented.

"In that case there's no point in all that noise down there," I said, "if I'm staying home. I'll go down and send them away."

"Keep your presents," my mother briskly advised. "It would be rude to give them back."

"No one brought any," I told her.

"Not for bon voyage? My G.o.d," she exclaimed, "they don't know the mores! They have no manners! Not even William's boy?" she rasped, incredulous. "Not even a hamper of fruit? William's boy must have come with something."

"He came with a girl."

"Ah," she acknowledged softly, "I didn't know that." And she turned her head into the pillow. "Tell her, Enoch, tell her."

He appraised me shrewdly. "It's still a voyage, but shorter than the other-r" he sounded positively political-"in brief you're wanted somewhere else. There's a person," he went on steadily, "who wants you."

"Tell her the other thing first," said my mother, m.u.f.fled. "It isn't fair."

"It's fair." He put his undistinguished peremptory hands on my shoulders and consulted with my look; it was a motion as authoritarian as it was unpaternal. He might have been sentencing me to a long term of imprisonment, exactly as though he were convinced it was a measure for the protection of society. Certainly he believed he was protecting something, perhaps my mother, who lay as if wounded, droning her long torpid whimper into the bedsheets. "If it isn't fair it can't be helped. This person," he told me, "has written me a letter. He has a great interest in you-you can't imagine how great."

My mother's sorrow pierced the air-a shriek exactly like a curse, "Hurry, hurry," I heard her cry.

"He wants you to come to him."

"Yes," I said, "tell me who."

"You don't know him-"

"Do you want me to go?"

"Perhaps you should," Enoch said, "for your own sake."

"Ah, don't lie to her," my mother groaned. "It's not for her sake."

"Then for his," Enoch amended.

"How you lie," she spit but, "when it's only for ours."

He shrugged inexpressively, viewing her in her tangled bed. It was impossible to know what he thought just then. "It's your father," he resumed at last. "He has asked to see you and we intend to agree to it."

For the first time in my life I said the name aloud; I said it as though it were a riddle which I had myself invented: "Gustave Nicholas Tilbeck"-but I had not known how sad that sound would be.

"Hurry, hurry," wept my mother; Enoch had turned away, and stood posted at the dresser, keeping vigil over the mirror's version of himself-a big, reasonable, a.s.saulted man confronted by his balding head.

"How much does he want?" I asked in my mother's old and grievous tone.

And Enoch: "How much does she know?" in the same voice.

"Her," my mother motioned coa.r.s.ely, "that one, who can know what she knows? She's like him, why hide it any more, they're alike-"